The Dells (24 page)

Lewis nodded and scribbled in her notebook. “What sort of problem?”

“She didn't say, but I think it had something to do with how her boss, Tim Dutton, runs the business.”

“He owns a hardware and building supply company, is that right?”

“His father started it more than forty years ago. Tim runs it now, but the family still owns it. I don't think they're doing very well. There's a lot of competition from the big chains nowadays. Marty's father was a general contractor, so she knows — knew the business, in some ways probably better than Tim. Tim isn't the kind who takes advice very well, though. Especially from a woman. Um … ” Rachel hesitated.

“What?”

“I think she was having an affair with him, too.”

“Dutton?” Rachel nodded. Lewis thanked her for her help, then she and Timmons left.

“I've got to get over to the park,” Rachel said. She collected her file box and computer from the dining room table. “You know where I'll be if you need me. Despite what Hal thinks, Mum and Dad will be okay on their own if you have better things to do than hang around
here.” She stood in the doorway, holding her boxes. “Jesus Christ, Joe,” she said, eyes glistening with tears. “Poor Marty.”

“Will you be all right?”

“Yeah, I'll be okay,” she said. She was lost in thought for a moment, then focused and said, “What are the chances there's a connection between Marvin Cartwright's murder and Marty's?”

“Too good,” Shoe replied.

When Hal regained consciousness — you couldn't call it waking up; it was much too painful — he had no idea where he was. He barely knew
who
he was. His head was splitting, an almost unbearable stabbing pain behind his eyeballs and down the back of his neck. When he tried to sit up, he broke into a cold sweat and nausea clawed at his guts. He fell back with a moan, then stiffened as pain lanced through his head. Was he having a stroke? he wondered. If he was, he wished it would kill him and get it the hell over with.

He lay as still as possible, breathing shallowly through his mouth, trying to control the nausea and the pain. When both had subsided a little, he dared slowly crack open his eyes and look around. He was in a motel or a hotel, but where it was located was anyone's guess. He closed his eyes again.

Thirst finally drove him to get out of bed and stagger half blind with pain into the bathroom where, unable to find a glass or a cup, he drank handful after handful
of tepid, bitter-tasting water from the faucet. He'd have traded his soul for a bottle of Tylenol.

He raised his head and stared at himself in the mirror over the sink. He looked even worse than he felt, as if he'd been dead for a week and only recently dug up. His skin was pasty and oily and his eyes were bloodshot, red-rimmed and crusted. There was what looked — and smelled — like dried vomit in his hair. He was wearing only his underwear. He didn't know where his clothes were.

Gritting his teeth, he removed his underwear and wristwatch and started the water in the bath. There was no shower curtain, just hooks. “Screw it,” he muttered, and pulled the knob that diverted the water to the shower head. The spray was weak and uneven, and the temperature kept changing, but he stood under it for a long time before unwrapping the tiny bar of soap and washing himself from head to toe. He dried himself with a towel that was coarse and smelled of bleach.

Christ, where was he anyway? More to the point, how had he got here, wherever the hell here was?

He trudged into the bed-sitting room. His clothes were in a heap on the floor beside the rumpled bed. His wallet was in his pants' pocket and he seemed to have all his credit and debit cards. There was no cash, even though he remembered withdrawing $200 from an ATM after leaving the office on Saturday. He went to the window and parted the curtain to squint out on an unfamiliar commercial street a storey below, awash in brilliant sunshine. He looked at his watch. It was 12:35. Sunday? God, he hoped so.

He sat on the edge of the bed to dress. Each movement brought a fresh wave of nausea. Between struggling into his shirt, damp and smelling of beer and vomit, and pulling on his equally soiled trousers, he tried to recall how he'd come to be there. He didn't remember arriving
or checking in. In fact, he didn't remember much of anything after leaving his parents' house in a huff because everyone thought he'd had too much to drink — he hadn't then, but he'd obviously had more later — and meeting Dougie Hallam at his bar. He supposed he was suffering from some form of retrograde amnesia from drink.

Dressed, he sat on the side of the bed, breathing hard and fighting off the nausea, concentrating on the carpet beneath his feet. When it passed, he went into the bathroom and drank some more water. He urinated, left arm braced against the wall over the toilet. His bowels churned and he knew he was in for a bout of diarrhea, which was his usual punishment for drinking too much.

Returning to the main room, he sat down again on the edge of the bed to catch his breath. He noted for the first time that there were a dozen or more empty beer bottles scattered about, as well as an empty Canadian Club bottle on the coffee table. There were also a dozen butts of his brand of cigarettes in the ashtray beside the bed. Some of them were ringed with dark red lipstick. Then he saw the empty blue foil condom packet on the floor under the edge of the bed. There were two more on the floor by the easy chair.

“Oh, god,” he moaned aloud, as he remembered the blonde woman squatting over the great spill of his gut, heavy breasts bouncing and breathing hard as she pumped up and down on thick thighs, muttering, “Come on, you fat bastard, come on.” He barely made it to the bathroom before he threw up into the toilet.

Other disjointed fragments of memory surfaced as he hunched over the sink, rinsing and spitting: making another withdrawal from an ATM while Dougie and the blonde waited in Maureen's car; Dougie slumped in the easy chair in the motel room, trousers around his ankles, the blonde crouched between his knees, his big hands clamped on either side of her head; and another woman,
this one with dark hair and a garish tattoo at the base of her spine, performing oral sex on the blonde while Dougie Hallam knelt over them on the bed, masturbating.

Hal's stomach heaved and he retched into the sink. Acid burned in his throat with each painful spasm. Slumping to the floor, he curled into a ball, arms wrapped around his head, moaning. He squeezed his eyes closed until red sparks flashed, but he could not eradicate the image of Dougie Hallam, Canadian Club bottle in one hand, erect penis in the other.

He curled tighter, moaning aloud again as he remembered Dougie Hallam slapping him, cursing him, while he whimpered and moaned on the bed. “Come on, you fat fuck. Get your ass in gear. Shit! Well, you're on your own, lard boy.” And his relief when Dougie finally left him alone.

More memories of the night, of Dougie and his two whores, circled through his mind, spinning, then slowing, then dimming as he slipped into unconsciousness …

Some unknown time later, he awakened on the bathroom floor, head throbbing, mouth foul, body aching. Dragging himself to his feet, he slurped water from cupped hands, then staggered into the other room. He let himself out of the motel room and walked unsteadily along the connecting balcony to the stairs down to the parking lot. Maureen's car was on the other side of the lot, baking under the hot August sun, parked between a rusty pickup and a mud-encrusted four-by-four with oversized tires. He unlocked the car and squeezed in, collapsing onto the driver's seat with a sigh of relief.

He sat for a moment, catching his breath, before shakily inserting the key and trying to start the engine. Nothing happened when he turned the key. He remembered that Maureen's car was equipped with a safety interlock that prevented the engine from starting unless the brake pedal was depressed. When he put his foot on the
brake pedal, he found that the seat was too far back. He located the control, and moved the seat forward. Had someone else been driving the car because he'd been too drunk?

He started the car and reached for the air conditioner controls, but Maureen's car did not have air conditioning. He rolled down both the driver and passenger side windows. He wondered if he should check out. He didn't have a key to the room, though. To hell with it. It was the kind of place where one paid in advance.

Next to the motel there was a small strip mall with a pharmacy. He turned off the engine and, without locking the car or winding up the windows, walked to the pharmacy, where he used his bank card to buy Extra Strength Tylenol and a litre bottle of water. He also got $20 in cash, the most the cashier would allow. Returning to the car, he took four Tylenol and drank half the water. He then started the engine, put the car in gear, and wondered where to go.

Shoe cruised slowly south along Weston Road, looking for place to park. He was in what should have been familiar territory — when he and Joey Noseworthy had been in their early teens, they'd gone to the Biltmore movie theatre almost every Saturday for the afternoon matinee — but he didn't recognize a thing. The Biltmore was long gone, of course, had been for some time even when Shoe had walked a beat in this area for the final months of his short career as a police officer. Everything else about the area was different too: more plastic and steel and glass, less brick and stone and wood; bars and licensed restaurants in a district that had once been one of the last so-called “dry” areas of the city. Shoe parked on a side street, in the shade of a row of mature trees overlooking the deep green gash of the Humber River ravine, into which Black Creek merged a few kilometres farther south. He locked the car, and walked back two blocks to his destination. The lettering on the storefront window read “RM Printing &
Reproduction, Ronald S. Mackie, Prop.,” and promised business cards in an hour, passport photos while you waited, and instant digital photo printing. “We're Open Sundays” proclaimed a sign hanging above the push-bar of the door. A buzzer rasped as Shoe pulled open the door and went inside.

A counter divided the shop into a small waiting area at the front and a larger production area in the back. The waiting area contained a row of half a dozen contoured fibreglass chairs under the window facing the street, a magazine-strewn coffee table, a water cooler, and a small work table. Above the work table hung a cork board crowded with business cards, event flyers, and notices advertising items for sale — from cars to computers to office furniture — garage sales, and babysitting and house-painting services. Shoe went to the counter. There was no one in the production area. A Ricoh copy machine, about the size of a small chest freezer, worked unattended, chugging away,
cat-a-chunk
,
cat-a-chunk
,
cat-a-chunk
, spitting page after page after page into the sorter. Three other machines, ranging widely in size and age, from a small, state-of-the-art Canon desktop machine to a huge Xerox 9500 that hadn't been state of the art for twenty years or more, sat idle. The red eye of a security camera glared from high in the far corner of the room.

A push button on the wall at the end of the counter was labelled “Press for Service.” Shoe was about to press the button when a door at the rear of the production area opened and a man stood in the doorway. He hesitated when he saw Shoe at the counter. Beyond him Shoe could see a ten-inch web printing press and other machinery. The man stepped into the room and the door hissed closed behind him. He was in his early sixties, six inches shorter than Shoe and soft around the middle. He had a round, open face and an unruly fringe of greying
brown hair surrounding a shiny pink dome. He wadded up the paper towelling with which he'd been wiping his hands and dropped it into a waste basket beside a cluttered desk. He stepped up to the counter.

“My sister told me you were in town,” he said, putting his strong, pale hands flat on the counter top. He was wearing an ink-stained grey work coat. A slight chemical odour emanated from him.

“How are you, Mack?” Shoe said.

“Not bad, all things considered.” He raised his hands from the counter top, then, as if unsure what to do with them, put them down again. “No one's called me Mack since I left the job. What's in a name, eh?”

“Have you got a few minutes?”

The copy machine stopped with a final
cat-a-chunk
, followed by a grating whine as the sorter retracted. Ron Mackie lifted his hands from the counter and dropped them to his sides. “Gimme a couple of minutes to finish up this job, then we can go get a coffee.”

Ten minutes later, Shoe and Mackie were sitting under an umbrella on the sidewalk terrace of a coffee and sandwich place across Weston Road from Mackie's print shop. Mackie was drinking a frothy iced coffee concoction from a tall glass. Shoe had regular coffee.

“I was surprised when Hannah told me you weren't still a cop,” Mackie said. “Not sure why I was surprised, now that I think about it. You miss it at all?”

“No,” Shoe said. He didn't want to ask Mackie if he missed being a cop, since he was responsible for ending Mackie's career.

“I did,” Mackie said. “For a while. I got over it. I still keep in touch with some of my old pals, though. Like street gangs, the cops isn't a club that's easy to quit.” He sipped his iced coffee, wiped his mouth with a waddedup serviette. He seemed nervous, Shoe thought. What did he have to be nervous about?

“Things turned out okay for me, though,” Mackie went on. “Between the disability and some good investments, I'm doing okay. More'n okay, actually. I don't really need to keep working, but the shop pays for itself and the wife says it keeps me out from underfoot. Some days, though, I think seriously about packing it in. Hannah tell you about this crazy woman who's been giving me grief?”