What Came Before He Shot Her

            He said, “You might want to tell me your plans and dreams. When you’re ready, that is.” He stepped away from the building and tipped his finger at Joel and then at Toby. “Until later, then, gentlemen,” he said and went on his way.

            Joel watched him for a moment before he turned to the door and opened it for Toby. Ivan Weatherall, he decided, was the oddest man he’d ever met. He knew things about everyone—personal and otherwise—and yet he still seemed to take people as they came. Joel never felt a misfi t in his presence because Ivan never acted as if there was anything unusual in his mongrel features. Indeed, Ivan acted as if the whole world were made of people who’d been taken from a shaken bag of races, ethnicities, beliefs, and religions. How peculiar he was in the world where Joel lived.

            Still, Joel ran his fingers over the embossed print on the face of the card. Thirty-two Sixth Avenue, he read, with a clock below Ivan Weatherall’s name. He said to the air what he’d so far kept to himself.

            “Psychiatrist,” he whispered. “That’s what, Ivan.”

            Chapter

      8 “So when I get home from work,” Kendra said, “I c’n see the boy’s been in a fight. But he i’n’t talking, is he, and neither is Toby. Not that I’d expect Toby to grass. Not on Joel of all people.” She removed her gaze from the soles of Cordie’s feet and studied the reflexology chart that lay on the kitchen table, next to which she and her friend were sitting. She moved her thumbs slightly to the left on Cordie’s right foot. She said, “How’s this? Wha’s it do for you?”

            Cordie was playing willing guinea pig. She’d removed her wedgesoled shoes, had allowed her feet to be washed, patted dry, and rubbed with lotion, and had provided Kendra with a running commentary about the myriad effects that reflexology was having on the rest of her body.

            She said, “Hmmm. Makes me think of chocolate cake, Ken.” She held up a finger, frowned, said, “Nah. Nah, dat ain’t it . . . Keep on . . . Li’tle more . . . Oh yeah. I got it now. More like . . . handsome man kissing the back of my neck.”

            Kendra slapped her lightly on the calf. “Get serious,” she said.

            “This’s important, Cordie.”

            “Hell, so’s a handsome man kissing the back of my neck. When we having ’nother girls’ night out? I want one of dem twenty-year-olds from the college dis time, Ken. Someone wiv big muscles in his thighs, y’unnerstan what I mean?”

            “You been reading too many ladies’ sex magazines. Wha’s muscles in his thighs got to do wiv anyt’ing?”

            “Give him strength to hold me like I want to be held. Up against the wall wiv my legs wrapped round him. Hmm. Dat’s what I want next, innit.”

            “Like I almost b’lieve you, Cordie,” Kendra informed her. “You want dat, you know where to get it and you know who more ’n willing to give it to you. How’s dis now?” She applied new pressure. Cordie sighed. “You bloody good, Ken.” She leaned back in the chair as well as she could, considering it was a kitchen chair. She lolled her head against the back of it and said to the ceiling, “How’d you know, den? ’Bout the fight.”

            “Bruises on his face where someone hit him,” Kendra said. “I get home from work and find him in the bathroom trying to make it all disappear. I ask him what happened, and he say he fell on the steps of the skate bowl. Over the gardens.”

            “Could’ve,” Cordie pointed out.

            “Not wiv Toby afraid to leave his side. Somet’ing happened, Cordie. I can’t sort it why he won’t tell me.”

            “’Fraid of you, maybe?”

            Kendra said, “I ’spect it’s more he’s ’fraid of causing me trouble. He sees Ness’s doin enough of dat.”

            “An’ where is Miss Vanessa Campbell dese days?” Cordie asked sardonically.

            “In an’ out like always.” Kendra went on to explain her attempt to apologise to Ness for what had gone on between them. She hadn’t yet mentioned any of this to Cordie because she knew her friend would ask the logical question about the apology: the why question that she didn’t particularly want to answer. But in this instance and because of Joel’s fight, Kendra felt the need of a girlfriend’s counsel. So when Cordie asked her why the hell she  was apologising to a girl who had disrupted life at 84 Edenham Way from the moment of her arrival, Kendra told her the truth: She’d run into the man who’d been with Ness in the car that night when Kendra had accosted the girl. He’d told an entirely different story from the one she’d assumed. He was . . . Kendra tried to come up with a way to explain that wouldn’t lead to Cordie’s questioning her further. She said at last that the man had been so sincere in what he’d told her that she knew at the level of her heart that he was telling the truth: Ness had been drunk at the Falcon pub, and he’d brought her home before trouble could befall her.

Cordie homed in on the detail she felt most salient. Kendra ran into him? How’d that come about? Who was he, anyway? What made him even bother to explain what had happened with Vanessa Campbell on the night in question?

            Kendra grew uncomfortable. She knew that Cordie would scent a lie the way a hound scents a fox, so she didn’t bother. She told her friend about the phone call for the sports massage, about ending up in the bedsit above the Falcon pub, about coming face-to-face with the man who’d been with Ness that night.

            “He’s called Dix D’Court,” Kendra added. “I only saw him that one time.”

            “And dat was ’nough to b’lieve him?” Cordie asked shrewdly.

            “Oooh. You ain’t tellin me ever’t’ing, Ken. No lyin to me now cos I c’n read it all over you. Summick happened. You get shagged at long last?”

            “Cordie Durrell!”

            “Cordie Durrell wha’? I don’t ’member him real clear, mind, but if he want a sports massage, dat tells me he got a decent sports body.”

            She thought about this. “Damn. You  get muscular thighs? Dat is so outrageously unfair.”

            Kendra laughed. “Di’n’t get nothing.”

            “Not f’r want of his tryin’s what I ’spect.”

            “Cordie, he’s twenty-three,” Kendra told her.

            Cordie nodded. “Gives him stamina.”

            “Well, I wouldn’t know. We jus’ talked after the massage’s done. Dat’s all.”

            “Don’t b’lieve you f ’r a second. But if it’s the truth, den you sixteen ways a fool. Put me in a room with someone wants a sports massage and we ain’t having stimulatin’ conversation ’bout the state of world affairs when it’s over, innit.” Cordie removed her feet from Kendra’s lap, the better to get into the conversation without distractions. She said, “So. You find Ness and say sorry. What happen next?”

            Nothing, Kendra said. Ness wouldn’t hear sorry  or anything else. She kept her comments confined to her niece, since allowing them to drift to Dix D’Court would mean revealing to Cordie that he’d phoned her again and again since the night of the massage. It wasn’t about another sports massage that he’d rung her, either. He wanted to see her. She’d felt something that night, he said to her. He’d felt something as well. He didn’t want to walk away from that. Did she?

            After the first three calls, Kendra had let her mobile take his messages. She’d let her machine at home do the same. She didn’t return his calls, assuming he’d finally go away. He hadn’t done so. It was shortly after this conversation with Cordie that Dix D’Court showed up at the charity shop in the Harrow Road. Kendra would have told herself that his appearance in the shop was a coincidence, but he disabused her of this notion immediately. His parents, he said, owned the Rainbow Cafe. Did she know where it was? Just down the street?

            He’d been on his way there when a display in the window of the charity shop caught his eye. (“Lady’s