I’M AT THE Tim Hortons in Belmont Village. I walked back home, then up the Iron Horse Trail from Victoria Park. It’s an enjoyable walk, and I got some sun poking through the heavy green canopy of the trail. Once you clear the park area and get near Gauge St., there’s a short railway overpass. They paved the trail with asphalt all the way from the park up to where the trail ends.
There was a time when I was a kid, where smoking was allowed in restaurants, and I grew up with a very specific idea of what a Tim Hortons smelled like. It wasn’t bad, per se, just different. Then, sometime in the 1990s, smoking was banned in restaurants, and all the Tim Hortons shops began to smell like bakeries. It was nice. A little jarring, perhaps, because of my memories of the way they used to smell. But nice.
This Tim Hortons smells a little like the old days because someone outside is smoking. Every time the door opens, second-hand smoke wafts in. I get nostalgic every time someone enters or leaves. It’s a weird feeling.
I’m drinking a large black coffee. Tammy, the overly happy teen behind the counter, kept wanting to put cream in it. I used to get what’s called a Regular, which is the equivalent to one cream, one sugar, regardless of what size you get. But I haven’t ordered it that way since I was in school.
Most people use the drive-thru at this Timmies. There are about a half dozen other coffee places in Belmont Village, but this is the only one with a drive-thru. As such, most of the staff are preoccupied with the window in the back, and only one person, Tammy, is serving the people inside. And there are a few of us.
There are two women in the corner. They look like they’re on their way to yoga. Both are wearing fitness clothes, and have those rolled-up orange mats. There’s also this old guy with a beard and what looks like an old German-style combat jacket—the ones with the hoods, like what the Mods used to wear back in the ’60s and ’70s. I’m thinking of the film Quadrophenia. He’s also got a grey knit sport coat underneath and torn jeans. Looks like how I dressed at university. Cool. Dated, but cool. There are also three construction workers at a table, enjoying coffee and a box of a dozen donuts between the three of them. Maybe they’ll take the rest back to the crew, but from the look of them, there won’t be many left.
Okay, back to the story. Vijay asked me to do some snooping. He had me working on a potential divorce case. I needed to provide the wife with evidence her husband was cheating.
I asked (half-jokingly) if the bailiff job was still available.
I met with the wife at their house in Kitchener. It was a medium-sized side-split in a middle-class neighborhood near Ottawa and River. Nothing fancy, but fine for a single income family. The wife served cookies and coffee. I politely refused and started taking notes about the case. She admitted she didn’t know how this went—she’d never hired a private investigator before.
I said it varied depending on the person and the case. What I didn’t admit to her was that I’d never done this before either. I figured I’d seen enough Moonlighting episodes to fake my way through it. I just had to work out where and when to break the fourth wall and start singing.
She said her husband was a business executive—a sales manager at some plumbing supply company. She said he was working a lot of late nights, taking a lot of overnight trips around the province. She was worried that her husband was seeing someone at work. Could I look into it and provide her with anything I found?
I said I couldn’t promise anything incriminating, but that I’d follow him for a week, and I promised to take pictures if I saw anything she needed to know about. I asked if she was interested in anything other than infidelity. As in, if he was doing anything illegal, or anything that she might not consider cheating. She said she wanted to know about everything.
The husband sounded like a real character. Let’s call him Jim. Jim was a blue-collar guy with a white-collar job. He had some elevated ideas about how his life should be, and he tried living up to those ideals. Which meant over-extending himself and their shared bank account. Probably hitting all the fancy restaurants over lunch, golfing with other execs, that kind of thing.
I’d do a little background work on him to see if that told me anything interesting. Have Vijay run a credit check on him to see how over-extended he was. The rest of the week would show me his pattern, what his daily movements were, and whether there were any more women I needed to worry about.
So, with this in mind, I contacted Vijay with the details, and he told me to expense everything necessary for the operation, and let him know if I needed anything specific. I had a camera and most of what I needed. What I didn’t have was a car, so I’d rent one for the week, keeping any notes and receipts.
I’m leaving out some details, including the names of everyone involved in the case. Obviously, since this is going on the Web, I want to respect people’s privacy. There are also some unresolved points, and I don’t want to cause any more problems for myself.
More construction workers just came in. It’s starting to get noisy here. I’m going to take my coffee with me and head back downtown. Stay tuned.