Burying Ariel (15 page)

“I do if you do,” I said.

“I have all the time in the world,” he said.

The comment was more than a pleasantry. The amount of time that elapsed between the placing of an order and the arrival of food at Druthers was legendary. So were the short fuses of the restaurant’s father-and-son chefs. More than one patron’s meal had ended abruptly when the father, hurling curses, exited through the restaurant’s front door, and the son, also hurling curses, exited through the back door. But the menu was inventive, the food invariably excellent, and the atmosphere, when father and son were in accord, sublime.

That spring afternoon, as I walked through the front door of the old converted house in the Cathedral district, it appeared that Ed and I were in luck. James and James Junior, father and son, greeted me with smiles and ushered me to the cool peace of the Button Room, my favourite of the restaurant’s three small dining rooms. The Button Room took its name from its walls, which were hung with framed shadow boxes filled with antique buttons of incredible variety: military buttons of shiny brass bearing the insignia of once-proud units; mourning buttons of jet or of hair taken from the head of the newly deceased and woven into stiff discs; tiny buttons of mother-of-pearl or satin that the fingers of eager bridegrooms had fumbled undone as they claimed their trembling brides. The linen at Druthers was always snowy, and the flowers, exotic. Today a single fuchsia orchid blazed in our bud vase.

Ed rose when he saw me. “I’ve ordered martinis,” he said. “After seeing that Web site, I thought that we needed more than a Shirley Temple.”

James Junior brought the martinis, ice blue with two olives apiece, handed us the menus and announced the specials: wild mushroom pâté; grilled tomato gazpacho, sweetbreads Druthers, mixed greens; coffee chocolate-chunk cookies.

I didn’t even open the menu. First, the Rombauers and now Druthers. It was obvious that sweetbreads were in the air, and I never bucked synchronicity. Ed followed my lead.

After James Junior withdrew with our orders, Ed raised his glass. “To sanity,” he said. “Although it appears to be fast disappearing from our troubled world. That ‘Red Riding Hood’ site is heartbreaking, Jo. To think of Ariel being one of that long, sad line …”

For a moment, we were both silent. Wrapped in our private thoughts, we sipped our martinis. They were excellent but ineffectual. The liquor burned, but it didn’t wipe out the memory of that long, sad line of girls and women, and of Ariel among them.

Finally, Ed broke the silence.

“I have some news,” he said. “Kyle Morrissey wasn’t a stranger to Ariel. Val Massey called me this morning. He’s working for the
Leader Post
, and he’s been assigned to Ariel’s story.”

Val Massey was an old student of ours. “How’s he doing?” I asked.

Ed smiled. “Dazzlingly. Bob Woodward in the making. At any rate, when he found out Kyle Morrissey had lived next door to Ariel …”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “There’s nothing next door to Charlie and Ariel’s place but an X-rated video store.”

Ed nodded. “
EXXXOTICA
. That’s where Kyle lives, or at least lived until December when he ran into a little trouble with the police.”

“The assault charge that went away,” I said.

Ed raised an eyebrow. “And who’s
your
source?”

“Rosalie’s betrothed,” I said. “And Detective Robert Hallam says this case doesn’t feel right to him.”

“That’s pretty much Val’s take, too,” Ed said. “He’s spent some time with Kyle’s aunt, Ronnie. Apparently, there’s something a little weird there, but Val says Ronnie is quite an advocate for her boy, and she’s managed to convince Val that Kyle’s only feelings towards Ariel were ones of gratitude.”

“Gratitude for what?”

“Until December, Kyle worked at
EXXXOTICA
. It’s the family business. Anyway, after Kyle’s narrow escape, his aunt Ronnie decided that the kind of clientele who came in to rent triple-X movies, might not be creating an ideal milieu for her nephew, and that it might be wise to get Kyle out of harm’s way.”

“Good decision,” I said.

“According to Val, it was,” Ed agreed. “Kyle liked the job he found with the air-conditioning company. Incidentally, he had listed Ariel as one of his references. Apparently, she helped him find the place he moved into too. It’s in those student apartments over on Kramer Boulevard.”

I took a deep breath. “Ed, did Val mention the possibility that Ariel’s interest in Kyle might have been more than that of a friend?”

Ed stiffened. “I take it you have a reason for asking that question.”

“I do,” I said. “Mieka and I had a heart-to-heart at the lake. Ariel was pregnant when she died, and the father of her baby wasn’t Charlie Dowhanuik.”

“You’re not suggesting that Kyle Morrissey …?”

“I’m not suggesting anything,” I said. “All I know is that Mieka believes that Ariel wasn’t romantically involved with the father of her baby.”

“An accident?” Ed said.

I shook my head. “A helping friend. And that opens the field to a number of possibilities. I wondered if Kyle Morrissey was one of them. I saw his photo in the paper. He’s a good-looking man.”

Ed gave me a small smile. “A bodybuilder, dark and beautiful, but not my type, and not Ariel’s. According to Val, when it came to brains Kyle Morrissey was paddling in the shallow end of the gene pool.”

“Not swift?”

“Not swift,” Ed said. “And not ‘helping friend’ material. Ariel was a compassionate woman. If she thought Kyle Morrissey had been roughed up by the system, she would have done what she could to help him start over. That might have included helping him find a job and an apartment; it would
not
have included asking him to father her child.” Ed ran his finger over the frilled edge of the catelaya bloom. “I’m no expert on these matters, but what I don’t understand is why Ariel had to seek out anybody. She had it all: beauty, brains, grace. If she wanted to have a baby, why didn’t she just wait for the right man and get one the old-fashioned way?”

“I think she felt she was running out of time,” I said.

Ed frowned. “She was twenty-seven. You can’t be talking about biological time.”

“No,” I said. “I think Ariel felt she might be running out of time to live the life she wanted.”

“And Charlie Dowhanuik wasn’t part of that life?”

“Apparently not.”

At that moment, James Junior arrived with the wild mushroom pâté, and out of deference to the wizardry in the kitchen, Ed and I moved to lighter topics: the weekend at the lake, a wood sculpture Ed and Barry were having installed on their deck, Madeleine’s perfection. But despite our banter, the martinis, a half-litre of Pinot Noir, and sweetbreads so succulent even the Rombauers couldn’t have improved upon them, Ed’s question hung in the air between us, a shadow at the feast.

When we left Druthers, Ed looked up at the high blue sky. “Given the morning we’ve put in, I suggest we both take an afternoon off,” he said. “I’m going to make myself a pot of camomile, stretch out in the hammock, and get back to
À la recherche du temps perdu.”

“Do you know I’ve never managed to get past the first chapter of that book?”

“I’ve never made it past page three,” Ed said cheerfully, “but on the first truly sweet day of May, I always try. It’s my summer ritual. And how are you going to extract the joy from this glorious day?”

“Checking out someone else’s remembrance of things past,” I said. “I’m going to try to get Kyle Morrissey’s aunt to talk to me.”

The only parking space I could find was in front of the used-furniture mart. There was a special on inflatable furniture – just in time for summer. I passed it up and continued down the street towards the video store.

The old lady was at her perch at the open window upstairs, and as soon as she saw me, she called out. “Nobody’s home at the dead girl’s house,” she said, “but I know things you’ll want to hear.”

“What kinds of things?”

“Come up and find out,” she said.

“I’ll be right there,” I said.

Not an errant weed or faded bloom marred the perky, girl-next-door charm of Ariel and Charlie’s bungalow on Manitoba Street. As a house-minder, Father Hill’s price was obviously beyond rubies. The lawn in front of
EXXXOTICA
could have used his ministrations. The dusty shoots that made their way through its hard-packed dirt were ready for extreme unction, but the woman down on her knees in front of the porn video store wasn’t praying. She had a razor blade between her fingers and she was scraping at her front window. Someone had papered it with photocopies of the image I had seen on Ariel’s Web page: the black background, the stylized sunflower, and the words “Never Forget.”

The woman craned her neck to give me the once over. She was my age, with a mane of waist-length sun-streaked hair, a narrow face, close-set green eyes, the leathery tan of a rodeo rider, and an unusually large Adam’s apple. She was wearing jeans, a very brief white halter top, and a look of abject disgust. She tapped at the glass with the razor blade. “As if I ever could forget,” she said in a voice that could have been either an alto or a baritone. “Look at the mess they made of my window.”

I thought the words had been rhetorical, but she was being literal. She waved the razor blade in a gesture of frustration. “I said,
look at my window
. My grandmother recognized you. She watches your show every Saturday night. Look at my window, so you can tell your audience what you saw.”

“Ms.…”

“It’s Ronnie. Ronnie Morrissey. My grandmother’s name is Bebe, and she’s a big fan of your show.”

“Then she knows we don’t do investigative journalism. We just talk about politics. I’m not even a reporter. I teach at the university.”

“But
you’re on TV.”
She paused to let the words sink in. In the real world, the distinction I had made was irrelevant. “You know people who can help us get the truth out. My nephew didn’t kill anybody. He couldn’t kill anybody.” She made a fist with one hand and punched the palm of the other. Her nails were nicely shaped and painted a shimmering mauve, but not even her careful manicure could disguise the fact that Ronnie Morrissey’s hands were meathooks. “Do you have kids?” she asked.

“Four,” I said.

“I was never blessed,” she said, “but I raised Kyle like he was my own. I know what he’s capable of doing, good or bad. If the cops called me and said Kyle got into a fight with someone who called him a dirty name or if they said he’d knocked back a half-dozen beers and relieved himself in the middle of Albert Street, I wouldn’t be happy, but I’d believe them. I don’t believe this, not for a single, solitary minute.” She knitted her brow. “Any of your kids boys?”

“Two,” I said. “One of them’s twenty-four; the other’s seventeen.”

“Then you know how it is,” she said huskily. “Now do me a favour and check out what they did to my window.”

Ronnie hadn’t made much headway with her cleanup. The area she had cleared was the size of a
TV
screen in a motel room, and there were still bits of black paper clinging to the glass, but I leaned forward obediently. Inside was a display of
XXX
movies with titles like
Extreme Cat Fights, Operation Penetration
, and
Come Gargling Sluts
. Framed by the sombre black of Ariel’s poster with its by-now familiar plea, the movie titles had a certain film noir eloquence.

“Quite the mess, eh?” Ronnie looked at her razor blade thoughtfully. “And they’ve done this to his apartment and to the locker at the place where he works. Where he
worked,”
she corrected herself. “They put him on unpaid leave. An innocent man, but that doesn’t mean a darn thing any more. The police are still hassling him, too. Kyle doesn’t react well to pressure, so last night we packed up his stuff and moved him back here. It’s a darn shame – he was so proud of being independent. Look, Ms. Kilbourn, I’d better get back to my scraping. Bebe will fill you in, but you get it straight.” She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted up at the old woman in the window. “I’m sending her up, Bebe.”

“I’m ready for her,” Bebe shouted back.

As Ronnie led me down the three steps that took us into
EXXXOTICA
, I wondered whether I was ready for Bebe. Convex security mirrors had been installed in the area around the cash register, and as Ronnie and I passed them, I caught sight of our reflections: two distorted funhouse women entering a distorted funhouse world. I’d been in some desolate places in my life, but my shoulders slumped under the weight of the store’s dingy misery. The room was long and narrow, and the light that made it past the handbills the Friends of Ariel had pasted on the front window was murky.

To reach the door that led to the living quarters, we had to navigate our way through racks of videos which offered the voyeur a smorgasbord of sexual delights: man with woman, man with several women, women together, men together, men with young girls, men with young boys. For the adventurer, there were dominatrixes with whips and dungeons, animals who were more than men’s best friends, and opportunities galore to revel in the joys of leather, chains, masks, uniforms, adult-sized baby clothes, and golden cascades.

Ronnie paid the videos no heed, but I did, and the fact that the people who rented them lived in my city, shovelled snow from their sidewalks, walked past me in the park, and stood beside me in the checkout counter at the grocery store gave me pause. It was
bizarro mondo
out there, which might have explained the complex system of locks that had been installed on the door that separated the store from the house’s living quarters. Magician-like, Ronnie pulled a ring of keys from inside her halter top and opened the locks. The world on the other side of the door was reassuringly normal: a small entranceway with a floor of terra cotta Mexican tiles, a telephone table, and wallpaper with a vaguely Navajo pattern in sand, mango, and turquoise.

“Up the stairs and straight ahead, you can’t miss it,” Ronnie said, then she abandoned me.