The Starr Sting Scale

by C. S. O'Cinneide

  She orders a few more items off the menu then presses send. You don’t even get a dedicated waiter anymore. Just a flurry of different Korean youngsters flying by your table with whatever order is ready. All of whom nod when I say the words sake and Sapporo to them but don’t bring me either. I think Malone has gotten to them already.

  “Well, hello, Chien-Shiung.” A not-unattractive woman in her late fifties is standing at the table. She’s well kept, but not in the way of Kristina Corrigan, with her ironed face and balayage highlights. More like she started off beautiful, and while the beauty has faded, you can still see it, as if her younger self is hiding behind a net curtain.

  “Hi, Shelley,” Malone says, with a plastered-on smile. I’m not sure what the reason is for the Polyfilla. The lady seems harmless.

  “I haven’t seen you since the Christmas party a few years back,” Shelley says. “How are you?”

  “Oh, pretty much the same,” says Malone. She’s not introducing me, as Carrie Fisher or anyone else. “I didn’t know you liked sushi,” Malone says, having exhausted what seems like a very limited repertoire in small talk.

  “I’m just waiting for some takeout for my book club,” she says. “We just read When the Cherry Blossoms Fall and I’m trying to stay on theme.”

  Malone still doesn’t introduce me.

  “Oh,” she says instead. “Is that the memoir about the English teacher who works in Japan or the one that follows the history of World War Two?”

  “I have no damn idea,” Shelley says. “Most of us never read the book.” She turns and smiles at me and then turns back to Malone. “Do you mind giving your friend and me some time to talk alone?”

  “I don’t know, Shelley …”

  “Just a moment,” Shelley says, and the young woman behind the curtain appears at once very sad and determined. Malone looks across the table at me, and I give her the nod. She excuses herself to the restroom. Shelley slides herself into the booth, to sit across the table from me.

  “You have your father’s eyes,” she says. She’s right. I do.

  “And his impatience with bullshit,” I say. “Why did you want to talk to me?”

  She moves one finger along the smooth surface of the table then looks up. “I knew your father when I was young. He was …” She pauses, looking for the right word. Seems to find it in the surface of the table and looks up. “He was an exceptional man.”

  I look at the wedding ring on her finger, plain but solid. Remember Malone’s reference to the cop Christmas party, something I would guess is also attended by the people they’re married to.

  “You’re Doug Wolfe’s wife,” I say. “Or you were.”

  “Still am,” she says, twisting the gold band around in endless circles.

  “Not sure if you want to hear it, but I think you could have done better.”

  She laughs with her whole face, and I can see why my father liked her. The laugh is faded, like the beauty, but at one time it would probably have been a rip-snorting guffaw. My father loved women who laughed like nobody was looking. He said that was the one time you really got to see their true selves.

  “Yes, well, I guess we all end up getting what we sign up for regardless.” She bites her lip. “I had always wanted to talk to you, Candace, and when Doug came home ranting about you working with Detective Malone, I thought I finally had my chance.”

  “Okay,” I say, wondering where this is going, and also how long Malone will be in the restroom. The spider roll has arrived, and it actually has eight legs.

  “I felt very bad,” she says. “When your mother left.” Someone pours her a cup of tea from a decorated bamboo pot. I hold my hand over my own cup and make another attempt to request sake. “I was young, and when you’re young, you don’t always think about the repercussions of your actions.”

  I nod my head in agreement, thinking of Tyler and Lachlan. Alice. Even myself. Ah, to be young. So many repercussions. So little time.

  “If it makes you feel any better, I think she would have left whether you were doing my dad or not,” I say. “She wasn’t exactly the maternal type.” I remember her sending me with a note and a fiver to the store for smokes when I was four. The man behind the cash used to try to get me to come behind the counter and sit on his knee, but I always told him that my dad was outside waiting in the car. Maybe that’s why I hate cigarettes so damn much.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Shelley says, obviously never having had to evade child molesters in order to maintain her mother’s nicotine habit. “A mother is bound to her daughter. She must have been very unhappy in order to leave you.” Shelley wipes away a tear I didn’t see coming.

  “Is that why you stayed?” I ask her, looking around her shoulder to see if Malone is on her way back. I’m not good at dealing with the emotionally vulnerable. But in this case, at least I’ve asked the right question and not offended her, like I usually do when someone’s upset.

  “Yes,” she says.

  I look again for Malone, this time hoping not to see her. I’ve got an opportunity here. “How mad was your husband at my dad?”

  “Pretty damn mad,” she says with a laugh that’s very different from the one that lit up her face earlier.

  “Do you think he might have, you know, tried to get back at my dad?” I’m trying hard to keep my voice level and even. The surest way of not getting an answer is to let someone know how important the question is.

  “You’re wondering about Mike’s death,” she says. “No, Candace. Doug wouldn’t have the passion for something like that. He always assumed your father would eventually get his comeuppance, given his lifestyle. Besides,” she says, after the rainbow roll comes with its spectrum of multicoloured raw fish, “your father gave him an excuse to hate me all these years. As long as Mike Starr was alive and well, so was his shame. He wouldn’t have wanted to give that up. Without your dad, he lost the living reason for his anger. Since his death, he’s had to settle with just ignoring me instead.”

  “How come you stay?” I say, finally accepting the fucking tea. It doesn’t look like I’m going to get served anything else. “Your daughter must be grown by now.”

  A man motions to Shelley from the front counter. He has a tower of Styrofoam boxes wrapped up in three white plastic bags. She must have a big book club.

  “Leaving marriages is for the young, Candace. When you get older, marriage provides its own comforts.”

  “Even ones where you’re hated?” I say, arching an eyebrow. This woman has many layers. My dad would have liked that, too.

  “Yes,” she says, getting up from the table. “Sometimes there’s even comfort in that.”

  CHAPTER 16

  “WE HAVE TO LOOK FOR LACHLAN.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Malone, haven’t we done enough looking for today?”

  When Malone returned from the restroom, we ate our sushi in relative silence. Neither one of us wanted to comment on the Wolfe in the room. Although Shelley was no longer in the room, having left to go discuss the controversial literary elements of When the Cherry Blossoms Fall over a couple of good bottles of Shiraz and a selection of raw fish.

  Women came and went in my father’s life, but she is the first one I ever had a decent conversation with. Most of the time I scowled at them as they tried to make nice, pretending they could be the mother I never had. I had a mother. She just sucked as a parent. And I wasn’t interested in having another woman slip into that role. But Shelley Wolfe was different than those other women, who all seemed to be cut from the same frosted-hair and honey-voiced cloth. She was made from material that had more texture than that. I’m sorry that she and my dad split. Even sorrier that she ended up tied to her sense of duty and a punishing bastard of a husband instead. She may think Doug Wolfe didn’t have it in him to hurt my father, but a man who can hold on to his hatred for that many years doesn’t do it for nothing. The whole point of keeping a full tank of anger is to provide fuel for the hope of revenge.

  I
’m thinking my own thoughts of revenge as Malone and I go about hitting some of the hot spots for teenagers with more time on their hands than sense. You can’t see through the dirty window of the Gigabytes Internet Café on account of it being plastered with images from the online battle arena video game League of Legends. There’s a knight, a Viking, and a monster that appears to be a cross between an armadillo and a jack-o’-lantern. Ahri, the nine-tailed fox, gazes wantonly at them all, with a deeply cut bustier and two black ears that look more like a cat’s than a fox’s.

  Malone opens the door and we walk in. The place smells like the inside of a gym bag.

  “Can I help you?” a young skinny guy with serious acne asks us, getting up from the reception desk. Behind him, half a dozen zombies sit in padded office chairs with the arms almost worn off. Their eyes are fastened to computer screens by an invisible tracking beam. Fingers tap nervously on keyboards and mouses, the only movement made by their otherwise-paralyzed bodies. Most of them are teenage boys, except for one fat, middle-aged guy dressed in a well-used bear outfit and sucking on a pacifier. He’s one of those furries that dress up like woodland animals and have sex. I had to take out a moose once who was cheating on his wife with a porcupine.

  “You see this kid around?” Malone asks, flashing a picture on her phone of Lachlan Reid. It must be from Facebook, a grinning selfie taken beside a fish aquarium in the shape of a woman’s balloon-like breasts.

  “Who’s asking?”

  Malone takes out her badge with her other hand. The guy scratches his face and one of his juicier zits bursts.

  “He comes here,” he says. “But I haven’t seen him in a few days.”

  “When did you last see him?” Malone asks, putting away her badge and her phone.

  “I don’t know, maybe Thursday?” he says. He looks at Malone. “Wednesday?”

  “Don’t you keep records?”

  “They have to set up an account. It has a time limit based on how much they’ve paid.”

  “Can you pull up Lachlan Reid’s account?” Malone asks.

  “No, the computers get wiped each night. If someone doesn’t use up all their time before that they lose it.” He adds as an afterthought, “We don’t allow anything illegal.”

  “How the hell would you know if they were doing anything illegal if you wipe the history every night?” I ask, eyeing the furry with the pacifier.

  “I walk down the aisles. Anyone looking at prohibited pornography, I isolate.”

  “Isolate?”

  “I turn their screen around to all the others and we laugh at him. They don’t usually come back after that.”

  “Anyone here now who might remember when Lachlan was last here?” Malone asks. She’s not interested in pornography.

  He turns around and reviews the zombies. “Maybe that one in the corner. The one with the Axl Rose bandana.”

  Malone and I walk over and stand behind the Guns N’ Roses enthusiast. He doesn’t even seem to notice we’re there. I pull his headphones off and he snaps his head around. “What the fuck?”

  “I’m Officer Malone.” She shows him her badge. “Do you know Lachlan Reid?”

  “Yeah,” he says. He looks up at me with a face that says he thinks I could take out both Ahri the nine-tailed fox and the gleaming-eyed armadillo. “I guess so.”

  “You guess so, or you know so, kid?” I’m starting to get woozy from the smell of teen spirit in here. I want to finish this up for the night.

  He looks anxiously at the screen, afraid he’s going to miss an epic battle and lose his battle ostrich or something.

  “I know him.”

  “When did you last see him?”

  “Here. He’s suspended, so I didn’t see him at school.” His fingers beat convulsively on the armrests. He’s like an addict with a full hit dangling in front of him that he just can’t reach.

  “So when did you see him?” Malone asks.

  “Couple of nights ago.”

  “And when did he leave a couple of nights ago?”

  “I don’t know,” he says, turning back to the screen and making a few mouse clicks before swearing. He must have lost his battle ostrich.

  “We close at eleven,” the skinny attendant calls over from the reception desk, eavesdropping and trying to be useful.

  “Any idea where he might have been going after that?” Malone says, swivelling the kid’s office chair around to face us.

  “Maybe the river?” he volunteers. He grasps both battered arms of the chair and tries to turn his head to look at the screen. Best interrogation technique I’ve ever seen. He’d give up his grandmother as Tyler Brent’s killer if he thought it would get him back to that keyboard.

  “Whereabouts?” Malone asks.

  “Riverside Park,” he says. Where Tyler was found. “Some of the kids hang out there.”

  “Anywhere else?”

  “Home?” he suggests, his fingers still itching to get back to the game.

  “No, he didn’t go there. He’s been missing since Thursday night.”

  “Wow,” the boy says. “He was friends with Tyler Brent.”

  “Yes, we know that. Thus, our interest.” Malone hands him her card. “Call us if you see him or you know anyone who has.”

  “Okay,” he says.

  Malone releases his chair and he swivels it hurriedly back to the computer. He puts the headphones back on after dropping her card on the desk. Then his expression goes flat again. From zero to zombie in ten seconds flat.

  Malone drops a card with the pimply guy at reception as well. “You, too,” she says, placing the card on the counter. “And, by the way, the bear in the corner is masturbating in public. That’s illegal, in case you wondered.”

  We walk out the door.

  “Takes all kinds, doesn’t it, Malone?” I say when we get outside.

  “Tell me about it,” she says. She opens the door to the unmarked. “Now let’s go see what kind is down by the river.”

  “Jesus, Malone, it’s as cold as a witch’s tit out here.” The balmy early spring weather we were having in the morning has disappeared, much like Lachlan Reid. The sun is starting to set, and we are beating around in the bushes of Riverside Park again with flashlights. We checked where Tyler was found. Nada. Now we’ve expanded our search to the rest of the park.

  “We’ve got to find that boy, Candace. The first few days of an investigation …”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. They are the most important,” I say in a sing-song voice. It’s not like me. I wonder if hanging out with Malone is having a negative effect on my usually biting sarcasm.

  “Why don’t you have a partner, Malone?” I ask, flashing my light in a garbage can, as if Lachlan is playing hide-and-seek with half-eaten sandwiches and empty juice boxes in there.

  She stiffens a little, doesn’t answer.

  “I mean, Selena has a partner.” Another perceptible stiffness, for what is most probably a different reason.

  “I had a partner,” she says. “But it didn’t work out.”

  “What exactly didn’t work?”

  She shines her light in a small forest of birch trees. It bounces off the white bone of the tree trunks. “I caught him taking a bribe.” I know what cops make and that bribes are considered the incentive bonus their boss never gave them.

  “So, you were a good Girl Scout and reported him and he got sacked. Why didn’t they get you someone else?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “I reported him, and they didn’t do anything other than accept my partner’s request for reassignment.” She kicks at some low-lying brush. “Nobody wanted to work with me after that.”

  “Shit, that sucks, Malone.” Sounds like the cops have their own code about squealers. But it doesn’t seem fair. Malone is police. It’s her duty to squeal.

  “Yeah, it did. It does.” She smirks at me. “I guess you’re my partner now.”

  “Now, don’t get all excited, Malone,” I sa
y. “Them’s fightin’ words.” But I’m laughing. I kick at a few bushes myself, still chuckling. Not many people can make me laugh.

  We’re losing the light now and have to split up to cover more ground.

  “You look over by the playground. I’ll check Lover’s Leap,” Malone says. Lover’s Leap is a sappy lookout on the river where a Native American princess is supposed to have leapt to her death in order to avoid marrying her father’s choice, or because of the death of her father’s choice, depending on what cultural appropriation bullshit you believe. You can see right down the gorge from there.

  Malone walks down the trail that leads to the lookout. I walk up the grass to a field with a fenced enclosure. I open up the rusty gate to the playground and it makes a loud cry for oil in the silence of the empty park. The fence is quite high. Probably a good idea when there’s a hundred-foot-deep gorge not far away.

  The climber is more of a work of art than something a kid could play on. Pieces of treated timber are thrown like pick-up sticks, with rope webbing between them. Some are so far apart I’d have trouble spanning them with my own long legs. I stand up on a mostly level balance beam and zip up my jacket, but only after I’ve taken a couple of sips from the silver flask that I filled with Jack Daniel’s from behind the bar at The Goon when Linda was busy with a male customer in the gents’. The last of the sun is setting on the other side of the river. My flashlight goes out. Great.

  A bush rustles just at the edge of the open area, outside of the fenced playground. I can see someone but can’t make out who it is in the dusk. I feel a bit trapped in here behind the fence, although I know I could climb out if I had to. It would slow me down, though. I jump down from the balance beam onto the ground. It’s covered in that rubbery mulch that smells like old tires, and the soles of my shit kickers bounce a bit on the surface. I don’t have my gun with me. I never carry it when I’m with Malone on account of my parole. That’s why I didn’t have it with me when we had the run-in with Mendler.