He took his wife’s arm. Did she flinch slightly? Perhaps he’d caught her off guard. She impressed me as a very guarded and nervous woman. “It’s been a pleasure making your acquaintance, Mr. McCall,” Moffat said.
I’d been dismissed, and would have gratefully retreated, but David wasn’t done. “Walter,” he said, “Tom was just asking me about your collection.”
“Oh? Are you interested in art, Mr. McCall?”
“Um, well, not really, it’s just that, um, well …” I could see he was losing patience. “I was looking forward to the opportunity of working with you on the photography for your exhibition catalogue,” I blurted.
“Ah, yes, that,” he said, glancing quickly at his wife, whose expression perceptively hardened. “I’m very sorry,” Moffat went on. “But we have decided not to go ahead with the exhibition. It was all very last-minute, I’m afraid. Please accept my sincerest apologies for any inconvenience it may have caused you. If something else comes up that you can be of assistance with, I won’t hesitate to contact you.”
“Thank you,” I mumbled.
“Now, if you will excuse us, we should circulate. David.” He took his wife’s arm.
Before he could drag her away, Elise Moffat extended her hand to me again, and said, “Mary-Alice told me of your associate’s assault, Mr. McCall. I’m very sorry. I shall pray for her full and speedy recovery.”
“Yes, yes, a terrible thing,” Walter Moffat added quickly. “She will be in both our prayers.”
“Thank you,” I said again, with more sincerity. Prayer wasn’t something I personally put any faith in, but what could it hurt?
“Walter,” David said. “Last week, when you were telling me about the latest additions to your collection, you mentioned that you knew Samuel Waverley, did you not?”
“I may have,” Moffat replied. “I don’t recall. I’m acquainted with him, of course. I’ve purchased several pieces from him over the years. Why do you ask?”
“It’s a coincidence, I’m sure,” David said. He looked at me. “Perhaps Tom should explain.”
“Explain what?” Walter Moffat wanted to know, eyes narrowing suspiciously.
“On Tuesday a woman calling herself Anna Waverley hired us to take photographs of a motor yacht called the Wonderlust, which she claimed to have received as part of her divorce settlement. I had to meet with another client, so Bobbi, my partner, kept the appointment. She was attacked later that night. The attack evidently took place on the boat.”
Mrs. Moffat’s pale complexion grew even paler, except for highlights of colour on her cheekbones. Her lips moved as she uttered what I assumed was a silent prayer.
“I’m certain that neither Mr. Waverley nor his wife had anything to do with your partner’s attack,” Moffat said. “Besides, if I’m not mistaken, he is out of the country. And while the Waverleys do own a boat, I believe it’s a sailboat.”
“I’m sure Tom didn’t mean to imply that the Waverleys were in any way involved,” David said.
“No, of course not,” I said. “The woman who hired us wasn’t Mrs. Waverley and the boat belongs to some numbered corporation. As David said, it’s purely coincidental that you know them.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, David,” Moffat said, in a tone of voice that made it clear he didn’t expect David to challenge him. “Haven’t you also purchased works from Samuel Waverley’s gallery?”
“You’re not wrong,” David said. “I bought a watercolour from him last year, and that bronze just last month.” He gestured toward a niche that contained a small, dark sculpture of a young ballerina. “I visited Samuel Waverley’s gallery on your recommendation. Although I don’t know the Waverleys personally, I have met them both at various charitable events. He’s, well, a bit cold, I thought, but she’s very charming. Quite lovely, really. Quiet, though, and … sorry,” David said, with an apologetic smile. “I’m prattling.”
Walter Moffat nodded, as though he agreed, but Elise Moffat’s smile, while distant, was not without sympathy.
“And you’ve no idea who the woman was who hired you?” Moffat said to me. “No, of course you don’t. It was a foolish question. I am rattled. We are not accustomed to such violence hitting so close to home.”
It was then that a man slid into position partly between David and me and the Moffats. He reminded me of my daughter’s pet ferrets, Beatrix and Harry, except that he was nowhere near as cute or cuddly. His suit looked expensive and his dark, thinning hair was combed over his skull from above his left ear and lacquered into place. Jeanie Stone’s description fit him to a tee.
“Is everything all right here, Walter?” the man asked, eyes darting suspiciously between David and me.
“Yes, yes, of course, Woody,” Moffat intoned reassuringly. “Everything is fine.”
“Woody Getz,” the man said, thrusting his hand toward me. “Walter’s campaign manager. And you are …?”
“Pleased to meet you,” I said, reluctantly taking his hand. It was cold and damp and limp. I let go quickly.
“My brother-in-law,” David said. “Tom McCall.”
“Oh, right. We spoke on the telephone the other day,” Getz said.
Moffat took his wife’s arm. She leaned against him.
“David,” he said, “I think it’s time Mrs. Moffat and I said good night. Mr. McCall, I hope that your partner makes a full and speedy recovery.”
“Thank you,” I said.
David reiterated Moffat’s best wishes for Bobbi, said good night, then led the Moffats away in search of Mary-Alice, leaving me alone with Woody Getz. He smiled at me. I felt like a fish stranded on the beach and Getz was a hungry weasel.
“So you’re Mary-Alice’s brother?” he said.
“I am,” I admitted.
“You live on Granville Island, don’t you?”
“Not exactly,” I said.
“Eh?”
“I live in a floating home in Sea Village.”
“But isn’t …? Ah, I get it. Very good. I should’ve said ‘at’ not ‘on,’ eh? Arh arh.” He didn’t quite nudge me with his elbow. “I’ve been thinking about maybe buying a place there myself.”
“Is that right?” I said. “Well, good luck.”
“We have a mutual acquaintance, you and I,” he said.
“Who’s that?” I asked. Did he mean Jeanie Stone? I hoped not. Perhaps he was referring to Blake Darling, the real estate broker, recalling Darling’s little chortle as he’d told me that his mysterious client “usually gets what he wants.”
“Kenny Shapiro,” Getz said.
“Who?”
“Kenny Shapiro. The director. I used to be in the industry. Kenny’s an old friend.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t …”
Then I remembered. Kenny Shapiro had directed the second season of Star Crossed, Reeny Lindsey’s syndicated sword-and-sex sci-fi series. They’d shot part of an episode at Sea Village the previous fall.
“You mean Mr. See-em-sweat,” I said.
“Eh?”
“Never mind.” Reeny had dubbed Kenny Shapiro ‘Mr. See-em-sweat’ because he had frequently overheated the sets to satisfy his penchant for authenticity. No spray-on sweat for Kenny. He wanted to see the real thing. His predilection for the real thing did not extend too far, though. Reeny had come close to quitting the series when he’d tried to persuade her to get breast implants.
I excused myself and went looking for Mary-Alice. There was still no sign of Jeanie Stone. “She was on the guest list that Walter’s manager provided,” Mary-Alice claimed, but I was certain she’d fibbed to lure me into her charitable web. I hated it that I could be so easily manipulated. I left soon after, which necessitated manoeuvring my car past a sleek Jaguar coupe, a couple of Mercedes sedans, and a hulking Cadillac Escalade that made my little Jeep Liberty feel downright puny. It was after ten, too late to go to the hospital, I decided, so I drove straight home.
chapter nine
The movers arrived at
the Davie Street studio promptly at eight o’clock Saturday morning, three hulking steroidal men in their twenties and a tall, wiry black woman in her thirties, who appeared to be the boss. In under two hours, notwithstanding our good-intentioned help, they moved everything it had taken us all week to pack down the freight elevator and into their truck. Although the elevator complained loudly and frequently, fortune smiled upon us and it didn’t break down. The drive to the new location took less than thirty minutes and by noon, the truck was empty. I thanked the woman and her crew, handed her the envelope containing the prearranged tip, then they all piled into the cab and the truck rumbled away, leaving us with our office furniture and filing cabinets, crates and cartons and equipment cases, not to mention the film fridge and Bodger’s cat carrier, stacked in the middle of the floor of the new studio space.
Prior to the rehabilitation of Granville Island in the seventies, the building into which we were moving had once been a chain and wire-rope manufacturer. It had been renovated to house artisans’ workshops, artists’ studios, and small galleries and shops. Originally, the building had had a concrete floor and a thirty-foot ceiling, with high, tall windows letting in plenty of light. Our new space still had a concrete floor, but it had been freshly painted a cheerful battleship grey. The front two-thirds of the space still had a twenty-foot ceiling and floor-to-ceiling windows. The back third, however, had been vertically subdivided, with office, washroom, and kitchen facilities upstairs, which is where we stashed a very unhappy Bodger’s cat carrier while we unpacked and tried to get organized.
At four o’clock Constable Mabel Firth poked her head through the front door. She was dressed in jeans and a tweedy jacket, and her dark blonde hair was loose. Although she was stationed on Granville Island and her husband Bill worked for the City of Vancouver, they lived in Burnaby, not far from the Chevron tank farm just east of the Second Narrows Bridge, so I didn’t often see her in mufti and almost didn’t recognize her. At first I thought she was off duty, then I noticed she was armed. There’s something about a big, attractive woman carrying a Glock …
“I guess you haven’t come to help us get this place sorted out,” I said.
“’Fraid not,” she said. “We’re re-interviewing all the witnesses in Bobbi’s assault case, in case we missed something the first time.”
“Have you been promoted to detective?”
“No, but a girl can always dream.” She took a spiral-bound notebook out of her inside jacket pocket. “Have you got a minute to go over your meeting with the faux Anna Waverley again?”
“Sure,” I said. We went outside and sat on a bench in the sun. “Faux?”
“Cute, eh? When I used it this morning, Jim Kovacs almost choked on his coffee. So …?”
I told her about the meeting, in as much detail as I could remember, but without embellishing or speculating to fill in the gaps in my memory.
“And when she left,” Mabel said, when I’d finished, “she was under the impression that you were going to meet her at eight on the boat?”
“Yes.” She made a mark in her notebook. “Am I to infer,” I said, “from the fact that you’re re-interviewing everybody, that you aren’t making much progress?”
“I’d say that was a safe inference,” Mabel agreed. “We canvassed residents of the condos with a view of the seawall and the path between the Broker’s Bay Marina and the Burrard Street Bridge. No one saw anything. Baz and I talked to dozens of people on the seawall and the promenade, asking them if they were in the area between eight and eleven Tuesday evening and, if so, did they see anything. Nothing. Our best lead was Anna Waverley, but while she can’t prove she was home alone after nine-thirty, there is the problem of motive. She doesn’t seem to have one. We can’t find any connection between you or Bobbi and the Waverleys.” She raised her eyebrows. “Is there one?”
“Actually …”
“What?”
“There might be a kind of indirect connection. My brother-in-law bought some art from Samuel Waverley’s gallery. He’s also met them socially at charity events.”
“What’s your brother-in-law’s name again?” I told her, plus Mary-Alice’s home phone number. “Anything else?” she asked.
“Does the name Walter P. Moffat mean anything to you?”
“Sure. I know who he is. Wally-the-One-Term-Wonder. I wasn’t one of his constituents. I wouldn’t have voted for him even if I was. Why?”
“I found out last night that he buys art from Waverley, too.”
“So do a lot of people, apparently, including the chief constable and the mayor. What’s your connection to Moffat, besides being a former constituent?”
“I was supposed to meet him Tuesday evening to discuss photography for an exhibition catalogue, but his manager cancelled the appointment earlier in the day.”
“La-di-da,” Mabel said. “Keeping pretty highfalutin company these days, aren’t we?”
“He’s more impressive on TV than in person.”
“That’s not saying much. What about Bobbi? Could she have known Anna Waverley or her husband?”
“It’s possible. Bobbi and I are close enough, I guess, but there are still some aspects of her private life she keeps private. But I didn’t get the impression that the name meant anything to her. Have you spoken to her father?”
“Oh, yeah,” Mabel replied sourly. “He’s convinced it’s your fault, that someone was out to get you, and Bobbi got in the way. What about that? You’ve had more than your share of trouble in the four years I’ve known you. Vincent Ryan was a nasty piece of work. Any man who would hire a psycho to rape and murder his own wife wouldn’t be above this sort of thing.”
“Ryan didn’t like to get his own hands dirty,” I said.
“He tried to kill your former girlfriend, Carla Bergman, didn’t he? And he did shoot that guy on the boat.”
“I don’t know if he was trying to kill Carla or not. As for Frank Poole, I’m not sure Ryan really meant to kill him. He may have been just trying to protect Carla. He wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders at the time. Besides, if it was Ryan, or thugs hired by Ryan, why the charade of hiring me? They could have grabbed me on my way to or from work any time they wanted. And why, when Bobbi showed up instead, assault her? The same goes for anyone else who might have it in for me for real or imagined reasons.”
“But if you can think of anyone …?”
“I’ll let you know, of course.”
Mabel stood up. She was a big, powerful woman, whose every movement was so effortless it seemed to belie the existence of gravity. “We’re pretty much dead in the water. Sorry. Poor choice of words. There’s not much we can do till Bobbi wakes up. Then maybe she’ll be able to tell us what went down on that boat. Assuming she remembers. I’m told that retrograde amnesia isn’t uncommon in cases involving head injury. In the meantime, we’re focusing our investigation on the faux Anna Waverley, whoever she is. But I’m afraid we haven’t got much to go on there, either.”
We shook hands and she left. I went back inside.
Mary-Alice, Wayne, and I had, in the course of the day, managed to get everything positioned more or less where it belonged, but the place still looked a shambles. We knocked off at five. Mary-Alice and Wayne went off together in Mary-Alice’s little white BMW while I locked up and walked home, where I showered, had something to eat, then drove to the hospital. I was grateful that neither Greg Matthias nor Norman Brooks was there. I sat with Bobbi until seven, talking to her about the move, telling her that she’d better get the hell better soon and do her share of the work, since she was so keen on the idea in the first place. The tube had been removed from her throat, but she was still catheterized and had an IV in her arm, electrodes taped to her chest, and an oxygen feed under her nose. As I talked to her, she muttered and twitched occasionally, setting off a flurry of bleeps from the monitors, and from time to time her eyelids fluttered, but she did not wake up. I wanted to shake her, but I didn’t, of course.
I left the hospital at seven and drove toward home. I didn’t go home, however. Instead, I turned west on 4th Avenue and drove toward Point Grey and the vast green of the University of British Columbia Endowment Lands. At seven-thirty I was parked on Belmont above Spanish Bank and Locarno Beach Park, a few metres up the street from a sprawling ranch-style house — the home of Samuel and Anna Waverley.
It wasn’t the biggest house on the block, not by a long shot, but it was big enough. Appropriately, it had a vaguely Spanish look, stone and stained wood and glass, with a terra cotta tile roof and deep eaves. A nice house, I thought, that I might be able to afford in my wildest dreams, but not otherwise. It was surrounded by mature trees on a good-sized lot, modestly landscaped with rock gardens and a water feature, but uncharacteristically devoid of topiary, which was abundant on the adjacent properties. The house next door to the Waverleys’ had a small cedar clipped into the shape of a poodle with puffball legs, chest, and tail. The things people will do to innocent trees and animals …
There was no car in the Waverleys’ wide cobbled drive in front of the attached three-car garage, but as I sat wondering what I was going to do, a dark green Volvo Cross Country went past me and turned into the driveway without signalling. Brake lights flashing, it stopped in front of the garage, driving lights bright on the stained-wood doors. A woman got out, leaving the door open and the engine running, and aimed something at the garage. A remote door opener, I presumed. When nothing happened, she leaned into the car, turned off the engine, then swung the door shut. The car horn bleated and the lights flashed as she walked away from it toward the front door of the house. She was wearing an athletic top, shorts, and high-tech runners. Her upper body was slim, almost petite, while her hips and rump were nicely rounded, legs elegantly tapered. Despite what Witt DeWalt had said, I thought her centre of gravity was fine just where it was.
Now what? I wondered. I couldn’t sit there long. It was a fairly exclusive neighbourhood. Sooner or later, most likely sooner, someone would get worried and call the police. Maybe they wouldn’t wait until they were worried. So I started the Liberty, put it in gear, and drove into the wide driveway, parking beside Anna Waverley’s Volvo. The boxy Liberty and the sleek Volvo looked good together, I thought, as I walked to the front door. Maybe they would mate.
Depth of Field Page 9
