Depth of Field

by Michael Blair

  “Um, how’s Bobbi doing?” he asked.

  “She’s doing okay,” I said. “Thanks for asking.”

  “Good thing Arty Smelski happened along in his kayak when he did, ain’t it?”

  “Is that the name of the paramedic who found her?” I said. “No one told me. I’d like to buy him a beer.”

  “Arty’d let you.”

  “Where would I find him?”

  “Dunno where he lives,” Eddy said. “But he’s got an old fishing boat in the Harbour Authority marina he’s fixing up to someday retire on. Likely you’ll find him there most days.”

  The Granville Island boat works was on the other side of the parking lot next to Bridges, facing Broker’s Bay, where the Wonderlust was berthed. The police had probably interviewed Eddy and his co-workers — or maybe not; it was early days yet — and it was unlikely that I’d learn anything they hadn’t, but it wouldn’t hurt to ask if he’d been in the area the night before and if he’d seen anything.

  “Tuesday evening is when my abductee support group meets,” he said, shaking his head.

  Don’t ask, I sternly enjoined myself, lest my curiosity about what went on at an alien abductee support group meeting got the better of me. Eddy seemed disappointed. There was nothing, I knew from experience, he enjoyed more than talking about his off-world adventures. He’d even showed me an X-ray once, purportedly of his very own head, and pointed out the tiny smudgy speck that was, he said, his alien implant.

  “I’ll ask around,” he said.

  “I’d appreciate it,” I said. And left him there, looking woebegone and staring out at the boat traffic on False Creek, waiting for Apophis.

  “She was right there,” Art Smelski said, pointing to a spot on the rocky shoreline by the civic marina docks beneath the Burrard Street Bridge. Late evening traffic rumbled high overhead and the gloom deepened as the sun went down over Vanier Park. “It looked like maybe she’d crawled out of the water a bit,” he added, “then passed out. The tide was starting to fall, so it’s a good thing I came along when I did or she’d have been swept all the way out into Burrard Inlet.” He gestured toward the dark expanse of water beyond the civic marina. “I got her out of the water, called 911, then started CPR.”

  “You carry a cellphone in your kayak?” I said.

  “Sure do. It’s waterproof.”

  The shoreline sloped steeply down from where we stood at the edge of the path that looped through the small park called Cultural Harmony Grove, virtually treeless except for a handful of saplings. At that time of night, despite the lights from the surrounding marinas, Smelski wouldn’t have seen Bobbi at all if he hadn’t been on the water in his kayak.

  “Do you always go kayaking at eleven at night?” I asked.

  “Not always. Depends on which shift I’m working. Helps me relax. Most o’ the time,” he added with a shrug.

  “Did you see anyone else nearby? On the path, maybe.”

  “Nope. Can’t see the path from down there. And I was kinda busy.”

  “Sure, I understand. You saw nothing out of the ordinary at all?”

  “Nope. Just your friend in the water.”

  “What about on the boats?”

  “Nope. It’s fairly quiet that time of night. Sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  “Your friend, is she going to be okay?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “That’s good, because she was in pretty bad shape. Whoever …” He stopped.

  “Whoever what?” I asked, my voice hollow.

  “My job,” he said awkwardly. “I mean, I see a lot of what people do to other people. Whoever beat up your friend, well, it was nasty. She’s lucky to be alive.”

  “It’s thanks to you she is, Mr. Smelski,” I said. I offered him my hand. He took it. “You saved her life,” I said, voice cracking.

  “Maybe so,” he said self-consciously. “But, well, I guess it’s what I do. And call me Art. Mr. Smelski is what my kids’ friends call me.”

  “Okay, Art, the next time you’re in Bridges, tell Kenny Li, the manager, who you are. Drinks and dinner for you and your wife are on me.”

  “That isn’t necessary,” he said. “But thanks. I appreciate it. So’ll my wife.”

  As we walked along the footpath back to the False Creek Harbour Authority where I’d found him working on his partly converted fishing boat, I asked him if he knew anything about the Wonderlust. He didn’t recognize the name, he told me, but when I described the boat to him, he said he knew it to see it.

  “Do you know who owns it?” I asked.

  “Nope,” he replied. “Whoever it is, they sure don’t take very good care of it, though. Older boat like that needs a lot of TLC.” He shrugged as he stopped at the top of the ramp to the long dock on which his boat was moored with dozens of other fishing boats. “You know the definition of a boat.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “A hole in the water you fill with money.”

  “Glad to hear your friend is doing okay,” he said.

  I thanked him again and trudged homeward to my very own hole in the water. I was no sooner through the door than exhaustion hit me like a load of bricks. I staggered upstairs, I gave my teeth a perfunctory scrub, dropped my clothes onto the floor, and fell into bed. I was unconscious before my head hit the pillow.

  chapter six

  Thursday morning, rather than taking the ferry across False Creek, I drove to work. Parking the Liberty in the loading bay behind the building, where we normally parked the van, I took the rickety freight elevator up to the studio on the third floor. Garibaldi Air Services had recently acquired a new Bell 412 passenger helicopter for the Vancouver to Whistler run, just in time for the 2010 Winter Olympics, and wanted a series of interior, exterior, and in-flight photographs for a promotional brochure and website. It was a two-person job — well, two and a half, really, if you counted Wes Comacho, whose helicopter I’d chartered for the morning to take the aerial shots. I’d thought about cancelling, but we couldn’t afford to lose the work. Normally, if Bobbi was busy, I would have taken Wayne along, but he was so afraid of flying that he broke into a sweat and stammered uncontrollably at the very thought of going up in a helicopter. Mary-Alice had volunteered, but aerial photography could be tricky and I was afraid that despite her good intentions her lack of experience would be more hindrance than help, especially since I would have to use the Hasselblad and the Nikon 35 millimetre film cameras. I had managed to borrow a decent “prosumer” digital camera from Meg and Peg Castle, the twin sisters who ran an escort service and soft-core porn website out of their offices on the second floor — I hadn’t asked what they used it for — but I wasn’t sure it was up to the job.

  At ten, as I was about to lug my gear down to the Liberty, someone knocked on the door to the stairwell. I unlocked it, and when I opened it there was a waspish, sharp-featured man standing on the landing.

  “You Tom McCall?” he asked.

  He was dressed in a dark suit and maroon tie, with a raincoat slung over his arm, even though the weather was fair. He had dark, liquid eyes and his thick, slicked-back black hair had an oily sheen. His voice had a nasal quality that made me think of Joel Cairo, Peter Lorre’s character from The Maltese Falcon. The climb to the third floor seemed not to have winded him at all.

  “Yes, I am,” I said. “But if this is about a job you’ll have to speak to one of my associates. They’re not in yet and I’ll be late for an appointment if I don’t leave now. You’ll have to come back, I’m afraid.”

  “This won’t take long,” he said as he stepped into the studio. His cologne was sharp and salty and he wore too much of it.

  “I hope not,” I said. “I really am in a hurry.”

  “I want to know who hired you to take pictures of that boat,” he said.

  “The Wonderlust?” I said.

  “Of course the Wonderlust,” he said impatiently.

  “I’d like to know who hired me, too,” I sa
id. “Who are you? Are you with the police?”

  “Never mind who I am. Who hired you to take pictures of that boat?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” I said.

  “You’re telling me you don’t know who hired you?” he said skeptically.

  “That’s precisely what I’m telling you. Now, if you’ll excuse me …”

  “I don’t believe you,” he said.

  “That’s certainly your prerogative,” I said. “But why would I lie?”

  “For the same reason most people lie,” he said. I waited for him to continue, thinking that perhaps he was about to impart some deep philosophical truth, but he just smiled thinly and said, “Let’s try a different approach.”

  “Fine by me. But not now. Do you have a card? I —”

  “Someone hired you to take pictures of that boat. Why?”

  Who was this guy? I wondered. I didn’t figure him for a cop; a cop wouldn’t have refused to identify himself. If I’d had to guess, I’d have said he was a lawyer. Representing whom? Again, if I’d had to guess, I would have said that he represented the nameless corporation that owned the Wonderlust, perhaps concerned about liability issues. “Who are you?” I asked again. “What’s your name?”

  “You don’t need to know that,” he said.

  “Fine,” I said. “Don’t tell me. I’ll just have to call you ‘Mr. Cairo,’ then.”

  He blinked. “Pardon me?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “I’ve got to go. I’m late for an appointment.” I pulled open the door to the stairwell.

  “I don’t care if you’re late for your own funeral,” he said. “I want to know who hired you to take pictures of that boat.”

  “I told you,” I said. “I don’t know who she was.”

  “It was a woman that hired you?” he said sharply. “What did she tell you her name was?”

  I didn’t know the real Anna Waverley from Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, but the chances were good that she too was an innocent bystander, like Bobbi and me, so I was reluctant to tell this man her name. “She gave a false name,” I said.

  “What’d she look like?”

  “Good day, Mr. Cairo,” I said, urging him out the door.

  “Just hold on,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere till you answer my questions.”

  “No, you hold on,” I said. “If you don’t leave right now, I’m going to call the police. I’m sure they’d be only too happy to answer your questions. They might have a few of their own, too.”

  He stared at me for a long moment, dark eyes hardening, before finally shrugging slightly and stepping through the door onto the landing.

  “We’ll talk again,” he said and began to descend the stairs.

  I closed the door and locked it and took the freight elevator down to the loading dock.

  I got back to the studio at 2:30. I gave Wayne a dozen rolls of exposed film to send to the outside lab we used from time to time. I also gave him Meg and Peg’s digital, with which I’d shot a couple dozen frames, some of which might even be usable. With Mary-Alice hovering over his shoulder, asking questions and making him nervous, he downloaded them to his computer, then burned them to a couple of CDs, one of which he gave to me to check on my computer before erasing them from the card in Meg and Peg’s camera. I was just finishing when Mary-Alice came into my office and dropped onto the sofa with a weary sigh.

  “Tell Wayne he can return the camera to Meg and Peg,” I said to her.

  “Okay,” she said. I looked at her. She looked back. “What?”

  “Is everything all right?” I asked.

  “You want a list?”

  “I mean, with you. Are you all right?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “You look tired.” She was neat as a pin, nary a hair out of place, clothes clean and carefully co-ordinated and accessorized, but despite her makeup, her complexion seemed dry and pale and there were dark smudges under her eyes.

  “I haven’t been sleeping very well lately.”

  “Oh?” I said warily. Call me insensitive, but my sister prided herself on the control she exercised over her life. If something was getting sufficiently under her skin to keep her up at night, I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know what it was.

  Her eyes narrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’ll be glad when things get back to normal, too.”

  She made a derisive gagging sound, got up, and left the office. I wondered if somehow I’d stumbled into a David Lynch movie.

  When I got home that evening, I turned on my computer and looked up Waverley in the Internet telephone directory for Vancouver. There weren’t many. There weren’t any S. or Sam or Samuel Waverleys in Point Grey or elsewhere. It wouldn’t be hard to find Samuel Waverley’s gallery in Gastown, but I couldn’t see myself walking in off the street and asking for the owner’s home address. I was going to have to find some other way to get Anna Waverley’s address. Why I felt I needed it, I wasn’t sure.

  After fixing something to eat, and eating it, I flaked out for a while on the sofa and tried to read. I came to at eight o’clock. Although it was late, I decided to go to the hospital, anyway. There was a good chance I’d run into Bobbi’s father, but there was also a chance he’d gone home or to a bar somewhere. As I drove past the Broker’s Bay Marina on my way off Granville Island, however, a parking space opened up, so, acting on impulse, I parked and walked out to the quay overlooking the moorings. The Wonderlust wasn’t in her slip. I went into the marina office. A middle-aged woman was behind the counter, leafing through a magazine. She looked up at me and smiled.

  “Where’s the Wonderlust?” I asked.

  “The Wonderlust? Police towed her away this afternoon. Said she was a crime scene.”

  “A crime scene?”

  “Yeah. A woman was raped on her the other day. Almost killed.”

  My guts clenched, even though I knew that Bobbi hadn’t been raped. As I looked out over the marina, I had a sudden inspiration. I wouldn’t have recognized a Sabre 386 if one rammed into my house, but I remembered Witt DeWalt, the Mariners fan, telling me that the Waverleys owned a sailboat called Free Spirit. I turned back to the woman behind the counter.

  “Almost forgot,” I said. “I was supposed to deliver some photographs to Mrs. Waverley. I was told she was staying on her boat. Which one is the Free Spirit?”

  “I dunno who told you that,” the woman said. “She hardly ever stays on that boat. She and her husband live in Point Grey.”

  “Yes, I know,” I said. “Um, look. I have to deliver the photos tonight. They’re very important. I left the address at home, though, because I thought she was supposed to be on the boat. I don’t suppose you could give it to me, could you? I’d really appreciate it. Mrs. Waverley will, too.”

  “Sure, why not?” the woman said helpfully.

  Three minutes later I was heading up Granville toward 12th, Anna Waverley’s Point Grey address in my shirt pocket. Now that I had it, I still wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do with it. I didn’t think Mrs. Waverley was very likely to speak to me if I just walked up and knocked on her door and told her that someone posing as her may have been responsible for my friend getting half beaten to death.

  As I circled the block around the Vancouver General Hospital, looking for parking, I spotted what I thought was Greg Matthias’s Saab. I wanted to ask him some questions about the investigation. And if Bobbi’s father was visiting, Matthias might be able to keep me from doing something stupid or that I’d regret, not necessarily the same thing. Fortunately, Brooks wasn’t there. Matthias was, though.

  “How’s she doing?” I asked him as I stood beside Bobbi’s bed. I gently touched the back of her hand with the tips of my fingers, hoping she’d wake up. She didn’t.

  “No change,” Matthias said. “For better or worse. The doctors say it’s just a waiting game, but that they have every reason to be hopeful.”

  “How lon
g have you been here?” I pulled a straight chair next to the bed and sat down.

  “Not long,” Matthias said. “Your sister and Wayne Fowler were here for a while about an hour ago.”

  “And Bobbi’s father?”

  “Haven’t seen him.”

  “I stopped at the marina on my way here. The Wonderlust is gone. The woman in the office told me the police towed it away because it was a crime scene. Is that where Bobbi was attacked? On the boat?”

  “The crime scene people found blood traces and evidence of a struggle,” Matthias replied. “Someone tried to clean it up, but didn’t do a very thorough job of it. Maybe they watch forensic shows on television and thought it wouldn’t do any good. We won’t know for sure if she was attacked on the boat until the test results are back. As for how she got from the boat to the bridge, the Wonderlust’s Zodiac is missing. Her attacker may have transported her from the Wonderlust using the Zodiac. The footpath between Granville Island and the bridge is well lit and fairly busy, even late at night. If she were dumped from shore, her attacker would have had to transport her by foot half a kilometre or more along the seawall and the promenade overlooking the False Creek Harbour Authority. Someone would have seen something. Likewise, if she ran and he caught up with her under the bridge, she’d have screamed for help and someone would have heard. Unfortunately, the scene under the bridge was too badly contaminated by paramedics and curiosity seekers to be of any help. We’re canvassing, but so far haven’t turned anything up.”

  “If he moved her by Zodiac,” I said, “why dump her in the shallows in the middle of the civic marina?”

  “I dunno,” Matthias said. “Maybe she came to, struggled with her attacker, fell overboard, and tried to swim ashore. We’re just going to have to wait until she wakes up.” He paused, looking at Bobbi, then started to add something else.

  “Don’t say it,” I interjected quickly, before he could speak.

  He nodded and said nothing.

  “Did you check out Loth?” I asked.

  “Kovacs and Henshaw talked to him, but I don’t think anything came of it. I’d have heard.”