“Now?” she asked the girl.
“In gale-force winds?” smiled Linc.
“She said it was very important.”
“Alright.”
Someone turned off the fan and everything
drooped back to normal. Studio
attendants carefully divested Coal of her sunrise-coloured dress, replacing it
with a shimmering black satin robe that she hastily belted around her
nakedness. Coal was curious about
who would intrude so decisively into a photo-session.
It was Joy Pommery.
“Hello,” said Coal gaily. “What brings you to this windswept
Garden of Eden this morning?
Anything wrong?”
Joy had known Coal Blackstone for a couple
of years now and they were almost friends. Coal rather enjoyed Joy’s tendency to be efficient about her
emotions—she was, after all, the resident psychotherapist for a large, absurdly
successful Toronto-based advertising agency called A.D. Inc.—and had always
been curious about the degree to which she could make carefully planned, highly
deliberated forays even into the mostly bleak terrain of her private life
whenever she felt the need to.
For her part, Joy admired—as everyone
did—Coal’s dark, smouldering beauty and her faultless poise. Just at the moment, though, it was
something else about Coal Blackstone that Joy was seeking out. It had to do with the rumors she had
heard about Coal’s more than casual interest in the labyrinthine ways of the
criminal mind.
Coal wasn’t anything as banal and as
earthbound as a private detective, or even something as predictable as an
amateur sleuth. But she did
continue to demonstrate an abiding fascination for the machinations of the
darkly bizarre, for understanding the shape of outlaw behaviours, for providing
some startling and revealing excavations of motives and meanings behind
psychotic enactments of every kind.
The police might normally have found
Coal’s rummaging around in crime to be both annoying and interfering, if she
hadn’t consistently proved herself so damned helpful to them. As Chief of Police Victor Grommet had
once said to her, “You know, Coal, you’d be a real scorpion in my shoe if you
weren’t so fucking useful
sometimes.” Coal had thanked him,
both for his tender admission and for the elegance with which he had stated
it.
“I hate to bother you during a shoot,
Coal,” said Joy, “but I’d really like to talk to you about something that’s
sort of worrying me.”
“Of course, Joy,” said Coal. “What is it? Something about the Mayor?”
“Yes.”
“You know, I simply can’t fathom what it
is you find so compelling about the portly Lord Tamburlaine,” said Coal. “I find him sort of off-putting.”
“So do I,” Joy admitted—with a trace of
relief at being able to say so.
“So??” asked Coal.
“It’s complicated” said Joy.
“Like everything else. Okay, why don’t we meet for a drink or
an early dinner later today? This
is clearly not the place to discuss anything of any importance.”
“Wonderful. Thanks, Coal.
Where and when?”
“How about Didier at 8 tonight?”
“Where is it?” Joy asked.
“You don’t know Didier? Oh, you’ll like it. It’s up on Yonge Street, just a bit
north of Bloor.”
“Great,” said Joy. “See you tonight.”
“Wait till you taste chef Leroy’s
soufflé!”
“It’s good?”
“It’s to die for!”
“Please, Coal. Don’t say anything like that.”
