Barrington Street Blues (20 page)

“Amber. What did he say he'd found?”

“He was raggin' me about this letter or whatever it was. Sayin' it's great to go to the old homestead once in a while and read letters from your old girlfriends.”

“Did he bring any letters home with him?”

“No. I asked him and he said he didn't bring it because it was safer where it was.”

“Safer? What did he mean by that?” She didn't answer. “Safer in that you wouldn't see it?”

“I don't think that's what he meant. He seemed like he wanted to hide it from somebody else.”

“So you've never seen it?”

“No. I searched his pockets and all his other stuff that night but he didn't have it.”

“And it was after this that he was worked up?”

“Yeah, whatever it was, he wanted to do somethin' about it.”

“So, what happened after that?”

“You know.”

“No, I don't.”

“He died.”

“What was the timeline? His body was found on the twelfth of January. His death occurred that morning, several hours earlier. Had you seen him the night he died?”

“Uh-uh. He never come home that night.”

“At all?”

“He went out that morning, first thing, and I never seen him again.” She looked away.

“I'm going to look into this, Amber, and I'll be in touch.”

“He wouldna been so worked up about all that shit, whatever it was, if he got the treatment he needed at the centre. His head wasn't on straight.”

“Did you ever meet Corey's mother?”

“Huh?”

“Corey's mother, Vonda.”

“I never seen her.”

“Okay. I'll talk to you later.”

She grabbed Zachary and dragged him from the room. He set up a cry: “Don't cut it off, Mama, don't cut it off!” Once again, one of old Monty's clients draws unwelcome attention in the waiting room of Stratton Sommers.

So. A letter from someone in Leaman's past. An old girlfriend, Amber thought. Whatever it was, he had left it at his mother's house for safekeeping. The question was: would the letter still be there? Had Vonda Carter found it? Had the burglar taken it? And what was in the letter that set Corey off so soon before he was found with a bullet in his head?

All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned every one to his own way. And the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.

— Isaiah, 53:6 (Handel,
Messiah
)

After reaching a settlement in a personal injury case late Tuesday morning, I was sitting across from Dudley Douthwright in his office at Dalhousie University. I hadn't really expected Dudley, assistant professor of statistics and quantitative methods, to look like his name, but he did. Or perhaps he was trying to live up, or down, to the name. He had the appearance of an unassuming, fairly handsome man of forty-five, but he probably wasn't past his late twenties. He wore glasses, a white shirt, navy tie, and pale blue cardigan.

“Thanks for seeing me, Doctor Douthwright.”

“You're welcome. With classes over for the year, I have a little more time to spare.”

I explained why I was there.

“Tex-Park. Oh, my. Not my most exciting employment opportunity.”

I resisted the temptation to ask where he had succeeded in finding vocational thrills.

“Did you ever see any homeless people sleeping or hanging around there?”

“I suppose I saw people who did not seem to correlate with a vehicle. They must have been using the facility for something other than parking. But I can't say I paid much attention.”

“Do you remember the names of any of the other part-time attendants?”

“I was there in 1985 and 1986. What year are you inquiring about?”

“I wish I knew.”

“When did the person go missing?”

“Again, I'm not sure.”

“I don't know what you can expect to learn from such nebulous data, Mr. Collins.”

“I know. It's a long shot.”

“All I can give you are the names of a couple of students I worked with during the summers I ingested all those exhaust fumes at the parking garage. I can still taste it.” He shuddered. “I knew a Donny somebody who put in a few hours a week there. And Chaz Thurber. He worked several summers there while doing his sociology degree. He spent much of his time making what he no doubt considered insightful comments about the people and their choice of vehicle.”

“Where's Thurber now, any idea?”

“Still labouring away at his Ph.D, as far as I know.”

“Here at Dal?”

“He's studying here and teaching part-time at the Mount.”

“Thanks for your help.”

“You're welcome. I hope you're not wasting your time.”

I called Mount Saint Vincent University to make sure Chaz Thurber was there, then decided to have lunch before heading out to the campus. The death of my old client, Ronette, weighed on my mind, and I wanted to be alone. I drove home, fixed myself a sandwich, and sat out in the sunshine. I wondered whether there was anything I could have done beyond getting her out of her various legal predicaments. But I knew the answer: nothing I could have done would have altered her fate. One thing this tragedy did, though, was bring into stark relief how petty my own troubles were; I resolved to pull out all the stops to get my family back together when Maura got home from Geneva.

While I was sitting there, one of the neighbourhood kids came by,
weighed down by a rake, a hoe, and some other gardening implements.

“Hi, Mr. Collins. You don't mind if I cross here, do you? It's quicker this way, and this stuff's heavy.”

“I don't mind at all, Ian. Any time. Have you taken up gardening?”

“I'm helping out at Mrs. Fancy's; she can't do it herself. Gives me a bit of spending money. You know.”

“Great. I may have some things I need help with too.”

“Sure.”

That reminded me: I had never heard back from my former colleague, Bob Mahoney, about Corey Leaman's neighbour, the woman he'd helped by doing errands and odd jobs. She might be able to give me some insight into Corey. Would she have known him well enough to say whether he seemed the type to take his own life? Perhaps not, but it was worth a try. I didn't have much else to go on. I sat for a few more minutes, then hauled myself out of my chair and called the office of my old employer, Nova Scotia Legal Aid. I got Bob's secretary on the line.

“How are you these days, Monty?”

“Great, Trudy.”

“Do you miss us?”

“Yes, I do, as a matter of fact. How are things?”

“Fair to middling. Bob isn't here. He's in court all day. But I know he was trying to reach you. Don't know what it was about. I'll tell him you called.”

I then called my own office and found out Bob had left a message for me that morning.

“Good thing you asked, Monty. I forgot to write you a message slip.”

Why didn't that surprise me? My secretary, Tina, was far, far out of her depth in a law office. “What did he say?”

“He said: ‘Tell Monty the name of the woman he's looking for is Mrs. Lundrigan.'”

“All right. Thank you, Tina. And try to stay on top of those messages.”

The phone directory did not identify anyone by the name of
Lundrigan in Leaman's area of Sackville, so I decided to take a little jaunt out to the Leaman-Carter neighbourhood to ask around. I got the impression nobody was home chez Vonda, which was good; I wasn't about to tip my hand to Leaman's mother about my search for Mrs. Lundrigan. I began my canvassing at the house next door. But the harried young mother, with one baby on her hip and a naked toddler clinging to her leg, had never heard of Mrs. Lundrigan. Across the street were two new jerry-built apartment blocks. I did not expect any joy there, but I made the rounds anyway. Only at a house a block away did I come close to enlightenment.

“I don't know.”

“All right. Thanks anyway.”

“But my grandmother might.”

“Oh. Could I speak to her?”

“No.”

“No?”

“She's not here.”

“I see. Where could I find her?”

“She's in a home.”

“Tell you what. I'll leave you my card. If you're speaking to your grandmother, you might ask her, and you can call me if she has any information about Mrs. Lundrigan.”

“Okay.”

I drove back along the Bedford Highway and dropped in at Mount Saint Vincent to speak to the former sociology student who had made comments about the customers and their cars during his nights as an attendant at Tex-Park. I parked my car and took a moment to enjoy the spectacular view from the campus, which overlooks the waters of the Bedford Basin. I found Chaz Thurber in his office examining a long accordion-pleated computer printout. After seeing how well Dudley Douthwright fit the popular image of a statistician, I was expecting a tweedy, bearded academic in the sociology instructor. But Chaz Thurber looked more like an Argentinian soccer star, with wavy long black hair and a strikingly handsome face. I introduced myself, gave him a short spiel on why I was there, and asked when he had worked at Tex-Park.

“Summers of ‘84 to ‘86.”

“Did you notice any street kids hanging around the place?”

“Oh, sure. I used to rap with some of them.”

Rap? Were we back in the seventies? “Perhaps you can help me then. Was there any talk about a man and a woman driving around, or parking at Tex-Park, and picking up street kids in their car?”

“There was no talk about it, but I had my own suspicions.”

“Oh?”

“I had seen the same car there at the same time of night, off and on for a few weeks. There wasn't anything unusual in that by itself, but I remember thinking I never saw the occupants come down the stairs and go out. It seemed they parked and stayed up there, then drove out later. There was just something about them that didn't jibe. He looked fairly young and fit, and she was older. She was like an archetype of the homely peasant: heavy, round-faced. They didn't seem like a couple. They had some kind of religious totem dangling from the rear-view mirror.”

“What kind of car was it?”

“A Crown Victoria. I knew the licence number at the time, but I can't remember it now.”

“Why did you feel strongly enough about this to memorize the tag number?”

“Because one night they had this girl in the car with them. And I thought maybe they were exploiting these marginalized young people.”

“Who was the girl?”

“Someone I'd seen hanging around in the parking garage.”

“And then she was with this couple? Did you get the impression she had gone into the car willingly? Or had she been abducted?” He shrugged and looked away. “What is it?” I prompted him.

“I don't know what she was doing with them. She may have known them, or —” Again, a reluctance to continue.

“What's the matter, Chaz?”

“It's just that I had tried to connect with this girl, do some dialoguing, She wouldn't open up. When I saw her in the back seat of the car, I made kind of a questioning gesture as if to say:
What are you doing there
? Or:
Are you okay
?”

“And?”

“She gave me the finger.”

“And then what?”

“Nothing, really.”

“So you didn't follow it up?”

“No.”

“Why not?” But I knew the answer. She had given him the finger, brushed off his attempts to “dialogue.” So the hell with her, even if she was being exploited. “Did you see the girl again?”

“No. Right then was when a group of stowaways was found on a ship from the Middle East. I got involved in that issue and I left my job in the parking garage.”

“So you have no idea what happened to the girl.”

“No. But the way she looked at me when she left was not, like,
Help me, I'm being kidnapped
. It was
Fuck you
. So, she didn't look as if she was in fear of her life.”

“Not at that point, anyway,” I said.

I left him and drove downtown.

When I got back to my desk, I scribbled some notes on that day's interviews and put them in the file. Graham Scott's name caught my eye. I didn't have much information about him. It occurred to me to ask his family for a photo. Not that it would serve much of a purpose, but it could provide an excuse to see his parents and perhaps learn more about his life. So I picked up the phone, called his mother, and invited myself over to pick up a snapshot.

The Scotts lived in a large, elegant old house on Larch Street, across from Kings College. The entire front yard was a garden of spring flowers. Muriel Scott, wearing an old canvas jacket and a straw hat, was pruning a shrub; it looked as if it was just past flowering.

“You're handy with a pair of secateurs,” I said to her.

“That's a word we don't hear much these days,” she replied. “Come inside.”

She ushered me into a living room done tastefully in pale blue and cream.

“How are things progressing?” she asked.

“Oh, these matters tend to move at a stately pace.”

“I see. Well. Let's choose a photograph of Graham. You need this for what again?”

“We want to come as close as we can to an accurate account of
what happened that night,” I improvised. “It would help if we could trace Graham's movements.”

“I thought the facts were quite straightforward, Mr. Collins. This Leaman fellow was released prematurely from the Baird Centre. His problems were such that he took my son's life, and then shot himself with the same weapon.”

“Yes. But the fewer loose ends we have heading into the litigation, the less likely we'll be tripped up by opposing counsel. We want to be in possession of all the facts, as painful as they might be. A picture may assist us in finding people who may have seen Graham that night.”