Why Men Lie (28 page)

Now the paralysis of dread set in, the disorienting doubt. The integrity of his reaction left her baffled.

“Did JC just leave?” It was Duncan, his face perplexed.

She nodded.

“What happened?”

She shrugged, distrustful of her voice.

Duncan sat.

“I asked him about that Tammy,” she said finally.

Duncan sighed, folded his hands across his stomach. “And what did he tell you?”

“Nothing.”

Duncan reached for the whisky bottle and the now well-used water glass, poured a modest drink. Sighed again.

“I’ve known about her for months,” Effie said. “At first it never crossed my mind that he’d be so irresponsible …”

“You said he told you nothing,” Duncan said.

She struggled not to shout. “For God’s sake, he didn’t have to. I’m not a child. I know what men want from people like that. But Jesus, some child prostitute in an alleyway on Gerrard Street? You’d think he could do better than that.”

“Stop, stop, stop,” Duncan said. “People will hear you. And you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Well, if you know so much, you tell me,” she said, tears threatening.

Duncan shook his head slowly, then sipped his drink. “He made me promise not to tell anybody.”

“Tell anybody what?” she said.

“How about if I track him down and talk him into telling you himself?” He leaned close to her, put a hand on her arm.

“Am I interrupting something?” Sextus said from the doorway.

Duncan looked up sharply. “Come back later.”

Sextus backed off.

“No,” Effie said. “You have to tell me now. Later won’t matter. Consider it a moral compromise for a higher cause.”

Duncan smiled. “Right. Moral compromise. My specialty.”

“I didn’t mean that,” she said.

“Secrets are funny,” he said. “They demand fidelity regardless of their worth. Even an unworthy secret is a test of character. That’s why I’ve never messed with your secrets.” He drank.

She studied his face, meeting his searching eyes. “I don’t need a
priest just now,” she said. “I need a brother. More than that, I need a friend.”

He stood. “He’s looking for somebody. He’s kind of desperate.”

“Who could he be looking for that would make him that desperate?” she asked.

Duncan sat again. “I’m surprised he didn’t tell you. I don’t know why he wouldn’t. He cares a lot about you, you know. Maybe he wanted to protect you.”

“From what?” she said.

“You didn’t know that he has a granddaughter?”

“A what?”

“A granddaughter.”

“Not that Tammy?”

“No, not Tammy. I understand you met the girl’s mother last summer. She lives in Port Hawkesbury.”

Effie nodded.

“Anyway, his daughter grew up in Isle Madame. And years ago she—I think her name is Sylvia—had a daughter that she never told JC about, until recently. I don’t know why he didn’t let you in on it.”

“And she’s in Toronto?”

“We think. She was last seen in Halifax. She had a black boyfriend, which the mother found … alarming. The mother did some checking, learned some unsavoury details about the guy, who’s more than ten years older than the kid. Anyway, she heard that this boyfriend was a pimp, running girls from Halifax in Toronto. It isn’t an implausible story.”

“Black boyfriends don’t have to be pimps,” Effie said tartly.

“You think I don’t know that?” he said. “In any case, JC asked me to help find her, to make some inquiries around the shelter. I didn’t
know he’d launched his own investigation … until I saw him talking to Tammy one night a few months ago. But that’s the story.”

“You’re right,” she said sorrowfully. “I don’t know why he didn’t tell me.”

“He’s always been a complicated guy.”

“And guys never change.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Duncan. “Now why don’t you come downstairs with me, mingle a bit. It’s a big day for your daughter.”

“I think I’ll go home,” she said.

A
fter Cassie’s wedding there was a week of silence. Finally she called him, got the answering machine, apologized. She didn’t try to qualify or evade. She’d been wrong. She had given it a lot of thought. Her grotesque suspicion had been unforgivable. But by offering an apology, she might at least recover a small measure of her self-respect.

The waves of self-reproach had been cleansing, in a way. Taken as a whole, her lives with men, for all the grief, had immunized her to a very real extent. Finally she understood that self-reproach was just another opportunity for self-improvement. It was, really, diagnostic. And after a long night of anger, loneliness, sorrow, self-pity, fear of growing old alone and, finally, the flood of tears, she felt a transformation. Failure was, she realized, a form of therapy.

Sextus called on April twentieth. She hadn’t heard from him in ten days. He seemed subdued.

“Just wondering how you are,” he said.

“I’m okay,” she said. “And you?”

“I’m good. Look, I’m sorry if I seemed to be hitting on you at the wedding. But you know me.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I don’t think I’ll be sticking around,” he said. “Think I’ll head back. Maybe you can check their place now and then while they’re away, honeymooning or whatever. I find it creepy, being here with all their stuff. Every time I open a drawer, I’m afraid of what I’ll find.” His laugh was humourless.

She felt an impulse to offer comfort, but she resisted it.

“I’ll be down probably in July,” she volunteered. “John’s baby must be due about then.”

“That’s what I hear,” he said. “I don’t suppose you got around to reading the great memoir yet.”

“Not yet,” she said. Again she resisted offering the reassurance that might comfort. A white lie would have been appropriate: “I’ve only started” or “I’ll give you my reaction when I’ve had time to read a bit more.” Her new protocol: words reserved for comprehension, stripped of sentimental purpose.

“So we’ll probably see you down there,” he said.

“
Ma bhios mi beo
,” she said.

“Whatever that means.”

“Your dad would say that anytime he was referring to some possible future happening. ‘If I’m alive.’ ”

He laughed. “That was the old man being the optimist.”

“Bye for now,” she said.

“Bye.”

She’d hardly put the phone down when it rang again. He had an afterthought, perhaps.

“Yes?” she said.

But there was only silence.

Three days after she had left the apology on JC’s answering machine, he called back and asked if they could get together. Maybe for a drink or dinner.

“Would that be wise?” she wondered.

Wise or not, he said, there was a lot to be explained. By both. “I was surprised to hear you apologize,” he said. “I wasn’t sure why.”

“I jumped to some dire conclusions. I was wrong.”

“Well,” he said, “not necessarily. Not in the circumstances.”

“What circumstances?”

“I realized afterwards, when I thought it through. You don’t know me very well. Blind trust is a lot to expect from someone who doesn’t really know you.”

“I wonder if it’s too late to correct that,” she said.

“Let’s see,” he said.

They had lunch and, on the Friday, dinner. And she went home with him and stayed the weekend. They mostly talked, but in the intervals the physical intensity obliterated doubt.

The girl he was looking for had always been a problem for her mother, her teachers, the entire community. She was barely sixteen, but she’d been missing for months. There had always been, it seemed, conflict with her mom, so when she’d asked to spend a weekend with some friends in Halifax last fall, her mother welcomed the prospect of her absence. She began to worry, though, when days passed with no contact from the girl.

Her name was Marguerite. She had told her mother that she would stay with some university students she knew from high school. She’d always been advanced in school, doubled up some grades, and as a consequence she ran with an older crowd of kids.
Her mother speculated that it would have been a strain on her, always trying to keep up, that it explained why she was so resentful of anything that drew attention to her immaturity.

By mid-week Sylvia had contacted the Halifax police, who, in the manner of policemen everywhere, declined to take the matter seriously. She was probably a runaway. There were legions of them out there, teenagers on the lam from parents, boredom and authority. Eventually they surfaced somewhere—most of them, at least.

But they’d obviously gone looking. A week after her first call, they were able to inform her that the kid had been seen in the company of a black man whose name they hadn’t yet been able to obtain. They’d been spotted in a dense complex of downtown drinking establishments known to the young in Halifax as the Liquor Dome. The girl didn’t look unhappy, according to the bouncer who had recognized her photograph.

Further independent inquiries by her mother produced the worrying intelligence that a number of young black men were recruiting prostitutes in Halifax and moving them to Toronto. Sylvia convinced herself that this had been her daughter’s fate and begged JC for help.

“When did she bring you into it?” Effie asked.

“In January sometime.”

“And you never thought of telling me?”

He shrugged. “I guess I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“But now …?”

“Let’s hope.”

JC had eventually discussed the problem with Duncan, who promised to make some inquiries: his homeless friends might have noticed someone new among the hookers on the street.

Effie interrupted, “I hope you aren’t angry at Duncan for telling me.”

“I should have told you myself. I don’t know why I didn’t.”

“She matters to you, doesn’t she?”

“She matters. I don’t know why.”

He had immediately started making casual inquiries in places frequented by men in search of sex that was quick, anonymous and cheap. He met Tammy. He’d heard a rumour that she had a black boyfriend who came from Halifax. She brushed him off, even attacked him once. It only made him more persistent. Eventually she agreed to help him. “I figured it was just to get rid of me,” he said. “But I gave her my business card, just in case.”

“When was that?” she asked. “The card.”

He shrugged. “I forget. A month or so ago. On Jarvis.”

“You’ve heard nothing more?”

“Nothing.”

She fought a wave of remorse. “I can’t imagine how you feel.”

“Feel? I’m impressed. You managed to find out more than I could without really trying. How did you pull that off?”

“I was spying on you,” she said. “I just didn’t know what to think. I know it was … I saw you with this Tammy once. I just happened to be driving along Jarvis, and there you were. Sometime later, I saw her again, and she was with another girl. By the time I stopped, she was gone, but—”

“Another girl?”

“She was a black girl. I told her I was Father Duncan’s sister, and that was when she mentioned her brother, Robert—Tammy’s boyfriend, I think. And St. Jamestown.”

He shook his head. “A needle in a haystack. Some hustler named Robert in St. Jamestown.”

“You’ve been there looking, though?”

He nodded. “Now I can’t find Tammy either. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter, does it? The world is full of Tammys and Roberts and Marguerites. Lost people, all of them. Just getting by. Trying not to think of where they’re heading. Every one of them a product of some other loss.”

She placed a hand on his. “At the end of the day, it does matter.” She smiled at him. “I never thought I’d hear either of us using that tired expression. ‘At the end of the day.’ Somebody I knew used it till I thought I’d lose my mind.”

“Your Conor.”

“How did you guess?”

“The Irish love it. ‘At the end of the day.’ It suits their outlook perfectly.” His accent was a perfect imitation of a Belfast lilt. “Whatever became of that fellow, anyway?”

“He died suddenly,” she said.

“You said once that you suspected he was a terrorist.”

“I said that?” She shrugged. “I suppose he was.”

“Was it …?”

“No,” she said. “Nothing like that. He owned some gyms. One day he was jogging on a treadmill, and that was when it happened.”

JC laughed. “Sorry. But that’s kind of weird.”

“It was at the time of all the hunger strikers, and he was all worked up over that.”

“I covered the hunger strikers,” he said.

“I suppose you did.”

“You realize that he was probably a gunrunner. The IRA had them planted all over the world, set up as legitimate businessmen. There was even a banker here in Toronto.”

“Conor was getting out of it. He promised me.”

“Men promise all sorts of things.” He was smiling.

“Conor always told the truth. He told me he’d only lied to me once. And that was about Sextus.”

JC was frowning. “What about Sextus?”

“Shortly before he died, he told me Sextus probably wasn’t as bad as he’d made him out to be. Conor didn’t like reporters much.”

“You’re kidding. He told you that?” He laughed abruptly. “You’re sure he died on a treadmill?”

“He died on a treadmill. It was a heart attack. I saw the death certificate.”

“I can’t imagine—”

“I hate it when you go away,” she interrupted.

“I hate to go away,” he said.

“I know you do.”

On May 19, Molly Blue phoned to let her know that she’d just seen the story on the AP wire: the stay of execution for Sam Williams had been vacated by a U.S. circuit court in New Orleans. Effie didn’t understand what she was being told. “Does this mean he’s been reprieved again?” she asked.

“No. The opposite,” Molly said. “It means he’ll be getting another execution date any day now, and we’d better get ready for it.”

“Does JC know?”

“I’d be surprised if he didn’t,” Molly said. “I expect he heard the news straight from the guy’s lawyer.”

Effie thanked her for the call.

JC called five minutes later. “There’ll probably be something in the papers about Sam tomorrow,” he said. “It’s my guess they’ll be setting a new execution date fairly soon.” He sounded weary.