“What was Walter doing there?”

“He wanted to know about Gabe, and about that ring. He was upset with me because I hadn’t told him—”

“Josie, stay away from Walter.”

“That’s funny. He said the same thing about you.”

“Josie—”

“Mel, if you don’t tell me what the hell is going on—”

“I tried to—”

“Well, try harder. Walter Freeman’s questioning me. He thinks I know more than I’m telling him, and I don’t, but everybody else knows more than they’re telling me, and I want to know what it is.”

Mel took a while to ponder my words. I was doing the same thing—what the hell did I just say?

“I think we should get together.”

“You want another night at some Open Arms Motel? Forget it.”

Mel looked away. “I have to be able to trust you,” he said.

“To do what?”

“To be quiet about things you shouldn’t know about.”

“Do they have anything to do with Gabe?”

This time he looked at me and nodded.

“You don’t think Gabe killed himself either, do you?”

He shrugged. “It’s difficult to counter. All the evidence, Josie, the forensic tests …”

“What tests? Tell me.”

“His gun was used—”

“I know that.”

“The paraffin tests on Gabe’s hand—”

“Big deal.”

“They prove he recently fired a weapon. The gun was in his hand and he pulled the trigger.”

“You know all this?”

“Josie, I worked with the lab, I filed the reports, I work with the lab people all the time—”

“So why don’t you agree with everybody else? Why are you and I the only ones who don’t believe Gabe would kill himself?”

Mel leaned toward me. I could smell his aftershave. I knew that aroma. I had wanted to buy some for Gabe to wear, and in a rare minute of wisdom decided not to. “Because we knew him better than anyone else.”

I closed my eyes. “We also know he had a motive, if discovering that your buddy at work has slept with your wife is enough motive for a guy to kill himself.”

When I opened my eyes, Mel was staring at me. “There’s something going on down at Central,” Mel said. He had lowered his voice as though there were someone in the car, eavesdropping. “Gabe did an audit of our evidence locker last month. We rotate the duty so there’s no way to hide what’s going on. Gabe found we were short on some cocaine being held for a trial.”

“Somebody stole drugs from a police evidence locker?”

“That’s what was happening.”

“And sold them?”

“Or used them.” Mel sat back. “But yeah, probably sold them. For sure.”

“Gabe reported it, right? He would report something like that.”

Mel nodded. “To Walter.”

“Okay.” I shrugged. “But it doesn’t concern me, and it doesn’t prove that Gabe killed himself. Because he wouldn’t. Damn it, he wouldn’t, especially not when he knew I would find him.”

Mel leaned toward me, and his hand gripped my wrist. “There are things you don’t know, all right? I’m trusting you here. If you don’t want to hear about them, fine.” He released his grip on me and sat back again, raising his hands, showing his palms. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

I rubbed my wrist where his hand had gripped it so tightly. “You’ve come this far. Tell me the whole story.”

And he did.

The man found dead in an alleyway, shot behind the ear, had been facing drug charges, his trial scheduled for two weeks later. Drugs taken from him were in the locker that Gabe had checked and found a kilo short, and Gabe had been using him as a means of tracking some murders over recent years, small-time dealers shot to death, their bodies dumped in back alleys with nothing to connect them beyond the drugs they dealt. This particular dealer’s name was Dougal Dalgetty, and he lived on the beach strip, over the upholstery shop down near the bikers’ clubhouse.

“The crazy woman,” I said, and Mel said, “What?” I shook my head, too busy absorbing everything Mel was telling me to go into details. I could see the woman standing on the boardwalk glaring toward our house, madness in her eyes, and her mouth moving as though forming silent curses, before turning and walking away, head down. Long hair combed into a bird’s nest. Weary dresses. Worn shoes. When I passed her on the boardwalk, she never appeared to notice me. Something about our house closed a switch in her brain. Or opened one. Just another casualty of a hard life, I thought. Just another mad soul.

Dalgetty, Mel explained, had been a connection, a link between Grizz and Pasquale Pilato, whom everybody, for a reason I’ve never understood, called Mike.

“Mike Pilato?” I said. This was serious stuff.

Everyone in the city—and maybe in the Western world—knew that no one except Pilato’s mother ever called him Pasquale. He was always Mike Pilato, especially to the news reporters and the cops who identified him as the head of the most powerful organized crime family in the area. Mike Pilato claimed he was a small businessman running a hardware distribution company in the old North End of the city, in the neighbourhood where I grew up. Near the shadows of the blast furnaces. Pilato’s neighbours said the police were pursuing a continuing vendetta against Mike, who lived in the same house he had been born in and who contributed thousands of dollars every year to the neighbourhood. He had purchased a couple of vacant lots and donated them to the city, then paid to have them neatly landscaped. The vacant lots became Pilato Park, with slides and swings for children and benches for pensioners. Was this a bad guy? Was this the kind of gangster who could have people disappear by doing little more than nodding his head? That’s what the neighbours asked.

Mike Pilato was a people’s hero, so it didn’t matter to his neighbours if he was rough around the edges. The people loved him. There were rumours that Mike had beaten men to death with a baseball bat in his younger days. Heroes tend not to do these things, so it was easier for Pilato’s neighbours not to believe the stories. They hadn’t seen it happen, so they didn’t have to accept it. This kind of thinking makes life easier for a lot of people.

Whenever Mike Pilato’s picture appeared in the press, rarely in recent years, he wore oversized dark sunglasses and a battered hat pulled low on his head. Months would pass when Mike Pilato was unseen in town, leading some people to claim he no longer even lived in the area. He was in Florida, in Sicily, in prison, or in a grave somewhere. On other occasions, the media would catch him strolling in the company of men you would not want to meet anywhere except in heaven—an unlikely location for them—on the street in front of White Star Hardware Distributors, his business on Cathcart Street.

“This can’t get out,” Mel was saying.

“What can’t get out?”

“What I just told you.”

“About Mike Pilato?”

Mel looked angry. He leaned forward. “About the internal investigation.”

I had been lost in the Mike Pilato legend and hadn’t been listening. “Tell me again,” I said, and Mel began, speaking each word as though he were counting to four. “Walter. Is. Being. Investigated. By internal affairs.”

My throat felt like I had been eating cotton. “Walter signed Gabe’s death report. He said it was suicide.” I looked across at Mel, who was nodding his head slowly. “Walter wants me to believe that Gabe killed himself.”

“He almost talked me into it,” Mel said. “And we signed the lab report submission, Harold Hayashida and I.”

“Walter was the first detective to arrive. When they found Gabe.”

Another nod.

“Walter doesn’t want me to have anything to do with you.”

“Because I’m co-operating with the investigation.”

“Walter was in my garden shed. Where the pervert was. Looking around, he said.”

“You told me that.”

“What about the guy asking for Grizz?”

Mel closed his eyes and sat silently for a moment. “Walter is a senior officer.”