Cathy whispered in Adelle’s ear.
Adelle gasped, slamming her drink on the table.
“Quiet!” Cathy whispered, then giggled.
“Did you recognize the guy?” Adelle asked.
Cathy slapped Adelle’s wrist playfully.
“How would I know? Don’t they all look the same? But it was huge.”
“You think it’s the guy she’s with now?”
“Maybe. There weren’t any pics of his face. Just her face and you know…”
“No!” Adelle responded.
The two girls began to giggle. Cathy put her hand over Adelle’s mouth, which only made Adelle laugh louder. Tears began to run down the girls’ cheeks.
“The thing is,” Cathy continued, “the pictures looked different. In some she had a different hairdo.”
“You mean they were with different guys? Different…?” Cathy nodded.
Adelle leaned back in her seat and tried to catch her breath. She picked up her glass and sucked on her drink until the straw began to rattle in the glass. Cathy slapped Adelle on the arm. Adelle put down the drink.
“Would you ever do that?” Adelle asked. “I mean, let some guy take pictures of you?”
“Of course not. Anyway, I think she knows that I’ve seen them because the next time I was in the room, I couldn’t find them.” The two girls were silent for some time.
“I’d do it,” Adelle said. “It might be fun having someone take pictures.”
Cathy slapped Adelle’s wrist playfully. “You are a pervert.” The girls continued to giggle for some time. Then the conversation turned to Cathy’s problems with Terry and Johnny.
Adelle shrugged. “Maybe. You have to feel sorry for Terry. Are you going to tell him?”
“Why would I do that? I got enough problems.”
“Have you made a decision yet?”
Cathy shook her head. “Sometimes I think I’ll go with Terry. But then Johnny looks so lost. I mean, we went out for a year and a half. I owe him something. Then I think I’ll go back to Johnny but I feel so bad about Terry. He is a real neat guy. And we have a lot of fun. Or at least we used to. Why don’t you take one of them?”
Adelle shook her head. “No thank you. I can get my own boyfriends.
Besides, I can’t stand Johnny. You can’t trust him.”
“How can you say that?”
“And Terry is crazy about you.”
“Why don’t you trust Johnny?”
“Open your eyes, kid!” Adelle then glanced over at the door of the restaurant where Detective Kelly and Mary Hendrix were leaving. “There they go.”
“Isn’t that guy a cop?” Cathy asked.
The Barbershop
“Kids these days have no respect, Sam.” George snipped gingerly around Sam Kelly’s ear.
“They’re not all bad,” Sam responded, his eyes closed. God, if George stopped talking, I could fall asleep.
“I’m not saying all,” George continued, chewing on some gum as he talked, “but they have no fear. We’re leaving the world in these kids’ hands. They’ll wreck it in no time. Civilization is coming to an end. Dark days ahead. Like the other day I asked a couple of kids to move away from the shop. They scare off my other customers. And you should have heard their language. If my old man caught me talking like that to my elders I would have been dragged out to the woodshed.” The detective laughed. George pulled his scissors back and, looking in-to the mirror, continued to speak.
“I know I sound like an old crank, Sam. But why aren’t these kids in school?”
“Summer vacation,” the detective offered.
“Working then? Why aren’t they working? Too damn lazy. Everything handed to them. And they always seem to have money. They’ll never get a job if their parents keep throwing money at them.” 81
The detective opened his eyes and looked around the shop. It was empty.
“What do you know about Joe Mackenzie?” he asked.
“Joe Mackenzie.” George thought about the name for a few moments.
“Old Joe. Not too much. He comes in here once a week for a trim. Works over at the plaza as a security guard. Nice old guy. Doesn’t talk a lot.
Had some kind of trouble with Ontario Hydro a few years ago.”
“What do you know about his wife?”
“Has old Joe done something illegal, Sam? Doesn’t seem like the type of fellow to break the law.”
“Neighbors have been throwing trash down his well,” the detective said.
“You don’t say,” George responded as he returned to the meticulous manicuring of the detective’s head. “Why would they be throwing garbage down old Joe’s well? Did he do something to piss someone off?”
“Not that we know of.”
“He never talks about his wife, Sam,” George added, snapping his gum. “Jesus, I didn’t even know the old guy was married. Does he have any kids?”
“A couple. His wife ran off with them years ago.” George loosened the apron around the detective’s neck as he measured a straight line across the bottom of his hairline.
“Ran off on him. Old Joe didn’t seem like the sort. I figured him for a boring past. Old Joe has a history. Who’d she run off with?”
“We’re not sure,” the detective replied, speaking to the reflection of the barber in the mirror opposite him.
“What’s the garbage in his well got to do with his wife running off?”
“Nothing,” the detective replied. An interesting question. Must remember to jot that down.
George, snapping his gum, reached for a brush and swept the loose hairs off the detective’s neck. Then he briskly flung the apron off and shook it over the floor.
“That’s quite an investigation you’re running,” George said with a smile and snapped his gum. “Where’s it headed?” The detective smiled. Another good question.
CHAPTER NINE
Cathy sat on the hood of the car. She looked out over Lake Ontario, her hair waving in the light breeze that blew off the cold gray water.
Johnny leaned against the side door of the Mazda, his back sheltering a match as he lit up a cigarette.
“You want to get back in the car?” he asked, flipping a used match in-to the sand and making a second attempt, this time successfully, to light his cigarette. Weren’t they down here to get some things straightened out between them? I hate this melodrama. Flowers, sunsets, waves crashing on the shore. Let’s just get in the car and do it.
“Doesn’t the water look like molten steel?” she asked, smiling and shaking the wind from her hair. “It looks solid. I can almost imagine walking across it. It’s looked this way for hundreds, even thousands of years. Isn’t that mind-boggling?”
“Fascinating,”
Johnny muttered, spitting out smoke.
Fucking fascinating!
Cathy turned and gestured to Johnny for a cigarette. He took one out of his package, lit it off his, and still leaning across the hood of the car, handed it to Cathy.
“It’s like time traveling when you look out into a body of water,” she said, turning back to the lake.
“Time traveling,” Johnny muttered. He turned and looked back over the sight of the now defunct psychiatric hospital. All boarded up.
Where’d they put all the loonies? The hospital was being transformed into a community college. Better dressed inmates. How was he going to tell his parents that he’d been kicked out of university? The best thing would be to take the Mazda and disappear. Go to California. Make a life someplace warm. But he didn’t have enough money for that. Cathy must have some dough.
Cathy turned to Johnny. “Don’t mope. I told you that we weren’t going to mess around when you asked me to go for a ride.”
“Why’d you come then?” Johnny demanded, his petulant voice beginning to irritate her.
“I wanted to talk. You’ve been gone a long time and I think there are issues we should address.” She was careful with each word. She didn’t want her voice to slip into the southern belle accent she fell into when she was anxious.
“Well, you didn’t have that attitude the other night.” Johnny shot the words out of his mouth like he was a gun. Giving me a hard-on thinking about it.