Ear-Witness (5 page)

“I don't know. Thanks, though.”

An old man with a small rat-like dog on a retractable leash sat on the bench beside us. “Where are all the women?” Kelly said. “Don't they play tennis?”

“Home with the babies,” I said.

She shrugged, looked sideways at the old man, and nudged me to my feet. We followed the path that ran beside the school and came out onto Jameson. “I came this close,” she said, showing me a space the width of her thumb, “to letting Joey do it. Without ... anything.”

“Oh, Kel,” I said. “Aren't you scared that ...”

She shook her head and turned a bright pink. “It's not that easy to stop him, Jess. And anyway,” she blushed, “I really want to do it.”

“This is probably a dumb question,” I said. “But why? Why no condom?” This was something I couldn't figure out at all. Why everybody didn't use them, like you're supposed to.

She giggled. “You have to be there. Joey says it's like washing your feet with your socks on.”

I didn't know what to say, then. It sounded to me like Joey wasn't thinking of Kelly at all, but who was I? I thought for a minute, then I decided. I was her best friend, that's who I was. Jealous, maybe, that she had a boyfriend and I didn't, but I didn't want her to get hurt.

“Doesn't he care about you?” I said. “What if he's got AIDS or something? What if you get pregnant?”

Kel looked up and down the street, like she was expecting to see somebody she knew. “He cares, and he doesn't have AIDS, and I won't get pregnant. He's just stubborn.” Then she grabbed my arm and pulled me into the library.

It was obviously time to talk about something else. “I had another scene with the Roach,” I said. “Yesterday. That's why I was looking for you.”

“He's a slime, Jess. You're going to have to do something about him. I still think you should let Joey and the guys talk to him. Or whatever. Shake him up a little.”

“Um,” I said. Joey, Kelly's boyfriend, was huge, with arms and legs as big as trees. I didn't know whether I liked him or not, or even if I wanted to like him, but I knew exactly what I thought of his friends. I couldn't stand them. Guys who pass around joints on street corners and elbow each other when girls pass by aren't my kind of people. They might scare off Ronny Roach, but they scared me off too. I didn't want anything to do with them. It was time to change the subject again.

“Remember Mrs. Jones, in grade seven?” I said.

“Mrs. Jones and the erogenous zones!”

“Mrs. Zones, we called her. Do those, um, places really feel nice? When Joey does... whatever?”

Kel bit her bottom lip and crinkled up her eyes. “Yeah,” she said. “If he's gentle, they feel totally superb.”

“I can just see you,” I said. “Making those little whimpering noises and heaving your butt up and down. Like in the movies.”

Suddenly we were ten years old again, doubled over on a street corner, laughing so hard we almost peed ourselves.

“Two double chocolate, one regular coffee,” Sheena said. “Jess?”

I ordered a muffin and a tea. It was Monday, after school, a week and three days since the murder. The doughnut shop was crowded and full of second-hand smoke. My eyes stung, and after three minutes in the place I already stunk like an old ashtray. Sheena didn't seem bothered at all.

“Shoulda ordered something chocolate, Jess,” she said. “Makes you grow. Look at me if you don't believe it.”

“Is it a problem?” I asked. “Being so tall? Is that a rude question?”

“Nah. It was me who mentioned it first. It used to bother me. I was the biggest girl in the whole darned town when I was growing up Now, on the force, being big is an advantage.” She grinned, then took a huge bite from her first doughnut.

I peeled the paper off my muffin. “My problem is weight,” I said. Then I put the muffin back on the plate.

Sheena frowned. “Nothing wrong with you. Still got a little babyfat maybe. That's all.”

“Nothing wrong that losing twenty pounds won't fix,” I said. I looked down at the muffin. Blueberry, my favourite.

“Ah,” she said. “Now I get it.” She took another bite. Crumbs dribbled down her chin and settled on the dark front of her uniform. “You think about your body all the time, right? First thing the world sees about you, is that twenty pounds?”

“Maybe.”

“You want to be some anorexic model?”

“Well I don't want to be anorexic, just thin.”

“Hate your body?”

I groaned. How do you tell a cop to lay off?

“Think you look like a sack of potatoes with a string around the middle?”

“A walrus,” I said. “In tight jeans.” I had to work on my face. What she was saying was sort of funny, but she was making me feel stupid, and if it killed me, I wasn't going to laugh.

“Helps a lot, doesn't it? Being so down on yourself?” She demolished her second doughnut, then wiped her chin with the paper napkin.

I dipped the tea bag in and out of my cup, then sipped the contents. There aren't any calories in tea.

Sheena leaned across the table and looked me straight in the eyes. “There comes a point when you gotta decide, Jess. Get on with life, or dig a hole and bury yourself. I don't figure you for a hole-digger, but maybe I'm wrong.”

I looked right back at her. “You have crumbs on your uniform,” I said.

“Thanks.” She brushed them off quickly, then pulled out her notebook. “Now,” she said. “We got business to discuss. You said the Birds didn't have visitors. Could you be wrong? Mrs. Bird, says they had people there all the time. Mr. Bird did, late at night. And that's why she didn't pay any attention to their guest. Never even saw him, she says.”

I closed my eyes. Tammi had to be lying, but why couldn't somebody else be the one to rat on her? Why me? When I opened my eyes again, Sheena was still there, waiting.

“This is a murder investigation, Jess,” she said. “Loyalty to friends has no place here.”

I shrugged to give myself a little time. “The only person I ever saw there was Tammi's girlfriend. The one who drives her home from bingo. Terri.”

Sheena flipped back a few pages. “Theresa Goodwin,” she said. “Real shapely brunette? Enough hair for three people?”

“That's her.”

“I'm more interested in visitors for Mr. Bird. Late at night.”

I knew I had to tell the truth, but I wasn't happy about it. “I don't think so,” I said. “They'd have had to whisper all the time. Ray's voice was really loud; you could hear him all over the building. The door buzzer's loud too. Mom says it would wake the dead.”

Sheena nodded, then wrote something down. “O.K.,” she said. “Another thing. You talk to the Orellana kids at all?”

“We've walked to school together a few times. I like Flavia a lot.”

“What about the guy, Carlos?”

I giggled. “He's strange. He's always telling us how many kilos he can lift, and how far he can run, and how many girls are crazy about him.” I caught myself picking bits off the crusty edge of the muffin, where the round part juts out over the bottom, so I tucked it all up nicely in a napkin and stuffed it in an empty cup on the table beside us. It wasn't even very good, it was just there.

“Carlos just wants you to like him,” Sheena said. “The whole family is up-tight. I tried to question them about what they heard the night of the murder.” She rolled her eyeballs up into her head. “It was a total waste of time. Their dad wasn't even there, or so he said. Works half the night. At two jobs. Mom and the two kids were there all right but they're like the three monkeys. You know:
See no evil; Hear no evil;
and
Speak no evil
. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me that you'd hear all that yelling and none of them heard a darn thing.”

“Maybe they're all heavy sleepers,” I said.

“More likely they're scared to talk to cops. Where they come from, police aren't the nice guys we got in Canada, you know.”

I thought about Raffi's friend, and what happened to him, but it didn't seem to be a good time to mention it.

“I was wondering if the kids would talk to you,” she said. “Assuming everything is on the up-and-up, and they aren't hiding anything. If you're real cool about it, and don't put any pressure on? I'm sure they know something. I can feel it in my gut.”

“I could try, I guess,” I said.

What else could I say? I didn't want to be a snitch, but if I said that, she'd probably think I didn't care if they ever found the killer, and that wasn't true. Murder is the scariest thing there is, especially when the guy who did it was still out there someplace, walking around.

The best way to keep from worrying about something is to keep busy doing stuff you like. I didn't want to think about the murder, so I was lying on the floor of our big front room, the newspaper spread in front of me, looking for stories about my father. He's a lawyer, the kind who works for people who are supposed to have broken the law. Sometimes he takes murder cases, so there are always a couple
of articles a month where he's quoted. “Defence counsel Gordon March questions police procedures.” Stuff like that.

When I heard Mom and Raffi thundering up the stairs, I jumped up to open the door. Mom staggered into the apartment with a zillion bags of groceries. Raffi followed with two cases of pop, a case of little apple juice cartons, a three-litre bag of milk, and a huge box of laundry detergent.

“Tammi's back,” Mom said. “Poor Tammi. She must be sad.”

Raffi grabbed six cans of Diet Coke, lined them up on the counter like little soldiers, and then transferred them to the fridge. Then he took another from the carton, snapped it open and drained half of it in one gulp. He jiggled the remainder around in the can. “She didn't seem all that sad to me,” he said. “More nervous, I'd say.”

I started putting the cold stuff away. “Nervous about what?” I asked.

“Good question,” Raffi said. “Why is Tammi nervous? You agree she's nervous, Lynda?”

Mom nodded. “She's nervous.”

“Maybe she's a suspect,” Raffi said.

I stared at him, hard. “Tammi? A suspect? That's nuts! There was a guy there, arguing with Ray. There was a big fight!”

Raffi tossed his empty can into the garbage. I sighed noisily, picked it up, shook it off, and dropped it into the recycling box. “I wish I had a quarter for every time I've done that,” I muttered.

“Not every argument leads to murder,” Raffi said. “If it did, the two of you'd have killed me fifty times over.”

Sometimes Mom acts like Raffi isn't even in the room with us. She did that now. “Tammi wants to talk to you, Jess,” she said. “I think it's about babysitting. She said something about going to bingo tonight.”

“Tonight!” I said. My face tightened up like some giant pinched it.

“You have a problem with that, Jess?” Raffi asked. When Mom ignored him, he ignored that he was being ignored. Adults can be really weird.

I opened my mouth to say something, then closed it again, because I didn't know how I felt. I needed the money I got from babysitting, but did I really want to go to a place where someone I know was killed?

“I said I'd ask you to go down,” Mom said. “To talk to her.”

“Mom!”

“Mmm?” She was standing on a chair, rearranging the cupboard over the sink.

“What will I say? I mean, Ray's dead! I can't just walk in there as if nothing happened!”

She climbed back down, and sat on the chair, looking thoughtful. “Well, you should say something, I suppose. I'm
sorry
would be fine. I wouldn't worry about it.”

“What did you say?” I asked.

She looked at Raffi and frowned. “I know I gave her a hug, but...”

“You said, Poor
Tammi, how awful for you,”
Raffi said. “And I, sensitive, new-age guy that I am, said,
Yeah, Tammi, bad stuff.”

“I just know I'll come out with something really dumb,” I said. “Something really ignorant. How am I supposed to know what to say, or what not to say? Nobody ever tells kids this stuff.”

“Ah,” Raffi said. “I hear you.”

Mom poked a straw into a box of apple juice. She looked from Raffi to me, and from me to Raffi. “Oh-oh,” she said. “I can see where this is leading.”

Raffi took a little walk around the room, bouncing on his toes like he did when he was thinking. “I'd like to help you out, Jess,” he said. “But I don't know. The minute I tell you what not to say, tell you what's really ignorant, you and Lynda'll dump all over me.” He folded his arms over his head, and looked scared, as if we were going to beat on him, with sticks.

“Do we do that?” I asked Mom. “Dump on him?”

“Not us,” she said. “We're completely supportive. He says something stupid, we never even tell him.”