Forty Words for Sorrow

49

“MCLEOD, WHERE’S YOUR SUP on the Troy Music Centre? Didn’t you interview them when you were working LaBelle?”

“Why you asking? It’s in the file somewheres.”

“It’s not in the file. I’m looking at the file. You remember who works there?”

“Two guys. Alan Troy—he’s the main guy—and some other guy, some guitar geek been there forever. He’s the one taught Billy LaBelle.”

“You remember his name?”

“Fuck, no.”

“McLeod, we’re trying to nail a killer here.”

“I wasn’t. I was just tracing Billy LaBelle’s steps, for Chrissake. We weren’t working a homicide back then. We were working a routine missing kid, so don’t come on like I’m Mr. Dereliction-of-Duty, all right? I think our late lamented leader Detective Sergeant Dickhead Dyson takes that title. Carl Sutherland, that’s the guy’s name. Carl Sutherland.”

“You have a middle initial?”

“F. for Fucking. Try the file, Cardinal.” McLeod left the boardroom, muttering to himself.

Cardinal wasted another ten minutes riffling through folders from the previous fall. “Delorme, why don’t you feed Troy’s ID into the computer and see what it spits out.”

“I did. We’re waiting.”

McLeod came back in. “Carl A. Sutherland,” he said, shoving a report into Cardinal’s hand. “Some asshole stuck it in the Corriveau file by mistake. If people would stop second-guessing my work for a change—and stop fucking with my stuff for five minutes—maybe I could get some work done around here.”

Delorme took the report over to the computer and typed the information into it. She tore a sheet from the printer. “Negative on Alan Troy. No record in local or national.”

Cardinal was reading McLeod’s report on his interview at the music store six months previously; it was one page, single-spaced. The first paragraph stated the positions of the two men—Troy the owner and Sutherland the assistant manager—and how long they’d been working there. Troy had been running the place, at various locations in the city, for the past twenty-five years. Sutherland had been with him for ten, joining just before the store moved into the mall.

The second paragraph discussed Billy LaBelle. Both men knew him and were concerned (where concerned, McLeod had written) about the boy’s disappearance. Sutherland was the one who actually taught him guitar. The boy had come in for his usual Wednesday evening lesson and left without incident. The next night Billy LaBelle disappeared from the Algonquin Mall parking lot.

Cardinal stared out the boardroom window at the filthy meringue of slush in the parking lot. The snowbanks looked like slag heaps, and black puddles glittered in the sunlight. What about Katie Pine? Troy and Sutherland hadn’t been asked about Katie Pine; the cases hadn’t been connected then.

Delorme stepped in front of him with a sheet of computer paper. “I don’t know about you, but Carl Sutherland just jumped to number one on my hit parade.”

Cardinal took the printout from her. Carl Sutherland had been arrested in Toronto two years previously for public indecency.

Seeing this, Cardinal suddenly felt that he was moving through the slow, inevitable motions of a dream. Seeing this, he knew, even though no one had told him and he could not prove it, he knew that Katie Pine had been in the Troy Music Centre and had met Carl Sutherland. Then the ground had opened.

Reading his thoughts, Delorme said, “We have to close the circle. We have to put her in Troy Music.”

Still moving in the dream, Cardinal reached for the phone. Delorme watched him as if she too were caught in the dream, biting her lip.

“Mrs. Pine, it’s John Cardinal.” He had always hoped his next conversation with Dorothy Pine would be to tell her that her daughter’s murderer was in jail. “You remember telling me Katie wanted to be in the school band?”

The dull, affectless voice was barely audible. “Yeah. Don’t know why she wanted to so bad.”

Then Dorothy Pine went so silent Cardinal thought the line had gone dead. “Are you still there?”

“Yeah.”

“Mrs. Pine, did Katie ever take any music lessons of any kind?”

“No.” She’d already told him this; she’d told McLeod too. But Dorothy Pine was not the type to complain.

“Never took piano or guitar? No lessons at all?”

“No.”

“But she wanted to be in the band, you said. She had a picture of the school band on her closet door even though she wasn’t a member.”

“Right.”

“Mrs. Pine, I don’t understand how Katie got so excited about music if she hadn’t studied it. She was obsessed with the band, and she had a charm bracelet with musical instruments on it.”

“I know. Found it at some music store somewheres.”

There it was—the dream was in control again. It was dreaming Cardinal and Mrs. Pine, and it was dreaming the words she was about to say. He could feel them travelling down the telephone line before he even asked the question. “Which music store did she get it from, Mrs. Pine? Can you remember the name? It’s very important.”

“No.”

The words would come. Dorothy Pine would say them. She was going to tell him the name of the store, and it would be Troy Music Centre, and they would have their man. Cardinal could feel a breeze from the phone, like the wind that arrives before the train pulls into the station.

“I don’t know the name,” Dorothy Pine said. “The store out in the mall there.”

“Which mall, Mrs. Pine?”

“It was the only place she could get the charms for it. She’d go back every month or so and buy a new charm. She got a tuba last time, just like two days before she went away. Before she, uh …”

“Which mall, Mrs. Pine?” Tell me now, he thought. You’re going to say the words. The same dream that’s pulling me and Delorme is pulling you too, and it’s pulling the words from your throat. He wanted to scream, Which mall, Mrs. Pine? Which mall?

“Was the big one out on Lakeshore there. The one with the Kmart and the Pharma-City.”

“The Algonquin Mall, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Pine, thank you.”

Delorme tossed him his down coat. She already had hers on.

“Grab Collingwood. I want a scene man with us.”

Even a place the size of Algonquin Bay has a rush hour, and rivers of slush made the going even more mucilaginous than usual. It was not quite six o’clock, and they had to use the siren on the bypass and then again on Lakeshore. Collingwood sat in the back of the car, whistling under his breath.

Cardinal tried to look nonchalant as they went through the mall, but there was a rush hour here too, and he found himself pushing people aside outside Pharma-City to get to the music store.

“Mr. Troy, is Carl Sutherland here?”

“He has a pupil at the moment. Can I help you with something?”

Cardinal headed to a series of doors past the counter, and beyond the shelves of guitars. “Which room?”

“Wait a minute, now. What on earth is this about?”

“Collingwood, stay here with Mr. Troy.”

The first door was a supply closet. In the second a startled woman looked up from the piano where she was counting aloud to a metronome. In the third room Carl Sutherland was shaping the little fingers of a ten-year-old boy around a guitar chord. He looked up sharply.

“Are you Carl Sutherland?”

“Yes?”

“Police. Would you come with us please?”

“What do you mean? I’m in the middle of a lesson.”

“Would you excuse us?” Delorme said to the boy. “We have something to discuss with Mr. Sutherland.”

When the boy was gone, Cardinal shut the door. “You gave Billy LaBelle guitar lessons, didn’t you?”

“Yes. I already talked to the police about—”

“And you also knew Katie Pine, didn’t you.”

“Katie Pine? The girl who was murdered? Absolutely not. I saw her picture in the paper, but other than that I never saw her in my life.”

“Our information is different,” Delorme put in. “Our information says Katie Pine was in here two days before she disappeared.”

“If she was, I didn’t see her. Why are you coming to me? It’s a big mall out there. Everybody in town goes through.”

“Everybody in town doesn’t get picked up for public indecency, Mr. Sutherland.”

“Oh, God.”

“Everybody in the mall doesn’t get arrested for exposing himself in the back seat of a porno theatre.”

“Oh, God.” Sutherland swayed slightly in his seat, his face utterly white. “I thought that was over and done with.”

“You want to come down to the station and tell us about it? Or maybe we should ask your wife.”

“You can’t bully me like this. I was acquitted on that charge.” Sutherland’s voice was now harsh, indignant, but his face was still white. “I’m not proud of what happened. But I don’t see why I have to be humiliated over it, either. A pitch-dark theatre is not public. It’s not public, and the judge agreed. Besides which, what went on was entirely between consenting adults, and it’s none of your business.”

“Billy LaBelle is our business. You were one of the last people to see him alive.”

“Well, what does this have to do with Billy LaBelle?”

“Why don’t you tell us?” Delorme said. “You were his teacher.”

“Yes, I was Billy’s guitar teacher. I’ve already discussed all this. Billy left the store one Wednesday night—the same as every other Wednesday night—and I never saw him again. It’s very sad. Billy was a really nice kid. But I didn’t do anything to him. I swear I didn’t.”

“Are you telling us you don’t know this boy?” Cardinal produced the photo of Keith London playing guitar.

“I don’t. I don’t know every kid that happens to play guitar.”

Sutherland hadn’t been phased at all by the picture. He was scared, yes, he was shaken, but the picture of Keith London did not seem any particular threat. Cardinal’s certainty began to slip. He pulled out the picture of Katie Pine.

“That’s the girl who was killed. I recognize her from the papers. Other than that I don’t think I’ve ever seen her.”

“She was in here two days before she disappeared. She bought a musical charm for her bracelet. You sell them out front.”

“She could have got it somewhere else.”

“She bought it here.”

“I never saw the girl, I’m telling you. Look in the inventory and you’ll see.”

“Inventory?”

“We’ve had computerized inventory for years now. It’ll tell you who sold the thing to her. It’s not like we sell a million of them. Three or four a month, I’d say.”

As they came out of the practice room, Alan Troy called, “What is it, Carl? What’s going on?” But Sutherland ignored him, leading Cardinal and Delorme to a cramped office in the back. Almost buried among stacks of invoices, a computer screen glowed with columns of numbers. Sutherland sat down and typed in a couple of commands. The screen went dark except for the cursor pulsing in the top left corner.

“You have the date?” he asked without looking at them. “The date the girl disappeared?”

“September twelfth, last year. She bought the charm two days before.”

“Fine. Now I need the item number.” He consulted a printout the size of a telephone book, flipping through the double-sized pages until he found what he wanted. He typed in the number. “This should tell us how many we sold in the past year.” He drummed his fingers on the desk as he waited. “Seven. Okaaay …” He typed in another command, the monthly breakdown.

“September tenth.” Delorme pointed at the screen. “Two days before.”

Sutherland moved the mouse and clicked. The screen filled up with a copy of the register receipt. He tapped the long fingernail of his right hand on the upper right corner. “You see that number three? That’s the salesperson. One is Alan, two is me, three is Eric.”

“Eric who?”

“Eric our part-timer. Eric Fraser. Mostly he helps with the stock, but busy times—lunch hours, after-school rush—he helps with the cash too. If you look at the top left there, you can see the time of the transaction: four-thirty p.m. If you look at our calendar, it’s going to show you I was teaching a lesson at that time. I think you want to talk to Eric Fraser.”

“Mr. Sutherland, is there anything around here that Mr. Fraser touched recently? Something nobody else touched?”

Sutherland thought for a minute. “Follow me.”

Alan Troy dodged around Collingwood, finger jabbing the air, demanding to know what was going on. Sutherland cut him off. “Alan, did Eric polish the Martins yesterday?”

“I’m calling the chief of police on this. My employees do not get treated in this way. These people have to—”

“Alan, for Chrissake, just tell them. Did Eric polish the Martins yesterday?”

“The Martins?” Troy squinted first at Sutherland, then at Delorme, then at Cardinal and back to Sutherland. “You want to know if Eric polished the Martins. Suddenly the urgent question of the moment is, did Eric Fraser polish the Martins? All right then, yes, Eric did polish the Martins.”

Cardinal asked if anyone else had touched the guitars. No. Business had been slow, Martins are expensive, no one had touched them.

Cardinal, still wearing his gloves, reached up for the guitar hanging against the wall. “He’d have to hold it at the bottom to put it back up there, right?”

Mr. Troy, his anger giving way to fascination, nodded. Cardinal held the guitar out toward Collingwood.

Collingwood, silent as ever, dusted a small amount of powder along the top of the soundboard, then blew it off. Two perfect thumbprints took shape. He pulled the Forensics card from his pocket, the thumbprints lifted from Arthur Wood’s throat.

“Perfect match,” Collingwood said. “Perfect match, plain as day.”