She hadn’t had breakfast and her legs were rubbery. Her vision blurred at the edges. She sat on the bench at a bus stop and in a few minutes felt better. However, by the time she got home she wasn’t sure she could make it up the four flights of stairs to her apartment. She did, of course, but as she unlocked her apartment door, her heart was hammering furiously and her undergarments were soaked with perspiration.
Taking off her shoes and hanging up her coat, she sat at the kitchen table and drank a cup of weak tea with sugar and milk made from powder because it was less expensive than fresh. Yesterday’s newspaper was on the table, open to the want ads, but most of the ads she’d circled now had lines drawn through them. Feeling better after she finished the tea, she put on her shoes, took her keys and some quarters from her purse, and went downstairs to the payphone in the lobby. She fed a quarter into the phone and called the dry cleaning store. Mr. Seropian’s wife answered.
“Is your husband there?” Barbara asked.
“Who is calling?” Mrs. Seropian asked. Barbara told her. “Not here,” the woman said and hung up.
Barbara dropped another quarter into the phone. Mrs. Seropian answered again.
“Let me speak with your husband,” Barbara said. “My paycheque bounced.”
Mrs. Seropian hung up.
Unwilling to waste another quarter, Barbara returned to her apartment. Her stomach ached with a mixture of anger and fear and hunger. She heated up leftover soup. She would have to go to the store in person, she knew. At least her bus pass was good until the end of the month. She also needed her pink slip so she could apply for unemployment. The thought of confronting Mrs. Seropian made her queasy, but it had to be done.
Soup finished, she lay down on the bed, on top of the covers. Her doorbell rang, but she was too tired to get up to answer. A moment later, it rang a second time, but still she did not get up. It was probably just another tenant, too lazy to get out his keys, or someone calling on the drug dealer who lived on the first floor.
Before returning to the office Shoe stopped by the dry cleaning store to speak to Barbara about the job at the marina. An overweight, black-eyed woman regarded him suspiciously from behind the counter.
“Is Ms. Reese here?” Shoe asked.
“You got cleaning?” the woman replied.
“No, I would like to speak to Ms. Reese, please.”
“She not work here,” the woman said.
“She isn’t working today, you mean? Did she call in sick?”
“Is filthy slut,” the woman said. “Whore. She not work here no more. Go away you, if you got no cleaning.”
As Shoe turned to leave the store, he caught sight of the store’s owner watching him with sad brown eyes through a gap in the row of plastic-sheathed garments hanging from the overhead conveyor.
Shoe drove to Barbara’s apartment building. The narrow, poorly lit vestibule was shabby with wear but had recently been washed down with some aggressively pine-scented cleaner. The glass of the inner door was reinforced with wire mesh. To the right of the door there were four rows of four mailboxes each. The box for apartment 401 was labelled “B. Reese.” There was a button above the mail slot, but no speaker grill. He pressed the button and waited. There was no response. He pressed it again, but still there was no answer.
It was almost four when he got back to the office. He found Sandra St. Johns in her own office, sitting on her sofa, feet up on her coffee table, laptop in her lap. He knocked gently on the doorframe. She looked up, put her feet down, and moved the laptop to the table.
“Come in,” she said, tugging her short skirt lower on her long thighs.
“Do you recall Patrick ever mentioning the name Claire Powkowski?” Shoe asked.
“No. Who’s she?” Shoe told her. She shook her head. “He never told me what he and Mrs. Ross talked about.”
She was quiet for a moment, then stood and moved past him to close the door. Her perfume, light and flowery, tickled his nose. She went back to the sofa but did not sit. She looked as though she had something to say.
“What is it?” Shoe asked.
“I wasn’t completely honest with you the other day,” she said, head down, not looking at him. Shoe waited. There were tears on her lashes when she finally looked up. “Patrick and I were having an affair.” She picked up a stack of file folders, tapped them on the desk to align them, and put them down again.
“It was just sex,” she said. “At least, it was supposed to be just sex.” She smiled ruefully. “You don’t want all the sordid details, do you?”
“Please, no.”
She smiled gratefully.
“Are you going to be all right?” he asked.
“Sure. No one dies of a broken heart, and mine isn’t broken, just a little bent.”
More than just a little, Shoe thought.
“But it wasn’t just that I wanted to tell you,” she said. “A couple of weeks before he resigned I had the feeling he was trying to make up his mind about something. I thought maybe it had to do with me, like he was thinking of dumping me. Then he told me he was leaving and I realized that that wasn’t it at all, that he’d just been trying to make up his mind about resigning. But now I’m not so sure.”
“Why not?”
“When Patrick and I were—” She paused, blushing, then went on. “Well, we didn’t talk much. When we did talk, it was usually business. Except once, about a month ago. There was a report on TV about that woman in Abbotsford who turned her son in to the police for sexually assaulting the little girl next door. I made some stupid remark about how she couldn’t have loved her son very much to have done that. Patrick said, maybe that was true, but maybe it was because she loved him that she’d reported him. I said, ‘It must have been awfully hard then,’ and he said that when we were faced with hard choices, generally the right thing to do is the one that’s the hardest to do.”
“And you don’t think Patrick’s ‘hard choices’ had anything to do with you or with leaving the company?” Shoe asked. “Could he have been talking about leaving Victoria, asking her for a divorce?”
“No. Although he felt guilty about being unfaithful to her, Patrick had no intention of leaving her. He loved her, even though he thought she might have been having a lesbian relationship with some friend of hers. As for leaving the company, I don’t think that was a hard choice at all, after Mr. Hammond’s refusal to go public. I think Patrick had the idea that he could get rich off stock options. He wanted very much to be rich. I never realized how much.”
“Thank you for telling me this,” Shoe said. Sandra opened the office door. “By the way,” Shoe said, “did Patrick keep notes?”
“He was a compulsive note taker,” she said. “He made notes about everything. And his day wasn’t complete until he’d transcribed them into his daily journal on his laptop.”
“What about his handwritten notes?” he asked.
“As far as I know,” she said, “he shredded them as soon as soon as he’d transcribed them into the laptop.”
The information technology department occupied a cramped but bright corner office one floor down. A polite young man with yellow hair and a silver ring through his left eyebrow consulted his computer and informed Shoe that according to his records Patrick O’Neill hadn’t turned in his laptop.
“How will I know it if I find it?” Shoe asked him.
The young man wrote the model name and serial number on a sticky-note. “Check with security,” he said. “Maybe they’ve got it.”
Upstairs, Shoe knocked on the door of Del Tilley’s office. The