The Rhythm of the Night

by M.G. Warenycia

            The apartment, which occupied the whole upper (i.e. the third) floor of an old Bay and Gable, faced south towards the waters more Sea than Lake. Notwithstanding its thousand-foot depth and murderous undertow, the cool waters seemed doubly inviting to those gathered in the apartment. Tugging at their collars and pinching up plastered shirts, they were frequently compelled to retreat to down the stairs to the second and ground floors, where buzzing window ACs provided a measure of relief. “Must’ve cost a fortune fer the view, before some developer went and ruined it,” a burly constable remarked, casually glancing out the protuberant bay window.

           “You kidding?” his sergeant, who, unlike the constable, was a born-and-bred Torontonian, scoffed. You know who used to live in these kinds of places? Students, immigrant Italians, Portuguese ‘n pensioners. It’s just last couple years somebody decided it’s the all hip and chic for yuppies to live in ‘The Core’ or whatever fancy name they made up for it. Now you got all these foreign investors, too. Yesterday’s garbage is today’s gold, at least if you’re in real estate. Gaaad, it’s a friggin’ sauna in here.” He mopped his forehead and scratched his bulbous stomach.

            “They sure didn’t build these places fer ventilation. Seems he liked it toasty, though.” The constable jabbed his chin at a stack of boxes for fluorescent and UV lamps of various types. The images on the boxes alone made the atmosphere more oppressive. “Not too shabby as bachelor pads go, otherwise, though, eh?”

            Although the structure of which the apartment was a piece was a Victorian building consisting of three or four ‘houses’ stuck together, with plenty of ornately carved stone details and gingerbread fretwork hanging from the eaves, the interior was furnished in a fresh, boldly-coloured fashion that, if it was somewhat dateable, was so out of choice and not because of neglect. Plump low-back sofa pieces, some leather, some cloth in bright ‘Memphis’ patterns, solid (though heavily scratched) hardwood floors; a pristine kitchen with lots of turned honey oak and faux granite surfaces. A laptop sat upon the kitchen table, while a sleek flatscreen desktop glowed atop a cherry formica desk, its ivory-yellowed CRT predecessor, complete with hulking CD tower, stored beneath. A pantry stocked with a menagerie of pastas, jars of overpriced whole grains, bags of exotic coffees and bottles of equally exotic sauces, along with an overflowing fruit bowl spoke of a diet richer than a student could afford. These, however, were barely-noticed background elements. The police officers could not help being distracted by the arrays of cages, terrariums, carpet-wrapped perches and scratching posts.

             Saltwater, freshwater, Australian desert and Amazon rainforest; they divided the apartment into habitats and made it feel vastly bigger even as they crowded it. There were cichlids, redtail catfish, skinks, piranhas, geckos, tarantulas, a small tortoise, and perhaps other creatures hidden among rocks, driftwood and aquatic plants. After a forensic tech lifted up the skirt of a couch to look for objects that might have rolled underneath in a struggle got the skin nipped clean off the top of a finger joint, the cops studied the tanks and cages more cautiously. They realized that there were no lids in some of the places where lids should have been and that there were faeces in secluded corners without any visible creature which could explain them.

            “I won’t test the theory myself, McMurtry, but I will bet you that was a green iguana under there,” remarked the lead detective, who had just arrived on the scene. “A homicide—not much doubt of that, hmm?” Caterpillar brows danced above Inspector Julius Ngai’s sleepy eyes as he moved to get a view unobstructed by the sofas.

           “No sirree, wouldn’t say there’s any doubt about it.” Constable McMurtry, kneeling over the body, concurred.

            “Wouldn’t be the first time a lonely weirdo offed himself,” Sergeant Barlow conjectured, disgusted by the horde of black and red and yellow eyes staring at him from watchers conspicuously less than half their number. “Who keeps a scorpion for a pet?!?”

            “I don’t believe he was a loner,” Ngai mused entrancedly, stepping slowly around the room, meditating on its symbols.

            “No, we already spoke to the building super—lives on the ground floor,” the Sergeant would not be persuaded. “Also been taking statements from the neighbours—the ones that are home, anyway. There’s nobody who says he didn’t live alone. Sole occupant. And all the shoes, coats, everything men’s, same sizes. Didn’t bring people over much, either, at least not as anybody paid attention to.”

            “You put the most important part last. They wouldn’t be able to tell you anything, unless they caught people coming and going. All this extra sound deadening he’s added to the walls…I wonder if the landlord knows. And that stereo system, which it appears he actually uses: I doubt my car cost as much. On top of all that, he occupied the whole flat. Unless someone was spying on him through those tiny windows, how would they know anything?”

            “Ehh, okay, bud, but let’s be honest. I dunno if it’s the same where you came from, but, here, the kind of guys who keep all kinds of reptiles in their apartments don’t exactly gave the reputation as being successful with the ladies.”

            “And yet…” Ngai ran a gloved finger across the top of a shelf adorned with various mostly Amerindian and Aboriginal Australian curios, then quickly removed the glove, tossing it to a befuddled forensics man. “Only the slightest film of dust. Such a man as you describe; as…” he nodded towards the body…”As that; he keeps his apartment spotless, by and for himself? And there’s no dishes in the sink.”

            “Guess he had a girlfriend, maybe?” McMurtry hypothesized.

            “I would think so.”

            “Huh. Shocker.”

            The victim was laying on his back, in the space between the kitchen, the edge of the living room sofa circle, and the computer desk. He was wearing a T-shirt, the black of which had fade to charcoal, its silkscreened Harley Davidson logo flaked and fissured. Worn jeans, fitted tighter than they were meant to be, a rubberized Seiko watch, and a pair of branded retro sneakers completed the outfit. Almost certainly, it was Scott Gillespie, a forty-something white male who had been the tenant of the same flat for the past eighteen years. The police inferred this from what the superintendent had told them about the person renting the flat and from the general appearance of the corpse, though any legally definitive identification would have to wait for fingerprints, dental records or DNA analysis.

            “I guess that’s another point fer what Ngai’s saying,” Constable McMurtry added. “You gotta have somebody you’re intimate with in yer life fer them to hate you that, uh, passionately.” He was referring to the condition of the face. It is well known in the field of criminology that either a deliberate and excessive destruction of the face or an attempt to conceal the face where the rest of the body is not concealed, after or during the commission of the crime, is indicative of there being a close personal relationship between killer and victim. “Too bad he didn’t have a parrot. You ever heard about that? Where, I think it was in England or some place, this guy had a pet parrot and the parrot helped them catch the guy who did it? I think it was because it sort of re-enacted the murder, verbally, screaming and doing voices.”

            “Hmm. Make sure you have all the pet accounted for. It’s still early in the summer. A miniature zoo like this could cause quite a bit of havoc before winter kills them off, if they escaped. I understand the collector’s desire, but,—“ Ngai tapped on the glass of an apparently empty terrarium, luring a bloated Urodacus manicatus out of its stony burrow. “Goodness, everything here looks like it wants to kill you—the iguana definitely wants to. One wonders how he slept at night.”

            “Maybe he slept during the day,” McMurtry offered. “The super says you never saw him in the morning. ‘N he wasn’t a student, ‘least not fer a long time. No criminal record, not even a DUI. You’d think a guy with…let’s face it, weird-ass habits, like this, he’d be on something, or have gone off on somebody.”

            “Music kept his daemons at bay, perhaps,” Ngai began perusing the stacks of records and CDs on the far side of the living room, beside the television. The officers continued poking around, each in their respective corners. Gradually, their heavy footfalls and occasional snorts, ‘hmm’s, and grunts were softened, then drowned out by a pulsing rhythm that first conducted itself into them through any hard surfaces they touched, rattling in their bronchial tubes. Only after ten minutes or so did anyone hear it with their ears.

            “It’s….like you said…here,” McMurtry muttered indistinctly.

            “Huh? Can’t hear you over that racket,” Barlow growled.

            “I was saying, to Ngai, ‘it looks like what you said,’ about how this poor sucker wasn’t alone in his life.” McMurtry beckoned the others to the laptop, which was not password-protected. “Lucky bastard.”

            The desktop wallpaper and an album of readily accessible photographs showed a man, presumably the deceased, and a woman—‘girl’ would be the more appropriate term—in a plethora of poses and places, most being scenic or chic spots in the City: ‘happening’ gastropubs, viral pop-up restaurants, nightclubs, beach parties, a recording studio. The contrast between the pair could not but provoke comment in any who saw them. She was almost certainly still in undergrad—if she was in university. She was not slim but rather compactly built in a way that communicated bouncy, explosive vitality. Muscular thighs and an ample posterior filled out her yoga tights and jeggings in a way that clearly was of great interest to the photographer. Her bust was about as large as it could be in a woman of her size without declaring artificial enhancement. Her mouth was broad, her lips full, her nostrils pointed ever so slightly towards the sky, while her eyes glittered with the pure emotion of the Moment.

            “Even the most generous observer would not credit that token of a forehead with either knowledge of the past or plans for the future,” Ngai observed. He delighted in exasperating his colleagues with lectures on abstruse and archaic subjects, such as phrenology and feng shui, though was careful to restrain this tendency in his official reports.

            “You read too much into things sometimes.” Barlow rolled his eyes as he raked his shirt cuff across the border of his scalp.

            “And what do your methods get from these pictures?” the Inspector challenged him.

            “I get that she’s a hell of a lot younger than him, and ‘she likes her icies,’ as the kids say it these days. Probably how she says it, too. Geez, some guys have all the luck. I ain’t no Calvin Klein model myself, but, come on, he’s gotta be twenty, twenty-five years older than her, and he’s not in such great shape, either. Dresses sloppy. Yeah, long hair looks good if you’re Fabio, but…on him, it looks like a rat’s nest.”

            “Money, maybe,” McMurtry pointed out the obvious.

            “Come on, it’s fine to rent a nice crib when you’re twenty, thirty, but his age and he doesn’t have a house of his own?”

            “Yer livin’ in the past, Sarge. The white picket fence and two-point-three kids doesn’t exactly have the appeal that it used to.”

            “He drove a twelve-year-old Integra, for crying out loud.”

            Meanwhile, as the noise outside began to thump uncomfortably loud, the reptiles and insects grew fitful in their glass-walled abodes and Ngai strolled back to the stacks of records and CDs.

            “If he’s got any Stones, or Springsteen, maybe they could have got lost in the chaos of the whole incident here, you think?” Barlow chuckled. He meant it.

            Ngai clutched his hair with one hand, flipping through the albums with the other. “The face is familiar, but, in my head, it doesn’t fit the name…”

            “Huh? Just tell me what he’s got there.” Barlow implied, ‘before the forensics guys return.’

            “I know the face, the look…maybe minus fifteen years and fifty pounds…” Ngai coughed, then read aloud: “’Emjay – Take Me to the Moon,’ ‘Capital Sound – Higher Love,’ ‘Spiral Sun featuring Lovanca – Feel My Lovin’…Tribal Mix and the radio edit…Lex & Spiro – Stages of Trance’…”

            “What? Who?” the others cried in unison.

            “…that would be the DJ Armin Fiero remix, the Lex & Spiro…actually, a lot of DJ Armin Fiero remixes in here…”

            “Never heard of any of that shit. What is it, rap?”

            “Some of these, only the clubbers in a particular establishment, on particular nights long ago may have ever heard them: a third of these are promotional copies. Labels printed on an old-school bubble jet printer, marked with Sharpie pens.” The murder victim’s tastes in music were as eccentric as his choice of pets. “It’s EuroDance,” Ngai informed his colleagues. “Electronic dance music, lots of bass and beats, high energy—grunty male rapper lines interspersed with wailing, dreamy female vocals. Popular in the 90s. Canada, believe it or not, was one of the world’s biggest producers, and the quality of the output—much of it from studios in the GTA or Québec—was top notch.”

            “Strange record to be proud of—no pun intended. You’re a fan, are you?”

            “Goodness no, but my wife—she grew up here—was into it. Mr. Gillespie must have been quite well connected. The vinyl records; it wasn’t a fad back then. The DJs would physically spin them, on turntables.”

            “I’d like ta get in touch with one of those connections,” McMurtry sounded pissed. He was still sorting through the files on the deceased’s computer. “Lot of pics of this woman. No name. I’m guessing he didn’t keep a pen-and-paper diary. Weirdest thing: nobody seems ta know this Scott Gillespie. I mean, when we were asking around. His parents are both dead. Blue collar people, lived out in Windsor. Nobody remembers him ever mentioning siblings. There’s no address book, unless it’s locked up in one of these computers somewhere. Guy doesn’t seem to have had a job, unless it was under the table. He pays a heft rent, on time, every month fer the last eighteen years. Girlfriend’s got no identity. Neighbours can hardly tell us when he came and went. You’d think the guy was in the CIA or KGB or something but…who’s a guy like this hiding from? Animal control? Carmen San Diego—I mean with all those Mesoamerican artefacts there?”

            The officers debated each other to distract themselves from the stultifying heat and to provide the sense of doing something, so that they might sooner be done whatever it was they could do in the apartment. Meanwhile, Ngai, who was sweating as much but noticing it less, oscillated in slow semi-circles, keeping well away from the body, studying random features of the room as a cat earnestly ponders a blank wall at 2:00 AM.

            “That—“ he said as he passed in front of the open bay window; “That is EuroDance, what you’re hearing now. Not very clearly, but that’s it.”

            “So that’s what they’re always playing in the Club District. Didn’t know it had a name.” McMurtry was grateful for this nugget of useless knowledge. The window faced directly towards the heart of the Entertainment District, barely hidden by a row of lowrise shop-apartment buildings.”

            “Not always; not anymore.” An expression of cunning crossed Ngai’s face and he hurried to the music library again. “Where is it…” He pulled out a jewel case containing a garishly inked label.

            “Gloves, Julius…If that’s a clue, that is.”

            “It is!” the Inspector exclaimed. “’Teena T – I Can Keep a Secret,’ produced by Metromuzik Inc., 410 Passmore Avenue, Scarborough…mixed by DJ Armin Fiero, vocals: Lise Desjardins…and digital editing by S. Gillespie.”

            “The same guy lying there?” the others asked innocently.

            “No, not the same. Knock of fifteen years and fifty pounds, as I say, and do not drown his professional discipline in the delusions of sugar daddying and, then, yes. Half these deejays from those days, you can’t even find an article about them on the internet. A zeitgeist, or a section of it: it emerged, thrived, was gone, essentially unrecorded. He does have the face of a composer. Or did.” 

            “So you think he’s, er, was a…like a record producer?” Barlow tried to fit the idea of ‘deejay’ into the range of concepts he understood.

            “Producer, sound engineer, something like that.”

            “Prolly offered her a contract. He’d help her break out if she let him break her in, y’know what I mean?” McMurtry joked. “She is a cutey, fer sure.”

            “Yes!” Ngai practically shouted as he grabbed his cell phone and hammered out a text.

            “Alright, I’ll happily accept what you’re saying: we can check it later. This heat…I don’t wanna be in here longer than we have to. Where’s the CSI van?” Barlow peeped out the window. “Murder weapon…what’s the murder weapon? And how’d the killer escape? We had to break the door down to get in here. The super and the neighbours were all on high alert, seeing how they heard the fight. Nobody came down the stairs and, anyhow, the door to the hall locks from the inside.”

            Ngai walked to the kitchen, plucking up the knives in the knife block. “Dull as if they haven’t been sharpened since sundried tomatoes were a thing.” It did not require an experienced homicide investigator to discern that the instrument used to deliver the fatal sash to the victim’s throat, as well as to produce the defensive wounds on his forearms and the devastation to his face, had been uncommonly sharp and fine; as sharp and fine as a fresh razor blade but longer and double-edged, tapering to a point at one end.

            “Check the bathroom,” Barlow ordered McMurtry, unwilling himself to enter what promised to be the most humid room in the flat. “Killer might have taken a razor—the old-timey barbershop kind—from the bathroom and used it on Gillespie here. The girlfriend would know if he shaves with a straight razor; personal things like that. The bathroom’s between here and the bedroom…he’s barring her way to the hall, she wants to leave. Fits with the story the tenants in the apartment below tell about a domestic. Said she was screamin’ like a banshee. Never heard anything like it in their lives.”

            “Easy there, Sarge. We don’t even know she was in here tonight. None of the witnesses say they saw a woman running down the stairs or coming to visit, either. Heat’s getting to ya.” The perky smile and comely figure of the victim’s girlfriend was getting to Constable McMurtry. “Kinda sad when ya think about it. I mean besides him getting killed. You travel the world, pump out all that creativity and, what, to be chasing sugar babies when yer drivin’ a twelve-year-old Acura and you don’t even own yer own place? Not me, buddy. Handle the fundamentals before you dive too deep into yer daydreams.”

            Barlow had no theory of the crime—he had no precise thoughts except a longing for conditioned air when he announced it was time they handed it to the just-arriving CSI people, to come in and process the scene. “Come on, you can brainstorm in the office,” he barked to Ngai, who lingered to examine one last time the victim’s travel souvenirs, nearly arranged but for one jarring gap in mute testimony of stories no one was interested to hear. “Probably gonna get some neighbours coming back after midnight, people who live in the student res next door. ‘Course, they’re probably too stoned out of their minds half the time to notice anything, but, hey gotta do our due diligence.”

            The ground floor was insufferably quiet and gloomy, with the tenants being holed up in their units or deciding to take a detour and kill some hours elsewhere as soon as, coming from the subway or campus, they saw the police vehicles parked out front of their building. Ngai escaped onto the sidewalk, preferring the throbbing air of the open city at night, however muggy and buzzing with newly-hatched June bugs. At the curb was a heap of rusting bicycles, blenders, disassembled drawers, pornos, records and CDs in cardboard file boxes. The odour of marijuana and the jasmine scent of linden blossoms mingled in the breeze.

             McMurtry, intrigued by his colleague’s cool contemplativeness, followed him outside. He thought of the open bay window and the locked hall door, and quickly checked again the sparsely planted garden bed that lay directly beneath said window. “Beats me how he—or she—got out. Soil’s completely smoo—“ he uttered before the Inspector hushed him.

            “I’m trying to remember something…”

            “She looks like a frisky one. Could’a done it, I figure, if she was drunk, and in the middle of a fight. Still, she’d have to be a ninja ta get out of there and not leave a trace, and nobody saw her; no ladder, no van or truck parked outside pretending to be contractors or something.”

            “She’s innocent, I’m sure. Sorry, not innocent; not guilty, at least. Not guilty of Mr. Gillespie’s murder. I know I’ve seen the face somewhere—“ his cell rang. “Ah, my wife!” he spoke with incongruous excitement. “Yes, yes—I’m at the scene now, or just outside it. Listen, you remember, once or twice—it wasn’t often but we did go there—there was that place you liked to go with your friend, the Greek girl with the curly hair. Lots of blue, pink, green lights; they had something like a beach-jungle theme going on, rooftop patio…They all have rooftop patios? Oh, well, this one had palm trees—fake ones, I guess—and things on it, and there was that Persian DJ…sorry, Armenian….had that grunting, hyper voice, announcing everything…”

            McMurtry listened—he knew his friend didn’t mind. In fact, he enjoyed being an object of awe for his deliberately obscurantist smarts…

            “…Armin Fiero, exactly, yes, him, and they had another fellow…’The Scarborough Sound Guy Scotty G?’ That’s a mouthful, but okay….Yes, memories, I know. Maybe I’ll bring you back a signed CD, then….And the club was?…I see. Good, thanks. Aye, dzoi geen! Oi nei! Come, Douglas, let’s take my car. Don’t want to startly any of these e-freaks.”

            “Uhh, where to?”

            Ngai stared in the direction of The Beat…

*

            “Bouncer said that Armin Gulbenkian, err, Fiero’s free to talk if we want. Heh. Never used to be cooperative like this, these club types. Anyhow, I talked to him when I was in there. Seems a really chill dude if you wanna…”

            “Ssst!” Ngai raised the power windows. The black ’84 Electra, square and sober as a Yuppie’s business suit, practically disappeared beneath the umbrous lindens lining the sidestreet.

            “Prolly should have gone in yourself. Plainclothes…The cut-eye the crowd in there was giving me…”

            “I said, ‘ssst!’ Watch the trees, behind the parking lot; the ones that run into the connecting streets like a canopy.”

            “Uh, ‘kay. Crazy, ‘bout his little lady there. You’d never think in this day and age, in a City of two million people, somebody can exist, a real ‘creature of the shadows,’ like that. Nobody being able to tell…”

            “Hush. Of course people know who she is. Obviously she eats and works. Eats, at least. And has friends, family. It’s only that her social circle and his do not overlap; a non-Venn diagram, so to speak. Undoubtedly, a deliberate choice on her part.”

            “Yeah. The bouncer’s seen her. All the staff. Bouncer knew Gillespie fifteen years, almost since he started out. Real cut up about it. Her first name is Ashley, and that’s all anyone knows fer certain. Bit of a princess. Kind of a bitch to the employees, honestly.”

            “What matters is, is she here tonight?”

            “Oh, no.” McMurtry told of how Scott Gillespie, adopting his stage persona of the Sound Guy Scotty G, would return to his old haunts in the Entertainment District, where, if EuroDance was on the playlist, the dishevelled but still magnificent mage of the turntables was always welcome.

            Unlike with most music starts, those who made it big upon CityTV’s Electric Circus tended not to experience the stereotypical dizzying crashes into ignominy when the tides of musical fashion changed. This was mostly due to the fact that they never made enough money to entirely lose touch with reality, on top of which they were otherwise ordinary people, perfectly capable of resuming their original paths as car salesmen, office workers, real estate agents, chefs or veterinarians, content with the occasional themed gig for nostalgia once in a while. DJ Armin Fiero ran a bar and a used car dealership in Etobicoke in partnership with members of his extended family, for instance. As for Gillespie, in the brief conversation he and McMurtry had, the DJ opined that his old partner, coming from a broken home and having nothing else in terms of a focus besides a software development company that never took off or, for that matter, seemed to actually do anything, took his artistic identity more seriously than anyone he knew in the CanCon EuroDance community. “Like, look at Emjay, probably the biggest star in the whole friggin’ scene back in those days, at least for Canada. She’s a housewife baking pies in some hick town in Quebec. I got my family, my kids…Scotty, he never had any of that to ground him, you know? That’s why, I think, when this thing came to him, on a silver platter, he threw himself into it; got tunnel vision. He said Ashley wanted to be a singer, and I guess he saw himself as like her mentor, but you could tell she didn’t give a crap about him. He was just a meal ticket…”

            McMurtry, naively, asked whether they ought to pounce on ‘Ashley’ or trail her. “Ya don’t usually see that kind of violence from a woman on a man, not unless there was some crazy abusive shit going on. Ol’ Codrington told me once, when he first made detective, very first homicide he ever worked, it was this chef—I’m talking the white hat kind, not just a cook—older guy, no history besides a couple DUIs, nice building, quiet…and the scene inside looked like an abattoir. His face was like ground beef, and his ‘sausage ‘n meatballs’…let’s say I hope nobody bought his food processor at a yard sale. Yup, yup. Didn’t take long ta find out who did it. Tons of witnesses, no alibi. Somehow I think she honestly wanted to be caught. Guy had a daughter, see. Err, stepdaughter, from a woman he used ta live with. She ran away from home at sixteen. He turned the mom soon after, ‘cause, you can guess the reason he was looking after her. So, her life kinda fell apart—not like it was ever together—and, things coming full circle…”

            The DJ was convinced that this temptress intended to destroy the friendships Scotty shared with everyone at the club, but to do it slowly and in such a way that something one of the waitresses or bartenders did would appear to be the cause of the final break. “She had it planned, bro. You could tell, she was one of those types…”

            “Yes, yes.  Codrington told me that story. Thrice, at least.”

            “Yeah, so, just saying it reminded me. Hey, all those deadly pets. Like some kind of a power fantasy? How ‘bout it?”

            Ngai pouted, keeping his gaze fixed on the clump of green ashes at the corner of the club’s parking lot. “Bah. Of the whole lot, only the iguana is truly dangerous. The rest, only if you do something stupid—well, getting a green iguana for a pet in the first place, aiyah! Psychopath. Anyhow, she is not involved—not directly—and has no idea the Sound Guy Scotty G is dead.”

            “Huh? You think a rival in the music business maybe? I’ve known hip-hop uys sometimes have beefs that turn deadly. Guess I don’t listen to euro…EuroDance, so…”

            “No. I’m still working it out in my head—the story. But it has nothing to do with duelling DJs. You heard Mr. Fiero. Gillespie’s new belle was a pain. Different generations, different tastes. Their photos together, generic dates. He was helping her to get recording sessions, but there is no way she was singing the sort of music he produced, or that one hears at clubs like this on Throwback Thursdays, Wayback Wednesdays and every such night. You heard he was he was slipping out of his passion, dragged out by his bewitching baby doll. No, I think his ‘manic pixie dream girl’ made him feel young and desired again, but the price was severance from his old friends, his old social home. Once he put a rock on her finger, the exotic pets would be the next to go, mark my word. I doubt there would ever be a wedding. I suspect that Fiero and his other co-workers would be in total agreement with me, and if Gillespie’s iguana had the intelligence, it would mercilessly set its diamond-sharp teeth into Ashley’s painted toes.” Ngai studied the sign atop the club entrance. “The Funky Monkey, eh? And they spell it ‘Fünké’…”

            “Wonder how they came up with that one.”

            “Oh, if you had been there, you’d know that they didn’t just pull things out of a hat. The lyrics of the songs back then, they sound stupid, true, but there’s real sentiment behind them.”

            Beside the golden streetlamps, the voluminous foliage of a monarch among the ash trees rippled with special energy in a particular spot, ever so slightly out of tune with the undulations produced by the stiff breeze rolling off the Lake.

            “Wonder what the used. To stab Gillespie, I mean.” The night was no different than many a hot summer night in Toronto, but the lonesome and unfamiliar spot and the deranging tug of sleep made McMurtry eager to fill the silence with speech, any speech. Intellectually, there was nothing to fear; he was cool as a refrigerated cucumber. Reason will cede its place at the driver’s seat, however, when fatigue, illness or other heavy strains press it from all sides. “Not like I’ve done autopsies, but ‘ve seen ‘em before, and, to me, that’s surgical precision they used—not the way it was done; not talking the angry blows or the mutilation part of it, but the cuts themselves. Real fine. Like they were done with a scalpel.” His partner remained disconcertingly quiet and focused on the trees. “Ya think there’s a link, maybe? Heck, no way even a sushi knife, or a fileting knife; no way it could just zip through like that. ‘N you saw the knives in the kitchen, right? It wasn’t a knife from the house, and there weren’t any razors, besides the normal kind…”

            “Yes, the knives were all there—the ones in the knife block—and, while his girlfriend seems to have kept things clean—I’m guessing it’s her—you know bachelor habits. All of them dull as butter knives, practically.” Suddenly, a thin, whistling cry pierced the night air, but it was too brief to make head or tail of. “You heard that?”

            “Yep. Holy…”

            Mad drunken screams and shouts regularly punctuated the Entertainment District on weekend nights. A broken heel, a broken heart; the narcissistic impulse to shove one’s ecstatic emotions onto unseen strangers. McMurtry thought he would have been used to this kind of thing by now, and yet he found his hand on the butt of his gun.

            “Do you know when the first burrito restaurant opened here—when you could first buy avocadoes in the store?” Ngai asked, as if, being in some ways an archetypal example of his race, Constable McMurtry ought to know the whole local history of the GTA.

            “I prolly wasn’t even living here, not back then.” Not wanting to seem a dunce about a topic where his professional senior regarded him as an expert: “But, uh, I figure it’s gotta be, I dunno, 80s, 90s? More 90s, I suppose, before that stuff started going mainstream. You never saw all the ethnic foods before, other than Greek stuff on the Danforth, Chinatown, Italian. Right about the same time our guy had a career, huh?”

            “A career that was relevant; part of ‘the scene,’ yes. He must have travelled a lot.”

            “Yer saying because of the masks and idols and stuff he had decorating his apartment?”

            “Yes, quite the collection, isn’t it? Granted, I don’t know much about Mezo-American art and culture, but they certainly looked genuine to me—genuine and old. As with his zoo, I don’t imagine he only began collecting yesterday—probably the two passions are linked and he brought things back, bit by bit, as be brought in his pets.”

            “Had ta be before 9/11.”

            “Mhmm, well, that’s when he had more thriving career; when his life last had drive and purpose. Which, I agree, would have ended not much after 9/11, until…”

            “…Until the chick came into his life…” They tried to finish each other’s sentences.

            “…And brought a new star to guide him, drawing him away from his old friends, his old music.”

            “Yeah, sometimes life is like that. Ya get into a rut; need someone ta come along and break yer shell, stop you from living in the past, in nostalgia.”

            “And yet all that nostalgia was real,” Ngai cut him off. “And the people, and music—look, the parking lot is nearly full. What that little gold-digging trollop was promising him was an illusion. Undoubtedly, his old partner saw it, the bartenders would have known it—a quarter of the women in that place have probably tried to rope someone into a trap like that. The iguana might have sense it, even—I wouldn’t put it past him. Anyways, let’s go hang out with deejays for a while. I doubt they’ll charge us cover.”

            The bouncers, wary of why they weren’t able to obtain work other than as bouncers, gave the two cops wide berth. The interior was coolly lit and densely packed with dancers, and the patrons were sufficiently entranced by the music and booze that no one took notice of them. Had they never seen an album or poster bearing his image, Ngai and McMurtry would not have assumed that the moniker ‘DJ Armin Fiero’ referred to anyone other than the leanly muscled, thoroughly tanned guy with his black hair in short, gel-stiffened spikes at the front, an open-necked aubergine shirt, with plentiful white gold chains and orange-tinted Matrix-style shades, despite the late hour. On seeing his official visitors, he handed the turntables over to a lip-biting, flame-haired girl and ushered the cops up a hidden flight of stairs. Noone could hear anything but the bass, beats and melody until Fiero shut the door of the second-floor lounge. The faintest traces of Foggy—‘In Your Eyes’ seeped through to help maintain the mood.

            “Yo, your uh—this dude here—he told me what happened to Scotty.” Armin’s stagetop swagger melted like the Dippity-Do on his temples. “Damn, man; I told him that b*tch was bad news. Like, come on, one of us could have set you up with somebody. Hotter, sweeter, not just a freakin’ gold digger. But he didn’t want to see his limitations. Sorry, have a seat. Drinks? No charge for you guys, obviously. Shit, man; Scotty…”

            “We actually don’t think Ashley or whatever her name is was involved, except indirectly.” Ngai spoke for himself and McMurtry. “No one rents the VIP lounge, eh? Place looks busy, though.”

            “Oh, no, it’s ‘cause they’re doing renovations, or supposed to. Full disclosure: there’s mould in the ceiling. Yeah. And, you know, the old look…” The lounge had a cheerful, cheesy jungle-tropic theme in the ornaments, potted tropical plants and designs painted on the walls that the Inspector remembered (hazily) from so many years before. By contrast, the dance floor and stage were indistinguishable from those of a hundred other clubs, here, in Montreal, in Manchester or Munich.

            “Yes, when we first came in, I thought to myself, it looks different than I remember it, which was, eih! Too many years back!”

            “Yeah, that…” Armin appeared somewhat embarrassed. “We’re spinning the same classic tracks, only, the tacky old décor, it’s too much, you feel me? Besides, we’re only in here on Wednesday, Thursday, Saturdays—it’s a different crowd the rest of the week, so they gotta meet everybody’s needs.”

            “You kept the name, though.”

            “Yeah, everyone knows where it is, so…”

            “The Funky Monkey…” Ngai chewed over the words. “I can’t help but ask, why all the umlauts? You can’t even pronounce them. It sounds wrong.”

            “Just a style thing. Like Yogen Früz. No reason really.”  

            The detective stifled a groan of exasperation. “The monkey, he’s funky—I don’t think I need you to interpret that for us.”

            “Hahaha, ah man!” The deejay’s eyes glazed over as he recited lines from a radio ad the club had aired on z103.5 FM a decade ago, putting on his best attempt at a sultry female voice. “Is that a banana in your pocket or are you just a funky monkey? Hahah, ahhh, the days, man; those were the days!”

            “I remember, and an audio sample—I swear you used it, too, when I was there, between when you were changing tracks and so on—a sample of a screaming monkey. Or maybe I was drunk or imagining things.” They were all laughing now, two for nostalgia, one at the strange tastes of City People. Scotty G’s murder seemed to belong to a less real world for the moment. “I always thought to myself, are they insane? How is that cool, or urbane, or sophisticated? It’s certainly not relaxing—a deranged, screaming simian sounding like he’s had too much vodka and means to settle some scores. Disturbing, in fact.”

            Armin laughed and shook his head. “Nah, bro. You weren’t high or anything at the time. That’s our thing, or was. Be different. Be out there, you know? Like, we used a sample for the radio, yeah, but, nah, that was a real monkey. No lie. He was a pretty small critter. Heheh, used to, if you carried him around the dance floor—he’d ride on your shoulder, like a parrot on a pirate—used to f*ck with people. Cheeky bastard! Sometimes he’d pull the straps on girls’ tops or if he didn’t like you, he’d grab a drink from one of the waitresses’ trays and throw it on you. I’m tellin’ you, man. But he was so cute—you knew your girl would be pissed if you hit him or something. But then somebody threatened to sue—health code violation or some shit like that—so we kept him on a leash by the tables. Ahhh, it was a freer time. Now you got me thinking about Scotty. Guess it hasn’t sunk in yet. Tomorrow’s gonna suck ass.”

            The party engaged in small talk for a few minutes, letting Armin relive pleasant memories. The Star or Sun would come calling on the morrow. They exited the club. McMurtry followed the Inspector around back. A couple making out in what was far from an ideal spot, beside the skip bin, and a shocking amount of empty bottles and cans—especially Smirnoff Ice and Red Bull—were strewn on boulevards and lawns ringing the parking lot. The cars were crappier than those parked out front: Corollas, Hyundais and stock Civics, instead of the BMWs, Porsches and heavily modified rice rockets in the front lot. Other than that, there was nothing of note. They went back to the car, Ngai driving southeast, zigzagging slowly to avoid the inebriated pedestrians beginning to filter out of the clubs. There were people on the street, even at that hour, but the further east one went, the less their presence symbolized youth and celebration, the more it told of latent degeneration festering beneath the bark of the Yggdrasil. The drab, semi-animate forms blended with the concrete and brick and steel as if elements of the same organism. Once or twice, McMurtry blurted out a “what’s happening to this City,” or “it wasn’t like this back in the day,” as seemed proper to the occasion.

            It must have been sleep overtaking him, why he did not sooner ask his colleague, “Umm, where are we heading? Kind of out of our jurisdiction…”

            The spot where Ngai parked, just north of the Gardiner Expressway, stood at the mouth of the Humber River and was naturally fertile in comparison to most of the rest of the paved-over and road-salted downtown. The vegetation was at the peak of its abundance. Each tree was a verdant cloud; the reed beds were so thick that the strongest paddler wouldn’t dream of attempting to drive a canoe through them. A paved trail led up around the water treatment plant into the marshes which dominated the river’s lower reaches, meandering parallel to its amorphous banks. “Take out your flashlight,” Ngai commanded with inexplicable vehemence. “Shine it in the water, especially along the shore, wherever something drifting might get caught up. Also, under any particularly large trees, especially walnuts, chestnuts—oh and especially the crabapples.”

            “Huh? This one’s gonna need some explaining.” McMurtry was terribly confused, but an order was to be followed, and, if the Inspector was wasting the Toronto Police Service’s time, that was on him.

           “We’re looking for the killer of Scott Gillespie, what else? Neither of us has signed off for the night. Really…I appreciate your estimation of my intelligence, but the things you assume about my character, sometimes it’s insulting…”

            “Sorry, geez.” The park established around the marsh was a lonely place at 12:48 AM. The contours of the nearby roadways and the impossibility of building large structures on the mushy ground meant no one would be just passing through. That habitué of the nocturnal urban park—the alcoholic hobo—was also nowhere to be seen. The occasional ruby glimmer in the bushes and the way the billowing canyon of herbage dampened sounds—including cries for help—made it a spot one did not want to be alone and rendered clumsy or helpless by alcohol in, privacy and (usual) lack of police presence notwithstanding. All the parts of the City close to the lakeshore had once been like this, except for the Beaches, so named because there was a real beach and not merely the usual reed-choked marsh where Lake met land. The notion felt like food for thought, even if contemplating it served no practical purpose.

            Contrary to his assumption that they were out there for nothing, McMurtry’s flashlight caught a sparkling beneath a tree; a relict forest monarch, holding undisputed sway over a patch of blonde grass studded with willow bushes. The boughs of the ancient tree hung almost to the ground and it was a lucky angle by which the flashlight caught the…

            “Bottle of whisky. Crown Royal. Huh. Hey, what’s this—“

            “Don’t touch it!” The profound blackness of the shiny object, roughly triangular, fat through its centre line and perhaps four inches long, disguised traces of a liquid which itself has a tendency to appear black under certain kinds of nocturnal lighting. “Yes, as I guessed, pretty much. That’s the murder weapon.”

            “This? Glass? A rock or, looks like crystal? What’s…” McMurtry squatted, painting the flashlight beam across the strange object’s surface from this direction and that. “Like something you’d give a naughty kid in his Christmas stocking.”

            “It would be a waste to put this into a fire: you won’t get any heat out of it. It’s obsidian—a type of glass, and, I suppose, a rock as well, so you’re not exactly wrong. Volcanic in origin. I wouldn’t touch it for more reasons than one. It’s sharp. Incredibly sharp. Makes the barber’s razor and surgeon’s scalpel seem like crude instruments in comparison.

            “Obsidian, eh? Heard of it. But what the heck’s it doing here?”

            “The murderer dropped it, clearly.” Ngai nodded gravely. “It might be a real artefact—I wouldn’t want to say you couldn’t have brought something in a Mexican or Guatemalan market when Mr. Gillespie was doing his globetrotting. Or it could have been made as a tourist souvenir. Doesn’t matter. As our very distant ancestors used flint tools—arrowheads and so forth—so, up until the Spaniards introduced them to metal, did the Aztecs, Maya and such peoples use obsidian. It cut better than the finest Castilian steel if, say, you were trying to lop off a horse’s head. Trouble was, it’s as brittle as it is hard. Easily shatters if you strike something resistant with it—a shielf, armour, a conquistador’s sword. Against soft flesh, however…” He snapped off a twig from a willow beyond the great ash’s shadow then used it to peel back the unkempt grass surrounding the lump of volcano’s spew. “A hand axe, like cave men used, or maybe it’s a spearhead or a tooth off a macuahuitl—an Aztec war club studded around its circumference with obsidian blades. There was an empty space on the shelf in Gillespie’s apartment where he displayed his curios, subtly distinguished by its sheen amid the faint dust-born matte texture of the rest of the shelf. Last dusted, I’d wager, when ‘she’ last dropped by. A couple days. Bachelorhood develops habits that only the anxiety of disappointing a woman can break.”

            “Ya figure she told him she was calling it quits? Maybe he figured he’d dumped all this money into her; he was entitled to her? Lot of times, when it’s a guy, especially an older guy, in a financially controlling position, they look at it like a contract; a business arrangement.”

            Ngai ‘refuted’ the other’s conjectures in his habitual fashion, shutting his eyes as if in deep meditation, huffing faintly through his nostrils and extending his arms, palms upraised as if stretching. “You saw that face; that visage he worshipped. ‘Celestial’ nose, empty head and a mouth that could swallow his wallet whole, among other things. I suspect—no, I am sure, since there’s nothing else he could offer her, besides pocket change—I am sure his links with studios, sound engineers, record labels and the like were the substance of his feeble hold on her. It wasn’t enough. You heard what the people in the club said. She needed—yes, needed—to sever him from his friends, from the fragments of faded glory that were all he had left from a career whose potential he grossly overestimated.”

            “What for?”

            “Mmh? So that when she inevitably dumped him, perhaps via a phone call while she’s on a vacation he is working a second job to pay for, he would have nothing left.”

            “Wicked, eh.”

            “Wicked. A…a bottle of Crown Royal—not this one—says that there would have been an ad on Craig’s List or Kijiji. Maybe there is already. An ad selling exotic pets, the same ones we recently became acquainted with. ‘Oh, honey, it escaped while you were out.’”

           Unable to resist testing the theory, McMurtry whipped out his Motorola Razr and began searching.

            “Check for monkeys. Capuchin monkeys—the kind that are black or dark brown with pale fur around their faces.”

            “Loading search results—reception sucks out here. Didn’t see any monkey in his apartment. How’d you get it so specific?”

           “That was the one in the photos on the wall of the lounge at the club. It’s not the scene of the crime, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing useful to glean—such as the face of the suspect.”

            “Wha…?!? Hold on.” McMurtry nearly dropped his phone. “Suspect?”

            “The monkey and his eponymous club—actually, I never asked which inspired which; whether they bought the monkey as a joke because of the club, for instance. The Funky Monkey. You would have seen him in the old pictures, framed and hung on the walls. I doubt iguanas would use climbing trees with swinging rings on ropes. Scorpions and salamanders certainly wouldn’t. The same monkey perching on the shoulders of DJ Armin Fiero and the Sound Man Scotty G or trying his hands—and tail—at the turntables for fun and marketing gimmicks. It’s safe to assume he came into the country like the lizards and arachnids and the shelf-top curios, maybe on a plane, maybe on a boat, when customs was not the dragnet it now is. When health and safety regulations and changing tastes forced the club to retire the party-loving primate, Gillespie kept him at his apartment. While he could no longer get funky as before, human companionship, alcohol and, above all, the euphoria-inducing euro beats were still there for him. Friends would come to visit and so on.”

            Privately, McMurtry wondered whether it was time to call backup and encourage Ngai to call it a night. If he wasn’t high, he sure needed sleep.

            “You were there with me. And even a drunken monkey could have seen what that harlot was doing. Already there would have been conflict as she simpered and sneered, and he, obedient, replaced the familiar tunes on the stereo with currently popular trash as per her request. One of the Funky Monkey’s few pleasures in life, silenced, literally. Visits from humans he knew grew scarce and, as for the lively atmosphere of the club, all he could do was to clamber to the bay window, pry it open, stare out at the distant spotlights raking the bellies of the clouds and listen with ear, heart and soul. The CDs doing in the trash were the last straw. You noticed the ‘trash’ being left out for garbage collection, along with other detritus of summer moves? He—I am referring to the monkey—may not have had a precise concept of Craig’s List, but animals sense our thoughts before they manifest as action. He knew something was up; that the familiar life he knew—the only life he could know—was about to be destroyed. Something happened. He heard some words of phrases he recognized or he sense, as only animals and small children can sense, the birth within a mind of hostile intent, though it might be so subtle that were we to look in a mirror it would not be revealed to us. He grabbed up the object which his primitive but supple intellect could best comprehend as ‘weapon’ and, with all of his wiry strength attacked the one who had given him an easy and comfortable life, then cruelly betrayed that trust for a motive even more inane and selfish than Mammon. As is usually the case when there is a close personal relationship between offender and victim, special savagery was devoted to the destruction of the face as representative of the victim’s identity. I don’t know that one could properly call their relationship ‘personal,’ but it was undoubtedly very close.”

            “Yeah, really went to town on ‘em. A regular Furious George, ya could say.” McMurtry couldn’t resist chuckling at his own joke. “Guess it is kind of like the weapon a Neanderthal would use, so, fer a monkey…”   

            The pair moved out and circled the tree, stabbing the mass of leaves with their flashlights, but the beams caught no glimmer of watching eyes. McMurtry looked across the narrow valley which enclosed them It was not big in the sense of wild spaces; you could see the luminous windows of the surrounding apartment buildings, like neatly stacked rows of fireflies. Yet in the middle of the night the primal Forest, in spirit as much as in fact, asserted itself. The marsh and its wood in summer fulsomeness presented a volume of mystery that could be probed but haplessly, one square metre at a time—a task which inspired vague and sinister feelings unrelated to the late Sound Guy.

            “Even if we bring out search ‘n rescue, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell we’ll find anything—unless he starts hooting and hollering. Huh. You’d think, even if we can’t see him, we’d at least hear him.”

            “Hmm. Yes, you would.” Ngai avoided stating the obvious inference: that the four-handed killer was aware he was being hunted and did not want to be found. Too, it was likely that a pair of intense, not-quite-human eyes were watching them as they conversed, ready to blink or shield themselves behind leaves should a flashlight turn their way.

            “Wee, it’s really more a thing fer Animal Control, don’t’cha think?”

            “Agreed. I don’t think a monkey falls under the jurisdiction of the Criminal Code. Possibly the sections about keeping exotic species as pets.”

            The detectives thus gave themselves an excuse not to wander further into the marsh, which had so suddenly taken on an eldritch aspect. It was a relief to leave the spongy tangle and to feel hard asphalt under their soles again. Winter—heck, autumn—would take care of the ‘suspect,’ although, knowing the full story, they couldn’t help wishing he would be safely trapped and sent to an animal rescue.

*

            The first breath of fall was ruffling the willows. The soft tones of the sluggish, strangled river were broken by the neon hues of kayakers and their crafts. These and the more numerous figures moseying along the shore (mostly in pairs) were largely students seeking to squeeze the last drops out of a fast-extinguishing summer. Unnoticed, a hunter was stalking the edge of a grove where were planted, a century or more ago, some apple trees which had since gone feral and been in turn superseded by their children. The shapes of these rewilded apples were wholly unrecognizable as of their tribe, but the fruits they bore were new-made relics, perfect copies of their parents—a strain of goldish baking apples whose name has since been lost to pomology. They were approaching the zenith of ripeness and a few of the burnished orbs had already fallen upon the grass, tingeing the air with a cidery perfume.

            Parks Canada normally insisted its agents be equipped with powerful firearms when stalking dangerous animals, but there were too many people in the marsh and the glass walls of the looming condo towers were practically begging for stray bullets. Ranger Valerie Paquette was not scared. She knew there were plainclothes police within shouting distance, on the stakeout for the man who had been throwing rocks at kayakers. The same troublemaker was believed to be responsible for the theft of a hiker’s backpack, which had been set down while the owner was fishing several metres upstream, as well as for a couple harassment incidents where someone had been leering and laughing at female visitors from the bushes. Trivial incidents probably attributable to the high schools and public housing buildings just beyond the woods. There would be nothing or her to do that the police could not do better, she insisted, hoping to excuse herself from the boring assignment. Then, the roles reversed themselves when the attacks got more serious. At dusk one day, a Labrador retriever ran into the treeline and returned the following morning with bloody wounds and a missing tooth. Coyotes or possibly foxes were the initial suspects, but a veterinary exam could discover no bite mark capable of founding a definite conclusion. The boilerplate warnings, already emblazoned on park signage, to keep pets leashed and under supervision at all times were re-promulgated and occasionally enforced.

            The toddler…the newspapers hadn’t got ahold of that one yet, but they would when the parents found out how little park management could pay as hush money. Maybe he’d ran into the bush after a butterfly; maybe kids just do stupid things. Certainly, his parents had not been watching him and wanted to cover their guilt. It was brown, or black, or grey, the thing that mauled him, and had ‘ears and a face.’ So the boy said, anyhow, though he was traumatized and toddlers aren’t the most reliable witnesses, to begin with. Bobcat wandered in from the 905, where there’s more of them than you think? A lynx? Could be—but so far south? One swipe of a bear’s paw would have killed him and the marsh wasn’t near big enough to hide a bruin, so that theory was out. Whatever it was, Ranger Paquette was to kill it so that by the time the headlines broke the park could already declare the problem resolved.

            Tricky thing was, there were no tracks. The soft riparian clay should have been ideal for prints, and the tightly grown trees with a dense understory meant you often didn’t have a choice as to where you could step. A Taser, a nightstick and bear spray would at best ward off a determined lynx, wolf or bar, but nothing in the evidence, run against her memory bank of such things, suggested any of these. Hence, she was not afeared, though she was uneasy as anyone confronted with the unexplainable. She more than once put her hand to her chest to check if her rosary necklace was still present. Before she took her weekend, she wanted to catch a glimpse, a sound; anything. The sixth sense, common to all who’ve made the Forest their leisure and livelihood, was active in her, just below the level of conscious thought, registering inputs and calculating probabilities. Not a big cat, nor a bear, nor a wolf. Patiently, she waited as dusk drew its purple curtain and, after the post-rush hour lull, the City of Night again stirred to life. From the Entertainment District and the lakeshore; from the balconies and rooftops of those lucky enough to have homes nice enough to throw a party in, there drifted the insistent, wilful beat, beat, beat: the heartbeat of the City in summer, when it deigned to live and love, and not merely to toil. As she shouldered her gear and trod out of the sinuous marsh, there came a cry, laden with melancholy, hunger and a jealousy for others’ joy that was somehow pure of envy. Valerie Paquette heard it only as another note in the rhythm; the Rhythm of the Night.

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