Felicity was alone, lovely, asleep. Flaked out on a couch in the lounge. I was close enough to her to smell the subtle perfume she was wearing. Longing built up inside me like an electrical charge, but I didn’t want to wake her so I went into the kitchen, found a half bottle of Pinot Grigio, poured an inch into a glass and drank it. When I went back to the lounge, Felicity wasn’t there. She was in bed.
“Hello, Silas,” she said, the barest suggestion of tremor in her voice. “Kiss me, Silas.”
I took my clothes off and got in beside her.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Victoria’s residential and commercial belt has been expanding rapidly in recent years. After a few twists and turns, I was happy to leave Douglas Street’s heavy traffic behind and turn onto Burnside Road. More miles of quiet farms and woodsy calm brought me to Jinglepot Road. Scarcely better than a lane, the Jinglepot winds up over a slope in the foothills and along a ridge. It was five degrees hotter up there than downtown. The air smelt faintly of burning sage. The place I wanted was a modest pre-war bungalow. Screened from the road by tall poplars, it had blistered paint and curling asphalt roof shingles. Off to the right, half-overgrown by blackberry bushes, was a low concrete building that looked like a military gun emplacement. The bungalow’s unkempt lawn was dotted with cedar lounging chairs, kids’ tricycles, a baby buggy and several multicoloured balls. I left my car at the side of the road.
Afternoon sunlight streaming through the poplar trees created moving patterns on the cracked cement pathway leading up to the bungalow’s front door. I pasted a Fuller Brush man’s smile on my face and knocked. After a long interval a middle-aged woman wearing a headscarf and paint-spattered overalls opened the door.
Looking a trifle flustered, she said, “Are you here about the room?”
I flashed my police badge. “Good morning, ma’am. No, I’m not here about the room. I am Sergeant Seaweed, Victoria PD. I’m here about Maria Alfred.”
“Maria,” the woman said, her tentative smile fading. “She’s my tenant. I haven’t seen her for a few days.”
“And you are?”
“Jenny Victor.”
Before I could get a word in edgewise, she went on with growing indignation, “The thing is, we need Maria’s rent money to make our mortgage work, and she’s in arrears. My husband and I bought this house six months ago. It’s a bit of a wreck, and we’re renovating. But it’s hard, you know, because he has a full-time job in town and the way the price of building materials keeps going up . . . We think Maria’s taken off without paying us what she owes.”
“When’s the last time you saw her?”
“Oh I don’t know,” she said unhappily. “Last week I guess.”
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to take a look at her room.”
“Well, I suppose . . . ” Mrs. Victor was saying when we heard a slight thudding noise followed immediately by a child’s wails.
Throwing up her arms in consternation, Mrs. Victor retreated indoors. I followed her along a hallway into a kitchen at the back. A cute two-year-old with a mane of blonde curls and a rosebud mouth had fallen off a chair while trying to climb onto a table. Mrs. Victor swung the sobbing infant into her arms and began to walk up and down, patting the infant’s back and making shushing noises.
Mrs. Victor seemed physically inert. Worn out at 40-something. She seemed slightly too old to be the child’s mother. When she remembered my existence, Mrs. Victor pointed to a door that opened off the kitchen and said, “Maria’s room is down there.”
I went down a steep flight of steps into a dingy low-headroom basement with exposed ceiling joists and wall studs. Half-stooped to save my head from injury, I groped around in semi-darkness until I found another door, opened it, located a light switch, and turned it on. Nothing happened until, after more blind groping, I located a lamp set on a low bedside table. It lit up when I turned it on. Floorboards creaked above, where Mrs. Victor was pacing back and forth.
Maria Alfred’s rented room was only about twelve feet square. It was evidently a recent addition to the house. The room’s gyproc ceiling and walls were a bilious shade of yellow; the linoleum floor was bumpy. The furniture consisted of a single bed covered with a white candlestick bedspread, a single bamboo chair with a yellow cushion, a chest of drawers and a circular picnic table with a matching plastic garden chair. A cheap wooden desk placed beneath a wall-mounted mirror doubled as a dressing table. A folding Chinese screen concealed a built-in closet empty except for wire coat hangers. The drawers had been cleaned out. A metal wastebasket contained nothing except discarded tissues. The room was clean, and the floor appeared to have been recently waxed. After thinking, I removed the drawers from the desk. When I did so, a photograph that had been wedged behind one of the drawers fluttered to the ground. It showed a group of twelve girls standing outside a country schoolhouse. I turned the photograph over. Girls’ names were written on it in immature pencil lettering. One of the girls was Maria Alfred. Ruth Claypole was another.
I put the photograph in my shirt pocket and went back upstairs. A well-tended vegetable patch that would have gladdened any gardener’s heart bloomed nicely in the backyard. There was no sign of the infant. Mrs. Victor was filling a bucket at the kitchen sink. She squirted some liquid detergent into the bucket, and then turned towards me, folded her arms and leaned back against a counter.
“Satisfied?” she said, with a kind of resigned fatalism. “Find what you wanted?”
I handed her the photograph. “I found this in the desk. Recognize anyone?”
Without hesitation, she pointed to Maria and said, “That’s her.”
“Recognize anyone else?”
After a long look, Mrs. Victor shook her head.
I said, “Maria has done a runner, obviously.”
“Of course she has. Now we’re faced with the expense and trouble of advertising and interviewing tenants all over again. Maria was only with us two months. It’s pathetic. You try to do the right thing, and this is all the thanks you get.”
“When Maria moved in, I suppose you got her to sign a rental agreement?”
“Well, no,” Mrs. Victor replied with awkward self-consciousness. “I guess we never got around to it.”
“You didn’t check with Maria’s previous landlord, ask to see references?”
“Well, no,” she said reticently. “Not that I remember. We took Maria on trust. She seemed all right to us.”
“So you don’t know where she came from, where she lived before?”
“We never talked much, come to think of it, because we didn’t have much in common. I have an idea she came from one of the islands up Desolation Sound way. Maybe Quanterelle Island. That’s about all I can tell you.”
Steam rose from an electric kettle. When the kettle clicked off automatically, Mrs. Victor turned towards it. Speaking with her back to me, she said in a nervous voice, “I’m making myself a cup of instant. Excuse me if I don’t offer you one, but I’m a bit rushed. If there’s nothing more, I’d like you to leave now.”
I leaned back against the table, put my hands in my pockets, and said rather sternly, “Maria’s room has been stripped. Am I supposed to believe that she came in here while you were out of the house and took her things away?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Victor replied reluctantly. When she turned to face me again, her glance slid away and her cheeks reddened.
I waited. Mrs. Victor’s shoulders slumped, and she covered her face. “We were keeping Maria’s stuff in lieu of rent,” she began to say, and then she started to cry. Tears squeezed between her eyelashes. “It’s so hard, you don’t understand. Everything’s going wrong. The house, my husband’s job. I’m sorry.”
Feeling like an asshole, I said roughly, “Show me where you put Maria’s stuff.”
Stooping, her arms folded across her narrow chest, she led me to a backyard shed and flung the door open. Maria Alfred’s possessions had been stuffed into two large orange garbage bags and were l
ying against a wall along with miscellaneous garden tools.
Without saying anything, I picked the bags up and put them in my car. I felt miserable; even the sky was clouding over. When I got behind the driving wheel, I glanced at the house. Mrs. Victor was watching from a window.
Cops know that people lie all the time. You get to expect it from everyone—not just villains and psychopaths, but from people who go to church on Sundays. Lying to cops is standard practice.
I went back to the house and knocked. Mrs. Victor opened the door about six inches, enough to show me her nose and eyes, red from weeping.
I hardened my heart and said sternly, “You’re sure that I’ve got everything?”
“Everything. You’ve got everything. I swear, we weren’t going to steal it.”
“Thanks, and good luck with renting your room. Next time, I advise you to get your tenant to sign a rental agreement. Standard forms are available free from the rentals branch office on Wharf Street. Check people’s references too, and make sure the first month’s cheque doesn’t bounce before the tenant moves in. If everybody was honest, Mrs. Victor, my job would be superfluous.”
Sometimes, I really hate being a cop.
It was raining by the time I got back downtown.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The desk phone was ringing when I slung the orange plastic garbage bags into the corner of my office. Taking my time about it, I then picked up the mail littering the floor beneath my letter slot and put it on the desk. When I opened the window blinds and looked out, it was still raining. The mail was mostly junk. I wasn’t ready to start poking through the garbage bags just then. To deflect my thoughts, I cracked the office bottle and poured myself a drink. Felicity thinks I drink way too much, and she’s probably right.
PC emerged noiselessly from behind the filing cabinet. After stretching and yawning, she assumed a sphinx-like pose, looked towards me and meowed. PC has me properly trained. As she required, I quickly finished my drink, took my glass and PC’s stainless steel water bowl out to my private washroom, rinsed them both, filled the bowl with fresh clean water, put it back where it was supposed to be, and then I opened a can of Thrifty’s white tuna and dumped the contents into PC’s stainless steel food bowl.
PC was having dinner, and I was building an origami beetle out of multicoloured junk mail when the phone rang again. I picked it up. A familiar voice said, “Silas? Silas Seaweed?”
It was one of the neighbourhood crazies. “Yes, Fran,” I said politely. “This is Silas.”
“Do you know where Bowker Creek goes under the road at St. Ann’s?”
“Ye-es.”
“Oh, I am pleased,” Fran said. “We’re having a get-together under the big willow tree. There’ll be hot dogs and coffee. June 14th, two o’clock. Mark it on your calendar.”
“Sorry, Fran. Today’s the 15th of August.”
“Oh dear, are you quite sure?” Fran said, putting down the phone.
PC had gone out. I poured myself another drink, put on a pair of rubber gloves, and then briefly inspected the contents of the garbage bags. It was mostly clothing. I didn’t see any documents or personal information. So much for that.
I stood by the window and looked down Pandora Street towards the abandoned Janion Building, seeing its boarded-up windows and bird-shit-spattered facade. It was raining harder than ever by then and a bit early for the evening stroll, but a wizened forty-year-old floozy wearing a blonde wig was already tottering back and forth in a tatty white blouse, fishnet stockings and leather skirt. Then the door opened. Cynthia Leach strolled in. I admired her porcelain skin and lovely blue eyes as she took her cap off and put it on my hat tree. Posed entrancingly, she tossed her head back and ran her fingers through her short blonde curls.
“Nice Manners wants you,” Cynthia said, hitching a fully loaded equipment belt up her shapely waist.
“I know, I’ve got call display.”
“You don’t like him very much, do you Silas?”
“Do you?”
“I like him more than you do, obviously. He’s not bad-looking, either.”
Feeling a slight pang of some emotion that, if I’d been fifteen years old, I might have diagnosed as jealousy, I said, “It’s not Manners that I hate, exactly, it’s his type. He’s the kind of guy who wakes up every morning and pastes this certain expression on his face. The one that says ‘I’m big and great and I’m important. You are a piece of shit’.”
Cynthia gave an indifferent shrug. “Have you heard the latest?” she asked, carelessly resting one shapely buttock on the corner of my desk. “City council is thinking of stopping drivers from renewing driving licences until their parking tickets are paid.”
“I know that too. The army of Right is on the march, the forces of Evil are in full retreat.”
“There are a couple of garbage bags in the corner.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Do you know everything?”
“I know that a ghost moved into this building recently.”
“My God,” she said, staring at me. “I’ve just noticed. What’s happened to you?”
“Haven’t you been paying attention?”
“You look different.”
“Every day and in every way I’m getting worse and worse. Somebody tried to roast me alive the other night.”
Realization dawned in her eyes. “You were in Nanaimo’s when it was firebombed?”
“Right.”
“But you look . . . your face seems thinner for one thing. Are you losing weight?”
I shook my head.
Cynthia gave me a long, penetrating look.
Flushing noises emanated from my private washroom. With Cynthia at my heels, I ran from the office, tore down the hall and unlocked the washroom door. It was unoccupied, although water from the last flush was still swirling in the toilet bowl.
“Will you please explain what’s going on?” Cynthia asked.
“Search me. All I know is, there’s no possible way that a human being could have flushed that toilet and escaped down this corridor without being seen. This isn’t the first time it’s happened.”
Cynthia sniffed. “Lucky you didn’t find a woman in there, or you’d be in big trouble.”
Footsteps sounded as Nobby Sumner, the building superintendent, came downstairs from his roof garden, lugging a desiccated potted ficus. I asked him if he’d noticed anybody near my washroom. Nobby shook his head.
Cynthia followed me back to the office. Cynthia was going on and on about male insecurity and rights-invasion when she reached into the junk mail still remaining on my desk.
“What’s this?” she said, bringing out a large, cream-coloured envelope. She held it to her nose, sniffed and said, “Hmmmmm. Expensive. It’s patchouli, I think.”
“Let me guess. It’s a property developer looking for investors.”
“Let’s find out,” Cynthia said bossily, ripping open the envelope and drawing out a deckle-edged card.
Her jaw dropped open. “It’s from P.G. Mainwaring,” she murmured in reverential tones.
“P.G. Mainwaring?” I said, grabbing the card.
Printed on it were the words in copperplate: P.G. Mainwaring invites your attendance at the Mainwaring Memorial Lecture, 7:30 PM, August 14, Empress Hotel. RSVP.
“August 14th. Pity, that was yesterday. I didn’t know you moved in such exalted circles,” Cynthia opined enviously. “How does a deadbeat like you happen to know the likes of P.G. Mainwaring?”
“P.G. Mainwaring?” I said guardedly. “I’ve never even heard of him.”
“Idiot! Men don’t drench letters in patchouli. P.G. isn’t a guy. They say she owns a thousand apartment buildings.”
“Who says?”
“Everybody. You’d know that yourself if you read the business section occasionally, instead of the funny pages.”
Cynthia and I were cheek to cheek, looking at the card together, when the door banged open and Lightning Bradley
marched in. “You two look very cosy,” he said with a knowing smirk.
Lightning looked thinner than before, haggard. He threw the burning stub of the cigarette he was smoking into the cold fireplace and added with a suggestive leer, “Am I interrupting something?”
Cynthia groaned, stood up and put her cap on at a jaunty angle.
I said, “Are you driving, Cynthia?”
“Yes, why?”
“Would you mind dropping those two garbage bags off at Serious Crimes?”
“About your washroom,” she said quite seriously. “Technically, you may be dealing with a poltergeist. Ordinary ghosts don’t possess physical attributes. That’s why they walk through doors instead of opening them. Ghosts certainly can’t flush toilets.”
Well, she was wrong there. When they want to, Coast Salish ghosts can do many strange things.
Cynthia said, “After you get rid of Ugly, Silas, just lock yourself in, close the blinds, take a couple of Aspirins, and have a long nap.”
“You don’t get it,” I said.
“Damn right I don’t,” Cynthia said. Her expression changed. She said animatedly, “My God! I just noticed. You’ve had a haircut!”
“Twenty bucks at Alfredo’s.”
“You wuz robbed.” Cynthia blew me a kiss, picked the orange sacks up and carted them off without saying a word to Lightning. Looking through my window, I watched her lug the sacks across the street and into the back of a blue and white Ford. A puff of black smoke escaped its exhaust pipe as she revved the car’s big V8. Cynthia glanced over, saw me looking, and made a funny face. I watched her drive past Swans Hotel, turn right onto Store Street, and go from sight.
Lightning threw himself into a chair and was reaching inside his tunic for another cigarette when he noticed my frown.
I said unsympathetically, “You are under arrest.”
“What for?”
“Conduct unbefitting. Suspicion of murder. There’s a BOLO out on you, for God’s sake.”
“Serious Crimes sends Be On the Look Out notices for jaywalkers, so who gives a damn?” Putting both hands into his pockets, Lightning added, “What am I, a goddamn pharaoh?”
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