The Placebo Effect (11 page)

Up on Dundas the remains of an American film shoot still have a block of storefronts painted to look like Brooklyn. They even had a three-sided subway entrance put on the small park at the corner of St. John's Road to complete the look.

But there were other secrets here. One of the local high schools is the most highly rated secondary school in the region. Another school, just a few blocks away, is absolutely at the bottom of that list. The highly rated school is almost entirely white and Asian—the low ranking, almost entirely black. How do they manage this? Well, the highly ranked school made freshman year so hard and so math intensive that… well, you can fill in the rest.

Determined to “get on with his life” he found a pay phone on Bloor Street and called Trish Spence's number. After a half ring he was promptly put on hold. While he waited for Trish to pick up he decided he needed to replace the computer he'd lost in the fire. He organized his life on his two Gmail accounts, and he couldn't imagine not being able to access the synaesthetes website. Eddie was a computer genius, but Decker only needed a simple machine that Eddie could soup up, password it to safety, then encrypt it to within an inch of the edge of the digital world.

“Trish Spence here, sorry for making you wait.” The voice on the other end of the phone hadn't changed much over the years.

“Hey Trish, it's me.”

“Decker! What's shakin'?”

He loved that. From fuck-you black-business-suit woman to California beach bikini girl in two lines. He could almost hear her smack her lips. She had to be in her early forties now, but when she spoke it was like talking to a young Joni Mitchell—California, I'm comin' home. He liked it. He liked her, he always had. “I need a meeting,” he said.

“Got new material for
At the Junction
? Or you just anxious to see me again?”

“Always. Can your company lend me a computer?”

“What happened to…”

“My house burnt down.” It startled him how easy it was to say that.

“What?”

“Yeah. Can I borrow a notebook for a few weeks until my insurance claim gets settled?”

“Sure. Just come by.”

“When?”

“Five o'clock at Rancho Relaxo on College by Spadina—evil mojitos.”

“I teach tonight.”

“Oh, be that way. My place in two hours. You okay, Decker?”

Decker didn't answer her question. He didn't know the answer to her question.

Decker ducked under the police tape and stood in what remained of the front hall of his home.

The sleet had turned to snow. The first snow of the year drifted through the charred roof beams.

After a divorce or a death—or a fire—you get to see everything anew. As if a light that had always been off was suddenly turned on. It removes the shadows, throwing a sodium-harsh light on the emptiness.

Fire doesn't annihilate a house—it eviscerates it. It leaves the biggest of the bones while immolating the vital organs within. It reminded Decker of all the apartments in New York City he had left—how after he had moved out all the furniture but had to stay the last night to return the phone to Ma Bell. How sleeping on an air mattress those final nights he always was amazed how small the apartment felt without the furniture—and its occupants.

How small a house is after a fire.

Something glinted in the fading light, and Decker knelt to get a better look. A silver picture frame—charred and twisted. Despite his best efforts he couldn't remember what photograph had filled the now empty frame.

He stood, brushed the ashes from his knees, and left the property. It was surprisingly easy to do. It shocked him. Like a three-legged dog, he thought. When a dog loses a leg it doesn't pine for its missing limb. It simply becomes a three-legged dog. Decker knew he should move forward—out of his old burnt house—into whatever future awaited him. But unlike a three-legged dog, Decker knew that he could never really free himself from his past—a past that had two failed Broadway shows, the awful death of his wife and a fourteen-month memory gap in it.

He crossed the street to where his '99 Passat was parked. He
was lucky that he'd had no garage and that his three-year battle with city hall to allow him to park on his own property had failed. Otherwise his car would have gone the way of his house.

He opened the trunk and the CD changer there. In 1999, CD player theft was evidently quite popular, so Volkswagen had installed a CD changer in the trunk. Ever so convenient if you're driving and you want to change to a selection you didn't happen to load into the changer. He scanned the numerous disks he had borrowed from the city's fabulous—truly fabulous—library system.

Decker flipped through the jewel cases. T. S. Eliot reading his own poems, sounding a wee bit like Monty Python's impersonation of an Etonian snot-nosed silly walker—too bad. Decker loved the words—just not, in this case, the speaker. Besides, ol' T.S. was from St. Louis, Missouri—what was he doing talking like that? There were also CDs of Elliott Gould reading Raymond Chandler's
Lady in the Lake
and Tim Robbins reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's
Great Gatsby.
He popped in the latter, got back in the car and as Fitzgerald's revolutionary cadences began he allowed the car to dictate his course.

Much to his surprise he ended up less than a mile away at George Bell Arena, where he had taught Seth how to skate, and where he had watched his talented son play dozens and dozens of hockey games. For a moment he remembered Seth's open face and huge smile after scoring a winning goal.

He entered the cold arena.

Like all cinder-block buildings, it echoed. In this case, with the thud of pucks smashing against wooden rink boards. Decker pulled his coat tightly around himself to fend off the dank cold of the place and climbed the steps to the seating area.

On the rink a pickup game was in progress. Most of the players were men in their mid to late thirties. One of them clearly knew what he was doing out there. He probably had managed a brief career in the national game and just as likely had fallen prey to injury—inevitable in a game played literally at breakneck speed.

Decker sat and watched the fluid carving and movement on the rink.

The arena echoed but he felt private there—safe—like he had as a kid inside the snow-pile igloo he'd built. He'd slowly carved away the ceiling so that he could see light outside but no one could see in—to his privacy.

A shout from the rink brought him crashing back to the present as a puck sailed past his left shoulder and rattled on the seat two rows behind him.

With a shock he realized that he had slipped back into layers of his past without consciously intending to. He knew it was not a good sign. Maybe a result of the lingering shock from the fire, he hoped. But he knew he had to be careful of such behaviour. Unless he wanted to be like those others—incapable of being part of the world; freaks with strange abilities but nothing really more than embarrassments; kids who peed their pants when they stood to answer questions in class.

He calmed himself as he had done so many times in the past by reciting a simple mantra—“You are from them, but not of them.”

He picked up the puck and tossed it back to the ice. The talented player he had spotted earlier batted it from the air and in one graceful motion headed back up ice. The game continued. Decker smiled. Sure it does; the game continues.

Metro fire captain Hugh Highlander was thinking about the Bantam girl's hockey team he coached. How they really needed a scorer. Girl's hockey, even at the high rep level at which he coached, seldom had more than four or five goals a game. And he was tired of losing 2–0, 2–1, 1–0—he needed a scorer.

“Over here, Captain,” the young fire department tech called from behind a charred upright.

“Coming,” Hugh called as he hoisted a leg over a fallen beam and moved deeper into the charred wreck of Decker's house. He'd seen way too many of these old houses—now so prized—go up in flames. They were never built with any thought to fire,
or even comfort. On the whole, what this city referred to as century houses were built for workers by their employers. They were made cheaply and not intended to last. But yuppies or yippies or Generation Xers fancied them and gussied them up—but seldom did they go deeply enough into the intrinsic problems of the houses' design to solve any real issues. Like so much renovation, their efforts just plastered over troubles. Especially when it came to fire. And these old things burned hot and fast—and often. But then again he knew that there had been suspicious fires in this very neighbourhood in the past sixteen months. As Hugh maneuvered his now growing bulk deeper into the wreck he took a deep breath and attempted to sharpen his focus. Arson was a serious crime, he reminded himself. If it was arson.

The young fire tech pointed at a V scorch mark on the remaining standing wall. When an object catches fire it leaves such a mark—the bottom of the V pointing to the source of the fire. The young tech pointed out three more V marks. They were none too subtle. Each blocked a potential exit.

Hugh's expression darkened, but he made himself speak slowly. “The kitchen was there?” The fire tech brought out the house blueprints and nodded. “We dealing with a gas fireplace?”

“No sir. Gas for the drier in the basement, but that's it.”

“And the gas line is…”

“Nowhere near those,” the young firefighter said, pointing at the V scorch marks.

Hugh turned from the tech and within five minutes found the telltale pour patterns that arson specialists called puddles on the cement stoops outside both the front and back doors. A flammable liquid when poured on a floor will cause fire to concentrate in these puddles. Hugh took a deep breath and looked for the final signifier of arson. He found it in the back of the house where one of the few remaining windows had a spiderweb pattern of cracks, ‘crazed glass.' He turned to the men around him and shouted, “Watch where you put your feet. I want pictures of everything. This is now a crime scene.”

IT WAS AN ORDINARY SUNDAY AT THE THIRTY-SEVENTH PRECINCT
in the city's west end. A robbery at a convenience store around Keele and Eglinton. A disturbance near one of the box stores on St. Clair. A noise complaint from the rich folks of Baby Point—they just didn't want the kids playing street hockey in front of their homes. What country did these people think they lived in? And, as it had been for the past five months, the booming
thump thump thump
as the commuter train system rammed new pilons deep into the soggy ground up at the old depot. And just for a bit of added multicultural spice Tamil protesters were sitting on the expressway that joined the city west to east along the waterfront, blocking traffic for three miles in either direction.

Garreth McLean—twelve-year veteran of the Metropolitan Toronto Police Service—had drawn Sunday duty. Since his divorce he often volunteered for Sunday stints to allow the married guys time with their kids. As he did his paperwork he kept his police radio turned up to full volume, just to keep in touch. He overheard radio chatter from the riot-geared cops who were monitoring the protest on the expressway. The demonstrators had just unfurled a Tamil Tigers banner and draped it across the roadway. The Tigers penchant for using suicide bombers to press their claims for a homeland hadn't gone over well with the citizenry, despite the large Tamil population in the city, the largest outside of Sri Lanka proper. The Tigers had been named a terrorist organization by the federal government more than a decade ago, and few people—except those currently blocking traffic—disagreed with that assessment.

Garreth was pleased when he heard a commanding officer order his men, “Take down that rag. Now!” The television on the other side of the room was carrying a live feed as the riot police forced their way through the crowd and ripped down the banner. The protestors howled.
Such is life in the Big Smoke
, he thought.

Garreth smiled and returned to the files on his desk. The first was an arson report from Fire Captain Hugh Highlander. Garreth wondered how Hugh was health-wise. Then he stopped wondering as he began to read the report on the most recent blaze—just a few blocks from the station. The phrase “definitely not an electrical or gas-related fire” leapt out at him.

He marked down the owner's name and got the crime site report from his computer. Something about the name Decker Roberts sounded familiar, but he couldn't place it. He ran it through the data banks—nothing. He put the file to one side and drew a large question mark on the front.

At one o'clock he took his lunch break and made his way up to Dundas. Now that the street finally allowed alcohol in its restaurants, there were more interesting places to grab a bite. And now that he wasn't burdened with a potential mortgage or potential kids' education costs—having neither house nor children—he had the money to indulge.

Children
, he thought, and the memory of Decker Roberts bloomed full in his brain. He swore aloud. Decker Roberts. His father had a case almost forty years ago with a Decker Roberts. Garreth knew it because it drove his father to drink—literally.

Garreth remembered finding his strong bull of a father thrashing around in their basement. Swearing at the walls—at the bottle of single-malt scotch—at the world as a whole. Swearing at a person—no, a kid—named Decker Roberts.

Back then—it was another world—back when his father had been a decorated and honoured homicide detective.

Mike giggled as his bus pulled into the Cincinnati Greyhound station.

He'd done it. Gotten away from the Assassin and gotten back to Cincinnati. He couldn't wait to get some General Tso's takeout and some chips, and lock his door, and forget all that stuff he'd seen in the Junction. Awful stuff. That boy on the lamppost. Awful.