Beach Strip (19 page)

“I’m just—”

“You hit my friend, I hit your friend? You think that’s how my world works?”

“It’s what most people would think.”

“Most people are stupid, right? I believe in punishment, not revenge. Punishment is not revenge. Punishment is better than revenge. Punishment is to reduce crime and reform the criminal. Those are a woman’s words. Her name was Elizabeth Fry. Reduce crime and reform the criminal. That’s what she said. I punish people who need it. I don’t take revenge.”

I twisted in the chair to look behind me. We were still alone. The room was quiet. Everything was quiet. No noise entered from outside. Not the rumble of trucks on the road or trains on the nearby railroad track. Nothing. The room also appeared to be darker than when I had entered.

I looked back at Pilato, who had been watching me with amusement. “Do you have other people working for you?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“Why aren’t they here? In this building?”

“How do you know they aren’t?”

He was toying with me. To my surprise, the realization made me relax a little. Maybe we could find something in common. “What do you think of Walter Freeman?” I asked.

“Big shot cop.”

“Not a nice guy.”

He shrugged.

“Maybe even crooked?”

“Crooked? Do you mean dishonest? Shady?”

“Any of them.”

Another shrug. “Who knows?”

“You would.”

Slowly shaking his head, he said, “No, I wouldn’t. I never know who’s trying to steal from me or steal from somebody else until it’s too late. I keep getting surprised by people I think are bastards and sometimes it turns out they aren’t. And other people, the ones who act like they’re models that the rest of the world, people who would spit on me if they could or see me locked up for the rest of my life, the rest of the world thinks they’re
grandi uomini
and they’re …” He shrugged and looked away, searching for the words he wanted. He looked back and studied me for a moment, and I had the impression that this might be one of the longest conversations Mike Pilato had had with a woman in some time without being in bed with her. “Is that what you think of me? That I steal money and kill people?”

“I think—” I began, not sure what I would say next. I didn’t have to say anything. He cut me off with a wave of his hand.

“It doesn’t matter what you think. I’m not interested. But let me tell you something. Do you know St. Patrick’s, the church over on Murray Street?”

I told him I knew of it. I had never visited it.

“Go. Go sometime, go look at the old marble baptismal font in the vestibule. Everybody loves it. Me,” and he made the classic gesture—shoulders hunched, palms up, eyes closed, bottom lip thrust out—”what do I know? I’m just a dumb Luigi, a pasta eater, a garlic lover. All I know is, it’s four, maybe five hundred years old. That’s what they tell me. Penteli marble, sat for hundreds of years in an old church in Agerola, near the Amalfi Coast, before an earthquake knocked it over, the church. Do you know it? The Amalfi Coast, south of Naples?”

I said I didn’t.

“You should go sometime. Nice, sexy woman like you. You go with a man who can show you the sights, somebody who knows where to find good food, good wine, nice scenery. Anyway, I go there last year, somebody offers to sell me the font, I pay money, a
shitload of money, and I get it sent here at my expense, pay every dime, you wouldn’t believe how many dimes I paid. The bishop takes it, puts it up front in the church, holds a Mass, blesses it, says it’s a gift from God, doesn’t mention me. That’s okay. He wants people in the church to think it came from God instead of Mike Pilato, what can I do? Then a week, two weeks later, he’s talking about all the low-lifes in this town, how the police’ve gotta clear out all this criminal element, and if they don’t, God and his angels will do it for them, lightning bolts and eternal damnation, all that
merda.
It was in the newspaper, the stuff he said. He’s pounding on the pulpit, the same guy who wet his pants over the marble font he got from me, saying just because people try to do good things, make parks and stuff, this doesn’t make up for the bad things they do, how they offend God. So who’s he talking about when he says that, eh? Everybody knows.”

He stopped talking to wave his hand, indicating the outside world. “Everybody knows. The next day I go into the church, and there’s the font, all polished and shiny. The one I gave him, the one he thanked me for, and nobody knows. Nobody knows I gave it to him—to the church, but to him too.”

“That was very nice of you,” I said. “Very generous.”

“Not my point. You got any idea what it takes to bring something like that, four hundred, five hundred years old, out of a country, out of Italy?”

“I don’t do that kind of thing very often.”

“You better not. The cops’ll be all over you.” His voice rose and the edge hardened. “You only do it with people you know, people you trust, people like yourself, and then you gotta grease their palms, put enough money in the right hands, and maybe they give you the papers to export it, and maybe the guys at this end, over here, maybe the assholes in customs here think the papers are real, so they let you bring it in. That’s how you do this kind of stuff, all right? Everybody knows that. Including the bishop.”

I was getting his point. “And he didn’t care.”

“He didn’t care. He didn’t ask, he didn’t want to know. He just wanted his marble font for his
brutto
little church. And he got it. Then he treats me like
immondizia.
He treats me like garbage.”

“Why did you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Go to the trouble and expense of bringing the font into the country.”

He actually thought about this for a moment. Maybe no one had asked him before. “The people around here, they like it,” he said. “I thought maybe the bishop, he’d put one of them little brass signs on it, the font, just to say it was a gift from Mike Pilato in memory of his mother or his dog, I didn’t care. Or maybe he recognizes me at a party, a reception I go to and I write cheques for this and that, feed the children, save the whales. But he doesn’t. Just turns away, finds somebody else to talk to. When I gave it to him, the baptismal font, I said, ‘Maybe you can put something on it, says I gave it, okay?’ and he says it wouldn’t be appropriate. ‘It wouldn’t be appropriate.’ It was appropriate for me to pay some dago son of a bitch in Naples enough money to buy himself a used car so I can get the font out of Italy, but not appropriate for the bishop to thank me. Doesn’t matter.” He looked to one side, with an expression that said he was lying. “The people here on my street, the people who like me, protect me, they know who brought that font over.” He glanced at his watch. “That’s all I got to say.”

“What did you think of my husband, Gabe Marshall? You said you met him. What did you think of him?”

“Nice guy. For a cop.”

“What about Wayne Weaver Honeysett?”

Again, his expression floated between amusement and anger. “What, maybe I should get a lawyer in here? You think I got time to sit here and have you talk to me like I’m in court? You’re some broad.” And he actually smiled.

“Please,” I said. “I appreciate your time and everything.”

“Honeysett? The jeweller they found under the bridge, his head crushed? Never met him.”

“How do you know his head was crushed? There was nothing in the newspapers about it.”

“You think I’m the kind of guy needs to read newspapers to know what’s happening?” He began sucking on a back tooth.

For an instant, I considered asking Pilato what else he knew about Honeysett’s death. Then sanity returned, and I had another question. “Why is some guy, who looks like he’s lived on a desert island for a couple of years, knocking on my door and demanding to see somebody named Grizz?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I was out of questions. “Thank you,” I said, standing up. “I’ll go now.”

He followed me to the door, where, I realized, we had been locked in with a complicated system that operated from an electronic keypad. He entered a combination on the keypad, and we both stood in silence while the mechanism whirred and a green light on the wall began flashing. The door swung open, and I walked ahead of Pilato through the dull, dusty foyer to the outer door. As I approached it, it swung inward, opened by the man with the broom and the old fedora.

“Thanks for your time,” I said, turning back to Mike Pilato, who remained inside the building, out of sight of the plumber’s van.

“Sure.” He stood watching me, in no hurry to return to his office.

“I’m sorry if I asked too many questions,” I added.

“It’s not the questions you asked you should think about,” he said. “It’s the question you didn’t ask.”

I closed my eyes. What the hell. “Did you kill my husband?”

“No.”

I opened my eyes and saw him looking at me. How could I believe him? “Thank you,” I said. I walked through the open area, still vacant, to the outer door.

“That’s not the question I meant.”

I turned to see Mike Pilato turning to enter his office, saw the door close behind him, and heard the mechanism lock him inside.

The man with the broom and the fedora resumed sweeping the immaculate walkway, stepping aside to permit me to pass.

The plumber’s van remained where it had been parked when I arrived. I smiled and waved in its direction.

T
he telephone was ringing as I arrived home. I usually play the game of speculating who might be calling before I answer. Two weeks earlier I would have believed it was Gabe. I was almost assuming that as I picked up the receiver and said hello.

“What would you like me to buy you?” a male voice said. I recognized it from the call a few days earlier. I also recognized it from somewhere else. I knew that voice. At last, a pervert I could identify, over the telephone, at least.

“I don’t want you to buy me anything,” I said. “But I want you to tell me how you got this number.”

The voice lost its threatening edge and actually stuttered over the next few words. “I … I, uh, I did … didn’t want to upset you, Mrs. Marshall. You’re in the telephone book, and I just wondered if you would like to talk, maybe over a coffee or something, you know?”

“No, I don’t know. And why are you calling me, anyway?”

“Maybe I’d better call back some other time.” He hung up before I could hit him with a decent Oscar Wilde put-down.

I was left standing with the receiver in my hand, telling myself over and over, I know that voice, I know that voice …

THE YEAR AFTER MY FIRST HUSBAND LEFT ME
for Little Miss Lemon Hair, I lived with a man who called himself a nihilist, a
word I looked up in the dictionary after our second date. He made it sound like a career choice, like being a philosopher or a dentist. I figured it was just another way of explaining why he couldn’t keep a job.

He was a bright guy with a quirky sense of humour, and the parts of his brain that had avoided being hollowed out by too much LSD remained brilliant. His intelligence attracted me, along with the fact that he was a lost soul whom I figured I could rescue. I had no plans for anything permanent with him. I thought I would clean him up, dress him well, put him on display, and move on to the next lost soul. Tina called it ugly puppy syndrome. “Women like you,” she lectured me, “choose the ugliest runt in the litter and think you can turn him into best of show, but you know what? He’ll still be a mutt.” Her husband, I assumed, came with a pedigree.

Anyway, the nihilist wasn’t much to look at and was even less appealing to live with. In fact, the only clear memory I retain of him and his two-room hovel over a butcher shop was a poster he had pinned on the wall beside his bed. The poster showed two buzzards sitting on a dead tree in the middle of the desert. One buzzard is saying to the other, “Patience, hell. I’m gonna kill something.”

I was running out of patience. I didn’t need to kill something, however. Somebody else had done that work. There’s always someone else. Or something else …

Gabe had said that when he called me the night he died, when I was with Mother.
There’s something else
, he said, and I said,
I know,
and Gabe replied,
How could you know?

How could I know that I had slept with Mel? That’s not what he meant. Gabe meant there was something else he had to tell me, something I could not possibly know.

Patience, hell.

I DON’T KNOW WHY
anybody would want to be a cop. Really. All that stuff about wanting to grab bad guys (what do they do about bad women?) comes from people who sit around writing scripts for movies and TV shows. Every male cop I’ve ever known, and this includes Gabe, wants three things from the job: a chance to meet and screw women under various circumstances; an opportunity to hang out with people who complain about the same things; and a fat pension.

Cops will say they do it because they want to solve crimes and rid the world of bad people, but that’s not entirely true. And they don’t do it for the excitement, either. Not detectives.

Most detective work doesn’t involve car chases, handcuffing suspects, or driving above the speed limit with red lights flashing and sirens screaming. It involves reading dull reports and interviewing even duller people who either don’t know what the hell you’re talking about or don’t want to talk to you in the first place. A lot of it’s done at battered desks in cluttered offices with dusty computer screens and wastebaskets filled with empty coffee cups. So I expected to find both Harold Hayashida and Mel in the detective squad area at Central Police Station. I was only half right.

Waiting for the duty cop at the reception desk to finish talking on the telephone, I saw Hayashida in his cubicle, bent over his desk with his palms flat on the surface and an expression on his face that looked as though he was working on a difficult crossword puzzle. Watching him gave me something to do while the duty cop muttered into the telephone receiver, making comments that convinced me he was talking to his mistress, his wife, or someone’s lawyer.

“Yeah … No … Uh-huh … Never … Impossible … Not likely … Got it … Will do …” His last words before hanging up sounded like a sermon. “When it all comes down the pike and everything starts going off the rails, remember who stirred the pot and got the ball rolling, all right?”

He slammed the receiver down and looked up at me. “What would you like, lady?” he asked in his best civil servant welcome.

I resisted the urge to ask if I could borrow a metaphor and requested to speak to either Sergeant Hayashida or Sergeant Holiday.

He asked what about.

I replied, “A murder.”

He reacted as though I had said a parking ticket. “Whose?”

“My husband’s.”

His eyes narrowed and he actually smiled. “Gabe Marshall’s?”

By this time Harold had noticed me standing behind the counter, and he called across to the duty cop, saying it was all right, I could come in.

“YOU’RE HERE TO HELP THE INVESTIGATION, RIGHT?”

We were in his cubicle, although Hayashida clearly wished I was somewhere else. He avoided my eyes, keeping his on a handful of papers I couldn’t read.

“If I can.” It was all the justification I had for being there.

“You can help if you have any information to pass on to us.” He tossed the papers aside and looked directly at me for the first time. Something I had done or said, or something someone else had done or said, had upset him. More to the point, it had pissed him off. “Have you?”

“I have a name,” I said. “Eugene Griswold.”

Hayashida’s face was a blank. Clearly, I had told him something he didn’t know. “Who?” he asked.

“Griswold. On the street, he’s apparently known as Grizz.”

He sat back in his chair and stared at me. “How do you know this? That the guy’s name, the guy called Grizz, is really Eugene Griswold?”

“Don’t you guys know?” Dumb question. Hayashida didn’t. “Mike Pilato told me.”

“What the hell are you doing talking to Mike Pilato?”

“Why can’t I talk to anybody I want? In fact, Mike Pilato was a lot more willing to talk to me than you guys are. And why do you keep parking a plumber’s truck in front of Pilato’s place? He knows who you are, what you’re doing.”

“I don’t know anything about a plumber’s van, okay?”

“You just can’t talk about it. Pilato’s right. You’re both playing games. Meanwhile, people get killed. Like my husband.”

Hayashida absorbed this, then reached for a pencil and pad of paper. He began writing, I assumed, Eugene Griswold’s name on the paper. I confirmed it by leaning forward to watch, and began spelling Griswold’s name aloud. “G-R-I-S—”

Hayashida muttered that he could figure it out for himself, damn it. “This Griswold guy,” he said, tossing the pad aside. “He work for Pilato?”

“Doesn’t work for anybody. He died about two hundred years ago. In Connecticut.”

He tilted his head. “Why are you wasting my time?”

“Mel Holiday knows the name,” I said. “And so does Mike Pilato. And you know this guy named Grizz. But nobody can put the pieces together. What is this, a police investigation or a game of charades? And why were you upset with me for wearing the ring Gabe gave me? You think he stole it?”

Hayashida was calm enough to ignore my questions. “Who else have you been talking to? About Gabe’s death?”

“Glynnis Dalgetty, Dougal’s wife. Dougal Dalgetty was supposedly killed by the guy called Grizz, although she thinks Gabe was—”

“Just so you know,” Hayashida interrupted, “Glynnis Dalgetty was convicted of manslaughter about ten years ago.”

My turn to sit back in the chair. “She was? Manslaughter?”

“Shot a guy in a hotel room. Said he was trying to rape her. Which, back then, might have been a possibility. Except she
couldn’t explain what she was doing in the hotel room with a guy who used to work for Mike Pilato, one of Pilato’s guys who maybe tried running his own show or was caught skimming from Pilato’s take, we don’t know for sure. We don’t know where Glynnis Dalgetty got the gun, either. Or why the guy was naked. Or why she shot him six times, including twice in the head.”

“Glynnis?” I tried picturing her with a gun in her hand, pulling the trigger six times.

“It was enough to get her maybe fifteen years for second-degree murder, based on the facts. I mean, it was such an obvious set-up to us. The court didn’t see it that way, as a set-up, I mean. The court considered it practically justifiable homicide. All she got was a two-year suspended sentence on the lesser charge. Nobody here went for a murder conviction. Man with criminal record tries to rape helpless woman, woman defends herself, man loses his life, who cares? That’s what the court decided, based on her defence.”

“Sounds like she had a good lawyer.”

Hayashida nodded. “Took a week for him to talk her into a plea deal and accepting probation, and even less time for the prosecution to accept it. She wanted the charges dropped. She acted like that’s what she expected to happen, she’d just walk away scot-free. A month after she walks out of here, she and Dougal are driving around in a shiny new Mercedes-Benz, drinking good liquor until Dougal filled himself with too much Jameson one night and made a wrong turn off a dock into the bay. Somebody saw them and got them out, Dougal and Glynnis. I understand the Benz is still down there.”

“Who paid for the lawyer?”

“You want to guess?”

“You’re saying Mike Pilato got Dougal and Glynnis to kill somebody for him.”

Hayashida turned back to his computer. “No, I’m saying that you should be careful where you go or you could wind up next to Dougal’s Mercedes.”

“He was pretty talkative today. Almost charming.”

“Because he wasn’t talking business. He never talks business in his office. He’s afraid we’ve bugged it.”

“Have you?”

Hayashida smiled. “He takes lots of walks. With people he wants to talk business with. And he doesn’t want anybody listening in.”

“I don’t give a damn about his business, whatever it is, and it’s sure not hardware. What’s wrong with asking about Gabe? What’s wrong with flattering him a little, letting him think he’s charming me?”

He looked across at me. “I’m serious, Josie. If Mike Pilato snaps his fingers because he wants you dead, you’ll be gone before he can put his hand back in his pocket.”

I had come in like Nancy Drew and been reduced to Anne of Green Gables. “Glynnis Dalgetty thinks Gabe shot her husband.”

Hayashida said, “Maybe he did.”

He was staring at me, waiting for my reaction, which was to tell him that it was total crap, Gabe never shot anybody. Including himself.

Hayashida thought about this while I watched him watching me. Then he stood up, looked around to make sure no one was eavesdropping, sat down again, and leaned toward me, his hands on his knees. “I think you should go get a coffee.”

I thought he wanted me to play cop station waitress. “Where’s the machine?” I asked, looking around.

“Not here.” He kept his voice low. Anyone beyond the cubicle wouldn’t hear a thing. “There’s a Tim Hortons down the street, about four blocks down on your right. Go have yourself a coffee. In the last cubicle near the rear exit, if it’s available. Okay?”

When I stood up to leave, Hayashida whispered, “Ten minutes,” but it didn’t register immediately because I was looking beyond the cubicle to the open corridor leading to Walter Freeman’s office. I knew it was his office because the sign on the door said
chief of detectives walter freeman
and because the oversized son of a bitch was waiting for a man to enter the office ahead of him, a guy with sandy hair and a good physique wearing a neat blue jacket over a white shirt and brown chinos, a guy who was calm and smiling slightly and not foaming at the mouth and screaming for me to tell him where Grizz was, which is what he had been doing the last time I saw him. Just as he entered Walter’s office, Walter scanned the squad area to see who was watching, and I enjoyed a brief thrill of Up Yours when his eyes locked on mine.

“That’s—” I began, leaning toward Hayashida, who had been busy adding something to his notepad.

Hayashida looked up at me, frowning. I wanted to say more, but Walter had closed the door behind the guy in the windbreaker and was walking toward me, gesturing for the cop on the reception desk to join him as he approached.

I expected Walter to ask what the hell I was doing in a place where he didn’t want me, but he didn’t speak to me at all. Instead, he spoke to the duty cop, who was hustling across the floor at Walter’s command. “Evict this woman,” he said in his best supreme commander’s voice. “Tell her she’s been witnessed consorting with a convicted felon by law enforcement officers and inform her that if she sets foot in this building again without a direct request from someone in this department, she will be charged with trespassing.”

“This is a goddamn public building,” I said to Walter, who was already heading back to his office. “I just might charge you with police harassment, Walter. Consorting? What the hell does that mean? And what are you doing with a junkie in your office?”

The last few words were aimed at the door to Walter’s office, which did not answer back because it was closed.

The obedient duty cop appeared to be deciding whether to use kind words or pepper spray to encourage me to leave, but I gave him time to use neither.

“YOU’RE LATE,”
I said to Hayashida when he slid into the booth opposite me. It was half an hour later.