LITMIR.BIZ

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mouths sewn shut for fear of reprisal.

      “Have you been to her place?” McKelvey said. “I mean her new place?”

      “Just inside the lobby. I picked her up one time, about two weeks ago.”

      McKelvey nodded, already working through the language he would use to somehow tune his friend into the workings of the big bad world out there without destroying this new ray of light that had entered his life. As far as he knew, Fielding had been on something like four dates since his wife’s death at the hands of a repeat drunk driver more than four years ago. The wrong woman, or the right woman, would see him as an easy mark.

      “So she’s gone for a few days,” McKelvey said. “Maybe she’s visiting a friend, a relative. You’ve been seeing each other what?”

      Fielding shrugged and said, “Four weeks, I guess.”

      “A month. Jesus, Tim. Maybe she’s screwed off for a few days and doesn’t feel like she owes you an explanation. Has that entered your mind?”

      Fielding removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes with the pads of his palms. He put the glasses back on. He sat back, exhaled a long sigh. “Something’s not right, Charlie. I know it in my gut. It’s not like her to just take off without a word. I mean, she missed a mid-term on Wednesday night. She could fail the course, and she’s put a lot into it. She’s trying to make a better life for herself. But there’s been something there that I could never quite put my finger on. Like she was waiting for something to happen.”

      McKelvey saw that his soft approach had missed the mark. “How well do you really know this woman, Tim? That’s all I’m saying. We can be friends with people or work with someone for fifteen, twenty years, then one day they do something that seems completely out of character. But is it really out of character? Or are we just shocked because we thought we knew every aspect, every angle to that person?”

      Fielding sat there looking into his coffee and didn’t say anything.

      “She could be in a hotel room in Montreal right now with her husband,” McKelvey said, and stopped his foul imagination from going further. “Or maybe she’s with her other boyfriend playing the slots down in Vegas for a long weekend getaway. Or anything else you can think of. You said yourself that you never stayed over at her place.”

      “She’s not married, and she doesn’t have another boyfriend. I believe that much about her. Her husband was executed by rogue Serbs in the war. Listen, I know you’re cynical, I know you think like a cop. That’s why I called you, Charlie, because I’m not stupid enough to assume I can place a missing person’s report on a thirty-two-year-old woman I met four weeks ago. They’ll laugh in my face. I thought if I told you about us, about her just disappearing, you of all people would believe me.”

      McKelvey sat there and ran his hand across his face, the extra day of stubble coming in rough as iron shavings. The things a man would do, would say, while in the throes of love or lust never ceased to amaze him. It was in this regard that all men were indeed created equally—pauper or prince, it hardly mattered: we all fall the same. He remembered this particular collar from his first year on the Hold-up Squad. Guy’s married and has four kids, starts screwing around with a girl at the office. The girl has expensive tastes, she likes the thrill of opening gifts, that ooh-aah moment. She wants to eat out at all the hot places, dance at all the cool clubs. The guy’s kids need braces and hockey equipment. His credit card gets maxed, he takes out too many loans that he can’t pay. When McKelvey finally had the poor bastard sitting there in the corner of the interview room—showing him a black and white single frame printout from the security video capturing him standing in front of the bank teller—McKelvey asked him what could possibly make a guy with no criminal record walk into a bank with a pellet gun on a Tuesday afternoon in May. The guy got this look on his face—a mixture of sadness and stoicism—and he said, “I had no choice, man. I couldn’t afford to keep her, and I couldn’t stand to lose her. Either way I was screwed. You know what I mean?”

      Now McKelvey exhaled a long breath across the room, across the morning that had begun with such promise. The end of summer, the beginning of autumn. He had some grocery shopping to do before the girls came to visit him on Saturday. He had a good coffee to buy and get into his system—something that wouldn’t act as an instant laxative—and later still he had a stool at Garrity’s on which to sit and circle classified ads for used vehicles he would not purchase. Ragged and ridiculous, perhaps, but he had a life to live. But yes, at the end of it all there was no denying that he did in fact have the time to go through some motions here, to give Tim Fielding a sense that at least something was being done.

      “Listen,” McKelvey said, “I don’t know what you’re expecting from me. I’ll go on over there and check out her place. Maybe ask a few of her neighbours or the super, or something like that. That’s all I can do here, Tim. I’m not on the job any more. I’m not a private detective.”

      “I’d appreciate it,” Fielding said, relief written on his face.

      “If and when it comes to that, I can put you in touch with someone on the force who won’t laugh in your face,” McKelvey said, getting up and moving for the door. “But that’s about all I can do here.”

      “I’ll get my keys,” Tim said.

      McKelvey got to the door then turned. He said, “Thing is, I should head over there myself, take a look around. I think it’s better that way.”

      Fielding stopped and took it in. He nodded as though he understood this was a requirement of police business, how things worked. McKelvey didn’t want to explain the fact that Fielding would be the first obvious suspect if anything untoward had happened to the woman, god forbid. Begin at the nucleus, work your way out. McKelvey saw the school teacher leaving his fingerprints all over the apartment…

      “I can at least give you a lift over there.”

      McKelvey smiled, pulling the card from his shirt pocket. “I’ve got a driver.”

      He used Fielding’s cordless phone to call Hassan. He asked the driver to meet him in front of the building. Then, against his better judgment, he shook his friend’s hand and promised to report back within the hour. In the elevator he shook his head at himself, at this whole thing, and dug his fingers into his pants pocket, where he found a half tab of the painkillers—he had broken a few of them in half, and he carried them around from time to time like loose change. In case the pain got too bad, or whatever. Maybe it was boredom, or maybe it was simply because they were there, and he could. Too much to think about, and anyway, he didn’t need to make any justifications here. He was far beyond the days of reporting to any sort of supervisor, real or imagined. He pressed the button for the ground floor, snapped his head back and swallowed the tab dry.

THREE

      Hassan pulled his cousin’s cranberry-red Crown Victoria up to the front entrance. McKelvey watched the big boat swung in on a wide arc, just like an unmarked cruiser from the old days, and his mind spun back: him at the wheel and a partner riding shotgun, easing the unit up to the curb to put the screws to a crew of the usual suspects the morning after the armed robbery of a Mac’s Milk—where were you around eleven last night, Alexander? And what about you, Damon James? The inherent sense of authority and purpose that flowed through his being as he stepped from the car, sunglasses on, big gun slung in its holster. The Man, the 5-0, the Heat, the goddamned King of Kensington. It was the best and worst job in the world, and like the city itself, he wanted to be able to say that he could leave it all behind, just walk away, but it was a lie. He knew in his heart of hearts that a part of his identity had been forever altered: now that there was no squad room, no courtroom prep with an ambitious Assistant Crown looking to make a career case, no administration or backwards bureaucracy to buck and bitch about, no drinks with the boys after the late night shift, no stakeouts with bad coffee and cold pizza, no sense of pride at the making of a good collar, no shield, no more no more. Welcome to civilian life, Charlie. Ain’t it grand?

      McKelvey got

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