Seaweed Under Water (21 page)

Getting up from my seat, I went around his desk. Owens was sitting on a chair fitted with castors. I put both hands on his chest and gave him a sudden shove that sent him sliding backwards several feet. Arms flailing, he came to a stop against a wall. Before Owens recovered, I started yanking drawers open. I found a bottle of liquid Ketamine and a needle rig in the bottom drawer of his desk.

“So that's what you've been having for breakfast. Special K,” I snarled. “Where'd you get it? Pinky's?”

“You can go to hell,” Owens said, still sprawled like a rag doll.

Ketamine was once a treatment for soldiers during the Vietnam War. Now a club or date drug, its legitimate use is as an animal tranquillizer. Known variously as Special K, ket, keller and wonk, Ketamine kicks in fast. Although a Ketamine high lasts less than an hour, impaired judgment and coordination can last a full day. Owens made an effort to stand. I pushed him back down and said, “Start talking, Jack, or you can kiss your professional life goodbye.”

At that moment, he looked like a basket case, but there was residual violence in him. He managed to stand up and throw himself at me, his fingers going for my eyes. I grabbed a handful of his hair, did a half turn with my body and used my leg to sweep his feet out from under him. Owens crashed backwards to the carpet and banged his head, hard. What happened next made me feel sorry for him. Half inert, he covered his head with his arms and cried like a baby.

Owens' secretary came in. White-faced with consternation, hands to her mouth, she said furiously, “What on earth . . . ”

“Your boss is ill,” I informed her. “Bring him some strong black coffee, please.”

Her eyes were on Owens. She didn't move.

I asked her, “How long has he been acting crazy?”

“Since yesterday,” she snapped, pulling herself together. “What have you done to him?”

“Nothing, compared to what I might do, if I don't get co-operation from somebody in this office.”

Belatedly, she seemed to realize how serious things were, for she produced a tentative smile and said, “Mr. Owens hasn't been himself lately . . . this is the first time I've seen him like this. What can I do to help?”

“Fetch some coffee.”

I had spoken harshly. She pulled herself together and went out. Owens pulled himself together too, after a fashion. He crawled around the room for a while, slobbering and moaning, before climbing back into his chair and closing his eyes. I slapped his face—not too hard—and asked more questions. It doesn't matter what I said, because I didn't get intelligible answers.

When, after swallowing two cups of black coffee, Owens
did
start talking, I couldn't shut him up. Words, slurred and partially incomprehensible, tumbled out of his mouth. I asked Jack Owens to explain the change in Jane's fortunes.

“Janey had tons of money in the end,” Owens told me, in a singsong voice. “Janey had money coming out of her yingyang. She was rolling in it, had hit the jackpot, right here, in the middle of River City, with a capital C, which rhymes with V, which is short for Victoria.”

“Where did the money come from?”

“I told you,” he burbled. “It came from right here, in the middle of River City.”

After that, Owens lost control of his brain and I didn't get another comprehensible word from him. Eventually, breathing normally, he seemed to fall asleep. Maybe he was acting. I decided to let things drop for the moment. The secretary still hovered. I told her to keep a close watch on her boss and started to leave.

She said vehemently, “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“You'd rather he died with a needle in his arm?”

“Of course not,” she said contemptuously.

“How long have you known about his drug use?” I asked.

She suddenly became very meek, but gave no answer.

“Keep an eye on him. I think he'll be okay, but if you become worried, call an ambulance. The medics will know what to do,” I said, and started walking. She followed me into her own office and closed Owens' door, saying, “Just a minute.”

I sensed the disgust behind her brittle smile. Unable or unwilling to meet my gaze, she said, “There's something perhaps you
should
know.”

I waited.

“There's this man. John Doncaster. Mr. Doncaster invested heavily in Mr. Owens' projects. Mr. Doncaster has been putting pressure on Mr. Owens. I happen to know that Mr. Doncaster has threatened Mr. Owens with bodily harm if he doesn't get all of his money back. Doncaster and some other investors don't seem to realize that if they're patient they'll get their money back with interest.”

Beneath the secretary's smooth veneer, I detected a flint-like hardness. I grinned at her and went out without speaking. Back on the street, I phoned Bernie Tapp. He wasn't answering. I left a message giving the gist of my recent encounter with Owens and suggested Bernie have somebody check out John Doncaster.

≈  ≈  ≈

I drove along the deserted dirt road, beneath the trees, creating dust, traversing in daylight the same road that Alf Gzowski had travelled in the dark, until I reached the Mowaht Bay Legion Hall and parked in its weedy parking lot. Situated across the highway from the Sound, the hall was a wood frame building with a wide porch. Two old men, taking it easy on a shady bench, gave me the once-over as I went up the steps and inside.

One legionnaire was drinking alone in a corner. Two others were ineptly banging balls against the cushions of a full-sized snooker table, trying to make trick shots that seldom came off.

I sat at the bar. A narrow beam of sunlight streamed in through a small high window. Dust motes whirled endlessly in the window's yellow light like a mini universe. After a while, a toilet flushed in the W.C. and a barman appeared. Wiping his hands on an apron, he asked to see my membership card. I showed him my badge instead and ordered a Foster's. The barman took a bottle from a cooler, snapped the cap off and put it on the bar in front of me. I asked for a glass. The cold glass he brought glistened with condensation. Instead of filling the glass for me, he leaned against the back counter with his arms folded. I was thinking about half a dozen things at once, so it didn't occur to me for a minute that the bartender was giving me the evil eye.

When the snooker game ended, one player came to bar and said, “Same again, Frank.”

The bartender detached himself from the counter, extracted a couple of Blues from the cooler and put them on the counter.

The snooker player was a middle-aged man in a well-tailored grey suit. He grinned amiably and asked me, “Fancy a game? Loser pays 10. Twenty if the winner makes any break above 50.”

It seemed like a good option, considering the level of skill I'd been treated to so far, but that was the idea. I shook my head, left a five-dollar bill on the bar and went out. The barman said something I didn't catch. The pool sharks laughed.

Seen from outside, HANE Logging's bunkhouse and the legion hall appeared to have been built and designed by the same contractor and in the same era—that is to say, about l940. I went up a similar set of steps, across another wide, shaded porch, pushed the bunkhouse's door open and went inside.

A long narrow corridor, with doors opening along each side, stretched the full length of the building. A white-bearded swamper, sloshing a wet mop back and forth across the gleaming linoleum floor, stopped work to stare at me. Joseph Bickle, one of the men I suspected of attacking me on the government wharf, lived in room number 11. Bernie had told me that Bickle lived in a bunkhouse in Mowaht Bay, and this was it. It was no surprise to learn that he worked for HANE. When I knocked on his door nobody answered. Apart from creaking sounds made by timbers expanding in the heat, the building was quiet.

The swamper cleared his throat and asked, “Who you looking for, Jack?”

“Joe Bickle.”

“I haven't seen Joe since he got out of hospital.”

“Know where I might find him?”

“No. If I do see him, who should I say was calling?”

“Tell him Norman was here,” I said.

I went back to the loaner, collected the roll of small picks and keys that I carry in my toolbox, locked the car and then wandered around until I found a place in the shade where I could keep an eye on the bunkhouse. I was lucky. After less than half an hour, the swamper came down the bunkhouse steps and went across the street into the Bee Hive Cafe.

Bickle's door—like those in the rest of the building—was fitted with an old-fashioned lock. It took me about a minute—manipulating two L-shaped steel picks—before the latch bolt slid back and I entered. The room was dark and it smelled of beer and tobacco. About the size of a prison cell, it lacked plumbing. Its furniture included a chest of drawers, a dressing table with a small square mirror and a large cedar chest. The room's beige walls were plastered with dozens of unframed black and white photographs depicting, for the most part, the early days of B.C.'s coastal logging industry. Pictures of steam locomotives, steam tugs and steam donkeys of every variety stared out of history. Men, now dead for 100 years, felled massive trees with double-bitted axes. Bullocks, yoked together in teams of 20, dragged logs along greasy skid roads. Three- and four-masted sailing vessels were pictured alongside sawmills. I'd seen some of these pictures once before—aboard the
Mayan Girl
, in Tess Rollins' office.

The room was spotless. Bickle probably paid the swamper a few bucks a week to keep it that way. I poked around in drawers, entertaining the hope I might find something incriminating. The cedar chest contained cameras, lenses, tripods and other photographic paraphernalia. The thin mattress on Bickle's narrow iron bed rested on springs, which creaked when I sat on it. My eyes were drawn to a framed diploma on the opposite wall. On closer inspection, it turned out to be a Certificate of Competency, dated l974, issued by The Chicago (Correspondence) Institute of Photographic Arts. The certificate attested that Joseph W. Bickle had satisfied the requirements of Examiners, and was Thereby, in their Opinion, Entitled to Practice the Art and Science of Public Photography.

Bickle had spent years making a photographic record of B.C.'s coastal logging industry, and I was struck by the technical excellence displayed. One photograph was conspicuous, precisely because of its dark, blurred image. The picture had been taken in natural light in an area of heavy bush. At first glance it appeared almost featureless, possibly even a double exposure. I got up off the bed for a better look. On closer examination, I saw that it was just one more photograph of yet another ancient steam logging-donkey. But I'd
seen
that particular steam donkey before—or one exactly like it—mouldering away in a grove of trees near Boss Rollins' house.

Footsteps sounded outside where someone climbed the bunkhouse steps then moved toward me along the corridor. Someone knocked on Bickle's door and said, “You in there, Joe?”

It was the swamper. The doorknob rotated back and forth, as he tested the lock. I heard a few indistinct muttered words, followed by receding footsteps.

I removed Bickle's picture of the logging donkey from its frame, folded it carefully and stuffed it into my shirt pocket. When the building grew silent, I let myself out without relocking the door.

≈  ≈  ≈

The loaner had been standing in the sun for over an hour and was furnace-hot inside. I opened the windows and stood on the driver's side with the door wide open, pondering my options while the car's interior lost heat. Across the highway, waves glittered in the Sound, gold and black flecks in the afternoon light. Drift logs, bleached white by ages of sunlight, mouldered along the beaches—thousands of tons of wood, impregnated with sand and pebbles, riddled with teredo worms and commercially useless. The
Mayan Girl
lay at its usual berth in the government wharf. As I watched, two people emerged from a cabin door and stood together on the deck.

With sun in my eyes, I was unable to recognize either, until one descended the gangplank and sauntered ashore along a float. It was Tess Rollins, wearing a beige jacket and black slacks, a white shirt, white high heels and a straw hat the size of a garbage can lid. She got into a $200,000 Mercedes convertible and sat with the door open, one lovely leg out, the other leg in. She fumbled for keys. A minute later, she drove off toward the Mowaht Reserve.

Tess was already out of sight by the time I'd jumped in my car and set off in the same direction. Instead of driving onto the Mowaht Bay Reserve, I pulled off the road near the place where I'd wrecked the MG, and parked. Overhead, trees with inter-
mingling branches and leaves blocked the midday sun. The woods were silent, the filtered daylight green and surreal. I climbed that five-wire fence and hurried along the usual trail, which, that day, possessed for some reason the eerie quality of a place hitherto unexplored. It was as if I were seeing it for the first time. The trail led on till I saw a patch of sky. The trees thinned, and Boss Rollins' house became visible ahead. Tess's Mercedes was parked inside Boss's garage, alongside that big black Lincoln limo.

I settled myself comfortably behind a leafy rhododendron and waited. Birds that had grown silent at my approach resumed their singing. A blue jay gave out a series of harsh unmusical
shaaars
notes, then a thrush chimed in, its piping notes clear and sharp. After a while, Tess Rollins came out of the house, arm in arm with Boss. The siblings were about the same height, but they didn't much look like brother and sister. Tess, wearing her fashionable tailored outfit, appeared smooth and expensive, even elegant. Boss wore hillbilly coveralls and could have passed for a skid-row derelict. Out of earshot, they appeared to be arguing as they went into Boss's garage where Tess drew her brother's attention to something involving the Mercedes' upholstery. After a short and apparently heated discussion, they returned to the house.