Aoki made him smile. She was wiry, all sinewy muscle, her dark hair cropped short. And she swore like a longshoreman. It was as though every movement, every mannerism was aimed at destroying the myth of her diminutive stature. She had confided in him over a drink a couple of years earlier about how her father had been interned at a camp on the west coast during the Second World War. She spoke of how he hadn't been angry with his new country for assuming he was a possible collaborator, saying instead that “everyone has a role to play when their country is at war”. McKelvey believed she both admired and detested this vein of deep stoicism within her father. Knowing Aoki, she wouldn't have taken it on the chin for king and country.
McKelvey was anxious, and he caught himself chewing at his ragged thumb. In a matter of weeks, the Crown would kick off the trial of a bank robber, drug dealer, extortionist, suspected killer and known biker named Pierre Duguay. The trial was attracting media attention due to Duguay's alleged connections to the Blades, an upstart Quebec biker gang with roots in the southern United States and South America. The Blades had battled the Hell's Angels in Quebec for a few years at the closing of the nineties, fighting to control the lucrative drugs, prostitution and fraud rings. The body count was high. Car bombings, pipe bombs, shootings. The Angels were too big, too well-entrenched, too well-organized and managed, so the war eventually ran out of steam, and a large faction of Blades patched over to their rivals rather than face certain annihilation. But there remained a faithful few who drifted from Quebec in search of new frontiers out west and up north in the mining towns, places like Sudbury and Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, but like all pioneers, they stopped somewhere to catch their breath, and it ended up becoming home for a while.
The Blades bought a house in the west end of Toronto, installed security cameras and raised a new flag. They also bought an old strip joint near the airport, a place in which to conduct business, to launder their soiled cash. New kids on the block come to carve out a little corner amidst the Asian street gangs, the Jamaicans, and yes, always the Hell's.
And it was Duguay, McKelvey knew, who was responsible for his boy's death. Duguay, whose method of operation was to get his hangarounds and foot soldiers to befriend and recruit street kids to peddle his crack, run his errands, get his army of the lost moving across the landscape of parks and transit stops, malls and arcades. It was what he had done in Montreal, how he had ended up in Joliette for a number of years. He had recruited McKelvey's boy, who exchanged the roof over his head for a fetid bed of rags beneath the Gardiner Expressway, the dangerous missions and shelters. Exchanged school textbooks for a goddamned squeegee rag and a bucket. Doc Martens and black eyeliner, a dozen pieces of steel attached to his head, tattoos, a whole warped and negative outlook on the world.
Then, just as McKelvey had prognosticated and warned, his boy had died alone, his body left in a vacant lot beneath the expressway. A piece of garbage tossed from a passing vehicle. That's all.
“How is Caroline?” Aoki said, leaning forward.
He blinked, brought himself back. He said, “Fine. She has good days and bad days.”
“And you?”
He took a sip of coffee, shrugged and smiled.
“You're always fine, right Charlie?” she said. “Good old Charlie, straight as an arrow, cool as a fucking cucumber.”
“Go easy,” he said, “my neighbour already chewed my ass this morning.”
She said, “You stopped seeing the department psychologist, I understand. That's okay, though, because between you and me, I don't think she's very good at her job. She's got nice hair, but she's a bit of a twat. That would be my reasoning. So what about you, why did you stop going? You got everything sewn up?”
He sighed, fumbling to put into words how he felt. How
did
he feel about sitting in a closet-sized office, opening up to a woman practically young enough to be his
daughter? Felt.
Feel. Express. Breathe in, breathe out. Let's hold hands and
explore the stages of grief, Charlie.
“You can only talk about things for so long,” he said.
“Sounds to me like you didn't do much talking.”
“You get to the point where it starts doing the opposite of what it's supposed to do. At first, sure, it makes you feel a little better, spilling all this poison. But then they want you to keep digging deeper and deeper...and there's nothing else
down
there.
There's nothing there. You've scooped it all out, everything, and now you're just...empty.”
Like cleaning a Halloween pumpkin,
he wanted to explain. But in picturing that, he was reminded of the years he and Gavin had carved pumpkins a day or two before Halloween, trying to find new ways to smear the greasy pumpkin guts on each other. He saw the various farmers' fields and Sunday markets they had visited in search of the annual pumpkin.
The
smell of those slippery insides, rich, fecund scent of fall
. And then he didn't want to think about that any more. He blinked and saw that Aoki was still talking. Her mouth was moving as he brought himself back into the conversation, like flipping to a channel midway through a show.
“...other things that you can look into, like out-patient counselling and...”
His mind suddenly flashed with an image of old Seeburger standing there like the king of goddamned Kensington, and he gritted his teeth and imagined tying those dogs from hell to the back of his truck and taking them for a run all the way to the Humber River.
“You should take advantage of the employee assistance folks,” Aoki said.
“I'll see about all that,” McKelvey said, nodding.
“I hope you do.”
He shifted his weight, rubbed the back of his neck, and said, “So.”
She reached for a paperclip and began to uncoil it. Not a good sign. He knew her too well and recognized the mannerisms. “I spoke with the Assistant-Crown attorney, Laura Wright. She understands your personal interest with regards to this particular suspect. They feel the best shot at a conviction against Duguay is with the charges he's currently sitting on.”
“I see,” McKelvey said.
“People here don't want to see what happened in Quebec a few years ago, when that little boy was killed in the car bombing. There's pressure on the mayor, the chief, on all of us,” Aoki said. “The joint task force logged an incredible amount of time getting one of them to roll over. They got Marcel Leroux by the balls, caught red-handed with a couple ounces of coke shoved down his cowboy boot leaving the Dove strip club. He's been persuaded to testify against Duguay on the extortion, money laundering and organized crime charges. With Duguay out of the picture, the local chapter of the Blades will suffer a major loss in their command structure. The task force can use the momentum to effectively shut them down before they even get a foothold. And with Duguay's record, he'll pull a dozen years at least. It's a simple cost-benefit scenario.”
“They're not willing to take a closer look at the file I pulled together?”
“Charlie. You're a respected investigator on my Hold-up Squad. I think you're a very fine cop. But you're not a homicide investigator. You have to trust that your colleagues are as good at their job as you are at yours.”
“I'm just saying, boss, what I've been saying all along. I don't think Balani and Gilmartin made the right connections here from day one. I know what I know because I went down there and talked to these kids. For hours. I know Gavin was selling dope for the Blades. Out of Moss Park there, and the Eaton Centre, the Yonge Line. That new apartment he was in up off Jane Street, it was a drug house for the bikers. Crack, E, weed. Duguay was known for getting guys like Leroux to get the street kids in on the hustle,” he said. “All we need is one of them to come forward and say that, yes, they saw Duguay with Gavin on the night he was killed. It'll take some coaxing. They've got their street code. Just get him positioned there at the scene, and we can make the rest of it work.”
McKelvey wanted to mention also the evidence of a woman in Gavin's apartment, a bag in the bathroom with a brush and makeup, items that disappeared from the time they were tagged and the time he checked the evidence lockup. Trying to match the inventory sheet with the physical property, coming up empty. A small thing, perhaps, but still. It was something he'd mentioned to Balani more than once. The senior detective brushing it offâ
stick to your holdups,
McKelvey, stick to your old lady muggings...
“I wanted to talk to you about something else,” Aoki said. “An offer. After your current files are closed up, I'm going to ask you to consider taking the department's early retirement package. I spoke with the head of HR last week, and he said with your years of service and accumulated lieu days, you could leave with almost a full year's pay before your pension would kick in. That means full benefits, everything.”
An old rotted dory finally cut from its dock, he understood for the first time that without this place to come to, without something to keep his mind in check, he was a man adrift. Lost and perhaps dangerous.
What would he do with his days?
His mind flashed with an image of Charlie McKelvey dressed in a blue vest and polyester slacks, smiling as he passed shopping carts towards customers...a big round button on his chest that declared: “Have a Nice Day!”
“I thought for a minute you were going to give me a promotion,” he said, smiling.
“Listen, don't take it personally. You're
eligible,
Charlie. The same offer's being made to four others in Detective Services, a bunch over in administration and special services. The department's trying to balance a budget while hiring more patrol officers. Anyway, it's not a negative, Charlie. I'd love to see you leave this business with a good package and all your wiring still intact,” and here she tapped the side of her head for effect. “You did more than your share, and you deserve to get on with your life. I think the timing's right, to be honest.”
“What if I don't want to retire? I've got a few more good years.”
“Right now they're
asking
. If you push this, they'll be
telling
you.”
“Who's âthey'?”
“There's more to this than...” She took a moment to find the right words. “Don't sit there and tell me you didn't see this coming. Your head and your heart aren't on this job any more. I've been very patient, Charlie. I've let a lot of things slide. You come and go from this place like it's a fucking train station. You stopped seeing the department psychologist. You harassed Balani while he was the lead investigator...”
“Is that what Balani said, I
harassed
him? Jesus Christ, Tina. I just want to keep up on developments. He hasn't followed up on any of the angles I've tossed out. And now that he kissed ass and got himself recruited onto that biker task force, what happens to the file? I guess closing this one isn't a priority.”
“You don't mean that. We look after our own, and Gavin was one of ours. I can only imagine how frustrating this is for you, but you've got to leave it alone. You have this hypothesis, Charlie, but nobody else can connect the dots. Balani doesn't agree with you, and quite frankly, neither do I. Motive, maybe, but the evidence just isn't there. The Crown has finite resources. We can get by sometimes on our gut instinct. Crown doesn't have the same luxury once they get to court.”
“Duguay did this,” he said, “or else it was on his word. Either way, it was him. The guys who were buying dope all say the same thing. That Duguay was running that apartment Gavin was in. Something went down, and he was seen in the vicinity.”
She went to respond but had to answer her ringing phone. She paused before picking up and said, “Talk to Caroline about the offer, Charlie.”
T
he first flakes of the season began to fall gently as McKelvey wound his way through the streets of the lower downtown, edging the lakeshore. Always the lake was out there, great dull silver horizon. It was a soft and slow snowfall, the kind he remembered from childhood, the snow just falling and falling so you couldn't tell whether the sky was up or down. Winters up north were so different from here in the city. He couldn't remember a green Christmas back home, but down here it wasn't unusual at all.
He didn't want to think about life back there, back at home, and so he pushed it from his mind and focused on the city streets moving with people and traffic, and soon enough his mind came back, as it always did, to the place where it got stuck, the groove worn deep. Every circuit, every synapse, every cell within the complex machinery of his grey matter seemed always to be working in the background on his son's file. It didn't matter what he tried to do in order to reign in his concentration; the wiring was splayed now, and the message wasn't getting through.
On mornings like this, he could not sit at his desk without his knee pumping in agitation, his fingers drumming a meandering and aimless beat, a million thoughts running through his head. Figuring things, remembering things. He would stand up and sit down, walk to the coffee machine a dozen times, visit the men's room and stare at his face in the row of long mirrors, anxious as a small boy waiting for
something.
Like a swimmer at the bottom of a pool, he could see the shimmering green-yellow lights of the surface dancing just beyond his reach, a whole universe taking place above that cloudy, formless horizon. Each morning he pointed his arms skyward, pushed off with both feet, and jettisoned himself toward the surface, his lungs aching for oxygen, fingers anticipating the first freshness of open air...
The falling flakes were hypnotic. He drove through the business heart of the city, blocks of chrome and glass, stone and concrete, University and Bay, then on down past the iconic train station with its weathered pillars and arches, the first view of the city offered to freshly landed European immigrants. This, too, had been McKelvey's first view of life in a metropolis, a smooth-faced kid stepping from the northern train with a duffel over his shoulder and a pocketful of hope. Now the immigrant taxi drivers lined up outside the station as well-dressed men and women flowed in and out of the brass-plated doors on their way to and from commuter trains hauling them in from 'burbs that were spreading like dark wine across a tablecloth, east and west, north and south.