Beach Strip (20 page)

“Walter,” Hayashida said, “would have me downtown patrolling washrooms if he knew I was here.”

“So why are you?” I asked. “Here, I mean.”

“You said something back there that’s important.”

“I said something important? You’re sure it was me?”

He looked across at the donut display. Cops are around donuts like squirrels are around peanuts. What is it, the fat? The sugar? The shape? “You said Glynnis Dalgetty believed your husband shot her husband.”

“She’s wrong.”

“I agree.” Hayashida tore his eyes away from the chocolate-iced lovelies to look at me. “Except, today the lab confirmed that the bullet that killed Dalgetty came from Gabe’s gun.”

“Then they’re wrong too. Gabe did not shoot that woman’s husband.” Before Hayashida could speak, I added, “And Dalgetty was killed, what? A month ago? Six weeks ago? And you’ve just learned he was shot by Gabe’s gun? Hey, when’re you going to hear that Princess Diana died?”

Hayashida opened his hands and stared at his palms. “We got a tip from somebody to say we should compare the slug from Dalgetty’s head with the one … the one we removed from Gabe. We knew they were both the same calibre, and probably came from the same kind of gun. But it never occurred to us to put both under the scope and check.”

“Dalgetty was executed.”

“That’s right.”

“Then so was Gabe.”

“Or, having killed Dalgetty, Gabe might have been remorseful or threatened with being identified as the killer …”

“Which would drive him to suicide.”

“It’s a possibility.”

I needed time to absorb this. “The guy who went into Walter’s office today,” I said, “wearing a blue windbreaker. He’s a nutcase, a junkie, looking all over for Grizz because he needs a fix, I guess, or whatever they call it now—”

“He’s a narc.” Hayashida was watching me as though daring me to react, which was enough to shut my mouth. “Undercover. Sent over from Toronto. Trying to flush out the guy named Grizz. That’s how you do it. Get somebody putting out the word and hoping for a reaction. By the way, I hear the guys in the plumber’s truck got some good shots of you entering and leaving Mike Pilato’s place. I hear they’re pretty flattering.”

I said, “I need more coffee.”

“You say a word about this, about the narc or about Gabe’s gun being identified as the weapon that was used on Dougal Dalgetty, and Walter will find a reason to turn your house upside down and arrest you for having your lipstick smeared.”

“I don’t tell stories I don’t believe.”

“Doesn’t matter what you believe. I’ve been here nearly fifteen years. Biggest lesson I learned? Don’t screw around with Walter Freeman.”

I held my head in my hands. Nothing was what it had seemed a couple of weeks ago. So I thought about the Buddhist.

I dated a Buddhist just before meeting Gabe. I had been looking for somebody gentle, trustworthy, spiritual. He was all of that. He was also a strict vegetarian. I never got tired of the sex, but I sure got tired of tofu and being told that the world does not exist
as we see it but as we imagine it. Or something like that. He was drifting from Buddhism into a mild addiction to hashish, which seemed to strengthen his spiritual side. It made me think that drugs are for people who can’t handle religion. Didn’t Karl Marx say something like that?

I was staring into my coffee cup, thinking about Buddhists and Karl Marx and remembering what it was like to live with a guy who ate one meal a day and how I never wanted to do anything with my life except live with Gabe on the beach strip and how that dream was gone forever and maybe I was the one who had destroyed it by sleeping with Mel Holiday, when Hayashida mentioned his name. “What?” I said, looking up.

“Mel Holiday.” Hayashida drained his coffee cup. “Talk to him. He’s been working hard on Gabe’s case. You need somebody to lean on. Maybe protect you.”

“Protect me? From what? From who?”

“We’re dealing with a murder and two suicides. Or maybe two murders and one suicide. Anyway, somebody was involved, somewhere.”

“Which suicide are you questioning?”

Hayashida stood up and looked around at everything except the donuts. “I don’t know.”

T
hat Buddhist I mentioned? He was a photographer. He did weddings, parties, bar mitzvahs, portraits, anything people would pay him to aim a camera at. On sunny days, he would make a point of going outside just before sunset. He was waiting for the magic hour. That’s what he called the time when the sun was about to go down. In summer, the magic hour lasted, he explained, a full sixty minutes. In the winter, you were lucky to catch ten minutes of it.

The magic hour, he said, was when more light reflected on you from the sky than from the sun. It was indirect light, and it was flattering to everything. It was the best light in which to take photographs, and also the best light to study and appreciate the world around us. “It’s soft light, full light. Rich light. Look at trees during the magic hour,” he would say. “They are more majestic, more alive than in the hard light of noon. And look at people in the magic hour. They are more beautiful, more open, more accessible.”

At first, I was impressed with his artist’s eye. I saw what he meant. I understood his meaning. But his raving about the way the world is lit just before sunset became something of a rant by the tenth time he repeated it. Which is when I told him I agreed entirely, and what I really wanted to see in the light of the magic hour or the light of a candle wasn’t another bowl of tofu and bean sprouts, but a greasy cheeseburger I could call my own, and that this particular romance was over.

After Hayashida went back to Central, I left Tim Hortons in the magic hour. The world didn’t look any more attractive or accessible than it had an hour earlier.

I HAD LEARNED
that Glynnis Dalgetty had killed a man, probably on Mike Pilato’s orders. I wanted to ask her about it. I wanted to know what it was like to watch bullets enter a man’s body and see him writhe on the floor until, I guess, she shot him in the head. Twice. What did the gun feel like in her hand? What was she thinking while she killed him? The colour of the Mercedes-Benz she’d get? Leftovers in the refrigerator? But I couldn’t believe it had anything to do with Gabe’s death.

I had also learned a little about Mike Pilato. I wanted to learn more.

The street where White Star Hardware Distributors was located had been deserted barely an hour earlier. Now the plumbing van was gone, and in the early moments of the magic hour it had become a combination playground, village square, and movie set. Teenage boys raced their skateboards along the pavement and up over the curbs. Girls their age in halter tops and shorts exchanged earbuds for their iPods or other music devices, closing their eyes, raising their clenched fists, and dancing on the spot to music only they heard and, I suspected, only they could tolerate. Two older women, their heads wrapped in bandanas, stood speaking and gesturing to each other while two men their age, who I assumed were their husbands, watched the procession on the other side of the street, the side where White Star Hardware Distributors was located and where Mike Pilato was.

Pilato still wore the black and gold shirt and black trousers. He walked with two men, Pilato doing the talking while the men kept pace with him and listened, nodding and sometimes gesturing with their hands to communicate expressions I interpreted
as agreement, surprise, or anger. They were accompanied by four younger men, two about twenty feet ahead and two a similar distance behind. All four appeared to have purchased their clothes from the same tailor: open-necked shirts with wide collars, dark trousers, and black pointed-toe shoes. They also appeared to buy their sunglasses from the same place: dark Ray-Bans that hid their eyes completely. The three with hair seemed to patronize the same barber, a man who appreciated thick, dark hair and did his best to enhance it. The fourth man’s head was shaved, the better to reveal a tattoo on his skull. The tattoo was an arrow pointing forward to a word above his forehead that I couldn’t read.

The seven men—Mike and his two partners, plus the four men who reminded me of outriders in old movies about cattle drives—were performing some kind of choreography. Whenever Mike and his friends stopped while Mike said something obviously important, the outriders halted as well. When Mike began walking again, the younger men matched their pace, their heads swivelling constantly from side to side.

When I slowed the car, lowered the window and called out to Mike, all seven men stopped walking and glared at me. I felt as though I had been asked to identify myself at a border crossing and had used the name Mrs. Osama bin Laden.

Instead of speaking to me, Mike looked at the two outriders ahead of him and nodded.

The man with the arrow on his head walked quickly into the street ahead of my car. His partner, I sensed, was behind me. I suppose, if I had pressed the accelerator to the floor, I could have run down Arrowhead, but I assumed this would be a suicidal act. Arrowhead walked to the open window on my side of the car and spoke without looking at me. “Keep moving,” he said.

I said I wanted to speak to Mike Pilato for a moment.

“You can’t,” he said. “Just get the hell out of here.”

“Why won’t he talk to me? He’s right over—”

“Drive away.”

“Okay, he’s busy, I can see that—”

“Drive away. Now.”

“Will you give him a message?”

“No.”

“Well, I don’t see why—” I began. This time it wasn’t Arrowhead who prevented me from finishing my sentence. This time I stopped talking because something struck the back of the Honda with the force of a gunshot. I twisted in my seat to look behind me. Arrowhead’s partner had hair on his head, a misaligned nose on his face, and a small sledgehammer in his hand. Where the heck had he gotten a sledgehammer? It hardly mattered, because he swung it again, and the Honda lurched forward from the blow.

Before pressing the accelerator to the floor, I looked across at Mike Pilato, who raised one hand, palm out, and someone barked a short flurry of Italian words as the Honda, like a horse who had just been slapped in the ass, sped away from White Star Hardware Distributors.

“I HAVE TWO DENTS IN MY CAR
that you could hide grapefruit in.”

The hand holding the last of my brandy in a glass from the kitchen was shaking. The hand holding the telephone was not, so Mel’s voice remained loud, clear, and comforting in my ear.

“I’ll talk to him. I’ll talk to Pilato, tell him he’s gone over the line.”

“How can those guys do that? How can they just walk out on the street and start smashing somebody’s car with a sledgehammer?”

“They went too far. So did you.”

“Mel, it’s a public street, damn it!”

“Not when Mike Pilato is having a meeting on it.”

“Meeting? He’s walking with two greaseballs—”

“And talking business. Makes it harder for us to bug him.”

“So you let him get away with this?”

“Pilato will probably pay for the damage.”

“I don’t care about that. I’d like somebody to go after
him
with a sledgehammer and leave a couple of dents in
his
rusting old body.” When he said nothing, I added, “You’re smirking, aren’t you?”

“No,” he said. “I’m serious, and I’m concerned about you.”

“Mel, I don’t have any idea what’s going on, except that everything is linked. Gabe’s death, what happened to Wayne Honeysett, Glynnis Dalgetty … did you know she was convicted of manslaughter and would have gone to prison if Mike Pilato hadn’t hired a lawyer for her, and when she got a suspended sentence … you know all this, don’t you?”

Mel said yes, he knew. He knew more that he couldn’t tell me.

“Why not?”

“Because there are things going on, Josie, that you don’t want to be involved in.”

I told him he was wrong. I told him I wanted to know everything that involved Gabe’s death.

“Then I’ll tell you. Soon.” He promised to call me the next day.

When the telephone rang five minutes later, I assumed he couldn’t wait.

It wasn’t Mel. It was Pilato. “First you’re not home, or not answering, then you’re talking to somebody so’s you can’t answer. All the time, I’m calling, calling, getting nothing but ringing or a busy signal. Good thing I’m a more patient man than people think, eh?”

“Why did your thugs smash my car?” I said. I am very brave when separated from a gangster by a telephone cord.

“Why did you go to Central Police Station when you left here?”

“How do you know that?”

“You ask me that? I ask you this. What’s it look like, some woman I never met comes into my office, talks about somebody murdering her husband, then goes to the police? You think I like that? You think I don’t wonder what you’re saying, why you see me? Huh?”

“So that gives you the right to have two of your hired hoods smash in my car?”

“Get it fixed and send me the bill.”

“No, I won’t. I’ll drive that poor little car into the ground, and every time somebody comments on the dents in my trunk lid, I’ll tell them that’s what I got for driving down a public street in front of your office. How’s that?”

“You think that’s a big deal to me? You think I haven’t been accused of bigger things than putting a couple of dents in that piece of crap you drive?”

“Like murder?” Nobody was going to swing a sledgehammer at me through a telephone receiver.

“You accusing me of that? Because you better be careful, Mrs. Marshall. You be careful with stuff like that. You come to see me, I’m nice to you, try to help you out, tell you a couple of stories. You start saying people get killed because of me, you forget about us being friends—”

“I am not your goddamn friend!”
I shouted through the telephone. “The only thing …” I began. My throat had gone dry. I began again. “The only thing I ever want to discuss with you is the death of my husband, and if you had anything to do with it, I’ll see your Italian ass in prison.” I really said “Italian ass.”

“You watch yourself, okay?” Pilato replied. “You watch yourself. You’re pissed, you’re upset because you think somebody killed your husband. Okay, okay. You loved your husband, that makes you a good wife, a good woman. I like that, it’s good. But you watch who you yell at like that, you hear me?”

“Did you have my husband killed?”

“I already told you, no.”

“No, you said you didn’t kill him. I just asked if you had him killed. Do you think he committed suicide?”

“Again, no.”

“Then who killed him? I mean, the police are saying he killed himself and that he shot Dougal Dalgetty.”

“They’re saying that? How come they’re saying that?”

“They say Gabe must have shot Dougal Dalgetty because the forensics lab matched the bullets, the bullets came from the same gun that killed Gabe, and I don’t think I was supposed to tell you that.”

“Too late.”

“So there’s something going on here that I can’t figure out and maybe you can. Or maybe I shouldn’t say anything more, so whatever you do, you didn’t hear it from me, right? About the bullets matching, okay? Hello?”

Mike Pilato had hung up on me.

“WHENEVER YOU SEE A BEAUTIFUL SUNSET,”
my Buddhist photographer boyfriend of a few months told me, “turn around and look 180 degrees in the other direction, to the east. All sunsets are pretty much alike. But the light they cast is always somehow different.”

Facing east across the lake, I was reminded of his words. This was an evening like the one he meant, soft and glowing, with the immediate world acquiring a tangerine radiance that I always find both uplifting and melancholy. Why did Mike Pilato appear to find it so interesting that the lab report identified Gabe’s gun as the one that killed Dougal Dalgetty? Obviously, I had told him all he needed to know, because he hung up on me without asking or waiting for more details. As if I had them.

I walked through my garden, noted with some comfort that the door to the garden shed remained closed and locked, and stepped
up to the laneway to look across the expanse of water that lay ahead of me, flat and smooth and glassy. Buildings on the shore to my left and right shone like jewels in the gold rays. I could make myself believe, with a little effort and a larger dose of imagination, that I was looking at an artist’s rendering of an idyllic scene.

The image, like all of my fantasies, lasted only for an instant. I became aware of people around me. An elderly couple walking hand in hand on the water’s edge, both wearing white trousers, the cuffs rolled up over their calves, each carrying their shoes so they could feel the coolness of the water on their bare feet. The woman, her hair silver-grey, leaned her head against the man’s shoulder and laughed at something he said to her. Three guys in their twenties were walking in the other direction, across the sand, passing a bottle of beer between them, laughing and looking constantly around to make sure everyone saw how cool they were, and keeping an eye out for cops who could make things very uncool. Here came Hans and Trudy, walking their schnauzer and maybe discussing recipes for sauerkraut. They waved and were about to greet me when I noticed the slim, balding man about twenty feet to my right, leaning against a tree next to the boardwalk, watching me.

“Who’s minding the bridge?” I called to him, and Tom Grychuk smiled and pushed himself away from the tree to walk toward me.

“Wondered when you might notice me,” he said. He wore a striped golf shirt, cotton trousers, and sneakers. Mister Suburbia with a civil service salary. Hans and Trudy passed, watching us carefully. I smiled to reassure them and turned back to Grychuk. “Okay,” I said, “I caught you. You’re it. Now what?”

“I just wondered if, I don’t know …” He looked at his shoes, then, as though he had read something on them, looked up with a grin that made him look as shy as he no doubt felt. “I was wondering if maybe we could have a coffee together, or maybe a drink at Tuffy’s.”

I wasn’t listening as closely to the words as I was to the voice. “You’re the guy,” I said.

“The guy?”

“The one who called me. On the telephone. Saying you would buy me something.”

“Oh, yeah.” He looked away, then down at his shoes again. “Well, you answered the telephone the first time I called and asked what I had bought you, remember?”