Last of the Independents (11 page)

At eleven the lights in the upstairs went off, but the basement lights still burned. Through a gauze of curtain I saw Zak Atero flopped on a couch watching sitcoms, a crack pipe resting in a wooden bowl on a burn-pocked ottoman. I saw no signs of anyone else in the house.

I parked out front and set the interior light so it wouldn't come on when I opened the door. Every hour I'd walk around the block and peer over the fence to make sure Atero hadn't moved. He was comatose by midnight, the television still aglow.

At two we had our sandwiches. My window was open just enough so the windows wouldn't fog. We drank tea to keep warm.

“The glamorous world of private detection,” I said, keeping my voice low. “Kind of makes you want to get back to video games, doesn't it?”

“You kidding?” He took a bite of a sloppy meatball sub that hadn't aged well. “I'm having a great time.”

“Feel like telling me what got to you earlier?”

“It's business related.”

“I'm in business.”

He sighed. “I met with what's left of my development team. The others split for greener pastures. I don't blame them — I mean, not everyone made what I made off
Blood 2
. They wanted to meet to discuss the third one, whether we're gonna go through with it or disband.”

“And you disbanded?”

“Worse,” he said.

“You came up with an idea but it's not what you wanted.”

“Even worse, because I didn't come up with it. Mahmoud, the project leader, brought in this twenty-one-year-old, Felipe, straight out of the Art Institute. He pitched this idea of, instead of a sequel, making a spinoff first-person shooter using the same characters.” He sniffed. “Mahmoud says it's the only way to keep the team together.”

“So?”

“So it's not right,” he said. “Magnus and Rosalind aren't kill-crazy psychopaths. It's not a game where you pick up little white health kits, for God's sake. There's depth and poetry to it. And I know you're not an artist, or a big video game guy, but
Your Blood is a Drug!
is important to people. They'll see this FPS and think, ‘Oh, Loeb doesn't care anymore, he'll license anything. He's got his paycheck. Now he just wants to piss on us.'”

“Didn't hurt those plumbers, being in a few subpar games.”

“But that's a brand,” Ben said. “I'm talking about a world that I created, that I wrote. You see the logo and I want you to think of more than just entrails flying at people. You think Felipe with his newly minted degree gives a shit about maintaining that legacy?”

“Not so loud.”

“Sorry, okay? Sorry.”

I handed him a napkin that was free of mustard stains and listened to him blow his nose. The light from the small basement windows winked out.

“I've never heard of anyone actually refer to their legacy,” I said. “Let alone someone under thirty. Not every book's got to be
Moby-Dick
. If it makes the kids happy, and everyone gets paid, who gives a shit?”

“You wouldn't understand,” said Ben.

“Probably not.” I refilled one of the mugs I'd brought and handed it to him. The tea had already lost most of its heat.

I said, “You know that question, what'd you rather be, rich or famous? Well you've got both. Granted, you're not famous to anyone who doesn't read
PC World
, but it's still a kind of fame.”

“But I want to be famous for the right things.”

I shook my head. “This is like talking to a guy who won the Lotto and wonders why it couldn't have been eight million 'stead of six.”

“Maybe,” he said, depositing the snot-filled napkin out the window.

We watched the dark house. After fifteen minutes by the dashboard clock we packed it in. As I drove Ben home he said, “If you had your choice what'd it be?”

“Between?”

“Fame and fortune.”

“I'd settle for solvency and a clean conscience.”

“But if you had to choose,” he said.

I looked at him like he'd been sneaking hits off Zak Atero's pipe. “You're not serious.”

“So money then.”

“Course.”

“I could just give you some.”

“You should.”

“I mean it,” he said. “I don't have much to spend it on. Not like I have a lot of friends. How much do you need?”

“Why be stingy, how 'bout half?”

“Seriously, Drayton.”

“I'm not taking anything from you, Loeb.”

“Well, Drayton, that makes me think you're full of shit. I'd've given you twenty grand here and now, and you said no. That means money's not as important.”

“No,” I said, “it just means money's not
most
important. There's a difference between fame and self-respect.”

“All right, but say we flip the polarity. What'd you rather be, horribly in debt or have everybody hate your guts?”

“I'm already in debt.”

“Say it was a choice between insurmountable, crushing poverty, and being as hated as Hitler.”

“Debt, probably. Least with a good name I can earn.”

“But that's my point,” Ben said. “If you're the kind of person who doesn't care what they're famous for as long as they get moved to the head of the chow line, that's one thing. But if we're talking about reputation — people knowing your name stands for something, rather than just knowing your name — that's a fame that's worth something.”

I paused for a beat. “You're right.”

“I know.”

Moments later, at the curb in front of the Djembe Hut:

“Twenty grand, huh?”

Ben grinned as he climbed out of the car.

His Countenance Enforces Homage

T
hanksgiving
I was up early to prep the turkey. In point of fact I hadn't gone to sleep, though I'd spent a few hours lying on the bed with the dog curled around my feet, feeling the intake and release of her ribcage on my shin. I sautéed onions, celery, and sausage, added this to breadcrumbs and sage. I salted the cavity — one more hand up one more animal's orifice — and stuffed the bird. Then I rubbed a pat of butter into the turkey's hide so vigorously that I could sense the nipples of Julia Child's ghost getting hard.

I had my first Jack and Ginger of the day and watched Kurt Russell defeat aliens until my grandmother came down to make the pie.

Family-wise I think of myself as alone except for her, though she has a sister with three children and six sullen, Nintendo-addicted grandchildren. I view them as acquaintances, conventioneers who I put up and put up with for one afternoon every year, plying them with mashed potatoes and gewurztraminer and sending them on their way so that the other 364.25 days can be free of relatives. For their part, I'm sure they feel equally obligated to descend from their comfortable homes once a year to check in on the Widow Kessler and her peculiar grandson. What does he do again? Some kind of security guard or something. Oh, right. There any money in that?

Sunday night marked the first interesting occurrence in the Corpse Fucker case since the incident with the mouse. Three days previous, a member of a biker gang had been gunned down on Gaglardi Way in Burnaby. His name had been Marc Moulette. I'd arrested him once.

He'd come out of the Gentlemen's Club on Main and Powell drunk and loud, staggered across the street, colliding into a homeless man's shopping cart full of dead soldiers. Mira and I had answered the complaint. We'd turned the corner onto Carroll and seen Moulette launch an empty bottle of Stoli at a bus.

Mira had been senior. She talked to him while I made an effort to put myself between them. Moulette was bald with a long fringe of brown hair, and wore his vest with the gang rocker and patch over a grey long-sleeved shirt covered in coffee stains. He was two inches taller than me, shoulders developed but waist paunchy, clean-shaven so the tattoos on his throat would be visible.

“What's the problem, sir?” Mira said. Five foot seven and dwarfed by the beast in front of her, and not giving an inch.

“You're a cunt,” Moulette said. “You're both cunts.”

“Now now.” Mira had her hand on her Taser. “You're going to stop the name calling and the bottle throwing and come with us.”

His hand went to the cart for a fresh bottle. His eyes were on her. He didn't see me close the distance. I cracked him across the head with my collapsible baton, hard enough so that the stick would never collapse properly after that. Moulette hit his knees hard enough to rip the denim. The second shot might have been excessive, but felt almost as good as the first. It left him sprawled on the pavement, face-down, dazed.

Later Mira and I had argued about it. She said I'd undermined her authority. I said I'd saved her life. In truth I simply wanted to hit Moulette because of what he'd called her.

There had been a brief investigation which cleared us, and the threat of a lawsuit that never materialized. And here was Marc Moulette, 47, reduced now to a sack of festering, foul-smelling organs encased in a grey reptilian skin, a hole in the back of his head and most of his face contained in a separate bag, an autopsy Y-scar hacked into his chest. Below that, a steroid-abuser's shriveled testes and a stubby blue-veined prick, a tag on his ankles with his particulars. His son was coordinating the burial. Closed casket. A big deal for Roman Catholics, apparently.

Moulette would have stood trial in November. It was a safe bet his own people had taken him out.

Killed by one family, buried by the other. As I sat watching
The Thing
I wondered if the shooter and I were the only two people to ever get the best of an exchange with Marc Moulette. I wondered what Moulette would have given to at least have been able to see his killer.

At noon I went to the store for a can of whole cranberries and a carton of whipping cream. When I came back the street was packed with minivans and station wagons. I parked in the alley and once inside I ran the gauntlet of relatives, letting them pinch and smooch to their hearts' content. “He's gotten so tall.” “What do you do again, Mikey? Hunh. There any money in that?”

B
y a quarter past four I was mildly sloshed and had retreated to the basement to play
Mortal Kombat
with my seventeen-year-old second cousin, Kaylee. She'd recently gone through a retro-punk phase, and the holes from the multiple piercings in her nose were still visible despite the absence of hardware. Before that she'd been a goth, and a stoner before that. I couldn't say what she was now, except that with her striped arm socks and matching stockings she looked vaguely like a Dr. Seuss character. Even with one hand petting the dog she was kicking my ass.

My cell went off just as Kaylee performed Sub-Zero's spine-rip finishing move. I was good sport enough to concede before picking up the phone, though fifteen years ago if I'd lost to a girl I would have pretended the ringing had distracted me. “Drayton,” I said into the phone, turning down the stereo so I could hear over Ozzy's wail.

“Can you come here?” Amelia Yeats's voice, agitated and tense.

“Sure,” I said, envisioning a late afternoon fuck atop her mixing board.

“Do you know where my dad's place is? The big mansion close to UBC?”

“Give me the address.” She recited a house number and gave me the code to the front gate: one nine six seven.

“Fifteen minutes,” I said, hanging up.

I looked down at Kaylee, who'd ingested nothing all day but cigarettes and root beer. “You driving yet?” I asked her.

“I have my learner's.”

“Feel like a jaunt?”

From upstairs, on cue, came a cackle of laughter from her grandmother.

“Fuck yes,” Kaylee said. “Get me away from these people.”

O
nly when Kaylee punched it in at the gate did I apprehend the significance of the four-digit code. 1967, Summer of Love. The gate enclosed an acre of manicured lawn, dotted with sculpted mounds of bark mulch that supported an assortment of flowers, most of which had withered and lost their colour. A large oval of driveway led up to a great house at the top of the incline. A Packard, a Rolls, and an Austin mini were parked near the double-sized front doors, along with a black panel van and further down, Amelia's pistachio-coloured Jag. The property stretched another football field behind the house.

When it came time to park, Kaylee slipped it in neutral and traded places with me so I could maneuver the car between the Jag and the van. I told her to wait in the car. I strolled up, peering in dark windows, looking for signs of activity. I was reaching for the lion-shaped brass knocker when I heard the first shot.

I dashed back to the car and told Kaylee to keep her head down, feeling awful for bringing her into whatever this was. I reached through the window and popped the trunk as the second shot sounded, a thunder crack unmuffled by the house. The source was around back somewhere.

I opened the trunk and cinched up my Kevlar vest.
Stupid
, I thought,
you're not a cop anymore, you don't even have a gun with you
. I started to dial the police when the third shot drowned me out. I tossed the phone to Kaylee, told her to keep down, give me ten minutes and then phone.

At the edge of the house I saw a lush varicoloured garden, burnished reds and oranges providing a carpet of leaves and nettles over the mulch. Above and to my left was a long second-floor veranda with a roof of corrugated green plastic. I saw Amelia Yeats and a Filipino woman crouched behind an overturned table on the gazebo, thirty yards from where I stood. Assuming they were the targets, that put the shooter on the veranda.

The house had been added to over the years, and signs of unfinished renovation were still evident. Walls had been added and torn down, a second floor had been built above the garage, and the stately brown paint was newer here than on the far side by the solarium. I broke a window on the newer annex and dropped down into the basement.

Immaculate inside. Ivory-coloured carpeting in the garage with maple flooring leading up the stairs. Maple walls, decorated with every music award possible. Grammys, Junos, a Best Original Song Oscar nomination letter. Photos of Chet Yates with Sinatra, George Harrison, some of the Jacksons. I double-took when I saw Yates next to Miles Davis, a rare smile on the Dark Prince's face. Yates had a fearless fashion sense, a lot of purple suits, Holstein-patterned shirts, eccentric headware and all manner of jewellery. He was average height, round faced and curly haired like his daughter. Handsome, with a smile helped along by some sort of narcotic. If a fourth shot hadn't rung out I would have stayed to look at everything. I went up the stairs to the main foyer and treaded on marble tile until I saw the sliding door leading out to the veranda.

I could hear him before I could see him. His hair was silver now and close-cropped. He'd traded the electric suits for a terrycloth robe and Bermuda shorts. Some kind of Aztec sun had been tattooed on his gut. As I watched he aimed a nickel-plated .38 at a spider plant hanging from the roof of the veranda and blasted it. Soil and white chunks of calcite sprayed the deck.

“Jesus Christ, Daddy,” Yeats called from below.

Her father grinned, held the gun to his temple.

“I'm getting tired, love. I'm tired all the time now. Don't 'spect you to understand.” He spoke in a cockney-accented baritone. “Just know that your daddy — motherfucker, what are you looking at?” He took aim at a hummingbird feeder, still rocking wildly from being hit with a shard of the planter. He missed, the bullet sailing in the direction of the garden, though thankfully not towards Yeats and the other woman.

Six shots means he's empty
.

I slid open the door in a crouch but my eyes saw the empty brass jackets by his feet and the open box of ammunition on the plastic table. Chet Yates took aim at the feeder and pressed the nozzle up to it and pulled the trigger, shattering it. Amelia Yeats screamed.

I went through the door, thinking in headlines, F
OOLHARDY
P.I. S
HOT BY
E
CCENTRIC
R
ECORDING
L
EGEND
. He saw me as my fist closed on the gun. I tapped him in the face with my elbow just hard enough to cause him to break his grip on the revolver. He fell to the deck, landing on his ass. Tears in his eyes, snot and blood cascading from his nostrils.

I opened the cylinder and dumped the ammunition into my hand. “He's okay,” I shouted to Yeats. I checked the brass. Two live rounds, four expended.

I looked over at Chet Yates, holding the cuff of his robe to staunch his nosebleed.

“Any other ordinance?” I asked.

He shook his head.

As we waited for Yeats and the other woman to approach he pointed to the gun and said, “Gift from Colonel Tom Parker, that was.”

“Yeah?”

“The King had given it to him, is what he told me, anyway. Had a thing for guns, Elvis did.” He grinned nostalgically.

“Ever meet him?” I asked.

“Just once,” Chet Yates said. “A sweet man. A bit gormless, but sweet. Colonel Tom was a bit of a wanker, though.”

R
oanna, the Filipino woman, was the old man's live-in nurse. She sedated him and helped him to bed while Yeats and Kaylee and I gathered up the bullets and casings and dirt and shards of plastic. I'd pocketed the gun.

“He's always been weird,” Yeats said, crouching with the dustpan as I swept. “He gets agitated once in a while and has these freakouts. But I've never seen him with a gun before.”

“Am I wrong in thinking he was a heavy drug user at any point?”

She looked at me like the answer was self-evident.

“Of course he partied back in the day. Lately though, he's been withdrawn. He plays a lot of Nina Simone and Joni Mitchell records, and sometimes I catch him muttering to himself, ‘It's all over,' or, ‘They're all gone.' Ro and I want him to see someone, but there's no way to convince him to go.”

“Hear that?”

From outside came the sound of a policeman's knock, patient but firm.

“The pigs,” Yeats said.

“I just told them to come,” Kaylee said. “I didn't say why.”

Patting my pocket, I said, “Where can I dump this?”

“Basement, maybe? There's a pool down there.”

I squeezed myself down an incredibly narrow and ornamented spiral staircase as Yeats admitted the officers. I heard her talking to them in a placating tone, explaining that some neighbourhood kids had set off M-80s in the backyard, upsetting her father, who had just been put to bed.

The pool room of Yates Manor was marble-tiled, brightly lit and dank. Both the pool and hot tub were tiled in orange with a design in blue and white on the bottom that I couldn't make out. The water was scummy and undisturbed. I flattened myself on the cold tile, reached in and opened the cage around the filter. I put the gun and shells inside and withdrew my arm, slick and clammy.

I came upstairs and backed up Yeats's story.

I
t was seven by the time Kaylee and I got back to my grandmother's house. Most of the relatives had dispersed except for my Great Aunt June, Kaylee's grandmother. The two old women were watching equestrian and killing the last of a bottle of white wine.

“Where've you two been gallivanting about?” My grandmother said.

“Work.”

“On Thanksgiving?”

“Is there any food left?”

“Want me to heat it up?”

“I can manage with cold,” I said.