Invisible Dead

by Sam Wiebe

  Step Two was, “Prior to the interview, play out all possible outcomes so as to prepare yourself for every eventuality.” It was classic Jeff Chen—smart, well thought out and deeply flawed.

  “I’ll play Rhodes, you play yourself,” Jeff said.

  “Fine.”

  “What y’all wanna know ’bout—why are you laughing?”

  “Nothing. You’re a master of dialect, Jeff.”

  “Fine. What do you want to know about?”

  “I’m looking into the disappearance of a young woman.”

  “Don’t know her.”

  “She went by Charity.”

  “Right. Don’t know anything about her.”

  “There’s a reward.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. If you tell me what I want to know, my partner Jeff Chen will give you a pot of the world’s most wretched coffee, plus any sexual favour you can name with a straight face.”

  Jeff sighed. “Fine,” he said, walking a half-circle around me. “I’ll be you, you be Rhodes. I need information.”

  “What’s that got to do with me?”

  “I have it on good authority that a young girl was in your company on the evening of October twelfth, year two thou—”

  “I’d never say I have something on good authority.”

  “Shut up and say you don’t know.”

  “All right. I don’t know anything about that.”

  “Are you quite sure?”

  “I am.”

  “All right, then.”

  I blinked, waited for Jeff to add something. He didn’t.

  “That’s it?” I said. “What fucking good does that do me?”

  “I’m showing you how to ask your questions, do it respectfully, and not invite any reprisals.”

  “Christ’s sake. The whole point, Jeff, is to get the information from Rhodes. To find out where the woman ended up.”

  “And what I’m teaching you, Dave, is how to come up with an exit strategy for when you don’t get that info. ’Cause it doesn’t benefit Rhodes to talk, and he’s not so stupid that you’ll be able to trick him. More than likely he’s only meeting with you to see how much you know.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” I said. “What do you think I’ve been turning over in my head the last five hours?”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t go, then.”

  “Can’t do that.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “ ’Preciate the thought.”

  “Dave—”

  I reached for the box of Twinings. “I’m going to wash out the taste of this swill,” I said. “Then at three o’clock I’m going to show up at Rhodes’s house and ask him if he knows what happened to Chelsea Loam. Alone and unarmed, which is what he expects. That’s the job. Given the inherent risk in what we do, I’ll be as safe as I can.”

  “There are other people at risk too,” Jeff said.

  —

  With my window open and my chair propped slanted against the wall, I waited out the clock. Martz’s acquaintance from Sex Crimes, Constable Jane Henriquez, called to say she’d never heard of a pimp named Kamikaze, and the name didn’t hit when she ran it through CPIC. I thanked her. Decent of Martz to follow through with that, I thought, considering the state I’d left him in the night before.

  I drank my tea, tried to concentrate on work. From outside I heard the wheeze of a train whistle above the Doppler tremors of passing cars. I looked outside, saw below me a dump truck amidst the stalled moving traffic, its exhaust pipe belching foulness into the atmosphere.

  Somewhere above or below ground was a woman who’d vanished when she was twenty-four and would be thirty-five this year. The world hadn’t paused. Hadn’t even noticed. With all the global positioning satellites and surveillance cameras that now blanketed the city in a unified field of transmissions, we were no safer—maybe much less so. Our technology makes us blind to the fact that we’re humans, with an inborn need to wreck and transcend any system we come up with. Cameras can’t stop us from disappearing—they’re one more thing to hurl angrily into the approaching void.

  I was waiting out the time, updating my correspondence on the Ghosh case, making sure that when I spoke to Mr. Ghosh next month I could assure him that nothing had developed. The emails I wrote on his behalf all began with “I know it’s only been a month since our last correspondence” and ended with “and of course if you hear of anything please don’t hesitate to contact me.” Hundreds of agencies and associations received those emails on behalf of Jasmine Ghosh, who’d be well into her teens now. If she were alive. I wondered how many of those agencies consigned my monthly correspondence to their trash bins.

  It was some kind of world.

  Sharlene Nelson entered my office without a heads-up from the intercom. On that system of outdated technology and faulty cabling we’d been sold a bill of goods by a friend of Jeff’s who had quite literally flown by night. By the time Shuzhen said, “Someone to see you,” Shay was sitting in my guest chair, running a hand over the scarred hide of the table.

  “Fancy furniture,” Shay said. “I like the rest of the office.”

  “It’s uncomfortably nice,” I said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because I’m uncomfortable in it and it’s nice.”

  “I like it. The elevator has brass panelling. All the doors are oak. Nothing looks like that now. There’s even a post office drop in the lobby.”

  “It’s not bad,” I admitted. “Beats my last office.”

  “You should see some of the places I’ve worked.”

  I refilled the teapot and brought the service back to my desk. She accepted a cup, stirred in skim milk and three dollops of honey. Stirred it and stirred it.

  “Is there something I can help you with?” I asked.

  “I need money. I want to make a change. I was kind of thinking maybe I could help you.”

  “Did you find out something about Chelsea Loam?”

  “No, but I could,” she said. “I know that area and I know those people. And no offence, but you still look kind of like a cop, so a lot of people probably won’t talk with you but might talk to me.”

  “It’s a fair point,” I said. People speak to cops out of fear and a primal need to please authority. An ex-cop doesn’t inspire those same feelings. There were worlds open to Shay that weren’t open to David Andrew Wakeland.

  Shay said, “Okay good, I’ll need a thousand dollars and I’ll need a little bit of it up front.”

  “I told you,” I said. “A thousand—”

  “You’re not going to poor-mouth, are you, Mr. Brass Elevator?”

  I caught myself and smiled. “No, ma’am.”

  “Good. Like I told you I need money to make a change. A thousand bucks isn’t even life-changing money. It’s foot-in-the-door money. So?”

  “Are you going to spend this on drugs?”

  “You’re spending it on finding that missing girl you said you want to find so much.”

  We eyed each other over the table. I had the better view.

  “Ask me,” she said.

  “Ask you?”

  “What you want to ask. Am I a hustler? Do I do drugs? Why yes, David, I do drugs. Yes, for a while I did sell my body to the night. And I’m going to take your money now and buy drugs. And I’m going to do those drugs with other people who do drugs and ask them questions and find out what you need to know. And once it’s over you’ll pay me and I’ll clean up and go back to school, because I’m twenty-nine and I can’t do this forever. But I can do it short-term and help you. If you can get over your delicate bourgeois sensibilities.”

  “How much are you asking for?”

  “Three hundred.”

  “And then seven when you tell me what happened to Chelsea Loam.”

  “No,” Shay said. “Then a thousand. The three hundred is expenses. That’s what private eyes always charge in movies, it’s always fifty dollars a day plus expenses, hundr
ed seventy five plus expenses. That three hundred is my ‘plus expenses.’ ”

  “How about one hundred?” I said.

  “How ’bout you go fuck a jug?”

  I held up my tea, saluted her and took a sip.

  “See,” I said, “it’s not my bourgeois sensibility, it’s my bourgeois pocketbook. I give you three hundred dollars, no collateral, no receipt, I’ve been hustled. I take that back. I’ve hustled myself.”

  “I’m not full of shit. You’ve known me since grade school.”

  “How about this,” I countered. “Sort of a trial run. I’ll give you two hundred and you bring me back something useful. Something I didn’t know.”

  “Like?”

  “For starters, I need a line on a pimp named Kamikaze. I need Chelsea’s last known address. I’d like to see her personal effects. Info on her birth parents. Pictures of her from around the time she went missing. Names of people who knew her. Anything like that. Concrete tangible information, not the runaround. Then I’ll give you your ‘plus expenses,’ and if it turns out right, the thousand.”

  “And what if I find her?”

  “Then I’ll give you the thousand and kick Jeff out, and I’ll go to work for you.”

  She grinned and stuck out her hand. “If you ever get sick of private eyeing, you could probably last on the street. I know a lot of girls that don’t have your business sense.”

  I cut her a cheque for two hundred dollars, made it out to cash, and wrote out a receipt for Gail Kirby. “I’ll put ‘Misc. Expenses,’ ” I said. “ ‘Drugs for hustler’ might offend her bourgeois sensibilities.”

  “It’s one of those words,” Shay said. “Bourgeois. If you say it to someone under forty who has more money than you do, you can pretty much shame them into doing anything you want.”

  I passed her the cheque. She inspected the numbers.

  “Usually I only take cash,” she said. “But since there’s a Royal Bank in the building, any problems I’ll just say the guy on the eighth floor used a bad cheque to pay me for letting him lick my butt.”

  I walked her to the elevator. As we waited she said, “Are you having regrets?”

  “Maybe a little buyer’s remorse,” I said.

  “Don’t,” she said. “It’ll pay off.”

  “Hope so.”

  Shay opened her purse and rummaged for cigarettes. I heard the sound of pills rattling in their plastic vials. She caught my look.

  “It creeps up on you. I used to feel so fucking good, Dave. I’d wake up at noon with nothing to do till night. And there’d be dope around, and I’d be like, this’ll pass the time and let me chill.” She caught sight of herself in the brass. “That probably sounds really stupid.”

  “Not at all,” I said. “Sort of. I mean, I used to feel juiced working patrol in District Two, and then come home to this quiet house with my girlfriend asleep, and want to go back out.”

  “Why’d you quit?”

  “I was sort of asked to resign. Long story.”

  “Some other time, then.”

  “Some other time.”

  The elevator was waiting. Getting on, she said, “I’m not trying to put one over on you, Dave.”

  “My experience, people who say they’re not trying to put one over on you are usually trying to put at least one over on you.”

  “Maybe, but I’m not. I’m going to find that lead and we’re going to find that girl and then I’m going to dry out and get my nursing certificate.”

  “Hope it works out,” I said.

  What I didn’t say: My experience, people who say they’re not trying to put one over on you, who aren’t in fact trying to put one over on you, are quite often putting one over on themselves.

  The door closed. I went back to my office. Finished my emails. By then it was half past two, and time to meet Terry Rhodes.

  11

  MEET HIM WHERE? was a question I didn’t think I’d need to ask. As I rolled out of the underground lot in my Cadillac, I thought I knew. Rhodes had a home on the Island in Campbell River. He had access to the clubhouses and hangouts of the Vancouver, Surrey and Coquitlam chapters. It wasn’t like an Exile in good standing didn’t have places to stay.

  But Rhodes had a piece of property at Adanac and Skeena, over the city limits into Burnaby. A quiet residential neighbourhood. On paper the place was owned by a company out of Montreal, leased to Rhodes for a nominal fee. He didn’t conduct business there, and not so much as a noise complaint had been connected to the address. I learned this from a call to an ex-colleague named Laal who’d been assigned to the Outlaw Motorcycle Task Force.

  So I drove toward Burnaby. But when I turned off Hastings onto Skeena a text came in from the same number. It gave an address in North Surrey plus the nonsensical phrase KEY IN PANDA.

  As I crossed the Alex Fraser Bridge, I started thinking about Shay. I didn’t care much about the two hundred dollars. The transaction made me anxious because I didn’t like Shay putting herself at risk for me.

  Even more, I didn’t like the idea there were places she could go that I couldn’t. As a cop I’d always prided myself on being of the street. The call-outs other cops hated—2 a.m., shitbox flat, yet another junkie domestic, insolent roaches that don’t even scurry—I’d done them happily and earned my scars. Yet now that world was closed off. I could occupy the same space, the same geography, without sharing that world anymore. And maybe I never had. It was like immigrating to a country and decades later finding out all the time you’d spent, all the taxes, had granted you no citizenship, no status. Other people, all other people, were more and more incomprehensible. And I wondered whether I wasn’t approaching the time to quit.

  Of course this was just a feeling, fleeting and mutable. But as I drove to meet Rhodes I found the idea of doing something else more appealing.

  The house Rhodes had brought me to was a three-storey McMansion in a quiet cul-de-sac, light blue with white trim. The roof had been capped with some sort of polymer and looked artificial, like a gingerbread house. A big empty driveway fed into a two-car garage.

  I parked at the end of the cul-de-sac and approached the front steps. Baskets and chimes hung above the railing. Beside me, a kidney-shaped flower bed was cut into the pavement. Among the lettuce and roses sat two garden ornaments, a pewter Buddha and a plastic panda. The panda was balanced atop a slug trap. I lifted it up and found a key driven into a rip on its flank.

  Inside, the lights weren’t on, and nothing happened when I turned the dimmer switch. The hallway extended in front of me in darkness. In the living room to my right, none of the TV components were lit up, nothing blinking or telling the time.

  I pocketed the key and walked down the hall toward the kitchen. I called out hello and my name.

  The kitchen was empty. There was no table in the dining room. Just one black chair and sitting in it, a man.

  Behind him, the blinds on the sliding door leading outside were twisted so that irregular slashes of light fell across him. He was sitting in shadow. A big man, wearing cargo pants and an orange wife-beater that clutched the contours of his torso. He had a fighter’s physique. He was barefoot.

  “He said three.”

  “I know,” I said. “I didn’t get the address till ten to.”

  “Late.”

  “The last half hour you’ve been sitting here waiting in the dark?”

  “It’s not dark,” he said.

  His voice was calm, his body almost motionless. I couldn’t see any tattoos. His hair was cut short, in a flat-topped style that looked like an exaggeration of Eisenhower-era respectability. An expensive-looking watch hung off one wrist, and two of the fingers on his left hand were taped. He was maybe forty.

  “Is Terry Rhodes coming?” I asked.

  “Why would he come here?”

  “We’re supposed to meet. I’m supposed to ask him some questions.”

  “That won’t happen.”

  “Then I’ll be going.”
<
br />   “Don’t be stupid,” he said.

  We waited. I waited for him to speak. He seemed to be waiting for me to see if I’d disobey. After a solid eighty seconds I started for the hall.

  “I told you, don’t.”

  I stopped. I said, “You don’t scare me.”

  “How would you know?”

  “I’ve known a lot of yous,” I said.

  He took a deep breath and nodded very slightly, as if I’d made an interesting point. I noticed he didn’t blink all that often. Someone in a neighbouring yard was cutting grass with a gas-powered mower. Outside it would be loud.

  “I think we need agreement on things,” the man said.

  He stood up and came at me, swift. I didn’t mean to back up but I did. He stopped arm’s distance from me. He was well-tanned and his skin had almost a jaundiced tinge to it.

  “Do you think I’m for real?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think I could hurt you if that’s what I wanted to?”

  “Probably.”

  “Yes, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re a private detective?”

  “Yes I am.”

  “Would you want to know what I am?”

  “What.”

  “What I do?”

  “You can tell me if you want.”

  “I take things.”

  “Kind of things?”

  “Things you’d rather keep.”

  I said, “Is this where I say, is that a threat? And you say, no it’s a promise? And I say, oh yeah? And you say, oh yeah?”

  I’d slipped my weight to my back foot. The man stood straight and still. The look on his face looked strangely like concern. I was starting to wonder if his thoughts and expressions matched up at all.

  “Mr. Terry Rhodes doesn’t know any girl that you’re looking for,” he said. “Stop looking for her. Stop right now when you leave this house. Will you stop?”

  “I’m kind of getting the sense he does know,” I said.

  “I need you to answer me yes or no. Will you?”

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “Can’t stop or can’t answer yes or no?”

  “How ’bout I say yes and go ahead anyway?”

  “I need you to say yes and mean yes.”