“I don’t know, Candace.” He stands up and walks over to the bay window, clenching and unclenching his hands. Then he turns around. “I pulled in every marker I had to find the fucker who did in your father. And no one knew nothin’.” I know I’m bringing up a sore subject for him. He’s a man used to being in the know, particularly when it comes to murder. It must irk his professional sensibilities that a cop might know more about the subject of crime than he does.
“Do you think it could have been my mother?” I ask, trying to guide him away from the offence. “She and the old man used to scrap a lot, didn’t they?” Perhaps it’s the meeting with the blonde that has me thinking about mothers, because the idea that my mom might have rubbed out my dad has never occurred to me before. Their short-lived union was acrimonious and violent. One time she clocked my dad with the clothes iron, the only time I’m sure she ever picked it up.
“Don’t be daft. That woman left you on a ride at the amusement park when you were four with nothin’ but five bucks and a map to Burger King. We haven’t seen hide nor hair of her since.”
“I thought she abandoned me on a median strip on the highway when I was three?”
“Same difference,” he says.
I leave it alone. Whatever the story, she didn’t come back.
Rod returns to sit on the couch and takes one of my hands in his. They are still greasy from the bologna. “Listen, darling, I just don’t want you to get your hopes up on this. There’s no guarantee this Malone is going to tell you anything. I never met a cop yet I’d trust as far as I could spit in a gale wind.” He leans in to look directly in my eyes. “And you wouldn’t help one of them, would you?”
“I would if I thought I could find out who slit my dad’s throat and dumped him in the river.” I take my hands out of his. I’m a little pissed at his reaction, although I don’t know what I expected. “Wouldn’t you?”
“I might,” he says, picking up his fork again. “Then again, I’m not as close to this Tyler Brent business as you are. Where did you say you met with the mother? He takes a bite of bologna and chews on the soft meat before he swallows, as if it’s even necessary.
“The Goon,” I say.
“Were you seen?”
“Just by barflies and lowlifes.” Uncle Rod nods his head. He knows the clientele of The Goon. It’s not a stellar bunch. The fact that I’m perhaps both a barfly and a lowlife goes without saying. Then again, the blonde did stand out there. She could be remembered. And her association with me would be hard to explain.
Uncle Rod grabs the remote and turns the TV back on. His earlier disgust with the Habs has been soothed with the meal and a brief time out. Two of the players have dropped their gloves and are trying to tear each other’s jerseys off in a strange kind of embrace. This is how men on skates fight — like they’re slow dancing. It’s hard to punch and stay upright on the ice at the same time. You need the guy you’re trying to level to hold you up, even as you attempt to punch his lights out.
“I don’t know, Candace Starr,” my uncle says, not taking his eyes off the screen. “You could be asking for a peck of trouble.”
“I could be,” I say, picking up my knife and fork. The use of my surname invokes my father, as does the salty taste of the meat in my mouth. Fried bologna was a staple of my childhood. My dad learned to make it from Rod, and I couldn’t get enough as a kid. I also couldn’t get enough of trouble. And some things never change.
Although, in my experience, allegiances often do. Uncle Rod’s reaction to my interesting day seems a little off, and Newfoundland isn’t too far away for a man to fly back, take care of business, and then fly out again. Maybe I’ll have to find his aging mother’s number and give her a call. He may be the only family I’ve got, but in a clan of killers, weapons aren’t the only ones capable of telling stories.
I eat my bologna and watch the black-and-white-striped referee pull apart the fighting players. They skate to their respective penalty boxes like spoiled children who aren’t getting dessert. The partners’ dance is over. At least for now.
CHAPTER 4
THE GUY AT THE LIQUOR STORE is attracting attention. He’s spent the last fifteen minutes loading up his cart with bottles and six-packs, with no apparent rhyme or reason. Premium liquors like Hendrick’s and Chivas Regal lie alongside cheap bourbon that would take the paint off a car. Organic light beer from a microbrewery jostles up against Black Death from Iceland. Right now he’s clutching a forty-ouncer of Jack Daniel’s in one hand while he reaches for a bottle of white wine with a large black high heel on the label called Girls’ Night Out. He is not a discerning shopper. Neither is he a discerning dresser. He’s forgotten to wear a shirt and his grey sweatpants look like he’s pissed in them. Smell like it, too.
“Can I help you with anything, sir?” The smiling liquor store employee pretends nothing is wrong, but we all know differently, except the guy. He slurs something unintelligible and tucks the white wine with the high heel into his armpit. The smiling liquor store employee goes back to stocking shelves.
I turn away from the drama and go to the back of the store to look through the bargain bins. Tonight I need quantity over quality. I’ve got too much on my mind. I pick up a couple of dented boxes of no-name fortified wine, steering clear of the Thunderbird. That bum wine turns your tongue black. I’m on my way to the cash when the guy with the cart does a runner out the exit doors, moving surprisingly fast for a man who can barely stand up. He makes it about ten yards into the parking lot before he’s tackled by two undercovers from the store. The bottles smash into pieces on the pavement.
“Candace?” A chubby but pretty middle-aged woman with a no-nonsense pageboy puts her hand gently on my elbow. That’s almost the highest she can reach. It’s Charlotte, Uncle Rod’s petite on-again, off-again girlfriend. She’s holding one of those little wire baskets with a bottle of the Girls’ Night Out wine in it.
“Hi, Charlotte.” I drop the two boxes of fortified wine on the rubber conveyor belt. They travel down toward the cashier like soldiers going to war.
Charlotte places her own purchase on the belt and moves ahead of me, dropping the shopping basket and opening her wallet. “I’ll pay for these,” she says, indicating my booze as well as hers. Charlotte’s nice that way and has always had a soft spot for me. She’s forever dropping by my place bringing food or gossip, a covert way to check in on my well-being. I’ve never understood it, liked or disliked her attentions. I’m missing the flip side of maternal instinct: the need to be mothered. That need is like music from a long time ago, and I’ve grown tone-deaf.
“Can I drive you home?” Charlotte asks.
“Sure.” Least I can do is keep the old girl company in her Toyota hatchback, since she’s financed the evening’s entertainment. Plus, it’s raining again. We walk out the automatic doors together and into the parking lot, careful to avoid the broken glass and the screaming, bleeding, alcohol-drenched drunk who is now in handcuffs. He must have fallen on the broken bottles when he got nabbed. A police cruiser has arrived.
“That was fast,” Charlotte says, as we load the back of her car with the drinks.
“They probably called them as soon as he walked in the store,” I reply, keeping my head down as I go to get in the passenger side of Charlotte’s car, my unruly hair drawn across my face. I’ve had enough run-ins with the cops today.
We are turning out of the parking lot when the large fishing lure hanging from the rear-view mirror swings around and almost catches me in the cheek as I lean forward to adjust my seat belt. Charlotte’s a nice enough woman but a lousy driver. The lure is shaped like a bottle of Screech, Newfoundland’s infamous cheap, high-proof rum. It is a souvenir from the one and only time Rod took her home to meet his mother. A disaster of a trip. The two of them started bickering as soon as the plane was in the air. By the time they got to St. John’s, they were no longer speaking to one another. Charlotte stayed in a motel and got a flight home to the States the ne
xt day. The mother never got introduced. Uncle Rod had brought the fishing lure home as a make-up gift. Charlotte embedded it in his hand first before accepting it. Still, it gets me thinking. I may as well ask.
“Did Dad and Uncle Rod ever fight?”
“What do you mean? With each other?” Charlotte narrowly misses a cyclist as she turns right. The rider falls off his bike and onto the curb, his spandexed legs tangled up in the frame. She doesn’t even notice. The windshield wipers swish furiously back and forth, only one of them making contact with the glass. The road is a melting watercolour on my side of the glass. If Charlotte kills us in a head-on collision, at least I won’t see it coming.
“Yeah.” I make sure the seat belt is still fastened. “With each other.”
“Rarely. They were cut from the same cloth, those two. Like brothers,” she says.
“Brothers fight,” I say. But it’s true. I can’t remember a cross word between my dad and Uncle Rod, although maybe they did their arguing out of earshot, an attempt to give me something resembling a stable childhood. Though they didn’t seem to mind if I heard them beating some guy to death with a bag of oranges in the basement until it made juice. Or leaving me alone to toast marshmallows by the campfire in the dark while they went to break a park ranger’s neck.
“There was the one time.” Charlotte bites her lip, immediately ashamed of saying anything. “But that was a long time ago.”
My interest is piqued. “What did they fight about?”
“Your mother.” Charlotte switches into the right lane and clips the side mirror of a parked van.
“What about my mother?” Of all the things they might have argued about I hadn’t thought my mother would be one of them. On that woman the two had always seemed to be in complete agreement. She was the “thieving wop” to both of them. They used this term to refer to her so often that as a child I thought it was all one word: Feethingwop. I thought it might be a cross between the boogie man and the tooth fairy.
“I shouldn’t have said anything,” she says, biting her lip again.
“Well, you did,” I say, as Charlotte pulls into a parking space in front of the E-Zee Market and slams on the brakes. The booze smashes against the back of the rear seats. She doesn’t look up from the steering wheel. The neon sign of the E-Zee Market sputters in the window. Majd really needs to get that fixed.
“Tell me, Charlotte.”
She sighs in surrender. “Your mother was connected,” she says. “Or her family was. She was estranged from them, though. Ran away with your dad when she got pregnant.” She must be on an “out” with my uncle, or she wouldn’t betray him like this. Nobody is ever allowed to talk to me about my mother.
“And?” I prompt. She’s not getting away with only giving up half a story.
“When she disappeared, Rod was afraid there might be repercussions.” Charlotte adjusts the rear-view mirror, like she’s afraid we’re being followed. The fishing-lure hooks dance back and forth.
“But she didn’t disappear. She took off,” I say.
“Some weren’t so sure.” She shifts in her seat, fiddling with the keys in the ignition, but she doesn’t turn the car off. “I think they argued about that, too. What happened to her,” she says.
“What did happen to her, Charlotte?”
Charlotte pops the hatchback with a button on the dash, the car still idling.
“Honestly, Candace, I just don’t know.”
Sitting in my apartment at midnight, with half of the last box of sickly sweet wine left, I decide it is too late to call Rod’s aging mother in St. John’s and ask whether he took off for a couple of days during his visit five years ago. But it is not too late to call the number on the card I hold in my hand. Usually, I have to go downstairs to the E-Zee Market and ask Majd to use the land line behind the counter. But I lifted Charlotte’s phone from her purse today when she went to unload the booze. I’ll give it back, though. I don’t steal from people I know. Or at least from people I know who bring me cookies. I figure a cop’s got to have voice mail to intercept late-night calls. I’ll leave a message. But Malone surprises me by picking up on the first ring, despite the time. A keener.
“Malone here.”
“I’ll do it,” I tell her.
Silence, and then finally, “Candace?”
“Who else?” She’s quiet on the other end for a moment.
“There’s going to be some ground rules,” she says.
“Hmm.”
“No breaking the law. No lying.”
I agree, knowing this is, in itself, a lie.
“You give me Tyler Brent’s killer, and I’ll open up the file to you on your father’s murder. No arrest, no file.”
“What if I just promise to do my best?” I say in a saccharine-sweet voice, before polishing off the wine in my fruit jar.
“Then your best won’t be good enough,” Malone says.
She gives me an address. Tells me to ask for her at the front desk tomorrow at ten o’clock. I don’t need to write it down. I’m good at remembering things.
“Of course, we’re going to have to keep things on the down-low,” she says. “We’ll tell people you’re a private investigator here to consult. A few people might know who you are, but for God’s sake try not to draw attention to yourself.”
I stand up to get another fruit-jar glass of wine and catch my reflection in the cracked full-length mirror nailed to the back of the door. It cuts off my head at the top. I’m wearing only a sports bra and shorts, so the gold five-pointed star tattoo on my flat stomach shows. A deep navel made for body shots at the centre winks like an indented wormhole. The kind Einstein wrote about, not the kind that actually houses worms. That would be gross. “I’m not a person who exactly blends into the wallpaper, Malone,” I tell her.
“Well, you’ll just have to practise your chameleon moves,” she says.
I tap the little spigot on the box of wine, my shoulder pinning the phone to my ear.What’s left of the crimson liquid spurts into the jam jar. It leaves red-tinged bubbles at the top. “I still don’t get it, Malone. Why are you doing this? What’s in it for you?”
“I told you, career advancement,” she says. But there’s a hesitation there that others wouldn’t notice. My life has depended on having a fine-tuned ear for tells.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Malone.” I hang up the phone and go stand at the one window in the room. It looks out on the street. Down below I can see into The Goon across the road. Inside a man with a familiar diagonal fade of tightly wound curls sits at the bar. He’s a bounty hunter I like to roll when he’s in town. Marcus Knight. Black guys like him rarely set foot in The Goon, it being strictly a hangout for white trash. Marcus is neither one of these.
I take in the shape of his sturdy shoulders and strong back from my apartment and think how I’d like to run my fingernails down them. But I need to get up early if I’m going to meet Malone. Well, early for me. Instead of joining him in the bar, I lie down on a mattress on the floor and study the stains on the ceiling while I finish off my drink. It’s my usual form of meditation before I pass out.
I don’t buy Malone’s story about career advancement. Something’s making her wet enough to risk involving a volatile entity like me, and whatever that is, it’s way hotter than a promotion. I couldn’t give a rat’s ass what happened to my mother. But I’ll do whatever it takes to find out what happened to my dad. Even help the cops find Tyler Brent’s killer. Or at least make them believe that I have. Whatever it really is that Malone wants me for, I’ll find that out, too.
And if she’s screwing with me, she’ll only live long enough to be sorry she did.
CHAPTER 5
BEFORE I LEAVE TO MEET MALONE the next morning, I use Charlotte’s phone to call Rod’s elderly mother, Agnes, in St. John’s. Charlotte can afford the long-distance charges. She has a good job with the government in the Accountability Division. Other than looking for typos in their quarterly newsletter, I’ve nev
er been sure what exactly she is accountable for. I’ll leave the phone in her mailbox on the way to the address Malone gave me. It’s in the same neighbourhood.
“I’m sorry we can’t come to the phone right now. Please kindly leave a message.” I love how she still uses the word “we” even though it’s just her and her pet hedgehog, Boris. Women, particularly older ones, do this so you won’t think they’re alone; they don’t know that most people who mean to do them harm don’t give a shit anyway.
“Hi, Agnes, it’s Candace. Mike Starr’s daughter,” I say after the old-school answering machine beeps. Then I clear my throat, at a rare loss for words. “Can you please give me a call when you get this message?” I leave the number of the E-Zee Market and repeat it twice, knowing I won’t have the phone handy later. After I hang up I realize the old girl might think something is wrong with Rod or someone else close to her if I’m calling all the way from the States. So I call again and leave another message. I don’t want to be on the hook for causing an old lady’s heart attack in Canada. Especially one who sends me thick, hand-knit wool socks every Christmas that I never wear but make for excellent silencers. I use the gun for more than intimidation, but I don’t tell Rod that.
“Where you going to today, Miss Candace?” Majd asks. He can see I’ve made an effort to look respectable, my hair tamed into submission and a smattering of makeup on my face. He is busy working on fixing some old speakers he found at the curb on garbage day, trying to coax them back into something he can hook up to the receiver that Lovely Linda gave him from The Goon when they replaced the sound system with digital.
“Nowhere,” I say. And he accepts that. Majd is the most awesome Syrian refugee I know. He has the gratefulness of a person who knows what it’s like to have nothing, and he cooks kick-ass samosas. He also isn’t afraid to take the piss out of stereotypes.
The Starr Sting Scale Page 3