Last of the Independents

by Sam Wiebe

  “All right.”

  “See you next week, then.”

  “All right.”

  He’d reached the door when he about-faced and placed a fistful of bills and change on the table, spreading it out so I could count it. “Seventy-three dollars,” he said. “Ten percent.”

  I put the music up, reused the teabag for a second pot, and worked my way through the Szabo file. Quarter past ten Katherine came in. She shed her soaked peacoat, hung her umbrella on the balcony rail, and said, “Don’t ever ask me to do that again.”

  “She appreciated it. And you said you liked animals.”

  “The front ends of animals, Mike. The cute, cuddly ends.”

  “Least in this job, unlike, say, government service, your exposure to assholes is brief and irregular, pardon the pun.”

  She looked at the overturned crate and the papers on the table. She noticed the Loeb file on her chair. “Should I file this?”

  “No, it’s important it stays out.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll move it when we get back. Did your boyfriend lend you the van?”

  “His mother’s minivan,” she said. “With express instructions it’s back by noon.”

  “We won’t be any longer than that.”

  “Damn right we won’t.”

  “But we do have some stops to make,” I said.

  I love Staples. It’s an irrational love, but genuine. Only book stores and the Army & Navy inspire the same level of ardour. I love the ten-dollar packages of parchment and the locked display case of ballpoint pen refills. I love the bins of cheapjack school supplies, dollar-ninety-nine plastic hole punches, thirty-nine-cent cahiers. I love the row of overpriced lockboxes and safes and the solitary Brother typewriter in the last aisle next to the ribbons and correcting tape. Every item in the store seems both necessary and frivolous, and the store itself seems aware of this paradox. The cashiers will find any justification you come up with entirely reasonable, even if you yourself don’t believe your business really requires a tri-coloured stamp set that says Welcome! in eight languages.

  By the time we’d circumnavigated the store I’d bought a stack of folding chairs, two stainless steel filing cabinets, and a year’s supply of alligator clips and legal pads. Katherine had added an ergonomic keyboard and a CO2-powered dust remover. She circled back through the furniture section to re-examine a pleather-covered office chair.

  “Look,” she said, using the lever to raise herself incrementally and then with one depression sink till her knees were above her waist. “We should get a matching pair.”

  “Not me. I need four legs and wood so I can tip it back against the wall.”

  “You could get hurt doing that.”

  “I live on the edge, Hough.”

  She grinned. “Well, I’m getting one. And a ridged plastic office mat to go underneath it.”

  “Oh, you have to get the mat.”

  “It’s more of an investment then an accessory, really.”

  “Have to spend money to make money.”

  After doling out my debit card to the cashier, we ran through the rain, pushing our purchases down to where we’d parked. We folded down the van’s seats and squeezed everything into the back, abandoning the shopping carts on the curb.

  As Katherine inched out of the parking spot, I said, “How many government jobs let you pick your furniture?”

  “You know,” she said, “there are always going to be other students looking for part-time work.”

  “It took a long time for me to get used to your many shortcomings. I don’t want to go through that every year.”

  “What you mean to say is, it’s hard to find someone gullible enough to administer a suppository to your dog.”

  “Is that what I mean?” The dashboard clock read 11:40. I brought out Django’s itinerary and gave Katherine directions to Enola Curious Studios.

  “We’ll be quick,” I promised.

  The studio was on the third floor of a yellow building just off Broadway and Quebec. Katherine parked beneath an overhanging maple tree behind the property, her boyfriend’s mother’s silver Odyssey slotting between a beige Vanagon and a custard-coloured Mustang.

  The studio’s double-door back entrance was locked. We walked around and caught the front door as a skinny beret-wearing kid was exiting. He looked grateful for the help as he maneuvered his upright bass through the doorway.

  On the landing, three forty-year-olds in punk regalia were passing around a joint. Two of them leered at Katherine. The third leered at me. Only as we reached the last flight could I hear soft music from inside. As I opened the hallway door the music got louder, and by the time we were standing at the studio entrance I recognized the song as a thrash-metal cover of “The Way You Look Tonight.”

  “Get it? Because it’s ironic,” I said to Katherine as I knocked on the door.

  The music cut off. I knocked again. Bare feet padded across the carpet. The door opened and a woman ushered us in. Before I could ask if she was Amelia Yates or Yeats she had disappeared through a glass-paned door at the end of the hall.

  On the left side of the hallway was a live room with a piano in the corner, patch-cords snaked across the floor, and a drum kit in the centre surrounded by a forest of microphones on boom stands. The walls were covered with ribbed foam. Movable baffles had been set up around the kit. The right side of the hall led to smaller rooms: a storage closet containing, among other things, a Fender Rhodes and a sitar, two isolation booths with ancient-looking Koss headphones hanging off music stands, and a break room with a pink-upholstered couch.

  “Must be worth a fortune,” Katherine said.

  From the glass room the music blasted out, stopped, blasted out, stopped.

  I opened the door to the central booth. The woman was facing away from us, staring at a pair of computer monitors each bigger than my grandmother’s television. Her crescent-shaped mahogany desk was flanked by speakers, no doubt positioned equidistant from her ears. A half-finished bottle of Diet Dr. Pepper with a pink straw stuffed inside sat next to the office chair.

  “Miss Yates?” I said.

  “Just a sec, just a sec.” She manipulated a wave form on one of the screens, pulled down a menu on the other. She held up her hand, gesturing for us to wait.

  The walls were decorated with framed photos, a gold record, a letter of nomination from the Juno Awards, an official thank-you from some fundraiser. I was looking for clarification on the Yates-Yeats question, but the documents were evenly split. I picked out faces in the photos. The crème de la crème of Canadian music superstardom: the bald guy from the Tragically Hip, Randy Bachman’s brother, one of the bald guys from the Barenaked Ladies, Dan Ackroyd in his Elwood Blues get-up, Randy Bachman’s son, Colin James, Avril Lavigne, the bald guy from Hard Core Logo, and Randy Bachman. And on the door, a very nice signed photo of a young Amelia Yates or Yeats in between the Wilson sisters from Heart.

  “Look,” Katherine whispered, nudging me no doubt to inspect one of the photos. Instead she pointed to Yeats’s chair. “Same as the one I just bought.”

  “Then you’ve got a lot in common.”

  “Okay, sorry,” Ms. Yates said, swivelling to face us. “Just have to bounce this down for those creeps in the hall.”

  The song started up again and we were forced to endure the entire two minutes and fifteen seconds. When it finished, she said, “How’s it sound?”

  “Fine,” Katherine said with exceeding politeness, or at least her version of it.

  “I’m sure The Man will feel it’s been suitably stuck to him,” I said.

  “Punk’s not my thing either,” she said, “but you have to admit those drums sound lethal.”

  She was unnervingly beautiful. To give a laundry list of her attributes with a poetic rendering of measurements and hues would miss the quality that made her that way — brown hair, brown eyes, brown skin, purple slacks, and an oversized Joan Jett tee exposing one per
fect shoulder. Mussed hair swept back from her face. She was the kind of impossible thin that we decry in polite company, before retreating to privacy to think about lithe hips and small high firmly sculpted breasts. She didn’t look fragile, though, or arrogant. Just preoccupied.

  The tray on her computer ejected a disk. Amelia Yates handed the disk to Katherine. “Could you run this over to them?”

  Katherine balked but took the disk and left the room, shooting me a what-a-bitch roll of her eyes.

  “Ms. Yates,” I said. “First, is it Yates as in Rowdy or Yeats as in ‘Rough Beast?’”

  “Either or,” she said. “It’s a made-up name. My dad always spelled it A-T-E-S because it seemed more American. But he was born in the West Indies, spent most of his childhood in London, and the last thing he wanted was to be reminded of anything or anyone British.”

  “Irish,” I said.

  “Same difference. So pick a spelling.”

  “I like E-A,” I said. “My name’s Mike Drayton, I’m a private investigator.”

  “Cliff hired you.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “He told me this morning you might be coming by.” She pointed to a large grey box in the corner of the room, its empty reels like owlish metal eyes. “That’s the reel-to-reel. I asked him if he had a source for new two-inch tape. He’s working on it. He’s a good guy to know. I’m so sorry about Django.”

  “Could you take me through that Friday?”

  She nodded, uncapped her soda. “He got here about ten with the Ampex. I had the money for him. We dickered for a little bit.” She shrugged, exposing more of that shoulder. “And then he left.”

  “Django was with him the whole time?”

  “Pretty much. He likes to bang on the drums, so he did that while Cliff and I discussed price.”

  “He seemed okay?”

  “Django?” She smiled. “He’s a great kid. I gave him a CD of his namesake, which he seemed to appreciate. He didn’t seem like he got many gifts.”

  “You think the relationship with his father was ...” I let her finish the sentence.

  “I don’t know. Cliff seems like a good dad. Just strict. But then Cliff could’ve been worried he’d break something expensive. I told Cliff it’s fine, let him play the drums. It’s just stuff, right?”

  I asked her more questions just to ask her questions. When Katherine came back to tell me we had to go, Amelia Yeats was telling me about the studio.

  “I named it after a band I started in grade ten with a girlfriend of mine. We’d do Heart and Zep covers, as well as our awful originals. We were playing up that are-they-lovers angle. Got us an opening slot on a Bif Naked tour. We were never as good live as we were in the studio, since Alison was always nervous singing in front of an audience. But it was the first time I did something musical that didn’t have anything to do with my dad.”

  “We really have to go,” Katherine said over my shoulder.

  “Your dad was who?” I asked, standing up but keeping my back to the door.

  “He still is,” she said. “Chet Yates. The producer.”

  “Wow,” I said, not recognizing the name.

  “Yeah. When your dad’s photo album has pics of Hendrix and Syd Barrett, you’re kind of in the music biz whether you want to be or not.” She gestured at the room, the studio, the building. “But I’ve done all right for myself.”

  “Who’ve you worked with?” I asked, but Katherine insisted and I let myself be dragged from the room. Amelia Yeats waved and walked us out, trailing behind to lock the door.

  “Any other questions, call,” she said.

  In the confines of the van, Katherine said to me, “It’s ten past one.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m late getting the car back, Mike.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What a self-centred ass.”

  “Her or me?”

  “Both.”

  “I thought she was all right.”

  “No kidding,” Katherine said.

  V

  Puritans and True Believers

  Eyeball three parts Canada Dry club soda, add one part President’s Choice red grape juice, a thimble’s worth of lemon juice and the same of lime. It’s important to add the ingredients in that order, as the grape juice is heavier and won’t mix properly if added first. My grandmother took these tonics medicinally at two in the afternoon and again at seven, claiming they levelled off her blood sugar and took the place of a diuretic. When she called down to ask if I wanted one, I was as dead to the world as one of the Kroons’ customers. I mumbled a yes instead of asking for tea.

  I’d spent Saturday night back in the funeral home, and had the same to look forward to tonight. I’d lasted about thirty hours tweaked on caffeine and a disappearing-reappearing Yeats-inspired erection. I took a shower in the basement stall, then dressed and headed upstairs.

  My grandmother had set up one of her TV trays on the back porch. We sat and looked at the carnage wrought by last night’s windstorm. That morning, when I’d delivered my dog from the throes of constipation, the laurel bushes that served as a fence between us and our neighbour had been rocking ferociously. Now, as I ate half the tuna sandwich my grandmother made, I watched the dog inspect the fallen branches and root beneath the laurel leaves that carpeted our backyard.

  “You sure you don’t mind doing the yard?” My grandmother’s way of introducing a chore she wanted done.

  “No big deal, Gran.”

  “And the doorframe, you’ll take care of that?”

  “I’ll get it done.”

  “I know. You’ve just been busy. Like your grandfather, always working even when you’re not.”

  We watched the dog toy with the slack clothesline, fumbling a clothes-peg about the yard with her snout.

  “Too bad that’s not a power line,” my grandmother said.

  At 3:00 a.m. I woke up behind the desk in the Kroons’ office, bathed in the glow from the laptop. I could hear what sounded like plastic being dragged across concrete. The screen showed no movement in the nearby rooms. I stood up, conscious of the bulge in my pants, thinking if I’d attended to that and ignored the yard work, I probably wouldn’t have fallen asleep. I was glad there wasn’t a camera on me.

  I trained my Mag-Lite on the carpet, walked to the door of the embalming room, and threw the door open. It slammed off the wall. I hit the lights. Nothing.

  The sound had stopped. I killed the lights and shut the door. Down the hallway and back to the room, silence except for my own footfalls. At the door to the office I heard the same scraping sound from the break room. I trained the light through the glass door and saw a mouse beat a swift retreat to the darkness of the space behind the cupboards.

  I relaxed, thinking, that’s exactly how the situation plays out in a horror movie, right before Jason Voorhees appears and eviscerates some unsuspecting co-ed.

  I went back to the office and sat down behind the desk in the darkness and the silence. I turned off the Mag-Lite.

  “Guess there’s nothing to be afraid of,” I said, hoping it was true.

  Monday afternoon I stumbled sleep-deprived into my office, collected my notes and the list of questions I’d prepared, and headed out to interview the proprietor of Imperial Exchange and Pawn, the last place Django James Szabo had been seen. I was at the door when I remembered to dump the receipts I’d just collected on the table and Katherine’s package on her desk (a special-delivery box that contained some kind of sex toy she’d been too embarrassed to have sent to her home because her father opens her mail). As I did this I chanced to look up at the car calendar and noticed it was Labour Day, a statutory holiday, and nothing was open. The only person foolish enough to be in their office on this fine rainless afternoon was me.

  Tuesday I was outside of Imperial Pawn at 9:54 a.m. I spent the minutes in my car sucking back a London Fog and holding Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class in front of me and trying to make sense of the lett
er-like markings within it. It was the kind of book where you have to read every sentence at least three times to figure out what’s going on, and by then you’ve forgotten the context. I try to alternate reading something educational with reading something fun, a sort of Nabisco Frosted Mini-Wheats reading program. I’d finished the Leonard on Monday; before that it had been Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer. I liked Hoffer: every other sentence read like it could have been on a fridge magnet. The Veblen was harder going. Occasionally, though, you’d come across something like this:

  As has been indicated in an earlier chapter, there is reason to believe that the institution of ownership has begun with the ownership of persons, primarily women. The incentives to acquiring such property have apparently been: (1) a propensity for dominance and coercion; (2) the utility of these persons as evidence of the prowess of their owner; (3) the utility of their services.

  I was struggling with that when I saw a hairy arm twist the sign on the door to WE ARE OPEN. A moment later, the neon sign flickered to life. It was 10:02 a.m.

  Imperial Pawn was located on the corner of a strip mall. There were a few parking spaces in front of the shop, and a larger lot around back. Cliff Szabo’s Taurus had been parked on the side street. I’d looked the area over when I arrived, as if the months between the disappearance and now might have left some trace. But of course there was nothing to see. No traffic cameras, no nearby stores. Across the street were a Value Village and a large, empty parking lot. Doubtless the people there had been grilled by the police, but I made a note to ask them again once I finished with Imperial Pawn.

  An electronic bell dinged when I entered the store. “Morning,” I said to the corpse behind the counter. He was sitting on a stool behind a cash register, arms crossed as if daring business to shows its face. Thick beard and thick eyebrows, a Chia Pet growing on each arm. A flattened Roman nose. He gave the slightest of nods.