“Hey. That’s Francy’s drawing table,” I said. “The one in her studio. What’s it doing here? Francy would never sell it.”
“Francy didn’t sell it to me,” Rico said. “Her husband did. The washstand, too. I paid a good price for them.”
“I’m sure you did, Rico, but they weren’t John’s to sell. At least the table wasn’t. I helped Francy finish that table. She bought it at an auction a couple of years ago. That’s where she did her work, right there. She kept her brushes in that drawer.”
“I wondered where the paint stains came from,” Rico said. “I thought they added authenticity to the piece.” He was beginning to look uncomfortable. “Am I going to have to give it back?”
“I don’t know, Rico. It’s hard to imagine Francy agreeing to sell it, but I can’t see John carrying the thing downstairs by himself. Francy’s studio is on the second floor. Maybe they were short of cash.”
“I gave Travers four hundred,” Rico said.
“Wow,” I said.
“It’s a good piece, Polly. And the man seemed kind of… I don’t know, pathetic. Desperate.” The price tag said $1200. Rico noticed me looking and gave a little deprecating cough.
“Overhead,” he said.
“So John just showed up with this stuff and you bought it, no questions asked?”
“You know me,” he said. “Someone brings me something I like, I buy it. My turnover’s pretty good. Nobody bugs me.” What he meant was that sometimes his merchandise was a little warm. Everybody in Cedar Falls knew that, but Rico was generally careful to avoid what he called “local produce”.
“If Francy wants it back, will you forget the mark-up?” I said. “For you, anything,” Rico said, but he looked miserable.
I decided that, after I found Francy again, I would get to the bottom of the table question. I was sure she would want it back. What was more pressing, though, was to ask her why John was desperate for cash all of a sudden. It seemed to have, as Becker would probably say, some bearing on the case.
Twelve
With a breathtaking Doppler whoosh
your image spun in,
sleep-wrapped still,
and dangled perfect from my rearview,
spread-eagled like a plastic Jesus.
—Shepherd’s Pie
Rico's espresso left me totally wired. After I said goodbye and climbed into the cab of George’s truck, I could see that my hands were shaking.
Sooner or later, the health Nazis, who have marginalized smokers to the point of desperation, are going to turn on coffee drinkers. I figure that caffeine is the next frontier—they’ll raise coffee-taxes, overwhelm our teenagers with anti-caffeine slogans (JUST SAY MILK) and then vilify the public health system for treating caffeine addicts with money from the pockets of clean living taxpayers. After that, they’ll focus on television addicts. That’s when I’ll be dancing in the streets.
I stopped off at Gretchen’s Petrocan Diner to fill up the tank before hitting the highway and nodded to Bert, the gas guy. He was the one who had attended Dream-Catcher’s workshop and subsequently claimed the cougar as his power animal. He was a weedy young man, so thin you could see daylight through his wrist bones, and he kept his long, mouse-coloured hair pulled back in a pony tail. He was wearing those baggy trousers that are hip these days—the idea being to wear them so big that your butt disappears completely, leaving about a yard of wasted material. He was always quick with a hamster joke, but I didn’t mind it coming from him. I figured he needed all the self-confidence he could get.
“Fill it up with regular, please, Bert.”
“Hey, Polly. Got something for you.” He poked the nozzle of the gas pump into the tank, scurried over to the secret glass booth, where only gas guys are allowed, and returned with something in his hand.
“What is it?” I said.
“I found it at the Lo-Mart last week. I couldn’t resist.” He handed it to me closed fisted, and I opened my palm to receive it. It was a small stuffed animal on a key chain, perhaps designed to look like a koala bear, but I could see why Bert had thought of me when he saw it. It was no koala, for all the designer’s efforts. It was a hamster, and it was really cute.
“Oh, gee, Bert. A mascot.”
He grinned, studying my face to make sure that I wasn’t mad. “I thought you could, you know, hang it on the rearview or something,” he said.
“It’s adorable. Better than a St. Christopher medal. It’ll protect me from the lumber trucks.”
“What’s a St. Christopher medal?”
“Never mind,” I said. What did they teach them in those schools, anyway? “Thanks, Bert. I really like it.” I handed him the Petrocan card (it’s in George’s name, like everything else) and waited, chewing my fingers, while he ran it through the authorization machine in his booth. George and I share a special relationship with Petrocan. We get into debt up to our eyeballs and skip the monthly payments, then Petrocan sends us a kneecapper letter and cancels our card. So we send them a small cheque, at which point they send back a note telling us we’re a preferred customer and activate our account again so we can get deeper in debt.
We were, as it turned out, a preferred customer that week. I reminded myself to pay the bill soon, waved at Bert and chugged off to Laingford. The hamster mascot swung merrily from the rearview and I felt invincible.
The highway between Cedar Falls and Laingford is treacherous. It’s a two laner, with sporadic passing lanes disguised as paved shoulders. Every six kilometres or so, there’s a “keep right except to pass” sign, and if you don’t move over, you’ll get a lumber truck up your wahzoo.
George’s truck was almost as old as me. I was born in nineteen-sixty-two, and his truck was pulled howling off the line in sixty-three. It “ran good,” as they say around here, but it was not designed to gobble up the tarmac the way these plastic, Smartie-coloured compacts do. If I pushed it, the truck would do a hundred and ten clicks, but it would set up a whine like a dog who needs to pee, and I preferred to do the limit. Doing the limit on Highway 14 was not a popular tactic and driving to Laingford was always a lesson in self control. When you’ve got people passing you doing a hundred and thirty, it’s hard to keep cool.
I was just huffing and puffing up the long hill before the exit ramp to Laingford when I saw the cruiser in my rearview, cherry-flasher spinning and headlights pulsating like a demented Christmas tree.
“Oh, terrific,” I said aloud. Maybe I was going to get a ticket for loitering. I’d been doing seventy kilometres an hour on the upgrade, slow enough to warrant putting the hazards on, but it always embarrassed me to do that. I felt that if I did, the truck would know that I had no faith in it, and it would conk out in sheer disappointment. I pulled over and waited, trembling. Cops, as I’ve said, scare me, even if I’ve done nothing wrong.
I did a quick personal inventory. I was clean. I’d had not a drop of booze, not a puff of smoke, my license was up-to-date and the stickers on the plates were fresh that month. The insurance papers were in a plastic folder, paper-clipped to the visor. There were no empty beer bottles in the cab.
My pulse rate was still off the scale, and my palms were slicked up the way they used to get when I held hands with a boy in the Laingford Odeon.
I