Читать книгу Cue the Dead Guy - H. Mel Malton - Страница 8

WOODSMAN: When you chop down a tree, don’t believe that it’s dead / For the spirit inside will take root in your head.

-The Glass Flute, Scene vi

He wrapped me in his arms and let me sob on his shoulder, stroking my back with a sure, safe hand. He lifted my chin gently and wiped the tears from my cheek, then he said very softly . . .

“How much have you had to drink?” He grabbed my arm and led me out to the cruiser where his partner, Earlie Morrison, was sitting waiting for him, sipping a Tim Horton’s cappuccino.

“Hey! Let go of me!” I said, and he did. I was humiliated. I could see Lori standing in the doorway of the convenience store, gloating. I glanced over at the truck, whose motor was still running, and noticed that Rico had scrunched down in his seat so that just the tangled top of his wig was showing. Good move, I thought. Becker wasn’t all that positive towards persons with alternative lifestyles.

“Hey, Polly. What’s going on?” That was Constable Morrison, giving me a big, sympathetic smile, which made the tears prick again at the corners of my eyes. When you’ve been crying, a friendly voice and a bit of sympathy will start you up again much more efficiently than harsh words will.

Morrison looked good—better than he had in a long time. He’d dropped some weight, definitely. When I first met him, he’d weighed close to three hundred pounds. I knew he’d been hanging around my Aunt Susan a lot lately, because he was doing the Big Brother thing with Susan’s ward, Eddie Schreier. Maybe she’d dragooned him into helping load feed at her agri-store in Laingford, a job that had been mine when I was a teenager. Anyway, he looked good, and I was glad he was there, because Becker was being a jerk.

“Ms. Deacon has been at a party where she fell down and hurt herself,” Becker said, speaking for me, which I hate. “I just want to give her an opportunity to blow into a little machine before we let her drive home.”

“I don’t believe this,” I said, letting fury overcome all the other emotions I was currently wearing on the sleeve of my goat get-up. “Do you really think that I, of all people, would be driving drunk?”

Mark Becker knew, because I had told him about it when we were getting to know each other, that my parents had been killed by a drunk driver. It had happened a long time ago, but that didn’t mean that I had forgotten, or that I was the kind of person to risk doing the same thing myself.

“No, I don’t think you would, normally, Polly,” Becker said. “But you’re acting in an erratic fashion, and you don’t look good, and you just burst into tears for no reason, so I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t check it out.”

“Why not just ask me, then?”

“Ask you what?”

“Ask me if I’ve been drinking.”

“Would you tell me the truth if I did?”

I just glared at him.

“Okay, okay. Ms. Deacon, have you taken a drink tonight?”

“Yes, officer, I have.” That surprised him. “I had a small, watery scotch at about midnight, but I didn’t finish it because halfway through it, I broke my nose. Satisfied?”

He made me do the breathalyzer anyway. It didn’t register. He seemed disappointed and shook the machine a couple of times, like it was a watch that had stopped. I think he was stalling, trying to think of another way he could get my goat, so to speak. Geez. Ex-boyfriends can be so vindictive. Whatever you do, don’t go to bed with a cop. You’ll never live it down.

He escorted me back to my vehicle and watched me get in. I made a show of doing up my seatbelt and checking the mirrors.

“Who’s that?” Becker said, peering in the window. Not that it was any of his business. Rico was pretending to be fast asleep in the seat beside me.

“A friend from the party.”

“Drunk?”

“Geez, Becker. You never give up, do you? So what if he is? He’s not driving.”

“He?”

Oops.

“Yes, he. It was a costume party, like I said.”

Becker backed away from the truck, shaking his head.

“Drive safe,” he said. At that moment, I didn’t know what I had ever seen in him, really, I didn’t.

The light rain had turned to fog, and it was a long drive home. The Old Rock Cut Road is much better than the highway, because when the weather’s bad, you can creep along without some idiot coming up on your tail doing a hundred and thirty, trying to get past. I drove carefully, but Rico displayed an annoying tendency to cringe at every corner and apply the phantom brake at every opportunity.

“So, Rico,” I said, “what exactly did happen back there with Shane Pacey—before the stairs incident?” It was a nosy question, I know, but he was hanging onto the strap above the door with a white-knuckled hand, and I thought that getting him to talk about the evening would relax him.

“Oh, God, Polly, it was so embarrassing. I’ll never be able to go back there.”

“It wasn’t your fault, you know.”

“Well, it was, in a way. I suppose I led him on.”

“He really thought you were a woman, didn’t he?”

“He must have. Did you hear what he said after he . . . after he found out I wasn’t?”

“I could hardly miss it. Not a nice boy, our Shane. But it’s weird. Guys like that aren’t usually so easily taken in. He must have been plastered.”

Rico didn’t say anything.

“Not that you weren’t totally convincing, Rico, but usually you can tell, really up close, you know?”

“Well, that’s what I thought,” Rico said, finally. “I mean, when he made a pass at me upstairs, I thought, oh goody, a kindred spirit. Someone to—you know—flirt with a little. He kissed me on the way downstairs, you know. You’d think he would have figured me out by then, eh?”

“Did he come on to you just out of the blue?”

“I was talking to that lovely girl, Amber, when he arrived. Pacey was already drunk then, I think. He met Juliet at the door and made a big show of complimenting her and so on. He bowed and then swept her into one of those ballroom dips and kissed her on the mouth. Everybody laughed.”

“I see. So why did you think he might be a kindred spirit?”

“No straight guy would take a risk like that, would they? Juliet would swallow him whole.”

“True.”

“That’s what I thought. Then he came over to the bar, where we were standing. He knew Amber, you could see that right off, but it was obvious that they didn’t like each other much. She seemed really surprised to see him. They said hi, but they were sort of stiff. Anyway, seeing as every other male up there was drooling whenever they looked at her, I figured that Shane was more my type than hers. Then she introduced me and I saw his eyes light up. It was wonderful.”

“She know, do you think? That you were a guy, I mean?”

“Oh, yes. She had already said that she thought I looked incredible. She was fooled at the beginning, but it didn’t take her long to figure it out once we got talking. She’s smarter than she makes herself out to be, I think.”

We had just taken the last corner before the rock cut, and a car behind us passed, flashing its lights. Rico didn’t even notice.

“Anyway, when he looked me over, she smiled. It was a match-maker smile, like she’d done us both a favour and maybe would be collecting on it later. I was planning to thank her, but I’ve changed my mind.”

“She set you up, you mean?”

“Could be. If she knew him, then she must have known how he felt about girls like me. Men with that attitude don’t generally make a secret of it.”

“Maybe she didn’t know him that well,” I said. It was hard to imagine the puppyish Amber deliberately being cruel.

“Or maybe she sicked Pacey on me, then stepped back to watch the fun. You keep an eye on her, Polly. Pacey, too. If you guys hadn’t been at the bottom of those stairs tonight, I’d probably be dead.”

“I’m glad we were there, Rico.”

“Sorry about your nose, eh.”

I knew my nose would be a conversation piece for the next couple of weeks, and I was already tired of it. I just nodded.

“I’ll never be able to show my face at Steamboat again,” Rico said for the millionth time. “They’ll all be laughing at me. And I’ve got to go in tomorrow to meet with Kim Lee about the AIDS benefit. I can’t cancel. We’ve had this set up for weeks.”

“It’ll blow over, Rico,” I said. “You know how self-absorbed theatre people are. As soon as they get into rehearsal, they’ll forget it ever happened. Anyway, tomorrow, you’ll be Rico, not Ricki. They won’t even know you.”

We were almost home. Crossing the highway from the Old Rock Cut Road to our concession road was usually a nightmare, but it was nearly three at that point, and there was nothing coming either way. I gunned it and pulled into the strip mall where Rico’s antique store sat sandwiched between the hardware store and the Quick-Mart. He lived upstairs in an apartment cluttered with his favourite pieces, the ones he “simply couldn’t give up”, and the tools of his trade—sanders, cans of paint, varnish and polish, ledgers and reference books, and a fat old cat called Oscar. We could see Oscar sitting in the upstairs window, waiting. Rico had left a light burning, and the apartment looked cosy and inviting.

“You want to come in?” Rico asked. Usually, I would have, but I had chores to do at home in less than four hours, and my own pet, Lug-nut, would be waiting for me, too.

“Not this time, thanks. I need to grab a couple of hours’ sleep before rehearsal tomorrow. You want a lift in for your meeting with Kim?”

“Thanks. I’ll be ready. I’ll dress butch. Maybe Pacey won’t recognize me.”

“He’ll have forgotten the whole thing, guaranteed,” I said. One could only hope.

I don’t even remember driving the last two kilometres home. My nose throbbed and I was utterly bagged. I had to work with the cast the next day—well, the same day, really, and I wasn’t going to get much sleep. Still, I figured that everybody else would be in more or less the same shape.

I parked George’s truck next to the farm house and staggered up the trail to my cabin. Half-way up, Lug-nut met me on the path and gave me a hero’s welcome, jumping up and licking my face and wagging his butt-end as if he hadn’t seen me in years. Once home, I lit an oil-lamp (I don’t have hydro) and shucked my goat-costume (ruined forever by blood-stains and bad karma). Then I set the alarm for seven-thirty and flumped down on my futon. Just before I fell asleep, I reflected on why I love my dog so much: he was the only one who had made absolutely no comment about my damned broken nose.