“Drinking to the demise of Ninth Life?” I asked Ian as Perry left.
“You got it.”
“What are Judith and Liz, anyhow, the Dynamic Duo?” I asked in exasperation.
He frowned. “What do you mean?”
“You and Alison are ready to lie down and die. You act as though it’s a foregone conclusion that you can’t do anything to deter them from their appointed course.”
“Are you nuts? In four days? I’m sure you talked to Alison. We’ve been trying to put Living World and Evan Maleck, its asshole president, out of business for years. To no avail. The media won’t have anything to do with us because we can’t prove our allegations. The cat Mary rescued would have gotten us a lot of good publicity. People hate seeing companion animals abused like that.”
“I’m not sure what you mean. Wasn’t that just business as usual for Maleck?”
“Not exactly. You see no one—not even Living World—does the Draize Test on cats’ eyes. Fortunately for cats, they’re unsuitable. They yell bloody murder and their eyes tear too much. Just like ours. That’s why cosmetics companies test their latest batches of goop on rabbits. No yelling, no tearing.”
“But the cat,” I protested. “His eyes had been burned by something pretty caustic. And they’d been clipped open, too.”
Ian sighed. “That was done by one of Maleck’s lab workers. Every year on the lab director’s birthday, they put a cat in with the test rabbits.”
“They what?”
“Yeah,” Ian said, looking away. “The lab director hates cats, so they play a little joke on him just to ring his chimes. They prep a cat with the test substance, put it in the restraints along with the rabbits, and when the director sees it, he goes bananas. They’re just a bunch of fun-loving guys at Living World.”
“Shit,” I said faintly.
Ian nodded. “Yeah, shit. The media would have loved the story of the cat, but it’s too late now. It boils down to this, Detective: we get some hard evidence, or we forget it.”
“Then let’s get it.”
“What?” he asked derisively, pushing his hair out of his eyes. “Since when have you become an expert on all this?”
“Oh, I’m no expert,” I admitted, “but I do have a couple of ideas. I’m going to need some help, though.”
“What kind of help?”
“I prefer to tell you when you’re sober,” I told him. “What I want to know now though, is if I can count on you. Will you go home and go to bed? Or are you going to keep on swilling beer and feeling sorry for yourself?”
He propped his chin up with one fist. “I’ve given almost four years of my life to this organization,” he said. “And we have done some good. We got by-laws passed which prohibited animal shelters on the island from selling animals for research. And we managed to persuade the SPCA to stop using the decompression chamber to euthanize unwanted animals. We put a mink farm out of business because it violated the local health code. We were making real progress, dammit! And then Living World showed up. It’s occupied our attention for way too long—we haven’t been able to do anything else. But it’s like Fort Knox,” he said heatedly. “We couldn’t find one single chink in its operation until we got Mary hired on as a lab worker. And that was only because someone at the local labor board owed us a favor.”
Red-eyed, he looked up at me. “Yeah, I am feeling sorry for myself. But I’m feeling sorry for the animals we won’t be able to help if we’re put out of business. I don’t believe for one minute that CLAW will be effective. Oh, they’ll probably make a big stink and get everyone upset. But they won’t make a difference. They’re kidding themselves if they think they can close Living World down. And the ill-will they create is going to spill over onto Ninth Life. They’ll neutralize us.” He drew circles on the table with condensation from his beer glass. “Four days, eh? Oh, why not? Maybe you can do what we couldn’t.” He sat back in his chair. “But don’t count on me. I’m tired, Detective. I might go home—up-island. See my folks. Right now, though,” he said, “I’m going to bed.”
“Can you drive?” I asked him, worried.
“Yeah. I’ve only had three beers.” He made a face. “I hate this stuff. It makes my nose clog up and my eyes scratchy. Gives me a headache, too. But it’s what people do for occasions, right?”
“Occasions?”
“Yeah, occasions. Celebrating good fortune or mourning bad fortune.” He stood up and slipped his arm into his black leather motorcycle jacket. Putting his helmet under his arm, he fiddled with the zipper of the jacket. “Maybe Liz is right,” he said. “Maybe I am a gutless turd. But I agree with Alison. Our cause—” he said with a lopsided, derisive smile, “animal rights—is an important one. And we’re just now starting to get people on our side. We can’t afford to alienate them. We have to do things right.”
I was aware that this last message was meant for me. “I’ll check with you and Alison tomorrow. Maybe you’ll have changed your mind.”
“Maybe,” he said, looking troubled. He smiled a little. “See you.” He zipped his jacket up, took a firmer grip on his motorcycle helmet, and walked off.
I swallowed the last of my ginger ale and followed him.
Midnight again. I stood in my kitchen, making cocoa. Well, hotshot, I asked myself, what do you have in mind? Pouring the hot chocolate into a mug, I added a splash of Scotch, and took it into the bathroom. While the tub was filling, I sat on the edge, thinking. Ideas careened around in my mind like gerbils in a cage. Which of them was most feasible in the short time remaining, I wasn’t sure. I’d have to sleep on them.
Shedding my clothes, I slipped into the bath with a sybaritic sigh. There’s nothing more conducive to right-brain activity than a cup of cocoa and a hot bath. I felt myself relaxing immediately. No dawdling, now, I told myself, taking another sip of cocoa. You’re in here to think, not to enjoy yourself. Where do you think you are—in a California hot tub?
The sound of my own heavy breathing—well, snoring really—woke me, and I realized that my bathwater was now distinctly cool. I fished for the plug with my toe and pulled, rationalizing that a whole lot of right-brain activity had probably gone on while I was resting my eyes. In fact, I realized, as I stood up and wrapped myself in a towel, one of the ideas that had been chasing itself around in my brain was a lot more developed than it had been an hour earlier. See, I told my disapproving left brain which had wanted me to sit down with a yellow tablet and make a list. Don’t be so skeptical. To paraphrase the guy touting the Paul Masson vintages, ‘We will serve no idea before its time.’ So there. Yes, indeedy, I thought, toweling dry and pulling on my sweats-cum-pajamas, I liked this idea very much. It had about it a certain . . . panache. It couldn’t do Ninth Life any harm, and it would certainly spell finis to Evan Maleck’s activities. If I could pull it off. And that was a big if. I yawned hugely, heading for the bedroom. Tomorrow was soon enough to start getting my ducks in a row. After all, I had four whole days left.
Chapter 6
Veterinarian Emma Neely answered my knock on her back door just before six. She ushered Repo and me into a little hall that contained rubber boots, coats and jackets on a rack on the wall, and a stack of animal carriers.
“My God, it’s the prodigal daughter,” she said gruffly.
I felt guilty. It was true—lately, only Repo’s care brought me out to Emma’s.
“I wouldn’t do this for anyone but you, sweetie,” she said, and I felt a little better until I realized she was talking to Repo. The prodigal daughter was evidently in the doghouse. “Take him on into the back and get started,” she told her assistant, a sturdy-looking young woman with braids and freckles, blue denim shirt flapping out over her jeans. “You know what to do, Ginny.”
“Does she?” I asked Emma after Ginny had left with Repo. “Your assistants look younger every year. That one can’t be more than twelve.”
She raised an eyebrow at me. “That sounds like the carping of a middle-aged g
rouch.”
“Oh, all right,” I admitted. Come to think of it, I was getting a trifle testy about my age. “What’s she going to do to him?”
“The usual tests—blood pressure, temperature. We’ll do a little blood work, and take a look at his urine. We should be able to rule out a lot of things by tonight.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll stop back by later on. Sorry I can’t be more precise.”
Emma smiled, tucking a few loose strands of graying brown hair back behind her ears. I hadn’t seen her in, oh, twelve months, and I realized with a start that she was looking every year of her fifty-five. Or was it fifty-six? Her hair was definitely more gray than brown, and her fiercely snapping dark eyes seemed to me to be just a little softer. Was it possible that she was mellowing, turning from the curmudgeon I loved into a civil-tongued dowager? What a terrible thought.
“Precise?” she snorted. “Since when were you ever precise? It isn’t your strong point. As I recall, however, you do have several more interesting qualities.”
I blushed. Emma had rented out part of her house to me when I was new to Victoria and she was practicing her profession in town. She knew me pretty well. And for her part, I was happy to see that she was as sharp-tongued as ever.
“As long as it’s before midnight, just drop in,” she told me. “I’ll be here. And if I’m not, it’s just because I’ve gone to the store or something. Ginny and my other assistant, Peg, live in the trailer out back. Knock and they’ll let you in. They can entertain you until I get back. So long, Caitlin,” she said, patting me on the cheek. “I have to go to surgery now. See you later. And don’t worry. We’ll find out what’s wrong with Repo.”
It was with a huge sense of relief that I drove away from Emma’s. She would find out what was ailing him; I was sure of that.
• • •
As I drove down Saanich Highway, toward town, the sun came up—a crescent of orange-red fire, just rising over the teeth of the mainland mountains. Snowcapped Mount Baker on the American coast was briefly splashed with reflected light and it shone vividly amber, then peach and salmon, as the sun edged higher in the sky. My car topped a little hill, and I slowed down to look around. The sky was powder blue and cloudless, with a scoured-clean look to it, and the ocean off to my left was a deep, fathomless indigo. Winter colors.
I let my eyes travel to the horizon and reminded myself again why I live here—because I fell in love with the ocean and never quite got over it. I wasn’t born and raised on Vancouver Island—my family lived in the Ottawa Valley for most of my life. But I remember clearly when I first came to Vancouver Island—on a business trip while I was still living in the east. I left Toronto in the middle of January, on a day so cold the snow cried out when you walked on it, and landed in Vancouver in the middle of the night. There were few jetways in those days, and when I stepped outside the plane into the open air, my nose was flooded with such a profusion of warm, moist, living smells that I stood there with my mouth open in amazement. I recognized cedar and pine, the smell of damp earth, and something that smelled unbelievably like roses. My God, I thought, awed—this in the middle of January? But there was something else, something tangy and unidentifiable, something indescribably exotic, like an operatic leitmotif.
I was horribly disappointed that the windows in the Bayshore Hotel didn’t open, and I hardly slept in anticipation of the next day when I could go outside and enjoy all those smells. I remember that I finally fell asleep praying “Please, no snow.” I needn’t have worried. As I stood in the hotel lobby the next morning, waiting for the sun to come up, I realized with a thrill that the ocean, or a tongue of it anyhow, was right there, right outside the hotel. I was so excited, I didn’t wait for dawn. In the gray half-light, I ran down a little path through the hotel’s rose garden to the sea. And as I reached the ocean’s edge, the sun came up over the towers of the city behind me, turning the waters of the bay to rippled gold. A line of poetry popped into my head:
The world is charged with the glory of God; It shall shine out like flaming from shook foil.
And suddenly I was bawling my head off—a bundled-up Easterner, making a fool of herself in the gardens of Vancouver’s most expensive hotel. Hardly an auspicious beginning for a love affair.
Now, nearly twenty years later, I looked out over the October seas to the San Juan Islands, crouched like enormous sleeping sea beasts, and felt some of the same awe I felt on that January day so long ago. It had taken me a little time, and some disentangling, to move west, but when I did, I didn’t stop at Vancouver. I went all the way to Vancouver Island—to Victoria, and the little hamlet of Oak Bay. Roses don’t bloom here in the winter, but you can smell cedar and pine any time you like. And that mysterious, indescribable something, that olfactory undercurrent my eastern nose couldn’t identify two decades ago, is something I now take for granted. The smell of the sea.
My stomach growled, bringing me back to the present, and I took the Quadra Street exit off the highway into town. There’s a restaurant at Cedar Hill Crossroads that serves especially good blueberry pancakes accompanied by fat, gorgeous slices of peameal bacon, and I had a hankering for pancakes. Besides, I wanted to use a phone. If I was going to be able to pull off what I had in mind for Ninth Life, I needed help. I intended to begin asking for it now.
There were a couple of calls that needed to be made right away, so I ordered my breakfast and headed for the telephone. Val answered on the fourth ring.
“Hi there,” I said. “It’s Caitlin.”
“Hi there, yourself,” she answered cheerily. “Before you tell me what you want, when are we going to get together?”
An image of Val came into my mind—moss-green eyes, expensively cut reddish-brown hair, wonderful television presence. She had that sort of polished, just-right look about her that only the very rich, the very beautiful, or the very successful have. In Val’s case, she was a little bit of all three. Her wealth she owed to her late politician husband—the murderous Baxter Buchanan who had cost me a few pints of blood and some broken ribs. Probably no one mourned Buchanan’s demise except his tailor and his tax attorney. Val’s good looks she owed to her genes and a healthy lifestyle. Her success was all her own.
“How about today?” I said, in answer to her question. “I know it’s rather sudden, but it’s kind of important. I need to pick your brain. And—I cannot tell a lie—I have a favor to ask you.”
“Ah,” she said portentously. “Well, let me look at my calendar. Hmmm, this morning is out. This afternoon, too. But how about noon? I work out then. I could meet you here at my apartment and you could talk to me while I exercise.”
“Okay,” I told her. “But I need you to do something for me in the meantime. Is Lorraine Shaver still your assignment editor?”
“Yes, why?”
“I need her to tell a lie for me. And even though she owes me a favor, too, this is something you have to know about. In case it boomerangs.”
“What is it?”
“I need to get inside the Saanich branch of a mainland cosmetics firm called Living World, and I want Lorraine to call up and use Channel 22’s muscle to make an appointment for one of your reporters. Me. For an interview with the director.”
“Oho,” she said. “But won’t you need a camera crew?”
“I’ll take my own.” I said. “A friend.”
“Who no doubt owes you a favor too,” she said, laughing. “Okay. I have no problem with this. I’ll tell Lorraine and she’ll call you with your interview time.”
“Thanks a lot, Val,” I said. “Oh, and one last thing. The interview?”
“Yes?”
“It, um, has to be tomorrow. Thursday at the absolute latest.”
“No promises, but we’ll try our best,” she said. “Anything else?”
“Not right now.”
“Okay. See you at noon.”
I hung up feeling hopeful. A quick check confirmed that my breakfast had not yet arrived, so I f
ished another twenty cents out of my pocket and dialed a number you will never find in any directory. Amazingly, Francis answered.
“This must be a mistake,” I said. “I was prepared to leave a message with that infernal machine of yours, Francis. How come you’re up?”
“I’m not up,” he said sulkily. “In fact, I’m on my way down. To bed. You have ten seconds to tell me what you need.”
I tut-tutted a little. “Francis, don’t be so hasty. I have five fat hundred-dollar bills just dying to meet you.”
“You have?” he said suspiciously. “You really must be in a jam, Cat my dear, if you’re offering money up front. Five hundreds, you say?”
I mentally kissed them goodbye. “Five.”
“Hmmm. Well I suppose I could give you longer than ten seconds. Will fifteen be sufficient?”
“Francis,” I intoned ominously.
“All right, all right. So what is it this time?”
“I need the dope on the Saanich branch of a cosmetics company called Living World, based on the mainland. And on its director, a guy named Evan Maleck. Apparently the company operated briefly in three other provinces—Quebec, Ontario, and Alberta.”
“We’re talking about at least four databases,” Francis said. “Maybe six. And if I do some digging on Maleck himself—taxes, credit and criminal history, medical records and so on—it could be more. Much more. The five will hardly pay for all that. Maybe you could be a little more specific. You know—give me a hint.”
“I wish I could,” I told him. “What I need is something really horrible on Living World, or on Maleck. Something that would shock and alienate Living World’s customer base—flower children grown up into save-the-earth types. Alternatively, I’d settle for something on Maleck himself that would result in tedious and protracted legal proceedings. Something that would put him behind bars. Either one will be fine. Your choice.”
“Got it,” Francis said. “This will be fun. I have some super ideas already.”
Ninth Life Page 6