my first year teaching, and the year isn’t over. I don’t have a yearbook.”
“I picked up last year’s from your school library on my way here.”
“Thorough,” I admitted again. She tsk’d me as she crammed the rest of the pizza slice into her mouth.
Home Depot is the kind of big box store that brings out the protestors when it moves into town, perhaps not as virulently as those picketing a Walmart opening, but vocal just the same. Vancouverites as a rule love a good — or even a piddly — protest, and no matter how few picketers arrive, it’s sure to make lead coverage on at least one of the nightly newscasts. Lazy journalism to be sure, but it’s mildly more compelling than the oft featured weather piece.
Despite protests, sit-ins, and bullhorns, the “tight-knit” Kitsilano community, home to some thirty thousand best friends, has now a Home Depot to call its own, albeit a “greenerized,” slightly smaller version of its suburban counterparts, and on this Friday evening, it was jam-packed, not with demonstrators but with consumers. Having satiated their need to rail against it, tight-knit community members were evidently inducting the corporation into the community by spending thousands of dollars on its wares. There’s already talk of a second one.
Andrea walked purposefully through the doors, though I knew full well her ability to tell a lathe from a drill press was about as strong as my knowledge of what either a lathe or drill press were. Her mission senses were heightened, though, and thus she practically scented her way to the paint department and made a beeline for the clerk operating a machine that was treating a can of paint like it was mixing a gallon of martinis. I recognized him from the dated mug shot Andrea had shown me on the way over. He had gained a few years and a few dozen pounds — the paint shaking business had obviously been good to him — but there was no mistaking this was our guy. “Courtney MacMillan?” Andrea asked in her polite but unmistakably police-like tone.
“I’ll be right with you,” he replied politely.
Andrea flashed her badge at him. “No, you’ll be with us now.”
“Okay,” he replied calmly. If Andy’s badge routine had upset him at all, he gave no indication. I would have been offended at her brusque intrusion, but MacMillan calmly reached up, turned off the paint can shaker-upper and handed the mixed latex cocktail to his waiting customer, who herself looked taken aback by the sudden appearance of the long arm of the law. Andy looked as though she was ready to begin when MacMillan politely spoke first.
“If you wouldn’t mind, could we converse in the back, away from the customers?” He turned, stepping out from behind his paint partition, and walked toward the back of the store.
“Converse?” I said to Andy as we fell into step a few paces behind the departing paint-smith. She managed a sort of perturbed “harrumph.”
“Boy, he didn’t seem to be the slightest bit intimidated by your bad cop bit. Maybe you want to switch to good cop?”
This time she managed a brief retort. “We’ll see.”
MacMillan stopped at the entrance to a hallway marked “Private, Staff Only.” Turning to face us as we approached, he gracefully waved us down the hallway ahead of him. “This way,” he directed serenely, “if you would not mind.”
“We would not mind at all,” Andy assured him.
“Thank you, Detective,” MacMillan replied. He stepped in front of us to hold open the swinging door to the inner sanctum of the home improvement mecca. He allowed the door to gently close behind him, then, without further word, strode down the nearest aisle way between two large shelving units. As he turned to face us his eyes blazed with rage. “Just who the fuck do you think you are, lady?” he hissed.
A slight smile pulled at the left corner of Andrea’s mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice adopting the same placid tone MacMillan’s had just seconds before. “I could have sworn I identified myself when I came in.”
“Can the bullshit. You’ve got a lot of fucking nerve barging in to my place of work and harassing me like a fucking criminal.” It was clear MacMillan’s Mr. Manners routine had been an act to save face in front of the customers. Or he was a sociopath; it’s hard to tell the difference sometimes between a good actor and a psycho. His diction, I noted, remained impeccable, clearly articulating the “ing” of his expletives rather than the more colloquial “in’” most often used in today’s vernacular.
“Aren’t you?” Andrea asked.
“I was.”
“I stand corrected.”
“So what the fuck do you want?” His face was reddening, and he was growing increasingly agitated by Andrea’s sarcastic grace.
“I want some information. I’d like your help.”
“Why would I help you?” He had a point.
“Because you want to be a good, decent citizen, and you don’t want your parole revoked.”
“Okay. What do you want?” he sighed.
Andrea pulled out the school yearbook from the oversized, low budget purse-cum-briefcase she kept in the car but rarely carried. “I want you to find someone for me. A few days ago you sold some spray paint.”
“We’re a big store. How do you know it was me that sold the paint?”
“Your prints were on the cans.”
“Did it occur to you that if I stocked the shelves, my prints would be on every can?” It hadn’t occurred to me, but I had to imagine it had to Andrea the super-cop. If it hadn’t, she wasn’t about to admit it.
“Humour me,” she said. Reluctantly he took the yearbook from her and made a half-hearted effort to flip through some pages and skim the photos. “Does this mean you remember selling to some teenagers recently?”
He didn’t answer but continued to turn pages and scan images. After several minutes of silence, during which I counted eight different brands of bathroom sinks, MacMillan turned the book around to face Andrea. His finger pointed to a Grade Eleven student — this year in Grade Twelve — named Paul Charters. He was in my Law 12 class. Andrea didn’t speak but took out her police notebook and recorded the name. The department had issued its detectives handheld personal digital assistants, but Andy had told me that powering up the BlackBerry lacked the dramatic flair of the flipped-open notebook.
A moment later he turned the book again and pointed at another student, Krista Ellory. It hadn’t struck me that any of my hallway redecorators might be female. My sexist upbringing, I suppose, had taught me that homophobia was essentially a male affliction. “Yes, I’m sure,” MacMillan answered before being asked.
“So you remembered selling the paint all along,” Andrea noted.
“You don’t sell a lot of spray paint to teenaged girls. It’s easy to remember.”
“See how we could have avoided all this unpleasantness if you’d just cooperated in the first place?”
“Probably would have gotten your information faster if you’d been a whole lot more polite and less aggressive.” That, of course,
