a quarter into a phone, something about closing those folding doors off to the rest of the world. The streetlight overhead turned the flesh of his hand yellow as he dialed the number Paul had given him at the hospital group. A crumpled piece of paper dug from his pocket, words recalled. He couldn’t say why he was calling, exactly, or what he hoped to accomplish.
A man answered on the third ring. “Hello?”
“This Tim Fielding?”
“Speaking.”
McKelvey dug in his outer coat pocket for the package of cigarettes he’d bought after the meeting with Aoki. Player’s Light Regular. His old friend the old sailor. He lifted the foil flap, fished out a smoke with his teeth. His stomach fluttered with the anticipation of the first nicotine rush, that sick twinge of guilt. All the things that kept him coming back.
“It’s Charlie McKelvey from Tuesday nights. Tuesday nights at the hospital group,” he said, fumbling for the two-cent matches that advertised rare coins. “I got your number from Paul there, the moderator.”
He had thought about hanging up one ring before the man answered, and now McKelvey was wishing he had. He struck the match and lit the smoke, and with the first flood of nicotine and hovering tendril of blue smoke knew that he was in trouble now. No way to explain away the stench of smoke that would cling to him in this enclosed space. He supposed this carelessness meant he was beyond the point of caring now. In the end, that’s what carelessness always boiled down to, an indifference to the consequences. It was how most criminals eventually got themselves caught.
“Oh, Charlie, right, right. The policeman,” Tim said. “Paul gave you my number?”
“Well yeah, you know, he said you might help me with something I’m going through.”
Tim laughed, and McKelvey took a long drag on the cigarette, holding the smoke until it began to burn his lungs like mustard gas. His eyes watered a little, and he released the smoke through his nostrils in two long funnels. Fuck it. He wasn’t going to quit these.
“Me help you, right. He wants you to mentor me, I suppose. Sounds like something Paul would try to orchestrate behind the scenes. Anyway...” Tim said, and waited for the conversation to resume.
“Mmmm, that’s right,” McKelvey said. “So how about it. One night this week, maybe?”
“How about tonight?”
“Tonight?”
“Why not? Just stupid cop shows on TV,” he said. “No offence.”
“None taken. I can’t stand to watch them myself,” McKelvey said. “Everybody thinks we’re running around with our guns drawn half the time.”
“You mean you guys don’t get to do that?”
“Sometimes. Most of the time I’m sitting at a computer for nine hours trying to learn some new software program so I can fill out my reports and upload them to an invisible mainframe, or whatever they call it...”
Tim laughed again. McKelvey glanced at his watch.
“Do you know Murph’s on Bathurst?” McKelvey said.
“Sure,” Tim said. “Who doesn’t?”
“The one and only. I don’t think Murph will ever retire,” McKelvey said. “He must be going on ninety. I could meet you there in, say, twenty minutes.”
“I’m on my way,” Tim said and hung up.
McKelvey stood in the phone booth watching his breath fog up the scratched and gouged Plexiglass, smelling the stale air, the reek of tobacco. He wondered briefly about fate and what had moved him to call the young man. He wondered about fate quite often these days, how chance meetings seemed always in the end to be so much more than they first appeared. How there was no such thing as pure coincidence. How everything—even the murder of a child, say—was supposed to have a purpose behind it, something to be taught or gleaned. Or perhaps it was punishment. A lesson to be learned. What goes around comes around. Call it whatever you will; the notion gave McKelvey a chill. He opened the phone booth door and walked into the night.
Murph’s was a bare bones tavern wedged between a dry cleaner’s shop and a convenience store owned by a Korean family. It was an old and worn establishment that had stubbornly weathered the various decades and all the changing trends the city could throw at it. McKelvey thought of the place as an old sports jersey or a favourite hat that you loved and never wanted to put through the laundry, because everything that was special about it would be washed away. It had to stay the same, with the scuffs on the wood floor and the ages-old stains on the walls and the toilets that only worked half the time, a filthy plunger propped in the corner. Graffiti scrawled on the washroom cubicles stretched back to the 1940s, and that alone was worth the price of admission. For a good time call Gertie…
They didn’t have much in common, it was true. Tim Fielding was a school teacher and an unapologetic socialist, and was not at all embarrassed to tell McKelvey over their first draft beer that he would have killed himself following his wife’s death if it hadn’t been for the Tuesday night meetings up at the hospital. No, they didn’t have much in common except for the shared experience of loss, but McKelvey liked the younger man. He got a good reading from the kid, and he had been ruled by his gut instincts for so long now, it was about all he trusted.
“I pictured myself going through with it,” Tim said, “you know, parking my car in the garage with a hose running from the exhaust. I went to the hardware store one day and checked out furnace hoses. After I left class. After I left my fucking students. I held it in my hand, turning it over. It was that real to me, that close. I can’t even believe I’m saying this now. But you being a cop, I guess you’ve probably heard everything.”
“What pulled you back?” McKelvey said.
Tim shrugged. “Responsibility won out in the end,” he said. “I tried to imagine the impact on my class. I knew it was something that would stay with them forever, and it wasn’t fair. It’s hard enough to be a kid nowadays.”
“You’re right about that,” McKelvey said. “I wouldn’t be a kid today if you paid me. We used to spend all day out in the woods, shooting squirrels with a BB gun or breaking glass bottles with a slingshot. TV wasn’t even an option most of the time. You used your imagination. You found something to do, or your father’d put you to work. And everybody wore the same jeans and the same cheap runners. Now you got nine-year-old girls dressing up like pop stars…” And they drank in silence in one another’s company. McKelvey didn’t have many friends outside of work, because he got a feeling for people right away, looked into their eyes in ways that his wife could never appreciate, always picking apart their reactions or actions, judging, measuring. “Can’t you stop being a cop for one night?” Caroline would say. “Sometimes you treat our friends like suspects. Sometimes you treat Gavin like he’s a suspect.” He shivered now at the thought, and it stung. Remorse and regret.
“You’re okay now, though?” McKelvey said after a mouthful of beer.
“Oh sure, I’m a poster boy for mental health,” Tim said, and they laughed.
Tim drew the frothy head from his mug of draft beer. He was a tall man, with a thin, latent musculature,
