Free The Early Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn by Gail Bowen Page A

Micklejohn. We were as attuned to one another as partners in a trapeze act or a good marriage. We knew one another, and we knew Andy. We loved his strengths, but we also knew his weaknesses, and we worked to make sure no one else did. We all had our reasons for working for Andy Boychuk, and we all had our areas of competence, but the working life of each of us was fuelled by one desire: the need to make our guy look good. So strong was that drive that neither Andy’s death nor Eve’s intrusions stopped us. In those days before the funeral, we kept on going to the CaucusOffice; we kept on working on plans to make sure our guy looked good. “Man makes plans, and God laughs,” said Dave Micklejohn sadly, but we kept on. Planning was a way of thumbing our noses at a universe where a bright and decent man could stand up to give a speech and be murdered before our eyes. And so Dave, who had been, among other things, Andy’s advance man, advanced the funeral – making sure that the routes from the legislature to the cathedral would be lined with people but not congested, that the cathedral could handle an overflow, that the women who were preparing the lunch had ovens that heated and refrigerators that cooled – making certain, in short, that the final public event of Andy Boychuk’s life didn’t blow up in all our faces.
    Kelly Sobchuk, who had done itinerary, planned the times and places all of us would be the day of the funeral. Lorraine Bellegarde, who had done correspondence, kept track of the memorial donations and flowers and letters that poured into the office first by hundreds and then thousands. Janice Summers, who had been Andy’s principal secretary, made certain that out-of-province VIPS and in-province political powers had hotel rooms and schedules and transportation. And there were a half dozen more of us working at a half dozen other jobs efficiently and bleakly.
    Every so often a kind of wild gallows humour would erupt. Around five o’clock one steamy afternoon before the funeral, I walked into the offices of the Official Opposition. A bottle of Crown Royal was open on the desk and another was empty in the wastebasket. About five of our people had gathered to hear Lorraine Bellegarde read the mail: a man in Ituna promised to deliver thirty thousand votes for us in the next election if we sent him Andy’s clothes, “since I am his identical size and he has no further need for same”; a woman in Stuart Valley had made Andy a pair of slipper socks out of white flannel. She made them, she said, “for all my departedsbecause I don’t like to think of them going over the line with bare feet, but let’s call a spade a spade: there’s no point in wasting good money on shoes for them.” Two men who had seen Eve on television sent proposals of marriage, and one woman who was a cosmetologist from the southwest of the province told Eve she would look ten years younger if she had her hair cut into a “soft bob” and dyed it a colour called Hidden Honey. A stubby sample of human hair – like a paintbrush – was taped to the page. I had a drink and walked out of the building into the heat. I couldn’t seem to get into the spirit. There were no more speeches to write, but I couldn’t see beyond the day of Andy’s funeral. Maybe I didn’t want to.
    My life between Andy’s murder on Sunday afternoon and the Friday morning of his funeral had a shapeless, anarchic quality.
    “I’m walking around doing things but none of them seems very real,” I said to Dave Micklejohn one sweltering morning when I met him outside the legislature.
    “Here,” he said, slapping a five-dollar bill into my hand. “Do you want a sense of reality, Jo, dear? Go downtown and get Eve a pair of panty hose for the funeral – taupe, all nylon, no spandex, cotton crotch, queen size – not, you understand, because our Eve is fat but because she is tall.” He was joking, but I went. You didn’t have to be a psychiatrist to see