By the Time You Read This (12 page)

19

I
T’S NO SECRET THAT
a certain type of man, or another type of man in a certain type of mood, will seek out exactly the person, place or thing that is most likely to bring him the maximum pain. A drunk will head to the bar, a compulsive gambler to a loved one’s savings account, a forlorn lover to the scene of parting. John Cardinal was in the basement the next afternoon, standing motionless in the dim light and chemical smells of Catherine’s darkroom.

The darkroom had been hers and hers alone, and he had never set foot in here uninvited.

Although Catherine would sometimes chat about a project beforehand, she never talked about her work in the darkroom. She was like a chef who doesn’t want anyone else in the kitchen, preferring to bring out the perfect meal as if it has been conjured out of thin air. She liked to come upstairs with a fistful of new prints and spread them out on the kitchen table. Then she would stand back while Cardinal examined them one by one.

If Cardinal was too slow to form an opinion, she would speak her own over his shoulder. “I like the fire escape in that one, the diagonal is so dramatic.” Or “Look at the cyclist in the background, heading in the opposite direction. I love accidental things like that.” Half the time Cardinal sensed that he was admiring the wrong thing: how cute the little kid was, how pretty the snow. But Catherine didn’t seem to mind.

There were several prints of the same photograph clipped to a line over her sinks, which Cardinal had installed for her years ago. The prints were black-and-white, and showed a brick wall in the foreground, a man approaching in the background, maybe half a block away. Man and wall were equally in focus, and Cardinal knew from his own limited experience that that was hard to do. It gave a slightly dislocated feel to the image, as if man and wall were equally inhuman. The man’s head was down, his face hidden by the kind of hat people rarely wear these days. An ominous picture… or maybe it just seemed that way in retrospect.

“What are you doing down here?” Kelly was leaning in the doorway, looking effortlessly lovely in white shirt and blue jeans. Catherine twenty years ago.

Cardinal pointed to the shelves that lined one wall, the tall closet for cameras and lenses, the wide shelves for storing prints. The bins for frames.

“I built those for her,” he said.

“I know,” Kelly said.

“Catherine designed it, of course. I mean, it was her workspace.”

“She was happy here,” Kelly said, and Cardinal felt a crimp in his heart.

“I’m going to ask you to do me a favour, Kelly. Not now, but a few months from now, maybe.”

“Sure. What do you need?”

“I don’t know anything about photography. And to tell you the truth, I liked every single picture Catherine ever took. She saw it, she thought it was worth photographing, to me it was valuable. But you’re an artist.”

“Struggling painter, Dad. Not a photographer.”

“You have an artist’s eye. I was hoping sometime, not now, you could go through Catherine’s photos and select the best ones. I was thinking—next year, maybe—we could put on a show of her work at the university or the library.”

“Sure, Dad. I’d be happy to do that. But I don’t think you should be hanging around down here. Everything’s still too raw, don’t you think?”

“Yeah. It is.”

“Come on,” she said, and actually took his hand and led him out of the darkroom. It all but undid him.

Kelly was right, though. He found it easier to breathe upstairs, in the domain that had been half his. He went into the living room and looked over the titles on the bookshelves. Catherine bought most of the books in the house. The majority were photography books, but she had also bought books about yoga, Buddhism, the novels of John Irving, and a lot of psychology, too—books about depression and bipolar disorder. He took down
Against Self-Slaughter
by Frederick Bell.

There were several other books listed on the flyleaf, all of them with academic-sounding titles, but this one appeared to be aimed at a general audience, its tone calm, reassuring and surprisingly self-revelatory. The first few pages related how Bell’s father had committed suicide when he was eight, and his mother ten years later when he was beginning university. Not surprising that such a background might lead one to labour, as Bell put it in the introduction, “in the fields of grief and despair.”

Cardinal flipped through. The book was organized around several case studies, each chapter beginning with a description of a suicide attempt that brought the patient into Bell’s practice. There was also a section dealing with partners of suicides, with particular emphasis on people who had married more than one person who had committed suicide. “Some people with deep, repressed suicidal fantasies of their own,” Bell wrote, “need to be near people who are able to kill themselves. Unable to hurl themselves over that mortal precipice, they need someone to commit suicide
for
them.”

Cardinal decided it probably wasn’t the best thing for him to be reading just then.

He went into the kitchen, where Kelly had settled herself over a sketchbook. He picked up the mail from the counter where she had stacked it. Most of it was for Catherine: a photography magazine, notices from the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Royal Ontario Museum of upcoming shows, a bill for her MasterCard, as well as various mass mailings from Northern University. There were a couple of square envelopes addressed to him, more cards.

He was looking for his letter opener when the phone rang.

It was Brian Overholt, a Toronto homicide cop Cardinal had known forever. They had worked vice together more than twenty years ago, and after that narcotics. Together they had made an effective team, and Overholt was one of the few Toronto colleagues he missed. Cardinal had called him about Connor Plaskett.

“John, I got an answer for you. Plaskett is indeed an experson. Got run over by an Escalade in the club district here a couple of weeks ago. Hung in on the critical list for a while, but he died a week ago last Saturday.”

“Was he into anything down there I should know about?”

“Not that we know of. His associates scattered into the woodwork when he got run over, so draw your own conclusions. They clearly didn’t want to pass the time of day with law enforcement.”

“You catch the driver?”

“No, but it’s just a matter of time. Anything else I can do for you? Hello? You still there?”

Cardinal had opened one of the envelopes addressed to him and now he was staring at the card it had contained.

“Uh, yeah, Brian. Listen, thanks a lot. Any time I can return the favour.”

“Sure. Next time I’m looking for an Eskimo, I’ll hold you to it. Hey, how’s Catherine?”

“Gotta run, Brian. Something just came up.”

This card was postmarked Mattawa, just as the first one had been, again a semi-glossy Hallmark of the sort available at any large drugstore, not to mention every stationery store in the nation. So the sender had bought at least three. Maybe he had bought them all at the same time in the same store. A clerk might notice someone who bought three sympathy cards at once.

Cardinal tried to keep his mind fixed in investigative mode and not react to the words inside the card.

What a terrific husband you must have been
, it said. Same set-up as before, original message of the card covered up with a typed message.
She preferred death to living with you. Think about it. She literally preferred to die. That should give you some idea of what you’re worth
.

Cardinal went to the window and tilted the card this way and that in the light. Yes, he could just make out a thin line across the capital letters. Almost certainly the same printer, and even if not, almost certainly the same sender. Whoever it was, it could not be Connor Plaskett, who had died before Catherine. Connor Plaskett, as Brian Overholt had so eloquently put it, was an ex-person.

She preferred death to living with you
.

“Oh, fuck you!” Cardinal slammed his fist on the fridge, sending magnets, notes and snapshots to the floor.

“Dad, are you all right?”

Kelly had leapt up from her chair and was regarding him with dark, alarmed eyes.

“I’m fine.”

She put a hand to her heart. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you swear like that.”

“You may have to get used to it,” he said, shrugging on his jacket.

“You’re going out?”

Cardinal grabbed his car keys.

“Don’t hold supper for me,” he said.

20

“C
AN YOU GIVE ME
an address on Neil Codwallader?” Cardinal was heading into town on 63. The heat of his anger surprised him. He could feel it pulsing in his wrists, throbbing in his temples.

“Neil Codwallader is single now, John. He doesn’t have anyone to beat up at the moment.”

It was Wes Beattie on the other end of the line, a parole officer. Beattie had an imperturbable and comforting purr of a voice; it was hard to believe he had ever been a cop, but he had put in fifteen years with the OPP before being reborn into the gentler avatar of parole officer. Whenever he spoke to Beattie on the phone, Cardinal pictured a fat tabby.

“I need to see him about something else,” Cardinal said, and honked at a Focus that suddenly changed lanes without signalling. “And I need to see him now.”

“You sound rather ruffled there, John. If Neil has committed some kind of breach, you’d better tell me about it. Can’t go keeping secrets from our brother and sister agencies, now, can we?”

“I’ll tell you after I talk to him. Are you going to give me an address?”

“Six-ninety Main Street East. But he won’t be there right now. He’s working two jobs.”

“Let me guess: he’s a volunteer counsellor at the Crisis Centre.”

“No, I can’t imagine Neil will be consoling battered women any time soon, but he is working at Wal-Mart three days a week. And he puts in another four at Zappers.”

“The photocopy place?”

“The very one. Listen, John, you’re not going to go crashing around and jeopardize his employment, are you? I don’t nurse any more affection for wife beaters than you do, but Neil has paid his debt to society and now he’s making an honest effort to—”

“Well, what do you know? Here I am at Wal-Mart,” Cardinal said, and disconnected. He swung into a parking lot the size of several football fields.

Cardinal rarely set foot in Wal-Mart. It was always so difficult to find anything, and the prices didn’t seem to justify the aggravation. Half the time the aisles were jammed with obese couples pushing prams, although today they were relatively empty. In any case, he preferred to support the independent downtown stores—a goal that seemed more quixotic with each passing year.

The only thing Cardinal liked about Wal-Mart was that it employed older people. Although it had its fair share of teenagers expert in feigned helplessness, it also had a good many retirees supplementing their pensions by helping bewildered shoppers find their elusive consumer items. He asked a tiny lady who looked near seventy where he could find greeting cards.

“You’re already there,” she said. “They’re in the next aisle over.”

Cardinal zeroed in on the sympathy area. Yes, there were plenty of Hallmark cards.

“Here we go,” he said under his breath. “‘With deepest sympathy …’”

He picked out a card identical to the third one he had received, and then another, identical to the second card. Apparently the first card had sold out.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” the tiny lady asked him as he walked by.

“I did. Thank you. Can you tell me if Neil Codwallader is working today?”

“Neil? Is he the tall gentleman who works in the photo place?”

“Lots of muscles, lots of tattoos,” Cardinal said.

“Oh, yes. He was here earlier. But I believe he’s gone home.”

She directed him to the photo booth, several aisles west and one south. You really needed a moped to get around this place.

“Neil left an hour ago,” the kid in the photo department told him. “He’s got another job somewheres.”

Ten minutes later Cardinal was on the other side of town, parked illegally on Lakeshore in front of Zappers.

Zappers was the kind of place you go if you’re from out of town and you need to check your e-mail right this instant, or if you need to send or receive a fax, or if you run a fraudulent business that requires an anonymous mailbox. Mostly it offered the use of obsolete computer equipment at minimal rates. There was only one customer in the place, an Asian woman typing at lightning speed.

Codwallader was behind the counter, his back to the store, photocopying an enormous stack of paper. When he turned around, he did not appear to recognize Cardinal.

His long hair and walrus moustache would have been in fashion thirty years ago, assuming he had been a rock star. Prison had not reduced the muscles that threatened to burst the seams of his T-shirt. His forearms were paisley with tattoos.

“Help you?” he said.

“You tell me,” Cardinal said.

Codwallader went still, not looking Cardinal up and down the way a normal person might, but giving him the dead cold prison stare.

“I know you,” he said. “You’re the cop.”

“And you’re the wife beater.”

“So you said. That doesn’t make it true.”

“Well, the hospital records, the doctors and the social workers all seemed to agree. Not to mention Cora herself.”

“I got nothing to say to you, pal. I don’t even remember your name.”

“Cardinal. John Cardinal. I’m the one who told the judge how I found your wife with her nose broken and her arm fractured and patches of her hair torn out. How both her eyes were blackened, and how her clothes had been all cut up.”

“Like I told the court, I didn’t do any of that shit.”

“Spoken like a true abuser. Never guilty, never wrong.”

“The reason I got no wife now is thanks to people like you. People who like to interfere. Right now I’m just doing what I have to do to get by, one day at a time. So if you’re not gonna use a computer or something, why don’t you just get the hell out?”

“Actually, it was your printers I was interested in.”

“Printers are over there.” A paisley finger indicated a row of three machines. “Two bucks first page, after that ten cents a page. Knock yourself out.”

Cardinal opened his briefcase. He took out a computer disc, slid it into one of the computers and selected a letter he had written to his insurance broker. That policy would have to be changed now, since Catherine had been his beneficiary.

Cardinal selected printer number one, then two, then three, and printed out three copies of the letter. There were various flaws in the characters, but no hairline scar across the capitals. Of course, in a shop like this, the cartridges would be changed often. If all the messages had been printed out at the same time—say, a day or two after Catherine died—that cartridge would no longer be in these machines. For that matter, if Codwallader had done it, he could have used his own cartridge.

Cardinal put the copies into his briefcase and took his disc out of the computer.

“How much do I owe you?”

“Two seventy-five plus tax. Three sixteen.”

Cardinal paid him.

“Tell me something, Cardinal. You married?”

Cardinal held up his left hand, showing the plain gold band. Catherine’s name was engraved on the inside. He had always planned to be buried with it on his finger.

“You’re so righteous and all,” Codwallader said. “Tell me the truth. You never feel like giving your wife a tap on the head? A little smack? I’m not saying you acted on it. I’m just asking. Be honest. You don’t never sometimes feel like giving her a smack?”

“No. And now I need you to answer me one question. Where were you on the night of October 7? Last Tuesday.”

“Tuesday? I woulda been right here. We’re open till ten p.m. weeknights. Listen, if something happened to Cora, I got no idea where she even lives or if she changed her name or nothing. So if she got beat up Tuesday night or whatever, it’s got nothing to do with me.”

“So you say.”

“You can check the security cameras.” He pointed at the tiny camera above the entrance. “They go back at least a month. Ask the manager.”

“I will. Where is he?”

“Away. He’ll be back next week. Fucking Cora. I thought I was through with that bitch.”