Beach Strip (17 page)

T
he lane along the beach extends five miles beyond the canal. I have walked its length. I walked it after Dougal Dalgetty’s widow left with her arms folded and her head down. I had walked it with Gabe on autumn days very much like this one when we talked about books and music and people we passed on the way. And I had walked it when Gabe was away for a few days testifying in Montreal and something happened.

Gabe and I had argued before he left. I love Montreal and wanted to go with him. He would be gone almost a week. I could go shopping or just stroll through Côte-des-Neiges while he waited to testify. Gabe said no. He was being paid to be there and it was work. He would take me at our expense some other time. I accused him of wanting to chase women while he was there. Wasn’t that what men did, alone in Montreal? Wasn’t it that kind of city?

The accusation made him angry, as angry as I have ever seen him, and he left in that mood, calming down a little when he called from the airport, but I was still furious and screamed at him before hanging up.

The next night, he called from Montreal and we had another argument. I drank some Teacher’s, sitting alone, and Mel arrived, and that’s when I said fuck it, or fuck him, who cares? I used the Scotch as an excuse, as a crutch, as whatever name you care to hang on it.

This is how it started. Mel and I sat staring at each other and talking about nothing until every phrase sounded like a double
entendre. When Mel got up to leave, I asked if he would like a kiss goodbye, flirting really, having fun, and he smiled and I walked to him and took his face in my hands and kissed him, open-mouthed. I thought he would say what I did was stupid and stop it, but he didn’t. We were on the sofa, and then we were on the floor and his head was between my breasts with his mouth searching for my nipple and when he found it, when his tongue began circling it, I know I said, “Lick it! Lick it!” aloud, and Jesus …

I loved it because it was bad and it was wrong, and I hated myself because it was bad and it was wrong, but not as much as I loved it.

I had not had an orgasm with Gabe for months, but it happened with Mel and then it happened again and again, like a string of damp firecrackers. When it was over, Mel kissed the back of my neck and I told him to get the hell out of my house, and he did.

And I dreamed about it the following day, walking the length of the boardwalk and sleeping alone in my bed. Dreamed about Mel and me, and I made up with Gabe over the telephone that night, and when he returned I resumed my life of working two days a week at the retirement home and visiting a mother who could offer me wisdom but no spoken words and painting the kitchen and telling myself I was happy with a great guy. But a month later I was at Mel’s apartment in the middle of the day, and we didn’t even get undressed this time because I wore this wide denim skirt …

The third time was all my idea. Gabe was attending a police course in New York. The subject was interrogation techniques. I called Mel and said, “One more time,” and he said, “Where?” and I said, “Not here and not at your place. Pick a motel somewhere.”

Fantasies. That’s what I wanted. A savings account of fantasies I could draw from after my next birthday, when I turned forty-one. Turning forty hadn’t upset me. It was a cosmic joke. Everybody made jokes about turning forty. Turning forty-one was scary, serious.

In the shower, with the water running. That’s the fulfilled fantasy. Mel and me, standing in the shower, warm water flowing over our bodies, and moving, moving until he moaned. Then we dried each other off, I dressed and left. It happened and it was over. Three strikes. I was out. Two months later Gabe was dead.

Did Gabe know about Mel and me? I was afraid he did.

Yes, he could, I began to think. Yes, he could have been angry enough to shoot me and then perhaps to shoot himself. Yes, he could have grown so despondent when I didn’t arrive that he could commit suicide just to stop the pain he was feeling. Yes, I might have killed him in that manner that lovers kill each other by turning away a head, withdrawing a hand, ignoring a word.

If I could believe that, and I felt the idea begin to embed itself within me while I walked the beach strip on that late summer’s afternoon, perhaps I could relax somewhat. The universe, as a great man once said, was unfolding as it should. Gabe was dead, Honeysett was dead, Dad was dead. Mother, Tina, and I were alive.

That was all I knew. I sat on a bench alongside the boardwalk and stared out at the lake while tears coursed down my cheeks and people glanced at me as they passed, a sad woman staring at the water, waiting for the cormorants to return.

He killed my husband.
That’s what Dougal Dalgetty’s widow said. She believed Gabe had killed her husband. Impossible.

I wiped the tears from my eyes, rose off the bench, and found the nearest pathway from the shore to Beach Boulevard. Across the boulevard and two blocks away, I saw the upholstery shop in the small two-storey frame building and walked toward it. How dare this woman, in her mourning and sadness, claim Gabe was a murderer. Had she been telling other people the same thing, walking up and down the beach strip, telling lies about my husband?

I know nothing about upholstering. I’m a slipcover kind of person, I guess. If it’s stained, wash it. If it’s torn, mend it. If it’s ugly, cover it. So I have no idea if the upholstery business is profitable
or not. Based on what I could see of Beach Upholstery, it was not. The display windows were crammed with dead and dying plants, although given the amount of grime on the window, the state of each plant’s health, not to mention its species, was difficult to determine. Lights shone from inside the shop, but I saw nothing moving, nor did I hear the tapping of a hammer or the whir of a sewing machine. I had never seen anyone enter or leave the upholstery shop either. But a cardboard sign on the front door, its upper left-hand corner dirty and worn from, I assumed, decades of being turned over at the beginning and end of each day, declared it open.

I had no need for upholstery. It was the door beside the shop I wanted, the one with a mailbox on one side, a doorbell on the other, and 212A above it. I pushed the doorbell button, heard a satisfying ring inside and shoes descending the stairs. A latch clattered, a bolt slid aside, and the door opened on Dougal Dalgetty’s widow’s worn face, remaining that way just long enough for me to place a hand against it and prevent her from closing it.

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

She moved behind the door and began pushing it, but I was already through the opening and inside the small foyer at the foot of the stairs.

“Please talk to me,” I said.

She closed her eyes, then turned and began walking slowly up the stairs, and I followed her into the three rooms that appeared to be her world.

I had expected antimacassars, splintery furniture, and worn carpets. Instead, I stepped on thick broadloom beneath several pieces of good-quality oak furniture. There were interesting prints on the walls, and lovely ceramic lamps cast a warm light in the room. An oak-mantled fireplace filled one corner. In another corner a Persian cat stood up, stretched and yawned, blinked in my direction, and walked off toward the kitchen in a manner that was clearly a rebuke.

“You want some tea?” Mrs. Dalgetty asked, avoiding my eyes. She was wearing the same pink cardigan and tartan slacks.

I told her no and thanked her. She appeared relieved. I asked if I could sit down. She said, “Sure,” and I chose a tweed loveseat. “Didn’t Wayne Honeysett live around here?” I asked.

I had meant it as a conversation starter. Mrs. Dalgetty took it as a threat. She stepped back, looked out the window toward the steel mills on the bay, and shook her head. “I don’t know nothin’ about what happened to him,” she said.

“But he did live near here, didn’t he? On one of the side streets?”

“What do you want?” She was biting her bottom lip, looking at the floor, at her worn nails, everywhere but at me.

“I wanted to ask about something you said when we met this afternoon. About my husband, and your husband.”

Her head remained in constant motion, even after she settled herself in a leather armchair. When she said nothing, I went on.

“You said my husband killed your husband. Why did you say that?”

“Because he did.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know, that’s all.”

“But who told you that?”

She shook her head from side to side.

“You know my husband is dead,” I said.

A change of direction. She nodded her head once.

“They think he committed suicide. The police do. I don’t think he did, but I don’t know. I don’t think my husband was capable of killing anyone, including himself.”

She looked directly at me for the first time and, as I had seen when we met on the boardwalk, the remnants of her beauty were visible. She had pretty eyes.

“Mrs. Dalgetty,” I said, “we have both lost our husbands recently,
and I’m sure your husband’s death was as devastating to you as mine was to me—”

“Glynnis,” she said. “My name is Glynnis.”

“That’s a lovely name,” I said. “Thank you. And I’m Josie. Josephine, actually, but—”

“Wayne Honeysett was murdered,” she interrupted. “Somebody crushed his head under the bridge. Didn’t they? That’s what everybody around here says.”

I told her yes, that’s what I thought. It was horrifying to imagine it, but I believed that’s what happened.

“And if your husband didn’t commit suicide and somebody killed him,” she said, “were they all murdered by the same person? Your husband and my Dougal and Wayne?”

“Then you knew him. You knew Wayne Honeysett.”

She nodded and stared out the window. “We grew up together. We were kids here on the beach strip. Wayne had his problems. He wasn’t perfect.” She smiled, looked down, and straightened the front of her cardigan. “He was kinda nice-looking, and he liked me. He knew me when I was young, and he liked me because he thought I was pretty. And I was. Not beautiful, maybe. Just pretty.” She opened her cardigan, revealing a small silver brooch in the shape of a peacock, with a green stone for its eye, pinned to her blouse. “He gave me this because he liked me. It’s white gold. The stone is an emerald. A real emerald.”

“It’s lovely. When did he give you that?”

“Two, three months ago.” She was fingering the brooch. “I never told Dougal that he gave it to me. I said I bought it for a couple of dollars at a garage sale and that it was just a cheap piece of junk. Dougal never knew nothin’ about jewellery. He bought my wedding ring when we got married and that’s all, so he didn’t know this is real gold and has a real emerald.” She looked up. “It is. I went into the city and had a jeweller look at it, and he said it’s a real emerald and real white gold. Said it’s worth a lot of money.”

“Mr. Honeysett must have liked you very much.”

“He liked women. He always did. He liked women to like him. It wasn’t even about sex, I think. I mean, I don’t know for sure. But he would give you gifts if you were a girl, a pretty girl. I knew him when we were kids, and he was always like that. I think Wayne became a jeweller so he could make things for women. Men, too. But he loved making things for women, brooches and earrings and stuff.”

She looked out the window, remembering. “We both grew up here on the strip. He was kind of sweet on me when we were fourteen, fifteen years old. I married Dougal and he married Florie, whose family had the money to get him started in business. The jewellery business.” She looked away from the window and, with her head down, said, “I should have gone to his funeral, Wayne’s, I guess. I thought about it, but I don’t like going too far from home nowadays. People talk.”

“Mr. Honeysett had his problems, I understand.”

She looked up and nodded. “Only after Florie died. Poor Wayne. People said terrible things about him, or said he was doing terrible things. Bad things. I don’t know if any were true. We’ve all done bad things in our lives, I guess. Most of us, anyway. I just know he was nice to me and some other people, I hear.”

“When did you see him last?”

“Two, three weeks ago. He stopped me when I was walking on the beach strip. He wanted to know how much I liked the peacock pin. He was always asking me that. Whenever we met after he gave me the brooch, he wanted to know if I still liked it, and if I still liked him, I guess. I told him it was just about the most beautiful thing I’d ever owned, which was the truth. That seemed to make him happy.” She shook her head and smiled. “Some men are strange that way. They like to make women happy because that’s what makes them happy. The men, I mean.”

“Some women are like that,” I said. “About men.”

She nodded and stared out the window again, across the strip and toward the lake.

We sat in silence as the cat returned, passing within reach of me without looking in my direction. Out of respect, I waited until it was settled in the same corner of the room it had occupied when I arrived. Then I said, “I need to know why you think my husband was involved in your husband’s death.”

“Mike Pilato told me.”

“When did he tell you that?”

“At Dougal’s funeral.” She closed her cardigan, hiding the peacock from view. “He paid for it, Mike did. The funeral.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “Dougal did some work for Mike. Mike’s a nice guy, no matter what a lot of people say. I mean, he’s, you know, he does a lot of stuff, but listen, Mike didn’t do nothin’ bad to us, Dougal and me. He did some good things for us. We helped each other out, Mike and Dougal and me.” She looked at a picture on the wall. “We helped each other out.”

“What kind of work did your husband do for him? For Mike Pilato?”

“None of your business. None of anybody’s business.” Her eyes were still on the picture.

“Do you think Mike Pilato would talk to me?”

She looked across and smiled. “Sure,” she said. “You’re pretty. Mike always talks to pretty women.”

“Thanks.” I stood up. “What do you know about this man called Grizz? Have you really never heard of him?”

“No.” Her smile was gone. “You in cahoots with him or something?”