Caught Read online

  Did you see anything? Slaney said. She stood back with her hands on her hips.

  I saw a journey, she said. If I could dissuade you, I would. You could turn back, but you’re not a man takes free advice.

  There’s a few things I have to mention, the man behind the desk said.

  Wayne, you don’t want this fellow tarring a roof, she said. Sure as shit he’ll fall off and ruin the hotel’s reputation. What are you putting him in a room with a thirteen in it for?

  The man asked her not to start up. He reminded her it was late in the evening and everybody was tired.

  There’s other rooms, the woman said. She crossed her arms under her chest and tilted her chin up.

  I wouldn’t stay in room 213 if my life depended on it, she said. You know what goes on in there, Wayne. There’s ghosts in that room every night.

  The man shut his eyes and his lids flickered.

  At night blood seeps into the room through the light fixture in the ceiling and pours down the walls until the whole room is red.

  Maybe I ought to tar that roof, Slaney said.

  It’s 213 or nothing, the man said.

  You got to have second sight to see that blood, the woman said. But it’s there.

  I’m grateful for the room, Slaney said.

  Toss some salt, the woman said. A little dash of salt in a circle around the bed.

  I’m going to ask you not to do that, the man said. I got a hard time keeping the place clean already without somebody throwing salt all over the carpet.

  Slaney thought he’d stay a couple of nights, long enough to give his picture a chance to fade out of the papers.

  He thanked them both and headed for the elevators, the tassels of the shawl clinging to his knees.

  Pulling Your Weight

  Patterson shouldered his way through the crowd to the pay phone after Gulliver left the bar. He got O’Neill’s secretary and she sounded sweet and abrupt. Marcie or Martha.

  Superintendent O’Neill is waiting for your call, she said. There was a pause. He heard her draw in a deep breath.

  I’m going to transfer you, Staff-Sergeant Patterson, she said. You hold on there.

  There was a kachunk and a silence long enough for Patterson to think he had been disconnected.

  The woman in the red pantsuit was collecting her things to go. She was swaying on her platform sandals; all the intelligence in her expression had drained away. She looked stupefied and wayward.

  Then O’Neill was on the line.

  We lost Slaney, Patterson said. He heard O’Neill taking a sip of his coffee. Slurping, basically, in Patterson’s ear. It was an amplified susurration of scalding liquid.

  You lost him, Patterson, O’Neill said. You lost him. He spoke in a measured, adenoidal drone. The false calm in his voice, Patterson knew, would be carrying through the frosted glass of his office door.

  Patterson thought of his wife. He thought of Delores nudging the fridge door with her hip, the kiss of the rubber seal when it smacked shut.

  Delores drank a ginger ale on the patio in the late afternoon with a fat biography or she read poetry. Sylvia Plath, or the other one she loved. Lowell or Larkin. She had been so happy when they gave Patterson the case.

  Hurray for you, she’d said. She’d tossed her gardening hat in the air like Mary Tyler Moore and hugged him. The tip of the pruning shears, still in her hand, had jabbed him, puncturing the skin.

  Slaney couldn’t have gone far, Patterson said. We’ve got three cars out there.

  I spoke for you, O’Neill said. People didn’t think you were the guy, Patterson. I’m going to be honest. Your name came up: people didn’t jump. There was a deflated feeling at the table. You’re seen as too interior. A guy who keeps to himself. These were the comments. There were guys didn’t think you were the man for this.

  Integrity, yes. Absolutely. Integrity, nobody argues, Patterson. A good guy, nobody argues.

  Thank you, sir, Patterson said.

  They were thinking initiative, though, see? Drive. Ambition. That little bit extra, Patterson, that makes a man stand out. Puts him just that tiny bit ahead of the crowd. Somebody said your name and a few guys expressed doubt. You want to know the truth? Nobody was jumping up and down. I would say nonplussed.

  But I spoke for you on this occasion, Patterson. I said this is the guy. We give him a chance, he’ll come through.

  We’ll find him, sir, Patterson said. We’re checking the hotels. He’s on foot. It’s all over the papers. He’s young; he’ll make a mistake.

  O’Neill asked: What if Slaney walks away from all this?

  He’s not going to walk away, sir, Patterson said.

  Did you liaise?

  I have alerted the local detachment to the sensitive nature.

  We need Slaney on the move. We don’t want him stopping to contemplate.

  We’ve got ghost cars out. We’ll trail him, offer him a ride to Montreal, Patterson said. We figure, Montreal, he’ll make contact with Hearn.

  Don’t make me regret I spoke up, Patterson.

  Slaney’s going back to Colombia, sir, there’s no question. And we’ll be on his tail.

  If he walks away now, the whole thing goes down the toilet. We lose Hearn too. You lose Hearn.

  He won’t walk, sir, Patterson said.

  An hour later Patterson stood in the narrow hall at the back of the men’s clothing store, his arms hanging loosely by his sides. The hall had floor-to-ceiling mirrors on one wall and dressing rooms on the other side. The clerk stood behind him with a length of yellow measuring tape. He was studying Patterson’s frame. Then the clerk stepped forward and looped the tape around Patterson’s neck.

  Harold Molloy, the jailhouse source, had said about a transport truck meeting David Slaney and he had said the appointed time, the approximate location. Molloy had been dead on. Gulliver had blown his cover. He might have scared the kid off for good.

  I lost him, Patterson thought.

  One of the dressing room doors swung open by itself. The mirror on the inside of the door reflected the mirrored wall opposite and a trillion Pattersons fanned out down the empty hall, all jerking hard when the door bounced on its hinges. Jerking and jittering, until the door slowly swung back and the infinite Pattersons, buff but dejected, folded back inside themselves and collapsed.

  He was crashing from a sugar rush. A box of stale Danishes he’d devoured in the car. He had been light-headed from hunger and pulled into a grocery store.

  Patterson would never be promoted. Slaney was gone. The shirt didn’t fit.

  I’ll take it, he said.

  The Bride

  There were three girls in shiny formal dresses on the second-floor landing. Slaney heard their shoes making the steel stairwell above him boom and clatter and then he came upon them.

  Their dresses, in the gloom, were as bright as sixty-watt light bulbs. They were smoothing their skirts, touching their feathered hair. The girl in the pink dress had wiggled out of a slingback pump and lifted her foot up with both hands almost as high as her waist to examine it. Her skirt had a cascade of noisy ruffles under the pink. She brushed something away from the toe of her stocking, hopping a little, and then she bent to hook the shoe strap back over her ankle.

  They were giggling and straight-faced by turns; one girl had an arm draped around another girl’s neck so she wouldn’t collapse from laughter. Slaney had to angle sideways to push past them and their skirts were crushed against his jeans and they held their cigarettes up in the air, away from their dresses. It was a semi-sexual jostling and the stairwell was full of their baby-powder scent and cigarette smoke.

  A lot of traffic in the stairwell, one of them said. A couple of cops just come through here in a big hurry.

  Where’d they go? Slaney said.

  Gone on up to the third f
loor, the girl in the pink dress said. And no sooner had she said it than the door above them screeched open. Slaney excused himself and pushed through the door to the hall and broke into a run and he saw a bride peeking out the door of the room adjacent to his own. Just a slice of white dress and the pouf of veil. She waved him over to her.

  Did you see Paul? she asked. I don’t want him to see the dress until I get up to the altar. Slaney said there was nobody around except some girls having a smoke in the stairwell.

  Lot of good they are, she said. Here I am with my zipper stuck.

  She kept her foot in the door to keep it from shutting behind her and she turned for Slaney to see how the dress hung open in the back.

  Can you just give it a little pull, she said. It got stuck once before. It just needs a sharp tug.

  Let me come in and have a look, he said. He pushed her gently back into the room and followed her in and the door shut behind him. Slaney took both sides of the dress and held them together with one hand and gave the zipper a tug with the other but it was still stuck. His hands were trembling.

  I’ve put on weight since I bought the damn thing, the girl said. I can hardly breathe when it’s done up. I just have to get through the ceremony and then I can ditch it.

  He heard the elevator ding and the door to the stairwell wheezed open at the same time and three or four men were running down the corridor. One of them said there was nothing on the third floor.

  It’s boiling hot in here, the bride said. The windows are painted shut. She turned and flounced over to a stool in front of a vanity table and sat down in front of the mirror and the voluminous skirt of the dress collapsed around her. The heat in the room was suffocating.

  There was a rectangle of sunlight on the beige carpet and Slaney was standing in it. The cops were next door knocking at his room. They knocked and waited and knocked again. The elevator dinged and somebody said they had the manager with a skeleton key.

  What’s all the ruckus out there? the bride said. You’d think people would have the decency to simmer down.

  She bent one arm back and her fingers fanned over the zipper where it parted in a V and she stopped reaching and rolled her shoulder twice. The dress didn’t move with her. It had ribs or rods, something that made it stand up by itself.

  You’re not much help to me all the way over there, she said. Slaney stepped up behind her. She gave the tiny gold bulb dangling from a bottle of perfume on the table a couple of squeezes. The perfume misted into the sunlight and the silvery particles, smaller than dust, sank away.

  That’s something borrowed, she said. She told him she had an aunt who had loaned her the perfume and had made an off-colour remark at the wedding shower. She squeezed the gold bulb again.

  Stinks to high heaven, she said. He could hear Wayne’s voice now, the hotel manager.

  I’m coming, he was saying. Give me a goddamn minute.

  Slaney had tarred the roof of the shed in the early morning and had assured Wayne the leak was repaired. Wayne had held the rickety ladder for him. He’d called out from below to ask how it looked up there. He had a fear of heights, he said. He couldn’t bring himself to go up on a roof.

  He’d gone into the shed to work on a lawn mower that needed repair until Slaney was done and he held the ladder until Slaney was safely on the ground. Then they both carried it back into the shed.

  Slaney had told Wayne he’d be heading out the next morning and thanked him for his hospitality.

  You didn’t get vertigo? Wayne said.

  For me it’s enclosed spaces, Slaney said. I’m fine in the wide open. I like it up there.

  Wayne was outside Slaney’s room now with the cops, taking his time, fumbling with the keys, making a lot of racket. He was telling the cops whoever had been in the room had checked out the day before.

  The heat of the bride’s hotel room was muddling Slaney. A bewilderment of heat and heady scent and the weird material she was wearing that must be made of some reconstituted petroleum product. It had a shine that seeped and crept like a living thing over the ultra-white folds and wrinkles.

  She was looking up at him in the mirror. She had an ordinary face, her eyes protruded, and she was rosy-cheeked and had a dimple in her chin. He thought plain and then he thought beautiful. She was looking his way but she wasn’t thinking about him.

  I don’t know where everybody is, the bride said. She had turned from the mirror to look Slaney over again. She twisted a little travelling alarm clock so it faced her.

  I got a full hour of freedom left, she said. Then she folded the clock under the lid of the little black case to which it was attached and clicked it shut. Slaney heard the men enter his room. He’d packed his mother’s blue suitcase and pushed it under the bed.

  The bride had a cigarette going in a brown glass ashtray the size of a Frisbee. She picked up the cigarette and tapped it three times and put it down again without smoking it.

  Slaney could hear somebody running a bath in the room on the other side of the bride’s room. The water ran and ran, splashing and tumbling, and he heard the heel of a foot scrudge across the tub and then the water was turned off. The bride tilted her chin down to her chest and told Slaney to try again with the zipper.

  Hurry up, she told him. Let’s get this over with. Slaney stepped forward and gingerly lifted away layer after layer of veil until he found her naked back. Her spine. She arched away from his fingers.

  Cold hands, she said. She was talking about the idea of being married and starting a family young so that you wouldn’t be old when the kids grew up and moved out. How you could still have a life after they left. She knew she was young, she said, but you might as well start early and get it over with. She said she was a firm believer in if life put something in front of you it’s important to deal with it. She tossed her head up suddenly and eyed him in the mirror.

  You know what I’m saying. You’re the kind of guy deals with things, am I right?

  There was a knock on her door then and she called out she was getting dressed and to give her a minute.

  The cops had left Slaney’s room and come to hers, and they moved at her command to the next door with the guy in the bath. Slaney heard the pipes shudder as the man turned the water off and sloshed out of the tub to get the door. There was talk but he couldn’t make it out.

  The bride lowered her head again and Slaney swayed the veils out of the way. There was a dark brown freckle on her white back and he moved his thumb over the freckle without thinking. After a moment he said he agreed. He said it was important to deal with things as they came up. He said it was a pity.

  What, she said.

  That you can’t see what’s coming, he said. She snorted.

  Look at me, she said. Just look.

  What?

  Do you think I saw this coming? she said. She mentioned a flower girl, her little niece on the groom’s side, who was spoiled rotten and had done her best to ruin all the fun at the rehearsal. She would have enjoyed slapping the child as hard as she could, if the kid were hers, she said. But then she said that she would never end up with a kid like that.

  A bit of fabric was threaded through the head of the zipper on the right side. Slaney would have to pry the fabric free. He worked at it but his hands were shaking, knowing the cops would be back at the bride’s door in a minute. The metal teeth beneath the fabric were bunching against one another; one of the slots in the head of the zipper was jammed with two crooked teeth.

  She told him then that her father felt she was a disgrace.

  I’m afraid I’m going to tear it, he said.

  Is it not moving at all? she asked.

  It’s still stuck, he said.

  Don’t break it, she said. A broken zipper is all I need.

  Why won’t the bloody thing move? he asked. He flicked a loose curl over one of her shoulders. He thoug
ht of the stairs and he thought about the elevator. If the cops went into the room with the guy in the bath he might make it to the elevator.

  He forced the zipper and it gave. It slipped soundlessly to the top. He brought the tiny metal hook and eye together. There was a flimsy loop of ribbon hanging out, under her arm.

  You’ve got a thing, he said.

  Could you just, she said. That’s not supposed to show.

  It doesn’t seem to belong, he said. To the general look.

  That’s a loop, she said, for you to hang the thing up in the back of the closet where you leave it for the rest of your life until maybe your own poor daughter grows up and makes the mistake of looking sideways at a man during the wrong time of the month.

  He stepped back. She was tucking the loop of ribbon into the top of the dress. She had raised one arm and she was poking the ribbon under with her finger and there was a faint shadow where she had shaved under her arm. Tiny black dots, like a sprinkle of pepper. Her underarm looked naked and grey-white next to the impossible white of the dress and it was secret-looking.

  Slaney saw she was sexy. Then came the knock on her door again. The bride swished around in the chair. She appeared to be astonished, for the first time since Slaney had forced himself into the room. He ducked into her bathroom. He was behind the door but he had caught her eyes in the mirror. He didn’t ask anything of her with his eyes. He waited for her to decide. She would have to do what she thought was right. The knock came harder and sharper and she left the mirror. He heard her dress swishing across the room and she opened the door.

  Officers, she said.

  Good evening, ma’am, one of the cops said.

  I hope so, she said. I’m about to get married.

  We were wondering if you’ve seen any suspicious activity, the officer said. Anyone looking like they might be on the run.

  Are you talking about the groom? she said.

  We’re looking for a young fellow, six-foot-two, blue eyes, black hair, slender of build, some would say handsome-­looking guy.

  I was looking for one of them too, she said. But you settle for what you get. I got to be at the altar in an hour, gentlemen, else the one I got might try to get away.