by Gerald Lynch
Aggressively: “Really?”
“Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“We get air?” He still looked suspicious, even angry.
“You get air.”
“Well, that’s just great fucking timing, on-medical-leave Detective Inspector Kevin Beldon. Because if you’ll look outside instead of up your own ass for once, you’ll see an overcast sky, the first in months. The temperature’s already dropped about ten degrees. Macro satellite says the drought’s over, severe thunderstorm coming, even a tornado warning. And, for your information, it’s fucking August the fucking eighteenth, with La Niña on deck. Just how much longer do you figure before the next ice storm in this fucked-up climate?”
The date had its effect. “It’s not?”
“Snow, by the middle of September, I predict, which makes street performing a real fucking pain.”
Kevin enlarged with the volume of air he took in. “Now, Pants, I want you to do yourself and me a favour.”
“Fuck you, and fuck your badge.”
“Not my style. I want you to hit me.”
The mime drew back his startled head, then looked merely puzzled. Finally he snorted: “Yeah, right, assaulting an officer of the law. What kinda fuckin’ dummy d’ya think I am?”
“A mime?”
“Fuck you, Beldon!”
With his foot Kevin jammed the closing door: “No-no, it was a joke, you jackass. Dummy, as in dumb? A mime. Get it?”
“I dunno what the fuck you’re talking about, Beldon. But thanks for your vote. See you —” But the door wouldn’t budge.
“Right here, big boy,” Kevin said, twisting up his chin like a man shaving, brushing a spot with the back of his fingers like testing bristle. “Your best shot, Pants. My word of honour, no charges. But I promise you this: if you don’t give me your best shot right on the button, I’m withdrawing my agreement for the air conditioning. There’s always next summer, you know, starting about February second these days.” He nodded once at the mime, raised his eyebrows in query, and screwed back his head, again presenting his chin.
The mime cocked his fist and gritted a smile at it: “Heaven knows I’ve wanted to…”
Kevin stretched his neck: “C’mon, pussy pants. Is it true what they say about you pussy-boy mimes, that you save your mouths for each other?”
The punch missed Kevin’s chin and scored on his left cheekbone, with force; the door slammed as the back of his head slammed the wall behind him.
He smiled weakly: Not bad.
He halted again at the front door, turned away and took the shallow steps three at a time to the third floor, needed no key to enter his apartment.
Breathing hard, he didn’t hesitate: In the near future, only mimes will talk of the weather.
His smile faded only when the pen wrote again: In the near future, only dummies will talk of the rule of law.
He was rubbing his cheekbone and looking at the page with creeping alarm — What’s wrong with him? — when the siren entered his consciousness like the prompting of a memory.
He was back on the first landing before the squad car’s terminal boop, crouching low to see out the top of the glass doors. He’d been too slow at every turn, and now again. Maybe it was just some cop answering Pant-O-Mime’s call.
Through the transom window he watched Frank get out the passenger side and, worrying chin in hand, come slowly to the front door. Frank paused there, not trying the handle or knocking or ringing, but standing still as if contemplating his feet. Poor Frank, a tormented soul. And rightly so.
Kevin fairly leapt down the final flight of stairs and approached the door holding his hands up in surrender, getting Frank’s attention by saying loudly, “Ya got me, copper. I’m guilty of removin’ evidence from da scene o’ da crime. I’ll sing for ya like a boid.”
Frank looked up but didn’t even crack a smile, and Frank always guffawed at Kevin’s bad Cagney. Kevin pushed the bar and held the door wide open. Frank fidgeted and still waited, so Kevin stepped outside.
There were now two patrol cars at the curb, each occupied by a lone driver.
“What’s up then, Frank? Something from the scans of Anna Kynder? Why the two units?”
Stout Frank looked up at him with hangdog eyes and a mouth loosening from carrying its bad news.
“Bill’s dead, Kevin. He was found under a canoe at Dow’s Lake. If I’d ever imagined it could come to this…I never…”
“No.” Kevin’s left hand clawed his thigh.
Frank pried the hand off, took it with his own left and viced the elbow with his right hand.
“It looks like he’s been dead only a short time. No one’s being allowed to touch the body till you’ve seen it — Jesus! — not even a remote scan yet. I’ve been trying to get in touch with you all over. I sent a car to Lundy’s Lane and Kelly’s already out at Dow’s, and she’s in pretty bad shape. Constable Ali will take you there now.”
“Ali…”
“I’ll be right behind you, old friend. But first, for your sake, I’m going to retrieve McNicol’s evidence.”
Kevin’s body was one long clench. “Where’s Sergeant Ertelle?”
“Ertelle? I called her first thing looking for you. But even after I told her about Bill she said you guys had arranged to meet back at the Omphalos O-R before the debriefing with me, to clean up some things, and that’s where she’ll be, she insisted I tell you. I told her there was absolutely no call for her to be at Omphalos and that you wouldn’t be returning, but she wouldn’t budge. I’m going to have to have a serious talk with Sergeant Brigid Ertelle when this is over. Maybe she enjoyed her days on bicycle patrol?”
“Brigid’s a good woman, Frank, a good cop.”
Frank turned crimson. “Of course she is. What happened to your cheek?”
Kevin touched his cheekbone, felt nothing, said nothing. Frank led him to the squad car and guided him in like an arrest. Kevin murmured.
Frank watched the car move off, the only sane movement in a mad world, even with its lights flashing and siren crying distress at that demented world. He turned back toward the entrance and all but crashed into the alarmed Pant-O-Mime.
The mime’s eyes were whipping between the squad cars and Frank. “He asked me to hit him, officer, hand to God! It was some kinda payback or something, like he wanted to be hurt! But he wasn’t that hurt! I demand to have legal counsel present!… Hey, what’s up? Are you cry —”
“Just fucking perfect?” Frank raised his eyebrows at nothing, freeing a couple of tears. He looked back to where the squad car had disappeared, squinted, touched two fingers to his mouth like a pledge.
“I don’t get it, officer.”
“That’s what Detective Beldon said just now, son: Just fucking perfect.”
Chapter 20
Months of drought had caused little Dow’s Lake to shrink, leaving the shore as receded and cracked as a long dead corpse’s desiccated lips. The bank lay low and dry behind Kevin, and its bordering grass had withered away. He drew back his lips in a mocking grin, could almost have laughed into the cool breeze. Inside the dirty brown oxfords his toes curled for a hold, as his soles seemed to feel the fake lake’s desire to revert to swamp.
We are what we were. We cannot change and are doomed for trying. We are an infection to be endured, to be sweated out and burned off, cured by a perfect death of our own making.
We are not Nature anymore, not truly. We are only this strangest matter, still doomed to death by entropy; whether hotly banging or coldly whimpering hardly matters. Undignified, we cling to the rule of law and the hope of love in a chancy world that cannot love us back. We are being rejected, ejected. Get over it.
We are not wanted here any longer. The earth wants nothing more to do with us. We should aim now only to die with dignity, with at least some of our much-vaunte
d human pride intact. At best we were an interesting experiment in law and order and love. Better the world reverts to whatever it was before we redesigned it in our own image. We have failed perfectly, fucking perfectly
“And no birds sing.”
“Detective Inspector Beldon?”
“Don’t worry, Constable Ali, I’ve not lost my mind entirely. It’s an old poem I memorized in high school.” He recited quietly: “Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, alone and palely loitering? The sedge has withered from the lake, and no birds sing.”
“What’s a sedge? Why’s it withered?”
Kevin looked up at the darkening sky, then turned to Ali, blinked. “A kind of grass, during a medieval drought, I guess.”
“Did I say something funny, Detective Beldon?”
“No, not at all, I apologize. If you recited some Derek Walcott I’m sure I wouldn’t recognize it.”
“Who? Who’s Eric Ballcock?”
“A great West Indian poet, Nobel Prize winner. Even I know that. Aren’t you from the Caribbean?”
“I’m Guyanese, man! — I mean, sir. I went to school in London. The only poets we studied were Salman Rushdie and Dr. Dre and all them classics!”
Kevin killed Ali’s smile by cocking back his head and laughing at the busy sky. Cloud cover weighted the air differently than had the intermittent fluff of yesterday. Fast-moving grey outriders scouted an ashen frontier, dark thunderheads massed behind, with the whole shoved westward by a solid black slab. It really did look like the end of the world.
The air in the unnatural depression where he stood smelled fishily of suspended organic materials exposed and newly moistened by the increasing humidity.
“Daddy!”
Constable Ali did a slow pop-eyed alarm that, were he white, could get him arrested for race crime. “Oh my god!” he cried. “Beldon! You’re the father! I am so sorry, sir, so very very, I never…”
It wasn’t the dead child at his feet who’d called out; it was Kelly, come running from the direction of the Pavilion, and none too gracefully in heels. She jumped down the embankment and ploughed through the mud and hardened sand, her feet twisting this way and that like wonky grocery-cart wheels. And there was Frank hustling from the parking lot as if worried that the show might start without him.
Kevin looked down again at his scuffed oxfords. Nearby, still covered in a blue tarp with brass-riveted holes, was Bill. Or what had been Bill. Bill’s body: the body.
“How could this have happened, Daddy?”
Kevin turned and reached, but before he could enfold her she placed her fingers firmly on the centre of his chest and held him off. “What are we gonna do? I could just die!”
Her face was distraught, and she didn’t sound like Kelly; but her eyes were still steady and dry, just like Kelly.
Frank came huffing up. “Dismissed, Constable! Stand by.” Abiki Ali turned and moved off to hailing distance. Frank was prepared. “Kevin, Kelly, I don’t know what to say. This DeLint case has been going wrong from the start. But I refuse to believe Bill’s involved till I see proof positive otherwise.”
Kevin moved his head, his dead head, as without feeling as he’d ever been, if still a talking head. “Who could have predicted this, Frank? You talk like you could have prevented it. Bill was a troubled boy, and a man always in trouble. I believe he was involved in DeLint’s murder.”
It was Frank’s turn to widen his eyes. “I just can’t conceive it, Kevin. But look, neither of you is doing this as an investigation. Conflict regulations and all. We don’t want to mess up any future trial. I’ll handle it all. As of this moment, Kevin, you are officially off the DeLint case. You two are here only as father and sister of the victim, understood?”
Kevin snorted dismissively, turned away and stooped, pinched the sky-blue tarp at about where the chest should be and drew it off the face. He heard Kelly gasp and knew she’d put herself in Frank’s arms. He was a touch jealous.
But Bill. That round face was Cyn’s face. You look cold, son. Would you let me hold you? You would, you always did. Look after Bill when I’m gone…Red. A favourite joking refrain — unsaid before her final trip. I’ve done a helluva job, Cyn. He’s better off in your care again.
“Dad?”
With the back of his hand Kevin went to brush some sand from Bill’s face, hesitated, remembering that Kevin Beldon never touched the body. But he wet his left thumb in his mouth and gently rubbed dusty sand from the fine hairs on Bill’s brow, then a coarser sand from under his left eye. The whole chest was sopping with blood. A new nightmare would be welcome.
“When you said canoe and lake, I worried he’d drowned. This is murder, Frank.”
“Dad?”
He stood and turned to Kelly and Frank, who now stood side by side.
Frank commanded without taking his eyes off Kevin: “Back to the security barricade, Constable Ali. No one’s to be let in till I give the order. I don’t care if the prime minister himself shows up with the Mounties — no one. If Parizeau makes a fuss, shoot him. And stand by to give Detective Beldon a ride home.”
“Yes, sir!” Ali hurried off, touching his holstered sidearm.
Frank walked around Kevin, crouched and reached under the tarp, took out the body’s right hand. It held an old revolver, bigger than the one McNicol had used.
“Suicide, I’m afraid.”
The hardened sand seemed to liquefy under Kevin. “But that’s my old service revolver. Frank, you shouldn’t be touching. And there are ways to make murder look —”
“No!” Kelly startled them both. “This cannot be! Bill did not commit suicide like Mom!”
Kevin was calm. “Frank, hasn’t MYCROFT confirmed Bill as accessory in DeLint’s murder yet? Bill made up the poison that sedated DeLint and fried his insides, the same that Anna Kynder took. Bill’s DNA should be all over the biohazard container we found in Kynder’s office.”
Kelly actually smiled and shook her head like she’d missed a joke: “Anna Kynder’s dead too?”
Frank was agitated: “How can you say that, Kevin? Bill wasn’t a murderer! Why would Bill be accessory in the killing of Eugene DeLint? The machete has McNicol’s prints all over it, and there’s material evidence linking Anna Kynder to DeLint’s murder, and linking McNicol to her, uh, apparent suicide.”
Kevin was disdainful: “Bill’s not a suicide, Frank. And neither was my wife. Eugene DeLint — the Widower, remember — caused Cynthia’s death, using post-hypnotic suggestion, voodoo, whatever. You remember Omphalos — DeLint — called Cyn the morning she died. Bill was told all that about DeLint and Cynthia by Kynder and McNicol, who used Bill for their own vengeance. But Bill was avenging only his mother’s death. Something like that it’ll turn out.”
Kelly said, “I cannot believe any of this!” She was crying now and had to bow her head to bury her face on shorter Frank’s shoulder: “Frank…?”
Frank took her squarely by the upper arms and set her in place. “Kelly.” It had the effect of a slap. He brightened a touch: “As usual, Kelly, your father is way ahead of the game, or at least keeping up with MYCROFT.”
She recovered somewhat and now whispered more than whimpered: “Who cares anymore, Frank? Bill’s bought it now too.” Accompanying the slang expression, a different coldness had come into her voice, which caused Frank to raise his eyebrows.
He retrieved his communicator from his shirt pocket, tickled its display, and read to himself as a small smile stole over his features. Without looking up he said, “Kevin, MYCROFT determines with one-hundred-percent certainty that Don McNicol was the murderer of Eugene DeLint, and with ninety-three percent that Anna Kynder was the mastermind in a conspiracy with McNicol to commit murder. And eighty-eight percent that McNicol was instrumental in the death of Kynder. But still nothing about Bill.”
He would like to crush Frank’s
windpipe. Instead Kevin took a corner of the tarp and angrily flicked it, re-covering the body.
“Thank you, Detective Inspector MYCROFT.”
Then he wanted to help Frank, but only because he needed to buy time. “We’ll have to hope MYCROFT can trace those old off-shore accounts, because I bet McNicol had been blackmailing DeLint for years, probably using DeLint’s taste for young boys to make him pay up. It would have taken big-time barter for the ingredients of the poison and the use of a lab. Bill would have got the money from McNicol. McNicol had long and deep ties to Haiti, where I’ll bet big Omphalos money has gone. We’ll discover that McNicol was also a master of voodoo or something, which MYCROFT can cipher out with whatever degree of accuracy suits his cyber ass. That whole gang was conversant with post-hypnotic suggestion techniques — DeLint, McNicol, Mother DeLint, and Dr. Ewan Randome, of course. It was Ewan told me about McNicol’s history with Haiti and the Duvaliers, and about all their abuse of voodoo hypnosis tricks.”
Frank jumped in again: “I didn’t want to say, because I believed it could never matter, but MYCROFT had listed Bill as one of five possibles who could have mixed up the poison that killed DeLint. I mean, your old friend Dr. Nora Goldstein was listed ahead of him, so I thought of course no way, just more MYCROFT overkill. But when we input Bill’s sui — this new, uh, development, I don’t doubt but that MYCROFT will confirm your conspiracy theory, Kevin!”
Resolved in his mind, Kevin was now calm enough to consider that he should give Frank one last chance. So he did his best level gaze: “Frank, is there anything else you’ve forgotten to tell me?”
Frank stared back.
A sizzle sound as loud as a near-miss bullet broke the stare-down and made them all flinch and turn to the covered body. They waited. Another fat raindrop scored on the tarp…and another, then a tattoo of them.
“Rain?” said Kelly lifting her elegant nose to the sky, closing her eyes, smiling, inhaling deeply. “Can we talk alone, Daddy?”
Frank, too, turned his moon face to the clouds. “Well, I’ll be damned.”