Authors: Inger Ash Wolfe
“A viatical settlement is a wonderful new option for a late-life infusion of capital! At a time when so many of Canada’s elderly are struggling on reduced pensions and investments that no longer earn double-digit returns, a viatical settlement can take the pressure off, converting your life insurance into immediate cash!”
Hazel held the phone to her ear, trying to figure out what the cheery man on the other end was saying. “What the hell are you selling?” she said.
“Well, Mrs. Micallef, we’re not selling, we’re buying!” He pronounced it
Mickeleff
.
“Mrs. Who? Buying what?”
“Life insurance.”
“Uh-huh. And how does this work?”
“We purchase your life insurance – and the payouts, Mrs. Mickeleff, are very generous, up to eighty per cent of the benefit –”
“What benefit?”
“The, uh, death benefit.”
“You goddamned vultures,” she rasped. Her mother was moving her spoon around in a bowl of soup, a shawl over her shoulders. “You invest in my death for a twenty per cent return?”
“That’s not how –”
“I’m sixty-four. You call me at
lunch
and ask to buy my life ins –”
“Sixty-four? Is this Mrs. Emily Mikay … leff?”
“This is her daughter, Hazel Micallef.”
“Oh. Oh … well, Mrs. Micallef, have you yourself thought abou –”
She hung up on him and returned to the table. “Who was that?” asked Emily.
“Someone who wanted to buy shares in you, Mother.”
“A rather unwise investment.”
“I communicated that to him. Have some bread and butter.” Emily was looking at the simple spread – homemade vegetable soup and a sourdough loaf – with no interest. Hazel wasn’t sure what was keeping the old woman alive anymore. She didn’t eat, didn’t leave the house, rarely watched television except sometimes at night, when she couldn’t sleep, and then, only movies. She liked the strong
female leads and the unbreakable men. Steve McQueen, Jane Fonda. Susan Sarandon and Sigourney Weaver and Clint Eastwood. There’d come a moment in any movie Emily watched when she’d say, “Here comes the hammer.” If Hazel was watching with her, she’d add, “I love it when the hammer comes.”
Otherwise, Emily spent most of her time in a fugue state between naps of varying lengths. Hazel had calculated that her mother was sleeping sixteen hours a day now. She rarely saw her before noon, and Emily used her strange new sleep habits as an excuse to miss both breakfast and lunch. She claimed she ate at four in the morning – tea and two Coffee Break cookies – but Hazel wasn’t so sure. She’d taken to counting the Coffee Breaks. Her mother ate them in spirals, snapping off the sugared edges and nibbling them like a rabbit. Her remaining identifying habits were listening to CBC Radio One and making acid commentary in her diminished but still ferocious voice.
“Wheat is bad for you now,” she said.
“So have a spoonful of butter. Get some calories down you. You look like a pair of chopsticks with a head.”
“I have to be careful how oily I let my insides get, dear. I don’t want things sliding out.”
“God,” said Hazel, slicing herself a second thick hunk of bread.
Tuesday was her day off. The plan had been to stay home, get the leaves raked up and put into paper bags, spend
some time with her mother. Hazel had tried to engage her in a game of cards, but Emily would have none of it. She didn’t want tea and neither did she want whiskey. She didn’t want to watch
Bullitt
, said she was too tired. “Tired from what?” Hazel asked her.
“Everything. I don’t want to see
Bullitt
again.”
“But Steve McQueen –”
“Is dead.”
She had a certain perspective on things these days. Hazel watched her stirring the soup in her bowl and the phone rang again. She snatched it up. “Good lord! Since when do you people call in the middle of the day?”
“Hazel?” It was Ray Greene, her old friend, occasional nemesis, and the new commander of the Port Dundas Police Department. His voice was tight. “Have you heard from Sean Macdonald?”
“I’m off today. What’s wrong?”
“He’s not answering his radio. He went out on a call at eleven and MacTier hasn’t been able to raise him since noon.”
“You’re kidding me. Not his –”
“Not answering his cell. Goes straight to voicemail. It’s like he’s vanished into thin air.”
“What was the call?”
“A woman named Honey Eisen, on that new development outside of Dublin. He went down to take a statement from her. She teed off on someone’s knee with a granite pen holder.”
“Ouch. You want me to go down?”
“You’re closer and we’re on skeleton crew because I’m in Mayfair on a ‘sensitivity training’ seminar. The PD down here is sending a car, but they’ll wait for you unless, you know, there’s trouble.”
“Sensitivity training.”
Behind her, her mother said, “I’m just going to pour what’s left back into the pot,” and her spoon clinked against the bowl as she sloshed it out. “Are you staying home this afternoon?”
“Apparently not,” Hazel said.
Hazel Micallef drove the eighty-eight kilometres to Tournament Acres in thirty-five minutes. There was no Mayfair OPS officers present – she’d beaten them.
Tournament Acres took up twenty hectares between the 15th and 17th sideroads to the west of Highway 41. Its north–south boundaries were Concession Roads 6 and 7. The land enclosed in that box of roads had till recently produced nothing but crops of corn and soy, just like most any other field in the area. But the land was much more valuable when you planted cheap, prefab bungalows and gave the fields a fancy name. Just the same, twenty per cent of the bungalows already built around the perimeter remained unsold: they were still available “from” $299,999. The Ascot Group – an American corporation
that specialized in large-scale, pop-up communities complete with malls or golf courses or spas – had left half a dozen houses incomplete and made those people who had bought in antsy about the safety of their investments.
Tournament Acres had been advertised and sold on the promise of its sumptuous country-club living and its two eighteen-hole courses. Now there was talk of building more bungalows where the second course was supposed to go – currently a sodden field of rotting corn stalks. People were incensed, and the
Westmuir Record
had been chewing the scenery over the debacle. The fact that most of the owners were from the Golden Horseshoe – Toronto, the 905, Hamilton – lent an air of
schadenfreude
to the talk about the ugly development, but Hazel felt for the investors. Retirees, mostly. People had spent their life-savings.
Hazel drove to Honey Eisen’s address on Pebble Beach Boulevard, the new name for the 15th Sideroad, and found Macdonald’s cruiser outside the house. Hazel parked behind it and tried the driver’s door. She looked through the window, her hands cupped over her eyes, and inspected the inside of the cruiser. She found nothing abnormal about it, except that Macdonald wasn’t in the car. All the doors were locked.
She looked around the area, over the fields to the east and at the discordant cottage-bungalows built on identical frames that lined the west side of the road. Around where
Eisen lived, the houses and gardens were complete, but farther north, they were less finished, and a couple were still being framed. The development stopped altogether less than halfway up Pebble Beach Boulevard.
She considered Mrs. Eisen’s dwelling. It had been done up in the same white wood as the clubhouse, with stuccoed columns in front. The front room throbbed white and blue with television light. Maybe Macdonald was in there watching reruns with the old lady. He’d always take a cup of tea if offered, and he was a tireless conversationalist, in both French and English. But three hours of chatting?
She went up the walk and rang the doorbell. The flickering in the front window stopped. She rang again. The woman who answered wore a shapeless, pale-green dress over her bony frame. “Did you get it back?” she asked.
“Did I get what back?”
“Baby Jesus, do you people even talk to each other? My bone!”
“May I come in, please?” Honey Eisen swept her arm out in mock welcome and Hazel entered. “Did a police officer named Macdonald come to –”
“Well, that’s why you’re here, aren’t you? To
arrest
me.”
“So he was here?”
“You should arrest the people who are building this place. They don’t know
what
they’re doing. And Schnozzola covers for them every step of the way. You speak Jewish?”
“No. Be quiet. Don’t say anything else because I’m not following most of it. Sergeant Macdonald was here, yes?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“He left a … an hour ago at least.”
“Do you know his cruiser is still parked outside of your house? He’s not in it.”
Eisen went to the window of her front room. “He went to talk to Givens. It’s a two-minute drive!”
“Who’s Givens?”
“Brendan Givens. The property manager of this whole schmazzle. Do you golf?”
“I don’t. Is Givens the person you struck with the pen holder?”
“Oh, and they never built the wave pool either. It was supposed to be finished before anyone took possession. They’re cancelling the second course to build more bungalows, and they’ve presold – signed and sealed – so our protests are pointless. Why are they selling more parcels when they can’t finish the houses they’ve already sold?”
“You smashed his knee because the golf courses aren’t finished?”
“No. I … bonked him because he locked my bone in his desk.”
“He locked your bone?”
“Your sergeant was going to go over there and get it back. I want to show it to you people anyway.”
“You don’t think it strange that he didn’t come back?”
“I thought maybe he had to take it to a lab or something. I mean, it’s not
my
bone! I just found it. I was planting some bulbs out back yesterday morning and my trowel went along something hard and scrapey. I thought it was a stone and I dug it out and it was a
spine
bone. Whatever you call it. I went right away to him, showed it to him. ‘What’s this?’ I said. He said it was probably from a horse, there were farms here with horses and sheeps and cows, but then he didn’t give it back. He locked it in his desk and said he’d look into it. But he’ll do what he does with
all
the complaints in this place: ignore it.”
“Why didn’t you call the police
first
?”
“I shoulda! You know, you people should be looking into him and the people he works for. You should nail them for whatever scam they’re working here on us poor old people and young couples. They advertised this place as paradise. It’s not. It’s a cesspool.”
Hazel drove to the clubhouse, and was taken aback to find that the stretch of Concession Road 6 along the southern end of the development was now named Sam Snead Way. Whoever he was, she doubted he had ever stepped foot in Westmuir County. She drove through a pair of wrought-iron gates and parked behind a two-storey building stuccoed to look like white adobe. The woman in the rental
office had no idea that a police officer’s car had been parked since about 1:00 p.m., with no one in it, on Pebble Beach Boulevard. She’d taken one look at Hazel’s cap and her whole face had shut down.
Hazel showed her badge at the inner gate to the clubhouse itself, and was let through. A path led around the side of the building to a long, porticoed verandah facing the first tee. A sign explained that the clubhouse was modelled on the famous Pinehurst clubhouse in North Carolina, except this one had been built at one-quarter scale. It looked chintzy. Hazel guessed a well-placed spark would burn it down in less than two hours.
The main concourse was done up in style, with marble floors and chandeliers in the foyer. Young, smiling women were stationed there to hand you a towel to take into the weight room or the indoor pool. She knocked on the door labelled
Corporate Operations
and a man in security uniform answered. “Do you have any ID?” he asked her.
She showed him her badge. “Do
you
have any ID?” He looked put out, but then produced his security guard’s photo card. “Gaston Bellefeuille,” she said, pronouncing it the French way.
“Gastin Bellfoil,” he corrected her. “Maybe you’d like to leave a message for Mr. Givens.”
“Maybe you’d like to be a crossing guard.”
He let her in and invited her to make herself comfortable in the suite lounge while he told his boss she was there. He
disappeared into the office with the name
B. GIVENS
on its door.
From the lounge there was no view of the undeveloped development, but she’d seen it driving in, as well as the old Dublin Home for Boys, an old, grey, stone nightmare still standing on the corner of Augusta Avenue and Fuzzy Zoeller Way. It was slated to become the northern clubhouse. For a golf course that didn’t sound like it was going to be built.
After what seemed like an extended wait, the door to Givens’s office opened and Bellefeuille came out. She went in. A man with a pronounced nose and a red, unhappy face rose from a desk and came to greet her. His left knee was braced and he walked on one crutch. “Oh,
god
,” he said. “You people again!” He stabbed the end of the crutch at her. “I said I’m not going to press charges!”
“I’m Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef. I’m not here about that. Did one of my officers – a Sergeant Sean Macdonald – visit you earlier today?”
The man retreated to his desk with much effort, huffing and puffing the whole way. He had a very tastefully appointed office. Signed pictures of political celebrities. A baseball in a Plexiglas case. He had excellent hair and was tanning-bed orange, but his spoonbilled nose spoiled the effect. It hung down like a glob of raw dough in the middle of his face, and it was spidery with small red veins.
“Who did
that
to you?” she asked, meaning his leg.
“I fell down some stairs.”
“I heard an old lady tried to drive your knee three hundred yards with a granite pen holder.”