Every City Is Every Other City: A Gordon Stewart Mystery

By John McFetridge

Behind the scenes, nothing is what it seems.

Gord Stewart, 40 years old, single, moved back into his sub­urban childhood home to care for his widowed father. But his father no longer needs care and Gord is stuck in limbo. He’s been working in the movie business as a location scout for years, and when there isn’t much filming, as a private eye for a security company run by ex-cops, OBC. When a fellow crew member asks him to find her missing uncle, Gord reluctantly takes the job. The police say the uncle walked into some dense woods in Northern Ontario and shot himself, but the man’s wife thinks he’s still alive.

With the help of his movie business and OBC connections, Gord finds a little evidence that the uncle may be alive. Now Gord has two problems: what to do when he finds a man who doesn’t want to be found, and admitting that he’s getting invested in this job. For the first time in his life, Gord Stewart is going to have to leave the sidelines and get into the game. Even if it might get him killed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ECW Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781773056753

Book preview

Dedication

For Laurie, always.

Chapter One

New York City: the blue USPS mailbox, the bodega with English and Spanish signs in the window, and the guy selling pretzels out of a cart.

Move back five more feet and it’s a movie set in Toronto: the C-stands holding reflector boards, the lights, and a dozen crew members waiting to pounce on the cut!

Every city is every other city these days. The same fast-food franchises, the same big box stores, the same cars on the roads heading to the same houses in the suburbs.

That’s not really true. You scratch the surface and they’re all different, they all have their own histories and their own secrets. But this is a Hollywood movie, so it’s not going to scratch the surface. No one wants that.

The location looks good and that makes me happy because I’m the location scout who found it — a boarded-up house in a row of boarded-up houses getting ready to be torn down for condos that the crew turned into a New York bodega.

Not much street parking, though, so the walk from set to craft services was a couple of blocks and when I got there the line-up for lattes was at least six people deep.

Hey Gordie, can I talk to you? The production manager, Lana, was walking towards me.

Sure, looks like this could take a minute.

You don’t need to be on set, do you? MoGib can handle everything, can’t he?

She was talking about my boss, the location manager, Morris Gibson, and she was right. I said, Did we lose a location?

No, it’s something else. She pulled me aside, around the corner of the craft truck and said, You’re a private eye, aren’t you?

It’s not like the movies, I said. I have a license and when there’s nothing shooting I do some freelance. It’s mostly just background checks.

But technically you’re a private eye?

I wanted to say, I’m the kind of private eye you’re thinking about the way that boarded-up building is a New York City bodega, but I just said, Sure.

OK, well, I wonder if you could talk to my aunt?

Is she writing a script?

Lana looked horrified. Don’t even joke about that, you know how many scripts I get handed? No, she needs someone to do an investigation.

There are real private eyes, it’s a real thing, you know. I could give you some names.

Could you just talk to her?

All right, give me her number.

Actually, she’s in my office. Lana led the way along the row of trailers, past the ones being used as dressing rooms to the ones farthest from the set. Come on.

I waited on the sidewalk for a couple of minutes and then Lana came out of the trailer with an older woman, looked to be in her fifties, dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and a blue Columbia jacket. She looked a little nervous and unsure of herself, which, even more than her age, made her look out of place among the crew.

Lana said, Gordon Stewart, this is my Aunt Barb. Mercer.

Aunt Barb said, I think Gordon Stewart is the most Canadian name I’ve ever heard.

It works as Stewart Gordon, too, I said.

She smiled for a second and then was back to frowning.

Lana said, You guys can use my office, and walked away as though she had somewhere to be.

I held the door and Barb walked back up the couple of metal steps she’d just come down.

The office was small, of course, the walls covered with schedules, pictures of locations, call sheets, and cartoons. The desk was also covered with paperwork. Barb sat down and I sat at Lana’s desk. Our knees touched. I said, So, how can I help you?

My husband is missing.

Just like that. I said, Whoa, this is way out of my league, this isn’t what I do.

Lana said you find things.

Yes, I find things. Places. Buildings, alleys, parks. Not people.

But you could.

No, I can’t.

She nodded, looked like she was working up the nerve to say something and then she said, Do you know that suicide rates for middle-aged men are way up?

Which was not what I expected. No, I didn’t know that.

Single, middle-aged, white men without a college degree have the highest suicide rate of any group.

I didn’t know that. I was glad my father, who fit the rest of the description perfectly, was past middle age. Sixty may be the new thirty but seventy is definitely not middle-aged. I have a degree from Humber College so that kept me out of the group, too, which might have been the first time the degree ever did me any good.

She said, Married, middle-aged, white males without a college degree are number two. It turns out baby boomers have always had high suicide rates and now that they — we — are getting into middle age, it’s going up even more.

For men?

Women have three times higher rates of suicide attempts, she said, kind of matter-of-factly, but men have a higher success rate.

So, we’re good at something.

She ignored my nervous joke and said, The researchers seem to think men feel there’s a stigma attached to a failed suicide. Also they use guns more and women use pills.

It was quiet in Lana’s office, just the air conditioning humming though not doing much good — it was hot.

I said, You know a lot about this.

She said, I looked it up after Kevin . . . She shrugged a little and then said, Men have all kinds of stigmas, that’s part of the problem. ‘Women seek help, men die,’ that’s what one of the articles said.

They don’t try to get any help?

Not much. Not enough. They get isolated. Like Kevin, they lose their jobs, they stop going out, stop seeing their friends, they get isolated, and then . . .

When did he . . . when was the last time you saw him?

April 9th. He was home when I left for work. It was just like a regular day. When I got home he wasn’t there. That wasn’t unusual. She was starting to choke up. I tried to call but his phone was turned off. I didn’t think he was missing.

How did you find out he was?

Three days later the police called. They found his truck up north, past Sudbury. She looked up at me. They asked me if I knew where he was. She looked back at her hands wrapped around a coffee mug. They asked why I hadn’t reported him missing.

I was wondering that, too, but I said, Six weeks ago. That was when this movie had started shooting. We only had a few more days to go.

Barb said, When I looked I realized he’d packed up his hunting gear and drove up north, past Sudbury.

That’s a long drive.

He used to do it every year, him and his friends, spend a week in the woods and come back with a deer. He hadn’t done it for years.

I don’t know much about hunting, I said, but April isn’t deer season, is it?

She shook her head. No. He left his truck beside the road, what they called Old Highway 806. The police think he walked into the woods and did it there.

I didn’t want to say anything, but it did sound like the most likely thing, so I just nodded.

Dense woods, you know. She was looking right at me. They say his body will probably turn up someday, some other hunters will find him.

That’s possible, isn’t it?

But, she said, I also read that a lot of middle-aged men just drop out, they just leave everything and start up a new life somewhere else.

Really?

Look on the internet, it happens all the time.

I believe you. But I don’t think I can help you.

Why not? Lana said you could. She said you do this all the time.

Again, places, not people.

Person, she said. I only need you to find one.

She looked like she really needed it, too. I wanted to help her but I had to be honest. I said, What I mean is, you’d need a hunter, a tracker, someone who could look in the woods.

If he did go into the woods.

Why do you say that? You think he didn’t?

Well, wouldn’t it be perfect? He takes his hunting stuff, his rifle, he leaves his car by the edge of the woods and he takes off.

Where does he go?

That’s what I want you to find out.

This sounds like it’s a little above my pay grade.

She looked pissed off then and said, I called a couple of private investigation companies, they really exist, you know.

I know.

They do background checks for big companies, they work for insurance companies looking for frauds.

I know, I said. That’s what I do in the winter when there’s not much filming here.

They charge hundreds and hundreds of dollars a day. And what are they going to do, look at credit card records? Is that what you do?

I thought, yeah, pretty much, but I said, They have a lot of resources.

I’m sure they do, but they don’t have fifty-percent-off sales. She drank some coffee and said, I get it that rich people have everything they want, but can’t the rest of us have something?

Neither of us said anything for a minute, and I was trying to come up with a way to get out of there when she said, I’ve got nothing left. I’m going to lose our house in another month. I’m going to have to have him declared legally dead.

I thought you had to wait seven years?

Everybody thinks that, she said. But it changed. After 9/11, actually. So now in Ontario there’s a new Declarations of Death Act. If someone disappears in what they call ‘circumstances of peril,’ then you can apply to have them declared dead.

And they’re calling the truck by the woods a circumstance of peril? And I was thinking it sounded so government, so cold and formal. Shit.

Yes. The police say they’ve looked into it as much as they can. As much as they will. But the thing is, if I do it, if I have him declared dead, then he might as well be.

Shouldn’t you save your money?

It doesn’t matter now, there’s so little left and nothing coming in. The first time Kevin got laid off, from Plascom, a plastic moulding company that moved production to Mexico — brand new machines there, not like they couldn’t have put in new technology here — I was still working and a few months later he got another job. Then I was off for about a year when I went through the breast cancer treatments, and he missed a lot of work and got put on a backshift, and when I was ready to go back they’d downsized and I didn’t have a job to go back to. Then, where Kevin was working cut the backshift and then closed down completely. He worked a few jobs under the table, he’s an electrician, and he got some jobs but never enough.

So you think Kevin ran away from his problems?

She stared at me and said, You see, that’s the main problem, the man attitude. Right away you think he was a coward and he ran away.

No, I said, you think he ran away.

That’s right, everybody else thinks he killed himself. She picked up the coffee cup Lana must have given her earlier and I saw how much her hands were shaking, she had to hold them together to get the cup to her lips and then she didn’t really drink any, she was taking a breath. I just want to try everything, I just want to know, if he’s not . . . if he’s still alive I want to talk to him.

What do you want to say?

I want to tell him I’m going to kill him. She shook her head a little and said, But then I want to tell him, even after everything, after everything we’ve been through, I just want to tell him that what’s coming up, whatever it is, I’d rather go through it with him than without him.

Now her hands were steady as she put the coffee cup down and looked me in the eyes.

She said, Can you help me?

And I said I’d try.

Chapter Two

We went into overtime on the set but only for an hour and the wrap out was quick. I was home just after eleven with a full six hours before I had to be back.

My father was in the basement watching TV. I got a beer out of the fridge and went downstairs.

What’s this?

"Gunsmoke."

You’re not serious?

He was sitting in his recliner a few feet back from the sixty-inch flat screen. The TV was the only thing in the basement made in the twenty-first century. The rest of the furniture, the shag carpeting, the wall panelling, and, I guess, me and Dad, were all from another era.

New one.

Is this on Netflix?

One of those, not sure which one.

Is it dark and edgy?

I sat down on the couch and put my feet up on the coffee table. The episode was just ending and the little box came up in the corner saying the next one would be starting in a few seconds.

He’s no Marshall Dillon, my dad said. But it’s OK. It’s darker, yeah.

The next episode started and I said, Are you binge-watching this?

What does that mean?

Are you watching a lot of episodes?

Not a lot, he said. I think this is the third.

The credits rolled and I thought I recognized some of the locations, probably in Alberta. I might have remembered something from the DGC, the Directors’ Guild of Canada, notices about filming there last year. Then I remembered people talking about it, someone saying a Gunsmoke reboot was scraping the bottom of the barrel, but a young PA said it was a surprise it had taken this long. I’ll probably be working for that PA someday soon when he’s a producer.

After a few minutes I said, Did you ever know anyone who committed suicide?

Maybe.

What do you mean, ‘maybe’? Either they did or they didn’t.

Can’t be sure, my dad said. Did you ever meet Lloyd Murphy? I worked with him at the Hearn.

No, I don’t think so.

Anyway, he died in a car accident.

That’s not a suicide.

Single car accident, my dad said, up on Highway 6, near Owen Sound, slammed into an overpass.

Why do you think it was suicide?

I don’t know, I just wondered.

Did it seem like something he’d do?

My dad finished his beer and put the empty on the floor beside a couple of other empty bottles and said, Not before, not at all. But after the accident, I don’t know, I started to think, yeah, maybe. The cop said there weren’t any skid marks or anything, never hit the brakes.

Maybe he fell asleep.

That’s what they said. But back then, you know, his wife would’ve lost a lot of insurance if it was suicide, so the cops said it was an accident.

What about the coroner’s report?

"What am I, Law & Order? He motioned at the TV. I don’t know, they probably would’ve called it an accident, too, nobody likes insurance companies."

Yeah, I see what you mean.

Probably happened a lot, my dad said. Suicides called accidents. Why? You’re not having any crazy ideas are you?

Me? Why would you say that?

I don’t know, because, your life is so crappy.

My life isn’t crappy.

He shrugged and looked away.

I said, Are you going watch many more episodes?

I don’t know, maybe.

OK, well, try not to fall asleep down here.

I got up and started for the stairs and my dad said, I guess you’re right, the fun never ends with you.

When I was in bed I couldn’t get to sleep so I Googled middle-aged male suicide and found out what Barb Mercer said was pretty much true. The articles I read had headlines like Why Suicide Rates Are Rising for Middle-aged Men and Suicide Rates Are Highest for Men in their 50s and Middle-aged Male Suicide Rates Rise by 40% Since 2008.

Then I tried to tell myself at thirty-eight I had at least twelve years before I had to worry, but for some reason it still took me a while to fall asleep, and when my alarm went off I had to drag my ass out of bed.

The sun was just beginning to rise when I drove along Danforth Avenue’s deserted storefronts at dawn and passed a row of orange cones three blocks long. At the end of the row was a Ford Focus. I tapped on the fogged driver’s side window and woke up Harriet Cheung, a location PA who’d been there all night.

The window slid down and she said, Hey Gord, and yawned.

I handed her a coffee and said, Everything OK?

She was in her mid-twenties, still a little excited to be working on a real movie but reaching the point of not showing it. A lot of the older guys on the crew have no time for the kids — usually called Humber Kids because they often graduated from the film program at Humber College — but I’ve seen enough of them move through the ranks to become production managers and line producers who hire me to at least be polite.

Harriet took the coffee and then opened the door and stepped out of the car and said, Yeah, everything’s good. Craft services here yet?

Just setting up.

I looked down the long row of orange cones and imagined the dissolve to later in the day when there was a line of trucks and Winnebagos and big lights set up in front of the bar and about a hundred people very busy working.

Then that dissolve seemed to happen and it was lunch.

I found Lana in her trailer office eating a bowl of butternut squash ravioli and staring at the screen of her laptop. She didn’t look at me when she said, My aunt is very happy that you’re going to help her.

I hope she’s not expecting much in the way of results.

A little closure would be nice. She turned a little towards me and said, And don’t ever tell any of these writers that there’s no such thing as closure or they’ll lose the only way they can figure to motivate any of these so-called characters.

You read these whole scripts?

I can’t just scan the loglines for locations.

Movie Magic pulls them all out for me, I said. Gives me a list. But still, there’s no reason to read the dialogue.

Lana said, So, what’s up?

I just wanted to let you know I’m taking off for a couple of hours. Everything’s covered here.

Where are you going?

I felt silly as I said it, but I said, I’m working on your aunt’s case.

He was a good uncle, Lana said. Thanks.

---

As I was driving across town I was thinking how Lana had said he was a good uncle, not he is a good uncle.

If I was scouting for a bland building in a bland industrial park near an airport, this one would be perfect. And yet, still hard to find a place to park.

But I found one and walked into the office of OBC Security Inc., which sounds as innocuous as the building it’s in until you find out the inside joke — OBC stands for Old Boys Club and the two men who run it are retired cops with very good connections. Which maybe sounds good if they were ever on the side of the underdog, but they never are. Say you’re the millionaire owners of a nightclub and your steroid-head bouncer threw someone out onto the sidewalk and broke their back and now they’re in a wheelchair and you don’t want to pay a cent to help out with renovations in their bathroom or a ramp in their house or anything at all, OBC are the guys you call. They’ll find something wrong with the arrest report or something in the victim’s background that makes them a lot less sympathetic.

I sometimes did freelance work for them, background checks, surveillance, that kind of thing.

As I was heading through the parking lot to the front door I saw one of the OBC partners, Chris Simpson, coming out the front door and heading to his black Dodge Charger, and he saw me.

Hey Gordo, what’re you doing here — now you can’t find movie work in the summer, too?

It’s P.I. work.

Simpson said, So you’re not scouting a location here?

No.

He started to walk away but then he stopped and looked back and said, That’s not a bad idea, though, a location scout P.I. series, that could work.

No, I said, Lana already pitched it, no one wanted a show set in the industry. Even Simpson knew I meant the movie industry.

He said, Yeah, but what if the P.I. wasn’t you, what if he was good-looking? And a guy people liked.

Like Rockford, I said. But also a location scout.

Simpson smiled and said, Yeah, like he’d just thought of it.

I think that was Lana’s pitch exactly.

Well, you should keep working on that, might be something there.

I said, OK, will do, and opened the front door of the office.

If this was a movie, the OBC tech would be a woman in her twenties, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, who knew everything about comic books or vampires. Probably, but not necessarily, Asian.

The actual tech was another ex-cop, a white guy in his forties, who if he had an outside interest, I was scared to ask what it was.

I knocked on the top of the wall divider on his cubicle and said, Hey Teddy.

Gordon R. Stewart, look at you in the summer.

It’s only May, it could still snow.

Don’t even joke about it. He stood up and we shook hands and he said, You want a coffee, I’m buying.

I followed him through the maze of empty cubicles to the break room. He said, What kind you want?

Didn’t you like it better when you just got black coffee?

Sitting in a Crown Vic all night doing surveillance, pissing in a cup? No, I have to say, I like this better. You want chocolate coconut? Salted caramel? French Vanilla?

What’s the closest to just plain coffee?

Teddy thought about it for a second and then looked over the rack of single-serve pods and said, Got one here called Doughnut Shop.

That sounds like it.

He popped it in and the machine jumped to life, gurgling and hissing away.

So, what brings you in?

I’m on a . . . case.

You can just say it, you know — you’re working a case. He handed me my cup and started out of the room.

You’re not having one?

Eight is my limit. At least till coffee break this afternoon.

As we walked back to Teddy’s cubicle, I said, My boss asked me to help her aunt. Her husband is missing.

Teddy grabbed a chair from an empty cubicle and wheeled it the rest of the way to his desk. "Your boss’s husband