Quintic (25 page)

Patricia on Rainy
Days

P
atricia stayed in all weekend.
Hard to go anywhere with bruised feet. Blisters gathered in the
motel’s neighbourhood. Cuts and nicks from her stroll barefoot at
Christopher’s arm, damn him.

She
dedicated her days to housecleaning. No, she
didn’t have a house and yes, every week the chambermaid did a bout
of cleaning. Nonetheless, she emptied her closets and went through
her belongings, discarding worn or unwanted clothes.

Her walk-in
was half-empty. She had not taken the time to go shopping lately,
what with the murder thing and all. And she didn’t have the
temperament of a collector, so clothes she didn’t keep long enough
to accumulate. Her only keepsakes (mementos, book ideas written on
menus, scraps of papers or napkins) she kept
pêle-mêle
in a stack
of hat boxes in her bedroom. She didn’t touch her boxes in her
cleaning spree, only what she considered her non-valuables such as
clothes, jewellery, shoes, makeup.

She emptied
a third of her
already half-empty closet.
She gave most of the items to the hotel staff as usual, and the
rest to charity. She ate healthy meals in the hotel’s kitchen,
salads mostly, without wine or coffee.

By Sunday
night, she was feeling better. Clearly she had to make it up to
Christopher in some way, but she was not ready yet. She too was
angry. Why did they stay such an awfully long time in that strip
club? Had he liked the show?

And he had made her walk
barefoot.

And he had sent her home
alone.

And she
hadn’t wanted to talk about Lemieux in the first place. And−
Damn him
!

Came Monday
morning, she set her alarm indecently early. Kicking off the week
with a premature rise would set the mood, she hoped, for work,
work, work exclusively on her book this week. She was
sooo
not
in the mood for the precinct
and its inhabitants. She would devote her time to writing and
writing only.

The rain
hadn’t stopped
, but the downpour didn’t
affect her spirit. She jumped into the shower quickly, dressed in
an all-weather outfit, forewent makeup and combing. A hairdo was a
hopeless cause in that kind of weather. Her hair was going to do
whatever the heck it wanted to, no matter the amount of gel or
mousse or hair spray. On the way down, she paused in the hotel
kitchen for a sandwich, and off she was to her French coffee shop
for a seven o’clock start.

She worked
until
her stomach growled for mercy. She
successfully ignored it another half hour. By ten-thirty, she was
starving, and craving for a club sandwich. Fresh lettuce.
Sun-ripened tomatoes. A bit of chicken. Lots of
bacon
. A brisk walk will do
me wonder after sitting all morning
.

She headed
for the diner. The rain had turned into a light drizzle during her
hours of writing, but it picked up during her walk. She was still a
good five blocks away from the diner, but the hail had already
soaked through her clothes. She backtracked her steps to the small
local restaurant she had seen on the side street a block down. That
joint would have to do for today.

“
Are you
open yet?” She asked the waitresses and the empty room.

“
Yes, ma’am.
It’s only eleven. On Mondays, the lunch crowd doesn’t come by until
eleven-thirty quarter to twelve.”

“
Great! I’ll
have the place almost to myself.” She picked a table near the
window.

“
What you’ll
have, honey?”

“
I’d like a
club sandwich, easy on the Mayo, with French fries.”

“
Coffee with
that, hon’?”

“
No,
thanks.” The place was warm enough.

Her club was
delicious
, and she ate her fries down to
the last one, studying the diner in between blissful bites. The
layout resembled her cold case restaurant with its dozen greyish
square tables, seating two or four, and two large windows on each
side of the front door. Here too the kitchen was visible through a
cut-out opening at the back, and the toilets were located on the
left of the kitchen window. The only noticeable difference was in
the sitting counter her case diner had that this place lacked. Even
the two-waitress two-cook staff looked similar enough to pass for
cousins of the other diner’s employees; their expressions
simultaneously looked tired, bored and busy.

The rain
stopped around noon.
As Patricia walked
out, she noticed a narrow alley to the right of the diner building.
With the rain beating down in her eyes, she had not seen it coming
in.
Interesting
. Did this place have
a back alley also? She found her cold case alley challenging, short
of interesting details. Its two unexciting containers did not
provide enough hiding for a lurking killer.

Behind the
diner, the side alley crossed a short back alley that went two
doors to the left and one door the right, a T-shaped dead end.
Doors on the left were for apartment buildings, garage accesses
only, no outdoor parking lots, no fire escapes. A definite
improvement for her cold case, though, because the apartment
buildings provided shades and shadows. She took pictures with her
mobile phone until the rain picked up again.

She
had only a couple more pictures she wanted to
take, the back door, trash container and such. Then, she planned on
first, going home to change into something sexy before, second,
surprising Christopher for coffee, baring a freshly made double
espresso from Vitto’s coffee shop, and third, wing it from there
depending on the Big guy’s mood. For sure he was going to be angry
but hopefully, not too angry.

Damn, she
had missed him this weekend. Exhausting herself with cleaning was
no substitute for curling up next to him under the covers. They
could have watched a film or a sports game. She liked watching him
watch sports on television. They could have talked. Make
love.
Damn
pride
. She derisively smirked at the
thought, although not sure whose pride, hers or his, she was
thinking of. Hers probably this time.

She went on
taking pictures
: the diner’s back wall,
its windowless back door, another building’s back wall, a third
building’s back wall, all grey stucco, a small (albeit almost her
height) trash container in the corner against the two walls. Quite
a challenge for the waste truck driver, this little back T-alley.
The alley was that narrow, if a truck rode in now, she wouldn’t
have any room to retreat to on the side.

Due
to the T-shape configuration, the driver would
have to, first, turn left, hugging the apartment buildings, then
drive up in reverse to the right end of the back alley to reach the
container. Then, since the small tank sat in the corner, the driver
would need to get out of his truck and rolled the container to the
middle of the alley to align it with his truck’s bin. Unless the
truck had a side shifter?

She tried
roll
ing the container by hand. The metal
box was very heavy, and its wheels weren’t new, probably they
weren’t perfectly round either. Tugging and pulling, her grip on
its side handle, she struggled to position the container to the
wall, centring it perfectly.
There
. The next time the trash
driver drove back, he wouldn’t have to get out. She smiled at her
good deed for the day. Time to go.

As she was
leaving,
a forgotten trash bag caught her
attention from the corner. Previously wedged between the container
and the wall, her back alley ‘home staging’ had brought it out of
hiding. A heavy-looking black plastic bag with some yellowish straw
on top.

The
rain
fell in her eyes, blurring the bag’s
details; she took a step forward without thinking. Instinct. She
had known what it was even before she saw it clearly. She was
getting too good at this, wasn’t she, too damn,
désespérément
proficient? The size, the shape, the straw. She stood
staring at the sack for a long time.

I
t wasn’t a bag at
all. A raincoat maybe? Those shiny plastic ones college students
wore these days. She poked the bag with the hesitant tip of a shoe
when it suddenly occurred to her that the
body
might not be dead. She
leapt and yanked the hunched shape, twisting it to see the face,
the neck. No pulse.

The girl had
been pretty. Her eyes were still open, big and green, a little sad.
The rain had plastered her hair to her skull and soaked through her
clothes. She had been sitting head bent with her arms around her
knees. Had she died all curled up like that, hiding behind the
container, or had someone put her there?
Left
her there, alone in a
back alley in the rain. Like the diner girl. She looked so wet; she
must have been so cold. So, so cold.

Patricia
ached for the girl;
she
needed
her out of the rain. Half-lifting, half-dragging, being as
gentle as she could, holding the garbage girl by the armpits,
Patricia inched nearer to the diner’s back door, and, once close
enough, knocked on the door, pounding with both fists, and
screaming, “Open up! Open the damn door. Please.” Over and
over.

The door
finally opened
. A cook blocked the
doorframe, an angry scowl on his face and a sharp knife in his
hand. Had the girl been stabbed? Patricia’s brain froze.

The cook’s
eyes went
to Patricia, standing in the
rain, her hair all frizzled and her wet coat moulding her breasts.
His eyes lingered on her chest before dropping to her jeans, her
hips, her legs. To the shape leaning on her leg.

He moved to
the body. Patricia stayed rooted to her spot by the door. He put
his arms under the girl, cradling her on his chest, carried her
body inside. He deposited his load on the kitchen floor.

Except
for
the unblinking eyes, the girl might
have been asleep. The cook came back for Patricia, fisting her
elbow and steering her inside. Patricia saw his lips moved. Was he
speaking to her or the body on the floor? Neither of them answered.
He wrenched the phone from the wall and dialled, talked and waited,
talked again and waited, the other cook now standing next to the
body, patting it dry with paper napkins while the waitresses
observed through the back window in stunned silence.

Patricia saw
them all, but she did not move. She stood, her mind a blank. She
was freezing. Her mind was reeling.
I have to do something
. Yes, but
what? The little voice in her mind nagged her.
You found another one
.
Damn it.
You found another
one
.

She was a
writer, she wrote fiction, that was her thing. Not
journalism.
Not police work. Just
research and writing and storytelling. No dead body. She didn’t
like dead bodies. She could kill anybody in a book but not in the
real life. In real life, she wanted normal like everybody had. She
yearned for normal, damn it! Without a dead, murdered body in
it.
Why did I go into that
alley? I have to leave. I can’t go through another murder
investigation. Not now.
Still, she
couldn’t move.

The cook
came to talk to her. She nodded.
What was
he saying, she had no clue, couldn’t hear a thing. Someone brought
her a chair. The police arrived. Two patrolmen. Then an ambulance.
Then two more policemen. Some detectives. She was shivering
steadily. Someone put a blanket on her shoulders. She was
quivering. Was this what going into shock felt like?

The
detectives came to talk to her. She didn’t know them. She tried to
answe
r their questions. She tried
explaining why she had been in the T-shaped alley. They looked at
her like she was crazy. Stupid cops.

She didn’t
like
policemen. Cops always made things
complicated. Her story was easy enough to understand. “One last
time gentlemen. I’ll talk slowly. I ate a club sandwich. I walked
out back to take pictures. I’m doing research for a book. I’m doing
research for a female private investigator. I moved the container
for the garbage truck driver. I found a large garbage
bag−”

One cop or
another interrupted with nonsense about a PI permit and the truck
driver’s name. One or another wanted to know what she had seen.
“Have you witnessed the murder?”

“
No, I have
not seen anything.” She repeated the chain of events.

One cop or
another asked stupid questions.

“
No, I did
not touch anything.”

One stupid cop or another asked
stupid questions.

“
No, I have
not moved anything. Well, except the girl, of course, she was
cold−” She breathed through her nostrils. “Not me, stupid. The
girl! Just like the other girl−”

“
The dead
one in the back alley at the diner−”

“
You think
you guys will let me finish a sentence at some point? The other
diner−”