by Graham Reed
“What? No.” It took me a minute to get my mind back on track. “I worked for him as a house-sitter. Not selling underwear.”
“Ah, so you don’t just sit on them, but provide housewarming services as well. That’s a full-service operation you’re running.”
I studied her closely to be sure. She was definitely smirking. I went with it. “That’s right. And for a rather exclusive client list, I might add. But after this weekend, an opening has come up, so let me know if you’re interested.”
“I just might be,” she replied with a full blown smile.
“Oh, yeah?” I sounded more surprised than I intended. Before I could improve my response, Richard came back into the room.
“Nothing left but this Chardonnay,” he announced, sloshing some into his glass, heedless of the Rioja dregs. The result was an unappetizing rosé. Not that there was any other kind. “So. Where were we?”
“I commented that The Norwegian barely knows Dante, and you got squirrelly and left the room.”
Richard stared into his glass for a minute and then sighed. “The Norwegian knows Dante a lot better than you think.”
I drained the rest of my wine and swallowed a couple more times for good measure before asking the question. “How?”
“Before I met him, Dante used to be quite a partier. Nothing too crazy, but he liked to do a bit of coke here and there.” Richard shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “When you cut The Norwegian’s pot supply, he moved into coke and Dante started buying from him.”
I was too surprised to reply immediately. When I did, it landed slightly beside the point. “I thought Dante didn’t even drink.”
“He doesn’t. All those empty calories. A moment on the lips, right?” Richard shrugged. “But he enjoys coke.”
I couldn’t believe that all this time Dante had been buying it from The Norwegian. I thought they had met only once, buying a half-ounce back when The Norwegian and I were working together.
Wendy shrugged. “So he’s a valued customer of The Norwegian’s. All the more reason that he wouldn’t come after Dante.”
Richard raised his glass to take another drink and then stopped and frowned at it uncertainly. “As far as I know, Dante hasn’t bought anything from The Norwegian in almost a year. The last time he did, things didn’t go so well.”
“What happened?” asked Wendy.
“Dante made fun of The Norwegian’s trench coat.”
I put my head in my hands and let out a groan.
Wendy looked back and forth between us impatiently. “So what?”
“Let’s just say the man has a very thin skin. Which he protects with his prized pterodactyl-skin coat.” Richard looked queasy. “Why did you ever get involved with the man, Jake? He’s a Neanderthal.”
I felt a surge of annoyance. “It was a bad choice, I freely admit it. That’s why I parted ways with him years ago. Which is more than I can say for Dante. Since you knew what a thug he was, why the hell did you let Dante buy coke from him?” I felt like a jerk even before I had finished saying the words. Dante was missing, most likely in danger, and Richard was convinced that The Norwegian was involved. He was probably feeling guilty enough already.
“Fuck you! I didn’t let Dante do anything. He’s a grown man, not my ward!”
Or possibly angry. I remembered Relationship Commandment Number 1: Do What You Feel. Richard had stolen this one from Omar Little after watching The Wire, but that didn’t make it any less true.
“Boys, boys.” Wendy raised her hands in a placating gesture. “Enough bickering. It’s getting late and I haven’t even had dinner or changed out of this monkey suit I wear to work.” She tugged at her yoga pants with visible annoyance. “So can we focus on Dante and decide what we’re going to do about finding him?”
I nodded, thankful for her interjection. The yoga pants were just a work uniform, not a preferred fashion. I had been worried she liked them as much as they liked her. “It’s dangerous to make fun of The Norwegian’s sartorial quirks, but if it’s any comfort, in my experience his vengeance tends more toward ‘swift and terrible’ than ‘best served cold.’ I really doubt he would’ve waited a year to come after Dante.”
“Unless he happened to be looking for a way to get back at you as well,” Richard countered. “He did say he had to punish you for messing with his business, and he knows we’re close friends.”
I could feel Richard and Wendy’s eyes upon me as I chewed my lip. It still didn’t feel right to me, but I had to admit it wasn’t as thin as my Lazy Burglar theory had been. “So what do you want to do?”
“Call the cops.” Richard gestured around the condo. “Look at this place.”
I sighed. “Okay. Go ahead. But first, let me fill you in on what Mickey Wu told me so we can get our stories straight on the party and the dead guy.”
Wendy looked over at me. “Dead guy?”
Chapter Seventeen
While we were waiting for the cops to show up, it dawned on us that they probably wouldn’t be too impressed to find us lounging around drinking wine in the middle of a crime scene. Fortunately, Wendy lived directly above it.
She led the way up the building’s fire stairs. Richard followed behind her, blocking my view with his own glutei maximi. I wanted to avert my eyes, but would’ve had as much luck trying not to watch Brad Pitt on the big screen.
She opened her door and ushered us into the lounge before disappearing into her bedroom to change. Her unit was a cookie-cutter reproduction of Dante’s, and a whole different world. His was a zen garden; hers an owl’s nest. When at Dante’s, I was inclined, more often than not, to speak in hushed tones. Wendy’s made me want to shout and jump around. Both were temples for, and testaments to, master craftspeople carrying on ancient traditions.
Richard had seen it all before. He busied himself with ordering Thai food. The police officer he talked to while still at Dante’s had told him that a missing person was not an emergency so it would probably be a couple hours before they could spare anyone.
While Richard was on his phone, mine buzzed at me. Speak of the devil and he doth text:
got you voice-mail. I have what your looking for. If you want back meet me tomorrow night
The typos were understandable. The Norwegian had fingers the size of bratwurst. Knowing Richard was going to freak out when I showed him the text, I felt it best to wait until he had finished ordering dinner.
My Thai was non-existent even when not compared to his fluency, so I was left to assume that the process was complete when he terminated the call. I bit the bullet and swallowed twice. “Richard…” I began.
He held up a finger. “Hold on. Voice-mail.”
I watched his face perform a rather compelling medley of emotive contortions, from concentration to relief, followed by surprise, and then an electrifying swan song of excitement mixed with petulance. “Dante’s okay!” he exclaimed. “And I’m going to kill him.”
Wendy came hurrying down the hallway. She had changed into a pair of faded brown corduroys and a green t-shirt with a chimpanzee wearing glasses and a suit with the caption ‘98% you,’ which inspired a mix of excitement and petulance in me. For one thing, I didn’t even own a suit.
Richard beamed at us. “I just got a message from Dante. That bitch is on a freaking yacht right now.”
Wendy clapped her hands. “Whose yacht?”
“Chip Thompson’s.” Richard laughed and shook his head.
“Chip Thompson? As in, the Chip Thompson? The guy who invented Near Future?” Wendy’s eyes were as wide and green as a pair of lost lagoons.
Richard switched to nodding his head. “Him. Maybe Dante never mentioned he’s an ex?”
“He did not. That bitch.” Wendy grinned.
I felt compelled to pull back on the conversational reins. “Hold up a minute. Who the hell is Chip
Thompson?”
The incredulity in their expressions came across as a pretty heavy load of judgment for posing an innocent question.
“That kid who created the Near Future computer game? Who’s now, like, what, a bazillionaire?” Wendy finished off by shaking her head in slow motion.
“He’s not a kid,” Richard amended in a huffy tone.
“He runs a gaming company down in San Francisco, doesn’t he?” Wendy said.
Richard nodded. “But he’s originally from Vancouver. Dante dated him for a few months before we got together. Chip was living in his parents’ basement at the time, working on the game, I guess. When he wasn’t writing code, he was checking out online hookup sites.” Richard skillfully executed a lewd finger mamba by way of illustration. “They hooked up. But Dante dumped him pretty quickly. According to him, Chip was marooned in arrested adolescence. I believe his exact words were ‘total failure to launch.’”
Wendy laughed. “Kinda seems like he launched after all.”
“Tell me about it. I used to tease Dante about it but he brushed it off, claiming he didn’t care about the money. He said Chip was an obsessive little megalomaniac who was more interested in video games than sex.”
“So what’s he doing on the guy’s boat?” I hoped to squeeze some relevance out of the conversation. It all sounded like good news, but I was having trouble reconciling it with The Norwegian’s text. If he didn’t have Dante, then who, or what, did he think I was looking for? I decided to puzzle that one out on my own as I didn’t want to spoil Richard’s good mood by bringing up The Norwegian again.
“Chip called him from his yacht last night, told him he was coming into town.” Richard shook his head. “Who knows? Maybe he’s trying to rub Dante’s face in his success, show off a little. And like I said, Dante loves to party. They’ve been sailing through the Gulf Islands but they’re coming in for supplies tomorrow morning and…” He paused to do a little dance. “Dante got Chip to agree to let me come along for the second half of their party cruise!”
“Now you’re the bitch!” Wendy laughed.
Richard giggled and thrust his hands into the air in a victorious gesture.
“But wait, if Dante just went yachting with the digerati, then who broke into his place?” Wendy asked. “And yours?”
Richard put his hands on his hips. “My money’s still on The Norwegian, punishing us because he thinks we messed things up for him somehow. The important thing is that Dante’s okay, and I’m going sailing!”
“What about the cops?” Wendy asked.
A rogue wave of panic rolled across Richard’s features. “Oh, shit. I better call them off. And call Dante back. Can I use your bedroom, Wen?”
She nodded and jerked her thumb toward the hallway. After Richard left, Wendy flopped down beside me on the sofa. She propped herself up with an elbow and begun to study me with a faintly amused expression when the front door banged opened.
A woman in her thirties walked in. She was wearing a blue bomber jacket over a blue button-up shirt, which merged in an orderly fashion with blue cargo pants. Her manner of speech was as efficient as her dress: “Hey, Wen,” she said, kneeling down to untie heavy black boots. I bet everything on a pair of black socks but lost it all. They were white. Her hair was blond, and heavily shellacked, seemingly for optimal aerodynamics. When she stood up and saw me, she frowned and added a terse hello.
“Hey,” Wendy replied without looking over.
“I’m going to take a shower,” the woman announced.
“Okay.”
“Who’s that?” I asked after she marched off down the hall.
“Barb,” Wendy replied. “We live together.”
Richard’s reappearance saved me from languishing in disappointment. “The cops aren’t coming,” he announced.
“Did you talk to Dante?” Wendy asked, looking over at him.
“No, his phone went straight to voice-mail.”
“Well, like you said, the important thing is that he’s okay. And you’ll see your man tomorrow,” Wendy reminded him sympathetically.
Richard sighed and looked out the window.
Sensing that things were getting mopey, I waded in. “Who wants to hear what I found out about the dead guy?”
After telling Wendy about our mysterious party guest’s untimely demise and Mickey Wu’s untimely return, I filled them in on what he had told me about his business associate, and that the dead guy’s family was trying to locate his missing phone. By the time I was done, Richard looked distracted, but Wendy was nodding.
“Sounds like you got served a big, fat baloney sandwich,” she said.
I nodded back at her glumly. If the story had sounded any more convincing to them, I probably could’ve talked myself into believing it and forgetting that the whole sordid weekend ever happened.
Richard seemed to have the same idea now that Dante’s whereabouts were no longer in question. He announced that he was going home to look for something “yachty” to wear.
My initial inclination to linger and talk vitamins with Wendy was kiboshed by Barb’s reappearance, throwing off wafts of lilac and wearing yoga pants identical to the ones Wendy had recently shed. Barb busied herself in the kitchen preparing some kind of foul-smelling lentil stew and setting the table. Noisily, and with only two bowls.
I took the hint and hit the road.
Chapter Eighteen
I was starting to feel pretty positive about how things were sorting themselves out. What had started out as a possible murder and a missing friend was now down to a rash of break-ins in a city where property crime rates were on the rise, purportedly due to the scourge of illegal drug use. If that was all that was going on, it was the kind of karmic retribution I was prepared to endure.
My newfound optimism ticked up a notch when I arrived home to discover that the quality of my uninvited guests had improved. In marked contrast to The Norwegian, this one was waiting, albeit impatiently, on my doorstep, and actually looked good in leather pants. I invited her inside.
“Why didn’t you call me back?” Nina asked.
“I did. I just didn’t leave a message.”
She frowned distractedly.
“You never check them anyway.” I immediately resented myself for defending myself.
“I always check my messages.”
“Even the ones from me?” It was like I never learned.
Nina hid the truth behind a sultry smile. “I don’t have to. I already know what you want.”
Feeling magnanimous and a bit horny, I chose to overlook the patronizing subtext and focus on the smile. “Is that why you dropped by so late?”
Smile, I barely knew you. Nina, on the other hand, I knew all too well. She switched to teasing my tetras by tapping her fingers on the aquarium glass. I consoled myself with three fingers of a different kind. Once the Woodford Reserve was in the glass, I dropped my butt into the Eames chair and waited.
“You really screwed things up for me with your stupid party, Constable.”
Nina and The Norwegian had more in common than I would have guessed. “How so? The other day you said it wasn’t a problem. That Mickey Wu was a nobody.”
She turned and pinned me to the chair with an expression of recrimination that was familiar, but at the same time utterly alien in its vulnerability. “If that’s true, then why did two men from the Chinese government show up at my office to interrogate me?”
I paused for a fortifying gulp of bourbon. “What did they want?” I already knew the answer.
Nina shrugged unhappily. “All sorts of weird stuff—How well did I know Mickey Wu? Is he a Canadian citizen? Who does he associate with?”
“What did you tell them?” I suspected I knew the answer to this one as well.
She averted her gaze. Her eyes began darting in unison with the movemen
ts of the fish. “What could I tell them? I have no idea whether he’s a Canadian citizen.”
“Or who he associates with?”
Nina didn’t say anything.
“Did you really have to tell those guys that I was a drug dealer?”
Nina shook her head quickly, her eyes those of a freshly slain doe. “I said that you used to be, not that you are.”
“Guess they weren’t taking very good notes.”
Nina turned her back on the fish. “You should be thanking me, anyway.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Because I didn’t tell them about what happened at your stupid party.”
It was refreshing for Nina to say something I didn’t immediately want to argue with. “But why did you have to tell them anything? Those guys admitted they have no jurisdiction here, no official powers.”
“I’m sorry, Jake. I got spooked, okay? I just needed to tell them something so they would go away and leave me alone. You have no idea how these people operate. The kind of pressure they can bring to bear.”
“But you haven’t done anything wrong. And you’re a Canadian citizen. What kind of pressure can they put on you?”
“Not me. My uncle.”
“But you said he wasn’t worried about Mickey Wu. That he was a nobody.”
Nina nodded at the tetras.
“So what’s the problem?”
“My uncle has been investigated by the Chinese government in the past.”
“I thought your uncle was the Chinese government. Didn’t you tell me he was some kind of power broker on the Central Committee?”
“He used to be. But not right now. We’re hoping he will be reappointed. But like all powerful men, he has enemies. And competitors. So if he’s linked to anything scandalous…”
“Like a snuff party?” Even I could imagine the political landmine my party could become in the hands of a decent spin doctor. It was enough to make a lesser man feel guilty.