The Weight of Stones Read online

  Five

  The alarm sounds, and McKelvey slaps the top of the little black box, giving himself the gift of another eight minutes of lostness. When the second buzzer sounds, he finally opens his eyes and stares at the stucco on the ceiling with its familiar shadows. He collects his bearings; is it Tuesday or Wednesday? Time shifts, and days melt into weeks. Mondays are born and suddenly bloom into Friday afternoons. There is comfort to be found in the mundane routines.

  He pulls himself from the cocoon of covers, steps numbly into the shower, slides a razor down his face, pats his cheeks with whatever cologne Caroline bought him for Christmas last year. He stands in front of the fogged mirror dabbing a piece of tissue on a nick. Stands back to adjust the sports coat that is too tight in the armpits. He feels hot, stuffy. He practices nodding, smiling a few times, until he feels like a meteorologist on a local cable channel, searching for a middle ground between contrived and genuine. And so he meets the day...

  McKelvey stood there in front of the mirror the same as he did every morning, adjusting and re-adjusting his tie. And still it was too short, three inches above his belt line. He undid the tangle and worked at it again. His thick fingers—ode to a few generations of McKelvey manual laborers, miners mostly—were not designed for this sort of fine work. He had never slipped a tie around his neck and made it the correct length in one attempt; it was always an event, a flail of silk. How many years had he been doing this, for godsake? Caroline used to laugh at him and, when he was old enough, Gavin, too. The kid said his fingers were like fat sausages...

  “Sausages,” McKelvey said aloud, and was startled by the sound of his own voice.

  Finally satisfied with the result, he brushed a few flakes of dandruff from the shoulders of his navy sports coat and regarded himself for a moment. He thought he looked old and heavy, and he was heavy, over two-fifteen now. There were pouches beneath his blue eyes, dark circles, bloodshot eyes. His face was evolving, morphing into his father’s face. The same width, the same creases at the jowls, the same wrinkles across the forehead from a lifetime of scowling. He leaned in to check his teeth, and they looked the way old people’s teeth begin to look: narrowing, dying. He hadn’t slept well, his mind working through the coming events of the day. It was to be a day of reckoning. At last, a beacon at the end of the long dark road. All of the work, all of the tears, all of the silent angst bottled under pressure. Two years of bulldog determination, countless hours of unpaid overtime logged pouring over files, drawing the connections. He had pushed it as far as he could push it, working angles from the sidelines, and the doggedness had brought him to the point of being written up for accessing files without authorization. The files concerned the murder investigation of his son, so Aoki had let the infraction begin and end at her desk. It was one cop doing another cop a favour. Any father would be interested in his son’s murder investigation, more so if the father happened to be the police. But even so, McKelvey believed there was some word out there about his level of interest in the whole thing, the way he came at things. He was aware that some people spoke of him in a certain light.

  He passed through the kitchen and downed the last of his cold black coffee. He set the mug in the sink and grabbed his long coat from its hook in the hall. He was warming up his old red Mazda pickup when he was startled by a knock on the window. He turned and looked into the face of his neighbour, Carl Seeburger, who was standing there with his wispy silver hair glowing like a baby’s down in the back light of the rising dawn. The old German had been their neighbour for just eighteen months now, having replaced a longtime and affable family by the name of Dewar. For eighteen months, he and McKelvey and some of the others on the street had battled sporadically, and sometimes loudly, over the trio of dogs that Seeburger kept, without much apparent attention, in his backyard. McKelvey rolled the window down without smiling.

  “Did I forget my lunch bag again?” McKelvey said.

  Seeburger’s lips began to work and, as always, a tiny white froth appeared at the corners of his mouth. He crossed his long arms across his chest and said, although it sounded more like a direct accusation, “Did you call the city about my dogs?”

  “Jesus Christ. It’s seven o’clock, Carl, you should be in bed,” McKelvey said, and immediately began to roll the window back up, move his foot to the clutch.

  Seeburger, dressed in faded grey work pants that were a little too short, and a worn red and blue flannel shirt and suspenders, stepped closer to the truck. He was a tall man, and he had to bend down to level his face with the window. McKelvey caught a whiff of strong cheese and wool. Even though he had apparently been living in the country for forty years now, Seeburger’s accent was still thick and harsh. Is sounded to McKelvey like a machine cutting and splicing. McKelvey believed it spoke to the man’s stubborn refusal to go with the flow.

  “Just because you work for the city, you think that gives you the right to use your connections to hassle tax-paying citizens? This is a free country, Mr. McKelvey, and I will not be treated like a criminal. If I choose to own dogs, that is my right. Protected by the Constitution. And if you have any more problems with my dogs, I would wish that you would be man enough to address me directly rather than use your connections to have me harassed by the city by-law office.”

  It was the right morning, or it was the alignment of the stars. Or it was just the way McKelvey felt lately. As though he were functioning in a sort of suspended animation. Everything was as in a dream, and he couldn’t think anything through with clarity. Anything could happen. McKelvey moved his right hand to ensure the stick shift was in park, then popped his seatbelt and was out of the vehicle standing toe to toe with his neighbour. Seeburger stepped back, his eyes blinking with anticipation.

  “Listen, let’s get something straight here,” McKelvey said and pointed an index finger. “I hate your fucking dogs, Carl. I really do. I wish death upon their ugly howling heads every night when I close my eyes and try to fall asleep in a neighbourhood that until eighteen months ago was a goddamned piece of heaven. Secondly, I don’t have any connections with the bylaw office, and even if I did, I wouldn’t require the use of said connections, because I would take care of things myself. I’m not beyond getting my hands dirty. In fact, I enjoy it from time to time.”

  “Oh, yes? Is that a threat, Mr. McKelvey?”

  “Oh no, it’s not a threat,” McKelvey said, “it’s a guarantee.” Then he opened the door and held it there for a moment before sliding behind the wheel. Something within himself, a coiled spring or a bottled surge, wanted his neighbour to do something wild and crazy, take a swing perhaps. McKelvey saw himself connecting with that big Teutonic chin, a blow for glory, a blow for every goddamned neighbour within earshot of those barking sons of bitches. His gaggle of thick sausages was already curled into a tight fist, jaw clenched. He looked up at the morning beginning to spread across the skyline in a deep, dark orange of early winter, then looked back to the old man standing before him, and said, “You know, Carl, it’s a very thin line. A very thin line.”

  “What is?” Seeburger said.

  “The precise location,” McKelvey said, “where your right to own dogs intersects with my right to a peaceful sleep.”

  McKelvey closed the door and put his seatbelt on. Seeburger stood there wagging a finger and said in a hoarse voice, “I’ll find out who called the city. That is my right as a tax-paying citizen!”

  “Have a nice day,” McKelvey said, smiling broadly and waving as he rolled away.

  He felt like a tourist at the office these days, somebody passing through. The police headquarters had at one time been located in a little shithole over on Jarvis Street, but now it was next to a Starbucks on College. There remained very little of the “old” building McKelvey knew from his first days on the force. Back then, the interview rooms were choked blue with smoke, and more than a few lockers in the change room held a pint of rum or brandy tucked beneath a pair of dirty gym shorts for an end-of-shift “happy
hour”. And women were just beginning to make their bold entry into the strange universe that was “The Police”. Hard to believe. A lifetime ago and just the other day.

  Now the interview rooms were painted in soothing pastels based on psychological consultations, and McKelvey’s boss was a thirty-eight-year-old woman named Inspector Tina Aoki. A university graduate with degrees in criminology and law, Aoki was right now working on her own time towards some sort of Masters. While many of his silver-haired peers were genuinely frustrated, perhaps even angered, by the seeming tendency to put greater stock in framed degrees over hours spent in the blood and filth of the streets, McKelvey took it all in stride. He accepted the fact that everything in life, if given time, changes to the point where you eventually don’t recognize it. We look upon our lives in a sort of warped hindsight, he knew, everything taken in our own unique context, set against our own criteria. He knew any tradesman was declared obsolete if he didn’t keep up with the latest tools. The knowledge didn’t prevent a man from longing, from time to time, for the old days, the old ways.

  Detective-Constable Charlie McKelvey made his second coffee of the morning at the refreshment stand in the Hold-Up Squad. This place had been his home for five years now, having transferred from a half dozen years on the Fraud Squad and, before that, a lifetime on the beat across four divisions that spanned the full spectrum of a city that never stopped growing. It was only the nature of the crime that changed with each transfer. The people he dealt with were invariably the same; whether he was pulling a guy over for running a red light, or forcing a known drug dealer to empty the pockets of his cargo pants across the hood of a cruiser up at Jane and Finch, everybody thought he was born last Sunday. They believed with a fervent religious conviction that their lies and excuses were brilliantly unique. It got to the point, and pretty soon into the job, where McKelvey went into every situation—whether a break-in at a hardware store or a stabbing at an after-hours booze can—ready to offer absolutely zero benefit of the doubt. It got to the point sometimes, he knew, where he took this view back home with him. And to Gavin. A teenager with a goddamned cop for a dad. You never believed him. And so, through this lack of trust or faith, the boy necessarily wandered and pushed the limits of a life, real or imagined...in this way did you fail your son...

  “Morning, Detective.”

  McKelvey looked up from the cup he was stirring and stirring, endlessly stirring, and he smiled at the youthful face of the administrative assistant who had been hired just a short while ago. Amy—he couldn’t remember her last name. She was standing in the hallway, a stack of files clenched under an arm. She was a striking young woman dressed in a form-fitting skirt and blazer combination. The guys were always giving her a hard time, kids in a playground. They disguised their lust for her behind jokes and pranks, and McKelvey believed she didn’t mind the attention.

  “Good morning, Amy,” he said. “You look nice today.”

  And she did. She was beautiful and young. She was perfect. And McKelvey felt a twinge of sadness for something he had lost within himself somewhere along the way.

  “Thank you, sir,” she said, and McKelvey thought she blushed.

  Sir. That’s what she called him. It stung, but he was pleased with the show of respect.

  “I’m just on my way to see the boss,” he said. “Is she in a good mood this morning?”

  Amy smiled, rolled her eyes, and continued on down the hallway without a word. McKelvey took his coffee to Aoki’s office. Her door was always open. She was talking on the phone when he popped his head inside. She motioned him in, and he took a seat across from her, sipping his coffee. The office was small and unglamorous—beige—but he knew she wouldn’t inhabit it for long. She would be heading up Detective Services before her hair began its turn toward grey, that was his bet.

  “Morning, Charlie,” Aoki said, setting the phone down.

  “You look pissed,” he said.

  She shook her head, leaning back in her chair. “These prosecutors, they think we can just pull evidence out of our assholes. They say ‘is that all you’ve got?’ and I feel like saying ‘no, we thought we’d keep some of the good stuff until we get to court’.”

  Aoki made him smile. She was wiry, all sinewy muscle, her dark hair cropped short. And she swore like a longshoreman. It was as though every movement, every mannerism was aimed at destroying the myth of her diminutive stature. She had confided in him over a drink a couple of years earlier about how her father had been interned at a camp on the west coast during the Second World War. She spoke of how he hadn’t been angry with his new country for assuming he was a possible collaborator, saying instead that “everyone has a role to play when their country is at war”. McKelvey believed she both admired and detested this vein of deep stoicism within her father. Knowing Aoki, she wouldn’t have taken it on the chin for king and country.

  McKelvey was anxious, and he caught himself chewing at his ragged thumb. In a matter of weeks, the Crown would kick off the trial of a bank robber, drug dealer, extortionist, suspected killer and known biker named Pierre Duguay. The trial was attracting media attention due to Duguay’s alleged connections to the Blades, an upstart Quebec biker gang with roots in the southern United States and South America. The Blades had battled the Hell’s Angels in Quebec for a few years at the closing of the nineties, fighting to control the lucrative drugs, prostitution and fraud rings. The body count was high. Car bombings, pipe bombs, shootings. The Angels were too big, too well-entrenched, too well-organized and managed, so the war eventually ran out of steam, and a large faction of Blades patched over to their rivals rather than face certain annihilation. But there remained a faithful few who drifted from Quebec in search of new frontiers out west and up north in the mining towns, places like Sudbury and Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, but like all pioneers, they stopped somewhere to catch their breath, and it ended up becoming home for a while.

  The Blades bought a house in the west end of Toronto, installed security cameras and raised a new flag. They also bought an old strip joint near the airport, a place in which to conduct business, to launder their soiled cash. New kids on the block come to carve out a little corner amidst the Asian street gangs, the Jamaicans, and yes, always the Hell’s.

  And it was Duguay, McKelvey knew, who was responsible for his boy’s death. Duguay, whose method of operation was to get his hangarounds and foot soldiers to befriend and recruit street kids to peddle his crack, run his errands, get his army of the lost moving across the landscape of parks and transit stops, malls and arcades. It was what he had done in Montreal, how he had ended up in Joliette for a number of years. He had recruited McKelvey’s boy, who exchanged the roof over his head for a fetid bed of rags beneath the Gardiner Expressway, the dangerous missions and shelters. Exchanged school textbooks for a goddamned squeegee rag and a bucket. Doc Martens and black eyeliner, a dozen pieces of steel attached to his head, tattoos, a whole warped and negative outlook on the world.

  Then, just as McKelvey had prognosticated and warned, his boy had died alone, his body left in a vacant lot beneath the expressway. A piece of garbage tossed from a passing vehicle. That’s all.

  “How is Caroline?” Aoki said, leaning forward.

  He blinked, brought himself back. He said, “Fine. She has good days and bad days.”

  “And you?”

  He took a sip of coffee, shrugged and smiled.

  “You’re always fine, right Charlie?” she said. “Good old Charlie, straight as an arrow, cool as a fucking cucumber.”

  “Go easy,” he said, “my neighbour already chewed my ass this morning.”

  She said, “You stopped seeing the department psychologist, I understand. That’s okay, though, because between you and me, I don’t think she’s very good at her job. She’s got nice hair, but she’s a bit of a twat. That would be my reasoning. So what about you, why did you stop going? You got everything sewn up?”

  He sighed, fumbling to put into words how he felt. How
did he feel about sitting in a closet-sized office, opening up to a woman practically young enough to be his daughter? Felt. Feel. Express. Breathe in, breathe out. Let’s hold hands and explore the stages of grief, Charlie.

  “You can only talk about things for so long,” he said.

  “Sounds to me like you didn’t do much talking.”

  “You get to the point where it starts doing the opposite of what it’s supposed to do. At first, sure, it makes you feel a little better, spilling all this poison. But then they want you to keep digging deeper and deeper...and there’s nothing else down there. There’s nothing there. You’ve scooped it all out, everything, and now you’re just...empty.”

  Like cleaning a Halloween pumpkin, he wanted to explain. But in picturing that, he was reminded of the years he and Gavin had carved pumpkins a day or two before Halloween, trying to find new ways to smear the greasy pumpkin guts on each other. He saw the various farmers’ fields and Sunday markets they had visited in search of the annual pumpkin. The smell of those slippery insides, rich, fecund scent of fall. And then he didn’t want to think about that any more. He blinked and saw that Aoki was still talking. Her mouth was moving as he brought himself back into the conversation, like flipping to a channel midway through a show.

  “...other things that you can look into, like out-patient counselling and...”

  His mind suddenly flashed with an image of old Seeburger standing there like the king of goddamned Kensington, and he gritted his teeth and imagined tying those dogs from hell to the back of his truck and taking them for a run all the way to the Humber River.