“You, mister man,” Loth called out, heaving himself away from the side of the car, which rocked on its suspension. “What I ever done to you that you gotta go and tell the cops I hurt yer fran?” He lumbered after me, cane tocking on the cobbles. “Hey, you. Stop. I’m talkin’ a you.”
I turned toward him and he stopped in his tracks, radiating anger and righteous indignation. His body odour was breathtaking. It was a wonder it didn’t rot the clothes off his back. Maybe it did; his shirt looked new.
“I didn’t tell the police you hurt her,” I said. “I just told them about your little altercation at the market last month.”
He glared at me. “Alter what? Fuck’s that?”
“Altercation. Confrontation. Argument. Difference of opinion. Look it up in your thesaurus.”
He took a couple of steps toward me, an ambulatory mountain of noisome flesh.
The street was dark and quiet, the haloed street lights casting indistinct shadows in the fog. The few people about scrupulously ignored us, hurried on their way. I thought seriously about running away, too.
“You t’ink I’m stupid, eh? Maybe I dunno fancy words like you, but I ain’t stupid. Why the cops talk to me, eh? ’Cause you told ’em I’s the one that hurt her.”
“Okay, fine. You didn’t hurt her.”
He took a couple more steps toward me and I backed away. “I ain’t never hurt no one,” he said menacingly, brandishing his stout cane.
A figure emerged from the shadows. It was Norman Brooks. I was almost relieved to see him.
“Jesus, McCall,” he said. “This guy a friend of yours? You really gotta start hanging out with a better class of people.” He waved his hand in front of his face. “Christ, you smell like a three-week-old corpse. When was the last time you took a bath? The day they let you out of the joint?”
Loth waved his cane at Brooks, repeating his familiar refrain. “I ain’t never hurt no one. I’m just a poor, sick ol’ man. My lawyer, he says I was imprisoned falsely. He exonerated me.”
“I’ll be sure to pass that on to the families of the women you raped and murdered in Coquitlam.”
“I ain’t never raped no womens,” Loth roared like an indignant lion.
With surprising speed, Brooks reached out and yanked the cane out of Loth’s hands.
“Was it this stinking piece of filth that hurt my daughter?”
“No,” I said, no idea if it was true or not, just hoping to defuse the situation before it got out of hand.
“Gimme my stick,” Loth said.
“You don’t need this thing any more than I do.” He held it in both hands, as if he were going to snap it across his knee.
“I need my stick. I got art’ritis real bad in my hip.”
“Mr. Brooks,” I said. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
“Fuck you,” he said, but he tossed the cane at Loth. It rebounded off Loth’s broad gut and clattered onto the cobbles. Loth got stiffly down onto one knee and picked it up. He used it to help himself stand.
“I ain’t hurt yer fran,” he said to me.
“Do you know who did hurt her?” I asked him.
He shook his great head.
“Bullshit,” Brooks said. “You know who did it, don’t you, you sac of shit?”
“I ain’t know nothing,” Loth said, still shaking his head.
“Goddamn it,” Brooks shouted, and for a second I thought he was going to attack Loth.
“You ain’t listen, anyway,” Loth said. “You t’ink I done it.”
“All right, you didn’t do it,” Brooks said. “But you know who did. Tell me.”
“Or you do what?” Loth challenged. He waved his cane. “You ain’t gonna hurt no poor, cripple ol’ man.” He turned toward me. “Tell him, mister man. I don’ know who hurt yer fran. Them mens maybe.”
“What men?” I asked.
“The mens that go with the whores,” he said. “All them womens is whores, suck on men’s dicks for money, spread their ass cheeks. Tell him. Tell him.”
“Jesus,” Brooks said. “What’s he talking about? What whores? Is he crazy?”
“Whores,” Loth said again, and lumbered away, cane tocking on the cobbles, muttering and swearing to himself.
Brooks looked at me. “A fat lot of help you were. He knows who attacked my daughter.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe he does know something and maybe he doesn’t. I’m not sure what you expected me to do, though.”
“More than you did, that’s for sure,” he groused.
I looked at him. “Screw you and the horse you rode in on,” I said, then left him there and walked back to my car.
Just another quiet Sunday evening on Granville Island.
When I got home, the message light on the phone was blinking. I accessed my voice mail. Reeny’s voice was tinny and distant as the message played back.
“Tom? Damn, I’d really hoped to talk to you in person, not do it like this. Shit. Look, I guess there’s no easy way to tell you, except straight out, before you see it in some tabloid. I know you don’t read them, but — I met someone, Tom. He’s a really great guy. You’ll like him. Anyway, we got engaged last night. And, well, I don’t suppose there’s anything much left to say except I’m sorry things didn’t work out. You’re a great guy, too. Take care. I’ll call you when we get back to Canada. Maybe we can get together for a drink or something. Bye.”
As I erased the message and hung up the phone, I remembered what Bobbi had told me about not being sure that she and Greg had broken up. I had no doubt whatsoever that Reeny and I just had. I wondered why it didn’t hurt more.
chapter thirteen
I was at the studio early Monday morning. Things were starting to come together, but there was still a lot to do. It was another grey, drizzly day. Whether it was global warming, scalar beams, or normal meteorological unpredictability, the summer wasn’t shaping up to be one of the better ones on record, although celestially speaking it was still spring. The streets of Granville Island were almost deserted, locals staying home and dry and the tourists huddling in their hotel rooms and B&Bs complaining about the Pacific Northwest weather. I sat with my coffee in a director’s chair, feet on a table and gazing out the front window at the little quadrangle called Railspur Park, not thinking about Reeny’s call by trying to decide what I would tackle first, unpacking the dozen or so boxes of files and photo archives or finish painting the upstairs office. The darkroom I was leaving for Wayne. Mary-Alice and I had a meeting after lunch with an architectural firm that wanted a photo spread of its new offices, but otherwise we had left the week open to get the new studio up and running. When Mary-Alice arrived, she found me trying to make up my mind whether to give Reeny a call or send her a congratulatory card to let her know that I harboured no ill feelings and wished her well.
“Hard at it, I see,” Mary-Alice said.
“Yes, indeed,” I replied.
“Don’t strain yourself.”
“I’ll be careful.”
She poured herself a cup of coffee and pulled over another chair.
I stood up. “Enough woolgathering. Time to get to work.”
She scowled and sipped her coffee.
Wayne came in, followed by a gangly girl of thirteen or so who looked enough like him to be his sister. He introduced her as his niece Alison. She elbowed him in the ribs. “Oof. Sorry. Ali. No school today and my sister has to go out of town, so I said I’d keep an eye on her.”
“I’m a photographer, too,” Ali said. She unzipped her waist pack and took out a little Canon digital. I felt a brief stab of envy at the idea of photography for fun.
“But can you paint?” I said.
“Sure, I guess.”
“You’re hired,” I said.
“The pay’s lousy,” Mary-Alice warned her.
When we broke at noon, Ali had paint in her hair and on her face, but she had managed to get more on the office walls than on herself. After cleaning her up,
I put a sign on the door that we’d gone to the Public Market for lunch and would be back at one. The weather had improved so we ate outside on the quay. When we got back to the studio, the message light on the phone was blinking. The message was from the police. When I called back, I learned that they’d located the van. Or at least what was left of it. It had been ditched in Surrey, stripped of everything removable, and then some, and set alight. No sign of the camera equipment.
I called the insurance company and gave them the good news. Later, leaving Wayne and Ali to look after the studio, Mary-Alice and I went to our appointment with the architectural firm. We took her car. The meeting went well, and we came away with a nice contract, plus the promise of more work in the future, if things worked out. On the way back to the studio, Mary-Alice asked me how much the insurance company would reimburse us for the van.
“Not much. It was getting pretty old. Certainly not enough to buy a new one. The cameras and the other equipment were covered for replacement value.”
“I don’t think we can afford to replace the van,” she said.
“Forget it. The Jeep will do for now.”
“That’s your personal vehicle.”
“So?”
“Keep track of the mileage. The company will reimburse you for its use.”
“Fine. Whatever.” Then I remembered that she’d reset the Beamer’s trip meter when we’d set out after lunch. “You’re charging your mileage now?”
“Of course,” she said. “Thirty-five cents a kilometre.” I had no idea if that was the going rate or not, but it didn’t strike me as excessive. “Do you have a problem with that?” she said.
“What? No, of course not. It’s only fair.”
“But you have a problem, don’t you?”
“What makes you say that?”
“Come on, Tom. You’re my older brother. I’ve known you all my life. I can tell when you’re not happy about something.”
I almost laughed, but my instinct for self-preservation kicked in. If Mary-Alice could sense there was something troubling me, it must have been tattooed on my forehead in bright green letters. Although she was right that something was bothering me, she was wrong about what.
“Is it me?” she asked. “Is it the way I’ve reorganized the company? I thought we’d settled all that.” She took her eyes off the road for a second to glance at me. “Haven’t we?”
If her idea of settling it had been me acceding to her wishes, agreeing with her plans, then it certainly had been settled. “No, it’s not that,” I said. “You’ve done a great job with the reorganization and I think the new studio is going to work out fine.”
“But … ?”
I didn’t want to talk about Reeny’s call, so I said, “I just need time to adjust.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Adjust to what?” she asked, somewhat defensively, I thought.
It was a good question. When I’d started the business after leaving the Vancouver Sun, it had been just me I’d had to worry about. As long as I had enough work to cover child support payments, rent on the studio and my house, plus food, clothing, and car repairs, with a little left over for a decent bottle of Scotch now and again, I was happy. And if things got tight, which they had from time to time, especially during the first couple of years, I could always make do with cheaper Scotch. Not much had changed when Bobbi had come on board as my assistant, or even when she’d bought in as a partner a few years later, we worked that well together. But things were different now. The company was no longer just me and Bobbi and Bodger scraping by and having a good time doing it, despite the ups and downs. It was Granville Photographic Services, Inc. We had a logo. We had a corporate seal. We had a chairman of the board (me), and a president (Bobbi), and a secretary-treasurer (guess who). We had inventory control. And we charged mileage when we used our personal vehicles on company business. It wasn’t as much fun anymore.
“Growing up,” I said. “Responsibility.”
Marry-Alice grunted. “We all have to grow up sometime, Tom,” she said. “You’re not Peter Pan.”
“No,” I said, wondering where Tinkerbell was when I needed her; I could have used a dose of pixie dust about then. Mary-Alice, too.
I didn’t recognize the cop outside Bobbi’s room when I got to the hospital at six that evening. He demanded my name and wouldn’t let me past until he’d checked it against his list. When he finally let me into Bobbi’s room, Greg Matthias was already there, sitting beside Bobbi’s bed, reading aloud from a trade paperback with an old hand-tinted photo of a cowboy on the cover, The Englishman’s Boy by Guy Vanderhaeghe, one of Bobbi’s favourite authors. He closed the book and stood as I approached the bed.
“How is she?” I asked. She didn’t look any different, although her bruises were yellowing and the lacerations were healing nicely.
“She seems closer to the surface,” he said. “As if she’ll wake up any time.”
Her eyes fluttered.
“She hears us,” I said.
“I think so.”
“Hey, Bobbi. Enough of this already. No more slacking off. It’s time to wake up.”
Matthias grinned and Bobbi’s eyes fluttered again and she muttered querulously. Then her eyes opened and she looked straight at me.
“Hi,” I said, half expecting her to close her eyes again, as she’d done the day before. She didn’t, though. She continued to stare at me, but she didn’t speak. There wasn’t any recognition in her eyes. Just confusion. “Hi,” I said again.
She blinked and in that instant came back from wherever she’d been.
“Tom?” she said, voice a raspy croak.
“Hey, Bobbi,” I said, throat tight, eyes burning. “Welcome back.”
“Where have I …?” She licked her dry, cracked lips. “Can I have a drink of water?”
Matthias handed me a cup with a bent drinking straw. “Just a sip,” he said.
Her eyes swivelled toward him, but her lips closed around the tip of the straw. She sipped and swallowed, sipped and swallowed, then released the straw.
“Hello, Greg,” she said, voice a bit less raspy.
“Hello, Bobbi. How do you feel?”
She looked at me, as if uncertain how to answer the question.
“I’ll get a doctor,” Greg said and went to the door.
“I know this is going to sound stupid,” Bobbi said, “but where am I?” She looked around. “It looks like a hospital room.”
“It is,” I said. “You’re in the Vancouver General.”
“What happened? Did I have an accident?” She tried to sit up, sending the monitors into panic mode. She fell back. “Christ, I feel like shit.” She reached up to touch her face. “My face feels funny when I talk.”
“You’re pretty banged up,” I said.
“Am I — am I going to be okay?”
“Sure, you’re going to be just fine.”
“Then why are you crying?”
I rubbed my nose. “Allergies.”
Matthias came back into the room with a nurse. She glanced at the machines beside the bed as she took Bobbi’s hand and said, “How do you feel, dear?”
“Like I’ve been hit by a truck,” Bobbi said. She looked at me. “Was I?”
“No,” I said.
Another woman came into the room, an attractive Indian doctor I’d seen around, about forty, with the most amazing eyes, huge and inky black. Her photo ID badge identified her as Dr. I.R. Sandra. She shooed Matthias and me out of the room.
“She doesn’t remember what happened,” I said in the hall.
“It could take some time.”
The door opened and Dr. Sandra came out. “You can go back in now,” she said. “She’s going to be fine. We’ll leave the monitors on for the time being. Don’t let her drink too much water. Just little sips. And don’t be surprised if she goes back to sleep. Normal sleep. She’ll likely wake up starving.”
Matthias and I went back in. The nurse was adjusting the bed, proppin
g Bobbi up a bit. She looked better already, more colour in her face, life in her eyes.
“Hi,” she said as the nurse left. “Maybe one of you guys will tell me what the hell happened. I asked the nurse, but all she said was that I got hurt. Did I have an accident? Shit, did I crash the van?”
“No,” Greg said. “You didn’t have an accident.”
“What, then?” Her voice took on an edge of panic. “Why can’t I remember?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Greg said. “You will. What’s the last thing you do remember?”
Her face screwed up in an almost comical expression of concentration. “I — we were in the studio, the office. I — we —” She closed her eyes and rolled her head slowly back and forth on the pillow. “I’m tired,” she said in a little-girl voice, squirming down in the bed. She pulled the covers up under her chin, closed her eyes, and went to sleep.
Greg and I sat beside the bed and talked softly about nothing in particular, waiting for her to wake up again. Dr. Sandra came into the room, looked at the machines monitoring Bobbi. She cranked down the bed and told us Bobbi might sleep for a while, maybe we should go home. We thanked her and she left.
“How is the new studio coming along?” Greg asked.
“Fine,” I said. “Still a lot to do, though. Do you want to get some coffee?”
“Sure,” he said.
We went in search of coffee, found a reasonable facsimile in the coffee shop on the main floor, and took it back up to the room, bringing one for the cop on the door. Bobbi was still asleep, on her side with her hands under her cheek and her knees drawn up. Greg and I resumed our seats and drank our coffee.
“Should you call Kovacs?” I asked him.
“He’ll know soon enough.”
“What about her father?”
“The hospital will notify him.”
I told him about my encounter with Loth and Norman Brooks the night before.
“I’ll suggest that Kovacs interview Loth again,” Matthias said. “You never know, maybe he does know something useful.”
“I thought for a minute Brooks was going to try to beat it out of him,” I said. “Loth may be old and arthritic, but I don’t think he’d have any trouble handling Brooks. He was more than a little drunk,” I added, lowering my voice.
Depth of Field Page 13
