Mind Games (23 page)

I shut up. Keep things safe and simple: that is Churko’s attitude, don’t get caught up in something messy on the eve of retirement.

I followed Churko outside, where reporters had gathered. He took on a grave look for the cameras, responded to a few questions. Yes, there has been a murder, a stabbing, that’s all we’re going to say right now. Don’t know if it’s tied to any previous incidents. All avenues will be explored. Now let us do our work.

I lingered for a while, then found my way by foot to Kingsway, the yellow scar that runs across Vancouver’s right cheek: fast food, fast gas, fast in-and-out motels. A teenaged boy on the corner, obviously a prostitute, living dangerously in these ugly times. Down the street, a woman plying a similar trade. I was lonely, in need of companionship that was healthy and real and proven. I felt incomplete after my aborted evening with Sally, in need of answers: had she intended to announce it was all over or to hold out a carrot of hope?

I was desperate to know, to be with her. I flagged a taxi, and soon was standing in front of the house on Creelman. Only a porch lamp was on, Sally’s upstairs bedroom was darkened. But something was missing: there was no Saab in the driveway or carport. No Saab on the street.

I rang the doorbell three times, insistently. She’d told me she was going home … I was concerned, then frightened. I dialled Celestine on my cellphone, and after several rings a sullen, sleepy voice replied.

“It’s fucking after midnight.”

“Just tell me if Sally’s there.”

“Why would I tell you?”

“Because she has disappeared. I’m at her house.”

After a moment, she spoke with lowered voice: “She’s here, asleep on the futon in the other room, and I’m not going to wake her. Go home to bed.” She hung up.

This was an alibi more likely prepared than off the cuff. Celestine’s role was to bear false witness for an under-the-counter affair.

Pause to let me catch my breath. Pause for an academic aside: Reik speaks of a sense-perception that seeps unrecognized into the unconscious, a telepathy still available to the life forms from which we evolved but largely lost to us. It can still communicate beneath awareness, can even emerge within our dreams. I’d seen Sally dressed as a little girl, as Miriam, I had dreamed of Ellery Cousineau by her side, whispering words of seduction.

He is a pedophile.

Cousineau lives in a West End condominium: I have been there once for drinks. I took a taxi there, a spindly tower near Stanley Park. Cousineau’s condo was on the ninth floor – was that it, the one with the light glowing?

I walked toward his building, thinking I’d buzz his suite, but then I saw the ghastly proof of my fears: a blue Saab was parked out front – the grinning Miriam doll hanging from the rear-view was distinctive, the cold truth of perfidy.

I waited under a chestnut tree in a mindless fog. I felt again that sense I was outside my body, lost in a world without reality. But ultimately I was no longer able to shut out Sally and betrayal and jealousy, and when mind joined body I found myself still under the chestnut tree, still a hundred feet from Cousineau’s building.

I waited through the night, shivering in the autumn cold. At a quarter to six, she emerged, wearing her dress of the evening before, and started her car and drove away.

You can’t begin to comprehend the crushing loss I felt. There was no dealing with this feeling, no way to placate it. I
could only bury it, like the dead, bury it deep beneath anger. So despite my exhaustion I carried on savagely into the day, gulping bitter coffee at an all-nighter, arriving at the office at eight a.m. to find James already there. I barked at him: Cancel my patients for the day, I’m feeling too foul to deal with the lesser problems of others. He withdrew from me and silently set about his tasks.

I lay down and tried to nap – to no avail. I stood, I paced. I went out to the balcony, clenching my fists, wanting to scream, to be heard across the inlet. I slammed on my helmet and strode off to unleash Vesuvio II onto the streets of Vancouver.

I was gearing into high on the Burrard Bridge when a four-wheel sports pickup swerved at me so suddenly that I skidded, fell, scraped my arm. It sped away before I could read the plate or see the driver, but I didn’t assume the act was intentional. All my thoughts were directed to exposing Ellery Cousineau for what he was: Category 302.2, exclusive type, sexually attracted to female children, extremely high recidivism rate, typically justifies his acts by claiming the child was sexually provocative. I pictured myself confronting Sally with the truth, watching the revulsion play on her face.

I worked my way through the West End, through the checkerboard maze of one-way streets, then to Denman Street. There, looming ominously, was your building, and I stalled. Was this my destination? Had unconscious impulses urged me to seek the safety of Allison Epstein’s couch? Will she recommend a straightjacket when I run out of fuel, when my rage deserts me?

But you, too, I’ve learned, are capable of anger. You were correct in dumping all over me today. I apologize for accusing you of withholding information. My irrational suspicions had Sally uttering a dark confidence to you, an admission of adultery.

Obviously, you weren’t implicit in the scheme – for that is what it is – or aware of its extent, or that Celestine Post is pulling
the strings. Oh, yes, she’s the hatcher of this plot, the author of my misfortune. It all comes clear, her Iago-like urgings in Sally’s ear:
If you think Cousineau’s such a hunk, go to bed with him. I dare you
.

So I’ll direct my anger at where it belongs. It is the witch, not the pedophile, not the children’s artist, who deserves my outrage. What impels Celestine? Lesbian possessiveness no longer seems likely. She dared Sally, challenged her to enter Cousineau’s bed. But why? To clear the way for an even more bizarre romance? Behind the acerbity, the sharp, digging elbows of her repartee, was there an attraction to me? Had Celestine actually been honest in saying she was pouring out her fucking heart to me?

If so, how long had she felt this way about me? And why hadn’t my antennae picked up the signs? I was always too focused on Sally, unable to make out Celestine in the background. She might have planted the seeds of marital rupture many months ago, pressing on Sally the notion that she should have a life of her own, that she should undo the shackles. Find freedom, oh, my sister: challenge the nerd, insist on Bologna, if he really loves you, he’ll let you go.

A blacker thought: Had Sally been having affairs all along? Had I blocked the clues, refused to read them? Is this the way it ends? With ugly irony? Sally will have Ellery. Celestine will have Timothy. We will live happily ever after.

I’d stopped by a lamppost while embroiled in these thoughts and was staring at your office window, imagining you at work with Mrs. Pianissimo, who complains strange men are following her, when suddenly Tim Dare, M.D., comes bursting through the door. I visualized the resulting scene: Dr. Epstein can’t take it any more, she’s off the case, go find another shrink, someone with infinite patience and forgiveness.

Still in a fuming gloom, I cycled off to 312 Main for another session with Jack Churko’s task force. I practised anger management en route, but my temper, like a volcano seeking fault
lines, spewed over once I got there. I stepped on toes, badgered Churko with irksome advice as to how to run his case.

Circulate José Pierrera’s photograph, I urged – someone might have seen him with the killers. Check the liquor stores in his home area, where they may have bought that case of beer.

“I know my job, Doc.”

“He could have been picked up in a gay bar.”

“We’re doing the gay bars. There’s no end of them. I ain’t got an army working for me, it’s taking time, this town is as bad as San Francisco. Anyway, you already told me you don’t see Pierrera in bars, you figure him as a loner, a homebody, a guy who gets off on phone sex.”

“I’ve been wrong before.”

“That’s real encouraging.”

Jimmy, the voice at the other end of the Adonis Hot Line, had been of scant help. He told Churko he did this job just to earn a buck; he wasn’t even gay. He could barely remember Pierrera, had no idea of his habits or haunts. Jimmy did most of the talking – purred sensuously from scripts.

I went on about Grundy and Lyall, implying – without a scintilla of evidence – there was a conspiracy to shelter them.

“I’m listening,” Churko would say. (I’m not listening.) “I hear what you say.” (I ain’t interested.)

I demanded to know why Grundison and DeWitt weren’t being watched each hour of day and night; insisted that I be allowed to talk to the two lying staff at The Tides, the watchman, the maid; there was a coverup; the authorities were cowed by the power of the Grundison family, afraid of their cunning lawyers, of multimillion-dollar suits for false arrest.

Churko diagnosed me as obsessive.

What’s worse, he’d retained a charlatan without a minuscule of professional training. A psychic! A clairvoyant! A matronly woman who, it was alleged, had led police to other murderers by dint of her ability to visualize the scenes of crime after absorbing them through her supernatural pores. She’d been taken
to Brighton Park, to the East End basement suite, and now was sitting in a darkened room, her eyes closed, while Churko waited with a few other gullible detectives.

Finally, she waved us in. “I see two young men,” she said, still seeming in a trance. “One is very husky, the other lighter but also strong. He has short hair, I think. His head seems shaved. While he looks on, the bigger of the men raises a weapon. I see it now, a pair of scissors, long scissors, shears … dear God, I see a hand come down …” She opened her eyes suddenly. “I’m sorry, but my mind rejected the image as too painful.”

I followed Churko to his office in a fury. “‘I see it now, a pair of scissors’ – what a pile of baloney. A shaved head – she read the papers, the speculation about skinheads. All it proves is you don’t have to spend ten years in university to conjure up the obvious. What did this amateur guessologist tell us we didn’t know?”

“That there were two assailants and they looked like Grundison and DeWitt. She supports your theory.” Churko squinted at me through the smoke of his cigarette, took in the wan, sleepless eyes, the embittered expression. “Are you having a problem, Doc?”

“Yes, I’m having a problem.”

“Maybe I don’t read people as good as you – I never got a college degree either – but you’re not acting normal.”

“When am I going to be allowed to question The Tides staff?”

“On my good time. Go home. Take a break.”

For how long, I wanted to know. He would call me. I told him I expected to see Grundy this Thursday, his regular visit, I could confront him, try to debunk his alibi, break the case wide open.

“Postpone it,” Churko said. “Go for a ride on your bike.”

I protested, they’d need my advice when it came time to take down Grundy, he had to be handled like delicate china.

“We’re not taking Grundy down until we got evidence.”

It was only during my glum journey home, cycling into a head-clearing wind, that my
idée fixe
about Grundy and Lyall lost its grip. Where was the proof, what right had I to convict them, in my own mind, without evidence? Churko was right: I must postpone that session with Grundy, I was acting irrationally.

When I got home, I was hailed by the young couple in the next-door houseboat. They were organizing a party tonight, they’d be pleased if I’d come, they were planning some music, I could bring my clarinet. I declined, but thanked them.

Sally was on my machine. “How did it go last night?”
How did it go?
“I’ll be home after seven.”

Vivian Lalonde came on after that. “We have to meet, Timothy, we have to talk about what I’m going to say. You do want me to lie for you on Monday, don’t you? Call me, this is urgent.” A second call was to similar effect. A third was her invitation to go fuck myself.

I fell into bed at a quarter to five, dinner not taken. I twisted in my sheets, fending off my demons, then floated into a vague, enervated wakefulness before blackness came.

This is my dream: I’m in a carnival tent where Celestine, in gypsy dress, is laying out tarot cards, telling me she can teach me a few tricks. She flashes a card at me, but it’s a photo that I faintly remember: Victoria at seventeen, a mischievous smile. “You don’t want to know the truth,” says Celestine, dismissing me.

There are many others in this tent, people I recognize from my dreams of the Alpine village, all in elaborate costume. I’m the only person not wearing some strange outfit, and again I feel that sense of not belonging. Among them is a man looking out vacantly from many eyes dispersed about his torso, and I am horrified.

As I make my way toward an exit, I come upon Sally and Cousineau. He’s tossing garments out of a trunk – girls’ dresses, stockings, underpants, ribbons – and he seems displeased with the available choices. “Wear this one, my dear,” Cousineau says, handing her a Mary-had-a-little-lamb dress. Next he extends
a tall, rounded shepherd’s staff, and the sight of this phallic insinuation causes me to stumble out, blinded by tears.

Now I’m at the shore of a lake, from which loons call; goats rut by the shore. But one of them is half-human, the satyr again. The sounds of a banjo come from the lakeside tent where I was conceived. I see a light flicker within it, and I hear Victoria moaning in distress. I’m overcome by the thick, pungent fumes of cannabis …

The smell woke me, and my first thought was that Celestine Post was smoking pot on the
Altered Ego
. But the smell, along with the sounds of a party, was coming from next door. Someone was playing a guitar. It was midnight.

I was only dimly aware of the party, I was concentrating on the dream, pulling it back, and as I worked at it, I was nagged by a sense that Victoria had lied – yet again – about Peter.

I wasn’t prepared to come to grips with that, to act on it, not immediately. I stumbled through the next few days, not returning calls, half-listening to the woes of the patients I couldn’t cancel, clashing with a judge in court, offering him harsh advice on what to do with a pederast, taking shots at a defence lawyer. James nursed me patiently through my crisis, arranged to reschedule Grundy and Lyall, advised Churko of the alternative date.