Beach Strip (15 page)

Gabe enjoyed working with Mel, at the beginning at least. Cops, Gabe believed, needed a special way of thinking and acting. You couldn’t think first and act later, because you could get shot or run over while pondering things. And you couldn’t act first and do the thinking later—that’s how innocent people get shot by cops who mistake a pocket comb for a gun when it’s in somebody’s hand and the light is poor. Gabe said Mel had the ability to think and act simultaneously. “Like an athlete,” Gabe said. “Like a pro athlete. The only thing he’s gotta control is his temper. Flies off the handle too fast.”

Gabe said those things in the first few months of working with Mel. Lately, he had seemed to avoid talking about Mel at all. Which made me think he knew.

Mel had told me Gabe never gave a hint of suspicion about our affair. They continued working as a team, covering drug deals and homicides, which frequently overlapped. Perhaps Gabe could not believe that his friend and partner would sleep with his wife. Perhaps Gabe was better at hiding his emotions than I knew. Perhaps I was imagining Gabe’s suspicion as a result of my own guilt. Perhaps Mel was shielding me from the truth.

I THOUGHT ABOUT ALL THIS AND MORE,
sitting at the kitchen table after Walter left. When I grew bored with my known thoughts, I took another look at the list on the refrigerator door and realized that, when Walter Freeman was chewing the ice cubes, he had a
perfect view of my list of fourteen things I knew for sure. Walter didn’t have to be very bright to figure out that the list represented my attempt to unravel the mystery about Gabe’s death and the role of poor Wayne Honeysett in it. And he didn’t need the eyes of an owl to discover that I considered him a creep, although this wouldn’t qualify as earth-shattering news to him.

It was the last item on the list that I kept reading over and over. Mel was the only one who was beginning to agree that Gabe might not have killed himself, so he was the only one I could trust. I would talk to Mel as soon as I answered the pounding on my back door, which I opened without checking to see who it was.

T
his time he was almost calm, which made him threatening. He wore the same tattered clothes and his hair was just as matted, but he didn’t rage like the first time, and although his eyes were red-rimmed and rheumy, they did not bounce like Ping-Pong balls dropping down a flight of stairs. They were fixed on me. The voice may have been calmer, but the script was unchanged. “Where’s Grizz?” he said. I tried to push the door closed, but he pushed back against me. “I gotta see Grizz,” he said. “Where’s he at?”

I screamed, hoping somebody on the street or the beach would hear, but he was already inside the room and pushing the door closed behind him. I thought of the butcher knives on the rack near the stove, but when I tried to picture myself grabbing one and turning to thrust it into his chest, the picture changed to me losing a wrestling match and finding the knife in his hands instead. I kept backing toward the kitchen anyway, hoping that I would block his view of the knives until I found both my voice and the cordless phone.

“Get out of my house!” I shouted at him. “The police were just here. They’re coming back—”

“Tell me where Grizz is,” he said.

“I don’t know who the hell you’re talking about! Just get out,
get out!
” My hand found the cordless telephone, but my fingers were shaking too much to dial. My feet were as reliable as ever, and I turned and ran down the hall to the front door. I unlocked and
opened the door before he could reach me and stumbled blessedly into the sunshine. Traffic was busy on Beach Boulevard and on the highway bridges, and a family was strolling past on the other side of the road. Instead of flagging down any of them, I dialed 911 and screamed at the operator, who answered with a maddeningly calm voice. I told her a strange man had burst into my house and I wanted the police here, damn it, to throw his ass into jail.

She took my address and kept me on the line, and as I spoke to her I walked to the side of the house where I could see him on the boardwalk, heading toward Tuffy’s. He looked confident and relaxed, and the sight of him made me both angry and brave, roughly in that order. “He’s on the boardwalk,” I said, “heading south.” Walking into the garden and up to the boardwalk level, I kept him in my sight and gave her a complete description of him—about five foot ten, maybe 175 pounds, around thirty years old, unshaven, straight sandy-coloured hair, greasy denim shirt, equally greasy overalls cut into shorts, worn grey Adidas sneakers, no socks.

He was perhaps a hundred feet ahead of me, strolling among the usual summer traffic on the strip—the in-line skaters, the skateboarders, the joggers, the boppers, the old folks, and two people in motorized wheelchairs. “Do not approach him,” the 911 operator advised me, just as I heard sirens out on Beach Boulevard, first one, then another.

I told her the police had arrived and I ran back through the garden to meet the cruiser as it pulled into the driveway. “He’s on the boardwalk,” I said to the cop as he emerged from the car, “going that way. Did you get the description?”

“We got it,” the officer said, and pulled at the microphone fastened to his shoulder belt. “Check the boardwalk from the first cross street south of here,” he said. “I’m coming down from here. Frank, you there?” I saw a third cruiser arrive, and the first cop began trotting through our garden to the boardwalk. I watched
three more officers, two from the second car that had stopped at the first cross street, and the third at the next street down, hustle toward the shoreline, heads up, their hands on their weapons, models of law enforcement efficiency. Each street extended up to the boardwalk. All four officers were in communication with each other, and all had their guns ready. There was no way the man who so desperately needed Grizz would escape.

“COULDN’T FIND HIM.”
It was almost an hour later. The first officer to arrive was standing at my garden door, writing something in his notepad.

I thought he was kidding me. “You’re kidding me,” I said.

“I never kid,” he said.

“He was no more than a hundred feet down the beach. I gave you everything but a DNA sample. How the hell could you miss him?”

The cop’s pencil froze, but one eyebrow didn’t. It climbed up his forehead when he looked at me, and he made sure I got the message before he spoke. “You’re Gabe Marshall’s wife.”

“Widow.”

He nodded. “Heard about you.”

“You heard what about me? What the hell does that mean?”

He resumed writing, then tore the sheet from his notepad and handed it to me. “You have another problem, you call us.” He pointed at the sheet of paper. “That’s my name, my badge, and the report number.” He turned to leave.

“Tell me what you’ve heard about me, damn it!” I shouted.

Over his shoulder he told me to have a nice day.

“THEY’RE NOT BLOODHOUNDS, JOSIE.”

We were parked under the highway bridges, near the canal and facing the bay. Traffic roared above us on the bridges at sixty,
seventy miles an hour. It was after dinner. Autumn was being held back by the sun. The breeze was no longer off the lake. It had matured into a wind from the north, drier and cooler. A chill wind. A September wind.

Two men were pulling a boat from the water and onto a trailer. In the distance, steam blossomed white above the steel company. The cormorants were returning in silent squadrons. I sat with my hands in my lap, wanting to be wrapped up by someone, anyone.

I shook my head. “I could have found that guy walking backwards and wearing a blindfold.”

“He might have ducked into one of the houses down the way.”

“Wouldn’t they check that?” I said. “Isn’t that what you do, knock on doors and say, ‘Excuse me, but is there a deranged man around here, aside from your husband, of course, or did one arrive recently asking to borrow a cup of sugar?’ I had the feeling these guys spent their time discussing donuts and the Blue Jays.”

“They’ll be watching for him—”

“I really can’t take this, Mel.” My little girl voice arrived, unbidden. “I’m still missing Gabe, I’m trying to get over that poor Honeysett man, his daughters think Gabe was a thief, I come home to find Walter Freeman in my garden shed, I answer—”

“What was Walter doing there?”

“He wanted to know about Gabe, and about that ring. He was upset with me because I hadn’t told him—”

“Josie, stay away from Walter.”

“That’s funny. He said the same thing about you.”

“Josie—”

“Mel, if you don’t tell me what the hell is going on—”

“I tried to—”

“Well, try harder. Walter Freeman’s questioning me. He thinks I know more than I’m telling him, and I don’t, but everybody else knows more than they’re telling me, and I want to know what it is.”

Mel took a while to ponder my words. I was doing the same thing—what the hell did I just say?

“I think we should get together.”

“You want another night at some Open Arms Motel? Forget it.”

Mel looked away. “I have to be able to trust you,” he said.

“To do what?”

“To be quiet about things you shouldn’t know about.”

“Do they have anything to do with Gabe?”

This time he looked at me and nodded.

“You don’t think Gabe killed himself either, do you?”

He shrugged. “It’s difficult to counter. All the evidence, Josie, the forensic tests …”

“What tests? Tell me.”

“His gun was used—”

“I know that.”

“The paraffin tests on Gabe’s hand—”

“Big deal.”

“They prove he recently fired a weapon. The gun was in his hand and he pulled the trigger.”

“You know all this?”

“Josie, I worked with the lab, I filed the reports, I work with the lab people all the time—”

“So why don’t you agree with everybody else? Why are you and I the only ones who don’t believe Gabe would kill himself?”

Mel leaned toward me. I could smell his aftershave. I knew that aroma. I had wanted to buy some for Gabe to wear, and in a rare minute of wisdom decided not to. “Because we knew him better than anyone else.”

I closed my eyes. “We also know he had a motive, if discovering that your buddy at work has slept with your wife is enough motive for a guy to kill himself.”

When I opened my eyes, Mel was staring at me. “There’s something going on down at Central,” Mel said. He had lowered
his voice as though there were someone in the car, eavesdropping. “Gabe did an audit of our evidence locker last month. We rotate the duty so there’s no way to hide what’s going on. Gabe found we were short on some cocaine being held for a trial.”

“Somebody stole drugs from a police evidence locker?”

“That’s what was happening.”

“And sold them?”

“Or used them.” Mel sat back. “But yeah, probably sold them. For sure.”

“Gabe reported it, right? He would report something like that.”

Mel nodded. “To Walter.”

“Okay.” I shrugged. “But it doesn’t concern me, and it doesn’t prove that Gabe killed himself. Because he wouldn’t. Damn it, he wouldn’t, especially not when he knew I would find him.”

Mel leaned toward me, and his hand gripped my wrist. “There are things you don’t know, all right? I’m trusting you here. If you don’t want to hear about them, fine.” He released his grip on me and sat back again, raising his hands, showing his palms. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

I rubbed my wrist where his hand had gripped it so tightly. “You’ve come this far. Tell me the whole story.”

And he did.

The man found dead in an alleyway, shot behind the ear, had been facing drug charges, his trial scheduled for two weeks later. Drugs taken from him were in the locker that Gabe had checked and found a kilo short, and Gabe had been using him as a means of tracking some murders over recent years, small-time dealers shot to death, their bodies dumped in back alleys with nothing to connect them beyond the drugs they dealt. This particular dealer’s name was Dougal Dalgetty, and he lived on the beach strip, over the upholstery shop down near the bikers’ clubhouse.

“The crazy woman,” I said, and Mel said, “What?” I shook
my head, too busy absorbing everything Mel was telling me to go into details. I could see the woman standing on the boardwalk glaring toward our house, madness in her eyes, and her mouth moving as though forming silent curses, before turning and walking away, head down. Long hair combed into a bird’s nest. Weary dresses. Worn shoes. When I passed her on the boardwalk, she never appeared to notice me. Something about our house closed a switch in her brain. Or opened one. Just another casualty of a hard life, I thought. Just another mad soul.

Dalgetty, Mel explained, had been a connection, a link between Grizz and Pasquale Pilato, whom everybody, for a reason I’ve never understood, called Mike.

“Mike Pilato?” I said. This was serious stuff.

Everyone in the city—and maybe in the Western world—knew that no one except Pilato’s mother ever called him Pasquale. He was always Mike Pilato, especially to the news reporters and the cops who identified him as the head of the most powerful organized crime family in the area. Mike Pilato claimed he was a small businessman running a hardware distribution company in the old North End of the city, in the neighbourhood where I grew up. Near the shadows of the blast furnaces. Pilato’s neighbours said the police were pursuing a continuing vendetta against Mike, who lived in the same house he had been born in and who contributed thousands of dollars every year to the neighbourhood. He had purchased a couple of vacant lots and donated them to the city, then paid to have them neatly landscaped. The vacant lots became Pilato Park, with slides and swings for children and benches for pensioners. Was this a bad guy? Was this the kind of gangster who could have people disappear by doing little more than nodding his head? That’s what the neighbours asked.

Mike Pilato was a people’s hero, so it didn’t matter to his neighbours if he was rough around the edges. The people loved him. There were rumours that Mike had beaten men to death with
a baseball bat in his younger days. Heroes tend not to do these things, so it was easier for Pilato’s neighbours not to believe the stories. They hadn’t seen it happen, so they didn’t have to accept it. This kind of thinking makes life easier for a lot of people.

Whenever Mike Pilato’s picture appeared in the press, rarely in recent years, he wore oversized dark sunglasses and a battered hat pulled low on his head. Months would pass when Mike Pilato was unseen in town, leading some people to claim he no longer even lived in the area. He was in Florida, in Sicily, in prison, or in a grave somewhere. On other occasions, the media would catch him strolling in the company of men you would not want to meet anywhere except in heaven—an unlikely location for them—on the street in front of White Star Hardware Distributors, his business on Cathcart Street.

“This can’t get out,” Mel was saying.

“What can’t get out?”

“What I just told you.”

“About Mike Pilato?”

Mel looked angry. He leaned forward. “About the internal investigation.”

I had been lost in the Mike Pilato legend and hadn’t been listening. “Tell me again,” I said, and Mel began, speaking each word as though he were counting to four. “Walter. Is. Being. Investigated. By internal affairs.”

My throat felt like I had been eating cotton. “Walter signed Gabe’s death report. He said it was suicide.” I looked across at Mel, who was nodding his head slowly. “Walter wants me to believe that Gabe killed himself.”

“He almost talked me into it,” Mel said. “And we signed the lab report submission, Harold Hayashida and I.”

“Walter was the first detective to arrive. When they found Gabe.”

Another nod.

“Walter doesn’t want me to have anything to do with you.”

“Because I’m co-operating with the investigation.”

“Walter was in my garden shed. Where the pervert was. Looking around, he said.”

“You told me that.”

“What about the guy asking for Grizz?”

Mel closed his eyes and sat silently for a moment. “Walter is a senior officer.”

“I know that.”