“What time is that?”
“Around six.”
He took a card out of his pocket, wrote something on the back, and handed it to me. “Have her call me at that number when she gets in.” It was a cellular exchange.
By eight o’clock that evening, Reeny still hadn’t returned from work. I kept telling myself that acting in a TV series is not a nine-to-five job, that there was nothing to worry about, shooting was just running late. I worried anyway. At some point it occurred to me that perhaps she’d decided to move out, find accommodation elsewhere. I even went so far as to check the spare room to make sure her clothes and other belongings were still there. They were. Her running outfit hung across the back of a chair, dry now but still richly redo-lent of her. A little before nine, Matthias called.
“She’s not back yet,” I told him.
“You sound worried,” he said.
“I don’t know. Should I be?”
“Are you and she involved?” he asked. “I mean, romantically,” he added when I did not reply right away.
“I know what you mean,” I said. “I’m just not quite sure how to answer. I guess I’d have to say no.”
“Well, when you see her, be sure to tell her I want to speak with her.”
“I will,” I said.
He said, “Thanks,” and I hung up.
I fretted some more, then around ten o’clock, having convinced myself that something was dreadfully wrong, I called Reeny’s cellphone. After four rings, her voice mail picked up: “Hi, this is Reeny…” I hung up.
I turned on the TV and tried to watch the news, but nothing stuck, as if my short-term memory had been short-circuited, so I turned the TV off and went up to bed.
Needless to say, sleep was a long time coming. I lay on my back in the dark, trying vainly not to obsess that Reeny had been abducted by Willson Quayle or the Yeagers or that she’d gone off to Mexico or Thailand or someplace with Chris Hastings. When sleep did finally come, it was accompanied by fretful dreams in which Barry Chisholm was an evil alien outlaw and that it was my job to bring him in, but no matter how hard I pedalled my bike, I couldn’t catch up with him, and every time I got close, a volunteer from the Community Policing office would stop me and tell me to put some clothes on.
I woke up at a few minutes past seven with gummy eyes and a roaring headache. As I staggered into the bathroom, morning erection bobbing uselessly, I banged into the closed door. Why was the door closed? I wondered groggily as I pushed it open. And who’d left the damned shower running?
“Hey!” Reeny yelped, standing in the shower, one arm across her breasts and the other clamped between her thighs, despite the steam-fogged shower stall door.
An unusual display of modesty, I thought dimly, for someone who made her living generally half out of a skimpy vinyl cheerleader outfit and who’d told me she wouldn’t object particularly strongly to fully baring her breasts as long as they were her own.
“Tom!”
“Oops,” I said and retreated into the hall.
“Close the bloody door!” she shouted after me.
I yanked the bathroom door shut and stumbled back to my room to put some clothes on.
“Sorry about that,” I said when she came into the kitchen ten minutes later, dressed in sneakers, jeans, and an oversized sweatshirt.
“S’all right,” she said with a smile. “No harm done.”
The coffee machine gurgled and hissed noisily. “Coffee’s almost ready,” I said.
“Would it be okay if I borrowed the Porsche again today?” she said.
“Sure,” I said. “And you don’t have to ask. Consider it a semi-permanent loan.”
“Thanks. I don’t want to presume too much.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. The coffee machine gave a final gasping wheeze. “You’re not working today?”
She shook her head as she poured two cups of coffee. “Not till later. It’s another night shoot.”
“Another night shoot?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, giving me an odd look. “I’m sorry. Did I wake you when I came in last night? I tried to be as quiet as I could.”
“No, I didn’t hear you,” I said.
She looked at me for a couple of beats. “I’ll try to remember to lock the bathroom door from now on.”
“Maybe I should start wearing pyjamas.”
She shrugged. “It’s your house.”
“Do I get a commission?” Mary-Alice asked. “I think I should get a commission.”
“I’m allergic to dogs,” Bobbi said.
Mary-Alice looked skeptical. “How can you be allergic to dogs and not to that scrungy cat?” Bodger and Mary-Alice had not got off to a good start.
“I don’t know,” Bobbi said. “I just am.”
“Well, take antihistamines,” Mary-Alice replied with a shrug. “A job’s a job.”
“That’s my line,” I said. “Anyway, we haven’t got the job yet.”
“I told Kim to be here by ten,” Mary-Alice said. “She’s bringing Princess Grace with her.”
“Princess Grace?” I said.
“Princess Grace is her Lhasa Apso.”
“She can bring her Dalai Lama for all I care,” I said. “But is she bringing her dog too?”
“Yuk-yuk,” Mary-Alice said.
“I wish you’d checked with me first, M-A” I said. “I’m not sure we’re equipped to do doggie portraits.”
“I thought you’d be grateful for the work,” she said.
“I am,” I said.
“We are,” Bobbi said simultaneously.
“But how much money can there be in pet portraits?”
“Well,” Mary-Alice said. “Princess Grace isn’t a pet, exactly. Her puppies sell for about two thousand dollars each.”
A little while later a woman came into the studio carrying what looked like a blow-dried mop head. Mary-Alice introduced Bobbi and me to Kimberley Price and she in turn introduced us to Princess Grace. Belying the myth that dogs and their owners look alike, Ms. Price didn’t look the least bit like a Lhasa Apso. She looked more like a Doberman pinscher, tanned and sleek and fit-looking, dressed mostly in leather. She made me nervous.
After a brief negotiation, we got to work. Princess Grace was better behaved that most of the children that have sat — or tried to sit — for portraits. She did what she was told without whining and, best of all, she didn’t get nervous and wet her pants. I was worried that Bodger might be a problem, but when he wandered into the studio to check out the action, Gracie, as her mistress called her, ignored him, which got his nose out of joint. Bobbi’s nose, by the time we were done, was thoroughly stuffed.
Bobbi had a lunch date, so I picked up a barbeque pork bun from the Chinese bakery across the street and shared it with Bodger. After lunch Bobbi and I loaded up the van and drove out to Richmond to do our bi-weekly progress shots of the construction of a new shopping mall. It was generally dull, uninspiring work that we were doing less and less of now that everybody and his sister had a digital camera and a home computer, but it helped pay the rent. Lack of sleep caught up with me at about three and I nodded off in the van on the way back to the studio.
“Tough night?” Bobbi said as we lugged our gear upstairs; the freight elevator was out of service again.
“You could say that.”
“How’re things with Reeny?”
“Uh, fine, I guess. She’s busy. I don’t see much of her.”
“That’s not what she says.”
“Eh? What?”
“She told me what happened this morning.”
“She did? When?”
“We had lunch.”
“Oh.”
“She thinks you’re mad at her about the thing with Willson Quayle. You’re not, are you?”
“Heck, no,” I said. “It’s not her fault.”
“How about me?” Bobbi said.
“It’s not your fault either.”
“I mean, are
you mad at me?”
“No, of course not.”
“Good, because I don’t want to do any more pooch portraits.”
“Me either,” I said.
“Who’s going to tell Mary-Alice?”
“You are, of course.”
Mary-Alice had other ideas, though. “Teach me how to work the cameras,” she said, “and I’ll do it myself. It didn’t look that hard.”
When I got home a little after five, exhaustion was like a physical weight pressing in on me from all directions. There was a note on a piece of scrap paper stuck to the fridge door: “I’ll be late again. Don’t wait up. R.” Not much chance of that, I thought, as I dragged myself into the living room. With a grateful moan, I flopped down onto the sofa and woke up two hours later to the sound of someone knocking on the front door.
Groggy and stupid from sleep, I stumbled to the door. Someday, I grumbled to myself, we were going to have to get the lock on the access gate fixed. When I opened the door there was a young woman standing on the dock. In her late twenties, I guessed, she was slim and dressed in a frumpy grey skirt, a white blouse buttoned to her throat, and pink cardigan. She had a small purse with a gold chain slung across her shoulders. She might have been a Jehovah’s Witness or a Mormon, but they usually travelled in pairs. The breeze blew strands of brown hair across her eyes.
“Are you Tom McCall?” she asked, raking the hair from her face. Her voice was light and little-girlish.
I thought about it, decided I was, and said, “Yes.”
“My name is Monica Hollander,” she said. She paused, waiting for me to respond. My brain still wasn’t fully engaged, though, and it took me a moment to formulate a reply. Her brown eyes grew troubled at the delay.
“Um, yes,” I finally managed to say. “How can I help you?”
She snapped open the little purse, took out a folded sheet of paper, and thrust it toward me. I took it from her hand and unfolded it. The dead, computer-generated eyes of John Doe/Tobias Zim stared up at me from the coroner’s office flyer.
“Do you know this man?” she asked.
“Uh, no,” I said. “Not exactly.” The gears in my head began to mesh. I handed the flyer back to her. “Do you know him?”
“He’s my father,” she said. “Was my father.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m very sorry.”
“Thank you,” she replied shyly.
“Have you contacted the coroner’s office?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Not yet,” she said, raking the hair from her face again. It was a very pretty face, but judging from the fine lines at the edges of her mouth and corners of her eyes, she wasn’t quite as young as I’d first thought. She might have even had a couple of years on Reeny. “I wanted to talk to you first.”
“Me? Why did you want to talk to me?”
“He died in your house, didn’t he?”
“Uh, yes.”
“Then you were the last person to see him alive.”
“Um, well, no,” I said. “I didn’t see him till — well, he was already dead when I found him.”
“I see,” she said.
“I’m afraid there isn’t much I can tell you, Ms. Hollander. In fact, there isn’t anything I can tell you. All I know about your father is his name. And I’m not even sure about that.”
“His name is — was Jacob Hollander,” she said.
“Jacob Hollander?”
“Yes.”
“Not Tobias Zim?”
She blinked. “No, it was Jacob Hollander.”
The wind was coming up, whipping her fine brown hair across her face, moaning through the eaves, and carrying the scent of rain and salt and wood smoke.
“You’d better come inside,” I said.
I expected her to hesitate, to exhibit a woman’s understandable reluctance to enter a strange man’s house alone, but she didn’t bat an eye. She stood in the small vestibule, looking around, as I closed the door, then preceded me into the living room. She wasn’t as slim as I’d first thought either. Her upper body was petite, almost delicate, but her hips were full and rich and her calves were strong and sturdy, tapering nicely, though, to slim ankles. There was a small butterfly tattoo on the outside of her right ankle.
“Can I offer you anything?” I said. “Coffee? Tea? A drink?”
“No, thank you,” Monica Hollander said.
She sat demurely on the edge of the sofa, skirt modestly covering her knees, schoolgirl purse in her lap, the folded flyer in her hands. I sat facing her across the coffee table. I hadn’t eaten anything since the barbeque pork bun I’d shared with Bodger for lunch and my stomach was hollow with hunger.
“Who told you my father’s name was Tobias Zinn?” she asked in her sweet, girlish voice.
“Zim,” I corrected. For some reason I couldn’t put my finger on, I decided to play it cagey. “The police got a tip from someone who said they knew him as Tobias Zim,” I said. She nodded mutely. “You don’t seem surprised that he was known by another name.”
“I suppose I’m not,” she replied, looking at her hands.
“What did your father do for a living?” I asked.
She looked up. “I don’t really know,” she said. “I hadn’t seen him in fifteen years. He travelled a lot, I know that. All over the world. Europe. Africa. Asia.” She smiled weakly. “When I was little, I used to pretend he was a spy, like James Bond, or an international assassin, like Edward Fox in The Day of the Jackal. My mother called him a professional gadabout. I didn’t know what a gadabout was, of course. I imagined it had something to do with horses. Isn’t that silly?”
“Pardon me for asking, Ms. Hollander, but do you have any proof that the man in that flyer is your father?”
She opened the little purse and took out a photograph. It had a square format, about three-by-three, like an old Brownie print, but when she handed it to me I knew instantly that it wasn’t old at all. The paper was crisp, the colours were rich, and the image was sharp. It had probably been taken with a medium format professional camera, such as a Hasselblad or a Rolleiflex. It was a family portrait, shot in a studio against a draped backdrop, by someone who knew what he was doing, lighting-wise. A man who might have been John Doe (Tobias Zim? Jacob Hollander?), a good few years younger and in much better health, stood with his hand on the back of the chair in which sat a handsome, matronly woman with dark hair and hooded eyes. A pretty brown-haired girl of thirteen or fourteen who might have been Monica Hollander sat on the floor at the older woman’s feet, leaning against her knees and looking directly into the lens of the camera.
“That’s my father, my mother, and me,” Monica Hollander said. “My mother died shortly after that picture was taken.”
“When was that?” I asked.
“Sixteen years ago,” she replied.
“This print isn’t that old,” I said.
“No,” she said. “I had it reprinted from the negative just last week. When my father disappeared.”
“Disappeared? I thought you said you hadn’t seen him in fifteen years.”
“I haven’t,” she said. “But two weeks ago he called and told me he was in Vancouver and wanted to see me. He was staying in a motel in Richmond, not far from the airport, but when I went to meet him, he wasn’t there. I waited and waited, but he never came back. After I’d waited for a long time, I talked the man on the desk into letting me into his room, but there was nothing in it, not even clothes. The bed hadn’t even been slept in.”
“When was this?” I asked.
“A week ago Sunday,” she said.
The same day Tobias Zim was supposed to have met Chris Hastings at the Hotel Vancouver.
I handed the photograph back to her. She looked at it for a moment, then put it back into her purse. Tears gathered in her lashes, which were long and feathery, like the antennae of a moth, as pale and fine as her hair. She took a tissue from her purse and dabbed delicately at her eyes.
“I don’t know what else
I can tell you, Ms. Hollander. As I said, I’d never laid eyes on your father before I found him on my roof deck. Perhaps you should speak to the police.”
She looked down at her hands in her lap, her fingers kneading the wad of tissue. “I — I wanted to speak to you first because I thought that since he — well, that you must have known him and that maybe you’d spoken to him — he said something…” Her voice trailed off. She dabbed at her tear-stained cheeks.
I was beginning to think that there was something more than a little bit fishy about Ms. Monica Hollander. As almost anyone who knows me can readily attest, I’m as susceptible to the charms of a pretty face as the next man, maybe a tad more so. However, I’d also been around the block often enough to know when I was being played. Leastways, most of the time. I didn’t know what her game was, but my curiosity was piqued. I figured I’d play along for a while, see where it led.
“Ms. Hollander,” I said. “Monica.” She smiled shyly. “Does the name Christopher or Chris Hastings mean anything to you?”
She raised her head and looked at me. “No,” she said slowly, drawing out the word as if she were thinking about it. “I don’t think so. Why?”
“He knew your father as Tobias Zim. Apparently they were supposed to meet downtown the same day you say you were supposed to meet him at the motel in Richmond. He claims to be a business associate of your father’s,” I said.
“I see,” she replied softly.
She was silent for a moment, sitting still and stiff on the sofa, expression distant, pensive, as if she was trying to make up her mind about something. Suddenly, decision evidently made, she lifted her purse and slipped the chain over her head. Opening the purse, she took something from it, I couldn’t see what, then tossed the purse onto the sofa beside her. As I watched, she raised her arms, gathered her fine brown hair in her hands, twisted it, and secured it behind her head with a big tortoiseshell clip.
The transformation was so startling it almost took my breath away. Not only did putting her hair up drastically alter her appearance, hardening and sharpening the angles of her face, but her body language also changed. Leaning back and crossing her legs, she no longer looked the least bit frumpy. She smiled enigmatically and regarded me through her fine eyelashes as she adjusted the grey skirt above her round knees and unfastened the top buttons of her blouse, undoing more than was really necessary for comfort, I thought.
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