“Why do you think he did something?”
“Well, you’re bloody eager to get him on the phone.”
“We just need to talk to him,” said Wingate. “Clear a couple of things up.”
The unmistakable sound of ice tinkling in a glass came over the speakers. “Let me ask you something, detectives. What do you know about PIs?”
“I’m sorry?” said Wingate.
“Do they even exist?”
“Private investigators?”
“Yes.”
“Mrs. Eldwin -” he began in an effort to get her back on track, but Hazel interrupted.
“Are you considering hiring a PI? Do you think something’s happened to your husband?”
Eldwin snorted derisively. “God no. At least I hope not. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to him before I got my hands around his neck myself.”
“What is going on here, Mrs. Eldwin?”
“He goes to town Friday, saying he’s got meetings and research – who has meetings on the May long weekend, huh?”
“Well, some people -”
“- and then calls and says he’s stuck in town until Monday. And then he stops answering his phone. What does that sound like to you?”
“I don’t know,” said Hazel. “What does it sound like to you?”
She swallowed something lustily. “It sounds like the same old story to me.”
“Is he not the kind of person to have meetings?”
“He’s the kind of person to penetrate other women.”
“I see,” said Hazel. “So you think he’s having an affair. And you want to hire a PI to catch him in the act?”
“So how much?” Eldwin asked.
“How much what?”
“How much for a PI? And do I have to pay expenses too?”
Hazel was getting frustrated, but she could tell this Mrs. Eldwin wasn’t going to turn out to be willing, so Hazel was going to have to be careful if she wanted to get anything useful out of the conversation. “I’d say a hundred a day is fair,” she said. “But you could save that money.”
“Oh yeah? You guys going to offer me a twofer?”
“We’ve got resources private eyes don’t. We might be able to track him down for you. But we need somewhere to start. Do you know the names of any of his associates in Toronto? What about the number of the person he went down to meet?”
“Look in the gutters,” she said. “Back alleys, whorehouses, dingy bars, that sort of thing. You’ll find him sooner or later. Let me know when you do.”
She took another big long drag on a cigarette and hung up. There was a pause and then a dial tone. “Wow,” said Hazel, “did you run her through CPIC?”
“I will.”
“Okay, so Eldwin’s gone to ground for whatever reason, his wife is drinking before noon, and we still have two amateur anglers at large. Where are we with Bellocque and Paritas? Do we have addresses?”
“Nothing for this Paritas woman, so I assume she and Bellocque live together.”
“How can there not be an address attached to her number?”
“Maybe it’s a cell.”
“Aren’t cells registered?”
He looked at her, a little sadly, she thought. “Well, they can be but you can also walk into Loblaws, buy your groceries, a bunch of flowers, and a prepaid cell with nothing but a handful of cash.”
“Fine. But you have an address for this Bellocque?”
He put his finger on it. “It’s a Gilmore address. You know where that is?”
“Yes, James. I live here, remember?” She shook her head. “Jesus, it’s been three days and we still don’t have a single statement. What the hell ever happened to the police called, call back as a working notion?”
“I’m sorry. I should have been more active yesterday, but the truth is, with this thing not changing much” – he gestured at the laptop – “and most of our primaries out on long-weekend DUIs and fender-benders, I guess I just thought some of this could wait until today.”
“There’s a man tied to a chair somewhere, James. A man we were pointed to by a broken, drowned mannequin. What about that seems not urgent?”
He breathed slowly to get his heart to stop pounding. “I hear you, Skip. But the truth is, we don’t know if that man is ‘tied’ to a chair, or if he’s in any danger, or even if what we’re seeing is real. And the truth is…”
“What? What is the truth?”
“The truth is, I’m not sure who’s the lead on this now. Is it me? Because if it is, I think you need to trust me to run it my way.”
She looked at him flatly, but he saw the fire behind her eyes. “Thirty-six hours have passed in idleness over a question of chain of command? Is that why you’ve been sitting on your ass?”
He stilled his face. She’d never spoken to him like this before. “I should go run Mrs. Eldwin through the database. Is there anything else you want me to do?”
“Go see Burt Levitt and show him a picture of the mannequin. See if it means anything to him. Ask where a person could buy one or find something like it.”
“Fine,” said Wingate, and he left without another word. The space he’d been standing in seemed to be buzzing. She had an instinct to call him back in and apologize right away, but she let him go. She’d been itching for weeks to come back to work, but now that she was here, she wasn’t sure her head was right.
She’d spent much of Sunday in Glynnis’s office with the door closed, reading the newspaper and keeping an eye on the site, but nothing had changed from the night before. Against their expectations, the camera’s pan hadn’t progressed anymore. It was as if someone had jarred it during that first hour after Wingate had discovered the page. It had been panning through the same visual field since then and it was making her more and more nervous. Maybe this was why she’d snapped at Wingate. She wanted them to make something happen.
She returned her attention to the screen. The camera was midway through its usual movement. In a minute, it would terminate on that mysterious, nervous leg. She watched it until it did. Was this the house? The house where a corpse with a note attached to it had just been dropped off, according to “The Mystery of Bass Lake”? She didn’t want to make the wrong connections, but her mind was eager to find a link, any link, between these things.
She looked at her watch. It was just past noon. In three hours, the highways heading south were going to fill with sad revellers returning to the city, and she was going to have to have more cars on the road to deal with the inevitable mess. Like the first snowfall of the year, when it seemed as if people simply lost their minds, the end of the Victoria Day weekend always meant a massive traffic snafu. By 5 p.m. every tow truck in the county would be on call.
She popped the lid of her Percocets and gazed into the vial. There were still twenty or more left in the bottle. She put one of the white pills in her mouth and swallowed it dry. On Sunday, she’d taken only two, and at their correct intervals. And she’d had only one this morning, but foresaw it would take at least three to get through the day, and she knew the next one she took would be more out of want than need. If she could get down to only the ones she needed, then she’d come off them. It was probably a good idea to come off them. Soon.
She knew, and she’d been told, how addicting these pills were, but she’d been on them in one form or another for almost three years, and although she depended on them now, she still told herself she was not dependent on them. And if she was, wouldn’t someone tell her? Wouldn’t someone notice? In any case, if she really wanted to stop, she would and could. Of course she knew addicts always told themselves they could stop at any time, so her confidence was not evidence one way or the other.
But she knew herself. She knew her weaknesses were things she could exercise her will over when she wanted to. The things you told yourself tended to come true, and Hazel told herself she did not have a problem. If she did, she’d have to wait until she was out of the woods before she dealt with it.