Chapter 3 Ghost Story #2
“Stanley Ostrowski.” He looked at the kettle in his hands as if it had turned him in. “Stan. I was just going to make tea. I don’t suppose there’s time for that now.”
“There’s time,” Luke said. “Make three.”
We took his statement at the dinette, under a laminated tent that said FINAL WEEK, which none of us remarked on.
Stan Ostrowski was sixty-six. He had been the night watchman at Farnsworth for eleven years, up until January, when the owner replaced the position with the camera contract.
Nobody had ever collected his key fob. In March the rooming house on Sherbourne where he’d lived for a decade was sold, and the new owner emptied the building.
A watchman’s pension didn’t cover a Toronto apartment.
One cold night he let himself into the only building in the city he had a key to.
“I did the rounds every night,” he said. “Same as always. Doors, dock, panel. Old habit.” He turned his mug a quarter turn. “The cameras don’t do rounds. A camera watches where it points. That was my argument in January, and nobody wanted it.”
“The lunches,” I said.
“I left what they cost. To the dollar.” For the first time his voice got an edge, and it was dignity.
“I’m not a thief. I’ve never taken a thing in my life that I didn’t pay for.
I ate, and I paid, and I kept the place tidy.
Tidier than that day crew keeps it, if we’re being honest with each other tonight. ”
“The beds,” Luke said.
“Somebody buys those beds. They shouldn’t look slept in.
” He paused. “Also, I cannot sleep in an unmade bed and then walk away from it. My wife had rules about that, and she’s been gone six years, and the rules stayed.
” He nodded upward, toward the mezzanine, toward the photograph, and none of us went near it, and the fridge hummed, and Luke let the quiet sit exactly as long as it needed to and not one second more.
Perlman came back when we called. He arrived ready to be furious, walked in wearing the expression a man rehearses in the car, and then Stan stood up, and Perlman stopped, and said, “Stan?”, in a voice with no fury in it anywhere.
It came apart from there, as cases go. The two details that finished Perlman were the exact change on the fridge and the recliner.
A floor model with a bad mechanism the warranty company had quoted two hundred dollars and a month to fix, repaired one morning in February by nobody, and chalked up alongside the beds and the radio.
“That was you,” Perlman said.
“It was a set screw,” said Stan.
Perlman looked at the ceiling for a while.
Then he said he would not be pressing charges, waved his hands through the words as if to shoo them, and asked Stan whether he was aware that Farnsworth had been paying a monitoring company eleven hundred dollars a month to report all clear on a building that had a man living in it since January.
“I was aware,” Stan said. “It kept me up some nights, professionally.”
He got his job back at the dinette table.
Nights, cash arrangement to start, the insurance question waved off with the same shooing motion.
Luke stepped out to the lot and made a call to a housing worker he knew, and by the time the paperwork was done there was a room lined up off Gerrard until the first paycheck.
Stan asked, seriously, whether he could finish out the night’s rounds, seeing as he was up.
We left the ghost of Farnsworth Furniture doing his doors in his slippers, and got in the car, and I started laughing somewhere around the second traffic light and had some trouble stopping.
“Five months,” I said. “He lived in a furniture store for five months, in the middle of the city, with a staff of nine walking past him every day. How does nobody notice a whole man?”
“People stop seeing what’s always there,” Luke said. He said it the way he said most things, flat, eyes on the road, already thinking about the report. “He was part of the building. Buildings don’t get looked at.”
“Deep,” I said. “You should get a podcast.”
“Type fast and you get the leftover pad thai. That’s the offer on the table.”
The bullpen was mostly dark when we got in, the cleaner’s cart parked by the interview rooms, a couple of desk lamps on and nobody under them.
Reid had left a sticky note on my monitor that said HOW WAS THE GHOST with no punctuation, which was Reid all over.
Luke claimed the food run on the grounds that I type faster, took the order without writing it down because he never wrote it down and never got it wrong, and went for the stairs.
“Don’t touch my report,” he said, at the door.
“Your report is six words and a hand-drawn ghost.”
“Don’t touch it.”
And he was gone, and I was alone on the floor with the case file and the good tired of a day that had gone right.
I was two paragraphs into the report when Wright came over.
I’d seen his office light on when we came in, and thought nothing of it.
He’d taken the evening supervisor slot that week, which had been mentioned around the floor as one more decent thing, one more swap somebody didn’t have to fight over.
He came across the empty bullpen with his jacket already over his arm and settled against the edge of the next desk, friendly, at ease, the same man who had wished us luck with the overtime forms that morning.
“I heard pieces of it already,” he said. “The furniture store. Is it true he was paying for the sandwiches?”
“Exact change. Taped to the fridge.”
“That’s the best thing I’ve heard in a while.” He smiled, and it was the good smile, the one the whole floor had been getting since his first day. “Eleven years doing rounds and he kept doing them after they fired him. You want to laugh and then cry.”
“That about sums it up.”
He nodded. He glanced at the stairwell door, unhurried, and then back at me.
“He looks good,” he said. “Luke. Better than I remember, and I knew him a long time.” Same voice as before. “You can tell a lot from how a man walks into a building in the morning.”
“The job’s been going well.” I kept my eyes half on the report. “Big month for the division.”
“Mm.” A small pause. “It isn’t all about the job.”
I turned my chair. He was watching me with the same open face he gave everyone. His hands had gone still.
“I wouldn’t follow,” I said.