Beach Strip (11 page)

“He just left here. Hayashida, he just left my place—”

“What’s going on?”

“He walked me back from the lift bridge. A guy died there tonight.”

“On the bridge?”

“Under it. You’ll hear about it when you go in today. I think he knew something about Gabe, this guy they found under the bridge. Nobody else believes me, but he wanted to talk to me when I went there with Gabe’s ashes—”

“Gabe’s
what?
”

I was tired. I was tired because it was almost sunrise, I was tired because I felt I had burned off every ounce of adrenaline in my body over the past few hours, and I was tired of trying to explain the world as I saw it to a bunch of men who called me “lady” and wanted to watch me from the garden shed and look under my bed. “Forget it,” I said. “I’ll explain later.”

“So why did you call me?”

“Because Hayashida told me you don’t believe Gabe committed suicide. He didn’t, did he, Mel?”

“Maybe he didn’t.” His voice changed, and I could picture him lying back in his bed. I knew that bed. Once. I knew the apartment. A high-rise in the far end of the city. A balcony facing west at the sunsets. An Ansel Adams print on the wall in the living room. A brass bed. “I’ve got the same doubts you have. He was doing some stuff on his own, talking to some rough people. People who could do something like this.”

“Thanks, Mel.” I waited, listening to his breathing. Then I said goodbye, hung up, and climbed the stairs to bed.

W
ith planning that’s not typical of me, especially when I’ve gone to bed after three a.m., I unplugged the telephone before falling asleep, and it was mid-morning when I woke to the sound of someone hammering on my front door.

I rolled out of bed and slipped on a green silk robe Gabe bought me last Christmas. Passing the mirror, I paused long enough to fluff my hair, wipe the sleep out of my eyes, and wish I had time to cover various wrinkles, but the thump-thump-thump on the front door resumed.

“Just a minute,” I shouted down the stairs, and when I reached the door I opened it without checking to see if it was Mel or a newspaper reporter or a door-to-door religion salesman. It was none of them.

He was about thirty years old, with hair that looked as though it hadn’t been washed since he’d shaved, which may or may not have been this year. He was wearing a denim shirt and grease-stained overalls cut off below the knee. Whatever part of me wasn’t being offended by the sight of him was recoiling from the smell of him. I tried to close the door, but he was already attempting to push it open, his eyes as large as Ping-Pong balls and just as bouncy, looking over my shoulder, off to the side, down at my robe, and into the house. “Where’s Grizz?” he started asking. “Grizz, you in there? Grizz, I gotta talk to you.”

I screamed, “Get out! Get out!” He kept pushing against the door before stumbling once, regaining his feet, and stepping back,
but he kept one strong arm on the door, preventing me from closing it.

“I gotta see Grizz,” he almost whispered. “Please, okay? Please tell Grizz I gotta see him.”

“I don’t know any Grizz,” I said, “and if you don’t get the hell out of here I’ll call the police!”

“Come on, lady …” Now he looked more hurt and confused than frightening, more panic-stricken than angry. He looked away and bit his lip, and when he removed his arm from the door I slammed it, slid the deadbolt in place, and walked to the living room window, where I watched as he turned and stumbled down the steps. He wandered off toward the canal, stopping once to look back at the house. If he comes back, I told myself, I’m calling the police.

I didn’t need to. The telephone rang almost as soon as I plugged it back in, and I nearly jumped out of the damn robe. It was Mel. “I called twice this morning,” he said. “I was about to ask a squad car to check and see if you were all right.”

“Well, I was and now I’m not.” I told him about the man in the denim shirt, demanding to see Grizz.

“Who?” Mel asked.

“He kept asking for Grizz,” I said. “Who the hell’s Grizz?”

“There’s a guy …” Mel began. Then, “I’ll tell you later today, maybe tonight.”

“Tell me now, damn it.”

“Not here. Not over the telephone. I’ll meet you at Tuffy’s at noon.” His voice changed, became softer. “Jesus, Josie, what you must have gone through last night. I read Hayashida’s report. Maybe you should think about staying with your sister for a while, go out to Vancouver.”

I told him I wasn’t going anywhere, but I wouldn’t mind a few more patrol cars passing by at night.

MY FATHER SOMETIMES SANG AN OLD COWBOY SONG
whose lyrics said something about a new world being born at dawn. You do not understand that idea until you encounter horror in the darkest moments of the night, the world that exists half-dead or temporarily so around three a.m., and a few hours later walk into a bright summer morning by a lake that’s all sapphires and diamonds, with people and dogs playing on the sand and cotton-ball clouds sailing across the sky. Nothing as brutal as what I had witnessed beneath the lift bridge could have happened on a planet like the one I entered through my garden door that morning. It must have happened in another world, one that’s in endless darkness. The world on the beach strip that day was born with the dawn, like the new world in the song my father sang.

I had dressed in red chinos, a white T-shirt, and sandals, and my first step into the garden gave me a floating sensation, a sense that life really did continue and was even worth living, despite the terrible things people did to each other. This feeling lasted about three steps, or until I saw the door of the garden shed still hanging open as it had last night when I returned from spreading Gabe’s ashes on the water. I slammed it shut and twisted the metal closure, promising myself that I would buy a good padlock later that day. You won’t need it now, I thought. Not since the bridge descended on that poor man’s head last night, assuming he was the pervert. But I would buy one anyway.

On the boardwalk, among the children, the dogs, and the Frisbees and within sight of the boats far out on the lake, I began to regain that New World at Dawn sensation, and it grew stronger when I passed the picket fence separating the Blairs’ garden from the beach. Jock Blair was bent over roses near the house, blue-grey smoke rising from his pipe. Maude sat in a chair with a kerchief around her head and her eyes hidden, as always, behind her sunglasses. Seeing me, she smiled and raised a hand in greeting. I
called good morning to her, which brought a nod of her head and a wider smile.

Jock turned at the sound of my voice and smiled, although his eyes avoided mine. The complex crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes deepened and his face, already the colour of ripe watermelon, grew more crimson. He had the whitest hair I have ever seen and wore plaid cotton shirts winter and summer. He was a shy man whose demeanour appeared threatened by the glance and voice of a younger woman. He loved roses. Once, I emerged from the back door to see him tending ours, the ones near the garden shed. “Rust, lass,” he said, and he pointed to some black stems. “Best you stop it in its tracks.” When I thanked him, he nodded and blushed and hurried away, back to the boardwalk and then to his garden, where I heard Maude scold him for being so forward, telling him I was more than capable of caring for my own roses, and ordering him inside to fix some tea and eat one of the warm scones she had baked just for him, the kind he liked, with currants inside.

I wondered what it must be like to spend fifty years of your life with the same man and still take pleasure in his company. Was it truly bliss, or was it like being one of conjoined twins, a relationship you accepted because no means existed of breaking it?

I used to talk like that with Gabe, saying I was obviously not a romantic, an idea that made Gabe laugh. “Your problem,” he would say, “isn’t that you’re not a romantic. It’s that you’re
too
romantic, and it scares you so much you try to deny it.”

I would reply that he sounded like one of those two-bit popular psychologists on television, and if he knew so much about me, maybe he should give me a full report, which would help explain a lot of things, including why I made so many stupid mistakes in my life.

His answer would be to stretch out an arm and squeeze me. “You’ll work it out,” he would say. “You’ll work it out yourself,
and then you’ll understand better than if I told you.” There are times, usually in the corner of my soul where it is always four a.m., that I wish Gabe hadn’t been so trusting of my ability to work things out and had explained some things in detail for me. Because he had been right. When I worked things out and understood what he meant, they were harder to reject than if he had told me himself.

It was half a mile to Tuffy’s. The beach and the boardwalk were crowded, as they are on every late-summer day. Walking among people and dogs, I felt safer from the creep who had appeared at my door looking for Grizz. What was behind his desperation to meet somebody named Grizz? Money? Protection? And why my house? Although I caught him sneaking a glance at other parts of my body besides my face, I didn’t consider him a real threat to drag me inside and attack me. Nor did I find him pitiful. Whatever, whoever he was, I didn’t want him back. He could find Grizz somewhere else, and I hoped he would. Somebody that desperate needed relief.

TUFFY’S ONCE HAD A SIGN
mounted over the tavern door that said
we were here before you were born
. The sign is long gone, lost among various renovations performed by its several owners. Nobody seems to lose money running Tuffy’s, but there isn’t much to be made from it either, based on the number of people who have owned the place over the years. Each new owner changed the layout, the staff, the menu, the paint on the wooden siding, and the faded sign dangling over Beach Boulevard. Heaven help them if they ever change the name.

Tuffy’s opened in 1890 as Tiffany House, a dining spot for the wealthy summer people in their turreted cottages. When the summer residents wished to sample Tiffany’s boneless pheasant, tournedos Rossini, or whole suckling pig in the privacy of
their own summer digs, Tiffany’s dispensed waiters in white tie and tails, driving an all-white carriage pulled by a team of white horses, to deliver the food and set the table for dinner or luncheon or picnic, complete with crystal stemware and British silverware. That’s how rich the people who lived on the beach strip were back then. That’s how well they lived in a place that was once a small paradise.

When the wealthy moved out and the blue-collar, sometimes-working class moved in, the immigrants and labourers melted Tiffany’s down to Tuffy’s, and it stuck. The imported claret was replaced with local beer, the British waiters with sullen students, and the white tie and tails with T-shirts and jeans. The closest the kitchen gets to pheasant these days is Buffalo-style chicken wings. Gabe told me he’d heard that an aging hooker had once worked out of an upstairs room in the back, which produced a bunch of jokes about suckling pigs, I’ll bet. Still, most people appreciate Tuffy’s for its honesty. It doesn’t try to be something it isn’t. Do not ask for a latte at Tuffy’s or expect the furniture to match. The beer is cold, the chicken wings are hot, the cheeseburgers are greasy, the walls are green, and the clientele mind their own business. I love Tuffy’s.

In Tuffy’s, a woman can order a beer without stirring fantasies among the men shooting pool or watching the SportsChannel on television screens hanging from the ceiling. When I walked into Tuffy’s, the pool players, the beer drinkers and the TV watchers looked up, then away. Guys who are basic and direct, like the men who favour Tuffy’s, recognize body language when they see it. Mine said Leave Me Alone. And they did. I chose a table as far from the bar as possible and ordered coffee.

Mel came through the door about ten minutes later, wearing a light grey windbreaker over a blue T-shirt and jeans, the line of his shoulder holster visible beneath the jacket. Pausing near the bar, he removed his sunglasses and stood waiting for his eyes to
grow accustomed to the light. By the time Mel spotted me and walked to my table in the far corner, near a window giving onto the beach, every guy in the place had identified him as a cop.

“You look good,” Mel said when he sat down.

“You look like a cop,” I said. “They all made you as one. In case you care.”

“That’s why I can’t do undercover anymore.” He swivelled in his chair and signalled the guy behind the bar that he wanted a Coke, then turned back to me. “You all right?”

“You always ask me that when you know I’m not,” I said.

Mel sat silent for a moment. “What was it like there, last night?”

“It was horrible. What I saw was horrible.”

“What the hell were you doing there, anyway?”

“Spreading Gabe’s ashes. I wanted to spread them in the lake, but there was an onshore breeze … never mind.”

“But what made you go under the bridge? Hayashida said you went down there with the bridge operator.”

“He said something to me.”

“Who? The bridge operator?”

“No. The man whose … the man who was killed. At least, I think it was him. The bridge operator said he’d been living under there for days. He told me he had seen something.” No, that wasn’t right. I closed my eyes, remembering his words. “He said that he knew what happened.”

“What was he talking about?”

“Gabe’s death.”

“Did he say that?”

No, I realized. He hadn’t. I shook my head. The waiter arrived with Mel’s Coke, and I waited for him to leave before asking, “Is it in the papers today?” I hadn’t seen a newspaper, hadn’t turned on the radio or television. “It must be all through the press.”

“No details,” Mel said. “Just that a man was found dead under the bridge. That’s all.”

“Nothing about how he died?”

“Not if we can help it.” He leaned toward me. “You don’t want this kind of stuff out. Suicide stuff.”

“Why not?”

“Copycats. It gives them ideas. Depressed people can walk around for weeks thinking about killing themselves and never do anything about it. Then somebody commits suicide in some spectacular way, and it’s as though the other people get permission to do the same thing. So they don’t give out that kind of information unless there’s a reason for it.”

“How about murder?”

“What’re you talking about?”

“This guy … what’s his name again? He knew me. I’m sure it was him. He called me Mrs. Marshall. They told me his name but I forget.”

“I saw the report this morning. His name was Honeysett. Wayne Honeysett. He was a nutcase.” He lowered his voice. “He was also a peeper.”

He waited for that to sink in. A peeper? What, a little bird that shows up on your windowsill in winter? “A pervert?”

Mel nodded.

“
My
pervert?”

“Pretty sure of it. They’re doing DNA testing now on what we scraped off the floor of the shed, comparing it to his.”

“Are all perverts nutcases? I mean, I guess there’s a connection, but some of the perverts I’ve met in my day seemed like pretty sane men on the surface.”

“Honeysett was certifiable. He used to be a jeweller. Had a store on Barton Street—”

“Honeysett’s,” I said. “That’s where I’ve heard the name before. That’s him?” Radio stations in the city once carried commercials for Honeysett’s Credit Jewellers. I remembered the white marble storefront, the big neon sign, the inane jingle—
Honeysett’s has
the diamond for your honey … for even less money … than you think.
I hadn’t heard it for years. “Does he still have the store?”