Punishment (6 page)

I shrugged. “No worse than your job, I suppose.”

“I always thought you wanted to be a cop, like I did. I remember, you were saying that after the Mountie came to grade eleven and gave the talk about careers.”

“How did you get into it?”

“After the war, I was released in California. I liked California. The weather, eh. Took out citizenship, but after a while I wanted to be closer to home. Moved up to Boston. Bunch of relatives there. Then got on the police.”

“And how was that.”

“A living,” he said. “Quite a good living, actually. I’m comfortable. And what about yourself.”

“Getting by,” I said. “Took a package and a pension.”

“Aren’t you a bit young for that?”

“Burned out, you could say.” I tried to laugh. “It was complicated.”

“Same for me,” he said grimly. “But a different kind of complicated burnout. Burned by a gang of niggers …”

“Please,” I said, holding up a hand.

He laughed. “You know that’s what they call each other.”

“Just humour me,” I said.

“Tony,” he said. “I got a bullet four centimetres from my spine. It’ll go into the grave with me. That’s my permit to use any fucking word I want, okay?” He shook his head. “Fuck me. So what burned you?”

“Ah well. It’s a long story.”

“Bad guys got to you?”

“Actually, no …”

He was waiting. I looked away. Enough said. He cleared his throat, pulled car keys from a pocket. “By the way, we should talk sometime about that quiff Strickland.”

“What about him?”

“About what if he gets off.”

“What’s it got to do with us?”

“You know what was going on there, don’t you?”

“Not really.”

“Well I’ll tell you. And it’s from a solid source. He was exploitin’ the young folk. Drugs. I understand they found porn there.
Christ knows what he had in mind for the poor kid that died before he got at her …”

“Neil, Neil,” I interrupted. “You know better than this. You’re trained …”

“I’m trained to put two and two together.” He hesitated, gave a kind of laugh. “You’re always fuckin with me, Tony. Just tryin’ to get a rise out of the old cop. But I know where your heart is. I know you as well as I know myself. What was it old Abe Lincoln said? We hang together or we hang separate.”

He walked away shaking his head and climbed into the Lexus, peeling rubber as he drove away.

Sullivan called five minutes after I got home from the store. “Mr. Breau?”

I hesitated. “I’ve been giving it a lot of thought.”

“Good,” he said. “What’ll I tell Dwayne?” And in a flash Strickland’s face was there in front of me, pale and frightened, and he was saying
You owe me, man
, and then Sophie’s voice, dear Sophie who was always too persuasive:
I think you owe him that much, Tony
.

“Okay,” I said. “You tell Strickland that I’ll be down to see him tomorrow. You make the arrangements to get me in to see him. Tell him I’ll be there to listen … nothing else.”

The sense of self-betrayal was instantaneous.

“Thank you,” said Sullivan, “he’ll be pleased.”

That night, I called Anna. I figured it would be useful to get some advice from her before seeing Strickland, as in the end she got to know him better than I did. We hadn’t talked for ages and she sounded wary when I mentioned him. “I’m surprised he ended up back there,” she said.

“His lawyer wants me to talk to him. I said no at first. But you know how lawyers are.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

“It’s pretty serious,” I said. “A young woman was found dead in the place where he’s been living and it looks like they’ll go for second-degree murder.”

“Second degree? Wow.”

“He’s definitely looking at criminal negligence. He wants to see me. I could use your advice.”

“God, Tony. I don’t know what to tell you. What were the circumstances?”

“It isn’t clear yet. She was missing for five days. She was probably there all the time. He was gone when they found her, which looked bad. Looked like he was running away.”

“I can’t imagine Dwayne mixed up in anything violent. He’ll probably say that he was gone when she died. Have they come up with a time of death?”

“Not that I’ve heard.”

“The cause?”

“Drug overdose. It seems he’s been dealing serious drugs around the place. Maybe it’s a mistake for me to talk to him. People here are pretty stirred up about it. I know the victim’s family pretty well.”

“You’ll have to be the judge of that because you know the way
they are down there,” she said. “But he always looked up to you.”

“That was then,” I said. “When he was inside and I was part of the system, part of his survival.”

“Say hello from me if you see him,” she said. “But you know what?”

“What.”

“I’d be very careful. It’s bound to get messy.”

“You’re probably right.”

“How are you otherwise?”

“I was thinking about you the other morning,” I said. “Just lying in the old bed, remembering.”

Silence on the other end.

“It sounds stupid, but I can’t help wondering how life would be if I could just push pause and rewind. Go back to where the story got confused, where I lost the thread.”

“So how far would you rewind it, if you could?”

“Good question.”

“Tony, I should tell you, you’ll hear it anyway—I’m involved with someone.”

“That’s great,” I said. “I’m glad.”

“Are you?”

“I suppose that depends.”

“Depends on what?”

“I think I’m going to hang up now.”

“Tony, before you do. About Dwayne, he’ll probably remind you that you were partly responsible for the fix he got himself into at Millhaven, over that Italian. Surely you can’t forget that. It’s probably why he’d turn to you now.”

“Thanks for that,” I said. And I put the phone down.

——

Looking back, the third encounter with Strickland was inevitable. Sophie was the catalyst for that one too. She was nervous when she called. “Someone needs to talk to you,” she said.

When I got there, Strickland was sitting in her office smoking a cigarette, something he only did when he was under pressure. He liked to run, was worried about his body.

I acted surprised to see him. I made myself sound hostile, impatient. “What’s up?” Pretended to be reading something in a file.

He looked at me, head slightly angled, eyes on mine, a smile threatening. “I think you know.”

“You’re here to tell me about Vito?”

“I need to make a deal.”

“Let’s not play games. What kind of a deal?”

“I need to get out of here.”

I laughed. “That’ll happen, eventually. What’s your rush?”

“Two goofs come up to me in the yard, an hour ago. One gets right up in my face. I could smell what he ate for breakfast. ‘There’s a rat,’ he says. ‘About Vito. And we’re real close to him now.’ His forehead is almost up against mine. What am I supposed to think he means? ‘Great,’ I say. ‘Keep me posted.’ And he says, ‘Ooooohhh yeah. You’ll be one of the first to know.’ ”

“Who was that?”

“Can you get me out of here?”

“Doesn’t sound like you’re in any position to negotiate. Who are you afraid of?”

He hesitated, looked toward Sophie helplessly, spread his hands in resignation.

“Were they the guys who did the Italian? The guys who threatened you?”

“I can’t say. I didn’t see.”

“Okay. Who made the threat?”

“They call him the Horse. The asshole right up in my face was Jimmy Driscoll.”

“Have you been talking to anybody?”

“Only you.” The look and the tone were accusing. “Only you, Tony. Who you been talkin’ to?”

“Come on,” I said. “What was there to talk about?”

“There’s this fuckin rumour in the unit that you and I are related. People making jokes. Then the IPSOs comin’ around,” he said. “Assholes, those guys. Comin’ right up and talking to me in front of everybody. You told them.”

“I told them nothing.”

“Someone talked to them because they’ve been all over me.”

“And you told them …?”

“What I told you … just fuck right off. But there’s talk around the unit, people looking at me funny. Tony, just get me the fuck out of here. You owe me, man.”

Sophie was nodding in agreement, face downcast, her expression almost accusing.

By the next morning he was on his way to Kingston Pen.

The call to Anna made for a long sleepless night. When she had asked,
Depends on what?
I might have answered:
Depends on
when
you started seeing someone. Depends on whom. Depends on what you mean by “involved.”
The mental math and lurid
speculation were inevitable. By two in the morning I’d drifted off but then the nightly roar of traffic to the shore had started up, the ATVs on the nearby gravel road sounding like they were passing through my living room.

It hadn’t occurred to me that I might have been too hasty in my rush to assume the full burden of blame and the hangover of guilt when our marriage hit the rocks. What if she’d had someone waiting in the wings? For sure it would explain how quickly she’d accommodated our new reality, and how efficiently she removed me from her life.
Involved with someone else
—a gentle phrase, evasive substitute for real disclosure. How about:
Fucking someone else
. Let’s try that on for size. Sounds of distant engines filtered through the pillow on my head. What if Anna … but then the images of Anna as I knew her intervened, Anna when everything between us was new and vivid. It was probably merciful that the roaring came closer then, the nocturnal ATVs.
Tonight they’re early
, I said aloud. There was rumbling and revving as they paused outside my kitchen door, it seemed. In my fantasy I had a rifle pointed out the upstairs window. Like nutty what’s-his-name out west. Ludwig Wiebo or whoever. And I thought of Pittman then, and something else I should have said: I don’t owe Strickland
anything
.

Finally I got up and switched on a light. After another moment I could hear them roar away, wheels spinning in the gravel, the crack of stone bouncing off my car.

I
was technically impaired, driving in my exhausted state. The regional correction centre was about two hours away and I had to make two stops for coffee. It was raining, the autumn leaves collecting in the ditches and the fields. Winter wasn’t far away and I was dreading it, remembering the dreariness of childhood. Of course the isolation wasn’t only caused by weather but the winter climate was a factor, for sure. I should buy cross-country skis, I thought.

I turned on the car radio. Another American talking about weapons of mass destruction. I clicked it off. Every morning at the store it seemed Neil would be front and centre, holding court, delivering the latest propaganda from the Bush cartel. Saddam this, al-Qaida that and nine-eleven, mixed up in a
crock of speculation. More than once I’d come close to saying exactly that—it’s all a crock. A few years back I would have wiped the floor with Neil using logic, humour, facts, but now I just ignored him, even when he tried to draw me in. In the rearview mirror I could see the eyes of a sad old man who’d lost his appetite for conflict.
What would Sophie think if she could see me now?

At the top of Kelly’s Mountain the rain briefly turned to sleet.

Sophie was standing in my doorway, arms folded, something clearly on her mind. Strickland had been in Kingston for nearly nine months by then and was complaining to anyone who’d listen. Obviously Sophie had been listening more sympathetically than I had been.

“I’ll be recommending reclassification for Dwayne,” she said.

“That’s nice,” I said. “So he’s ‘Dwayne’ now, is he?”

She ignored that. “If I have my way he’d be in minimum. But I could use some help from you.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“He doesn’t belong here, Tony. They’re fucking him around.”

Her face was pink. She never used obscenity. People commented on that, her calmness.

“Come on,” I said.

“He’s been here for more than
eight
months. He was in the hole for three of them. He doesn’t belong here, Tony. It’s having a bad effect on him.”

“He’s considered a rat,” I said. “It’s for his own good he’s here. Any other place would be a risk. You know that.”

“I want him in Warkworth. He wants to be in Warkworth. They have decent programs there. And please—this rat business. You know better.”

“I know what?”

“You know the circumstances.”

“I know that circumstances don’t cut it in that world. A rat’s a rat.”

“Circumstances matter, Tony, more than anything.
Come on
.”

I shoved my chair back from the desk and stared at her for a while. I suppressed a resentful comment, and said instead, “You’re sticking your neck out, don’t you think?”

“It’s what we have to do sometimes,” she said. “I’m a bit surprised by your attitude. I’d have thought …”

“It’s the world we live in. It’s reality.”

“Reality,” she said, obviously holding back her anger. “Reality can change. It’s up to us …”

“I think you should stick to your knitting,” I said. “You want to go out on a limb for this fellow …”

“ ‘Stick to my knitting’?” she said. “An interesting analogy.” She walked away.

I studied the empty doorway, surprised by a deep, deep sense of disappointment.

An hour later I called her to apologize and to ask if I could buy her lunch.

She surprised me and said, “I understand Strickland isn’t your problem and it was unfair of me, trying to draw you in just because of personal history. You don’t have to buy me lunch.”

“I’d like to,” I said. “I’d like to have lunch. What do you think?”

“Pick a day,” she said.

Lunch with Sophie was near the waterfront. A small hotel dining room fashionably cluttered with large antiques that created little nooks for privacy. She accepted a glass of wine but didn’t touch it for a while, holding the stem of the glass between her fingers, twirling it slightly, deep in thought.

Finally she spoke. “I met someone a while back who said he knew you when you were just starting out. Lou something.”