Seaweed on the Rocks

by Stanley Evans

  I went over the same ground again, after which Hector—who realized he had already said too much for his own good—clammed up. I adopted a friendlier tone. “One more thing, Hector—why did you and Marnie go over to Donnelly’s Marsh?”

  He seemed puzzled that I would ask such a dumb question. “To hide our sad asses from guys like you.”

  “Right, I’ve got that. But why Donnelly’s? The place is haunted.”

  Hector shivered and the red-streaked whites of his eyes showed.

  “Our people never spend time on the marsh after dark,” I was saying when he put his hands over his ears to block my words and shook his head like a man demented.

  “Shut up, shut up, for Chrissake! Don’t say no more,” Hector begged. “I don’t even want to think about that place.”

  “You don’t want to think about it because that’s where you left Marnie Paul to die. You ran away and left her to die alone in the dark.”

  “Marnie was already dead, man! She overdosed. She stopped breathing. I did what I could, man. I’d have stayed with her except she was gone, and I was scared out of my gourd.”

  “You mean I scared you by trying to get into the house through the front window . . . ”

  “No, man! It was that Jesus great big grizzly! You don’t have to tell me that marsh is haunted, man, because I seen that great big ghost of a bear with my own eyes. Head like a goddam balloon . . . ” And Hector burst into tears.

  I drove him to police headquarters, down the tunnel ramp into the underground parking lot and into an empty stall. I switched off the engine, and we sat there for a minute listening to the cars coming in and out of the tunnel making sounds like a winter’s gale. Hector’s high had faded and he sat beside me as quiet as a statue.

  I said, “Anything more to add before I turn you over?”

  He didn’t respond.

  I said, “There’s a war going on out there because drugs have changed everything. There’s so much crime on the streets now the police can’t really handle it all . . . ”

  “Yeah-yeah-yeah, it’s pathetic,” Hector retorted with a burst of his former spirit.

  “Just listen,” I said very softly, “and don’t interrupt me again.”

  “I’m kidding,” he said, sounding as if he meant it and staring up at the MG’s headliner instead of at me.

  “Titus Silverman is dead,” I told him. “He was murdered. If Marnie dies, I personally guarantee that you will go away for a very long time. And even if she lives, you won’t have another chance to pimp young girls because I will fit you up. I will fit you up for killing Titus Silverman and, if necessary, for killing Lawrence Trew. The mayor will give me a great big fucking medal for it. I’ll be a hero for a day. And don’t think I can’t do it, because there are a lot of people on the street who owe me favours. I will teach them how to give convincing evidence against you in court. They’ll say whatever I ask them to say.”

  Hector had closed his eyes and he was shaking his head slowly from side to side.

  “I am going to make you a proposition,” I said. “Are you listening to me?”

  I took it that the strangled sound that emerged from his throat meant yes.

  “Good,” I said. “Pretty soon you might be getting a message from me. If I do call, I’ll be suggesting you either go into retirement or, failing that, move the fuck out of this province and never come back. Are you straight on what I’m telling you?”

  Hector’s head moved up and down.

  “You’ll move the fuck out of my sight forever?”

  “The first chance I get I’ll be long gone.”

  “Bright boy,” I said.

  I took him upstairs in the elevator and reported to the duty sergeant. After some paperwork, Hector was locked in one of the second-floor interrogation rooms. Then I walked upstairs to Acting DCI Bernie Tapp’s office and gave him a rundown.

  Bernie stared at me aghast. “Why, in God’s name, did you accuse Hector of killing Trew? We don’t even know that Trew’s dead!”

  “It was just an impulse, an idea that came out of the blue. It scared the hell out of him.”

  “It scares the hell out of me, too,” Bernie said, staring at me as if I were deranged.

  I waited in Bernie’s office while he and Nice Manners gave Hector another grilling. Bernie’s office overlooks the Memorial Arena, and I watched the people lined up outside the box office to buy tickets to the next ice hockey game. Over an hour passed before Bernie returned and sat behind his desk, staring at me without expression. I had the feeling he was a little annoyed with me. We drank several cups of coffee together and chatted about Hector for a while. About the only thing we could agree on was that Hector was a devious rat.

  Bernie took a can of birdseed from a filing cabinet and opened a window. After rattling the can, he spread seeds along the windowsill. A couple of hungry pigeons flapped in immediately. When he put the coffee can away, he said, “For a guy who’s screwed up royally several times, Lawrence Trew seems to have done very nicely for himself. He has a million-dollar house in Rockland. He drives a Carrera. And his only tangible income comes from hypnotherapy.”

  “Sounds like a nice racket.”

  “Maybe too nice. Nice Manners is still convinced that some of Trew’s money came from drugs.”

  I raised my eyebrows questioningly.

  “Maybe Hector and Marnie visited his office and filled prescriptions more than once.”

  I shook my head.

  “Narcotics tell me there’s been no diminution in the illicit drug trade since Titus Silverman bit the dust,” Bernie continued thoughtfully. “Maybe he and Trew butted heads and Titus lost.”

  “So you think Trew’s hiding?”

  “Maybe. And maybe he’s dead.”

  “That’s a lot of maybes.”

  “And lots of unknowns. For example, I need to know who owns that Donnelly’s Marsh house where this whole thing started.”

  “It’s on rez land. It belongs to the Coast Salish Nation.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since forever. The Coast Salish stopped occupying it in the mid-1800s, and some time after that it was leased to the Donnelly family, Irish farmers who ran sheep on it for the next eighty years or so. They left sometime in the 1970s, and since then it’s been more or less abandoned.”

  “Why? It’s a lovely piece of property, right there on the water.”

  “It’s lovely in summertime and there’s good clamming along the beach, but people don’t like going there because it has ghosts.”

  “So how come Hector and Marnie hid out there?” Bernie asked, and then before I could answer, he asked, “These ghosts—are they Donnelly ghosts or Coast Salish ghosts?”

  “They were there long before the Donnellys took possession.”

  Bernie scratched his nose. “Why did the Donnellys move off?”

  I shook my head.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The case was going nowhere. The man—or woman—who had killed Titus Silverman might have killed Lawrence Trew as well, and my mood was gloomy because murder, like every other form of extreme behaviour, is addictive. That killer had to be caught and quickly, so I went back to first principles and made a list of all the dubious characters in the case. That list included the late Titus Silverman, the elusive Lawrence Trew, Charlotte and George Fox, Tubby Gonzales, Hector and Marnie, and Joe McNaught. Harvey Cheeke’s name was down there, too. Over the course of the next few days, I tracked down and questioned the friends, enemies and associates of all the people on my list. My questions all tended in one direction—what threads, if any, connected these mismatched characters?

  Days passed fruitlessly. I gathered little information and discovered no promising leads. In the meantime, I was still keeping tabs on Charlotte Fox. Her activities followed a familiar pattern. She seldom ate at home and spent a lot of time and money in Victoria’s high-end rag shops, beauty salons and day spas. She attended a couple of gallery openings, several cocktai
l parties and a concert by the Victoria Symphony Orchestra.

  Then suddenly after a couple of weeks of this, the pattern changed. One afternoon Charlotte abruptly left town. After driving her Lexus through Goldstream Park and up Highway 17 into the Malahats, she hightailed it non-stop past Mill Bay and Arbutus Ridge, her average speed about 100 kilometres an hour. She took a five-minute pit stop at the McDonald’s Restaurant in Duncan, after which she continued north for another ten minutes before leaving the coast and heading west into the Beaufort mountains. At that point I came out of my office onto Pandora Street on the run, fired up the MG and, with the laptop open on the passenger seat, went after her.

  Victoria was very hot and muggy that day. If you’re used to a cool wet climate, as we are around here, every hot day seems the worst in history. But this one really was, because rainfall and temperature records were falling all over BC. As I ascended into the mountains, it became a bit cooler, but vehicles with raised hoods and steaming radiators jammed the viewpoint parking area at the top of the Malahat. While they waited for engines to cool, the sweating tourists aimed their cameras and VCRs at Brentwood Bay and Saltspring Island and off to the east, where North Saanich’s farmlands and vineyards were dehydrating beneath layers of mist. As I roared past, I could see out in the middle of Saanich Inlet that somebody was building a house on an acre of tree-covered rock. Beyond the summit, the road descended into the heat again. Scorched air, rising above the blacktop, made the horizon shimmer.

  At Duncan my MG’s gas gauge was showing half a tank. According to my laptop, the Lexus was stationary a few miles short of Songwet, an out-of-the-way Native village at the head of one of Vancouver Island’s deep coastal inlets. I gassed up at the Shell station, checked my tires, water and oil, and stopped at McDonald’s long enough to grab a coffee. Ten miles past the Cowichan Lake turnoff, I headed west along unpaved logging roads towards the Beaufort Range. Small tree-girt lakes and mountain peaks dominated the scenery. A mile short of Songwet, I came to a fork in the road. A rough wooden sign pointing down the left fork said: PRIVATE LOGGING ROAD. DANGER. NO PUBLIC ACCESS. I ignored the sign. Five hundred yards later, a locked gate and an unmanned sentry hut brought me to a stop. My laptop told me that the Lexus was somewhere beyond that gate. I backed up to a sideroad and parked.

  High clouds roiled with red and yellow fire, lit by a sun that was now invisible below the western horizon. I walked back to the sentry hut, climbed the gate, and looked around. Down to my left, half-visible through forest, a saltwater inlet rippled. Loons and cormorants floated silently, and immense trees leaned over the water, lending an air of mystery to the silent landscape. I began following the road down toward the water.

  It was nearly dark when I came out into a clearing dotted with Oregon grape and blackberry thickets. In the middle of it was a rustic cottage lit by kerosene lamps. Music and smoke spilled out of the open windows and doors. A half-dozen revellers had gathered on the shore. All the laughter, canned music and rowdy voices drowned out the approach of a woman who came up from behind, threw her arms around me and told me how much she’d always wanted to be an Indian. She had black and red markings daubed on her face and was wearing a red and black cape hung with ermine tails and bear claws, but she wasn’t a Native. She was White and middle-aged. Standing close in her embrace, I smelled the breathy funk of dope.

  “Are you one of the dancers?” she asked breathlessly.

  I said that I was, escaped her clutches, and stepped back into the trees. From this vantage point I could see that Charlotte Fox’s Lexus was parked in a grassy area near what seemed to be a traditional Coast Salish longhouse. Nearby were a twenty-passenger school bus and a war-surplus ambulance. On the adjacent level ground a wood fire glowed within a shallow pit that was about fifteen feet long and four feet wide. It had obviously been burning for many hours so that now it was largely reduced to hot ash and small embers.

  But as I drew closer, I realized that things were not as they seemed. The longhouse was a Quonset hut with a false, lime-washed housefront crudely decorated with paintings of thunderbirds, whales and otters. The front door of the longhouse was so low that, when I pushed it open, I found it necessary to stoop before I could look into a gloomy room lit by a small fire burning on the ground inside a circle of stones. A wooden screen at the back of the house was partially draped with black curtains. Instead of entering, I went around to the rear of the building where I found a door that opened on the narrow area that lay behind the screen. In a traditional Native longhouse this back part of the house behind the screen is where shamans and sorcerers store the equipment used to create magical effects, because tricks and wild dances—many of which simulate murder, cannibalism, and other bloody dramas—are an essential part of West Coast Native initiation rites and ceremonies. But here I could see, after my eyes adjusted to the darkness, that the area was filled with theatrical props of various kinds, including long dark curtains, painted canvas flats and black boxes large enough to accommodate human-sized objects. Robes, blankets and papier-mâché animal masks dangled from hooks.

  When I heard the longhouse’s front door open, I put an eye to a peephole in the screen and watched a man enter with an armload of wood with which he built up the fire and then went out again. Moments later several more men wearing long robes and carrying masks entered the longhouse and stood around the fire, talking in low voices. I grabbed a wolf mask and a robe, put them on, went out the back door and made my way in the dark back into the trees bordering the parking lot. The clouds above were now black smudges in a starlit sky.

  Then gradually I became aware of an eerie, smoky-yellow light. Several feet long and suspended above the ground, a river of flame was travelling past my hiding place, headed towards the inlet. The effect was unnerving until I realized its cause—half-screened by the underbrush, a long line of masked, dark-robed individuals carrying flaming wax torches were walking in single file towards the inlet, where a crowd waited. After the procession passed, I joined the back of the line. Nobody paid any attention to me. I wondered which mask hid Charlotte Fox’s pretty face.

  A large dugout canoe had been drawn up on the shore, and as our procession snaked past the cottage, a dozen “Native” handlers, all of them disguised as crazy men, grizzly bears, wolves or cannibals, dragged a struggling shaman out of the cottage and threw him into the canoe, where he lay as if poleaxed. The people watching along the shore began to shout and clap.

  The shaman’s hair dangled in loose, matted strands to his shoulders. He was naked except for a leather breechcloth and knee-high leggings hung with small bells and deer-hoof rattles. Carved bone charms dangled from a ring around his neck, but the rest of his bare body and his face were black with filth. Cedar-bark bracelets entwined with bones, sticks and feathers encircled his wrists.

  The handlers wrapped a heavy chain around the shaman’s neck, pushed the canoe into the inlet, leapt aboard and paddled out into deep water. Then, as we all watched, the shaman was thrown overboard. He didn’t protest and he sank from sight instantly. The handlers paddled back to shore and beached the canoe. By this time the crowd had grown silent, and after waiting eight or ten minutes to see if the shaman would resurface, the procession reformed and straggled back up to the longhouse to mourn the shaman’s death.

  Once inside the longhouse, people set their torches upright in stands positioned around the room on the earthen floor. It was evident that this ritual was a new experience for some of them, as they had to be shown what the stands were for and how to set their torches in them. There was a certain amount of confusion before things were sorted out. A few of the older people then sat on three-legged stools while the rest of us crouched in a half-circle on the bare ground, facing the fire and the screen and encircled by the torches. The smell of burning wax was strong.

  After a woman placed a rack hung with bear claws, teeth, rattles and carved wooden headgear in front of the fire, a dancer carrying a paddle and a miniature canoe suddenly appeared th
rough an opening in the screen. He pretended to paddle the canoe down a raging river, mimed getting washed overboard, and then did a series of sleight-of-hand tricks with things that he drew out of the canoe. As a finale, he pulled a raven mask out of the canoe and put it on his head. To our astonishment, another mask jumped out of the box, apparently of its own accord and it, too, landed on his head. Then another mask jumped out, and another. As a magic act, it impressed the hell out of me.

  Authentic West Coast Native musical effects are produced by whistles, drums, rattles and human voices, but it was electronic harps and keyboards that produced the faint melodic sounds we next heard as three dancers emerged from behind the screen. Beating drums and wearing animal headpieces, their bodies draped in blankets decorated with traditional crests, the barefoot, singing, swaying dancers circled the spectators and the fire, its glow picking up the rainbow colours of their abalone-shell necklaces and bracelets.

  Then still singing, the dancers passed through the screen and returned with a boy about ten years old. They seated him on a mat in front of the fire. In the silence that followed we could hear him weeping. An owl called, and the drummers commenced a frenzied beating. At that moment the shaman, still wet from his recent immersion in the sea, emerged from a hole in the dirt floor. Wild-eyed and shaking a carved beaver rattle, he jumped and spun in circles as violent contortions shook his whole being. When he squatted beside the weeping boy, the shaman shook his wet head with enough violence to fling water on the terrified child’s face. Then, using a pair of wooden tongs, the shaman grasped the boy’s head and, calling out the name of various animals and spirits, dragged the boy around the fire, first in one direction, then the opposite one, before pushing him roughly onto the mat again.

  While this was going on, a large black wooden box had appeared in the smoke hole and descended to the ground. Shaking and singing, the shaman’s gyrations took him behind the black box so that the lower half of his body vanished. The drumming intensified whenever the shaman raised his arms to shake his fists at the sky.