Invisible Dead

by Sam Wiebe

  R.W. unlike anyone I’ve met. Makes my cry every time. After the date he pays me extra to lie there and answer questions. Do I have a family, what do they think of what I do, if I was a mom would I want my daughter etc. etc. Same questions every time and I still tear up. Wonder if I told him we don’t have to fuck, we can go straight to questions, would he appreciate it? I’m convinced that’s what he pays for. The fuck is meh to him. But maybe he needs it to feel normal. Not saying I don’t love Kazz but when I think of A.K. I can imagine a sort of different life. He and I and Kevin in a place above his studio on Cambie. I could model for him, or muse for him as he calls it, without the other distractions. What would I do for $? Maybe get a student loan and get some sort of childhood educator certificate—wish we had internet so I could check the Langara website and find what that degree is called. Something where I could work with Kevin and maybe 3 or 4 other special kids and really help them. Then come home to A.K. and muse. Not that he’s a husband type or I’m a wife type but it’s my dream and I can be as unrealistic as I darn please. Kazz called. C.G. on his way. Scared of C.G. Scared of T.R. Ice and fire, those two. Don’t like their clubhouse. Don’t like their parties. Want to do my date or two dates and go home and cop. Casey said T.R. just watches. Told her on the bed on her knees and then she felt paws on her back. Don’t want don’t want don’t want he’s here.

  Rhodes’s initials came up again.

  Not what I thought. Exiles parties all right. All T.R. wanted was head. Paid well and gave me two free sheets. Asked if I wanted to come back. I said yes. Asked if I wanted to make serious $. I said all $ serious. T.R. laughed and said I was too smart to be taking dates, I should be his accountant. Actually not a bad guy.

  And:

  Slow ass night UNTIL. Sat around with T.R. and crew watching that movie with whatshisname. Cousin Vinnie. Seen it before. There’s a part where this guy’s hitting his kid and the movie stops and the kid as an adult says over the screen, something like, “It’s okay he hit me because we all take a beating time to time.” And T.R. says that’s not a beating. Called the father a faggot and stalked out of the room. Comes back he’s taken off his coat. Not saying a word. Picked up a half-full bottle of Crown Royal and smashed it on the head of one of his own men. His name’s Skeet I think. The bottle doesn’t break like it does in the movies and everyone laughs. T.R. hits him again and keeps hitting him and on the fifth or sixth time it breaks. I couldn’t look away. Skeet’s close to this other biker named Delmar who’s actually a nice guy. Delmar gets up to pull T.R. off Skeet and C.G. kind of shakes his head and Delmar just stands there while T.R. beats his own guy for no reason. Just about kills him for all intensive purposes. I got a cab and got out of there. Called Delmar today. Thankfully Skeet’s going to be fine. Have to call T.R. soon, explain why I wasn’t around to give him his beej.

  It was noon when I packed away the book. Impossibly, given the heat of the day, my tea had cooled. I walked to Malone’s and ordered a double Bulleit and a pitcher of ice water. I stood at the bar waiting, thinking how nothing my problems really were.

  “How goes the struggle?” the bartender said as she put together the order, complete with a generous handful of unrequested citrus wedges in my ice water pitcher.

  “Could do with some rain,” I said.

  “Vancouverites.” She stressed the ouver in a noticeable hoo’s-it-gooin’-eh? “Canadian” accent. “You complain about the rain until you don’t get it.”

  “I never complain about the rain,” I said.

  “ ’Tire city don’t know nothing about weather. Don’t even have weather, not like Manitoba, not like Ontario.”

  “They’re welcome to it,” I said. “Give me women in gumboots and cigarettes under awnings.”

  “Talk about weather once you’ve seen a Manitoba snowstorm, then you can talk.”

  A woman slouched on a stool behind a fortress of cider glasses looked up. “Without weather,” she said, “what’d shitheads like you two have to say to each other?”

  —

  I killed two hours in the university library at Harbour Centre looking up leads from Chelsea’s diary. I started with the artist because A.K. had come up often in the book, both professionally and unprofessionally. Chelsea had “mused” for him. She’d “made love” with him. She’d also “dated” him and “dated” several friends and acquaintances of his. He had a studio or exhibition space somewhere on Cambie Street. He had signed his sketches AK-47.

  The website of Alex Knowlson had this to say about Alex Knowlson:

  “An acclaimed artist and cultural historian whose work embraces a heady new omniscience. There are no places, no faces, no races; instead one is left with an aestheticized liminal space that puts at its forefront the spectre of post-colonial alternate histories in order to challenge, refute and resist the Neo-Liberal complacency of postmodern consumer culture.”

  On the third time through I actually understood what that meant.

  My knowledge of painting consists of two trips to the VAG, one semester of Art History (precipitated, naturally, by a girl who’d also signed up for the course) and my mother’s print of Daumier’s Quixote and Sancho which hung in her sewing room. I know little of the last forty years of art, other than there must be some.

  That said, I liked Knowlson’s work. His earlier sketches—his “AK-47 period”—were undoubtedly of Vancouver, a Vancouver filtered through a chiaroscuro wonderland of exaggeration and menace and swagger. I liked those the best because I felt I’d eaten in those lonely diners with their rain-sopped neon signs. I’d worked those streets.

  His later work—the omniscience stuff—was more conceptual. Grids and polygons. Two-dimensional renderings of three or four dimensions. The collision between the soft rounded human forms and the precise angles and vanishing points of the environment. It was jarring and bewildering and I liked it, too. And I believed those images still to be of Vancouver, a Vancouver of the mind as opposed to his younger self’s vision of a Vancouver from the guts and loins. Like early William Gibson novels, Gibson’s Japanese sprawls a more accurate Vancouver than anyone else’s.

  The site gave no address or contact information, only a photo of the studio, close to the Cambie Street Bridge. That seemed like a studied bit of I’m-not-in-it-for-the-money preening. I thought of phoning Shuzhen to dig up the number for me, then remembered what business I was in.

  In a moment I had Alex Knowlson’s cell number and the hard line for the gallery. His cell phone went straight to message.

  “Hi, you haven’t quite reached Alex. In all likelihood I could come to the phone right now but I choose not to. Perhaps I don’t know your number. Perhaps I don’t feel like it. If you’re offended by that, hang up now. Or leave a message.” Beep.

  His gallery-workspace receptionist picked up on the first ring. “All Knowledge Gallery,” came the chipper salutation.

  “My name is David Wakeland, I’m a private investigator and I need a moment of Alex Knowlson’s time.”

  Maybe she hadn’t heard me, and maybe she’d prepared her answer before I’d spoken. “If you’re looking for tickets you’ll have to contact the university.”

  “Tickets to what?” I asked.

  “Mr. Knowlson’s talk tomorrow night. Art and the Demand for Public Space. It’s sold out, or close to it.”

  “He do a lot of those talks?”

  “He does the right amount,” she said. “It’s important to him to give back and to participate in the dialogue. What was it you wanted to talk to him about?”

  “An acquaintance of his named Chelsea Loam. This is my cell, he can phone me back on this number.”

  I caught the Skytrain to Main Street–Science World and walked the short distance down Main to the Waverley. It was four o’clock and the bar was mostly empty. An overweight man with a shaved head and tattoos manned the bar, which seemed the centre of light and heat in the quiet universe of the Waverley. I paid for a gin and tonic and picked out a red Naugahyde
booth where the barkeep could deliver it.

  Instead of sitting I wandered around the horseshoe-shaped seating area, taking in the musty smell, the soiled green felt of the billiards tables. Old men nursed pints of yellow beer and stared at silent television screens. The back door was propped open. I could see outside to the parking lot, where a trio of hirsute men pulled off the world’s least covert drug deal.

  My drink arrived at the table before I did. I sat and pulled out the lemon wedge and the straw. The gin had an industrial tang to it. I sat and waited for Dolores Gunn.

  Time passed. The barkeep brought me another gin and tonic and asked if I wanted a discount taco platter. Someone had ordered and changed their mind. I snapped at a few cheese-soaked tortilla chips, sipped my drink and watched on the TV as a city that wasn’t Vancouver geared up for the summer Olympics. When the barkeep made his next round he asked me one of those barkeep non-questions that encourages safe chatter.

  “How ’bout those Games?”

  “Better there than here,” I said.

  “Not a fan, huh?”

  I shrugged. “I might watch the boxing. That kid Hunter’s supposed to be the next Frazier.”

  “But they’re hyping him as the next Ali.”

  “Hype is hype.”

  “True that.”

  I thought of bringing out the diary and studying it, but I didn’t want Dolores Gunn to know of its existence. Maybe if her memory was good and she was willing, I’d ask her to help me give full names to the sets of initials: G.O., C.P. T.R. was Rhodes, A.K. was Knowlson. C.G. would be Charles Gains, Rhodes’s enforcer. “Ice and fire, those two.”

  The sports show had gone to its expert panel. I was watching idly when a shadow slid into the bench next to me, wedging me into the wall. Another shadow sat down across from me, a look of pained determination on its bruised, familiar face.

  “Hello, Ken.” I looked to my left, noticed the pattern of scars on the man’s scalp where hair no longer grew. “Hello, Skeet.”

  “Wakeland,” Ken said. “I don’t know why you couldn’t leave things the way they were.”

  “I don’t either.”

  “You thought Terry was pissed before. He gets a call from this dealer who says you took something from him that Terry’s going to want. Any idea what that could be?”

  I didn’t look at the nylon lunch bag Skeet had knocked to the floor by my feet. “Nope.”

  “This guy’s shitting his pants ’cause, first place, he’s got to tell Terry this diary exists, then he’s got to explain how he lost it. And the only reason he tells him is if Terry finds out from someone else he’ll clip him.”

  “How exactly is Terry Rhodes mixed up in this if he didn’t kill her? Was he lying to me?”

  Everett ignored the question and put one hand out on the table. “Let’s have that diary, Dave.”

  “Think, Ken. Why would I bring it with me?”

  Everett set his elbows on the table and rubbed his temples. “Nothing’s simple with you.”

  Skeet said, “We take him to his office, he brings us the diary. Simple enough.”

  “It’s not at the office,” I said.

  Ken hit the table. My gin jumped and sloshed. “You really going to make me ask, Wakeland? Fuck is it?”

  “I mailed it to myself,” I said.

  “That’s not believable.”

  “Sure it is. I have a P.O. Box.”

  “Where?”

  “Belarus.”

  “Do you think I want to do this?” Everett said. “ ’Cause I don’t. But you’re leaving me no choice.”

  “Why should you have a choice? No one told you to join a biker gang.”

  “All right.” Everett took a pair of slow breaths that seemed to strengthen his resolve. “On your feet. We’ll search your car first.”

  “I walked here,” I said.

  “On your feet.”

  I held up my index finger, one moment. I used the same hand to pick up my drink and pour it into my mouth, ice cube slivers and all. I used the same hand to bring the glass across my body and into the face of Skeet. And when I did that the glass shattered.

  I clambered over him for the back door, weaving through tables of stunned patrons. Everett’s right hand caught at my shoulder. I spun back to hit him, turning right into his fist. We clinched, staggered, collided into the Golden Tee Golf machine. I broke away from him, brought my fists up.

  I had height on Everett, had the longer reach. And I knew his patterns. Brush off the jab and then wait and slip the heavy overhand left. I slipped it and caught Everett above the eye—I felt seventeen again.

  In that half-second of self-congratulation I didn’t register a bloody-faced Skeet behind me, his arms wrapping around my torso, enfolding me in his mass. He propelled us forward, toward the wall. My feet stumbled and dragged until the impact of brick and biker ripped the air from my lungs.

  My forearm scraped against Skeet’s face as I tried to unpin myself. I would’ve had better luck boring through the brick. I got a breath in. Everett approached from the left side, a trickling cut over his eyebrow. A fight-stopping cut, I thought. If this were a fight with rules.

  “Fuck it,” Everett said to Skeet. “Bring him back to Terry.”

  “Got the zap straps?” Skeet wheezed.

  “In the car. He tries anything, here and there, snap his fucking arms.”

  I was jostled and steered toward the exit. A low drawl of a voice said, “Leave him here.”

  It wasn’t a woman’s voice but it was a woman speaking. She was squat and solidly built, with long dark hair. She wore a bartender’s apron over a red plaid shirt and dark jeans. Cradled in her arms was what looked like an antique stagecoach gun, double-barrelled, with two triggers. Her finger rested across both of them.

  “Don’t get involved,” Everett said casually. But he didn’t move.

  “My place of business. I’m involved.”

  “Know who we are?” Skeet said.

  “Cunts,” the woman said. “Cunts I’m nicely giving a choice to. Leave or stay for the cops, who Barry’s calling now.”

  Skeet’s grip on me loosened and I shrugged him off. I stepped away from them, out of the line of fire.

  “It won’t get left like this,” Everett said.

  “It better, you expect to walk out of here.”

  The clamour of an ambulance siren filtered into the bar and registered with everyone in it. I looked over and made sure the lunch sack was still by the base of the table.

  Everett and Skeet withdrew.

  I sat down, hands on my knees, and breathed.

  The woman came over, holding the shotgun with the barrel pointed up.

  “You should get going too,” she said. “Don’t go up against those type of men ’less you got a big fucking blunderbuss. ’S’all they understand.”

  “You’re Dolores Gunn,” I said. “I’m—”

  “I know,” she said. “I get the paper. You can kind of take care of yourself, for a kid.”

  “They might come back,” I said.

  “No. They know not to pull shit in here. They’ll probably try for you again, though. Must have something they want.”

  She sat down with a wheeze of pain and set the scattergun on the table. Barry the bartender swept by with two glasses and took the gun away with him.

  “He really call the police?” I asked.

  “What do you think?”

  She tipped her glass back and consumed it in one gulp. I tried mine. It was tap water.

  19

  “YOU KNEW CHELSEA LOAM,” I said.

  “I did know her.”

  “Her foster mother hired me to find her.”

  “ ’Leven years too late, but a nice gesture.”

  “Can you tell me anything about her?” I asked. “How did you know her?”

  “You’re all business,” she said. “Let’s go to my office. Prying ears and all that.”

  Her office was a cubbyhole of beige-painted
brick, one wall stacked with empty liquor bottles, newspapers and recyclables against the other. In between, a small desk and two chairs. We squeezed in.

  Dolores spoke thoughtfully, her eyes roaming the office.

  “Chelsea was the nicest girl I knew. Too nice for where she ended up. You need to be hard to last, and she wasn’t all that hard. But she made friends. Everybody liked her.”

  “How’d you meet her?” I asked.

  “You meet people working a bar. Lila might’ve introduced us. Or now I think of it, she’d been ripped off by some dealer and she asked me to arbitrate. Get her money back.”

  “I know what arbitrate means,” I said. “You do that sometimes?”

  “For a fee. Girls, ’specially girly-girls, need muscle once in a while. They usually get a guy, but that complicates things. He wants to be her pimp, or he falls in love and wants to ‘rescue’ her. With me they cut out the bullcrap. I charge a flat rate. Fifteen percent, no strings. Just like a business manager.”

  “Who was this dealer?”

  “Name was Kamikaze. He and Chelsea later hooked up, but back then he just wanted money.”

  “And later on he didn’t?”

  She smiled grimly. “Then it was money and pussy. Not ’zactly a pimp but not like he was looking out for her.”

  “Can you tell me about the people she moved with?”

  “Not the girls,” Dolores Gunn said. “Their business is their business and you prob’ly wouldn’t understand anyway. Ask me about the men.”

  I asked her. “Alex Knowlson,” I said.

  “Want my opinion or Chelsea’s?”

  “Both.”

  “I think he’s like every other artist. He has an idea about the ‘Downtown East Side’ based off TV and what he reads. And he comes down to ‘create art’ and ‘speak the truth.’ But it’s all about him. He makes a few bucks, people in Ontario go, ‘Gee, poorest postal code in Canada blah blah blah,’ and none of it changes anything. Alex was nice enough, and God is he handsome. But he’s a colonizer. He don’t live here.”