The Chairman's Toys

by Graham Reed

  “Has been. But he’s put the word out that he’s gonna be flush any day now. High grade dope, and plenty of it.”

  I slid Martin’s phone into his jacket pocket. “You know heroin’s not my scene.”

  “Not heroin. Opium, man. The Norwegian’s gone exotic. Can’t wait to get a taste.”

  “Sounds great, Martin. I wish you and The Norwegian all the best in your future endeavours.” I started to turn away.

  “Got any weed then? You still kind of owe me, you know.”

  Martin looked up at me with such a hopeful expression that a hairline crack spider-webbed its way across my left ventricle. I made a mental note to spackle it up with some cholesterol while watching Full Metal Jacket this evening. “Sorry, Martin. I’m running on empty myself these days. I don’t even have the 500SL anymore.”

  He regarded me suspiciously. “What’d you do with it?”

  “Took it up the coast. Got as far as Prince Rupert before trading it to a fisherman for a pickup truck full of fresh Dungeness crabs. Man, they were good. I definitely got the better end of that deal.” I shook my head sadly. “It was a beautiful car but it just wasn’t made for those roads. Take it easy, Martin.”

  The Mercedes was actually parked in my friend Bella’s garage. I had enjoyed my joyride almost as much as Martin enjoyed his, but neither of us truly earned or appreciated the car. Bella’s a mushroom-picker on Hornby Island and the 500SL gets her a twenty percent price bump from the fancy Vancouver restaurants that buy her fungi. When she was in town a few months ago making a delivery to a seafood restaurant, she took me for a ride. Aside from being richly redolent of morels, the 500SL is still in superb shape. Unlike Martin, she takes very good care of it and is way too smart to let me near the driver’s seat.

  Chapter Six

  After flagging down a cab, I pulled out my phone, scrolled to “N” in my contacts and made the call I’d been dreading. It rang a couple times, just long enough for me to start hoping it might go to voice-mail.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, Nina.” I tried to sound upbeat. “How’s the real estate game?”

  “You asshole!”

  I waited a few seconds, hoping she might calm down. Or hang up on me. The continued sound of agitated breathing suggested I was out of luck on both counts. “So I guess you heard from Mickey Wu.”

  “Damn right, I heard from him! What the hell did you do, Jake? I put my ass on the line when I recommended you to my clients.”

  This was true, of course, but it still rankled since it had been her idea in the first place. I knew she only did it so I wouldn’t go after alimony, which I hadn’t wanted any more than the house-sitting gigs. But I said yes anyway because I figured it would at least keep us in close contact. The closer the better.

  I abandoned upbeat and took a run at maudlin. “I screwed up big time. I don’t know what I was thinking. The thing is, I’ve been pretty down lately and Richard suggested we have a little get-together to cheer me up. It just got a tiny bit out of hand.” Like most women, Nina loved Richard. As far as she was concerned, he could do no wrong.

  “Don’t feed me that baloney, Jake. Mickey Wu is threatening to call his lawyer!”

  This got my attention. I swapped maudlin for earnest. “Listen, just give me a chance to tell you my side of things, Nina. And then maybe you can tell me what Mickey Wu said.” She didn’t immediately shut me down. “Why don’t we grab a drink this afternoon?”

  I noticed the cabbie monitoring my progress in the rearview mirror. I could see he was pulling for me, so I gave him a wink to let him know I had the situation in hand.

  Nina hung up on me.

  The cabbie was still watching me. “Sounds good, see you there,” I mumbled before lowering the phone.

  As the cab dodged through traffic I stared at the phone, willing it to vibrate in my hand. To my surprise, it did. A text popped up on the screen.

  Cactus Club, one hour

  Nina has terrible taste in bars.

  Nina has incredible taste in footwear. She was wearing a pair of biker boots that looked like they were made of brontosaurus hide stitched together with Janis Joplin song lyrics. Faded jeans and a tobacco-coloured cardigan sweater completed her disguise. No one would ever guess she was a one percenter. Not the outlaw biker kind, but something far more lucrative—one of Vancouver’s top-grossing realtors. Her taste for casual attire wasn’t a hindrance to her professional achievements since most of her clients lived in China. I’d like to say that hard work was the secret to her success, but I suspected it had more to do with having an uncle who was a card-carrying member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

  Nina was polishing off a brace of sliders when I sat down at the table and fell in love all over again. She didn’t look up until she had methodically finished chewing and swallowing the last bite of her burger. After carefully wiping her mouth with a napkin, Nina began slurping a Coke and glaring at me.

  I ate the pickle from her plate while I considered how to proceed. I was prepared to confess my sins but I didn’t know how much Mickey Wu had told her and saw no reason to overshoot the mark.

  “So,” she said after noisily dredging the ice cubes with her straw. “You’re into snuff parties now?”

  Everything, apparently, is how much Mickey Wu told her. I tried to look mortified as I studied the silverware and worked on a genuine-sounding, preferably exculpatory, explanation. When I had a rough draft in mind I looked up to discover that Nina was grinning.

  This was unexpected. I’d anticipated a chewing out at least as bad as the sliders had received. Still, there was no harm in a show of contrition just to be on the safe side. “Listen, Nina, I’m truly sorry that I caused you grief. It was a hugely irresponsible, boneheaded move.”

  “Yup.” Her smile persisted.

  “But...you’re not angry?”

  She shook her head. “It’s what you do, Jake. It would be naive of me to expect anything else. I am, after all, dealing with a semi-employed, semi-reformed drug dealer coming up fast on his forties.”

  “I am not!”

  “Which part?”

  I affected a wounded look. “I prefer to think of myself as a semi-retired bon vivant tenderly stirring the embers of his fiery youth.”

  Nina rolled her eyes. “Whatever gets you to sleep at night.”

  “Deadwood reruns and my vaporizer, mostly.” I generally prefer to let sleeping dogs lie, maybe even curl up beside them for a power nap, but I needed to know where I stood with Nina. “I appreciate the vote of no-confidence in my character, but why aren’t you more pissed off right now? Didn’t you hang up on me an hour ago?”

  Nina nodded. “And then I called my uncle to tell him what happened. Our family’s reputation is serious business back in China, you know. It would be totally humiliating for him if word of your little stunt got back to my uncle’s cronies. And my client list would dry up in no time.”

  “All of which suggests you should be seriously angry with me.”

  “Which I was. Right up until the moment I found out that Mickey Wu is a nobody. So my uncle’s not worried about what he thinks or says.”

  “Seriously? I thought the guy was some kind of big shot back in China.”

  “Just because he’s rich?” If it was possible to scoff sexily, Nina managed it. “Millionaires are a dime a dozen over there. Real power comes from knowing the right people.”

  “Like your uncle?”

  Nina nodded. “And Mickey Wu doesn’t. My uncle has never even heard of him.”

  Unbelievable. First Mickey Wu decides to clean up my mess for me, and now Nina isn’t even mad at me for making it. Could I get any luckier today?

  “”So, Jake…” Nina whispered as she leaned toward me with a look on her face that sent my heart galloping. Maybe I could…

  “Tell me about th
is dead guy.”

  “Oh, yeah. Him.” My heart rate settled back down to a jarring canter. “Not much to tell. Richard found him on the bathroom floor. We think he might have OD’d.”

  Her expression morphed into one of distaste. Nina treated her body like a temple; we both did. Lamentably, she allowed no sacraments stronger than extra strength aspirin within it. “Was he a friend of yours? Or maybe a customer?” Her tone was cutting.

  I didn’t bother to look wounded. “You know I only ever sold weed, Nina. And I don’t even do that anymore. I have no idea who the guy was.”

  “But don’t you want to know?”

  “Not especially.” Digging for dirt didn’t strike me as a particularly effective way of getting out of a hole.

  Nina looked disappointed. Her attention wandered back to her phone, which had been having brief seizures on the table at regular intervals. She never left the thing alone for more than a few minutes. There had been times when I had resorted to texting her to get her attention while we were having dinner together. It was a sore spot between us but watching her fiddle with it now did remind me of something.

  “I have his phone,” I volunteered in yet another attempt to get her to focus on me.

  Nina raised an eyebrow but didn’t look up, leaving me uncertain as to which was the phone of interest, hers or the dead guy’s. To find out, I put his on the table between us.

  She put hers away and looked at me expectantly. I hesitated. All of a sudden I wasn’t sure I wanted to know who the guy was. What if it turned out that I did know him and hadn’t recognized him after his run-in with Mickey Wu’s bidet? What if his wallpaper photo was a shot of his wife and infant daughter? What if it was bad karma to snoop in a dead guy’s phone?

  All good reasons to leave the thing alone. On the other hand, there was the way Nina was looking at me right now.

  I picked up the phone and flipped it open. Then I glanced at Nina to confirm that she hadn’t suddenly sprouted bangs, which I took as evidence that we hadn’t instantaneously time travelled back to the nineties. And yet I was still holding a flip-phone. Too much had been happening in my bloodstream and Mickey Wu’s living room for me to notice this when I grabbed it off the dead guy.

  I gave myself over to a hot flush of nostalgia. I loved flip-phones. If you don’t enjoy thumbing one of those babies open, you should see a doctor immediately because you’re a little dead inside.

  I closed and opened it a couple more times and grinned at Nina. She checked her watch.

  On my side of the table, nostalgia gave way to consternation as I frowned at the device’s tiny display lit up with ghostly blue glyphs. “Is this Mandarin?” I turned the phone so Nina could see it.

  She squinted, then nodded, taking possession of both the phone and my frown. Silence reigned as she mashed the old-timey navigation buttons for a minute. “There’s almost nothing on this thing. Just two measly photos.”

  “Of what?”

  “This girl.” Nina turned the phone around to show me a picture of a young Chinese woman wearing a Stanford School of Business sweatshirt. “Was she at your party?”

  I studied the photo, disconcerted by the fact that there was something familiar about her. After a minute I shook my head. “No. Definitely not. I would’ve remembered her,” I added, hoping to convince us both.

  “Maybe she’s his girlfriend,” Nina suggested.

  “I hope not, seeing as how he’s dead. Besides, she’s way too young for him. He must have been close to my age and she’s what, maybe twenty, twenty-one?”

  Nina rolled her eyes. “Middle-aged guy dates girl twenty years younger. Quick, call CNN.” She returned her attention to the phone. “Hang on, this second picture is a bit more interesting.”

  Surprised by her enthusiasm, I studied it closely before announcing my conclusion. “It’s a bank.”

  “Exactly. Maybe he was casing the joint.” Nina’s eyes sparkled. “And after robbing the bank he double-crossed his partner, but the partner caught up to him and killed him at your party.”

  I thought back to the dead guy’s conservative black suit and barber school haircut. “This guy was more bank teller than robber. It’s probably a picture of where he worked.”

  Nina yawned. “Boring. No texts, no contacts. Only two outgoing calls. Didn’t this guy have any friends?” She glanced up. “Let’s call the numbers and see who answers.”

  Before I could stop her, Nina pressed redial on the first number. Her expression grew puzzled.

  “Who is it?” I didn’t really want to know the answer.

  “It’s not calling the number.”

  “Must be broken. Too bad.” I exhaled a gust of relief and disappointment and held out my hand, which Nina ignored. She wrestled with the phone until a small plastic piece popped off and fell to the floor.

  “Or if it wasn’t before, it is now.” I contorted myself to reach under the table.

  When I re-emerged with the piece, Nina was grinning triumphantly. “Mystery solved. No SIM card. You see what’s going on here, right?”

  “Ummm, not really.”

  “The phone has barely been used…the SIM card’s gone....It’s obviously a burner.” Nina’s mouth tightened into a pout of disapproval I knew all too well.

  “You think the dead guy was a drug dealer, don’t you?”

  “Correct.” She looked stern, but also self-satisfied. Like a half-Chinese Nancy Drew, assuming the book jacket drawings from my mother’s childhood collection were woefully inaccurate. I shook my head to clear out adolescent mental images of torpedo bras beneath pixie dust sweaters.

  Nina mistook my gesture for an indictment of her deductive powers. “I suppose you’ve got a better theory?”

  I remained silent while I tried and failed to come up with one. Unfortunately, the fact that The Norwegian had been loitering around the crime scene made Nina’s all too plausible. His ability to handle turf wars had been the reason I had partnered up with him in the first place.

  In a huff, Nina returned her attention to her phone and began scrolling through her calls list. This inevitably presaged an abrupt departure on her part. I endured this snub with increasing frequency toward the end of our marriage and it still drove me crazy. I decided to turn the tables on her and stood up. “Well, I’ve got to…”

  “I knew it! Check this out.” Nina appeared surprised when she noticed I was standing. “Or did you have to rush off somewhere?”

  I mumbled an incoherent equivocation and sat down again. “What have you got?” I nodded toward her phone.

  “These outgoing calls on the dead guy’s phone, one of the numbers looked familiar.” She handed the phone back to me.

  Both calls had been made on the night of my ill-fated party, one right after the other. The first call lasted six minutes. The second was less than a minute and the number was familiar to me as well—it was The Norwegian’s. I groaned. “I recognize it, but how do you…?”

  “So I checked my call records and, sure enough, here it is.” Nina held up her phone to show an incoming call from the first number, logged only a few hours earlier.

  I swallowed my question about The Norwegian and asked a different one instead, even though I didn’t want to know the answer. “Whose number is it?”

  “Mickey Wu’s!”

  This time Nina’s breathy excitement did nothing for me. My heart was beating fast again, but it felt more like an incipient anxiety attack. A roller derby of confused thoughts and questions began careening around my head. At least the call to The Norwegian explained how he had found out about the party. Was it possible that one of his customers was also a friend of Mickey Wu’s? Maybe the dead guy had called Mickey (prior to becoming dead, of course) to ask why he wasn’t at his own party. Which would also explain Mickey Wu’s early return. But if that was the case, why had Mickey acted surprised about th
e party? More importantly, why hadn’t he recognized the dead guy?

  I noticed that Nina was standing up. “You’re leaving?” I was immediately annoyed with myself for asking the same old question in the same old tone of voice. “We still haven’t figured out who the dead guy is.”

  “Just call Mickey Wu and ask him,” she replied in a tone that was also familiar. It was the one she used when talking to her more obtuse clients on the phone. “Gotta run. Seeya, Jake.”

  I was still cataloguing all the reasons that call seemed like a bad idea when the waiter brought over Nina’s bill.

  Chapter Seven

  It was late afternoon by the time I finally arrived home. After a power nap and a shower, I headed for Richard’s place, stopping off to pick up curries and Kingfisher beers.

  Richard gave me a disapproving look as he let me in. “That stuff is going to kill you one day.”

  “The beer?”

  “The food.”

  “Aside from the goat, it’s mostly vegetables and chickpeas. I thought you told me I should eat more of this stuff.”

  “In salads. Not swimming in ghee.”

  “So you don’t want any?”

  Richard put his hands on his hips and pursed his lips. “Where’s it from?”

  “Vij’s. Where else?”

  He snatched the take-away containers away from me and headed for the kitchen.

  “Aren’t you worried about killing yourself?” I called after him, tossing my jacket on the floor as soon as he was out of sight. Richard kept his condo in a state more akin to performance art than comfy digs. Where my place had an exposed brick wall authentically salvaged from the backside of a blast furnace, Richard and Dante spent an entire weekend creating an “accent wall” from bamboo they had personally macheted out of a jungle in Thailand. The furniture was sleek and modern—mostly teak, some walnut, swaddled where necessary in a colour palette of pale greens and greys. The walls were art gallery white, the paintings vivid and oversized. The floors were reclaimed hardwood, invariably clear of any visual impediments to the appreciation of their grain. Except when I was visiting.