Punishment (28 page)

The judge cleared his throat. “Mr. Sullivan, do you have any other questions for the witness?”

“Just one, Your Honour.”

He came close to Caddy. “Mrs. Stewart—have you or any member of your family ever used OxyContin for any medical reason?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“It’s a simple question, Mrs. Stewart. Yes or no. Has anyone in your home ever had a prescription for the drug?”

“I can only speak for myself,” she said firmly. “No.”

“That’s your answer?”

“That’s my answer.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Stewart.”

Caddy stepped out of the witness box and came to sit beside me, rigid. It felt as if I exhaled for the first time all afternoon.

The judge was speaking: “I wonder if you gentlemen can give me an idea of whether it’s realistic to anticipate wrapping up by the end of tomorrow.”

Jones stood. “I intend to call three witnesses tomorrow.”

The judge frowned.

Jones said: “One is an undercover police officer, so obviously I don’t want to say too much just now. The other two were friends of the victim.” He sat down.

The judge was flipping through a large day-timer. “So obviously we aren’t likely to finish up tomorrow.”

“In the circumstances I think it would be prudent to assume that, Your Honour,”

Jones said sourly.

“But we can try,” said Sullivan.

In the corridor Caddy was quiet, nodding as people whispered comfort, or laid sympathetic hands on her arm or shoulder as they walked by. “It’s awful,” one said, “dragging you through this all over again.” Caddy smiled wearily, shrugged, and after the woman was gone, said, “I have to go to the washroom.”

I went to the men’s and Neil was there, washing his hands vigorously. “That was something,” he said. “I never heard the like. I got the diarrhea listening to it. Honest to Christ. I’ve been in here ever since. What happened?”

“Three witnesses tomorrow. One of them is supposed to be an undercover cop.”

“Great,” said Neil. “I was hoping for something like that. The Mounties had to be all over that asshole.”

On the highway I reached across and grasped Caddy’s hand. “You don’t have to be there for the rest,” I said. She was silent.

“The undercover cop … I want to hear what he has to say. And the others, too.”

“You know who they are?”

She was staring at the passing countryside. “One maybe, Angus John,” she said. “I heard he was around.” She sounded distant. “She had nice friends.”

We were at her place then. “Let’s do something tonight,” she said. “Go somewhere. There’s a new bistro in town. Or I could cook something.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Oh Tony.” And then she wept.

Standing by her piano studying her memories, she leaned back, to press her head against my cheek. My arms were loose around her middle, her hands lightly cupping mine. Then she moved my hands to her breasts and I kissed her neck. She turned and kissed me firmly, then more urgently.

“We should go upstairs,” I whispered.

“No,” she said. “Here. We should stay here.”

“The light …”

“Leave it on.”

Maybe she wanted me—or all the ghosts surrounding us—to see a different Caddy in the glare of light, to hear another Caddy in the sounds she made as she kissed me furiously, hands beneath my shirt, then tugging at my belt and buttons. Of course I responded, at that moment driven more by her expectations than desire. I raised her sweater, unhooked her bra with a dexterity that surprised me. I felt an old familiar surge as the sudden tumble of her breasts released me from whatever inhibition I’d been briefly caught in, sinking to the carpet in that gallery of silent witnesses on top of the piano, hanging on the wall. Jack. Maymie. Maymie. Maymie everywhere. Trousers down, shaken free, buoyed by my rampant readiness in spite of them. Maymie, Jack, Maymie, Jack. But, alas, only briefly rampant.

When we were naked on the carpet I realized that the sensations in my lower body were but tricks of memory. I was limp and my awareness of it guaranteed that there was nothing either one of us could do about it. I cursed the light, the smiling faces of the dead. I could feel her energy diminishing, imagined lust decaying, turning into pity.

No bloody way, I told myself, and in a display of passion that was more angry than erotic, I kissed and sucked and licked my way down the length of her long lovely body, all the way to her painted toenails, then up to where I knew they keep the keys to all their secret fantasies—every woman I’ve ever known. Hungrily, I banished all the phantoms from the room, even banished Caddy, tried to make her every woman I’d ever loved.

“No, no,” she said, suddenly alert. “No, Tony.” She had her hands firmly on either side of my head, cupping my ears, then tugging at my hair. “You don’t …” But it was too late for turning back, too late for either of us.

And then she said, “Oh … Jesus … 
Jesus
.”

I guess I could have stayed the night. In fact, she asked me to. But I felt awkward and quietly declined. “I have to get home. We can’t forget about the dog.”

S
ettling into the front seat of my truck on Friday morning, Caddy seemed subdued, an unfamiliar shyness in the look she gave me as she fastened her seatbelt. As we drove away I realized my failure to respond to her glance had caused her mood to swing to sadness, then toward what seemed like irritation. She was staring straight ahead, arms folded as if to stifle a sudden chill.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She glanced at me and said, “For what?”

“I meant to call when I got home last night.”

She produced a tissue, blew her nose. “Just as well you didn’t. You wouldn’t have got an answer.”

I reached across and caught her hand. She didn’t resist, but closed her fist around the tissue.

“Have you ever wondered,” I said, “how our lives would have been if we hadn’t been so gullible, way back when?”

“Gullible?”

“Yes. I was anyway. Taking everything literally, about sex and girls. I was amazed to find out later in life how many of us were just having a grand old time while I was struggling to be proper.”

She sighed. “You think other people were having a grand old time, do you?”

I realized I’d just made matters worse. I shrugged. “The way they tell it, anyway.” And felt the heat increasing in my face and neck as she stared at me, processing and suppressing all the things she could and maybe should be saying.

“About last night,” she said at last. “I wouldn’t want you to go getting the wrong impression.”

“And what impression would that be?” I tried to sound casual, but she didn’t answer. Then I became angry, or maybe sorry for myself. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference. The day was overcast making the mid-winter landscape seem even dirtier and drearier.

“The friend of Maymie’s,” I said at last. “I suppose you know him well.”

She sighed. “Not really. I know who he is, who his people are. But it’s different now. The young ones are hard to get to know. They aren’t interested in … old people. I think that when we were young, age didn’t make such a difference.”

And after a long pause, she said, “What was Strickland really like?”

I struggled for an answer that wouldn’t hurt. “I’d have to say
he’s more like we were. Maybe a little old-fashioned. Growing up the way he did, with older folks.”

I looked across at her and she was nodding.

She didn’t speak again and finally we were at the courthouse. As I aimed the truck carefully into a space between two police vehicles she said, “I think you were fond of Strickland at one time.” I forced a smile. “Umm. I’m afraid not.”

Her eyes searched mine, but they were full of kindness. Then she leaned across and lightly kissed my mouth. “I’m okay about everything,” she said, eyes wide, eyebrows raised. “Really!”

I could only nod.

I followed Caddy to the third row and sat on the end chair by the aisle. She was beside me, coat folded across her lap, hands clasped together. She still had the balled-up tissue, now a tiny lump I wouldn’t have noticed at all if I hadn’t seen it in the truck. A sudden wave of tenderness swept through me, scattering misgivings about our past, anxieties about what lay ahead. I touched her hand. She turned her head slightly and smiled and maybe I imagined that she pressed her shoulder a little bit more firmly into mine.

Then two uniformed policemen escorted a third man wearing jeans and a tweed sports jacket up the centre aisle to a place in the front row. Caddy leaned her head close to mine. “The undercover cop,” she said. At that moment the clerk ordered everyone to rise.

The judge reminded us all that this was a preliminary hearing to determine whether or not there was sufficient evidence
to justify a trial. There was a publication ban on all proceedings but, he warned, the court would be particularly vigilant about the evidence we’d hear today. Then he nodded toward Jones, who stood.

“Your Honour, thank you for the reminder—the evidence today is particularly sensitive considering my first witness. I call Corporal Ryan Jackson.”

The man in the sports coat rose from his front row seat and walked toward the witness box, pausing on the way to raise his hand and swear to tell the truth. He was obviously at home on the stand and comfortable with Jones, answering questions with articulate self-confidence. He’d been a police officer for twelve years and it came as no surprise that along with all his special certificates in the forensic sciences he had a master’s degree in sociology. His hair was shaggy, collar length. He wore large tinted aviator glasses of a style that had been popular among cool folk in the seventies and he had the kind of mustache that for a while, back then, was commonplace on cops and pimps. Of course I realized, as he was speaking, that the mustache was part of a disguise. Just then Caddy leaned close to my ear. “The glasses are fake,” she whispered. “And so is that mustache.”

He was seductive in his cautious candour about all the people he had fooled in the course of his undercover work, including bikers. And how, from a biker clubhouse not too far from St. Ninian, he’d picked up three kilos of marijuana on a sunny summer evening for delivery to a local pusher, Dwayne Strickland.

“And do you see Mr. Strickland in the room?” asked Jones.

Jackson nodded in a friendly way toward the middle of the courtroom where Strickland sat behind his lawyer. I could imagine Strickland smiling back at him with a similar, enviable poise.

“And when did this transaction happen?”

“It was in July. I have the exact date in my notes. It was in the evening.”

“You may check your notes.”

He fished a notebook from inside the sports coat and flipped through the pages. “July 27 at 8:06 p.m.”

“And where did this transaction occur?”

“Near Mr. Strickland’s residence on the Beach Road … correction … the Shore Road.”

“You refer to ‘a biker clubhouse.’ ”

“Yes. We subsequently, um, seized a quantity of drugs from there. The charges are still before the courts.”

“A quantity of drugs. Various kinds of drugs, we can assume.”

“Yes. We …”

Sullivan was on his feet. “Your Honour, I fail to see the relevance.”

Jones said: “I think it’s important to confirm that the source of the drugs in question, the drugs delivered to Strickland’s …”

“
Allegedly
delivered,” Sullivan said patiently. “We’ll have more on that later, but for the moment my friend is on the brink of insinuating …”

Jones laughed. “Your Honour, I know my good friend here has many talents, but I didn’t think predicting the future …”

“Gentlemen,” the judge said wearily, and with a limp wave of his hand, “sit down, both of you.” They quickly sat. “I take your
point, Mr. Sullivan. But I would like for the witness to confirm that the drugs they found in the raid on the clubhouse included marijuana.”

“Yes, Your Honour,” Jackson replied. “Quite a bit of marijuana.”

“Along with other drugs, presumably including oxycodone.”

“Yes. It was quite the pharmacy.” An appreciative chuckle rippled through the room. The judge remained impassive.

“Fine,” the judge said. “Please continue.”

At the break I saw Jackson, Jones and the two uniformed policemen disappear into an office down the corridor. I was about to make a comment to Caddy but Neil was standing beside me and Caddy had slipped away. “They got him by the balls now,” Neil said.

“I didn’t think you were there.”

“I came in near the end, about the drug drop. Sounds like a slam dunk to me. And wait until the next ones.”

“And who will they be?”

“You’ll see. Final proof that buddy was a fuckin pusher.”

I saw Caddy then, re-entering the courtroom. “I’ll catch you later,” I said, and followed her.

Sullivan took over. He was friendly and respectful, almost fawning, as he probed for details of how the policeman had, in the course of two years, wormed his way into an outlaw motorcycle gang. Granted it was in a small place, nowhere near the peril or sophistication of, say, Quebec, Alberta or British Columbia where, in addition to concerns about police investigations, gang rivalries make the bikers paranoid about
people they don’t know. But this is a friendly place, and Sullivan and the cop shared a chuckle about how the local bikers even had an annual open house for the general public, free wine and beer and coffee and baked goods supplied by area housewives. It was how the Mountie first became familiar with the clubhouse, posing as a carpenter who grew up in the neighbourhood. Showed up at an open house, made himself available for small renovations—mostly reinforcing doors and other openings, bricking up or barring basement windows. Little things like that, all the while learning the layout, strengths and weaknesses.

“Matter of curiosity,” said Sullivan, shuffling some paper. “Would there be any evidence of drug use at these open houses?”

The witness chuckled. “Not a chance. As a matter of fact—zero tolerance. Not even a joint. No, these are public relations exercises in a fairly old-fashioned community.”

“I’ve heard that the bikers actually make good neighbours even in the bigger places. They go out of their way to be helpful.”