by Paul Slatter
Something had been bothering Stephanie, something the woman had said didn’t add up. Turning in her driver’s seat she asked, “May I ask, if it’s your son who’s deaf then how come you can lip read also?”
Ditcon said, butting in, “We haven’t got time for chit-chat—what are they saying?”
The school teacher, taking her aim up to Suzy’s mouth, waited a bit and then said, “They’re talking about a house, they’re talking about the bay window.”
And they were, Chendrill sitting there hearing how sorry Suzy was about the way her husband had thrown Chendrill through the window and was worrying if he was okay.
Chendrill assured her he was fine. He had already gotten it out of her how she knew Alan and had confirmed the fact that the woman had bad taste in men. He’d also found out that the loan shark was an old boyfriend who had a brother who also had a ‘friend’, and how Suzy knew the brother was gay because he’d not once looked below her chin. She’d said, “They had this thing where they would go to horse races around the province. But I always thought it was an excuse, because from what I could see the horse they had always came last, so why bother unless it was to get away?”
Chendrill asked if she’d ever met Sebastian in the past. She said she had, at parties years before, and he’d been so sweet. Then this year, earlier in the spring, she’d had another row with her husband one afternoon and been walking along the path where they sat right now and she’d heard her name called out and at first she thought it was a man from the bar or some kind of stalker, but then she’d seen the dog and it had all clued in. Not long after that, she’d met the ex-boyfriend again.
So that was the connection, Chendrill had thought as he’d heard the sirens working their way towards the park through the city, then seen the glimpse of light reflecting off the front of the glass flash a couple of times from the side of a car parked on the road up top. With all the commotion, someone up there was watching someone in the park and they weren’t being very discreet. The odds were high they were watching him.
Chendrill asked, “What’s he do for a living, this ex-boyfriend?”
“Lends money,” Suzy answered, without a beat. Then she carried on straight after with, “He’s always got cash on him, he’s never short.”
Then Chendrill asked, “So why had he been hitting up Sebastian for $250,000?”
Suzy stopped talking and looked at Chendrill in surprise. She said, “I’m sorry.” But the woman wasn’t sorry, not one bit, she was confused. She asked again, but this time in another manner, “He did what?”
Chendrill carried on, the man having enough experience to spot a liar or trickster—there was always body language that showed in their breathing, or a small look to the floor, the rubbing of the neck or the constant touching of their hair and this woman was showing not one sign. She was, from all he was hearing and seeing, just an honest woman and Sebastian hadn’t been wrong.
“He was hitting him up for $250,000. He said it was for the horse that died.”
Suzy looked away and then back, the woman obviously pissed off, the way they can be when they hear someone they care about has gone behind their back. She said, “I can tell you, the only people who’d have paid top dollar for that nag were the people who made glue. I’ll tell you what it was right now—Sebastian went behind his boyfriend’s back and offered my Mattia’s brother $250,000 for the horse, but what it was really for was for his brother to back off and stay away from the man Sebastian loved. I know these guys were all crazy back then, fucking each other, it’s the way they all carried on, even Sebastian, but he saw something more with those two, and it was something he needed to stop. I know he approached Mattia to broker the deal.”
Chendrill sat there looking out to sea. Wow, he thought. It was the way Sebastian worked—he’d seen it himself—the man threw money at things. It was kind of one of the good and the bad traits he had about himself. He said, “And you hooked up with this Italian again and told him Sebastian was still around and you’d met, and Sebastian was being kind and buying you a house and the next thing the man’s going around dragging up the past and wanting his piece of the pie?”
Suzy looked at Chendrill and said, “Yeah, it seems that way, doesn’t it? I’m surprised he’s still interested in me after he realized what I’d been doing for a living over the last decade or so. But I’m telling you, after I’d told him about the house, I made him swear on my life that he’d leave Sebastian be.”
They sat for a moment, both staying quiet as Suzy calmed down and Chendrill took it all in. Then Chendrill said, “Sebastian mentioned to me you had a medical issue he was worried about. How is it?”
Suzy looked to Chendrill and he could tell she was uncomfortable with the question. He said, “Sebastian and I were very close. But not in that way. He was worried about you.”
Suzy, took a deep breath and then blushed, then after tussling her hair, said, “Yeah, I’ve got this bag. I had something happen to me and now I have to wear it for a while, you know, while things heal.”
Chendrill nodded, then asked, “So how does having this bag affect you when you’re moonlighting at the club?”
Suzy stared at him for a moment, working it all out, putting the pieces to her own puzzle together in her head. She said, “That was you today then? You sent the PI that I heard was there into the club and had me watched, yeah?”
Chendrill nodded, then said, “Kind of.”
“Yeah, they said someone had been up in the room…. And now you’re wondering how a girl can lap dance when she’s got a bag.”
Chendrill stayed quiet.
“Well first, we need the money—I know I got this job at the school, but it’s wasn’t enough and there’s not a lot of work at the docks for my husband, you know?”
Chendrill did know. Vancouver docks were busy; there was always work there if you wanted to work hard when you turned up. But if you didn’t, the work would go to someone else—unless you were in with the right people. Suzy carried on, “So, I knew there were bills coming up and I didn’t want to ask Sebastian as I was so happy he’d found a home for us and I was embarrassed about what happened with my stupid thug of a husband and the window. So I went back for a bit and, well, I took the bag out for a bit and taped the tube to my skin with sticking plaster. You can do that.”
“Oh?” Chendrill said, not sounding that convinced. Having seen pretty much all her skin when he’d been in the room a few hours earlier.
“You don’t believe me?” Suzy asked. Chendrill stayed quiet. Then with a rush of blood to her head, Suzy reached down to her jeans and, with her long false nails bending as she did, she unbuttoned them, pulled them to the side, and then pushed down the same knickers he’d seen her in earlier to reveal a colostomy bag attached to the bottom of the left-hand side of her stomach. Pulling it up a little she clasped the tube with her long red nails and exposed the sore looking cut in her stomach were the tube entered her bowel.
“See, happy now?” Suzy asked as she pulled up her panties and refastened her jeans.
Chendrill was happy, happy that she hadn’t been lying and happy his friend hadn’t been proven a fool for his generosity. He said, “Sebastian told me you were leaving your husband. Is this correct?”
Suzy looked at him and for a moment he thought that the lap dancer was about to cry, then nodding she said, “Yeah, I think its best after what he’s put me through. You know I should have known it after the first date he took me on and he had us sneak in through the back door of the cinema for free. A week later he had us doing the same in restaurants, although then it was us sneaking out instead of in. I was young then and I took it as fun and exciting. But now I see he was just being cheap, those people working for us, cooking meals and all and all we were doing was stealing.”
Chendrill looked away again for the moment and thought about what a slimy fuck the woman’s husband was. He’d only been around the couple for a minute amount of time and he could see the way the man leache
d off of her and used her to get what he needed sexually. He said, “You’re very honest.”
Suzy looked at him and said, “Yeah well that’s me, tell it as it is. If you’re with someone who’s decent, obviously it’s best to keep quiet about some things, but what’s the point in holding back if you’re asked something and the answer’s not going to hurt. That’s why I was so open with Seb.”
Chendrill felt the sadness inside her and the sadness inside him, which seemed for the moment to be constant. He thought back to how often Sebastian would have sat here with her and listened to the woman as she let out all her problems. He felt like being honest and telling her that if it were not for her shitty husband and kids, Sebastian would have been around for easily a few more years until the dog died. But what was the point in that? As she’d just said herself, what’s the point in being honest about something that was going to hurt?
He sat back and looked at the waters some more, feeling the breeze on his face, then to the mountains on the other side of the inlet with their ski resorts waiting patiently for the first snows to fall. Sebastian had kept his little secret about this promise to Alan quiet, never letting the slightest inkling out of the box. If he had, Chendrill knew he’d have been on it and the man’s feelings would not have been taken into consideration. Then he heard Suzy say, “You know, I feel like I have had guys wanting me sexually since I was a teenager and the only one who’s ever gone out of his way for me has been a gay guy.”
Chendrill looked back to her and waiting as a couple passed before saying, “And on that note, are you going back to your old boyfriend?”
Suzy looked to him as she put a little more together in her head. She said, “You’ve been having me followed over to Deep Cove have you?”
Chendrill stayed quiet again, and thought so that’s where that fuckhead loan shark hangs out when he’s not out there selling blocks, sitting out there in amongst the real people who had jobs and pretending to be one of them. Then he heard Suzy take a deep breath and say, “Well, yeah that’s where I go, and if you were wearing a bag for the same reason I am you wouldn’t be judging me.”
Chendrill looked at her, the woman sitting there with her blonde hair blowing in the breeze. He got it. He’d heard what her husband had said and Sebastian had confirmed it when they’d sat and chatted in the car. Any man who used his wife in such a perverse manner for his own sexual gratification, even without hurting her physically, deserved to see her run to suburbia even if it was into the arms of a shithead like this Mattia the Italian. In Chendrill’s eyes, you reaped what you sowed. He said, “Yeah, I get it, don’t worry.”
Then he saw her turn to him, take a deep breath, and say, “I know what went down with Seb’s dog. So, I’m going to tell you something about this other job my husband has that I’ll leave with you. Now I know who you are, if you’re anything of the man Seb said you are, then I’ll know it’ll only be a matter of time before my husband gets what he deserves and I can move forward with my life.”
***********
“What are they talking about?” Ditcon asked again for what seemed to be the hundredth time. The man wondering if he could share the binoculars and have one eye on either side with their heads together the same as he had with his friends when they’d watched people fucking at the point in Stanley Park when they were kids. He asked again, “Anything?”
Staying focused, the school teacher wondered what to invoice these idiots for being dragged out of school under the pretext of a national emergency when all the lady with the lovely tits had been talking about was herself and now her husband’s job. Without dropping the binoculars, she said, “They were talking about Deep Cove. Then after they were talking about drug addicts, horses and money, $250,000 to be precise and she’s really annoyed about it, and bags they were talking about bags, then the lady showed him her knickers.”
Fuck, Ditcon thought. Then said, “The dirty bastard.”
“Oh,” said the school teacher, who’d just decided on nothing less than $500, then carried on saying, “and she said something about a gay guy. And now they are talking about her husband who she doesn’t love anymore because he keeps going down to the United States all the time.”
Then it hit Ditcon—it was obvious, the fucker was bringing stuff through the border and using mules to do it. He was getting hot women and guys to do the dirty work and having them stuff drugs in little bags down their pants or wherever. The guy was recruiting drug addicts who could keep themselves together to do the work. And then one had let him down, that’s why he jumped the border—he had had no other choice. There was a reason he was driving the fancy car, it was oh so simple once you put it all together. The guy was running drugs. It all made sense now. He said out loud, “Oh my God—how far the mighty fall.”
Chapter Sixteen
Rock Mason was pissed, pissed off and pissed drunk and it was no way to be when you had no money and you were sitting in the bar at the Sutton and no one was interested anymore in what you had to say. It wasn’t because he’d been telling anyone who would listen about how much of a shitty town this was. Or about how he was better than anyone there or who had ever been there. It was because almost everyone in the bar had seen the video. Be it the guy behind the counter who gave out the drinks, or the other TV celebrities who were staying at the place and wanting to talk about themselves, or the star fuckers who came and went hoping to get laid or to make friends on Facebook.
By now, they’d all seen the video of Rock Mason—the superhero who could do everything, including saving the world—trying to dance alongside the BlueBoy guy. Trying to dance and failing amongst a troupe of beautiful Asian girls, then standing on his own dressed as a turkey, then calling a gentle old man a ‘fucking faggot motherfucker’ and attacking people while still dressed as a turkey, then ripping the turkey suit off and trying to be Bruce Lee and failing miserably before getting knocked out in one punch by a guy in a Hawaiian shirt. They’d all seen that and other stuff, secretly filmed and released anonymously by a small group of film students recruited and paid handsomely for their troubles by Sebastian.
The man was fucked. Fucked by the video and fucked by the fact that he wasn’t getting paid for his pathetic ego-induced performance as an astronaut, and on top of this Sebastian had stipulated that the production was not going to pay the hotel anything over and above the man’s accommodation that was to end at midday the next day. And that was why when Rock Mason had stopped spouting off about how he hated Canadians to a bunch of Canadians, he was presented a bill for his overages which included all the meals and drinks he’d been buying for himself and everyone in the bar in an attempt to make himself look cool since he’d arrived with his superstar status generosity that in Rock Mason’s mind he didn’t ever think he’d have to pay.
But now he did.
The assistant manager handed him the bill with a smile and watched as Rock Mason squinted at the paperwork, which was now almost six pages long. This assistant manager who was about to go home and throw all his old Rock Mason DVD’s in the garbage now happily telling him that the amount was $33,434.00 before tax.
Rock Mason stared at the bill that, in his mind, wasn’t for him and threw it back at the man then said, “Give it to the guy it belongs to; I couldn’t give a fuck.”
Then taking back the bill, the assistant manager, who liked to sneak into empty rooms to watch the porn channel, pulled out another letter—this one with a Slave Media logo and ‘Attn: Rock Mason’ on the cover.
Rock Mason stared at the envelope squinting with blurry eyes, then opened it and said, “Thank fuck for that,” as he read the first line at the top of the page which read:
Travel Memo.
Rock Mason - Actor
Then he continued reading:
Greyhound Bus
One-way ticket
5:40am – Departure - Vancouver BC - Bus station
4:05pm – Arrival – Los Angeles CA – Bus Station
Total trip time 34 Hrs
25 Min with one transfer.
*************
Chendrill arrived to check on Dan and his mother just before 7 p.m. that evening—not that looking after Dan was his job anymore, but old habits can be hard to change and strangely the place had become very familiar.
He knocked and then opened the door with the key Dan’s mother had given him so as he would come see her when she was sleeping. He reached the kitchen and saw a Prada bag hanging from the back of the kitchen table chair. He looked at Dan’s mother as she came out of the bathroom in the hall and said, “Is this yours?”
“It’s Marsha’s, or should I say Marshaa’s as she corrected me earlier.”
“Oh?”
“She’s been down in Dan’s room all day with him and she’s quite loud.”
Chendrill raised his eyebrows. “Yeah that kind of loud, she doesn’t seem to care. The two have been at it all day. I went down there once when the noise stopped for a bit and Dan told me to fuck off.”
“He said those words?”
Dan’s mother nodded. She was annoyed and normally the boy would have seen the other side of her temper, but for some reason having a supermodel in the basement seemed to have quelled it.
Then they both heard the door to Dan’s room open in the basement and heard Dan’s usual pounding footsteps come up them two at a time. He reached the kitchen and without a word he passed them both and opened the fridge. Chendrill said, “I hear you’ve been telling your mother to fuck off.”
Dan answered straight away without looking away from the fridge—the glow from the light inside outlining what was left of the shiner Chendrill had given him when he’d thumped him. He said, “That cabby with the hockey stick’s been hanging about here again—go do your job will you?”
