The police, when they arrive, take the form of a single man, a tall plainclothesman with bright green eyes that suggest one needn’t take him too seriously. A moustache that seems an afterthought, an obligatory accessory he’d be more comfortable without. I’ve never been around a real detective before, and I try to prepare myself to be at once cautious and relaxed. And yet his open features, along with finding myself a couple inches wider than he (I’d expected a broad slab of recrimination), instantly make me feel that no real harm can come from this man.
“I’m here about the murder,” he says, with practiced regret, as someone in coveralls might arrive at the door to say
I’m here about the cockroaches.
I extend my arm to invite him in and he brushes past, makes his way directly into the living room. It’s the sort of familiar entrance an old friend might make, one comfortable enough to go
straight for the bar and not say hello until the first gulp is down.
When I follow him in, however, Detective Ramsay hasn’t helped himself to a drink, but is standing in the centre of the room, hands clasped behind his back. He gestures for me to sit—I take the arm of a ratty recliner—while remaining standing himself. Even being half-seated, however, concedes the weight advantage I’d briefly held. For what might be a minute, it seems I’m of little interest to him. He looks around the room as though every magazine and mantelpiece knickknack were communicating directly to him, and he wants to give each of them the chance to speak.
“Are you a married man, Mr Rush?”
“My wife passed away seven years ago.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Yourself?”
He raises his hand to show the gold band around his ring finger. “Twenty years in. I tell my wife a fellow does less time for manslaughter these days.”
I try at a smile, but it doesn’t seem that he’s expecting one.
“Someone told me you’re a writer.”
“I’m out of it now,” I say.
“Going into a new line of work, are you?”
“Not decided on that yet.”
“Would’ve thought the writing life would be close to ideal. No boss, set your own hours. Just making things up. Not work at all, really.”
“You make it sound easier than it is.”
“What’s the hard part?”
“All of it.
Especially
the making things up.”
“It’s a lot like lying, I imagine.”
He steps over to the bookshelf, nodding at the titles but seemingly recognizing none of them.
“I’m a pretty avid reader myself,” he says. “Just crime novels, really. Can’t be bothered with all that Meaning of Life stuff.” Detective Ramsay turns to look at me. His face folds into a disapproving frown. “Can I ask what you find so funny?”
“You’re a detective who only reads detective novels.”
“So?”
“It’s ironic, I guess.”
“It is?”
“Perhaps not.”
He returns his attention to the shelves until he pulls out my book.
“What is it?” he says.
“I’m sorry?”
“What
kind
of book is it?”
“I’m never quite sure what to say to that.”
“Why not?”
“It’s tricky to categorize.”
Detective Ramsay opens the back cover to look at the author’s photo. Me, looking grumpy, contemplative, air-brushed.
“That title’s quite a coincidence,” he says.
“Yes?”
“The Sandman killings a few years ago. I was the lead investigator on that one.”
“Really.”
“Small world, isn’t it?”
“I suppose, on some level, the title was inspired by those events.”
“Inspired?”
“Not that what the murderer did was
inspirational.
I mean it only in the sense that it gave me the idea.”
“What idea?”
“The
title.
That’s all I was talking about.”
His eyes move down and at first I wonder if there’s a stain on my shirt. Then I realize he’s looking at my hands. I resist the reflex to slip both of them in my pockets.
Ramsay brings his eyes up again. Repeatedly lifting and lowering my book as though judging its merits based on weight alone.
“Mind if I borrow this?”
“Keep it. There’s plenty more in the basement.”
“Oh? What else have you got down there?”
It’s only the laugh he allows himself after a moment that indicates he’s joking. In fact, everything he says in his half-submerged brogue could be taken as a dry joke. But now I’m not sure any of it is.
“I need to run through your day with Ms Dunn,” he says, putting my book down on a side table and producing a notebook from his jacket pocket.
“It wasn’t a
day.
I was with her for twenty minutes at most.”
“Your twenty minutes then. Let’s start with those.”
I tell him how Petra left a message with me the night before, asking to speak in person. The next morning I returned her call, and we arranged to meet at her house at five o’clock. On my way out of the subway she was there, wearing running attire and a Yankees cap. Reluctant to go to her house, she guided me into the ravine. She told me of her concerns about a man who seemed to be following her, someone she’d spotted outside her house at night. She was frightened, and wanted to know if I had noticed a shadow after me as well.
“And have you?” Detective Ramsay says.
There is a point in the telling of every story where the author becomes his own editor. Not
everything
is included in an accounting of events, no record the complete record. Even the adulterer who cannot live with his conscience excludes the smell of his mistress’ perfume from his confession. Nations at war provide casualty numbers, but not a tally of missing arms versus legs. Deception, in the active sense of distorting the facts, may not be the cause of these absences. Most of the time it is a matter of providing the gist without inflicting undue pain. It’s how one can be truthful and keep secrets at the same time.
This is how I later came to justify my telling Detective Ramsay, No, I haven’t been followed, don’t know what Petra was talking about in the ravine at all. Even as I take this path I’m aware it
may be the wrong one. The police could be the only ones to keep me and Sam safe at this point. But there is something that makes me certain that such disclosure would only make me next. If I am being watched by the Sandman as closely as it feels I am, then I have every intention to play by his rules, not the law’s.
Not to mention that I’m starting to get the feeling I may be a suspect in Petra’s murder. Trust me on this: one’s instinct, in such cases, is to withhold first, and figure out if this was a good idea later.
“So why’d she call you?”
“I suppose it was because of the writing circle we were in together. Years ago. She was trying to draw a connection between us, my book, the concerns she had about a stalker. It was rather vague.”
“Vague,” he says, pausing to reflect on the word. “Tell me about this circle.”
So I do. Give him all the names, the little contact information I have. Again, I decide to leave a couple things out. My meeting with Angela, for instance.
“Just want to confirm the sequence of events with you,” he says. “You met with Ms Dunn around five o’clock. Is that right?”
“A couple minutes before five, yes.”
“And you left her in the ravine twenty minutes later.”
“Give or take.”
“You walked home after this?”
“Yes.”
“Did you talk to anyone? Stop anywhere?”
“I had a drink in Kensington Market.”
“Where, exactly?”
“The Fukhouse. It’s a punk bar.”
“You don’t look the part.”
“It happened to be on my way.”
“Would anyone recognize you from The Fukhouse?”
“The bartender might. Like you say, I don’t look the part.”
“When did you arrive home?”
“It was evening. Some time after nine, I guess.”
“That’s when you called over to the neighbour’s to check on your son.”
“Yes.”
“Did you have any particular reason to be concerned for your son’s safety?”
He was standing in my window.
“I’m a widower, Detective. Sam is the only family left to me. I’m never
not
concerned for his safety.”
He blinks.
“That’s a long walk,” he says. “Even with a couple of drinks.”
“I like to take my time.”
“You might be interested to know that Mrs Dunn disappeared some time between your meeting with her and eight o’clock. Two and a half hours or so.”
“Disappeared? I thought you said she was murdered.”
“I said that’s what we
believe.
”
How could I have gotten this guy so wrong? The combination of Ramsay’s leftover Scots accent and droll demeanour had me thinking that if they really suspected that I could have done whatever was done to Petra, they would have sent over one of their hard cases. But now I see that Ramsay
is
a hard case.
“Do you know of anyone who would have a motive to do this to your friend?” he asks absently. “Aside from her shadow?”
“I’m not her friend.
Wasn’t.
I barely knew her.”
“’Not friend’,” he says, scribbling.
“As for motive, I have no idea. I mean, she mentioned her divorce, and how she was seeing her ex-husband’s business partner. It seemed like a delicate situation.”
“This is during your twenty minutes in the ravine?”
“It wasn’t much more than a name.”
“And what name would that be?”
“Roman. The boyfriend. Roman somebody. Petra was concerned that if her relationship with him came to her ex’s attention, it would cause her some inconvenience.”
“Roman Gaborek.”
“That’s him.”
“Did your friend mention that Mr Gaborek and Mr Dunn are both leaders among the local organized crime community?”
“She alluded to it.”
“Alluded. She
alluded
to it.”
“That’s right.”
“It’s a funny thing,” he says, flipping his notebook closed. “Most of the time, people who hear about something like what you’ve just heard about ask how it was likely done. But you haven’t asked me a thing.”
“I don’t have much of a stomach for violence.”
“It’s a good thing you didn’t ask me then. Because Ms Dunn, she met with
considerable
violence.”
“I thought there was no body.”
“But what the body
left behind
—well, it was indicative of certain
techniques.
Reminded me of four years ago. Remember?”
If one were to enter this room right now, one might mistake Detective Ramsay’s expression as showing how much he enjoys moments like these. But I can see that it’s not pleasure so much as rage. An anger he’s managed to disguise, over the years, as something near its opposite.
“Well, that’s it,” he says. I rise and offer a hand to be shaken, and when he finally takes it, the grip is ruthless.
“Hope I was of some help.”
“If you weren’t, you might yet be.”
Ramsay goes to the door to let himself out and I follow, suddenly desperate to hear the click of the bolt closing behind him.
“One last thing. The cap you say Ms Dunn was wearing when she met you…”
“Yes?”
“What team was it again?”
“The Yankees. Why?”
“Nothing. They just never found a cap, Yankees or otherwise.”
He opens the door and steps outside. Before he closes it, he shows me a smile. One he’s saved right for the end.
The morning brings a funny thought: I’m about to be famous all over again. Whenever they come for me and I make the shackled walk from police cruiser to courtroom, cameras whirring, reporters begging for a quip from the Creep of the Day for the suppertime news.
Then the clock radio clicks on. And I have the same thought all over again.
It’s the morning news telling the city that Petra Dunn, forty-five, was abducted yesterday in the Rosedale ravine. Evidence at the scene strongly supports foul play. Police are currently questioning a number of “persons of interest” in connection to the crime.
Person of interest, that’s me. Yesterday morning I got out of bed an unemployed pseudo-novelist, and just twenty-four hours later I’m facing a new day as the prime suspect in a probable homicide. But it doesn’t stop there. Because if Detective Ian Ramsay thinks I did in poor Petra Dunn, it follows that I did in Carol Ulrich, Ronald Pevencey and Jane Whirter four years ago too.
Angela may have been right. The Sandman’s come back. And as far as best guesses go, it’s me.
“Dad?”
Sam standing in my bedroom doorway.
“Just had a bad dream,” I say.
“But you’re
awake.
”
He’s right. I’m awake.
The first thing I do, once I’ve showered and shaved, is take Sam to stay with Stacey, Tamara’s sister in St Catharines. On the hour’s drive there I do my best to explain why a policeman came to talk with me last night, and why it’s best if the two of us are separated for a while. I tell him how sometimes people get caught up in things they have nothing to do with, but that they must nevertheless endure questions about.
“Process of elimination,” Sam says.
“Kind of, yeah.”
“But I thought it was ‘innocent until proven guilty’.”
“That’s only in courtrooms.”
“Does this have to do with your book?”
“Indirectly, yes.”
“I never liked your book.”
Of
course
he’s read it. Although forbidden to do so, how was he
not
going to read his father’s one and only contribution to the bookshelf? I can’t know how much of it he’s able to understand—a gifted reader, but still only eight years old—yet it
appears he’s gathered the main point. The Sandman of
The Sandman
is real.
Once home, I leave a message on Angela’s machine, asking her to get back to me as soon as possible.
Waiting for her return call, I consider how many in the circle have already been in contact with each other. After the night at Grossman’s, I just assumed all of us went our separate ways. But there may have been relationships formed I had no inkling of at the time. Lovers, rivals, artists and their muses. The sort of passions that have been known to give rise to the most horrific actions.