My section commander’s a sergeant from Winnipeg on back to back rotations to Yugoslavia. He’s been telling us horror stories about the shelling and the sniping going on all the time. But that’s mostly in Sarajevo, and we’re going to be escorting convoys and protecting civilians in Croatia, which is a little horseshoe-shaped country that curves through the mountains and down the Adriatic Sea. Maybe Danny and I can go to a Greek island on our leave. Far cry from the North Atlantic. This is our first taste of real action, and I sure hope we both make the cut.
THREE
Green was already formulating a battle plan for the military as he walked back towards Gibbs’s car, but at the last minute he detoured over to have a quick word with Twiggy. The uniformed officers had obviously decided they had gleaned all the information from her that they could, for they’d left her sitting on the ground by herself. Some thoughtful officer had brought her a cup of hot coffee and a cigarette, which hung from the corner of her mouth. She cradled the coffee and pretended to be engrossed in her paper, but she was rocking slightly as if to soothe herself. At the sight of him, her lips stretched around the cigarette in a jagged but affectionate smile.
He extended his hand. “How are you doing, Twiggy?”
She squinted up at him through the smoke. “Well, well, Mr. G,” she said, her voice rattling through the phlegm in her throat. “Been awhile. What is it now? Superintendent? Chief?”
He feigned horror. “God forbid! Inspector, and that’s as high as I plan to go. I have a fear of heights.”
She chuckled, thrusting her thick tongue through the gap in her teeth. It seemed to Green that she’d lost a few more since he’d last seen her. “I don’t see your buddy around much any more either. Sully. He retired or something?”
“Just off on another assignment. And we got a great big city to take care of now, so we don’t get down onto the street as much as we used to.” He eyed the soggy ground beside her. She had spread out some of her newspapers to sit on. Without hesitation, she laid out the one she was reading, and he eased himself gingerly down beside her. The reek of booze and body odour almost made him gag, but he kept his expression friendly.
“So,” he said gently, “this must have been an unpleasant surprise for you.”
Twiggy shrugged. Green had known her since she’d first hit the streets, and he knew the reason, yet only a slight wobble in her chin betrayed the pain she must have felt. For Twiggy, like himself, dead bodies stirred up one memory too many.
“Not the first time,” she said. “Won’t be the last. Some day it’ll be me.”
He didn’t insult her by arguing. In truth, he was surprised she was still around. She was an alcoholic, a smoker and a diabetic. The only reason her heart and lungs hadn’t collapsed beneath the abuse was that she’d inherited the constitution of an ox. And the bloody-mindedness to match.
He stuck to the facts. “Did you know the woman?”
Twiggy’s eyes peered shrewdly through folds of fat. “Didn’t get a good look first time round, and wasn’t about to take another.”
“Still...did she look familiar?”
“Like you said, it’s a big city.”
“But you’ve seen a lot of it.”
She chuckled. “Not so much recently. My knees don’t like to travel. But she wasn’t from around this part, that much I’ll say.”
“Did you see her arrive?”
“She was already here.”
“Already dead?”
“Maybe. It was dark, and I didn’t notice.”
“Was anyone else around here last night?”
She shifted restlessly, wincing at the stiffness of her joints. “Mr. G, your cops already asked me all this. They took notes up the ying yang. Now I gotta go before I lose the best part of the day.”
Green pulled his wallet from his inside jacket pocket. “It’s just that sometimes, after the shock wears off, witnesses remember more details.”
Twiggy’s eyes flicked to his wallet before travelling up the slope towards the buildings on Bronson Avenue. She poked her tongue through her teeth. “I might have seen her earlier. With someone.”
“Man or woman?”
She stared into the distance, worrying her teeth with her tongue. “It was just a vague impression. I saw more the jacket than the woman.”
“When was this? The same night?”
“Maybe, maybe not. The nights all blur together, you know?”
“What were they doing together? Did it look like drugs? Soliciting?”
“I just remember them on a street over there, outside some fancy place.” When she pointed a stubby, yellowed finger towards downtown, Green noticed an oozing sore on the finger where the skin had cracked. “Talking.”
“Hear anything?”
She cast him a disdainful look before stubbing out her cigarette and beginning her struggle to rise. Green reached to haul her up, then extracted twenty dollars from his wallet. “Treat yourself to a proper breakfast, and check that finger out at the clinic.” He extended his card with the money. “And Twiggy, you be sure to call me if you remember anything more.”
A jagged smile lit her doughy face as she plucked the bill from his hand. “Sure thing, Mr. G. My memory’s a funny thing these days.”
* * *
Actually, Twiggy’s memory was still remarkably sharp for details that were important to her survival. Such as the whereabouts and activities of all strangers who came into her personally declared sphere of operation.
She waited till Green had disappeared around the edge of the wall before she made her move. Stuffing her newspapers under her arm and dragging her garbage bag behind her, she struggled up the muddy slope and headed to the seat in the nearby bus shelter. There, shielding her actions from the suspicious eyes of the police officer guarding the scene, she emptied her garbage bag onto the bench beside her. She pawed impatiently through the crumpled bedding and the pile of smelly clothing, picked up a small cardboard box and pried off its lid. Inside were two pairs of homemade bead bracelets and a gold ring now much too small for her swollen fingers. They were remnants of another lifetime, kept only because they were worth more in memories than in cold hard cash.
She frowned at the inside of the box. Too small. She groped through the clothes for a better hiding place, but everything was damp and stained. As a last resort, almost reluctantly, she picked up the two books that had weighted down the bottom of the garbage bag. One was a paperback picked up at a church rummage sale for 25 cents. If Life’s a Bowl of Cherries, What am I Doing in the Pits?, by Erma Bombeck. Bombeck had been dealt one of life’s crappier hands but had risen to fame and happiness, only to be struck down by a fatal disease at the height of her success. Twiggy had been unable to resist the irony, and indeed, Bombeck’s humour had brought her through many a desolate night.
But the paperback wasn’t big enough. Not for what she had in mind.
The second book was a