Honour Among Men. Barbara Fradkin
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street. There was no one nearby, no one watching her. No one remotely interested in a fat old bag lady standing near the corner of Bank and Wellington Streets, almost in the shadow of the Confederation Building on Parliament Hill, an area probably crisscrossed with so many security cameras that no one would dare do her harm. The phone booth was well chosen from that point of view, although the voice at the other end of the phone had been almost drowned out by the roar of traffic, not to mention the damn bells of the Peace Tower.
She’d used up half a day’s worth of quarters making the long distance call to Petawawa, only to have the stupid twit on the phone say she’d have to check with her boss. Who wasn’t in, of course. Where were these politicos when you really needed them? Out on the campaign trail, kissing babies at Easter parades and shoving party pamphlets into distrustful farmers’ hands.
Preaching about peace, honour and returning Canada to its respected place on the world stage. If she had a loonie for every ounce of sanctimonious crap those guys dished up . . .
It almost made Twiggy want to go with the Ottawa Sun guy. To stand for something right in this me-first-and-only world. But she was part of that world, which had never done her any favours when she’d tried to live by a higher code. So why the hell shouldn’t she put herself first too? In the end, money was all that counted, and whoever was willing to come through was going to get her story.
But both sides were playing coy. Both had listened to her pitch and said they were interested, but they’d have to get back to her. Which cost her time and money every time she had to trek to the phone booth. Both had tried to get something for free too. Tried to find out who she was, where she was calling from, exactly what she thought she’d seen. Well, she could play coy too, and they weren’t getting a thing until she had something to show for it in return.
She did wonder how much they could tell on their own. Could they identify the telephone booth? Were they recording the calls and analyzing every sound to figure out who she was and where she was calling from? Did they have that fancy equipment the CSI used on that cop show on TV? Naw, she decided. One was just a cheap tabloid hack, and the other a political wannabe from a two-bit country riding up the Ottawa Valley.
She hobbled slowly across the street, dragging her garbage bag as she headed towards Tim Hortons. Thinking about cops gave her a momentary twinge of guilt. Mr. G had always been good to her; she knew he’d been genuinely freaked out when her boys were killed, and he’d shown a lot more heart than the rest of the cops and doctors and lawyers she’d met in the last six years. He was one of the good guys. There wasn’t really a single person alive on this planet that she gave a damn about any more, but Mr. G came close. By rights, he deserved this information, so that he could do something good with it. Get a surveillance team, search warrant, wire tap, whatever cops did to lay their trap and catch the bad guy. Before the creep had a chance to cover his tracks.
She worried over this unaccustomed moral dilemma for the five minutes it took her to reach the Tim Hortons. Was there a way she could let him know, and still get her money? Something anonymous, maybe, that couldn’t be traced back to her?
Worth thinking about, anyway.
Holding two plates aloft, Anne Norrich pirouetted through the kitchen door and bumped it shut behind her with her hip. Her eyes shone, and her face was flushed a hot pink to match her floral blouse.
“Ready?” she challenged.
Green steeled himself and nodded. A plate descended before him, and it took him a moment to recognize the apparition sprawled across it. He had prepared himself for scaly skin, even a fish head with shrivelled eyes, but this was far worse. A speckled red missile with beady eyes, long bony appendages, lethal claws and worst of all, feelers which draped either side of the plate and came to rest in the mashed potatoes. Green was transfixed with horror.
Norrich roared with laughter. “You should see the look on his face, Annie!”
Alarm flitted across Anne’s face. “Have you ever eaten one?”
He managed to shake his head, his voice still somewhere in the pit of his stomach.
“Well,” said Norrich, “you haven’t lived until you’ve had an honest to God Nova Scotian lobster. Steamed in ocean brine, no spices or fancy sauces. Just a bowl of lemon and melted butter to dip it in.” He lifted the bottle of wine which sat at his side and held it across the table towards Green. “Here, I think you need a good dose of extra courage. Then you won’t notice how hard it is to get any food out of the horny bastards.”
They’d started the evening with scotch and were now well into their second bottle of wine. Since Green’s idea of tying one on was a second beer with his smoked meat platter at Nate’s Deli, he was already seeing double. Perhaps there weren’t quite as many legs as there seemed to be, he thought in a brief lucid moment, but nonetheless he held out his glass gratefully. It was the only way he was going to get through this course.
Green was not much of an observant Jew, particularly where the Kosher laws were concerned, and he loved his Chinese shrimp and barbequed pork as much as the next Jew, but he thought the rabbis were on the right track in forbidding this menace. A vision of Woody Allen chasing the lobster around the kitchen in the movie Annie Hall popped into his mind, and he almost choked on his healthy slug of wine.
Anne was a solicitous hostess and fluttered around tying his bib and showing him how to crack open the shell to extract the meat. When the head and some green insides spilled out onto the white lace tablecloth, she spirited them miraculously from view. With no feelers and beady eyes to contend with, he was able to concentrate on getting some nourishment.
As he struggled, Norrich regaled him with stories about growing up in a remote fishing village, where his father had been the only RCMP presence in town. The man grew to be a legend over the course of the lobster. After Norrich had popped the cork on the third bottle, Green decided he’d better steer the conversation to the case before they both sank into a stupor. He had spent part of the afternoon reading Norrich’s reports on his visit to Daniel Oliver’s reserve unit and had been unable to glean a single useful fact about the man. Not only was there no mention of a possible connection to Ian MacDonald’s death, but there was no hint that Norrich had even asked about it. Surely there were tidbits Norrich had picked up that he’d chosen to leave out of his official reports.
Green couldn’t think clearly enough to be subtle, so he plunged straight in. “I saw from the reports that you went out to the West Nova Scotia Regiment to ask about Daniel Oliver. Did you find out anything about his peacekeeping tour?”
Norrich blinked and stared at the table cloth as if trying to remember where he was. “No, it was just a routine inquiry. ‘Did he have any enemies? Did he mention any conflicts?’ That kind of thing. But since Oliver had left the reserves a year earlier, they’d pretty much lost touch with him. Waste of time from the investigation’s point of view, but I met a great group of guys.”
“Did you speak with any of his overseas mates?”
“No, but none of the regiment was overseas with him. He’d served with a battalion from the Princess Pats which was based in Winnipeg, but it had reservists from all across the country.”
“What about his friend Ian MacDonald?”
“Ian who?”
“MacDonald. Served with him in Croatia. He was killed two years after coming home. He was in the same reserve outfit. Did you ask about him?”
Norrich peered at him balefully. Despite the haze of booze, he obviously sensed the implied rebuke in Green’s tone. “Don’t see how the hell that was relevant.”
Which means you didn’t even ask, asshole, Green thought. He forced himself to take a deep breath. “Why did Daniel Oliver leave the reserves?”
Norrich picked up a claw and splintered it with vigour. “He developed a serious attitude problem. He picked fights with friends, said none of them knew what the hell