The Early Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn Read online

  “Tea would be fine,” I said, sinking into the chair.

  On the bottom bookshelf were a dozen or so coffee mugs, each with the orange and yellow sunrise logo of Good Morning, Canada. They were given as mementos to people who appeared on the show. As I looked across the table at the man pouring tea, I thought I must have watched him earn all those mugs, and a dozen more besides. His face, weary and decent, had flickered across TV screens for twenty years. It was comforting to see him sitting across from me.

  He was a tall, courtly man, white-haired and sunburned. His clothes were off the rack: lightweight trousers, not expensive but nice, and a white golf shirt. When he handed me the mug of tea, I noticed that the tips of two of his fingers were missing. The tea was good, and I said so.

  “Earl Grey,” he said. “I change blends during the day but I like Earl Grey for mornings – a good, no-nonsense tea.”

  “Yes,” I said, and we lapsed into an awkward silence.

  “Well,” he said finally, picking up the folder, “it’s about this business, of course.” Across the file in blue marker was the name “Boychuk.” “I’ll need you to tell me about some things. Why don’t you just start at a point you feel is useful, and I’ll stop you if I need help following your line of thought. Would it irritate you if I smoked?”

  “No, of course, not. I used to smoke myself.”

  “Everybody’s smoking is in the past tense but mine,” he said gloomily, opening a fresh pack of Kools. “You deserve praise for quitting.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “It’s been a while.” If the city police force trained its officers to do the good cop, bad cop procedure, then Millar Millard must have been the prototype for the good cop.

  Two hours later I knew he could also be the prototype for the smart cop. I had described that last day hour by hour, minute by minute. I had begun with Dave Micklejohn picking up first me at my house then Andy at the apartment on College Avenue where he stayed when he was in the city, and I had gone through our stop at the Milky Way for ice cream, the time at the picnic, the people we saw, the things we ate and drank. Millar Millard had been gentle and encouraging. After about an hour he had made us a fresh pot of tea, and brought out a box of Peek Freans biscuits, which he arranged carefully on a plate before offering them to me. I began to relax. We were friends, two intelligent people working out a problem together. At least that’s what I thought, and that’s why what happened came as such a shock.

  I had found giving a narrative of that last day painful but bearable until I came to the moment when Andy walked across the stage to the podium. When I remembered how happy and certain he had been in those last minutes, I felt my throat closing. I had to look out the window to keep from breaking down as I told the story of the last minutes of Andy Boychuk’s life. When I finished, I turned from the window and looked into the face of my new friend Millar Millard. I guess I expected some sort of commendation. I had, after all, gotten a pat on the head for quitting smoking. This had been worse, but I’d managed to give him a thorough, controlled account of those last awful minutes on the stage. Praiseworthy.

  But there was no praise.

  Inspector Millar dragged deeply on his cigarette. He had changed. We had changed. I was no longer someone helping the police with their investigation. I had become something else. Millard’s blue eyes had lost their weary amiability, and his voice had lost its warmth. He leaned toward me.

  “Just two more questions, Mrs. Kilbourn, but I want answers: How did you know there was poison in that water Andy Boychuk drank at the podium?”

  I was thrown off base. I babbled a long and aimless story about being in Florida when my children were little and how one day on the beach my daughter had instinctively recoiled from a poisonous man-of-war even though it was as blue as a jewel. “It was as if Mieka just knew that thing was a killer,” I finished lamely. “When I bent over to give Andy mouth-to-mouth, I knew the smell on his lips was deadly, and I knew I couldn’t let Rick Spenser drink from the glass Andy had drunk from. Call it atavistic, if you will …”

  “Oh, I will, Mrs. Kilbourn,” he said dryly. “I will note in my report that you were obeying a primal response when you tackled Rick Spenser.” He stubbed out his cigarette, looked hard at me and said, “Shall we abandon this area for the moment and look at another puzzling aspect of your behaviour that day?” His eyes were the hostile grey of a March sky. “What was it that you took from the podium before the police arrived? There are, I should mention, a dozen witnesses, albeit reluctant ones, who will testify that they saw you remove something from the area in which the murder had been committed.”

  “I believe they call it the scene of the crime,” I said, smiling.

  “I believe they do,” he said, not smiling.

  I took a deep breath, reached into my bag, pulled out Andy’s speech portfolio and handed it to Inspector Millard. “This,” I said, “is what I removed from the scene of the crime.”

  It was his turn to be knocked off base. He read the words on the cover aloud: “ ‘Every Ukrainian Mother’s Dream.’ ” Mrs. Kilbourn, I’m at a loss here. Is this some kind of joke?”

  “Yes,” I said, “that’s exactly what it is – or was. That’s Andy Boychuk’s speech portfolio. The inscription was a private joke.”

  His eyes were glacial. “Private between whom and whom?”

  “Between Andy and the people who worked for him. The portfolio was a gift to Andy from Dave Micklejohn and me last Christmas. One of the Ukrainian newspapers in the province had run a picture of Andy and used the Ukrainian mother’s dream thing as a caption.” I hesitated. “It seemed pretty funny at the time …”

  He lit another Kool and rubbed the area between his eyes. “I’m sure it did. These little whimsies always look a bit tawdry when there’s been a murder.”

  “You have more experience of that than I do, Inspector,” I said.

  He looked at me wearily. “Mrs. Kilbourn, let’s cut the crap. Why did you take the portfolio from the stage that day? You’re a clever woman. You knew better than that.”

  “I guess I wasn’t thinking clearly. If you want to dismiss me as hysterical or stupid, go ahead. But there was nothing devious in my taking the portfolio. I had given it to Andy. It contained the last speech I’d ever write for him. He was dead. At that moment I suppose I just thought I was taking something that was mine.”

  “Mrs. Kilbourn, you amaze me.” He shook his head sadly. “Well, let’s have a look at the last speech.” He opened the portfolio. The poem was still in place. He read it without expression and when he was through, he looked up at me. “William Blake,” he said. “ ‘The Sick Rose.’ ”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “What’s it doing here?”

  I was angry. I picked up my bag and stood. “I guess that’s for you to find out, Inspector. Thanks for the tea.” I started toward the door. I think I expected him to stop me. He didn’t.

  But when I opened the door, he said very quietly, “Any time, Mrs. Kilbourn. And, Mrs. Kilbourn, I’m certain I don’t have to tell you this, but we’d appreciate it if you didn’t leave the city for a while.”

  That patronizing “we” ignited something in me. “You seem to forget, Inspector, I have a funeral to go to. I’m not the kind of woman who leaves a friend to go to his grave alone.”

  It made no sense, but at that moment it was the best exit line I could muster.

  The police station was air conditioned, but by the time I got to the street where I’d parked the Volvo, sweat was running down my back. There was a parking ticket on my windshield. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised. When I reached into my bag for car keys, I pulled out a sheet of orange paper – the list of school supplies Angus needed before they’d let him through the door to grade eight. That didn’t surprise me, either. I wanted a shower, a cold drink with gin in it and a novel in which an inspector of police was first humiliated then killed. But I was not a free agent; I was Angus’s mother. I peeled the ticket off the windshield,
put a quarter in the meter, crossed the street and went into the Bay.

  I like the way stores look in the last days of summer: the stacks of fresh notebooks, the bright new three-ring binders, the crayons sharp with possibilities. I like the “Back to School” signs – cardboard cutouts of shiny red apples and cartoon bookworms suspended above the school supplies. And the “Back to School” clothes cut from heavy fabrics in deep and glowing colours reassuring us that, after a lightweight summer of ice-cream pastels, life is about to begin again in earnest. It’s a time of hope, and that morning, in spite of everything, I could feel my spirits rise as I ticked off items on Angus’s list.

  I saw her by accident. When I was walking toward the boys’ department, I happened to look up and spot the televisions, a bank of them, different makes and models and sizes. And on the screen of every one of them was the face of Eve Boychuk. Twenty Eves looking out at me through twenty pairs of unreadable eyes.

  I walked over and turned the sound up on one of the TVS. She was amazing – no other word for it. She was reeling from the murder of her husband, but she was opening up her fragile and private world to public scrutiny. Tanned and handsome in a simple blue cotton dress, she was leaning forward, telling the interviewer that she wanted her husband’s funeral to be something people would remember all their lives. The camera pulled in for a close-up, and there, in the large appliance section of the Bay, Eve was saying that her “dearest wish” was that her husband’s body lie in state in the rotunda of the legislature.

  I couldn’t believe my ears. Twenty Eves coolly rebuffing the interviewer’s timid reminder that lying in state was an honour reserved for premiers and lieutenant governors.

  “So many people loved Andy,” said all the Eves, “that I’m sure the premier wouldn’t be mean enough to deny people the chance to come to the city to say good-bye.” Oh, she was smooth. For the first time since his party had booted us out of office seven years before, I felt sorry for the baby-faced ex-linebacker who sat behind the big desk in the premier’s office. Eve had flummoxed him.

  She had, as it turned out, flummoxed us all. When I walked in the front door of our house, Angus barrelled into me. He was on his way to play baseball, he yelled over his shoulder. I made him come inside to check out his new school supplies.

  “Awesome,” he said, deadpan. Then on the porch he turned. “Mum, Mr. Micklejohn has called about eighty-three times and he sounds like he’s going to cry.”

  When I picked up the telephone to call Dave, he was already on the line. Not a word about the coincidence of my trying to call him when he was calling me, not a word of greeting. The man who prided himself on taking care of details was starting to crumble. There was no preamble, just, “Jo, something’s going on with Eve. I thought she was going to leave everything to me, then this morning, before I’d even had time for my morning ablutions, she was on the phone giving me directions about the funeral. She is intruding in everything from the choice of pallbearers to the food at the reception. ‘No perogies, no cabbage rolls.’ That’s what she says. Can you imagine? Did you catch her act on television this morning? She is not the woman we thought she was.”

  “Fun is fun till somebody starts to mutate,” I said. “Angus has that written on his science notebook.”

  “Kids,” said Dave. “Anyway, what do you think’s up with Eve?”

  “I think she’s showing us she can play the game, too. I think she’s showing us that we underestimated her because she wasn’t part of our little circle. And don’t forget, she’s suffering.”

  “All of us are suffering, dear. But we’re professionals. We know how to do things right. I don’t think we should have to restructure Andy’s funeral as a confidence-building experience for Eve. However, I don’t know what options we have. The frame of mind she’s in – who knows what she’d do? I need some guidance here, Jo.

  “In that case, my advice is to go along with her. Let her give us some general ideas and tell her we’ll work them out. We’ve got the organization. You saw to that.”

  At the other end of the phone, I could feel Dave preening. He had a right to.

  In the last year of his life, Andy Boychuk had the best organization the province had ever seen, and in large part it was due to Dave Micklejohn. We were as attuned to one another as partners in a trapeze act or a good marriage. We knew one another, and we knew Andy. We loved his strengths, but we also knew his weaknesses, and we worked to make sure no one else did. We all had our reasons for working for Andy Boychuk, and we all had our areas of competence, but the working life of each of us was fuelled by one desire: the need to make our guy look good. So strong was that drive that neither Andy’s death nor Eve’s intrusions stopped us. In those days before the funeral, we kept on going to the Caucus Office; we kept on working on plans to make sure our guy looked good. “Man makes plans, and God laughs,” said Dave Micklejohn sadly, but we kept on. Planning was a way of thumbing our noses at a universe where a bright and decent man could stand up to give a speech and be murdered before our eyes. And so Dave, who had been, among other things, Andy’s advance man, advanced the funeral – making sure that the routes from the legislature to the cathedral would be lined with people but not congested, that the cathedral could handle an overflow, that the women who were preparing the lunch had ovens that heated and refrigerators that cooled – making certain, in short, that the final public event of Andy Boychuk’s life didn’t blow up in all our faces.

  Kelly Sobchuk, who had done itinerary, planned the times and places all of us would be the day of the funeral. Lorraine Bellegarde, who had done correspondence, kept track of the memorial donations and flowers and letters that poured into the office first by hundreds and then thousands. Janice Summers, who had been Andy’s principal secretary, made certain that out-of-province VIPS and in-province political powers had hotel rooms and schedules and transportation. And there were a half dozen more of us working at a half dozen other jobs efficiently and bleakly.

  Every so often a kind of wild gallows humour would erupt. Around five o’clock one steamy afternoon before the funeral, I walked into the offices of the Official Opposition. A bottle of Crown Royal was open on the desk and another was empty in the wastebasket. About five of our people had gathered to hear Lorraine Bellegarde read the mail: a man in Ituna promised to deliver thirty thousand votes for us in the next election if we sent him Andy’s clothes, “since I am his identical size and he has no further need for same”; a woman in Stuart Valley had made Andy a pair of slipper socks out of white flannel. She made them, she said, “for all my departeds because I don’t like to think of them going over the line with bare feet, but let’s call a spade a spade: there’s no point in wasting good money on shoes for them.” Two men who had seen Eve on television sent proposals of marriage, and one woman who was a cosmetologist from the southwest of the province told Eve she would look ten years younger if she had her hair cut into a “soft bob” and dyed it a colour called Hidden Honey. A stubby sample of human hair – like a paintbrush – was taped to the page. I had a drink and walked out of the building into the heat. I couldn’t seem to get into the spirit. There were no more speeches to write, but I couldn’t see beyond the day of Andy’s funeral. Maybe I didn’t want to.

  My life between Andy’s murder on Sunday afternoon and the Friday morning of his funeral had a shapeless, anarchic quality.

  “I’m walking around doing things but none of them seems very real,” I said to Dave Micklejohn one sweltering morning when I met him outside the legislature.

  “Here,” he said, slapping a five-dollar bill into my hand. “Do you want a sense of reality, Jo, dear? Go downtown and get Eve a pair of panty hose for the funeral – taupe, all nylon, no spandex, cotton crotch, queen size – not, you understand, because our Eve is fat but because she is tall.” He was joking, but I went. You didn’t have to be a psychiatrist to see that he was close to cracking.

  There was no pattern at home, either. The boys didn’t go back to s
chool till after Labour Day, and Mieka was to start university in Saskatoon in the middle of September, so our lives were ad hoc, listless, like the lives of people who are stuck in a strange city by an airline strike or bad weather.

  Part of the sense of strangeness could, I knew, be traced to the fact that on Tuesday, two days after the murder, the kids and I had moved into the granny flat. It was Peter’s idea – a way for us all to get away from the heat.

  Our house on Eastlake Avenue was built in 1911, and like all old houses it had dozens of cracks and crannies through which winter and summer air passed freely. Air conditioning would have been a waste there. But the granny flat was another matter.

  There was a sprawling double garage behind our house, and the previous owner had had a flat built over it for his mother. It was one large room with a kitchenette and a bathroom. She had allergies, so it was sealed tight as a tomb. With a flick of a switch you could have it cool enough to refrigerate a side of beef or hot enough to slow cook it.

  The granny flat had been the place where Ian worked on lectures for his human justice class, and on more than one lazy afternoon, a place where we made love. When he died, I moved in the books and notes for my dissertation. Now it was my office, but for me it was more than that. The granny flat was a place where I could mourn or sit staring into space without fear of worrying the children or of being seen to look like a fool.

  When Ian had had his office there, he’d panelled the walls in knotty pine and had bookshelves built along one wall. There was a desk, a good leather chair for the desk, a reclining chair for reading, a brown corduroy couch that made up into a hideaway bed, and that was it. The decorating was fifties Argosy magazine, but the room had a cottagey feeling I liked.

  The Christmas before Ian died I’d ordered a braided rag rug from Quebec as a surprise. It is a joyful splash of colour in that sombre room. The rug and a wall full of photographs Ian’s mother sent me after he was killed are the only changes I’ve made. The pictures are a chronicle of Ian and his brother, Jack, growing up. I don’t know what a grief counsellor would say about the hours I spend standing in front of the pictures, but it helps. There is something comforting about the neat and inevitable progression of those young lives: from babies who stare wide-eyed, then beam as they sit, then walk, to boys who hold dogs and play baseball and ride bikes, to young men, faces suddenly serious under strangely dated haircuts, who hold the arms of girls in billowy dresses, and graduate, and receive awards.