Last of the Independents (9 page)

Lisa: “He's dangerous. That man he's with —”

Ramsey: “— The detective?”

Lisa: “He's smart. He probably set this whole thing up.”

Ramsey: “Set up the old man punching me?”

Lisa: “Is that so hard to imagine?”

Ramsey: “What does he get out of him punching me?”

Lisa: “Perhaps it scares you into talking.”

Ramsey: “He said he already knew.”

Lisa: “He could've said that to trick you into talking to him, Papa. Like, if you're hiding money and I say I know where it's hidden, and you look over to the bathroom where you hid it.”

Ramsey: “Why would I hide money in the bathroom?”

Lisa: “You see my point though.”

Ramsey: “Dangerous.”

Lisa: “Possible. How's your hand?”

Ramsey: “Fine.”

Lisa: “How's the camera?”

Ramsey: “It probably needs some parts.”

Lisa: “Not a problem.”

Ramsey: “But who do we go to for them?”

Lisa: “I'm sorry it was Cliff. I wish Zak had been later or earlier.”

Ramsey: “It's a strange and cruel world.”

“
Was that what you wanted?” Katherine asked me.

“Don't know.” To Szabo I said, “You know a Zak?”

He shook his head.

“But it's something to go on, isn't it?” Katherine asked me.

“Sure,” I said. “I can take it to Fisk. How long will the battery in that bug last?”

“A few days,” Amelia Yeats said. “But the laptop has to stay in this area.”

I pointed through the tinted window at the Waves café across the street. “Can you get a signal from over there, least until I bring my car back?”

“Long as you bring a charger with you.”

“I think you all owe me an apology first,” Ben said.

Katherine shook her head. “What on earth for?”

“For stepping in at the last moment and selling the shit out of my part. I've always considered acting kind of an unworthy profession. But now I see the allure of a life in the theatre.”

“You played a longwinded doofus who didn't know what he was talking about,” Katherine said. “What a stretch.”

“Some are born to tread the boards, others to hurl insults from the safety of the balcony.”

He hadn't meant to remind Katherine of her choice, but her mood sank. Later, once Cliff and Amelia had gone and Ben had been dropped off, and the laptop was charging off my Camry's lighter, I leaned in the window of the Odyssey and said, “Actually worked out better this way, all things considered.”

“I'm sorry about that,” she said. “I feel like I let you down. And when I heard the fighting I thought of coming to help but —”

“It worked out fine.”

“How's your ear?”

“My —” I touched the crust of newly formed scab. “Right. Got to get some antiseptic on that.”

“I could bring you that.”

I shook my head. “Your day's done. When they close shop I'm heading to the Kroons'. I'll pick some up on the way.”

“Night,” she said, starting the engine.

I'd already been lucky, but I waited in the car another four hours hoping to give Zak a last name, a description, or a base of operation. All I got was a few mumbled g'nights as Ramsey and his daughter locked up and went their separate ways. Luck provides no encore.

Near-vana

I
'd
been giving the Corpse Fucker short shrift, putting in my hours but leaving all kinds of stones unturned. I made up for that in the last weeks of September. I interviewed the office staff under the guise of taking suggestions for improving security. I uncovered very little. Carrie knew about the situation, but had no idea who it could be or how they were getting in. Jag was in the dark. The dispatcher, Kurt, had only heard rumors. The Kroons were more concerned with preventing another defiling than catching the culprit. To me those seemed like the same idea.

Spending three nights and four days on the Corpse Fucker subsidized the time I was spending on the Szabo disappearance. At least that's how I rationalized it. I hoped that splitting myself between the two cases wasn't adversely affecting them. It was tough to tell. Both were moving on glacial time.

Tuesday afternoon Tish at the front desk of the Cambie Street Station told me Gavin Fisk was off that day. I looked up his home address, an apartment within walking distance of the Science World dome. I fed the meter and walked over the Cambie Street Bridge, enjoying the view of the boats and barges rocking on the choppy grey water below.

Fisk's apartment was a white shard of crystal jabbed into the skyline. Given his pickup and his shit-kicker persona, I'd expected a less cosmopolitan dwelling. As I rang the buzzer I wondered if he had white wall-to-wall carpeting in his flat. Maybe a tiger's pelt draped in front of a fake fireplace.

A woman's voice, a familiar woman's voice, asked who it was.

“It's Mike,” I said. “To see Gavin if he's around.”

“He's not,” Mira said.

“Will he be home soon?”

“Come up and wait for him if you like.”

She met me outside the elevator on the third floor, the door to the apartment held open with the bent-back latch. Padding down the carpet in slippers and a terrycloth robe, tendrils of hair spilling from the towel wrapped around her head. Sometimes after seeing an ex you think,
Thank God I dodged that bullet
. Sometimes it starts a pain in your guts because she looks so beautiful, so at peace. That wrenching of the innards is the knowledge that her happiness is predicated on not being with you. With Mira Das I felt neither, though a sex impulse reared its head as I scoped her contours through her robe. What I felt was a loss without a longing. Sometimes you reread a favorite book, particularly one you treasured when you were young. You meet the same golden characters who utter the same witty banter and jump through the same startling and pity-evoking hoops. The book's brilliance hasn't diminished on rereading, but you are different. You've moved outside the circumference of the book, and you know that as much as you may admire it, you will never recapture the feeling that the book was translating yourself to you as you read. So that even knowing it by heart, it feels strange. That was the feeling she evoked: we were beyond each other now, and contentedly so.

We sat down on sections of a black-upholstered sofa. Only the barest of traffic noise petered through the double-glazed windows. Grey wall-to-wall Berber carpeting, scuffed enough that I didn't feel bad leaving my shoes on.

Mira had her hands folded in her lap. “I should have offered you something to drink.”

“Not too late,” I said.

“Tea? I probably have some Twinings Earl Grey.”

“You remembered.”

“I remember being dragged out of perfectly good restaurants that didn't serve it. That was before you started sneaking it in.”

“Creature of habit,” I said. “I'm less particular now. I've become addicted to these London Fogs — teabag, steamed milk, shot of vanilla. Each one costs half a week's pay, but it's worth it.”

Mira laughed. “What else has changed?”

“I'm learning to work with others, trust people a bit more. This is turning into a therapy session. What about you? You moved in with Fisk?” I didn't mean it to come out as a question.

“I moved in in August, after months of debate.”

“He didn't want you to? I'm sure he had great excuses. ‘Y'know, darling, for two people to really appreciate each other they need space.'”

“Actually I was on the fence,” she said. “Gavin wanted me in from the start.”

“So why'd you cave?”

“I didn't ‘cave,' I decided. Why would I have to cave?”

“Because you're not in love with him and he's not in love with you.”

We heard the click of the plastic kettle shutting off. She brought the teapot in, set it on the glass coffee table. “You were saying?” she said.

“You're too smart to consider him an equal and he's too much of a cunt hound to settle on one woman.”

“You're still a prick,” she said, her childhood in London evident in her voice.

“You asked. Two fuck buddies want to delude themselves they've found true love, that's their business.”

“How's your love life, Michael?” she asked.

“Arrested,” I said. “I mean, there's someone.”

“Which is it?” Enjoying watching me squirm.

“Well, we're friendly. She's rich and gorgeous and self-employed and talented as hell. And I get the feeling she's into me. But every so often I get a look from her like she's Queen Elizabeth and I'm standing in her throne room wearing a coxcomb.”

“What's her name?”

“Yeats. Amelia.”

“The producer?” Mira stood up and walked to the large maple bookcase on the far wall, the one I'd built for her that matched the two in my bedroom. She reached to the top shelf and pulled down a CD by some B.C. band. How could I tell they were Canadians, let alone from British Columbia? In the cover photo of the band, the kick drum head was painted as a Canadian flag, green bars instead of red, a cannabis leaf substituted for the maple. Only an alt-rock band from Vancouver would find that clever enough for an album cover.

The blurb at the bottom of the back of the CD read: “Tracks 1, 5, and 7 (*) produced by Bob Rock. All other tracks produced by Amelia Yates. Mixed and Mastered at Enola Curious Studios, Vancouver.”

“Won a Juno last year,” Mira said, her voice losing the accent. “I watched the show. I think she had a boyfriend.”

“Could be,” I said. “Didn't stop you from trading down.”

The door rattled and Gavin Fisk walked in, carrying two cloth bags full of groceries. He wore track pants and an MMA T-shirt with silkscreened images of barbed wire and diamond plating. He nodded at me, stepped over to Mira for a peck on the cheek.

“Beverly Hills Buntz,” he said. “Returning that Jeff Buckley CD?”

“Came to talk to you about the Szabo case.”

He put the groceries on the counter of the kitchenette. “Want to start dinner?” he said to Mira. She nodded and began unpacking cauliflower and jasmine-scented rice, as if a soundproof wall had sprung up between them.

“You know the dad phoned me out of the blue to apologize?” Fisk said, flopping onto the couch.

“He's a good guy.”

“You put him up to it.” He shrugged. “Doesn't make much of a difference.”

“Did you come across anyone named Zak? Maybe connected to the Ramseys and Imperial Pawn?”

To his credit he thought it over. “Can't say I did because I didn't. Why?”

“I heard the Ramseys mention him.”

“In connection to the kidnapping? How'd you work that?”

“Do you really want to know?”

He grinned. “Mr. Right and Wrong is beating confessions out of people now?”

“Only a cop thinks ‘right' and ‘lawful' are synonyms.”

“Which you're not anymore.”

“Will you ask about Zak? Maybe run the name through CPIC, see if anyone with that name has a sheet with car thefts or kidnappings?”

“It's not exactly lawful — or right — to run searches for civilians,” Fisk said.

“Not like you can't find an excuse.”

“But I don't have a motive.”

“Solve a case that's still on the books? Reunite a kid with his father? What do you want, a kickback?” I poured three dollars in quarters, leftovers from the meter, onto the coffee table. It was the wrong thing to do.

“What I'd like from you, first off, is a bit of fucking respect. We're not co-workers, Mike. You're not on the job anymore. Maybe you haven't clued in to that. If you were in my place — and you
know
this, Mike — and some pain-in-the-ass amateur approached you with a first name and he's in no hurry to tell you how he got that name, you wouldn't hop to it like you expect me to.” He mock saluted. “Yes, sir, Mr. Private Citizen, sir. Thanks for enlightening me how to do my job. By the way, you want to tell me how to take a shit, too?”

“Just treat it like a tip. If a stranger came to you with the name Zak —”

“I'll take it under advisement.”

“Go fuck yourself, Gavin.”

We stood up. He gave me a “you-want-some-of-this” stare. I stepped past him towards the door, our shoulders grazing. I looked at Mira in the kitchen, chopping cauliflower to make aloo gobhi. I left them to each other.

S
aturday afternoon I laid things out for Cliff Szabo.

“My guess is that Zak is primarily a car thief. I don't have too many contacts in that world, so if you know anyone who runs a chop shop or fences cars or car parts, I could use a steer in their direction.”

“I'll find someone,” Szabo said.

Before he left he put fifty four dollars on the table and apologized. It had been a slow week.

T
he night of Friday the 24th: no Corpse Fucker.

The night of Saturday the 25th: no Corpse Fucker.

The night of Sunday the 26th: no Corpse Fucker.

T
uesday night I met Amelia Yeats at the Commodore for her friend's concert only to lose her in the multitude for two hours. I stood at the bar and drank exorbitantly priced Jack Daniels. I was handing over my tag to the girl at the coat check when Yeats tapped my shoulder, asked me how it was.

“Good. Tribute bands weird me out a bit, but at least they were more about the songs than just looking like the musicians.” No worry that her friend's band would fall into that category: while “Near-vana: a Tribute to Kurt Cobain” boasted a guitar/vocalist with the appropriate dirty blond hair and red-and-black horizontally striped sweatshirt, the rest of the band included a five-foot tall female Krist Novoselic and a Samoan Dave Grohl. “It was nice to hear ‘Down in the Dark.'”

“Wasn't it? Zoltan has a decent voice, but he's a stellar guitar player. I keep telling him to get some originals together, maybe get another singer. He's more comfortable, I guess, doing Cobain than himself.”

We crossed Granville to the Mega-Bite, found a table, ate potato pizza off of paper plates.

“So is he your boyfriend?”

“Zoltan?” She wiped her mouth demurely. “Not since forever. Why?”

“Why do you think?”

She shrugged, smiled. I leaned over and kissed her. Hot sauce, potato, cigarettes, rum.

“My ex says she saw you at some awards show,” I said after some silence.

“Your ex. She leave you or you leave her?”

“I moved out. She moved on.”

“What'd you do, cheat on her?”

“Lost myself in work. Missing child. Ben's sister, actually. Cynthia Loeb.”

“You ever find her?”

I shook my head. The demons that the night off had dispelled crowded around, demanding entry. I willed myself to enjoy the moment.

“No leads?” Yeats said. “No hunches?”

“All likelihood she's dead,” I said. “But I can't tell them that.”

“You lie to them?”

“Never. But her mom won't hear it and her brother doesn't need to.”

“Horrible.”

“Yeah. And here we are eating pizza.”

“What does that mean?”

I shrugged. “Just that nothing stops on account of tragedy. I still have to get up every day, make tea, walk the dog, earn some money. So does Mrs. Loeb. And Cliff Szabo. You try to remain vigilant, but most days there's nothing you can do. You can't make the kid materialize out of thin air. The hard thing is getting accustomed to your own uselessness.” I finished my pizza and balled up a napkin with my fist.

“So why do it?”

“I have some bad tendencies that come out when I work for other people, or when I'm not working at all. This way I'm always busy and I have a measure of control.”

“It's the same with me,” Yeats said. “If I can't tell the people I'm working with to fuck off I go nuts. Not that I want to tell them that, just that I want the ability to tell them that.”

“To disengage. At your discretion.”

“Right.”

“Come back with me,” I said.

“Can't tonight. I have to mix Zoltan's demo for some contest he's entering. How about Friday?”

“Working. Monday?”

“Let's leave it open,” she said.

T
hursday afternoon Cliff Szabo told me to meet him outside a body shop on Kingsway. A Vietnamese man shook Cliff's hand and led us into a back room, where a half-dozen men in smocks were disassembling a Cabriolet. I spent a couple minutes with each one, heard a similar smattering of evasions, non-answers, and lies. Outside the shop I said to Szabo, “How do you do business with them?”

His answer: “Their English is better when money is involved.”

T
he night of Friday, October 2nd: no Corpse Fucker.

The night of Saturday, October 3rd: no Corpse Fucker.

The night of Sunday, October 4th: no Corpse Fucker.

I
'd started to bring my dog to the office in order to keep her out of my grandmother's way. On dry days she'd lie on the balcony, letting out the odd disgruntled woof at passersby.