“Want to grab a beer and burger up at Fran’s after work?” she said. “First snowfall always makes me a little lonesome for home. Looks so pretty falling out there on the ocean.”
“Could always go look at the lake,” he said, fiddling with some yellow stick-it notes.
“Just doesn’t have the same magic,” she said, smiling.
He checked his watch and said, “I’ll have to take a rain check.”
They talked for a minute about some of the cases that were on the go, the usual suspects holding up Chinese convenience stores, lottery booths, a recent and violent trend towards armed robberies at the after hours booze cans. Then Hattie smiled at him, a sort of sad smile he thought, and she moved on to her cluttered desk. McKelvey called his wife at home, but Caroline did not answer. Then he remembered that she was out with four other women, fellow sufferers in grief. Drinking red wine—then, later, desserts and cappuccino—at a cozy Italian restaurant in Yorkville. She had told him all of this in the morning as he was getting ready for work, but he either didn’t hear her or had forgotten. It hardly mattered.
McKelvey left a message, speaking quietly into his phone. “Hey,” he said, “I’ll be home late. You don’t have to save supper.”
He thought of telling her about his day but decided it would only cause her unnecessary worry. He waited awhile at his desk, fiddling with pens and papers, before turning off his desk light and slipping out. The sky was black, devoid of stars. The city was quilted in fresh white, which made everything look clean and new, as though the whole place had been built just a year ago. The dusting would be gone by midmorning under the glare of the early December sun. But for now, at just after six, the new snow made the city almost look like a place where bad things never happened. It covered up the filth, McKelvey thought, the way a hooker covers up the bruises on her cheek with foundation.
He drove for a while before pulling into the parking lot of a convenience store a few blocks from his home, then he was standing in the phone booth in front of his car with his collar pulled up, the receiver cradled against an ear, reading the ads for chips and pop and candy bars posted over in the store window. Everything was on sale, two for one. Everything was a necessity. The use of payphones was not necessary, however, as the force supplied a cellular phone with which McKelvey had made a compromise: he would use it for work, but that was it. He could push himself towards the emerging technologies only so fast, so far. He still owned milk crates full of record albums, as yet unconvinced that the mysterious compact disc was here to stay. There was something about pushing a quarter into a phone, something about closing those folding doors off to the rest of the world. The streetlight overhead turned the flesh of his hand yellow as he dialed the number Paul had given him at the hospital group. A crumpled piece of paper dug from his pocket, words recalled. He couldn’t say why he was calling, exactly, or what he hoped to accomplish.
A man answered on the third ring. “Hello?”
“This Tim Fielding?”
“Speaking.”
McKelvey dug in his outer coat pocket for the package of cigarettes he’d bought after the meeting with Aoki. Player’s Light Regular. His old friend the old sailor. He lifted the foil flap, fished out a smoke with his teeth. His stomach fluttered with the anticipation of the first nicotine rush, that sick twinge of guilt. All the things that kept him coming back.
“It’s Charlie McKelvey from Tuesday nights. Tuesday nights at the hospital group,” he said, fumbling for the two-cent matches that advertised rare coins. “I got your number from Paul there, the moderator.”
He had thought about hanging up one ring before the man answered, and now McKelvey was wishing he had. He struck the match and lit the smoke, and with the first flood of nicotine and hovering tendril of blue smoke knew that he was in trouble now. No way to explain away the stench of smoke that would cling to him in this enclosed space. He supposed this carelessness meant he was beyond the point of caring now. In the end, that’s what carelessness always boiled down to, an indifference to the consequences. It was how most criminals eventually got themselves caught.
“Oh, Charlie, right, right. The policeman,” Tim said. “Paul gave you my number?”
“Well yeah, you know, he said you might help me with something I’m going through.”
Tim laughed, and McKelvey took a long drag on the cigarette, holding the smoke until it began to burn his lungs like mustard gas. His eyes watered a little, and he released the smoke through his nostrils in two long funnels. Fuck it. He wasn’t going to quit these.
“Me help you, right. He wants you to mentor me, I suppose. Sounds like something Paul would try to orchestrate behind the scenes. Anyway...” Tim said, and waited for the conversation to resume.
“Mmmm, that’s right,” McKelvey said. “So how about it. One night this week, maybe?”
“How about tonight?”
“Tonight?”
“Why not? Just stupid cop shows on TV,” he said. “No offence.”
“None taken. I can’t stand to watch them myself,” McKelvey said. “Everybody thinks we’re running around with our guns drawn half the time.”
“You mean you guys don’t get to do that?”
“Sometimes. Most of the time I’m sitting at a computer for nine hours trying to learn some new software program so I can fill out my reports and upload them to an invisible mainframe, or whatever they call it...”
Tim laughed again. McKelvey glanced at his watch.
“Do you know Murph’s on Bathurst?” McKelvey said.
“Sure,” Tim said. “Who doesn’t?”
“The one and only. I don’t think Murph will ever retire,” McKelvey said. “He must be going on ninety. I could meet you there in, say, twenty minutes.”
“I’m on my way,” Tim said and hung up.
McKelvey stood in the phone booth watching his breath fog up the scratched and gouged Plexiglass, smelling the stale air, the reek of tobacco. He wondered briefly about fate and what had moved him to call the young man. He wondered about fate quite often these days, how chance meetings seemed always in the end to be so much more than they first appeared. How there was no such thing as pure coincidence. How everything—even the murder of a child, say—was supposed to have a purpose behind it, something to be taught or gleaned. Or perhaps it was punishment. A lesson to be learned. What goes around comes around. Call it whatever you will; the notion gave McKelvey a chill. He opened the phone booth door and walked into the night.
Murph’s was a bare bones tavern wedged between a dry cleaner’s shop and a convenience store owned by a Korean family. It was an old and worn establishment that had stubbornly weathered the various decades and all the changing trends the city could throw at it. McKelvey thought of the place as an old sports jersey or a favourite hat that you loved and never wanted to put through the laundry, because everything that was special about it would be washed away. It had to stay the same, with the scuffs on the wood floor and the ages-old stains on the walls and the toilets that only worked half the time, a filthy plunger propped in the corner. Graffiti scrawled on the washroom cubicles stretched back to the 1940s, and that alone was worth the price of admission. For a good time call Gertie…
They didn’t have much in common, it was true. Tim Fielding was a school teacher and