Forty Words for Sorrow

38

FOR CARDINAL, THE AFTERMATH of chasing down Woody’s vehicle was mostly paperwork. His sup alone was developing the heft of Moby Dick, and on any operation involving another force, such as the OPP, the reports just multiplied. Even using the war room required a detailed accounting of equipment requisitioned, personnel involved, rounds fired, etc.

He wanted to question Freddie Lefebvre, but Fast Freddie, having lapsed into unconsciousness moments after his confession of intoxication, was sobering up in a well-guarded hospital bed.

The message light was flashing on Cardinal’s phone. It was Karen Steen asking if there was any progress, to please call her when he had the chance. He remembered the denim-blue eyes, the absolute candour of her features. He wished he had something to tell her, some words of encouragement, but there was nothing. The ident boys, Arsenault and Collingwood, were locked up in the garage with Woody’s van. There would be no point pressing them for prints for several hours.

Cardinal pulled a stack of paper from his in-box. There were several fat envelopes from the Crown, the usual notices, forms, and requests for information. Then there was an interoffice envelope containing a memo from Dyson telling everyone for the hundredth time not to make idiots of themselves in court. The word contemporaneous appeared several times, underlined.

There was another piece of paper attached to the memo apparently by accident, held there by traces of something that looked a lot like honey glazing. It was a note labelled From the Desk of Det. Sgt. A. Dyson, addressed to Paul Arsenault. Arsenault was to make himself available to the Mounties’ document people on an upcoming weekend. The combination of the RCMP and document experts could only be the Kyle Corbett case. And a weekend—that would mean a big production, something serious in the offing.

“Jesus Christ. Why should I testify again? I’m starting to feel like a voodoo doll. Everybody wants to stick pins in me!” McLeod was shouting into his phone, and searching for something buried under the junkyard on his desk. He hung up, cursing. “Fucking Crown. It’s like he wants me to have a heart attack.”

“Maybe he does,” Cardinal said mildly.

“It’s my kid’s piano recital on Thursday. I missed his birthday courtesy of the Corriveau brothers. If I miss this, my wife—pardon me, my former wife, Lady Macbeth with a court order—will cut me out of the picture altogether. She’s already got the Family Court in the palm of her hand, I swear. Far as that place is concerned, I’m somewhere between Attila the Hun and Charles Manson. And Corriveau—what’s the point of dismissing a witness if you’re just gonna call him back every five minutes?”

Without warning, Cardinal was suddenly thinking of Catherine. McLeod’s paranoid yowling faded into the background, and he remembered Catherine’s hollow face, and the way she would look over at him from her book, peering over the tops of her reading glasses. Her gaze was so intent at such moments, as if she feared some alien had stolen into bed beside her in her husband’s shape. “Are you all right?” she would ask, and the memory of those four simple words was unbearably sweet.

“Hey, where you going?” McLeod called after him. “I’m not finished whining yet. I haven’t even started.”

Catherine Cardinal came down the hall toward her husband, arms stretched out before her. Her hair was still wet from the shower. She held him tightly, and Cardinal breathed in the smell of his wife’s shampoo. “How’s my girl?” Cardinal said softly. “How’s my girl?”

They sat on the couch in the sunroom again. Catherine was so much better, Cardinal felt a flutter of hope. She looked him in the eye, and her hand made only intermittent nervous movements—not the obsessive circles of before. She opened her mouth to say something, but no sound came out. Then she turned away, and Cardinal waited while his wife wept, his hand resting gently on her knee. Finally, Catherine caught her breath and said, “I thought you’d be down at the divorce court by now.”

Cardinal shook his head and smiled. “You won’t get rid of me that easy.”

“Oh, I will. If not this time, then next time or the time after. The worst thing is, there’s not a soul in the world who would blame you.”

“I’m not going anywhere, Catherine. Don’t worry yourself with that.”

“Kelly can look after herself now, and she wouldn’t blame you one bit for leaving me. You know she wouldn’t. Even I wouldn’t blame you.”

“Will you stop? I said I’m not leaving.”

“Well, maybe you should have an affair with someone. I’m sure you come across lots of willing young women in your job. Have an affair, but just don’t tell me about it, all right? I don’t want to know. One of your female colleagues, maybe. Just don’t fall in love with her.”

Cardinal thought of Lise Delorme. No-nonsense, down-to-earth Delorme. Delorme who might or might not be investigating him. Delorme, as Jerry Commanda had noted, of the nice shape. “I don’t want an affair,” Cardinal said to his wife. “It’s you I want.”

“God—you never do anything wrong, do you? You never lose your temper, never lose patience. How can you hope to understand someone as fucked up as me? I don’t see why you bother trying. I mean, you’re practically a saint.”

“Come on, honey. That’s the first time you’ve accused me of sainthood.”

Catherine, of course, didn’t know about the money. Cardinal had taken it during her first bout with clinical depression, years earlier. She had been hospitalized, adrift among a Sargasso of lost souls, for eighteen months. Then her parents had weighed in, phoning him every other day from the States, making him feel like a rotten husband, and he had cracked. For a time Cardinal had told himself that’s why he had done it, that his wife’s insanity had broken him. But the Catholic in him, not to mention the cop, could never accept that. He gave himself no excuse.

“Husbands leave their wives all the time,” Catherine was saying. “No one else would put up with what you put up with.”

“People live with lots worse things.” I should tell her about the money, prove to her that she’s better than me: she loses her mind once in a while, but she’s the one who never does anything wrong. But the thought of how she would look at him stopped Cardinal cold. “Look, I brought you a present. You can wear it on your first day out.”

Catherine opened the tissue paper with terrible gentleness, as if cleaning a wound. The beret was light burgundy, a colour Catherine liked to wear. She tried it on, fitting it over one ear at a rakish angle. “How do I look? Like a Girl Guide?”

“You look like someone I’d like to marry.”

That made her cry again.

“I’ll go get us a Coke,” Cardinal said, and went down the hall to the machine. It was the old kind that poured syrup and seltzer water into a paper cup—no loose metal objects here. He stood for a few moments in the corridor looking out at the white slopes of the grounds, the surrounding pines with boughs bent low under their weight of snow. Near the coroner’s office a couple of orderlies taking a cigarette break hunched in a doorway, stamping their feet to keep warm.

When he came back to the sunroom, Catherine had curled up tightly at the end of the couch, her expression a fixed scowl. She wouldn’t drink the Coke; the paper cup sat untouched on the table. Cardinal stayed with her another fifteen minutes, but she remained as numb as wood. Nothing he said would evoke a response. When finally he left, she was still in the same clenched position, glaring with ferocious concentration at the floor.

Dyson motioned Delorme into his office, and once she was in, he proceeded to ignore her—taking a phone call, looking for a file, badgering Mary Flower on the intercom. Finally, he faced forward, plucked up his letter opener and braced it between his palms. Delorme thought for a moment he was going to take it between his teeth. “An update. How are we doing on Cardinal, Lise?”

She hated it when he used her first name; he sounded like a low-rent movie producer. “The files aren’t giving me much so far. Nothing the Crown would be interested in.”

Dyson held the letter opener at an angle, making it glitter in the afternoon sun like a tiny Excalibur. Outside his window an icicle glowed and dripped. “Well, maybe it’s time we ran a tap on his phone.”

“Musgrave’s planning to do exactly that. But he’s not going to get to it right away.”

“Oh?”—lowering his sword with irritation. “And why’s that?”

“They’re planning to hit Corbett on the twenty-fourth.”

“The twenty-fourth? Jesus, what is it with those guys? They can’t bring themselves to do one thing at a time? Do they have to do everything badly all at once? I mean, why in God’s name do they have to do this before you finish your investigation? Where is the sudden urgency?”

“Corbett’s planning to take out some guy who runs a Black Diamond Riders chapter down south.”

“So they’re jeopardizing an ongoing investigation to save the life of some no doubt murderous biker. The Mounties move in mysterious ways. Who’s their source on this?”

“They didn’t tell me. I’m not surprised, under the circumstances.”

“No.” Dyson let out a big sigh. “No, indeed.” Delorme wasn’t sure whether to say what was really bothering her, but seeing Dyson uncharacteristically reflective, she plunged on. “Maybe it’s not a bad idea to lay off Cardinal for the moment, D.S. Have you thought what it will do to Pine–Curry if we haul him in just now?”

“I have. And it’ll be a lot worse if it comes out later.”

Afterwards, when Delorme was at her desk filling out sups, Cardinal came back trailing clouds of cold air, as if he were returning from the Underworld. The lines on his face looked deeper, and Delorme had a sudden intuition that he had been to see his wife.