mailboxes, then a sharp left, and then she was almost past the driveway before she saw it. There was no name nailed to the tree. She parked the car on the side of the road and went down the driveway on foot. There was a big brown Mercedes at the end of the drive. Delorme didn’t even want to think what it had cost.
After Corporal Musgrave, former senior constable Joe Burnside was pure oxygen. Joe Burnside was blond, six-foot-four in his socks – where does the RCMP find this species, Delorme wondered – and happy as a clam. ‘You’re working Special? I know you. You’re the one that bagged Mayor Wells! Come in! Come in!’
Delorme shed her boots and joined him in the kitchen, where he poured her a steaming cup of coffee. She revised her estimate: six-foot-six if he’s an inch.
‘Man, you gotta get out of police work and into the money,’ he was telling her ten minutes later. They were sitting in overstuffed armchairs that faced a blinding white view of Four Mile Bay. ‘With your background? Your achievements? You’re perfect! Look at me – eight years a corporal in the Commercial Crimes Unit and now I’ve got my own business – me! Joe Burnside! Trust me, I’m the last guy I would have thought could do it and I’m telling you, I’m turning offers away. There’s more work than we can handle. And you know where it’s not going? It’s not going to the RCMP. Excuse me a second.’ He crossed to a couch where a bony old collie was curled up asleep. He bent down close to its head and yelled, loud enough for it to hurt Delorme’s ears, ‘Get offa there, you lazy-ass good-for-nothing mutt!’
The dog opened a glassy eye and regarded him calmly.
‘Deaf as a post,’ he muttered, and pulled the dog from the couch by its collar, leading it like a pony to the fireplace, where it lay down once more and returned immediately to its canine dreams. ‘Everybody says I should put him down. Well, people that don’t have dogs say put him down. They don’t cost you a dime for fifteen years, then the minute they get sick, people say kill ’em. Sorry, you want to talk business. Puts me off, though. People have no loyalty. How long you been doing white-collar?’
‘Six years.’
‘You see what’s happening? With cutbacks? I don’t know about you guys, but I’ll tell you, the Mounties are just toothless. Toothless. They’re taking everybody off white-collar and putting them on the street – you know why? Because street work is visible and white-collar isn’t. People like to see their tax dollars at work. And with the Mounties going out of business, that means someone’s gotta take up the slack. Good ol’ private enterprise. Which – I’m happy to say – is me. A two-month investigation on copyright infringement? Piracy? Forty thousand bucks. And Corporate America is happy to pay it – it’s mostly US companies that hire us. And the great thing about Americans, they don’t trust you unless you ask for a lot of money.’
He’s born again, Delorme thought, he should be a preacher. But all she said was, ‘Kyle Corbett.’
‘Ohhh,’ Burnside groaned theatrically. ‘Don’t remind me. Kyle Corbett. That one really hurt.’
‘You had the background sewn up. You had solid stuff. It was you and Jerry Commanda all the way.’
‘We had a source. Good source, too. Guy named Nicky Bell worked with Corbett for years, but happened to be facing an unrelated charge on computer porn that Corbett didn’t know about.’
‘And he gave you a time and a place.’
‘A time? A place? No, no, no, Nicky Bell was the best singer since Gordy Lightfoot. He gave us months of stuff. Me and Jerry picked that bird clean. But the big windup was gonna be at the Crystal Disco out behind Airport Road, and for that we needed one of your guys. We got John Cardinal – smart guy, but always depressed, it seemed to me.’
‘What happened then?’
The affable manner disappeared. Burnside’s face – formerly as bright and wide open as Four Mile Bay – suddenly darkened. It was like an eclipse. ‘You know what happened,’ he said. ‘Or you wouldn’t be here.’
‘You hit the club. You came up empty.’
‘Bingo.’
‘What went wrong?’
‘Nothing. That’s just the point, isn’t it. Everything went right. Everything went exactly according to plan. It was like watching the insides of a Swiss watch. Except for the ending. Corbett was tipped off. You know it and I know it. But if you’re expecting me to say who I think did it, you’re barking up the wrong tree. There’s no proof of anything.’
‘What did your source tell you?’
‘Nicky? If you think anybody’s ever going to see Nicky Bell again, you’re in the wrong line of work. Wife confirmed there was a suitcase missing from his house, some clothes were gone, but I think that’s just cover. I think Kyle Corbett sent him to the bottom of Trout Lake.’
The dog was back on the couch, but Burnside didn’t seem to notice.
As Delorme was putting her boots on, he looked her up and down. She got a lot of that, but for once she didn’t think it was sexual. ‘You’re working that Windigo thing too, aren’t you? Well, I know you are.’
‘Yeah, I am. I’m moving out of Special.’
‘Windigo’s an ugly case.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘A real ugly case, Ms Delorme. But investigating your own partner, well, there’s a lot of cops – Mounties, OPP, you name it – a hell of a lot of cops would say investigating your own partner’s a lot uglier.’
‘Thanks for the coffee. I needed warming up.’ Delorme did up the snaps of her coat, put on her gloves. ‘But I never said who I was investigating.’
D’Anunzio’s was still a magnet for teenagers, just as it had been when Cardinal was growing up. Part fruit store, part soda fountain, at first glance D’Anunzio’s had always been an unlikely hangout. But Joe D’Anunzio, with the manners of a monk and the girth of an opera star, numbered everyone who came into his store among his friends. He looked after his soda fountain with the expertise of an old-time bartender and treated his young patrons like his old ones, letting them linger for hours in the wooden booths at the back over their Cokes and chips and chocolate bars. As kids, Cardinal and the other altar boys had always trooped over from the cathedral after mass, and later, when they had grown out of their surplices and soutanes, they would come to D’Anunzio’s instead of mass – substituting Rothmans and Player’s for the frankincense, Aero bars and ice-cream floats for the bread and wine.
Cardinal sipped his coffee and watched the kid playing the video game.
In Cardinal’s day it had been a pinball machine. Pinball was more physical, less hypothetical, and for your nickel you got lots of bells and rattles. Under the ministrations of the youth at the controls, its replacement uttered an irritating series of beeps and boops.
‘When did that house burn down, Joe?’
‘Over on Main there?’ Joe served cherry Cokes to two blond girls who had their hair cut identically: buzzed on one side, long on the other.
