The Starr Sting Scale

by C. S. O'Cinneide

  “Of course, his given name was Tidal Wave,” the father adds, putting an arm around his wife. “He was born right here in a saltwater birthing pool on the back porch. Remember the huge cascade the placenta made when it was delivered, Cyn? We still have it. Would you like to see it?”

  I don’t know whether he means the pool or the placenta, but thankfully Malone responds in the negative to both. The father goes to the kitchen to get some tea for his wife. He had asked if either of us wanted any, but Malone and I said no. It’s probably that crappy herbal stuff anyway. The couple seems to have recovered from their earlier start when they saw the two of us at the door: an Asian woman with a gun and a wild-haired Amazon with a whiff of the street about her. I swear I saw the dad reach for a particularly pointy umbrella out of the stand, readying himself for attack.

  Finally, after all the bullshit chit-chat, Malone gets down to business.

  “Tell me, Mrs. Brent …” she begins.

  “Ms. Winogrodzski-Brent,” she interrupts.

  “Oh yes, my apologies.” I am dying to hear Malone say this ridiculous faux-feminist hyphenated name out loud with a straight face.

  “But you can call me Cynthia.” Damn.

  “Cynthia,” Malone says. “Is there anyone that Tyler didn’t get along with, anyone who would want to do him harm?” The father has come back in the room with a mug of what looks like steaming yellow piss for his wife. Must be chamomile. I so called it.

  “He was a free spirit,” says the mother. “We raised him that way. I don’t know why anyone would want to harm him.” This time she actually looks a bit torn up. “He had dozens of friends.”

  “Can you give us some of their names? Maybe a friend he was out with last Saturday night?” Malone has her iPad virtual keyboard at the ready to record Tyler’s many friends, but the mother looks like she’s in Final Jeopardy! and can’t figure out the answer in the form of a question.

  “Well, there are just so many,” she finally manages. “It’s hard to keep tabs, to learn all of their names.” Some mothers leave you on a median strip and some leave you with a succession of nannies while they go around the country hugging trees. Neither type is around enough to learn the names of your friends.

  “If you give us his phone, maybe we could look up some of his contacts. Do you know where it is?” Smooth move, Malone, slipping that in there.

  “I thought it was with the police,” the mother says. “It’s not here at the house. Tidal Wave always took his phone with him. We bought it for him for safety reasons, so he could call if he was in trouble.” Yeah, right. I’ve seen kids send five hundred texts a day, upload to Snapchat and Instagram until they’ve got disjointed thumbs, but never have I seen one of them use the damn thing for an actual phone call.

  “There’s Lachlan Reid,” the dad volunteers. And the mother shoots him a disapproving look. Malone picks up on it and raises an eyebrow.

  “We didn’t approve of that relationship,” the mother says. “Not that we would ever try to control something as sacred as friendship. But he was a bad influence on our son.” Impressive that she can’t remember the kid’s name but can still blame him for her son’s less-than-stellar behaviour.

  “Was he depressed?” I jump in, wanting to take the conversation down a different path.

  “What do you mean?” the mother says, looking offended.

  “I mean depressed. Lying around in his room, wearing black all the time, listening to Kurt Cobain on repeat.”

  “If our son was depressed, we would have gotten him the appropriate help. We do not believe in the stigma of mental illness,” his mother replies stiffly. “But he was not depressed. He was planning on buying a motorcycle with his birthday money. He just needed to get his licence.”

  “Yeah, but listen, the Kurt Cobain …” I say.

  “Any other friends you can remember?” Malone asks, shutting me down.

  “First, I’d like to understand what your associate is insinuating,” the mother demands.

  “She has Tourette’s,” Malone says without missing a beat. I turn to her with my mouth open as she continues. “She can’t help but blurt out obscenities and nonsense words during conversation. We hired her as part of an affirmative-action program for neurological disorders.” For the first time in my life I find myself at a loss for an obscenity to blurt out, I am so stymied that Malone has seen fit to categorize me as brain-damaged.

  “Oh, I see,” Cynthia says, smoothing her skirt, giving me a kind, pitying smile. “Well, Greg and I have always been supporters of affirmative-action programs.”

  “Absolutely,” Greg agrees, giving me the same sappy look. I swear, if the two of them reach over and give me a group hug, I’ll vomit.

  “So,” Malone says, taking the floor again. “Any other friends you can remember?”

  Cynthia continues to smooth her skirt. The father bites his lower lip.

  “Well, of course there were girlfriends,” the mother finally manages. I notice the plural. So does the father.

  “I thought there was just Alice Corrigan,” the dad says.

  “There was another one,” the mother says. “Jessica something. She showed up at the house one day looking for him.”

  “But he and Alice had been going out for a whole year,” the owl-eyed dad says, really shocked for the first time since we arrived. If the guy was expecting fucking monogamy from a hormone-infested teenage boy with a free spirit, his jeans must be cutting off the circulation to his brain.

  Malone takes down the additional names, entering them on the iPad. She needs to get to the hard questions. Shit or get off the pot. I decide to help her out a little with my Tourette’s.

  “What about his rap sheet?”

  Malone elbows me discreetly in the gut. The father clears his throat. The mother chokes a bit on her chamomile.

  “Maybe we’ll have that tea after all,” Malone says to the father.

  “No,” Cynthia says, grabbing her husband by his sweater vest and yanking him back down on the couch. “I am afraid you misunderstand my son,” she says, only giving me a break because she thinks I’m disabled. Otherwise, she’d be bitch-slapping me right now.

  “The thing is, Mr. and Mrs. Brent,” Malone explains, trying to bring the focus back.

  “Mr. and Ms. Winogrodzski-Brent,” the father corrects her. “I took Cynthia’s name as well when we partnered for life.” Oh, for fuck’s sake.

  “Well, sir,” Malone continues, “it’s not like Tyler — I mean Tidal Wave — wasn’t known to police.” That’s an understatement. I read the printout of Tyler’s criminal record in the car. It filled a whole page and the kid wasn’t even eighteen yet.

  “Just the usual acting out, finding himself, experimenting,” the mother says.

  “We encouraged him to experiment. It is only through allowing a child from infancy to fully explore the world with no restrictions, that they can find true peace and understanding.” The father sounds like he’s repeating a cheesy Facebook post he read. I cannot get over this couple. I have seen infants operate. In my opinion, if you allow them to explore the world with no restrictions, the little buggers will find and drink the drain cleaner under the sink. Not that I have any real experience with kids.

  “Well, there were some run-ins with drugs and an assault charge,” Malone suggests, trying to tread carefully.

  The mother and father sit there blankly, as if Malone is speaking a foreign language. Their united front of complete denial is impressive, even to a hard-ass like me.

  “And we were called out here,” Malone continues undaunted, consulting her notes even though I know she doesn’t have to. “Let’s see. Yes, I believe we came out last fall for a domestic disturbance.”

  “That was a misunderstanding,” the dad says, bristling in his skinny jeans. Something has penetrated the united front.

  “Your daughter, correct? She was eight years old at the time. Is her name Echo?” Jesus, where was this one’s placenta delivered, in a
storm drain?

  “Do you have any children, officer?” the mother snaps, batwings fluttering. I hadn’t thought about whether Malone might be married or a mother. I find myself interested in the answer.

  “Detective,” Malone corrects, still wearing her compassionate cop face, but I’m starting to see the impatient woman who threw my lunch at me in the car. “And no, I don’t have any children.”

  “Well, if you did, you would know that sometimes children have scuffles, and sometimes things can get a little bit out of hand. But it’s all part of the normal maturation and development of the human animal.”

  I need to move this thing along. None of us are getting any younger.

  “This animal stuffed your daughter’s head in the gas oven until she told him where her allowance was,” I say.

  Not long after that we leave. But not before we search Tyler’s room. No phone.

  I never do get any tea. I think it’s because I have Tourette’s.

  “I want to go back to the scene. See if we missed anything. Tyler’s phone. A rope.”

  “Do we have to?” I wish I never said anything about the phone. If Malone would just take the autopsy at face value, we could forget all this and call it a suicide. Then I can get the information about my dad and get the hell out of this whole fucked-up situation.

  “Yes,” Malone says. “We do.”

  “C’mon, the kid was obviously mentally unbalanced, growing up in a house with those two wack jobs. How could he not be? He did some weed, downed some Valium, and then reflected on the futileness of the human condition until a rope presented itself. Case closed.”

  Malone pulls into a parking lot bordering Riverside Park, opens up the back door of the unmarked, and lets me out again like a kid imprisoned by the child lock. I can’t believe we’ve been at this for hours. This is way too much like work. She pierces me with those green eyes as I get out. They appear to be throwing sparks.

  “Quit the crap, Candace.”

  We walk down an embankment and then over to an open grassy piece marked off with police tape. You can hear the river running fairly high in the deep gorge below. Early spring run-off. The water is about a hundred feet down and twice as far across.

  “Hey, Malone.” A tubby older cop is removing the tape. He has long sideburns like Roy Orbison.

  “Hey, Doug. How are things?” Malone appears nervous. She also appears to be trying to hide me behind her. But I’m not easy to hide unless I want to be hidden.

  “Oh, you know, can’t complain, and if I do, who the hell would listen, right?” I step out from behind Malone and the guy sees me. His friendly smile collapses like a used tissue in the rain.

  “Oh, yeah, this is …” Malone begins.

  “I know who she is,” he says then spits on the ground. “What the fuck is she doing here?”

  “I had some questions. Thought if I brought her here she might find her answers better.” Malone is lying again. I am impressed by this side of her.

  “We both know that’s bullshit, Malone.” He walks over and hands her a big wad of sticky yellow tape. “But I’m three months from early retirement and I don’t give a shit. Just keep her away from me.” He walks past us and over the embankment. Malone throws the tape on the ground once he’s gone. Then she starts pulling out her equipment, gloves, evidence bags, and a pair of tweezers. I remember now that I forgot to ask the blonde in The Goon that day who did her eyebrows. Maybe I could ask Malone. She looks like she knows where to wax.

  “What’s his problem?” I ask instead, once I figure the fat cop with the bad attitude is out of earshot.

  “Doug Wolfe?”

  I’d caught the first name earlier. The last name reminds me of the tattoo on Tyler Brent’s calf, the floating arms framing the face and the snarling black muzzle. “Yeah, Wolfe. Guess he isn’t big on introductions,” I say.

  “He didn’t like your dad much,” Malone admits. A lot of cops didn’t.

  “A bit of a lackey job for a guy who’s been on the force since the time of Christ,” I say. “What did he do, fuck the wrong man’s wife or something?”

  “Something like that.” She hands me a pair of gloves and a flashlight. It’s getting late, so we move quickly.

  “What are you expecting to find here that the dozen cops who combed through this place last night didn’t?” I ask after a few minutes of beating the bushes.

  “I told you, a phone, for one thing.” Malone lifts up a rock and shines her beam underneath. All she finds are some blind earthworms writhing in the light.

  “And what, a smoking noose for the other? So we can finally say the kid killed himself in a drug-aided fit of teenage angst and go the hell home?”

  “You know as well as I do that dead men don’t remove their own nooses,” Malone says.

  “Maybe someone found him afterward and took it off.”

  “Peyton says it must have been removed almost immediately after death to have left so little bruising.”

  “Peyton?”

  “The pathologist.”

  “Oh yeah,” I say and gently squeeze the thick wad of bills in my front pocket. “Maybe it was a suicide pact. Somebody helped him and then went and drowned themselves in the river.”

  “He doesn’t seem the type.”

  “They never do.”

  “Besides, there’s nothing around here he could have hanged himself on anyway,” she says, waving her arms around at the grass and low-lying brush. “The body’s been moved. That points to murder, not suicide.”

  “You never know.”

  “Listen, Candace. I’m getting tired of you trying to find ways to get out of actually solving what the hell happened to this kid. If you aren’t interested in the terms of our agreement, you can just go.” She puts her hands on her hips, like she’s a fifties housewife scolding a ruffian. If she shakes her finger at me, I’ll cram her flashlight up her ass.

  But I want to find out what happened to my father, so I turn around and pretend to look some more. Maybe she’ll give me an A for effort and I can finally get to The Goon for that Scotch.

  After ten more minutes of poking around in the bushes with flashlights, she finally notices it. Then again, it’s getting dark, and it is around a bend in the river, and at least a hundred yards away, so maybe she isn’t a total loss as a detective.

  “What’s that?” Malone points at a thin line that crosses from a small shack on the other side of the river across the gorge. I squint like I’m thinking about it.

  “I don’t know,” I say, hoping to hell she’ll let it go.

  “It’s a zip line,” Malone says, walking toward the dirt platform embedded on the edge of our side of the gorge. It’s the landing spot for thrill-seekers who pay to sail high above the river rapids and pretend to be Tarzan.

  She reaches out and pulls a sturdy lanyard attached to a pulley on the static line toward her. Earlier it had blended in with the grey rocks of the gorge and what was left of the cloudy day.

  “Hey, Candace, guess what I found?”

  “Shit,” I say. I hope the orange fibres left behind on the lanyard are negligible, but I’m guessing they’re still going to tie me to this cop until we solve this case, just like someone tied Tyler Brent’s neck in a noose before they pushed him across the river on the zip line.

  Looks like Malone is going to miss her hockey game.

  CHAPTER 7

  THAT NIGHT I TIE ONE ON at The Goon, after finishing a bottle of Johnny Walker at home with my new friend Shannon, who I met at the liquor store. I had hoped I might spend the night with Marcus. But apparently he hasn’t been into The Goon all day. Probably on the road back to wherever he came from, with whoever he’s been tracking stuffed in the trunk like a bag of empties waiting to be returned. You wouldn’t think I’d get along with someone who makes his money capturing wayward criminals, but I appreciate men with strong hands and a good sense of how a woman’s body works. Marcus Knight has both, with six-pack abs to sweeten the deal. I coul
d use some of that right now. But for the time being, Shannon has a taut enough belly that’s made for body shots, much like my own. I prefer men for sex, but I’ll take a woman if that’s what’s handy. Shannon is currently proving the shotworthiness of her midsection to half a dozen guys at one end of the bar while I talk to the old-timer at the other.

  He isn’t the first old man I’ve pulled aside tonight, the ones of a certain age who frequent the fringes of places like this. After what Charlotte said when she drove me home, I need to talk to someone old enough to have known my mother back in the day. Hopefully one with enough brain cells still intact to remember what may or may not have happened to her. These older ones, they sit off to the side, their faces cast down to hide their rheumy eyes, looking up only to pay the waitress for watered-down draft with their stack of pennies. This guy’s different from the grey-haired sad sacks I’ve been grilling up until now. Roberto is his name. He wears a white fedora with a black band and shines his shoes so you can see yourself in them. Each night he comes into The Goon and asks for two shots of grappa. One he drinks quick and the other he nurses throughout the evening at the bar while he makes gentleman-talk with Lovely Linda. At nine o’clock, he tips his hat, leaves Linda a dollar tip and walks home. He’s not a big guy. Even sitting at the bar I register that he is at least a foot shorter than me. His polished patent leathers dangle from the bar stool like a kid’s.

  “Yes, I knew your mother,” Roberto says, ignoring the boys in the background slurping B-52s from Shannon’s belly. “And also her family.”