Hit and Run

by Norah McClintock

  “Maybe you wouldn’t,” Riel said. “Until you thought about it. Most people are all right, Mike. Most people want to do the right thing. But we got nothing. No one came forward. Best we could figure, maybe the car was stolen someplace else. A guy who stole a car would have a whole different group of friends—friends with maybe less incentive to come forward if a buddy did something wrong. So we checked Impalas that had been reported stolen. Did a pretty broad sweep, too. We didn’t come up with any in the area, but we did pull one that had been reported stolen up in Simcoe the day before and was never recovered. After that …” His voice trailed off.

  “You just gave up?”

  “We hit a dead end. We don’t quit when that happens. But other cases come up and they get assigned, and you have to try to clear those, too. Stuff happens. So even if you haven’t closed that one, you can’t give it one hundred percent of your attention.”

  “So that’s it?”

  He studied me with fog-gray eyes. He was so quiet for so long that I figured that really was it, that he had nothing else to say. Then he surprised me. “I never met your mother, Mike. But I have a pretty good idea what she was like.”

  Part of me wanted to tell him, No, you don’t. You have no idea at all. But, I admit, I was curious.

  “She worked hard,” he said. “She always got to work on time and never left until she had everything done. She was always cheerful. The people she worked with liked her a lot. She took courses on her own time because she wanted to improve herself so she could get promoted. And while she was working hard, she was looking after you all by herself and looking after your uncle, too, until he was old enough to look after himself. She kept the house spotless—I saw that the first time I walked into the place. It’s an old house, but you could tell by how everything sparkled that she was making the best home she could for her family. She liked to read, too, and she tried to get you reading, didn’t she?”

  My mother did love to read. She loved it more than watching TV. She used to read to me every night when I was little. When I got older, she’d get me to cuddle up to her and she’d ask me to read to her.

  “How did you know?”

  “There were two stacks of library books on the coffee table in the living room. One was kids’ books. The other was books for adults—fiction and nonfiction. She was well organized. She always returned her books on time, didn’t she?”

  That earned him another look of surprise from me. He smiled.

  “She had the due date slips tacked to the bulletin board in the kitchen,” he said. “She made sure you ate right—granola, not sugary cereals. Orange juice, not pop.”

  “I got pop on special occasions.”

  “She made her own jam.” When I looked baffled, he said, “I saw it when your uncle opened the fridge to get milk for his coffee. Looked like homemade strawberry jam. She ever bake bread to go with it?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and my mouth watered just thinking about the smell from the oven. I looked at Riel with new interest. He was a lot smarter than I thought.

  “It’s not easy being a single mother,” he said. “You have to work pretty hard just to pay the bills. It’s pretty rough for some single parents—they’re so busy trying to meet their financial obligations that they don’t have enough time to make sure their kids turn out okay. From what I know about your mother, she was the kind of person who would have been determined to make sure that no matter what else happened, you went to school, did your homework, worked hard, and stayed out of trouble. Am I right?”

  He was doing it again, trying to make me see myself through Mom’s eyes. Only this time I didn’t get mad at him.

  He’d said he was sorry for how things had turned out for me. For all the stuff I’d lost, he meant. All the stuff that disappeared when Mom died.

  “She wouldn’t be too happy right now, would she, Mike?” he said. He stood up slowly. “You’re in trouble right now, but you don’t have to keep going in that direction. I just wanted to tell you that.”

  “I threw those cakes away,” I said. I hadn’t planned to say it. The words just popped out. Riel waited. “I didn’t want to take them, but I did,” I said. “Then I threw them away.”

  Riel didn’t say anything. I don’t know if he even believed me.

  I sat there for a while after he left, then decided to go over to Vin’s so that I could explain to him what had happened. Up near Danforth I spotted Jen. She wasn’t alone. She was with a guy I had never seen before. She was holding his hand.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  When you see your girlfriend holding hands with another guy, you’ve got a few options.

  Option one: denial. Tell yourself you’re not seeing what you’re seeing. It’s not what you think. Maybe she’s landed the female lead in the school play and the guy whose hand she’s holding is the male lead and they’re rehearsing. Right out on the street where everyone can see them. But it doesn’t mean anything. It’s not real.

  Option two: pretend you didn’t see it. If you didn’t see it, you don’t have to deal with it. You can make believe she’s still yours and yours alone, it’s all cool.

  Option three: deck the guy. What’s he doing holding your girlfriend’s hand? He must be pushing himself on her, because she’s yours and she wouldn’t hold some other guy’s hand unless she was being forced to. And if some guy is forcing your girlfriend to do something she doesn’t want to do, then the guy deserves whatever you feel like dishing out to him.

  Option four: tell her it’s over. If she’s going to be holding someone else’s hand, you don’t want her holding yours anymore. After all, she’d play it that way, wouldn’t she? If she saw you clinging to another girl, you’d be out of the picture so fast you’d start to doubt that you’d ever been in it.

  Then there’s what I did, which was wheel around and start walking as fast as I could in the opposite direction. And the whole time I was marching away, I kept hoping I’d hear her call, Mike, Mike, stop, it’s not what you think.

  It didn’t happen.

  Vin’s mom answered the door. She’s kind of tough looking. She’s a waitress at a bar—has been forever. She wears a lot of makeup, even around the house, and she’s got tons of hair, which she wears like one of Charlie’s Angels on TV, only by now those angels are pretty middle-aged. Her voice is husky. Too many cigarettes and too much beer, Vin says. And she keeps strange hours—works until the bar closes at two in the morning, then comes home, does some housework, and sleeps until noon or so. She starts work at five thirty in the afternoon five days a week, Tuesday through Saturday. Which meant she was still home when I got to Vin’s house. It was better than having to face Vin’s dad, though. He works permanent evenings at a Ford plant.

  Usually Vin’s mom is nice to me. She kids us a lot, me and Vin and Sal. Calls us a posse. Tells us, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” and then laughs because, according to Vin, there isn’t a lot that his mom wouldn’t do at least once. I guess grabbing boxes of cakes out of a bakery truck was one thing, though, because when she answered the door she didn’t crack a smile, and when I asked if Vin was there, she stared at me for a moment before turning and calling him.

  “Vincent!”

  She never called Vin by that name unless she was good and mad at him. Vincent had been her father-in-law’s name. Vin’s mother never had anything good to say about Vin’s grandfather. I don’t even know why she agreed to name him after the old man.

  While I was waiting for him—waiting to see if he’d even talk to me—she said, “What would your mother say?”

  Jeez, it was that kind of day.

  Vin slouched past his mom. She cuffed him on the butt. “You’re not to leave this porch, do you understand me, Vincent?”

  “Yeah.”

  He didn’t even look at me. He walked to the porch railing, his back to me. I was sure he wasn’t going to say a word. His mother went inside. When the door clicked shut behind her, Vin turned around.

  “She want
s to ground me for life.” He sighed. “Still, it’s better than my dad. He wants to kill me.”

  Vin’s dad came across real tough. He was a nice guy, though. Every so often he’d come up with baseball tickets and he’d take all three of us to a game, me and Vin and Sal. He knew all the players on all the teams. Vin said the only part of the newspaper his dad ever read was the sports section, and the only magazine he ever opened was Sports Illustrated.

  “I didn’t tell them anything,” I said.

  “I know.”

  In a lousy day, one good thing had finally happened.

  “I mean, I thought you had when I saw you at the door this morning and those two cops were coming up the walk right behind you. But then I thought about it, and I realized you’d never do that. You never ratted on me before.”

  “Riel says they probably asked around about who I hang out with,” I told him. “He says it’s basic police work.”

  He frowned. “How does he know that?”

  “He used to be a cop.”

  This was news to Vin. “How do you know he wasn’t the one who ratted me out? He’s seen us together.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. And, after a moment, “He investigated the hit-and-run.” I didn’t have to explain which hit-and-run.

  “No kidding? So how come he’s not a cop anymore?”

  I realized I didn’t know. The best I could do was shrug.

  “Maybe because he was no good at it,” Vin said. “Or maybe they fired him because he couldn’t cut it. I mean, they never found out who killed your mom, right?”

  I leaned against the porch railing and stared out at Vin’s front lawn. It had more grass and fewer weeds than ours.

  “He says they tried. He says no one saw anything.”

  “You talked to him about it?”

  I told Vin how it had happened.

  “And?” he said.

  Good old Vin. We’ve known each other since day care. He did a lot of stupid stuff—like stealing boxes of cakes from a bakery truck—but he was my best friend. He knew me better than anyone, even better than Billy. He knew when something was bothering me.

  “He says the car that hit her was probably stolen. He says whoever did it probably didn’t see my mom because it doesn’t look like they tried to brake or swerve. He says maybe whoever did it had been drinking or maybe they fell asleep at the wheel.”

  I could see Vin processing the information.

  “And?” he said again.

  “And I’ve been thinking,” I said. “Would you get high if you were driving a stolen car? Would you take the chance you’d fall asleep at the wheel?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve heard of stupider stuff,” he said. “Besides, maybe he was a stupid car thief. Or a tired one.”

  “If I was driving around in a stolen car, I’d be a model citizen,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to attract any attention.”

  “If you were driving around in a stolen car, you’d be anything but a model citizen,” Vin pointed out.

  “A guy in a stolen car,” I said. “Doesn’t brake … Doesn’t even swerve.” It kept eating at me. “This is gonna sound crazy, but—” Could I say it out loud?

  “You think whoever was driving did see her?” Vin said slowly. “He saw her, but didn’t brake or swerve because…?”

  “You think it’s possible?” I asked. “You think someone might have wanted to kill my mother on purpose?”

  Vin’s eyes met mine. They went all soft.

  “Your mother was the greatest, Mike. Remember those chocolate chip cookies she used to make?” He smiled at the thought of them, and I could almost smell the warm chocolate. “And she never got mad at us, no matter what we did. You always got the feeling that she understood, you know what I mean?”

  I knew exactly what he meant.

  “Why would anyone want to kill her, Mike? What Riel said makes more sense, right?”

  Didn’t brake. Didn’t swerve.

  “Right, Mike?”

  “Right,” I said. But I kept thinking about it. How impaired did you have to be to not even see a person in the street right in front of you and to not even react? And if you were that impaired, then how could you vanish without a trace? No one heard anything. No one saw anything. No one noticed a vehicle speeding in the area. How could you be so messed up that you couldn’t see where you were driving and what you were about to hit, then so on the ball that you managed to get away without a trace?

  I thought it would be hard to find him, but it wasn’t. He was right there in the phone book. Riel, John. The address listed was a house north of Danforth, a couple of blocks east of Greenwood. I was nervous as I approached it. There had only been one John Riel in the phone book and no J. Riels, so I figured it had to be him. But as I was going up the walk it occurred to me that maybe I was about to knock on the wrong door. I mean, he used to be a cop, right? Maybe cops kept their numbers unlisted, you know, for security reasons.

  I started to turn back—call me a coward—when I saw someone coming around the side of the house, carrying a bag of groceries.

  “Mike?” After Riel got over his surprise, he smiled. “What’s up?”

  “I need to ask you something.”

  “You had supper yet?”

  I hadn’t, but I lied and said I had.

  “Well, I haven’t,” he said. “Come on in. If it’s okay with you, we can talk while I cook.”

  I followed him up the steps and into the house. The place wasn’t much bigger than my house, but it was a whole lot neater—a whole lot emptier, too. All the walls were painted white. There wasn’t much furniture—a couch and a couple of chairs in the living room, a stereo set and a couple of well-stocked bookshelves, a table and chairs in the dining room, another smaller table and some chairs in the kitchen—and all of it was either black or chrome or both. The floors were bare—black and white tile in the front hall and the kitchen, hardwood everyplace else.

  “Haven’t lived here long, huh?” I said.

  “A couple of years.”

  You could have fooled me. It looked like he had just moved in and hadn’t got around to doing any decorating.

  I followed him through to the kitchen.

  “Have a seat,” he said, waving to one of the black and chrome stools at the counter that divided the kitchen into a cooking area and an eating area. He started to unpack the bag of groceries—a couple of steaks, some potatoes, some lettuce, tomatoes, and a cucumber. Then he opened the fridge. “Soda?” he asked.

  “Yeah, okay.”

  He pulled out a Coke for me and a beer for himself, opened them both, and shoved the Coke across the counter to me.

  “You talk to Vin?”

  I nodded.

  “And it’s all good?”

  “Yeah.”

  Riel actually smiled.

  “So, what can I do for you, Mike?”

  It took a moment before I could get out the few words.

  “It’s about my mom.”

  He pulled up a stool, sat across from me, and waited. He didn’t say anything while I told him what I was thinking. He didn’t say anything for a little while after I had finished, either. He just sipped his beer.

  “So,” he said finally, “what you’re saying is maybe your mother was killed on purpose.”

  I nodded, grateful that he hadn’t laughed.

  “Do you know of any reason why anyone would want to do that, Mike?”

  “Well, no,” I had to admit.

  He took another sip of beer.

  “See, that’s the thing about murder,” he said. “In almost every case, the person who does it has a reason. He wants revenge. He’s angry. The victim has something he wants badly. He’s trying to stop someone from telling a secret. Stuff like that. What it means is, there’s usually a link between the killer and the suspect—which is how we have a shot at solving cases. Pretty much we’re successful, too. The ones we don’t solve, and by that I mean, we don’t make an arrest—” I wondered wh
ether he noticed he was saying we, like he was still a cop. “In most of those cases, one of two things happens. One, we know who did it, but we can’t prove it. We just can’t get the evidence. Or, two, someone else knows who did it, but they won’t tell. Gang killings are a good example. A lot of times a lot of people know who did it, but they won’t tell because they’re part of one of the gangs involved or they’re citizens who are afraid of repercussions if they tell.”

  “What about serial killers?” I asked. “They don’t usually know their victims.”

  “True,” Riel said. He seemed kind of surprised, though. “But with serial killers, there’s usually a pattern that helps you connect the dots. The killer picks the same general type of victim. He strikes in a particular geographic area or at a particular time of night or day. He uses a similar M.O. None of those things apply in the case of your mother. And I’ve got to tell you, Mike, I’ve never heard of a serial killer using an automobile as a murder weapon. That’s not how they operate.”

  Okay, so maybe that was all true. But no matter how you looked at it, there was still one fact. “Someone was driving the car that killed my mother. Okay, so you have way more experience than me.” A rookie cop first day on the job had more experience than me. “But I still don’t see how someone could be so drunk or whatever that they couldn’t see my mother in the street and then be so alert that they could get away without anyone seeing or hearing anything.”

  Riel took another sip of his beer and was quiet for a few more moments while he got up and scrubbed a couple of potatoes. He seemed to like to think things through before he answered. Then, finally, he said, “I hear what you’re saying, Mike, but in the absence of any motive, there was no reason for us to think it was murder.” He put the potatoes onto an aluminum pan and slid the pan into the oven. Then he stood with his back to me for a few moments while he washed the cucumber and the tomatoes. When he turned back to me, he said, “Suppose you tell me everything you remember from before it happened.”

  I frowned. “You mean, the day it happened?”

  “The days before, the weeks before, whatever you can remember about what your mother might have done, where she might have gone, who she might have talked to, any arguments you remember her having with anyone, anything you can recall about her daily routine.” He handed me the cucumber and the tomatoes. “And while you’re at it, slice these nice and thin for me, will you?”