Beach Strip (22 page)

T
he warm Tina and the cool Andrew awaited me at the airport in Vancouver, Tina running toward me with arms outstretched and Andrew hanging back, clutching a bouquet of flowers. I felt like a bride arriving at her honeymoon resort.

I survived the hugs and took the flowers and Tina’s arm, and we all walked out of the airport and into Andrew’s Lexus, Tina boasting about the Vancouver weather and the dinner that she and her new maid, Goldie, were planning for us, while Andrew drove us past glass walls and greenery. Everything in Vancouver is green from rain, and maybe from misplaced envy.

An hour later I was sitting in the den on Point Grey Road, the den’s picture window framing a view that the local tourist bureau no doubt approved and had perhaps even created. We looked across English Bay to the downtown core, its office towers and condominiums shining in the sun. Beyond them, marking the horizon, mountains shone, capped with enamel-white snow. I have been jealous of few things or people in my life, but the view through that window made my dream of living on the beach strip seem about as ambitious as putting on socks in the morning.

Andrew made me a drink, a vodka and tonic with a perfect slice of lemon and a sprig of mint, served in a Waterford crystal glass. He refilled both our drinks within five minutes while he and I nibbled on buttery Camembert served with crackers shaped like flowers. Dorothy Parker was damn straight: living well really
is the best revenge. Tina was in the kitchen, supervising Goldie, based on the clatter of pots and dishes that drifted up the hallway toward us.

“I must tell you,” Andrew said after I assured him that I was more than pleased with the drink, “how excited Tina has been about your coming here.” Andrew is lean and tall and speaks with a mild English accent. He looked around and lowered his voice as though assuring himself that my sister was not hiding around the corner, eavesdropping. “Tina can be a little, uh, wrapped up in herself at times,” he said.

“You mean narcissistic?” I suggested.

He smiled and nodded. At heart, Andrew is a nice man. I often felt that he shared some genes with certain jazz musicians who, I remember reading, become truly at ease with themselves and the world only when they are making music. Andrew, I suspected, was truly at ease only when in an operating room, an anaesthetized patient in front of him, a surgical team around him, and a scalpel in his hand. A little ghoulish, maybe, but wouldn’t it be comforting to know that the man who is about to slice open your body and expose its innards to the world didn’t want to be doing anything else with his life?

“Mind you,” Andrew said, “the word ‘narcissistic’ has a pejorative sense to it, and I’m not sure that I would want to apply it in a cavalier manner to Tina, who, as you know, has many admirable qualities.”

Two of the most admirable qualities in a man are his easy use of phrases like “cavalier manner” and his quick defence of his wife, whether she deserves it or not. I assured Andrew that I meant no disrespect to my sister by using the term “narcissistic.” Andrew was so pleased with my comment that he didn’t notice when I checked to confirm that my nose hadn’t grown.

“She is so fond and so envious of you,” he said, sampling his own drink.

“What would I have that would ever make Tina envious?” The vodka was warming. I decided I would drink less brandy and more Smirnoff.

“Your outlook. Your sense of self. Your …” He smiled over his glass at me. “Joie de vivre.”

Thank goodness. I thought he was going to say my boobs.

He was still talking. The vodka was loosening him as much as me. “Tina wraps herself up in material things because she lacks your ability to take life as it comes. Those are her words, by the way. Not mine. ‘Josie would be happy living in sneakers and jeans every day,’ she has said to me a couple of times. ‘She just knows how to take life as it comes and not give a damn about anything else.’ She meant that as a compliment. I mean, Josie, she really adores you. In her own way.”

“We’re different,” I agreed. “But we’re close. In our own way.”

He looked toward the open door again and began sliding his chair closer to me. “I know she spends too much time and effort on incidentals in life.” He paused and actually smothered a giggle before speaking again, which suggested that his drink was stronger than mine. “Sometimes I tell people I think I’m married to a centipede when I see all the shoes she keeps in her closet. Did I mention we converted the guest bedroom, the one next to ours, into a closet for Tina’s clothes?” He drained his drink. “Another?” he said, holding his empty glass for me to inspect.

Like a dutiful sister-in-law, I passed the empty glass to him, and he turned to the small bar next to the window just as Tina leaned in through the open doorway. “How are you two getting along?” she asked. She had changed from the sweater and skirt she wore earlier into a satiny green dress under a flowered apron. She had even changed her lipstick from coral red to a deep crimson, a better match for deep green. At least her hair colour was the same.

“We’re having a fine old time,” I said, “talking about you.”

“I love it when people talk about me,” she said. “The nastier
the better.” She held up five fingers. I thought she was showing off her manicure. “Five minutes,” she said. “Ten at the most.” She disappeared down the hall.

“We may have to do more drinking and less talking,” Andrew said, handing me my third drink.

“The key to sociability,” I said, and we touched the rims of our glasses together. I was beginning to like Andrew. “Your work is so interesting,” I said. “Can you tell me about it?”

He gave it some thought. “After a while …” he said, and began again. “After all the years I’ve been doing surgery, more than twenty now, there are few surprises, and the surprises I encounter are never good news, only bad. I regret that a little. I think our lives are better when we are surprised from time to time, don’t you? I don’t mean big surprises like your spouse announcing that she’s leaving you or …”

He looked away. I knew what he had been about to say. He had been about to say we don’t need surprises like finding your spouse dead.

We both began speaking at once. I started to tell him that he needn’t be embarrassed, it was a normal thing to say, but when I heard him speaking, looking out the window at the mountaintops, I stopped. “I have come to believe that a truly happy life is poised on the edge between routine and normalcy and risk and surprises,” Andrew said. “Maybe that’s why people do things like skydiving or riding roller coasters.”

Or having affairs with their husband’s partner, I thought.

“Anyway, I’m sharing office space at the clinic now with a urologist,” Andrew said before taking a long pull from his drink. “We have a lot of fun together. I call him the plumber and he calls me the butcher.” He laughed at his own joke.

The sounds drifting up the hall from the kitchen were growing louder, along with Tina’s voice barking instructions to the silent Goldie.

“Tina is very lucky to be married to you, Andrew,” I said.

He blushed. What makes a celebrated surgeon blush? A compliment.

“Thank you,” Andrew said, and set his glass aside. “Thank you, Josie, that’s very kind. You know,” and he pulled his chair a few inches closer, “I know Tina has her faults and all of that, and we have our little disagreements over things, but I could do worse. Than be married to her, I mean. Some of her friends … are you playing bridge with them Thursday?”

“Actually, I hope not.”

“Avoid it if you can. A couple of her friends, Charlene and what’s the other one? Davida. Charlene and Davida, they are really over the top. Kiss you on the cheek and stab you in the back. Simultaneously.” He stumbled through that word, adding an extra syllable or two. “I came home …” He glanced at the doorway, confirmed that Tina wasn’t lurking there with a shotgun, and dropped his voice so low it was my turn to pull my chair closer. “I came home one afternoon just as the bridge club meeting was breaking up. Davida had already left with a couple of other girls—that’s what they call themselves, and that’s all right, I guess—and three or four of them were getting ready to leave. I got some kisses from them, and then Charlene discovered that someone had walked off with her handbag. She knew it was Davida because they both have the same Louis Vuitton purse, so it was an easy mistake to make. But what happened next was that Charlene and the other women—except Tina, I’m proud to say—when they knew it was Davida’s purse, they opened it and practically ransacked it, looking at all her receipts, her pictures, her address book, everything. I mean, that’s just—”

“Dinner is finally served,” Tina said.

“Wonderful.” Andrew smiled, then stood up and took my arm. “Josie and I are starved, aren’t we?”

I agreed I was, which meant I avoided commenting on Charlene and Davida and their purses and friends.

D
inner began with a cold potato soup that Tina kept insisting was not vichyssoise, which I said was fine because I was never sure if I was pronouncing the damn word correctly anyway, which caused Andrew to snort in laughter and me to giggle.

“It sounds like you two did more drinking than talking in the den,” Tina said, visibly annoyed.

Through the rest of the soup course, while Tina discussed her problem with damask drapes and grumbled about the terrible job her garden maintenance people were doing, Andrew and I avoided looking at each other lest we both break into giggles. Three glasses of vodka had reduced us to eight-year-olds at summer camp. It was delightful.

The main course was grilled lamb chops and thinly sliced baked potatoes served on a sauce that I must admit was as gourmet as I ever expect to eat. My compliments were sincere enough for Tina to call Goldie in from the kitchen to take some sort of culinary bow. “Goldie is from Guatemala,” Tina announced in a tone that suggested a Guatemalan maid was a notch or two higher in the Vancouver social strata than one from Mexico or, for all I knew, Kurdistan. Anyway, she was a shy, petite woman with coal black hair and eyes, and Andrew and I toasted her with the Châteauneuf-du-Pape that Tina had made a point of informing us cost eighty-five dollars a bottle, but it was worth it, wasn’t it? I
agreed, and said if she cared to break the empty bottle I would be pleased to lick the pieces.

Dessert was a mango sorbet. It went well with the coffee and not so well with my head, which was bouncing between the appetite satisfaction of the meal and the rapid fading of the alcohol.

Something was bothering me, had been bothering me since before I sat down at the dinner table. It was a voice in my mind, and if voices can have colour, this one was as dark as Goldie’s hair but not nearly as attractive. I kept trying to listen to this voice, absorb what it was saying to me, but all I could hear was Tina discussing boxwood hedges and cracked flagstone.

“Josie.” It was Tina, reaching to grab my arm. “Where are you, anyway?”

I turned to stare at her, my eyes unfocused.

“You have forgotten,” Andrew said, “that the poor girl is still on Eastern Time, which means,” and he looked at his watch, “it’s well past eleven at night to her inner clock. She must be very tired.”

I looked at Tina and told her Andrew was right. I was very tired.

Within minutes I was in the guest room at the far wing of the house, a second-floor suite with the same view across the water to downtown Vancouver that I had enjoyed in the den. A quick tour of Tina’s toiletries, a turndown of the bed, and a kiss on the cheek were followed by blessed darkness and silence and the even more welcome blessing of the soft bed and the duvet and the gentle slowing down of the spinning room.

I WOKE UP AND I KNEW.

I knew what happened that night, the night Gabe waited for me on the blanket and died. I knew how and why he had died, and I knew what I had done and what I had not done to cause his death, the story like a picture, and the picture developing like
the one the horny Buddhist photographer had shown me in his darkroom once, an image on paper beginning to form. I had been dreaming that I was in the darkroom alone, watching the image appear on the paper in the tray, an image of Gabe on the blanket. In my dream I began to cry, and I was crying when I awoke.

It was the purses. The identical Louis Vuitton look-what-I’ve-got-you-bitch purses.

The face of the clock next to the bed glowed 2:15.

Going back to sleep was out of the question. I needed to walk. I needed to think things through, to decide what to do and how to do it. I dressed, went downstairs, and opened the side door into the garden.

Tina had told me almost everything about her house, about the custom cabinetry made of Philippine mahogany, the special floor tiles imported from Mexico, and the solid brass door fixtures from a small foundry in England. She had never mentioned the security system.

Opening the door triggered a speaker somewhere in the house, pulsing a high-pitched tone. Lights in the garden and under the eaves of the house lit up, and while I stood waiting for my addled mind to explain what the hell was happening, the telephone rang.

I closed my eyes and the door, and waited for Tina to find me, deciding what I would say to her.

“JOSIE, YOU’RE NOT WELL.”
Tina was following me through the house while I asked her to tell me where the goddamn computer was. “Maybe you have that post-traumatic stress thingy or something.”

“Thingy?” I stopped and looked at my sister, wrapped in her silk robe, her arms folded across her chest. Andrew had spoken to the security people, assured them that the house had not been invaded by cannibalistic Vikings or anything nearly as threatening, and cleverly gone back to bed. “I’ve solved my husband’s murder and you think I have a
thingy?
”

“Josie—”

“Show me your fucking computer!”
I believe I have never shouted louder. I may have awakened Andrew. I probably woke up Seattle.

Tina threw her hands up and turned into a room off the hall that I had assumed was a washroom. It was a small office. The computer on the desk stared back at me blankly. “Thanks,” I said, sitting at the desk. “Now go back to bed, Tina. Because I’m not. I can’t. And give me your password. I have to look up a lot of things before dawn.”

IT WAS FIVE IN THE MORNING
and the sky was as dark as it had been at midnight. My flight left at seven, putting me in Toronto at three-thirty and home on the beach strip in time for dinner. I did not plan on having dinner.

I had spent two hours on Tina’s computer, making my flight reservations and searching the Internet for information on many things and many people. Some details confirmed what I already knew. Some were dead ends. None contradicted what I believed had happened. Everything confirmed it. Now I was standing near Tina and Andrew’s front door, waiting for the lights of the cab I had called to take me to the airport.

Andrew was silent, sipping a coffee. Tina was agitated.

“For god’s sake, Josie,” she said, “tell me why you have to go now. Talk to me, talk to Andrew, we’ll listen. How can you be so sure?”

“Because I am.” It was all I could say, the only way I could respond.

“What are you going to do when you get back?”

“Make some telephone calls. A lot of telephone calls.” This was only half right.

“To whom?”

“To the people who helped kill Gabe. All of them.”

“Damn it, you can’t go making accusations …” We had been having this one-sided conversation since I emerged from her office and began packing my bag, which is when Andrew awoke again and made coffee, wearing a silk robe in a blue and purple paisley pattern. I knew Tina had bought him that robe. She didn’t have to tell me that. No man would choose a robe like that for himself. Now she turned to him. “Talk to her, Andrew,” she said. “Talk some sense into her.”

Andrew studied his coffee cup for a moment, then said, “Josie has always made a lot of sense to me,” which released a low squeal of exasperation from Tina. I was saved from witnessing Tina’s revenge by the sight of slowly approaching headlights.

“My cab’s here,” I said, and hugged first Tina, who refused to uncross her arms from her chest, then Andrew, who squeezed me tightly and advised me to take care of myself.

“Josie.” Tina reassumed the role of a caring older sister. “Promise me you’ll at least rely on Mel what’s-his-name.”

“Holiday. Blue eyes.”

“For god’s sake, don’t go playing games with some of the other people you’ve told me about, the Mafia guy, the woman who shot somebody in her hotel room, that dope dealer …”

I assured Tina I wouldn’t. I planned to count on Mel more than I ever had. More than I ever expected I would.

The cab was in front of the house, the driver getting out of the car.

PEOPLE WASTE TIME AT AIRPORTS,
thanks to all the security. I wasted no time at all. I spent an hour on the pay telephones, calling ahead to Walter Freeman, to Harold Hayashida, to Mike Pilato, to Glynnis Dalgetty, to Maude Blair, to Tom Grychuk, and, of course, to Mel.

“I’ll meet you at the airport,” Mel said when I told him I was returning, and I insisted no, I needed to follow up on something else, and I asked him, almost begged him, to see me that evening, because without him nothing could be done.

Mel told me I wasn’t making sense. “Josie, nothing’s happened since you left yesterday. There’s nothing new to talk about, just a lot of investigations going on. At least give me an idea what we’ll be looking for, who we’ll be looking at, who’ll be involved.”

So I told him. “Grychuk.”

“Who?”

“Tom Grychuk. He operates the lift bridge. Over the canal.”

“How does he fit in? He’s not even on our radar.”

“They’re calling my flight. I have to go. Tell me you can see me tonight.”

“I can see you any night,” he said, which was just what I didn’t want to hear at the moment.

“I’ll call,” I began to say around the lump in my throat, then began again. “I’ll call you at seven. On your cell. All right?”

They hadn’t called my flight yet. I just couldn’t bear to keep speaking to him with so much distance separating us.

I FELL ASLEEP SOMEWHERE OVER ALBERTA
and woke when the pilot dropped the aircraft heavily in Toronto, landing the plane as though knocking a bookcase to the floor.

I headed for the arrivals area with my carry-on bag, running through all the things to be done when I arrived home and pushing aside a few small niggling doubts. I knew enough to be sure about what happened to Gabe and why, but the few details I lacked kept gnawing at my confidence like mice on a pantry door.

Walking through the sliding doors and into the concourse where the taxis and limos waited, I saw the friends and relatives of passengers watching the doors like spectators at a dull baseball
game. The only person who stood out was a tall, gap-toothed man in a blue chauffeur uniform smiling back at me and holding a white cardboard sign with
mrs. marshall
scrawled across it in black crayon.

“Hello, Alex,” I said. Alex reached for my carry-on bag, which I snatched away from him. “How’s Tina?”

From behind the wheel, Alex informed me that Tina had reserved the limousine and insisted on paying the fare. From the back seat, I informed Alex that it was very nice of Tina and I was going to enjoy her generosity and his careful manoeuvring of the limousine, but I was not going to take part in any damn conversation on the way.

Alex nodded and looked hurt.

It took forty-five minutes to reach the beach strip. It felt like forty-five hours.

When Alex opened the door, I stepped out, thanked him, walked directly to my front door, unlocked it, and collapsed on the living-room sofa. I needed five minutes alone to gather my thoughts and my courage again. When I had done so, I made a few more phone calls.