Last of the Independents (24 page)

“Shoshona. Yours?”

“Wilbur. Glad to meet you.”

The Ostrich Man had finished his drink and retreated with his bird to the table, probably all too aware of the kind of business Shoshona and I were conducting. As I walked to the girls' table I passed Jerry and Precious's table, stuck out a finger to the bird, who was content chewing on a branch, and caught a look of disapproval from the Ostrich Man.

Di headed to the washroom as we took our places. Shoshona pushed the fry plate away and downed the residue in Di's shot glass. “What line of work are you in, Wilbur?” Nodding over at the bartender to hit us again.

“Well, Shoshona, I'm a security installation consultant. I travel around this great province helping businesses optimize their security systems. Do you know, Shoshona, that thirty-six percent of all public buildings, and a whopping fifty-six percent of all small businesses, have insufficient alarm and security features?”

“Wow,” Shoshona said. I held up two fingers to the bartender. Another beer, another Jager.

“Those numbers are based on an eighteen-month study using forty separate criteria. Not only did I oversee the study, but I designed the criteria myself. My bosses said that I showed tremendous initiative. They were right.”

“I think you showed tremendous initiative too,” Shoshona said.

“Thank you. Can I ask you something, Shoshona?”

“You're buying.”

“In addition to tremendous initiative, I'm also blessed with a rather large cock, and a few extra dollars. I'd like to invite you or your friend, or both, for an all-expenses-paid trip to my shitty motel room down the road. How does that sound, Shoshona?”

“You can have me or Di, can't have both.”

“Then I'd much prefer you. I'd be afraid of ripping her in two.”

Before we left the Palatial, Shoshona told Di which room I was staying at. “It's just a precaution,” she said as she rejoined me. “Can't be too careful.”

Outside the temperature had dropped below zero. A wedge of moon hung in a cloudless sky. We crossed the street to avoid walking past Ace's.

“Born here?” I asked Shoshona as I brought out my keys.

“No. I've lived here for — let me see.” She counted on her hand. “Six years.” The number seemed to depress her.

“Know the place pretty well.”

“I guess.”

I followed her inside, closed the door, hit the lights.

“Off,” Fisk growled. He'd passed out on my bed.

“What is this?” Shoshona said. “I don't pull trains.”

“My colleague is drunk. He used the wrong room.”

She saw Fisk's holster in the open drawer of the bedstand.

I beat her to it and shut the drawer. Fisk sat up at the sound.

“You
are
cops,” Shoshona said. “I fucking
knew
it.”

“We have some questions for you,” I said. “We're looking for a missing child who came here in March or April with three women, all in the same business as you. One was mid-thirties, blonde or black hair, another younger, brunette.”

“Barb and Dom,” Shoshona said.

“You saw them? You talked to them? Was the kid with them?”

“If I tell you, what happens to me?” Shoshona asked.

“Who gives a shit?”

She settled into the chair and lit a smoke. “I met Barb at the Palatial. She was really friendly, really genuine. She'd been in the business a long time. She said she and her friend were in town for a couple weeks. They weren't going to stay, just meeting someone. Till then they needed money. What I thought was nice was she asked us could they trick in our backyard for a little while. They didn't have a pimp, and they were planning on being out by May. That's what she said.”

“What about the other girls and the kid?”

“Dom came in the bar with Barb. Only times she came in by herself was to score off me or Di. Barb was clean — been there, done that.”

“The kid,” I said.

“Right, Mungo or whatever his name was.”

“Django?”

“Sure. Mungo, Django. Barb said he was Dom's, but I didn't buy that. I've had two kids, I know what it does to your hips and ass. Barb maybe I could see, or the other one, but not Dom.”

“Other one?”

“Deirdre I think her name was. I saw her a few times but she didn't party, so we didn't really talk.”

“So what happened?”

“Come May they left.”

“All three of them and the kid?”

“They were renting this small house in town, corner of Fifth and Gardenia. Deirdre and Dom used to leave food out for the neighbourhood cats, but there are no neighbourhood cats. One day they were all there, then it was just Barb, and then she was gone, too.”

“When did you see them last?”

“Really couldn't tell you,” Shoshona said. “I assumed they went back to the Mainland. I do know that Dom scored a bunch of dope before she left.”

“Are we talking about a selling amount?”

“No, just personal, but like she wasn't going to be able to get any for a couple weeks. When she came in the Palatial to pick that up, that might have been the last time I saw her.”

“And the kid, how did he look?”

“Like a kid,” she said. “Looked healthy, no broken bones. Always off in his own world. They got him one of those Game Station things, portable video games and movies. Kid barely looked up.”

“No idea who they were waiting for? Someone local, someone passing through?”

“No idea. Can I go now?”

“Never said you couldn't,” I said. “But we'll wait for your friend to show up all the same.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She'll knock any minute now,” I said. “Open the door maybe an inch and tell her to toss her gun inside. Then you can go.”

Shoshona spent three minutes attempting to convince me I was wrong, but soon enough we heard a soft knocking. Shoshona persuaded Di to toss the small pearl-handled revolver inside. “Now can I go?” she said.

“
We've got a house to check,” Fisk said. “People to talk to. Uh huh. I do understand that, sir. An extra day would be appreci— one more day. I understand. Yes sir. Goodbye.”

“Bureaucrat,” Fisk said after he'd set the phone down. He said to me, “The Superintendent doesn't see why I need two extra days. He said tomorrow's my last.”

“I'll drop you at the ferry tomorrow night, then.”

I was on the bed. Fisk stood in the doorway. My gun was at hand, Di's revolver in the bedstand next to the poems.

“The kid was still alive in May,” Fisk said. “That ought to give you hope.”

“It does.”

“The suicide's tough to figure.”

“He's alive,” I said, startling myself with the words.

“You feel it, do you? In your bones?”

“No,” I said, “I just think it. I haven't thought it before seriously but I think it now.”

Alive
.

The Friends of Michael Drayton

L
oretta
Dearborn left two more messages. Katherine finally phoned her back Tuesday. With an hour before her French lab, she put in the call from one of the payphones in the Langara College atrium. She could barely hear Mrs. Dearborn's responses over the throng of students pushing to get in and out of the lecture theatres.

“I wish to speak to Michael Drayton and he alone,” Mrs. Dearborn said.

“Mike is on the Island right now.”

“They don't have phones on Vancouver Island?”

“You know what cellphone satellites are like,” Katherine said, covering for my technological ineptitude. “I swear I'll pass whatever it is straight on to him.”

“It concerns the disappearance on the news.”

“Then Mike will want to hear it when I tell him.”

“Has he checked the house on the 500 Block of Fraser Street?”

“What do you know about that house?”

“Young lady,” Mrs. Dearborn said, “I was a secretary for the Toronto Dominion Bank for thirty-seven years. If I displayed telephone manners like yours, I'd've never been hired in the first place.”

“I'm really, really sorry,” Katherine said.

Before sharing her information, Loretta Dearborn told Katherine that she'd phoned the police several times a week until they stopped answering her calls. She tried to phone Mr. Szabo himself, but his phone manners were every bit as bad as Katherine's, in fact much worse. She tried to take into account the difficult circumstances, but that was no excuse for profanity and derogatory comments.

Next she'd tried Aries Investigations, who were handling the Szabo case. Roy McEachern she found utterly charming. He spoke like a gentleman, thanked her for her diligence and foresight, and assured her he'd act immediately on her tip. Unfortunately, Mr. McEachern became harder and harder to get hold of on the phone, and his manners became more brusque, until finally like the cops he broke off contact with her. A shame, because he seemed so nice and forthright.

So Mrs. Dearborn sat on her information until she chanced across a local news segment the other day. The handsome Indo-Canadian anchor was discussing the Szabo disappearance. She learned that Cliff Szabo had replaced Mr. McEachern with a Mr. Drayton. Mr. Szabo and the newscasters urged the public to come forward with information. Mrs. Dearborn decided to try one last time.

“I'm sure Mike and Mr. Szabo will thank you for all that,” Katherine said. “If it's not too much trouble, could you tell me what you know?”

“I've lived on Fraser Street for fifty-one years, since driving out here from Morden, Manitoba, with my husband. I can tell you from observation that the neighbourhood is not what it used to be. Used to be families lived in those houses and I could name you each one. The Robinsons, the Russos, the Van der Meersches. Now they've chopped all these homes into separate apartments, and the ones living upstairs don't know the people below them.”

“That's true,” Katherine said.

“And so many Chinese.”

“Ma'am, if you don't mind, could you get to the point?”

“That house on the corner of 500 Block used to belong to Gus and Louise Crane. A nicer couple than you're apt to meet these days. When they passed on, their son Martin took over the house. Then Martin moved to Saskatoon and sold it to a family named Bellows. I couldn't tell you how it passed into the hands of those prostitutes, but that's who was living there when the child went missing.”

“What did you see?”

“I do not begrudge a person a cat, even two or three. I've owned my share over the years. But those women had four, none of them spayed. They seemed to play host to every cat in the neighbourhood. It was ridiculous. And when they left, they left the cats. Some animal lovers.”

“I hate that, too,” Katherine said, still looking for a means to speed the old girl up.

“Anyway, I tried to tell the policeman, a crass young man named Fisk, but he didn't want to listen. I saw the three women who lived there drive off in a very small car with a bicycle sticking out of the trunk. The trunk was tied down with that elasticky rope, I don't know what it's called. People use it to jump off bridges and other foolishness.”

“Bungie cord,” Katherine volunteered.

“The women had a boy with them. I didn't see him all that well, but I do know he had brown hair. I'd never seen any of them with a child before. I told that to Constable Fisk and to Mr. McEachern. They both said they'd look into it but they never did.”

“Mike is a bit more thorough,” Katherine said, or at least that's what she reported to me that she'd said.

“Then I saw the police cars out front of that place the other day and I thought, ‘Finally.' And when Mr. Szabo mentioned Mr. Drayton on television, I decided to call.”

“He'll thank you personally when he gets back,” Katherine said.

“Did they talk to the one who returned, do you know?”

“The one what?”

“The girl, dear.”

“One of the three girls came back?”

“She lives down the block from me,” Mrs. Dearborn said. “The little yellow house on the corner. The MacReady's home, at one time. She rents the downstairs. I don't see her too often on account of the hours she keeps. Back to her wicked ways, I'm sure.”

“And she's still there?”

“As far as I know, Miss.”

“When did you see her?”

“June or July? I made a note of it, I could check.”

“Just the one time?”

“A few times in June or in July.”

“But not recently?”

“Well not yesterday, but four months ago is fairly recent.”

“I promise I'll look into it,” Katherine said, and hung up without saying thank you, a point of contention between them in the weeks to come.

K
atherine tried my cell, couldn't get through, left a message at the Country Cabin Motel. Then she called Mira Das and explained the situation to her. Mira and another constable met the real estate agent at the yellow house. The name on the lease agreement was Deirdre Hayes.

The agent pulled up in a Suburban with a raised chassis and monster wheels. Mira described him as looking like a pro wrestler's manager. Mira asked him if he also rented the house with the cats. He explained that the company he worked for owned about fifty houses in Vancouver, most partitioned into suites. Because of the condition and small size of the suites, it wasn't uncommon for tenants to pick up on short notice, forfeiting their half-month's deposit. In some cases it took a few months to get in, clean things up, assess what renovations were needed, and get the suites back on the market.

“No landlord takes that long,” Mira said. “You're saying you've had a vacant apartment, overrun with cats, that you didn't go inside for seven months? And you rented another suite to the same woman three months later? Hard to believe, sir.”

“Believe what you like,” the agent said.

He unlocked the ground level suite and let them inside. Mira was prepared for another horror scene. The suite was small and narrow, a single room with a kitchen at one end and a shower stall and toilet at the other. Fridge empty. Cupboards bare. A small bag of vet-approved gourmet cat food on the counter next to the hot plate. To Mira it looked like someone had cleaned the place at least a month ago, and it had sat empty ever since.

“When was the last rent payment?” Mira asked the agent.

“I'll check the books,” he said. He kept these in his truck. Mira and Constable Mander waited as he flipped through a big dirty binder covered in stickers.

“Post-dates through July of next year,” he said.

“And the last few have gone through?”

He flipped. “Looks like.”

“You know you're obligated to go through a rental suite once every six months,” Mira said.

“Fifty houses. Eighty-seven suites. Think it's easy? Because it's not.”

“And the other house?”

Flip. Gusts of air from the corner of his mouth as he found the page. “Post-dates to August. May's was the last that cleared.”

“And you didn't follow up on that? And don't tell me about the fifty houses again.”

“This isn't my area of concern,” the agent said.

“It will be if I bring you to the station,” Mira said. “You know this ties into the abduction of a child?”

That rocked him. “I just handle houses, okay?”

“Last time: why didn't you follow up when the check bounced?”

He shrugged and spread his hands. “They're whores. Do I really want to know the ins and outs of a whore's business? No pun intended.”

“Either you got money from them off the books, or your boss told you not to pursue it. Maybe both.”

“Hey,” he said.

“Which was it?” Mira gave him a second. “Okay, let's go down to the station and discuss this further.”

“All right,” the agent said. “There's a guy who works for my boss name of Zak. He gave me six thousand dollars towards their rent and towards fixing up the place. I don't know if he gave it to me on instructions from his boss or it was his own idea, but I took the dough and did what he asked. I mean, I don't know that side of the business, just enough to know I don't want to know.”

“Name of the business?”

“C and C Properties.”

“What do the C's stand for?”

“Crittenden and Chow.”

D
eirdre Hayes, Dawn Meeker, and Barbara Della Costa leave Vancouver with Django James Szabo in March. Barbara and Dawn appear in Prosper's Point soon after. Maybe Deirdre was with them, but in any case she returned to the city in June. Perhaps she had a falling out with the others. Perhaps she wanted to check on her cats.

Deirdre rented the downstairs suite of the yellow house in June. There was no evidence she'd done more than drop her luggage by the door and her toiletries by the bathroom sink.

Dr. Boone's final pathology report would put Barbara Della Costa's death in early June. The evidence suggested that someone else moved the car to the shed in order to prevent the discovery of Barbara's body. Two missing women, one missing boy, one corpse. Only one other person seemed to know anything about Dawn Meeker.

Zak Atero's video confession was good television, but had no weight in court. His position, given through counsel, was that the tape was coaxed from an unwell man suffering from withdrawal. Atero declined to be interviewed and made it clear that all such requests should go through counsel.

There are ways around this, from coercion to deception to outright violation of a person's rights. Zak Atero wasn't smart enough to avoid these on his own, but with his brother to tell him to keep quiet and leave it to the attorneys, he might as well have been.

But Theo was out of the picture, until he walked out of the hospital Wednesday morning intent on killing me. On Tuesday night, though, Mira Das picked up Zak using one pretext or another and managed to maneuver him into an interview room and have him waive his right to counsel.

Mira is neither violent nor comfortable bending the rights of a suspect to secure a confession, which is probably why, unlike myself, she's still a police officer. She is, however, a brilliant interviewer. By the end of her talk with Atero, he had admitted to stripping and burning my Camry. He'd also given them as much as he could about Dawn Meeker, his fellow addict and sometime bed partner. He knew she was from a small town somewhere on the Island. He knew her parents were dead and had left her nothing. He knew her foster father had forced her to perform fellatio. He knew she had a brother and that the brother knew about the foster father's abuse. The brother promised her that one day they would have revenge. The brother lived on the Island but his work brought him to the Lower Mainland frequently. He didn't know names — hadn't, in fact, known that Dominique's real name was Dawn.

This was communicated to me on Tuesday night by Mira, at about the same time Zak was telling his brother what he'd just admitted to.

G
etting out of the bed was the hard part. No doubt Theo's entire body still ached from the beating. The cracked ribs made it hard to draw breath. The sprained fingers made wielding a bat or a knife cumbersome. He could shoot a pistol left-handed, but to hit anything he'd have to be at arm's length to the intended recipient.

I'd seen his target pistol in his room, but that wasn't the weapon he brought to the office with him. Most likely he had a source for untraceable firearms, boosted from private residences or bought at gun shows. The weapon he brought was a .32 snubnose revolver with a blued finish, a weapon for personal defense, to be pulled from a closet safe or a handbag when the owner feels threatened.

He didn't stop at his house but wore the clothes he'd been admitted in, zipping up his suede jacket to conceal the blood on his shirt. He purchased a toque and a pair of gloves at the Bay and made one other verifiable stop at the Blue Papaya.

Lloyd Crittenden had washed his hands of the Atero-Drayton feud, but Theo had markers and called them in. I'd been wrong — Theo's job at Landmark Logistix was more than a tax dodge. It was a strategic placement, since a warehouse bonded to deal with shipping containers from overseas offered all sorts of possibilities. Theo would have preferred working with cars, his and his brother's passion. Doubtless he reminded Crittenden of this sacrifice.

He left the restaurant with David Chou, Zak's partner and fellow Crittenden bag man, and two other men, newly-arrived immigrants from Mainland China with criminal records there. Perhaps at this point he bought his toque and gloves, but I think it more likely they proceeded straight to my office.

Of course, on Wednesday morning I was far from the office — in point of fact I was in a field several kilometres outside of Prosper's Point, watching the house of the person ultimately responsible for keeping Django Szabo from his father. Katherine was at school, Mira had begun her seven-day rotation off, and my grandmother was sleeping in after a late night at the casino. Only Ben was inside the office. I've mentioned that he was drawn there. Like Katherine he enjoyed spending time inside, even when I wasn't around. Maybe especially then. Alone with a hot beverage and a book or a computer, the office could seem like a person's own Fortress of Solitude in the midst of the city.