Beach Strip (23 page)

M
other looked up in surprise when I entered her room. Her expression suggested that she thought something was wrong, perhaps with her memory. Hadn’t I left the day before, saying I would be gone for a week? Had a week passed? Had she missed five days of her dwindling life, lost somewhere in the routine of eating, sleeping, and waiting?

“I’m all right,” I said, hugging her. “I came back early because I have something important to do.”

I brought us tea from the commissary, ignoring glances from staff members. Back in her room, Mother waved at the television set, indicating that I should turn it off, then reached for the blackboard and wrote on it,
Talk to me. What is wrong?

I wanted to cry, so I did. Just a little, enough to dampen my eyes and wet my cheeks. I realized for the first time that we had both lost the men we loved, lost them in terrible ways. Not slowly, to disease or decline, but violently and agonizingly. When you lose someone in that manner, you lose something else as well. You lose the sense that the world is a good place, and at times a beautiful place. It’s more than losing your innocence; we all lose our innocence earlier than we know. When someone we love is taken from us in a brutal manner, we lose our sense of home, our notion that we can withdraw to a place where we are loved unconditionally.

When Mother saw me crying, she reached to wipe my cheeks and brought her lips to them and kissed me. Had she been able to
speak, I know she would have repeated words to me that she had spoken when we lived in the house near the steel mills, when my father carried a lunch box to work each morning, and the lunch box contained a sandwich made with more mustard than meat, wrapped in waxed paper, along with a Thermos of hot tea and perhaps a piece of cheese or an apple, and sometimes a note from Mother. Tina found one of the notes when she was ten and I was seven. The note said,
Always remember.

“Always remember what?” I asked.

“Always remember that she loves him, you ignorant twerp,” Tina said.

I began apologizing for the pain I knew I had caused Mother, especially in the years before I married Gabe, when I had met men in bars and discos and once while hitchhiking home, and the harsh words I used when she tried to caution me.

She lifted my face when I began telling her how sorry I was for all the ways I had let her down, for all the times I had not been here with her, for all the nasty things I had said to her, and all the sweet things I should have done and failed to do. She held up her finger and shook her head, silencing me. Reaching for the blackboard, she began writing on it, glancing up at me from time to time before handing it to me, her eyes waiting for my reaction.

She had written:
Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.
It was a Hallmark moment.

“That’s lovely, Mother,” I said.

She beamed with pride, took the blackboard from me, erased the words, and wrote,
Because a thing seems difficult for you, do not think it impossible for anyone to accomplish.

Like many women of her generation, Mother had qualities that the world refused to acknowledge because it refused to grant her the opportunity to reveal them. I had known this about her, but never expected she was capable of spouting such wisdom. “This
is wonderful,” I said. “Any more? I can use a little backbone right now.”

Another smile, another swipe of her arm over the blackboard, and she added, in her lovely cursive writing,
You have power over your mind, not over outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

This wasn’t Mother speaking. She was a wonderful, wise woman, but …

“Where are you getting this?” I asked. I believe I raised one eyebrow.

She laughed, silently of course, reached into the wheelchair cushion beside her, and withdrew a paperback edition of
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
that had been Gabe’s, and that I had brought to her a few weeks ago.

“That’s quite a leap you made,” I said. “From Elmore Leonard to Aurelius. You almost had me fooled, quoting a Roman who’s been dead two thousand years or so.” I reached to give her another hug. “Thanks for this,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow, and I think I’ll have good news.”

When I released her, she was looking at me, her mouth shaping an O and her eyes sparkling at the idea that her daughter would finally bring her good news. Then she reached for her pad again and wrote,
Mel Holiday?

“Yes,” I said, and she frowned and shook her head no. “I have to,” I said, and leaned to kiss her goodbye, not aware at the time of something that should have been obvious.

Leaving the rest home, I tried to maintain the self-confidence that Mother and Marcus Aurelius had planted in me. I remembered a few lines from a book Gabe had been reading some months ago:
If something offends or distresses you, it is not the thing that causes you pain but your emotional reaction to it, and it is in your power to control and use all of your emotions.

I think it was also Marcus Aurelius. Or maybe Dr. Phil.

I LIKE CLEAN BREAKS.
From friends, from lovers, from clothes I don’t want to wear anymore, from everything. Even seasons. Leaving Mother that night, I felt a clean break from summer to fall. The air was cooler and dryer, the breeze more insistent, the lake more choppy. The sun was already behind the steel mills, slouching toward Kitsilano. A month ago it would still have been high in the sky and warming. It was the end of August and the beginning of autumn—and the beginning of something else, as well.

“I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR YOUR CALL.”
I knew he had been by the way he answered the telephone before the first ring ended. “Josie, what’s going on?”

“Tell me you love me.” I had been wanting to say this all day.

“Josie, you know how I feel about you …”

“Tell me.”

I could picture him closing his eyes, the way men do when something is going to pain them. “I love you, Josie.”

“Thank you. Now tell me you’ll meet me down near the canal lift bridge in an hour, in the parking lot on the bay side. Near the sandbank at the back of the lot. Closest to the bridge.”

“What’s this about?”

“Just meet me, Mel. Park the car facing the bay. Right up against the sandbank so you can’t see it from the parking lot.”

“Not until you tell me why.”

“Damn it, Mel!” I breathed deeply and began again. “There’s a window in the office where Grychuk works. The lift bridge operator. The guy—”

“I know who he is,” Mel almost snapped.

“Sorry. I promise I’ll explain. Just meet me there. Park your car where I said.”

“Why can’t I pick you up? At your house?”

“Mel, it’s only a couple of hundred yards.”

“I can still meet you there. You can tell me what’s going on.”

“Because we’ll be watched.”

“By whom?”

“That’s what I want to explain to you. In an hour. Okay?”

I counted two breaths.

“Josie, please don’t do anything silly.”

“I promise you, Mel. This is the least silly thing I’ll ever do.”

It always feels good to tell the truth. Or at least not to tell lies. Which is not necessarily the same thing.

I had an hour to kill while the sun went down, and I thought it would never set. See what I mean about time passing at different speeds?

I FILLED THE TIME BY APPLYING MAKEUP
and choosing a woollen sweater that Gabe had always liked. I believe he liked it, sweet man that he had been, because other men liked it, or at least liked the way I looked when I wore it. And a loose skirt, in case I had to run quickly. And rubber-soled shoes for the same reason. And gathering as much courage as I could from myself and not from a bottle.

At five minutes to eight, I made a final telephone call. Then, together with my nervous knees, I left the house, crossed Beach Boulevard, and began walking toward the canal bridge. To my left the horizon was the colour of roses, the sky the colour of gravel. The wind was east, off the lake, and gusty.

Ahead of me, the lift bridge control room shone with lights from within, where Tom Grychuk sat. On the bridge itself hung green lights for the traffic. Yellow lights marked the bridge outline, and red lights flashed from the top, for low-flying aircraft, I assumed. I had never thought about the bridge lights before. I was seeing them now because it was easier than thinking about what I expected to happen in the next few minutes.

I stopped and looked out at the lake. I tried to look all the way to the Thousand Islands.

Gabe had visited the Thousand Islands with his first wife. They took a boat tour and stayed for a week in Gananoque. When he told me about the vacation I asked him to repeat the name of the town. He did. He pronounced it “Gan-an-ock-wee,” and I commented that the prettiest place names in all of North America were First Nations names like Gananoque. Allegheny. Mississauga. Manitoba. Musical names. Rhythmic names. He agreed, and named some of his own. Nipissing. Kapuskasing. Saskatoon. Muskoka. We played a game of musical names together, each of us thinking of one in turn, because Gabe wanted to cheer me up. Gabe always understood what I was thinking when I became melancholy, and picturing a young Gabe with his still young and faithful wife on a long-ago summer’s day in a town called Gananoque overlooking a thousand granite islands dotted with pine trees and wildflowers made me melancholy.

I stood remembering Gabe and the Thousand Islands because I needed strength. I was about to do something I had never imagined myself capable of doing, and I needed to remind myself why it was necessary. And what could happen to me if something went wrong. I told myself I was doing it for Gabe. But I wasn’t. I was doing it for myself, and if life was to unfold for Mel and for me in the way that I believed it must, I needed to be strong. More than that, I needed to be wise.

I’ve never doubted my inner strength. It was my habit of acting like a hysterical chicken in a hot kitchen that was worrying me. If I had made one error in logic, I was about to look terribly foolish in the next few minutes. I drew some comfort from reminding myself that looking foolish was infinitely preferable than looking dead. Which was also a possibility.

I took a final glance in the direction of the Thousand Islands and resumed walking, turning left before crossing the bridge and
following the road that fishermen and boaters took to get to the shoreline of the bay. The road crossed a sandbank before dipping down to the water’s edge, and when I reached the bottom of the low grade I looked to my right to see Mel’s car parked as I had asked. Mel was watching me through the windshield, his face lit by the setting sun, red like molten slag. Behind and above him, I saw a man in the window of the lift bridge control room, silhouetted against the light. I raised my arm. He raised his.

Mel leaned to open the passenger door. I slid in, closed the door behind me and sat back, closing my eyes.

“You all right?”

I opened my eyes to see Mel studying me with that special expression of his, his brow furrowed and his smile wide and warm. He was wearing his blue jacket, with jeans as tight as a second skin. “No,” I said. “I need something from you.”

The smile faded. “What?” he asked.

“A hug, for a beginning. A really warm, solid squeeze.”

I reached toward him and half pulled him close, then leaned away. “Take your gun off. Do you know how uncomfortable it is to hug somebody who’s wearing a shoulder holster?”

“Okay,” he said, withdrawing the Glock from the holster and setting it on the dashboard, then reaching for me. I remained within his arms, feeling his breathing and hearing his heart, long enough for him to tilt my chin up and look at me, perhaps preparing to kiss me.

“I can’t, Mel,” I said.

“Can’t what? It’s too soon?” Meaning, I guess, too soon after Gabe’s death for us to become lovers again.

“Just let me sit up for a minute.”

He released me and I sat with my back against the passenger door, watching him in the dying light. Then I leaned forward. Instead of reaching for another embrace, I took the gun from the dashboard, held it in both hands and pressed my back against the
passenger door again, aiming the Glock at Mel’s blue eyes, those beautiful blue eyes, which were already squinting in surprise.

“I swear,” I said in a voice that surprised me with its strength. “I swear, Mel, if you try to take this from me, I’ll blow your head off.”

“You’re crazy.” I understood why Mel said that. I didn’t feel entirely sane at the moment. Just very calm and determined.

“Probably. But it doesn’t matter. Because I’m going to sit here with your gun pointed at your head, and we’re going to talk about how you killed Gabe, you son of a bitch.”

I
had imagined all the things that Mel might say in this situation, and how I would respond. So his first reaction didn’t surprise me.

“You can’t fire it,” he said. “The safety lock’s on.”

“These guns don’t have safety locks, Mel. That’s why you cops like them. You don’t have to grope for the safety lock while the bad guy puts a bullet in you. When you pull the trigger, you release the safeties and the gun fires. No fumbling around. I pull this trigger and the bullet comes out. Simple as that. Right, Mel?”

“Gabe teach you that?” I hated the way he said it.

“No. Gabe hated guns. A little time on the Internet. That’s all it took.”

“Is that where you got this crazy story about me shooting Gabe?” He sat back as though trying to move out of range. He looked calm, except for a small twitch at the corner of one eye.

“It’s not a crazy story,” I said. “And it didn’t come from the Internet. It came from you and Hayashida and Walter Freeman and Mike Pilato—”

He forced himself to laugh. “Mike Pilato? You’re believing the biggest gangster in the city?”

“—and Glynnis Dalgetty—”

“Who?”

“—and Andrew Golden and two snooty women who got their Louis Vuitton purses mixed up. You killed him, Mel. You shot Gabe while he was waiting for me, naked on the blanket inside
the bushes, and before that you shot Dougal Dalgetty, and later you killed Wayne Weaver Honeysett, trying to cover up everything with your story about drugs missing from the police locker and Gabe suspecting Walter, which was when I really started wondering about you. Gabe wouldn’t take home a two-dollar notepad, and you tell me he might have been taking drugs from a police locker? Walter knew it too, in the depths of his stupid soul. He knew Gabe was no thief, so he started believing I was. You killed Gabe, Mel. I know how you did it, and I have a good idea why you did it, and if I don’t put a bullet first in your balls and then in your brains before the cops get here, we’re going to go over all the details. Right here. Right now.”

“You’ve got officers coming?” Mel twisted to look around. “That’s good. Because when they see you with my weapon, they will either shoot you or arrest you, and probably both. And whatever story you come up with will be the product of a delusional woman who can’t believe her husband killed himself because his wife didn’t want to fuck him.”

He looked directly at me, and I saw the flash of anger that Gabe had told me about, so long ago, the one I had seen in small doses.
Mel has the ability to think and act simultaneously.
Gabe had said that. And:
The only thing he’s gotta control is his temper.

He was speaking to me again.

“Right, Josie? Isn’t that right? A drunken man finds out his wife’s been screwing his partner, and when she doesn’t show up as promised, he loses it and turns the gun on himself. That’s what happened, right?”

I wanted to scream and shoot, not necessarily in that order. I spoke instead, in a calm voice that continued to surprise me, while Mel listened, too interested or perhaps too frightened to interrupt me. “No,” I said. “You shot Dougal Dalgetty because he started to squeeze you. He was turning the tables on you after you’d been squeezing him and Mike Pilato, threatening to arrest
Dougal for drug dealing unless he and Pilato paid you off. How much did they pay you, Mel? Enough to buy that place by a lake and do what, Mel? Just lie around and spend the money you took from Pilato and Dalgetty and maybe some others? Or maybe take me or some other woman to that inn in New England? The Griswold Inn, right? Eugene Griswold, innkeeper. Two hundred years after Eugene died, he gives you a name for a drug dealer that never existed. You make him up as a big dealer, telling Gabe this Eugene Griswold is new in town and throwing his weight around, going up against Mike Pilato and killing one of Pilato’s dealers, Dougal Dalgetty. And when Gabe starts checking on his own, talking to people like Mike Pilato, trying to find Griswold, he realizes there is no Griswold or Grizz, and since you were the only person saying there was, you must be lying, which meant you were hiding something.”

Mel opened his mouth to speak, but I knew what he was going to say and interrupted him before he could say it.

“How much did Dalgetty and Pilato pay you before they decided they’d paid you enough, and if you didn’t knock it off they’d drop the word about you to Walter Freeman? Especially when you didn’t lift a finger to get the charges against Dalgetty dropped? How scared were you about that, Mel? Did you think Dalgetty would turn on you in court, saying he’d been paying you off? Or maybe they paid you in more than cash. Were they slipping you bags of dope, Mel? Cocaine? Heroin? What was it?”

Mel wouldn’t look at me as he spoke. “It was Gabe,” he said. “Check it out, Josie. It was Gabe’s gun that killed Dalgetty. Gabe. Not me.”

“It was you, Mel. And it was you who was under the lift bridge when Wayne Honeysett told me he had seen everything.”

He turned to face me. “That’s crazy.”

“Your cell phone records say so. The date, the time, the location …”

The sun had set, and the light inside the car and all around us was weighing down with the greyness of dusk, but I could still make out Mel’s expression and pallor. His expression was concern. His pallor was as grey as the dying light. “You don’t have my cell phone records,” he said in a voice that sounded like high noon in Death Valley.

“No,” I agreed. “Hayashida has them. Got them this morning. I called from Vancouver, asked him to check them out. He did, and confirmed what I suspected. The night Wayne Honeysett died, you were within a hundred yards of right here. You saw him, Mel. You saw him because you were trailing him, right? You were trailing him because you started checking the interviews with all the local perverts, like the good cop you pretended to be, because you realized he might have been in the garden shed the night you shot Gabe. You figured Honeysett was the peeper who hid in the garden shed, the poor sap who fell all over himself when he became infatuated with women like Glynnis Dalgetty, and me, I guess, and a bunch of other women he gave gifts to. He was too shy, too totally screwed up to give me the ring he made for his wife, so he gave it to Gabe and asked him to give it to me, and Gabe did, probably because he felt sorry for Honeysett and wanted me to wear it. What happened, Mel? Did Honeysett start talking about what he knew, what he saw, the night Gabe died? Is that why you had to kill him?”

Mel, still thinking about his cell phone records while staring through the windshield, muttered that I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about.

The silence made me uncomfortable, so I kept talking, waiting for what I knew I had to do, and it all spilled out of me in a torrent.

“Honeysett didn’t go to the police because he was afraid they would charge him with being a pervert again, and he probably would have gotten a jail term. What happened, Mel? Did you see
him run from the shed after you shot Gabe? Or maybe as you were coming into our house, through the garden? Did you decide you had to kill him before he figured out what you had done, before somebody like Walter Freeman took the miserable little guy seriously? You must have been under the bridge when I scattered Gabe’s ashes. Is that where you were, Mel? Hiding under the bridge, waiting to talk to Honeysett? Did he know you’d be there? Were you going to shoot him like you shot Dalgetty and …” I had to swallow the lump in my throat. “Like you shot Gabe?”

He turned to look at me. For the first time, he appeared truly frightened, because he understood how much I knew.

I had more to say, not to impress Mel as much as to finally speak aloud all the things I had been telling myself for the past twelve hours.

“Did you panic, Mel? Did you lose it and shoot Honeysett in some kind of … of unthinking knee-jerk reaction? Or did you wait until the bridge went up, so the noise would hide the sound of the gunshot? Which was it, Mel? Never mind, I don’t care. Afterwards you lifted his body and set his head, with the bullet from your gun in it, on the bridge support and held it there while the bridge came down on it. Jesus, Mel, don’t you have nightmares about that? What kind of sound does a man’s skull make when a bridge comes down on it and crushes it like an eggshell and squeezes the brains into jelly? Sure works to hide a bullet, though, doesn’t it? Sorry, a projectile. The pro-jec-tile becomes just another piece of junk off the bridge supports, like a flattened penny, and who the hell would look for that among crushed brains, right, Mel?”

He looked away and down, one hand squeezing the bridge of his nose.

“What’s that, Mel? I couldn’t hear you. Say it louder. I’m really interested in what you have to say.”

He raised his head to look through the windshield again. “I
said you have no proof. And it was Gabe’s gun that shot Dalgetty and Gabe’s gun that he used to kill himself.” He turned to look at me. “Because he discovered you had been screwing his partner.”

Which might have been enough for me to shoot him there and then. But I didn’t. I was too damn proud of myself to miss the chance to show him how clever I was. And how stupid I had been.

“I don’t know if he knew that.” I wanted to close my eyes, to lower my arms, and to think about Gabe, but I couldn’t. Not yet. “But he knew you shot Dougal Dalgetty.”

There’s something else
, Gabe had said when he called, wanting to make love on the blanket, and I said,
I know
, and Gabe asked me how I could know. He meant how could I know about Mel shaking down Dalgetty and Pilato and making up the story about Eugene Griswold, because that’s what he wanted to tell me, that he believed Mel had killed Dalgetty.

“And Mike Pilato figured it out as well. That you shot Dougal. When I told him the forensics matched. The bullet that killed Dalgetty and the one that killed Gabe. They matched. Pilato knew Gabe hadn’t shot Dalgetty, and now he knew you had. He suspected you all along, because you were the one shaking him and Dalgetty down. It fell into place with the forensics report, first with Pilato, then with me. So you take your choice, Mel. You get me sitting here, or you get Mike Pilato looking for your ass, ready to punish you for shooting his good buddy Dougal.”

Mel actually smiled. “Mike Pilato doesn’t scare me,” he said.

“He’d better. And what were you doing at our house that night, anyway, Mel? Did you learn that Gabe knew who killed Dalgetty, and why? Were you looking for me? Never mind. Gabe went into the bushes, wrapped in a blanket, you followed him, maybe you talked to him while he was there on the blanket, trying to get him to go along with you, and Gabe wouldn’t. He wouldn’t cover for you, and he wouldn’t have been on his knees when you shot him either. Not for you, not for anybody. I think he was getting
up off the blanket, ready to kick your ass, and that’s when you lost it and shot him with your gun—”

“It was Gabe’s gun.” Mel sounded tired, resigned. “Forensics says so. Hayashida signed the form. The paraffin test was positive—”

“No, no, no, no, no, Mel. You were so ‘upset’ about Gabe’s death, so intent on ‘investigating what really happened,’ that you insisted on filling out the forensics forms yourself. You were the one who read the serial number of Gabe’s gun aloud to Hayashida, who entered it on the form before the gun was fired. Except it wasn’t Gabe’s gun you fired into the water tank to get …” I couldn’t resist saying it the same way again. “… the pro-jec-tile for the forensics lab. It was
your
gun. A Glock G22 identical to Gabe’s, identical to the one carried by everybody else in the department. Boy, I hope they got a volume discount for all those ass-ugly guns. And you sure as hell deserve a medal for thinking fast in a tight situation, like Gabe said you could. You shoot Gabe, drop the gun in the right place, get the hell out from inside those bushes before anybody on the beach can see you, and walk through the garden and into our house, where you get Gabe’s gun out of the kitchen. Then you put it together, slip it in your holster and leave by the front door, maybe already thinking about how you can convince Hayashida or whoever that your gun is really Gabe’s until you get a chance to switch them again. Brilliant.”

I waited for a reaction. There was none, except for a slight glistening on his brow. He was beginning to sweat. Good.

“Oh, and you shook his hand too, didn’t you, Mel?”

He looked at me. I had surprised him again.

“You grabbed his hand, his right hand, with your own. Just a quick grab and release. Shaking hands goodbye, Mel, while Gabe lay dying? No, transferring some of the gunshot residue from your hand to his. Just enough, Mel, for the paraffin test to find some. Just a trace, that’s all you needed. Where’d you pick that up, Mel?
At the police academy? Or from that case in Baltimore, where a suspect and his lawyer proved the residue on the suspect’s palm came from shaking hands with the real killer? Nobody thought of doing a paraffin test on
your
hand, did they? Or even to check the gun for fingerprints. Why should they? Everybody believed Gabe had shot himself with his own weapon. Why waste time on fingerprint tests? Boy, you were good, Mel. Really good. You almost got away clean, except that Wayne Weaver Honeysett was in the garden shed, waiting for me to come home so he could watch me undress in our bedroom—maybe I’d be near the window, where he could see me. He heard the shot and watched you instead. Watched you go into the house and get Gabe’s gun. Poor Wayne. Jerking off among rusty rakes and a bag of topsoil.”

I leaned forward, trying to look Mel in the eye.

“You also grabbed our notepad from the kitchen counter as you were leaving. What was in the notebook, Mel? Was there something in there about you and Dalgetty, maybe? Is that why you took it with you, why I couldn’t find it? Or maybe he just wrote that he loved me. Is that what Gabe wrote on it?”

“Yeah, that’s what he said.” Mel sat up straight, his back against the seat. “Something like that.”

“What did it say, Mel?”

“Go to hell.”

“You know what I think? I think there was something about you in it that didn’t add up with Gabe. Something my friend Dewey saw him writing a day earlier. Is that what it was?”