“Then you know how it is,” she said huskily. “Now do me a favour and check out what they did to my window.”
Ronnie hadn’t made much headway with her cleanup. The area she had cleared was the size of a TV screen in a motel room, and there were still bits of black paper clinging to the glass, but I leaned forward obediently. Inside was a display of XXX movies with titles like Extreme Cat Fights, Operation Penetration, and Come Gargling Sluts. Framed by the sombre black of Ariel’s poster with its by-now familiar plea, the movie titles had a certain film noir eloquence.
“Quite the mess, eh?” Ronnie looked at her razor blade thoughtfully. “And they’ve done this to his apartment and to the locker at the place where he works. Where he worked,” she corrected herself. “They put him on unpaid leave. An innocent man, but that doesn’t mean a darn thing any more. The police are still hassling him, too. Kyle doesn’t react well to pressure, so last night we packed up his stuff and moved him back here. It’s a darn shame – he was so proud of being independent. Look, Ms. Kilbourn, I’d better get back to my scraping. Bebe will fill you in, but you get it straight.” She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted up at the old woman in the window. “I’m sending her up, Bebe.”
“I’m ready for her,” Bebe shouted back.
As Ronnie led me down the three steps that took us into EXXXOTICA , I wondered whether I was ready for Bebe. Convex security mirrors had been installed in the area around the cash register, and as Ronnie and I passed them, I caught sight of our reflections: two distorted funhouse women entering a distorted funhouse world. I’d been in some desolate places in my life, but my shoulders slumped under the weight of the store’s dingy misery. The room was long and narrow, and the light that made it past the handbills the Friends of Ariel had pasted on the front window was murky.
To reach the door that led to the living quarters, we had to navigate our way through racks of videos which offered the voyeur a smorgasbord of sexual delights: man with woman, man with several women, women together, men together, men with young girls, men with young boys. For the adventurer, there were dominatrixes with whips and dungeons, animals who were more than men’s best friends, and opportunities galore to revel in the joys of leather, chains, masks, uniforms, adult-sized baby clothes, and golden cascades.
Ronnie paid the videos no heed, but I did, and the fact that the people who rented them lived in my city, shovelled snow from their sidewalks, walked past me in the park, and stood beside me in the checkout counter at the grocery store gave me pause. It was bizarro mondo out there, which might have explained the complex system of locks that had been installed on the door that separated the store from the house’s living quarters. Magician-like, Ronnie pulled a ring of keys from inside her halter top and opened the locks. The world on the other side of the door was reassuringly normaclass="underline" a small entranceway with a floor of terra cotta Mexican tiles, a telephone table, and wallpaper with a vaguely Navajo pattern in sand, mango, and turquoise.
“Up the stairs and straight ahead, you can’t miss it,” Ronnie said, then she abandoned me.
Later, I came to realize that the walls of Bebe’s room were painted a soft dove grey, but my first impression was of retina-searing pink. Bebe, as it turned out, was not simply a watchful neighbour. She was an entrepreneur, and her business was reclaiming and refurbishing Barbie dolls. It was impossible to calculate at a glance the number of Barbies in her sunny front room, but it must have been in the hundreds. Hair braided into perky cornrows, teased into airy beehives, swept into chic chignons, or twirled into ringlets, Bebe’s battalions of Barbies were marshalled on every flat surface, poised to tackle the many roles of women at the beginning of the new millennium. But whether they were headed for the bike path, the ball, the board meeting, or the birthing room, all of Bebe’s Barbies were sallying forth in outfits crocheted from the same durable nylon yarn in the same eye-popping shade of bubble-gum pink.
Bebe was pretty sassy herself. She was wearing sequinned tennis shoes, white slacks, and a white sweatshirt with the legend “I Drove the Alaska Highway.” Her hair was dandelion fluff, she had a dab of cerise rouge on the wizened apple of each cheek, and her eyes were the blue of a distant sky. She was very, very old.
“I’m ninety-five,” she said. “Might as well get the question marks out of the way so you can pay attention to what I’m saying.”
“Good policy,” I said, wishing Ronnie shared her grandmother’s candour.
Bebe indicated the chair opposite her. “Take a load off your feet,” she said. “Though it’s not as much of a load as I’d have thought seeing you on TV. I’ve heard it said the camera adds ten pounds. That must be true.”
As she watched me take the seat she had assigned me, her eyes never left my face, but the crochet hook in her hands kept flying. “I recognized you the other day. That’s why I waved. I wanted you to go on TV and tell the country that Kyle is innocent, but you didn’t come in. You should have. That show you did Saturday night was as soft as boiled turnips. ‘What Would Queen Victoria Think of Today’s Canada?’ Queen Victoria wouldn’t give a damn, and neither did you. I was watching your face, Joanne Kilbourn. You knew that show was mush.”
“We pretaped it, so we could get away for the holiday weekend,” I said meekly.
Her crochet hook sped on, leaving behind it the gently undulating flares of the skirt for an evening gown. “I told Ronnie that’s what you done,” she said. “So can we expect more of the same on this week’s show?”
“There is no show this week,” I said. “We’re through for the season.”
“Then how can you tell the country that Kyle is innocent?”
“Is he?” I asked.
Her old chin jutted out defiantly. “As innocent as you are.”
I leaned towards her. “Then tell me what I need to know,” I said.
“Kyle didn’t kill Ariel Warren,” she said. “They were friends. He brought her up here to meet me. It took me five seconds to cipher out the relationship.” She lowered her voice. “Kyle’s not much in the brains department, but he’s got enough brains to know that Ariel Warren was out of his league.”
“He could have found that frustrating,” I said.
“Coulda, woulda, shoulda,” she snapped. “Useless words.” The crochet hook flashed angrily. “The point is he didn’t. Didn’t find it frustrating. Didn’t kill her. Case closed.”
It was time to try another tack. I leaned forward and peered out Bebe’s window. “You have a good view of the street up here,” I said.
“I see everything,” she said flatly. “And I’ve got the scrapbooks to prove it. Look at this.” She pulled a scrapbook from a pile beside her and handed it to me. “Open it for a surprise,” she said.
The book was filled with newspaper clippings of people who would have considered themselves movers and shakers in our small city. Beside each picture was a list of XXX movie titles.
“I read the Leader Post, cover to cover, every day.” Bebe explained. “When I spot a photo of one of our customers, I cut it out. Then at night I get out the rental book and I write down what they rented. You never know when something like that might come in handy.”
I closed the scrapbook and looked at her steadily.
She read my gaze. “But we’re not here to talk about that, are we? Today is about Kyle. As usual the cops have got their blinders on. There’s a lot likelier possibilities than our boy but, of course, nobody’s ever accused the cops of being able to take in the big picture.” Her mouth snapped shut, defying me to disagree.
“I need more than your opinion, Bebe,” I said.
“I’ve got more than my opinion. I could see every move she made. And the one she lived with, too,” she added triumphantly.
“Charlie.”
The hook stopped, and the old blue eyes looked at me with real interest. “Charlie,” she repeated. “So that’s his name. I never did know it. He kept to himself – not that you’d blame him with that face. The only time he went out was in the afternoons – I guess that’s when he worked.”