Last of the Independents (23 page)

She shook out a cigarette from a pack she kept in the back pocket of her jeans. She offered me one, lit hers and blew out a mouthful of smoke with what passed for cosmopolitan nonchalance in Prosper's Point. “Three you said?”

“Any number, if they were traveling with the boy.”

“The boy I don't know about,” Abigail said. “I remember two women in a Jeep. They'd get gas across the street and one of them would come over for coffee and danishes, enough for three people. The weird thing was, it was the same woman who pumped the gas that got the coffee. The other one just sat in the car.”

“Who got the coffee? Was she blonde?”

“Both brown haired, I think.” Abigail flicked her cigarette butt into a puddle near the curb, disturbing the rainbow scum of oil. “The one in the car was a mousy brown, kind of thin. The one that got the coffee looked about forty. On the fat side, no makeup, only these really fake drawn-on eyebrows. You know those racist cartoons from World War Two, where Asian people's eyes are drawn as upside-down V's? That's what her eyebrows looked like.”

“This is in April?”

“April and May, yeah.”

“How many times did you see them?”

“A few times. I think they were living around here.”

“Do you know where?”

“No clue,” she said.

“Would Stevie know?”

“Why would he?”

“Different question: are there prostitutes in town?”

She raised one eyebrow. “Couldn't tell you.”

“If there were, which bar would they frequent?”

Abigail thought it over. “Big Dave's is where the old people drink. Ace's is more upscale. Cops drink there. That leaves the Palatial. Lot of fights break out there. They even had a shooting two years ago. Yeah, I'd say the Palatial.”

“'Preciate it,” I said, handing her a twenty-dollar bill and a business card. “Think of anything else, let me know.”

She folded the money and tucked it and the card inside the packaging of her cigarettes.

“Tell Stevie I didn't mean to step on his turf.”

“You didn't,” Abigail said. “And it won't matter, he'll be jealous anyway.”

“Why's that?”

“Because you're more interesting than him,” she said. “He'll sulk and then talk shit about you when I get back. So predictable. We hooked up like a year ago and he's obsessed.”

“Probably not a lot of alternatives,” I said. Then realizing how insulting that could be taken: “Not that you're not worth obsessing over.”

“I'm eighteen in less than two months,” she said. “New Year's Baby.”

“Are you planning on leaving?”

“I want to.”

“Then you should,” I said. “Go waitress in the Big City. Be broke, live in squalor. Don't wait for some guy to take you out of here.”

She tore one of the flaps off the cigarette pack, wrote something on it, and placed it on the plywood before hopping down and heading back to the teepee. I looked at the paper and saw it was a phone number and email, and her name, the
i
dotted with a heart. I left it on the floor of the van, locked up, and headed into the station.

When I asked where I'd find Sergeant Delgado, the receptionist said, “Willie's down in the morgue talking with Dr. Boone and somebody from the Mainland. Want me to page him?”

“If you could just give me directions,” I said, showing her my credentials. A private eye license does not grant admission to an autopsy room, but either she didn't know that, or Fisk had already cleared me. She pointed to the elevator and told me I wanted Basement Two.

The coroner's office was on the right hand side of the hall as I came out of the elevator. The door was open. Inside sat Gavin Fisk, a ponytailed older woman in a suit, and a tall man in the dark blue RCMP uniform. Fisk looked up at me as I handed him his coffee.

“Mike Drayton,” he said to the others. “Formerly VPD, hired by the father to make sure I dot my P's and Q's.”

The Mountie stood up and extended a big hand. “Willie Delgado,” he said. “This is Beth Boone, our corpse doctor.”

“Pleased, Mike,” Boone said, extending her own well-moisturized hand.

“Beth was telling us that the official identification will take at least a week on account of the lack of personal effects.”

“Who's the deceased?” I asked. “I mean what's the description?”

“Unidentified woman, mid-thirties, black hair,” Delgado said.

“Barbara Della Costa?”

“If they knew her identity, Mike, she wouldn't be unidentified,” Fisk said. “'Sides, Barbara was the blonde.” Before I could retort he added, “Not that she'd have any difficulty buying a tube of black dye, or that black couldn't be her natural colour.”

I asked Dr. Boone, “Were her eyebrows drawn on V-shaped, very severely, maybe oversized?”

“She died several months ago, so that's hard to say. I can tell you for sure, though, that her face was regularly depilated.” Her hand traced along her own silver eyebrows. “Faint razor scars, too. Only noticed them when she was on the table. I'll finish my coffee and get to the autopsy.”

“Where was she found? What body position?”

“Upright behind the wheel of a late nineties LeBaron,” Delgado said. “Parked in the shed on Lester Rusk's place. Lester's been dead eight years. His niece sold the spread to a Japanese concern. No one really goes there.”

“You found her?”

“'Fraid so,” he said. “Not my finest hour, I must admit. My new neighbours got this dog, which has been taking an interest in the rabbit hutch my daughters keep. A fence seemed like the solution, but I didn't own an auger — that's a tool to dig fence holes.”

“I've used an auger before,” I said, wondering why I felt the need to tell him that.

“Anyway, these days, who's got an auger? Then I remembered that Lester had all sorts of tools, 'cluding at least one auger. Man liked his flea markets. He used to leave his tools all over the yard, but after the sale, all that crap was thrown in the shed.”

“Should I be writing this down?” I said, thinking, a policeman should be able to pick out a pertinent detail.

Delgado smiled. “Anyway, a couple months ago I head over to the Rusk place. The shed's been padlocked, but all the tools and whatnot have been piled along the side. I take the auger and think nothing of it, 'cause it's not like I'm technically 'sposed to be there anyhow. Then the other day when Mr. Fisk phoned about that missing boy, I thought to myself, that shed could only have been emptied out 'round the timeframe he mentioned, March–April-May. See, I'd been to the shed before that to return a little hand-cranked cement mixer.”

“Sure,” I said, hoping to cut the anecdote short. “So you took off the padlock and the car was inside.”

“How it happened, pretty much.”

I turned to Fisk. “Should we check out the Rusk place?”

“Unless the sarge has any leads on who killed her.”

“What, not who,” said Dr. Boone. “From first glance I'd say carbon monoxide poisoning. Looks to me like she killed herself.”

The Ostrich Man

“I
don't like this Delgado,” Fisk said. “I don't like this town. I don't like the coroner sitting on her ass when that body might tell us something.”

We were following Delgado's Interceptor up a gravel logging road. The road was so narrow that when a car approached going the opposite way, we had to stop and pull over so that the right-side wheels rested on the ribbon of grass separating the road from an algae-covered ditch.

“We know one thing,” I said. “Barbara and Dawn came here for a reason. They weren't hiding out here at random.”

“What makes you say that?”

Delgado turned left onto a strip of hard-packed dirt. He parked in front of a weather-beaten homestead, its ancient porch a gap-toothed smile of sunken and missing planks. Behind and to the left was a rusty aluminum shed, white with red trim, its doors hanging open. Police tape and an official notice were secured to the door.

I said, “If this was just a stop-over, Barbara would have bought the fishing rods here, then sold them somewhere else. Tofino, maybe. But she stayed here to try and sell them, meaning this was her base. If she did herself in, whatever was here was something she couldn't outrun or escape.”

“Doesn't bode well for the kid,” Fisk said.

“No it doesn't.”

“She kills him, then kills herself?”

“Why take him in the first place then?”

“So what happened here?”

“I don't know.”

“Something bad, probably.”

“I don't know, Gavin.”

He unbuckled his seatbelt as I stopped. “I don't like this place,” he reiterated.

The ground was puddled and uneven. Delgado walked us toward the barn. “Anything in there?” Fisk asked, pointing at the house.

“Cleared, emptied and sealed up, just the way it was after Lester passed.”

“But you guys unsealed it and looked inside.” Fisk had stopped moving.

“Of course,” Delgado said.

“Nothing tampered with?”

“Nope.”

“No secret rooms or nothing?”

“There's a salt cellar.”

“And what was in there?”

“Salt.”

Delgado led us to the open mouth of the shed. The aluminum frame had been fastened onto a concrete slab using industrial screws. An array of shovels, axes, trowels, hoes, rakes, shears and machetes littered the ground by the right side, along with some larger tools including Delgado's borrowed cement mixer, bricks, pottery and other flotsam.

“You print these?” I asked him.

Delgado shook his head. “Don't see the point. I mean, some of my own prints would be on there.”

“The point, Willie,” Fisk said, “is that the car got in the shed somehow. Meaning whoever put the car in the shed took the crap out of the shed and dumped it here.”

“Don't take a tone with me,” Delgado said. “Beth believes this to be a suicide.”

“Prosper's Point must have a different definition of the term,” Fisk said, “'cause in Vancouver suicides don't padlock themselves in sheds after they off themselves.”

“Easy,” I said to Fisk, and turned to Delgado. “My colleague's concern is that we simply don't know all the details at this point. Given that, it makes sense to treat this like a potential crime scene. Which I'm sure you've done.”

Delgado directed a pained look at Fisk. “As to the padlocking,” he said, taking a sudden interest in his shoelaces, “I couldn't be sure someone from around here didn't see the padlock on the ground and lock the shed to prevent vandalism.”

“Reasonable,” I said, thinking just the opposite and wondering what Fisk was making of this. I hoped he wouldn't share his thoughts and make an enemy out of Sgt. Delgado. To his credit, Fisk kept dumb.

“To be perfectly honest,” Delgado said, “I couldn't swear that it wasn't me who saw the car and put that padlock on. My thinking being that since the house wasn't disturbed, one of the new owners might have intended to lock the car in the shed and forgot. The lock was in its original packaging but the keys had been removed.”

“Did you at least run the plates?” Fisk asked.

“I certainly did, when I came back the second time, after your call.”

“Unbelievable,” Fisk said. “I'm gonna check the house.”

Once Fisk had removed the planks from the side door and entered, Delgado said to me, “Your — colleague? — could stand with a refresher course in getting along with people.”

T
he autopsy wasn't finished by the time we returned to the centre of town. Delgado invited us for drinks and grub at Ace's. We settled our gear into adjoining rooms in the Country Cabin. My room had a stale smell to it. An old-style TV with knobs and dials, a phone, a painting of grouse above the headboard. I unpacked my clothing and appliances, plugged in the cellphone charger. In the bedstand drawer, instead of a bible, was a chapbook of inspirational poems from local authors.

I phoned Katherine. She gave me the number in Iceland I'd asked for. She also told me about someone who'd phoned the office.

“Loretta Dearborn.”

“Don't know her,” I said. “Potential client?”

“She phoned about the missing child.”

“The Loeb case or the Szabo case?”

“Didn't specify.”

“Could you find out for me?”

“I'll give you her number, Mike, but I meant what I said.”

“About?”

“About not working for you anymore.”

“For the next day or so, till I get back to the office and can sort things out, could you please check into it? Think of it like you're helping a missing child.”

“You're a manipulative prick.”

“Any sightings of the Ateros?”

“No, it's been quiet.”

“Stay away from the office. Just use the answering service. If Loretta wants to meet, suggest a neutral, public place, coffee shop or the like. Any trouble get in touch with Mira Das.”

“Look both ways before you cross the street, I got it. Enjoy your vacation.”

“Kiss my ass.”

I cleared off the student's desk that stood in the corner of the room and set up my kettle and grill. I lay down on the bed. My cast itched. I wondered what time it was in Reykjavik.

I
'd dozed off on the bed with my shoes and coat still on. Fisk woke me when he opened the adjoining door. He looked over at the steaming kettle on the desk. “Planning on moving here?”

I sat up. He unplugged the kettle for me and looked at the other appliance. “That a George Foreman?”

“I was planning on walking down to the Overwaitea and buying the makings for grilled cheese,” I said.

Fisk had a beer in his hand. “I thought we'd try out the famous Prosper's Point cuisine.”

“I don't have money for that, and I can't stomach fast food more than once a day. You go ahead, I'll meet you back here later.”

Fisk would have none of it. “I think I can put a couple of steak dinners on my expense account,” he said. “Don't make me drink with Delgado alone.”

A
ce's had Molson and Bud on special. I forget what we ordered. By the second pitcher all was right between Gavin and Willie. They'd moved on to first names and were sharing war stories. We all ordered T-Bone steaks with fries. The two of them argued over who would pick up the check.

The autopsy had confirmed Dr. Boone's speculation: asphyxiation due to carbon monoxide poisoning, though she was waiting for test results on the carboxyhemoglobin-to- hemoglobin ratio in the dead woman's blood. No bruises on her body or any signs to suggest she'd been coerced. Moles on her left breast and both arms, a tattoo on her lower back of a butterfly, scars on her knees and hip. Dr. Boone wasn't ready to pronounce a definitive time-of-death, but she told Delgado that mid-June probably wouldn't be too far off the mark.

Fisk made a call from the payphone and came back having verified that Barbara Della Costa had a butterfly tattoo on her back. “Not that that clinches it,” he said. We were all drinking from pitchers now. “You couldn't pick a more common tramp stamp.”

“Almost as clichéd as barbed wire around the bicep,” I said, knowing Fisk had that tattoo.

“Hey,” Delgado said, as if about to broach a subject he'd given some thought to. “Either of you ever seen a pussy with rings and stuff in it? That common in the city?”

“Ask Mike about his cock piercings,” Fisk said. He found this hilarious, almost falling off his chair.

“Is he serious?”

“No,” I said, “he was born without a sense of humour. It's a side effect of being an investigative genius.”

“I just don't understand why a person would put shrapnel in their privates,” Delgado said, in what sounded like a punchline cribbed from a bad standup act.

“High self-esteem,” Fisk said. “First girl I ever ate out had six piercings, including one in her clit. And I —” He laughed, unable to finish his sentence “— had braces.”

A country band set up, bringing with them a small crowd. When Delgado left the bar for a smoke, I followed him out.

“Which way is the Palatial?” I asked him.

“Left to Third Avenue and down a piece,” he said. “Don't know why you'd want to go there. Other than when the bikers come, it's pretty dead.”

As I started off down the street, Delgado said, “Did it hurt?”

“Did what hurt?”

“Getting that cock piercing installed. Sounds painful to me.”

I paused to think up an appropriate response, settling on, “Not as bad as you'd think.” Sometimes the joke is on you, and it's best to just go with it.

A
s a structure, the Palatial was not a dive. In fact, it had points over Ace's. The bar itself was varnished mahogany, with the same for the banisters, stairs, tables and chairs. The room had been designed with thought given to table space, privacy, acoustics. Over this foundation, though, a layer of neglect and abuse had settled. Every surface had been gouged, burned, carved and graffitied. The floor was sticky and dotted with bottle caps crushed into the wood and bits of glass. None of which was as bad as the table in the far corner, its surface covered with specks of old vomit, or the overturned rat trap beneath the P.A. system.

The bartender was a woman in flannel who didn't look like a stranger to her own product line. She had a bright red cratered nose, small eyes and a broad, aimless smile.

“Set you up?” she asked.

“Pabst Blue Ribbon, and I'd like to open it.”

She shrugged and fetched the bottle.

Other patrons floated through a cigarette haze. A native- looking couple sat drinking from the same glass in the quiet and relative cleanliness of the upstairs. A gent with a long beard and grubby overalls had parked himself at the end of the bar. He was talking to a man who looked comatose, but who rose up every few seconds to nod and slurp from his beer stein, which remained planted on the bar. Two women ate French fries by the door. They shot me looks of appraisal. I nodded back. Odds that at least one of them was on the game: even.

The bartender brought me the PBR and the glass. I ignored the glass. I wiped the lip of the bottle with my shirt cuff.

I sat down on a stool that seemed to have missed a few steps on the assembly line. I kept my feet flat on the ground. Serves me right, I figured, offering my clients that wobbly bench all those months. Thank God for Staples. One of the women leaned over the table to confer with the other in whispers. The one standing looked at me again. Thicker by far in the waist than the hips, smaller on top, black hair trimmed short. Her friend had peroxide cornrows, was a third the size, and had a malnourished pallor that made me wonder if she glowed in the dark. Odds that they were on the game: seven in ten.

I took in the bar so as not to seem interested. A man sat at a small table half-hidden by the staircase. He was drinking cider from a can and eating a BLT, fingers poised on either end of the toothpick. A boutique notebook sat open in front of him, six sharpened pencils rubber-banded together within reach. Sharing the table was a green bird in a cage.

The bartender picked up on the look I was giving the man and his bird, neither of whom paid attention to me.

“That's Jerry and Precious.”

“Which is which?”

She guffawed. “Jerry's the one runs up his tab. Raises all kinds of birds, 'cluding exotics. Had a lovely pair of peacocks, some ostriches. That's the source of his nickname, the Ostrich Man.”

“What does he raise them for?”

“Zoos, meat, I don't know.”

The Ostrich Man wrote something in his notebook and looked up to see who was watching him. I nodded to him. He smiled.

“It's a green conure,” he said, “case you were wondering.”

“Beautiful,” I said.

He opened the cage, brought Precious out, sat her on his arm to show how tame she was. “Completely domesticated,” he said. “Conures make good pets. They like attention.”

He walked to the bar and tipped Precious onto my arm. At that range I could smell the cider. The bird strutted down to my elbow, about-faced and hopped back onto Jerry's palm.

I said, “Next round's on me, if you'll have it.” I looked at the bartender and pointed at the two girls at the table. “Include them, will you? And another Blended Splendid for me.”

When the drinks came, the dark-haired woman sidled up to me. Odds: nine in ten.

“My girlfriend Di thinks you're a cop,” she said.

“Ever know a cop to buy a round?”

She downed her shot of what looked like Jagermeister, picked up my beer bottle and helped herself. My next sip of beer tasted like licorice. Definitely Jager. Definitely on the game.

“Truth is,” I said, “I came here to get away from cops. I was at Ace's earlier. Don't know if you're familiar with that establishment, but it's full of cops. What's your name?”