Last of the Independents

by Sam Wiebe

  “That the only reason?”

  “It’s not the highest paying job, I know.”

  “How about fifty-fifty?”

  “Where I come from we don’t turn away money.”

  “You just did.”

  Cliff Szabo stepped past her. Katherine shut the door as she left, shooting me a look that was equal parts “thank you” and “you’re insane.”

  Szabo tested the bench before sitting down. “I overreact,” he said by way of apology.

  “I’d like to help,” I said.

  “I’m still not sure,” he said. “What can you do the cops can’t?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing,” he repeated.

  “That’s right. The police have resources and connections I can’t begin to compete with. They’re your best hope to get your son back. Any PI who’s not a fraud will tell you the same.”

  “So why hire you?”

  “Because, statistically speaking, the more people looking, the better. And because sometimes people get lucky.”

  I gestured at the kettle. Szabo shook his head.

  “Most missing persons the police find, or they come back on their own. Of the three I worked where that wasn’t the case, I found two. And both were due more to luck and patience than skill.”

  “You said three.”

  I nodded at the Loeb file on the corner of my table.

  “I want you to understand,” I said. “The best I can do is work this efficiently and diligently. I can’t make your son appear. When you feel that what I’m doing isn’t helping, say so, but know going in that it’s expensive and time-consuming, and there are no guarantees.”

  He stood up and walked to the table. He produced a thick roll of twenties, stretched the elastic around his wrist, and began counting out piles of five.

  “You don’t have to pay up front,” I said.

  He didn’t reply until there were six piles of five, fanned across the table like a poker hand.

  “Six hundred is all the money I have,” he said.

  We both looked at the money silently.

  “I can also pay you ten percent.”

  “Of what?”

  “My business,” he said, his posture perfect, dignified.

  I was going to object, because I didn’t want his money and because it wasn’t nearly enough. It was an insult to say anything either way. I nodded and created an empty file on the Mac.

  “Tell me everything,” I said.

  “Friday, March 6th was the day he went missing. I pulled Django James out of school to take with me. I had things to sell. An Ampex reel-to-reel, some coins, and a BMX bike. He was very fond of the bike. He helped me clean it, paint it, replace the chain. The previous owners hadn’t cared for it, even though it was a Schwinn Stingray, the Bicentennial model. I let Django choose the new colour. He chose blue.”

  “The cleaning et cetera happened prior to that Friday?”

  “Yes. We loaded the car in the morning. I sold the Ampex around ten to a music studio. Twelve hundred dollars. Cost me ten dollars fifty cents.”

  “Name of the studio and address?”

  “Enola Curious. Broadway near Cambie, a couple of blocks from the Skytrain station.”

  “Who did you sell to?”

  “Amelia Yates, she owns the studio.”

  “Is that Yates with an A or Yeats with an E-A?”

  “I’m not sure,” Szabo said. “She’s bought from me in the past. We finished about 10:45, then Django and I went to some coin shops Downtown, but I didn’t sell anything else.”

  “Let me stop you for a second,” I said. “Why exactly did you pull your son out of class?”

  “To show him.”

  “Show him what, exactly?”

  “How the world works.” He sat down, not on the bench, to the left of the desk in Katherine’s chair. I watched him flex his left knee several times.

  “School is important, of course,” he said. “He has to get an education. But school doesn’t tell you how to make money. How to survive. They teach you Tigris and Euphrates. Tigris and Euphrates is good, but try and pay the Hydro with Tigris and Euphrates.”

  “You pull him out often?”

  “Once a month, usually. We go on holidays and Pro-D days as well.”

  “After the coin shops?”

  “Lunch,” he said. “We went to Little Mountain. He rode the bike around. He wanted to keep it. I told him we had to sell that bike, but we’d find another. Bikes are easy to find, but original BMX bikes are too valuable to keep.”

  “And he was upset over this?”

  “Not upset. He’s very well-behaved.”

  “Disappointed? Bummed out?”

  “Yes, a bit. When I went to the bike store he sat in the car.”

  “What time was that?”

  “One.”

  “One,” I repeated, typing it into the file. “And after you sold the bike?”

  “I didn’t sell it,” Mr. Szabo said. “The bike shop low-balled. Times are tough, he said. Not tough enough to give away a Stingray Bicentennial for chicken feed.”

  He waved his hand in dismissal of the owner.

  “After, we went to a pawn shop, and that’s where it happened: Django and I went into the store. I was talking to the owner. Django asked could he wait in the car. I gave him the keys. I made a deal with Mr. Ramsey who owns the shop. I came out and the car was gone.” Anticipating my question he said, “2:43 p.m.,” and repeated “Friday, March 6th.”

  “The car was never recovered?”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “Make and model?”

  “Brown Taurus wagon, 1994. Transmission not so good, few dents in the passenger’s side door. Previous owner practically gave it away.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I was in shock for some time. I checked my watch. I looked around to see if I had parked somewhere else and forgot. I went into the store. I told the owner and his daughter my son had been taken. They smirked like I was joking. I kept saying it until they saw I was serious. They called the police for me. I repeated to them what happened again and again. An officer named —” He dug through his wallet, shuffling through business cards and creased scraps of paper. “Sergeant Herbert Lam.” He offered me the card. I waved it away, aware of who Lam was.

  “Any phone messages after?” I asked. “Any response to the news stories?”

  “Someone said I should check a house on Fraser. Three tips said that, but it turned out to be the same person each time. Sergeant Lam said the woman had a problem with her neighbour and was trying to get the police to arrest her.”

  “Sounds like my grandmother.”

  I saved the file as Szabo-prelim.txt and sent it to the LaserJet.

  “I’ll need all the missing persons data, including a full description of Django, what he was wearing, dental charts if you’ve got them, the plate and VIN numbers from the car.”

  “I’ll bring them tomorrow.”

  “Make it Monday,” I said. “Give me time to run some of this down.” I brought out the client and contract forms. “And I’ll need everything McEachern worked up.”

  Mr. Szabo looked at the door. “I don’t have that,” he said.

  “McEachern didn’t give you a copy?”

  “He did, but I was angry. I threw it at him. I told you, I overreact.”

  “I don’t blame you,” I said. “I’ll talk with him.”

  We shook hands. On his way out Cliff Szabo turned back and said, “I love my son, Mr. Drayton.”

  “Never doubted it.”

  “They’ll tell you I didn’t,” he said. “I’m not good at sharing such things. But I do love him,” he reiterated, and was gone.

  In my brief time on the job, I’d met few cops better than Herbert Lam. He’d been one of the legends of the VPD, up there with Kim Rossmo and Al Arsenault, Dave Dickson and Whistling Smith. Lam was probably responsible for half a dozen missing children ending up back in the arms
of their loved ones. A legacy to be proud of.

  One evening in July, Lam and his family were driving home from Spanish Banks. A semi-trailer crossed the median, flipping the car, killing Lam and injuring his wife and daughter. I found this out from the front desk of the Main Street station. The news floored me. I wasn’t Lam’s age and I hadn’t worked with him on the job, but I felt a sense of loss. In the movies the great detectives are obsessive geniuses. In real life, too often they’re hard-working family men and women who don’t deserve the ends they meet.

  When Katherine came back at half past four I was on the phone trying to figure out who had taken over Lam’s workload. I’d negotiated through the VPD phone maze to Constable Gavin Fisk’s desk, only to get his voicemail. Fisk I knew. I’d gone through training with him. We’d once been friends.

  Katherine read through the file while I waited for Fisk to pick up. He didn’t and the call went to message. “Gavin, this is Mike Drayton. Concerning the Szabo kid. You have my number.”

  I hung up and tried Aries again, to no avail.

  “He’s so precise about the time,” Katherine said.

  “What does that tell you?”

  “I guess it’s possible he looked at his watch just before he noticed Django was missing.” She studied my expression. “Is it possible he’s lying?”

  “Is that ever impossible?” I hung up the phone. “Sometimes an abundance of details means you’re trying hard to convince someone something is true. More likely, though, after being grilled by the police several times, being interviewed by the press, not to mention McEachern, Szabo probably committed his best guess to memory and now repeats it as fact.”

  “So what does that tell you?” Katherine countered.

  “That he’s more concerned with emotional truth than empirical truth, as most of us are. Facts have to cohere into a story of some kind before we can deal with them.”

  Katherine had placed an ATM envelope on the corner of the table, currency visible through the holes. “What’s that?”

  “Five hundred dollars,” she said. “Half of Laws’s bonus. I couldn’t take it all once I saw how much it was.”

  “It’s yours,” I said. “You earned it.”

  “When I worked at White Spot, management took a portion of the tips. Take it. Or put it into the business. Upgrade some of this shitty furniture.”

  I took the money. “What’s your schedule for this semester?”

  “I’m yours Tuesdays and Fridays starting next week.”

  “Drop out of school and come work for me.”

  She laughed. “Seriously?”

  “I need the help.”

  “You want me to drop out and do this for the rest of my life? On what kind of wage?”

  “You just got five hundred dollars.”

  “Is that likely to happen again?”

  “We can negotiate,” I said. “This isn’t about money, it’s about you fulfilling your calling.”

  She smirked. “Which is what?”

  “Every person has a purpose to serve. This —” I swept my arm majestically around the room, Charlton Heston style “— is yours.”

  “And what’s your calling, Mike?”

  “I’m here to make sure you don’t squander another three years on a bachelor’s degree, and then the rest of your life in government service. Smart as you are, why the fuck would you want to work for the Canadian government?”

  “Money. Security. Benefits.”

  “That’s the language of fear.”

  “No, Mike, that’s the language of adults.”

  I said, “Work here.”

  She said, “I’ll think about it.”

  III

  The Blessed Peacemakers

  In the lobby of the Cambie Street police station, above the plaques commemorating the dead, is stenciled an excerpt of witness testimony from the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” Every time I step inside I’m drawn to that wall. I look from the scripture to the plaque beneath the word peacemakers. I stare at the bottom row. I find the photo of the clean-shaven man fourth from the end, and I lock eyes with him.

  It’s a photo my grandmother doesn’t display. He is so eager to do good. His is the expression of a man who has never reckoned with deep uncertainty. His world is one where the law, the Sovereign, and God are perfect and infallible and in no way contradict one another. It’s hard to look at that face and believe he would know anything about living in the world today.

  My grandfather, Jacob Kessler, was born the year of Stagecoach and Gone with the Wind. A rawboned Mennonite from Moosefuck, Manitoba, he rebels, runs away from home, gets drunk, and enlists. After a stint in the navy he moves west, joins the Vancouver Police, meets a thin, sharply beautiful girl with a glint of prairie poverty in her eye. They have a son and a daughter: a nuclear family in the nuclear age. The son eventually hangs himself. The daughter meets the draft-dodging scion of the Drayton & Kling Paper Products empire. They’re together twelve years before they have a kid. The pressure gets to Jacob’s son-in-law and he splits for an ashram in Southern California. His daughter follows as soon as she sheds the pregnancy weight. The kid only knows them as abstracts.

  Around the house, Jacob was a dark presence, a stoop-shouldered, apelike, Victor McLaglen-type who drank lemon juice during the afternoons and Crown Royal in the evenings; who watched hockey scores and Hee Haw and owned three long-playing records, all of them Merle Haggard. Doted on me, took me camping and hunting, always teaching.

  As a cop he never sought advancement and hated the brass. He stayed CFL, Constable For Life. In the seventies, his heyday, he was part of an anti-gang unit charged with taking the neighbourhoods back from the local gangs. Rumours abound about members of the H-Squad descending on the East Vancouver parks, preying on the predators, beating them senseless or worse. He didn’t talk much about those days.

  Six weeks before mandatory retirement, Jacob rousted a drunk who had passed out after rubbing fecal matter on the cenotaph in Victory Square. The drunk stabbed him in the throat with the broken-off handle of a sherry bottle, then hightailed, taking his gun and radio.

  Legend has it Jacob completed the walk to St. Paul’s Hospital, passed out at the door, and never woke up.

  Four years later, the moment I’d met the recommended minimum of post-secondary education, I dropped out of college and applied for the job.

  It didn’t work out. Which is why, on a cool Friday in September, three days before Labour Day, I was staring up at my grandfather’s face, a stranger amid the day-to-day traffic of the Main Street station.

  Gavin Fisk had said he’d be down in a minute. Seventeen minutes later he strolled out of the elevator, a hockey bag slung over his shoulder. A tall, muscular white man with a stubble-dotted head, wearing grey sweats and a shirt that said POLICE: The WORLD’S LARGEST STREET GANG.

  He grinned and grabbed my hand in an alpha-male handshake. I upped the torque of my own grip. Rule one for dealing with people like Gavin Fisk: never show weakness and never back down. Otherwise you’ll spend every morning handing over your lunch money.

  “Encyclopedia Brown,” he said. “What’d you want to see me about?”

  He didn’t wait for my response but kept moving. We walked out of the station, down Wylie to the high-fenced lot beneath the Cambie Street Bridge that contained the motor pool and the staff parking.

  “One of Lam’s Missing Persons cases from earlier this year. Django James Szabo?”

  “Lunatic father,” Fisk said. We stopped by a white F350 spotted with gull shit, parked over the white line so it took up two spaces. He unlocked the canopy and hefted his hockey gear into the bed.

  “I talked to him,” he said, “took him through his story a couple times. He was real calm till we get to the questions nobody likes — did he hit his kid, did he fuck his kid, and I’m being diplomatic as hell — then out of nowhere he overturns the table and lunges at me.”
/>   “He was distraught.”

  “Yes, Mike, I guessed that too.”

  “You look into his story?”

  Fisk unlocked the door of the cab and propped one foot on the running board. He rolled down the window and threaded his arm through.

  “If I remember right, he’d dragged his kid to a bunch of junk shops. They all remembered him, frequent customer or seller or whatever he was. He sold some old junk to a music studio. The hot piece of ass that owns the studio said the same thing, though I grilled her very thoroughly on the subject.”

  That wolfish grin. “What about the pawn shop?” I said.

  “Not much to get out of them. Store tape shows the kid goofing around, his dad sending him to the car. Dad leaves, comes back, acts upset or a reasonable facsimile. They call the cops, the cops show up.”

  “Anything suspicious on the tape prior to their arrival?”

  Fisk’s good humour chilled a few degrees.

  “No,” he said. “’Magine that, no one walked in with a sign round their neck saying ‘I plan to take a kid.’ Has the dad unloaded his conspiracy theories on you yet?”

  “He thinks it’s a kidnapping.”

  “Of course. Because the idea his kid took off on his own is hard to take.”

  “You think he ran away?”

  “From that nutjob? Wouldn’t you?” Fisk sat and pulled the door closed. “Herb Lam had the same thought. Know what clinched it for me?”

  Anything other than facts, I thought, but shook my head and said nothing.

  “Szabo taught the kid to drive. Lanky kid, he could reach the pedals with the seat all the way forward.”

  “So nothing ever came up, no evidence someone might have taken the car with Django in it?”

  He shook his head and started the engine.

  I shouted, “You or Lam ever run down a list of carjackers?”

  He shifted out of park but the truck didn’t move. His gaze had frosted over.

  “There’s no way in your mind we could be right about this, is there?”

  “I have to check either way,” I said.

  “You talk to Roy McEachern yet?”

  “Won’t return my calls.”

  “Drop my name if it helps.” His warm, predatory smile flashed through. “You know Mira and I moved in together.”