“Are you going to see Bobbi later?” he asked, as we went out into the studio.
“If I can,” I said. “I don’t feel like going another round with her father, though.”
“Can’t say as I blame you. I’m going to try to drop by around six. Why don’t you meet me there? Safety in numbers.”
“All right, I will,” I said.
We went into the back room. The rotating “light lock” door to the darkroom had been removed and stood forlornly in its frame against a wall, yet another victim of the Digital Age; we hadn’t been able to find anyone who wanted it and there wasn’t space for it at the new studio. Wayne and Mary-Alice were in the darkroom, filling a couple of cartons with plastic jugs, bottles, and cans of old chemicals to be hauled to the hazardous waste recycling depot.
“I’ll leave you to it,” I said to Matthias.
We shook hands and I returned to my office to continue cleaning out my desk. A few minutes later, Mary-Alice came into my office.
“Greg seems to be handling it well,” she said. “Wayne’s a basket case, though.”
“He’ll be fine,” I said.
“How about you?”
“What about me?”
“Come on, Tom. I’m not a complete idiot, no matter what you think. I know how you feel about Bobbi.”
“I’m not sure you do,” I said.
“You’re in love with her.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Mary-Alice. Bobbi is my friend and, yes, I probably love her. Maybe not quite as much as I love Hilly, and maybe not even as much as I love you. But I am not in love with her. Not in the sense you mean. Romantically.”
“Bullshit. Do you expect me to believe that you and Bobbi have worked together for almost ten years without sleeping together even once?”
“I can’t help what you believe, Mary-Alice.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just what it sounds like,” I said.
The year before, Mary-Alice had been convinced that her husband David had been having an affair with his nurse/receptionist, and two years before that, that our father, a retired engineer, had been having an affair with Maggie Urquhart, my Sea Village neighbour. The latter suspicion had proved, at least so far as I was concerned, to be unfounded; I had no opinion about the former. Mary-Alice’s faith in her own infallibility was as unshakeable as the Pope’s. Of course, just because Mary-Alice, or the Pope for that matter, believed something to be true didn’t necessarily make it not true, although in this case, she was dead wrong.
I ushered her to the door of the office and out into the studio. “We’ve still got a lot to do by Saturday,” I said, but I could tell from her expression that the subject was only temporarily closed.
chapter five
I left the studio at a little past three, hoping to catch a short nap, a shower, and a bite to eat before meeting Greg Matthias at the hospital at six. There were a number of things I wouldn’t miss about the Davie Street studio: the creaky, unreliable freight elevator; the leaky windows; Dingy Bill, the incontinent homeless man who occasionally camped out in the stairwell; and clients’ complaints that they could never find parking. One of the things I would miss, however, was the twice-daily commute to and from work. The half-kilometre morning walk from my house to the Aquabus dock by the Public Market, the short ferry ride across False Creek, and the slightly longer hike from the ferry dock at the foot of Hornby Street to the studio gave me time to switch mental gears and prepare myself for the daily grind. The return trip at the end of the day helped me relax and recharge my depleted psychic batteries. And it was about the only exercise I got. The new studio space was at most a five-minute walk from home, hardly time at all to change modes, recharge batteries, or burn off a pint of Granville Island Lager.
Disembarking from the tubby little Aquabus ferry at the dock by the public market, I climbed the steps to the quay and trudged toward home along Johnston Street, past the Ocean cement plant, one of the last vestiges of Granville Island’s industrial past, and the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, where a pair of students were wrapping another in clear plastic packing tape while a fourth video recorded the process. I might have paused to watch, just to see if I could figure out what the hell they were doing, and why, but I was so tired that all I could focus on was the siren song of the sofa in my living room. As I angled across the parking lot toward the ramp down to the Sea Village docks, I saw Loth sitting on the end of the raised pad of the old freight crane in the middle of the lot, drinking something from a brown paper bag. Unfortunately, Loth also saw me.
Loth — I didn’t know if it was his first name or his last — had been loitering about Granville Island since the New Year. He was a huge old man, seventy if he was a day, two or three inches shy of seven feet tall and weighing in at three hundred pounds or more. He was immensely strong. I’d seen him lift the rear end of a Ford Focus clear off the ground, for reasons known only to him. There was a rumour making the rounds that he was an ex-con, recently released from the Kent Institution, the federal maximum-security prison in Agassiz, the Corn Capital of B.C., where he’d been serving time for manslaughter. I’d never put much stock in it.
“You, mister man,” Loth called out as he dropped his paper bag with a glassy thud onto the pavement and heaved himself off the crane pad. He loomed toward me, his stout wood cane bowing under his massive weight. “Any work you got?” “What?” I asked.
“Work. You got work?”
“For you, you mean?” I said, backing away from him.
He kept coming and I kept backing away. He was huge. And he had a body odour that would peel paint, an overpowering mix of dried sweat, urine, and what smelled like rotting meat. I imagined that the only reason he wasn’t surrounded by flies was that any fly that got too close would instantly drop dead from the toxic stink.
“O’ course for me. Who else you see, yeah?” He waved his cane. “I paint good. Carpenter, too.”
“Sorry,” I said. “No.” He accepted it with a shrug.
“I hear about yer fran, yeah?” he said.
“My what?”
“Yer fran,” he repeated. “Mouthy cunt with no tits. Someone beat her up good, yeah.” He laughed and the alcohol fumes on his breath made my eyes water. “Mebbe now she learn to keep her mouth shut, ’cept when she sucks on men’s dicks, yeah.”
He howled with laughter and, leaning on his cane, shambled off across the lot toward the Granville Island Hotel to entertain the guests there. My heart was thudding and I realized I was holding my breath. What part of fight or flight was that? I wondered.
I picked up the bottle and paper bag he’d discarded and headed toward the ramp down to Sea Village and the safety of home. Home was a small, two-storey cedar-plank cottage, painted forest green and built on a reinforced concrete hull. The roof was flat, a deck surrounded by a cedar railing, the access shed sticking up in one corner like an afterthought. It had three bedrooms, one and a half baths, a practical kitchen, and a small sunken living room containing the aforementioned sofa.
As I started down the ramp, someone called, “Mr. McCall, oh, Mr. McCall.” I turned to see a man striding toward me along the quayside, briefcase dangling from one hand, BlackBerry clutched in the other. His name was Blake Darling and he claimed to be a real estate broker. He was as slick and slippery as he looked in his natty yellow jacket. Ignoring him, I started down the ramp again.
“Wait, sir, please,” he called. “Just a moment of your time.”
“I have nothing more to say to you, Mr. Darling,” I said. “Nothing has changed. I wasn’t interested in selling yesterday, I’m not interested today, and I won’t be interested tomorrow. Neither are any of my neighbours. Give it up. You’re only wasting your time, and your client’s money.”
“I never waste either,” he said. His voice was high-pitched and grated on the ear like feedback from a cheap guitar amp. “Time is money, as they say. Feel free to ask any of my clients if they’ve gotte
n their money’s worth. My list of satisfied clients is quite long.”
“You’re becoming a nuisance,” I said. “Some of my neighbours are talking about applying for a restraining order against you.”
“They’d just be wasting their time,” he said.
“Look, why can’t you get it through your head that none of us is interested in selling our shares in Sea Village?” Which was the only way to acquire a house moorage, as there was no room to expand along the quayside.
“My client is a very determined man, Mr. McCall. He usually gets what he wants.” He chortled and smiled, as if at some secret joke. “He didn’t get to where he is today by taking no for an answer. Neither did I.”
“Well, I hope he — and you — can handle the disappointment,” I said. “But even if someone was willing to sell, your client, whoever he is, would likely never be approved by the board, of which we are all members. To paraphrase Groucho Marx, Mr. Darling, anyone who’d hire someone like you to represent him isn’t the kind of neighbour we want.”
“There’s no need to be rude about it.”
“Nothing else seems to have worked.”
“You haven’t heard the latest offer.”
“I don’t want to. It doesn’t matter. Go away.”
“It’s a very good offer,” he said.
“Whatever it is,” I said, knowing it was pointless to try to get the last word, “it won’t be good enough.”
“How will you know until you hear it?”
“Good day, Mr. Darling.” I turned and walked down the ramp to the floating docks.
“I won’t give up, Mr. McCall,” he called out to my back.
I wondered if Loth was available for part-time security work.
“You think this Loth character might be the one who attacked Bobbi?” Greg Matthias said quietly. We were in Bobbi’s room. She was out of intensive care, but still in a coma and hooked up to an IV pump and monitors. She was in a semiprivate, but the other bed was unoccupied.
“Detective Kovacs asked me if we’d pissed anyone off lately,” I said. It wasn’t until my encounter with Loth that afternoon that I’d remembered Bobbi tearing a strip off him at the Public Market a few weeks before; he’d been making fun of a wheelchair-bound little person named Francis Peever, who taught at the Emily Carr Institute. “Loth looked like he was ready to kill her before Mabel and Baz arrived to break things up. And he strikes me as the kind who might hold a grudge.”
“Does he strike you as the kind who would send a woman made up like Marilyn Monroe to lure you to the marina in order to beat the living daylights out of you?”
“Well, no, when you put it that way,” I conceded.
He scratched a note in his book. “We’ll check him out.”
On the bed Bobbi whimpered and stirred, setting off a flurry of bleeps from the machines, then lay still and quiet again. Presently, the machines settled down again, too.
“The doctors say that’s a good sign,” Matthias said.
“I hope they’re right.”
I’d been thinking about what Mary-Alice had said. I was reasonably certain I wasn’t in love with Bobbi, but I was also reasonably certain that I couldn’t be absolutely certain I wasn’t. Naturally, because Bobbi was a very attractive woman, in a wholesome girl-next-door kind of way, I’d entertained the possibility of a romantic relationship, but I’d never considered it very seriously for very long. In point of fact, I suspected that if I suggested it, in all likelihood Bobbi would laugh, which would tend to dampen my enthusiasm.
There was no doubt in my mind, however, that I would be equally willing to throw myself in front of a bus to save her as I would to save my daughter Hilly, Mary-Alice, or even my former spouse, Linda. (I hoped it would never be necessary, particularly in Linda’s case; she’d just think I was trying to weasel out of paying child support.) As I looked down at Bobbi lying in that hospital bed, battered and bruised and comatose, I also knew for a certainty that if whatever or whoever was in charge of the particular dimension of reality in which we lived offered me the opportunity to change places with her, I’d do it in a nanosecond. From the expression on Greg Matthias’s face, I suspected he would, too.
I just didn’t want to marry her.
Or have Norman Brooks for a father-in-law.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded as he came into Bobbi’s room. “I thought I told you not to come around last night.”
“You didn’t, as a matter of fact,” I said. “You told me to leave. Not the same thing at all.”
“Well, I’m telling you now. Get out and don’t come back.”
“Are you drunk?”
“Get him out of here,” he barked to Matthias.
“I think Bobbi would want him here,” Matthias said.
“I don’t give a fuck what you think,” Brooks snapped back. “I don’t want him here.”
“Then I guess you don’t care what Bobbi thinks, either,” I said.
Brooks’s face clouded with rage. Matthias took my arm. I shook his hand off.
“What the hell is your problem?” I demanded.
“You are,” Brooks snarled. “I don’t like you …”
“I get that,” I said. “But why? What did I ever do to you?”
“You’re a punk. You and the kind of people you associate with. You damn near got my daughter killed.”
“That’s not —” I was going to say he wasn’t being fair, that it wasn’t my fault that Bobbi had been hurt, that it could have just as easily been me lying in that hospital bed, but Matthias gripped my arm again.
“Let’s go,” he said, giving my arm a brief squeeze for emphasis. There was no shaking him off this time.
Outside Bobbi’s room I said, “I’m getting damned sick of that guy.”
“Look, let’s go have a beer,” Matthias said. “How about that place near where you live? Bridges. I haven’t had anything to eat since breakfast. I hear they do good burgers.”
So we got in our respective vehicles and drove to Granville Island. Bridges was busy, but we were able to find a seat on the terrace overlooking the marina. From where we sat we could see the Wonderlust. We could also see the point under the Burrard Street Bridge where Bobbi had been found. Neither of us spoke, except to the waitress, until she had taken our order. Then Matthias asked:
“What’s Norman Brooks got against you?”
“I wish I knew,” I said. “He obviously blames me for what happened to Bobbi. I suppose that’s understandable. In some way I guess I am, but — shit, you don’t think he thinks I did it, do you?”
“I don’t know. It’s possible. You don’t have the best alibi I’ve ever heard. You and Bobbi are getting along all right?”
“Sure.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “But …”
“No but,” I said. “We’re getting along fine. At least, I think we are. Why? Has she said anything to you?”
“No, but she might have said something to her father.”
“They don’t talk much,” I said.
“Well, whatever it is, it’s clear he doesn’t have much use for you — or your friends,” he added with a wry smile.
Our beers arrived, and his hamburger, a fat half-pound charcoal-grilled patty in a crusty Kaiser, with onions, tomato, and mushrooms. He tucked in.
“Good,” he said after a few bites. He ate a few more mouthfuls, drank some beer, wiped mustard off his chin, then said, “Let’s change the subject. How’s your daughter? Hilly, right? Is she back from Australia yet?”
“She’s not due back till the fall,” I said.
“She’s what, sixteen?”
“She’ll be fifteen in August.”
“You must miss her.”
“I do,” I said. “She usually spends a good part of the summer with me. This is the first summer in nine years she hasn’t been with me.” I sipped my beer.
“How’s Reeny doing?” he asked, after washing down a mouthful of burger.
“Fin
e. She’s still in Europe.”
“But you two are, um, still together, aren’t you?”
“To be honest,” I said. “I don’t really know. We like each other — a lot, I think — and we get along, but the last time we spoke on the phone we both agreed there was something missing. I’m not sure what, though.” Maybe love, I added to myself.
Matthias nodded. “That’s essentially how it is between Bobbi and me,” he said. He gestured toward my almost finished beer. “Want another?”
I shook my head. “Thanks, but I think I’ll call it a night.” I started to take out my wallet.
“My treat,” he said.
I thanked him and left him there with the remains of his burger and his beer.
As I left the pub I saw Eddy Porter sitting on a bench, looking woebegone as he stared out at the boat traffic on False Creek.
“Why so glum, Eddy?” I asked. I should’ve known better.
“Apophis is coming,” he said.
“Who?”
“Not who. What. Apophis is a near-Earth asteroid. It’s going to hit the Earth in 2036.”
“Oh,” I said. “We still have plenty of time to stock up on bottled water and freeze-dried food, then.”
“Won’t do any good,” he said. “It was an asteroid like Apophis that killed off the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago. Apophis’ll do the same to us.”
“Well, in that case, I’ll immigrate to the moon.” And Hilly. Reeny, too, if she wanted to come. We’d live in a dome and raise hydroponic veggies.
He shook his head. “It’s going to hit the moon, too.”
“Mars, then. Or is it going to hit Mars as well?”
“No. Mars is okay,” Eddy said.
“That’s good to know,” I said. He nodded.
Eddy Porter was employed at the Granville Island boat works, where he’d probably inhaled too much fibreglass solvent. A few years earlier he’d been abducted by aliens who, he said, had inserted an implant in his head, which was no doubt how they kept him apprised of upcoming celestial events. He was harmless. In fact, I often wondered if he was one of the saner people I knew.
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