Last Dance. David Russell W.

victuals to the small tiled area that passed for my kitchen. “Come and eat,” she commanded. She reached absentmindedly for two wine glasses and helped herself to a bottle from the rack.

      “Cabernet?” I scoffed. “With pizza?” She slid it back into the rack.

      “You would suggest?”

      “Something gentler, like a Pinot Noir. One mustn’t overwhelm the palate with so bold a beverage without a meal of deeper substance.”

      “You’re such a dork.”

      “It’s true.” Andy ignored my sommelier instincts and pulled out the Cabernet.

      “So who’s the world’s best detective?” she asked.

      “Sherlock Holmes.”

      “I meant living and non-fictional, though if I were fiction, I’m sure I’d be in the same category as Holmes.”

      “I would have put you closer to Clouseau.”

      “Certainly you should remember I’m about to crack your case wide open before you go insulting me.”

      “‘Crack the case?’ Wow. Talk about shock and awe.”

      “I’m about to tell you of my major crime-solving finesse, and you’re busy snobbing me out about my wine selection.”

      “You simply cannot expect me to take you seriously if you plan to use ‘snob’ as a verb.”

      “Gerunds offend you now?”

      “A gerund is the other way around. You were saying about cases being shucked?”

      “Cracked. We found something at the crime scene.”

      “What?”

      “Prints. Better yet, prints in our system.”

      “They left their prints on the goalpost?”

      “Not that crime scene. This one.”

      “You CSI’d my place?” Andrea frowned at my pop culture reference; she watched just as much TV as me, but it bothered her when I felt I knew something about her job based on what I’d seen on the box. “Why would they have touched the door?”

      “They didn’t. They did, however, dump their spray paint cans into the bushes in your back alley.”

      “You are thorough.”

      “Clouseau be damned.”

      “But how do you know those are the paint cans used to badly misspell homophobic graffiti?” Instead of answering, Andy, whose mouth was full of the gigantic pizza slice she had extracted from the box without benefit of utensil, plate, or napkin, pointed at her midsection, a gesture she normally used to remind me she had abs of steel, but which this time was intended to demonstrate she had solved the great graffiti caper through her infallible gut instinct. “Oh well, at least there are sound scientific principles involved.”

      “Prints were left on the cans.”

      “So you said. But that makes no sense. Those were definitely kids in the hallway. If they’re young offenders, why were their prints in the system?”

      “They weren’t. We found the prints of a twenty-eight year old ex-con who did time in the late nineties for drug trafficking.”

      “And?”

      “And we got lucky. He works in a hardware store not six blocks from here.”

      “How is that going to help us?”

      “How many cans of spray paint do you think he sells to teenagers in this neighbourhood?”

      “Sounds like a bit of a long shot to me. How do you know these paint cans were the ones sold to our graphic artists?”

      “Oh, they were,” she replied, pointing again to her midsection. “Now all we have to do is take in your school’s yearbook and have our paint-meister pick out your perps from the photo array, as it were.”

      “It’s my first year teaching, and the year isn’t over. I don’t have a yearbook.”

      “I picked up last year’s from your school library on my way here.”

      “Thorough,” I admitted again. She tsk’d me as she crammed the rest of the pizza slice into her mouth.

      Home Depot is the kind of big box store that brings out the protestors when it moves into town, perhaps not as virulently as those picketing a Walmart opening, but vocal just the same. Vancouverites as a rule love a good — or even a piddly — protest, and no matter how few picketers arrive, it’s sure to make lead coverage on at least one of the nightly newscasts. Lazy journalism to be sure, but it’s mildly more compelling than the oft featured weather piece.

      Despite protests, sit-ins, and bullhorns, the “tight-knit” Kitsilano community, home to some thirty thousand best friends, has now a Home Depot to call its own, albeit a “greenerized,” slightly smaller version of its suburban counterparts, and on this Friday evening, it was jam-packed, not with demonstrators but with consumers. Having satiated their need to rail against it, tight-knit community members were evidently inducting the corporation into the community by spending thousands of dollars on its wares. There’s already talk of a second one.

      Andrea walked purposefully through the doors, though I knew full well her ability to tell a lathe from a drill press was about as strong as my knowledge of what either a lathe or drill press were. Her mission senses were heightened, though, and thus she practically scented her way to the paint department and made a beeline for the clerk operating a machine that was treating a can of paint like it was mixing a gallon of martinis. I recognized him from the dated mug shot Andrea had shown me on the way over. He had gained a few years and a few dozen pounds — the paint shaking business had obviously been good to him — but there was no mistaking this was our guy. “Courtney MacMillan?” Andrea asked in her polite but unmistakably police-like tone.

      “I’ll be right with you,” he replied politely.

      Andrea flashed her badge at him. “No, you’ll be with us now.”

      “Okay,” he replied calmly. If Andy’s badge routine had upset him at all, he gave no indication. I would have been offended at her brusque intrusion, but MacMillan calmly reached up, turned off the paint can shaker-upper and handed the mixed latex cocktail to his waiting customer, who herself looked taken aback by the sudden appearance of the long arm of the law. Andy looked as though she was ready to begin when MacMillan politely spoke first.

      “If you wouldn’t mind, could we converse in the back, away from the customers?” He turned, stepping out from behind his paint partition, and walked toward the back of the store.

      “Converse?” I said to Andy as we fell into step a few paces behind the departing paint-smith. She managed a sort of perturbed “harrumph.”

      “Boy, he didn’t seem to be the slightest bit intimidated by your bad cop bit. Maybe you want to switch to good cop?”

      This time she managed a brief retort. “We’ll see.”

      MacMillan stopped at the entrance to a hallway marked “Private, Staff Only.” Turning to face us as we approached, he gracefully waved us down the hallway ahead of him. “This way,” he directed serenely, “if you would not mind.”

      “We would not mind at all,” Andy assured him.

      “Thank you, Detective,” MacMillan replied. He stepped in front of us to hold open the swinging door to the inner sanctum of the home improvement mecca. He allowed the door to gently close behind him, then, without further word, strode down the nearest aisle way between two large shelving units. As he turned to face us his eyes blazed with rage. “Just who the fuck do you think you are, lady?” he hissed.

      A slight smile pulled at the left corner of Andrea’s mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice adopting the same placid