Invisible Dead

by Sam Wiebe

  Caitlin turned her attention to the cotton swabs and water which would keep Gail’s mouth from drying out. Caitlin would be there to do that. She would take the time.

  “I hope she doesn’t suffer,” I said.

  —

  I cabbed home, feeling sore, lethargic from the heat, worn down by arguing with Caitlin and with myself. I set down my carry-on and drank tepid water from the tap. I turned the lights on around the apartment, checked the barred windows and the patio. Everything was how I’d left it.

  My mailbox held the usual assortment of supermarket flyers, condo brochures, catalogues from the Adult Education Annex. And an envelope, slipped in with no postage, no address. The typed note inside read IT’S GOOD TO HAVE FRIENDS. Ken Everett, telling me there would be a return engagement.

  I wondered what Everett’s punishment would be for failing to wrest away Chelsea’s diary. Maybe he’d never make it above hangaround, a stooge for life. Well, his choices had led him there. He’d vested his faith in the wrong hierarchy.

  I sat on my couch, listened to the hums and clicks that made up the zero level of silence in the apartment.

  Since I left the city, what I’d wanted was to be back in my bed. Now here it was, feet away, with its comforting Hudson’s Bay sheets. And it held as much interest for me as the toys a child already possesses interest him on his birthday.

  What I’d really been looking forward to was coming home to a woman who’d become healthy and whole again and who owed that in some part to me. And in return owed me what? Love? Maybe I was just that arrogant and foolish. There are no damsels. No knights errant either.

  What I wanted was to save somebody.

  My eyes closed and I fell back on the couch. I didn’t dream. I didn’t let the phone rouse me, even on the third set of chimes.

  —

  In the morning I took a long hot shower, then walked a block up Commercial to see how my leg felt. I bought breakfast at the Portuguese grocery. It was late afternoon when I checked my messages.

  One was from Jeff, the gist of which was, Why aren’t you at work today? One from Shay’s number with no accompanying message. One from Caitlin that was hard to make out. I phoned her first.

  The dialing noise that signified ringing sounded eleven times. No message. I hung up and hit redial.

  When Caitlin did pick up she said through sobs, “Gail passed. I guess you don’t need to worry anymore.”

  I called Shay next. She answered promptly. “So you lived to tell the tale,” she said.

  “What happened with you?”

  “Me? I’m doing better than I have—”

  “You’re still using?”

  Pause. “Can we have this conversation in person?”

  “I’ll come to you,” I said.

  Jeff had left a cryptic message, so I drove to the office first. Shuzhen had left for the day. Marie and Jeff sat on her desk eating cherries. They seemed very glad to see me.

  “It’s a surprise,” Marie said, taking my hand and leading me to my office. Jeff walked behind, telling me again, way to go on the Solis case, nice job turning in Ross and making it work for us.

  They’d removed my table. In its place was a stately L-shaped desk with an oiled hardwood veneer, a hutch on one side with row upon row of drawers and cubbyholes, and a lowered drawbridge to hold a keyboard.

  Marie walked me through the many features and options. “…and if you need more surface area, the hutch comes off like—unh—like this. And feel the felt on the bottom of the hutch! That’s to keep it from scratching the wood.”

  “Where’s the table?” I asked.

  “The table? David, look. Jeff and I—”

  “Put it back the way it was,” I said. “Please.”

  “She shopped everywhere to find you the best,” Jeff said.

  To its credit, the desk was of solid construction. When I plunged the hutch down into the centre of the writing surface, it was the hutch that disintegrated, bursting into a mess of wood splinters and tiny handles. I kicked at the desk and broke off the handy little drawbridge, and finally toppled the thing, and stomped it until one of the stout mace-shaped legs snapped off.

  I picked up Chelsea Loam’s file, which had been neatly squared and placed on the distant corner of the floor.

  “How fucking dare you,” Marie said.

  “The thought is appreciated,” I said.

  I took the stairs down, and kept going down, down Hastings, down Water, wishing the weather would do something, wishing the heat would break. The city seemed engulfed in sweat and excess. People ate outside on restaurant patios, swilled their sweet cocktails and pale blond beers, set fire to cigarettes, the smoke from which hung fat and lazy above their heads.

  I walked to Shay’s apartment. The elevator was out. I took the stairs two at a time.

  She answered the door. She let me in. Music on her stereo. Neil Young doing “Albuquerque.”

  “All right,” she said unprompted, “but let me go first. Yes I left and yes I used. But that’s not the same thing as using. See, I can’t go cold turkey, I’ve tried and I don’t do well. But I’ve cut back. I was using every day before. Now, I used yesterday morning and haven’t felt like it since then. It feels like it’s down to once a week. I don’t know if you can appreciate that, how big a difference it is, how much better I feel. You can see I look better, right? What you and your mom did really helped me. But here I go running my mouth and monopolizing the conversation. Did you want to say something?”

  A pale collarbone jutted out through the oversized V-neck of the shirt she wore. Her hair was an unruly tangle that obscured one ear and a part of her jaw. Frail and unbreakable, the two adjectives that always came to mind when I thought of her. Never more apt than now. She did look better.

  I nodded to her. I did have something to say.

  “I don’t want to judge you. I’m not fit to judge anyone. The ugliness I’ve seen, the hundred million ways people can be shitty to each other—it paralyzes me because I know I’m no better. I want to fuck without consequences same as everyone else. Maybe it’s sex and maybe I’m in love, because Christ knows I’ve thought of nothing besides you and this other woman who’s most likely dead. And to put all our ugliness on the table, I have what you need for your habit and I can be what you need to do away with it. My weaknesses nicely align with yours. I have money, not billions but a steady income. I’m healthy. I’m good at what I do. I made the ‘notable mentions’ list of Vancouver magazine’s Top Thirty Under Thirty. I’m loyal and I have a sense of humour and I have love to give. I know what it is to be lonely and I won’t take you for granted. If that’s too much then give me what you can and I’ll learn to live with the rest of it. And I’ll try not to fuck things up.”

  I didn’t say any of that. I didn’t say a word.

  I reached for her, that underwater feeling of every movement lugubrious and tense, anticipating rejection, sliding through disbelief as my hand found her cheek amidst the tangle of hair, found her willing and accepting the touch. I brought our mouths together. The warm exhalation of breath on my cheek, in my mouth. A hand moving up to set its thumb above the collarbone, an arm moving diagonally across her spine, down to graze on the slope of buttocks. Kissing and breaking that kiss. Feeling her hand rub at the back of my neck, the other arm reaching up to link with it. Her body harder than it should be, mine softer.

  We toppled over together onto her unmade bed, kicking up a perfume of a dozen smells that were all of her, fragrant and acrid, bitter, sour.

  I ripped at her shirt, delighted to find it the only garment she was wearing. Her hands held me back from undressing myself. She unlooped the belt mechanically, professionally. She caught herself and smiled. Her hand rubbed into me through the fabric, searching me out, taking her time. With a rough tug she freed me from jeans and underwear both. Stroking it, sitting on it, fitting the condom over it, and it into herself, controlling every motion, slapping my hand down playfully as I groped up th
rough her armpit to touch the smooth plane between her shoulderblades. And I held back until there was no doubt this was more than payment or gratitude, and I drove into her, violently seeking salvation.

  Later I woke in the swamp of the bed, feeling for her. I heard the rush of water and saw the light cast on the far wall in uneven streaks from around the misaligned door. I walked to the window naked. Looked out through the grillwork. Late, all sorts of sordid activity on the streets below me. I lit one of her awful cigarettes and dropped it down to bounce off a newspaper box. No lights on anywhere but street level.

  I knocked on the washroom door and she invited me in, into the small square of mildewed tile. I put my arms on her, feeling the water alternate cold and hot. I was hard again. I braced her at the meeting point between wall and tile. She told me what I’d forgot but I was kissing her and she didn’t let me go, and I thought, I don’t care, give me whatever sickness you have.

  25

  THE CITY MOVED languorously through August. Clouds formed and teased the possibility of rain. Even that empty threat was enough to send the tourists scurrying for cover. Summer in Vancouver: a collection of hot grey days, a haven for bad ideas and wildness of no particular use.

  My apartment on Broadway became our staging ground. Shay had her flat. I had the office. Sometimes we met downtown for dinner, strolling down Robson like any other couple.

  Shay was warm and wickedly funny. She worried about her teeth, about aging. She could pick out four or five Beatles tunes on piano. She’d hated taking lessons but hated more the way her mother had agreed to let her quit, as if confirming a lack of talent and dismissing a whole array of possible futures. Her father was dead. Her mother had severed ties.

  I told her my secrets, too. We became repositories of each other’s best stories, dreams and humiliations. She wanted to teach or counsel people, but not children. Young adults and people who could benefit from her experience.

  I told her I wanted to own a house.

  “In Vancouver?” she asked, as if the thought of someone under forty being a homeowner and not born to wealth was as far-fetched as time travel.

  “Same area as I live now. It can have a few years on it, and I don’t care about the yard. But it has to have a porch. Something about sitting on your porch in the rain, having a smoke. That’s what I want.”

  “That is a perfectly appropriate dream,” she said, “for a seventy-year-old man.”

  Her habit remained hidden. She had money from the hotel settlement and never asked for more. When we spoke about drugs our conversation cooled.

  But there were subjects enough to fill hours of talk. She’d say things for effect, insert non-sequiturs into her anecdotes, or suspend them and change tack completely, trusting me to follow the unspoken leaps taken by her mind.

  So I spent the first part of August in pursuit of two women. Then the diary came calling.

  —

  To his credit, Jeff Chen made the first move for reconciliation. He phoned a day after the table incident and asked for a sit-down with the three of us, he and Marie and myself. It was a short conversation. I apologized. They accepted. We talked things out.

  I spent my first morning back fixing my new desk, or more accurately, cobbling together a makeshift table out of the wreckage. Anti-vanity, Marie called it—the idea that you can get by with the tools at hand, yet feeling fraudulent and inauthentic if the tools at hand happen to be expensive or gaudy. She was right. I couldn’t convince myself I was still doing work that mattered if I was posed behind the Executive Deluxe.

  So much of everything is bullshit.

  I was circling around three men, trying to get interviews without divulging what I had. G. Calvin Palfreyman’s assistant professed that her boss was positively deluged. Eladio “Chucho” Perez had a full voicemail loop and a summer home on Bowen Island. George Overman didn’t own a phone and didn’t make appointments, and all inquiries went through his son.

  The sentence “I want to talk about your connection to a missing sex trade worker” might open some doors. I was hesitant to take that approach. If I threatened to make that connection public, men like that would have investigators of their own looking into me. A guilty, terrified millionaire would raze a city to keep his secrets. I had Shay and Jeff and my mother to think of. For those first weeks in August, I’d wait them out, work through back channels. For once I’d do things with a minimum of collateral damage.

  I didn’t hear from Everett or Rhodes. I hadn’t gone to the police or tried to use the diary against them. Maybe I didn’t matter.

  Utrillo had arranged a security consultation with George Overman’s son Nick. Jeff had decided to come with me, probably in the hopes of doing actual, profitable business. The Overmans had bought up three housing tracts in a cul-de-sac around West Forty-Ninth, making them neighbours of an ex–Governor General, the mayor, two retired Canucks and a hip-hop artist. A perimeter of laurel bush enclosed the Overman compound. The houses were of different styles and dimensions, but had been sided with the same gold-tinted aggregate, giving them a warm if outmoded look.

  As we started up the driveway I tapped Jeff’s elbow and directed his attention to the sidewalk near the bushes. Dozens of amber caterpillars clung to perforated leaves. Many of the branches swayed with the weight of the creatures.

  “Try one,” Jeff said. “Chinese delicacy.”

  “Seriously? Raw?”

  “You’re too gullible,” he said.

  The bushes enclosed a massive yard, built up with symmetrical planter boxes for flowers and vegetables. A Vietnamese woman in a broad hat knelt between tomatoes and kale, attacking weeds by plunging her hands into the rich black soil and removing the offender, roots and all. She smiled and nodded to me in recognition. It was Mrs. Tranh, Gail Kirby’s housecleaner.

  “Your daughter in school today?” I asked.

  “Studying. Always busy.” She held up some of the earth. “Me too.”

  “Looks lovely.” It smelled of warm manure and basil and soil. A sprinkler chittered away deeper into the property.

  Nick Overman let us in. He was forty-two, slender with a well-groomed beard, dressed in a camel-coloured shirt and white slacks. He shook my hand and bowed to Jeff. The two of them traded sentences in Mandarin. I caught ni hao and zao an and something that sounded complimentary.

  He led us through a house stocked with dark antiques, silver and glass. Every bookcase in the library had a glass door. The desktops were glass. A sliding door partitioned off the living room. He had the turntable setup I dreamt of, a McIntosh tube amp and a Linn Sondek, big JBL cabinets raised off the ground. Carelessly stacked vinyl, Jimmy Buffett, Steely Dan.

  Nick Overman poured us each some water from a crystal decanter, then sat in a plush sueded chair that seemed to sculpt itself around his body.

  “Security is an interesting business,” Jeff said, “because it’s a business built on peace of mind. Not having to worry is what we aim to give our clients. Sometimes it’s an alarm system, sometimes it’s a bit more elaborate than that. But our guarantee is, by the end of our consultation you will know exactly what you need to get yourself to a place of feeling totally tranquil, totally secure.”

  Jeff then launched into phase two of his spiel, which involved a brochure that listed statistics on breaking and entering, burglary, home invasion and arson. He recast Vancouver as a Gomorrah of crack dealers, rapists, victimizers and scum, all hard-wired with an unquenchable lust for the blood and fortune of the Overmans. By the end, even I wanted to rethink my home security options.

  Before Jeff could launch into phase three, wherein the Overmans avail themselves of Vancouver’s leading security experts, Nick Overman held up a hand and said, “Whoa there, before you continue, let me explain something.”

  “Of course,” Jeff said.

  “My security needs are maybe different from your other clients’.”

  “Part of what makes Mr. Wakeland and myself experts is our ability to adapt t
o our clients’ needs,” Jeff said. “Which we recognize are fluid.”

  “What I mean is, I’m in no danger.” Nick Overman walked to the sideboard, loaded with the kinds of whiskeys and liqueurs that liquor stores keep in display cases. He opened one of the drawers and fiddled with his keys. When he turned around he was pointing a gun toward us.

  It was a large-calibre automatic, a .45 maybe, black. Nick Overman pointed it at the floor.

  He said, “This is how Pop handled security. This one time a burglar strolled into our house while we were having dinner. Back when you could leave a door unlocked in this city. He comes down the hall, sees us, we see him. Just another dope fiend. He starts giving Pop this shuck-and-jive story about how his friend’s house looks just like this. My dad, he stands up and shows him the gun he used to carry around, this silver wheel gun, and begins checking the loads, calm as could be.”

  Nick laughed in anticipation of the punchline.

  “The fiend backs up, starts saying, Oh, I’m sorry, don’t hurt me, I’m only doing this to get some medicine for my sister. You got to believe me. And my dad says—cocks the hammer back real easy—says, I will believe anything you say, provided it ends with you hightailing it out of here and never coming back.”

  “Your father seems like an interesting guy,” I said.

  Nick Overman put the gun back in its drawer. “I think so,” he said. “Pop did all right for himself. He’s earned some peace. Which is one of the reasons we’re not a normal household for you boys’ line of work, and why I wanted to tell you that before you get worked up. Go on, please.”

  “If I can hazard,” Jeff said, “your father lives with you.”

  “In one of the houses out back,” Nick said. “My ex lives in the other, on paper. Alimony reasons. Mostly the kids stay there, now that they’re old enough.”

  “How’s your father’s condition?”

  “He has a woman living with him, a nurse. When he sticks to his meds he’s almost all there.”

  “But there have been incidents,” Jeff said. “Now, you have a loved one who might be acting strangely, wandering the property. So motion sensors, alarms, things of that nature aren’t effective solutions for you. Have I read that right?”