by Sam Wiebe
“Just ’cause I didn’t kill her doesn’t mean I wouldn’t’ve. Or that if she shows up alive I wouldn’t still. You got your answer, bitch. Far as my involvement, and my crew, that fucking ends it. Turn over.”
The foot left my back. I rolled over. The back of my head rested in a puddle of what I knew to be another man’s piss. My vision cohered. Rhodes stood over me, his enforcer behind him holding the leashes.
“This is the last time we ever see each other,” Rhodes said. “You ask for me again I’m sending Charley here to kill you. And that’s not a threat—I know you’re not smart enough to understand threats. It’s a plain-ass fact. I can’t have you fucking things up.”
Then they were out of my vision. I moved to sit up and a last, final kick struck me in the groin. I doubled over and screamed through clenched teeth.
“And another thing,” Rhodes said, leaning over me, sounding cheerful. “It’s Kenny Boy’s new job to keep you out of Exile business. You cross me, he comes after you. And Charley goes after him. Just thought of that now—not bad, uh?”
He left. I heard the sound of the dogs receding into the noise on the first floor.
I used a chair to pull myself up. I took off my wet jacket. I noticed Ken Everett still sitting in his chair, a half-finished Vodka Collins in front of him.
“You realize how fucking lucky you are?” he said.
—
If it had been raining, I could have washed by standing outside, stripping down, and to hell with what people thought. But even with the sun long gone it was hot and dry.
I did the best with what I had in my car, which turned out to be some serviettes and a cold cup of tea. I drove home to shower.
Rhodes hadn’t killed Chelsea Loam. Claimed he hadn’t, anyway. He seemed to be telling the truth, but then maybe I was deceiving myself. Maybe I didn’t want to think that I’d suffered a beating and humiliation just to have my ear pissed in—hardy fucking har—by a biker.
Everything hurt but everything seemed functional. I thought about revenge but the concept didn’t apply to people like Rhodes. Some people, some families, pay and pay. Others pay nothing. Rhodes would never have to get accustomed to life in a prison cell. Even if someone killed him, Rhodes’s death would only be a recycling. A different sack of meat and water and bad chemicals would take over. Everett had been right—I’d gotten off cheap.
At my apartment I soaked and soaked under the shower, using every cleansing agent I had. I dried off and stood naked in my apartment as the steam-fog rolled out of the shower and dissipated in the long empty room.
The case had started with a killer’s interview and had ended with one. Rhodes had been my last good lead. The case wouldn’t solve. It would end up on a shelf next to the Ghosh file. I’d take it down once in a while, make some calls, tell whoever cared that I was doing what I could. It hurt. It hurt like hell. But some cases never close.
Cases. I was doing what the authorities did—treating her as a thing. A collection of scraps of paper, captured images and faint recollections. Chelsea Anne Loam had lived. She’d been one of the billions. Maybe that didn’t entitle her to anything. There’s so many of us, it’s hard to maintain the belief that any one of us matters. Maybe impossible. We value our own life, our friends, those near us, those that look like us. But maybe that speaks only to our vanity, our need to see reflections of ourselves everywhere.
That was smug nihilism and it was very convincing. My biological parents were cultists and as a result I don’t take anything at face value. And I know the idea of a person having a soul is laughable, obscene even, given this world of mass destruction, of epidemics, of fast food genocide. It is unprovable and it is silly and I hold on to it, clinging, with all my terrified strength.
15
ORSON WELLES ROUSTED ME FROM MY SLEEP. During a week-long burst of tedium, I’d misused company property to make ringtones out of old Mercury Theater radio plays. It had provided a sore distraction from a lack of distractions. What I heard was Welles as Macbeth hollering about Birnam Wood be come to Dunsinane. I sat up, feeling the bruises on my stomach scrape each other, and groped for my cell.
“This is me,” I said.
“David Wakeland?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“This is the wait staff at Veritas, we have an unpaid bill?”
“It couldn’t wait till morning?”
“Sir, this client ran up a four hundred dollar tab. We have her here in the restaurant.”
“So what do you need a PI for?”
And it slid into place.
“Is this woman’s name Shay?”
“She refuses to give a name, sir. She told us to phone, said you’d settle her bill for her. Otherwise we’ll be forced to notify the authorities.”
“I’ll come down,” I said. “You still across from the courthouse?”
“Yes sir, in the hotel lobby.”
I dressed and drove downtown. Vancouver dies after one. Nothing is open, no noise is allowed. Speeding through streets which are usually congested to hell, you get the feeling of driving through a scaled-to-life model of Vancouver, plastic and unpopulated.
Lawyers need a place to congratulate themselves. In Vancouver that place was Veritas. Opposite the Supreme Court building, the swank cocktail lounge sometimes featured good piano jazz. The restaurant was closed, the great fireplace dark. Chairs had been placed on tables. I rapped on the glass door. A tired-looking woman in a peacoat and scarf unlatched it. She passed me one of my cards, the one I’d given to Shay, with my cell number pencilled on the back.
Shay was sitting by the dead fireplace. She stood up as I stepped inside, a look of triumph and relief on her face, a look that told the two employees, See? I told you he was real.
“Dave,” she said, hugging me. I was engulfed by lilacs and cigarettes and cheap vanilla. She was wearing a feathery purple jacket zipped all the way up, white jeans, heels.
The waitress who’d been standing guard over Shay while the other opened the door passed me a bill on a tray. It came out to four hundred and twelve dollars in VSOP, single-malt Scotch and champagne. I handed over five hundred dollars in twenties, withdrawn from an ATM machine. The two tired waitresses rang it up, cashed out and split the tip.
As one set the alarm, the waitress who’d answered the door asked me, “So it’s true what she said about her working for you on a big case?”
I looked at Shay as we stepped outside. Shay smiled. I looked back at the waitress and told her it was.
“She’s one of our better operatives,” I said. “Without her, we wouldn’t have recovered the Montrose Diamond.”
The waitresses glanced at each other, impressed.
In the car I said, “I’ve only been a PI seven years, so I’m not authoring any textbooks yet. But a good rule of thumb I’ve found is, if you’re working a big case, you don’t go around telling people you’re working a big case. Tends to be counterproductive.”
Shay shrugged. “I’d run out of lies. It’s not like they’ll tell anybody. They just wanted their money.”
“So this was work?”
“Sure.”
“My kind of work?”
“You want me to say it wasn’t a hustle, it wasn’t a hustle. Feel better now?”
“The truth makes me feel better.”
She let out a one-syllable bark of a laugh.
I said, “Who were you drinking with?”
“Just a guy.”
“He skip out on you?”
She was fixing her makeup in the side mirror. Her purse was open on the dash. It looked like a square white leather envelope, GUCCI branded on it with sequins. Bad stitching and a twice-repaired strap.
“Here’s the thing,” she said. “I really appreciate you coming through for me, and I’ll get the money back to you soon. You can drop me at my door. Would you like a blowjob before I go?”
I looked her. Her expression was glossed over, emotionless. “No,” I said.
“Gay?”
“Where’d this come from?”
“Look,” she said, with the frankness of an inveterate liar. “You know you’re not getting your money back. And I do appreciate you helping me avoid adding to my sheet. So if you want to pull over, I got a dam in my purse somewhere. Or not. Or you could come upstairs.”
Upstairs I sat on her Ikea couch and ran a hand over my hair. She was in the washroom, pissing then showering. I looked around the flat.
It was dirty and hadn’t been painted in a long while. Photographs taped onto the yellow walls. Shay and a woman, Shay and a man, Shay with two children. Better times. On the opposite wall was a Marie Laurencin print, pale women running with wolves. An old CRT television, its bulk propped on a plastic three-legged stool. Mattress thrown down by the kitchenette.
Shay came out of the washroom wrapped in towels, brushing her teeth.
Her apartment didn’t have a balcony, just an old double-paned window with a layer of film and grease between the panes. The window was propped open by an old beige air conditioner. Beyond that I could see the darkened outlines of other windows in other buildings. A few lit up, curtains drawn.
“Did you find out anything about my missing woman?” I asked.
“Well, I tried asking about her.”
She sat down on her couch and lit a cigarette. It was a Dunhill, different than the vanilla Bullseyes she’d been smoking at La Grange. She offered me the pack.
“A date left ’em here. Might as well smoke ’em.”
So we did. The smoke hung in the room, curling around the light fixtures in the stucco ceiling.
“No leads at all, then?”
“Do you really want to talk about this?” she said. “Because I thought you came up for the other.” She removed her cigarette long enough to chew on her thumbnail. It was a parody of seduction, erotic all the same.
“I don’t know why I came up,” I said.
She blew out a cloud of smoke and set her face in a practised look of innocence. Ran a hand down into my collar and caught sight of the welts. “Someone hurt you?” she asked.
Before I could answer she’d stood up and grabbed my wrist. Her bed was close. Her bedsheets yellow, fetid and warm. I took a step with her, eased down onto the mattress.
The towel around her shoulders had fallen, exposing tan lines, freckles and scars. Damp, her hair clung to her neck in a single mass.
Everything hurt but it didn’t stop either of us.
—
My cigarette had flared out. I placed it in a clay pot in the centre of the table, the pot holding a tobacco museum’s worth of crushed filters. I would rather have laid there on her mattress, but Shay seemed to want me gone.
As I struggled back into my clothes I asked her who she’d talked to.
“Mostly older people, people who’d been around at that time. There’s a lady named Geena who sort of remembered her but couldn’t tell me much. A few others.”
“No word on Kamikaze, her pimp?”
“He wasn’t with her. Doesn’t remember her.”
That caused a double take. “You spoke to him?”
She was looking back over her shoulder toward the window.
“Yeah, but like I said, he doesn’t know anything.”
“Where is he?”
She hesitated, then said, “He has a place on Alexander. By the water. But I’m totally sure—”
“I need to ask him myself,” I said.
“For what?”
“ ’Cause he might be lying.”
“He wouldn’t lie to me.”
I realized she wasn’t looking toward the window, but to the knockoff Gucci sitting on the coffee table.
“You have a history with him.”
“Not really.” She tilted her head to her shoulder. “Sort of.”
“Can you introduce me to him?”
“Not now.”
“Tomorrow?”
She didn’t answer, entranced by what was in her purse.
“Tomorrow?” I said again.
“I’d really rather not,” she said.
“You could give me his address,” I suggested. “Where he hangs out. His name even.”
“No, I’d have to explain things, or else he might think I narked on him.”
“He wouldn’t hit you?”
“No. No. Totally not.”
“So tomorrow?”
“Fine. Can I—” She turned back to look at me. “I’ll need some more money,” she said.
“Wouldn’t this fall under services rendered?”
She’d been fingering one of her small silver earrings. Now she let her arm drop insolently so that it slapped against her thigh.
“Can I get the money or not?”
“A little more,” I said. “How about twenty?”
“Come on.”
“Well, what do you think’s fair?”
“How ’bout two.”
“Hundred? You come on.”
“At least fifty, then.”
“Fifty. After the meeting. From this point on, it’s cash and carry.”
She sucked in air. “Okay. Then let’s set it up real early, like first thing. Why’on’t you meet me out front at eleven and we’ll go see him.”
“Kamikaze.”
“Right.”
“I’ll be here at eleven,” I said.
She drummed her fingers on the door handle. I stepped into the hall and she began to shut the door. I held up my hand.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Whatever.”
The door clicked snug in the lock.
16
IN THE MORNING I phoned Jeff and told him I wasn’t coming in, that I had to see about something. I went back to sleep until nine. During the night my body had exploded in bruises, reminders of the thrashing Terry Rhodes had given me. Walking was painful.
I shuffled down Commercial Drive to Tangent and had eggs and hash browns and a pot of tea. I lingered over my toast and an emaciated wheel of orange. I paid up and drove to Shay’s apartment.
During the day the area was bustling. I parked by the old Woodward’s building, now appropriated as part of Simon Fraser University’s arts campus. Classrooms and hip cafés and grocery stores and a London Drugs. A block east, among the hotels and bars, a street bazaar of people selling outdated electronics, clothing, trinkets and books. I walked on.
Shay met me outside her apartment. “It’s not far,” she said.
I followed her across Water Street and down to Alexander. We passed the dockyards that abutted the train tracks, the enormous cranes unutilized, no cargo ships in sight. Past the sugar refinery, the detox, a handful of new restaurants with wait staff in formal wear who gazed at us optimistically through clean glass doors.
Past the turnoff for CRAB Park, we stopped outside a white-painted complex of staggered terraced apartments that gave the building the look of a giant ivory staircase.
“It’s super-pricey,” Shay said. “But wouldn’t it be great to be in there?” She pointed at an adjacent structure of weathered, blue-painted wood. “That’s an artist’s colony. They even have a kiln in there, right next door. Isn’t that badass?”
We rode the elevator up to the fourth floor. Our destination was the suite at the end of the hall. Shay walked ahead of me and knocked three times. She held me at arm’s length, out of sight of the peephole.
“Yo,” came a groggy voice from inside.
“It’s me, Kazz. Shay.”
The door opened. A gangly man in boxers and a T-shirt leaned out. The shirt was rumpled and had holes, but I could make out the slogan. It said THIS IS WHAT SEXY LOOKS LIKE. The man looked at Shay and looked at me and scowled further.
“Going shopping?” he asked.
“Not today,” Shay said. “It’s for my friend. This is Dave. Kazz.”
Kazz nodded at me. “ ’Sup.”
“Can we come in?” Shay asked.
Kazz threw his hands up as if he’d lost a majo
r argument. He retreated into the apartment. Shay and I followed.
The suite had a high ceiling and a view of the water. He had nice things, nice art on the walls, but everything was coated in soot and dust. A glass end table had been rolled between the leather sofa and a wall-mounted plasma screen. On it sat a hash pipe, a propane torch, an empty cereal bowl and an Xbox controller. I got the feeling that was an accurate cross-section of Kazz’s interests.
He was past forty, his bald spot offset by a thick stubble that ran down his neck to his chest. A faded FTW tattoo circled his left forearm. Flames covered the right.
“Bud and mushrooms,” he said. “Those I got. Anything heavier I’d have to make a trip. How ’bout a Dell laptop, new in the box?”
“I just want information on a woman,” I said.
Kazz scowled in Shay’s direction.
“I told him you didn’t know anything,” Shay said. “He just wants to hear it from you.”
“I know my rights,” he said. “This is entrapment. It’s been entrapment ever since you stepped in here.”
“I’m not a cop,” I said.
“This is about Chelsea.” He sat on the padded arm of the sofa. “I don’t know anything.”
“But you knew her. You were her pimp.”
“I was her boyfriend. We were heavy in love. We were thinking about marriage at one point.”
“I heard you were abusive to her.”
“Fuck that.”
“I’m not sitting in judgment,” I said. “I need information on where she might’ve gone.”
“She’s just gone, man.”
“So you don’t know anything.”
“Sweet F.A.,” he said.
“She leave any papers, things, anything at all?”
His eyes darted instinctively to the short hallway that connected the living room to the bedroom and closet. He covered this up by rotating his head and yawning as if working a kink out of his neck. But I’d caught the look and he knew I’d caught it.
“Nothing,” he said. “There’s nothing here and I don’t know nothing. So buh-bye.” He waved sarcastically at me.
“Could you tell me a bit of background? Where you met her, at least? What she was like?”
“Those are painful memories,” he said. “And I don’t like this Gestapo interrogation you’re pulling. I’m legally within my rights. I asked you to go.”