“Like?”
“The case I’m on, this nursing home thing. I met the client Friday and I was supposed to type up my notes but I had a date Friday after work-”
“With LaReine?”
He looked puzzled. “What? No, no, I met her just last night. Friday was this girl Micheline, friend of my ex- wife. I always wanted to plant her when I was married but I was trying to be a good husband back then. Stupid me, eh? So I ran into her at the track and I went for it, tabernac, and she was everything what I hoped for. Now I just have to make sure my ex finds out about it.”
“Which ex?”
“Eh? Oh, Mireille, of course. Vicki doesn’t give a crap anymore.”
“So you ran into this girl at Woodbine?”
“Best luck I’ve had there in weeks. I even hit a four-hundred-and-twenty-dollar trifecta.”
“But you said you had a date.”
“When?”
“You said you couldn’t type up your notes because you had a date. But your date was someone you ran into once you were already at the track.”
Franny slumped in his chair and threw up his hands with a smile. “You got me,” he said. “Caught me in my own lie. That is why you are a rising star-”
“Was.”
“Come on. See how you picked up my little fib?”
“Butter the other side later, Franny,” I said. “You bugger off to the track and I have to type up your notes?”
“Clint said you were here to help if I needed it. And I do.” He wheeled his chair closer. I could smell a musk of cologne, booze, coffee and, presumably, LaReine. He handed me a chrome microcassette recorder and said, “Double-spaced, please. Before end of business today is fine.”
CHAPTER 3
Buffalo: the previous March
Barry Aiken entered his garage from the laundry room off the kitchen, so it wasn’t until he opened the outside door that he felt the coldness of the rain and the bite of the wind. A raw, late winter day in Buffalo, still a few weeks shy of spring. Barry had to open the garage door by hand because the remote hadn’t worked in weeks: the only loser on Lincoln Parkway getting his face wet opening the door to the outside world.
He heard the rumble of thunder in the distance, felt the dampness in his bones. Shivered and zipped his leather bomber as high as it would go. Barry hated driving to the west side but that’s where Kevin was, and Kevin had the supply; Barry was all demand. He patted his jacket pocket, the inside one that buttoned shut, to make sure he had his wallet. He didn’t like carrying this much cash, but what else was he going to do? Offer to write Kevin a cheque? Ask him if he took plastic? Right, then hang around until he stopped laughing.
Barry aimed his fob at the side of his Honda CR-V and heard it chirp as the lock disengaged. He got in and eased the seat back and adjusted the mirrors. Amy had been the last one to drive and he was much taller than she was, six-one to her five-five. He started the engine and put the gearshift in reverse, then put it back in park and turned off the engine. Got out of the car and retreated to a corner of the garage that was sheltered from the wind and the neighbour’s view. He opened his silver-plated cigarette case-both the case and the bomber jacket had once been his dad’s-and slipped out a thin joint.
Just half, he told himself, to take the edge off, get him to Kevin’s and back. He needed to calm down. Needed something to calm him down. Until he saw Kevin, a joint would have to do. He lit up and inhaled deeply, holding it in his lungs, watching smoke spiral off the lit end. The neighbours would smell it if they were outside, but so what? It wouldn’t be the first time. He exhaled and inhaled again, holding the smoke in until his lungs told him to cut that shit out and take in some air. He blew out a good-sized cloud and took one more hit, then butted the joint carefully against the cinder-block wall of the garage and put the remnant back in the case.
No more, he told himself. Not until you get home. Don’t want to go past mellow into paranoid. Don’t want to be all red-eyed if you get pulled over for some reason. Especially on the way back.
Thus fortified, Barry backed out of his driveway and drove down Lincoln Parkway, a wide boulevard with fine houses on large treed lots. That he lived in one of Buffalo’s more affluent areas was due more to his father’s efforts than to his own. His dad had left Barry the house when he passed away two years ago, and he and Amy had been more than happy to leave their frame semi near D’Youville College and live close to the Albright-Knox Gallery and the park system designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. Live as his dad had, in his dad’s colonial-style brick house with the white portico in front, on a street where the neighbours were all professionals, just as his dad had been.
Asked what he did, Barry would say graphic designer. True enough but not in the sense it had once been. He had started out in fine arts, like everyone else in his sixties circle, and eventually had turned to Mac-based design to leverage his modest talent into a livable wage. He had been an in-house designer for more than twenty years, the last twelve at the Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority, churning out pamphlets, brochures, reports and newsletters until the latest round of cutbacks claimed him. Why keep a middle-aged man on staff with benefits when work could be farmed out to twenty-two-year-old techies straight out of college who knew all the latest design programs and would charge half the price, the bony-butted pimply little shits.
So now he was freelancing out of his home but work was hard to find. Maybe his lifestyle was catching up with him, or maybe he was just getting old, but he didn’t feel as sharp as he once did. Things didn’t click like they used to. He’d still be trying to master the latest page-making software when the company would release a new version. He couldn’t put in sixteen-hour days like cyberpunks fuelled by junk food, caffeine and the inexhaustible energy of their youth. His income had tailed off dramatically. For now he had modest savings and a decent stock portfolio his dad had left him, but there wasn’t enough to keep Barry and Amy going until their pensions kicked in. Thank God, thank God, thank God they had never had kids. Amy had wavered in her late thirties but Barry had held fast and hadn’t he been right? Look at them now. How would they manage if they had teenagers? Amy wasn’t faring any better than he was, financially or otherwise. Who needed a piano teacher with arthritis, barely able to play the notes her students stumbled through?
The worst thing about being laid off-worse than the drop in income or the blow to whatever self-esteem had accrued to him during a relatively unaccomplished life-had been the loss of his dental, health and prescription drug benefits. As a municipal employee, he’d had a good plan that covered Amy as well. Now they were shopping for a plan they could afford and having no luck at all.
Barry switched on his headlights and set the wipers to high as he drove toward Elmwood. Humps of snow were still visible on some lawns, so black with soot they looked like magma. Not even noon but almost dark, wind blowing the rain hard against the windshield. Remind me again why I live in Buffalo, Barry thought.
’Cause you got no fucking choice.
He had been born in Buffalo fifty-five years ago, the only child of a surgeon and a homemaker, his mom dying of breast cancer when he was fourteen. He had never lived anywhere else. Where could he and Amy go at their age? How would they find someone like Kevin in another town?
His dad had moved to Buffalo from Brooklyn after med school to take up residency at Roswell Park and had genuinely loved the town. Loved its history, its architecture, its smallness and slower pace. Well, you’d really love it now, Dad, Barry thought. It’s smaller than ever, fewer than 300,000 people, maybe half the population of its heyday. When his mom and dad had arrived in 1949, Buffalo had been a Great Lakes port thriving on shipping, steelmaking and manufacturing. With those industries now in decline, and little to replace them, it was just another Rust Belt relic closing in on itself, best known for lake-effect storms that dumped snow three feet at a time and a football team that went 0-for-4 in Super Bowls.
Some Buffalo Bills player, he forgot who, once said after leaving for warmer climes: “Buffalo isn’t the end of the world. But you can see it from there.”
Barry could feel the tightness in his hip spreading up his back and under his right shoulder blade, the one that’d been going into spasm lately. God, getting old sucked. It wasn’t just the hip, the leg, the back. Everything
