Invisible Dead

by Sam Wiebe

  “Good thing they’re not who I’m looking for,” I said diplomatically.

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean. Any one of them would take your fucking eyeteeth out for a paper’s worth of skag. Animals, Wakeland.”

  “Keep your voice down.”

  “I got roaches, silverfish crawling on my uniform. And these two don’t give a shit if they fucking kill each other. But I’ve got to. And these sheltered cunts—” here he craned his neck in the direction of the college students sharing the bench with us, the gesture not lost on them “—they act like, oh, the cops don’t care, they use stormtrooper tactics, why don’t they just ask these nice, innocent addicts not to rob and steal and suck prick for fucking dope. And I cut myself again going through that bitch’s medicine cabinet. And who were we talking about? Chelsea Loam. I read that file. She’s just the same.”

  “Focus on her. Tell me what you know.”

  He smiled. “Why don’t I just give you her file?”

  “I’d like that.”

  “I know you would. But it’d be wrong.”

  “Only legally.”

  “Which means I’m not doing it,” Martz said. “I bent the law enough for you already. Or have you forgotten that Salt mess? That whole—what’s the word for a bunch of fucked-up shit?”

  “Fiasco? Debacle?”

  “That whole debacle cost me my promotion. Most likely I’m CFL now. Constable for Life. Lucky fucking me.”

  “My father never moved past constable.”

  “And he was a great cop,” Martz said, pointing unsteadily. “Because he knew the difference between—know what? I’m sick of arguing with you. Sick of the whole schmozz. What do you want to know?”

  “Any leads, for starters?”

  “If there were, don’t you think we’d’ve followed up on them?”

  “Missing Persons is a small unit,” I said. “Can’t do everything.”

  “Damn straight. Tell that to—tell that to everybody.”

  “Do you have her DNA on file?”

  “DNA, fingerprints. Dental records.”

  “LKA?”

  “One of the flophouses downtown. The Baltic, maybe.”

  “Who’d she run with?”

  “Who’d she run with,” Martz repeated, almost mystified at the question. “Who the fuck do you think? Junkies, pimps—”

  “She had a pimp?” Chelsea hadn’t struck me as the pimp type.

  “I’m just saying, when we looked into her, that’s the calibre of people she hung with.”

  “Soiled doves and men of low character.”

  “In so many words, Wakeland.”

  “How hard did you look?”

  He glared at me. The vein that ran up his temple over his shaved head pulsed. “Fucking hard,” he said. “You think we wouldn’t look for her hard?”

  “I don’t know, I’m not a cop—”

  “Fucking A you’re not.”

  “—anymore,” I finished. “And it doesn’t matter, you know I have to go back through everything. I need to know everything about her. Everyone she met in detention or in rehab, every roommate, every friend.”

  “Every prick she ever sucked.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Every goddamn one of them, that’s what it takes.”

  “Is prurient a word? You’re prurient, Dave.”

  “I’ll also need to find her parents. Her birth parents.”

  “All that to find her probably lying dead in a ditch somewheres.”

  “You’re not going to talk me out of it.”

  “No,” Martz said. “I know that won’t happen. I don’t even think it’s all that stupid. I—listen. You know how these—women—get reported missing?”

  “Loved ones.”

  He shook his head. “Most of the time it’s care workers, calling ’cause they haven’t picked up their welfare cheques. Or the health clinic ’cause they didn’t refill their scrips. That’s the quality of person you’re dealing with, Dave. They’re hanging on as it is. You really think you’re gonna find someone like that? You think you’re helping anyone by poking around in all that piss and come?”

  Outside on the patio, a jittery panhandler moved around the tables. The sun had disappeared. The foot traffic toward Gastown and the waterfront was heavy.

  “Do you really want an answer to that?” I said.

  “No,” Martz said. “I want to go home and have a shower and clean all this skin off.”

  “Clean what off?”

  “All this shit—roach shit, rat shit, human shit—fucking petrified diarrhea nobody bothered to clean up.”

  “You said skin.”

  Puzzled, Martz stared into the glasses and pitcher, a forest of distorted reflections of himself.

  “I don’t understand the significance,” he said.

  5

  NO ONE HUSTLED LIKE JEFFERSON CHEN. At eight the next morning we were in the lobby of a financial building on West Georgia. Jeff was pacing, going over his pitch. He was wearing a bespoke suit he’d brought back from Savile Row, grey pinstripe with wide lapels, white silk shirt, no tie. He looked a bit like a villain from a Ringo Lam film. I was wearing the same black suit–black tie combination I’d worn yesterday, and looked like an arena security guard right after the Big Game.

  Dunham Insurance wanted to outsource their claims investigations. They were “exploring all their options.” Jeff wanted the job, wanted it badly. It would mean hiring another full-time investigator. Maybe an office manager. Jeff was determined to grow the business up and out, to not only get it off the ground, to not only see it soar, but to construct an entire floating city of commerce.

  We waited in the lobby. I listened to him run through his sales pitch again and again. I was there as a mascot, an old hockey player trotted out to press the flesh at the grand reopening of a supermarket.

  The elevator doors opened and a man and woman, both in blue suits, came out and shook our hands and herded us into the elevator and up to the eleventh floor and through glass doors into a conference room where another two suits smiled and made small talk about the Canucks and told us we could start whenever we were ready.

  Jeff wasted no time.

  “Wakeland & Chen and Dunham Insurance are a perfect match because both companies are dedicated to excellence. Not good or good enough but excellent service is what we provide, and it’s what we provide consistently. Not only that, but we’re more cost effective than our competitors. Our typical invoice is sixty-five percent of what Aries, our leading competitor, charges. We are mobile and flexible, our technology is beyond state of the art—Dave, pass them each a complimentary pen camera—and every member of our hard-working staff is hand-chosen and personally trained by David Wakeland, who you may have seen on the CBC in conjunction with one or two high-profile cases.”

  On the elevator ride down, Jeff shook his fist in triumph. “Fucking yeah. Nailed ’em, Dave.”

  “It was the pen cam. Everyone loves the pen cam.”

  “You did good, too. Didn’t say anything to embarrass us. I’m glad at least one of them watches local television.”

  “I’m going to need more time on the Kirby case,” I said. “At least another few weeks.”

  “You’re remembering to send out the invoices, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “And you’ll be around for the hiring interviews?”

  “If I can.”

  “You have to. I promised them back there.”

  “You also promised that we’re cheaper than Aries.”

  “We are, given how you’re under-billing the Widow Kirby.”

  The elevator dinged. We pushed our way into the lobby through a throng of young professionals. They packed themselves into the car as if there’d never be another.

  We walked down toward the waterfront, Jeff mindful of the bloated gulls sailing low overhead. I’d always felt about five blocks out of place in the financial district. Whoever had called Vancouver a city of gl
ass hadn’t been talking about my city. But as we passed yet another mirrored window, I caught our reflection. We looked at home.

  “I appreciate the effort you put into running the business,” I said.

  “I know you’ve got your own way of doing things, and that’s cool.”

  “Are we lying to each other?”

  “No,” said Jeff. “We’re on our way up, we’re making moves, and we’re doing things our own way. What could be better than that?”

  I didn’t answer. We crossed Burrard at Pender, passing a homeless man with a violin, a ghetto blaster and a somnolent dog.

  “You know I’ve got your back,” Jeff continued. “But you know I can only have your back if we have steady work like Dunham and Solis rolling in. For you, that means sometimes you have to put on a suit and smile and pretend to be human.”

  “I can do that,” I said.

  “Good. Where you going next with the Kirby case?”

  That I didn’t know. Martz had told me what I’d expected to hear—that as far as the police were concerned, Chelsea Loam had disappeared for no reason, and with no possible leads. Neither could I get a sense of who she was from her foster family. Gail Kirby and her daughter had been bludgeoned by Chelsea’s swift slide into addiction. To Gail, who had adopted the head-in-the-sand approach, she was a troubled innocent, struggling to find herself. And to Caitlin, who’d seen the effect Chelsea’s struggle had had on her mother, Chelsea was a lost cause. It would be facile to say that the truth probably lay between the two. Maybe the better answer was that they were both right.

  I had a cigarette before following Jeff up to our office. His cousin Shuzhen was up there already, sorting through the previous night’s emails while the coffee brewed. She was in her second year of pre-law at UBC, temping during the summer. She hadn’t yet taken off her coat, a white beltless Burberry that clung to her plaid skirt.

  “Chinese donut?” she asked.

  I set the kettle down on its base and flicked it on. She handed me a pastry. With the donut wedged into my mouth I ripped open a yellow teabag, set it down in the tiny clay pot.

  “How come you don’t drink coffee?” Shuzhen asked. “You look like you should drink coffee. Black coffee. In a big red 7-Eleven mug. Every day, same teabag, same pot.”

  I had to put the donut down on the corner of the saucer to answer her. “I’ll tell you why,” I said. “Coffee shrinks your testicles to the size of raisins.”

  “Seriously? That’s not true.”

  “A doctor told me for your balls to maintain optimum fluff and buoyancy, the body needs a daily pot of Earl Grey.”

  “You’re full of it, Dave.”

  “Yes I am.” I poured out the water, watched the string on the bag pull taut. “I don’t know why I like anything. Good citizen of the Commonwealth, I guess.”

  “You know it’s the Chinese that invented tea,” Shuzhen said.

  “Now that I don’t believe. Next thing you’ll be trying to tell me they invented gunpowder and the printing press.”

  I set the tea service on my office table and dumped out Chelsea Loam’s meagre file next to it. Two photos. A few documents. My handwritten notes on my meeting with Nichulls. I needed an entry point into her life, somewhere to begin piecing her last weeks together.

  What I needed was a guide. Someone who knew the stroll and the secret places where people congregated. I’d worked there, but the knowledge I had as an ex-cop wouldn’t help. I needed access to the world kept hidden from cops.

  Chelsea had lived ten minutes on foot from where I sat now, drinking my Twinings. It was five minutes from where my old office had been. It was another world.

  I took off my tie, still knotted, and looped it over the back corner of my chair. I changed into a hoodie and jeans and beaten-up Red Wings, took my lockbox out of the bottom drawer of the file folder, and stuffed my pockets with fifty-odd dollars in change. I ran off copies of Chelsea’s Missing flyer, making sure to circle my cell number on each of them.

  Jeff and Shuzhen were huddled in conversation as I headed to the elevator.

  “Balls feel nice and fluffy now?” Shuzhen called to me. I didn’t need to turn around to know the look Jeff was giving her.

  —

  I started at the Baltic, hoping the manager had miraculously preserved a box of Chelsea’s possessions. But she shook her head when I showed her the poster, had actually started shaking it even before her eyes locked on Chelsea’s face. I asked if Chelsea had been a resident and she looked and said no one of that name had stayed here, but the guest logs didn’t go back that far.

  I left a poster with her and asked her to display it. She said she was only the day manager and would have to square that with her boss.

  I tried the nearby hotels and SROs in case Martz had his details wrong. I met with similar non-answers. It had been eleven years. For the vulnerable underside of the city, eleven lifetimes.

  Outside the needle exchange I watched a woman sitting on an overturned bucket as she held her lighter to a square of tinfoil, inhaling the fumes through a Slurpee straw. She had on a purple pro wrestling sweatshirt, yellow lettering, THE CHAMP IS HERE. I waited until she’d finished before approaching.

  “Morning,” I said.

  “So?”

  I passed her a flyer and a business card. I went through my spiel. She considered both pictures.

  “I used to see her,” she said. “Way back. Her name was Charity.”

  “Her street name, you mean.”

  “Whatever. I heard she got clean.”

  “Who’d you hear that from?”

  “Fuck I remember a thing like that for?”

  “She’s missing,” I said.

  “I realize that from the big word over her picture says ‘missing.’ ”

  “Anyway,” I said, “can you tell me anything about Charity? Who she hung around with? What she was like?”

  “I didn’t really know her that well,” the woman said. “We had the same social worker is how I know her name. She was young. Real pretty, too.”

  “What’s your case worker’s name?”

  “It’s Beverly now but it used to be Vivian. And Shirley before that, but it was Viv who was me and Charity’s case worker.”

  “Vivian have a last name?”

  “Yeah and you should look it up. And ask her about Charity ’cause she’d know.”

  “I will.”

  “I only saw her here an’ there. Didn’t know her well.”

  “Appreciate the help,” I said. “Can I ask your name?”

  “You can but I’m not giving it to you, Mister Policeman. Mister Pleece-man. Mister Puh-leeze-man.”

  I gave her ten dollars in bills and ten in change and told her to call the number on my card if she needed anything.

  “I need new blood,” she said. “A new head of hair. New veins. New lungs.”

  “Least your mind works,” I said.

  “That was true,” she said, “would I be sitting here?”

  6

  VIVIAN FEATHER HAD RETIRED from social work a few years after Chelsea Loam’s disappearance. She now ran an artist’s colony on Quadra Island. The miracle of the internet robbed me of an excuse to take a trip up there, but I got through on Skype soon after looking her up.

  “Broke my heart,” Feather said. “Chelsea wasn’t all that different from me at her age. Fierce young aboriginal woman, beautiful, everything going for her after a rough patch or two. And then…” Her voice trailed off.

  Vivian Feather was a heavyset woman with long straight silver hair. She wasn’t looking quite into the lens of the webcam, but downward as if peering over imaginary glasses. She looked younger than her seventy years, but old enough that talking to her reminded me to visit my mother.

  “You must have known her pretty well,” I said, leaning forward in my office chair. “Who else did she confide in?”

  “I don’t know if she had that many people to talk to.”

  “Did she ha
ve a man in her life? Was she heterosexual, homosexual?”

  “That’s all very private,” Feather said. “What she told me in confidence I don’t mean to break.”

  “Of course not, and I wouldn’t want you to. But without making you uncomfortable, Mrs. Feather, could you tell me what you can?”

  “I’ll say this,” she said. “The man who dropped her off and picked her up from my office was always very rude. I assume that was her boyfriend.”

  “What was his—”

  “Even if I remembered, I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I heard a rumour she got clean.”

  “From who’d you hear that?”

  “Lady on a bucket. She said you’d know.”

  “When Chelsea stopped coming,” Vivian Feather said, “she’d been talking about rehab for ages and ages. Never made a serious attempt that I saw, but that’s no judgment on her. I haven’t walked in her shoes. I know she was under pressure.”

  “One day she just wasn’t there,” I prompted.

  “That’s right. I told her several times I would gladly come to her, meet her where she wanted to. But she liked my office. I always had Tootsie Rolls, fruit leather. Back when I could metabolize that stuff.”

  “You remember when she stopped coming to see you?”

  “October sixth was the last appointment she kept. I remember the date. I couldn’t stand that nobody’d bothered looking for her.”

  “Did you go to the police with that info?” I asked.

  “I don’t recognize the police,” Vivian Feather said.

  “Meaning?”

  “I mean I don’t recognize their authority. They’re the paramilitary wing of an occupying force on unceded land belonging to the Coast Salish peoples.”

  “So who’d you tell?”

  “Anyone who’d listen,” she said. “God, mostly. I still pray for Chelsea every night.”

  “Was she religious, Chelsea?”