As always, I would also like to thank the Vancouver Public Library for providing the perfect working location for any writer. Every word of Cabal was written here.
Dedication
To my wonderful wife Penny who believed in me when I had stopped believing in myself.
Annalise
Thursday, Ottawa
Why is she late? She’s never late. Ever since I’ve known her she’s always been on time. I check my watch again. Over ten minutes. Maybe I should call or text. I clutch my purse closer. It doesn’t feel any different, despite the explosive nature of the contents. How did I get mixed up in this? I’m in so far over my head. I should have told Sally days ago.
I’m sure the security guard sensed something was wrong when I left the building. Sure, he smiled at me when I passed his desk but maybe he knows. Maybe someone checked Neil’s emails.
If only I hadn’t— Oh, it’s no use rehashing the whole thing and playing the blame game.
Where is she?
A text! I remove my glove and feel the bite of the Ottawa winter as I rummage in my purse. Because of my hat, sunglasses and scarf, the phone doesn’t recognize my face, which is kind of the point. My hands tremble as I enter my passcode. Her text reads, I’m just parking. It’s her second text. I must have missed the first one. It says, Got delayed by a call from my boss. Had to take it.
Thank God. I need to get the papers into her hands. She’ll know what to do. She always knows what to do. A problem shared and all that. It was a crazy idea sending them to Denis. How could he possibly be of any use? What was I thinking? I should have come to her in the first place.
There are a few people walking along the canal—all bundled up against the cold and on their way to an early lunch, no doubt—but I’m the only one sitting on a bench. I turn to look towards the ramp leading into the Rideau Centre parking; no sign of her yet. Then I see the young man. His face seems vaguely familiar. He sits on the next bench over from me and shuffles off his heavy backpack. There is a length of string protruding from the middle compartment. His jacket is definitely not made for a Canadian December and he seems to be trembling. I can’t help feeling sorry for him. He looks like he’s a new immigrant and it’s likely his first encounter with our snowy winters. He looks middle-eastern. Maybe he was a refugee. Who knows what he may have gone through to get to the safety of Canada.
He cuts a look at me and gives me a shy smile. No, not shy. Embarrassed maybe. I give him a smile back. I want to reach out to him. Say something welcoming; tell him the winters aren’t so bad once you get used to them. Maybe I should tell him where he can get a good winter jacket, without paying an arm and a leg for it.
But before I can say anything, I see her; she’s crossing the street towards me. Relief floods in and, with a quick smile to the young man, I stand and walk to her. She wraps me in a big hug and for the first time in five days, I feel safe. Thank God she’s here. We just stand hugging in the middle of the sidewalk, people passing on either side of us.
Suddenly she tenses.
I pull back and look at her face.
She’s scared.
I turn and follow her gaze.
Five meters away the young man is on his feet clutching his backpack to his chest and holding the string sticking out of it.
Sally pushes me aside and shouts “NOOOO!” as she runs at him.
He yells, “ALLĀHU AKBAR.”
He looks at me, his lips say one word, ‘Sorry.’
As she is about to barrel into him he pulls the string.
Cal
Monday, Vancouver, four days later
Hey Rocky.” The name from the past brings a flood of memories, most of them bad. It’s a voice from the past too. I turn. He’s standing right beside me; it’s like he appeared from nowhere. It’s how he got his street name. He’s aged a decade in the three years since Roy’s death. Living on the streets in the downtown east side will do that to a person.
“Hey Ghost, how’s it going?”
He shuffles from one foot to the other. Undecided. “Yeah,” is all he says. A pause, then, “Yeah, I’m OK I guess. You?”
“I’m good,” I lie. If I were good, would I be here right now at Wastings and Pain—as this junction of Hastings and Main Street is often called—looking for a dealer in the winter rain? I hope this encounter is quick. He does his shuffle again and pulls at the arm of his raggedy jacket. Come on Ghost, spit it out.
“You’re a cop now eh?” he says, equal parts of hope and worry written across his bearded face.
“Private Investigator.” That seems to wash away some of the worry. “Why?”
He worries his lip with what remain of his bottom teeth. “Dj’a remember Wily?” The image of a short, skinny alcoholic, with a tinder-spark temper, springs into my mind. I have a nasty premonition of what’s coming. I just nod. “Stupid bastard got hisself killed last week.” He looks at me expectantly but I don’t rise to the bait. Here it comes. “Only I was wondering if you could, y’know, like, uh, look into it.”
There it is.
A trickle of rain finds its way under my collar and down the back of my neck. I don’t have a lot of time. I need to make this buy, use it and get back to work. I should just say ‘sorry’ and move on. But I don’t. “How’d he die?” It comes out as a sigh.
“’S a long story. Could we go somewhere out of this goddamn rain?”
All my instincts scream, ‘no, no, NO.’ “Sure. Meet me in forty-five minutes at the Ovaltine; I’ll buy you lunch.” It’s what Roy would have wanted me to do for his friend.
I wonder what Roy would have thought about what I’m going to do next.
The guy at the check-in desk locks eyes with me and smiles. He seems like a nice guy. He must be to work here. We go through the sign-in process and he waves me on to the main room. The nurse behind the desk gives me the talk and the kit and I turn around. There’s a row of booths, each one with a tabletop and a chair. The chair faces a mirror. The chairs are filled with addicts in various stages of fixing up. A guy in a red hoodie is inserting a needle into a vein. He tries twice before succeeding. I hear a woman sighing “Ooooooooh, yes,” as the drug hits her system. Some of them are on the nod, enjoying the afterglow of the hit. A guy in a long black overcoat, covered in stains, pushes himself to his feet and wanders off. I walk over to take his place in booth number seven. I look in the mirror. It’s there for two reasons: one, so that the nurse can have a front view of the addicts in order to spot any onset of problems; and two, so that the addicts can watch themselves shooting up. This will sometimes affect the addict so strongly that she or he will be given a motivation to seek the counselling that’s available here.
Welcome to Insite, Vancouver’s safe injection site. This place has saved hundreds of lives. Maybe mine will be one they save today. I sit down and lay out the kit and start. Remove my jacket and roll up a sleeve. Tie the surgical rubber around my bicep. Pull out the flap of heroin from my pocket, unable to stifle the worry that it may contain dangerous, even fatal, amounts of fentanyl. Into the cooker it goes with the sterilized water. When it bubbles, I turn off the cooker and drop in the gauze ball then rip the protective wrapper off the syringe and insert the needle and fill it. Ready. I look at myself in the mirror and in my mind’s eye, I see them all staring at me: Sam, Stammo, Roy and even Em is there. Worst of all is Ellie. I imagine her reaction to watching.
Then a knife of pain hits me. They all disappear as I insert the needle and push the plunger. I free my bicep from the elastic and it hits.
“Oh… Oooooh… Oooooooooooooh.”
The Ovaltine Café is a time capsule. Walk through the doors and you are back in a bygone era. I doubt it’s been renovated since the day it opened in 1942, which incidentally, makes it the oldest, continuously-running restaurant in the city. But it’s clean, with good food, served in big portions and is probably the only place in Vancouver where you can still get a good, filling breakfast, any time of day, for less than
ten bucks.
Ghost is tucking into his corned beef hash like there’s no tomorrow. Between mouthfuls, his story unfurls.
“So, like I was saying, last Tuesday night was bitter cold, so me and Wily and Freddy Connor—you remember him, he was Tommy’s younger brother—so we all stayed the night at the Catholic shelter downtown. ’S an OK place if you can put up with the praying part. Not that I’m complaining, they treat you alright there.” He scoops up another mouthful of egg and hash. “Anyhoo, next morning, we came back and it was still pretty cold so we picked up our welfare and went off to the Balmoral Pub.” I smile. The Balmoral Pub bears not the least semblance to the Queen of England’s country estate of the same name. “So, we’d had a couple of beers,” a ‘couple’ in this context is anywhere between two and a lot, “when this guy walks in. Big mother but well dressed, well… he was dressed well enough that he looked out of place in the Balmoral anyways. He looks around and he spots Wily and walks over to our table. He leans down and whispers something to Wily, who goes as white as a sheet. Looked like he’d seen a ghost. Next thing we know, Wily’s grabbed his stuff and he’s walking out with the guy and we never seen him again.”
“You mean he went missing?”
“At first, yeah. We was worried ’cause we din’t see him for a couple of days. We all live in Oppenheimer Park, we got a big tent we all share. He never showed up and all his stuff was gone. Then on Friday morning the cops show up looking for us and told us he was found dead on Thursday. Then they ask me and Freddy to come and identify the body. They drive us over to the morgue at VGH and sure enough, it’s him.”
“Did they tell you the cause of death?” I ask.
“Din’t have to. Someone had beaten the snot out of him. We figured it was the big guy but the police wasn’t that interested in what we thought.”
He goes quiet and scrapes the last remnants of his hash off the plate then starts spreading strawberry jelly on his toast. “So you want me to find out if this big guy killed him?”
“Yeah,” he answers. “Except that there’s something more urgent. Me and Freddy want him to have a proper burial, in a cemetery with a gravestone and all, like you gave old Roy. Wily’s got a sister, she lives in Ottawa, got a big job with the Feds, name of Annie. If you could track her down, she’d wanna know about Wily and pay for him to have a decent funeral. Wily was real fond of her; said she was good people. Do you think you could track her down, Rocky?”
“Sure. We could give it a try. What’s her last name?”
“We don’t really know.”
“What was Wily’s name?”
“Dunno that either.”
Great. Half of the people who live in Ottawa work for the federal government and I have to find the one named Annie. I look at the hope written on Ghost’s face and can’t bring myself to tell him it’s mission impossible. I just say, “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Oh thanks Rocky, you don’t know how good that makes me feel. When do you think you’ll know?”
I take out a business card and hand it to him. “Give me a call on Wednesday.”
It’s a long shot but I might be able to find something out. But right now, I need to pay the bill and get back to the office before Stammo starts wondering why I’ve been gone so long.
“You taking banker’s lunch hours now?” Stammo growls as I walk into the main office. “You’re only just in time for the meeting.”
“What meeting?”
“Jeez, Rogan where’s your mind at? We’ve got a meeting with that guy Etienne Grey. The one who thinks his wife is cheating on him. It’s a good that he’s late, otherwise we wouldn’t have looked very professional if you’d shown up halfway through. Why’d you take so long anyway?”
I can feel a flush rising in my cheeks. I’m only using three times a day, I’ve got it under control, but I can’t let anyone know. I say the first thing that comes into my head. “I ran into an old friend and we got talking. Turns out he’s got a problem we can help with.”
“Oh,” comes the reply, “Good.” He seems mollified. “Is he one of your buddy Arnold’s friends? I like them for sure. They’re all loaded.”
I skip over the worry that this will be a pro bono job and simply say, “It’s tracking down a next of kin.”
“Good. Easy work. What’s the name?”
He’s not going to like this. “Well—ˮ
I’m saved the embarrassment of admitting I don’t have a clue by the sound of the front door opening, followed by Adry’s greeting. Our three o’clock meeting is here.
Stammo rolls back from his desk and wheels out of the office into the reception area. I follow. The client is handing an expensive looking coat to Adry. He’s in his thirties, tall, basketball-player tall, with blond hair, blue eyes and a serious expression. Nick extends his hand and the client has to lean forward a bit in order to shake it.
“I’m Nick Stammo and this is my partner, Cal Rogan.”
“Etienne Grey. Pleased to meet you.” His shake is firm and his serious expression softens a little. I have the unusual experience of having to look up to make eye contact. It strikes me that Stammo has to do this all the time now. Before the incident that put him in that wheelchair he was fairly tall too. It’s one of the many things that he’s had to adjust to and, as always, I feel the twinge of guilt that maybe I could have done differently on that day three years ago.
I lead the way to our tiny conference room and hold the door open for Grey and Stammo.
Once we’ve taken our seats, Stammo leads off, “How can we be of service Mr. Grey?”
“It’s a bit embarrassing really.” I’ve lost count of the number of times a client has started with those words, or a variation thereof. “It’s my wife.” That’s the next most common phrase heard in this room; actually it’s usually ‘It’s my husband.’ Stammo and I stay silent and let him go at his own speed. He sighs before continuing, “We’ve always been honest and open with each other but recently Susan has been going out in the evenings and coming home late, often at two or three in the morning and she refuses to tell me where she’s been. When I’ve questioned her, she swears she’s not having an affair but just point blank won’t tell me what she’s been doing. It’s driving me crazy; I just have to know what’s happening.”
On the face of it, he seems like a really nice guy whose wife is almost certainly cheating on him, but something tells me otherwise. I need to watch him for anything out of place.
“Is it specific days?” I ask.
“Not really, though she’s often out on Wednesdays.”
“Does your wife work?” asks Stammo.
“Yes. Like me she’s a lawyer. She’s at a different firm and she specializes in corporate law. It’s quite a high pressure job. I don’t know how she does it; on the nights where she’s out she’s wrecked the next morning and then she’s sometimes out again the following night. And when she gets back home, she often has difficulty getting to sleep. I swear sometimes she only gets a couple of hours sleep a night. I’m worried sick.”
Stammo glances at me then asks, “How are your marital relations?”
“Normal, I guess.”
Neither Stammo nor I speak. We know he’ll fill the silence. But he doesn’t. Just as he’s about to open his mouth, Adry enters with coffee and Stammo’s favourite cookies. She puts them on the table. “You guys remember I’m leaving early today?” she says quietly, probably aware that she has broken the flow of the interview. I’d forgotten that her new boyfriend is coming over at four o’clock to take her out for an early meal and a hockey game but I nod in time with Stammo and she leaves quietly.
Grey takes a sip of coffee and nibbles a piece of chocolate cookie.
“You were saying…” Stammo prompts.
“Yes. I suppose it’s normal. We have a date night every Friday. She never seems to go out on a Friday night or at weekends.”
“What do you mean ‘seems’?” I ask. Either she does or she doesn’t; surely h
e must know. That suspicious antenna is twitching again.
“I travel on business quite a lot. Sometimes I don’t get back until Saturday morning or I’ll leave on a Sunday afternoon. I wouldn’t know whether or not she goes out on the nights I’m away.”
I nod. Maybe I’m being overly wary.
“When you say you suppose it’s normal, what exactly do you mean?” Stammo asks.
Grey looks uncomfortable. “We, uh, make love most Friday nights and at least once on Saturday and on Sunday.” I feel a tug of jealousy. “And she’s still as affectionate as always.” The tug becomes a yank. “But it’s clear that something’s bothering her. She just won’t tell me what it is.”
I’m starting to get the feeling that maybe this isn’t the case of a wayward wife.
Stammo slips the notepad off his lap and onto the desk. “We’ll need some details about your wife,” he says.
As Stammo takes down the information on Susan Grey, I wonder what is taking her out on weeknights. Assuming it’s not a lover, what might it be? I’m drawing a blank.
As I watch Stammo scribbling notes, I’m aware of a certain twitchiness coming over me and I know exactly what it means. And it is nothing good. Although it’s only a couple of hours since my last hit, my body is starting to crave heroin again. When I fell back into using after Em’s death and Sam’s defection with Ellie, I was able to cope on a once-a-day hit. Then it became twice a day. A couple of months ago I went to three times a day but now the cravings are becoming more insistent. I can hear the siren call of the Beast urging me on to take just one more hit.
Cal Rogan Mysteries, Books 4, 5 & 6 (Box Set) Page 25
