The Weight of Stones (20 page)

“Oh my god,” McKelvey said, forgetting the long-standing feud, forgetting the midnight prayers wherein he sought specifically this, the deaths of those same bastard dogs.

“He's at Mount Sinai. They have him heavily sedated, and it looks like he could be in for a triple bypass. All of that Limburger has taken its toll,” she said and tried to smile but instead stopped just short of breaking into tears. “I have a favour to ask, Mr. McKelvey. On behalf of my father. He was very implicit in his instructions. You're the only neighbour who is still on speaking terms with him.”

McKelvey's mind spun.
On speaking terms?
What did the old German need, a few pints of blood for his operation?

“I don't know how I can help,” he said. He felt awkward standing there with the door open, dressed in his skivvies. Then suddenly his cop's mind rewound her opening statement, and it struck him in the face with the force of a sledgehammer.
‘When he found them in the backyard, two of them anyway...
'

“The Doberman survived the poisoning,” she said, “and we have nowhere to put him. I'm allergic to both dogs and cats, and anyway I'm not allowed pets in my condo...”

“Oh no,” McKelvey said, shaking his head, “see, I don't really have a thing for dogs.”

“I'm begging you, Mr. McKelvey, my father was implicit in his instructions.”

“So you said. Still. I mean, I don't...” He shrugged and turned his head, looking around the hallway as though his current situation explained everything.

“The Doberman, Rudolph, is highly trained, Mr. McKelvey, and he's—”

“I'm not home very often, with my job and everything.”

Anna squinted and said, “My father said you were retired very recently.”

McKelvey was taken aback by the neighbour's seeming awareness of his life.

“Well, yes, but I'm consulting on a project. I have no way of knowing whether I'll be home at night, so the dog could starve to death. Take him to a kennel and board him. That's what those places are for. It's not my responsibility.”

Anna's chin began to quiver, and a series of tears formed at the corner of her eyes and began their slow trickle down her rosy cheeks. His jaw clenched. The tears, a dirty trick.

“He never got on well with other people,” she said, “but those dogs were like children to my father. He's already in a fragile state, and if he knew his Rudolph was at a kennel, it would kill him. Please, Mr. McKelvey. Let me go and get the dog, and you can see for yourself how well-behaved he is, and I promise as soon as I can make other arrangements, I'll come and get him. He won't be any bother at all.”

McKelvey stood there, stunned. If he had been groggy a few minutes earlier, he was wide awake now. His instinct told him the German was setting him up—yes, likely believing McKelvey responsible for the poisoning—and this was a sort of mean-spirited payback. The old bastard. But he hadn't poisoned the dogs, much as the idea had crossed his mind, as many times as he had fantasized about walking over and shooting them in the fucking head with his service pistol. He looked at Seeburger's daughter now and saw within her the desperation and emotion of all the families of victims he had worked with over the years. Her father was ill, perhaps even gravely so. He could always tie the dog up or keep it locked in the bathroom, or whatever it was people did when they didn't want to be around a damned dog. Fuck.

“Christ,” he muttered beneath his breath. “All right. A day or two. That's it.”

Anna Seeburger was gone from the front step and back within two minutes, with the sleek black Doberman on a leash, a bowl and a small bag of food under her arm. She dropped the dog off like a busy working mother dropping her baby off at daycare.

“Whoa, hold up,” McKelvey said as she turned towards her Volvo which was still running at the curb, “give me your phone number or something, just in case I need to reach you.”

She came back and handed him a business card. He held it with his free hand while the other held Rudolph's leash. He closed the door and turned to see Rudolph sitting there in a perfect pose, the picture of Zen.

“What the hell am I supposed to do with you?” he said.

The dog stared back with his glossy eyes, blinking. McKelvey moved the bowl and the small bag of food to the kitchen then unfastened the leash and hung it over the back of a kitchen chair. The dog followed him, maintaining an appropriate distance. McKelvey returned to his bed and climbed under the covers, his mind reeling from the strange irony of it all. When he opened his eyes and lifted his head, Rudolph was sitting there in his pose at the threshold to the master bedroom, a protector or a servant. Sitting there like a statue, silent.

“So you're the last man standing, is that it?” McKelvey said.

Rudolph blinked and waited.

McKelvey woke an hour later, and the dog was still there at the door, only now he was curled and sleeping. McKelvey put his feet on the floor quietly, easing his weight from the bed. He took a step, but the dog was feigning sleep and instantly raised his head, eyes open and alert. Rudolph stared with his big moist eyes, and McKelvey took a few steps to the door. He gingerly stepped over the dog then cautiously moved down the hallway towards the bathroom. Rudolph followed at an obedient pace, nails clacking on the hardwood.

“Sit,” McKelvey said, turning in the hall. The dog stared at him for a moment. He remembered how the police dogs were trained with German-language signals so they would not listen to false commands. “Christ, don't tell me the old guy speaks German to you.”

Rudolph cocked his head to the side. McKelvey slipped inside the bathroom for a long shower. He would be just in time to meet Tim Fielding for his afternoon tattoo.

Eighteen

T
hey had arranged to meet at a coffee shop on the corner of Queen Street West and Spadina. McKelvey came in a few minutes late and spotted Tim sitting at a table with a coffee. He bought a tea from a young man behind the counter who had large black rings expanded through his earlobes. He was reminded of pictures of lost tribes in
National Geographic.
There seemed to be no limit to the ways in which human beings were willing to distort or adorn or impale or otherwise defile their bodies. It was boredom on display in the twenty-first century. He shook his head on his way to the table.

“Somebody looks happy,” Tim said.

McKelvey sat down and yawned. “I finally got a good sleep,” he said.

He wanted to tell his friend about Leonard Tilman. He'd made a few calls that afternoon and got confirmation of the arrest. Pulled over twenty minutes after an anonymous phone call. Due to his previous convictions and the conditions of his probation, Tilman would be remanded at the detention centre to await a bail hearing. McKelvey shivered with complicity, drawing the cosmic connection between himself and this stranger, Leonard Tilman. And they weren't so different, Leonard Tilman and Charlie McKelvey, were they? That's what he thought now. Just two lost souls, each of them drifting across the painted lines in his own way.

He drank some of the tea and said, “Listen, I thought you'd want to know. I heard a report from a friend of mine on the force. Leonard Tilman was arrested for drunk driving last night.”

Tim sighed. McKelvey closed his eyes, pushing away the desire to tell his friend the truth about retribution, how in the end there was no other way for a man to live with himself than to put one foot in front of the other, to swing the hammer or throw the rope, to make things happen when everyone else was standing around with their hands in their pockets.

“Are they going to finally nail this son of a bitch?” Tim asked. That was it, there was nothing left in his voice. He had exhausted himself of violent hatred. He was simply tired of it all.

“I still have some friends at the Crown attorney's office. I'll be sure to put in a real good word for this asshole,” McKelvey said.

“How long do you think he'll do?”

“My bet is he'll draw a few years this time for sure.”

Tim said, “Thank you, Charlie.”

“For what?” McKelvey said.

“You know, for putting in a word on Tilman. I appreciate it.”

McKelvey said, “I'm glad I can do it.”

“Well,” Tim said, glancing at his watch, “I guess there's no point in putting it off.”

The tattoo parlour was long and narrow, nestled among the vampire clothing outlets and trendy head shops of Queen Street West. The place was clean enough in McKelvey's estimation, a lingering smell of antiseptic in the air. There was nobody else in the shop on this weekday afternoon. The woman who greeted them at a low counter was dressed in torn black fishnet stockings, a camouflage mini skirt, a black sleeveless top with what appeared to be her bra on the outside, and her lips were painted the deepest purple to match the thick band of eyeliner highlighting an otherwise youthful and attractive round face. Her name was Kendra, and it was a small enough shop that she appeared to be both the receptionist and the tattoo artist. McKelvey found himself counting the number of Kendra's piercings—nine that were visible—while Tim went over the rough sketch he pulled out of his pocket.

“Is your friend getting one too?” Kendra asked as she drew an ink outline from Tim's design, then made a transfer from it. “I'll give you guys a discount if you double up.”

“I don't know,” Tim said, glancing over his shoulder. “Are you?”

“Not today,” McKelvey said. “Maybe for my ninetieth birthday or something.”

“Everybody should get at least one tattoo in their life,” she said.

“I don't see any on you,” McKelvey said, teasing.

“‘See' being the operative word,” she came back with a little smile. “Check out the portfolios over there on the coffee table while you're waiting. Most of my work is in there, and a bunch of other local artists who work in the shop. There's a picture of my back in there somewhere. Took eighty-five hours just to do the outlining, another sixty hours for the colour work.”

McKelvey whistled and made his way to the four waiting chairs and the coffee table piled high with the thick black ledger-sized art portfolios. He looked around at the posters on the walls, the samples of artwork to choose from, a sign going over all the rules and health code information in great detail. Another sign declared:
If you're not 18, don't even
bother.
He watched as Kendra brought Tim to a single dentist-style chair just behind the counter and began to prep his flesh for the inking. She put rubber gloves on then shaved the area at his upper left shoulder with a disposable razor, explaining every aspect of the procedure as she worked. McKelvey marvelled at the professionalism, the artistic pride, to be found within this strange subculture of placing permanent designs on the human body.

“Just holler if he starts to pass out,” McKelvey said. “He tends to get squeamish at the sight of blood, starts flopping around and the whole thing.”

“And yet I'm the one sitting in the chair,” Tim said.

McKelvey said, “Touché,” then hefted the top portfolio and began to flip his way through the clippings of artwork and accompanying colour Polaroids displaying the finished result. There were entire sections dedicated to themes: dragons and skulls, Celtic and tribal, naval-style and Japanese. Soon the sound of the tattoo machine began to buzz like a sharp electric razor, and McKelvey could hear Kendra and Tim making the time pass with smalltalk. She asked about the design, and Tim told her the story of his wife. She said something about memorials being one of her most common requests, recounting the time she'd inked the portrait of a man's revered father across the expanse of the client's back. It was work that she came to with a sense of artistic and spiritual understanding.

McKelvey was on the third portfolio, skipping some pages here and there, gazing at other spreads absentmindedly, when he flipped a page and stopped. Stopped cold. He couldn't speak, he couldn't move. His stomach clenched. The air in his lungs constricted as he stared at a picture of Gavin smiling, displaying a freshly inked tattoo on his chest above his heart. A girl in the photo beside him, a pretty girl smiling with black hair and olive skin, proudly displaying a matching tattoo.

He lifted his head. The room spun. Noise from the tattoo gun.
Humming
. His fingers fumbled with the protective plastic sheet, then he was beneath it, pulling the Polaroid free. He went to the counter, legs weightless. He stood there, the photo between a thumb and forefinger, and the photo seemed to be shivering.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Kendra.”

The young woman raised her head, clearly intent on remaining focused on the job at hand. She held the tattoo machine in one hand, in the other a bloody tissue that she was using to dab at the plasma running from the fresh wound.

“This is my son,” he said, and held the photo out. “My son, Gavin.”