Undertow

by R. M. Greenaway

  Leith and JD took chairs by the window. Cleo sat across from them, removed the camera from around her neck, and said, “First of all, thanks for handing over the crime scene so quick. I know it wasn’t easy for you people. I just hate things hanging over my head. I’m anal that way. Second, let me tell you about Oz and what makes him tick, because I’m sure you’re interested. I got to know his parents before they died. They’re old money, I mean really old money, and they cherished Oz. So he grew up not knowing there’s such thing as adversity. Or the word No. Always got what he wanted. But for all that, he could be a nice enough guy, when he wasn’t being an unholy idiot. Smarter than you’d think, too. What went wrong in our marriage?” she tacked on, as Leith opened his mouth to ask his first question.

  Speeding things along, and doing a good job of it too, he thought, impressed.

  “Probably Dallas,” she answered herself. “What Dallas turned out to be, that was the first time in his life he couldn’t get what he wanted. She was meant to be perfect, you see. His perfect little princess. He had her life plotted out from first birthday party to grad to wedding day to business partner. You should have seen him when he first got to hold her. He was weeping with joy. Pretty quick we realized she wasn’t reacting as a newborn should, and the specialists were called in, and bingo, everything went sour.”

  Leith irritated her by interjecting a question. “Did you know Melanie, his sister? Was she spoiled in the same way he was?”

  “No. Being a girl, she was pretty well left to go find a rich husband. That or get a job. She didn’t do so well with the job, sounds like, but the husband was a perfect score. Jon, what a peach. Anyway, if I can continue. It’s a bit of a shock for me, having Dallas. I would like to love her. Many of those kids are lovable, but not Dallas. How can you love someone who won’t even look you in the eye? I have hired help for now, but I will be setting up a more stable long-term arrangement for her. Yes, she will live with me, unless I find it’s detrimental to either of us. If invested even semi-wisely, the money I receive from the sale of this place will cover her expenses, not into perpetuity, but until she reaches eighteen, when her trust kicks in.”

  Leith held up a hand for permission to speak. “I understand that along with everything else, you’ve got Oscar’s shares in the nightclub. Where will you be taking them?”

  “Unless you’re charging me with something, I don’t believe that’s any of your business. Is it?”

  JD said, “Actually, it is our business. Just think of the club as a suspect right now. You’ve got forty-two percent Class A shares, right?”

  Cleo stared at her. “Well, two things. Thanks to the shareholder’s agreement, it seems Class A reverts to Class B upon death of a major shareholder, meaning I don’t have voting rights. Unit price is stipulated in the articles. Jon can’t afford to buy my shares, so he’s looking for other options.”

  “Are you giving him a deadline?”

  “Not at this point. I like Jon. I’m not going to push him. Second thing, the forty-two shares are divvied up to Oscar’s heirs, meaning me, his sister Melanie, and his daughter in trust.” She looked at Leith. “Anything else?”

  Leith didn’t have anything else at the moment, but JD did. “Do you know Jamie Paquette?”

  “That skinny hooker half his age with brown hair?”

  Leith almost interrupted, not sure they were talking about the same woman. Paquette’s skinniness was subjective, of course. Personally, he would call her slim verging on voluptuous. Age-wise, she was younger than Oz, true, but not by half, and seemed older than her years. Cleo’s “half-his-age” was probably spousal exaggeration. Hair colour was another matter; she was definitely blond, not brunette. But of course hair colour can come from a bottle. He kept his mouth shut.

  “No, that’s not fair,” Cleo contradicted herself. “Not necessarily a hooker. I only met her once, at that restaurant, when Oz and I got together to talk about Dallas. That was just a few days after Jamie moved in with him. Last May or June, I think it was. I got to observe her a bit. She’s not shallow, just does a good job of looking it. Well, he was mad for her, and I could see why. She was … alive. A good fit for him. Better than some of those other showroom dummies he took up with after he and I split.”

  As Cleo showed them out, she said, “He brought all this on himself, you know.”

  Leith expected it was a general comment on Roth’s lifestyle, but asked, “How so?”

  “When we met at the restaurant he told me something. It was supposed to make me madly jealous, I guess. When he first got the boat, he called it The Cleo. That’s me. It is now, wait for it, The Jamie. Or was. Seems it’s been purged from his list of assets. Sold or sunk, I don’t care, it wasn’t worth much to me.”

  Leith recalled the empty boat trailer in the dead man’s garage. He still wasn’t sure what this had to do with bringing on trouble.

  JD was losing patience, too. “So why does this matter to me, ma’am?”

  “Well, it’s bad luck to change a boat’s name,” Cleo said, lifting her brows at her. “And Oz knew it. Just wasn’t thinking straight, I guess.”

  * * *

  “I don’t like her, but that’s because I don’t like anybody,” JD said.

  Leith was finding JD to be quite a liar. She did know something about corporate structure, and she did like people. For some reason she preferred the negative slant on anything that was remotely personal. He wondered if she had been violently disappointed at some point in her life. Possibly way back in the formative years?

  She wasn’t done. She said, “Although I don’t like her, I bet she’s not responsible.”

  Leith agreed. He and JD were restudying the crime scene photographs from the Roth residence. They were in the Oz case room, but the Lius were here too, photographically speaking. Up on their own board, keeping an eye on matters. Not forgotten, by any means, a team on their case full-time, but Leith wanted them present in his own mind, always.

  He checked his watch, jounced a knee. He watched JD study a photograph with a loupe, cross-reference it with the Roth floor plan, and move on to another one, back and forth, as if weaving together a specific concept. He had no idea what that concept might be. He said, “What’s up?”

  “Quite a struggle,” JD said. She centred the floor plan on the table between them and pointed out the trail of havoc. “Here, here, here. They’re all over the place. Pull a drawer, topple a bunch of chairs, break a dish, scatter knives. This is not a fight. This is Kaiju versus Kong.”

  “What it is, is two big guys duking it out,” Leith said. “Or three, probably.” The team believed it was two against one, considering the damage and apparent control the home invaders had over the burly Oscar Roth. The fight was charted and timed, from bloodstains and scuff marks, and there was nothing staged about it.

  Except to JD. She said, “It looks fake to me. For one, with that kind of struggle there would be DNA all over the place, from all parties. Or something, some shred of themselves left behind.”

  “They might have been tossing the place, too, with gloves on. Looking for something. Or just causing malicious damage, for the hell of it. Or to send a message.”

  JD burst out laughing in her annoying way, loudly and with mouth wide open.

  Leith frowned. “What?”

  “Maybe they were looking for something! A pillowcase. Ripped the place apart and finally found one in the upstairs linen closet. These guys are clowns!”

  Leith didn’t think they were clowns, and he didn’t think any of it was funny. “You’re making a story out of nothing. This was a scary scene. We don’t know why things happened the way they did, but a man died.”

  She pushed a photograph at him, one of the most graphic shots: Oscar with the pillowcase removed. He was banged and bruised. His face looked melted and grotesquely coloured, the resting cheek purple with pooled blood, the drained side
like pale wax. She said, “And once again, why cover his head, these two big guys, if they’re going to kill him?”

  The team had worried about that. Had the struggle begun with a bag over his head to subdue him, then progressed organically from a beating to murder? Not with those signs of struggle. A hooded and subdued man wouldn’t have left a trail like that. So the bagging had come later on.

  Was it sadism, to increase the victim’s fear, a form of torment?

  Certainly it wasn’t remorse or empathy, considering the way he’d been shoved headfirst into his car and left to die.

  Another theory was he was being led to the garage with plans of kidnap, and he was hooded so he wouldn’t see the route they would be taking. But he had tripped and knocked himself out, and the kidnappers had decided it was more trouble than it was worth to cart him away. So they had found the car key and decided to gas the man instead.

  Chaotic, yes. But one thing Leith knew was that people committing violent crimes don’t always read like manuals. People are on booze, meth. They’re psychotic. High on adrenaline. Sexually charged. Confused. He had wasted too much time over the years looking for logic in scenes like this, and these days didn’t agonize over it except as a last resort.

  “You know what I think?” JD said. “I think this is a bullshit crime scene, that two people he knew well took him by surprise, bagged his head to render him helpless, and killed him. Tried to make it look like a home invasion, or a revenge killing, with that die asshole schtick. Why do we think there was someone after him? Because Oscar was apparently paranoid that someone was after him. Why do we think that? Because those two say so.”

  Leith followed her eyes to the board on this side of the room. Melanie York and Jamie Paquette.

  True, other friends and acquaintances of Oscar Roth had been questioned, and nobody else thought he had been particularly antsy lately. No more than usual, anyway, hard to say with the hyper type. Leith pointed out that Jon York had corroborated that paranoia. “He said Oz worried he was being followed, right?”

  “Yes, he did,” JD said. “So maybe he’s in on it. I’ll put him in the mix, dig some more, and see where it goes.”

  Leith nodded, feet thumping nervously. Again he checked his watch face, and again he was disappointed. Still a ways to go.

  “Getting married?” JD said.

  In a way, he was. Alison would be arriving tonight, and he felt edgy as a blushing groom-to-be.

  Twenty-One

  Gold

  The sky was black, the windows open. A breeze gusted through Leith’s apartment. He wandered restlessly, selected music, a pop band Alison liked. He checked his face in the mirror again. He sat and tried to read Maclean’s. Tried to work his case files.

  Finally he sat on a hard-backed chair by the window and smoked a cigarette, his last for a while, probably, because Alison would once again be after him to quit. He was always quitting and always sneaking one final puff, it seemed.

  He worried about the plane. What if it goes down? Of course it won’t go down. But what if it does?

  Or another one: what if she arrived, and their time apart proved them incompatible? What if incompatibility led to divorce? How could he bear it?

  And finally: why was he thinking these thoughts?

  He sucked harder at his cigarette and lit another.

  He had wanted to pick them up at the airport, but things got too complicated as he was on call, so in the end he had told her to grab a taxi. Now he wished he had damned the consequences and driven out there, to Richmond, to greet them as they came through the gates.

  Around 1:00 a.m. a noise like garburated metal ejected him from his chair. The chair capsized, and then its legs caught his and tried to capsize him, too. The noise was the intercom buzzer; his family had arrived. He crushed the cigarette and fanned the air. He jogged out to meet them, down the carpeted stairs, past fake ferns and a dry fountain. He found her standing in the lobby, two suitcases at her feet, child in her arms.

  Leith grabbed the suitcases and showed her the way up. She stood in the dark living room looking around. Her sandy-brown hair was shorter than he recalled, and styled differently. Her pretty, full face seemed to be trying to smile, but something held her back. “Where should I put Pumpkin?”

  Together they laid Isabelle down on Leith’s bed. He stood staring down at the child, and thought about little Rosalie Liu, and how blessed he was to have Izzy here, safe and whole. He turned to Alison, who was watching him patiently. He went to hug her but recalled the front door — he had almost forgotten — needed deadbolting.

  “Always do this,” he told her, as he snicked the lock shut. “Both locks, always. Right? This isn’t Prince Rupert. Remember that.”

  “You gave me the same lecture in Prince Rupert,” she reminded him. “Except you used my hometown as a comparison. ‘Always lock the door, this isn’t Parksville,’ you said.”

  She still had her coat on, he realized. He rushed to help her out of it, and with the coat fallen to the floor, they finally were standing together. She held him tight. He held her tighter. They swayed to the pop tunes. He came a little undone, his tears wetting her hair. He knew he had missed her, but hadn’t even guessed how badly. Not even close.

  * * *

  Under the black lights, dancers looked like fireflies. Up on the stage the go-go girls undulated like deep-sea creatures. Dion should have been long gone by now, should have been over the Rockies and in a motel room somewhere between Calgary and Edmonton, resting up before the next leg of the trip. But he wasn’t over the Rockies. He hadn’t even left the building. Partly because he couldn’t seem to get off the penthouse suite sofa today and had dozed through to dinnertime.

  But it was more because he wanted to see Jon York. He had a question for him.

  After dinner he returned to the club to see if York was around. He wasn’t, but staff said he would be in soon. So Dion waited with a beer. York arrived and seemed pleased to see him. Just like last night, Dion was invited to hang out and relax. York himself couldn’t stick around quite yet, he had things to do, but would be back later.

  “I thought I’d stay one more night, if it’s okay with you,” Dion told him. “I’ll pay, though.”

  “You can stay all week, and you don’t have to pay a cent,” York said, with a cheery salute.

  “How come you’re so nice to me?” Dion called after him.

  “I’m nice to everyone,” York assured him. “If I like them. I like you. Is that so hard to believe?” And he left.

  Dion’s phone had been vibrating on and off all day. Several of the messages were from Mike Bosko. They had started out as simple texts — call me — which he had answered with, Sorry, will be in touch when I have time. This hadn’t satisfied Bosko, who began leaving voice mails instead. You have to do this by the book. Consider your future. Don’t want a mark like this on your record, do you?

  The last message was a soft-spoken threat that he had listened through twice: If I don’t hear from you tomorrow, I’ll take measures to bring you in.

  Now it was past ten at night. York had returned, joining Dion at the purple VIP booth. Again the place was a zoo. Not jam-packed, like some of the Vancouver clubs Dion had visited in earlier years, but what he would call hopping. Again, people glommed around York to talk. This time Dion stayed at the edge of the conversation. He watched the go-go dancers on the stage, but today they seemed unreal, and nothing to do with him.

  No time so far was a good time to ask York the question. Not a terribly important question, but he needed to know.

  Finally he took his beer bottle outside to the deck for a bit of cool, some lower decibels, and a cigarette. He didn’t lean on the railing and stare outward — he still had that myserious aversion to the sea — but sat on a bistro chair facing into the club.

  As he half expected, York joined him, taking another chair on the
other side of the table. None of York’s royal subjects followed, and Dion was glad. York had his own cigarette pack out and was fiddling with a lighter.

  “I haven’t formally quit my job,” Dion said. “I just walked out. My boss says he’s going to have me arrested. I’ve been procrastinating. That was stupid. I wrote a resignation letter this evening and dropped it off. Hopefully that’s good enough.”

  “Wow,” York said. “You really like to burn your bridges.”

  “I bomb my bridges. There’s something wrong with me.”

  “You don’t say.”

  York’s smile came from a level place. Not up, down, or sideways. He heard, got it, but wouldn’t try to fix it. Instead he shared his own news. He spoke of the extraordinary shareholders’ meeting he had been to today, and the brass-tacks sit-down with his financial team. “The power’s back in balance,” he finished. “Numbers are looking good.”

  But he spoke in a quick, nervous way that made Dion wonder if it was, to some degree, wishful thinking. “That’s great,” he said.

  “Yep, they don’t call me Midas for nothing.” York flicked ashes into the night, and a bit of silence followed. Which meant question time had arrived, now or never.

  Dion said, “What’s Jamie up to lately?”

  York looked at him, and slowly he smiled. “You want me to hook you up?”

  “Too soon. Her boyfriend just got killed.”

  “I don’t think she’s got any kind of moral compass to worry about there.”

  “She’s bad news, is she?”

  York was still considering him, with too much interest. “The worst,” he said. “But maybe that’s what you’re looking for.”

  Maybe. Dion thought of Kate, who was so different from Jamie. Kate was good news, and he wanted her forever, but she wasn’t his. Probably any relationship he pieced together with Jamie, if York managed to rig it, wouldn’t last. But it was worth a try. He said, “That’s what I’m looking for. You said she never comes to the club. Why not?”