“Thank you sir,” the driver said. Then, as McKelvey walked toward the entranceway, he called out. “Please, if you need a driver, sir, give me a call. I give you my card…”
The man had scrawled his name and cellphone number across a taxi receipt in the shape of a business card. The entrepreneurial spirit impressed McKelvey, and he stuck the card in his shirt pocket, giving the top of the car a tap before he walked away.
The elevator in Fielding’s building was mirrored floor to ceiling. If the designer had been after some element of class or chic, he’d missed the mark. The effect was disorienting, slightly creepy. The glass was smudged with hand prints and the smeared smacked lips of toddlers. McKelvey punched the button for the ninth floor then stood back and checked his reflection in the yellowish light. He was dressed in jeans with a white dress shirt and navy sports jacket, still unable to leave the house without looking something like a plainclothes cop. Which is what he was, in his heart of hearts, and what he always would be. It was his skin, it was his DNA—the Alpha and the Omega of Charlie McKelvey. Which was somewhat ironic, considering he had stumbled by chance into the job as a fresh-faced kid off the bus from the cloistered northern mining town of Ste. Bernadette. It was a steady paycheck at first, and he’d never expected it to become a lifetime, to define everything about who he was and what he believed. One day you simply wake up and The Police is your marrow.
He buttoned and unbuttoned the jacket, turned to the side, sucked in his modest paunch. Those draft beers at Garrity’s, the always-at-hand bar peanuts. He thought he didn’t look as bad as he felt. He was holding his weight steady at one ninety, better than the two fifteen he’d carried around his last few years on the Hold-up Squad, eating fast food and guzzling too much coffee. The soft lighting in the elevator was flattering too, and his curly hair seemed to have more pepper than salt. But as the floor chimed and the doors whooshed open, he saw that it was all an illusion: every mile was etched there, and he had been both city and highway driven.
Tim Fielding was the sort of man who could not easily conceal the internal workings of his life, something McKelvey had learned from their time together in the men’s grief group up at St. Michael’s Hospital. The young widower wore his guts on his sleeve, the type of man who would never hold up under police questioning. That morning, when he opened the door, McKelvey thought Fielding looked as though he hadn’t slept in a week. His usually clear eyes were red and glassy, and his face had taken on a new paunchiness.
“Thanks for coming, Charlie,” he said. “You must think I’m crazy.”
“To be honest,” McKelvey said, “you’re the most rational person I know.”
Fielding went to the kitchen and poured two coffees from a drip machine. He handed a mug to McKelvey, and McKelvey read the swirling blue letters that proclaimed “World’s Best Teacher’.”
“You take sugar and cream, right?” the younger man said.
“Just cream,” McKelvey said. “I’m supposed to go for skim, but what the hell. It’s a holiday almost.”
Fielding stood with the fridge door open, staring. After a moment he turned and held his palm up.
“Sorry,” he said. “No cream. And the milk’s expired.”
McKelvey nodded, accustomed to his own lack of fresh groceries. He sat in the living room on the sofa and set his coffee on the table. It was one thing for his own fridge to carry little more than a block of crunchy orange cheese, but Fielding was better organized and took better care of himself than that. These were the variety of observations that allowed a cop to form his appraisal of a situation. Everything meant something. It was the part of his job had that always driven his wife crazy. On the way home from a house party, Caroline might say, “Charlie, for god’s sake, those are our friends. Do you always have to watch people like that, like you’re on duty?” And for the most part he was unaware he was even doing it. The insinuation seemed to be that he wanted to find the dark spot in every soul.
“Donia,” Fielding said, coming around the kitchen island to join McKelvey, “she’s a student in my night school course I was telling you about. She’s Bosnian, a survivor from the war. Her family was destroyed. She came over less than a year ago to work in a factory as a seamstress, working these industrial sewing machines. She wanted to get ahead, but her English isn’t strong enough. She’s from a small village. Her people were simple people, farmers and tradesmen. She always said that: simple people, but good.”
McKelvey took another mouthful of the black coffee. It was caustic, like Liquid-Plumr running down the back of his throat. His doctor had warned against this sort of carelessness, for the peptic ulcer which had hemorrhaged and escalated his retirement meant a lifetime of vigilance against those four horsemen of the apocalypse: booze, cigarettes, stress and coffee. He had grown sick of the bitter and bland low-fat yogurt, of a life lived on the narrow margin of the health food aisle. A man could only eat so much plain rice and couscous before he snapped, walked into a steakhouse off the street and bought a twenty-two ounce prime rib with all the trimmings.
“You met her through the night school,” he said, getting his facts down.
“I just…we hit it off. It sounds stupid, Charlie, I know. She’s a beautiful woman, and there was something there. She’s wounded, I suppose, and I’m obviously not a poster boy for the well-adjusted. We just seemed to fit.” Fielding threaded the fingers of his hands as he might do in demonstrating a point to his students. “We went for coffee and then it was lunch and then it was dinner. And then, you know…”
“You slept with her,” McKelvey said. Going easy here, for if he had been making inquiries on the job, he would have used guttural language in an attempt to draw some emotion, indignation— yeah, that’s what you did with her, isn’t it, you dirty dog?
Fielding nodded and said, “I hope you know me well enough to know there was nothing untoward about the situation.”
Untoward, McKelvey thought. Was that a fancier way of describing the act of a teacher putting his prick in one of his students?
McKelvey said, “Go on.”
“We’re adults here, Charlie,” Fielding continued. “She’s not one of my Grade Six students with braces and a training bra.”
McKelvey pushed the mug away a little so he wouldn’t keep reaching for it out of habit. He regarded his friend, saw the truth written across the man’s face, and in fact had never suspected otherwise. Tim Fielding was one of those people walking the streets, bless his heart, who happened to lack the gene necessary for telling bold-faced lies.
McKelvey said, “So what happened?”
“She stopped answering her phone two days ago. She missed class on Wednesday night, and she hasn’t missed a class in six weeks. Something’s not right, Charlie. I’m no cop, but it just doesn’t feel right.”
“You have a key to her place.”
“No, but she has a key to mine. We didn’t spend the night together more than a few times, but when we did, she always stayed over here. She said her place was too small.”
“Where does she live?”
“She was in a unit off Blevins Place in Regent Park when she first came over last year. She said she had heard enough gunfire during the war, so she found a little apartment she could afford at Roncesvalles and Dundas, near the tracks over there.”
Fielding gave the address, and McKelvey pictured its approximate location. On the edge or even within the boundary of the so-called “Little Poland” neighbourhood. But first she had lived in Regent Park, having come to this country to escape war and instead having found the darkest the city could offer in terms of social housing gangs, handguns going off like