The Night of the Raccoon – teaser sample

The full novel is available in Kindle or Paperback form at: https://www.amazon.com/Night-Raccoon-Michael-Warenycia/dp/B08Y4LKFG9/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=night+of+the+raccoon&qid=1626239128&sr=8-4

The Night of the Raccoon

by M.G. Warenycia

I.

            “Makeup won’t fix that; yeesh,” the elderly academic muttered, dragging out his steps so that he could extend his passage round the buzzing intersection as much as possible without looking like a shameless gawker. A female constable, hastily attaching yellow tape to the trunk of a locust tree planted in the pavement, frowned purposefully at the old man. She failed, however, to inspire any degree of shame in him. When they had first arrived on the scene, at the northeast corner of Baldwin and Spadina, she had tried to shoo away the crowds. It worked, at first; a lone individual can be readily singled out and embarrassed. But the legions of cell-cam-wielding oglers rapidly became so numerous, and her workload was so great, that she soon gave up and allowed them to satisfy their prurient curiosity.

            “Can you believe some people?” she whispered to her only colleague on the scene, fearful lest any nearby devices pick up her saying something which might make the Toronto Police Service look bad on social media and thereby get her into hot water with the brass. Constable First Class Jennifer Koo did not need that. She had spent a good chunk of a career struggling to be the perfect Boy Scout in her superiors’ eyes. She was still a constable, albeit more of a constable than she was when she was a Constable, Second Class. The owner of the Xam Yu Seafood Restaurant, on whose doorstep the tragedy occurred, protested from behind the windows looking onto the sidewalk, surrounded by iron-stomached customers who’d taken a break from their meals to snap pics and record videos. Constable Koo paid them no heed and knotted the tape around the door handle – the customers would have to exit through the kitchen, unless they planned on waiting for the cops to finish their work. Lord knows how long that would take. Jennifer knew from experience that her superiors would prefer she err on the side of expedience. It wasn’t like Yonge and Dundas, or clearing a charred junkie off the third rail to get a busy subway station back up and running, but there was heavy pedestrian and cyclist traffic, tourists, plus a lot of media-savvy students who had hysteria-prone middle-class parents happened to live in the neighbourhood. Not to mention that the Chinatown Business Improvement Association would be up in arms against the police, City Council and anybody else they felt like blaming for an incident which put a stain on their community’s image, rightly or wrongly. Mind, they had reason to be anxious: SARS, Bird Flu, moral panics over counterfeit handbags and DVDs; a few headlines were enough to make a dent in their custom by stirring the fears of a peril jaune, never far below the surface in the collective Canuck consciousness.

            At that moment, a hulking, angular black Buick rolled up to the Baldwin side of the corner restaurant. A burly, buzz-cut sergeant stepped out and stood at the end of the parking space, waving his arms to direct the driver back and forth till, half a minute later, the land yacht was wedged neatly alongside the restaurateur’s Honda Pilot, which was hemmed in behind by the establishment’s skip bin and in front by the crime scene and a hunter-green Chinatown lamppost. Hopefully the restaurateur was patient man.

            “Brrr!” the driver – who was dressed for the mild September day in a woollen trench coat, scarf and gloves – flapped his lips. “What have we here? Eugh, not the sort of thing you expect at 4:30 p.m. Looks like someone overdid their pre-drink.” Indeed, the hour helped make the scene more than something virtuous passers-by may sneer at while feeling secretly gratified by their own moral restraint. Had it occurred later that evening, or on a Saturday night – or merely in the parking lot on the other side of Baldwin – it would be (superficially, anyway) the sort of casual spectacle those who frequent Downtown are habitually shocked and routinely appalled by. “My goodness, what do you have to drink to mash yourself up like that?”

            “Dunno, buddy, but I got a feeling it wasn’t Molson’s,” the stalwart sergeant opined. “Sorry it took us so long, Jenny; they got all the roads around campus blocked off fer some kinda protest. Had ta go around ‘n got stuck behind a street car. I see the EMS guys beat us to it. Ya get anything from them? Another opioid case?”

            “No,” Constable Koo answered, quiet, obviously affected by the circumstances. “They tried naloxone, just in case. People –“ she pointed to the guilty but still lingering crowd, a couple of whom were lined up to talk to her partner, Constable Calabrese – “They said she was acting…unusual. Erratic. Violent, in fact. Before she…I mean…that’s why we got called before EMS, I guess. Not that their judgement counts for anything, but some people were convinced she was on drugs. Hmph, somehow they also became instant experts on her occupation. You get some absolutely disgusting comments.”

            “I understand,” nodded the detective in the woollen coat. Constable Koo assumed that he meant he understood her. Actually, he was referring to the crowd. Whatever one felt, ethically speaking, about their morbid curiosity, it would be patently unreasonable to expect hardworking denizens of a generally safe, sterile and boring metropolis, many of them university students and many others Cantonese, to not stop, stare and snap when they happened to notice, sprawled beneath a drooping locust tree right there on the sidewalk, in front of a popular restaurant, the contorted, barely-clad frame of what was a more-than-usually attractive young woman, eyes bulged in the crazed fury of her final spasms; her broad, full-lipped mouth disgorging a grotesque quantity of foamy saliva onto the tidily swept concrete. It did not help to discourage perverse fascination that the twisted pose of the body inspired impressions vaguely sexual; impressions further stimulated by the fact that, while she had on a short parka, this parka was unzipped and she was otherwise quite minimally clad, with her gauzy American Apparel top expelling one weighty, possibly ‘improved’ breast, and, beneath, perfectly smooth orange-tanned flesh was revealed from the ankle above her blindingly white sneakers all the way to where her skirt, made of the stretchy black material as yoga tights, had run or flipped up.

            “Should I get something to cover her with?” Constable Koo asked the detective, intending the question rhetorically.

            “Hmm…no,” the detective said after a studied pause. “Let them gape and gawk. It is better that way. It might discourage some of the more sensible ones from doing…whatever caused her to end up here. Wait till forensics have come and done what they need to do.

II.

            “It’s alright hun, take your time,” Constable Koo folded her hands around a steaming cup of tea, mirroring the trembling girl sitting across the table. The generous plate of stir-fried Alaskan King Crab with ginger and onions meant to sop up a pounding hangover, which in turn provided the excuse for such splurging by an impoverished student, had grown lukewarm. The incident had occurred just after she had downed a bowl of salt egg drop soup.

            “It was like, can life have please prepared me for this? Oh my God. I mean, I live Downtown because I don’t want to have to deal with…ugh! It was awful!”

            “It’s alright. I just need you to tell me what happened.”

            “Okay, okay. Psyche!…psyche!…Okay…whew. We were just starting our meal, me ‘n Parvaneh. We’re roommates, and we…I was out partying last night. There was a midterm yesterday morning. I’m an ACS major. So, you know, you gotta relax, celebrate. ‘Cause I probably failed but, whatever, right? Anyway, I woke up like noon, or one. Yeah, it was more like one, one-thirty. She’s like, ‘oh, girl, you don’t need to go to friggin’ Burger King or poutine or whatever. My friend’s uncle’ – that’s her friend, this girl Charmaigne – ‘he has this restaurant, ‘n it’s like an ordinary Chinatown dive spot but the food is actually really super authentic, like, white people hardly ever go there and BlogTO just gave it this awesome review, so we should totes hit up there instead.’ And I’m like, umm, rent? And she’s like ‘I’m paying,’ so, yeah, obviously.”

            “Constable Koo scribbled furiously, silently cursing the wrist-cramping torrent of vocal fry.

            “…So, like, we came here and ordered our food and, of course, ‘cause it’s like almost 3 o’clock by then, so there’s not many people, I make sure we grab a window seat. ‘Cause I’m dumb, right? Haha!”

            “Nobody said you’re – “

            “…And it’s my fault I have to get freakin’ goddam PTSD right? Because I totally deserve to have to be taking meds and seeing a shrink for the rest of my life. I dunno, she looked like friggin’ one of those sex slaves that was locked in a basement for ten years and gets out, or like on that zombie drug that made that guy eat off the homeless guy’s face.”

            “Bath salts. Sorry, please, try to tell me the things you yourself saw and heard. Only those.”

            “Umm, okay. So, this psycho zombie girl comes walking out of nowhere – she was on something right? Or she was crazy?”

            “Well, we don’t know…”

            “Because she’s like, falling over herself and shaking, spazzing out, and you can hear her growling or spitting, ‘n her eyes are like white ‘n red ‘n she’s falling into cars and thrashing around. ‘N there’s spit ‘n foam coming out of her mouth like she’s gonna bite somebody.”

            Constable Koo ceased trying to guide her subject and took down fact and raving speculation together.

            “I was so scared she was gonna try ta break the window, and nobody even tried to lock the door. She could have come in the door, like, literally just walked in and bit somebody or clawed their face off or something.”

            “Okay hun, you’ve been a great help, thanks.” Constable Koo got up and left Becca Thompson for the EMS folks to take care of. A case of shock which would probably pass soon enough.

            Outside the side-rear entrance of the restaurant, Parvaneh Esfandiari was shuffling back and forth, hands tucked deep within her sweater. She had insisted on sun and fresh air before she would talk to the police. Now she was shivering like a malaria patient. It was better, though, than sitting in the same place, everything exactly how it was when she saw…whatever that was. The sun would wash away the images for a few hours yet.

            “Need a blanket ‘er somethin’? We keep a couple in the cruiser,” the police sergeant chivalrously offered the shuddering, wild-eyed damsel.

            “No.”

            “Okay, no problem. If you could tell me, as you saw it, what went on back there…”

            “I can tell you what I saw, but that doesn’t mean I understand it. Was she on crack? An addict or a prostitute?”

            “We don’t know yet, ma’am, we’re just opening the investigation now. Definitely keep ya posted, though.”

            “That’s the weird thing,” Parvaneh stared emptily at the pigeons, the seagulls, the blank tiled wall of the LCBO opposite. “She was dressed like a student. Okay maybe a student who’s going clubbing. Her face and hair ‘n stuff didn’t look like a street person. Not to judge or stereotype but…”

            “’Course not. Nobody’s judging you here. We’re just tryin’ ta figure out what happened to this young lady and why, get justice for her…”

            “Is there a why? But, really, serious?”

            “’S’what we’re tryin’ ta find out. Now, as fer what you saw…”

            “You know already. Aren’t you talking to Becca and the people who work at the restaurant? I guess, if you want.” Parvaneh told a tale similar in all the essential to that told by her friend and lunch companion, minus the insinuations of a zombie-hood and murderous intent.

            “Great. You’ve been a real help.”

            “It’s just,” Parvaneh withdrew a slender hand from her sleeve, stalling the cop with a graceful gesture; “You have to wonder…you guys live with this stuff everyday…what’s got to happen to someone to…to lead them to that point that they can…toss themselves away like that for…and she was beautiful, too, looking past what happened to her.”

            “Fer sure; real tragedy,” the hearty policeman’s responses sounded canned; perfunctory. In fact, they were expressions of sincere sentiment, clumsily spoken but deeply felt. “A beautiful life ahead of her…”

            “I mean, how do people lose themselves so bad they’ll do that to themselves, you know what I mean? Pushed so far you don’t mind the risk of losing your humanity because that’s already been taken from you,” the philosophical Persian contemplated, venting her ideas about depression and loneliness in an increasingly dehumanizing urban world, but her words failed her. She sighed, then spoke no more. She had encountered the basic type of which this Sergeant McMurtry was a representative sample before, largely on road trips with her girlfriends, where they’d had to stop for meals, gas or vehicle repairs in the Shield Country to the north, the Ottawa Valley or the Niagara Peninsula…a common type among the ‘natives’; friendly, pleasant, but not the sort you could share your artistic, cosmopolitan soul with and stand even the remotest chance of being understood, let alone empathized with.

            While his uniform colleagues were interviewing witnesses, Detective Inspector Julius Ngai was a not doing very much: pacing slowly the ‘L’ of sidewalk around the restaurant, or standing still and looking at everything and nothing in particular, every ten or twelve minutes walking a few dozen metres along the road in a random direction from the intersection, then returning. He was, however, thinking a great deal and he looked stern and authoritative enough that none but absolute rookies ever took him to task for not appearing appropriately flustered with busy-ness. His seeming idleness was an act of thoroughly strategic purpose, essential to be performed as soon as sufficient evidence was available to permit it – in this case, he was satisfied that he already had plenty to work with. This purpose was nothing more and nothing less than to observe (without being distracted by too much ‘doing’) the environment in which the victim (and probably the perp, as well) acted out their role; to see, hear, smell…daydream, if possible…perceive how the light, the weather, the ether of the place might have acted on the psyche—if he was thinking in Chinese, he would say ‘the spirit’ – of the parties involved. In coarse, superficial crimes—a bank robbery or a mutual capping over drug trade turf—such esoteric measures were unnecessary. The plot being already known, the crassly material methods of the forensics men; their blind accumulation of quantitative data would suffice to woo a jury and secure a conviction. Here, too, they would answer the surface level ‘what’ soon enough. Nonetheless, it was obvious from the sheer nightmare-inducing strangeness—judging by the witness’ statements, that was the real horror of the thing—of this incidence, that more creative approaches than were known to the whitecoats were called for. Ngai was familiar with the spirit of the place; of Chinatown and its environs, eastwards out to Sherbourne and Broadview, west to Little Portugal; the campuses of Ryerson, OCAD and the University of Toronto. He’d worked primarily in the TPS’ 52 Division for most of his nearly fifteen years in Canada. The trick now was to understand how it would act on the soul of the vic.

            Ngai returned to the Xam Yu to find Constable Koo occupying herself making notes. Two police-marked panel vans were hunting for a free slice of curb. “Well, looks like they’re here to handle the gross and nasty end of the business. Sergeant McMurtry can hold the fort and get cursed off in Cantonese by the owner of the joint. Why don’t you and I go for a stroll, nuh?” It was a rare case of homicide, or domestic violence, or sexual assault where, beneath her stony exterior, Constable Koo didn’t find herself getting worked up into rage, pity, indignation or a combination of the three. She was glad for an excuse to leave the site of trauma and misery and set out on the warpath to justice – in the nitty-gritty fight against the ‘bad guys,’ her zeal was unflagging. “Oh, but take a photograph of her before we do.”

            Jenny winced. “Like this? She’s prolly a student. Even if she’s not, girls these days all have Facebook and things, prolly got a driver’s license too and a university ID. Do you really think people want us going around showing them pictures…of stuff like that?”

            “And do you think that people – the odd fellow with a particular fetish aside —like seeing that on the streetcorner? She may have all of the IDs you mention and more, and I expect her biography will prove to be less of a mystery than you imagine. I’ll wager she didn’t slink away from some clapboard shack in Hickton, Manitoba and drift through twenty-five years of couch-surfing and shelter-hopping prior to her getting here. Those pictures, though—on her social media; they will be filtered and edited; her hair will be a different colour; she will be fatter or skinnier and be wearing a difference face of makeup. Whereas, here is how she would have gone about on the streets, shopping, eating, commuting. Minus the foam and spasms, of course.” Jenny grudgingly snapped the picture, comforting herself that she would delete it off her phone when she got home.

            It was early evening and the new school year was in full swing. The close-packed Bay-&-Gables, sheltering from the busy street in the shadow of shaggy century-old lindens, were murmuring with young life—it was warm enough still that most houses hadn’t buttoned up and turned on the heat. Always, somewhere, to left or right, someone was hurrying out to ride off on a battered bicycle; a chattering cohort, bellies full of noodles, gourmet burgers or hotpot, backpacks full of new textbooks, were returning to their sharehouses like swallows to their caves.

            “You’d think half the street is rented out as dorms for students,” Jenny remarked, redundantly.

            “Mmh, yes, about that. The remainder is elderly folks who bought a generation or two ago, and Tong houses. You know, Triad meeting spots. Not so much anymore, though. Losing its character, sadly.”

            “I mean, ugh, if she’s a student or lives like one, what, we just go knocking on doors and hope whoever has the info we want doesn’t also have class at that moment? I bet the landlords don’t even have complete records.”

            “If they don’t, her classmates will fill us in. And, no, goodness; we’re not going to bother with all that. Just look at the houses. Take your time. You have your uniform on; if people catch you staring at them, it’s not stalking. They’re the ones who’d better be nervous.”

            “Okay, but what am I looking for?”

            “Trends. Fashion. None of these debauched savages belongs here. They never had houses of their own before. They chose to live, at considerable expense, in a famously exotic part of the City and to set up house here. Lacking cars, they would furnish their dwellings from nearby. What sorts of things do they buy, that are things of this place?”

            “Oooh. Hmm…I see a lot of those cheap roll-up grass mats that get trashed in a couple weeks by winter boots ‘n stuff. Lessee…flowers in vases, vases like you can buy in the pottery ‘n curio shops here but which look like fancy antiques. Guess you can get the flowers around here, too; there’s those Viet places, west on Dundas. There’s a Buddhist knot charm…okay, maybe that house is locals…”

          “Granny and grandpa Chan ride hipster bicycles and have a giant pride flag sticker in the window? My my, and Kensington Market is a squatters’ camp for Tibetan refugees, is it?”

            “Ugh, whatever. I’m trying. So, you’re saying…we hit up the curio shops, the Tap Phong Trading Company, florists, and, lemme guess…restaurants that serve food that soaks up booze and are open late?”

            “Ah, you will earn your promotion soon enough!”

            For reasons presumably Ngai’s own, the pair circled up north to College Street, then worked their way south along Spadina. The Tap Phong Trading Co proved a waste of time. Customers in that store – enormous by Downtown standards – were too numerous, and the cops only succeeded in causing a checkout girl to squawk and wave her hands in shock. The smiley, hunchbacked proprietor of a maze of a curio shop on Dundas, on the other hand, had a sharp recollection – albeit of brief and limited interactions. Speaking in Cantonese, he jabbed a finger at Jenny’s cellphone: “Yeeas, yes, she comes here before, last three, four years. Maybe every two, three months.”

            “You are quite certain it is this woman; there are a lot of young ladies her age living around here, and they tend to dress alike, look alike,” Ngai was respectful of the old man and suspected he had indeed seen the girl in question (she had to get her discount Oriental curios and New-Agey good luck charms somewhere, after all), but, for investigatory purposes, it was important to squeeze firmly.

            “Hng…” the shopkeeper scratched his bald head and adjusted his glasses. “Yep. A hundred of a hundred, definite it’s her I’m thinking of. She didn’t look like this, though. What happened to her?”

            “Oh, murdered.”

            “Aiyah! Heavens! She was here two months ago, after Canada Day. Maybe it was in August. Same hair. Same looks. Alive, though. A killer! In this neighbourhood! You won’t mention my store in the papers, will you?” The old man walked up and down the aisles, shaking his head as he contemplated unsold stock and next year’s lease. “She didn’t die here; I’ve got nothing to do with it. I don’t even know the white devil girl’s name!”

            “Ease your heart, venerable sir; her body, as you see it on the phone, is lying out front of the Xam Yu Restaurant.”

            “You don’t say?” Intrigue instantly replaced fear in the shopkeeper’s eyes. A keen observer might suspect he was flipping through a Rolodex in his head, wondering who he might go to for hot gossip on the matter, and if there were any rumours of past sins swirling around the owner of the Xam Yu – such as he might offer as his tithe of fertilizer for the grapevine. “Xam Yu…you know, I heard one of the chefs there likes to take trips to Montreal. Ugly, pockmarked guy. You know the saying about the toad eating the swan meat? Eh, heheh!”

            “Mmhmm, ah, yes, but we are quite sure the murder has nothing to do with anyone who works at the Xam Yu, except that it was their bad luck she died on their doorstep.” Technically, it was as likely the girl had OD’s on one of the potent and unpredictable synthetic drugs, new varieties of which seemed to be appearing every month, all of which caused somebody to go apeshit and create long-term employment for police psychiatrists. Saying ‘murder,’ saying it frequently and with brooding emphasis, had an effect on witnesses and suspects that was often very useful. “But, we would like to know: what sort of things did she buy?”

            “Wah, everything! Different things. Vases. Flower pots. I remember, she bought a Yixing red clay tea set. Not real Yixing clay, of course. She also really liked bead bracelets and charms, like in that tray there, the ones with Buddhist symbols and scriptures on them. She bought one of these,” he picked up a miniature scroll made out of bamboo slats upon which characters were inscribed. “The Ksitigarbha Sutra; Dei Tsang Pu Sa Bun Yuen Ging. Strange, since she couldn’t read it. You can’t really hang them up for decoration, like the rice paper and silk paintings. Those sell a lot better.”

            “They all look the same; the bamboo scrolls,” Ngai challenged the old man here: “You sure that was the one she bought? That specific text?”

            “Yes. I’m telling you, I thought it was strange – she asked for it by name…someone had written it on a piece of paper she showed me, sorry, that’s what I meant. I remembered, because she couldn’t read it, but she was still so picky. I had to scrounge it out from the storage room in back. I could have given here anything, I suppose. It wouldn’t matter. But I am an honest man.”

            “Anything else?”

            “How should I know? Random kitchen stuff, I guess, and one of those hanging gourds, like the ones up by the door there.”

            Despite having been hired as part of a diversity push by the department back in the day, when they desperately needed to improve relations with the Chinese community, Jenny often found that she could not make head or tail of the chats Ngai had with civilians, especially elderly ones. Trying to come up with something relevant, she asked: “Did she, uh, ever appear intoxicated when you saw her?”

            “Yes, yes,” the man furrowed his brow, tut-tutting in curmudgeonly fashion.  “Oh yes, that’s these students nowadays for you. The parents in this country, they don’t teach their children respect and manners. You see how they grow up! Yes, I remember that one. A couple times I’ve seen her come in with friends, other girls. They’re pointing and picking up this or that, giggling like monkeys; laugh like they’re about to burst! I can’t understand a word they’re saying, but I can see there’s nothing to be laughing about. Those times, I’m glad I have those ‘you break, you buy’ stickers all over the place. Mind you, when they do smash something, you can guarantee they are going to make a scene, shout and curse, and start arguing about how that’s not legal, saying they didn’t see the sign – as if that makes it okay! – act like they’re the victim. Mother fuh…next thing they’ll accuse you of assaulting them. Spoiled brats, that’s all the young people are in this country!”

            Ngai listened reverently as the shopkeeper finished his rant. When they left, it was dark, with a nip in the air more early autumn than late summer. “Can we head back to the station now?” Jenny pleaded. “My brother’s in from Vancouver and my parents are having dinner…and if we’re gonna check out restaurants next, that’s like thirty or forty places here…”

            “I think we can head back,” Ngai acceded; “You have reports to type up. But we won’t have to hit every establishment in the neighbourhood – you asked a brilliant question back there. You are learning.”

            “What? What question?”

            “Why, about the vic’s drinking habits. Now we’ve learned she was a loutish lass, too. I’ll wager she liked to chew gum noisily, and talk out the sides of her teeth, raising her tone at the end of every sentence, and that this was part of what irritated our jolly old shopkeep back there, though he may not specifically remember it.”

            “Uh-huh. How does that help us, exactly?” Jenny was stumped.

            “Ah! Student, of some kind – we can safely rule out engineering and medicine – she lives here full time, for a couple years; a fair bit of walking, exposed to all weather. Those tanning salon ‘gams’ – the body of the sporty fitspo girl, rather than the waifish model. That broad mouth, strong jaw, good bone structure…well-formed, slightly projecting teeth…likes her meat, she does. Booze. Winter. Attractive…more Ryerson or OCAD than U of T, hence she is entering Chinatown from the east, along Dundas. Oh, I think I know the precise establishment we ought to visit first!”

            Jenny sighed. It amazed her when Ngai pulled these elaborate theories seemingly of his a…thin air, and had to explain to someone, anyone just how his chain of logic infallibly came together. Not that his explanations ever made things any clearer to the person he was telling them to; it was more like a compulsion. He’d made detective, and everybody somehow tolerated him. And she was – still – a constable…

           “Oh, you!” Carmelo Otranto affected a lisp as he playfully slapped the back of Charmaigne’s hand, which had intruded into his sector of the table. In a lightning offensive, the melamine pincers had seized a cube of hong shao rou, red and stripey as a block of liquorice allsorts, plucking it out from the pond of blackish soy broth hedged by emerald bok choy in which it reposed. “Doesn’t your mom feed you?”

            “Hey, I’m doing you a favour,” Carmelo’s dining companion huffed in mock-seriousness. “Oh my God, ohm, nom…you’sh shouldn’t be ordering this shtuff…mmh…wow; yeah, remember me with gratitude next time you’re in Flash or Woody’s and you get hit on.” Carmelo poked at his belly and sighed. “It’s weird you people – no offence – are…well, so many of you are foodies, but yer so friggin’s self-conscious about oh, you gotta be super thin ‘n have a six pack ‘n stuff.”

            “Uff, I don’t go in for that; they’re all so snotty and narcissistic. I just don’t wanna be ugly and gross.”

            “Hah, ah, hahah, you should let my mom cook or you! My dad is a hardcore Buddhist. He doesn’t care what we eat, but my mom likes to please him, so, like, by default most of the dishes are vegetable-y and watery.”

            “Which is why you are stealing my fatty pork…”

            “Yes.”

            “…Which you could have ordered yourself…”

            “Yes.”

            “Where’s Tamara?” Carmelo thought of the missing member of the trio that had arranged this meet-and-eat at the Northeast Chinese Restaurant, 427 Dundas. “She can’t blame us for starting eating already. We’ve been marching around town all day, and I didn’t eat lunch, ‘cause I wanted to appreciate it better. It’s…cruel of her.”

            “Huh…” Charmaigne checked the cell phone resting beside her plate. “No messages since she said ‘omw’ at 5:15. Dunno where she is now.”

            “Lives near OCAD, right?”

            “No, closer to U of T, actually. Up past of the circle with the creepy haunted building…I think. I’ll order some dumplings – they make them so crunchy here. Like, slow burnt just right, all over. Tamara can share them when she reaches – if I leave her any.”

            “And then you have an excuse to split the bill with her!” Carmelo grinned chimpishly. “Man, though, there’s such a thing as fashionably late, but then there’s just ‘I can inconvenience people, therefore, I am hot stuff.’”

            “Awww, come on. She’s an artist; a diva. You wouldn’t like her if she was the kinda person who showed up on time for everything. Artists don’t usually notice time in the same way as us normal people.”

            “Hmph!” Carmelo crunched a node of umami laced bok choy. “I dunno why this kind of Chinese food didn’t take off here sooner; I can see myself coming here all the time in winter. And this lady who runs it; she’s like a woman who runs a gambling parlour or a brothel in a Hong Kong movie. Some people are literally made for their jobs…like Fate gave them a specific face, voice ‘n everything, and it should honestly be forbidden by law for them to be anything besides their chosen calling – chosen by Fate, not necessarily by them themselves.”

            “But what if someone studies something for years, throws themselves into a career…who gets to decide, oh, no, you gotta go do something else?”

            “Fate? I don’t know. That’s how society ran in mediaeval times, or, look, India, they had the caste system for thousands of years. Besides, if you were an artist or a musician or a theatre performer and you were actually any good, some lord or lady, or the Royal Court, or a daimyo if you were in Japan, would take you in and support you.”

            “Yeah, absolutely, now that I think about it. Yeah, how did artists ‘n performers actually make a living in those days, with no welfare? I never really thought about it before. Kinda like now, with government grants and stipends.”

            “But the shit they turned out was actually beautiful, unlike now. ‘Oooh, I took this reproduction of a Renaissance painting of the Virgin Mary and threw poo on it, ooh, I am such an artiste,how dare you not fund my existence!’ Speaking of grants and subsidies, wasn’t Tamara trying to get some? Some ‘a dat guv’mint gravy? You know, gotta ensure she doesn’t starve to death after graduation…or have to work.”

            “Hmm,” Charmaigne wriggled her nose and rested her lips on her fist. “Yaaah, I know she applied. I mean, not like an application you put in a letter for…it was called, like, the Governor General’s Prize, or the Queen’s Prize, or something like that. It’s this competition through her school, or through the AGO, I guess. They have the students get recommended by a prof, then there’s some big art show at the AGO where they put all the pieces on display, with an artist’s statement, then some panel or committee decides who gets the grant money. Like professors, academics, famous artists, donors – not necessarily art people, which is something I remember her complaining to me about.”

            “Oh, Tamara was in a show? Which didn’t happen in some indie café or queer bookstore? Wow.” Carmelo slowly clapped his hands.

            “Yeah. I think it was back in the summer. August sometime. Or the beginning of September.”

            “It’s October tomorrow. Did she win?”

            “I dunno. Like, I’ve seen her since then, but we never actually had a serious chat about that kind of thing. Jobs, future ‘n stuff – none of that. Remember I live out in Markham, so I’m not really spending a lot of time Downtown in the summer, and September’s always a crazy month.”

            “Can ask her when she arrives. That’s a pretty big deal…the difference between being an avant garde socialite and a barista for life, frustrated because your life is over from the day you leave uni. Think it’s something worth talking about, don’t you? Hmph…I know someone who was in that show, too, now you remind me of it, and she definitely won something, because she had a party celebrating it at this new restaurant…I forget the name, but it’s focused all around charcuterie boards, native Canadian foods, that stuff. It was in the news a few months ago because there were these vegan cyclists who were protesting outside because they didn’t like how he served deer and seal and things. Supposedly it’s been booked since then. Any publicity, right? It’s a bar, too, obviously. She couldn’t have been bluffing, because she bought the drinks for everybody all night, and normally she’s always broke. Steph Botrel. She used to live in Markham, too, before uni.”

            “Steph Botrel. Right, yeah. Actually, I do know her.” Charmaigne kept her words polite, but her features shaded into the pitiless visage of female jealousy. “She went to OCAD, huh? Makes sense. She wasn’t really…she didn’t have the mindset for serious academics, you know.”

            “Yep. Pretty awesome painter, though. Drawing, I mean, mostly. Very impressive, mhmm.” Carmelo couldn’t help betraying a devious smile. He gleefully gnashed a saucy mushroom stolen from Charmaigne’s plate. “Mmh. You know, I think I could turn vegetarian, if I belonged to your culture and could eat Chinese every day. Farsu magruand spaghetti carbonara are too delicious, however.”

III.

            The diner had half stood up, his hand slapped the restaurant-logo-stamped billfold closed, the feet of the green metal chair scraped noisily back on the cobbles. To all appearances, he was about to step out of the shade under the awning bearing the words “Espresso etc. French Café” in Gallic tricolour…and he locked up like a mime on a Paris boulevard. Slowly, he descended back into his seat, hunching over his plate, sheltering the billfold with his arm to discourage the waiter from coming round again. He wanted to avoid anything that might possibly draw attention to him; even the minor eye-draw of being the only table on the patio which the waiter (conspicuously uniformed in white shirt and black vest, à la fin de siècle Paris) was attending to. The diner was a regular at Espresso etc., too, and the scrupulously charming staff made a point of knowing their regulars by name. What if the waiter said it – and loudly? Anyone walking along the sidewalk would hear, if their ears were tuned to pick it out…and hers were!

            “What’s the matter?” His tablemate, Helen Weisbrot, PhD, leaned across to whisper. She furtively scanned the street out of the corner of her eye, suddenly curious, yet sensible enough not to blow her friend’s cover by getting up or otherwise obviously looking around.

            “Sssh…keep talking. Talk about the food or something.”

            “Ahhm…’I should have tried some of your…what’s that, krampouezh aux champignons? The aroma is to die for’…Ugh, what’s going on? Just tell me.”

            “Shhh!”

            “Tell me or I’ll ask louder.”

            “Argh, okay. I saw somebody,” the man kept a wide, uneasy eye on the street running westward as he spoke in suppressed tones. “Somebody who I do not wish to see me. Not right now.”

            “I understand. Who? I didn’t know you had enemies, Radovan.”

            “Enemies? Oh, enemies…no. This is a student. Former student. Yes, former.”

            “At U of T?”

            “No, no. I believe she is university now. OCAD-U. Feck, what boolsheet!”

            “Oh, wow, you never told me you were teaching at OCAD! That’s a side of you I haven’t seen before.”

            “There are other sides of me you have not seen, either,” Radovan thought to himself. “No….I am interested in art, yes, but I do not teach. This was…in darker times. When I was…ehhh…teacher for…elementary school. S…Substitute teacher.”

            “Oh. Ohhh. I see…” Dr. Weisbrot was a cheerful hippie, but not immune to the prejudices of her profession. She felt like someone whose friend has just casually admitted to having a loathsome-yet-not-tragic STD. “You never told me about that. I thought you were a professor in Yugoslavia, before you went to work at U of T.”

            “Yes. I was. A professor. When it was Yugoslavia. Then there was a time when I did other things. Nobody recognized my qualifications when I first came here. Not until they published my books in English. Oh, hoho, then…then! ‘Oh, please, expert of Balkan history and politics, please come teach future diplomats and NGO workers.’ Pegh! If you had been consulting me thirteen years ago, you would not have made so many stupid mistakes!”

            “Hahah, aww, don’t get mad at me! Oh my gosh, what was it like, teaching…elementary school? I’ve often wondered myself; wished I could try working with younger kids, see what it’s like, you know?”

            “It was…ehhh…” Radovan Vranic blew into his beard. “Pfff…there are things I have done in my life, in my past, things which I do not talk about. It does not matter. It is past. All I will say, there was a girl in a school they shoved me into more often than I would have liked. Grade 7, grade 8. The girls in this country, they grow up so fast, so, I see her, passing on the street today, right now, and I recognize her. Also, I saw her before, maybe, one month, six weeks.” He exhaled gutturally.

            “Ah…is that so? Heh…” Dr. Weisbrot shifted in her chair, moving back, stiff with discomfort – moral discomfort. What Radovan had just said…fair enough, it might be true in a technical sense, but…there was something not a little unsettling about hearing it from a male teacher, and a grizzled, aggressive, patriarchal one at that. The story sounded like something that might ought to be reported to the university administration…

            “I did not remember who she was, until she mentioned the school. Egh, thett school! I did not remember the name, of course, but I remembered a girl with thett face. She was very good at painting, drawing; good marks. Quiet. No friends. One of the obedient children, which are good to teach, but I would be embarrassed if she was my daughter. Most of those children, they are yammering birds and chattering monkeys. This country wastes its money by believing it can educate them. It was…there was, at the Art Gallery –“ He pointed to the building resembling a grounded zeppelin, which sat across the street. “An exposition. Called the…Prince or Duke of this or thett, legacy estate stipend…I forget. A show for the art of students; it was a competition for prize and payments to live on, from a fund.”

            “Six weeks…in August?” Dr. Weisbrot consulted her memory. “Oooh, you mean the Lord Beaverbrook Trust.”

            “Is thett so?”

            “Yeah, it had to be! Exactly like you said; it’s to ensure that the best artists coming out of the universities don’t have to abandon their calling for the sake of crude survival. That’s because the guy who established the trust, some British aristocrat…actually, scratch that; he was a Canadian who got a British title…he was an art collector and patron. He wanted to varnish his legacy and help ensure that a tiny glimmer of proper classical painting was preserved against the tide of ‘degenerate’ modern art that was taking over the scene and making all the money – this was back in the sixties, I think. So, he set this arrangement up to provide money to support new classically-trained artists, or, anyway, artists who worked in the kinds of styles he liked, support them while they’re trying to find their way, make connections in the right circles…you know, the kind of schmoozing you gotta do to survive in the art world and actually make a living off it before you’re dead. Or to live off your patrons, if you wanna swing that way.”

            “Sugar daddy.”

          “Yeeah…that’s what I’m talking about. Hey, it happens. It’s only awarded every other year, right?”

            Radovan shrugged.

            “Anyhow, I went to the show. Some really impressive works; it’s so fascinating to see how spirits raised in our modern world use traditional techniques and mediums to integrate and express the themes and experiences relevant to them. Sorry, you were saying?”

            “Yes. I was on the committee which determined the winners.”

            “Oh, wow, that’s awesome! You should have told me.” To Dr. Weisbrot and most of her social set, spending hours bickering on a panel of art snobs, thereby being part of the ‘scene’; creating it…why, it seemed like an incredible and profound responsibility…even though it was no difference in essence than her tedious, workaday tasks like grading papers and attending faculty meetings.

            “Ehhh….awesome to you, perhaps. Determining the winners…it also means you determine the losers. Thett is not so simple a matter as it looks. It can be very difficult. You have no idea.”

            “Well, I mark my students. Same thing. What was so difficult about this particular contest?”

            “A few moments ago, you saw me? I act funny. We are about to leave, I sit down to stay. Why? Because I see this girl, walking part, going thett way. This girl…Tamara…I forget the last name. English names, egh, how do you remember them when they do not mean anything? Taylor Miller, Tanner, Cooper. So short, only sounds, not words. Tanner – what, your ancestors like to become brown in the sun?”

            “Oh, actually, it means…”

            “Foolishness! This girl, this Tamara, I remember because…Maybe she saw the list of the judging committee members on the website, or a brochure. Maybe she came to the show one day and did not reveal herself, but she watched us judging. It was three days, four days. For sure, she remembered who I was, because she told me about when I would come to her elementary school, to teach. Substitute teach. I thought nobody knew thett; nobody remembered. She came to see me.”

            “At the AGO?”

            “No. In my office. At the faculty building.”

            “At the U of T? I thought it was only OCAD student at the show.”

            “Yes. U of T. Maybe she used the internet to find me? How do I know? She looks like a student, so why is the security going to stop her? She is a student going to discuss a paper with her professor, they must assume. I do not know her at first, but I do not pay attention to all the faces. Then she tells me a story. I remember. Okay; what do you want? Simple, she says. She knows I am a judge on the committee. She takes out an artist statement, very long – in the show, the rules say one page, no more. She starts to read, so I will understand her piece better. I say, it would be unfair to the other contestants who only get one page, and after that, their painting must speak for itself. She says, oh, but my piece has a more complicated meaning, so it needs a longer artist’s statement to achieve the same degree of explanation. I wanted to say, if you have to make a longer artist’s statement that means your work is not as good; it cannot speak for itself. I do not say this. I keep it to myself. This is a mistake, big mistake. She sees this is not working, so she tries another tactic. She tells me about her sufferings; how she was raised only by her mother; how she was in…Catholic boarding school? Maybe…And the nuns, she says, they beat her and oppress her, and the priests did all kinds of terrible things to her, and her art is how she expresses her suffering, to cope with the pain. It is sad to hear, da. I do not want to be mean; to kick her out, so, okay, yes, yes. I listen.”

            “And?”

            “And? I asked her thett myself. Thett’s it! She wants me to vote for her because she has had bad experiences. Because somebody did naughty things to her many years ago. I do not know if it is true or not, and how can it matter? I am judging paintings. How do I know thett another student, equal quality, equal skill, maybe they are an orphan, maybe they are crippled or they live on the street? Most of them, most of the students are struggling. So how can I give only her special considerations? I cannot. I do not want her to get angry, start yelling and screaming, so I tell her, okay, okay. I’ll think about it. The next day, she comes again. This time, she cries first. Then, she makes me an offer, a bargain. Lucky, there is Narine, the secretary, she has come to bring me coffee. She knocks on the door, which was always open, reaches inside and knocks. She makes it clear to the girl that she has been standing there for a long time, heard everything. The girl, her face turns red and she leaves, leek-etty-spleet.”

            “That was lucky! Would’a been a real doozy to try explain that one to admin, if it had turned into a he-said, she-said. Boy…what did you say her name was again? Did she win?”

            “Tamara! And I don’t know last name. She lost. No prize money. Nothing.”

            “Blaine! Tamara Blaine! I remember her painting…there was only one ‘Tamara’ in the show, far as I know. Lost? Her? Oh my gosh, how? My girlfriends and me agreed, it was one of the best pieces in the whole show. Heck, if it was up to me, I would have given her top prize. Lemme guess, you were the deciding vote; the one that made sure it went to somebody else? Probably browbeat some of the other judges into ditching her, too?”

            “Ehhh…deciding vote? We are judges. We all decide. I admit, the technique was not behd…”

            “Not bad? Whah…huh? Excuse me? Not bad? It was freaking amazing!”

            “A high degree of patience, workmanship, one could see thett, yes. Regardless, what of the themes? The expression of theme, of message. It was too…blunt. Too rude. Direct. It leaves you with nothing to interpret, nothing to discover. Thett is not good for classic painting. Even for a small drawing, it is not good. And her…character…not thett it is a matter, but…ehhh…”

            “What? What is she like? I never met her in person. Now you’ve got me interested in this young lady of talent! I didn’t see her when she passed on the street, either – if that was the girl you’re talking about.”

            “Bweh, you think I am blind? Of course it was her! I would recognize her anywhere. Punk, drolja; everything tattoos, the hair in strange colours. Disgusting!”

            “Okay, okay, who won then? Who did you give the prize to?”

            “Oh, hohoh, very talented young lady. Beauty and also talent. I forget the name. It was a landscape scene.” Radovan placed his cellphone in front of Dr. Weisbrot. It displayed a complex, obviously carefully arranged scene, with a variety of people, plants, animals and architectural elements layered and interwoven. Due to the small size of the screen, it was a moment or two before Weisbrot figured out what everything was, and three or four moments more, before she grasped the underlying symbolism – no one would have jammed all those elements together without some ulterior purpose which the elements themselves, once you thought about them in their proper context, simultaneously declared.

            She could tell from the lack of reflection from a flash that the piece wasn’t even an oil painting; it was either a watercolour or gouache, and the lines delineating the basic forms were left visible. It couldn’t have been accidental; they looked like they might have been done with pen….the overall effect was crude compared to the softly moulded forms, shaped by colour, light and shadow, in Miss Blaine’s work. The colour, which filled the spaces between the lines in great, flat, barely modulated swaths, was positively cartoonish. True, she could see how the subject matter and the references and jokes inserted might amuse someone who could make all the abstruse connections in their heads, but…was Radovan serious? He honestly believed that this drawing…a mere drawing…deserved to win the competition? She glanced across the table and saw that Radovan was smiling expectantly. He straight-up expected that she was going to agree with his lunatic verdict. He couldn’t be that out of touch, could he?

            As for the subject…the landscape was a split combo of two places – Dr Weisbrot wasn’t sure if there was a progression in time between them or if they were meant to be actually nearby each other – a set of houses, set up as student dorms, and a rural, semi-forested scene….The houses were both old and mid-century Brutalist. Old, as in Victorian or Edwardian, but the style was not the same as the Bay & Gables she was familiar with. On second thought, they reminded her of Montreal. The rural part was cultivated, with corn, sunflowers, squashes, beans…she didn’t recognize all the plants…and in the background was a wood of birch, pine and maples – sugar maples, such as hadn’t thrived in Toronto for many a decade – and dairy cows, as well as abnormally large and round cats, generally in the same colour scheme as the cows. The cows were confined to one half of the drawing, the cats occurred throughout. The whole thing was in that unnatural but useful top-down-three-quarter perspective where most everything appears equidistant from the viewer, such as is commonly used in traditional Chinese and Japanese painting, wherever there is a need to depict a landscape with a great number of buildings and people – battles, festivals – the small details and gestures of which the artist wants to make sure the viewer can see…if they will be patient to study the whole vista, end to end. The denizens of these scenes were urban and rural, to match the buildings, though the distinction was not very sharp, since they were all in recognizably modern clothing. Almost all were clearly or probably white people; their hair and features presenting a shocking degree of uniformity. However, because her Metropolitan life had not trained her to look at Europeans from an ethnographic lens, Dr. Weisbrot, unlike her colleague, failed to grasp the nuanced touches crammed in by the artist. Studying it longer, Dr. Weisbrot noticed that the figures were engaged in intellectual and political activities – writing, fiery discussions over coffee and beer, singing songs accompanied by flags and acoustic instruments – as well as occupations associated with land and home, like farming, milking cows, hunting beavers. Moreover, though the clothes were modern, there was something in their arrangement, and in the poses and expressions of the figures, which reminded her of some other art she had seen before…although those other images had been professional oil paintings, whereas this was basically cartoon line drawing, albeit impressively meticulous.

            “The flags! Look at the flags!” Radovan urged, impatient. “How come I am not from this country, and yet I get it, and you do not?”

            “Oooh! Hahah! Now I realize – they’re all Québec separatists…and these ones in the town…there’s the evil Anglo Mountie, and officials stoking up the ‘ethnic vote’ among some people who don’t look like they speak much French, and there’s the patriotic students, plotting rebellion I guess. And the fair dairy maids, and the bold young farmer lad with his rifle; looks like he’s resolved to fight for independence or something. Huh…almost everybody is smoking. Oh, but I remember that! When I’ve been to Montreal, and their women still don’t age like they do here…And the trees are all symbolic species. Why are there so many cats? My friend Céline, she had like three or four so, I see…Wait, now I remember….it’s like this series of paintings, about the guerrillas who rose up against the French Revolution, in this one part of the country. I forget the artist – there might have been a few. So, it’s a parody?”

          “The artist uses the modern perspective, like from video game. Full of meaning! Brilliant concept!”

           “Umm, it’s cute. It’s a little funny, I guess. And they clearly put in a lot of time…but, if you ask me, this is not what deserved to win, even if the theme of the show is kind of like, oh, classical art plus Canadiana, heritage plus modernity…”

            “Yes, maybe so. Happily, nobody asked you. They asked me. Panel was deadlocked. I unlocked it.”

            Radovan left his half of the bill plus a generous tip, then left, making sure to head east (although eventually he’d have to circle back westwards), with an eye over his shoulder.

IV.

            “Aiyah!” The hearty matron’s wail caused Carmelo and Charmaigne to drop their chopsticks – the owner of the restaurant, the woman who’d just let out an ear-splitting cry of exasperation, was right behind their heads, holding a tureen of nian yu dun qiezi (stewed catfish with eggplant) meant for the next table. They looked up at the woman, who they (being regulars at the establishment) knew affectionately as Saucy Mama, while they blinked like coked-up deer. “You see TV?” The woman pointed a strong chin and a stronger shoulder towards the television hanging from the ceiling above a houseplant-flanked fish tank. “The gee-url, somebody kill her. Eeih! People crazy! She is student. I seen her before. Eat here some time.”

            “Oh my God,” Charmaigne’s attention turned to the screen, which presently showed a reporter in front of the crime scene, the centrepiece of which had been removed. “Holy shit. That’s like a couple streets up from here.”

            “Yeah,” Carmelo stared in amazement. “Just think, if we’d walked to the intersection before we came in here and looked north, we probably would have seen it. Actually, we could go do that right now but…” The morsels of braised fatty pork on the plate in front of him suggested that running out to view a murdered human carcass was inadvisable. He naturally assumed it was murder (though the headline running across the screen merely stated “OCAD student found dead at Baldwin & Spadina”) because there were police visibly milling about behind the CityPulse reporter, and a parked blue-and-red-striped white van that had the words “Forensic Identification Services” on the side. You might hear about a student getting “struck by a vehicle” at a busy intersection, but “found dead?” That was…not normal.

            “Hush!” Charmaigne strained to hear the reporter and follow the banner text scrolling past underneath her.

            “Alright, alright.”

            “I wonder if Tamara knows her; knows the girl that got killed, I mean.”

            “Speak of the Devil…” Carmelo’s brow jumped as none other than Tamara Blaine came through the door and down the steps, tossing her bloated backpack onto one of the empty chairs.

V.

            The Homicide unit at 52 Division headquarters was summering with a desire for vengeance at a level rarely seen since the Creba shooting on Boxing Day, 2005. The steady exposure to the trickling cull of addicts, hobos, hookers, schizos – and individuals combining the preceding identities – whose population, while not huge, was more than in most of the neighbouring jurisdictions…it had the effect of either inflicting PTSD and making people transfer or quit, or of numbing the sentiments of the officers who had plough those fields, year in, year out. There was something that sucked the enthusiasm of pity out of you that came from meeting with case after case where there’s a homicide or an OD death, and you get all ‘affected’ by it, only to discover that the only person besides you who shows the slightest fraction of your emotional concern is an intern at CAMH, the vic’s social worker, or a landlord who is coming to terms with the fact that he will never be collecting that back rent he’s owed. All this is not to say that everyone working the beat in 52 Division becomes a hard-boiled, thin-blue-line warrior of the streets – it’s Toronto, not Rio. Nevertheless, there’s an undeniable difference in the feel of the thing when the victim is…let us not beat around the bush…a pretty (even hot) young girl, with a suburban background and her whole life ahead of her. It was approximately 7:00p.m. Few facts were conclusively known at this point, but the cops had got a name off an OCAD student card found along with a post-secondary student metropass, several chewing gum wrappers (assorted brands, both fruity and minty), six Tylenol, Kleenex, and $18.34 CAD in various denominations, in the numerous pockets of the deceased’s parka. None of her other garments had pockets, therefore nothing was retrieved from them.

            “Superintendent’s out front talking ta the press,” Sergeant McMurtry strode into the wall-less, cluttered main office, abuzz with keyboards, chit-chat, phones, and the bubbling of pot coffee. “Just back from interviewing the witnesses at the scene. Gaahd, that was fukkin’ waste of time. Took me ten, twenty minutes to get what was basically ‘me see same thing as him’ out of people.”

            “If a witness does not understand English or French, you’re supposed to obtain the assistance of an interpreter. We’ve got so many officers who speak Mandarin and Cantonese now…They might have felt stressed, talking to you,” Constable Koo recited a fifteen-year-old poster promoting multicultural community outreach that was still up beside one of the watercoolers.

            “Oh, they understood English just fine, trust me on that. Act like they all got something ta hide. Prolly do. Cat meat in the freezer, ‘er half a dozen relatives who came out of a shipping container in BC living in their basement.”

            “Ugh!” Jenny flushed like a beet, wishing she could hate Sergeant McMurtry. She had been flushing like a beet because of him her whole career, but never reported any of his obnoxious behaviour – a continually repeated lapse which she refused to see the reason for.

            “Go easy on them,” Ngai sleepily waved McMurtry off. “If they didn’t have secrets, they might as well tear down Chinatown and cover it all with more bloody condos. Regardless, if the Xam Yu served cha shao feline, you can rest assured I would have persuaded you that the owner had, oh, human trafficked a fragile and beautiful Asian princess and abused her as a sex slave, and let you volunteer to do the interrogation….no consequences when it comes out as an error, since the public would believe him guilty if he tried to sue you, because…because movies and TV. I think they are simply unlucky, in this case, the Xam Yu people.”

            “Well, she sure must’a got unlucky. Whatever her dealer gave her this time…geez, talk about a bad trip, eh.”

            “Which is why I keep saying, harm reduction –“ Jenny piped in but was silenced by another wave from Ngai.

            “It was an OD then, was it?” Ngai asked.

            McMurtry shrugged and flashed his palms at the Superintendent and reporters, unseen behind several doors and walls. “You can ask them. That’s what the brass decided we’re telling the media fer now. Boy, people are getting’ worked up about this one; just opened my phone from this afternoon. Ho-lee, talk about…it’s gonna be a pressure cooker, next few days. You headin’ home already?”

            “Yes,” Ngai nodded. “It’s too early in the evening; I need to get some rest for the night. And, as you say, we will be busy fellows the next few days, won’t we? ‘What the brass decided to tell the press,’ you say? If they decided, they don’t know, do they, now, then?”

            “I guess not. I mean, come on; they barely took the body away from the scene before I left. Coroner’s prolly not even had a look at her yet. Steph Botrel. Geez. My dad had an army buddy named Botrel. They had a farm about two miles up the road from us. Used ta go over there sometimes, ridin’ skidoos up through the back forty. Had a sugar bush, beaver pond. That’d really suck if it turns out they’re related. Too bad you don’t have better ‘bedside manner,’ Julius, ‘er they could send you to inform her folks. Her school says her home address is in Markham, right by you. ‘S’gotta be her parents; the address she used to apply, ‘cause no way she’s commuting that far fer school every day. Anyway, even if they’re just guessing, it’s gotta be in the ballpark. I mean, she wasn’t she ‘er stabbed, right?”

            “No, she was not, that is true. Are they going to release the identity to the press, too?”

            “Year. I mean, why the heck not? Must be loads’a people she went to school with, gonna wonder why she didn’t show up fer class, ‘n they’re memories haven’t been wiped out by weed ‘n shots yet. Gotta strike while the iron’s hot, eh?”

            “Mmh. I need to eat and I need to sleep. It’s rather odd, though, don’t you think? That her cell phone was not on her body?”

            “Yeah, sucks. We get spoiled these days. Remember how it was when all you had was landlines and address books that somebody wrote in with a pencil? Heh. Yeah, I agree, there’s somethin’ fishy about that – pardon the pun.”

            “Pun?”

            “Seafood restaurant?!?”

            “That’s not a…never mind. You were saying?”

            “Well, girl like that…She doesn’t look ‘cheap,’ if ya know what I mean. She’s prolly got the latest iPhone. Someone might have taken it off the body. ‘S’like a month’s salary, almost, if yer a waitress or something.”

            “Impossible!” Jenny protested. “We were on the scene no more than seven or eight minutes after…it…happened. Ten minutes, tops. And there was a whole crowd of people watching the whole thing…ugh! She was never without at least a twenty people who had their eyes on her at all times.”

            “Okay, I get’cha, but ya still gotta explain it, ‘cause there’s no bloody way in this day ‘n age a young lady like that’s getting’ by with just a rotary dial-up in her house.”

            “Maybe…maybe,” Jenny was fighting for the reputation of the deceased girl she never knew, but whose dignity, gawked at by wretched lechers and stung by salacious thoughts (so Jenny imagined), she took as her own. “She had, what, six Tylenol in her pocket? You don’t do that normally. Okay; if a girl needs a portable warehouse, she’d get her handbag. The normal dose is, what, two? ‘Don’t take more than two tablets every four hours’ or whatever. And they weren’t in anything, just loose in her pocket. Those things get soggy and pick up dust, and crumble if they’re in your pockets too long, and, come on, it’s just lazy and eww. I bet she was sick, or feeling sick. And since it’s not even flu season and the weather’s just started to get cool…”

            “Hence she would have just taken her parka out of storage, or just purchased it, if it is new,” Ngai helped Jenny out.

            “…It means she’s been feeling sick the last couple days. But she’s probably not actually sick. I mean, not from a real illness. You guys get where I’m going with this?”

            “Yeah, fer sure,” McMurtry stroked his chin, stubbly after a long shift on the streets. “I won’t argue with you there. Date rape drugs, some kind of slow poison, maybe. Jealous roommate puttin’ arsenic in her pumpkin spice lattes? Just gotta wait fer the coroner to run their tests, I guess. All we can do, right?”

            Inspector Ngai cocked his head back, staring off at nothing, the better to percolate the ideas brewing in his head— no; if he didn’t whip his tired self into going home right now, he’d be stuck at the office till 10:00 and need a ride home. He donned his hat and scarf, and went out to the parking lot, taking care to avoid the reporters and their judgy cameras and ‘common sense’ opinions.

VI.

            A dull, all-pervading wave of pain spread through Jacques Kennelly’s body from his standing-sore heels, up his spindly shins and bulging quads, converging and running up his spine to the base of his neck between shoulders like knotted blocks of vulcanized rubber. Sometimes he wondered if all that carefully cultivated muscle didn’t actually hinder his efficiency, measured over a whole workday – or worknight, rather, since, while KINE on Queen opened at 11:00 a.m., it did the vast majority of its business during a separate evening-night shift from 5:00 p.m. to midnight, after a daily close between 2:30 and 5:00. At this point on a Friday night – around 9:00-9:30 – the week’s quota of hacking through elk joints and splitting wild boar ribs from grilling would begin to tell; no amount of yoga and supplements could prevent it – he’d tried. Somehow taking painkillers for work-related aches felt wrong. Jacques had no special aversion to modern medicine per se, but his work and the image of himself he’d built through it, why, it was all about nature, survival, the wild, purity; popping a pill for pain caused by that stuff seemed hypocritical. Normally, whenever his body began to flag, Yulissa would stop by on her rounds between tables and kitchen and give him a massage while he stood and worked at the chopping block. Somehow her pointy little fingers found the exact spot; the nerves hidden beneath the rippling muscle. She had surprising strength in those small, plump hands; with a careful pressure she produced an effect both numbing and strangely stimulating. Nobody ever said anything because, as coworkers and customers were always telling him, he looked like Jon Snow from Game of Thrones, and such things get one a long way in the right circumstances. As for Yulissa, well, she was ‘thick,’ to be somewhat euphemistic, but with enough ‘bad girl’ in her looks and manner – a little ink, a piercing or two in the right places, plus a chubby girl’s compensation prize – to be sexy in a familiar but not intimidating or jealousy-inducing way, while she had warmth and humour, which are welcome when one’s stressed out at work and everybody’s at each other’s throats. The sort of woman whose arms it’s easy to fall into on a dark, exhausted, slightly tippled winter night, but rumour was she had a kid at home, which was a tower complex in Etobicoke – nobody had actually seen either of those two things with their own eyes, but it was enough to keep any males (and most females) in the ambitious, up-and-coming restaurant and its high-rent environs from approaching any closer than a pleasant, slightly-pitying workplace friendship. Yulissa had no time for fun tonight, though, which meant she really had no time at all. Alphonso, the regular head waiter, was on vacation in Brazil, while Zuleika, who always shared Yulissa’s shift, was at home with a sprained wrist and banged up knees from a cycling accident.

            KINE’s phenomenal growth in popularity was thus a mixed blessing. Paul, the owner, had drive and vision, back when they’d started the business, mostly on a bit of cash Paul got from his grandma, plus some savings Jacques had acquired out in the oil patch – luckily he’d come back east before they started importing foreign labour to take over the jobs at half the wages. The windfall of publicity they got when those psycho vegans began their noisy, sometimes-almost-violent protests on the sidewalk outside got to his head, though. Not that Paul was an egomaniac. On the contrary, he was a shy guy at heart. All the interviews, the huge amount of email and reviews to sort through, the necessary increase in staff and scale – it made Paul feel that, all of a sudden and without really wanting it, he was in charge of a serious operation. All he had ever intended was to practice his craft with his buddy and share with Downtown people his love of the richness and beauty of his wild North Country home. Now Paul spent most of his time in the office, managing the business on social media, leaving the big administrative decisions to Mike Herzog, the accountant who wasn’t even a legit accountant – he got some Indians to do the real number crunching. A smarmy suit; sometimes Jacques couldn’t figure out how or why the guy made the decisions he did, even if he tried. Like when he filled a third of the wine cellar in one shipment, with a ton of awful, sickly sweet wine from some worthless little European country nobody had ever heard of. Or when he refused to purchase coyote and bear meat, after Jacques had spent weeks studying their anatomy and creating a menu to be based off dishes including proposed new ingredients. Jacques had got so mad he confronted the little shyster in the parking lot; hadn’t even wiped the bits of stray flesh and grease off his face and arms, knife still in his hand…”We have to be ahead of the curve; we aren’t trending, we create the fucking trend!” Herzog, with a face that nobody could trust, insisted that he’d spent the funds Jacques wanted used for his carnivoran dishes to purchase a vanload of Haida Gwai halibut and Alberta buffalo. Jacques wanted to slug him, but Herzog had a friend-slash-bodyguard in his car and Jacques had rent to pay.

            Then the protests happened and Jacques found himself all at once the accidental face of the business. They were making a storm of noise, screaming at the customers as they came in and out. It was only a matter of time before the fake-blood-throwing – or Molotov cocktails – started. One time he brought a cutting board out and proceeded to carve up a rack of seal by the panorama window looking out onto the sidewalk at the protest – stress and exasperation made him do it – and the restaurant just blew up. Viral vids of the protest event; the ‘war’ between the vegans, represented by a bunch of pencil-necked eco-fanatics in sloppy, mismatched windbreakers and pom-pom toques, and the ‘carnivores’ (which all normal folks who wanted to be hip sided with), represented, unwillingly, by Jacques, this soulfully long-haired and bearded tower of silent strength (judiciously decorated with tribal tats and clothed less than was seasonable, owing to his sweaty work) was a sensation worth more than any amount of paid advertising. Unfortunately, now he was effectively a prisoner of the house, at least on weekends, his performances of brawn and butchery part of the reason everyone from broke students to Bay Street brokers jockeyed for tables and begged for reservations.

            A prisoner. He wanted to drop the massive, thick-spined cleaver; by Wednesday afternoon he had already gone through a week’s worth of basic disarticulation, separating the primal cuts et cetera, going by the old rate. He wished he could slow down, take up a lightweight knife and switch to fileting salmon and prepping clams and grouse for individual orders…but after days of brutally taxing his strength, the fine motions and bent postures that those more finessed tasks required would actually hurt more than the same additional hours of carrying on with what he was doing.

            He felt a smooth caress along his trapezius, then a sharp but pleasing pressure right between two vertebrae. “Aah…nnggh…” he sighed unconsciously. “Argh!” He yelled and the cleaver fell onto the board – luckily it didn’t hit the ceramic floor so as to startle the customers, none of whom noticed his cry of pain over the hubbub of the packed restaurant.

            “Oh my Gooohd, did I hurt’chu?” Yulissa gasped, backing away as if her hands were giving electric shocks. Jacques was breathing heavily, but said nothing. She came around to his side, and saw that he was clutching his left hand forcefully, making the veins pop all up his right arm and on the sides of his bull neck. On the cutting board, blood of man mingled with blood of elk. “Oh my Gooohd, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry; I shouldn’t have, not while you’re working…” Her face went pale with horror and guilt.

            “N-no, nah; it’s not you, don’t worry about it, don’t worry.” Jacques breathed between compressed grunts of pain. He jerked his chin towards the television above the bar. The TV was turned to the local news, CityPulse, which was in the midst of cycling over the stories from earlier in the day. A trench-coated Indian lady was talking rapidly and dispassionately about the girl found dead at the corner of Baldwin and Spadina. Jacques had heard the incident mentioned on the news earlier, but he paid little attention to crime stories; there were too many and cops, lawyers…they were all corrupt anyway. He had to focus on his craft. Now, however, there was more information and Rita Ramsahoi was spewing out tidbits that caught his ear and his heart.

            “…The victim has been identified as Stephanie Botrel, of Markham Ontario, who was studying fine arts at OCAD. According to what the Superintendent said at the press conference moments ago, her parents have been notified, although they are not releasing any statements at this time – understandably distraught, Tom. While the police aren’t specifying whether Stephanie’s death was an intentional poisoning, or whether it was an unintentional consequence of the ongoing opioid epidemic, but we have reports that homicide detectives are on the case, and the police are warning students and all young women living in the area to watch their drinks, only go to parties with people they trust, and not to consume pills or medication which didn’t come in its original untampered packaging. OCAD’s president issues a formal message of condolence to the family, and assured Stephanie’s classmates that all campus security and harm reduction programs will be enhanced, where possible…Back to you, Tom.”

            Yulissa could see tears forming in Jacques’ wistful eyes and knew they were not from physical pain. She, too, knew the girl on TV, the one who’d been murdered, though she had to struggle to keep her expression and voice suitably mournful. “Ju wan’ me to call the ambulance? Yo, that looks bad, guy. I’ll get the first aid kit from the kitchen!”

            “No, don’t,” Jacques whispered in her ear. “I…I’m gonna go out back, rest for a while.”

            “Whah? No way, d’ju bleeding! Jur han’? It looks bad. I’m gonna call 911.” With the blood and Jacques’ attempts to hide his injury, Yulissa couldn’t tell how serious it was or where exactly he’d been cut. She blinked nervously, her broad chest, bare across the shoulders, was bathed in sweat mixed with the scent of fruity shampoo. She was conscious of it and hoped that Jacques was, too.

            “Sorry, I just gotta sit down, rest for a minute. Gotta give somebody a call.”

           “But jur han’?” Yulissa pleaded. Another waitress passing by the butchery station craned her neck, then hurried to the kitchen before Yulissa could make eye contact.

            “I’ll go home. I’ll tell Paul. ‘Course he’ll have to give Herzog a call.” Jacques sneered. “Right now, though, sorry, sorry.” He pushed away Yulissa’s hands with his shoulders. “I’m gonna go out back, sit down…feeling lightheaded. Gotta talk to somebody.” Jacques limped off like a wounded aurochs, disappearing behind the kitchen wall, shouting parting words: “There’s enough of the boar, seal and venison for who’s coming tonight, and if there isn’t, push the fish!”

            “I will!” She thought she shouted back, but she only whispered. She was a whimpering ball of sympathy, though she was reassured that it wasn’t a serious injury. She was more reassured by the fact that, whoever Jacques was going to be calling as he sat out there in the parking lot, it was not Stephanie Botrel.