Sam Kelly stood up and shook his visitor’s hand. He gestured to the chair opposite his desk. The stocky middle-aged man flirted with a smile. Sam took a seat. His visitor sat.
“I could have come to your home,” Sam said, sweeping some papers he’d been looking at off to one side of his desk. “Thanks for coming to see me, Mr. Gray.”
“It’s Frank. Ruth said you’d been at the house.” Frank smiled uncomfortably, looking around the detective’s office. “She was concerned that I was in some sort of trouble. I’ve never been in any trouble with the law.” 101
“Relax, Frank. This isn’t an interrogation. Just a friendly interview,” the detective said.
Frank seemed to jerk slightly as he nodded. He ran his hand through his thinning hair.
“Not like television?” the detective asked.
Frank shook his head. “Neater,” he replied, his smile flickering on his lips. “Police shows have messy offices and filthy streets. There are more filing cabinets than I expected. And I expected to see pimps, hookers, drug dealers lining the walls. You have someone come in here and clean up?”
The detective chuckled. “I like to clean my own office. It gives me time to think. Most of the time there isn’t much else to do.”
“I thought the police were overworked.”
“Traffic is. We don’t get too many homicides out here in the suburbs.
Can I get you a coffee?”
Frank declined, his eyes still darting around the room as if he were looking for a quick getaway. The detective stepped out of the office into the hall and grabbed himself a cup of coffee. Sugar and cream were nonexistent. He was getting tired of drinking coffee black. He glanced in-to his office. Frank Gray was still fidgeting in his chair. Probably scared out of his mind, the detective thought.
“Let’s see what we have,” the detective said as he wheeled into his chair and looked down at his notes. “Did Ruth tell you anything about our conversation?”
“Some,” Frank responded, looking into his lap like a schoolboy who has forgotten to do his homework. “Didn’t make a lot of sense. Ruth was upset. She thinks I’m in some kind of trouble. You know the way women fret.”
The detective rubbed his chin with the end of his pen.
“I didn’t mean to upset your wife, Frank. But there are a lot of leads we have to follow up on and… Why don’t I give you a brief outline of the case.”
For several minutes the detective entertained Frank with the tale about a man dying on the corner of Bloor and Botfield and the police report on the fellow who had discovered him and how his name was the same as Frank’s. Frank listened attentively but said nothing. The detective waited. The two men looked at each other for some time.
“When did this happen?” Frank asked as he straightened up in his chair, leaning slightly forward.
The detective smiled uncomfortably for a minute and shook his head.
“Why would you ask that?” He tapped the end of his pen on the desk and then, noticing that Frank had become mesmerized by the pen, put it down. “That’s my problem. A fellow, we don’t know who he was, came into the Zig Zag last week and reported to the bartender that a man had just died on the sidewalk only a few yards from the front door of the tavern. We have no record of anyone dying on that corner that evening, or any evening that year. But we do have a record of someone dying on that corner thirty odd years before.”
Frank stared at the officer.
“This is a joke, right?” he cried.
Sam Kelly shook his head.
Frank took a deep breath, his nostrils flaring, his complexion growing red. “You have a guy dying on the sidewalk thirty years ago, and some guy who saw the incident reported it to a bartender a week ago. And someone with my name is mentioned in the case and you don’t think this is a colossal joke?”
“I don’t know what it is,” the detective confessed. “Do you know Joe Mackenzie?”
Frank, still agitated, moved about his chair like a caged animal.
“What do you mean you don’t know what it is? You upset my wife and dragged me all the way down to your office for this?” For several minutes Sam Kelly sat silently in his chair and let Frank blow off steam. Although he’d stopped ranting, Frank’s rage seemed to move inside, like a brush fire running under the forest canopy. Sweat ran down his forehead. His breathing grew shorter and labored. The detective left the room and returned a minute later with a paper cup of water.
Frank took a few swallows of water. When his breathing began to relax, Frank took a small container of pills from his shirt pocket and popped one in his mouth. He finished off the water. The detective offered to get him some more water but Frank declined.
“It’s almost gone,” Frank said wiping the sweat off his forehead and neck with some tissues he found in a box on the officer’s desk. “I’ll be all right now.”
“You sure?” the detective asked. “We could continue this some other time. I wasn’t trying to get you upset, Mr. Gray.”
“No, I’m all right. Sometimes I overreact to situations. Doctor tells me that I’ve got to monitor my rage. I know you’re just doing your duty, Officer. And you have your procedures. I was so laid-back when I was a kid. Can you believe it? People said I had ice water in my veins. But 103 now… I just can’t be sure that at any moment I might explode. I’m like a bomb.”
Frank chuckled as he continued to wipe the sweat off.
“Used to be as cool as a cucumber.”
The detective smiled politely and returned to his chair. God, he didn’t want someone dying in his office. He’d interrogated many prisoners, for minor offences in the main, but he’d never had someone implode right in front of him.
Frank leaned forward, and spoke to the detective in a whisper as if he were sharing a personal anecdote. “Are you afraid of dying, Detective?”
“I’d like to avoid it,” Sam said with a smile.
Frank did not. He was in earnest.
“I figure that when you die, you end up in a room. The room is empty.
No windows, no furniture, no door. And it’s dark. Not pitch black, but the darkness just before complete nightfall. Just enough light to see that you are alone in a room.”
“Like being buried alive?”
“Ya, in a way,” Frank said, nodding, “except you’re not horizontal and you don’t have trouble breathing, and you can walk around. But you’re in the room and you wait.”
“Waiting for what?”
“Do you mind if I smoke?” Frank gestured to the pack of cigarettes on the officer’s desk. Although the detective didn’t smoke himself, he found it helpful to have a pack around for interviews. It helped to loosen tongues.
Sam nodded. Frank grabbed the pack, removed a cigarette and the matches that were tucked inside, and lit up.
“Haven’t smoked in years,” Frank sighed, the smoke swirling out of his nostrils. “Doctor’s orders.”
The detective was about to suggest that Frank might want to put the cigarette out when Frank insisted that they continue the interview.
“Do you know Joe Mackenzie?”
Frank thought for a moment. “Didn’t he live in that old farmhouse in the hydro field near Echo Valley?”
“Still does.”
“I thought that place had been abandoned for years.” The detective leaned back in his chair for a few minutes. He opened a drawer in his desk and took out a pad and scribbled something in it.
“You live around here all of your life, Frank?” he asked.
“Most of it. Lived in Windsor for a while. That’s where I met Ruth. At college.”
Frank stopped talking. The detective looked at Frank and waited.
“I had more hair then,” Frank said, running his hand through his thinning hair.
The detective smiled.
“Red hair if you can believe it. Ruth was a great beauty on campus.
Long black hair. People used to call us Sonny and Cher. After the singing duo. We sort of fell in love at first sight. Been together ever since. I was kind of a quiet kid. Didn’t have many girls. Ruth had a boyfriend when I saw her the first time. I don’t think I’m being of much help. I just don’t have much to say that amounts to anything.”
“I don’t know what’s helpful. Continue, Frank.” Sam knew that Frank had to talk. Perhaps it would reveal more than Kelly’s questions could elicit.
Frank smiled. “Her boyfriend gave me a nickname.”
“Red?” the detective asked.
Frank shook his head. “Puppy Dog. What a name, eh?”
“Well,” the detective smiled. “You got the girl so I guess the dog got the last bark.”
Frank laughed quietly.
“Did you know June Mackenzie, Joe’s wife?” Sam asked. “Her maiden name was Hare before she married.”
“There were some Hares that went to school with us. One of them was a girl, I think. Can’t remember her name. What does she have to do with the fellow dying outside the Zig Zag?”
“She disappeared,” the detective replied.
“Didn’t she run off with some fellow?” Frank asked. “Some ex-hockey player.”
The detective nodded. “How about a Joseph Begin? Have you heard of him?”
Frank shook his head.
“What’s all this about, Officer?”
“Missing persons.”
Frank’s eyes dropped. “Our son disappeared,” he said, his voice tentative.
“Yes, I know.” The detective spoke softly now. He didn’t want to go through another meltdown with Frank.
“Ruth, she never got over it. Keeps thinking Johnny will come back.
He ain’t coming back, Detective. We would have heard something from 105 him, if for no other reason than to bum money off us. Johnny was a loser.
He was never good at anything. Looks and personality, but no character.
He was my son and I loved him, but he was a bum.” Margaret
“What did you do?” Adelle asked Cathy, her eyes wide with anticipation.
Cathy leaned across the restaurant table in the booth the two girls occupied. “I kneed him in the balls!”
Adelle clapped her hands, leaned back, and laughed. Cathy smiled.
“Nobody is going to try that crap on me.” Cathy’s voice was sharp and bitter. “You were right though. The guy is a creep and to think I let him touch me. God, it makes me feel so sleazy to think that I touched…” Margaret arrived at the table to take the girls’ order. With her hair pinned up, her thin bosom-less body, and the low sarcastic voice that slipped out of the side of her mouth, she was, for the girls, the anti-fe-male. The girls looked up with disgust. Couldn’t she see that they were talking? The girls ordered.
“You dragged me over here for a Coke and two straws?” Margaret said with a snarl.
Cathy looked up and smiled with as much charm as she could garner.
“We are having a conversation,” Cathy said, enunciating each word as if she were speaking to someone who did not understand the English language.
Adelle turned and raised her eyebrows, giving parenthesis to Cathy’s declaration.
Margaret tapped her pencil impatiently on her ordering pad, leaned to one side, and smiled. “We are running a business,” she replied. And then leaning over the table, added, “And if you ladies give me any more of this snotty business, you’ll no longer be welcome in this establishment.” The two girls were silent for a brief moment before Adelle added, “I’ll have toast.”
Margaret returned to the counter.
“Where is she coming from?” Adelle cried.
“What a bitch!” Cathy whispered.
“No wonder there’s never anyone in this place,” Adelle added, her eye on Margaret. “I would never talk to a customer like that. Mr. Leblanc would fire me on the spot. She must be going through the change. My mother’s like that. The other day she went into a rage because I used a 106 bit of her makeup. There was hardly anything left in the tube of face cream and she blames me because it’s all gone. Like it’s my fault that she didn’t buy more. She uses my tampons and I don’t scream at her. Why do women become such witches? If I turn out like that, promise me you’ll have me put down.”
Margaret returned with the girls’ Coke and toast. Both girls smiled at the waitress. Margaret shook her head.
“Why did you go to the beach with him?” Adelle asked once Margaret had departed.
“I didn’t go to the beach. We just ended up there,” Cathy explained as she placed her straw in the Coke. “I was feeling sorry for the guy. It was kind of obvious what he had in mind once we got there, but I felt this ob-ligation to be fair with him. Why do we bother? No matter what I said, he wouldn’t let up. At least when I ask Terry for space, he gives it to me.
But Johnny thinks he’s owed something. Like I should drop to my knees and do him. I am not his right hand.”
Adelle giggled. “You are terrible. Not his right hand. I’ll have to remember that one.”
“We started to argue. You know how boys are. He thinks he’s the one being reasonable and I’m being this incredible bitch because I want to talk about certain issues. What is a relationship if you can’t discuss things like adults? He starts telling me I’m yelling. Trying to paint me as hysterical. I was just so bloody frustrated trying to get him to talk. And then he gets physical with me. Pushes me to the sand and starts to undo his pants. When he tried to fuck me, I gave him the knee. He barfed. I rolled away but still got some on my hair. Yuck! What an asshole! How could I have ever let that slug between my legs? You warned me but I couldn’t see it. It’s like you’re so in love with someone that you don’t see them for who they really are.”
“You’re love blind,” Adelle added, pushing the toast to one side. Taking the second straw, she placed it in the coke and began to sip.
“Exactly.” Cathy nodded and paused to take a mouthful of Coke. “It makes you think that you can’t ever trust them. No wonder some chicks become lesbians. Women understand women. But men! It’s like you’re dealing with an alien species.”
“I could never do that,” Adelle said.
“What?”
The two girls sucked on the drink, their foreheads pressed against each other.
“The lesbian thing,” Adelle explained.
Cathy laughed. “You didn’t think I-”
“Of course not,” Adelle interrupted. “Just a point of information.
We’re stuck as heterosexuals. Like, I don’t care how desperate I was, I couldn’t become a lesbian. I’d rather enter a convent. Anyway, I’m still sort of a virgin.”
Cathy giggled. “What’s sort of a virgin?”
Adelle blushed, then whispered in Cathy’s ear.
“You don’t swallow!” Cathy roared with laughter.
“Not so loud,” Adelle cried with tears of laughter in her eyes.
When Adelle had recovered from laughing, she asked, “What happened next?”
“After Johnny upchucked?”
Adelle nodded.
Cathy continued. “He drove me home. He didn’t talk. He looked kind of sickly to tell you the truth. I was really pissed. I guess I laid it on kind of thick on the way back. He deserved it. Even after he dropped me off, I was in a state. Then my mother starts yelling at me about how she didn’t know where I was and all of my friends were out looking for me and that she had half a mind to ground me. I told her she had half a mind.”
“You didn’t!” Adelle gasped.
Cathy shook her head. “But I felt like it. God, she can be so annoying.
Your mother can’t hold a candle to mine in the nagging department. Sometimes I wish my father would slug her. I took a shower and washed Johnny out of my hair. And then I phoned Terry.”
“You didn’t!”
Cathy nodded. “I had to tell someone. He said he was going to kill Johnny. Fat chance of that, eh. Johnny was on the college wrestling team.
Until he got kicked off for drinking at a meet.”
“Don’t you feel kind of guilty now?” Adelle asked.
“About what? Terry getting beaten up? I warned him not to go after Johnny. He is so stupid sometimes. I can take care of myself. I don’t need Terry going around acting like Sir Lancelot.” The two girls leaned over the table and finished their drink. They looked at the toast.
“I am definitely not eating that,” Adelle said, making a face of complete revulsion. “It’s dripping with calories.” Cathy grabbed the toast. “I’m famished,” she said.
Detective Kelly sipped at his coffee as he sat at the counter.
“The blueberry pie is fresh,” Margaret said. She’d always had a soft spot for a man in uniform, although technically Sam wasn’t in uniform.
Still, he was a cop. Her husband had been a fireman.
“Well, then I’ll have a piece.” The detective smiled.
Margaret turned away, returning a moment later with a slice of pie and a fork. The detective took a piece and smiled. Love to watch a man eat.
“This is good, Margaret,” he said, wiping his mouth with a napkin.
Margaret leaned against the counter and lit up a cigarette.
“I didn’t make it, so you don’t have to pretend that it’s good.” Pretend.
“It’s not bad. Pretty good in fact.”
“You don’t mind?” Margaret gestured to the cigarette.
The detective shook his head.
“The boss is out. It’s the only chance I get to steal a puff. If he shows up, the cigarette is yours.”
The detective laughed. Margaret put an ashtray on the counter.
“I thought this place was nonsmoking,” he said.
“Only when a cop walks in.” Margaret laughed. Does someone cook for him?
Finishing the pie, the detective wiped his mouth with a napkin and pushed the plate away. He took a sip of coffee.
“Tell me about the fight.”
“Wasn’t much to tell,” Margaret began. “The blond kid, Johnny I think is his name, was walking along the sidewalk out front. Good-looking tall young man. Reminded me of an old boyfriend I had. God, they’re all old now.” Margaret laughed before continuing. “Then Terry comes out of nowhere and stops him. Terry’s mother, Mary, and I are old school friends. Do you know her?”
The detective nodded. “She asked me to look into this.”
“I can see through the window that they’re having an argument,” Margaret continued. “Terry started pushing Johnny. Big mistake. He’s about a foot shorter than Johnny. Johnny levels him with one punch right in the side of the head. Terry just drops. I can see Johnny standing over him, yelling down at the sidewalk. Terry gets up off the sidewalk and kind of tackles Johnny. I can see that there’s blood on Terry’s forehead. He must have hit his head on the sidewalk. Johnny puts two punches into Terry’s stomach and that was it. Johnny walks away. By the time I got out there, Terry was already on his feet, bent over in pain but on his feet. I asked him if he was all right. He brushed me off and staggered away. I guessed he was going home.” 109
Margaret flicked a few ashes into the tray before continuing. “Mary must be pretty upset. It isn’t easy raising a teenager. Not that Mary was any angel when she was a kid. She told me once that Terry was God’s way of punishing her for her wild youth. That was about it.” Sam Kelly shook his head.
“Are charges going to be laid, Sam?” Margaret asked.
“No,” the detective responded. “Terry won’t talk to me about the incident. My hands are tied. All I can do is warn Johnny, maybe talk to his parents. That pie was delicious.”
Margaret picked up the plate and placed it with other dirty dishes. She took one last puff of her cigarette and ground it out in the ashtray and then removed the ashtray from the counter.
“Any idea what it was about?” Margaret asked.
The detective shook his head. “With teenagers, who knows? Could have been over money, drugs, a girl, a perceived slight. Maybe Johnny looked at Terry the wrong way. Or just male hormones.”
“I guess you didn’t need this on your plate?” Margaret smiled.
“Especially with that salesman disappearing.”
“You heard about that?”
Margaret nodded. “You hear a lot of things in this place. What do you think happened to him, Sam?”
The detective shook his head. “Don’t know. Maybe he’s out of town, maybe he woke up the next morning with a hangover and took off on his route again. We’re trying to put a trace on him. Ever see him in here?”
“Could have. We get everyone passing through the Six Points area in this place. What did he look like?”
The detective gave a description that he’d received from Helen Kraft.
“That could be any of a dozen guys that walk in here every day.
Sounds like a real loser.”
The detective finished his coffee and dug into this pocket for change to pay the bill.
“It’s on the house,” Margaret said. “We were going to have to throw the pie out. It was stale three days ago.”
“I thought you said it was fresh,” he responded.
“The only thing fresh in this joint is the customers,” Margaret responded.
The detective laughed. “You’re too much, Maggie.” The detective climbed to his feet to leave then turned again to Margaret.
“Do you know anything about a tall gaunt fellow? About seven feet.
Dresses in black. Asks a lot of questions. Has an obsession with the year 1950.”
Margaret nodded.
“I thought he was trying to hit on me. Filled with all kinds of useless information. Asking me a lot of stuff about Mary’s ex. Him and Mary are an item. Seemed very interested in any stories about people who have gone missing over the last few decades. Gave me the creeps, to tell you the truth. But he’s a good tipper.”
The detective smiled, reached into his pocket and threw some change on the counter.
“I can take a hint.” He laughed.