Free Sundowner Ubunta by Anthony Bidulka

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    I had instructed the florist to keep me anonymous. “How did you know?” I asked the nurse.
    “You strike me as just that kind of guy.”
    Forecasters were calling for the first day of above-freezing temperatures for the year. But I was taking no chances; I’d worn a thick, zip-up fleece under a black leather overcoat, a scarf and black leather gloves to work that morning. I put them on as I headed out to find what there was to find at a submarine shop where someone who might have been Matthew Ridge worked over a decade ago. This case was becoming more like an archeological excavation than an investigation. Although I’m a hopeless optimist, my expectations of discovering something useful were not high.
    The shop in question was on College Drive across from the U of S campus and, not surprisingly, still in business. Submarines have long been a diet staple for much of the city’s university population, which descends on Saskatoon each fall like a horde of hungry locusts with a meagre meal budget. I arrived early enough so the lunch rush was still a ways off. Even so, the staff was keeping busy, prepping the mounds of shredded lettuce, slices of sweet pickles and juicy tomatoes, and piles of meat-like stuff that would be consumed throughout the day. The kids behind the counter looked at me like I was from Uranus when I asked them about a guy named Matthew who worked there fifteen years ago. I quickly moved on to the manager who just as quickly passed me on to the owner, Wanda Woo, who just happened to be in the back, punching numbers into a massive contraption that might have been the first calculator ever invented.
    “What you want?” she asked with a pinched nose and mouth, her sharp eyes full of suspicion when I’d sat myself down opposite her on a stool made of splinters.
    “Well,” I began hesitantly, “don’t laugh, but I’m looking for an employee who worked here about fourteen or fifteen years ago.”
    “Not funny,” she accurately pointed out.
    “His name was Matthew Ridge and I thi…”
    “Moxley.”
    I stopped there because I had no idea what she’d just said. Was it something in Chinese? Was she telling me to get the hell out of her subway shop? Had she sneezed? Should I say gesundheit? Was I simply lost in translation?
    “Moxley,” she repeated.
    “Mooooooxleeeeeeeey?” I slowly repeated after her, with what I hoped was an inquisitive oriental-flavoured upturn at the end of the unfamiliar word.
    “Moxley,” she said with an authoritative nod. “No Ridge. Matthew Moxley. No Matthew Ridge.”
    Light bulb. If I understood her correctly, she was telling me that there was no Matthew Ridge who’d worked here, only some guy named Matthew Moxley, who, unfortunately, was not who I was looking for.
    I was immediately disappointed, but really, the chances were low I’d find my quarry in a submarine store he might have worked in fifteen years ago based on a possible sighting by an ex-girlfriend who hadn’t seen him in five years. And not only that, how many Matthews might have worked at any one fast-food outlet in fifteen years? However, if I’ve learned anything from my dear schnauzer Barbra whenever she sees me near the treat jar, persistent mooching pays off. Sometimes.
    “What about someone named Matt Ridge? Or I wond…” I stopped there because Mrs. Woo had hopped down from her seat to her full four-foot-one height, ambled over to a time-worn filing cabinet, 37 of 170
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    bent at the waist to open a bottom drawer, pulled out a file without seeming to have to even search for it, and returned to her seat. She shoved the file at me with the word, “Moxley.”
    “But I’m lo…”
    She shook her head as if disgusted with the denseness of the matter in my head. “No Ridge. No Matt.
    No Matthew Ridge. Moxley. Matthew Moxley.”
    I took the file and saw the name Matthew Moxley scrawled on the label in barely visible pencil.
    “All good,” Mrs. Woo assured me.