Aloha, Candy Hearts (33 page)

Joanne emerged from the shadows. I studied her and decided Ethan had been doing a good job; she looked almost sober.

“I lost you,” she said. “Someone said they saw you coming out here. I didn’t know Russ was with you.” She looked at us back and forth. “So what am I interrupting?”

“I’m just saying gootbye,” Mom claimed, reaching out to lay an arm around her daughter ’s narrow waist.

“I have to go back into the city for a while, for work. But in case you’re not here when I get…”

“About brunch tomorrow, Russ…”

I waved it off. “Yeah, I know. Mom told me. You have to head DD6AA2AB8

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home.”

She lit a cigarillo. “I’d stay, but I just heard about this gig; have to get some stuff put together for that. And I think the cats are probably missing me by now.”

I caught my breath and stared at my sister. She has pets, I thought to myself. This gave me pause. You don’t have pets unless you have a home. You don’t have pets unless you wanted to—and were capable of giving—love.

She chortled her trash can laugh. “All they do is ignore me when I’m there, but I set foot in that door after being away and it’s like I’m the friggin’ second coming.”

“Donya, don’t say such tings!” Mom scolded.

Joanne laughed and hugged Mom closer. They understood each other better than I ever would.

“I really have to run.”

And then I did something I don’t remember doing before. I pulled my sister into a hug. I whispered into her ear, “Love ya.”

When I let her go, although I didn’t feel her arms around me, I knew she’d wanted to hug me back. Fair enough, I’d taken her by surprise.

I tittered nervously. “But I have to find my car first.”

“I saw it over there, next to the pink caddy,” Joanne said, pointing, just as happy as I was to move on.

I gave Mom a quick hug, and dashed away.

“Sonsyou!” Mom called after me. “Be careful. No shooting!”

The four-storey parking lot where Reginald Cenyk wanted to meet had sat at the corner of 1st Avenue and 20th Street for a long time.

It was one of those creepy places with ceilings so low that even in my itsy bitsy Mazda I couldn’t help but feel the roof was going to scrape the top.

Reginald was right. Except for a few random cars on the first level, the place was deserted. At a snail’s pace, I wound my way up to the top floor, unconsciously bowing my head in a futile effort to make the car smaller. I was pretty sure no one was following me, but I’d extinguished my headlights as soon as I entered the lot, just DD6AA2AB8

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to be sure. It made the going excruciatingly slow, but if nothing else, I hoped it gave Reginald some comfort that we’d be alone.

It was dark outside when I pulled off the last ramp onto the rooftop level, grateful to be out from under the tomb-like ceilings.

Conveniently, the southeast corner he’d chosen for our rendezvous, was just up ahead and slightly to the right of the ramp. I parked the car as directed, and waited. Over the edge, to my right, I could see the bright white and blue lights of the twelve-screen Galaxy cinema, and up ahead the cheery, neon, palm-tree-shaped sign of the downtrodden Capri Hotel. I looked down at my badly crinkled tux and muddied patent leather dress shoes. Ruining formal wear seemed to be a habit with me. At least this time there were no bloodstains. I lowered my window and drank in fresh, rain-scented air.

A few minutes later, my eyes glommed onto the rear-view mirror as a pair of headlights inched up the ramp behind me. Reginald wasn’t being as careful as I’d been. Then again, I’m a trained professional at this kind of stuff.

I couldn’t wait to hear what he had to tell me. I reached for the car door handle to get out. But I never made it. Instead, my body was violently thrust forward. I felt my chin crack against the Mazda’s steering wheel.

White Truck.

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Dazed, I lifted my head just in time to see the headlights back away from where they’d just rammed the back end of my car. It was the white truck, with its silly front vanity licence plate: a rowboat and a beehive. I heard its engine roar. It was coming back for more. Uselessly my right foot slammed down on the brake—as if that would stop anything.

My fingers grasped for the seat belt doohickey. I had to get free before this idiot squished me into a pancake against the guardrail.

With the next impact, I realized in horror that wasn’t his intention at all.

The metal bar made a ghastly groaning noise as the vehicle behind me pushed the Mazda against it with all its horsepower.

My eyes widened in full horror as I watched the steel give way.

I was going over!

The convertible jerked forward in stuttering protest. The nose inched over the edge. A gurgling noise escaped my tight throat.

Strangely enough, I found I could not scream out the terror I felt DD6AA2AB84

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infuse my body like a deadly venom. I knew I would never survive the four-storey drop. Four words blared in my head: The End Is Near!

Further.

Further.

The car made a sickening thumping noise as the front tires rolled over the edge and the chassis hit cement. The nose began to teeter. It was only then, at that last, most desperate moment, that my fumbling fingers finally released the seat belt catch. I threw open my door.

Maneuvering my torso through the door, in preparation for…I didn’t know what…I could see that the car had caught on a thick shard of twisted metal. I was saved!

No, I wasn’t.

The killer truck had repositioned and was zeroing in for one last smack. With no time to consider options, my brain screamed,

“ooooh noooooooo!” as I tossed my body from my car. The microseconds that followed seemed much longer, long enough for me to feel a keen sense of horror at what was happening to me, and a burning guilt for abandoning my car. I was a cowardly rat, jumping ship, not knowing if my own fate would be any less cruel than the one I’d left behind. But I had no choice.

I reached blindly into the air, hoping to find salvation. And I did. The fingers of my right hand fell upon an intact railing.

Although it was hard and rough to the touch, the metal edge of it cutting into my skin, at that moment, the steel of that railing felt dearer to me than a lover ’s cheek.

As I took hold of the railing, my body crashed against the side of the parking garage, my legs flailing below me. My eyes jerked upwards in response to a horrible noise: the deafening sound of the final blow in a fight to the death. I watched as my sweet Mazda RX-7 convertible was viciously hit from behind. With a cry curdling in my throat, I witnessed the silver body nosedive into the back alley, far, far below. With a surprisingly muted wallop, the car crash-landed. One railing, one arm groaning with pain, were the only things keeping me from joining her.

I looked up to where the driver ’s side of the gleaming white DD6AA2AB8

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truck had pulled up to the pavement’s edge. With a benign whir, the window was lowered. An unsmiling face appeared. Reginald Cenyk, archivist turned murderer.

It wasn’t exactly the best time for me to have a eureka moment, but there it was. It wasn’t a rowboat on the white truck’s licence plate: it was an ark. Like in Noah’s ark. An ark and beehive. Ark.

Hive. Archive. Sheesh. Reginald Cenyk, cheesy archivist turned murderer.

The truck door opened. Things didn’t look so good for me.

I looked down. Deadly chasm. Nope, I still wouldn’t survive the fall. I looked up. Killer who wanted to get rid of me because I’d found him out. Nope, things didn’t look too good for me at all.

“What was that for?” I asked as if he’d just given me an unan-ticipated noogie. I sometimes react weirdly in perilous circumstances.

“I know you know,” Reginald answered back, his pale face flushed with colour, thinning red hair fluttering in the wind. “As soon as you stepped into my office and started asking all those questions, I knew you knew.”

He was giving me more credit than I was due. I actually didn’t know anything for sure until his most recent phone call, when he specifically referred to a journal and letters. I hadn’t told him what form the missing material was in. Then I learned Simon Durhuaghe was being blackmailed. But it hadn’t started until after Walter ’s death.

Who else could have known about the content of the damning material without actually having seen it? If I accepted that Walter and Helen were innocent in all this, who else was a common denominator between them and the archival material? And, who knew that Walter had the treasure map and would be on that plane from Vancouver?

The answer to every question was the same: Reginald Cenyk.

He’d been an employee at the archives when the controversial Durhuaghe material was first discovered. Walter had made calls to work from Victoria, no doubt to Reginald who he erroneously trusted.

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of a parking lot. I expected something less dramatic from him. Like maybe a gun or knife. I’d been ready for that.

Reginald stepped forward. “I hate this,” he said, turning his baby face into a grimace. It seemed as if he was talking more to himself than me. “But it must be done. I have to get out of here.”

From where he stood, and how I was positioned, hanging by a metal thread, he had a good shot at my forearm. And the bastard took it. Pulling back his leg, he let loose against my exposed, straining limb, kicking it as hard as he could.

I yowled in pain.

He readied for another kick. My arm couldn’t take it. It would do me in. I was going to fall.

My eyes moved to a spot behind Cenyk’s back. I screamed,

“Darren! Help me!”

Startled, Reginald whisked around to protect himself from a rear assault. It gave me all the time I needed. I’d managed to secure a piece of loose rebar. Using my uninjured arm, I whipped it up and over the pavement ledge, and in the momentum of an arc, swung it with every muscle I had against the tender midpoint of Reginald’s calves. I knew that’s where it would hurt the most.

The slender man fell to the ground, his hands tied around his legs, mewing in pain. I bunched up my screaming muscles and used the leverage of the railing I was holding on to to swing myself up and back onto firm ground. I rolled up next to Reginald and jumped up, rebar still in hand. I raised it over my head, peered down at him and growled, “Don’t move, you piece of shit, or I’ll archive your ass!”

He didn’t.

I fished my cellphone out of a pocket and dialled. Now I’d call for the help of my cop friend for real.

“I can’t believe you,” Kirsch told me in a tone of voice that left no doubt about how he was feeling about me at that particular moment. “You had me right there, you asked me for information, and then you went off to catch a killer on your own. Are you friggin’ nuts?”

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If you put it that way, perhaps, but I’m an independent kind of guy.

“I wasn’t one hundred percent sure.” I defended my reasons for leaving the wedding reception to meet Reginald Cenyk alone, rather than take the handy cop with me. “Only ninety percent, maybe even only eighty.”

In reality, I was more sure than that, but I thought I could take him. He was an archivist, for Pete’s sake. I’m a macho gay man detective. It should have worked out okay. I just hadn’t considered the possibility that I’d be battling a six-thousand pound, three-quarter ton truck, rather than a ninety-eight pound weakling.

Lesson learned.

We were in the police station outside an interrogation room.

“So, what’s he saying in there?” I asked, hoping to steer off the current topic. “You’ve had him in there forever.”

Kirsch let out an exasperated sigh. He was too tired to resist me. But he wasn’t too tired to be a thief. He snapped the fresh cup of coffee out of my hand, and took a long sip.

“I’m paraphrasing,” Kirsch said when he was done, “but it seems he came up with the idea to use Durhuaghe’s journal to sub-sidize an early retirement almost as soon as he and his pals at the archives found it. They debated what to do with it: return it to Durhuaghe, destroy it, or just include it with the rest of the material and let fate take control. Cenyk’s vote was to put it into the archives along with the rest. Of course, he planned to steal it the first chance he got, and use it against Durhuaghe. Instead, Helen Crawford overruled him and hid the stuff.”

“She wanted to protect Durhuaghe’s reputation.”

“Uh huh. Sounds like Cenyk harassed her about it over the years, hoping to trick her into revealing her hiding spot, but she never cracked.”

“She knew what he wanted to do with it?”

“Not exactly, but she probably suspected. And if not Cenyk, somebody else might use it against her hero. She probably created the treasure map after she retired and before she left the city. It was her way of keeping the material safe, but still accessible after she died.”

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“Accessible only if whoever had the map had the smarts to figure it out.”

Kirsch nodded. “I think she hoped it would be someone of her choosing, someone she trusted. But yeah, if the map ended up in the wrong hands, she didn’t want to make it easy for them.”