Last of the Independents

by Sam Wiebe

  “That’s what we all want,” Kroon said.

  “I don’t consider a dead body particularly sacred.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “But it’s wrong for the bodies to be violated. If dropping this could lead to another incident, then I do object.”

  “How can you if you’re working for us?”

  “I object morally.”

  He grinned. “Hard to put noggin to pillow knowing the big bad Corpse Humper’s out there, uh? I’m right there with you. Difference between us is, for me, no question about it, finances top morals. You willing to work gratis, order to catch this guy?”

  “I can’t,” I said, thinking but not adding that I already had my charity cases, and both of them trumped the Kroons’.

  “So how can we come to an accord on this?” Kroon the Younger said. “Some way we can do business and part friends?”

  “Give me till Remembrance Day,” I said.

  “You can catch him in that time?”

  “Yes.”

  “You guarantee it?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Remembrance Day is what, the 11th?” He turned it over in his head. “Yeah, I can do that.”

  He stood and extended a lanky arm across the table. “Glad we got that squared away.”

  As Kroon left I dialed Ben again. On the sixth ring a subdued voice said, “Yeah?”

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “In the bath.”

  “For the last three hours?”

  “I’m fine, Mike.”

  “Out with it.”

  “I got some news, okay?”

  “Bad?”

  “Bad, yeah. And no I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Someone found your sister’s body?” A white wall appeared on my mind’s peripheral. Pain, relief, gladness, sorrow, and the exuberance of knowing that finally these emotions could be expressed.

  But Ben said, “Not about her,” and the wall sank back below the horizon. “I don’t want to go over it on the phone.”

  “Fair enough. Interested in coming with me on a stakeout?”

  “I guess.”

  “You’ve only been begging me for months.”

  “That was then,” he said.

  I closed up the office, set the alarm. The trees had begun to drop their multicoloured burden, clogging drains and sewers along the side streets that I took to get to Ben’s building. Some of the houses I passed were already festooned with Hallowe’en decorations, corpses and mummies. A few even had their Christmas lights up.

  I drove with the windows down, savoring the last few days of the year before the lack of heat became noticeable. Fall is the best season, and in Vancouver, at least, it seems the shortest.

  I kept thinking about Amelia Yeats. I found it hard to keep my bearings around her. What threw me, and I only clarified the thought while pulling into a parking space in front of the building next to the Djembe Hut, was that Yeats was the most self-sufficient person I’d ever met. Mira had been strong, but she had needs, for companionship, for sex. Yeats didn’t seem to need anyone. If she went with me it was out of desire or whim. My worry was that she’d take to me briefly, like a new toy, only to lose interest when another novelty came into her field of vision. I wondered what that would be. A performance artist? A human spider who climbs buildings with suction cups? I was already pondering the dissolution of our relationship, and being aware of this made me think I’d blown the kiss out of proportion. It had been a chance occurrence, with no guarantee to repetition. I didn’t know what it had been. In relationships, I am the last person to spot the obvious play.

  Ben wasn’t waiting by the curb. I locked the car and took the staircase at the side of the building, banged on the door at the top. A Jamaican woman holding a baby opened the door. She nodded to the end of the hallway behind her, a door with a cardboard skeleton thumbtacked to it. “Ben in there.” Smells from the kitchen, chicken and peppers. I pounded on Ben’s door and made the brass-jointed skeleton dance.

  “Come in.”

  Ben sat on the edge of the bed, dressed in cords and a hoodie, sneakers laced and tied. A cigarette burned between his fingers. He’d been crying.

  “You need to tell me about this,” I said, leaning on the doorframe.

  “All right. In the car.”

  But in the car he didn’t want to talk, either. I drove to a Subway where we ordered sandwiches and I filled my Thermos. I keep a case of water in the car, along with a Costco-sized box of granola bars, the nutritive kind, not the ones with chocolate coating. In the event that following Zak Atero kept us car-bound for the next twelve hours, we wouldn’t suffer for food.

  Following Zak proved more challenging than that. At five he came out of his brother’s house and peeled out of the cul-de-sac in a white Eagle with a Jesus fish bolted above the rear plate. He was an impatient driver, cutting people off, making snap turns without signaling. When he made a right off Granville I nearly lost him. By making the next right and crawling back, I found the Eagle in the parking lot of a Save-On. Someone was in the car with Atero.

  After a moment the two men climbed out of the car and crossed the lot to a Cold Beer and Wine. They were inside for seven minutes before Atero came out carrying a flat of beer and the other man, stocky, Chinese, clutching a paper bag.

  “Some sort of payoff,” I said.

  “How can you tell?” Ben asked me.

  “The paper bag.”

  “Alcohol comes in paper bags, case you weren’t aware.”

  “The bag wasn’t shaped to a container or bottle. It’s half rolled-up, creased, so it wasn’t new.”

  “Do you know who the Chinese guy is?”

  “No.”

  Atero placed the beer in the car. The other man held onto the bag. They pulled out of the lot, headed east, made a left on Cambie. A few blocks north they pulled into a strip mall of predominantly East Asian shops. Atero idled while the other man dashed into a Mumbai Sweets and emerged moments later with another wadded-up paper bag.

  They made four other stops before Atero dropped his partner at a parking garage near the Chapters on Broadway. The man walked down the ramp as Atero sped off.

  “Here’s my guess,” Ben said, upright in his seat now, a bit of his vigor restored. “My guess is they’re the world’s least efficient garbage removal company.”

  Atero was picking up speed as he dashed through lanes and ran stale yellows. I got caught behind a light and he was soon out of view. Moments later I was two cars behind, and we went over the Granville Street Bridge together.

  “Drugs?” Ben asked me.

  “Or protection money. Could be anything.”

  “Think they do this every week?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “I bet they don’t reuse those paper bags,” Ben said. “I hate to think of them piling up in some landfill.”

  “We could ask him,” I said.

  “What does any of this have to do with the disappearance?”

  “Beats me.”

  Zak Atero took a circuitous route home, over the Granville and back up the Cambie by way of a few one-way streets and alleys. It was a route designed to lose a tail, but he drove it mechanically, with no heed to what cars were in his proximity. I kept back for the most part. When he went down the alley I hung a right and then a left so that I was in front of him when he came out. I waited for him to pass me. Despite my best moves, if Atero had been looking he would have lost me easily.

  He parked in front of his brother’s house, a grey and brown Vancouver Special that had survived half a century without attaining much in the way of dignity. Atero went around the back. I parked in the alley with the lights off and watched through the kitchen window. His brother was beefier, his hair fairer and thinning, but they had the same axe-blade of a face, close-set eyes and narrow, high-bridged nose. The house could stand a re-siding, the eaves were clogged with mucilage from the backyard trees, and the deck, which sloped towa
rds the alley, was in need of buttressing.

  At eleven the lights in the upstairs went off, but the basement lights still burned. Through a gauze of curtain I saw Zak Atero flopped on a couch watching sitcoms, a crack pipe resting in a wooden bowl on a burn-pocked ottoman. I saw no signs of anyone else in the house.

  I parked out front and set the interior light so it wouldn’t come on when I opened the door. Every hour I’d walk around the block and peer over the fence to make sure Atero hadn’t moved. He was comatose by midnight, the television still aglow.

  At two we had our sandwiches. My window was open just enough so the windows wouldn’t fog. We drank tea to keep warm.

  “The glamorous world of private detection,” I said, keeping my voice low. “Kind of makes you want to get back to video games, doesn’t it?”

  “You kidding?” He took a bite of a sloppy meatball sub that hadn’t aged well. “I’m having a great time.”

  “Feel like telling me what got to you earlier?”

  “It’s business related.”

  “I’m in business.”

  He sighed. “I met with what’s left of my development team. The others split for greener pastures. I don’t blame them — I mean, not everyone made what I made off Blood 2. They wanted to meet to discuss the third one, whether we’re gonna go through with it or disband.”

  “And you disbanded?”

  “Worse,” he said.

  “You came up with an idea but it’s not what you wanted.”

  “Even worse, because I didn’t come up with it. Mahmoud, the project leader, brought in this twenty-one-year-old, Felipe, straight out of the Art Institute. He pitched this idea of, instead of a sequel, making a spinoff first-person shooter using the same characters.” He sniffed. “Mahmoud says it’s the only way to keep the team together.”

  “So?”

  “So it’s not right,” he said. “Magnus and Rosalind aren’t kill-crazy psychopaths. It’s not a game where you pick up little white health kits, for God’s sake. There’s depth and poetry to it. And I know you’re not an artist, or a big video game guy, but Your Blood is a Drug! is important to people. They’ll see this FPS and think, ‘Oh, Loeb doesn’t care anymore, he’ll license anything. He’s got his paycheck. Now he just wants to piss on us.’”

  “Didn’t hurt those plumbers, being in a few subpar games.”

  “But that’s a brand,” Ben said. “I’m talking about a world that I created, that I wrote. You see the logo and I want you to think of more than just entrails flying at people. You think Felipe with his newly minted degree gives a shit about maintaining that legacy?”

  “Not so loud.”

  “Sorry, okay? Sorry.”

  I handed him a napkin that was free of mustard stains and listened to him blow his nose. The light from the small basement windows winked out.

  “I’ve never heard of anyone actually refer to their legacy,” I said. “Let alone someone under thirty. Not every book’s got to be Moby-Dick. If it makes the kids happy, and everyone gets paid, who gives a shit?”

  “You wouldn’t understand,” said Ben.

  “Probably not.” I refilled one of the mugs I’d brought and handed it to him. The tea had already lost most of its heat.

  I said, “You know that question, what’d you rather be, rich or famous? Well you’ve got both. Granted, you’re not famous to anyone who doesn’t read PC World, but it’s still a kind of fame.”

  “But I want to be famous for the right things.”

  I shook my head. “This is like talking to a guy who won the Lotto and wonders why it couldn’t have been eight million ’stead of six.”

  “Maybe,” he said, depositing the snot-filled napkin out the window.

  We watched the dark house. After fifteen minutes by the dashboard clock we packed it in. As I drove Ben home he said, “If you had your choice what’d it be?”

  “Between?”

  “Fame and fortune.”

  “I’d settle for solvency and a clean conscience.”

  “But if you had to choose,” he said.

  I looked at him like he’d been sneaking hits off Zak Atero’s pipe. “You’re not serious.”

  “So money then.”

  “Course.”

  “I could just give you some.”

  “You should.”

  “I mean it,” he said. “I don’t have much to spend it on. Not like I have a lot of friends. How much do you need?”

  “Why be stingy, how ’bout half?”

  “Seriously, Drayton.”

  “I’m not taking anything from you, Loeb.”

  “Well, Drayton, that makes me think you’re full of shit. I’d’ve given you twenty grand here and now, and you said no. That means money’s not as important.”

  “No,” I said, “it just means money’s not most important. There’s a difference between fame and self-respect.”

  “All right, but say we flip the polarity. What’d you rather be, horribly in debt or have everybody hate your guts?”

  “I’m already in debt.”

  “Say it was a choice between insurmountable, crushing poverty, and being as hated as Hitler.”

  “Debt, probably. Least with a good name I can earn.”

  “But that’s my point,” Ben said. “If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t care what they’re famous for as long as they get moved to the head of the chow line, that’s one thing. But if we’re talking about reputation — people knowing your name stands for something, rather than just knowing your name — that’s a fame that’s worth something.”

  I paused for a beat. “You’re right.”

  “I know.”

  Moments later, at the curb in front of the Djembe Hut:

  “Twenty grand, huh?”

  Ben grinned as he climbed out of the car.

  XI

  His Countenance Enforces Homage

  Thanksgiving I was up early to prep the turkey. In point of fact I hadn’t gone to sleep, though I’d spent a few hours lying on the bed with the dog curled around my feet, feeling the intake and release of her ribcage on my shin. I sautéed onions, celery, and sausage, added this to breadcrumbs and sage. I salted the cavity — one more hand up one more animal’s orifice — and stuffed the bird. Then I rubbed a pat of butter into the turkey’s hide so vigorously that I could sense the nipples of Julia Child’s ghost getting hard.

  I had my first Jack and Ginger of the day and watched Kurt Russell defeat aliens until my grandmother came down to make the pie.

  Family-wise I think of myself as alone except for her, though she has a sister with three children and six sullen, Nintendo-addicted grandchildren. I view them as acquaintances, conventioneers who I put up and put up with for one afternoon every year, plying them with mashed potatoes and gewurztraminer and sending them on their way so that the other 364.25 days can be free of relatives. For their part, I’m sure they feel equally obligated to descend from their comfortable homes once a year to check in on the Widow Kessler and her peculiar grandson. What does he do again? Some kind of security guard or something. Oh, right. There any money in that?

  Sunday night marked the first interesting occurrence in the Corpse Fucker case since the incident with the mouse. Three days previous, a member of a biker gang had been gunned down on Gaglardi Way in Burnaby. His name had been Marc Moulette. I’d arrested him once.

  He’d come out of the Gentlemen’s Club on Main and Powell drunk and loud, staggered across the street, colliding into a homeless man’s shopping cart full of dead soldiers. Mira and I had answered the complaint. We’d turned the corner onto Carroll and seen Moulette launch an empty bottle of Stoli at a bus.

  Mira had been senior. She talked to him while I made an effort to put myself between them. Moulette was bald with a long fringe of brown hair, and wore his vest with the gang rocker and patch over a grey long-sleeved shirt covered in coffee stains. He was two inches taller than me, shoulders developed but waist paunchy, clean-shaven so the tattoos
on his throat would be visible.

  “What’s the problem, sir?” Mira said. Five foot seven and dwarfed by the beast in front of her, and not giving an inch.

  “You’re a cunt,” Moulette said. “You’re both cunts.”

  “Now now.” Mira had her hand on her Taser. “You’re going to stop the name calling and the bottle throwing and come with us.”

  His hand went to the cart for a fresh bottle. His eyes were on her. He didn’t see me close the distance. I cracked him across the head with my collapsible baton, hard enough so that the stick would never collapse properly after that. Moulette hit his knees hard enough to rip the denim. The second shot might have been excessive, but felt almost as good as the first. It left him sprawled on the pavement, face-down, dazed.

  Later Mira and I had argued about it. She said I’d undermined her authority. I said I’d saved her life. In truth I simply wanted to hit Moulette because of what he’d called her.

  There had been a brief investigation which cleared us, and the threat of a lawsuit that never materialized. And here was Marc Moulette, 47, reduced now to a sack of festering, foul-smelling organs encased in a grey reptilian skin, a hole in the back of his head and most of his face contained in a separate bag, an autopsy Y-scar hacked into his chest. Below that, a steroid-abuser’s shriveled testes and a stubby blue-veined prick, a tag on his ankles with his particulars. His son was coordinating the burial. Closed casket. A big deal for Roman Catholics, apparently.

  Moulette would have stood trial in November. It was a safe bet his own people had taken him out.

  Killed by one family, buried by the other. As I sat watching The Thing I wondered if the shooter and I were the only two people to ever get the best of an exchange with Marc Moulette. I wondered what Moulette would have given to at least have been able to see his killer.

  At noon I went to the store for a can of whole cranberries and a carton of whipping cream. When I came back the street was packed with minivans and station wagons. I parked in the alley and once inside I ran the gauntlet of relatives, letting them pinch and smooch to their hearts’ content. “He’s gotten so tall.” “What do you do again, Mikey? Hunh. There any money in that?”