by Sam Wiebe
Elder flinched when his son referred to him as if he wasn’t there. It was curious to watch the two of them redraw the lines of power. A month earlier when they’d come to my office they’d resembled walking advertisements for old and new school: Elder patient, mannered, calm and commanding respect, Younger brash and smarmy, bridling at any insinuation he wasn’t ready to take the reins. Now Younger looked burdened. He cast his eyes about the room as if looking for something to anchor him. He looked everywhere but avoided his father, whose eyes rarely left his, as if pleading to his son for reassurance, and the son unwilling or unable to give it. Discovering the identity of the Corpse Fucker had not only destroyed Thomas Kroon the Younger’s image of his father, but that of himself as well. I wondered if having the same name added to the burden.
“I’ll get him the help he needs,” Younger said to me. “Now what about the police — should we involve them?” His voice free of indications of his own preference.
“When we started you told me you didn’t want the publicity that law enforcement would bring. Is that still true?”
“I guess so. Yes.”
“Then I need some things from you.” To Elder I said, “First off, no more talk of suicide or how ashamed you are. You accept what you did and accept help. Any more suicide nonsense, word or deed, and it ends up page one of the Sun, with a letter going out to each of the victims’ families.”
“All right,” Elder said. He looked hopefully to his son, who busied himself writing something on a sticky note.
“If the incidents are over and I don’t have to worry about you offing yourself, then I can live with not involving the police. The only other matter is the sum of ten thousand dollars, which I’d like paid out over the next four months.”
“You’re shaking us down?” Younger said, perplexed.
“Call it atonement,” I said. “I’m working a missing child case where there’s a chance of finding the kid if we act now. The father can’t afford to pay and I can’t afford to work for free, and to be honest, you can’t afford not to pay, so it works out for everyone, you subsidizing the search. If it wraps up in the first two months, I won’t ask you for the other five grand. The only way I come out of this with a somewhat clean conscience is if I know Szabo gets the help he needs.”
“Szabo? That was in the paper the other day,” Younger said.
“I remember,” Elder said, looking to the son who wouldn’t look at him.
The son said, “We’ll pay.”
I shook their hands in turn. “Can you see me out?” I asked Younger.
On the walkway he lit a cigarette, offered me the pack. “Tempting but no,” I said. He lit up and exhaled something more than smoke. “You’re in your mid-forties?” I asked him.
“Forty-two this April. What’re you, early thirties?”
“Twenty-nine,” I said. “I have no place giving you advice, but that’s not going to stop me. You’ll be mad at him a long time, and he deserves that. But don’t drag it out. Don’t hate him.”
“I can’t hate someone I don’t fucking know,” he said. He coughed hard enough to extinguish the cigarette. He relit it. “My dad taught me the business. It’s all I know. Now I find out at the centre of this is — ” He spread his hands, to say, well, what exactly is this?
“Your attitude to him the next few months will affect his lifespan,” I said. “You don’t want him to kick off with some reckoning still owed between you.” Kroon looked at me as if to say, “Is the lecture over now?” I added, hesitantly, “Fucked-up parents are better than none at all.”
He finished his smoke, stubbed it out, and contemplated the butt as he worked it into the concrete with the toe of his loafer. My part in their family drama was over. I wondered if either of them would forgive the elder Thomas Kroon. I wondered if I’d ever know.
Katherine was at the office sending off the last batch of files to the lawyer. From the looks of things the lawsuit would proceed against the school. I’d thought of it as a scare tactic, but it looked as if the school would rather take the whole sordid matter to court than simply pay my fee. This presented me with the day’s second great ethical dilemma. A lawsuit had the potential to ruin the reputation of a teacher who, to my knowledge, had never glanced sideways at a child. I had Katherine indicate that if it came down to such a scenario, we would drop the lawsuit before dragging the man’s name through the mud. Hopefully the school trustees would pull their heads out of their asses and pay up before it came to that. I wasn’t optimistic.
I put a call in to Gavin Fisk and tapped my pencil while I waited.
“Are you meeting Ben and I for a drink tonight?” I asked Katherine.
“Maybe,” she said. “Who else’ll be there?”
“Probably just us, Yeats if she wants to come.”
“I can’t make it, I just remembered.”
“What do you have against her?”
“It’s no use talking to you,” Katherine said.
“Why’s that?”
“Because. Anything I say will just make you defend her more fiercely, which means we’re going to fight, and I don’t want that.”
Irrefutable logic if you took the first idea as truth. Amelia Yeats was beautiful, brilliant, talented, funny. What wasn’t there to love? Drugs for starters. I hated to think of myself as a prude, but I’d seen too many ashen-faced zombies with no teeth and gouges out of their arms to be comfortable with dating someone into that. Yeats was also inexplicably rude to Katherine — maybe she could sense her disapproval. It was hard to imagine someone as self-reliant as Amelia Yeats falling into either of those traps.
I worried it over until Fisk returned my call. “Mister Holmes,” he said. “I did promise to keep you informed. April 7th, Barbara Della Costa tried to use a credit card at a Shell station on Vancouver Island, a small town north of Nanaimo called Prosper’s Point. Am-Ex hadn’t received a payment from her in five months. Week later the card was used at a rod-and-gun store. Same town. Owners had the old manual imprint system, frequent problems with service out in the boonies.”
“She bought a gun?”
“Six top-of-the-line fishing rods,” Fisk said. “A pawn shop nearby confirms that a woman hocked two of them the same day. Brought the others back the next week but the shop owner said nothing doing. She gave him a fake address, naturally. I’m heading over Monday.”
“No word on the other two girls?”
“None, but we have a name for one of them. Dawn Meeker. Co-signed a lease on an apartment with Barbara before they moved into the house on Fraser.”
“Dawn Meeker. Dominique.”
“Never would’ve thought of that, Sherlock. Glad there are PIs around to keep bumbling cops like me from missing the obvious.”
“Can I tell Szabo?”
“I’d prefer to be there for that conversation,” Fisk said.
“We’re meeting Sunday morning.”
“That’s my day off,” Fisk said. I said nothing. “Fine,” he said. “Didn’t want to sleep in anyway.”
“Eleven in front of the police station.”
“Try and get him to open up a bit to me,” Fisk said. “Being forthcoming is in his interest more’n mine. Grouchy old bastard. How you got him to trust you is beyond me.”
“My countenance enforces homage,” I said.
“What?”
“Shakespeare. You wouldn’t understand. See you tomorrow.”
As we closed up shop, I said to Katherine, “If I promise not to argue with you, will you tell me what you have against Amelia Yeats?”
“We’re back to that?”
“I guess I never left it,” I said. “Are you worried she’ll have me running the office off of star alignments and tarot cards?”
Katherine shook her head. “You’re way too domineering for that.”
“So it’s just the name-calling?”
“No,” Katherine said. “I didn’t want to bring it up, but don’t you think she’s a little close to th
is investigation? One of the last people to see Django. Frequently did business with Cliff, and we know how reputable the people he deals with are. Contact with lots of lowlifes, like those punks that were in the stairwell. Plus you told me her father’s insane.”
“I’m trying to imagine the scenario you’ve come up with,” I said. “She decides out of the blue she wants this kid so she hires Zak Atero to boost the car, hires the hookers to take Django and make it look like they left town with him, and all so that she can — what? Give him to her father? Grind his bones to make her bread? No,” I said, locking the door behind us, “Yeats has her problems but she’s not involved.”
“Does she use drugs?” Katherine asked.
“What does that matter?”
“That’s a yes,” she said. “What’s the connection between Zak Atero and Dominique?”
“You have a point,” I said. “I’ll ask if she knows them. But she won’t.”
“She only knows the good drug users?” I started to respond and she said, “Just look at her like you would anyone else, Mike.”
I wondered if that were possible.
XX
The Paddy’s Cure
From home I phoned Yeats to broach the subject of the Ateros. Before I could, she asked if I wanted to go to a Hallowe’en party at some club downtown. Before I knew it I’d re-arranged my night so I was meeting Ben at nine at Doolin’s.
“What’s your costume?” she asked me.
“It’s a surprise. You?”
“Same. Pick me up at 6:30.”
I helped my grandmother carve a jack-o-lantern, at least as much help as a one-armed man could give. When I’d finished dumping out the sheets of newspaper covered in seeds and pumpkin muck, I held up the felt pen she’d used to trace the facial features and asked if she wanted to be the first to sign my cast.
In contrast to the sardonic tags my friends would make, she wrote, in her elegant, slightly wobbly penmanship:
Dear Grandson, I hope you heal up quickly. Stay safe and out of trouble. Have a happy Hallowe’en. Love Gran.
Before I left I phoned Mira Das and asked her to have a patrol car check on the house. I hoped the Ateros would be busy with their own celebrations.
“What’re you ’sposed to be?” Yeats said as she slid in next to me. Her father had been tranquilized for the evening and put to bed. I waited for her in the car. She came out wearing an orange jumpsuit with numbers painted on the back and rubber manacles around her ankles. The suit was unzipped to her belly and showed a generous amount of skin.
“Couldn’t think of anything,” I said.
“No costume is the saddest costume of all.” She pawed through an orange-knit handbag, her hand emerging with a pair of drugstore sunglasses. “Here,” she said, sliding them into my pocket. “If anyone asks you can tell them you’re Corey Hart.”
There was no live music at the club, just a succession of DJs, none of whom seemed all that concerned with who they scared off the dance floor. I stuck close to Yeats, determined to ask her about Atero and not to let her out of my sight. Maybe it was insecurity, and maybe that was why I hadn’t bothered with a costume, too uncomfortable in my own skin to layer something over it. Yeats’s costume was both sexy and self-referential, poking fun at her mother’s incarceration and maybe making that fact easier to deal with. I knew I wasn’t there yet. I’d hidden behind ironic detachment, finding myself a vantage point where I could criticize others without being criticized. She was right, no costume was the complete failure of imagination and courage.
“Not really my scene,” she said over the boosh-boosh-boosh of the house music. “Split?”
“Split,” I said. We did, working our way down Granville, paying the cover when we had to or slipping in with a bribe to the bouncer.
I’d taken the Tylenol Threes the doctor prescribed and decided mixing them with alcohol would be a bad idea. After the first five dollar ginger ale, I changed my mind and ordered beer. Then some oily-looking executive sent over a tray of shots. By the time we’d worked from the Vogue to the Commodore to the Media Room, I’d decided that alcohol pretty much went with anything. A few painkillers and some watery club beer wasn’t going to turn me into Samuel Coleridge, but it did give me a nice out-of-it feeling.
At the last club we arrived during the band’s intermission. Yeats saw her friend Zoltan lurch out of the men’s room looking nauseous. She asked me to stick with him for a minute while she touched base with someone backstage.
I propped Zoltan against the bar. He was dressed as usual: Nirvana tee, flannel shirt wrapped around the waist, ripped jeans. “Who are you?” he said, drooling a little on the bar.
“Mike,” I said. “What’s your costume?”
“I’m Eddie Vedder,” he said, flashing a grin before stumbling and sending his drink into the lap of a seated couple behind us.
Zoltan wandered off. I circulated, trying to recognize people I’d been introduced to at other events. I tried to guess what the elaborate and occasionally wonderful costumes were meant to symbolize. The bar was tiny and packed with friends of the band, all of them artists, all of them political theorists and critics of pop culture. So-and-so’s side band was total genius. The Beatles were overrated. The only real American writer is Bukowski. Like listening to a chorus of solipsists. When I couldn’t take any more I pushed through the door to the side of the stage.
A skinhead with a thick orange goatee held me up at the backstage entrance. “You have a pass to be back here?”
“Security,” I said, handing him one of my cards and scowling as if preoccupied so he wouldn’t notice I was drunk. He looked skeptical but let me through.
Backstage wasn’t at all glamorous. I found Amelia Yeats in a dirty corner underneath some pipes on the ceiling, crouching with two women and a man. The man was cutting lines of coke on the top of a road case. The band’s name, Prawn Chow, was stenciled on the side.
She looked up at me, wiping her nose. “Dad’s here,” one of the other women said.
“I did warn you,” Yeats said, trying for a self-effacing smile that wasn’t quite there. “So don’t act surprised.”
“I’m not,” I said. Right. “This makes you happy?”
She didn’t answer. The ferret-faced man tried to duck out. I caught him by the jacket collar, spun him into the wall and frisked him, coming up with two more baggies, each marked with an Olympic-rings logo. Not a street brand I recognized.
“The fuck is this guy’s problem?” one of the other women said.
“Is he a cop?” the other said.
“No,” Yeats said. “Give those back to Max, Mike.”
I looked over at Max, who wanted nothing more than to excuse himself from a situation he didn’t understand. “Do you want these back?” I asked him. He shook his head. “What’s the price on these?” No answer. I dug a hundred-dollar bill out of my wallet. “C-note do the trick?” He nodded, took the money and scurried out.
“Don’t,” Yeats said as I ripped open one of the bags.
I tapped out an amount on the back of my hand. Years of handling drugs and watching others use them and I still fumbled. “Up the nose?” I said.
“Mike.”
“Here goes,” I said, taking my first nostril-full of an illegal narcotic. In the shock I dropped the packets, which were scooped up by the other women on their way out. One even pinched up the coke that had spilled on the floor from the open baggie, reaching through my legs to do so.
“What did that prove?” Yeats said.
“I don’t know.”
‘Intense euphoria’ was a phrase from police drug literature that came to mind. I certainly didn’t feel that. My nose felt sore and after a minute my nostrils went numb. After a while I felt like large shards of my brain had become unmoored and had begun to drift into orbit around my skull. Only willpower kept them from flying off completely. I spotted an orange exit sign and made for it. Yeats followed me out. Over before it began, I thought. My mouth fe
lt dry.
“Do you know Zak Atero?” I asked her.
“Who’s that?”
“Barbara Della Costa? Dawn Meeker?”
“Are these people you know who use drugs?” Standing in the doorway, arms crossed, both of us lit up by the marquee signs that cast shadows and light over the alley.
“Yes,” I said.
“So I must know them, right?” Yeats shook her head, using the opportunity to wipe her eyes. “Never heard of them. I don’t understand what just happened. I told you days ago what I did. I thought you were cool with that.”
“I thought I was, too,” I said. “Evidently not.”
“You think you’re going to stop me, or save me, or something like that?”
I leaned against the wet brick.
“I think, as much of an asshole and an idiot as I feel like now, I’d’ve felt ten times worse watching those parasites burrow into you and doing nothing. You have money and you hate yourself for reasons I can’t fathom. They smell it on you same as I do, and they feed off it. I will walk back in there and apologize if you tell me any of them paid for that stuff ’sides you.”
“It’s not your business, Mike.”
“Hell it isn’t.”
“You don’t get a say in what I do, in any of it.”
The music started up and our voices were almost lost. I watched the light reflected in the puddles ripple as the rain started up again.
“I knew you’d get like this,” she said, smiling and shaking her head to herself. “I don’t need you to protect me. I don’t want you to try. Can’t you respect that?”
“No,” I said.
“Then fuck you.”
She zipped up her jumpsuit, wiped at her eyes. I shrugged and pulled my coat around me. I felt the sunglasses in my pocket press against my breast and thought to give them back, but instead I heard myself say, “Look me up when you feel like making a change.” I felt stupid. I started up the alley towards the bar.