Hair-Trigger (9 page)

12

T
he teller had been found dead at the scene, while the man shot outside the front door died later in hospital. The double homicide drew media coverage for the remainder of the week, so the fact that O'Hara's mother's house hadn't been searched seemed to confirm for Rowe that the guns weren't registered, unless the police had interviewed his father in jail or raided a biker clubhouse somewhere.
Despite the discretion imposed on journalists in matters of race, a West Indian accent had been reported in one of the papers. Rowe didn't get much sleep and kept a low profile in the days following the robbery, but was soon drinking his anxiety away publicly.

Lion on the Beach was styled after a pub except for the rock groups, or so he surmised, having associated English-type watering holes with an incongruous mix of red-nosed grandparents and college-age kids, worn carpeting, tactless lighting, and, if anything, folk music. He preferred darker places.

The band was playing radio standards in a corner of the room that had been cleared of tables, in front of a brass railing that bordered the upper back section.
Older singles congregated in the area alongside the bar.
There was a dartboard, and a picture of a horse on a post by the partition he was leaning against, his attention divided between the makeshift dance floor and the man with the blonde hair and windbreaker he'd somehow ended up bullshitting with about the perfect robbery.

“You wouldn't want to do a bank,” the guy said.
“With all the security cameras and everything? What you'd want to do is an art theft.”

Rowe turned to him.
“You've got to be kidding. You can't move that shit for fifteen years, and only then with contacts.”

Beach Boy shrugged as he lifted his draught glass. Wiping his mouth, he leaned in closer.
“Just go in through the roof to avoid the sensors—two guys, you'd need two guys to do it. You wouldn't do it for fast cash, you'd think of it as an investment for the future. A retirement fund.”

“What roof are we talking about?”

He looked uncertain. “I might know a place.”

“Where?”

“I don't want to say right now. But I've checked the angles.”

“Well, is it a public gallery or a private collection?”

“Private.”

Rowe lit a cigarette. “What kind of artwork?”

“A lot of Group of Sevens, especially A.Y. Jackson.”

“If it looks like an inside job, you'd probably be a suspect.”

Beach Boy shook his head. “Wouldn't be an inside job. I'd need another guy to help me move the paintings because there are sixteen of them. The sensors cut across the doorway diagonally, right?” He illustrated the plane with his arm. “There are two of them.
That's why it'd be best to go in through the roof.”

Rowe had seen him as sort of a windsurfer going to seed, but looked at him again. Squaring his shoulders, he took a drag and watched the band. “So how would you get in through the roof? Is there a skylight or some kind of ductwork you could crawl through?”

“No.”

“What then? Is it a house or a small building?”

Beach Boy took a sip and said, “Look, you know what the best thing to do would be? Just drive your car up to the place, break in, get in and out. Two guys. Have a few beers first, then bam—set off the alarm and pack the pictures in the trunk fast—no, rent a
van
, then get the hell out before the police show up. That's all you've really got to do.
Think about it. It's simple.”

“Well, you don't need two people,” Rowe said, losing interest. “If you do it yourself you won't have to split it, and there will be one less person to talk about it.”

“I guess.”

Downstairs, one of the bulbs in the washroom was out. Rowe observed the play of shadows in the mirror as he ran a hand through his bristly hair. Outside the door he paused by the staircase to look at a charcoal collage of rock star faces mounted behind glass on the wall under a light. He didn't know anything about art, but always stopped to study the near-photographic detail.

An older blondish woman half-stumbled out of the ladies' room. Although Rowe stepped aside so she could get by, she stopped to study the picture, and smiled up at him. “Hey, you're cute
.
”

She was squinting as if to steady her wobbly eyes. Her silly expression had a guilelessness he found promising as he took in her wide mouth, and observed that her complexion was fairly unlined in the harsh lighting.

“Thanks. You too.” As she was turning to go, he asked, “What's your name?”

“Bella.”

“I'm Derek.”

“Hi, Derek.”

Rowe followed her erratic trip up the staircase. A bit heavy in the trunk, maybe.
When they reached the top, he asked, “Do you dance?”

She gave him a coquettish glance. “Sometimes.”

“Feel like it now?”

“Sure, why not?”

He took her by the elbow and guided her around the corner of the bar, past the stools, the drinkers in the aisle, the amplifiers and musicians. Bella bumped against a couple of people when they maneuvered onto the dance floor, but moved into the right rhythm as Rowe caught her by the waist to steady her balance. Periodically, he leaned in to talk to her, trying to assess her beyond the giddy drunkenness and pale yellow sweater. He winked over her shoulder as Beach Boy raised a glass to him.

Afterwards, he suggested they go somewhere else, and waited while she went to find her coat and say goodbye to her girlfriend. Leaning against a tabletop near the front, he watched a game of darts until she reappeared wearing a fur jacket. Couldn't locate the friend.

Rowe nodded to the bouncer on their way out the door, and held her arm as they crossed the street to the south side.

He took her to a place called Lido's, but it was too noisy and full of kids to talk properly, so they left and cut back to another one called The Beach Bar. Without a band or dance floor it was comparatively empty.

He bought a vodka and tonic for himself, talked her into a large Coke, and asked for a glass of water on the side. Leaning on her elbow, Bella grinned at him from under her bangs and asked, “So how old are you?”

“Forty-four.”

She looked comically agog. “I thought you were younger.”

“How about you?”

“Forty-seven.”

“I thought
you
were younger.”

She shook her head and turned serious. “Hey, d'ya smoke?”

Rowe gave her a cigarette and tapped out another for himself, then looked in his pockets for a light.

“Great. Nobody smokes anymore.” Exhaling, she examined the advertisement on the back of his matches. “You don't go to this place, do you? It's disgusting.”

“Why?”

“It's a meat market.”

“It's just a neighbourhood bar to me.”

“You live up there? Me too
.
” Strands of her hair overlapped, mussed and childlike. “I have a house on Balliol. You live in a house or apartment?”

“Apartment.”

“Ever been married?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Guess I never met the right woman.”

“You're not bisexual or anything, are you?”

“Not me.” Rowe took a drink. “If you're worried about AIDS, I got checked last month and have a clean bill of health at home.” While she seemed to be thinking it over, he said, “Here, have some more Coke.”

They left the bar fifteen minutes later. As they walked along the sidewalk, she asked, “Do you drive?”

“Not tonight.”

“Well, I've got a car up Queen there, but I don't know if I should. I was supposed to stay at my girlfriend's tonight. . . .” Bella buttoned her jacket. Though her articulation had improved, her walk was still unsteady. “You got a license?”

“Yeah, but I've been drinking for a while too, and I've already been charged with Impaired. Let's just catch a streetcar.”

“A
streetcar
?” She looked at him as if he was joking. “I haven't been on the TTC in ten years.”

“Then it's high time.”

The tracks ran by ice cream parlors, confectioneries, bars and restaurants with closed patios. The stores dealing in roller blades and wind surfing were probably dead in the daytime now that it was off-season for the beach and boardwalk.
The tourists were gone. The nights continued to get cooler.

There were only a few people on the streetcar.
West, past Woodbine, the neighbourhood near the torn-down racetrack was fairly barren until the brief oasis of a mall and neon-lit kitchenware store renting out of a small building at the junction of Kingston Road, where the housing and businesses became increasingly poorer.
They passed tattooists, hair stylists, donut shops, an adult video outlet, the odd used car lot, and fly-by-night operations with an occasional hand-painted sign.

Sitting to the rear of the side doors, Rowe started kissing Bella. She still looked alright, but now he wasn't sure why he'd thought she was younger. “How come I never saw you in that bar before?” she asked.

“I haven't been going there very long.”

“It's not a bad place. Gone to bed with anybody there yet?”

A trick question, but he was encouraged by her cockeyed expression. “Yeah, but it was a fluke. I bumped into this hammered woman I'd been talking to earlier, and said, ‘Shall we leave then?' I was kidding, but she went, ‘All right,' and we walked out the door.

“She lived in a building a little ways away, but when we got there she realized she didn't have her keys. The front door was unlocked, but we spent about twenty minutes banging on her apartment for her twelve-year-old daughter to wake up and let us in. We were sitting on the stairs when the girl came in behind us. Turned out
she
had the keys, and was staying at a friend's place where her mother was supposed to pick her up.”

“God.”

“Later, I was lying in bed when she had to get up to go to the washroom. After she came back, the daughter—who hadn't gone to sleep yet—stuck her head around the corner and saw me there, and started shouting, ‘Mother, I want to talk to you in the hall, right
now
! Mother, come out here
now
.' So she went out in her nightie, and I could hear the girl yelling, ‘Mother, what do you think you're doing? You're drunk, and you don't even
know
him!'”

“Roles were, like, reversed.”

“Yeah. She was still up watching TV at five when I had to sneak out past her.”

“Shit. You don't have any kids, do you?”

“‘No. What about you?”

“Married twice, no kids.” Bella smiled, looking out the window. “Somehow I got away with writing children's books, though. I was considered quite the freaking expert.”

He put his arm around her. “How'd you get into that?”

“A long time ago I got up the guts to take some stories I'd written to a publisher, and the vice president said, ‘These are the
worst
children's stories I've ever read.'” She laughed. “I guess he figured I had talent but didn't like the material, because he hired me to write this series on manners instead. I also wrote jacket copy and whatever else was required, you know, like this project called
Questions Kids Ask
, and then there was an encyclopedia . . . we had to sit around a boardroom and come up with over a thousand questions a five-year-old might ask, and would get pretty punchy late at night, starting out with, ‘Why is the grass green? Why is the sky blue?' and end up with ‘Do chickens have lips?' It was tough going in with a hangover and having to explain the mating habits of the duckbilled platypus or whatever. I knew I could make up almost anything and have kids believe me if I wrote it with authority.”

“You still write?”

“No . . . I went freelance after that for a while since the job had been just for the manners thing. They didn't have any in-house writers.”

Rowe hadn't counted on an intellectual. “I guess they could tell you had breeding, to pick you to do manners.”

“Yeah. I turned into a fucking manners
expert
,” she said. “After that I saw this ad in the paper for someone to teach etiquette classes for children, and phoned to tell them about these books I'd written, and got the job. It was at this institute that'd been started by these women who were already running a modeling agency. They decided to expand the courses to include subjects like, um . . . ‘Lifestyle Teaching.'

“One student's mother was a columnist for the
Sun
, and thought my class was interesting enough to write about, and then another reporter followed up with a big story a few weeks later. I said that I'd come by my social graces early; while other parents were reading the usual bedtime stories to their kids, my mother was instructing us from, like, Emily Post. I said the class filled a gap in today's society when you thought about all the families with two jobs, where the parents didn't have time to teach their kids the ins and outs of etiquette, but still wanted them to know how to behave. Oh—and I told how there was this little girl who was always making fun of another kid's hair, I think it was, so I took her aside and explained why it wasn't nice to mock the way anyone looked. So, like, she was gazing into my face so attentively during my spiel, and when I asked her if she had any questions, she wanted to know why I had so many grey things in my teeth.”