Читать книгу A Case of You - Rick Blechta - Страница 9

The one big sticking point in my relationship with Olivia was her friend Maggie. For some reason, she seemed to hate me from the moment she walked into the Sal.

A tough woman, you knew immediately that she’d been around the block a few times and trusted nothing and no one. She had blonde hair from a bottle done in a sort of mullet cut, and though around five-five in height, she might have weighed a hundred and ten pounds. Life can knock people around, and she gave every impression of having been knocked around a lot. She would have been considered pretty by some, but that edge was draining away quickly as the years passed. I never saw her in anything but tight jeans, high-heeled boots and a fringed leather jacket.

Maggie tagged along to the first rehearsal, held in my basement studio. She plopped herself in a corner, sitting there with her arms folded and a scowl plastered on her face. Occasionally she let out a huge sigh and shook her head, until Ronald had enough and told her to wait upstairs. The stomping footsteps overhead as she paced proved even more annoying.

During a break, Olivia went upstairs, and we could hear raised voices – mostly Maggie’s. Olivia soon came back down looking troubled, and for the rest of the afternoon her work could most kindly be described as distracted.

When we packed it in (Ronald in deep disgust), my two bandmates split pretty quickly, but I kept Olivia back. “Is everything okay?”

Her lip trembled as she shook her head. “Maggie is very, very angry with me.”

“Why?”

“She just is,” was the evasive answer.

“You mean she’d rather see you out panhandling for chump change?”

“I only do that because it’s better than hanging around our room while she’s...”

“What?”

“Never mind. I shouldn’t be saying anything.”

Maggie yelled from the top of the stairs, “O, are we going to get out of here sometime before midnight?”

“I’ll be right along!” Olivia shouted back, then turned to me.“Look, I’ve gotta go.”

“Will you come back tomorrow?”

“Ronald said we’re not rehearsing until Sunday afternoon.”

“I thought we could do some extra work. I play a bit of piano and have a huge CD collection. We can go through it and see if there are any songs that tickle your fancy. That way you’ll be better prepared for our next rehearsal.”

She looked troubled. “I don’t know if I should. Maggie will be even more upset.”

“Hell with Maggie! You need a lot more rehearsing if you’re going to be ready for Tuesday night.”

“I don’t know...”

“Call me in the morning.”

“I don’t have a phone.”

“Does Maggie?”

“A cell. She knows I’d have no good reason to ask for it.”

“Will you come tomorrow?” I pressed.

“I’ll try. I could tell Maggie I’m going down to Union Station to work.”

***

Next morning, when I staggered downstairs around eight to brew a pot of coffee, I found Olivia shivering on my front steps. Thanking my lucky stars that I’d bothered to put on my robe, I hustled her into the kitchen, where I wrapped her in two blankets.

“How long were you out there?” I asked as I filled the coffee maker.

She stared down at the table. “I don’t know. Awhile...”

I ground some beans, and when the coffee was ready, I pressed a mug into her cold hands. “Drink this.”

Olivia smiled. “Could I have sugar and milk in it?”

“Right. I forgot about that.”

She was one of those people who likes coffee with her sugar. I drink mine black and strong, as did Sandra, my ex.

Without asking, I started cooking breakfast, my regular morning job when I still had a family. Olivia expressed no preference, so she got eggs scrambled the way I like them. Even though she’d claimed not to be hungry, she wolfed down the eggs, four slices of bacon and several pieces of toast. I took the opportunity to shower and dress while she finished.

When I came back downstairs, I found her, sans blankets, in the living room looking over my shelves of CDs.

“Does Maggie know you’re here?”

“She was, um, busy when I left.”

“Next time you get here early, please ring the bell. I don’t want to find your frozen body on my front steps.”

I’d meant it jokingly, but Olivia’s expression clearly showed she’d taken me at my word. I’d find later that she often did that.

We spent the morning listening to tunes I thought would be appropriate for her range and expertise. Her sponge-like memory astonished me. She had each song down note perfect after only a few listenings. The bottom of her range was a low F, and none of the songs seemed to strain her upper limits. In short, she could pretty well sing anything she wanted in almost any key.

“Have you taken lessons?” I asked as we enjoyed more coffee and some toast towards the end of the morning.

She shook her head. “I just like to sing.”

We had to knock it off around noon so I could go out to Oakville to pick up Kate. We’d planned to buy some bedroom furniture for her at IKEA, a place I was beginning to know well since Sandra had torn our family to shreds.

“You can come early tomorrow before rehearsal to go over these songs again if you’d like.”

Olivia shrugged noncommittally.

“It’s really no trouble if you’d like to come early,” I said as I helped her on with her coat, “but ring the doorbell, okay? It’s supposed to be absolutely frigid, and I don’t mind getting up.”

Twenty-four hours later, I again found her on the steps – this time with Maggie, and it had obviously been her wearing out my doorbell, since her finger was still on it when I opened the door.

She wasted little time getting in my face. “You have no right to badger Olivia the way you do,” she snarled. “You should just leave her alone!”

“Look,” I said, trying to keep my own anger in check. “I’m simply offering her a way to get off the street. She likes to sing. She’s good, and don’t you think it’s up to her to decide what she wants to do?”

So the argument raged back and forth, first on my porch, then in the front hall. Through the whole thing, Olivia just looked on blankly, never asking us to stop shouting, or more importantly, stop discussing her as if she wasn’t even there.

Finally, I got a word in edgewise, one that Maggie didn’t try to talk over. “What is the big deal about singing in public?”

The venom in Maggie’s voice was nearly overpowering. “Don’t play games with me! You know goddamn well what Olivia can do with her voice. You just want to use her so she can bring in plenty more customers and save your lazy-ass jobs. Her ability is not going to go unnoticed for long.”

I hit her with my best shot. “And why is that so important?”

“Maggie, please,” Olivia finally said.

Her friend turned with blazing eyes. “I have a stake in this too, you know. I took as big a risk as you.”

Olivia blanched and looked down at her feet like a scolded child.

“What are you talking about?” I interjected.

But the angry woman had made a decision and turned, her hand on the front door knob. “Do what you want, okay? But when the shit hits the fan, just make sure none of it gets on me!”

With that, she stomped across the porch, down the steps, and hurried off towards Broadview.

I gently closed the front door and turned. Olivia was still standing there, face blank, head lowered. Tears flowed down her cheeks.

Putting my arm around her, I asked, “Hey, are you all right?”

“No, I’m not!” came the answer as she shook off my arm.

Walking into the living room, she sat on my brand new IKEA chair with her head turned away.

I left her alone while I brewed a pot of coffee, hoping that the smell might bring her around. When I brought her a mug, she’d turned the chair around to face the wall and was rocking and humming softly.

She wouldn’t acknowledge my presence, and while I went around the house doing various odds and ends, I continually checked on her. The hours ticked by with no change, and I was getting concerned when she appeared in the kitchen doorway as I was reading the paper.

“Can I have some water?”

“Sure,” I said springing to my feet.

Olivia took the glass without a word and went back to the living room. I waited a moment, then followed.

The sun had disappeared behind heavy clouds rolling in from the west, leaving the room in near darkness. She was back in the chair still facing the wall, but she wasn’t rocking or humming. I sat on the sofa and waited.

“I guess I need a place to stay,” she said softly a few minutes later.

“Why was your friend so angry?”

“Because she’s right. I’m being foolish.”

“What’s the ‘big risk’ Maggie was talking about?”

Olivia turned, but I could barely see her face in the dim light. “I can’t answer that, and you must never ask me again.”

From her tone, I knew she meant it. So I didn’t ask. I seldom asked her anything after that.

I realized now that I should have.

***

Word was now getting around town that Olivia wasn’t singing with us any more, but even so, we had a pretty good house at the Sal that evening, enthusiastic and relatively quiet. Dom had invited a sax playing friend from Montreal to sit in, and Simon had been very impressive on tenor, soprano and flute. We all stayed a bit later than normal, listening to old war stories about the ‘60s jazz scene as witnessed by Harry the owner and Franco the bartender.

Ronald usually cut out as soon as the gig was over, but he stayed around, primarily to crow about his new computer – as if any of the rest of us cared.

He lived alone, and while he would shack up with the occasional woman, the two passions in his life were the piano and computers. Ronald could make both sing. The few times I’d asked him for help looking up stuff online, I was amazed at how much he knew and how his fingers flew as fast over the computer’s keyboard as they did on the piano’s. I believed that he could find anything that existed in cyberspace with just the stroke of a few keys.

That night he went on and on about his computer’s great processing strength, its storage capacity, how he’d “ramped up his access speed” or some such garbage. Everybody else’s eyes glazed over. Didn’t he notice nobody cared about any of that except him?

Pain-in-the-ass Ronald was the farthest thing from my mind as I drove home along the deserted streets not much before three a.m.

I share a mutual driveway with my lawyer neighbour, and damned if there wasn’t a car parked between the houses. He probably had another sweet young thing over for the night. It would have been within my rights to pound on his door and make the car’s owner come down and move it, but I decided to just park behind and make her wait in the morning when she wanted to leave. That’s why I entered my house via the front door rather than the back as I usually do.

There aren’t any street lights directly in front of my house, so the shrubs, a group of scraggly rhododendrons and other evergreens I’d let get the better of me, blocked off almost all light on the porch.

Tired from the strain of the past three days, fuelled by two scotches I shouldn’t have had, I fumbled with the lock and dropped my keys. Bending to pick them up, I noticed the outline of someone sitting on one of the rattan chairs I hadn’t bothered to put away for the winter.

“Hello?” I said. “Who’s there?”

When I got no answer, I walked the eight or so feet to where the chairs were. Maybe it was Olivia, and she’d fallen asleep waiting for me to return.

Why had I picked this night to come home so late?

I touched the person’s shoulder gently and got no response.

“Are you all right?”

Able to see a little better because my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, I could tell the person had their head back, resting it against the house. When I shook the shoulder a little harder, the person slipped sideways and slowly toppled out of the chair.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I had to back away and bend way over to keep from passing out. I didn’t have to be very smart to know that something was horribly wrong.

It would have been a simple matter to go into the house and turn on the porch light, but I didn’t think of that in my distracted state. Instead I went to the car, and with shaking hands, fished a flashlight out of the glove compartment. I already had it on when I came back up my steps.

It wasn’t Olivia, but her friend Maggie – and it looked like she’d been strangled.

The effect of seeing someone lying dead on my porch,her swollen throat a mass of ugly bruising and her tongue fat and purply-red in her open mouth, was made infinitely worse by the harsh, concentrated beam of the flashlight. Maggie’s eyes were open, and her expression was incongruously one of surprise, as if she hadn’t believed her life was about to end.

Standing up slowly, I clicked off the light and leaned back against the porch railing, telling myself to keep breathing deeply. The first thing that went through my shaky mental faculties was, What have I gotten myself into? as I entered the house to call the police.

The two constables who arrived took one look at the body, said something into a walkie-talkie and escorted me to their cruiser, where they sat me in the back. It was only when the door shut that I noticed there were no door handles or window cranks. I’d never before had a twinge of claustrophobia, but I sure felt it then.

I was asked some preliminary questions while we waited for reinforcements, with me leaning close to the plastic divider so I could hear them clearly. My head was still swimming, and I’d started shaking, a delayed reaction to the shock, I suppose.

Three more cars pulled up in short order. Lights bouncing off the neighbouring houses and loud voices talking soon had the first of the curious neighbours on their porches and front walks, staring at the drama taking place on my property.

Yellow crime scene tape was unrolled from the tree at the corner of my property all the way across to the driveway, where there was another big tree, then up to the corner of the house. Towards Broadview, a fourth cruiser parked across the road, sealing it off.

Left alone in my backseat prison, I could only watch helplessly.

Eventually someone in a business suit, obviously more senior, came to the window and peered in. He was a big man, but some of that had gone to fat, and he looked to be not far from retirement. One of the original constables was with him, and I heard him say, “This is the guy who called it in. That’s his house.”

“I don’t plan on freezing my ass out here talking to him. Take him into the house and get him something to drink. He looks like he needs it. I’ll be in to speak with him in a while.”

As we walked towards the house, I asked, “Could we go in by the back door? I don’t...you know...”

The constable grunted. “That’s what I had in mind, buddy,” as we continued up the driveway.

To my embarrassment, his hand was on my upper arm when I noticed the street’s nosy parker, who lived on the other side of me, step out her front door. I kept my face forward, pretending I didn’t see her. The old battleaxe had made it clear long ago that she didn’t think much of me or my choice of vocation. This certainly wasn’t going to help matters.

Once inside the kitchen, the constable asked me if there was any booze, but I don’t have any in the house any more, so he made a pot of coffee. I just sat at the kitchen table dumbly, not even bothering to remove my coat. Through the storm door, I could see people moving around on the porch and the occasional flashes of photos being taken.

We were silently sipping from our steaming mugs when the man who’d freed me from the police cruiser came in the back door.

“Constable, the media has arrived. I want you out front making sure none of them gets past our line. Got that?”

The constable took a big sip of the coffee as he rose and winced as it burned its way down. “I’ll get to that right away, sir.”

The big man stuck out a meaty paw.“I’m Detective Sergeant Palmer,” he said as I got partway out of my seat to shake. “Mind if I join you in a mug of that coffee? It’s going to be a long night.” He went over to the kitchen door and looked out at the foyer, then shut the door.“You don’t mind if we search your house, do you?”

That gave me a twinge, but I couldn’t think of a reason to deny the request. A lawyer probably could have given me a dozen. All I wanted at that point was to appear cooperative and above suspicion. I did decide, though, that a prudent course of action would be to not offer any information not directly asked for. I still stupidly had the hope that I might keep Olivia out of this mess.

After filling a mug from the orderly row I kept on the counter, the cop sat down heavily in the seat across from me. “Bet you wish you’d never come home tonight.”

I couldn’t decide whether the comment was meant to be friendly.

***

An hour later, I knew it had been a mistake to come home. If I’d had even an inkling of what waited for me on the porch, I probably would have never come home.

Palmer’s questions, while not overtly hostile, were relentless. Quite rightly, he focussed on where I’d been all day, who had seen me, what I’d been doing. I answered everything as fairly and completely as I could, even though there were things I didn’t want him to know. I don’t think he believed me when I told him I only knew Maggie’s first name and that she lived somewhere in the west end. I didn’t know where, and I didn’t know what she did for a living.

“I’ve only met her a few times. Actually, she was a friend of the vocalist for the jazz group I play with.”

Palmer looked up at that. “And where can I find the vocalist?”

I winced inwardly, realizing I’d just given something up. “I really don’t know. She left in the middle of our gig two nights ago, and we haven’t heard from her since.”

The detective was in the middle of writing when one of the underlings came in and spoke softly into his ear. Palmer whispered something back, and the underling nodded and left.

The detective looked at me for a good twenty seconds, probably to ratchet up my anxiety. It did the trick. “You say you hardly knew the woman on the porch, that she was a friend of your group’s singer.”

“Yes.”

“The singer who’s not around.”

I nodded.

“But you are trying to help.”

I nodded again but didn’t appreciate the sarcastic edge to his voice.

“Have you reported this singer as missing?”

“She’s not exactly missing.” I told him briefly what had happened at the club on Tuesday night. “Yesterday, I hired a private investigator to find out what the hell’s going on.”

Palmer barely refrained from rolling his eyes. “Who?”

“Shannon O’Brien.”

His face looked more friendly. “Get her on the phone.”

“Isn’t it a bit early?”

“Trust me, she’ll want to know.”

“You know her?”

“Since she was a hotshot young constable. Her dad was head of homicide when I got promoted.”

The nearest phone was in the off-limits front hall, so I used my cell. I got an answering service and explained that I really needed to speak to my investigator, no matter what the time was.

“Is this something that can wait until business hours?”

“No, it can’t!” I barked. “Something really terrible has happened. I must speak to her right away.”

The woman at the answering service calmly said she’d relay my message but didn’t sound enthusiastic about it.

Two burly cops came into the room, took the last of the coffee after seeing our mugs, and went into a corner to huddle with Palmer. I could only catch words here and there as people began noisily going in and out the front door.

My cell’s “Take Five” ringtone started playing, and I snatched it up.

She sounded put out. “Mr.Curran, it’s Shannon O’Brien. The answering service said you needed to speak with me immediately. What’s up?”

“When I got home from the club a few hours ago, I found a body on my porch.” It felt very odd to speak of such violence so matter of factly.

“Whose body? Olivia’s?”

“Olivia’s friend, Maggie. I haven’t seen her since—”

Palmer stepped over and held out his hand.“Give me that. Shannon, it’s Guy Palmer... Yeah, it’s good to hear your voice, too... Well, the world’s a small place. Look, to cut to the chase, your boy came home tonight and found a stiff on his front porch. Strangled... Well, you and I both know these things can get out of hand pretty quickly. What can you tell me?... You will?... Okay, I’ll be here waiting. I don’t have to tell you the drill... Yes, I’ll let them know.”

He handed back the phone, and she sounded more friendly. “Mr. Curran —”

“Look, call me Andrew, or Andy.”

“Andy – and you call me Shannon, okay? I will get there as soon as I can, less than an hour if the traffic gods are kind. Just sit tight. Everything is going to be all right.”

I was beginning to feel a little rough around the edges. “That’s easy for you to say. You didn’t find someone murdered on your front porch.”

“You’re right. But I will be there to help. Get some food in your stomach. You’ll feel better.”

“I don’t feel like eating.”

“Do it anyway.”

I hung up as another plainclothes cop knocked on the back door. “Got a minute, Guy?”

Palmer and one of the cops went out the back door. The third stayed behind to keep an eye on me. Palmer came back in after a brief discussion. It was easy to see from his red face that he was furious.

“Still want to stick to your story about the dead woman?” he asked.

“I’ve told you what I know.”

“Have you?”

“To the best of my ability, yes.”

“Then how come the old lady next door told us she’s seen her here several times, and on one occasion you had a very loud argument, right out on that porch where she’s lying now?”

Looked as if my private investigator was mistaken about everything being all right.