by Bruce Barber
resemblance to a haven of entertainment and good fellowship than it usually did.
A patron was lowered over his table, eyes closed and snoring heavily. Two bald men, one whose pate was bisected by a ragged scar, faced each other over the billiards table, holding their cues like pikestaffs as they disputed the score. A man in an expensive three-piece suit sat before the empty stage, hands folded in his lap, staring up as if awaiting a vision. Three bikers groped a female member of their club beneath the Daily Special sign.
As Keyes made his way through, his shoes occasionally stuck to the floor, grasped by spilt liquor and other nameless fluids. Raw guitars and drums pummelled the thick clouds of smoke that hung low beneath ineffectual ceiling fans.
Keyes’ first impulse was to make a straight line for the exit door, but then he saw Kiri Ellison stranding by the bar, in conversation or argument with the bartender, who in all probability was the proprietor as well. The bartender had a wad of bills clutched tightly in his fist, no doubt the subject of his interchange with Kiri.
At last the man peeled some bills from the roll and thrust them at Kiri with poor grace. There was something very strange about the tableau, and Keyes realized what it was after a moment’s reflection: although the bartender was a hulking brute of a man whose knuckles probably scraped the floor when he walked, the diminutive Kiri seemed somehow to be the larger of the two, no mean feat – she was clad only in the tiniest of G-strings and a small mask which suggested the visage of a bird.
Of prey? Keyes wondered.
Just as Keyes reached Kiri, the music ended abruptly and harsh fluorescent lights came up full, revealing with brutal honesty the disrepair and neglect beneath the peeling gilding of The Lily and its patrons. But Kiri was still beautiful, he saw, perhaps the only thing of beauty in this abysmal place.
Keyes had no idea what to say to this girl, how to voice his suspicions, which admittedly had their roots only in slim circumstance, dreams, and guesswork. Approaching George Brocken had been relatively simple, since they had the theatre as common background. Keyes knew nothing about Kiri’s life other than hearsay, gossip, and their one brief conversation outside The Bells. He had, however, concluded one thing about her from that meeting: that she was a blunt, straightforward person; she would probably respond best to the same traits in others. Or so he hoped.
“Miss Ellison?” he said. She was standing alone now, counting the money.
She removed her bird mask, and tucked the bills in the G-string.
“You again... slumming?” she asked, her tone neutral and disinterested.
Keyes took a deep breath, then plunged forward.
“No. I need to talk to you, in private. I have reason to think that you killed Alan Wa1es...”
Keyes was more or less prepared for violence, tears, loud denials, and so forth, but not for the sad calmness of her reply:
“I figured somebody would come to that conclusion sooner or later,” Kiri said. “I’ll grab some clothes. Meet me outside in a couple of minutes and we can get this over with.”
(4:4) Big Bill’s, a doughnut shop
Kiri came out a side door of The Lily, wearing her jeans and leather jacket. “Come on,” she said, leading him across the street to Big Bill’s, an all-night doughnut franchise. It was empty, except for a gum-chewing teenaged girl at the counter, who poured two mugs of coffee as soon as she saw Kiri and Keyes enter. They sat at a table near a window looking out on an intersection. On the other three comers, there were churches.
“Well?” Kiri said. “What do you think you know?”
Keyes told her of witnessing the rendezvous with Wales before the performance of Macbeth, and of the sequins he had found beside the body; he explained what he knew of how badly she had been treated by Wales. He did not tell her of his dream.
“I know none of this is solid evidence,” he concluded, “but I had a feeling that you were involved, somehow –”
“Are you going to the police?” she demanded.
Keyes sipped at his coffee.
“No,” he said at last. “I don’t think so. I just want to know what happened. I feel like I’ve been reading a book that somebody tore the last page out of. I want to find that last page.”
“Well, I haven’t got it,” Kiri said. “When you saw Alan and me, we were having a fight, as usual, but then he had to go to work, so he told me to meet him later under that well thing. We’d done it before. I wasn’t going to go, but I’ve never been able to stay mad at him. When I got there, he wanted... he liked...” She paused, then stared at Keyes defiantly, as if challenging him to be shocked. “He liked blow-jobs in public places. But this time, he kept glancing up that well, as if he were expecting somebody to be there.”
Keyes interrupted.
“It seems to me he treated you pretty badly... Why did you put up with it?”
“Alan and I went to school together. We’re both from St. Marys, you know. He was the first guy I ever slept with. And when he came back here, he told me he’d help me get into acting school, or something like that. This dancing job pays well enough, so I decided to take it until Alan set something up for me in the theatre. Course, he never even took me to a play, but I was in love with him, no matter what he did. I don’t expect you to understand that...”
Keyes thought of Sandra, and his own history with her.
“I think I do,” he said softly.
“Then I heard footsteps, and a woman’s voice – she said ‘Alan, you bastard,’ or something like that.”
Kiri stopped talking, and stared out the window for a moment, toward the churches.
“I raised my head, but all I could see was Alan,” she continued. “l didn’t want anything to do with a scene like that. I just took off. I ran down to the island. It’s where I like to go to get my head together. And that’s it, the whole story. I didn’t kill him. Maybe I should have. He was a bastard, and I can do better. But I didn’t, and I have no intention of telling the cops about that woman, whoever she was – I guess I’m sorry Alan’s dead... but maybe she did us all a favour.”
“You seemed to care when I saw you outside in the rain the other day,” Keyes reminded her.
“Maybe I’ve had time to think,” Kiri said, sadly.
Keyes reached into his jacket for cigarettes. The sequins had attached themselves to the package. He plucked them off, one by one, and handed them to her.
“I believe you,” he said. “I guess I’ll just keep looking for that last page. You really didn’t get a glimpse of the woman?”
Kiri shook her head.
As a detective, I make a great sculptor, Keyes thought, standing up.
“I’m sorry to have bothered you, Miss Ellison, and I hope you’re not offended by my suspicions.”
“I guess I should thank you for letting me explain my side of it. Some people wouldn’t have taken the time. I think... you must have loved somebody once, too.”
“I guess I must have,” Keyes said. Then, for no reason he could put his finger on, Keyes added “May I walk you home, Miss Ellison?”
An expression crossed her face that made her look very young and very innocent for a moment, until a frown knitted her thick brows, perhaps as she wondered what the catch was, since in her life up until now, there probably always was a catch to kindness, usually a sexual one. In this case, however, she must have decided otherwise.
“Thank you,” she said. “That would be nice. I don’t live far.”
They made a strange duo as they walked unhurriedly to a neighbourhood near the railroad tracks, but certainly no stranger than many of the couples in the clash of cultures that inhabit Stratford during its warm dramatic summers, and cool moody autumns.
(4:5) Sunday, Bloody Sunday, Part I
Keyes felt terrible the next day. He was so unwell that he did not get up. Stratford, he thought as he lay in his hired bed, was too much for him. He could no longer deal with the pace that Stratfordians maintained, at least the Stratfordians of his acquaintance.
>
He had slowed his drinking down enormously since he left the stage. His life as a writer was tame compared to the life most actors led until age or children slowed them down. Keyes had almost forgotten about the burden of left-over energy that so many actors carried with them into the pub after the last lines were spoken and the last bit of applause had faded away. He had forgotten the passion of it all, and the raging thirsts.
It had not been his intention when he returned to Stratford to try to get back into the magical world he had known there once upon a time. He didn’t want to keep up with his theatrical friends. Even in his play-acting years he had never been able to keep up with many of them, especially the mighty O’Reilly. Sandra, too, had frequently drunk him under the boards. Her appetites generally were grander than his, more urgent, more sweeping. Even Betty had a capacity for drink and perhaps for life that made Keyes feel, at least on this hangover morning, that he was only a frail creature, a monkish introvert.
I can’t even get any writing done in this circus, he thought. He had not completed a single paragraph on the life and times of Seamus O’Reilly during the past week, which, after all, was the main purpose of his visit to Stratford. He supposed he could plead murder as an extenuating circumstance to whatever court passes judgement on writers who do not write.
He groaned and heaped pillows over his head. In the distance he heard a church bell, and then another. That distance was not distant enough.