Depth of Field

by Michael Blair

  “Wait here,” Matthias said to me, then led Brooks through the automatic doors into the examination area.

  While I waited, the waiting room began to fill up. A man and a woman came arm-in-arm into the ER. They were in their fifties, I guessed, well-dressed and both more than a little inebriated. The knees of the man’s light grey trousers were torn and bloody. They spent a few minutes talking with the triage nurse, then took seats in the waiting area. The woman asked the man if he wanted a cup of coffee. He said, “Yes.” I wanted to tell him not to bother.

  A few minutes later a scruffy-looking man came in, wearing filthy jeans, a ratty leather jacket, and a toque that looked as though it had been used to wash floors pulled down over his ears. He cradled his left hand, which was wrapped in a grease-blackened rag that dripped blood on the floor as he spoke with the triage nurse. He too was consigned to a seat in the waiting area.

  A woman came in with her son, who looked about eight, and threw up twice while his mother shouted at the triage nurse. They were admitted immediately.

  Matthias and Bobbi’s father came back into the waiting room. Norman Brooks looked as though he wanted to kill someone. I couldn’t blame him. Except that evidently the someone he wanted to kill was me. He lurched at me, lifted me out of my chair by the lapels of my jacket, and shoved me hard against the wall.

  “You son of a bitch,” he snarled into my face, breath sour, spittle flying. “This is your fault.”

  Matthias pulled him off me. Although he was shorter than Brooks, and not as heavy, he didn’t have any trouble handling the bigger man. “Mr. Brooks,” he said, marching him to a chair and pushing him down into it, while the middle-aged couple and the scruffy man watched cautiously. “I don’t care if you used to be a cop. I will have you arrested if you don’t pull yourself together. Mr. McCall had nothing to do with your daughter’s attack. If you lay a hand on him again, I will make damned sure he presses charges against you for assault. Do you understand me, sir?”

  “It’s all right, Greg,” I said. “He’s upset. So would I be if it was my daughter lying in there.”

  “No, it’s not all right. He’s not doing anyone any good acting like a drunken bully. Bobbi or himself.”

  Brooks sneered. “I s’pose you think I should be grateful for your sympathy, eh, McCall? Well, I’m not. It’s your goddamned fault she’s in there.”

  “How is it my fault, sir? I didn’t attack her.”

  He jerked his chin at Matthias. “He said she was working. You should’ve been with her.”

  “She’s gone on dozens of jobs on her own,” I said.

  “Yeah, but it’s just this one that counts, isn’t it?” He waved me away. “Get out of here. Go. You’re not needed here.”

  Anger boiled up in me. I wanted to hit him. “If anyone’s not needed here, it’s you,” I said, teeth clenched so hard my jaw ached, fists knotted at my sides. “When was the last time you saw her? When was the last time you even spoke to her? She told me the other day she hasn’t seen you in months and that the last time she did see you, you were drunk and feeling sorry for yourself.”

  Suddenly, he was on his feet, in my face again, before Matthias could stop him. “She’s still my daughter,” he shouted as I backed away from him. “There’s fuck all you can do about that, you pissant faggot punk. Get out of here. You, too,” he added to Matthias. “Neither of you has any right to be here.”

  I opened my mouth to tell him that I had just as much right to be here as he did, maybe more, but Matthias put his hand on my arm.

  “Tom, there’s nothing to be gained by arguing with him. Let’s go. I know the staff here. They’ll call me if there’s any change in her condition.”

  Brooks smirked as Matthias led me toward the exit.

  “Does he know you and Bobbi are seeing each other?” I asked, still seething, as we left the hospital.

  “No, I don’t think he does. Although I doubt right now it would make much difference to him.”

  “He must’ve been a hell of a cop,” I said.

  “Don’t judge a man till you’ve walked in his shoes, Tom. As you said, what if it was your daughter in there?”

  My anger evaporated.

  “What’s the problem between you and him, anyway?” Matthias asked.

  “I don’t know what his problem is,” I said. “Mine seems to be him.”

  We rounded the corner onto Oak Street. His personal car, a Saab 950 Turbo, was parked in a restricted zone. I couldn’t remember where I’d parked my Jeep Liberty, which I’d bought to replace my venerable old Land Rover. It was a few minutes after three. Sunrise was still two hours away.

  “Do you want me to help you find your car?”

  “No, it can’t be far away. I’ll just walk around till I find it.”

  “You’re sure? I don’t mind.”

  “Thanks, yeah, I’m okay. You’ll call me when you hear something?”

  “Of course. The RAS — Robbery and Assault Squad — investigators will likely want to talk to you.”

  “I’ll be available,” I said.

  We shook hands. He got into his car and I went looking for mine. It didn’t take me long to find it. Or the parking ticket under the wiper blade.

  chapter three

  I drove home, undressed, and got into bed. I was exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep. My eyes kept sliding open and it was too great an effort to keep them closed. I got out of bed, went downstairs, and out of desperation made a cup of camomile tea from the box Reeny had left behind. After the first sip, I poured the vile stuff down the drain. I trudged upstairs and climbed back into bed, to lie staring into the dark for another hour, unable to erase the image of Bobbi, battered and bruised, surrounded by muttering machines, with tubes down her throat, needles inserted into her veins, and electrodes glued to her head and chest. I didn’t know what frightened me more: that she might die, that she might never wake up, or that when she did wake up she wouldn’t be Bobbi anymore.

  I finally gave up trying to sleep, got out of bed, showered, dressed, and at ten past six was standing on the quay by the main entrance to Broker’s Bay Marina. The sun was rising over the coastal mountains. The fog of the previous day had moved out and the cool morning air was so clean and clear it had an almost surreal quality, like cut crystal. Gulls wheeled and shrieked, squabbling over the carcass of a big fish in the water by Fisherman’s Wharf. Above and behind me, thirty metres over Anderson Street and the entrance to Granville Island, morning traffic hummed and rumbled on the Granville Street Bridge, the deeper notes resonating in my chest cavity.

  It hadn’t been difficult to locate the Wonderlust. She was a fifty-foot-plus motor yacht, easily the largest pleasure boat in the marina, occupying the full length of the T at the end of the fourth and longest of the marina’s eight floating docks, almost directly opposite Fisherman’s Wharf. Although she was a bit dowdy and her chrome was dull and her hull grungy from neglect, she was a sturdy, well-equipped boat that would sleep eight without crowding. Although I was no expert, I guessed she would easily fetch a quarter of a million or more if she was cleaned up. It struck me as odd that Ms. Waverley had wanted photographs of the boat before she was shipshape. A few dollars invested in sprucing her up would have added considerably to the price.

  The marina entrance was gated, but the gate was propped open, despite the sign that read “Do Not Prop Door” in large white lettering. I walked down the ramp and out to the end of the floating dock to where the Wonderlust was moored. I climbed the short, portable gangway onto the afterdeck, and knocked on the hatch to the main cabin. A few seconds later, I knocked again, harder. Then harder still. The hatch rattled in the frame. If Ms. Waverley was aboard, she was a very sound sleeper indeed. I tried the handle; the hatch was locked.

  From the afterdeck of the Wonderlust, through a thick forest of masts and spars and booms, I could see the area under the Kitsilano end of the Burrard Street Bridge where Greg Matthias had told me Bobbi had been pulled from the wa
ter. The shoreline of Broker’s Bay, from the western tip of Granville Island — technically not an island at all, but a mushroom-shaped peninsula joined to the Kitsilano mainland by a thick stem of land — around to the little park known as Cultural Harmony Grove just east of the Burrard Street Bridge, looked like one continuous marina. It was really three marinas: the Broker’s Bay Marina, the False Creek Harbour Authority, and the Burrard Bridge Civic Marina. The latter extended a hundred metres beyond the bridge and had moorings directly beneath the span. I didn’t know precisely where Bobbi had been found by the off-duty paramedic in his kayak, but I guessed it must have been somewhere near the docks under the bridge.

  I returned to the quay.

  Bobbi was supposed to have met Ms. Waverley on the Wonderlust at eight. Matthias had said she’d been found just past eleven. Where had she been between eight and eleven o’clock? What had she been doing under the bridge? Had she been fleeing from her attacker or attackers? Or had she been attacked somewhere else and dumped into False Creek under the bridge? At some point while I had lain abed and sleepless after returning from the hospital, it had occurred to me that I hadn’t asked Matthias if the police had found the van. Had someone assaulted and dumped Bobbi in order to steal the van and the photo equipment? That didn’t explain how Bobbi had ended up in the water under the bridge. She’d have parked the van in the nearby lot between the boat works and Bridges restaurant and pub. It wasn’t there; I’d looked.

  I was still standing on the quay at a few minutes to seven, wondering if I really wanted to walk around the bay to where Bobbi had been found, when a man in a red squall jacket and a Seattle Mariners baseball cap arrived to open the marina office. He wasn’t alone. With him were two uniformed cops. The cops worked out of the Granville Island Community Police Office and I knew them both. Constable Mabel Firth was a friend, a strapping dirty blonde in her forties whose husband Bill also worked for the city. Mabel’s partner, a former professional football player named Baz Tucker, was younger and bigger and blonder. Neither appeared pleased to see me.

  “What’re you doing here, Tom?” Mabel asked. Before I could reply, she said, “Go home. Let us do our job.”

  “I won’t get in the way,” I said.

  “Since when?” she said.

  “I just want to talk to Anna Waverley, the woman who owns that boat.” I pointed toward the Wonderlust. “Bobbi was supposed to meet her last night, to take some photographs of the boat. Maybe she saw who attacked her.”

  “Have you spoken to her?”

  “No. She’s not aboard.”

  “Leave it to the RAS investigators, Tom. They’ll be here in a minute. Go on home now,” she said sternly, as if speaking to her ten-year-old. When it was obvious I wasn’t going to leave, she said, “I understand how you feel, Tom. Bobbi’s my friend, too. Look at it from our point of view. You could be a suspect yourself. I know,” she added quickly, holding up her hand to cut off my response, “it’s ridiculous, but tell that to the suits. As far as they know, you and Bobbi could’ve had a falling-out over business. It happens all the time. Or maybe you were more than just business partners and had a lover’s quarrel. See how it can get complicated?”

  “Heads up,” Baz Tucker said quietly as two men came along the quay, dressed almost identically in suits so plain they were like uniforms.

  “Which one of you is Firth?” the older of the two men asked. He was in his mid-fifties, with watery blue eyes and a pale, acne-scarred complexion. His partner was in his thirties, with a smooth, olive complexion, and full, almost voluptuous lips that I imagined many women would envy. There was nothing even remotely feminine about his piercing, dark eyes.

  “I am,” Mabel said.

  “I’m Kovacs. He’s Henshaw. Who’s this guy?”

  “Tom McCall,” Mabel said. “The victim’s partner.”

  “As in husband? Boyfriend?”

  “Her business partner.”

  “Okay,” Kovacs said. “But he still shouldn’t be here.”

  “I told him that.”

  He turned to me. “We’ll come find you when we need to talk with you.”

  “I’ll save you the trouble,” I said.

  He turned his head slightly, squinted one pale blue eye and peered at me with the other. “Are we gonna have a problem with you?”

  “A problem? With me? Heck, no.” Mabel looked as though she wished she were home in bed.

  He scowled and shrugged and said to Mabel and Tucker, “We can take it from here.” He and his partner went into the marina office.

  Mabel turned to me. “Go home.”

  “I’ll just hang around out here till they’re finished talking to the marina operator.”

  She heaved a sigh of resignation, then she and Baz left. A few minutes later, the detectives came out of the marina office.

  “You still here?” Kovacs said.

  “So it would appear,” I replied, which earned me another scowl.

  “Tell me about the woman who hired you to take pictures of her boat. What’d she look like?” I assumed Greg Matthias had passed on the information I’d given him.

  “She had medium-length blonde hair,” I said, “but her eyebrows were dark, almost black. She had an oval face with big green eyes and even features. Good teeth, except for a slightly crooked left upper incisor. She wore a little too much makeup perhaps, but she was quite attractive. In her early thirties. Say five-six in her bare feet. Well built, but Bobbi didn’t think it was all natural. She may have been joking, though.”

  “That’s a very detailed description,” he said. “Mostly we get crap. You got a good eye. I suppose that comes with being a photographer.”

  “I suppose so,” I said.

  He consulted his notebook. “And she told you her name was Anna Waverley and that she got the boat as part of her divorce settlement.”

  “That’s what she told me.”

  “Who’s Bobby?”

  “My partner, the victim. Bobbi — with an ‘i’ — Brooks.”

  “Right. Bobbi. Short for Roberta. Does she usually work alone?”

  “Not always, but we both do from time to time, especially when we’re busy. Depends on the job. I would have taken this one, but something came up with another client.”

  “Did Anna Waverley give you a billing address?”

  “No. She paid cash. Something to do with her divorce. She told me she lived in Point Grey, or rather that she got the house in Point Grey in her divorce settlement, but I assumed she was staying on the boat. She isn’t aboard now, though. She told me she had a possible buyer who was leaving for Hawaii today, which is why she needed the photographs last night.”

  “All right, thanks.”

  He nodded to his partner, then they both walked down the ramp onto the floating docks. I guessed the younger detective hadn’t lived in Vancouver long, or else he hadn’t spent much time on the water; he walked with the exaggerated care of a drunk as the linked sections of the floating docks rolled beneath his feet. As they climbed aboard the Wonderlust, I went into the marina office. The man with the Seattle Mariners baseball cap was behind the counter.

  “I know you,” he said. “You live in Sea Village, right? It was your house that almost sank a few years back, wasn’t it?”

  “It was,” I confirmed.

  “Bernie Simpson, the salvage guy who patched her up, he’s my uncle.”

  Living on Granville Island was like living in a small town or a large goldfish bowl. Everybody knew everybody else’s business. The residents of Sea Village were the only permanent residents, except for a few who lived (semi-illegally) on boats in the marinas. We tended to stand out and were frequently the subject of local gossip, not all of which was undeserved. A few years before, a small deadhead — not a Grateful Dead fan, but a water-saturated log that floats below the surface, usually more or less vertically — had drifted under my house. When the tide had gone out, the log had cracked the ferroconcrete hull and my house had begun to sink. The
barman at Bridges had probably known about it before I had.

  “Name’s Witt DeWalt,” the Mariners fan said, sticking out his hand. “What can I do for you?”

  I introduced myself and said, “Did the police tell you that a woman was assaulted near here last night?”

  “Yeah. They did.” He shook his head slowly. “Terrible.”

  “The woman who was assaulted is one of my closest friends and my business partner. We’re commercial photographers. We were hired to take photos of Ms. Waverley’s boat. Bobbi, my partner, she was supposed to meet Ms. Waverley here at eight last night. You didn’t happen to see anything, did you?”

  “Sorry. I got off at six. But you sure you got the right boat? The police asked about the Wonderlust.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, like I told them, there must be some kind of mistake, then. The Waverleys don’t own that boat. It’s owned by some company that’s just a number. They’ve been trying to sell it for months, except they haven’t been taking care of it. The Waverleys have a sailboat.” He waved in the general direction of the docks. “Thirty-eight-foot Sabre called Free Spirit. They don’t use it much, either, but take better care of it.”

  “Anna Waverley,” I said. “Is she blonde, about thirty, with green eyes and, um, a full figure?”

  Witt DeWalt shook his head. “Not even close. She’s at least forty, maybe a bit more. Slim on top, a bit huskier down below. What you might call a low centre of gravity, but not fat or anything. A runner. I don’t remember what colour her eyes are, but her hair’s a dark red. Auburn, I guess you’d call it. About this long.” He held his hand level, just below his earlobe, and sliced it back and forth. “Good-looking woman. Handsome, you might say. Always friendly, too, although she doesn’t smile much.”

  “Do the Waverleys come around here often?”

  “They haven’t kept the Sabre here long, just since the winter before last. But, like I said, they haven’t used it much. I don’t think it’s been out in months. Mrs. Waverley comes by in the evenings couple of times a week. Just to check her out, I guess.”