Slow Recoil (11 page)

SEVEN

T
he brain is a yolk that floats in a sea of cerebrospinal fluid— that briny flotsam of all we've learned and tried to forget. McKelvey woke the next morning with his circuits misfiring: bits of grade school math questions, the combination to his high school locker, the faces and names and rap sheets of a hundred criminals. Reminders to pick up milk bread eggs, everything spun together inside the swollen globe of his fragile skull—shaken and stirred. He was alive, of course, but he figured there must be a good part of him left on the grille of the truck that had hit him, backed up and run over him again. He lifted his head from the pillow and knew instantly that the day would require him to meet and exceed the limitations of his physical and spiritual capacity. He stayed in the shower for thirty minutes, the hot water a balm of sorts against the intense swelling pressure that threatened to stretch his face to the point of explosion. His teeth ached at their very roots.

He was gingerly running a razor down the silver stubble on his chin when the phone rang. He wiped away the creamy lather with a hand towel as he moved across the condo to the single phone on the desk by the window.

“Nineteen ninety-five Honda Accord registered to Ontario business B-10078837,” Hattie recited in the voice she reserved for testifying, for reading the facts as presented. “And yes, I had a pal at the provincial records office check into the business registration before they closed for the long weekend. It's a garage in Rexdale. Jarko's Automotive.”

McKelvey scribbled the information down on a note pad. “Thanks,” he said.

“Hey, no problem,” Hattie said. “Listen, if there's anything else I can do to help you get me demoted or suspended without pay, don't hesitate. We have operators waiting to take your call.”

“Hattie,” he said. And that was it, the best that he could do. His mind was already working through the next steps here.

“About tomorrow,” she said.

“Right.”

She sighed and said, “You forgot, didn't you? You forgot about inviting me over. Jesus, I'm such an idiot. This is like the third time you've done this in a month.”

“I didn't forget, Hattie,” he said, recovering, coming back on line. “Dinner tomorrow night. I'll make some macaroni and cheese. With the crumbs on top.”

“As long as it's not out of a box,” she said. “And remember, I caught you last time. I have these rather sharp deductive skills.”

‘
I love you
', he could have said. Or even ‘
Have a great day,
sweetheart
'. It was there, it was on the tip of his tongue, always on the tip of his tongue, these best of intentions. He laughed instead and made some joke about soda crackers and the kind of cheese that came in a spray can. As soon as he hung up, he reached for the Toronto phone book. McKelvey remembered how they used to try and split the behemoth in half with their bare hands standing around the change room after a shift, a bunch of young beat cops full of piss and vinegar with too much to prove.

The superintendent was a human cliché. He was in his early fifties, but he already owned the look of a man resigned to a life of cheap rent in exchange for waking at all hours to a mind-numbing and seemingly infinite flow of requests. Change the light bulb, fix the fridge, repair the leaky faucet, do something about the goddamned bed bugs. He was perhaps five-six, a hundred and forty pounds, and his t-shirt was stretched across a tight, round belly that was the direct result, McKelvey surmised, of the nightly six-pack of budget beer consumed while sitting in a tattered recliner to watch, hopefully uninterrupted, as Vanna White stood there flipping letters in exchange for a seven-figure salary.

“Help you?” the man said. He held the door open just enough. He had what appeared to be a fleck of corn flake glued to one corner of his mouth.

“Name's McKelvey,” McKelvey said, and handed the super one of his old business cards. He had a stack of them in his sock drawer. He had crossed out the office number and neatly printed his own number beneath it, fully aware of the legal implications of that simple action.

“Hank Chinaski,” the super said. He took the card and read it. “Hold-up Squad, eh?” He shrugged, scratched the back of his hair then adjusted his testicles like some old man out in public. “You looking for one of the losers lives in this crap hole? Lotta old people on pension, maybe one of them robbed a bank?”

“Donia Kruzik. Single woman lived up in 801. She moved out. What can you tell me about her?”

“The Polish chick?”

“Bosnian,” McKelvey said.

“News to me if she cut and run,” Chinaski said. “Wouldn't be the first midnight move around here. We don't have what you'd call a service elevator, you know, with the option to put it on hold while you move all your shit. They woulda had to hold it up manually. Then again, she didn't have much stuff, now that I think of it.”

Chinaski sighed, opened the door all the way, and turned towards the kitchen. The place was a mess, the roost of a slovenly bachelor. He picked up his set of all-access keys and shrugged at McKelvey. “Let's go take a look,” he said.

In the elevator, McKelvey asked what the woman was like as a tenant, quiet or loud, on time or late with the rent. Any information was better than none. It was how any cop drew a picture of a suspect or a victim, by asking questions. In McKelvey's experience it was often the detail someone else thought of as insignificant that helped close a loop.

“Yeah, well you know, she kept to herself pretty well. Wasn't here that long. Six months I guess, maybe not even quite. She had a job, far as I could tell. I went up there just the once to fix her shower head,” and here the superintendant sort of smiled to himself at some real or imagined memory.

“Guy like you running a building like this, you must get some good opportunities,” McKelvey said, an old pal, the detective's job to find common ground, wink wink.

Chinaski bared his teeth, yellow from cigarettes and coffee and no dental plan. “Time to time. 'Course, not nearly as much as I'd like,” he said. “Hey, it's shit pay for a shit job. People yelling at you all the time. No respect, man.”

“Sounds familiar,” McKelvey said. “So listen, you didn't get anywhere with Donia. Maybe you tried a line or two, but she wasn't interested.”

“She seemed, I don't know what you'd call it. Preoccupied.” Chinaski nodded to himself, satisfied with his word choice, as though he had finally summoned the question to one of Alex Trebeck's answers. “The apartment was set up pretty basic, nothing homey. She seemed serious, is what I would say. Guess the Europeans are like that.”

“She was quiet, never had any issues?”

“Sure, yeah. Until recent. There was a loud argument in her unit a couple of nights ago, people called to complain. It's got to be pretty loud for folks to bother calling me on a noise complaint. When I got up there, this guy was just leaving.”

“What did he look like, you remember?

“Tall guy, pretty big in the shoulders. Buzzed hair. Not to be fucked with, you know. I mean, he was pretty hard looking. He just brushed right by me like he didn't even see me. And then she was alone. She said her friend had left, and she promised there would be no more problems. But I could see that she was very upset, whatever had happened.”

The elevator stopped, and the doors slid open. They walked down the hallway and stopped at the unit. Chinaski selected the right key from a couple of dozen on his belt chain, inserted it in the lock, and, before turning, and out of habit, called out: “Superintendent. Coming in.”

The super held the door for McKelvey. As McKelvey stepped inside, Chinaski motioned to his eye with a few fingers, and said, “Mind me asking what happened?”

McKelvey said, “Getting clumsy in my old age.”

The apartment was exactly as McKelvey recalled. Empty. There was a smell of stale, closed air. The place still held the vibe, however, of expended kinetic energy, the invisible buzz of human activity. Something had happened here. An occurrence. It was a sense that was impossible to explain to someone who had never set foot in a crime scene. The corner store with the owner sprawled amidst the bags of chips and cheesies, two holes in his chest, blood pooled and already turning dark as cherry juice—and it was here now, despite the silence of the scene, this residue of limits exceeded in the pursuit of evil deeds.

“Well, shit on a stick,” Chinaski said, nodding, taking it all in. “Must have been some quiet operation. Oh well, no loss. They was fully paid up for the month. Sure as hell didn't need to be moving out in the middle of the night like that. Goddamn got to rent it again now, go through the waiting list of jeezly losers.”

That word “
jeezly
” reminded him of Hattie, one of the many east coast bastardizations she threw out now and again. The super must have been from the Maritimes. He wasn't alone in the city. There was a standard line about there being more Newfoundlanders in Toronto than on the island of Newfoundland.

McKelvey said, “You'd have her cheques on file?”

“She paid cash month to month,” Chinaski said. “That is, after she settled first and last and the damage deposit. I'd have that one on file for sure.”

McKelvey felt the familiar tug that ran from his crotch to this throat, the rush of a connection forming. Not to put too much stock into it, but it was something. “Can I get a copy?”

“Don't see why not. But listen, it'll take me a few hours. My office is kind of a shit show, if you know what I mean,” Chinaski said.

“I understand. Listen, you have video cameras in the lobby?” McKelvey said. He wanted to run through the tape, capture an image, anything—even a grainy profile of the man who'd jumped him.

The super shrugged. “Thing is, they're not actually hooked up.”

“What do you mean, not hooked up,” McKelvey said.

“The owner didn't want to pay for video tapes and all that shit.” Chinaski shrugged again. “He's a real cheap asshole. I think he's Ukrainian.”

“You have my number there. If you can let me know when you find the cheque, or remember anything at all, give me a call.”

“Is this for your cellphone?” Chinaski said, indicating the number scrawled in pen beneath the scratched-out office number.

“Home number,” McKelvey said. “I'm sort of working from home these days.”

“Geez, that's all right. Everybody's working from home these days. Didn't know they were doing that with the cops now.”

“All sorts of perks,” McKelvey said, and moved for the door.

The taxi bills were piling up. Hassan had been waiting for him at the curb outside Donia's building while he spoke with the superintendent. Sitting there in his cousin's big car, the meter running, McKelvey's private chauffeur. This was an expense that would never be expensed. Because he wasn't working for anybody; Christ, he wasn't working, period. But McKelvey was getting used to the driver and his old fashioned manners, the way they were slowly starting to share the banter of two old friends sitting on a park bench. Sports and talk radio, the burgeoning war in Afghanistan, the price of gas, the weather.

“This war on terror,” Hassan said once, “will never end. It will last a century. Like the crusades you studied in school, yes? This peace we want so badly, it is like trying to squeeze water from stones.”

“We've got to try, don't we? What's the alternative,” McKelvey said.

“It is just what we do, what we have always done, my friend,” Hassan said. “Poking the hornet's nest with a big stick. It is pouring gasoline on a fire. We watch the flames grow. The trouble with settling things with guns and bombs, you see, is that with every death you create a new reason for your enemies' children to hate you. The wheel turns and turns. If you don't listen to the news, if you don't watch the CNN, then how do you know what goes on around the other side of the world? Maybe we all sleep better at night if there are no TVs and we mind our business.”