If Looks Could Kill

by Michael Blair

  “You did, didn’t you?”

  I sighed. “Look, I think I’m going to insist you give the day camp a try.”

  “I won’t like it.”

  “I’m sure they won’t mind if you bring Beatrix along.”

  “You think so?”

  “As long as she stays out of trouble.”

  “Well, I suppose…”

  What’s so hard about raising children? You just have to know how to handle them.

  I took Hilly to the community centre, insisting that Beatrix wear her harness and leash. While I signed Hilly up and explained to the young woman behind the counter that the only time Hilly’s hearing aids were likely to be a problem was when she was swimming – she had to take them out – Hilly examined the notices pinned to the bulletin board, Beatrix perched on her shoulder.

  “About the ferret,” I said.

  “No problem,” the young woman said. “Lots of kids like to bring their pets. We have a cage we can use if we have to. We also have a couple of hearing impaired kids in the group. Does your daughter sign?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think she’d like to learn.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  I kissed Hilly, wished her a good day and told her that if I was not home for dinner to go to Maggie’s. As I said good bye a couple of boys came into the centre, signing to each other, fingers furiously flashing. They looked enough alike to be brothers. One was about Hilly’s age. The other was older, maybe seventeen. A pair of Walkman headphones dangled around his neck. The older one kept making emphatic gestures to the younger one, repeatedly slapping the back of his right hand into his left palm. I had no idea what was going on, but it was clear they were arguing about something. I left Hilly watching them.

  When I got to the studio, Bobbi had the Land Rover loaded and was waiting for me, a little impatiently. I apologized and we drove downtown. We were scheduled to take executive portraits for Northwest Trust’s annual shareholder’s report. The company’s board of directors had insisted we come to them, believing, perhaps not unreasonably, that their time was more valuable than ours. So we went to them, with our cameras and tripods, flash units, cables and lights, reflectors and backdrops. It took us a couple of hours to set up in the boardroom, take light readings and Polaroid test shots. It turned what would normally be a half-day job into a day, even a day and a half, but I had no objection to billing them the extra time. I was going to need all the billing I could generate if Pacific Hotels followed through with their threat to find another photographer.

  Bobbi was very good on these kinds of assignments. She had endless patience with subjects who regard the whole thing as an utter waste of time. She could get the most self-important executive or the most obstreperous child to jump naked through flaming hoops. Maybe it was her big brown eyes or her big sweet smile. Whatever it was, I didn’t have it. From my newspaper days I’d learned to just get in their faces and shoot. It didn’t bother shopping malls or helicopters, but people tended not to like it.

  But today Bobbi was distracted and careless. During the set up I had to remind her to adjust reflectors, take light readings, change camera backs, things she normally did automatically. And during the morning shoot she was short with a vice president who kept telling us that he had more important things to do and would we please hurry it up.

  During lunch I asked her what was bothering her.

  “It’s nothing important,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’ll try to get back on track this afternoon.”

  I’d known Bobbi for six years, saw her almost every day, considered her a friend even though we rarely got together outside of work. She was an only child, her mother a nurse at Vancouver General Hospital, her father a cop in Richmond, divorced for some time. She had a boyfriend, Tony Chan, with whom she’d lived for a year or so, but I’d met him only a couple of times. He claimed to be a painter. He painted, so I suppose he was a painter. In my opinion, he wasn’t a very good painter, but some people thought he was and even paid money for his paintings, quite a bit, as such things go. But I knew very little else about her private life.

  “Look,” I said. “Your personal life is none of my business, except how it affects your work. Everything okay at home? With your parents?”

  “Yes, Mom’s fine. And Pop, well, he’s fine too, but I don’t see very much of him.”

  “Everything okay between you and Tony?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “If you need some time off,” I said, “all you have to do is ask, you know that.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “C’mon, Bobbi, I’ve never had to remind you to reload cameras. Does this have anything to do with the Pacific Hotels thing?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Bobbi, help me out here. I’m not very good at this kind of thing. I’m not cut out to be a boss, but I’m stuck with it and you’re going to have to bear with me.” She nodded and smiled meekly. “I’m not trying to pry into your life. I’m your friend and I respect your privacy. But I’m also your employer and your personal life becomes my business, so to speak, if it affects your work. Our work.”

  “I’ll try not to let it,” she said.

  “Good,” I said. “But I want you to know that if there’s anything I can do to help, you just have to ask.”

  “I know,” she said. “Thanks.”

  I looked at my watch. It was a few minutes before one. “Back to work,” I said, standing, collecting both Bobbi’s tray and mine.

  The afternoon sessions went better, except for one minor incident involving a senior vice president who was very sensitive about his male pattern baldness and had brought with him an aerosol can of hair enhancer. I had to bite my cheek to keep from snickering and about halfway through the session Bobbi excused herself from the room to make an emergency pit stop. She came back a couple of minutes later and we finished the sitting. After the VP left we both dissolved into fits of giggles. Through tears Bobbi told me she’d had to leave the room or wet her pants with the effort to keep from laughing.

  I got home around seven-thirty. Hilly was upstairs watching TV. “How was your day?” I asked, straightening a photograph of the Lions Gate Bridge I’d taken from a helicopter.

  “What?”

  “How was your day?” I asked again, a little louder and facing her so she could read my lips. She doesn’t do it consciously, she says, but she has less difficulty understanding if she can see your lips when you speak to her.

  “Okay,” she said.

  The photograph didn’t want to stay straight. Because of the movement caused by tides and the wash of passing boats, hanging pictures were always going out of true. For that reason, most of the works on the walls, like mirrors, were fixed at both the top and bottom.

  “Your house is tilted,” Hilly said.

  “What?”

  She pointed to a glass of soda on the end table. Sure enough, the liquid in the glass did not seem level.

  I went downstairs, stood in the middle of the hall, and listened carefully. I heard the distant thrum of the bilge pump. Normally it runs for a few minutes, then shuts off, perhaps three or four times a day. I’m hardly ever aware of it, never notice it unless I listen for it. I waited for it to stop. It didn’t. I jerry-rigged a plumb bob with a six foot length of string and a bit from an electric screwdriver and thumb-tacked it to the inside of the kitchen door jamb. The screwdriver bit hung almost two inches from the base of the door jamb.

  I went outside, knelt on the dock near the corner of the house and looked at the side of the hull. Floating homes don’t have Plimsoll marks, those lines on the sides of ships that show how much water they are drawing, but the more or less constant draft causes a line of salty, oily crud to form just above the water line. I could not see the crud line.

  My house was sinking.

  Chapter 11

  I had no idea how fast the house was taking water. Was it in any real danger of sinking? The hull was ferro-concrete but the rest of
the structure was mainly wood. Wood floats, doesn’t it? But wooden ships sank, didn’t they? Otherwise how did all those old Spanish galleons end up on the bottom of the Caribbean? Okay, so they were filled with Aztec gold and bedecked with cannon and cannonballs. My house was neither filled with gold nor equipped with cannon. Nevertheless, I was worried.

  My first impulse, of course, was to panic, run in circles shouting, “My house is sinking! My house is sinking! Abandon ship – er – house. Women and children first.” I wasn’t even certain how deep the harbour was at low tide, but I knew it was a damned sight deeper at high tide.

  It occurred to me that perhaps Vince Ryan was behind it, that he had somehow sabotaged my house because I had refused to help him. The idea seemed a little paranoid, even to my fevered imagination, but I couldn’t shake cold feeling that this was what he had meant when he’d said, “Things happen.”

  Hilly was largely unconcerned. “It’s not like it’s a long swim to shore,” she said.

  I called Daniel. “I suggest pumps,” he said.

  “This is hardly the time to talk fashion,” I said.

  “Not those kinds of pumps. Water pumps. Just in case your bilge pump can’t handle it.”

  “Right. I’ll call Budget Rent-a-Pump.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “No, of course not. My house is sinking.”

  “May I remind you,” Daniel said, “that it’s really Howard’s house and he’s not going to be very happy to learn that you have sunk it.”

  “I didn’t sink it,” I said. “I mean, I didn’t run it aground or hit an iceberg. But ownership is beside the point,” I added. “It’s sinking and I’m living in it. Ergo, my house is sinking.”

  “Point taken.”

  “Purple Tools,” I said. “They might rent pumps.”

  “Indeed, they might,” Daniel agreed. “Purple pumps.”

  “I’ll call them,” I said.

  “Do that,” Daniel said.

  I looked up the number for the Purple Tool rental outlet at 3rd and Pine and called them. It was after eight PM, so naturally a machine answered.

  “Sorry,” a pleasant female voice said. “We’re closed. Please call again after eight in the morning. But if it’s an emergency, you can reach us at 555-TOOL. That’s five five five eight six six five.”

  I called the number and after a couple of rings the same pleasant female voice answered. For a second I thought I’d got another tape, but the voice added, “How can I help you?”

  “Do you rent pumps?”

  “Yes, we do,” she said. “Purple ones, naturally.”

  “My house is sinking.”

  “Excuse me.”

  “My house is sinking and I need a pump. I really don’t care if it’s purple.”

  “Who is this? Hal, is that you? Did those idiots at Grumpy’s put you up to this?”

  “Look,” I said. “This isn’t Hal and I don’t know anyone named Grumpy. My house really is sinking.”

  “Sorry. You must live on one of those houseboat things on Granville Island. I didn’t think they could sink.”

  “Trust me,” I said. “It’s sinking.”

  “You need a pump.”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “Gas or electric?”

  “Electric will be okay, I think.”

  “How big?”

  “I really don’t care how big it is. You can park it on the boardwalk.”

  “No, I mean, what capacity?”

  “Sufficient to keep the Pacific Ocean out of my bilge,” I said.

  * * * * *

  The purple pump arrived twenty minutes later, on its own little purple trailer towed behind a little purple pickup and accompanied by a young woman in well-stuffed stretch jeans and an oversized sweatshirt. With her was a towering old man in twill coveralls.

  “Mr. McCall?” the woman said in the familiar pleasant voice. “I’m Gwen. We spoke on the phone.”

  “Thanks for coming,” I said.

  “No problem. Which is yours?”

  “That one,” I said, pointing.

  “All right, then, let’s get to it. Would you mind giving me a hand? Pa’s not supposed to do any heavy work.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I helped her unload the purple pump from its purple trailer and skid it down the ramp and through the gate to a point on the finger dock near my house. Pa watched. It took about twenty minutes to get the intake hose through a vent into the bilge, Gwen doing most of the work, Pa providing helpful suggestions in heavily accented English, suggestions she more or less ignored. She then ran a heavy-duty extension to the outside outlet, plugged the pump into the extension, and started it up. It whirred and thumped and then settled into a steady thrum as it spewed water into the harbour.

  “This thing’ll handle about thirty gallons a minute,” Gwen said. “I doubt you’re taking water that fast. Your house’d be probably on the bottom of the harbour by now if you were. It’s got an automatic shut off if it starts pumping air, but you have to start it yourself.” She pressed a switch and the pump thumped to a stop. “Give it a try.”

  I pressed a big button labelled START. The pump thumped and whirred and I released the button. The pump stopped.

  “You’ve got to hold the button down until the pump gets going,” Gwen said. She waited expectantly while Pa stood behind her, eyes half closed and shaking his head slowly from side to side.

  Feeling like a first grader learning how to flush a urinal, I pressed the START button again and held it until the pump settled into a steady thrum. Then I released it. To my relief it continued to thrum and spew water into the harbour.

  “That’s better,” Gwen said, beaming at me.

  Pa grunted and muttered something in what sounded like Russian but was more clipped, maybe Polish or Estonian.

  “My father doesn’t approve of my instructional methods,” Gwen said. “He thinks I’m too patronizing. I don’t mean to be. Do you think I’m being patronizing?”

  I didn’t want to hurt her feelings so I said, “It’s better than getting a call in the middle of the night because someone can’t start the pump.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I think I can handle it,” I added.

  “Good. See, Pa.”

  Pa looked unconvinced.

  “It might help if you attached a tag or plate with starting instructions,” I said. “Hold START button until pump operates steadily. Save yourself a lot of trouble.”

  I signed a one week rental agreement, at fifteen bucks a day, hopeful that the insurance would cover it, then Gwen and Pa climbed into the little purple pickup and were off. After they left I watched the pump for a few minutes – not particularly exciting – then went inside. The jury-rigged plumb bob was still hanging at an angle to the door frame.

  “I guess I won’t have to wear a life jacket to bed after all,” Hilly said when I told her about the pump.

  “Very funny,” I said and went back downstairs to fix myself a drink.

  I putzed around for a couple of hours, listening to music, trying to catch up on my reading but mostly thinking about my sinking house, my relationship with Susan, Carla and my refusal to help Ryan find her, my sinking house, what was bugging Bobbi, what the loss of Pacific Hotels would do to my bottom line, my house, Susan, Carla, the unhappy client, my – well, you get the idea. At eleven I went out to check the pump and found that it had stopped. I pressed and held the START button, but the pump spit air and shut itself off after a couple of seconds. Back inside I made myself another drink, turned off the stereo and the lights and sat in the dark with a drink I didn’t want, wondering how my life had suddenly become so crowded with complications. When no answer was forthcoming I dumped the drink down the sink, went upstairs, brushed, flossed and rinsed, and climbed into bed.

  I got up almost immediately and went to look in on Hilly. She was fast asleep, Beatrix curled up on the pillow by her head. The ferret raised her head and regarded me suspiciousl
y as I approached the bed.

  “Is it all right if I kiss her good night?” I asked her in a whisper. She did not answer. Nor did she object when I leaned over and kissed Hilly on the cheek. Some complications, I told myself as I returned to my room, were easier to live with than others.

  * * * * *

  I woke up at seven-thirty, feeling as though I’d slept on a pile of rocks. I hobbled into the bathroom and stood in the shower for a long time, just letting the heat soak into me, before dressing and dragging myself downstairs, limp and lifeless. Hilly was up and dressed and annoyingly cheerful. As I was working on my second cup of coffee, still not fully conscious, Hilly told me she wanted to get to the day camp early.

  “Does this mean you like it?”

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  From her, okay was a shining endorsement.

  It’s impossible to get lost on Granville Island. Just look for the massive span of the Granville Bridge over the north end of the island or the tall mixing towers of the Ocean Cement plant, a holdover from Granville Island’s industrial heritage. But the narrow, intersecting streets can be confusing to newcomers, so I walked Hilly and Beatrix to the community centre. When I got back to the house, I checked the pump. I’d been up three times during the night: at one o’clock, at three-thirty, and again at five-thirty. At one the pump had started up properly, but two and a half hours later it had spit air for a few seconds then shut off. I’d started it again at five-thirty, but now, at eight, it spit air again when I tried it.

  After checking the pump I drove to the studio, left a note for Bobbi, explaining that I would be in after lunch, that I was leaving the Land Rover in case she needed it, then took the ferry back home. I reheated breakfast coffee in the microwave (about all the damned things are good for, besides making popcorn), called my insurance agent and left a message on his machine to call me at home or at the studio. I called Daniel to ask him if he knew the name of a contractor who could repair the hull and he gave me a number for Simpson Marine & Salvage. I called and left a message on another machine. As I hung up I wondered if anyone started work before nine AM any more.