The Further Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn (48 page)

Grace Lipinski, the Faculty Club manager, was at the entrance to the bar arranging some dazzling branches of forsythia in a Chinese vase the colour of a new fern.

“I brought back the dishes,” I said, “with thanks.”

“Anytime,” she said. “And while you’re here, you can take back the picture that the cleaning people found. It was just in with the paper towels, but I wiped down the frame and glass with disinfectant to be on the safe side.”

“You’re a wonder,” I said.

“Tell the board,” she said. “I’ll be right back. Enjoy the forsythia.”

Grace disappeared, but I wasn’t alone for long. Old Giv Mewhort was standing at the bar and, when he spotted me, he picked up his drink and started over. He moved with great precision, careful not to spill so much as a single drop of gin
in the glass in his hand. It was mid-afternoon, but Giv had already reached the orotund stage of drunkenness.

“My dear,” he said. “I haven’t had a chance to tell you how distressed I was to see that young Cassius has taken your place on that political show. Did you step aside or were you pushed?”

“I was pushed,” I said, “by young Cassius.”

Giv sipped his drink and sighed. “ ‘Such men as he be never at heart’s ease/Whiles they behold a greater than themselves,/And therefore are they very dangerous.’ ”

I smiled at him. “Thanks for the warning,” I said. “But I think Tom Kelsoe’s done about all the damage to me that he can.”

Giv leaned forward and whispered ginnily. “Don’t bet the farm on it, Joanne.” He pointed towards the back of the bar and roared dramatically. “ ‘Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look.…’ See for yourself.” I turned and glanced into the bar. On the couch in the far corner, two men were deep in conversation. They were so close together and so intent on their conversation that they seemed oblivious to everything around them. One of the men was Tom Kelsoe, the other was Ed Mariani. I felt the way I had in high school when I’d poured my heart out to my best friend and discovered her ten minutes later, laughing and intimate with the one girl in school I considered my enemy.

Grace came back with the photograph and handed it to me. “It’s all yours,” she said.

Giv Mewhort leaned across me and gave the picture of Reed Gallagher and Annalie Brinkmann the once-over. “So he gave it back,” he said. “The Human Comedy never fails to surprise, does it? Although I must say that I never understood why he nicked that photo in the first place.”

“You know who took this?” I asked.

Giv waved his glass towards the recesses of the bar. “Young Cassius.” He laughed. “I warned you, my dear. ‘He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.’ ”

When I slid behind the steering wheel of the Volvo, I realized how badly the scene in the Faculty Club had shaken me. Like Giv, I didn’t understand why anyone would want to take an old newspaper photograph. But while the news that Tom Kelsoe was a thief was unnerving, it was the sight of Ed Mariani cosying up to him that had jolted me.

They were colleagues. There were a half-dozen innocent reasons for them to have a quick meeting in the Faculty Club. But in my heart, I knew there was nothing innocent about their meeting. For reasons I couldn’t fathom, Ed had run to Tom as soon as I’d told him my suspicions. For a moment, I thought I was going to be sick to my stomach. It had never occurred to me not to trust Ed. I had told him everything: first about Kellee, and now about Jill.

I put my head down on the steering wheel and tried to think. At the moment, there was nothing I could do about the situation with Jill. She was in Toronto. I couldn’t get to her, but neither could Tom Kelsoe. For the time being, she was safe. I didn’t have that assurance about Kellee Savage. I’d already failed her twice, but there was still time to make amends. It was April 5. If Kellee Savage hadn’t paid the rent for her room on Scarth Street, Alma Stringer might be interested in showing me the room.

When I got to Scarth Street, Alma was hammering a piece of laminated poster-board to the wall next to the mailboxes in the front hall. “I thought you and me did all the business we were going to do,” she said.

I pulled a twenty-dollar bill from my wallet and held it up. “I want to see room six. I just want to look at it; I promise I
won’t touch anything. You can stand in the doorway and watch me if you like.”

Alma’s fingers took the twenty so quickly the act seemed like sleight-of-hand. Then, without a word, she turned and walked into the house. I followed along behind. She had an old-fashioned key-ring attached to the belt of her pedal pushers and she stopped in front of number 6 and leaned into the door to insert the key in the lock.

I don’t know what Alma had expected to find on the other side of the door, but it was obvious from her shriek of fury that she hadn’t anticipated being confronted by a room that seemed, quite literally, to have been torn apart. Whoever had destroyed Kellee’s room had been as mindlessly destructive and as efficient as the vandals who had attacked the Journalism offices at the university. Bureau drawers were pulled out and overturned; the sheets had been ripped off the bed; the mattress had been dragged to the floor. The table had been upended and the drawer that held utensils had been flung across the room.

Alma looked at the mess, and said, “If shit was luck, I wouldn’t get a sniff.”

“Are you going to call the police?” I asked.

She laughed derisively. “Sure. That’s what I’m gonna do. And have them all over the place, tracking in mud, leaving the door open, runnin’ up my heating bill. No, little Miss Goody Two-Shoes, I’m not gonna call the police. I’m gonna hand the rummy in the front room a ten and get him to clean this up, so I can rent it.” She started down the hall.

“Wait,” I said. “When was the last time you were in here?”

“You know, that’s quite a mess in there,” she said innocently. “That rummy’s probably gonna want at least twenty bucks.”

I opened my wallet and pulled out my last twenty. Alma bagged it in a snap. “The last time I was in number six was
the day she moved in, and that was January. As long as my tenants don’t bother me, I don’t bother them. We both like it like that.”

“But Kellee hadn’t paid her rent for April.”

“I figured I’d let her use up her damage deposit.” She smoothed her thin yellow hair. “I try to be decent. Now, unless you got the wherewithal to keep the meter running, get outa here. I got work to do.”

When she left, I stood for a moment in front of the locked door of number 6. I hadn’t had much time to look around, but even a quick glance had revealed there wasn’t much in the room that was personal. There were a few items of lingerie near the overturned bureau drawers and a flowery plastic toilet kit had been flung into the corner, but there didn’t seem to be nearly the quantity of personal effects you’d expect to find in a room someone actually lived in. It was apparent that Kellee had pretty well moved out by the time her intruder had trashed the room.

I walked back up the hall. Alma’s laminated sheet was a bright square against the faded wallpaper. It was headed “Rules of This House,” and a quick glance revealed that Alma had a an Old Testament gift for conjuring up activities that could be proscribed. Beside the list was the rack of mailboxes Julie had told me about. Sure enough, Kellee had placed a happy face sticker beside her name; I looked at her box more closely. There was no lock on it. I opened the lid and pulled out her mail. There wasn’t much: what appeared to be a statement from the Credit Union, the May issue of
Flare
magazine; a couple of envelopes addressed to “Occupant,” and the cardboard end flap from a cigarette package. On the flap, someone had pencilled a message. “I’ve moved. #3, 2245 Dahl. B.”

I stuck the cigarette flap in my bag. It was a slender thread, but it was all I had. I walked back to the Volvo, slid into the driver’s seat, and headed for Dahl Street.

CHAPTER

11

As I walked up the front path of 2245 Dahl Street, the building cast a shadow that seemed to race towards me, and I knew I’d had enough of sinister rooming houses with their emanations of despair and of hard-lived lives. This place was even worse than Alma’s. The paint on the Scarth Street house might have been peeling and the porches might have been sagging, but it was still possible to spot vestiges of the building’s former elegance and coquettish charm. There were no suggestions of past glory here. The apartment on Dahl Street had been a squat eyesore the day it was built, and sixty years of neglect hadn’t improved it.

Someone had propped the front door open with a brick, and I thought I was in luck, but inside the vestibule there was a second door, and this one was locked tight. I pounded on the door, but when no one came I could feel the relief wash over me. I’d done my best, but my best hadn’t been good enough. I was off the hook. As I turned to leave, a tortoise-shell kitten darted in from the street and ran between my legs. It was wet and dirty, but when I reached down to reassure it, it shot back out the door. My fingers were damp from where I had touched
its fur and when I raised my hand to my nose, I could smell kerosene.

I hurried down the steps, eager to put some distance between me and this neighbourhood where horrors that should have been unimaginable were part of everyday life. I’d parked across the street, and before I opened the door of the Volvo, I took a last look at 2245 Dahl Street. The fire escape on the side of the building zigzagged up the wall like a scar. In case of fire, it would have been almost impossible to get down those metal steps. The life of the tenants had spilled out onto them, and the steps had become the final resting place of beer bottles, broken plant pots, and anything else small enough and useless enough to be abandoned. On the step outside number 3 someone had propped a statue of the Virgin Mary. According to the message on the cigarette flap, number 3 was B’s flat. It seemed that Kellee’s friend was a person with a faith life. I looked up the fire escape again. The door on the third floor was open a crack. It didn’t look inviting, but it did look accessible. My time off the hook was over.

Climbing the fire escape was a nightmare. Picking my way through the litter meant watching my feet, and that involved peering through the metal-runged steps at the ground below. The effect was vertiginous, and by the time I’d reached the landing outside the door to number 3, my head was reeling, and I had to hold onto the Virgin’s head to get my balance.

Inside, a television was playing; I could hear the strident accusing voices of people on one of the tabloid talk shows.

I leaned into the opening of the door. “Anybody home?” I asked.

There was no answer. I pushed, opening the door a little more. “Can you help me?” I called. “I’m looking for someone who lives here.”

On the television, a man was shouting, “you ruined my life … you ruined my life,” as the studio audience cheered.

Nobody home but Ricki Lake. I turned to go back down, but when looked at through three flights of metal staircase, the ground seemed a dizzying distance away. It didn’t take me long to decide that slipping into the house and leaving by the front door made more sense than plummeting to my death. I pushed the back door open and stepped inside. The kitchen was small and as clean as it would ever be. The linoleum had faded from red to brown, and it was curling in the area in front of the sink, but the floor was scrubbed, and the dishes on the drainboard were clean. The refrigerator door was covered with children’s drawings and an impressive collection of the cards of doctors at walk-in medical clinics.

The curtains in the living room were drawn; the only illumination in the room came from the flickering light of the television. Still, it was easy enough to pick out the front door, and that’s where I was headed when my toe caught on the edge of the carpet. As I stumbled, I caught hold of the back of the couch to break my fall. That’s when I saw the woman. She was lying on the couch, covered with a blanket, but when our eyes met, she made a mewling sound and tried to raise herself up.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was looking for someone.”

She stared at me without comprehension. She was a native woman, and she seemed to be in her thirties. It was hard to see her clearly in the shadowy room, but it wasn’t hard to hear her. As she grew more frantic, the sounds she made became high-pitched and ear-splittingly intense.

I tried to be reassuring. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m leaving. I’m not going to hurt you.” I reached the door, but as my hand grasped the knob, the door opened from the outside.

The woman who exploded through the door was on the shady side of forty, but she had apparently decided not to go gently into middle age. Her mane of shoulder-length blond hair was extravagantly teased, her mascara was black and thick, and her lipstick was a whiter shade of pale. She was wearing a fringed white leatherette jacket, a matching miniskirt, and the kind of boots Nancy Sinatra used to sing about.

She was not happy to see me. “Who the fuck are you?” she rasped. “And what the fuck are you doing in my living room?”

“My name’s Joanne Kilbourn, and I’m trying to find Kellee Savage.”

She reached beside her, flicked on the light switch and gave me the once-over. “Social worker or cop?” she asked.

“What?”

She narrowed her eyes. “I asked you if you were a social worker or a cop.”

“Neither. I’m Kellee’s teacher.”

“Well, Teacher, as the song says, ‘take the time to look around you.’ This isn’t a school. This is a private residence.”

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the cigarette flap with the address. “I found this in Kellee’s mailbox. It has your address on it. Are you B?”

She took a step towards me. Her perfume was heavy, but not unpleasant. “Teacher,” she said, “let’s see how good you are at learning. Listen carefully. This is my home, and I want you out of it.”

“I just wanted to ask …”

She wagged her finger in my face. “You weren’t listening,” she said. She grabbed my arm and twisted it behind my back. As she propelled me through the door, she gave me a wicked smile and whispered, “Class dismissed.”