If Looks Could Kill

by Michael Blair

  “How was California?” I asked.

  “Bahah,” he said in his wet voice.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “No, I meant the convention was in Baja.”

  “So, how was Baja?”

  “Overrated. The convention was worthwhile, though.”

  “That’s nice,” I said, hoping it wouldn’t encourage him to tell me about it. I didn’t want to know what went on at a convention of proctologists.

  David drew on his cigar, tipped his head back, and made a fat, blue smoke ring. It drifted toward the ceiling until it was shredded by a vagrant air current. Now there was a reason to regret I’d quit smoking, I thought. I sipped my coffee, resisting the urge to look at my watch. Hilly and Mary-Alice chattered in the other room, rattling through the pages of fashion magazines.

  “So,” David said with elaborate casualness. “Mary-Alice is quiet upset about this thing between your parents.”

  “Yes, I suppose she is.”

  “It’s not an easy thing for her,” David went on. “She’s very close to her mother.”

  “Maybe too close,” I said. “But I think she’s worrying for nothing.”

  “You don’t believe your father is having an affair?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  He nodded. “Hilly’s growing up fast,” he said.

  “Yes, she is.”

  “I hope you don’t think I’m presumptuous, but would you like me to arrange for a friend to examine her?”

  “What? Oh. No, I…”

  “It couldn’t hurt,” he said.

  “No, of course not,” I said. “But she’s seen an army of specialists and the diagnosis is the same each time. The nerves are damaged and there’s nothing they can do.”

  “I just thought I’d offer.”

  “Thanks for your concern,” I said, wincing at the stiffness in my voice.

  We lapsed into silence once again. As much as I tried, I could not like him. There was no logical reason for it. He was not a bad person. As Mary-Alice had told me, he was a kind and socially aware man who contributed to charities and participated in fund raising events for people living with AIDS, abused children, the homeless, and the environment. Perhaps it was chemical or something about his deep wet voice that got to me, like the tines of a fork scraping across a dinner plate.

  “David,” I said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful. Believe me, we haven’t given up hope that someday someone will be able to restore Hilly’s hearing. If you think your friend has something new to offer I’d be more than willing to let him look at her.”

  David shook his head. “Please, don’t apologize, Tom,” he said. “I’m the one who should apologize. It was arrogant of me to think you and Linda hadn’t done everything possible for Hilly.”

  “Forget it,” I said.

  “I know little about the speciality,” he said, drawing out the British variation of the word. “But if you have no objection, I will speak to my friend and see if there is anything new she can offer.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” I said. We sat in silence for a while longer. Finally, when I was finished my coffee, I looked at my watch. It was almost ten-thirty. I stood up. “I think we should be going,” I said. “I have an early morning shoot and I’ve arranged for Hilly to stay with a neighbour.”

  * * * * *

  We didn’t get home until after one o’clock in the morning. A drive that normally takes less than half an hour took over two hours. I’d forgotten about the Symphony of Fire, the annual international fireworks competition held each Saturday and Wednesday night during the last two weeks of June. Staged from a pair of barges anchored off English Bay Beach in the West End, the fireworks had drawn tens of thousands of people into the area along Beach Avenue between Stanley Park and Burrard Street and the West End was closed to non-residential vehicular traffic until eleven o’clock.

  The traffic started piling up as soon as we hit the approach to the Lions Gate Bridge. Gambling that Stanley Park Drive would be better, I exited the Park Causeway as soon as we were across the bridge, but it was worse, stop and go all the way to Burrard. Even after we’d crossed the Burrard Bridge to the Kitsilano side of False Creek, the fun wasn’t over; we had to fight our way onto Granville Island. Thousands of people take boats out into English Bay to watch the fireworks. The boats start trickling out of the False Creek basin as early as five in the afternoon to get a good anchorage, and when the fireworks end at about eleven, all those hundreds of boats, from kayaks and canoes to 90-foot yachts and tour boats, make their way back under the Burrard Bridge into the narrow inlet. My house and the others in Sea Village rock all night in the wash from the power boats, too few of the drivers evidently capable of grasping the meaning of the “No Wake” speed limit of 5 knots.

  It was too late for Hilly to go to Daniel’s as planned, so she brushed her teeth with bottled water and slept in her own bed. As I lay in my bed, waiting for sleep to come and listening to the wash of the waves against the hull and the creak of the moorings, I wondered what had become of Carla. It had been five days since she’d asked for my help to get away from Vince Ryan. But where was she? Had Vince Ryan caught up with her? And why did I care? I didn’t want to care, but I did, even though it was becoming clear she wasn’t the person I had thought she was. What had she stolen from Ryan? I had the feeling that, whatever it was, it was something a lot more important to him than my stereo, computer and camera had been to me.

  Chapter 19

  The next morning Bobbi picked me up at four-thirty for the shoot in Stanley Park. I considered dragging Hilly along to the shoot, but waking her at four AM would have been tantamount to child abuse. So I left a message on Daniel’s answering machine that I’d left her home alone. The shoot went well – the Shakespeare-in-the-Park people were all set up by the time Bobbi and I got there – and I was home by seven-forty-five. Hilly was still fast asleep. I went back to bed for an hour, then woke her and we both went next door to use Daniel’s shower. Then I took her for a late breakfast in Stanley Park. After breakfast we rented bikes and spent the day in the park, pedalling around the seawall, en route visiting the aquarium, riding the miniature railway, eating greasy fish & chips from the snack bar by the kid’s water park, playing pitch ’n’ putt, things I’d rarely done even though I’d lived in Vancouver for years.

  The bike rental place was just across Georgia from Devonian Harbour Park and Coal Harbour. After we returned the bikes at the end of the day, we walked along the park path that runs parallel to the water. There were hundreds of boats moored in the public marinas, boats of all sizes, from fifteen foot outboards and little twenty-five foot day sailors to yachts three times the size of my house, and the majority of them seemed to be sailboats, creating a dense and noisy forest of masts and spars and stays.

  The office of the Harbour Ferries Marina was in the forward cabin of an old tour boat called the Hollyburn, permanently moored at the end of the dock. I asked the woman at the desk if there was a boat called the Dragon registered at the marina.

  “Half a dozen at least,” she said.

  “This one was described to me as a sixty foot Bradley custom sloop.”

  “That sounds like the Pendragon.” She gave me the slip number and directions.

  Poole had been right: the Pendragon was a lovely thing, sleek and tidy and well kept, although the brightwork could use some polishing and the varnish was beginning to flake off the teak trim. According to a leathery, sun-baked woman who was reading on the afterdeck of a stubby and nondescript little cabin cruiser in the next slip, Pendragon was owned by a man named Christopher Hastings who, like Pendragon, seemed to match the description Poole had given me.

  “But his Zodiac is gone,” she said.

  “Meaning?”

  “He’s not aboard.”

  “Does he live aboard?”

  “You’re not supposed to,” she said warily.

  I nodded. Like most of the marinas around Vancouv
er, Harbour Ferries wasn’t zoned for live-aboard moorage, but you could get away with it as long as you were careful about waste disposal and had a permanent address elsewhere.

  “If I see him,” the woman said, “can I give him a message?”

  “No,” I said. “I was just admiring his boat.”

  * * * * *

  All in all, it was a good day and both Hilly and I were exhausted by the time we got back to the house, which was more or less on an even keel again, thanks to the flotation bags under the hull. Hilly went upstairs to check on Beatrix while I tried the water: it was still off. When I went upstairs to see if Hilly wanted something to eat, I found her asleep on her bed, Beatrix curled up against her chest.

  * * * * *

  For the next couple of days I was too busy to worry much about Carla or to check out the owner of the Pendragon. Monday morning, after awakening to the rattle and clank of Bernard Simpson and his crew setting up below my bedroom window, shaving and showering at Daniel’s, I took Hilly to the community centre, where I spent a frustrating half-hour with the director. He was a wispy fifty-something man with a pale powdery skin and manicured nails, and try as I might I could not seem to make him understand that, while I did not condone violence, Hilly had been raised to take responsibility for herself and the next time some barbarous lout decided to make fun of someone’s handicap, he might not get off so easily.

  I spent the rest of the morning in my office, still struggling with the promotional brochure until I finally gave it up and called the designer I used from time to time. The afternoon was taken up with a couple of portrait sittings, an aspect of the business for which I have little aptitude and less patience but which pays moderately well for the time involved, and preparations for a movie location shoot later that evening.

  Around 4:00 Bobbi came into my office to tell me that everything was ready for the movie location shoot. She looked so down in the dumps I took her downstairs to Zapata’s for a Corona with lime and tried to cheer her up with silly stories about my sinking house, the trial by ordeal that was modern parenting and the pathetic state of my social life. She smiled briefly when I told her how Francine Jane’s muscular development frightened me, but otherwise I enjoyed little success. Otherwise I enjoyed no success at all.

  “Okay,” I said, “so what’s eating you?”

  “Nothing’s eating me,” she said.

  “C’mon, Bobbi. We’ve known each other a long time and I’ve never seen you like this. You’re usually so cheerful I want to strangle you. But if you don’t want to talk about it, I can’t make you. Tell me to butt out and I’ll drop it.”

  “Butt out.”

  “What was that stuff in the office the other day?”

  “What stuff?” she asked.

  “When you went storming out.”

  “Nothing important,” she said.

  “You damned near tore the door off the hinges.”

  “Butt out.”

  “Nope,” I said, shaking my head. “I’ll stay out of your personal life, but what goes on in the studio is my business.”

  “It was personal.”

  “Then keep it out of the office.”

  “Fine,” she said stiffly. “You finished?” She didn’t mean my beer.

  “Yes.” I hated being a boss.

  “I’ve got some work to do,” she said, standing. “Are you going back up?”

  “No, I think I’ll go home.”

  “I’ll pick you up at seven?”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Tom?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks. You’re a good friend.” She leaned down and kissed me. She’d never kissed me. All right, so it was just a peck on the cheek, but it made the blood rush to my face. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

  “You haven’t,” I said.

  * * * * *

  Hilly had asked if she could bring a friend to the movie set and I said, sure, as long as they stayed out of trouble. I was a little surprised when the friend turned out to be a girl. I’d half expected a pimply-faced boy with an earring, a half-shaved head and paratrooper boots. Courtney was slim and fine-featured, with flawless skin, straight blond hair worn long and loose, and a mischievous laugh. Although she was the same age as Hilly she wore make up and a skin-tight Spandex tank top that accentuated her tiny budding breasts. She was proud of them and they undoubtedly earned her a lot of attention from the boys, but I couldn’t help feeling there was something slightly pathetic about it. She was also an outrageous flirt. I found myself wishing Hilly’s friend had been a boy. Adolescent boys I understand. Sort of.

  “I don’t like her,” I said to Bobbi after the shoot. We were packing the equipment into the back of the Land Rover. Hilly and Courtney had gone to the mobile commissary to see of they could get George Clooney’s autograph.

  “Why not?” Bobbi asked.

  “She makes me uncomfortable,” I said. “She’s like a pre-adolescent Madonna. Did you dress like that when you were a little girl?”

  “Sure I did,” Bobbi said. “And everyone thought I was a boy. But Courtney’s not a little girl. Neither is Hilly.” She laughed. “Pubescent girls make many men uncomfortable,” she said. “You feel guilty because you’re sexually attracted to them.”

  “I am not sexually attracted to her,” I said emphatically, knowing as I said it that there was some truth in what she was saying.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “It’s a perfectly normal reaction. A healthy male wouldn’t do anything about it, though.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  Bobbi shrugged. “What can I tell you, boss? Kids grow up fast these days.”

  “Don’t call me boss,” I told her.

  She shrugged again.

  * * * * *

  On Tuesday we had three portrait sittings before lunch. After sharing a quick lunch of barbecue pork buns with Bodger, I sat with the graphic designer for a couple of hours working on ideas for the brochure. The balance of the afternoon I spent with Mrs. Szymkowiak, going over the books for the semi-annual meeting with my accountant. It was never an experience to which I looked forward with any great enthusiasm, but it was especially discouraging given the sorry state of my bottom line. I wondered why I ever left my job at the Sun.

  After supper Hilly asked if she could go to the arcade. I said, “Okay,” but reluctantly and only after extracting a promise from her to be back at Daniel’s by eight o’clock. She grumbled a little at the early curfew, but I did not want her to be out after dark or alone in the house. Perhaps I was being overly cautious, but I wasn’t going to take any chances. After walking her to the arcade, I took a ferry across False Creek, and walked along the Sunset Beach bike and foot path to the edge of Stanley Park, then across the narrow neck of the peninsula to Coal Harbour and the Harbour Ferries marina. A total distance of slightly more than three kilometres. I was mighty proud of myself.

  Chapter 20

  Christopher Hastings was fifty-something, tall and slightly shaggy, a comfortably worn man with a large head, a wild shock of sun-bleached greying brown hair, pale blue-grey eyes, and a battered and uneven nose. We sat on the afterdeck of Pendragon, drinking herbal tea brewed by a strikingly handsome woman with long straight pale hair who looked eighteen in the slanting light of the lowering sun but who was probably closer to thirty. He called her Reeny, although she’d introduced herself as Irene Lindsey. I was sure I’d seen her on television, commercials or perhaps a locally produced syndicated series, but I didn’t fawn, at least not too much, and she admitted she’d been in a couple of episodes of The X-Files.

  I didn’t know what to make of Chris Hastings. He claimed to be a television writer and affected a laid back, ageing hippie demeanour, but there was a cold, almost feral watchfulness lurking behind his steel-coloured eyes. There was a tiny cellular telephone in the breast pocket of his baggy Indian cotton shirt. Perhaps he augmented his income as a people smuggler or drug dealer.


  At first he volunteered nothing, responding to my questions, but otherwise telling me very little. After fifteen minutes the only thing I’d learned that was even remotely interesting was that about a month after Carla had run out on me, Hastings had bought her a one-way airplane ticket to Montreal, for which, of course, she’d never reimbursed him. That was the last time he’d seen her.

  “Do you know a boat broker named Frank Poole?” I asked.

  “Only by reputation,” Hastings said.

  “Which is?”

  “Not good.” I waited for him to elaborate. He finally said, “I wouldn’t buy a boat from him, but otherwise I know very little about him.”

  “He said you and Carla were shacked up – his words – for a couple of years before she started working at the tennis club.”

  “She crewed for me on occasion for a couple of years,” Hastings said. “Pendragon has a wooden hull,” he added, “and I winter her on the Fraser River; fresh water kills the teredo worms. Carla helped me move her a couple of times. She also stayed aboard when she was between crewing jobs. But we weren’t ‘shacked up’. It was around that time Reeny and I got together.”

  “And I like my men exclusive,” Reeny said.

  “Carla had a serious case of wanderlust,” Hastings said. “She was your basic boat bum when I met her, hanging around the marinas and yacht clubs, offering her services – ”

  “So to speak,” Reeny interjected.

  “ – in exchange for passage to South America, Fiji, or Australia. She never lacked for takers, usually single older men – ” He smiled wryly at Reeny. “ – but she was usually back within a few weeks, a couple of months at most, looking for something else.”