Giles Blunt - Forty Words for Sorrow

The chief was standing by the fireplace, poker in hand, his face in shadow. It was rare to spend more than ten minutes with R. J. and not hear that preposterous laugh of his, but hearing Musgrave's Horseman's Tale had clearly depressed him. He said in a subdued voice, "It gets worse."

It did indeed get worse. Another piece of solid information. Another date and time. The single change: This time, Jerry Commanda was back playing left wing for the OPP. Another raid. Another zero. "This time," Musgrave added, "Corbett files suit for harassment."

"I remember that," Delorme said. "I thought that was pretty funny."

Dyson glared at her.

Musgrave shifted in his chair. It was like watching a continent change shape. "You've got the facts. I'll let you draw your own conclusions. You have any questions?"

"Just one," Delorme said. "What exactly do you mean by 'solid'?"

That was the only time the chief had laughed that night. Nobody else cracked a smile.

Now, two months later, Delorme was feeding the shredder in her Special Investigations office and hoping without much optimism that her new partner would come to trust her. As she carried a wastebasket full of shreds to the incinerator, she saw Cardinal putting on his coat. "You need me to do anything?" she asked him.

"Nope. We got a positive ID back on the dental records. I'm just going out to tell Dorothy Pine."

"You sure you don't want me to come?"

"No, thanks. I'll see you later."

Terrific, Delorme muttered to herself as she dumped the trash. He doesn't even know I'm running a check on him and still he doesn't want me for a partner. Great start.

TO reach Chippewa Reserve, you follow Main Street west past the railroad tracks and make a left just past the St. Joseph 's mother house, formerly a Catholic girls' school and now a home for retired nuns, at the junction with Highway 17. There are no signs to Chippewa Reserve, no gates; the Ojibwa have suffered so much at the hand of the white man that to lock the door against him now would be pointless.

The most remarkable thing about entering the reserve, Cardinal often thought, is that you don't know you're on the reserve. One of his very first girlfriends had lived up here, and even then he hadn't registered its status as a separate enclave. The pre-fab bungalows, the slightly battered cars parked in the drives, the mutts chasing each other over the snowbanks, these could belong to any lower middle-class neighborhood in Canada. Of course the jurisdiction changed- law enforcement here was in the hands of the OPP- but you couldn't see that. The only visible difference from any other part of Algonquin Bay was, well, the place was full of Indians, a people who for the most part moved through Canadian society- or rather, alongside it- as silent and invisible as ghosts.

A shadow nation, Cardinal thought. We don't even know they're there. He had stopped a hundred yards past the turnoff, and now, since the day was sunny and a seasonable minus ten, he was walking with Jerry Commanda along the side of the road toward a perfectly white bungalow.

When not encased in a down parka, Jerry was extremely thin, almost frail-looking, a deceptive morphology because he also happened to be a four-time provincial kickboxing champion. You never saw what Jerry did exactly, but the most recalcitrant villain, in the course of a disagreement with him, would suddenly turn up horizontal and in a highly vocal mood of compliance.

Cardinal had never been partnered with him, but McLeod had, and McLeod claimed that, had they lived two hundred years earlier, he would have probably turned on his ancestors and happily fought the white man at Jerry's side. The detectives had held a big party for Jerry when he left, a party he did not attend, being no lover of sentiment or fuss. When he moved to OPP, he could have taken an assignment at any of the townships the provincial force covered, but he had asked to work exclusively on reserves. He got the same pay as the municipal police, except- a point on which he was as infuriatingly verbose as his race is said to be silent- he was exempt from income tax.

Last night, Jerry had irritated him by pretending he hadn't been aware of Cardinal's exile from homicide. Jerry's sense of humor tended to be opaque. And he had a disarming habit, perhaps ingrained in him from countless hours of tripping up suspects under interrogation, of changing topics suddenly. He did so now, by asking about Catherine.

Catherine was fine, Cardinal told him, in a tone that suggested they move on to something else.

"What about Delorme," Jerry asked. "How're you getting along with Delorme? She can be kind of prickly."

Cardinal told him Delorme was fine, too.

"She has a nice shape, I always thought."

Cardinal, though it made him uncomfortable, thought so, too. It was no problem having an attractive woman working in Special- with a separate office, separate cases. It was another to have her for a partner.

"Lise is a good woman," Jerry said. "Good investigator, too. Took guts to nail the mayor the way she did. I would have chickened out. I knew she'd get tired of that white-collar stuff, though." He waved to an old man walking a dog across the street. "Of course, she could be investigating you."

"Thanks, Jerry. That's just what I wanted to hear."

"Got our new streetlights working," Jerry said, pointing. "Now we can see how homey it's getting around here."

"New paint jobs, too, I notice."

Jerry nodded. "My summer project. Any kid I caught drinking had to paint an entire house. Made them all white because it's more painful. You ever try to paint a house white in the summer?"

"No."

"Hurts your eyes like a bastard. The kids hate me now but I don't care."

They didn't hate him, of course. Three dark-eyed boys carrying skates and hockey sticks had been following them since Jerry came out of his house. One of them threw a snowball that hit Cardinal in the arm. He packed some snow together in gloveless hands and hurled one back, way off the mark. Must have been ten years since he'd thrown anything other than a tantrum. A skirmish ensued, Jerry taking a couple of missiles indifferently in his skinny chest.

"Ten to one the little guy is your relative," Cardinal said. "Little smart-ass there."

"He's my nephew. Handsome like his uncle, too." Jerry Commanda, all hundred and forty pounds of him, was indeed handsome.

The boys were chattering in Ojibwa, of which Cardinal, no linguist, understood not a word. "What are they saying?"

"They're saying he walks like a cop but he throws like a girl. Maybe he's a faggot."

"How sweet."

"My nephew says, 'He's probably going to arrest Jerry for stealing that fucking paint.' " Jerry continued translating in his monotone. " 'That's the cop that was here last fall- the asshole that couldn't find Katie Pine.' "

"Jerry, you missed your calling. You should have been a diplomat." Later, it occurred to him that Jerry might not have been translating at all; it would have been like him.

They walked around a shiny new pickup, approaching the Pine house now.

"I know Dorothy Pine pretty well. You want me to come with you?"

Cardinal shook his head. "Maybe you could stop in later, though."

"Okay, I'll do that. What kind of person kills a little girl, John?"

"They're rare, thank God. That's why we'll catch him. He'll be different from other people." Cardinal wished he was as certain of this as he sounded.

ASKING Dorothy Pine last September for the name of her daughter's dentist- so he could get her chart- had been the hardest thing Cardinal had ever had to do. Dorothy Pine's face, the heavy features scarred by a ferocious, burnt-out case of acne, had expressed no trace of grief: He was white, he was the law, why should she?