Invisible Dead

by Sam Wiebe

  “So it’s not Nichulls,” Jeff said. “What next?”

  “Next is telling Gail Kirby it wasn’t him.” I looked at Marie. “And giving her the invoice.”

  “And then back in the rotation?”

  “More than likely,” I said. “She had the one anonymous tip about her daughter. Now that that’s a bust, there’s not much left to the case.”

  “Good,” Jeff said. “Not good, but—you know what I mean. The VP of Solis Developments asked about you personally.”

  “Goody.”

  “They’re thinking of ditching their in-house security, taking up with us. Their boss, Utrillo, is on the fence. But the sales VP Tommy Ross is a fan of yours. Wants you to bodyguard him on his trip to Winnipeg.”

  “Pass.”

  “No passes allowed.”

  “I hate Winnipeg.”

  “Have you ever been?”

  “It seems the kind of place I wouldn’t like.”

  Jeff shook his head. “I do a lot of things I don’t like. For you this is mostly a vacation. Free plane, free hotel. While you’re out there you can see the world’s biggest Coke can.”

  “No,” I said.

  “They’re a big account, which makes them more important than a small account.” He held in his arms a thick file in a faux-leather accordion folder with a gold foil decal in the shape of a sun. He spoke to me in the voice you’d use for a small child or a large dog, pointing between the file in his arms and the open folder with the two photographs. “Big account. Little account. Little. Big. See how that works? If the big account is happy, you can afford to work on the little account. If not, then we’ll all need squeegees and cardboard signs.”

  I said I’d think on it.

  “And please get rid of the table. I will pay to replace it. Get a whole office suite.”

  “There are some nice rosewood desks at the India Imports on Broadway,” Marie said. “You can use my discount.”

  I waxed noncommittal and took the big brass elevator eight floors down to street level. Half the battles I fought, I fought only to fight them. Why not ditch the table? It was just something familiar.

  On Hastings I unlocked my Cadillac and drove west down Seymour, working out what I’d tell Gail Kirby. I wondered what she’d expected from Nichulls. What she expected from me.

  I looked at the file on the passenger seat, a corner of the black-and-white photo reaching out past the beige cardboard to graze the beaten leather. A few strands of black hair, the edge of a jawline.

  Chelsea Loam.

  I doubted very much we were done with each other.

  3

  MRS. GAIL KIRBY once told me, “When I was calling Missing Persons every day to ask what they were doing to find Chelsea, they used to say, ‘She’s just a whore, it’s not like she’s anyone important.’ The first reporter I went to told me if Chelsea was the daughter of some grey-haired lady from Kerrisdale, everyone would put a lot more effort into finding her. Well, now I am a grey-haired lady from Kerrisdale, and before I finish I’m going to know what the fuck happened to my daughter.”

  She’d come to me reluctantly, a month ago, prompted by her other daughter, Caitlin. “She thinks I’m not strong enough to face this monster,” Gail Kirby had said. “Caitlin should know what I faced in my time. But I see her point.”

  Caitlin had thought the whole effort a waste. After my first meeting with her mother, she’d told me, “There’s simply no way Chelsea could be alive and not call us. Not with the amount of money my mother shelled out to her, unconditionally. No way she’d go all this time without coming back for more of that. Plus Gail loved her. Chelsea’s dead, she’s dead, and let that be the end of it.”

  “But why hire me?” I’d asked.

  “Because,” Caitlin had said. “Gail shouldn’t have to deal with people like that. Her life’s been arduous enough as it is. If this ‘clue’ is as bogus as it appears, she shouldn’t be tormented by Ed Leary Nichulls.”

  The clue referred to a letter the Kirbys had received through the doggie door of their palatial house in Shaughnessy Heights. No stamp, nothing written on the construction-paper envelope. The envelope itself unfolded into a note written in blue magic marker. All caps. ASK SCRAPYARD ED ABOUT YOUR DAUGHTER.

  False leads weren’t uncommon. The Ghoshes, other clients of mine, had received notes claiming if Mrs. Ghosh stood by her bedroom window naked, rubbing herself for three nights in a row, her daughter would be brought back. Jeff and I found the writers, a couple of high schoolers whose parents took a boys-will-be-boys attitude to the incident.

  I parked my Cadillac in Gail Kirby’s driveway and headed to the door through a trellised archway. The clematis that weaved through it had bloomed ivory-coloured flowers, but patches of the front garden remained dead heaps of brown and grey, last year’s untended bark mulch. Gardening was Mrs. Kirby’s very favourite hobby and she hadn’t been attending to it.

  I let myself in. I found Gail and Caitlin in the solarium, playing cribbage and drinking Pimm’s. Gail smiled as I approached.

  I gave her the news. It didn’t seem to dampen her spirits. Caitlin involved herself in her cellphone.

  “It was worth a try,” Gail said. “Sit down for a minute.”

  I sat in a white wicker chair and flicked a spider off the armrest. Watering cans and gardening supplies littered the tiled floor of the solarium. Bags of calcite and fertilizer, stacks of red clay pots, floral-patterned gardening gloves and a trowel and shears tucked into an overturned straw hat. All of it filmed with dust. One of the pots had been repurposed to accept cigarette butts. It lay next to Gail Kirby’s chair, beside her oxygen tank.

  “Gail has something she wants to ask you,” Caitlin said. She didn’t look up. Her tone made it clear that she’d lost an argument on the same subject before I’d arrived.

  Gail lit a cigarette and looked at her daughter with a mixture of sadness and pride. Only a parent could pull off such a look. She said to me, “What would you do, David, if you were working this case full-time? Where would you start?”

  “With the police,” I said. “They have resources a private firm can’t compete with. I’d work up as much info on your daughter as I could from friends and family. At the same time I’d start with her disappearance and work backward. Find out who she worked with, lived with, who she went to for help. A lead might emerge. But I’d start with the police.”

  “The police don’t care,” Caitlin said.

  “Lot of cases they’re effective, whether they care or not.”

  “I care,” Gail said. “I have the money. Would you put up a reward if you were me?”

  “No, but I’d pay for information. Let people know a solid lead is worth money, but keep the scammers and lunatics away.”

  “I want Chelsea found,” Gail Kirby said. “I’m prepared to pay.”

  “Money pissed away,” Caitlin muttered.

  “There will be plenty left for you when I’m gone,” Gail said.

  “That’s unfair.” Caitlin pushed away from the table and made a show of tossing her cards in. “Know what? I refuse to deal with this any longer. I have a life of my own.”

  As she stormed out, Gail said to me, “She may have a point.”

  “There’s no guarantee,” I admitted. “And it’s not cheap.”

  “I don’t care about the money. Do you know how it came about, this fortune?” She took a whiff of oxygen and set the mask back on the table’s edge. “Lew—my husband—died in an industrial accident on an oil rig in Fort St. John. The settlement was generous. Caitlin had finished school and Chelsea had left us. I put all of it into real estate. This was before the housing boom. Now I’m worth skillions.”

  She crushed out her cigarette on the glass table and consigned it to the pot with the others. “And now I have cancer,” she said. “Stage three. It’s not going to get better. I want my daughter found, David. Chelsea only lived with us for five years, but she’s as much my daughter as Caitlin is. It kills m
e not to know. And since I have this money, I’m going to use it.”

  “It’s been eleven years,” I began.

  “I know she’s probably dead. I have no illusions. I just need to know.”

  Gail took an envelope from the pocket of her button-up sweater. She meant to sail it across the table to me, but her strength failed and it glanced off the pitcher in the middle of the table. I reached over. Inside was a cheque for two hundred thousand dollars.

  “Your time and expenses,” she said. “You find her or what happened to her.”

  “I can’t take that much from you,” I said.

  “Sure you can.”

  I pushed the invoice toward her. “Pay this and I’ll draw up a contract.”

  “And you’ll find her?”

  “I’ll do my level best.”

  “Do everything,” she said.

  —

  Caitlin was waiting in the driveway. I’d boxed in her Beemer, but she lingered by the side panel of my Cadillac like she wanted some words. I’d had enough of words for the day, but it wasn’t my choice.

  She eyed the Cadillac, a decade-old XLR in dire need of a wash, like it was the model of conspicuous consumption. “You probably have a fleet of these made off of swindling old ladies like my mother.”

  “Let me ask you a question,” I said, opening the door and resting an elbow on the roof. “What do you think it’s worth, finding your sister?”

  “She wasn’t my sister,” Caitlin said.

  “But what price would you allow your mother to put on that?”

  She shook her head. “It was my idea to hire you. Otherwise Gail would’ve had to follow up on this mess herself. She didn’t think you were necessary. Now,” she said, “she thinks you’re worth two hundred thousand dollars.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “It doesn’t matter because you’re not going to find her because she’s not around because she’s dead. Something happened to Chelsea.”

  She paused and turned to examine an unkempt rose bush in the front yard. Wilted yellow petals, tendrils of thorns snaking out across the path. I waited her out.

  “Chelsea messed up everything,” she said. “Everything she touched. Even my mother knows it deep down. Hiring you is only out of guilt for Gail finally being happy—which she won’t be for much longer if the doctors are right.”

  “How long does she have?”

  “She doesn’t tell me those kinds of things,” Caitlin said. “She doesn’t want me to worry. That’s a laugh, isn’t it?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s simply how it is,” Caitlin said. “What it means to you is if you’re going to swindle her, you’d best do it in the next few months.”

  —

  Rather than return to the office, I drove to St. Augustine’s, had a pint of Black Plague Stout, and began piecing together what I knew of Chelsea Loam’s life.

  Lewis and Gail Kirby had adopted her just before her thirteenth birthday, taking her out of a group home. There wasn’t much on her before that. Single mother, unknown father. Ethnicity predominantly white and aboriginal, possibly Métis. Chelsea was well-behaved at the home. Her self-portrait, age seven, showed the black-and-white outline of a girl, faceless but wearing a long dress, in the midst of a Crayola field of daffodils, tulips and sunflowers. MY NAME IS CHELSEA. MY SECOND NAME IS ANNE. MY FAVOURITE FRIEND IS PAULINE. MY FAVOURITE SONG IS CALLED HOLIDAY BY MADONNA. MY FAVOURITE BOOK IS MY SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN BY I DON’T KNOW THE AUTHOR. I wondered cynically if the adoption centres encouraged children to cutesy up their drawings in order to attract a family, like a matron instructing a stable of debutantes how best to land a beau.

  Chelsea had done well with the Kirbys. Appropriately trepidatious during eighth grade, being locked in classrooms and gymnasiums with so many unfamiliar strands of DNA. Grade nine saw her settle into a group of friends, play in concert band, land on the honour roll. More of the same in ten and eleven, a widening of her social circle to include boys. She’d joined jazz choir and sung a solo in “Get Your Kicks on Route 66.”

  In grade eleven there was trouble—relatively speaking. She’d pulled a C in geography, a C– in pre-calc. Incompletes for PE and Career and Personal Planning. Gail suspected drinking. Lew suspected drugs.

  Lew’s accident and death and the resulting confusion made it hard to account for where Chelsea was at, physically and spiritually. As Gail had told me, one day she just wasn’t there.

  What followed were late-night phone calls every few months. Chelsea needed money for a procedure—“Don’t make me say it,” she pleaded with Gail. She’d been arrested and needed money to retain competent legal counsel, “not these legal aid shitheads.” She’d tested positive for hepatitis and could use a few bucks for her prescription. She was getting clean. She was trying to get clean. She was thinking about trying to get clean, really trying this time.

  And Gail always paid her. Both wept at every transaction.

  Then the calls stopped coming and Gail reported her missing. That was eleven years ago. Chelsea would be thirty-five now. Six years older than me. And yet looking down at her photo I saw a girl half my age.

  I had no real perspective on Chelsea Loam. If I delved into her childhood I might find skeletons—abuse, violence—but then I might not. There’s no formula for why people stray from the righteous path.

  It was going to be a messy case, I could sense that much. I A-B’d the two photos I had, the smiling blonde in her yearbook dress, the defiant professional with eyes of wet flint. Separate existences. Separate friends.

  It was so damn easy to lose the way.

  4

  THE WAITER BROUGHT our sushi in elegant wooden ships.

  “So…”

  “Dave.”

  “Dave, right. What do you do for a living, Dave?”

  “Private investigator.”

  “Really? That’s neat.”

  “I like it. What about you?”

  “You know what I do. I work with Marie in the shop.”

  “Right. How’s that?”

  “Well, it’s not my dream job, but it could be worse. The customers, though. Sometimes they’re totally unreasonable. People expect so fucking much, they’re so entitled. Drives me—huh.”

  “What?”

  “Huh, nothing. Sending Abby a note about tomorrow.”

  “Ah…”

  “Abdul. He works in the office with Marie and I. Nice guy but a little scatter-brained.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m just gonna type this and go pee. Order me another Asahi when she comes back, ’kay?”

  She walked off, nearly bumping into the table next to us. I wondered if she texted on the toilet.

  It was quarter past nine. Ryan Martz would be off work by now, tossing them back at the Cambridge. I wondered if it would be bad manners to walk out without saying anything, without leaving payment or a note. Probably.

  I walked down Thurlow and made a right on Pender. The office buildings were mirrors reflecting fire as the sun bobbed at the horizon, causing a surprisingly cloudless sky to light up teal in that final hour before dark. The I-Don’t-Give-a-Shit hour.

  Located on the ground floor of a hostel, the Cambridge was a hamster den for slumming college kids and backpackers. Every surface in the place had a tacky coating of spilt beer and ketchup. Why would a cop drink there, away from his own kind? Maybe that was the explanation. I’d gone through training with Martz. I knew his parents had been hippies, the overly permissive and disorganized kind, and his entire square-john, shaved-head, Metallica-driven existence was an edifice raised in defiance to them. Maybe by downing Winchesters in a beer parlour populated by sociology majors with dreadlocks and smug utopians in trilbies and kerchiefs, Martz had found a way to commune with his anger. Drinking, after all, is one of the best forms of perseveration.

  I slid onto the picnic bench across from him. Waited for him to notice me. Martz didn’t react, other than to
hold up his pint to the barkeep as a signal to bring a fresh glass.

  “Wakeland,” he said. He was half gone already. “What’re you doing here?”

  “Just here for the music,” I said. “My day’s not complete without a few hours of white guy reggae.”

  “I bet,” Martz said. “I bet you come here all the time.” He launched into a laughing fit, rapping on the table with a bandaged hand.

  “What’s so damn funny?”

  “Picturing you dressed up like the Terminator, black jacket and shades. ‘Rasta la vista.’ Get it?” And he collapsed back into laughter.

  “That’s good, Ryan. For you it’s brilliant.”

  “So you came to see me.”

  “No shit.”

  “About?”

  “A woman, a young lady who disappeared eleven years ago.”

  “Chelsea Loam,” Martz said. “I heard about your visit to Nichulls.”

  I had some beer. It tasted like rust and water and beer. The Cambridge was filling up. The barkeep was coordinating with the doorman over cheap wireless headsets to keep the standing crowd from blocking the entrance.

  “The mother asked me to look into a tip she got.”

  “Chelsea Loam was an orphan.”

  “Foster mother. So I did, I looked into it.”

  “We had that same tip,” Martz said. “Someone saw Chelsea Loam out with Nichulls. Turned out to be garbage. Or maybe not. But who can prove it?” He shrugged helplessly. “Hookers.”

  “It’s not her fault if someone did something to her.”

  “What do you know?” Martz said. “You don’t fucking know. She could’ve gone skiing down the wrong hill. Happens.”

  “Now you’re reaching, Ryan, and it’s sad.”

  “This one I dealt with today,” he said. “I spent all day up in her shitty fucking roach-infested room. Other day she and her roommate had a fight. The officer who caught the code three tells me they were trying to kill each other. Roommate walks out, and when she doesn’t come back the next day, the other one calls Missing Persons, all boo hoo hoo. And I get to take her statement. Rat shit everywhere, Burger King wrappers. And while I’m doing that she walks through the door, the missing roommate, and the two of them go at it again. And I get stabbed in the hand with a fucking pen trying to separate them. They can both get themselves killed, far’s I’m concerned.”