Depth of Field

by Michael Blair

  “You sure you’re all right?” Matthias asked.

  “Uh, I think so. Feeling a bit giddy, though. Like I’ve had a bit too much to drink. Which I haven’t. Yet.” I started to get up.

  “I’ll get it,” Bobbi said. “Scotch?”

  “Please. Lots.”

  She went to the little cabinet I use as a bar and poured me a large shot of the Bowmore. As she handed it to me, there was a knock on the door, then a pair of uniformed cops came in, both beefy males in their thirties. I didn’t know either of them. Mabel Firth and Baz Tucker’s replacements, I presumed. They conferred briefly with Matthias, standing close and keeping their voices low so I couldn’t make out what they were saying. He nodded and they left.

  Matthias took the report. Bobbi grew wide-eyed and pale when I repeated the message the man had wanted me to give her. When I finished, I tossed back the Scotch and held out the glass for more.

  “Motherfucker,” she said angrily, pouring me another big shot. “I wish I could remember what happened.”

  “You will,” Matthias said. “And when you do, we’ll nail this nasty prick, don’t worry about that.”

  “I just hope I remember before anyone else gets hurt,” Bobbi said.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “If this is the guy who attacked Bobbi and killed Anna Waverley, what does he think he’s doing? First he comes to the studio and demands to know who hired us. Then he tries to get to Bobbi in the hospital. Now he attacks me and threatens to kill us all if Bobbi reveals what happened on the boat. It’s like standing on a street corner shouting, ‘Here I am, I did it, catch me if you can.’ Even if Bobbi can’t identify him, I can. Does he really think that he can scare us into keeping quiet?”

  “He scares me,” Bobbi said. “And after what he did to you, aren’t you scared?”

  “Bloody right I’m scared,” I said. “But I’m more angry than scared.”

  “Of course you’re angry,” she said. “Anyone would be. He beat the shit out of you.” She shook her head. “He more than beat the shit out of you. He, well, humiliated you.”

  “Funny. I don’t feel humiliated. Much.” I thought about it for a moment, then said, “I’m not ashamed that someone with martial-arts training beat the shit out of me, any more than I’m ashamed that Yo-Yo Ma can play the fiddle better than I can.”

  She stared at me for a couple of beats, then smiled slightly. “Yo-Yo Ma plays the cello,” she said.

  “Which is just a fiddle on steroids. My point is, my self-esteem isn’t based on my ability, or lack thereof, to fight or withstand pain.” I gritted my teeth as a brief flicker of residual sensitivity rippled along the nerve endings in my groin.

  “You’re a lover, not a fighter,” Bobbi said, in a gently mocking tone.

  “You said it, not me.”

  “All right, so why are you angry?” she asked.

  “Because he invaded my home, violated my sanctuary, and threatened to hurt people I care about. Oh, yeah, and beat the living shit out of me. I guess what makes me most angry, though, is that I opened that fucking door.” I took a mouthful of Scotch and looked at Matthias. “Does he seriously believe threatening to kill us is going to stop us from talking?”

  “Speak for yourself, fella,” Bobbi said.

  “He probably does,” Matthias said. “He seems like a classic sociopath. Impulsive, reckless, and narcissistic, with no real grasp of consequences. He’s probably reasonably bright, but thinks the rest of us are idiots.” He smiled self-consciously. “Criminal profiling 101.”

  “You make it sound simple,” I said. “Like you can just go out with a big net and bag him.”

  “Would that it were so easy. We’ve got to find him first. His prints are probably in the system. We’ll dust …”

  I shook my head, eyes closed, visualizing Joel Cairo’s hand as he stroked my cheek.

  “What?” Matthias said.

  “He wore gloves,” I said.

  “He isn’t totally crazy, then,” Bobbi said.

  Matthias shook his head. “As I said, he’s probably reasonably bright, maybe even a bit brighter than average, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it from his behaviour. From our perspectives, his actions are those we tend to associate with stupidity. Reckless and irrational. From his perspective, his actions are completely normal. We’re on totally different wavelengths, which makes it difficult to anticipate what he’ll do next.”

  “Maybe he’ll move to Venezuela,” I said.

  Matthias stood up. He looked at Bobbi. “What are you going to do?

  “I’ll stay here.”

  “Good,” I said. “I need all the protection I can get.”

  “We’ll leave a car on the quay,” he said to me. He turned to Bobbi. “I’ll arrange to have someone take you home in the morning to pick up your stuff.”

  “Thanks,” Bobbi said. She walked him to the door, where they spoke quietly for a moment, then she gave him a quick, sisterly kiss on the cheek and he left. She came back into the living room.

  “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m sore, but I’m all right. The Scotch is helping. How about you?”

  “Tired. And my stitches itch.” She ran the tips of her splinted fingers along the line of tiny stitches where her eyebrow had been shaved off.

  “There’s a spare toothbrush in the upstairs bathroom,” I said. “And I think the bed linens in the spare room are clean. Clean enough, anyway.”

  She smiled, said good night, and went upstairs. I levered myself off the sofa without too much discomfort, a bit wobbly and head buzzing with the Scotch I’d drunk too quickly. I made the rounds, checking that all the windows and doors were locked, even the door to the roof deck. I rarely locked the door to the deck. Getting into the house via the roof would necessitate, in order of descending probability, scaling the exterior wall, leaping across the twelve-foot gap from Daniel’s roof, landing by parachute, or jumping from a hovering helicopter. But the world felt a lot less safe, secure, and predictable than it had as hour earlier. It wasn’t a good feeling. I’d had guns pointed at me, I’d been physically threatened, even manhandled, but I’d never been rendered so utterly helpless and vulnerable as I had that night. Despite the brave front I’d put on for Bobbi and Matthias, Joel Cairo scared me. The next time I saw him I either wanted a hell of a good head start or one of Skip Osterman’s shark pikes in my hands. Of course, I’d just as soon never lay eyes on him again, under any circumstances, no matter how well-armed.

  chapter twenty-two

  “You sure you’ll be okay?”

  It was Friday morning. Bobbi and I were in the kitchen, eating breakfast. Rain rattled against the kitchen window, wind moaned softly in the eaves, and the house quietly creaked and groaned as wavelets lapped gently against the hull.

  “He isn’t going to try anything in broad daylight in a public place,” I said, even though it was possible he might do just that, given Matthias’s description of sociopaths as impulsive and reckless. Truth be told, the man I called Joel Cairo had spooked me more than I cared to admit. I felt an urge to check behind every door before I walked through. I might never be able to watch The Maltese Falcon again.

  “I can come with you, if you like,” Bobbi said. “Strength in numbers.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I insisted. “Besides, Wayne’s coming with me. And Jeanie Stone will be there.”

  Bobbi snorted, then coughed and grunted with pain, pressing her left hand to her rib cage. “Well, I’m worrying for nothing then, aren’t I?”

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “I talked to Greg while you were in the shower. He’s arranged for Mabel to come by to take me home to pick up some stuff. Then, well, I thought I’d visit my dad.”

  I yawned and stretched, trying to work out the ache that was like an overstretched bungee cord across the top of my back. Fortunately, I didn’t seem to be suffering any obvious ill effects from my encounter with Cairo, save for a bruise on my chest and a lit
tle residual soreness in my nether regions. I hadn’t slept well, plagued by dreams I didn’t remember, but which nevertheless awakened me sweating and tangled in my sheets, to lie staring into the darkness for a long time before falling back asleep, only to dream again. I’d have said to hell with it and stayed in bed for a week, except that at ten that morning Jeanie Stone, Wayne, and I were scheduled to go to Stanley Park to scout locations for the calendar shoot, set to begin Sunday at dawn. That is, if the rain ever let up.

  The streets were quiet as I walked through the rain to the studio. First to arrive, as usual, I put on the coffee. I was working on my second cup when the door buzzer jangled and Mabel Firth came in wearing a wide-brimmed Tilley hat and a waxed-canvas Australian stockman’s coat that hung to her ankles. She stood by the door as she removed her hat and shook the rain from the tips of her dark blonde hair.

  “I’m dripping all over your floor,” she said.

  “It’s concrete,” I said. “It won’t notice.” I poured her a cup of coffee while she took off her coat and hung it from a hook by the bottom of the stairs to the office. “What’s up?” I said, handing her the coffee.

  “Matthias told me what happened. I just thought I’d stop in and see how you were doing. You’ve had a rough week.”

  “I’ve had better.”

  “If you need to talk to someone, I can recommend a couple of people who specialize in working with victims of violent crime. I’m going to give them to Bobbi, too.”

  “I appreciate your concern,” I said. “But I’m okay. No obvious ill effects, physical or psychological. How about you? Greg told me you and Baz have got yourselves into some trouble over what happened with Loth the other day.”

  “We’ll both get reprimands in our jackets, but we’ll be okay. One of the tourists’ videos clearly shows Loth whacking the guy with his cane, sending the bicyclist into the bridge pier, and throwing a cop into the bay. And Baz replaced the camera he threw into False Creek with a far better one.”

  “This won’t jeopardize your chances of becoming a detective, will it?”

  “I might miss out on the next round of promotions,” she said. “I can live with that.”

  The door buzzer buzzed again as Wayne came into the studio. Water dripped from his yellow rubberized poncho, his sneakers squished and squeaked on the antiskid floor paint, and his jeans were soaked below the knees. Jeanie Stone was behind him, carrying a gigantic golf umbrella. Before coming inside she closed the umbrella and shook it off. Despite the umbrella, her leather jacket was beaded with rain and her coal-black hair glistened with moisture.

  “Wet?” I said.

  “Some,” she said, combing her fingers through her hair. “The CIA must be messing with those Russian scalar things again.”

  Wayne took off his glasses and wiped the lenses with a soggy tissue.

  “We can put off checking out locations till the weather clears,” I said.

  “What, because of a little rain?” Jeanie said. “You won’t melt, will you?”

  “Just shrink a bit,” I said.

  She smiled, glancing at Mabel. “But if you’re busy …”

  Mabel looked at me. “We’re supposed to scout locations for a calendar featuring female forestry workers,” I explained. “Jeanie is Miss October.”

  “Ah,” Mabel said. “Well, don’t let me keep you.”

  Jeanie and Wayne went back out into the rain. I handed Mabel her coat and hat, then took my squall jacket from the hook.

  “By the way,” she said, as she put her long coat on. “I know it goes against your nature, but it might be a good idea for you to keep your head down for the next little while. A couple of years, say.”

  “Why? What have I done now?”

  “Jim Kovacs is on a tear. He’s angry that Matthias talked to you about the Conrad woman rather than letting him handle it. Likewise, your assault. Not unjustifiably, either; Bobbi’s assault is Kovacs’s case, not Matthias’s, and your assault is obviously connected to Bobbi’s. He also wants Matthias off the Waverley case. Chrissy Conrad was on Anna Waverley’s boat, and admitted to knowing her, which is compelling evidence that there’s a connection between your and Bobbi’s assaults and Anna Waverley’s murder.”

  “Greg is homicide,” I said. “Kovacs is just robbery and assault.”

  “He’s handled homicides before,” Mabel said. “He’s more than qualified. Besides, he seems convinced that Matthias is covering for you because of your friendship and his relationship with Bobbi.”

  “That’s nuts. Greg’s a good cop. Besides, we aren’t all that close. Anyway, there’s nothing to cover me for. Hell, I’m a victim myself.”

  “Whatever, there’s a definite conflict of interest. Apparently, the you-know-what really hit the fan yesterday when Kovacs thought he was being shut out of Matthias’s interview with Samuel Waverley.”

  “So he’s back?”

  “Didn’t Matthias tell you?” She looked worried, as if she’d said something she shouldn’t have.

  “No,” I said, as we left the studio. “But it’s unlikely that Mr. Waverley had anything to do with his wife’s murder, isn’t it, given that he was out of the country? Unless he hired someone to do it. He didn’t, did he?”

  “Matthias doesn’t think so,” she said, rain dripping from the rim of her Tilley hat. “He was apparently pretty badly shaken by the news of his wife’s murder.”

  I put my hood up and locked the door. If the bizarre weather kept up, I thought, we were going to have to think about installing an awning over the studio entrance. Or pontoons. Jeanie and Wayne waited in Jeanie’s truck, a bright red Ford Escape Hybrid, idling silently at the curb.

  “Listen, Tom,” Mabel said. “Kovacs is looking for any excuse to bust your balls, pardon my French, and push Matthias out of both investigations. The only reason Greg hasn’t been pulled is that he outranks Kovacs and Major Crimes is short-handed at the moment. Stay out of trouble, all right?”

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  “Try harder,” she said.

  It didn’t take Jeanie, Wayne, and me long to find suitable locations for the calendar shoot. There was still some equipment left over from the Stanley Park clean-up that we could use as props. Jeanie pointed out some of the areas where she had worked in the immediate aftermath of the windstorm. “You really shouldn’t operate a chain-saw with tears in your eyes,” she said.

  Afterwards, I had Jeanie drop me off at Sea Village, where I got into my Jeep Liberty, which seemed inordinately noisy and smelly after a couple of hours in Jeanie’s hybrid, and drove to Samuel and Anna Waverley’s house in Point Grey. The house was dark and there was no one home, so I got back into my noisy, smelly Jeep and headed back toward Granville Island. Instead of going to the studio, however, I crossed Burrard Street Bridge to the West End, then worked my way through the heart of the city to Gastown, the historic site of Vancouver’s beginnings. The most popular legend is that Gastown was named after a Yorkshire steamship operator turned saloon keeper named John “Gassy Jack” Deighton, but the less poetic claim the name derives from a pocket of natural gas that erupted to the surface. How Gassy Jack acquired his nickname may also be disputed, but his likeness stands atop a whisky barrel at the corner of Carral and Water Streets, the original location of his first saloon.

  Waverley Art and Antiques was farther west along Water Street, jammed between a travel agency and currency exchange office. A bell tinkled as I went in. The shop — calling it a gallery was being overly generous — was long and narrow, musty and gloomy, and crammed to the rafters with enough heavy furniture, ornate lamps, brass bed-ends, knick-knacks, sculptures, and old paintings to fill a couple of dozen houses like the one in Point Grey. There was even a collection of taxidermy, dusty, moth-eaten and glassy-eyed: half a dozen different kinds of raptors, a couple of red foxes, and a badger. Where was PETA when you needed it, eh, guys? I silently asked.

  “Can I help you?” someone asked out loud. A head appeared above a tall
bureau. It belonged to a woman, blue haired and wrinkled, who must have been eighty years old — and at least seven feet tall.

  “I’m looking for Mr. Waverley,” I said.

  The head disappeared and a moment later the entire woman emerged from behind the bureau. She wasn’t seven feet tall at all. She was barely five feet tall. She was still eighty years old, though. “He isn’t here,” she said. “There’s been a death in the family. Mr. Waverley’s wife. Such a tragedy. I’m Mrs. Martini. How can I help you?”

  “I was acquainted with Mrs. Waverley and I’d like to express my condolences to Mr. Waverley. He isn’t at home, though. Do you know where he is?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He has a cabin near Garibaldi. You know where that is, don’t you?”

  Garibaldi was about halfway between Squamish, at the head of Howe Sound, and the resort town of Whistler. There wasn’t much there, not even a gas station. It was really just a jumping-off point for hikers, backpackers, and climbers heading into Garibaldi Provincial Park.

  “Yes,” I said. She seemed to expect more, so I added, “It’s on the Sea-to-Sky Highway on the way Whistler.”

  “That’s right,” she said, smiling. She had a full set of perfectly straight, brilliantly white teeth. If they were her own, I wanted the name of her dentist. “But there’s no phone or cellphone service, I’m afraid.”

  “Do you think you could tell me how to get there?” I said.

  “Oh, goodness, no,” she said. “I’ve never been there myself. I do have a little map that Samuel drew, though.”

  “Could I have a copy?”

  “I only have one.”

  “Perhaps I could take it next door and make a photocopy.”

  “I don’t see why not.” She disappeared behind the big bureau again, climbing onto a two-foot-high platform that supported a small office area. She rooted through a desk drawer, found what she was looking for, then descended to hand me a three-by-five index card upon which a rough map had been drawn. “You’ll bring it right back,” she said.