Lake on the Mountain: A Dan Sharp Mystery

by Jeffrey Round

  Dan accepted the comedown in expectations — from stalking bones in the Sahara to stalking flesh-and-blood rats in the gutters of the city — with equanimity. At least he was making money. He reported to the townhouse on Queen East near Logan each morning at seven a.m. before hitting the road with his assignments. This meant tracking a wide range of people who were in some way disabled — from those who’d lost the use of limbs, through those claiming whiplash and soft tissue injuries, to people with repetitive strain syndrome. Some had found themselves dismissed from their jobs outright. Others were luckier, having had the relative good fortune to have their mishaps occur at the workplace, making it harder for their employers to get rid of them. All became targets for insurance companies looking for an excuse to opt out of paying benefits.

  While waiting for lawsuits to be settled, some disappeared and were last heard from at Tijuana addresses or luxury chateaus up north. Others were luckier in having spouses support them for the duration. Still others, having lost their income, got swallowed up by welfare rolls or were glad-handed from relative to relative while waiting out the endless doctor reports and psychiatric assessments — the company doctors always finding reasons why the claimant should be working and the lawyers’ doctors finding equally valid reasons why they should not. It was all a matter of perspective, unless you happened to be the sufferer.

  This was where Dan came in. He was there to challenge the perspective. He became adept at disguising himself outside claimants’ homes, snooping through their garbage, and making discreet enquiries of the people next door who were sometimes only too eager to divulge their neighbours’ secrets. “He operates a business in his basement, customers come and go at all hours.” Or, “I see her working down at the pub on the corner on Sundays.” Many of those Dan caught in lies later expressed shock that the young man on their corner had been able to keep invisible till it was too late. After a handful of incriminating pictures, the potential lawsuits and hoped-for insurance payments became history.

  His first month on the job, he located ten claimants who’d been impossible for others to find. He got incriminating pictures of seven. His supervisors were impressed and commended him every chance they got. He’d had misgivings about a couple of the ones he’d shadowed, wondering if they really were scamming or just making do the best they could. A guy who claimed to have a bad leg and got caught playing football was one thing, but several claimants he’d photographed doing everyday things that had to be done, like it or not. The pictures didn’t show whether it had been easy for them to perform those tasks or how costly it had been in terms of pain and suffering.

  He expressed his concerns to a supervisor. She gave him a wormy smile, the veins of a chronic drinker mapping her nose. “We know,” she said. “It’s a tough call. Just get the pictures and don’t worry about it. Let the courts decide who’s lying.”

  “Luck of the draw,” a co-worker told him with a shrug. “Hey! It’s not up to us to judge.”

  The more he got to know his colleagues, the more Dan realized he was working with people who’d rubbed themselves sideways against the law more than the norm. Confessions of impaired driving, assault, tax evasion, drug possession, and fraud were commonplace amongst his co-workers. Most of them talked freely about their pasts. Some bragged about the things they got away with. One admitted he was working off the payments of a paternity suit. Dan began to feel he’d been drafted into the city’s virtually unemployable fringe set.

  One cold April afternoon, he watched an older woman hobbling around her front walk with a shovel. She wore oversized rubber boots and a ragged overcoat. With a record snowfall blanketing the city, her movements hardly made a dent in the drifts thrown up by a street plough. According to the report, a fall had left her unable to fill her duties at a stationery factory where she’d worked for the past twenty-seven years. She was widowed, the mother of a thirty-year-old. If she’d been Dan’s mother, he thought, she wouldn’t be out there shovelling for herself.

  He rolled down the windows and took a couple of pictures then sat watching, his breath hanging on the air. The woman stopped every few seconds to draw a lungful of oxygen and stretch her left arm. Dan saw the pain in her face. He put the camera down and stepped out of the car.

  She looked up when he approached.

  “Do you need some help?” he asked.

  She leaned on the shovel and regarded him. “I hurt my arm.”

  “I can see that.”

  He took the shovel and cleared her sidewalk with a dozen brisk motions.

  “Thank you, sir,” she said.

  “It’s no problem.”

  She stood there watching him. “They told me I’d better watch out for anyone with a camera. They said the insurance company would take pictures of me and show the court.”

  He smiled. She’d known he was there. “What did you say?”

  “I said I’d tell the court the insurance company didn’t pay me my money for six months now, so I didn’t have no choice but to shovel my own snow. Otherwise somebody’s goin’ to get hurt like I did and then they’ll sue me!”

  “You live all alone?”

  She nodded. “My husband died. My son got married and went back to Jamaica. I ast the neighbour’s boy would he shovel for me. He said he couldn’t be bothered for no five dollars. I’ll give it to you, if you want it.”

  She held out a bill.

  Dan shook his head. “You keep it,” he said, jabbing the shovel into a drift.

  Back in his car, he yanked the film from the camera and returned to work to hand in his resignation. The baby was four months away.

  A week later, another ad held out hope. If he could locate insurance scammers, Dan felt, surely he could locate other missing people. The office might be a dismal shade of grey that reflected in the faces of everyone who worked there, but it seemed a long step up from what he’d been doing. His colleagues were an interesting mix of former police officers and private investigators. What the walls lacked in colour his co-workers made up for in personality.

  Somehow he talked himself into the job, beginning with a research position. Dan found he had the right stuff to find people who went missing for more compelling reasons than avoiding insurance investigators. He still suffered qualms over tracking down someone who might not want to be found, but he no longer felt he was enabling insurance companies to punish innocent people for doing what others did: living their lives as best they could.

  A personal tape recorder, a high-speed camera, and a flashlight became his stock-in-trade. He wrote down all the relevant facts on a thick notepad, then memorized them and looked for ways to connect the dots. Theories without facts were useless, he soon learned, but facts that didn’t stand up to testing were a waste of time.

  Somehow he made it through the first year, then a second, with most of his personal beliefs intact and Ked growing like an errant weed he’d planted on a whim and was surprised to find waiting for him each morning when he woke.

  He hired a nanny and trundled off to work and back again each day, spending his evenings alone with this bundle of living, breathing flesh that seemed as much a part of him as his own arm.

  At times, the boy was his only companion apart from the TV. He tried to juggle Ked on his knee and watch the jabbering shows about raising kids and having a rewarding life at the same time. The ones where privileged women argued about epidurals and hiring midwives. In truth, the task was lonely and demanding and he seldom seemed to get outside of an insular world that had shrunk to almost nothing. There were days when he still wished he had a career that was impressive-sounding, but that thought died when he celebrated his twenty-fourth birthday alone.

  Six

  Anger Management

  The morning passed with little excitement. The bottle of Scotch did not put in an appearance. Just before one o’clock Dan went off to the coroner’s office on Grosvenor Street, but the body of the missing person fifty-five Division claimed to have a possible match for tu
rned out to be someone else. Someone who didn’t even vaguely resemble the person in Dan’s file, apart from being human and male. There were doubts even about the latter, considering the raised mammaries that appeared to have been a botched home job injecting silicone under the skin with a hypodermic. Another victim of do-it-yourself beauty school etiquette. All went well for these home-style girly-boys until they misjudged the position of an artery and sent the polymer mainlining into their hearts and lungs. By then it was too late. Death came grisly but swift, and the rictus masks left for their discoverers weren’t too pretty either.

  At least the Serbian boy would be going home soon. When he’d left, it had probably been a merry send-off — women in babushkas and kerchiefs smiling and sipping Turkish coffee, bristle-faced men offering their worldly wisdom and passing the šljivovica from hand to hand while the children romped around the room, not understanding why they were celebrating their older cousin’s leave-taking, but glad for the sweet rolls. Dan didn’t want to think about the bumpy coffin ride back in the bottom of a cargo plane, the seven-hour flight to repatriate him, the teary return that awaited him in his homeland two years too late.

  The sky threatened drizzle as he walked north on Yonge Street, keeping his distance from passersby who seemed to have nothing better to do than throng the intersections looking fashionable. He stopped for lunch at Spring Rolls. The downstairs was filled with a noisy young crowd who seemed to think it a glamorous social event rather than simply a quick, cheap eat. He bypassed the clamorous lunchers and went upstairs, where it was only slightly less crowded. A waiter waved him curtly to a window table. The man’s face betrayed annoyance at having one customer take up a spot for two. Dan could remember when the place barely got half full. Whenever he found a convenient location to eat, it turned trendy in a couple of months. Then the wait time increased, the food went downhill, and the service got snarly. So much for Toronto’s exalted dining experience.

  He ordered a drink before he was seated. One beer to take the edge off. It wasn’t that he needed it, he reassured himself. Just holding the tumbler in his hand made him feel better.

  Two tables over, a rugged-looking guy in denim caught Dan’s eye. Black T-shirt, chiselled cheekbones, thick moustache. Face like a motorcycle cop from the backend of a seventies porn catalogue. He looked familiar. Dan wondered if he was undercover, possibly someone he’d worked with before. He kept catching Dan’s glance. The third time it happened the man smiled unexpectedly. Dan blushed and turned away.

  He sipped his beer and kept his gaze averted, wondering how long the guy would keep at it before he gave up.

  The waiter returned for his order. Dan stumbled over the name of one of the Asian fusion dishes. The waiter corrected his pronunciation and regarded him gravely, as though he’d asked for a side order of blowfish.

  His meal had just arrived when the denim-clad mannequin laid a bill on the table. Dan kept his head turned as he walked past and dropped a slip of paper beside Dan’s fork. Out of the corner of his eye, Dan watched him disappear down the stairs before turning it over — the name Chuck and a phone number. He finished his lunch and left the number on the table. Maybe his hurried waiter would think it was for him. The two of them could work it out.

  Outside, the day had turned bright. The sun made a sudden appearance as Dan crossed through Allan Gardens, noting the unusually large number of addicts looking up uncertainly at the light, like seals left stranded by a retreating tide. He thought over the early morning meeting with his former neighbour at the donut shop, and wondered again why Steve had given Glenda the house, especially since she made more money than him. Is that what straight men did?

  There was no reply from Bill when he reached the office. He tossed his coat over a chair then made a few calls about the young runaway, Richard Philips. At four o’clock he signed off on the file of a woman missing for five years who’d recently turned up — schizophrenic and amnesiac — on a Hawaiian island. She’d been living in an abandoned milk truck. Her appearance had altered so radically, it had taken a DNA test to convince her relatives she was the same woman. Sometimes that was as good as it got.

  He opened another file and read over his notes without taking anything in. A fourth cup of coffee failed to revive his concentration. He’d been staring at his computer for some time without registering a thing. Just before six, he closed his laptop and left the office.

  His counselling was an hour off. It seemed to be a day for wasting time. On a lark, he left his car in the underground garage and walked west on Wellesley Street through the downtown core. He ducked into a video arcade burgeoning with teens and pre-teens — kids who liked to hang out on the strip. He watched them in the half-light, silhouetted like an army of overactive gnomes labouring underground. A crazy quilt of sound came at him, the jabbering voices of boys and machines. The variety of games boggled his mind, newer versions at the front, older ones farther along the warren of blinking lights. Shooting games, driving games, even a fast-paced step-dancing game. Movie themes dominated: Lord of the Rings followed by Star Wars and The Matrix. Near the far end stood Roger Moore, as dashing as ever — James Bond is immortal, after all. Closer up, a perennial favourite: a Playboy Bunny with a waggling set of ears. Elsewhere, Nancy Reagan’s much-quoted plea hung over a flaming bridge: Just say no to drugs. But what if they said yes to you?

  Dan kept his eyes peeled for Richard Philips. He’d seen a million boys like the ones here today, all variations on a theme. He was the kid next door with the Popsicle smile or the ten-cent grin, a skateboard beneath his feet, a baseball cap on a crow’s nest of hair, and a comic book tucked beneath his arm. You know him. He’s the boy who got all As, or sometimes Bs or even Fs. The future baccalaureate or the wearer of the dunce’s crown, the one who stupefied his teachers or failed miserably at his studies. He’s the boy who cheered others on in their endeavours and threw matches at cats. Who won or lost at aggies, who skipped classes and lobbed crusts at other boys in the lunchroom. You know every variation of him. And every now and again one little thing went wrong, one screw fell out of place, and he was no longer that charming boy you thought you knew but a conniving criminal, a survival-minded sharp waiting on the other side of the lamppost, on the far side of midnight, leaning against the doorframe and taking your measure. But you know him. Because somewhere deep down inside, he is you or your son or your brother or maybe even your future father. You know him.

  Dan watched the kids jockeying for place, aiming guns in the air, at the screens, at each other. Blam! He listened to the sharp yells as the boys won or lost, then started new games that took them to the far reaches of space, the depths of the ocean, or the deepest jungles. Losing themselves as successfully as they could.

  Apart from Dan and the arcade manager, there was only one other adult in the room. At first Dan didn’t recognize him. He was a bag of bones, an old haunt Dan hadn’t seen in years. At forty he’d been a chronic predator; at sixty he was a fright. Dan watched him move among the boys like an aged shopper browsing the aisle of some fancy specialty shop, hands trembling with hunger. The boys all seemed to know him too — Wicked Uncle Ernie with his bag of magic tricks, all for kicks. Come home with me, kiddies. We’ll watch some television, snort a little blow. Smoke some crack. Aren’t I a charm? We’ll have fun. Whatever turns up. And P.S. Don’t tell Mom. The voice paced, the tone measured: here was sincerity, surprise, and now and then a little calculated enthusiasm. Great shot, Tim! What a score. Keep it up, Bennie! Whatever was required came tripping off his tongue in calculated increments, plotted to the needs of the moment. Now smile for the camera because: these premises are monitored 24-hours. Let the means determine the ends. Each according to his need. And now and then a gentle laugh, nicely modulated. Every syllable a sure step, one foot placed squarely in front of the other.

  Dan caught the predator’s eyes, tossed him a knowing nod to unsettle his dreams, and let him know he’d been noticed — who knows, maybe the former hustler had
gone undercover after all these years — then left, heading for his counselling session.

  Dan’s work offered the weekly sessions to help employees deal with the supposed stress of their jobs. His employer was considered progressive. Words like “wellness” and “holistic” were floated freely around the office. Currently, however, Dan’s counselling had also become “compulsory” after he dented a filing cabinet with his fist.

  Two days before that incident, he’d successfully tracked down the spouse of a client who warned him that her husband, a manic-depressive, had left home without his meds. Twelve hours after being freed from a rehab centre, the man turned up a suicide in a west end back alley. It came as a complete shock to himself and everyone else when Dan spun around and slugged the cabinet.

  A superior with fifties hair, a Father-Knows-Best attitude, and a pro-counselling bias decided to make Dan an example. “You’re letting this get to you,” he said from the far side of the room where Dan stood nursing his knuckles.

  Dan was livid. “You’re goddamn right I’m letting it get to me! This should never have happened. Who ordered this man released?”

  “Calm down, Daniel.”

  “Fucking hell I’ll calm down!” This time he kicked the cabinet, caving in one of the lower drawer fronts as though it had been to blame.