Crying for the Moon, page 14
Maureen had always loved the library, despite having been in the stacks when some guy had hauled it out and waved it at her. Another time, a fella standing in Biography was pulling away at himself. Jesus, why did they always have to find her? It was like she had a sign on her that said, “Abuse me. I’m no fucking good anyway. If you require someone to waggle your dick at, here I am.” I’m like a walking buffet for the pervert crowd. She was getting worked up.
To calm herself down, she went straight to the card catalogue. She loved the card catalogue: everything there was numbered and in its place. Good old Melvil Dewey. She looked under the 500s, for Science, maybe 540, she supposed for Chemistry. Oh, it was glorious. All the books on one subject all together on the shelves, all numbered, no chaos, three numbers to the left of the decimal point and a limitless amount of numbers after the decimal to indicate what each book was and where it was, and the cutter number to tell you the author of the book.
She found Poisons and Pesticides of the Modern Age by G. Botkin. Chlordane was even listed on the typed-up part of the card. She wrote out the number 542.580973B8261956COP2. She knew she didn’t have to write it all down, but she wanted to—she wanted to head into the stacks fully armed.
Maureen looked for chaos and instability and loved the unpredictable. But there was a part of her that longed for the comfort of order, a part that felt so much better inside structure. She loved the soothing certainty of a place for everything and everything in its place. She loved that 542.580973 was right there in the stacks after 542.580972. It brought her a real moment of joy that there were two copies, just like it said on the card. Yes, she loved the library and all the glorious organization that the library contained. But she had never let on to anyone that she felt that way. She was ashamed of the dweeby person who loved all that order. She didn’t want anyone to think that she was one of those foolish, pasty-faced, overweight, drippy dorks going around being joyous about books, lurking about in the stacks, burying their heads in texts, with food stains on the front of their blouses from always reading while trying to eat. Who she wanted to be was someone more like Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde, or Julie Christie in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, beautiful and hungry and living wild and free and . . . She wasn’t really sure what the words were to describe who it was that she longed to be, but she longed to be that other person so badly, she could practically taste it. It wasn’t just that she wanted to be someone else; she physically needed to be someone else.
Maureen sat down with Poisons and Pesticides of the Modern Age and opened it up to the section on chlordane. “Chlordane: a man-made mixture of chemicals widely used as an insecticide . . . Chlordane is moderately to highly toxic. Symptoms usually start within 45 minutes to several hours after exposure to a toxic dose.” Okay, but what was a toxic dose? How much straight chlordane had she poured in the orange juice that morning, and was it enough to be a toxic dose?
“Convulsions may be the first sign of poisoning,” she read. Oh! Convulsions? Oh dear Jesus! “May be preceded by nausea, vomiting and gut pain.” Of course, if Bo had those symptoms, he’d assume that it was because of the almost full bottle of whisky he’d baled back into him the night before. “Initially, poison victims appear agitated.” Well, Bo was always up on bust agitated-wise. “But later, they become depressed, uncoordinated, tired and confused.”
Except for the convulsions, it sounded like a real bad hangover, the kind where you wake up still drunk, and then as you start to sober up, you feel worse and worse. She kept reading and finally found what a toxic dose would be. The amount of chlordane that was lethal orally was called LD-50, meaning that 50 per cent of the subjects died. The dose that would kill 50 per cent of study subjects was 50–500 milligrams of pure chlordane per kilogram of body weight. So, how many kilograms was Bo? And how many the fuck was 50–500 milligrams? How much did that mean? What was it in ounces or pounds, or whatever the fuck?
All she wanted to know was would the amount of chlordane she put in the orange juice be enough to kill Bo. God, she was drowning in her own ignorance. She had to look up everything. She knew fuck all about fuck all, just like Bo always said. According to the librarian, the slash in “mgs/kgs” meant “per,” so it meant “milligrams per kilograms.” But, Jesus, she was still no further ahead, since they’d only just brought in the metric and Maureen still thought in the old ounces and gallons. She got out the Encyclopedia Britannica, which had weights and measures conversion tables. Oh God, why don’t I just kill myself? Math had the opposite effect that the Dewey Decimal System had on her, though she knew it was all numbers. Some numbers gave you comfort and some numbers—like conversion tables—just fucked with your head and made you angry and hopeless all at the same time.
Okay. She could do this, but she’d need a piece of paper. So grams. Okay, how many grams are there in a cup? Turns out there are 340 grams in a cup. And it would only take six grams to kill a 210-pound man. So it was starting to look like it would only take a very tiny amount of chlordane in the orange juice to kill at least 50 per cent of the people who were given chlordane-laced orange juice. The thing that was becoming clear to Maureen was that she’d probably really overdone it on the chlordane—she’d always had a heavy hand. The Sarge told her that’s why she was no good at making cakes.
So, she had poured a lethal amount—actually probably a thousand times the lethal amount—into Bo’s orange juice. She’d tipped up the bottle of chlordane and poured glug glug, and maybe even a third glug, into the decanter. But where did all that fancy number fuckery get her? It was now clear that she could have killed him, according to what she could understand from the book. It seemed like she had definitely put enough poison in the orange juice to kill him, but the question was did he even drink the orange juice?
The person across the table from her got up and walked away, leaving behind a pile of books. Maureen looked at them, desperate for a distraction. One was called Alcoholics Anonymous. On the cover it read, “This is the Third Edition of the Big Book, the Basic Text for Alcoholics Anonymous.” Geez, everywhere Maureen looked these days, there it was. It was like AA was haunting her.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
GEORGE WAS AT THE UNIVERSITY WHEN MAUREEN GOT to his place, so she just walked in. He never locked the apartment. He said that if people were determined to come in and rob him blind, there was no lock he knew of that was going to keep them out, and they would just end up doing a whole lot more damage if they had to kick down the door to get at his stuff. Maureen sat down and called Fluff. Whoever answered the phone said that Fluff was down at the boutique, giving Joyce a hand.
“Boutique Artistique—cool threads for kind heads,” Fluff answered the phone.
“Fluff, it’s me, Maureen.”
“Maureen.” Fluff’s voice registered a little coldness, and then she gave that apologetic little laugh of hers and said, “Joyce is just making me try out a new slogan for the shop.” Another little apologetic laugh. “What’s going on?”
“Yea, yea, I just wanted to ask you, Fluff, on that Tuesday, the last time you were talking to Bo”—Maureen could hear a little catch in Fluff’s breathing when she said Bo’s name, so she hurried on—“how did he sound?”
“Regular, you know . . . a bit pissed off, but then that was Trevor.”
“Did he sound agitated or excited at all?” Maureen asked, looking at the notes she’d taken at the library.
“No more than usual, you know. He was fed up with the job and he wanted to get away from the boys at DAFT, and he had a bad hangover, you know.”
“Really?”
“Yea. He just said he was sick as a dog with a hangover and he was gonna have to start taking it easy.”
“Did he sound”—what was it they said in the book?—“you know, down in the dumps, desperate or confused at all?”
“No, someone came to the door and he had to go.”
“What time was that, Fluff?”
“What, are you suddenly the Riddler, Maureen? Why are you asking all these questions?”
“Well, Fluff, I just want to know what exactly happened that day that Bo went missing.”
“Why? What good will that do? That won’t bring Trevor back.”
The thought that Bo could come back sent Maureen into a spin. Her thoughts went right off the rails for a second.
“Maureen? . . . Maureen? Are you still there?”
Maureen couldn’t answer. She was lost in a violent reverie, seeing herself on the floor that night, trying to shield her face from Bo’s kicking.
“Maureen, look I gotta go. Someone just came in the shop. Maureen? . . . ”
Finally, Maureen croaked out, “Okay, Fluff. See ya. See ya later on.”
Maureen hung up, still shaken from the thought of Bo being resurrected. She had to sit—her knees felt buckly. She fell back into the beanbag chair and felt a hardcover book under her. The page the book was open to said, “Section 23, The Offences Against the Person Act.” Maureen continued to read: “. . . whosoever shall unlawfully and maliciously administer to or cause to be administered to or taken by any other person any poison or other destructive or noxious thing, so as thereby to endanger the life of such person, shall be guilty of an offence. The maximum penalty for an offence under Section 23,” Maureen read with mounting horror, “is ten years’ imprisonment.” She closed the book, Martin’s Annual Criminal Code, 1969. According to the back cover, George had borrowed it from The Law Society of Newfoundland Library.
George thinks I’m guilty . . . Maybe I am guilty? She could hear the big iron bars slamming shut all around her. Just then, George came in through the door. Maureen screamed and jumped up. George fell back, at first alarmed and then defensive. Maureen rushed to apologize.
“I was so lost in thought. I was in another world . . .”
“I don’t know what you’re getting so hinky about. You’re putting the Chinese angle on me, and all I’m doing is trying to come into my own joint. No need to throw another ing-bing.”
“I don’t even know what you’re saying. I’m sorry. I was just startled.”
“I could bounce, if you like.”
“What?”
“I could leave. What have you got there?” George asked, nodding toward the book.
“Oh, this was . . . I was . . . this was just . . .”
“Oh, Martin’s Annual Criminal Code,” George said, taking the book from her hands. All of a sudden, he was full of false jollity. “I guess I should have cheesed that.”
“George, I don’t know what you’re saying. Please, just talk to me like you’re a normal human being and not someone from one of those stupid Mickey Spillane books.”
“Not Mickey Spillane; it’s Raymond Chandler.”
“You think I’m guilty, don’t you?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But I gotta couple of Cs that says you will never see the inside of the calaboose.”
Maureen gave him a hard look.
“I’m just saying, whether you’re guilty or not, I don’t think you’ll ever do any jail time.”
“Why?”
“’Cause there’s too many people who’d like to see that booze hound in a Chicago overcoat.”
“George!”
“You know he—Bo—coulda been trying to put the Chinese squeeze on that crowd of dope dealers. You know, chisel ’em outta their drug fortune.”
“George, I found out today at the library that chlordane has an LD-50.”
George looked at her blankly.
“It kills 50 per cent of the people that it’s administered to, and I put a huge amount of chlordane into his orange juice.”
“But when did you find out that chlordane kills people?”
“Today.”
“Right. So, according to English law,” George said, flipping through Martin’s Annual Criminal Code, “an act doesn’t make a person guilty, unless that person’s mind is also guilty.”
“I don’t get it—what?”
“See, unless you had malice of forethought, mens rea, the guilty mind—did you mean to kill Bo with the chlordane?”
“No, I don’t think so. It was like I wasn’t the one who did it, like I was standing beside myself the morning when I did it.” As Maureen spoke, she could see herself pouring in the poison and spraying the food with the Flit gun, but it was like she was remembering a movie or like someone else had done the deed and she just happened to be there to witness it. Oh, now her head was really pounding, just on one side—her eye, the side of her nose, all the way to the back of her neck. “But according to what I read there, even if I didn’t kill him, I’m still a criminal. It says right in that book that if anybody pours any poison that endangers the life of a person, they’d be guilty of what they call in there ‘a heinous crime.’ I don’t know what to do. Maybe I just need to take off.”
“Yea, good thinking. Be a bim with a bindle. I mean, go on the lam . . . just run away. Look, it’s as easy as duck soup. All you gotta do is drop a dime on them.”
“Them who?”
“The boys, the DAFT boys. Put the finger on ’em.”
“Oh, George,” Maureen said in exasperation. “It’d be all right if you had a dust of sense, even two clicks to call a clue.”
“Now I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m already in trouble with the boys and with the cops, and now you want me to be a—”
“Snitch. A stoolie.”
“Yea, and tell the cops about something I don’t know that much about anyway. I’m just not smart enough for any of this.”
She could see herself getting up on the stand, not like Marlene Dietrich, a woman of mystery with a jaunty hat and all that composure, giving nothing away, remaining a fascinating question mark. No, she’d be up on the stand all red-faced and burbling, spilling her guts to all comers. Sometimes Maureen despaired of herself: she really was deeply shallow. Here she was, guilty of what was called cold-blooded murder in books, and she was worrying about how she was going to look on the stand.
CHAPTER TWENTY
WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOIN’ HERE, RAT?”
Maureen had just walked up over the stairs and into the DAFT offices, which were right over the DAFT storefront on Duckworth Street. The storefront, presumably, was there to make the purchase of DAFT wooden shipping boxes more available to the general public, but the few times Maureen had actually been in there and all the times she’d passed by, she’d never seen an actual customer—just one of the boys’ girlfriends or some fawning hanger-oner standing behind the counter, overseeing an empty store dotted with wood crates that were, according to the sign on the wall behind the counter, “heat-treated and stamped for export shipment.”
Jack Dunne was sitting on the edge of his desk, and Maureen was surprised to see Joyce Maynard sitting on a chair in front of him. Joyce was not looking that happy.
“I need to talk to you,” Maureen said to Jack. “What’re you doin’ here, Joyce?”
“Doing some business. Why?” said Joyce sharply.
“Oh, nothing. No reason. Just nosy, I guess,” Maureen mumbled.
“Well, I’m just leaving. Remember what I said, Jack . . . Here, take my seat.” Joyce gestured to Maureen.
Jack walked Joyce out of the office. Maureen sat down.
Would you take her grave as fast? Maureen’s mind said.
Oh, come on, let us please just stay focused, Maureen said to her mind.
Focused on what? her mind asked.
I don’t know . . . Focused on what happened to Bo.
You poisoned him! Maureen’s mind shot back.
Maureen knew she had to stop having this internal dialogue because Maureen’s mind was definitely not her friend. It was always calling her names, making fun of her, calling her down to the lowest, and that was probably the best of it, because otherwise it was just wandering around lost or making jokes at the worst possible times.
While Maureen was engaged with her mind, her hands and eyes were not idle. Her hands were shuffling through the papers that were right in front of her on the desk, turning them toward her so she could read them more easily. Her eyes rested on a document with the Canadian High Commission of Jamaica letterhead. It was a letter addressed to the Maynard family concerning one Carleen Maynard.
What! Holy fuck-a-moley, Carleen! . . . See, Maureen, you should never have left Carleen in Montreal.
Shut up! Maureen said to her mind.
She read: “. . . Carleen Maynard . . . held in custody, awaiting trial on charges of drug smuggling with intent to traffic, presently in remand at the St. Jago Women’s Prison in Kingston.” The document further said that Carleen Maynard was being provided “the most basic of meals, no bedding, the conditions were well below minimum standards . . . hole in the ground toilet . . .”
Maureen dropped the document and sat back in shock.
“So, like I said, rat, what are you doing here?”
“AA,” she said in a whisper. “I heard you had something to do with it.”
“Go on,” said Jack. His expression did not ease up—not one little bit.
“Well, I wanna, you know, maybe not quit drinking altogether, but I’d like to drink more like other people drink, you know? I’d like to learn how to do that, and I thought maybe AA could help, and maybe you could tell me how to join up and maybe even give me a hand.”
“AA is in the phone book, Maureen. Look it up.”
“‘Whenever someone reaches out for help, I want the hand of AA always to be there, and for that I am responsible,’” Maureen read from a scrap of paper she pulled out of her pocket. “I was reading some literature on AA at the library and that’s what it said: that your main purpose, if you’re a member of AA, is to stay sober and to help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety.” Her stomach was churning, but she just kept staring at Jack.
