Invisible Dead

by Sam Wiebe

  I drew out a business card. “I’m working for Chelsea’s foster mother. If you’d feel more comfortable talking to her—”

  He swatted the card out of my hand. “Son, I asked you to go. I’m not asking anymore. Now get. The fuck. Out. Of my domicile. Before I press charges.”

  He backed me toward the door. Looking over at Shay he added, “Don’t ever bring anyone around again or else don’t you come back.”

  “I knew that wouldn’t go well,” Shay said as we retreated to the staircase. “I knew he didn’t know anything.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  We walked west up Alexander toward my car.

  “He’s really not a bad guy,” Shay said. “He just doesn’t like talking about Chelsea. Guess her leaving really hit him hard.”

  “I can tell.”

  “But he’s not usually like that. He writes these songs sometimes that are really, really imaginative.”

  At the Cadillac I handed Shay five twenties. “Sorry to ruin things with him,” I said.

  “He’ll be fine after a few days. He’s a Leo. Leos are all hotheads.”

  “You buy from him?”

  “No. Not usually. Once in a while.”

  “Where you off to now?” I asked.

  She smiled and shrugged. “Woman About Town. Places to go. You?”

  “It’s tea time. Might get a bagel, look at the water.”

  “Enjoy that.” She started backward up the street. Waved to me. “No hard feelings.”

  “None.”

  I waited till she rounded the corner. I opened the glove box and brought out the steno pad and pen I used to chart my mileage. Then I popped the trunk. Inside was a tool box, and in the tool box were tools. I took out an old-school Mag-Lite, the kind that used three D-cells and weighed as much as a length of lead pipe. It was my father’s, and it brought a sentimental smile to my face.

  I put the flashlight in a grubby Canadian Tire bag and made my second trip down Alexander. Kid Diogenes, prowling the city with his lantern on a quest to find one honest man.

  I caught the door to Kazz’s apartment building, trailing behind a grocery-laden couple dressed in refugee chic. When I knocked on Kazz’s door I grasped the bag in both hands and tried to look sheepish.

  Kazz opened the door. “Fuck is it?”

  “Forgot her keys.”

  “Fucking typical.” He let me move past him into the room, toward the sofa. He hadn’t paused his game. I watched his avatar stare dumbly at a pixelated wall.

  Kazz stood with his arms folded. I waited until the door shut. I grasped the flashlight and shook away the bag, which wafted lazily to the parquet floor.

  He looked at me and blinked and I tapped him on the temple with the grip end of the Mag. He dropped to the floor and stared up at me, insolence replaced by panic.

  “What the hell,” he said, scrambling away from me and knocking his head into the butcher-block island. “Wait. Help. Help.”

  “You don’t want to go that route,” I said. “Go have a seat on the sofa and let’s talk.”

  “Help—”

  I held up the flashlight. “On the couch.”

  He crawled over and pushed himself into a sitting position in the middle of the sofa. He threaded his fingers together and sat with both hands in his lap.

  “Let’s start over,” I said. “My name is David. What’s yours?”

  “I have rights,” he began.

  “Yes, but we’re not talking about you. The subject at hand is Chelsea Loam. You’re what we might call a secondary character. Now what’s your full name and date of birth?”

  “Why?”

  “So I can check you out, dummy.”

  His hand went to his pocket. I held up the flashlight. He drew his wallet out ever so slowly. Placed it in my left hand.

  Brandon Kenneth Trevino didn’t have a driver’s licence. I put his SIN card, Care Card and Amex on the counter and snapped photos with my cellphone.

  “Let’s start with the first time you met Chelsea,” I said. “Where was that?”

  “Meeting.”

  “What kind?”

  “I’m not s’posed to talk about it or anyone who goes.”

  “But a twelve-step meeting, roughly.” He shrugged in affirmation. “How long had you been going, and how long had Chelsea been going?”

  “She’d been there longer than me. But she, you know, lapsed a few times.”

  “And you?”

  “I was fierce into it for a while. But the meetings made sense. I mean, nowadays I just smoke weed and a little coke, rarely, like at a party. I was kicking smack then, and doing okay till Chels and I hooked up.”

  “And she lured you off the straight and narrow.”

  “No BS. Chels would go through these shame cycles—that’s one of the terms I learned, it’s where your shame drives you to kick, but kicking’s hard, and pretty soon you fuck up, and then the shame kicks back in and you want to cop. She’d do that all the time. ‘I got to get clean I got to get clean’ Monday morning, ‘I got to get high I got to get high’ Tuesday night. Ask anyone who knew her.”

  “So who knew her?” I asked.

  “Everyone. But close friends she only had a couple.”

  “Names, full last and nick.”

  “It’s been more than ten years.”

  “That’s right. You’ve had plenty of time.”

  He chewed his lips. “Dolores Gunn. They were friends.”

  “And who’s Dolores Gunn?”

  “She’s a bartender on Main. I want to say the Waverley but I’m not sure. I’m sober now, I avoid those places. By now she might’ve quit.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “There were a lot of girls around,” Kazz said. “I wasn’t, like, formally introduced to all of ’em.”

  “Names.”

  “Lila, Vee, Casey, Kimmy—Kimmy might’ve been after Chels. Ask Dolores.”

  I jotted the names on the back page of my mileage log.

  “Anyone else? Any men that hung with her?”

  “Vee, before the op, but besides him—her—can’t think of any.”

  “So just you in terms of men.”

  His eyes narrowed. “That an insult?”

  “It’s a prompt.”

  “Of course there were men, but that was business. She had regulars but I didn’t know them. I kept the skeeves from bothering her.”

  I wrote it all down, then worked the pen through the coils at the top of the pad. I put the pad aside. I said, “We’re going to have a talk now about being a pimp.”

  “I said before that I wasn’t a pimp.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  Kazz turned his head around the room. His gaze rested on the many fine things in his bright, high-ceilinged apartment. He sighed. I was patient.

  “Okay.” He slapped his knees. “Let me say first, it was a time of aggravation and turmoil in my life. I was angry, I was fixing.”

  I nodded.

  “Did I always have a job back then? No. And Chelsea lived with me, yeah, and yeah she paid some bills, but I wasn’t a capital-P pimp. I didn’t have a stable. But I looked out for her, sometimes, sure. There’s creeps out there.”

  “In terms of clientele. She was a good-looking young woman.”

  “Yeah,” Kazz said. His mouth quivered and he clenched his jaw. “Gorgeous at one point. Still a hard seven when she disappeared. I got her this costume, ‘Native Princess.’ Sort of a Disney Pocahontas thing. Little warpaint. Older white dudes paid through the ass for that. German tourists? Currency exchange downtown never saw so many Deutschmarks.”

  “The day she disappeared,” I said. “What do you remember?”

  “Waiting,” he said. “Waiting and waiting. It’d been a good morning, some money had come through from my dad. I’d bought three papers of H and two of coke, plus I’d fixed earlier. I was gonna share with her when she woke up, which would’ve been noonish. Figured we’d fix and lie in bed all day. Only she wasn’t th
ere when I got back. I waited till I started coming down, then I did one of the papers. That was how the next few days went—me waiting, trying to hold onto some for her. She never came back. Never heard from her again. Love of my life,” he added.

  “Anyone ask about her?”

  “The cops, for a while. I got calls from her mom, once or twice from her sister. But I was kicking, and I didn’t need that kind of negativity in my life. After that I tried to move on.”

  “Besides the cops—anyone ask about her, last few years? How about Terry Rhodes?”

  His eyes widened. “The Exiles? Fucking hope not.”

  “What about Anne Loam, her mother?”

  “I remember Chels mentioning they were trying for a meet. I told her it was a bad idea. Someone gives you away, then gets in touch years later, it’s to shake you down for money or make themselves feel better about what they did. Chels didn’t need that noise.”

  “What about her son?”

  “Kevin?” He shook his head adamantly. “That’s never been conclusively proven, him and me.” Through the windows I could see to the harbour. A cruise ship lurched away from the dock. The sound of canned samba music carried as far as the shore. High times in the Caribbean for someone other than Brandon Kenneth Trevino or myself.

  Kazz hazarded to stand up. “That’s the story,” he said. “I kicked smack. Now I deal a little herb, help people make connections, manage a couple of bands. I’d kind of moved on, when you brought all this back up.”

  “Sorry ’bout that,” I said. “We’re almost done.”

  “Almost?”

  “There’s one more thing, and I think you know what it is.”

  “I honestly have zero clue what you’re talking about.”

  I said, “When I was here before, with Chelsea—I mean, with Shay—I asked did you have anything of Chelsea’s. You said no but you looked over there.”

  I pointed with the flashlight in the direction of the closet and bedroom.

  Kazz bolted for the door. I got a hand on his throat and tossed him toward the sofa.

  I got hold of the Xbox console and ripped it free from its wires, sent it hurtling across the room. A bronze statue of Ganesh sat on a black-painted Greek column. It was being used as a keyring holder. When the console hit, the statue crashed hands-first into the floor. The column rolled back and forth in a semicircle. The Xbox bounced off the wall unspectacularly.

  “Let’s get this over,” I told Kazz. I brandished the Mag-Lite.

  “It’s all that’s left of her,” he said softly.

  “There’s nothing left of her. Which is why I’m taking it.”

  He stood up and walked to the closet. Opened it. Crouched down and moved some clothing off a shoebox. He brought the box back to me. I set it on the counter between us and flipped up the lid. Inside were two folded sheets of paper, some silver jewellery, and a thick quarto-sized book.

  I put down the flashlight and unfolded the papers. They were sketches, a cityscape and a face. The first was done as if standing kitty-corner from the Carnegie Library, the perspective distorted so that the tall financial buildings of the city centre seemed to wrap around the more detailed, low-slung buildings of the Hastings-Main corridor. A mouth, square-cut steel fangs devouring up a neighborhood.

  I knew the face in the second sketch. It was Chelsea Loam, the Chelsea Loam of the police mugshots, gaunt and diamond-hard. The clean linework and subtle hatching enriched her physical characteristics, made their hardness seem in service of some deep-hidden warmth. The sketch somehow had more soul than the photos did.

  I leaned into the counter and imagined her on a wet street corner in May, shivering in a fringed buckskin coat, waiting for a strange car to cruise by, slow down, unlock the passenger door. A line of strange cars, each taking something, leaving her tokens redeemable for poison.

  Both pictures were signed AK-47.

  “Know the artist?” I asked Kazz. He was also leaning on the counter, twisting on the ball of one foot, then shifting to twist on the other.

  “Some trick,” he said.

  “They’re good.”

  “Well, why don’t you just take ’em, then?”

  I held up the jewellery, two simple crosses on thin chains, which I saw were pewter and not silver.

  “Chelsea make those?” I asked.

  “We did together. Well, I fired it for her.”

  “Do they have sentimental value?”

  “It all does, man. It’s all mine.”

  “I’ll need to borrow it.”

  He snorted. “Borrow.”

  His eyes fell on the book.

  It was a ragged-cut journal with a cover of padded vinyl. A nylon band to keep the pages together. Once I slid it off, papers began falling out, slips and scraps that had been shoved between pages. Ticket stubs, directions, printouts. I turned to a random page.

  …just that kind of day, like walking through a sprinkler. Makes me want to clean. Clean the apartment. Clean my shoes, the blue Fluevogs that I noticed have gum on the sole. Clean myself. Clean up my act. Maybe I’ll soak in the tub. Spend the whole day in there until my skin turns raisiny and I have to get K to carry me out.

  Meeting w/ G.O. tonite. Last of my regulars. He’ll go on about his wife again I know it. How she doesn’t understand him. Maybe if you didn’t perv on girls younger than your grandkids, maybe she’d understand then. G.O. sweet and pays good but not too bright. Not much wattage in the headlamp as Gail says. Should phone her. Should phone Kevin. Maybe after. Bath now. Wash my sins away ha ha ha.

  I put the book down, ran a hand over the creased vinyl. The book felt as if it had a charge. As if it were a very real piece of her.

  Kazz had picked up the Mag-Lite.

  I looked over at him. “Really?”

  “Get out and leave everything. This is personal property and I know my rights.”

  “Put it down, dummy.”

  He held it for the most studied and epic of defiant poses. Then his arm sagged and he set the flashlight on the counter.

  “Good. Now who else has seen this?”

  “Seen it?”

  “Did you show it to the police?”

  “I don’t cooperate with fascists.”

  “Why hide it? Why keep it at all?”

  “I loved her.”

  “Was the plan to blackmail someone?”

  “I loved her. Really. Why’s that so hard to believe?”

  “Your One True Love disappears. You don’t go to the cops. You got her journal—her bad trick book—in a shoebox in her closet.” I tapped the book. “I could buy true love if you were trying to crack this. Visit these johns on your own and try to find out who took her. You know who G.O. is?”

  “No,” he said. “I get too emotional when I read Chels’s stuff.”

  “Putting aside the Most Lamentable Tragedy of Star-Crossed Chelsea and Brandon, and going from my gut, there’s two viable reasons a guy like you holds onto a book like this. Both come down to power. Either you’re afraid of someone named in the book, or this is blackmail material.”

  “You seem to know everything,” Kazz said.

  “I read a lot.”

  He turned to look out the window. The cruise ship had chugged out of sight. He watched the Seabus ferry the midday travellers to the North Shore.

  I backhanded him. He stared at me dumbly. I slapped him again. I raised my hand to slap him a third time and he cowered and held up his hands.

  “What’d I do?” he said. A child’s question, spoken in a child’s voice. His whole life laid bare in three words. Kazz Trevino had taken an unfair beating early enough in life that the unfairness of it had stuck with him.

  “Blackmail or insurance,” I said. “Which.”

  “I thought maybe there’d be some money in it. When Chels was younger and better looking she had all these regulars, like call girl style. That was before her habit really crept up on her. She didn’t give me names—she’d say, ‘I got a date with Mr. Ge
orge,’ that sort of thing. She had rich clients, some famous ones. She was so stupid about it, she didn’t get their names all the time. Sometimes she didn’t even know who they were. Then we’d be sitting in the Ovaltine and she’d see, like, a finance minister on the front page of the Sun, and she’d go, ‘I used to see him.’ So stupid.”

  “Who’d you blackmail?” I asked.

  “Nobody. I can’t make heads or tails. Some of those initials stand for nicknames. More I looked, more they seemed to lead nowhere.”

  “What about AK-47?”

  “Dunno,” Kazz said.

  “Guy or girl?”

  “Guy, I think. Think he’s some sort of artist.”

  “You get that from him signing his name on two pieces of art?”

  “Man,” Kazz said, “I didn’t exactly care whose prick she was sucking. I just handled the money.”

  I packed the book and drawings back into the shoebox. I put the Mag-Lite under my arm. I left him the two pewter necklaces.

  “We covered a lot of ground,” I said. “I’ll bring all this back when I’m done.”

  “Nah,” he said. “Fucking trouble’s all it brought me. You keep it.”

  17

  MY PLAN WAS TO HOLE UP in the office with a pot of tea and itemize what I had. The world of Chelsea Loam had been as bleak and sparsely populated as a Beckett play. Now there was a deluge of names. The bartender Dolores Gunn; Lila, Casey and Kimmy—possible coworkers; Vee—coworker, friend, possible post-op transgender person; AK-47—artist, possibly male; G.O.—elderly trick with money. There would be others. And all of them would know a different Chelsea Loam.

  But most significant was Chelsea herself. Her voice and her thoughts. Her obsessions. Her regrets. The journal was a document of her mind in those months before the disappearance. How intimate printed words could be.

  At the office Shuzhen herded me into the small conference room, where Jeff sat facing a trio of smart-dressed corporate types. He looked up, glad to see me, until he noticed I was wearing street clothes. Jeff was wearing his power suit and a tartan tie.

  He stood up and introduced me. “This is the man himself. Dave, this is Pat Carnahan, Don Utrillo and Tommy Ross. They’re from Solis.”