by Sam Wiebe
“Theo’s brother,” McEachern said, nodding, a spark behind his gaze. Despite himself he was taking an interest in the case. “You think Zak was the car thief, picked Django up by accident. It’s workable, though why didn’t he just dump the kid at the nearest gas station? What evidence are you going on?”
“Ramsey and his daughter were discussing whether to warn Zak.”
“They told you that?”
“I heard it from them, yeah.”
He shook his head, grinning. “You bugged the pawn shop. You devious bastard.”
Despite myself I felt a little pride. “It was good, wasn’t it?”
And then we looked at each other, and the grin and the pride faded, and we were adversaries again.
“Listen,” McEachern said. It was becoming his catch phrase. “With Hess and Anthony behind bars, there’s not much Lloyd can do if you cross him now.”
“Good to know,” I said.
“I said now.” He tapped my shoulder with two fingers. “That’s not to say that he’d just forget about you. One way or another he’ll make you pay for crossing him. Maybe down the road, when Anthony is back on the street and Szabo’s forgot about you. Then there’s nothing to stop him from revisiting things. You willing to write that kind of check against yourself?”
I opened the door. “I have to go.”
McEachern’s paw slammed down upon my knee. “Your granddad and I promised each other, anything happens, we look out for our partner’s kids. If it was me, I’d hope Jacob would talk to my daughters the way I’m talking to you. Help me keep at least that much of the promise. Leave them alone.”
“Remember what you said to me when I asked you for the Szabo file?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t want you on the case.”
“But remember what you said? It was to the tune of ‘go fuck yourself.’”
The righteous feeling of slamming the door on him and having the final word dissipated as I got to the front steps of my grandmother’s house. I looked back. The van was crawling up the street, Roy McEachern hidden behind the tinted glass.
Waiting in the foyer of Yeats Manor for Amelia to come down, keeping her father company, made me feel eighteen again. I half-expected Chet Yates to ask me whether my intentions for his daughter were honorable. I’m not sure how I would have answered him.
Sitting in an uncomfortable Stickley, holding a cup of organic Earl Grey, the bergamot strong enough to render the brew undrinkable, I felt Chet Yates’s yellowish eyes searching me. I wondered if he recognized me. His concern seemed to be whether I recognized him. I kept an uncomfortable smile on my face and let him direct the conversation.
“Where are you and Amelia headed?” he asked after wrapping up a long anecdote about the bassist of a band I’ve never heard of.
“Not sure, but I think it’s the Media Club. A friend of hers is dropping a CD.”
“I don’t understand modern music,” he said, not indignantly, but lamentably. As if his faculties were no longer up to making any kind of critical judgment.
He set his cup and saucer down on the arm of the settee. His eyes followed the row of photos along the wall. “I was lucky,” he said. “I know I was. I dearly wish I could communicate more of what I learned to Amelia. But everything today is drum machines and Pro Tools and Auto Tune. What’s worse is, instead of using these fascinating new inventions to explore, most people use them to cover up mediocrity.”
“I don’t know much about art,” I said. “I’ve never really listened to pop music, I mean what gets on the radio. Nothing against it, it’s just not my thing.”
“What is your thing?”
“Townes Van Zandt, Howlin’ Wolf.”
“The Wolf,” Mr. Yates said, lighting up. “I saw him in London once.”
“Get the fuck out of here.”
“It’s true,” he said. “I met a lot of those old musicians. Muddy, of course.”
“The greatest.”
“Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Pinetop Perkins, Albert King, John Lee Hooker — I recorded the Hook with a bunch of European musicians in ’86, no, ’88. Spotty performances, but the old man still had it.”
“What was he like?”
“Old,” Chet Yates said, the word somewhat deflating him. “As we all get, sooner or later. I never got your last name, Mike.”
“Drayton.”
“Were your people British?”
“Protestant Irish on my father’s side. The rest are Mennonites.”
“Pardon my ignorance but what is a Mennonite?”
“Damned if I know,” I said. “Deutschland by way of Russia, I think. It has something to do with buttons and zippers being Satan’s handiwork.”
“My paternal grandmother dabbled in Vodou,” Yates said. His eyes went to the fireplace, a teepee of green kindling hissing and popping behind the grate. “Mind if I ask if you’ve been to this house before? Specifically on Thanksgiving?”
“What I saw isn’t likely to become news any time soon,” I said.
“I appreciate that. I feel out of it sometimes. Like I’m a spectator in my own life, watching myself on a projection screen. I couldn’t tell you why I had that gun out.”
“Your daughter said you were depressed. That’s treatable.”
“The symptoms are,” he said. “The malaise goes deeper.” A door closed upstairs. Chet Yates smiled. “I won’t burden you with a laundry list of my frailties. I did want to ask you if there was something I could do to compensate you for your troubles.”
“Not necessary.”
“Maybe not for you. Can you understand my distaste in finding myself in debt?”
I thought it through. “There’s a black van parked outside.”
“Yours.”
“I’d be interested in purchasing it,” I said. “What would you take for it?”
“Whatever you feel comfortable paying.”
“A thousand, assuming it runs?”
We shook hands on it.
Amelia Yeats walked down the left staircase. She was wearing a checkered skirt and a leotard below that, and a zipped-up bomber jacket that concealed her top. Her long curly hair was loosed from its normal ponytail and hung about her shoulders. Velvet boots and a touch of jewellery completed the vision. I felt woefully underdressed and unprepared, a monster from an old Hammer Horror film cobbled together in haste and brought to life prematurely to wreak havoc on some quaint European village. As if to drive the point home, when I stood up to greet her my shin grazed the glass coffee table, toppling it and shattering the top. Chet Yates tucked his legs onto the seat next to him as Roanna the housekeeper swept in to assess the damage.
“Awfully sorry,” I said.
“It’s just a table,” Mr. Yates said.
His daughter leaned over him, careful of the glass, and pecked his cheek. “You’re heading out now?” he asked her.
“Unless you want to bore Mike with more talk about how much better everything was back in the old days.” To me she said, “That’s my dad’s favorite hobby. He doesn’t even know who Daniel Lanois is.”
“The actor from Last of the Mohicans,” I said, trying out a joke that crashed even before takeoff. “We should probably go before I embarrass myself even more.”
The CD release was another non-event. I hung out at the bar watching a bunch of dapper gents in scarves and homburgs, some of who were the band, co-mingle with women that ranged from awkward bespectacled fanzine journalists to bronzed and glittering groupies whose vanilla perfume I could smell long after they’d departed. I watched Amelia Yeats glide through the sea of them, at times seeming to belong, and then giving off a wayward glance that made me feel that she too felt out of place. I like people individually. In groups of a dozen or so they begin to act like a hydra, or at least that’s how I see them, one big organism that tells the same stories and interjects the same one-liners and demands the same polite nods and chuckles. Even drunk I prefer the company of a small group, or solitude, to a
place in the crowd.
The band played cuts off their album and then took the stage and played those same songs with much less artistry. I began to appreciate the amount of work someone like Yeats went to in order to sculpt a record out of the mushy soundwaves generated by a lousy band.
The smell of pot enveloped me. Some in the crowd danced. Most nodded their heads. A few held up their cellphones, capturing for posterity a moment they were already talking through.
At the intermission the bassist came down to man the merch table. I bought a CD out of politeness and used it as a coaster for the rest of the night. “Thanks for supporting local music,” the bass player told me. I could picture him running a telethon. I couldn’t see Yeats so I followed a throng of people outside to inhale cold air and secondhand smoke.
During the second set the band invited up guest musicians. Yeats’s friend Zoltan took the stage for a pair of originals, both of which sounded vaguely like “Come As You Are.” A dreadlocked girl got up and belted a Smokey Robinson and the Miracles number, and then I saw Yeats cross the stage, wearing a grey band T-shirt and running scales on a borrowed Flying V.
They played “Heartless” and an original which I gathered was from her former band. It was a haunting blues song that she belted out, punctuating it with stabs of noise from her guitar. She sang with her eyes closed, voice rising and falling in volume but a steady crescendo of pain and intensity. The woman in the song, mistreated and abandoned by yet another man, finally took her own life, only to find herself at the gates of heaven to await Saint Peter’s judgment. Yeats’s voice strained to hit the last jarring note, catching only a corner of it before breaking in an anguished moan. Before the last chord faded she cut the charge in the room with a self-effacing joke and surrendered the guitar to an eager-looking man with a Caesar cut and dropped off the stage into the crowd.
Later, as we rode the Skytrain back to the park’n ride, I said, “That was intense.”
“That was always how I wanted to do it,” Yeats said. “Stripped down, bluesy. But it was Ali’s song, so we went the pop route.”
“You don’t play any more?”
“I don’t enjoy it any more so why would I?”
“You have a gift.”
“You can return gifts,” she said. “Having skills is better. I taught myself engineering, like my dad.”
“Yeah, but you could have been—”
“Famous?” She grinned. “By the time I was nineteen I’d had two abortions, been in rehab. I was fucked up even before I had that band, and I would’ve destroyed myself if I kept at it.” As proof she held up her arms. I noticed for the first time the white scars etched into her wrists, deep enough to persuade me they weren’t done for attention.
I’d pocketed a couple of bottles of Kokanee Gold for the ride home. We slugged back the tepid beer alone in our car of the train. We could hear a group of drunks in the next car, standing by the doors and squealing about the stupid bastard whose cellphone they’d just stolen. It was the kind of scene I hated to ignore, but there were four of them, I was drunk, and they were off the Skytrain two stops before us.
“Where’s your mother in all this?” I asked her.
“Eastwood Park,” she said. “It’s a penitentiary in England.”
“She’s in prison?”
“She was part of a group called the Something Liberation Army, I forget what exactly. She and these other guys kidnapped an MP and his family. I think their plan was to hold the MP’s wife and kids hostage and force the MP to kill the Prime Minister.”
“Jesus,” I said, because there was nothing else to say.
“Only the gags on the wife and kids were too tight and one of the kids threw up and choked on her throw-up.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. When the cops caught them they got one of the other kidnappers to confess. My mom had one of the longest prison terms handed out to a woman in that decade, which is kind of an honour.” Tilting her head in lieu of a smile to acknowledge the necessity of a joke to deal with the horror of the event and the painful intimacy of sharing it. All of this was rehearsed and second nature.
“’Splains why you hate the police,” I said.
“It’s a corrupt, racist institution. They all are.”
“I didn’t see that on the job.”
“Course you’d say that, you’re —”
“White?”
“One of them,” she finished. “Or were. And before you start thinking it’s a race thing, my mom is whiter than you.”
We got off the Skytrain at Waterfront and walked up to the lot where I’d stowed my car. A pint-size kid in a hoodie was tagging a parking sign. He took off at a long-striding walk as we approached, leaving a glyph in yellow paint dripping off a space of brick on the side of a building.
“When I was on the job,” I said, “I always felt that, so long as everything I did squared with the spirit of the law, I had wiggle room when it came to obeying the letter.”
“Beating confessions out of people?” Yeats said, equal parts curiosity and scorn.
“I wasn’t a detective and I didn’t handle too many interviews. Mostly I’d try to keep good people out of the system.”
“Good people. Isn’t it hard to figure out who the good people are?”
“No,” I said. “If you’re going about your life and not fucking things up for others, you’re one of the good people. That doesn’t mean everyone else is bad, just that for them, the system has to run its course.”
“Sounds like you were one of the good ones,” she said. “Good cops, I mean.”
“There’s some dispute around that.”
“How’d you get kicked out?”
“I resigned, technically. The details aren’t important.”
“I told you about my mother,” she said, mock-pouting.
“I could’ve found that out with a Google search.”
“You’re going to tell me,” she said, “or I’ll beat it out of you.”
“Fascist.”
“Tell me.”
I shook my head. “I don’t have perspective on it yet. I alternate between seeing myself as totally in the right and thinking I fucked things up completely. But I’ll tell you why I wanted to become a cop.”
So I did, recounting the whole lamentable story of Jacob Kessler, his journey across Canada to work in Vancouver, and his even longer journey to St. Paul’s Hospital, dying with every step.
“After work he’d take off his uniform and leave his clothing strewn about the house. Shoes by the door, cap on the sofa in the living room, jacket on the stairs. That’s where he’d sometimes leave his gun and belt. His shirt and pants went into the basket near the basement staircase. I’d pick up different pieces and play. Obviously the gun was the best, but my second favorite was the hat. His name was felt markered on the inside and the band inside was always cool with his sweat. When he’d see me doing this he’d pull the brim down over my face. Didn’t have a highly developed sense of humour, my grandfather.”
I drove down the ramp and paid the outrageous parking tab. Traffic was thick for midnight, some sports event having recently ended, spilling fans out of the bars and putting questionable drivers on the road. I made it over the Cambie Street Bridge and hung a left.
“Anyway,” I said, “I guess the point of that boring story was that I was trying to fill his shoes before I even understood the term. Being on the job meant ...” I trailed off.
“What?”
“Everything,” I said.
“I feel like that about what I do,” she said. “How does being a private eye stack up?”
“Better than most of the alternatives. Could stand with more income, but who couldn’t?”
A man getting into the driver’s seat of a car parked on Broadway took a step backwards into my lane. I weaved around him, catching the look of astonishment and irritation on his face as we passed him. “Drunk asshole,” Yeats called back to him.
At her building
we paused on the stairway. “Are you coming up?” she asked.
“Am I invited?”
She was two steps above me and leaned down so her weight was on my shoulders. Her hands met at the back of my neck. As we kissed I took a step up, put my hands on her back, a polite distance above her ass, the fragrance of beer and stagelight sweat on her. Her coat had bunched up and I ran my hand over the exposed small of her back, feeling the gooseflesh.
“You don’t have to go?” she asked, a glimmer of welcome in her green-brown eyes.
“Hell with it. The Corpse Fucker can wait.”
“The what?” Pulling back to look me in the eyes.
“Nothing,” I said, kissing her, running my hands inside her jacket.
“Did you say the Corpse Fucker?”
“I’m guarding a funeral home from a necrophiliac. It’s not a big deal. Got the keys?”
She withdrew, turning towards the door. “I should work anyway,” she said. “Sounds like you should be there.”
The smoke of our breath mingled. She pulled the keys from her purse and opened the stairwell door, kissed me, and pushed me back. I waited at the entrance. When the door had shut and the light had dimmed I went to work.
XV
Atero-Vision
After my stint at the funeral home I drove to the Atero household and parked down the block with a view of the front door. I unscrewed the lid of my Thermos and poured out the lukewarm dregs of last night’s tea. The stereo played a compilation of murder ballads I’d picked up at Charlie’s on Granville Street before it closed. Forty-four tracks of bloodlust and misfortune. Perfect music for the grey hours before dawn.
I’d pissed away days pretending I had any choice in the matter. Atero knew something I needed to know, simple as that. Getting that knowledge would put people I cared about at risk and invite a reprisal from Crittenden. Those thoughts were a pint of acid sloshing around the bottom of my stomach. I told myself I was doing this for the kid, and not because I balked at being told what not to do. Maybe it didn’t matter. If the end result is good, who gives a shit how pure of heart the person is who brings it about?