Giles Blunt - Forty Words for Sorrow

Cardinal waited a long time before answering. It was after four o'clock, and suddenly exhaustion hung about his shoulders like a leaden cape. Delorme was still wired from her triumph; she'd be running on the high octane of victory for hours to come. Finally, he said, "It may have been permission. I'm not really sure. That doesn't mean you had to take advantage of it."

"Okay, look, it wasn't nice. Every once in a while, I remember that a good cop- like a good lawyer or a good doctor- is not necessarily a nice person, or pleasant to be around. So, you and me, we don't have to work together if you don't want. You can take me off Pine-Curry and I'll understand. But me, I think we should finish out this case together." Togedder, she pronounced it, and Cardinal was so tired it made him smile.

"What?" she asked him. "What are you smiling about?"

Cardinal got up stiffly and handed Delorme her coat. She did up the snaps, looking at him the whole time. "You're not going to tell me, are you."

"Be careful driving home," he said softly. "That slush could freeze again anytime."

ERIC was getting on Edie's nerves. For several days he'd been completely serene, cheerful even. But now he was bossing her around all the time. First he wants her to make his dinner. Where the hell did that come from? Usually he couldn't stand to have her watch him eat. Suddenly he wants sausages and mashed potatoes, and she has to hustle out to the supermarket through a sea of slush to get them, soaking her feet. Then he eats in the living room by himself while she and Gram eat in the kitchen. Two days previously she had written in her diary: I love Eric with a terrible passion, but I don't like him. He's mean and selfish and cruel and a bully. And I love him.

Now they were in the basement with Keith tied to that chair with the hole in it and the pot underneath. First thing she'd had to do was empty his damn pot. She hated coming down here now, it was like changing a litter box. Eric would never do it, he just complained until Edie took care of it. And she was feeling horrible to begin with, hollowed out inside, the way she did when the eczema came back. It was crawling over her face up from underneath her jawline, her skin was cracked and red and weeping. When she had come out of the supermarket some louts driving by had rolled down their windows to make barking noises at her.

She came back from the little bathroom just as Eric was explaining his reasoning to Keith. Eric seemed to take pleasure in this talking in front of the prisoner, but it was making her edgy.

"See, prisoner, we don't want to worry about bloodstains anymore. You reach a certain point, you start to feel like you shouldn't have to clean up after yourself, know what I mean?"

The prisoner, taped into immobility and silence, did not reply; he'd even given up making pleading eyes at them.

"I've found the perfect place to kill you, prisoner. It's a locked-up, bricked-up, fucked-up former pump house. How often do you think people go there? Once, twice every five years, maybe?" Eric put his face six inches away from the prisoner, as if he would kiss him. "I'm talking to you, honey."

The red-rimmed eyes shifted away, and Eric grabbed the prisoner's chin, forcing him to look.

Edie held up the pad of paper. "You wanted to do the list, Eric." Thinking, he'll kill him right here, if I don't get us upstairs pretty quick.

"We were considering going back to the mineshaft, weren't we, Edie. They'd never expect us to show up at the mineshaft again."

"You're not getting me on that ice," Edie said. "It's been above freezing three days in a row." She pointed to the pad. "What about a tub of some sort? Catch the blood."

"I'm not gonna lug a tub around, Edie. The whole point of going out to the fucking pump house is that we don't have to worry about the mess. A table would be nice, though. Something a comfortable height. Right, prisoner? Right. Prisoner number zero-zero-zero agrees." Eric unfolded The Algonquin Lode and spread it out on the bed where the prisoner couldn't help but see his own high-school graduation picture along with the subhead: SEARCH FOR TORONTO YOUTH AT A STANDSTILL.

"Maybe a bag of lime," Edie offered. "To obliterate his features after we kill him. Maybe even before we kill him."

"Edie, you have such an interesting take on things. Don't you just love that about her, prisoner? The youth of Toronto agrees, Edie: You have a very interesting take on things."

CANDLE wax, wood polish, and old incense. The smells in the cathedral never changed. Cardinal sat in a pew near the back and let the memories come: There was the altar where he had served Mass as a boy in surplice and soutane, there the confessionals where he had owned up to some but by no means all of his first sexual adventures, there the rail where his mother had lain in her coffin, there the font where Kelly had been baptized, a doll-faced banshee whose shrieks had unnerved everybody, especially the young priest who had anointed her.

Cardinal's faith had left him sometime in his early twenties and it had never come back. He had attended Mass regularly throughout Kelly's girlhood only because Catherine had wanted it and unlike, say, McLeod, who had nothing but contempt for Rome and all her works, Cardinal had no strong feelings against the Church. Or in favor of it. So he wasn't sure why he had stopped by the cathedral this Thursday afternoon. One minute he had been in D'Anunzio's eating a ham and Swiss, next minute he's in the back row of the church.

Gratitude? Certainly, he was glad Delorme's investigation was over. And, as for Dyson, he felt terribly sad, almost a kind of heartbreak. McLeod had heaped scorn on their fallen boss all morning. "Good riddance,"- barking across the squad room to anyone available. "It's not enough he's an arrogant fuck? He also has to be dirty? Some people don't know when to stop." But Cardinal felt no moral superiority; it could just as easily have been him hauled off to the district jail in cuffs.

A gigantic gold-fringed medallion of Mary being assumed into heaven hung above the altar. As a boy, Cardinal had often prayed to her to help him be a better student, a better hockey player, a better person, but he didn't pray now. Sitting in the fragrant expanse of the cathedral was enough to evoke that sense of wholeness he had known as a boy, and as a young man. He knew to the hour when he had lost that wholeness. Just because Delorme had stopped investigating him didn't mean his own conscience was going to grant him a reprieve.

"Excuse me."

A bulky man edged his way past Cardinal into the pew- pretty annoying with the place utterly empty, but people had their favorite pews, and Cardinal was, after all, an interloper, not a regular.

"Nice little church you got here."

The man was almost exactly square. He perched beside Cardinal like a perfect cube of meat, a solid mass devoid of neck or waist or hips. He pointed to the medallion of the Assumption. "Cool medal. I like churches, don't you?" He turned to Cardinal and smiled, if you could call that sort of mirthless display of teeth smiling. Two gold incisors gleaming for an instant, then gone. The man's face, flat and round as an Eskimo's, was harrowed by four symmetrical scars, vivid white grooves that ran across the forehead and chin, and vertically down each cheek. The nose had the misshapen, imploded look of a pepper. The man had to turn a full ninety degrees to face Cardinal, because his right eye was covered by a black leather patch. On this, some wit had stenciled the word Closed.

Was he someone Cardinal had put in jail? Surely he would have remembered this creature molded from the clay of pure thug.

"Warm for February." The man slid a black watch cap from his skull, revealing a perfectly shaved scalp. Then, with surprising delicacy, he removed first one leather glove and then the other, resting his hands on his knees. The knuckles of one hand were tattooed with the word fuck, the knuckles of the other said you.