The Evil That Men Do

by Michael Blair

  “Yeah,” Smithers said. “That’s Mr. Kimball. His hair is longer, but that’s him, all right. Haven’t seen him in a while. She was here just after lunch, for an hour or so.”

  “She?” Franks said.

  “His wife.”

  I looked at Franks. “Now you know why I’m here, why are you here?” If there was a body in the apartment, I surmised, there would be a lot more excitement.

  “Someone broke in and trashed the place,” Franks said. “Looking for something, we figured. Now we know what.”

  “Did he find it?”

  “Doesn’t look like it or he’d’ve stopped looking at some point. The whole place is trashed. Any ideas who might’ve done it?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. Most likely it was a man named Lawrence Thomason.” I gestured toward the inverted dome of a security camera in the hall ceiling. “Does that work?” I asked Smithers.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  Leaving Officer Davydov to mind the apartment and wait for the investigators, Franks and I accompanied Smithers down to the security office on the ground floor. It had two computer workstations, neither of which was occupied and only one of which was active. Smithers sat at the active workstation and called up the video feed for the main entrance.

  “How far back should I go?”

  “Can you just run it backwards?” Franks asked.

  “Sure.” He clicked on the control bar at the bottom of the screen and the video began to run backwards at more or less normal speed.

  “Maybe you could crank it up a bit,” Franks said.

  Smithers clicked his mouse again and the video playback speeded up, showing people scampering backwards in and out of the building. I saw myself. So did Smithers and Franks.

  “I wondered how you got in,” Smithers said. “Where’d you get the keycard?” I ignored him, concentrating on the screen.

  “Stop,” I said, when I saw a broad-shouldered man scamper backwards into the lobby. The scene froze. “Go forward at normal speed.” Smithers clicked and in a few seconds I saw Thomason exiting the building. “That’s him. Okay, keep rewinding until we see him come in. There.”

  Smithers stopped the rewind then played the recording back at normal speed. We watched as Thomason came into the entrance lobby with a woman lugging two paper bags of groceries. She almost dropped one as she passed a card over a scanner to unlock the inner door, which he held for her.

  Smithers grunted his disapproval. “Tenants know they’re not supposed to let people come in without they scan their cards.”

  “She had her hands full,” Franks said. “And look at those shoulders. Would you have tried to stop him?” She looked at me. “So who is he?”

  “He’s a friend of our client, Brandt’s ex-wife. Or at least she thinks he’s her friend. I guess you’d call him a fortune hunter. I imagine he’s after the money Brandt stole.”

  “Where’s Brandt now?” Franks asked.

  “I don’t know. I was hoping to find something in the apartment that would lead me to him.”

  “You got in with a keycard,” she said, gesturing toward the video screen. “Where did you get it?”

  “From Brandt’s girlfriend, aka Mrs. Kimball.”

  “Where is she?”

  “I’d rather not say right now.”

  “And I’d rather not haul your ass downtown.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t, too, but she’s represented by the firm I work for.”

  “Is she a fugitive?”

  “Yes, but she’s agreed to testify against Brandt in return for immunity. She claims she doesn’t know where he is, and I’d like to keep her under wraps until Brandt is apprehended. Thomason, too. He paid her a visit earlier today and roughed her up pretty badly. As soon as I know she’s safe, she’ll turn herself in.”

  “This is above my pay grade,” Franks said. “You’re gonna have to talk to the suits.”

  “She’s got a boyfriend,” Smithers said. I wanted to smack him.

  “Who?” Franks said.

  “Mrs. Kimball. Young guy. Younger than her. Lives on a boat in the Harbour Authority Marina.”

  “Do you know his name or the name of his boat?” Franks asked.

  “Nope,” Smithers said. “Sorry.”

  “What about Kimball? Brandt? Does he have a girlfriend?”

  “Couldn’t say,” Smithers said. “But he’s got a boat, too. And before you ask, I don’t know where he keeps it.”

  “Do you?” Franks asked me.

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “Keep screwing around and you may not be at liberty at all.”

  An hour later, on orders from her supervisor, Franks kicked me loose, but not before making sure she had my contact information, both in Vancouver and Montreal. She’d flat out refused to let me look around Brandt’s apartment and had shrugged when the building manager tried to get me to turn over Marie-Claire’s keycard.

  On my way to the car, I tried calling Zach, but got his mobile voicemail. I left a message that I’d see him in a half hour or so, that I was going to stop at the Ramada Inn on Granville Street and check us in. When I disconnected, I saw that the phone’s battery indicator was red, showing only a 10 percent charge. To conserve the battery, I turned the phone off and made a mental note to get the charger out of my backpack.

  It was after 1 a.m. Sunday by the time I got back to the marina. The Serendipity was dark, blinds drawn over the windows of the deckhouse. Through a gap in the cabin door blinds I could see the glow of telltales on the instrument panel of the navigation station. I tried the door. It was locked and I’d left the key with Zach. I knocked.

  “Zach. It’s Riley.”

  A shape humped up from the settee aft of the pilot’s chair, resolved into Zach as he shuffled to the door with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. He flipped the latch of the lock then staggered back to the settee without opening the door. He sat with his shoulders hunched, arms folded inside the blanket, staring at the deck. He was not a morning person, I reckoned, as I went into the cabin.

  “Where is she?” I asked, dropping my backpack on the chart table.

  “Below,” Zach said, voice thick and drugged with sleep. He shook himself like a wet dog in an effort to revive himself. “What time is it?”

  “One fifteen. Vancouver time. Four fifteen Montreal time.”

  “No wonder I feel like death warmed over.”

  I thought there might be another reason: the smell of alcohol was strong on his breath.

  “So what’s happening?” he asked, scrubbing his face with the palms of his hands.

  I brought him up to speed. “The police wouldn’t let me look around Brandt’s apartment,” I concluded. “But at least we now have a photo of Thomason.”

  I turned on a gooseneck lamp over the navigation station and showed Zach the printout of a video image the building manager had given me. It was dark and grainy, but it was better than what we had, which was nothing.

  “My evening might have been a little more productive than yours,” Zach said. “She’s holding out on us. She knows more about where Brandt might be than she admits.”

  “Which means she held out on Thomason, too,” I said. “She’s tougher than she looks.”

  “Yeah,” Zach said. “I guess she is. Anyway, she had a little too much to drink after you left and started going on about Brandt’s new girlfriend, how she’s a ‘dried-up old bag’ who looks like she’s made out of shoe leather, she’s spent so much time sunbathing. She clammed up, though, when I asked her where she’d seen this woman. I think she may have followed Brandt one day and knows where his new girlfriend lives.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t trust Terry’s lawyer to honour the immunity deal,” I said. “She’s keeping something back as a bargaining chip.”

  “So I gue
ss we’re going to have to have another talk with her,” Zach said.

  “Looks that way.” I started down the companionway to the forward cabin.

  “Now?” Zach said.

  “As good a time as any.”

  I went into the master stateroom in the bow and found the light switch. Marie-Claire was sprawled on her stomach on the berth, bare legs tangled in the sheets. She squirmed and mewled when the light went on. She was naked but for frilly pink panties, a narrow band of fabric around her hips. She had a tramp-stamp tattoo in the small of her back, a stylized eagle, vaguely Salish or Haida.

  “Up you get,” I said, shaking her shoulder.

  “Go ’way,” she muttered, burrowing into the pillows.

  “You lied to us.”

  Grumbling, she rolled over and sat up, wincing and pressing her hand to the livid bruise on her sternum. Her breasts were high and unnaturally globular, like melons. I found her sweatshirt on the deck and tossed it to her.

  “What do you mean, I lied?” she said, pulling the sweatshirt over her head, mindful of the bandage.

  “You know where Chaz’s new girlfriend lives.”

  “I don’t,” she insisted, unable to look me in the eye. She wasn’t a very good liar, despite her association with a con artist.

  “Yes, you do,” I said. “Look, if you want your deal, you’re going to have to be straight with us. Holding out is only going to make it more difficult for Terry’s lawyer to negotiate a deal with the crown prosecutor, maybe impossible. And if Thomason gets to Brandt before we do, all bets are off.”

  “Shit,” she said. She swung her legs over the side of the berth and pulled on her pink pants. “I’m so fucking dumb. I should never have called her. I don’t know what made me think I could ever go home, that I could ever have a normal life again. But I’m just so tired of living like a goddamned criminal.”

  I resisted the urge to remind her that she was, in fact, a criminal.

  “I loved him, you know,” she said.

  “Who? Chaz?”

  “Yeah. Stupid, eh?” She got up and went into the

  galley.

  “Terry loved him once, too,” I said.

  “Dumb,” she said.

  She took a bottle of water from the mini fridge, twisted it open and drank. Zach watched from the top of the companionway. He moved aside as she went up to the lounge, where she slumped on to the settee aft of the helm. Someone, she or Zack, had patched the cushions with duct tape. I sat in the pilot’s chair, swivelled it around to face her. Zach sat in a wicker chair by the end of the chart table.

  “The only thing Chaz ever loved was himself,” she said. “And money. Man, does he love money. He’s like a fucking money junkie, can’t ever get enough. Maybe it’s an obsession or something, like those people who wash their hands all the time or line their shoes up around their beds. He spends hours and hours just looking at his account balances on his computer or his phone. When he’s not doing that, he’s trying to figure out ways to get more.”

  “Are you saying he’s going back into business?” I said. “That he’s setting up another Ponzi scheme?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. He was getting restless, I know that. But I don’t think he’s found a bank to use. The thing in Montreal only worked because he had a bank manager who had expensive habits and didn’t ask questions. That’s why the scam fell apart, because the banker jumped off the goddamned Jacques-Cartier Bridge after he got caught processing Chaz’s phoney mortgages.”

  “So where is Chaz now?” I said.

  “If I tell you, what guarantee do I have that you won’t just grab him up and throw me to the sharks?”

  “None,” I said. “Just our word. But I’m guessing you’ve got more to bargain with than anecdotal evidence.”

  “Anecdotal? What does that mean?”

  “Hearsay. He said, she said. Do you have any hard evidence? Documentation. Account numbers. The names of other people who can corroborate your testimony.”

  “I don’t know any of his account numbers, but I do know the name of the offshore bank he uses. There might be some people around who knew what he was up to, but I don’t know any of them. Terry didn’t have a clue. Anyway, he told me he preferred working alone. All I know about his business is what I saw. I did help him create the fake statements and I’m, well, better at forging signatures than he is.”

  “What about files? Did he keep records?”

  “Oh, sure,” she said. “He kept records of everything, every person he scammed, right down to the penny. God knows why.”

  Part of his compulsion, I guessed. “Where are they?”

  “I dunno. On his laptop, I suppose.”

  “Which is where?”

  “I guess he took it with him.”

  “He must have kept something on paper. Were there filing cabinets in his offices?”

  “Sure, but we shredded a lot of it before we took off. Anyway, the police would have all that now, wouldn’t they?”

  “Yes, I suppose they would,” I said.

  “I don’t have much, do I?” she said.

  “Did he keep a backup of his computer?” Zach asked.

  “I don’t think so. He’s not really very computer-literate. I know way more … Hey! What about my computer? I have all the fake statements, correspondence, prospectuses and stuff on my computer.”

  “Where is it?” I said.

  “Downstairs,” she said, glancing toward the companionway. “That’s what I went back to the apartment to get.”

  “Thomason didn’t take it when he searched the boat?”

  “He didn’t find it. I hid it in the washing machine.”

  Zach went below and returned with a laptop slipcase in one hand, an external power supply and cables in the other. He placed it all on the chart table.

  “All right,” I said to Marie-Claire. “Where do we go from here?”

  I wasn’t sure she understood what I meant, but finally she heaved a sigh and said, “A couple of weeks ago I borrowed Mace’s car and followed Chaz out to a marina north of here. A place called Eagle Harbour, just before the Horseshoe Bay ferry terminal. He met a woman on a big yacht, maybe twice as long as this thing, but more modern looking. At first I thought she was part black or an Indian, like from India or Pakistan, except that she was blonde. Not that that means anything. But when I looked at her through Mace’s binoculars I realized she was just really, really tanned. And she was wearing this little bitty string bikini, which made it obvious she was tanned, like, everywhere. Hasn’t she ever heard of skin cancer, for god’s sake? It was gross. She was in pretty good shape, though, for an older woman.”

  “Do you recall the name of the boat?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  “How about the name of the marina?”

  “Sorry.”

  It didn’t matter. I was familiar with the marinas in Eagle Harbour. There were three: the West Vancouver Yacht Club and the Thunderbird Marina in Fisherman’s Cove, and the smaller Eagle Bay Yacht Club in Eagle Bay. It wouldn’t be hard to find an extremely tanned blonde on a 20-metre-plus motor yacht.

  Marie-Claire grimaced as a jaw-cracking yawn pulled the stitches above her ear. The contagion spread to Zach and to me. For her, it was not quite 2 a.m., but for us it was nearly 5 a.m.

  “Do you mind staying here again?” I asked Zach.

  “No,” he said. “I’d like my travel kit from the car, though.” I told him where the car was parked and handed him the keys.

  “Can I go back to bed?” Marie-Claire asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Before you do, though, was there anything at the apartment that would lead Thomason to Eagle Harbour?”

  “I doubt it. Chaz would’ve been afraid I’d find it.”

  She went below. I went out to the afterdeck to wait for Zach. It
was a beautiful night, a light breeze riffling the water of the marina, sighing through the rigging of the sailboats. The night air was crystalline, and the lights of the ski runs on Grouse Mountain shone like diamonds against black velvet. Zach stepped aboard with his carry-on and handed me the car keys.

  “You’re not going after Brandt now, are you?”

  “We’re just a step ahead of Thomason. I don’t want to lose the advantage.”

  “You sure you don’t want me to go with you?”

  “Someone needs to keep an eye on Marie-Claire. I don’t want to take the chance that she’ll disappear on us. Or that Thomason will get to her.” I took out the iPhone. “You wouldn’t have a car charger, would you? My phone’s nearly dead.”

  “No, sorry. Why don’t you take mine? It’s fully charged. You can plug yours in here.” He handed me an iPhone, newer than the one Gil Maxwell had lent me, and we exchanged passcodes. “And don’t worry about long distance,” he said. “I have an unlimited plan.”

  Chapter 26

  The West Vancouver community of Eagle Harbour clings to the mountainside east of the Queen Charlotte Channel, which lies between the mainland and Bowen Island at the mouth of Howe Sound. Mainly residential, mostly with the kinds of homes that run to seven figures or more, if it has a commercial district of any note I hadn’t found it when I’d worked at the West Vancouver Yacht Club for a summer seventeen years before. I’d taught sailing to kids, a job for which I’d been only marginally qualified, staying a lesson or two ahead of my students thanks to Tory Dinsmore, who’d been the club’s food services manager and a much better sailor than I’d ever be. I wondered if she was still around. Probably not. The last I’d heard she’d hooked up with some Australian single-handed sailor whose name I don’t remember but whose family owned a sheep station the size of Oregon in Western Australia.

  On the presumption that Thomason might try to follow me, I’d taken precautions. Before leaving the city, I’d circled the block a few times, then took Stanley Park Drive rather than the Causeway to the Lions Gate Bridge. On the Upper Levels Highway I’d driven with the excessive caution of someone who was afraid he’d had one drink too many, keeping well below the speed limit, with one eye on the rear-view mirror, watching for a car that hung back. Nor had I driven directly to Eagle Harbour. Instead, I continued on to Horseshoe Bay, looping through the BC Ferries terminal, even parking for a couple of minutes in the pedestrian passenger drop-off area, before backtracking to Eagle Harbour along Marine Drive, taking random detours on side streets. I was as sure as I could be that I hadn’t been followed, but it had taken more than two hours to drive a distance normally covered in half an hour or less.