Depth of Field

by Michael Blair

  We got out of the car, staggering with exhaustion as we made our way down the ramp and along the dock to my house.

  “I’m going to have a Scotch or six,” I said when we were inside. “Do you want anything?” She didn’t answer. I turned to find her staring at me. “What is it?”

  “We’ve never made love,” she said.

  “What? Jesus, Bobbi. What the hell …?”

  “I thought I was going to die tonight.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “But look, maybe you’re in shock or something. Post-traumatic stress whatever.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But when that crazy bastard was pointing his gun at us I really thought we were going to die, right there and then, and all I could think about was that in the ten years we’ve known each other we’ve never made love. I realized that I didn’t want to die without ever having made love with you.”

  “For god’s sake, Bobbi.”

  “Is the idea so awful?”

  “Hell, no. It’s just that, well, you’re my friend. It would almost be like making love with my sister.”

  “You said ‘almost.’”

  “Yeah, well, you aren’t my sister, are you?”

  “Pour your Scotch,” she said, smiling with a wattage I hadn’t seen in a while. “You look like you need it more than ever.”

  While I was pouring my Scotch, she got herself a Granville Island Lager from the kitchen. When she came back into the living room, we sat side by side on the sofa, feet on the coffee table.

  “So,” I said. “When would you like to do it?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Sometime before I die.”

  “Good. I’m a little tired tonight. I don’t think I could do a proper job of it.”

  “Me either,” she said. “And my stitches hurt.”

  We clinked, glass to bottle, then simply sat there, shoulders touching, not talking, until we were both struggling to stay awake. Bobbi’s eyelids fluttered, drooped, then lifted.

  “Go to bed,” I said.

  “I think I will,” she said, getting up from the sofa with a sofa grunt of pain. She leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. “G’night, boss.”

  After she had gone upstairs, I sat for a few minutes longer, finishing my Scotch. Then I got up, made certain the doors and windows were locked, and went up to bed. Surprisingly, I slept dreamlessly until I awakened at eight o’clock Saturday morning to the smell of coffee.

  I spent most of Saturday going over the plans for the calendar shoot with Bobbi, Wayne, Mary-Alice, and Jeanie Stone, details such as props, costumes (such as they were) and accessories, a tent for the ladies to change in, movable privacy screens, as well as our own gear. Bobbi tired quickly, but did her share of the work, maybe more. Greg Matthias came by in the middle of the afternoon, asked her if she felt up to talking about what she remembered about her attack, and took her for coffee when she said yes, she’d be grateful for the opportunity to sit down. When she returned half an hour later, she was a little preoccupied, which wasn’t surprising, but soon rallied. Every so often, though, she tended to stop what she was doing or saying, like a wind-up toy running down, and slowly drift off to somewhere else in space and time, perhaps one of Anna Waverley’s alternate timelines.

  When I least expected it, the realization that I’d witnessed the deaths of three people in less than a single day kept creeping up on me like a speeding cement truck, leaving me feeling empty and cold inside, breathing hard and heart pounding, desperately wishing that I could slip away to an alternate timeline myself. This reality had taken on a strange and disturbing perspective, as if I were living in a world with too little depth of field, as if my world were compressed into a very narrow band of focus, like one of Toni Hafkenscheid’s whimsical landscapes, minus the whimsy. I didn’t like it at all. Surely there was a parallel universe somewhere in which Walter Moffat was still enjoying his paintings of half-naked ladies, Woody Getz was selling used cars and making cheesy porn with Mr. See-em-sweat, where Sam Waverley and Doris Greenwood snuggled in front the fire in Sam’s cabin in the mountains, and Anna Waverley found a lover she liked in Elise Moffat.

  Bobbi’s father came into the studio at a little past five. Everyone else had gone.

  “Got a minute?” he said.

  “Depends on what you have in mind,” I said.

  “I came to say thank you,” he said. Neatly dressed in a suit and tie, freshly shaved and barbered, he looked like a different man. I was willing to bet he was sober, too.

  “For what?” I said. “I almost got your daughter killed. Again.”

  “Yeah, she told me what happened. She told me you saved her life.”

  “She was exaggerating.”

  “Goddamn it,” he growled. “I’m trying to do the right thing here. Save the smart remarks, okay?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But Mrs. Moffat is the one you should be thanking, not me.”

  “The way Bobbi tells it, if you hadn’t jumped Kittle when you did, he’d have killed both her and you.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Bobbi jumped him at the same time I did.”

  “That’s not what she says. Anyway …” He held out his hand.

  “Okay,” I said, as we shook hands. “You’re welcome.”

  “I’m sorry I’ve been such an asshole, too.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I understand.”

  “I haven’t been handling retirement very well,” he said. “That’s no excuse, though. Believe it or not, I was a good cop, but I was a truly lousy husband and father. There’s not much I can do about the former, except treat my ex and her husband with more respect, but I intend to do everything I can to make up for being a lousy father.”

  “Bobbi will like that,” I said.

  “We’ll see,” he said. He looked at his watch. Bobbi had told me she was meeting him for dinner, some place where she wouldn’t frighten children. “Gotta go.”

  “Good luck,” I said.

  “Are you okay?” Bobbi said, as we sat on the roof deck later that evening, nursing a pair of Granville Island Lagers.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s just, well, every so often I realize how close I came to being shot.”

  “You were shot.”

  “It’s all right, ma’am, it’s only a flesh wound,” I drawled. “I mean really shot,” I added. “Dead.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I try not to think about it.”

  “Me too.”

  “Does it work?” she asked.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Me either.”

  “You told your dad I saved your life …”

  “Well, you did. Sort of.”

  “It’s hard to find good help these days,” I said. “What about the other thing?”

  “What other thing?”

  “What you were thinking when you thought we were going to die. Did you tell him about that?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Good,” I said. “Because I was thinking that maybe I’d like to make love with you too before I die, but not so soon.”

  “Am I going to regret telling you that?”

  “Probably.”

  The calendar shoot was scheduled to begin at dawn Sunday morning, which, a few days before the summer solstice, was at the unconscionable hour of 5:10 a.m., so we said good night and headed for our respective beds. I didn’t think I’d get to sleep, but I must have, because the next thing I knew it was four o’clock in the morning and Wayne and Jeanie Stone were pounding on the front door. Figuratively speaking, leastways; Bobbi was already up and had made a thermos of coffee, which we took with us to the studio to pick up our gear.

  “What happened to your car?” Jeanie wanted to know, eying the duct tape around the stem of the broken side mirror as we loaded our gear into the back of the Liberty — some of it was already stowed in Jeanie’s yellow Ford Escape Hybrid.

  “It had a rough night,” I told her. “I’ll tell you about it someday.”


  Jeanie, a.k.a. Miss October, posed on one of the pieces of logging equipment left in the park after the windstorm cleanup, something called a “feller/buncher” that could bite off a tree up to four feet in diameter. She stood on the massive jaws, wearing nothing (apparently) but a hardhat and work boots, peeking out from behind the strategically positioned blade of a huge chainsaw standing on end. In reality, she was also wearing a tiny string-bikini bottom — we’d Photoshop out the bikini strings on her hips later to make it look as though she really were completely naked behind the saw. By 5:00 p.m. we were all exhausted, but we had managed to shoot Misses May through October — we’d shoot Misses November through April in the studio and Photoshop in the appropriate backgrounds. Although the other “models” left as soon as their sessions in front of the camera were over, Jeanie hung in for the whole day, helping Bobbi with the heavy lifting.

  “Thanks for your help,” I said, as we unloaded gear from the cargo area of her Escape back at the studio.

  “It was fun,” she said. “When do you want to do the rest of the months?”

  “Let’s see what we’ve got so far,” I said. “We might want to redo Miss May in the studio. How about I call you late tomorrow or early Tuesday?”

  “Okay. Once we’ve done the rest, we can decide where you’re going to wine and dine me.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “Not having second thoughts, are you?”

  “Heck, no. I’m looking forward to it.”

  “Good. Me, too.” She climbed into her Escape and waved as it hummed away, the tires making more noise on the cobbles than the hybrid engine.

  “How did it go?” Mary-Alice asked when I went into the studio.

  “It went great,” I said. “Jeanie and the other girls worked their — worked very hard. It’s going to be a fun calendar. I think they’re going to raise a lot of money for the park restoration fund.”

  “At least it’s all for a good cause,” Mary-Alice said.

  I tidied up a few loose ends, then told Mary-Alice I’d see her later. Five minutes after that I was standing on the quay overlooking the Broker’s Bay Marina. My timing couldn’t have been better. The tide was out, the ramp down to the docks steeply sloped, and Chrissy Conrad waddled slightly as she descended to the dock, carrying a heavy paper bag of groceries in each arm. Her hair was blonde again, and even shorter. I caught up with her at the bottom of the ramp.

  “Let me help you with those,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said with a start. “Hey. It’s all right, I’ve got it.”

  I relieved her of a bag, anyway. “Taking a trip?”

  She looked at me for a beat or two before answering. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”

  “This is too much boat for someone to handle on their own,” I said as we approached the Free Spirit. “Especially someone who doesn’t know much about boats.”

  “I’ll manage.” She set her bag of groceries on the gunwale beside the cockpit. “Thanks for the help,” she said, reaching for the other bag.

  “I don’t suppose the fact that you don’t own it is going to stop you from taking it.” I held onto the groceries as I stepped aboard the boat. The hatch was open. I peered down the companionway into the cabin.

  “Sam and Anna aren’t going to need it, are they?”

  “No, I suppose not. Awfully cold, though.”

  “Look, I appreciate your help, but I can take it from here.”

  “So, Chrissy — or should I call you Caroline? — whose idea was it to steal Walter Moffat’s art collection? Yours? Or Woody Getz’s?”

  “Gimme a break,” she said. “Woody doesn’t have that much imagination. Or the balls.”

  “Yours, then. But you must’ve known most of it was junk. You must’ve also known that Moffat couldn’t afford to ransom it back.”

  “It wasn’t all junk,” she said. “There are a couple of bronzes that are worth three or four grand apiece. And an early Maxfield Parrish that Sam sold to Walter by mistake. He thought it was a copy, but it turned out to be the real deal. It’ll fetch at least fifty grand at auction, maybe more. There’s a Franz von Stuck ‘Amazon’ that might be real, too. It just needs a little better provenance.”

  “What about the rest of it?”

  “Threw it into a skip.” I could almost hear poor old Walter spinning in his fridge at the morgue.

  “What if Mrs. Moffat reports the theft?” I said.

  “How likely is that? She’d have to admit that her husband collected tits. And even if she does, I’ve got bills of sale dated from before the robbery.”

  “Forged, no doubt.”

  “So what? By the time anyone gets around to checking, I’ll be long gone.”

  “Did you take the money from the safe, too?”

  “What money?” she said archly. “Oh, you mean the illegal campaign contributions and the proceeds of Woody’s blackmail scheme? It never existed, did it?”

  “And the boat?”

  “It was a gift from Anna.”

  “You don’t really expect me to believe that, do you?”

  “I don’t care what you believe.”

  “Did you know that Kittle was going to abduct Bobbi and kill her — and me?”

  “Shit, no.”

  “When I asked Elise Moffat if she knew you, she lied. Why would she do that? Why would she protect you?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe because she thinks I’m her daughter.”

  She’d be the right age to be the baby Elise had put up for adoption. And there was a superficial resemblance. But I didn’t believe for a minute that Chrissy — or Caroline — was Elise’s daughter. “You aren’t, though, are you?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think you are one cold-hearted piece of work,” I said.

  “Yeah, well …”

  “Four people are dead because of you.”

  “How do you figure that? All I did was try to run a simple little scam that backfired through no fault of mine. Like I told you, no one was supposed to get hurt. And if Woody hadn’t panicked when your friend showed up, no one would’ve been. Stupid bastard.”

  “But people did get hurt, didn’t they? Maybe you aren’t directly responsible, but you set a number of balls in motion that resulted in Bobbi’s near drowning and the deaths of Anna and Sam Waverley, Walter Moffat, and Tony Kittle. Not to mention the likely collapse of the Bridgwater foundation.”

  “Not my problem. Anyway, what’s the most the police could charge me with, even if there was any proof, besides your word, that I was the one who hired you to photograph the Wonderlust?”

  A sun-bleached young man came sauntering along the dock, a bulging backpack slung over one muscular shoulder. I’d seen him around Bridges and the marinas, but I didn’t know his name. Your basic boat bum. Chrissy had close to ten years on him.

  “Hello, sir,” he said pleasantly as he climbed aboard the Free Spirit. He dropped the backpack to the cockpit deck. “Are you a friend of Lucy’s?”

  “Hey, baby,” Chrissy said, leaning into him, kissing him on the mouth. “He was just helping me with the last of the groceries. You all set?”

  “All set.”

  Chrissy said to me, “Well, thanks for all your help.”

  I looked at the boy. “I wouldn’t go with her on this boat, if I were you,” I said.

  Predictably, he said, “You aren’t me, though, are you?” I mouthed it along with him, which seemed to annoy him.

  “Why don’t you cast us off, baby?” Chrissy said. “We’ve still got a couple of hours of light.”

  “Sure, Luce,” the boy said. “You’d better go ashore now, sir.”

  I stepped over the gunwale onto the dock. “Well, good luck to you,” I said to him. “You’re going to need it.”

  I watched as he cast off and Chrissy/Caroline/Lucy started the engine. I was still watching as they motored out of the marina into False Creek and turned toward the Burrard Street Bridge and the open water of Burrard Inlet.
Then I went home and made a couple of telephone calls. The first one was to Elise Moffat. I told her what “Caroline” had told me, that while most of her husband’s collection was junk, some of the items were quite valuable and that she should immediately report them stolen.

  The next call was to the Coast Guard, to report a stolen sailboat.

  The End

  acknowledgements

  Thanks to Alan Annand and Marc Casinni for their support, encouragement, and invaluable comments on early drafts; Toni Hafkenscheid for his wonderful cover photo; Dr. Judith Paterson for suggesting the title of Jeanie Stone’s thesis; Stuart Ramsey for correcting my geographical and topographical blunders — all errors are my own; the folks at Dundurn Press for a stellar job, as usual. And to Pamela Hilliard, without whose love, patience, and understanding, writing — and life — wouldn’t be nearly as much fun.