The Devil's Dust (12 page)

“I can't change the past, but I can change today,” Peggy says, and her words reach McKelvey like a sacred doctrine. “I can make a difference in some small way, even filling coffee cups all day. Just do the next right thing. That's all I want, Charlie. To close my eyes at the end of the day and know that I didn't intentionally hurt anyone or play games with them.”

McKelvey opens his eyes. Peggy is smiling at him. He feels as though he has slept for a hundred years. He thinks for a moment that perhaps if he sits here, if he makes no move to leave, then time will cease. He does not want to open the door. He does not want or need to step outside, to the world, The Diagnosis, the calls from his worried family.

“I want to give you something,” she says. “I think you could use it.”

McKelvey's old family home is dead quiet when he returns. He pauses just inside the door which opens onto the kitchen. If he squints he can see his mother standing there with her back to him, busy at the stove — she glances over her shoulder and smiles that smile that delivered the family through good times and bad. And over there at the kitchen table, his back to the wall, his father sits with his legs stretched out, workboots untied, the tongues sticking out, running fingers through his hair made messy from wearing a hard hat all day. He turns a stubby bottle of beer with his fingers, a hand-rolled cigarette smouldering in an ashtray, package of Drum tobacco next to a Zippo lighter.

McKelvey smiles to himself as he fills the upstairs tub with hot water, the steam fogging the mirror. The tub, an old-style claw-foot, brings him back to his childhood, those Sunday night baths whether he needed one or not. He liked them best in summer when he would sit in the cool water and his mother would wash his hair and the air coming in the open window smelled of newly cut lawns, and he could hear the crickets singing at twilight. Now he drops his clothes on the old white tiles and steps into the tub. He eases back and lets the water envelope his aching body, accept his aged vessel like a hand to a glove. He looks down at his body in the water, and he smiles again. An old man's body. But he feels like a boy inside. Is this how it is for everybody, he wonders. He remembers Peggy's words, about doing the next right thing, about putting your head on your pillow with a clear conscience, and an image of the young cop comes to his mind. Eddie Nolan. A good young cop trying to make a difference in this dying town. He knows then that he will help the young man. Though he is not given to the notion of karma and cosmos, he does contemplate the coincidence of his arrival, the breadth of experience he can bring to Nolan's virgin work.

He towels himself dry and then wraps the towel around his waist. His hand reaches out and opens the medicine cabinet above the sink. His fingers move the deodorant, the shave cream, the Preparation H, and find the pills. Peggy's words enter his brain like a telegraph. He holds the pill bottle for a full minute, gears shifting, his mind conjuring various scenarios, and then he raises the toilet seat and sprinkles the pills. This is not the first time he has done this; he has been here before. He has twice flushed the source of his nagging doubt and the very next day called Dr. Shannon for a refill. But he wants to make this change in his life once and for all. Wants to, needs to,
has to
. He stares down at the floating capsules, tiny tablets of heaven and hell. And he flushes.

He smiles for what seems like the hundredth time that night as he climbs into bed and pulls the covers up, and he recalls the mischievous grin on Peggy's face as she kissed his cheek at the door and said “I hope you didn't think you were going to get lucky tonight, Mr. McKelvey. But I'm not that kind of girl …”

To which his face burned red, and he stood at her door, stammering through some adolescent reply. She smiled and closed the door. And now he looks over at the card she gave him before leaving. It sits on the closed toilet seat. The Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

and where there is sadness, joy.

It's all good
, he thinks. Despite the current state of his blood cells, the fact he has very likely run away from his life, the likelihood both his estranged wife and doctor are searching for him right now, despite the flushing of his lifeline down the toilet, it's all good.

"C
onsider yourself deputized,” Nolan says over the phone.

Nolan says he is at the station, has been there all night. Everything has changed, he says, and McKelvey hears the exhaustion and fear in his voice.

“Chief Gallagher got special approval from Mayor Danny Marko in the middle of the night. You're on the force, Charlie. A special constable. Limited authority, but a step up from an auxiliary officer.”

Special constable
. McKelvey turns the phrase on his tongue. He both likes and dislikes the sound of it. What it means exactly, he can't be sure. Perhaps “auxiliary officer” is more fitting. He was certainly an auxiliary husband and father. But he has already decided to help the younger cop. Titles are meaningless to him now.

“What happened?” McKelvey asks.

Nolan runs through the high-level details. Wade Garson's trailer exploded just before eleven o'clock. Constable Pete Younger arrived first on scene. The rookie got too close to the fire. He was taken by ambulance down the highway to meet the Medevac to Sudbury.

“He's not in good shape, Charlie. They're talking about flying him down to Toronto. I was second on scene. The trailer was beyond fully involved, it had blown apart by then. Insulation and metal siding sprayed all over the woods like confetti. When I got to Younger he was barely breathing.”

“They find Wade Garson's body?”

“We'll need to run dental records on this one. God, I can still smell it. I can't get the taste out of my mouth …”

McKelvey knows what Nolan is talking about. He can see and smell the first body he ever responded to as though it were only yesterday. This homeless man who drank himself to death and was left to swell to the point of bursting in his room at a King Street flophouse. It was during an August heatwave. Maggots crawling from the ears and nose, the smell a strong and sickly sweetness of pus and vinegar. The landlord was absent and the other tenants were drunkards themselves, oblivious to the rotting corpse down the hall. It marked McKelvey for life, this notion that in the end we die alone.

“Garson must've been cooking the meth after all. I think I smelled ammonia or something like that. The Chief is there now holding the scene until the fire marshal arrives. Gallagher sounds like he's about to lose his mind. He found out the provincial police are sending a senior investigator from HQ in Orillia. He's going to pick him up at lunch and meet back at the station for a briefing. I'll swing by and pick you up.”

“I'll be ready in twenty minutes.”

He hangs up. Something is bothering him, digging at his mind. He stands there at the phone which Levesque has finally activated with the telephone mafia at Bell Canada. He has a phone listing here; he is apparently an auxiliary — or special — member of the police force. He is back home, or so it seems, and yet his home is in the city. Toronto the clean, Toronto the dirty.

And then it comes, like the name of a song recalled in the middle of the night. Wade Garson's place didn't smell of ammonia. A lingering pong of stale marijuana, perhaps, but not the chemicals required in the production of methamphetamine. If Nolan is right, and he did smell something strange in the fire, then what has changed, McKelvey wonders, in the last twenty-four hours?

McKelvey slides into the cruiser, which is warm and smells of smoke from the fire which clings to Nolan like a fingerprint, and on top of this there is the pungency of Nolan's young-man's cologne — something loud on the senses, too aggressive. McKelvey is reminded of the younger men on the force, how much care and attention they put into their appearance compared to the old days. Gelling their hair, frosting the tips, playing games with their facial hair, reading magazines in the lunch room that gave tips about which red wines to buy, which exercises to employ in order to achieve Hollywood abs.

When it came to doing sixteen hours of dead-time in a ghost car for a winter night stakeout, or God forbid, getting down to business in the darkest corners of the dark world they policed, McKelvey sensed a subscription to a new law of diminishing returns from this generation. This young cop at his side reminds McKelvey more and more, not of himself in his own rookie days — for he was much more brash and balls-out, for better or for worse — but of the cop he wishes he had been. Nolan's eagerness to learn, to in effect be the best cop he can be, leaves the older man with a sense of remorse.

“It'll take you a few showers to wash that smoke off.” McKelvey looks over and sees Nolan's hands are blackened with soot.

“Chief's wound up like a top,” Nolan says, putting the cruiser in motion.

The day is bright and clear. It doesn't seem possible that problems could find a place like this as they navigate the quiet streets, roll past simple homes with snow-covered roofs. Hard-working people living simple lives of low expectation. In fact, McKelvey recalls, the only base expectation seemed to be that a life of hard work, of attending church on Sunday, of helping a neighbour when they were sick, that a life lived by these rules should necessarily result in less pain and suffering. McKelvey looks out the window at the sleeping town and thinks,
but there are no rules, no promises to be kept or broken
.

“We've got some extra uniform shirts I can get you, and a weapon and some cuffs,” Nolan says, “and we can get you set up with Younger's cruiser.”

“I don't need a gun,” McKelvey says, still looking out the window. He sees but does not register the passing landscape, his vision clouded with stark images of the old factory down by the Toronto harbour — the shootings there, the gunfire that echoes still. If he closes his eyes he can see the body of Detective Leyden splayed on the catwalk, he can smell the gunpowder; can see it hovering in the air like a horizontal mist. And he watches, too, as the man he shot gets pulled backward out the window to the green-blue water below. He hears the broken glass from the window hitting the concrete floor below as though a chandelier has crashed. He hears it most nights when he closes his eyes.

Nolan shoots him a glance. “You don't
want
a gun or you don't
need
a gun?”

“I don't need it,” McKelvey says, then adds, “Don't want it.”

“Fair enough, I guess. Saves paperwork with the Chief. You take a baton at least?”

McKelvey nods once, then asks, “Who's the coroner in these parts?”

“Doctor Nichols at the clinic here. He doesn't get much practice with this sort of thing. Mostly old people dying in their sleep.” Nolan says this as though he himself has dealt previously with this sort of predicament, examining charred bodies pulled from an exploded trailer suspected of being a meth factory. “He's at the scene with the Chief right now. We should catch them before the Chief picks up this OPP investigator. I'm not looking forward to that, to be honest.”

“The OPP riding in to save the day? Not much chance of them staying out of it once you have a local officer hurt and this rash of crime. Just make sure they know you're leading this. Don't take your hands off the reins for a minute. Those assholes think they invented investigative procedures. Just be thankful it's not the RCMP coming in.”

They are out on the highway now; it is as though the town has simply dissolved behind them. The pavement is scraped clean of snow and ice. The steel guard railings are caked with brown from salt and dirt kicked up by the big rigs, but the treeline set farther back is dusted with white snow, pristine.

“I'm glad you're here,” Nolan says. “I've never attended a scene for something like this.” He turns and gives McKelvey a small smile. The gratitude is genuine. McKelvey can't help but think of the card he has tacked to his fridge door: The Prayer of St. Francis. What is he blind to in himself that Peggy was able to see? What does she know about him?

Nolan has to hit the brakes as he comes around the slight bend in the road. They are suddenly at the turnoff to Wade Garson's trailer. Before McKelvey can respond to Nolan's comment, something occurs to him.

“Stop,” he says.

He pops the door latch and climbs out. He walks over to the mouth of the snow-packed lane leading into the trailer. He looks down at the ground. He crouches and touches the snow in various spots. Another door swings shut and boots crunch across the frozen ground.

“Tire tracks?” Nolan says, standing to the side.

“The OPP will photograph, set casts, and generally sniff up and down this lane six ways to Sunday,” McKelvey says. “We don't want them throwing evidence in our face like we're amateurs or something. You ID any tires here that look fresh?”

Nolan leans in and squints into the snow. The brightness of the day does not help their work. He clamps a thumb and forefinger like a vice across his forehead.

“My head,” Nolan says, and he shakes it to clear his vision.

“Wheelbase, tread wear patterns. Just like a thumb print,” McKelvey says.

“This one,” Nolan says, and he stands up, pointing. “This is a truck or an SUV. Something bigger than the Nissans we drive. What do you think?”

“Could be the paramedics, or anybody who came through here last night.” McKelvey stands and takes a haul of the fresh country air into his lungs. He feels good. He is working on something here. Small, or nothing at all really, but it's a start, and he can feel it starting again, this thing that happens when he stands at the very edge of an investigation. “We'll get some pictures of these tracks, Nolan. Find out what the paramedics and the coroner drive, start running some checks.”

Nolan heads back to the cruiser. “I've got a digital camera in the glove compartment.”

“Next time,” McKelvey calls after him, “your Chief should know better than to leave the entrance to a crime scene unattended like this. Anything ever makes it to court, the defence will have a field day. A break in the chain of evidence collection is grounds for reasonable doubt.”

McKelvey looks over and Nolan is taking a picture of him.

“What are you doing, making a fucking scrapbook?”

“Sorry,” the younger cop says, and he shrugs. “I'm a little excited, I guess.”

The trailer looks as though it has been blown apart with the industrial grade dynamite they use in mining. The roof and three walls have been shredded, twisted, peeled back like the top of a Jiffy Pop, but strangely enough the far side wall still stands. It is an eerie sight. Curtains still hang from blown-out windows on that wall, everything scorched and smouldering. The remnants of Wade Garson's life exist only in outline now, a fridge leaning sideways, the skeleton of a favourite La-Z-Boy. Though the fire has been doused for hours now, small spirals of smoke still curl and rise from the soggy mess of ashes. Dressed in a lumber jacket and hip waders that he likely uses for fly fishing, standing up to his knees in the centre of what must have been Wade Garson's kitchen, can only be Dr. Nichols, the only physician within the town limits, the only coroner in perhaps the region.

Nolan and McKelvey leave the cruiser at the mouth of the laneway and walk in. Gallagher gives a little wave. He is sitting sidesaddle inside Younger's police cruiser, door open, legs outside. He could be a man enjoying himself at a tailgate party, McKelvey thinks. But as they draw closer, he sees the man's face is haggard, the worry written deep in his eyes. Gallagher drinks from the lid of a steel Thermos.

“This is a real goddamned jackpot, boys.” He motions toward the remains of the trailer. He takes another drink, flicks the cup lid toward the snow, and then screws it back on tight. “Should've run these Garsons out of this town a long time ago, pulled a Texas lynch mob on their asses. Now look at us. I got a good young cop in the hospital with his lungs burned to hell and the OPP is coming in. That'll be the end of this police force, all on my watch.”

McKelvey notices Gallagher's glassy, rheumy eyes. He catches a whiff of rye in the air and understands the Chief is not consoling himself with coffee. This will make matters even worse when the provincial police arrive on the scene. He knows from experience that despite best efforts, big-city cops necessarily doubt the talent and abilities of their small-town colleagues. He has held this view himself, following the trail of a bank robber from Toronto to a town like Brockville. He supposes it's this way with most professions, this notion that if you were any good at what you did, you sure as hell wouldn't be content to work in some backwater for half the pay. He is reminded of some of the shoddy dentistry that had been performed on him by old Doc Finton when he was a kid up here, this miner's town dentist who reeked of body odour and had hair sprouting out of his ears and nostrils like he was using fertilizer to grow the stuff.

“You look tired there, Chief,” McKelvey says.

Gallagher rubs his jaw. He looks up and stares at McKelvey for a minute.

“You wanted to get your nose in this, well here you are,” he says. “Welcome to it. You're with us now, McKelvey. A special constable. Congratu-fucking-lations.”

“He didn't ask to help,” Nolan says. “I asked him. And with Pete in the hospital, well, we can sure use the extra body.”

McKelvey thinks of pulling the older man aside, as he would do if he were back home in the city and smelled booze on the breath of a colleague. Tell him to head home for a shower and some rest, a bite to eat. Let a man exit with grace. But he believes it would not go this way with Gallagher. The man has this notion of McKelvey, big-city cop looking down his nose at the local force. He decides to take a longer route to the same endpoint.

“That the coroner over there?” McKelvey asks.

“Dr. Nichols,” Gallagher says. “He's not the best, but he's the best we've got. Body, or what was left of it, was bagged and tagged and brought by the paramedics to the medical clinic.”

McKelvey watches as the coroner stoops, rummaging through debris like some collector at a flea market. The coroner is afforded certain privileges, access to the scene where a body is found, but this probably borders on destruction of evidence. In the city, the forensic officers would be booted and suited to avoid cross-contamination.
But this is not the city
, he thinks.