Cal Rogan Mysteries, Books 1, 2 & 3 (Box Set)

by Robert P. French

  Silent along Hastings.

  Hastings and Main.

  She comes to a halt outside the Carnegie library. The sidewalk is teeming with addicts, dealers and drunks: a view of the real Vancouver pointedly not televised to the world during the 2010 Olympics. One old timer with a long, yellow-stained, white beard is vomiting into the gutter, not ten feet in front of the car. An addict, stripped to the waist, is at the foot of the library steps, gyrating in the strange dance that crack has imprinted onto his neurons. A gaunt, pimpled youth is furtively buying something from another addict, all happening in clear line of site of the Main Street police station.

  Several pairs of resentful eyes are drilled in on the Porsche.

  “Get out of this car, Cal.” She stares straight ahead, her taut knuckles gleaming white against the black leather of the steering wheel.

  “Sam—”

  “Out. Now.”

  My hand reaches for the door handle.

  “Don’t you ever come near me or my daughter again, you bastard,” she says through her teeth. “Thanks to you, we have to get Ellie out of Vancouver. George and I have accelerated our plans for moving to Toronto. Ellie and I are going on ahead. We’re leaving in ten days, ten days during which she will have a bodyguard 24/7. Now get out of this car and out of our lives.”

  “Sam, please—”

  “No, Cal. No more. Just go. Get out there with the other degenerates.”

  A giant auger is drilling out a void in my gut as I slide out of the SUV and close the door. Does this mean that I’ll never see Ellie again? My need to find Kevin’s killer crumbles to nothing in the face of this eventuality.

  Sam is frozen at the wheel of the car. A white marble statue in designer clothes, with tears streaming down her cheeks and dripping off the line of her jaw. Then she is gone in a roar of exhaust and I try to hold her image in my mind, to photograph it indelibly and permanently onto my memory, to keep a picture of the only woman I have ever loved. I watch her until she disappears into the distance, one more vehicle in the Hastings Street flow.

  I look around at the denizens of ‘Wastings and Pain’ as the intersection is often called. Do I belong here? Am I now trapped in this circle of hell? Am I forever to be one of these poor lost souls that Sam—with her newly-won, wealthy, West Van eyes—can see only as degenerates?

  Hell, a few years ago, that was what I used to call them as I sat in the comfort of my police cruiser. Now I am one of them.

  But right now too many eyes are on me. This is the danger zone. I pull Arnold’s business card from my pocket. The address on the back is only four blocks away. I put my head down and head east towards my new digs in Strathcona, so very glad that Arnold gave me a second chance.

  Although I wonder why he did.

  And I wonder if there’s any way Sam will.

  28

  Cal

  It’s even a worse dive than Beanie’s, the dim lighting hiding the unsanitary condition of the place. Roy, instantly recognizable by his battered leather hat, is sitting hunched over a table, by himself, his back to me. It’s taken me all morning to track him down and I’m going to have to handle him carefully.

  “Hi, Roy.” I say quietly.

  In an instant he’s on his feet, stumbling slightly as his foot catches in the chair leg.

  “It’s OK Roy, I’m not mad. I understand.”

  The naked fear on his face melts into a disbelieving wariness.

  “Sit down, I’ll get you another beer.”

  I head back to the bar, my back to him, praying that my trust will be reciprocated and he will not run. Or maybe just the lure of another beer will keep him in place. I order and pay for a pint of his favourite brew without looking back at him. I get a bottled beer for myself because there’s no way I’m going to drink out of one of the glasses here. I am not too sure about drinking out of the bottle even though, for such a crappy place, the beer is an excellent local brew—go figure.

  When I turn, he is sitting down again but this time on the other side of the table, watching me. As I approach, he examines the mess that was recently my face, then slips a glance at the emergency exit door at the back of the bar.

  “I’m sorry, Rocky.” He says, even before I have lowered myself into the chair, cringing at the unclean, sticky feel of the arms.

  “What happened Roy?” I reach forward and squeeze his forearm. The gentle gesture works.

  “They made me do it, Rock. Me and Nelson. I was talking to Nelson outside the Irish Heather, he was running on the spot, you know the way he does when he’s talking to you. And they pull up in this big black car. The one in the fancy leather jacket, he gives the orders and the others force me and Nelson down the alley.”

  The words are tumbling out on top of one another. “They sez to Nelson that if he don’t find you and bring you back there, they’re gonna kill me and then find him and kill him too. Poor old Nelson’s not playing with a full deck but he understood what they was saying and off he runs. Then the big guy on the crutches hustles all the crack-heads out of the alley and they made me stand there and tell ’em when you arrived.

  “I’m sorry Rock, there’s nothing I could do about it.”

  “It’s no problem Roy.” I say.

  He seems sincere but I can’t be sure.

  “It was me called the cops for you. Thank God I had a quarter in my pocket fer the phone.” He says.

  I remember the scream of the sirens as they were kicking the crap out of me.

  “Thanks, Roy. You probably saved my life.”

  He smiles, takes a long draft of his beer and relaxes back in the chair. Maybe I can catch him off guard.

  “Roy, did you kill Kevin?”

  He takes in a sharp breath and his eyes lock on to mine.

  “How did you know?” His voice comes out as a whisper.

  It’s my turn to stare with eyes wide open. Roy just admitted to killing Kevin! My only two remaining friends and one killed the other. What is this? A Greek tragedy?

  The desire for revenge is powerful. Roy’s rage at the death of his buddy Tommy and the deaths of Kevin’s other guinea pigs must have driven him to the ultimate conclusion: an eye for an eye. But Kevin… my best and oldest friend, the man whose parents were my second parents, the only friend to stick by me as I spiralled down. Roy snatched his life away and with it took my one link to normalcy. Revenge. Roy is going to learn something about revenge.

  He reads the rising storm and leaps to his feet, fear written on his face.

  “No, no. I didn’t kill him.” His voice is a panicked squeak. “What I meant to say was how did you know I was planning to? I wanted to. But I didn’t do it, honest Rock. Honest to God.” His eyes cut for a second to the back door.

  Now I don’t know what to think. I have heard hundreds of protestations of innocence in my career but I cannot tell if his outburst is the truth. I want it to be but that does not make it so. But then this is the first time I’ve investigated the murder of a friend. My emotions are in the mix, clouding my observation. I can’t see the truth for the feelings. In my confusion, I want to grab him and shake it out of him but as I start to move, the one true part of me takes over, the cop.

  Deep breath. Sit down. Deep breath.

  “Sit down Roy.” He glances again at the back door, I can see him calculating the odds.

  “Sit down Roy.” He shrugs and slumps back down into the filthy chair. I want out of this disgusting place so badly but now’s not the time to make the move.

  The cop is back in charge. “So Roy, if you didn’t kill Kevin, where were you that Saturday morning?”

  He looks at his beer for a second then picks it up and takes another deep draft. He keeps his eyes averted and as he puts the glass back on the stained table top. “I’d rather not say, Rocky. Don’t make me.”

  “Roy, where were you?”

  “Please, Rocky. You don’t wanna hear the answer”

  I just look at him and wait. His eyes do the trapped ani
mal routine for a while and then he resigns himself to the inevitable.

  “OK. OK. I’ll tell you.” He finishes his beer in one swallow. “Just get me another one, will you, Rock?”

  I get up and go to the bar. This time I don’t take my eyes off him for an instant. He moves in his chair and I tense, ready to chase after him if he makes a break for the back door.

  When I return, he downs half the beer. He’s had enough to loosen his tongue but he’s still on the right side of sober. Just.

  “OK. Here’s the thing… I been kinda following you.

  “I gotta lot of friends but you’re the only one that still has a part of his old life. Yer Saturday trip to see Ellie was a part of yer life I didn’t know nothing about and I figured you didn’t want me to know about it neither. You always said you was going to arrange for me to meet her but it never happened. I always felt hurt by that.”

  For a moment I am surprised that Roy expresses his hurt at the fact that I have never taken him to see Ellie. Then I realize I’m doing just what everyone else does when they encounter a junkie or an alcoholic. I forgot that despite the rough exterior, Roy is as sensitive and as vulnerable as any other human being. Living on the streets does not entirely lessen a person’s humanity.

  He picks up his beer glass but puts it down again without drinking. “Anyways, I got curious and about a year or so ago, I started following you.” He averts his eyes. “At first I’d just trail you to the bus stop and then one day, a number four and a number seven came along at the same time. You got on the first one, so I jumped on the second one and when you got off at Arbutus, I got off too and followed you to Kevin’s. When you left, Kevin stayed in his little patch of front yard, watering the plants. I waited a bit and then went over and talked to him. He was a nice fella, friendly. Not many west-siders would take the time to talk to a guy like me. He even gave me a couple of bucks.”

  More beer vanishes down Roy’s throat. “So every week I would follow you and every week I got to know more and more of yer route. Finally I managed to follow you over to West Van, to Ellie’s house.” Her name wrenches the feelings of loss in my gut.

  “So once I knew where she lived, when you left on a Saturday to go to change at Kevin’s house, if the weather was OK, I’d go over to West Van and hide out near the house and follow you and watch you with her.

  “One time, I almost came up and talked to you but I figured you’d be mad, so I didn’t.”

  I cannot keep the amazement out of my voice. “You’ve been stalking me?”

  “Not stalking, just taking a friendly interest. I never meant no harm, you know that Rocky.”

  “But why, Roy?”

  “I told’ja. I wanted to see that other part of yer life. I’m glad I did. It gave me faith that maybe you can get off the heroin. You gotta, Rocky. That lovely little kid needs a proper Daddy, not some junkie living on the streets.”

  His revelation has knocked me off course. I don’t know whether to be touched by his interest in my other life or disturbed by the fact that he’s been stalking Ellie and me. I’ll process it later.

  “So are you saying you followed me that Saturday when Kevin was killed?”

  “Yeah, I can prove it too. I can tell you what happened, eh. You went to Ellie’s house and spoke with her Ma for a bit. She handed you something, money I think. Then you walked down to the docks, had a talk with her and she looked at something in the water. You walked along the beach for a long time and I couldn’t see everything you done, ’cos I had to stay out of sight. Then you looked in a bunch of them fancy shops and went to have lunch at some Italian place.”

  Roy’s description is just too detailed to be fabricated but the clincher for me is a sudden memory of being with him in the Yaletown pub. I remember his words. It’s gonna be hard but you’ve gotta do it. For yourself and for that cute little daughter of yours. You’ll be able to get back on your feet and then you can take her to a fancy Italian restaurant anytime you want. The memory of the words holds no comfort for me, I may never go to an Italian restaurant with Ellie again, but it adds the ring of truth to Roy’s tale. How else would he have known about the Italian restaurant?

  There’s just one thing more I need to know.

  “How did you know about Kevin’s drug testing?” I ask.

  Roy looks with longing at his empty glass so I get him another.

  “OK. A coupla months back, I was sitting on a bench in Pigeon Park with some guys and up walks Kevin. You know how tall he was; he stood out like a nun in a whorehouse. He looks around a bit, kinda scoping out the various junkies and I kinda waved and he recognizes me from that time I talked to him. He walks over and we get talking, eh.

  “After a bit, he takes me for a beer at Beanie’s and he tells me about this drug he’s developed and would I help him find some people to test it out on. He offers to pay me for helping and he says he’d pay the people who tried the drug twenty-five bucks a time.

  “It seemed like a sweet deal, so I rounded up a bunch of people I know: some drinking buddies and a few heroin addicts. They may have been a bunch of drunks and junkies but they was good people. Normal, nice people who had regular lives before the booze or the drugs took over. Well, shit, y’knew most of ’em yerself.”

  As much as I don’t want to, I believe what he is saying.

  “It was great at first, me and a bunch of folks was making some good money and some of ’em wasn’t craving like they used to. It was amazing… Then it happened. The drug started killing us off. I was scared at first, I thought I was gonna die too. I was scared to go to sleep at night in case I didn’t wake up. But after a while I got as mad as hell. But when Tommy died, that was it.”

  He’s grinding his teeth.

  “What did you do?” I ask.

  “I was so mad I decided I’d kill the fucker. I planned it all out with a couple of buddies. We decided I’d have to lure him down here into one of the alleys and then we’d do him.” He gives me a sheepish look. “I know he was yer friend an’ all and I thought about that; I did. Robbing you of yer only other friend wasn’t right but when it came down to it, he was still a murderer.

  “Anyways, I phoned him up—I knew his number from when I’d been helping him—and told him that I was gonna go to the police if he didn’t cough up a thousand bucks. He was shit-scared and agreed right away. I told him to meet me outside the Irish Heather at five o’clock on Saturday evening. The plan was to take him into the alley and a couple of the guys was gonna hit him with a length of re-bar or two-by-four and I was gonna finish him off with my good old knife.”

  He sighs. “We waited until after six, but of course, he never shows up. Someone beat us to it. So anyways, one of the guys had a bottle so we went off to Oppenheimer Park. On the way there, I ran into you outside Sunrise Market but you was off to fix yerself up at the Lion, so you probably don’t remember.”

  More beer vanishes down the throat and he chuckles. “I know he was yer friend and all but when you told me about how you got that thousand bucks, my thousand bucks, outta his wallet, I thought I was gonna bust a gut. It made me think that maybe there is some justice in the world, after all.”

  I’m bobbing like a cork on a storm of emotions.

  Roy’s last words have made me so angry that I want to grab him and wipe that smile off his face. Yet at the same time I’m relieved that he is not responsible for Kevin’s death and that we can go back to the way we were before.

  Except that we can’t. Roy was in my cop world and then in my junkie world whereas Kevin and Ellie were in my other world. Now those lines are blurred. Where will our relationship go from here?

  And on top of it all, I have now eliminated my prime suspect in Kevin’s murder. Do I have to face the possibility, in fact the probability, that Kevin killed himself? Is my dream of solving the crime and getting back into the police force just another junkie dream? Or is there something I’m missing?

  Then I remember Ellie’s picture…

&nb
sp; “Rock?” Roy breaks into my thoughts. “Y’ain’t mad I followed’ja when you went to see Ellie eh?”

  I shake my head and sigh. “No Roy, it’s OK. You didn’t mean any harm.” I feel a real pain in my heart. “Anyway, I won’t be going over there anymore. Next week Sam’s taking Ellie to live in Toronto and she has said that I can’t see her any—” Suddenly, out of nowhere, tears are streaming down my face and I’m racked with sobs. I have been pushing the thoughts of Ellie to the back of my mind but now it’s all breaking through. Roy reaches his filthy old hand across the table and pats my forearm in comfort. It just makes me sob all the more.

  29

  Cal

  With trepidation, I type george walsh finance vancouver and it’s right there in front of me. The logo of Walsh Investment Corporation Ltd. comprises the three bright slashes of colour, yellow, green and purple, which I have seen before in two places: last week, I saw it on a business card poking its head out from under a box of tissues on Sandi’s desk at QX4; two days ago, I saw it in the hospital, in a picture drawn for me by my darling Ellie, a picture that features the Wall Centre building bearing the logo of her soon-to-be stepfather’s company.

  The thought of Ellie opens the big wound. When Sam takes her to Toronto, I may never see her again. Would the gang really come after Ellie? I have to admit that from what I know of drug gangs, they will do anything; mercy is not in their vocabulary. It wrenches me inside to know it is safer for Ellie and Sam if they move as far away from me as possible. But I must not think about this right now. I just need to focus on what I’m doing here. I can think about Ellie later.

  I click my way around Walsh’s website—which I grudgingly have to admit is pretty impressive—until I find a page entitled Current Investments. It has company names listed alphabetically. Holding my breath, I scroll down, recognizing a few of the names and logos of companies that George has invested in. Close to the bottom of the list is QX4.