Invisible Dead

by Sam Wiebe

  “Have him walk the plank, Animal.”

  “This ship cannot condone mutiny. You have my permission to shoot the lad.”

  All three of them laughed. Nia was holding the gun in a proper two-handed stance. She swung the barrel around and down until it was pointed at me. “Pew pew,” she said.

  Then she shot me.

  It’s that easy to kill someone. Back of the head, middle of the chest. With a small-calibre round, there might not even be an exit wound.

  There was shock and pain. Then mayhem. Nia dropped the gun and shouted that she hadn’t meant to pull the trigger, that she’d been joking. The other girl screamed. The Admiral stood dumbfounded.

  I touched the outside of my right thigh. A growing dark spot on the suit fabric. A graze, but enough blood to make me worried.

  We tore out of the dump, Ross cautioning me to yield up the steering wheel, Nia begging forgiveness. The vintage Caddy had a modern GPS. I punched in HOSPITAL and followed the soothing female voice: “In one hundred metres, left turn, go straight, right on sixteenth.”

  I missed a turn. “Recalculating,” the voice said. Ross urged me to pull over so he could drive.

  “Seriously, you don’t have to prove you’re tough.”

  “It’s not toughness,” I countered, “when everyone else is shitfaced.”

  We passed the emergency entrance, its red neon illuminating a nearby strip mall. I glided the Eldorado up to the door, took too long putting it in park. The GPS told me I was a fool. Nia ran in and before I could work myself out of the car, two paramedics had me by the shoulders, lifting me up and helping me into the waiting room.

  There are rules and procedures for dealing with victims of gunshot wounds. I filled out some forms, and was briefly questioned by a uniformed pair of Winnipeg’s finest. When I sheepishly told them that my rifle misfired while I was shooting at tin cans, they accepted the lie without question.

  The wound itself was little more than a graze, quickly swabbed and dressed. The doctor told me I was lucky.

  Nia and I split a cab. The Tylenol Threes kept the pain to a manageable throb. As the taxi turned into the Comfort Inn parking lot, Nia’s cell rang. Her ringtone was a Cyndi Lauper tune I’d have in my head for the rest of the night. She answered, nodded, passed the phone to me.

  “Buddy.” Ross sounded boisterous, though his tone was undercut by a delicacy he hadn’t exhibited before.

  I told him not to worry, what my story had been. He sounded relieved.

  “Guess you need some rest, huh?” he said.

  “I could use it.”

  “I got you a room here at the Plaza. Tell the cabbie to head over here. You can rest up, and we’ll bring the party to you.”

  “Nice thought, Tommy,” I started to say. But it didn’t matter where I stayed. And why not let him pay for a suite, when he’d fucked my room up, literally?

  Ross was waiting by the valet’s station, along with the other woman whose name I still didn’t know. The women wore party hats and held streamers in their hands. Ross had donned a Jughead crown, gold, the kind you’d find in a kid’s meal at Burger King.

  As I eased myself out of the cab, Ross grabbed an arm to steady me. He doffed his paper crown and moved to put it on my head. I shrugged him off.

  “Not really up to partying,” I said. “Just a clean bed for a few hours.”

  “Sure, sure, no problem. I think, though, we should have a drink, take a minute, the four of us, and appreciate how much worse things could have turned out. One drink. Okay?”

  Ross had booked the room that adjoined his own. Rather than unlocking the door to mine, we followed him into his room and he unlocked the sliding partition. He had two bottles of champagne on the sideboard, bucketed, on ice.

  “Hope you like Cristal,” he said. “It’s what the homeboys drink. Nothing but the best.”

  I took a flute and clinked glasses with the others, took a sip and set it down. I had an ashy taste in my mouth so bad I would have drunk spittoon polish. One of the women hooked her phone into the suite’s sound system and began scrolling through her playlist. Ross leaned toward me as if to collude.

  “First off, I’m sorry,” he said. “I only wanted to vent a little steam. The job is stressful as hell, and when I cut loose sometimes I don’t exercise the soundest discretion. So—”

  “I’m not going to tell on you,” I said.

  “No, no, of course not. Didn’t think you would.”

  “I’m going to go to sleep and tomorrow I’m going home.”

  “That’s cool, I understand.” He nodded, relieved. “So. Party then, huh?”

  “Go ahead.”

  As he stood up I asked him about George Overman. He almost didn’t place the name. Puzzled, he sat on the armrest of the chair.

  “Is this connected to some case?”

  “Probably just me keeping my mind off the pain,” I said. “You said you met him?”

  “Once at his party and then once years later at a fundraiser. His son Nick runs the company now. Nick didn’t seem like a bad guy. The old man—well, to be honest I don’t see what the fuss is about.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, at that dinner, they wheeled the old man out, everyone gave him a standing O, and some people even lined up to take pictures with him. I mean, I get it, I totally appreciate that he built that company out of nothing. But he doesn’t run it anymore. His son doesn’t, either. They just ‘see to their interests,’ that kind of thing. The guy I met was just another old man.”

  “When was this?”

  “Six years ago, maybe.”

  “How old would he be now?”

  “Seventy-something, at least. Old is old.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Ross nodded and tackled one of the girls, laughing, onto the bed.

  —

  I woke on my bed but not in it. The wound was swollen and raw. I reached over the sleeping form next to me and pawed at the bedside table for the tablets. My hand struck the thin tube of anti-inflammatories but couldn’t find the stouter bottle with the pain meds.

  Light seeped in around the edges of the blinds. It was noon. Nia breathed peacefully on the other side of the bed, wrapped in her coat. My wallet sat on the writing table next to the television stand. Everything else of mine was at the other hotel.

  I limped to the washroom and washed my face. I was still in my dress pants, a small but noticeable puncture partway down the right pantleg.

  The door between rooms was open. Next door Ross and the other woman were entwined beneath the sheets. Both snoring. Spilled out across the top of the credenza were my Tylenols. Some of them.

  I limped into the room to gather them up but thought Ross might have something stronger. Some Percocet, maybe, or a morphine drip. I looked around and didn’t see anything. I tried his washroom.

  He had two identical shaving kits. I opened one and found nose trimmers and Selsun Blue. The other was a veritable pharmacopoeia. Vicodin, Percs, ecstasy, codeine—the grass is always greener—and a pouch of Rohypnol.

  Two white tablets remained in the pouch. The older kind, that dissolve colourlessly. I tipped them into my hand. I remembered finding some on the person of a rapist who’d worked the parking lots around Jericho Beach.

  I pocketed the pills and found the pen cam in Ross’s pants on the floor. I left the hotel and shuffled out into daylight, trying to see Winnipeg for what it was and not just an absence of Vancouver. Hot and dry, but like Vancouver, struggling to figure out what it owed to itself and what face it would show to the world.

  It was time to go home.

  I got back to the suites in time to intercept the breakfast trolley. Ross was propped in bed. The women had both left.

  “Morning,” Ross said.

  “Afternoon.”

  He shrugged and smiled. “I figure, whenever I wake up, it’s morning. Is that breakfast?”

  I put the cart next to him. He sipped at the orange juice. I
looked from the spilled codeine tablets to him.

  “You drink, you end up doing a lot of things,” he said in lieu of an apology. He put the tablet on his tongue and took a sip of his cappuccino. “Might as well start early.”

  I pulled a chair over to his bedside. I put the empty pouch of Rohypnol on the bedstand. I watched him realize what it was, saw him realize its significance.

  Mute, he stared at his feet. A child caught by his mother hucking rocks at sparrows’ nests, that was how his face read.

  “I don’t know how long this has been going on,” I said. “I don’t know how many women.”

  “It’s not like that, Dave.”

  “Does Utrillo know about this? Or the other one, Carnahan?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “There’s nothing to know about,” Ross said. “It’s depression medicine. I get depressed.”

  “Triggered by the word ‘no’?”

  Ross rotated his glass of orange juice on the tray with the concentration of a safecracker. I waited him out. When he looked up at me he’d found an expression that was halfway contrite.

  “A friend gave them to me. Said they help uptight people relax. You were with me. Did any of those girls resist? Say no? Any of them complain about me footing the bill?”

  “Hard to complain when you’re doped to the gills.”

  “I never—”

  “You’re telling me if I call those blonde girls, get them tested, not one of them’s got any of this in her system?”

  Ross’s juice had regained his attention.

  “If they do it’s something they probably took themselves.” He looked in my direction without making eye contact. “Tell me how we make this right.”

  “You’re the one with the key that opens everything.”

  “Money?”

  “Phone up the girl, make her an offer.”

  “I meant you,” Ross said. He smiled eagerly. “You and your partner need the business. And Solis doesn’t need any unnecessary aggravation. Let me do what I can to make it happen.”

  I thought it over.

  “Ten thousand,” I said.

  Ross grinned. I held up my hand.

  “On the condition,” I added, “that you turn the rest of your travelling pharmacy over to me.”

  “I can do that.”

  “All those pills.”

  “Sure.”

  “And tell me honestly if the other people at Solis knew about this.”

  “None of them, not a thing. I take full responsibility. And thanks, bro.”

  “I am not your fucking bro.”

  He came back from the washroom with the shaving kit. Tossed it on the bed. Sat down on the edge in his tighty whities, drank down his orange juice.

  “I’ll let you take a shower,” I said, gathering up the kit. “Last day of vacation, long flight ahead.”

  Once I heard water running I hobbled down to the lobby. The concierge looked up from his computer as I placed the kit on the desk.

  “A present,” I said.

  “For me?”

  “For the police. Turn it over to them when they ask. Only them.” I brought out the pen cam, cracked its plastic case and removed its flash drive.

  “I’m sorry, are you a guest here?” The concierge’s hands were poised over the keyboard.

  “A guest of a guest,” I said. “Ross, the Solis account.”

  Clack clack. “Of course.”

  “Can I charge long distance calls to the room?”

  “You sure can, sir.” He hit one and handed me the receiver.

  I phoned my mother and got no answer. She did a twice-weekly brunch at the casino with a few of her friends. She’d probably be gone the whole day.

  Don Utrillo’s office manager put me right through.

  “Mr. Wakeland,” Utrillo said. “How’s Winnipeg?”

  “Growing on me,” I said. “There’s a situation here with Tommy Ross.”

  “Tommy. What’s up with him?”

  “He’s been doping women and taking sexual advantage of them,” I said. “Found some roofies on him, among other things.”

  “What’s any of that got to do with us?”

  “Nothing, except he’s been doing it on the company expense account, in the company suite. I figured you could be the one to phone the Winnipeg PD, tell them your security staff alerted you to this rogue employee’s behaviour. Ensure cooperation and so on, keep the corporate image clean.”

  “You’re very considerate,” Utrillo said.

  “Wakeland & Chen strives to consider the angles the others don’t,” I said. “When you call, tell the officers Ross’s dope kit is at the front desk, along with a video file. Tell them to fast-forward through the gymnastics to the part where he confesses and absolves the company.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “Tell them to test the girls he was with. Tell them if they look at the very bottom of the shaving kit they’ll find two of the pills. Ross should be preoccupied until they show up.”

  “You handled this absolutely right,” Utrillo said.

  “Yep.”

  “If you need something you can call me.”

  “Do you know how I could get an audience with George Overman?” I asked.

  “Discus Solutions?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I could make a call,” Utrillo said. “Guess having him as a client would add to your prestige. Remember, Solis business comes first. We don’t plan on sucking hind tit.”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  “Great. Excellent. See you back here in civilization.”

  —

  In front of the Comfort Inn, waiting for the airport shuttle, my cell rang. Jeff Chen, eager to learn what feats I’d surmounted to get Utrillo to sign off on our contract.

  “Had Ross arrested,” I said.

  I explained things to him. Jeff found it funnier than I did. It cost me a minute of long distance cell time before he could reign in his laughter.

  “And now I get to finish the Loam case,” I said. “No distractions.”

  “That was the deal. Although—”

  “No ‘although.’ ”

  “Has Caitlin Kirby talked to you?”

  I tossed the plastic husk of the pen cam into a discarded Slurpee that sat on the rim of a nearby trash bin. “What about?”

  “Her mother’s in the hospital,” Jeff said. “Gail Kirby had some sort of respiratory failure. She’s been comatose since last night.”

  24

  NO MORE PAINKILLERS. My guts lurched on touchdown. Early evening and not a cloud in the sky.

  I took the Skytrain through Richmond, over the Fraser River and into the city centre. I got off at Broadway–City Hall and lugged my carry-on into the foyer of Vancouver General Hospital.

  I’d called my mother and learned that Shay had left Laurel Street the previous day. To go score? I wondered, but asked instead if Shay seemed better.

  “If by better you mean happier, then I guess so. She had a rough go of it. I gave her space, and after two days she seemed to be doing better. She asked a lot of questions about you as a boy. She’s nice, David.”

  “Shay say why she left?”

  “Just that she had business to take care of. Plants to water.”

  I thought of the dead ficus on Shay’s windowsill, the clay pots with their dusty grey soil and mounds of cigarette butts.

  “All right,” I said. “I was worried you might have chased her off by making that onion and cheese loaf.”

  “You said you liked my onion and cheese loaf.”

  “I miss having that dog around to clean my plates.”

  “Where’s the nice David?” my mother said.

  “Try Winnipeg.”

  At the front desk of VGH I asked which room Gail Kirby was in. I bought tea and a bagel at the hospital canteen and rode up to the observation ward. Caitlin was keeping vigil. She had a knitting project with her and fed her needles
as she spoke.

  “Here to check on your two hundred thousand dollars?” she asked. “Believe me, you should be worried. If something happens to my mother you won’t see dime one. I’ll contest your contract. I’ll contest it even if it costs me two hundred and one thousand in legal fees.”

  I eased into the seat on the other side of the bed. Caitlin stared at her lap.

  “All you had to do was tell her a good story,” she said. “Some pleasant fiction about how Chelsea died in her sleep and was buried up in Haida Gwaii or some other faraway place. A car wreck. Even an overdose. Now it’s too late.”

  “She asked me to find the truth,” I said.

  “The truth is what every truly dishonest person hides behind. The truth is Chelsea is dead, somehow, some way, and this woman here isn’t. And she was poorly the last few days and all she could ask about was Chelsea. I tried to lie to her but she knows me too well. She would’ve believed it coming from you.”

  “If I start lying to clients,” I began.

  “Oh, fuck your policy. One client. One sick woman who could have gone to her grave with a nice thought about a daughter that didn’t care for her, didn’t care for herself enough to take care of herself. I lived a lie as Kevin’s mom for years and it was the most honest thing I’ve done. Don’t tell me you’re above a lie.”

  There was no retort or rejoinder that could make her feel worse. Caitlin saw her own emancipation lying on that bed. What she was saying to me might have been true. But to make a happy lie out of Chelsea’s life would be its own special sin.

  “George Overman,” I said. “Eladio Perez. Calvin Palfreyman. Do you know any of those names?”

  “What does it matter? Haven’t you heard anything I’ve—”

  “Yes,” I said. “I can’t say you’re wrong. But it’s not what I do. Until a judge throws out my contract, I’m employed by your mother.”

  She hesitated. No doubt she thought I was wrong, but part of her must have been curious. “I’ve heard of George Overman,” she said. “His company donates to some of the same foundations Gail does. The other two I’ve never heard of.”

  “Terry Rhodes?”

  “Him I’ve heard of. Nothing good.”