by Sam Wiebe
“Succinctly, Mr. Chen.” Nick added something in Chinese.
“Not a problem for us,” Jeff said, “though it would be for our competitors. They get their products from a wholesaler. But Wakeland & Chen establishes relationships with the manufacturers themselves, which means customizability. Total control of features and specs. Now, a lot’s been said about face recognition technology, but here’s the thing.”
I interrupted at a good moment to ask if I could look over the grounds. “To give us a better idea of the customizability,” I said. I patted my leg. “Also, I suffered a gunshot wound the other day. Doctor’s orders to stretch it every ninety minutes.”
“Of course,” Nick Overman said. “I hope you took care of whoever shot you.”
“You wouldn’t want to trade places,” I said.
26
THE SUN AND THE WATERING BYLAWS had baked some of the green out of the Overman yard. It was still trimmed diligently, nourished and kept free of dandelions and clover, but the interstitial space between the houses had the look of a slightly yellowed golf course.
The smaller, rancher-style house was George Overman’s. A pair of crooked plum trees had deposited their fruit on the back patio, spattering the concrete with red-purple stains. Empty ice cream buckets sat near the trunks.
Imagine a captain of industry who finds that all his wealth and renown only hedge him in. He seeks his joy in the company of a young prostitute. He becomes a regular, and more than that, a protector. As her life spirals away from her he seizes control. Devotes his money and resources to all manner of cure, from rehab to acupuncture to Freudian talk therapy. She recovers. They realize, perhaps, what they have is a form of love. The captain’s wife passes on and his son takes the helm. The old man retreats to his family compound, to be comforted and fed plums by this young, no-longer-troubled woman, who for propriety’s sake he takes to calling his live-in nurse. The two of them define happiness for themselves, gently disconnected from the world.
It was beautiful enough that it should have been true.
Looking through the patio door I saw a silver-haired woman bustle through the making of a crustless egg salad sandwich. She poured a glass of water, filled an egg-poaching cup with an assortment of medication, put all of this on a tray and carried it into the living room.
When she came back I knocked on the door, startling her. She wore a yellow peasant dress and a jade orca pendant around her neck. She was twenty years too old to be Chelsea Loam.
“You startled me,” she said. “Are you one of Nicky’s friends?”
“My partner is talking to him. We’re consultants. Could I have a moment with Mr. Overman Senior?”
“I don’t know about that.” She looked me over. I smiled, unshaved and in my unpressed suit.
“Two seconds, just to pay my respects.”
She consented, listing rules on duration, tone and appropriate topics. She explained to me his dementia, which for the most part was benign. There was a calloused look to her, though, that made me wonder how often she’d borne the brunt of his abuse. Everything I’d researched about Overman had mentioned his ruthlessness. How he’d fire the bottom third of his sales force every year. How he’d made his son start in the shipping yard and work his way up like anyone else. But nothing mentioned the man himself, or what was left of him now that he was no longer fit to compete. I wondered how Nick Overman had convinced his father to yield control.
“Georgie, visitor,” the nurse’s singsong voice announced. The living room had two televisions blaring, sports highlights and soap operas. Overman sat in a Barcalounger, feet up, controls and half a sandwich on a mobile tray rigged to rest over his lap. He snapped the soap opera TV off as I followed the nurse into the room.
“Who the hell are you?” he said.
Coils of hair grew like ivy from his head. He was liver-spotted, mottled pink and orange on his face and the backs of his arms. His coughs were frequent and unpleasant, and each one set the nurse on edge.
“My name is David Wakeland,” I said. “I’m a private investigator. My partner is talking to your son.”
“You want something from me?”
“I want to talk to you.”
He coughed, shooing away the nurse. “That’s…something,” he said. “Nick’s the one to talk to if you’re looking for a contract. Private dick, huh? You work for who, ’zactly?”
“Myself.”
“That’s a good place to be at your age. You’re what, thirty-two?”
“Thereabouts.”
“Successful?”
“That depends on what you tell me.”
His cough dislodged something brown that he spat on his plate. It had been brought on by laughter.
“Everyone wants the wisdom,” he said. “Problem is, no one listens to it. I was the keynote speaker at UBC, few years back. Room full of a thousand business students and their teachers. I say, show of hands. How many of you ever started a business? Couple dozen hands go up. And how many of you turned a profit on that business? Say, half the hands go down. Now, how—water please, Marian.”
His nurse brought in a pitcher and silently refilled his glass.
“How many of those businesses lasted a year? Two years? Not a hand was still up. These were kids your age, with master’s degrees, and their teachers. I tell ’em, it’s too late. You got to start young and you got to make mistakes while you’re young enough to recover. You got to have the discipline to keep things afloat when not a single customer wants what you’re peddling. You can do that when you’re eighteen, twenty. Not so much when you’re twenty-eight. I ask them what school Ray Kroc got his master’s from. They go duh-duh-duh Ray Kroc, who’s that? Maybe some of them knew the name. I tell them, you learn anything of value in this world, you learn it by doing and watching. I was their age, I knew what colour tie Ray Kroc preferred. I’d wear the same type shoes. I tell them, you spent fifty grand on a degree, say you were me, would you hire yourselves?”
He laughed and coughed and spat again.
“No one’s as dense as an educated man,” he finished.
“What I came here for,” I said, “is to ask you about a woman you used to know. Chelsea Anne Loam. She went by Charity. She’s been missing eleven years.”
“My memory’s not ten out of ten,” he said. He’d wiped his mouth with his fist, but left his fist up, obstructing my view of his expression. His eyes were sharp.
“She was a sex trade worker,” I said. I described her.
“And you think I used to see her,” he said.
“Eleven-plus years ago, yes. She wrote about you in her correspondence. Favourably,” I added.
Overman used his next occasion to cough to wipe at his eyes.
“Charity ain’t free,” he said. “She used to say that when I paid her. Has someone hurt her?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Was it that useless tit of a boyfriend?”
“Don’t know.”
“So what do you know, let’s start there.”
“You first,” I said. “Tell me what she was like.”
He chewed the corner of his mouth, nostalgia slowly replacing his hostility.
“What she was like. Beautiful. Sweet. Looked a bit like Cher from Sonny and Cher. Same long neck. My Indian Maiden is what I used to call her. She had this coat—”
“I know about the coat,” I said. “I’m more interested in what your routine was like.”
“We’d meet in Oppenheimer Park. I’d pick her up. I kept an apartment in town, but when Nick started college he moved in. I took her to the Four Seasons. She liked watching these snooty bastards bow and scrape.”
“No arrests, run-ins with other clients?”
“When I do something I do it carefully and I do it real well.”
“So what happened?”
His hands dug into the soft arms of the chair. “It wasn’t about the money,” he said absently. “When I noticed what was happening to her I gave her mo
re, told her to look after herself. Goddamn it.” He beat his fists on the chair. Marian pulled his tray away, deftly, and left the room.
Overman pointed at the nurse’s retreating back. “She’d like to believe I was always like this,” he said. “A weepy old man who watches soap operas all goddamn day. Like I never wanted my dick sucked.”
“Chelsea Loam,” I redirected.
“Such a beautiful kid. We had so much fun. And then she started aging, in that way druggies do. She used to have a great ass, big old hips. Then she was down to nothing, so thin and brittle I felt I’d break her. Her hair started turning grey. Lines on her face. She joked that she was catching up to me.”
“So you cut her loose,” I said.
“No,” he said. “She was still my little Indian Maiden. She knew how to take care of me better than anyone. But it was damn sad watching her go the way she did. Goddamn drugs.”
He cleared his throat, and looking for somewhere to dispose what was in his hands, rubbed it on his shirt front.
“Do you smoke cigarettes?” he asked.
“Sometimes.”
“What brand?”
“Gauloises blues when I can get them. Or Parliaments.”
“Machine gunner cigarettes,” he said of the latter. “Give them to me. Lighter, too.”
I handed him my pack and matchbook.
“The sooner you quit, the less of this you’ll have to look forward to,” he said. He made a show of crushing the pack in his fist, but carefully tucked the mangled pack into his pocket.
“You didn’t stop seeing her,” I said, “so what happened?”
“When something depreciates it loses its value or utility. The market adjusts, ’less it’s mitigated by the goddamn government.”
“You realize you’re talking about a person,” I said, my voice rising.
“I’m talking about a transaction,” Overman said. “And anyway it was Charity’s choice. She could’ve had me exclusive, I would have paid. Gladly. She ran herself down. As a consumer, I adjusted.”
“Which means what?” I asked. “No more Four Seasons? You put her up at a Travelodge?”
“Yes,” he said. “We picked a nice motel out in Surrey and things went on as they did.”
“And afterwards, you get her a nice Ray Kroc burger, send her on her way with some bus tokens?”
“I was as mad as you are,” he said. “What we had used to be an experience. She used to enjoy it—hell, maybe not, but she’d pretend. By the end it was spread her legs and stare past me at the goddamned ceiling. You tell me, is that worth a premium price?”
I wanted to overturn his lounger, step on his throat, and watch black sludge trickle out of his mouth. “Tell me how you learned she disappeared.”
“One day I showed up and she didn’t. I called and left a message with her tit boyfriend and she never returned it. I figured she’d overdosed. And I’ll tell you to your sancti-fucking-monious face, I was goddamn glad. She’d become a burden on me and my marriage and wasn’t worth the hassle. I never shed one tear for her.”
“Your son ever meet her?”
“Nick knew I had a side piece. You think Chelsea was the only one? She was the one I paid for, but there were others. Lots.”
“Tell me about Terry Rhodes. Didn’t you hire him to do security?”
Overman snorted. “The company did, once or twice, for parties. We’d hire great bands—Clapton one year—and get the Exiles to work the door. Those were some wild parties.”
“Nick know Rhodes?”
“He met him once or twice. Bikers scared him. Nick didn’t grow up scrapping like I did. He did away with those parties. He’s a better man than I am. Runs the company with a steady hand. He’s very prudent, very sharp. The best of me and my wife.”
“Did you know about Chelsea and Terry Rhodes?”
Overman paused, nodded. “I warned her not to go to those parties. When they’re sober and working, those men are unpredictable. In their own clubhouse, they can be…” His neck stiffened, his eyes considered mine. “You think it was Terry?”
“He told me it wasn’t him.”
“And you believe him?”
“Not especially,” I said. “Considering our relative positions at the time, if he’d done it I think he would’ve told me.”
“Then who do you suspect?”
“I hoped she’d be here with you,” I said. “The way she wrote about you, I thought you’d’ve looked after her.”
“You can’t look after people who won’t look after themselves,” he said.
“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe they need looking after the most. Enjoy those cigarettes.”
—
I found Jeff and Nick Overman on the front lawn, where the two of them stood chatting in Chinese. Nick shot me a look of wry indulgence; Jeff, one of embarrassment.
“Sorry,” I said. “The chance to meet him was too great to pass up. He’s a Vancouver legend.”
“In business circles he is,” Nick said. “How’s my father doing today?”
“Enjoying an egg salad sandwich and watching his TVs.”
“Good. He can be unruly.”
“Must be tough to be the son of someone so well respected,” I said.
“It’s not without challenges, but I’ve had it good, compared to a lot of people.” His mouth pursed in a stoic smile. “It’s a myth I worked my way to the top without his help. What really happened, I worked my way to the middle, enough to demonstrate to him that I was capable. I spent most of my twenties apprenticing in Zhuhai at our factory, learning Mandarin. Those were my favourite years. Since then I’ve had it relatively easy, though I’ll tell you”—he chuckled—“getting my kids to care about business and work instead of Nintendo, that’s a job for Sisyphus.”
“How old are your kids?” Jeff asked.
“Liam is fourteen, Georgina is twelve this month, and my second wife is expecting. So yeah, full house. Houses, I should say. You?”
“My fiancée and I are working on our first,” Jeff said. “Dave here is single.”
“A swinging bachelor,” Nick said, giving me a square’s idea of a lascivious grin. “Good looking guy like you, women must be falling in line.”
“They must be,” I said.
—
By the time Jeff had started the ignition he was swearing.
“Why does every white person who learns five words of Chinese think we have some sort of mystic connection?”
“He sounded fluent to me,” I said.
“Because you’re an expert. Decade in Zhuhai and he can’t count to twenty.”
“How’d business go?” I asked.
“He said he’d think about it.”
“Give him a pen cam?”
“No,” Jeff said. “I was too angry.”
“Why did he set you off when Ross and the others didn’t?”
“Because,” Jeff said. “That was business and this was me helping you.”
“I don’t get it.”
“My dad told me, if you get the money, it doesn’t matter what they call you. It sounds better in Chinese. The point is, the money is a symbol of respect. Jawing with Nick Overman, knowing there’s no money in it, I feel like—”
“Like?”
“Like a Wang Jingwei,” he finished.
“Oh,” I said, when he’d been silent for a long while. “A Wang Jingwei, of course. Don’t bother explaining further.”
“Wang Jingwei was hanjian, a traitor,” Jeff said. “He sold out the Kuomintang to the Japanese. It’s an insult, something you call a person who works against their own people.”
“Like Quisling,” I said.
“Sure. When I worked for Aries, he’d put me on any case that involved Asians. I’d interview people in Chinatown and they’d call me Wang Jingwei. And sometimes when I’m listening to someone like Nick Overman, and I’m smiling and nodding and pretending to care, I feel like maybe they’re right.”
“Sorry for putting y
ou through that,” I said. “When I’m working only for money, that’s when I feel like a traitor.”
“You feel like a traitor when you’re successful,” he said. “I’ve seen you torture yourself on the Jasmine Ghosh case, and now this one, not to mention the Salt kid and what happened with that.”
“What’s your point?”
“If you’re such an amazing detective, Dave, why do you spend all your time on cases that don’t solve?”
I didn’t know how to answer that.
“You could tell, Dave, by reading the Ghosh case, that she wasn’t ever going to appear. Couldn’t you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And now you work a case where the client is dead and the client’s daughter is refusing payment of our last invoice, and the missing woman hung out with the fucking Exiles, and there’s a chance you could get hurt.”
“Christ, Jeff, what else can I do? There’s no one else.”
“How many years do you plan on doing this? Twenty? Thirty?”
“Until I have a house with a porch,” I said.
“Thirty, say, which is generous considering your tendencies. Say you turn down every case that feels like it won’t solve. Say you take that time and apply it to cases that will solve, and that won’t endanger you. How many people will you reunite with their families, how many answers can you bring to loved ones? All those people you could actually help, and not to mention will pay you, you’re turning all of them down because you’re too obstinate to say when you’re beat.”
“You don’t think I can solve this?” I said.
“Whether you can solve it is Not. The. Fucking. Point.” He hit the dashboard hard enough to leave a dent in the vinyl. I’d never seen him lose control to that extent.
He took a few breaths.
“If you put your effort into unworthy things, you bring about unworthy results. That’s another of my dad’s sayings that doesn’t really translate.”
He looked at me sympathetically, hoping for comprehension. A frustrated teacher making one last attempt on a heedless student.
“You’re like a man standing in a freezing river trying to catch a fish with his bare hands. If you can do it, that means you have more skill than those of us on the shore with our rods and nets. But you’ll wear yourself out. In a few years I’ll be running the company, telling clients stories about how great you were. But we’ll both know that you made a choice, Dave. You’re on borrowed time, and I’d be a bad friend if I didn’t point that out.”