The Weight of Stones Read online

  “You should take advantage of the employee assistance folks,” Aoki said.

  “I’ll see about all that,” McKelvey said, nodding.

  “I hope you do.”

  He shifted his weight, rubbed the back of his neck, and said, “So.”

  She reached for a paperclip and began to uncoil it. Not a good sign. He knew her too well and recognized the mannerisms. “I spoke with the Assistant-Crown attorney, Laura Wright. She understands your personal interest with regards to this particular suspect. They feel the best shot at a conviction against Duguay is with the charges he’s currently sitting on.”

  “I see,” McKelvey said.

  “People here don’t want to see what happened in Quebec a few years ago, when that little boy was killed in the car bombing. There’s pressure on the mayor, the chief, on all of us,” Aoki said. “The joint task force logged an incredible amount of time getting one of them to roll over. They got Marcel Leroux by the balls, caught red-handed with a couple ounces of coke shoved down his cowboy boot leaving the Dove strip club. He’s been persuaded to testify against Duguay on the extortion, money laundering and organized crime charges. With Duguay out of the picture, the local chapter of the Blades will suffer a major loss in their command structure. The task force can use the momentum to effectively shut them down before they even get a foothold. And with Duguay’s record, he’ll pull a dozen years at least. It’s a simple cost-benefit scenario.”

  “They’re not willing to take a closer look at the file I pulled together?”

  “Charlie. You’re a respected investigator on my Hold-up Squad. I think you’re a very fine cop. But you’re not a homicide investigator. You have to trust that your colleagues are as good at their job as you are at yours.”

  “I’m just saying, boss, what I’ve been saying all along. I don’t think Balani and Gilmartin made the right connections here from day one. I know what I know because I went down there and talked to these kids. For hours. I know Gavin was selling dope for the Blades. Out of Moss Park there, and the Eaton Centre, the Yonge Line. That new apartment he was in up off Jane Street, it was a drug house for the bikers. Crack, E, weed. Duguay was known for getting guys like Leroux to get the street kids in on the hustle,” he said. “All we need is one of them to come forward and say that, yes, they saw Duguay with Gavin on the night he was killed. It’ll take some coaxing. They’ve got their street code. Just get him positioned there at the scene, and we can make the rest of it work.”

  McKelvey wanted to mention also the evidence of a woman in Gavin’s apartment, a bag in the bathroom with a brush and makeup, items that disappeared from the time they were tagged and the time he checked the evidence lockup. Trying to match the inventory sheet with the physical property, coming up empty. A small thing, perhaps, but still. It was something he’d mentioned to Balani more than once. The senior detective brushing it off—stick to your holdups, McKelvey, stick to your old lady muggings...

  “I wanted to talk to you about something else,” Aoki said. “An offer. After your current files are closed up, I’m going to ask you to consider taking the department’s early retirement package. I spoke with the head of HR last week, and he said with your years of service and accumulated lieu days, you could leave with almost a full year’s pay before your pension would kick in. That means full benefits, everything.”

  An old rotted dory finally cut from its dock, he understood for the first time that without this place to come to, without something to keep his mind in check, he was a man adrift. Lost and perhaps dangerous. What would he do with his days? His mind flashed with an image of Charlie McKelvey dressed in a blue vest and polyester slacks, smiling as he passed shopping carts towards customers...a big round button on his chest that declared: “Have a Nice Day!”

  “I thought for a minute you were going to give me a promotion,” he said, smiling.

  “Listen, don’t take it personally. You’re eligible, Charlie. The same offer’s being made to four others in Detective Services, a bunch over in administration and special services. The department’s trying to balance a budget while hiring more patrol officers. Anyway, it’s not a negative, Charlie. I’d love to see you leave this business with a good package and all your wiring still intact,” and here she tapped the side of her head for effect. “You did more than your share, and you deserve to get on with your life. I think the timing’s right, to be honest.”

  “What if I don’t want to retire? I’ve got a few more good years.”

  “Right now they’re asking. If you push this, they’ll be telling you.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “There’s more to this than...” She took a moment to find the right words. “Don’t sit there and tell me you didn’t see this coming. Your head and your heart aren’t on this job any more. I’ve been very patient, Charlie. I’ve let a lot of things slide. You come and go from this place like it’s a fucking train station. You stopped seeing the department psychologist. You harassed Balani while he was the lead investigator...”

  “Is that what Balani said, I harassed him? Jesus Christ, Tina. I just want to keep up on developments. He hasn’t followed up on any of the angles I’ve tossed out. And now that he kissed ass and got himself recruited onto that biker task force, what happens to the file? I guess closing this one isn’t a priority.”

  “You don’t mean that. We look after our own, and Gavin was one of ours. I can only imagine how frustrating this is for you, but you’ve got to leave it alone. You have this hypothesis, Charlie, but nobody else can connect the dots. Balani doesn’t agree with you, and quite frankly, neither do I. Motive, maybe, but the evidence just isn’t there. The Crown has finite resources. We can get by sometimes on our gut instinct. Crown doesn’t have the same luxury once they get to court.”

  “Duguay did this,” he said, “or else it was on his word. Either way, it was him. The guys who were buying dope all say the same thing. That Duguay was running that apartment Gavin was in. Something went down, and he was seen in the vicinity.”

  She went to respond but had to answer her ringing phone. She paused before picking up and said, “Talk to Caroline about the offer, Charlie.”

  Six

  The first flakes of the season began to fall gently as McKelvey wound his way through the streets of the lower downtown, edging the lakeshore. Always the lake was out there, great dull silver horizon. It was a soft and slow snowfall, the kind he remembered from childhood, the snow just falling and falling so you couldn’t tell whether the sky was up or down. Winters up north were so different from here in the city. He couldn’t remember a green Christmas back home, but down here it wasn’t unusual at all.

  He didn’t want to think about life back there, back at home, and so he pushed it from his mind and focused on the city streets moving with people and traffic, and soon enough his mind came back, as it always did, to the place where it got stuck, the groove worn deep. Every circuit, every synapse, every cell within the complex machinery of his grey matter seemed always to be working in the background on his son’s file. It didn’t matter what he tried to do in order to reign in his concentration; the wiring was splayed now, and the message wasn’t getting through.

  On mornings like this, he could not sit at his desk without his knee pumping in agitation, his fingers drumming a meandering and aimless beat, a million thoughts running through his head. Figuring things, remembering things. He would stand up and sit down, walk to the coffee machine a dozen times, visit the men’s room and stare at his face in the row of long mirrors, anxious as a small boy waiting for something. Like a swimmer at the bottom of a pool, he could see the shimmering green-yellow lights of the surface dancing just beyond his reach, a whole universe taking place above that cloudy, formless horizon. Each morning he pointed his arms skyward, pushed off with both feet, and jettisoned himself toward the surface, his lungs aching for oxygen, fingers anticipating the first freshness of open air...

  The falling flakes were hypnotic. He dro
ve through the business heart of the city, blocks of chrome and glass, stone and concrete, University and Bay, then on down past the iconic train station with its weathered pillars and arches, the first view of the city offered to freshly landed European immigrants. This, too, had been McKelvey’s first view of life in a metropolis, a smooth-faced kid stepping from the northern train with a duffel over his shoulder and a pocketful of hope. Now the immigrant taxi drivers lined up outside the station as well-dressed men and women flowed in and out of the brass-plated doors on their way to and from commuter trains hauling them in from ’burbs that were spreading like dark wine across a tablecloth, east and west, north and south.

  Across from Union Station, the old Royal York Hotel appeared frozen in time, monolithic matriarch of hospitality from a forgotten era of crisp white table cloths, heavy silverware, and doormen dressed in rich burgundy coats and hats. McKelvey moved eastward, down side streets he hadn’t been on in years, not since his days in a radio car. Back then he had known every street in his division, every corner where someone might hide. Those long ago days when he never seemed to question his physical ability to wrestle another man’s hands into a set a cuffs, to put him to the ground like a dog, knee in his back. Was this a brand of unquestioning confidence unique to police officers, or was it simply youthful ignorance or arrogance? He couldn’t say. And while he still believed he could handle himself, there were no illusions of infinite strength. He felt the energy of his life force waning.

  The radio in the car thrummed and snapped with activity, but after a while McKelvey tuned it out. He noticed the subtle and not-so-subtle changes to the geography, the transformation of old apartment blocks into trendy loft condos. When you lived and worked in the city, as McKelvey had since the age of eighteen, you eventually stopped noticing any changes until they were entirely completed. Massive structures simply appeared as though set there overnight by a child building a train set village. Urban change was overwhelming in its velocity; there was simply too much of it to absorb. There was something going on around you all the time, a minute by minute transformation of the city, renovations, new glass, paint, scaffolds rising and falling like rusted skeletons, jackhammers and trucks backing up, apartment buildings blooming like strange orchids among the grasslands of the war-time bungalows and row houses. McKelvey remembered the old days of the warehouses along the train tracks, the low thick buildings that resembled concentration camps, the smashed distillery house windows staring like black empty eyes, the vacant lots where poor kids played stick ball long before there were million-dollar condos. Today wealthy young executives ate salmon steaks overlooking the train yards and back alleys where the original urban immigrants lived in shacks insulated with newspapers. Evolution.

  He wound his way northward, meandering through the old neighborhoods where he had worked, specific coordinates bringing forth the memory of vivid calls: a stabbing at this corner, a bloody armed robbery at that convenience store, all the while his mind running through the meeting with Aoki. Caroline would ask about the news from the Crown, and he would tell her that not only would there be no charges brought in Gavin’s murder, but the sun had set on Charlie McKelvey’s mediocre police career. Hell of a day. So many things to think about.A man could get lost in the details without even knowing it.

  And then he was stopped. Stopped and staring at a traffic light.

  Red.

  Flakes falling almost horizontal now, mesmerizing.

  McKelvey stared at the traffic light. Green now. It had changed from yellow to red to green without his even noticing. He was staring at the light, yet he was also watching himself as a young man, a kid riding in a patrol car with no experience. And then the kid was Gavin, and he was on that first bike they bought him, and then Gavin was just lying there lifeless on the table, a single bullet hole to the upper left forehead...the gunshot wound the colour of black cherry...

  Someone honked.

  McKelvey blinked, checked the rear view. A guy in a delivery van behind him. Honked again. Fucking idiot. McKelvey slid the unmarked cruiser into park, undid his seatbelt, and was out of the vehicle and approaching the delivery van, the wet flakes swirling, and he could hear himself, hear his voice, hoarse and distant. It sounded like it belonged to someone else. The driver of the van just shook his head and pulled around the car, leaving McKelvey standing there in the road with the snow stinging his eyes.

  Like a magnet drawn to its inevitable destination, he pulled the car up alongside the wrought iron fence surrounding the cemetery. The snow had stopped now, and the sky was muted, grey as putty, still and cold. What a day, he thought. The world is talking to you, Charlie, is what Caroline would say. She’d said it all the time when they were kids in their twenties, failing miserably in that first basement apartment they rented. A real dive. All they had back then was a futon on the floor, books and a turntable supported by milk crates and bricks. He saw an image of Caroline and himself at that age, sitting up in bed after making love, a bottle of cheap wine wedged in the tangle of covers between them, the air thick with the scent of their bodies. He saw the image, but he couldn’t connect himself with the man in the picture. There was nothing.

  In the summertime, he would sit in the car on days like this and watch people come and go from the cemetery, human traffic manoeuvering through the landscape of grief. He rolled the window down, and he could taste the city in the back of his throat, wet dirt and ash. He sat in the car, where not so long ago he would get out of the vehicle to walk across the emerald lawns manicured to perfection, walk through those rows of stones, through generations of families laid to rest, and believe with utter conviction that the soil beneath his feet was the dust of living beings, who, at one point, had laughed and cried, won and lost, and taken for granted the dependability of the blood running through their bodies. He would understand that because he was made of the same bone and blood as those who had gone before, there could be no hope for escape; the soil patiently awaited his embrace.

  He had once possessed the ability, indeed perhaps the courage, to step from the vehicle, to make the long walk to the place where his boy rested in perpetuity. To kneel and touch the soft grass there, find the mettle to speak a few words. All the long moments Caroline never knew about, all the secret promises and pledges he made with himself, the lost hours parked at the cemetery. He sat there now, and he searched for the thrust to propel him up and out through the door of the car, through those rows of stones. He glanced in the rear view and saw a stranger’s set of eyes, a stranger caught in mid-life, in mid-stride, entangled in the lines and nets of his own setting. He understood this was the point of embarkation; he squinted and made out a door—slightly ajar—just up ahead. It bled a little light.

  He opened the car door and walked through rows of stones, his dress shoes and pant legs wet from the fresh snow. The place was empty, lonely as only a cemetery could be. The headstones rose up from the earth like stoic grey perennials. The trees that ringed the perimeter were dusted like the trees on the front of a Christmas greeting card. His body found the stone it sought through the remembered geography of the heart and soul. He stood there before it. A simple stone, simple but right. He turned and crouched and touched it.

  His boy.

  He touched the face of the stone, the letters of one life etched for all time. We build monuments, he thought, to prove we have come through this place. Or perhaps for the false comfort of those who remain. He touched the grooves of the letters and dates, the bare statistics of a life stamped in granite. The natural rhythm of the lives of those who are left behind is necessarily set off-kilter; yes, he had lost his balance there for a long time, but now he felt himself coming through to the other side of something, a new window opening within himself. He couldn’t say what it was exactly, or even where things were headed. But it was something different to feel, something besides the feeling of utter helplessness. It wasn’t optimism, no. It was something more like hope born of desperation. And it was okay. It was oka
y. Anything but this, the status quo of hauling grief around like a bag of stones.

  “It’s okay,” he said, and stood. He took a deep haul of the chilled air, and it felt like being born again. He brushed some snow from his knees. “It’s okay, my boy. I’ll do this one on my own.”

  Seven

  He walked back to the car, and his breath was visible in small clouds. It was getting dark out already, the afternoon fading imperceptibly. He went back to the office, parked the vehicle, checked his messages and had made up a few lies when Hattie stopped by his cubicle with a stack of files under her arm.

  Detective Mary-Ann Hattie had transferred in from Halifax a couple of years earlier, and she and McKelvey had worked together on a series of armed robberies. They’d been printed up in the Star together for netting the so-called “Royal Bank Bandit”. She was a genuine fisherman’s daughter. She was lanky, owned unruly red hair, and her skin was as white as milk. McKelvey always thought she looked like somebody’s kindergarten teacher.

  “Want to grab a beer and burger up at Fran’s after work?” she said. “First snowfall always makes me a little lonesome for home. Looks so pretty falling out there on the ocean.”

  “Could always go look at the lake,” he said, fiddling with some yellow stick-it notes.

  “Just doesn’t have the same magic,” she said, smiling.

  He checked his watch and said, “I’ll have to take a rain check.”

  They talked for a minute about some of the cases that were on the go, the usual suspects holding up Chinese convenience stores, lottery booths, a recent and violent trend towards armed robberies at the after hours booze cans. Then Hattie smiled at him, a sort of sad smile he thought, and she moved on to her cluttered desk. McKelvey called his wife at home, but Caroline did not answer. Then he remembered that she was out with four other women, fellow sufferers in grief. Drinking red wine—then, later, desserts and cappuccino—at a cozy Italian restaurant in Yorkville. She had told him all of this in the morning as he was getting ready for work, but he either didn’t hear her or had forgotten. It hardly mattered.