Last of the Independents (15 page)

The band played cuts off their album and then took the stage and played those same songs with much less artistry. I began to appreciate the amount of work someone like Yeats went to in order to sculpt a record out of the mushy soundwaves generated by a lousy band.

The smell of pot enveloped me. Some in the crowd danced. Most nodded their heads. A few held up their cellphones, capturing for posterity a moment they were already talking through.

At the intermission the bassist came down to man the merch table. I bought a CD out of politeness and used it as a coaster for the rest of the night. “Thanks for supporting local music,” the bass player told me. I could picture him running a telethon. I couldn't see Yeats so I followed a throng of people outside to inhale cold air and secondhand smoke.

During the second set the band invited up guest musicians. Yeats's friend Zoltan took the stage for a pair of originals, both of which sounded vaguely like “Come As You Are.” A dreadlocked girl got up and belted a Smokey Robinson and the Miracles number, and then I saw Yeats cross the stage, wearing a grey band T-shirt and running scales on a borrowed Flying V.

They played “Heartless” and an original which I gathered was from her former band. It was a haunting blues song that she belted out, punctuating it with stabs of noise from her guitar. She sang with her eyes closed, voice rising and falling in volume but a steady crescendo of pain and intensity. The woman in the song, mistreated and abandoned by yet another man, finally took her own life, only to find herself at the gates of heaven to await Saint Peter's judgment. Yeats's voice strained to hit the last jarring note, catching only a corner of it before breaking in an anguished moan. Before the last chord faded she cut the charge in the room with a self-effacing joke and surrendered the guitar to an eager-looking man with a Caesar cut and dropped off the stage into the crowd.

Later, as we rode the Skytrain back to the park'n ride, I said, “That was intense.”

“That was always how I wanted to do it,” Yeats said. “Stripped down, bluesy. But it was Ali's song, so we went the pop route.”

“You don't play any more?”

“I don't enjoy it any more so why would I?”

“You have a gift.”

“You can return gifts,” she said. “Having skills is better. I taught myself engineering, like my dad.”

“Yeah, but you could have been—”

“Famous?” She grinned. “By the time I was nineteen I'd had two abortions, been in rehab. I was fucked up even before I had that band, and I would've destroyed myself if I kept at it.” As proof she held up her arms. I noticed for the first time the white scars etched into her wrists, deep enough to persuade me they weren't done for attention.

I'd pocketed a couple of bottles of Kokanee Gold for the ride home. We slugged back the tepid beer alone in our car of the train. We could hear a group of drunks in the next car, standing by the doors and squealing about the stupid bastard whose cellphone they'd just stolen. It was the kind of scene I hated to ignore, but there were four of them, I was drunk, and they were off the Skytrain two stops before us.

“Where's your mother in all this?” I asked her.

“Eastwood Park,” she said. “It's a penitentiary in England.”

“She's in prison?”

“She was part of a group called the Something Liberation Army, I forget what exactly. She and these other guys kidnapped an MP and his family. I think their plan was to hold the MP's wife and kids hostage and force the MP to kill the Prime Minister.”

“Jesus,” I said, because there was nothing else to say.

“Only the gags on the wife and kids were too tight and one of the kids threw up and choked on her throw-up.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. When the cops caught them they got one of the other kidnappers to confess. My mom had one of the longest prison terms handed out to a woman in that decade, which is kind of an honour.” Tilting her head in lieu of a smile to acknowledge the necessity of a joke to deal with the horror of the event and the painful intimacy of sharing it. All of this was rehearsed and second nature.

“'Splains why you hate the police,” I said.

“It's a corrupt, racist institution. They all are.”

“I didn't see that on the job.”

“Course you'd say that, you're —”

“White?”

“One of them,” she finished. “Or were. And before you start thinking it's a race thing, my mom is whiter than you.”

We got off the Skytrain at Waterfront and walked up to the lot where I'd stowed my car. A pint-size kid in a hoodie was tagging a parking sign. He took off at a long-striding walk as we approached, leaving a glyph in yellow paint dripping off a space of brick on the side of a building.

“When I was on the job,” I said, “I always felt that, so long as everything I did squared with the spirit of the law, I had wiggle room when it came to obeying the letter.”

“Beating confessions out of people?” Yeats said, equal parts curiosity and scorn.

“I wasn't a detective and I didn't handle too many interviews. Mostly I'd try to keep good people out of the system.”

“Good people. Isn't it hard to figure out who the good people are?”

“No,” I said. “If you're going about your life and not fucking things up for others, you're one of the good people. That doesn't mean everyone else is bad, just that for them, the system has to run its course.”

“Sounds like you were one of the good ones,” she said. “Good cops, I mean.”

“There's some dispute around that.”

“How'd you get kicked out?”

“I resigned, technically. The details aren't important.”

“I told you about my mother,” she said, mock-pouting.

“I could've found that out with a Google search.”

“You're going to tell me,” she said, “or I'll beat it out of you.”

“Fascist.”

“Tell me.”

I shook my head. “I don't have perspective on it yet. I alternate between seeing myself as totally in the right and thinking I fucked things up completely. But I'll tell you why I wanted to become a cop.”

So I did, recounting the whole lamentable story of Jacob Kessler, his journey across Canada to work in Vancouver, and his even longer journey to St. Paul's Hospital, dying with every step.

“After work he'd take off his uniform and leave his clothing strewn about the house. Shoes by the door, cap on the sofa in the living room, jacket on the stairs. That's where he'd sometimes leave his gun and belt. His shirt and pants went into the basket near the basement staircase. I'd pick up different pieces and play. Obviously the gun was the best, but my second favorite was the hat. His name was felt markered on the inside and the band inside was always cool with his sweat. When he'd see me doing this he'd pull the brim down over my face. Didn't have a highly developed sense of humour, my grandfather.”

I drove down the ramp and paid the outrageous parking tab. Traffic was thick for midnight, some sports event having recently ended, spilling fans out of the bars and putting questionable drivers on the road. I made it over the Cambie Street Bridge and hung a left.

“Anyway,” I said, “I guess the point of that boring story was that I was trying to fill his shoes before I even understood the term. Being on the job meant ...” I trailed off.

“What?”

“Everything,” I said.

“I feel like that about what I do,” she said. “How does being a private eye stack up?”

“Better than most of the alternatives. Could stand with more income, but who couldn't?”

A man getting into the driver's seat of a car parked on Broadway took a step backwards into my lane. I weaved around him, catching the look of astonishment and irritation on his face as we passed him. “Drunk asshole,” Yeats called back to him.

At her building we paused on the stairway. “Are you coming up?” she asked.

“Am I invited?”

She was two steps above me and leaned down so her weight was on my shoulders. Her hands met at the back of my neck. As we kissed I took a step up, put my hands on her back, a polite distance above her ass, the fragrance of beer and stagelight sweat on her. Her coat had bunched up and I ran my hand over the exposed small of her back, feeling the gooseflesh.

“You don't have to go?” she asked, a glimmer of welcome in her green-brown eyes.

“Hell with it. The Corpse Fucker can wait.”

“The what?” Pulling back to look me in the eyes.

“Nothing,” I said, kissing her, running my hands inside her jacket.

“Did you say the Corpse Fucker?”

“I'm guarding a funeral home from a necrophiliac. It's not a big deal. Got the keys?”

She withdrew, turning towards the door. “I should work anyway,” she said. “Sounds like you should be there.”

The smoke of our breath mingled. She pulled the keys from her purse and opened the stairwell door, kissed me, and pushed me back. I waited at the entrance. When the door had shut and the light had dimmed I went to work.

Atero-Vision

A
fter
my stint at the funeral home I drove to the Atero household and parked down the block with a view of the front door. I unscrewed the lid of my Thermos and poured out the lukewarm dregs of last night's tea. The stereo played a compilation of murder ballads I'd picked up at Charlie's on Granville Street before it closed. Forty-four tracks of bloodlust and misfortune. Perfect music for the grey hours before dawn.

I'd pissed away days pretending I had any choice in the matter. Atero knew something I needed to know, simple as that. Getting that knowledge would put people I cared about at risk and invite a reprisal from Crittenden. Those thoughts were a pint of acid sloshing around the bottom of my stomach. I told myself I was doing this for the kid, and not because I balked at being told what not to do. Maybe it didn't matter. If the end result is good, who gives a shit how pure of heart the person is who brings it about?

I chewed a granola bar. Burl Ives was singing “Streets of Laredo.” Odd to think of the snowman from the stop-motion
Rudolph
singing anything other than “Holly Jolly Christmas.” I realized this would be the first Christmas without the dog. I finished my bar and stowed the wrapper in the ashtray.

Porch lights snapped on up the block as robed women dragged garbage cans and blue bins out to the curb. Zak Atero's brother Theo came down the front steps of his house and plunked a knotted green bag by the edge of his car. He wore red dotted boxer shorts and a brown tank top, showing tanned muscular forearms that connected to pale hairy upper arms thick with wobbly flesh. His horseshoe of hair stood at all angles. He was barefoot.

Theo disappeared inside. Leadbelly, Victoria Spivey, Dick Justice and Mississippi John Hurt took their turns on the car stereo. When Theo exited his front door for the second time, he was dressed in a pale blue short-sleeved dress shirt. He carried a brown suede jacket and a suitcase with gouges in its vinyl covering. He stored jacket and case in the trunk of a late eighties Mustang, its deep red paint scarred and flecked with rust. Theo started the car and let it idle a moment, kicking out enough black soot to suggest a problem with the exhaust system. Eventually he turned on his lights, swung the Mustang around and drove past me. I waited until the end of disk one before climbing out of my car with my gym bag and walking around to the back entrance of the Atero household.

The back door had a pet flap. I wondered when the last Atero pet had kicked off and what it had died from. I couldn't quite reach the handle when I put my arm through the flap, but the porch window was wide and low and unlocked.

I searched the upstairs and the ground floor, finding stacks of car repair manuals and plates covered with congealed grease and cheese. I found two thousand dollars in twenties and a .22 target pistol in the bottom drawer of Theo's armoire. His pay stubs, a messy pile on the shelf beneath his nightstand, showed he worked as a floor manager for a warehouse in Coquitlam. The other room on the top floor contained a queen-sized mattress stripped of coverings and boxes piled everywhere. I opened a few of them: knickknacks belonging to their parents, tax returns, old
Chatelaines
and
Car and Drivers
. Nothing to link them to Django Szabo, but I hadn't expected anything. Whatever connection existed would be found in Zak's room. I made sure the gun was empty, left everything, and took two flights of stairs down to the basement.

The television was running some early morning exercise show where a woman with a beatific smile put a class through yoga positions. Atero was asleep on the couch. I turned the television off and sat on the armrest by his feet so my shoes were resting on the seat cushion. My gym bag sat on the floor within easy reach. The room was dirty and bare, quiet except for Zak Atero's soft snoring. I stared down at him. He was wearing an orange shirt with an Atari logo, blue briefs with white trim. He was still wearing socks.

I prodded his stomach with my shoe. “Wake up, Zak.”

He snorted and tried to roll over towards the back of the couch. I jabbed him in the ribs. His breath caught and his eyes opened. I waited for him to focus.

“What's going on?” he said through a yawn.

“Sit up and look at me.”

He propped himself on his elbows, the situation starting to focus for him. I kept my hands in the pockets of my coat.

“You're the guy,” he said, “from the office on Hastings.”

“Two-Eight-Eight-Two, cross street Beckett, anytime you want to find me.” Confident, easy. “I also make house calls.”

His head sunk to the left and he stared at the clock above the TV. “It's five already? Shit, I'm late.” His legs stirred, testing to see if I'd allow him to stand up. I shook my head.

“It's 5:00 a.m., Zak. Your brother won't be back for ten hours, you don't have anywhere to go, and we have a lot to cover.”

“I told you already, dude —”

“None of this ‘I told you already' shit,” I said. “I want to know what happened on March the 6th. Leave nothing out.”

“How can I tell you what I don't know?”

“Understand something, Zak.” I looked down at the gym bag, made sure he saw me look at it. “Neither of us is leaving this room until you tell me what happened to Django Szabo. Now, I don't want to lay hands on you, which I'm sure you're not too keen on either. But I will beat you till you beg me for permission to die if that's what it takes.”

I moved my leg to the floor and kicked the gym bag, hard enough so Atero could hear the clank of metal beneath the canvas. I grinned down at him.

His arm extended to the pipe resting on the ottoman. “I got to at least get a little high. You got to at least let me have that.”

I booted the ottoman hard enough to send it rolling into the wall with a thud. The pipe, the bag, the ashtray, and clickers all hit the floor.

“Man —” he began.

“— Tell it and then you can get as fucked up as you want.”

He nodded.

“What happened was, a friend of mine had a similar car to the, whatever their names are, their car.”

“Szabo. What kind of car?”

“Four-door Taurus wagon, brown, 1997 I think. Seven or eight. So anyway, their car and my friend's car —”

I swatted him on the side of the head. He looked up at me incredulously. “What'd you hit me for?'

“You lied to me. Don't want to get hit, don't lie.”

“I was explaining —”

“You don't have any friend, Zak. You were ripping rides in front of the pawn shop.”

He nodded. “So I walk by it and see one of the pegs is up. The door pegs, like for the locks.”

“Go on.”

“Car's empty, least I think that. I go around the block, come back, street's clear, I take another look, see that there's no club on the wheel. Not like I brought a slim-jim and cutters with me. I mean, I suffer from impulse control and this car's sitting there with a bow on it. So I open the door and start it up.”

“How long till you realized the kid was on board?”

“I was almost at the handoff,” Zak admitted. “I called Fat Rick, told him to meet me under the bridge at Marine, usual place. I'm on Cambie, within three blocks, and I see these little eyes staring at me in the mirror. Like to have a heart attack when I saw him.”

“What happened at the handoff?”

“Didn't make the handoff,” he said, shaking his head as if the wisdom of that decision was apparent. “Rick's not like that. I hand him a car with a faulty taillight I never hear the end of it. 'Magine what he does I hand him a car that's still got a passenger?”

“So you went where?”

Atero shrugged and snorted. “I don't remember.”

“Where, Zak?” I raised my hand and he flinched.

“Hey, look.” Eyes fixed on me, his version of sincere. “I look like a pedophile to you? Someone who hurts kids?”

“Prove to me you're not.”

His head collapsed back onto the armrest. “I can't help you.”

I said, “I can imagine a scenario where, you're driving, you see the kid, he's scared, you're scared, and maybe he's acting up in a way that's dangerous. Maybe you try to keep him still, in the interest of safe driving. And maybe the kid hit his head, or passed out and never woke up. Or you didn't know your own strength.”

Atero's eyes were closed, tears forming in the corners, a bubble of spit between his lips.

“My point is, Zak, these are things the court would take into account were you to come forward and show remorse. But you've got to tell me where you stashed that kid's body. That's the only way you'll earn yourself a break.”

“I wouldn't hurt anyone,” he blubbered. “I just like cars.”

I prodded him. “We're doing good being truthful to one another. Let's not louse it up now. Tell me where the body is. After that you can get good and high.”

“I don't know.”

“Zak, another second I'm going to start beating on you.”

“Look look look,” he said, scooting up to a sitting position, putting negligible distance between us. “Look, okay? I didn't hurt him. If anything's happened it is not my fault.”

“Where's the body?”

“There's no body is what I'm telling you,” he said.

“Meaning he's still alive?”

Zak Atero nodded. “I mean, far as I know.”

O
f course I'd considered it as a possibility, a hypothesis. Not every missing child turns up dead. Usually, though, the fortunate ones get fortunate within a few weeks. With runaways, sometimes they show up years later, living their lives, their parents forgotten or at least out of mind. Intellectually I'd entertained the possibility, but my gut sense of things had written Django James Szabo off as dead even before my first meeting with his father. I'd had the same feeling with the Loeb case.

What Atero told me sounded genuine. I'd heard every permutation of lie from him already. This was different. Determining veracity is not a science, but I'd stake my reputation that he wasn't lying when he said that Django passed from his hands alive and unharmed.

After he'd run through his story I unzipped the gym bag and removed a black metal tripod. I spread its legs, took an old-fashioned VHS camera from its travel case and threaded it onto the base of the tripod. I trained the lens on a medium closeup of Zak Atero.

“Tell it all the way through,” I said, focusing and pressing play.

My first thought was returning him, but I didn't know where the boy lived, and I couldn't just drive up and drop him at the pawn shop.

I thought of the pawn shop owners, the Ramseys. They seemed to know the boy's father. How do I know the Ramseys? I work for a guy — don't ask me his name — and Ramsey has a deal with him. I try not to know the details about things like that. Ramsey and I also have a sort of side agreement with regards to his parking lots. I'm not saying I tell him when I take a car, but there's not much in his area that escapes him.

So I phone Ramsey on a burner and tell him I'm swinging back with the kid. He says no good, he's not getting involved. Hangs up on me. 'Magine hanging up when there's a kid involved.

Anyway, it's no secret I suffer from certain weaknesses. It was getting pretty bad and I was desperate to ditch the kid. It was a weird situation. He's sitting in the back staring at me with his little eyes. I'm freaking out more than him. He just kind of accepted it.

So I try to think where can I take him that's safe, that there won't be five-oh, and that I can get this other problem sorted out at the same time. I can't go home and I can't stay out on the road. There's this girl I know, Dominique, don't know her last name, couldn't swear that was the name she was christened with. She and a couple of girlfriends have this house over on Fraser. Big empty garage out back.

Yes they were hookers, but when I say that, understand I'm not talking about rock hos from Surrey. These are nice girls. No pimp. They get protection from the same guy I work for. They do their business in the first floor and live upstairs. The other two were dykes, I do remember that. Always bitching to Dom about having me over in
their
house.

I drive over there and one of the other ones comes to the door and says Dom's got a party, I should leave. I say I'm not going anywhere 'cause I need to get that car off the street, and I'm'a put it in the barn. She says no good, the john's car's in there. I'll spare you the whole comedy routine, but I get the john's keys and pull his car into the alley, then stow the Taurus inside. The kid's just sitting in the back seat all this time.

Far as I know the car's still there.

All the while the kid says nothing. Just watches me. I tell him come inside with me. He just nods.

Inside, Dom's friend, the older one, Barb I think her name was, she sits him down in front of the TV, starts asking him does he want a sandwich, juice, that kind of thing. Never offered me a sandwich, I've known her three years. I'm halfway thinking she's going to offer to take the little guy's cherry for him.

Anyway, Dom calls this guy she knows and we go pick up what we need to. When we come back the kid's still watching TV. The other girls are working, so Dom and I see to our business. Next thing I know it's the next day. I see the kid sleeping as I head out on account of some pick up I have to make. I'm careful not to disturb him.

That's the last I ever saw of that boy. Sure I've seen Dom and Barb and the other girl a couple times since, but never at their place.

Last time I saw any of them was two months ago. I ran into Dom and the other one at a club, might've been the Roxy, maybe the Commodore. I remember Dom was pissed at me, thinking I might have taken a bit more than my share of the dope, and that I was ducking her. Anyway, we made up.

Remember that freak summer storm that one weekend? Think it was July. Anyway, it's raining when I go into the club, and on our way out it's a righteous thunderstorm. Wind, rain, the whole bit. We went out to my car.

We attended to business, then we sat there, in the rain and thunder, counting the seconds between the flash and the rumble. The subject of the kid didn't come up.