City of Ice (14 page)

“That’s good news. He needs someone looking after him.” Boyle gestured in a way she found charming, the hands a nervous dance of activity.

“If he wants to live in a tunnel, what can I do? I don’t have resources. I’m only a poor student who’s been written off by her mom.”

Boyle nodded sympathetically.

“Dad said you were going to write about him. But unless I missed it, I haven’t seen any article written about my father.”

“I got sick,” he explained. “Bad flu. Couldn’t work. I’m only getting back to it now. I’ll need to research your dad before doing the story.”

“Research?”

“Talk to the bank, that sort of—”

“Those scumbags! They had to be dragged into court and made to cough up!”

“Heather, that’s what I don’t understand. If the courts directed the bank to pay your father a disability pension, why didn’t his circumstances improve?”

Bingo!
She had him. “What the court gives the court takes away. The judgment stipulated that the bank’s insurance plan pay my father an allowance. Which they did. But welfare cut him off because now he had this other income.”

“You don’t think that’s fair?”

“It would be, except by this time my mother had her divorce decree, which clearly stipulates that as my father’s income increases, the
rate
at which he pays alimony also goes up. His disability payments were
added to the welfare payments, even though the welfare was to stop shortly, and the disability was garnisheed by my mom. So he actually receives less money on the bank’s disability than he was getting on welfare. Go figure.”

“What does your mother think about this?”

“She grabbed the cash and looked the other way.”

“It’s nuts,” he commiserated with her.

“Will you run the piece on my father?”

“Are you kidding? It’s an amazing story. I take it you don’t object.”

“
Object?
I’m
desperate
for people to know what happened. Maybe friends from the old days will hear about him, maybe they’ll help.”

“The community could be moved by this story, Heather. Here’s a man at the pinnacle of success, vice president of one of the largest banks on the continent, and one day—”

“He can’t get off the train.”

“—he can’t get off the train. He goes to work in the morning, he’s the kind of man who enjoys taking the Metro, but at his stop—”

“He stays on.”

“—he stays on. Then spends the entire day going back and forth on the subway. At the end of the day, he finally gets off and goes home.”

“That was the first time but not the last.”

“Four days in a row. Finally the bank calls his home to see why he hasn’t shown up for work, and his wife finds out that he hadn’t been to the office all week.”

“He broke down in front of Mom,” Julia improvised. “He said he couldn’t get off the train. Mom freaked.”

“He went into therapy,” Boyle said, repeating the story for the sake of the corroboration he was receiving. As research went, this was a breeze.

“Right. Tell me about it. Therapy. Empowerment.
Getting in touch with your feelings. He walked out of therapy a sick, confused man and went straight to his boss’s office and resigned. Just like that. No severance pay, no disability, no unemployment insurance. Inyour-face quit. It would be heroic if it wasn’t so damned pathetic.”

“A year later his wife leaves him,” Boyle says, guiding her to fill in the details.

As Heather Bantry, Julia was only too willing to oblige. “A year after that he’s on welfare, sick, disoriented, on the streets, a case. Next came the court fiasco declaring he’d been mentally incompetent when he quit, so things looked rosy. But he ended up poorer than ever. In three years a vice president of the First Canadian Bank goes from middle-class comfort to spending Christmas in a tunnel.”

“That’s a story.” Boyle was elated. He could easily forget his professional detachment on this one. “It says—this could happen to me. This could happen to anyone!” He stopped to cough and blow his nose. “Here we have the justification for a social safety net the rich can understand. A mental breakdown, and no matter how well you’ve planned, no matter how safe and secure your life, with bad luck you can be shoved to the bottom of the ditch.”

She could imagine her instructor urging her out the door. She had gained the information she needed—he still planned to write the story—now was the time to depart gracefully. “I’m really pleased. Good will come of this, I’m sure of it.”

He pushed himself to his feet as well. “Listen, in case something comes up, can I have your number? People might be calling the paper to help, stuff like that.”

Without skipping a beat, Julia shook her head. “I’m just getting settled, I don’t have a phone yet. No permanent address either. I’ll have to call you later.”

“Here.” He handed her a business card from his desk. “How did you find me in the first place?”

She suffered a lapse. Not having a ready reply made her mind race. “You’re famous,” she answered quickly. “I asked around. You weren’t so hard to find.” She could hear Selwyn’s voice,
Good, Julia. Good good!

“Thanks for dropping by, Heather. Keep in touch, okay?”

“I will. So long.”

Julia Murdick flew down the stairs and sailed out the door to the windy arctic street. She ran through the light scuff of snow on the plowed sidewalk, and by the time she turned the corner her lungs hurt from breathing frosty air too rapidly. She caught hold of herself. Slowed herself down. She did not want Norris to detect her excitement. This was going to be her more difficult challenge for the day—concealing her euphoria.

Detective Bill Mathers traveled into Verdun to locate Jim Coates, but no one answered his door. This was an old, run-down community, originally populated by Irish who’d come to build the bridges onto the island and stayed to labor in the railway yards or on the docks. All that was gone now, the area mostly French. Steep stairs led up to drafty flats. Mathers teetered on the top step, trying to see in the window. He looked down at the crowded street below. A dog barked up at him as though he emitted a foreign smell. The street looked like a tinderbox. Verdun was notorious for its fires. In winter the desperately cold made mistakes and set their homes ablaze. In summer, the back alley sheds were kindling to bored kids and firebugs and those out to cheat insurance firms. Mathers shivered and went down to the flat below, where the landlady revealed that the young man had moved without leaving a forwarding address.

“I asked the scalawag where he thought he was off to. The scamp didn’t know.” A diminutive, frail woman in her eighties, wrapped in a piss yellow housecoat, she stood with the aid of a cane and spoke with the voice of a cranky despot. “He paid for January and a month extra, to break his lease, then he packed off and left.”

“Have you rented the apartment? Can I see it?”

“Nothing to look at but dirt. Take the Hoover up if you go.” Mathers waited while she engineered her creaking form off in search of the key.

Not much of an apartment. Junk mail had tumbled through the slot, a Monday morning’s worth. Dust bunnies procreated. The telephone had been abandoned on the floor, yanked from the jack. Mathers plugged the phone back in, but there was no dial tone, the line had been disconnected. A lonely coaxial cable slipped out from one wall like a rat’s tail. Mathers departed, dropped off the key, and headed for the corner deli, where he ordered a bowl of soup. He sat in a booth that had been slashed with a knife and never repaired, and made a phone call while the can of Campbell’s was warming. After lunch he called the office a second time. He was told that Jim Coates had discontinued his telephone service and paid the electric bill but had advised neither utility of a forwarding address. Nor had he contacted the Post Office.

“One last try,” Mathers suggested. “Call the cable companies.”

Five minutes later Bill Mathers was on his way to the new address of Jim Coates. Dispensing with mail and telephone, the young man had been unable to cut himself off from his favorite shows. He’d moved to a small apartment eight blocks away, where utilities were probably included in the rent, and Mathers wondered if that had been intentional to avoid being traced. Good thinking if it was. He rang the doorbell and was
buzzed up. Waiting on the third floor, the young man was not pleased to see him.

“How’re you doing, Jim?”

“How’d you find me? I just moved.”

“Can I come in?”

Coates considered his options a moment, then stood aside. “So how’d you find me?” he asked again.

“Were you trying to hide?”

The mechanic moved across the room and turned off the tube.

“You quit your job, Jim. Changed residences. You’ve been on the go in a hurry. We were wondering why.”

“You suggested it.”

“I suggested finding another job, giving Kaplonski notice. I didn’t say move.”

“Whatever,” the young man muttered. “Time for a change. It’s no big deal.”

“Why the fast tracks?”

Coates paced nervously around his living room, rubbing his hands as if they were cold. “Like you told me, they’re crooks. I wanted the hell out.”

“Why so fast?”

“You scared me, all right? Look—what is this? Since when is it a crime to quit my job? Can’t a guy move?”

Mathers stepped closer to him, inhibiting his restless wandering. “You didn’t give the Post Office a forwarding address. You don’t have a phone. If something’s going on I should know about, I want to know about it.”

“Nothing’s going on, all right?”

“We raided Kaplonski’s place this morning. Took everybody in.”

“Everybody?”

“The works.”

“Now you’re here for me?”

“We noticed your absence. Wanted to make sure you’re all right. Are you all right, Jim?”

“I’m fine.” He did not look certain.

“Yeah?”

This time the mechanic hesitated.

“What’s the trouble?”

Mathers had maneuvered him into a corner of the room, and the young man could only flap his arms in a gesture of worry. “It’s probably nothing.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“I was having lunch the other day, okay? Near Garage Sampson. I used to go around the corner to this greasy spoon. A guy walks in. I’m at the counter. He sits down beside me. There’s other places at the counter but, you know, he sits down right beside me. Then he’s talking to me. The weather. Hockey. Politics. He’s reading the paper, whatever’s on the page he talks to me about it. He starts asking what I do. So I tell him. By now I’m ready to leave. Then he wants to know if I’d like to make a few.”

“What did you say to that?”

“I’m leaving. I mean, I’m not talking to this guy. I don’t know if he’s a creep or what, but I’ve seen him before, so I’m leaving.”

Mathers took another step forward, and the boy was blocked off now without hope of escape. “You saw this man before, Jim?”

“Yeah. In the same place.”

“So maybe he’s a regular, something like that.”

“Maybe. But the only time I saw him there he was talking to Hagop. And, you know, Hagop’s dead.”

Mathers nodded, and took a breath to control his own emotions. “So you just ran out, or what?”

“I told him I wasn’t interested. He laughed, he said I didn’t understand. He leaned into me, you know, he whispered. He was creepy. He said he had a business proposition. I asked him, what proposition? He’s talking differently now. His accent’s changed. Like this was his real voice and that other voice was fake. He said he
wanted me to talk to Kaplonski. Say a few things. He said he wanted me to put a bug in his ear.”

“His exact words?”

“A bug in his ear, yeah. I was scared on account of Hagop. So I told him I couldn’t do that. I never talk to Kaplonski. He said he’d pay me five hundred bucks to have one conversation. I jumped out of my skin, man. I mean, Hagop talked to this guy and Hagop’s dead. Here’s some creep offering me five bills to talk to my boss and I’m supposed to believe that’s not dangerous? I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t want to know either.”

Mathers scratched himself under his collar. “Let’s sit down, Jim. Give me a description of the guy. Everything you can think of. Take your time. Try to remember every little detail. You did a good job covering your tracks, but I’ll fix it so nobody follows you the way I did. First, tell me everything you remember. Height. Hair color. Hairstyle. Eye color. Clothes. Jewelry. What kinds of accents he used. Distinguishing marks. Everything. Talk to me, Jim.”

Detective Mathers sat back on the lumpy sofa. Opening his notepad, he began to write in earnest. He wrote down the details, such as they were, and coaxed more out of his witness, as though he was an artist lovingly crafting a portrait. He wondered who was forming on the page. The detail that he underlined three times was mention of a scar, about the size of two fingernails, that shone on the man’s cheek as a patch below his right eye.

As instructed, Julia Murdick undressed in the narrow confines of the examination room. Her doctor did her best to keep the heat cranked up, but the room felt chilly nonetheless. Julia donned the thin robe provided and climbed onto the examining table, fitting her feet into the stirrups, convinced that contrary to graffiti
she’d seen on campus God was not a woman. Had God been female She never would have equipped women with such complicated sexual plumbing. And the speculum! God had to be a sexist to permit the invention of that device. Surely the contraption traced its origins to torture chambers.

Dr. Melody Weesner entered a few minutes later wearing a bright, earnest smile. “Let’s have a peek,” she chimed.

She’d warmed the speculum first, at least. Julia grunted as the instrument opened her wider. Perspiration broke across her forehead.
The indignities
, she chanted to herself.

“You already know about the retroverted uterus.”

“Inherited it.” Julia waved off the doctor’s protest. “All right, not exactly, but my mother has one too. Is that my problem? Mom says she manages, but I can’t.”

“We’re done here,” the doctor reported, and she removed the instrument and peeled off her rubber gloves.

“What’s the verdict?”