Last of the Independents

For my parents, Al and Linda,and my brothers, Dan and Josh

T
hanks
to my editor, Laura Harris; everyone at Dundurn and the Crime Writers of Canada; Jess Driscoll; Mercedes Eng; Mike Stachura; Andrew and Lauren Nicholls; and Mel Yap.

All errors are mine, all resemblance to real people or events entirely coincidental.

“It is the struggle of all fundamentally honest men

to make a decent living in a corrupt society.”

— R
aymond
C
handler

Business Is My Trouble

T
he
younger Thomas Kroon leaned forward on the clients' bench and said, “There's no real polite way to say this, Mr. Drayton. Someone's fucking our corpses and we'd like it to stop.”

“The sooner the better,” his father added.

I stared at them across the table that served as my desk, past a half-eaten sandwich and a cold cup of tea, past the keyboard, past the day's filing and the week's accounting, and over the mountainous sinkhole of despair that was the Loeb file. The two Thomas Kroons wore identical broad-lapelled suits with the same gold, silk diamond-patterned tie. They had the same mahogany-coloured hair, though I suspected the senior Thomas Kroon's was the result of chemical treatment. Neither looked too encouraged by the furnishings of my second-floor Hastings Street office. When one of them shifted on the cinder-block-and-plank bench, the other had to hurry to find a new equilibrium.

At the word “fucking,” my assistant, Katherine Hough, stopped typing. I waited for her to resume before I said, “This has happened multiple times?”

“Four,” Kroon the Younger said.

“Three that we're sure of,” his father corrected.

“And how did you deduce that this wasn't some sort of …,” I struggled for the word, “…indigenous secretion?”

“I know what ejaculate looks like, Mr. Drayton.”

“It's not exactly easy for us to sit here admitting this,” the younger Kroon said. I'd started to think of him as Thomas Junior, even though he'd prefaced our consultation by stating that he wasn't named Junior, hated being called Junior, and anyway it was inaccurate because he and his father had different middle names. “Like the Bushes,” I'd said. The comparison hadn't been well-received.

“The first one was just over two months ago,” Elder said. “The 27th, a Monday. I normally open by myself during the week, but Thomas was with me. We came in early that morning to get started on draining a young woman who had arrived Sunday night.”

Kroon the Younger added, “Draining fluids for embalming, he means.”

“We found ejaculate on the outside of the bag, and when we opened the bag up, more ejaculate in the woman's oral cavity.”

“Which wasn't there when she arrived,” Younger said. “I was there when the Removal guys dropped her off Sunday night. The bag was pristine.”

I took notes. “What was the woman's name?”

“Ethel Peace,” Elder said.

“And what'd you do?”

“Cleaned her up, of course.” Elder indignant.

“He means did we call the cops,” Younger said to him, turning to me for a nod of confirmation. “We wanted to, but I felt, if that kind of thing ever gets out, we're finished. Bad news travels at warp speed in the funeral business. So we put up a camera over the freezer, figuring next time we'd catch this person.”

Elder inclined his head toward his son. “Someone kept forgetting to turn it on at the end of the day. Two weeks later, Violet Thorvaldsson, same modus operandi, as you folks say.”

Us folks.
I said, “Did you get footage of the other incidents?”

“There was only one other attack,” Elder said. “Two days ago. Maureen Lennox. Some of the ejaculate happened to land on an adjacent bag.”

“You don't know that,” his son said.

To me the father said, “Think it's safe to say he wasn't interested in both Mrs. Lennox and Donald Peng.”

“But there's no video of the incident or incidents?” I said.

“The cameras were on,” Younger said. Anticipating his father's interjection he added, “I set them, I'm sure. They'd been switched off from the office. Someone entered the password and exited the program, then restarted it about an hour later.”

“How many people know the password?”

“The two of us alone,” Elder said, readjusting his weight on the bench so that Younger had to scramble to stay poised on the edge.

“Well, he says that,” Younger said. “But our tech guy Jag has it, and I'm sure Carrie, our secretary, has it, which means it's probably written down somewhere, which means anyone in the office could find it.” He snorted. “There's the right way, the wrong way, and how the secretary does it. I'm sure you deal with the same thing.”

Without looking up, Katherine said, “I'm not his secretary.”

Younger shrugged, whatever. “There's about eight people in the office. Some of them know. We want to pay you to put a stop to this.”

“You could just change your password and leave the cameras running 24/7,” I said.

“To give you the straight deal, Mr. Drayton, we don't know what to do when we catch this person. If it comes out we didn't report the first four —”

“First three,” Elder corrected.

“— we'd be put out of business. We can't turn this person over to the police.”

“But he must be made to understand this can't continue,” Elder reaffirmed.

“You want me to find him and give him a stern talking to?”

“Or geld him,” Younger said. “Whatever keeps him from fucking our corpses.”

“I don't geld,” I said. “But I'll find who he is and confront him with the evidence, if that's what you want.” Nods of affirmation from both Kroons. “Three hundred dollars a day plus expenses and equipment fees.”

“Sounds equitable,” Elder said.

I dredged up a contract and two boilerplate liability waivers. The Thomas Kroons read them and signed.

“Any pattern to these attacks you've noticed?” I asked them.

“Always Mondays, or the first day back after the weekend,” Elder said.

I looked over at the vintage car calendar nailed to the wall above Katherine's computer. Today was Wednesday, the 2nd of September. September's car was a '50 Ford painted a milky orange hue. The colour of peach yogurt when it's been stirred up.

“I'll come by Friday, talk to your staff,” I said. I rose out of the chair and shook both exceedingly dry right hands.

Thomas Kroon the Elder said, “Would it be all right if we introduced you as a security consultant rather than a private investigator?”

“As you like. You're open weekends?”

“Three-quarter days,” Younger said.

“I'll need a key and your security codes when I come by on Friday. I've got my own equipment, and I might have someone stay overnight. Keep this between the two of you.”

“No worry about that,” Younger said. “Believe me, this isn't the kind of thing we like to advertise.”

A
fter the Kroons were gone I slid my sandwich forward to the edge of the table. “So what do you think?”

Katherine swiveled around in her chair. A high-school rugby player, now a student at Langara College, Katherine was stockily built and only feminized, in the traditional sense of the word, in the light eye shadow she wore, the berets in her black hair, and the layer of foundation she used to hide her freckles.

She had become the second employee of Hastings Street Investigations eight months ago, doing four hours of clerical work a week. When her course load lessened in the summer, I'd brought her in Monday to Thursday. I'm proficient with computers but I hate them, and worse, am the type of person who tries to pass this hatred off as a distinction rather than a deficiency, the mark of a genius whose intuition is hamstrung by binary code and random access memory. So much of modern investigating is simply knowing which database to search. I was happy to turn much of that work over to Katherine, freeing me up for the kind of jobs my antiquated skill set was better suited for. Like camping out in the basement of a funeral home, waiting for a necrophiliac.

“I'm just glad my grandpa went through Forest Lawn,” Katherine said. “Can you imagine the audacity, them not telling the cops?”

“It would ruin them.”

“Maybe they should be ruined. How'd you feel if that was your aunt, or if it was you?”

“It's dead tissue at that point.” I finished my sandwich, wadded up the wrapper and missed a three-pointer into the wastebasket next to the door. Through the window, the afternoon sun was making one last effort to break through a chalk-coloured sky.

“So you wouldn't mind, after you're dead, someone having their way with you?”

“I couldn't mind because I wouldn't be there.”

“But the family, Mike.”

“I doubt the Kroons will tell them.”

“Then I guess that makes it a victimless crime,” Katherine said.

“The Kroons are the victims.”

She rolled her eyes, one of her handful of annoying tics that meant “I give up, I can't reason with this idiot.” She returned to her search. I finished typing my meeting notes and forwarded them to her. I was passing her the contract when the buzzer rang. Katherine looked over at the television monitor to her left and said, “Your friend is on his way up.”

“Which one?”

“How many do you have?”

A moment later Ben Loeb crashed through the door and collapsed wheezing on the clients' bench. He shed his jacket and took several gulps of air before saying, “I just saw the weirdest pair of twins.”

“Father and son,” I said.

“Clients?”

“Can't really go into it.”

“They run a funeral home and someone's having their way with the corpses,” Katherine said. “And your hero here thinks it's no harm, no foul.”

“Undertakers. That's why they looked so weird.” Ben dug through the pockets of his sweater, found his notebook, and jotted something down. “They did have that Bonasera vibe. What did they want? Did they entreat you to beat someone up for them?”

“Obviously they wanted the corpse-humper stopped,” Katherine said.

“That's about the gist of it,” I said.

“And you took the job?” When I nodded, Ben's head sank.

“What?” Katherine said. “You don't think necrophilia is a serious crime? You'd be happy with someone defiling your lifeless body?”

“It's kind of flattering,” Ben said.

Not only did she roll her eyes but her head followed, and her body followed her head, as she turned back to her screen, done with us, muttering, “Peas in a fricking pod.”

Ben looked at the Loeb file on the corner of the table, and the Loeb file looked into Ben. Five years ago nine-year-old Cynthia Loeb had walked four blocks from her home on Seventh Avenue into a 7-Eleven where four witnesses saw her. Her exit was on the security tape, but she had never been seen again. There had been bogus sightings, anonymous tips, a scrapbook's worth of news clippings, dozens of VPD and RCMP bulletins, spots on local and national news. Dozens of serious-voiced blond anchors had intoned, “The search continues for,” “Months after the disappearance,” and “The family continues to hold out.” All that was left now were numbers and names.

Cynthia and Ben's father had died of angina, a condition which existed before the disappearance but caused their mother to state that he had died of a broken heart. He may very well have. Mrs. Estelline Loeb hired me thirty-two months before that day with the Kroons. I had failed her, her husband had failed her, the police and the media, the support groups, the talk show hosts, and her son, Ben, had failed her. Her optimism never faltered. Her hope never waned. The Loeb file grew to Jarndyce and Jarndyce proportions, a labyrinth of dead ends. I nicknamed it “The Impossible Case.” I stopped accepting her money. But the first of every month I received a phone call from her. We'd discuss what witnesses needed to be re-interviewed, what agencies hadn't been contacted recently, whether a fresh round of flyers should be put up. She never cried or fell into hysterics, or emoted at all beyond cheerful, blind optimism. To fail her so consistently, so spectacularly, had broken my heart.

Her son Ben was different. He'd been twenty when his baby sister disappeared — there was a middle child, Izaak Junior, who had died in infancy — and after two years of brooding and sulking, overindulging in every vice he could find, Ben's life, according to him, went pretty much back to normal. Not that he wasn't moved every time he saw the file, but he'd resigned himself to his sister's absence in a way his mother hadn't and couldn't.

“Benjamin Loeb,” so an article in
GamePro
read, “is one of the hottest video game writers to come on the scene in the last decade, bringing the sensibilities of William Gibson to the world of Hideo Kojima and Drew Karphyshyn.” Ben kept a laminated copy of the article in his wallet. He'd been blocked since developing the third installment of
Your Blood is a Drug!
— a role-playing game he'd written about a dystopic future where the majority of people volunteer to undergo the chemical equivalent of a full-frontal lobotomy. The series was wildly successful, spawning a line of merchandise that included a fully poseable Magnus Kane action figure (the brooding, leather-wearing, curtain-of-black-hair-across-his-forehead antihero, the one person in Neo Vancouver immune to the effects of the drug) and a T-shirt that said
P
ROUD
S
LAVE OF THE
P
ARAGON
C
ORPORATION
. Ben was wearing one of those shirts underneath his jacket, stretched and bunching in an effort to contain his amorphous trunk.

He spent more time in the office than Katherine did. Perhaps in the cobbled-together furniture and the high-tech gadgetry he saw the clubhouse or the neighbour's tree fort he'd been excluded from. My office has that effect on some people. Most, though, like the Kroons, find the outside world an immensely desirable place after fifteen minutes in the cramped second-storey shoebox that houses my business.

“Talk to your mother lately?” I asked Ben.

“Why? Anything develop?”

“No.”