Seaweed on the Rocks

by Stanley Evans

  “If you’ve heard I have AIDS, forget it. I don’t.”

  She smiled.

  I said, “This friend of yours—what’s she been doing that she shouldn’t have been doing?”

  She was silent for a moment and then abruptly stood up. “Forget it. I’m sorry I said anything.”

  The glass in her hand was empty, and so was mine—we’d wasted a whole bottle of very good wine. Instead of savouring it slowly, we’d been swigging. “Take it easy,” I said. “I won’t put you through an inquisition. Anything you can tell us that will help nail a blackmailer, we’ll treat confidentially. If your answers don’t help us, fine, that’ll be the end of it.”

  She put her glass on the table. “No, I won’t say any more. And I really must ask you to leave now.”

  I didn’t argue.

  Going through the hall, I saw George Fox in a room opening off the lounge. He was with three well-dressed matrons of the furs-and-pearls set, and they all seemed to be enjoying themselves. I realized instantly that I’d seen one of the matrons before, but I was outside the house before I placed her. The last time I’d seen her, her face had been daubed with red and black paint.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  After leaving Charlotte’s house, I went over to the Parrot Lounge, a rooftop restaurant about a half-mile from my office. But instead of enjoying the billion-dollar view, I turned my back on it and sat at the bar. The bartender came over promptly. Her name is Gloria. She’s about thirty, a buxom-phase Renee Zellwegger, and that night she was wearing a white Foster’s T-shirt that fitted her like shrink wrap and a pair of jeans with a high waist as tight as a corset. A while back, about three years before I met Felicity Exeter, Gloria had played a big role in a recurring dream that also involved a five-barred gate, a sewing machine and a bowling alley. The dream never made sense, but one night I got drunk and confided in her. She gave me her take on it, we had a good laugh and have been pals ever since. Now I ordered a Bacardi and coke, no ice.

  I finished the first drink, decided to have another and signalled Gloria again.

  “Your money’s no good here,” she deadpanned, looking me straight in the eye.

  “You’re buying?” I asked.

  “Not me. You’ve got another friend,” she said, pointing.

  I turned on my barstool and saw a woman sitting alone at a table. She was examining me the way some people examine pictures in a museum. Though they’ve seen reproductions of the same pictures many times, the originals are sometimes quite different and sometimes vaguely disappoint. I had the feeling I disappointed this lady.

  I gazed at her for quite a while, remembering what I’d been missing. Felicity Exeter’s long hair was like polished bronze with yellow-blonde tints. The face beneath it was heart-shaped, the nose straight and patrician, the mouth wide and soft, and she had the imperious air that rich girls acquire after years of civilized mollycoddling. She was wearing a short, shiny, green silk dress almost the colour of her eyes, a pearl necklace and three very good diamond rings. Underneath all that, she looked troubled.

  “Attaboy, Silas,” Gloria said. “Go get her.”

  I carried my drink over to Felicity’s table and sat down beside her. Close up, her green eyes were colder and darker than I remembered.

  “It’s been a long time,” she said. “I’m glad you came in here tonight because you never call me any more. Sometimes I have trouble remembering exactly what you look like.”

  “I don’t have that particular problem. Maybe it’s because I think about you all the time.”

  “Really,” she said.

  Her cellphone rang and we both stared into space. At the fourth ring, the caller gave up.

  Felicity relaxed, and a glimmer of warmth appeared in her eyes.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  Yawning, Felicity Exeter flung the bedclothes aside, stretched out one long shapely leg and looked at her bare foot. Still yawning, she wiggled her toes, got out of my bed, and walked naked across the cabin to where her clothes and mine lay jumbled together on the floor where we’d dropped them the night before. Some women dislike being seen naked, but Felicity doesn’t mind in the least, so I hoisted myself higher on the pillows and watched her dress.

  “My goodness,” she said calmly, looking at the tiny watch adorning her wrist. “It’s nearly seven o’clock.”

  “Stay and I’ll make breakfast,” I said. “Or we could go to John’s Place.”

  “No, thank you,” she said sweetly, zippering and buttoning her lovely body out of my sight. “I’m a farm girl, remember? You’re not the only goat in my life.”

  “Goat! Is that fair?”

  “Perhaps not, darling, but lying in bed with you before you’ve brushed your teeth, you do sometimes remind me of a fluffy little black kid with morning breath.”

  “I hate these goodbyes,” I said.

  “You hate hellos, too,” she said, coming over and planting a sisterly kiss on my brow. “But you know what you can do about that, don’t you?”

  “Do I?”

  “Of course you do, darling,” she said, opening the cabin door. She stood for a moment in the doorway. Gazing back at me fondly she said, “Somebody told me you’d been ignoring me because you had AIDS.”

  “Somebody told me you’d been ignoring me because you’d met somebody else.”

  She blew me a kiss and went out. A minute later I heard her Land Rover start up.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Several days passed before I spoke to Old Mary Cooke about her latest trip to the Unknown World. For some reason that she hadn’t explained, she had moved off the Warrior Reserve and was living in a wickiup on a beach lying below a cliff of lichen-mottled rock. It looked like a bonfire ready for burning. Her sons had built it for her out of driftwood, but they hadn’t sawed the wood up, just used it any length as it came from the sea, though it was mostly straight, longish tree trunks rubbed smooth by rocks and tides. The roof was draped with tarpaulins and had a stovepipe sticking out of it. They’d made the door from derelict planks. The fence around Old Mary’s small parcel of land matched the rest of the place.

  I rattled the gate, which was padlocked—who knows why?—and after a while she came and let me in. She was wearing a long black skirt, a thick woollen Cowichan sweater and a knitted toque.

  “I brought you a smoked salmon,” I said, handing her that propitiatory object.

  “Thank you, Silas,” the old woman said, laying the salmon down on the piece of salvaged plywood she had obviously been using as a cutting board. The wickiup was dark inside, but in the light of the fire I could see a jumble of upright logs in the centre of the room that provided a small private sleeping space. Beside the fire were two ancient sofa chairs upholstered in blue tapestry that had gone green and furry in places. The old woman sat on one of the chairs. I was wearing a pair of $80 black trousers, but after some hesitation I sat on the other chair.

  Strings of onions hung from the roof along with miscellaneous cooking utensils, lengths of rope, and a collection of fishing floats. There was a strong pervading smell of iodine and smoke. What looked suspiciously like a dead dog lay against a box of kindling.

  “That’s a bad wind,” she said. Then, sitting upright with her head cocked as if listening to something I couldn’t hear, she filled a short stubby pipe with dry leaves taken from a tin box and lit them with a sliver of wood from the fire. The tiny flame illuminated her wrinkled brown face before it flickered out and left us in semi-darkness again. “I knew Hector Latour’s granddad,” she said at last, inhaling with evident satisfaction, although to my mind the burning leaves stank like old gym socks and must have tasted worse.

  “He was a log salvager, lived up Stewart Island way. They nicknamed him Seal Whiskers because he was so prickly. He was a gambler. Instead of congratulating winners and taking his losses with a smile, Seal Whiskers called the people who beat him tricksters, and he didn’t always pay what he owed. Seal Whiskers was married, but he took up with his neighbour’s un
derage daughter. He did not love that girl. He did it to spite that girl’s father. Somebody killed Seal Whiskers after he’d been gambling one night. Few people came to his funeral.”

  The strong smell of woodsmoke mingling with the smoke from the old woman’s reeking pipe was making my eyes water, and I closed them for a minute. She was still talking about Seal Whiskers when I went into a doze. I didn’t fall asleep entirely but when I opened my eyes, she was going on about log-salvage swindlers—how thieves in speedboats steal up to floating log rafts at night, cut the corner chains with oxyacetylene outfits and help themselves to thousands of dollars worth of prime BC timber. But somehow Old Mary’s voice had gained strength, and in the slow swirling smoke of her fire, I could see that her hair now appeared sleek and black. She’d stopped being a fat, grey-haired old woman and had become an upright, shapely, barefoot young woman dressed in what might have been deerskins.

  I told myself that it was eyestrain, a trick of the light, and closed my eyes again. A minute later I heard the wickiup’s door open then close. I got up and went outside. Beyond the beach the ocean had a purple sheen. Old Mary had walked across a shelf of rock and was following a footpath into the trees. I followed. An hour later I’d gumshoed her as far as the Johnson Street bridge, but since it’s very dark along there, I was sure she didn’t know she was being followed. That illusion lasted until we reached Fisgard Street and a diesel pickup went by, laying an exhaust smokescreen. By the time the smoke cleared, Old Mary had given me the slip, and the woman I was now following was a bimbo, thin as a whippet, wearing high heels and a power suit. I lost sight of her as she strode past the Good Samaritan Mission, its grey concrete exterior as featureless and harsh as a prison wall. I went on, still hoping to catch up with Old Mary, but a half-hour later I knew I’d lost her. I circled back to the Mission and went inside, wondering if Joe McNaught might be in his office. He was. Seated behind his monster desk, he was eating a steak sandwich.

  He said, “Find Harvey Cheeke yet?”

  “Not yet. There’s a Canada-wide on him.”

  “In that case, what do you want?” he asked ungraciously.

  “Five minutes ago I could have given you an answer, now I’m not sure,” I said, and told him about my walk. “It crossed my mind she might be coming here.”

  “I hope she’s not the old woman who was here a half-hour back. She created a riot in Marnie Paul’s ward and upset the medical staff.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Smoking, doing incantations. She was wearing some sort of necklace.” He paused. “Some of the staff found it rather . . . unsettling to look at.”

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t ask. Things like that are highly subjective. It’s like being afraid of spiders or heights.” McNaught bit into his steak sandwich. Speaking with his mouth full, he said, “Want me to phone a taxi for you?”

  “Not right now. I’ll phone the station later and see if there’s a patrol car to drive me home.”

  “If the general public knew how you cops operate, there’d be trouble.”

  “No, there wouldn’t. The general public already knows that cops and preachers are all the same—idle, grasping bastards. Tell me about this necklace.”

  He put down his sandwich long enough to make a circle with his pudgy hands. “It had these flat disks on it about the size and shape of a CD,” he said and picked up his sandwich again.

  I realized McNaught was describing one of Old Mary Cooke’s ivory bobbins. They have two holes in the middle with a piece of string looped through them. She grasps each end of the loop and swings the bobbin with a rotary motion to get it spinning and then, by alternately loosening and tightening the string, she can make the bobbin rotate back and forth.

  “It made a whistling sound,” McNaught said, his mouth full again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I’d been patrolling the Old Town’s streets for two hours, and it was cold—by local standards, that is. On Vancouver Island’s southernmost tip, even in May, sudden gales howling in off the Salish Sea can lower the temperature by several degrees in an hour. If it is wet as well as cold and you don’t know how to stay dry, hypothermia can kill you in a hurry. I was wearing a quilted jacket, boots and waterproof pants and still had to step lively to keep warm.

  I was looking for Harvey Cheeke, but around midnight I found a girl prostrate in a doorway. I knew her well by sight, although I didn’t know her name. She’d been panhandling on Fort Street, and the last time I saw her she’d been singeing the hairs off her skinny white arms with a cigarette lighter. Now her eyes were closed, but she wasn’t asleep. She was dead. I phoned for an ambulance. Tony Roos was driving the one that showed up. Victoria’s homeless shelters had been full all week, Tony said, although he figured she could have squeezed herself into the Good Samaritan if she’d wanted to. But maybe she hadn’t wanted to.

  Apart from an occasional passing car, Government Street was deserted after the ambulance departed. I turned down towards the Inner Harbour and Bastion Square just as it began to rain. A hundred and fifty years ago—before sections of the Inner Harbour were filled in—the spars of sailing vessels had jutted above waterfront warehouses now buried beneath fifty feet of rubble. The remains of an old sea wall, a hundred yards from the nearest water, can still be seen down here if you know where to look for it.

  I switched on my flashlight and followed its yellow beam into Commercial Alley. The cold night wind sighed and sobbed in the dark corners. Rats sniffing around on the cobblestones fled at my approach. Rain dripped and gutters overflowed. My cellphone rang, and I sheltered beneath an awning for a minute while I answered. It was Moran, reminding me about a poker game. I put the phone away and switched my flashlight on again. Last time I’d been down this way there’d been a dumpster parked beside the awning, and the pavement was still dryish where it had stood. Now I noticed faint traces of black soot surrounding a circular iron manhole cover in the middle of the dry area.

  My heart began to pound. I remembered something Harvey had said.

  I punched in 911 and then hauled the manhole cover aside. The air that rose up was foul. Iron rungs stretched ten feet down to a tunnel. With the flashlight in my mouth, I stopped breathing, put my foot on the top rung and started down. I stayed below ground long enough for a quick look along a brick-lined tunnel about seven feet high and six feet wide that stretched into unrelieved blackness in both directions. Above my head, no sounds were audible.

  When I climbed back up, I was gasping for clean air. Emergency sirens wailed towards me along Yates and Wharf streets. The first vehicle to arrive was a shiny red pickup driven by a fire captain who explained that the tunnel had originally connected the Driard Hotel to a laundry. But he wanted to do things by the book—install air blowers and ventilate the tunnel thoroughly before letting anyone go down. We were arguing the point when Bernie Tapp showed up. I told Bernie what I had in mind and why. The fire captain was overruled and Bernie and I put on breathing apparatus and went down the manhole.

  We shone our flashlights across brick walls and an arched ceiling. As the floor was pierced here and there by drainage holes, the tunnel was perfectly dry but it was icy cold. We turned left, walked fifty strides or less and came up against a brick wall. The mortar protruding from the joints told us that it had been bricked up from the opposite side. We retraced our steps and then continued for another fifty paces or so beyond the manhole to reach a second bricked-in dead end. But there was a vaulted recess, ten feet deep, jutting off to one side. And this was where Harvey Cheeke had found himself a sanctuary. He was dead, laid out neatly in his sleeping bag. What appeared at first glance to be a pile of jumbled clothing nearby proved to be the boys missing from Harris Green. They were huddled together beside the remains of a fire they had lit to keep themselves warm. They had been dead for weeks.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  “It’s colder down that tunnel than it is on the street,” Bernie said. Daylight was creeping over the city as
we sat in his office. “Doc Tarleton reckons the boys died of hypothermia,” he continued. “Harvey Cheeke was luckier. He died of natural causes.”

  “If death by tuberculosis is natural these days,” I said sourly.

  Bernie didn’t take it personally. He filled his pipe and leaned back in his chair. With the pipe clenched between his teeth, he reached into his pocket for a match before remembering that his office was a smoke-free zone. He put the pipe back in his pocket, clasped his hands together and twiddled his thumbs. He was waiting for me to say something.

  “I can understand it in a way,” I said slowly. “Some people are born tramps. They hate walls, rules, bosses. Most of them hate cops. Like a lot of other people I know, Harvey would rather sleep in a doorway than check into a shelter or a hospital.”

  “Yeah, well. He went his own way to the last, but what good did it do him? They say he was talented. With a bit more common sense, he could have had his own studio.”

  “True. Anyway, I ought to have twigged that he was living in a tunnel. He told me he just had to pull the lid down on his squat. Then I remembered he’d complained that some kids had hit him with a brick and tried to steal his poke. I guess when they didn’t get it, they followed him . . . ”

  “Probably spied him going down that manhole,” Bernie said. “It must have seemed like fun, going down there.”

  “Then what happened, somebody decided to fix a roof along Commercial Alley. The roofing gang parked their dumpster on top of the manhole, trapping Harvey and the boys.”

  Bernie shook his head sadly. “Two kids trapped inside a tunnel with a dying man. It must have been a fucking nightmare.” He stopped twiddling his thumbs, got up, went across to a filing cabinet and brought out a can of birdseed. Two pigeons patiently waiting on Bernie’s windowsill had puffed up their feathers to stay warm.