Читать книгу Last Song Sung - David A. Poulsen - Страница 10

The next morning I made a pot of strong coffee and was back at my upstairs bedroom post just after 7:00. I watched the departure of the man who lived in the house where Faith’s body had been found. At 7:34 he came out the back door of the house, walked to the garage, and disappeared inside. A minute or so later, a brown Chrysler 300 backed into the alley, turned left, and headed west, disappearing from view in a few seconds. I noted that the man was thirty-something, wore a good-looking, lightweight suit, and carryied a briefcase. I recorded his departure in the notebook Kennedy used to diarize all “sightings” on either property.

Seventeen minutes later, a woman came out of the house. She had a little girl in tow, and they, too, entered the garage, then after a couple of minutes drove away, this time in a Nissan Murano. Nice vehicles — this family didn’t appear to have been affected by the downturn in the Alberta economy.

They were too young to have been living there when the murder had taken place, unless one of them had grown up in the house. I wondered if either of the adults — I assumed they were either husband and wife or live-in partners — was aware that they parked their vehicles just metres from where a little girl just a few years older than their own daughter had lain as the life drained out of her. I wondered, too, whether real estate agents were obligated to tell prospective buyers about horrific events that had taken place in or around properties they were trying to sell.

I drank coffee and watched for a while longer, then went downstairs. At 8:22, a red Equinox pulled up in front of the house where Faith Unruh had lived. An eleven- or twelve-year-old boy, backpack over his shoulder, dashed from the front door and down the sidewalk and then climbed into the back seat of the Equinox. The boy was dark-skinned, perhaps East Indian or Pakistani. He rapped knuckles with another boy, similar in age and Caucasian, already in the back seat. The driver — I guessed he was the second boy’s dad — pulled away from the curb, and I could see someone else in the passenger-side front seat, an older sister, maybe. All of them were likely heading for the kids’ school.

I recorded that departure too. I took a break between 9:00 and 10:00 to take in yogourt and a bran muffin and thought about the fact that I hadn’t, during my time in the surveillance rooms, listened to any of my music. Music was part of virtually every one of my days. It had been the therapy I relied on after Donna’s death. Yet it had felt somehow wrong to have even that small pleasure while I looked out these windows hoping to spot a killer. I wondered if Marlon Kennedy looked at his time on the surveillance stools the same way.

Cobb texted just after eleven o’clock:

Read again your report on the conversation with the former assistant manager of Le Hibou. Good work. Want to hear your thoughts. Interesting the attitude change in Ellie after she’d played the other club. Might be a good idea to do some checking on the place when you get time. I’ve got a lot on my plate today — some domestic, some case-related. I’ll call when I get some time.

And that was my morning. For lunch I went down to the kitchen and made myself two baloney and lettuce sandwiches and took them and a Diet Coke back upstairs. But this time I decided to take my laptop with me. I pushed aside cords and power bars and made space on the table that occupied much of the centre of the room. I set up to do a little work on the Ellie Foster disappearance while I kept an eye on the scene outside.

The afternoon went by surprisingly quickly. I divided my time about equally between surveillance and research, looking, as Cobb had directed, for connections to Ellie Foster’s music career. And I spent a fruitless hour and a half trying to find out something about the coffee house known as The Tumbling Mustard. Found one mention — actually, a poor-quality photo of a poster from the club dated October 17, 1964. It was promoting a singer who called herself Angie. That was it — just the one name. Nothing on anyone named Fayed. I wasn’t sure I’d learn anything even if I was able to track down Mr. Fayed, but I was intrigued by the notion that Ellie had undergone some kind of personality or attitudinal change during or around the time of her Tumbling Mustard gig. Maybe Fayed could shed some light on that.

On a whim I checked out performers named Angie and actually surprised myself when I discovered a Wikipedia mention of a “Fredericton-born folksinger who enjoyed a brief career in the early and midsixties and retired to a sheep farm in the Shuswap area of B.C.” I tried to find more about the elusive Angie, who may or may not still have been raising sheep in British Columbia, thinking she might be able to direct me toward Fayed, but I turned up nothing. Then I came across a brief notation that offered “prayers and thoughts to the family and friends of Angie Kettinger, the wonderful New Brunswick–born singer who passed away last night in the Salmon Arm hospital at just sixty-six years of age.” The piece, dated April 29, 2011, included details of a memorial service to celebrate Angie’s life and music.

I was hoping that the passing of Angie Kettinger wasn’t a harbinger of things to come as Cobb and I tried to track people with some knowledge of Ellie Foster’s life and disappearance.

When I broke for dinner — a pizza warmed up in the oven — I had an almost blank page where I’d hoped several lines of meaningful text would be. After I’d cleaned up the dinner dishes — one plate, one glass, my kind of cleanup — I once again returned to the surveillance locations. As I sat on the upstairs stool looking at the quiet scene that was the house across the street, I realized how little I had accomplished that day. At eight o’clock I broke for a run, weaving my way around the pleasant neighbourhood and passing in front of both of the houses I had been watching on cameras. Back in Kennedy’s house I spent twenty minutes sitting in the dark of the dining room, trying without success to pull together even one thought that would move the Ellie Foster investigation forward.

After a quick check of the two cameras I was back at my computer feeling, more than anything, useless and depressed. For the next while I again immersed myself in the musical career of Ellie Foster. It wasn’t a long career. She had sung professionally for just over two years, but even in that time — as I read reviews, promo pieces, and comments about her from those who had seen her perform at Le Hibou in Ottawa, the Louis Riel coffee house in Saskatoon, a couple of Toronto and Vancouver clubs, or even Caffè Lena in Saratoga Springs, New York — it was clear that a great many people thought she was a special talent.

There were countless glowing commentaries and predictions of a major musical career that would rival those of Baez and Mitchell. I put in another hour of Google searches and phone calls and finally came up with something. Nothing major, but something. I tracked the number of a former Herald writer who used to write a music column. I’d met Bert Nichol a couple of times, but he’d retired by the time I started at the paper, so I didn’t know him well, and I doubted he’d remember me at all.

I had no idea how old he was, but I figured old was the operative word. Nevertheless, I hoped he could tell me a little about The Depression … if he was still lucid. And willing to chat. I called the number. It was coming up on ten o’clock, and I knew I was pushing my luck, but maybe the guy was still up and about.

A woman’s voice came on the line.

“Hello. Is this Mrs. Nichol?”

“Who’s calling, please?”

Ah, careful. Good girl.

“This is Adam Cullen. I used to work at the Herald and met Bert a few times, although I didn’t really have the opportunity to get to know him. Right now I’m working with a detective on the Ellie Foster disappearance from 1965. We’ve been contracted by a family member. I was hoping I could speak to Bert if he’s still up.”

There was a long pause.

Finally she said, “He’s still up, the damn fool. He watches reruns of those game shows — says it’s research for when he’s a contestant. I think he’s kidding, but with Bert you never know. I’ll take the phone to him.”

“Thank you,” I said.

I’ll take the phone to him. Bedridden? Wheelchair bound?

A couple of minutes later, a voice that would have fit perfectly on an old 78 rpm record came on the line.

“This is Bert.”

I went through the self-introduction again, hoping I wouldn’t have to repeat it a third time. No danger there. Bert was 100 percent sharp. And business-like. Or maybe I was keeping him from one of his shows and he just wanted to get rid of me.

“What can I do for you?

“I wondered if you covered The Depression when you were writing music for the Herald and if you could tell me a little about the place?”

“I didn’t get the music beat until ten years or so after The Depression was gone from the scene.”

“Oh,” I said, knowing my disappointment was likely evident in my voice.

“But hell, I guess I knew the place as well as anybody. Went there lots — even took Rose a time or two — that was Rose, my wife, you were talking to before. I saw Ellie Foster perform maybe three or four times. In those days I was just dipping a toe in the music world, and I remember I wrote two or three pieces about her for a couple of smaller music publications — the ones that paid in free copies and once in a while an album in the mail. In fact, me and a couple of friends of mine, we were supposed to be there the night she was kidnapped or whatever the hell happened to her. But one of the Herald sports guys asked me to cover for him. The Saskatoon Quakers were in town to play the Calgary Spurs. Senior hockey. He was supposed to do a piece on Fred Sasakamoose, who was travelling with the Quakers at the time. You heard of Fred Sasakamoose?”

“I have, yes.” I’d caught a CBC documentary some years before on Canada’s first-ever First Nations player in the NHL. “Cree elder. Former NHLer.”

“Exactly right.” Bert sounded like he was happy I was up on my hockey history. Which I wasn’t. But I did know of Fred Sasakamoose.

“He’d retired as a player a few years before,” Bert Nichol went on, “but he was coming to Calgary with the Saskatoon team, so I got to interview him. Good guy, as I recall. But it meant I missed that night at The Depression, all the shooting and shit … ah, sorry, Rose … all that stuff that went down that night.”

He dropped his voice a decibel or two. “Heard about Ellie when I got home later that night. A goddamn … uh … bloody shame.” He dropped his voice even lower, to a whisper. “My wife doesn’t approve of bad language.”

“I understand,” I said. “Listen, Bert, do you still have any of those stories you wrote about Ellie Foster?”

A pause, then normal volume. “Naw. That was a long time before computers. I’d write ’em and send ’em off — lots of times, the editors didn’t even get back to me, especially if they didn’t use the stuff. Probably just chucked ’em. End of story.” He chuckled. “Literally.”

“Yeah. Listen, Bert, any chance we could maybe have coffee and talk about The Depression a little?”

“After all this time?”

“It’s a long shot, I know, but her granddaughter is hoping to bring about some kind of closure to it, and —”

“Granddaughter?”

“Yes.”

Another pause, longer this time. I was beginning to think I’d lost him when he finally said, “Listen, I know if it was my grandkids, I’d want people to help any way they could. Why don’t you come over here tomorrow afternoon? I don’t get out much, so meeting you somewhere might be a little difficult.”

“That would be great. Can I bring anything?”

A pause. “How about a Peters’ Drive-In milkshake? I could do with one of those.”

“Done. What flavour?”

“Chocolate and orange mixed.”

“Got it.”

“I don’t know if I’ll be much help, but what the … the … what the heck, right? Always worth a chat.”

He gave me the address, and we ended the call.

I had just put my computer to sleep and was about to head back downstairs to the ground floor camera when my phone offered the first few bars of Loverboy’s “Turn Me Loose.” I picked up, expecting to hear Jill telling me something she’d forgotten to say the night before. I was wrong.

“Just checking in,” Cobb’s baritone voice informed me. “Making sure you’re not lying in a ditch somewhere.”

“No ditch. Everything’s fine here, or at least as fine as terminal boredom can be.”

“I can imagine,” Cobb said. “Actually, I had a couple of reasons for calling. Wanted to keep you up to speed on our other case.”

“Ellie Foster.”

“Yeah. I called in some favours. I got the actual homicide file from the shootings and Ellie’s disappearance. What Monica Brill gave us was bits and pieces, a summary.”

The homicide file, I knew, was a comprehensive collection of witness statements, the reports of the investigating detectives, crime scene photos, forensics reports — in short, every piece of documentation pertaining to the homicide being investigated. I knew as well that some jurisdictions, particularly those in the States, called that collection the murder book. But the Calgary Police Service used the term homicide file, sometimes abbreviated to the file.

“Anything there?”

“I’ve given it only a cursory glance. I want to spend some time on it tonight. How about I stop by in the morning and we take a look at what we’ve got?”

“Human contact. What a concept. I’ll have the coffee on.” I didn’t bother telling him about my conversation with Bert Nichol — figured that could wait until morning.

Cobb laughed. “See you then.”

I stood up and took a quick look out the upstairs window. Nothing to see but a house and backyard at peace. I ran tapes for an hour, took one last look at the Unruh home from downstairs, then did the same thing upstairs with the murder house (the name I’d decided to give it to keep them straight in my mind).

A quick glance, then I was turning away to call it a night when something brought me back to the camera ­ — a movement, or maybe just a shadow. I grabbed the binoculars and brought them to my eyes, and while most of my being was telling me it was nothing, I couldn’t control the racing of my heart.

“Come on,” I said out loud. “Kennedy’s been watching for years, but you’re going to stumble across the killer in a few hours? Give your head a shake.”

But I stayed in place for another half hour, watching … and seeing nothing. I ran the tape back and watched it three times. Something had moved in the alley behind the garage. I was sure of it. I was almost equally sure that what I’d seen was a dog or cat, or maybe a waving tree branch caught by a gust of wind.

Almost sure.

My eyes were aching and tired from the strain of trying to see something in the blackness of the alley. I wanted to go to bed, to sleep and dream about something pleasant.

But there was a part of me that wouldn’t let it go … couldn’t let it go. What if I’d had the chance to spot the killer, but ignored it, and he went on to kill again? And again. How would I live with that?

I decided to walk across the street and have a look around. Total darkness had long since settled on the street, and I took one last long look before I left the house. Earlier I’d noticed a flashlight on the windowsill next to the rifle, and now grabbed it. I hesitated and actually considered taking the .30-06. I shook my head at that insanity — just what the neighbourhood needed, a stranger wandering the back alley with a weapon. Yeah, that would hardly draw any attention at all to the house where the street’s recluse lived.

Instead I pulled on my jacket, tucked the flashlight into a pocket, and descended the stairs. I stopped in the kitchen long enough to take a nearly empty bottle of bread and butter pickles out of the fridge. A glass jar, surely a dying breed. I dropped the last couple of pickles onto a side plate, rinsed the long, skinny jar, and stuffed it under my jacket. Not as effective as a .30-06, but possibly useful in hand-to-hand combat. So did you take a knife, a hammer, brass knuckles? No, I opted for an empty pickle jar.

As prepared as I thought I could make myself, I slipped quietly out the front door. It was just after eleven, and the street was in the process of settling for the night. Several houses were already in darkness, including the one I was headed for.

I took a minute to look at the houses where it appeared that at least one person was still up. I looked at the windows, most with curtains pulled and muffled light behind them as residents read, watched TV, tapped away at computers, or got ready for bed. No one at any of the windows was looking out on the street as a stranger crept carefully along, flashlight now in hand.

I went the opposite way down the street, turned left at the corner, then left again at the alley. The house was seven in from the corner — I’d counted while I walked down the street. I hadn’t used the flashlight at first; there was sufficient light from the street lamps to allow me to navigate. But once in the alley, by the fourth house in, darkness had pretty well encircled me, and I flicked it on.

I slowed my pace as well, listening to my breathing and the crunch of the gravel beneath my runners as I walked — convinced that anyone within a two-block radius would be able to hear both. At house number six I stopped and pointed the flashlight first one way, then the other. Saw nothing, detected no movement. Heard nothing but the distant hum of an occasional vehicle.

I tried to determine where the movement I’d seen had been. Everything looked different once I was actually in the alley. I kept my hand over the flashlight, removing it periodically and letting the beam illuminate the alley for a few seconds at a time before covering the light again. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and I moved again now, slowly and carefully inching forward until I was behind the garage on which the camera was trained. I looked across the way, and between houses I could see Kennedy’s house, knowing that I would now be on the tape. I bent down close to the ground and could no longer see the window of the Kennedy house. The back fence of the property blocked my view of the house from this angle. Which meant that the camera could not now see me. And that meant that something — or someone — creeping along close to the ground would likewise not be visible from Kennedy’s roost.

The significance of my discovery, it seemed to me, was minimal. A dog or cat could move through the alley undetected. So could someone crawling along the ground. But it seemed to me people seldom slithered, snake-like, along gravelly — or any other — surfaces. Unless, of course, that someone was somehow aware that there was a camera trained on the area and that he or she could be seen if walking upright. Rather hypothetical. Rather ridiculous.

What was more likely, of course, was that it had been a small animal that I’d seen, or that animal’s shadow, thus rendering my evening’s excursion utterly unproductive.

Nevertheless, I wanted to be thorough. I again cast the beam of the flashlight around the area behind the garage. Saw nothing. Then I went over the ground in smaller pieces, moving the light and my vision back and forth across the alley … again, seeing only gravel, dirt, and a couple of garbage cans against the fence. They, too, would be invisible from Kennedy’s vantage point, and I stepped closer to them, thinking, though not with great certainty, that whatever I had seen had to have been in this general area.

The garbage cans, their grey metal shining when I splashed the light on them, were on a small wooden stand maybe a foot off the ground. I scanned the area again and saw nothing … except for a single piece of paper, clearly something that had escaped the confines of the trash bins. I picked it up and stuffed it in my pocket, if for no more reason than to avoid returning from my wild goose chase completely empty-handed.

One last look around, splaying the light first here, then there. Nothing. Not even a second scrap of paper. I made my way back up the alley to the street and retraced my steps to Kennedy’s house. Once inside, I returned the flashlight to the upstairs windowsill and out of curiosity rewound the tape to see what I had looked like prowling the lane behind the murder scene. I first saw flashes of light created by my placing my hand over the flashlight, then removing it. Then I was on the screen, moving slowly, clearly visible despite the darkness and shadows of the alley. I rewound the tape, watched it again, and was surprised to note that as dark as the alley had been, and even though I was never in the flashlight’s beam, I was recognizable — a testimony, I supposed, to the quality of Kennedy’s equipment. Watching the tape, I realized my expedition had, in fact, borne some fruit. Going down there had been useful in terms of providing a frame of reference for what I was seeing when I looked through the viewer of the camera.

And having provided at least a little justification for my nocturnal prowl, I reset the tape and headed off to bed. I was asleep in seconds, but it wasn’t a peaceful night. I woke several times, tossed and rolled around the bed, and dreamed of shadows.

Unpleasant shadows.