BINGO YEARS AGO AT THE CATHOLIC CHURCH CENTRE. Donaldson knew she would be hard-pressed to solve the case of Arlo and Arnie, two boys he had known—hard-pressed as well to solve the insulin death of little Mary Lou Toomey, their sister, who was three months pregnant.
But she might find something in a batch of letters to implicate a man in the death of a Mrs. Wally who had her bingo winnings stolen and was left dead on the old apartment’s back steps years before.
Yes, that was an old, old, old case for sure. But Donaldson believed that was money that this man first used to offer to buy the pistol from Oscar Peterson. She did not think it was Mel’s crime. She believed it was his brother’s.
So she went into the office, and went back over the effects, in an old brown bag, of Mrs. Jack Wally. Purse was there, money was missing, two brass buttons torn from her Navy Reserve jacket as she fought for her life that cold night. Her son had stated her silver strapped watch that she had won in the raffle at the Mott wedding was missing. It had been an old watch even then, but it was beautiful and she wore it, and kept it in pristine condition.
She discovered over the next few days the watch had been innocently given as a present to Eva Mott. That night she went to collect it.
“It is such bad luck, I think, that watch,” Eva said.
“This will be good news for you sooner or later,” Donaldson said, putting the watch in a plastic bag. She smiled at the young woman, hoping against hope she would heal.
She and her girlfriend, who had opened up a veterinary clinic, had moved in together. Sometimes Ms. Sackville came in with her calico cat.
“Do take care of Simone,” she would advise. “I would be terribly lost without it.”
Henrietta opened the back door, and cold autumn air mixed with the stale smoke of the building.
He nodded to her and she let him in, and up the back stairs, and he entered apartment 27, the apartment above the Motts.
“We will have to get a car,” Mel Stroud said. “We will have to get a car.”
“Does he have it?”
“Sure, but he will never sell it. We will just go in and take it. I am not thinking so much of Raskin now. We will sell it to the Chinese, or the Japanese—they are the ones with the money now.”
“Is it really worth something?”
He took out an old magazine page, that had been folded and refolded, spread it on the small table under the light and pointed it out. There were four pistols on the page, from an 1880 Smith and Wesson, to this 1908 model. They ranged in price from twenty thousand to sixty-nine thousand dollars.
He tapped the magazine, smudged with dirt, and then folded it again, and smiled at her.
“Canada-wide warrant on you,” she said. She smiled.
“I’ve had them before,” he said. “But it’s Shane. You see, Shane is the real trouble-maker in the family. Can’t do a thing with him, was always a momma’s boy, so the less we see of him the better.”
He took out his knife, opened it, cut a piece of hash. It was the same knife he had drawn on Packet Terri.
“It killed Jesse James,” he said, “that pistol. I figure it’s really worth two hundred and thousand.”
“Two hundred and thousand?”
He always exaggerated the importance of everything around him.
“Sure. So we will go to Argentina with the money—get away from all this racket.”
There was noise in the apartment below. He went down and knocked on the Mott door for the very first time. It was simply because he had learned Mr. Mott had a job at the car dealership—his eleventh job in eleven years.
“Could you keep it down,” he said pleasantly. “My wife is ill. Very ill.”
“Oh sorry,” said the man, “sorry. We usually don’t make noise. It’s just the movie. Why, I have been known to hide for weeks and not make a peep.”
“Hey, that’s just like me,” Mel Stroud said. “In fact I used to live in an apartment that used to be here—one they tore down long ago. I miss the old times, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Mr. Mott said.
“Like King Cole tea!”
“Yes, that’s what I have. How did you know? Would you like a cup?”
“Maybe—maybe some other time,” Mel said. “Maybe I’ll take one up to my wife someday.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“Nerves. She just lost a child. She was three months pregnant, but diabetes and she lost it.”
“We lost our grandchild a little while ago,” Mr. Mott said. The man seemed visibly shaken, even changed by this coincidence. Mel put his hand on Mr. Mott’s shoulder and there were tears in his eyes. Tears came to Mr. Mott’s eyes too.
“I am so sorry,” Mel Stroud said. “I am so, so sorry, sir. I bet she was a nice child.”
“Thank you. She was the best,” Mott said. “Thank you.”
“Sometimes tragedies in life bring us all closer together.”
He left.
“I have finally met a nice man in this bugger of a place,” Mr. Mott said, going back to his wife. “Someone who won’t make fun of me. Maybe give me a loan now and then when I need it.”
“Why did you bother them?” Henrietta Saffy asked.
Mel Stroud put the hash on a pin and lighted it with his lighter. “Because he is working at the Chevy dealership—I saw him there today. His brother-in-law must have got him the job; and I think we will test drive a car of his. Not for a while, but after a while. In a while—go for a ride. So he has to trust me.”
“The kind of car that will take us out of this dump?”
“Precisely. Precisely,” Mel Stroud said, and held the smoke deep into his lungs. “Precisely so. But remember—you have diabetes. If he asks, tell him you’re two shots a day and trying for another child. And cry—cry about it awhile. You should learn how to cry and have some feeling.”
He handed the hash over, to wild, crazy and dangerously brilliant Henrietta Saffy.
All violence is mimicry, and she was a grand mimic.
They gathered in a group of fifteen kids, macabre-looking in the twilight air. One would think he had fallen into a stage of mimes, so choreographed it all seemed.
So they picked the closest target. Two old men who had committed errors in their lives, trusted the wrong sources, but had never intended in their lives to commit a crime.
It was a crisp, clear starry night just after Halloween and many were wearing masks from the Halloween dance. Some threw firecrackers and others lighted flares. Then a torch flared; the black smoke of burning oil went up against the red night sky when they lighted a truck on fire. It was in fact an accident.
But when they saw it, children cheered, the pit, pit, pit of fire engulfed the black night, and all those students, many richer than Torrent Peterson could ever imagine, most who would never worry about an oil bill, why guess what? After dancing a bit, they all ran away.
Yet a whole section of forest toward Riley Brook burned, and more oil went into the water than had gone in over the last five years.
It spread toward Oscar Peterson’s junkyard and he stood out against it with a small hose. The children all scattered. And an investigation into all of this happened.
Mel Stroud watched from his apartment building in awe. If that could be done and justified by middle-class kids of middle-class parents, stealing a pistol would be nothing.
“Fuckin crazy cocksuckers,” Henrietta said, taking a sniff of cocaine. “We gotta get outta here—people like them are dangerous. Yes sir, dangerous fuckin sons of bitches.”