Searching… “I remember the name but…” I shrug.
“The last case you and I did at VPD…”
Searching… Got it. “Oh Yeah, the Oboe thing. Didn’t he run an illegal gambling joint in the West End? What’s-his-face was laundering money for him.”
“Bingo. Guess where I saw Susan Grey going last night.”
“Oh crap.” I don’t know whether Etienne Grey would rather have his wife gambling their money away or being unfaithful. Except… “Wait a minute. Surely he must have been shut down. Steve knew about it and it was in the notes on the case. Maybe it’s not a gambling joint any more.”
He looks relieved. “I didn’t think of that. You’re right. Except that I don’t remember there being any prosecution.”
“Why would you? We’d left the Department by then. Do you want me to call Steve and check it out?” I ask.
“Good idea, but we should hold off telling her husband until we’ve got something definite to tell him. I’m going to check it out myself.”
Adry says, “Is that the right thing to do, Cal? Shouldn’t we tell the client everything? Nick, you’re the one who’s so keen on daily reporting to the clients.”
“She’s right, Rogan,” I say.
“We don’t have anything to report,” he says. “She went into a house in the West End. Just hold off until this evening. I’ll know more then.”
“OK. But just ’til this evening. What’s next?” I look at my spreadsheet. “Oh, right. It’s the missing person. The rich kid with the drinking problem.”
I look up at Rogan.
But it’s the person standing behind him that gets my attention. Rogan and Adry swivel around in their chairs, following my gaze.
It’s a woman. Late thirties. Quite tall. Smartly dressed in a navy blue suit with a white silk blouse. She’s good-looking but she’s looking at us coldly. She doesn’t say anything. We all just stare at each other.
Adry is the first to speak. She stands up. “Can I help you?” she says.
The woman smiles, almost warmly but not quite.
“I’m here to see a Mr. Stammo.” She looks like a lawyer.
“I’m Nick Stammo.” I wheel out from behind my desk and over towards her. “And you are?” I extend my hand.
She doesn’t take it. Not acceptable.
“Is there somewhere we can talk privately?” she says.
I hold her stare. “Not until you tell me who the hell you are.” Out of the corner of my eye I see Rogan get up and stand beside me. Solidarity brother.
Her face softens. She smiles and it seems genuine. Seems. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I flew out here on the red-eye. My name’s Jennifer Halley.” She reaches into the pocket of her suit jacket and takes out a business card.
I take it. The logo is a Canadian maple leaf with what look like blue sword blades sticking out of it and with a crown on top. It says, ‘Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Jennifer Halley.’ No title beneath, just a phone number and an address in Ottawa. I’m not going to just take her word for it.
“Adry,” I say, without taking my eyes off our visitor.
“Yes Nick.” Her voice is right beside me.
“Look up CSIS online and call their office in Ottawa.” I hand her the business card. “See if this is genuine.”
“Don’t do that.” There is a tone of command in her voice. Adry stops in her tracks and looks at me. I look back at Jennifer Halley. “Please,” she says. There is something else in her voice now. I’m thinking fear. But of what? If she’s really with CSIS why wouldn’t she want us to verify that?
I look into her eyes. Time stops.
She speaks first. “I’ll tell you why later. Just hear me out first.”
I’m getting a bad feeling about it but Rogan says, “OK.”
We exchange glances and I say, “OK. Leave it for now, Adry.” She hands me back the card. “Come in and sit down,” I say and wheel back to my desk. Agent, or whatever, Halley follows and sits down at the guest chair beside my desk. I gesture towards Rogan. “This is Cal Rogan. He’s my partner. Anything you have to say to me you can say to him.”
She stands up. “I’m sorry. That was a pretty crappy way to introduce myself. Let’s start over.” She extends her hand and smiles. “Hi, I’m Jennifer Halley.” This smile is genuine. I shake her hand and she turns to Rogan and does the same with him.
She sits back down and Rogan sits at his desk.
“So what can we do for you Agent Halley?” I ask.
“First thing is, we don’t have agents; I’m an intelligence officer.” Then why doesn’t it say so on your card, I wonder. She continues, “You called the Public Service Commission in Ottawa yesterday. I was wondering why.”
In the second I take to gather my thoughts, Rogan says, “You flew three and a half thousand kilometres, overnight from Ottawa, to ask us that?” It’s a damn good question.
“I did,” is all she says.
I mull that over. It’s crap.
“Why?” Rogan asks. “You could have sent one of your local people or you could have asked someone from the RCMP to come and see us. Hell, you could have picked up the phone. And anyway, why would you care.”
“I could have done, yes. But I wanted to talk to Mr. Stammo face-to-face.” She turns to me. “So, Mr. Stammo, why did you call the Public Service Commission?”
I look at Rogan and he gives a slight shrug of the shoulders. I turn back to her. “We’re trying to find the next-of-kin of Annalise Lamarche. I tried calling her personal assistant at the Department of National Defence but she said her parents were deceased and they had no next-of-kin information. I saw on her Facebook page that she was friends with a Sally Hyde who works for the federal government, so I thought I’d talk to Sally and see if she could help. I called the Public Service Commission to try and track her down but they said they had no record of her. That’s about it.”
“Why were you trying to find the next-of-kin of Annie Lamarche?”
“Her brother was killed in Vancouver on the same day she was killed in the bombing in Ottawa.”
She doesn’t try and hide her surprise. “Denis is dead?”
“Yes. He was tortured and beaten to death.”
Her eyes narrow as she processes that. “How is your firm involved?”
“Denis Lamarche was an alcoholic and homeless,” Rogan answers. “He was a friend of a friend of mine. My friend asked us to track down his next-of-kin so that Denis could have a decent burial.”
“You called her Annie,” I say. “You must have known her too.”
“I did. Not well, but I knew her through Sally.”
“So why are you here Ms. Halley?” I ask.
She’s silent for a moment. She looks from me… to Rogan… to Adry… then stands and walks to the door. She turns back towards us. “I’ll get back to you.”
She walks out the door and down the corridor and I notice that she doesn’t have a briefcase, or even a purse. I have an odd feeling we’re never going to see her again.
7
Cal
I’m still puzzling over the odd appearance of Intelligence Officer Halley. Stammo thought we should call CSIS and try to verify she was who she said she was, but something tells me she’s genuine and has a good reason for us not doing that. Despite what he says, I’m sure we are going to see her again and soon too. I hope so because I have a very interesting question to ask her. However, time to put all that out of my mind right now. I need all my faculties front and centre for my next task.
I press the doorbell and hear it chime inside the house. There is no other sound except the background hum of the traffic on Davie, two blocks away. I look up and around. There is one… no, two… no, there are three cameras trained on me. I wave at the one above the door and press the doorbell a second time. This time I’m rewarded by the sound of a door opening.
The last time I was at this door, almost three years ago now, it was opened by gambling boss Dominique Dufres
ne’s bodyguard, who was built like a Mack truck. I wonder if he’s still on duty. I’m hoping not, I remember, without a lot of enthusiasm, him escorting me from the premises. I hear two bolts sliding back and the turning of the latch. The house Susan Grey entered last night has very thorough security.
The door swings open.
“We’re closed.”
The speaker is eighty-five if she’s a day. She is dressed in the clothes of a Victorian maid—all black and white and frills—and looks like she could blow away in a brisk wind.
“I was wondering if I could make an appointment.”
She looks at me like I’ve recently escaped from Riverview Hospital. I said the wrong thing. I focus in on her. I remember a psychology teacher in one of my UBC classes, too many years ago, saying, ‘In any interaction, remember that the other person wants to understand you as much as, or even more than, you want to understand them.’
“Could I come in, please,” I ask. “I really need your help.”
I don’t know where those words came from. They came out of my mouth but where did they arise from? I don’t know and will probably never know.
She looks uncertain for a second, two seconds max, then she opens the door wide and ushers me inside. As it was three years ago, the front door leads into a small, square entrance area, except that it’s changed. It is wood panelled below with expensive cut-glass panels above, which obscure the view into the rooms beyond. She closes the front door and for an instant we are in an airlock between the outer world and the unknown interior of the mansion. She presses a button beside the door which leads inside.
Silence descends.
I look at her.
She looks at me.
Time progresses, as indeed it always does.
A shadow flits across the cut glass and the inner door opens.
It’s not the same muscle but it might just as well be. A good two metres tall and half as wide, he gestures me to step inside. Being a man of wisdom, I do as I’m told but can’t help wondering if I will step out with such facility.
The room I enter is not the room I entered three years ago. It has been renovated into a circular foyer of epic proportions. To the extreme right and left are staircases curving to the upper levels. There are sofas of fluid design which look simultaneously both inviting and forbidding. It’s like I want to go sit on them but don’t dare to, in case I somehow profane them. The decor is predominantly red plush yet starkly modern—no mean feat of the designer—and the artwork on the walls is both expensive-looking and erotic.
In a flash of intuition I realize where I am.
In seven hours these sofas will be draped with the bodies of gorgeous young women, dressed simultaneously both demurely and seductively, on display for the pleasure of Vancouver’s wealthiest sybarites.
Etienne Grey’s likely worst dread has been multiplied many-fold: his wife is not having an affair with a man but with a whole legion of us. My two hundred dollar bet with Stammo has been exponentially magnified.
“How can I help you, sir.” The voice of the muscle snaps me back to my current situation. There is a politeness in his tone with an underlay of menace. Through my confusion, Hamlet’s voice comes to my aid: ‘Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play the fool; nowhere but in's own house. Farewell.’ If I play the fool here I might just get to say farewell to this house.
“Sorry,” I say, slurring the word in a feint of drunkenness. “I think I’m in the wrong place. I came here to play the craps tables.” Silence from the muscle and the ‘maid’. “I’ve been out of town for a while. I’m an old buddy of Dominique.” More silence. “Y’know… Dominique Dufresne.”
A soupçon of understanding flows across the face of the ‘maid’. She yammers a few words in a language alien to me.
“Mr. Dufresne’s gone,” says the muscle, mispronouncing the last name.
I decide, for my own safety, it’s better to keep up the subterfuge. “Do you know where he moved to?”
The muscle gives a nasty little chuckle. “Millhaven,” he says. The ‘maid’ cackles; it’s not a pretty sound.
Millhaven is Canada’s max-security prison, an institution so evil that it gives the lie to this country’s liberal values. I pretend to be confused. “Is that on the east side?” I ask.
“Show the gentleman out, Mariana,” he says.
Taking my elbow, ‘the maid’ leads me into the ‘airlock’ and opens the outer door.
I give everyone an imbecilic smile and head out, glad to have left without having any bones broken, or worse.
“I’m afraid Ms. Grey isn’t available right now.”
Those eight words fire up the anger I’m feeling deep in my gut. I lean forward and speak quietly, so the other denizens of the lobby can’t hear me. “If you don’t have Susan Grey in front of me in the next sixty seconds, I am going to walk through your offices and hassle the hell out of everybody, and I mean everybody, until I find her. Your choice.”
She reads the truth in my face and redials the number. “Susan,” she says, “I think you need to come out to reception, like right now.” She listens and grunts at the response. “She’ll be right out, sir,” she says, clearly unsure that I have earned the last word.
I’m so agitated I don’t give a devil’s curse for her words. I look at my watch. If Susan’s not here in those sixty seconds, I’m going to… Well, I don’t actually know what I’m going to do but it’s not going to be pretty. For no particular reason, I think about Damien Crotty’s t-shirt. Free will: the persistent illusion that we have any control over the choices we make. I feel compelled to be here. I don’t feel I had any control over that choice. And I can’t help musing on the fact that the slogan came into my head without any exercise of free will on my part.
“Cal? What are you doing here?”
Susan’s words drag me up from my mental meanderings. “I need to talk to you.” I say.
“I’m in the middle of a—”
“Susan,” I say, sotto voce, “we need to talk now.”
She does an accurate read of my mood. “Come with me.”
She leads me into the main office area, past a cluster of conservative cubicles and into a cramped conference closet; it’s too small to be considered a room. “Wait here,” she says in a voice that brooks no disagreement.
I sit and wait, my aggression deflated.
She’s back before I can ruminate any further on the nature of free will.
She closes the door and before sitting down, she demands, “Cal, what the fuck are you doing here?”
“To ask you what the fuck you’re doing going into a high-class brothel in the West End on a Wednesday night?”
It’s like I slapped her in the face. She slumps back in her chair and stares at the ceiling. A whole herd of emotions stampede across her face ending in puzzlement. “How did you…?” Now it’s anger. “Have you been stalking me?”
“Stalking? No. Following, yes.”
“What the hell, Cal. We have one drink together and you start following me? Why would you do that? We’re long over. I’m married now. I told you that.”
“It wasn’t personal,” I say, knowing I’m going to have to make a choice.
“It wasn’t personal?” she is close to shouting now. “Then what—?” I can almost see the gearwheels in her mind meshing together. “Were you being paid to follow me?”
I nod. “Yes.” I say it as gently as I can.
“Who?” she asks.
“You know I can’t tell you that.”
“You’re a private detective, not a cop. Who says you can’t tell me?”
“Client confidentiality. A lawyer should understand that.”
She gives me a look which I interpret as unwilling acceptance. I lean forward. “What were you doing there, Sooze?” The gentle use of her nickname, from all those years ago, calms her and a deeper acceptance settles onto her face.
“It had to come out sooner or later. Maybe it’s better that it�
��s you who saw me going in there. If my husband had seen me…” She shakes her head. Now I’m on the horns of the dilemma. If I tell her who my client is, I will probably kill their marriage and almost certainly get sued by Etienne Grey in the process. If I don’t tell her, she’ll likely tell me stuff that I’ll then have to report to her husband, which is a betrayal of her I cannot live with.
She breaks into my discomfort with, “Here’s the deal. Your client is either my firm, a rival firm, a company whom we are suing that’s looking for dirt on me, a company that wants to check up on me before trying to hire me or the firm, or, it’s my husband.” I hope I managed to keep my poker face intact and didn’t give her any tells when she mentioned the last option. “Whichever, I’m going to tell you the truth and trust you have the integrity to use the knowledge wisely.”
“I’ll do everything I can, I promise you.”
“I’ll meet you tonight, after work. Maybe a problem shared will be a problem halved, who knows.” She stands. “And Cal, I need you to know, it’s not what it seems.”
I’ve been in this business long enough to know that it almost always is exactly what it seems.
A quick sandwich, an NA meeting—I was disappointed Tina wasn’t there—two Tylenols and two Advil later and I’m back at the office. As I walk in the door, CSIS intelligence officer Jennifer Halley gets out of the guest chair in reception. Rogan 1, Stammo 0. Not that I’m keeping score.
She walks with me into the main office where Adry and Nick are looking at something on his screen.
“OK, Mr. Stammo. Your partner is back. Can we talk now?” She’s all business and clearly frustrated at being kept waiting for my arrival.
“Sure. What’ja got?” Nick says, indicating the guest chair beside his desk. She takes it and I perch on the edge of my desk looking down at her. She is a striking woman, both beautiful and sexy. And although she is still showing some irritation there is a subtle change in her attitude from this morning. She seems less combative and warmer.
“I’m running the investigation into the bombing in Ottawa, which is why I’m here talking to you. I should warn you that anything I tell you must be kept in strictest confidence and if you divulge anything to any third party, you will be subject to—”
Cal Rogan Mysteries, Books 4, 5 & 6 (Box Set) Page 29
