Chapter 7
That night, Ross got home late. The next morning, he slept in even later. When he finally did drag himself out of bed and into the kitchen, he found a box of Cap’n Crunch, a clean bowl with a spoon in it, a plastic tumbler and the sugar bowl neatly laid out at his usual place at the red Formica table. All that was missing was a map showing him the way to the refrigerator.
Ross sagged into a chair. Was he still a kid? In his sweet mother’s time-addled mind, yes. And he doubted he had the slightest hope of growing a single day older.
He ripped open the box and spilled cereal into the bowl. His stomach growled. He went over to the fridge. Two-per-cent milk. Was that an oxymoron? He’d have to look it up. He poured milk over the cereal, filled the unbreakable plastic tumbler, grabbed the sugar bowl and tilted it over the cereal, gave the bowl a gentle shake. As he sat hunched over his breakfast he saw that his mother had, on his behalf, dropped two slices of white bread into the toaster.
Ross pushed the bowl of Cap’n Crunch as far away from him as his arms could manage. He tossed his spoon into the sink and got busy scouting the house for loose change.
Outside, it was raining again. Ross, standing in the scant shelter of the porch, turned up the collar of his black leather jacket. He lit a cigarette. Blue smoke tiptoed gingerly into the rain, and was cut to shreds.
Nothing moved but the rain. He smoked his cigarette to the filter and trotted down the porch steps, jumped the front-yard gate and sprinted down the street towards the bus stop. The bus stop offered no shelter; it was nothing but a post with the words BUS STOP painted on it. But there was a beige station wagon parked on the street only a few steps away. Happy day, the car was unlocked.
Ross climbed into the back seat. He sat quietly, smoking. From time to time he wiped condensation from the window. Finally the bus materialized in the rear-view mirror. He dumped a handful of pennies and nickels into the hopper, demanded and received a transfer.
That bus and another just like it took him downtown. En route, he picked up a black umbrella with a wooden handle that was left behind by a man who’d almost missed his stop. Cruising along Georgia, his new umbrella protecting him from the downpour, he remembered a restaurant he used to patronize, all those years ago. The place was still there, pretty much as he remembered it, though the name had changed. He sat in a window booth. The restaurant was sunk below street level. A woman hurried by on the sidewalk, and he found himself sneaking a peek up her skirt. A waitress arrived with a menu. Ross ordered coffee, scrambled eggs, hash browns and sausages, toast. The girl was a little on the thin side, but cute. His age or maybe a year or two younger. Her spiky pink hair went well with her complexion. If her plastic nametag could be believed, her name was Puffy. She blessed Ross with a heart-breaker of a smile, oyster-perfect teeth. She asked him if he’d like to start with a glass of orange juice.
“Yeah, sure.”
“What size you want?”
“Large,” said Ross magnanimously. Another short skirt hurried past. The ladies were keeping close to the building, to avoid the rain. This time, he was careful not to exploit the view.
He kept an eye on the waitress as she made her way back to the kitchen to place his order. She wore a silk shirt that almost matched her hair, tight black jeans, heavy black boots. She turned and glanced back at him. He gave her a big smile, and she quickly looked away. So much for irresistible charm.
Another waitress arrived with his orange juice and coffee. She told him his breakfast would be along in a few minutes. Ross was subdued. It wasn’t even noon, and he’d looked up a strange woman’s skirt and terrified an innocent waitress. He drank most of his orange juice, and then the rest of it. He drank some coffee. His food arrived. He picked up his knife and fork, remembered the napkin, and what was expected of him. He put the cutlery back down on the table, shook out the napkin to its full expanse and laid it across his thigh.
Puffy blind-sided him as he pushed the blade of his knife into a sausage. She said, “You like k.d. lang?”
Ross had been caught by surprise. He chewed and swallowed. “Who’re you talking about?”
Puffy threw back her head and laughed a little too loudly, for someone who was supposed to be working, “k.d. lang. The singer.”
“Uh, right.”
“You like her? I mean, d’you like her singing?”
“Yeah, sure.” Ross sounded a little limp, even to himself. He added, “She’s great.”
“I like her too,” said Puffy, smiling and laughing.
“Good.”
“I like her an awful lot,” said Puffy, and got up and walked away, her hips hardly moving at all.
What was that supposed to mean? Ross made a mental note to look it up somewhere. He stabbed his fork into his eggs.
When the bill arrived he was astounded to discover that the orange juice alone was two-twenty-five. For a glass of orange juice! Add a dollar-ten for the coffee, five-ninety-five for the eggs and sausages. Ross dropped a ten on the table and walked swiftly towards the door. He was going broke fast. He needed a job.
Or some other, easier way of making money.
Digesting, Ross walked briskly east on Georgia for two or three blocks and then veered towards the new downtown library, which to his untutored eye looked like a really big sand castle artfully crossbred with a fragment of a Roman colosseum. Sort of like a leftover Star Trek set. One of those not-quite-parallel-universe situations. He strolled across a forecourt of interlocking concrete paving blocks, subtly guided by the architecture towards a wall of plate-glass doors. The joint was locked up tight. Ross lit a cigarette. The first thing you learned in the slammer was to keep your back to a wall. The second thing was how to wait. At 9:59 a security guard wearing scuffed black boots unlocked the first of the two sets of double glass doors. The library was open for business, and Ross was first in line. He’d decided to research the armoured-car robbery. He wanted to learn how much of what Garret had told him was truth, and how much was lies.
Entering, he discovered that the building was indeed huge. More paving blocks curved gently away into the distance. To his left there was a row of small shops, including a coffee bar, pizza joint, a Duthie Books store. To his right, a wall of glass opened on the main floor of the library.
He pushed open another glass door, and walked into the library proper. The place was maybe a bit too brightly lit. At the information desk he asked an elderly man wearing shiny bronze pants and a gold shirt and gold-rim glasses where he could find back issues of newspapers, microfiche machines. The old man leaned towards him. Was he hard of hearing, or about to fall over? His belly sagged into the protruding edge of the counter.
The man’s brow cleared. “Third floor. Turn right as you exit the elevator. There’s an information desk. You’ll see the sign.” He said something else, that Ross couldn’t quite hear.
Ross said, “What?”
The old man’s glasses slipped down his nose. In the act of pushing them back where they belonged, he seemed to lose track of Ross’s existence.
Ross took an elevator to the third floor, asked a woman talking furtively into the telephone for directions. She pointed without bothering to look at him. He followed the line of her finger. The machines were not far off. They looked like primitive televisions.
He found another librarian, a middle-aged woman wearing a heavy gold bracelet and glasses far too large for her face. He explained that he needed back issues of the Sun and Province newspapers from January of five years ago. She smiled and led him to a shelf containing hardbound green copies of the Canadian News Index. She selected the volume for the year he was looking for, explained that searching for a particular subject was the easiest way to go, and pointed out the beige file cabinets where the spools of microfilm were stored. Ross opened the book. He looked up Crime, then Murder, and finally Homicide. The articles were arranged by province and date.
He borrowed a pen from another librarian and wrote down promising headlines,
then went over to the cabinets. The microfilm was stored in individual boxes about twice the size of a cigarette package. He found the six he needed without any trouble.
He shucked his jacket and sat down in front of a machine. A well-dressed, grandmotherly type sat motionless at the adjoining machine, peering at a picture of a long-ago wedding. He turned to his own screen. His blurry image was reflected in the blue-tinted frosted glass. He stared blankly at himself. After a little while another librarian noticed him, and asked if he needed any help.
Ross said, “No, I’m fine.”
The librarian hesitated. She was in her fifties, tall and slim. Her hair was short and glossy; chestnut streaked through with darker strands. Ross couldn’t fault her for giving him a visual rousting. He had not slept well the previous night, and looked it. He wondered if she dyed her hair. Probably. But did she do it herself at home or go to a salon? He knew from bitter experience that he wasn’t all that good at judging character, but believed she was the type who’d prefer to have things done for her, as long as she could afford it. He was considering whether it was a good idea to ask her about this when she walked briskly away.
Ross leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes. When next he took a peek at the world, the elderly woman was gone. Directions for operating the machine, complete with easy-to-follow diagrams, were taped to its flank. It took him about ten minutes to find what he was after. He shifted his chair so he was a little closer to the screen, and began to read the first article.
As he read article after article, he was relieved to discover that Garrets description of the robbery had been remarkably accurate, right down to the smallest detail.
Billy, as he’d made his desperate, blood-soaked run from the scene of the armoured-car robbery to Nancy Crown’s opulent waterfront home, could have abandoned the missing two hundred and twenty thousand dollars at any point on the route. Or he might’ve left it in his getaway car, which had been parked nearby, a down-at-the-heels rust-bucket Ford Pinto.
Ross examined a photograph of the car, counted the eleven stylized white arrows pointing at the police bullet holes in the vehicle. Ross kept reading. There were more than twenty articles of varying length, and he read all of them twice, and several of them three or four times.
Travelling west on Point Grey Road, Billy had run into a one-car, one-cop roadblock. Shots had been fired. Billy had crashed the Pinto shortly afterwards, the cop in hot pursuit. There was a picture of the cop. Donald L. Mooney. In his early twenties, a good-looking, clean-cut guy with short black hair, a straight-ahead look. Mooney had been first at the scene of the car crash, but his role from that point on was uncertain. The inference was that he had chased Billy on foot for a block or two, then lost him.
It was surely possible that Mooney had grabbed the bagful of money out of the Pinto and kept his mouth shut about it.
But anyone who had known poor dead Billy, or had taken the time to find out what he had been like, would figure that the kid had held on to his hard-earned loot right up until the moment he died. He’d gone to ground at Nancy Crown’s house. It didn’t make any sense that he’d head in that direction unless he intended to round up Nancy and head off into the sunset with her. From his point of view, wasn’t it likely that a bundle of cash would seem the most plausible reason Nancy might go along with his hare-brained plan? The newspapers had portrayed her as an innocent victim, but Ross had his doubts.
He squinted once again at the lines of type that described Billy’s end. That doomed boy had come to grief in the Crowns’ swimming pool. Ran through a plate-glass door, bounced his head off the tiles and slid unconscious into the water. There was the merest hint of a suggestion that Nancy’s husband, Tyler, might have saved Billy’s life if he’d been willing to get his feet wet.
Ross studied Tyler Crown’s grainy black-and-white photograph. Tyler was in the money business, but he looked like a pretty tough dude, with those beefy shoulders and that prematurely not-quite-bald, bowling-ball head, barbed-wire eyebrows and the cool, from-the-high-side-of-the-desk look in his eyes. Ross, staring at the photo, considered the possibilities.
Billy had probably dropped the sealed canvas bag full of cash somewhere en route between the armoured car and Nancy Crown’s house. The most likely scenario was that he and the money parted ways sometime after he abandoned the shot-up Pinto. An incredibly lucky passer-by had stumbled across the bag and taken it home to see what was inside. Windfall. Since the money had never been turned in to the authorities, it was safe to assume that the passer-by had kept every penny.
Or, the cop, Donald E. Mooney, had stuffed the money in the trunk of his patrol car and was planning early retirement.
Or, Billy still had the cash when he showed up at Nancy’s. After he’d taken his header into the pool, the Crowns had taken a few minutes to hide the money somewhere in the house. When the cops asked the traumatized couple about the cash, they lied like snakes.
Ross liked that last plot best, because it explained why Tyler didn’t fish Billy out of the swimming pool; if Billy was dead, it drastically reduced the chances of him spilling the beans to the cops.
Ross slipped another roll of microfilm into the machine. He struggled to divine Nancy’s nature from the dot-matrix puzzle that was her photograph. What were her strengths, her weaknesses? What gave her pleasure, what might cause her unendurable pain? He leaned back in his chair. What was all this about recovering the money? For a minute there, he’d been acting as if he were the original owner. But that was what this exercise was all about, wasn’t it — seeing the situation from somebody else’s point of view? Slumped in front of the faintly humming microfiche machine, Ross considered the film that had unwound in his brain as he’d approached the 7-Eleven on Broadway.
Rage of gunfire. Screams of the wounded. The shotgun blast shredding the meat and muscle of Garret’s shoulder. He’d felt the pain. It was as if he’d actually been there at the time, had come back for another look.
Spooky.
He left the library, walked back up Georgia to Granville under a drab, ill-tempered sky. Three buses and a little less than an hour later he disembarked by the Oakridge Shopping Centre. He cut across a parking lot, made his way into the mall. A security guard gave him directions to Zellers. Ross hadn’t known what to expect, but felt kind of let down anyway. The store was one of those new-wave, aggressively no-frills places that seemed to be popping up all over. The display shelves were made of grey-painted metal. The linoleum floors obviously hadn’t been waxed in years. The merchandise seemed of low quality. He wandered through the sporting-goods and toy departments.
Garret’s sweetie looked a lot like her Polaroid. She was working one of six cash registers. She wore a shapeless, dark blue Zellers smock, no makeup that he could detect, no jewellery other than a watch. Ross covertly studied her. She apparently took her job seriously, for none of her customers raised a smile. She turned and looked his way, catching him by surprise. Thinking fast, he scooped up a twelve-inch-tall plastic Batman from a red cardboard bin full of the creatures.
Batman was hollow, a lightweight of only a few ounces. He had a raised seam right down the middle of him, head to toe, where his two halves had been heat-welded at the factory. His features were vaguely Taiwanese. He did not even faintly resemble Michael Keaton or Val Kilmer. His spray-painted eyes were dull and out of focus. His plastic body had no warmth, no flex. The head and his four limbs were locked in position. He was, literally, a stiff. Ross tried to imagine playing with him. It would be like playing with a miniature cadaver. He tossed the Batman back into a bin of identical Batmen.
Shannon glanced up, gave him a sharp look. Was that a cloud that had passed across her pretty eyes? He wandered over, grabbed a plastic container of breath mints from a rack. He put the mints down on the counter. She ran them over an infrared scanner. Eighty-nine cents popped up on the cash register. Ross handed her five dollars; the last of his bankroll. She made change, asked him without looking at him if he w
anted a bag.
“No, but you could do something else for me.”
She gave him a look she might have been practising all her life, she had it down so perfect.
Ross said, “The thing is, I’m broke, and I need a place to stay.”
She reached for the phone by the cash register.
He said, “Don’t you recognize me, Shannon?”
She hesitated.
He said, “It’s me. Your pen pal. Ross.”
Shannon suddenly looked as if she’d been dipped in a great big bucket of bleach. Her face crumpled.
Ross said, “Maybe I should’ve waited until you got off work…”
“No, it’s okay.” She glanced furtively around. No one was paying them any mind. She said, “You were supposed to call me. I’d almost given up. I thought you’d decided you didn’t want to see me…”
Ross smiled. “No, that’s not it at all. I had some things that I had to take care of…”
She stared appraisingly at him, as if trying to figure out if he was as dangerous as she had every right to think he might be. He tried without much hope of success to look honest and dependable, straightforward and true.
She said, “You don’t look like the kind of person who would stab someone with a knife.”
“I was defending myself. I had no choice. It was him or me, Shannon.”
She smiled brightly, fetched her purse from beneath the counter, reached inside, brought out a small black wallet with silver trim. She unzipped the wallet and pulled out a crisp new twenty. “I’m off at seven. There’s a dark blue Saab in the parking lot, to your left as you go out.” She handed him the twenty. “In the meantime, maybe you’d like something to eat.”
A middle-aged couple approached the cash register, wanting to buy a pair of gum boots and a child’s comforter decorated with one of the more obscure Walt Disney characters.
“Seven o’clock, blue Saab.” He stuffed the twenty into his jeans. His throat was dry. They had written to each other a lot, after Garret had died. The letters had become increasingly friendly. Eventually they’d shared their most intimate secrets, the way people do when they never expect to meet. But this was different. He said, “Okay, fine. I’ll see you then.”
Memory Lane Page 7