by Sam Wiebe
By a quarter past four I was mildly sloshed and had retreated to the basement to play Mortal Kombat with my seventeen-year-old second cousin, Kaylee. She’d recently gone through a retro-punk phase, and the holes from the multiple piercings in her nose were still visible despite the absence of hardware. Before that she’d been a goth, and a stoner before that. I couldn’t say what she was now, except that with her striped arm socks and matching stockings she looked vaguely like a Dr. Seuss character. Even with one hand petting the dog she was kicking my ass.
My cell went off just as Kaylee performed Sub-Zero’s spine-rip finishing move. I was good sport enough to concede before picking up the phone, though fifteen years ago if I’d lost to a girl I would have pretended the ringing had distracted me. “Drayton,” I said into the phone, turning down the stereo so I could hear over Ozzy’s wail.
“Can you come here?” Amelia Yeats’s voice, agitated and tense.
“Sure,” I said, envisioning a late afternoon fuck atop her mixing board.
“Do you know where my dad’s place is? The big mansion close to UBC?”
“Give me the address.” She recited a house number and gave me the code to the front gate: one nine six seven.
“Fifteen minutes,” I said, hanging up.
I looked down at Kaylee, who’d ingested nothing all day but cigarettes and root beer. “You driving yet?” I asked her.
“I have my learner’s.”
“Feel like a jaunt?”
From upstairs, on cue, came a cackle of laughter from her grandmother.
“Fuck yes,” Kaylee said. “Get me away from these people.”
Only when Kaylee punched it in at the gate did I apprehend the significance of the four-digit code. 1967, Summer of Love. The gate enclosed an acre of manicured lawn, dotted with sculpted mounds of bark mulch that supported an assortment of flowers, most of which had withered and lost their colour. A large oval of driveway led up to a great house at the top of the incline. A Packard, a Rolls, and an Austin mini were parked near the double-sized front doors, along with a black panel van and further down, Amelia’s pistachio-coloured Jag. The property stretched another football field behind the house.
When it came time to park, Kaylee slipped it in neutral and traded places with me so I could maneuver the car between the Jag and the van. I told her to wait in the car. I strolled up, peering in dark windows, looking for signs of activity. I was reaching for the lion-shaped brass knocker when I heard the first shot.
I dashed back to the car and told Kaylee to keep her head down, feeling awful for bringing her into whatever this was. I reached through the window and popped the trunk as the second shot sounded, a thunder crack unmuffled by the house. The source was around back somewhere.
I opened the trunk and cinched up my Kevlar vest. Stupid, I thought, you’re not a cop anymore, you don’t even have a gun with you. I started to dial the police when the third shot drowned me out. I tossed the phone to Kaylee, told her to keep down, give me ten minutes and then phone.
At the edge of the house I saw a lush varicoloured garden, burnished reds and oranges providing a carpet of leaves and nettles over the mulch. Above and to my left was a long second-floor veranda with a roof of corrugated green plastic. I saw Amelia Yeats and a Filipino woman crouched behind an overturned table on the gazebo, thirty yards from where I stood. Assuming they were the targets, that put the shooter on the veranda.
The house had been added to over the years, and signs of unfinished renovation were still evident. Walls had been added and torn down, a second floor had been built above the garage, and the stately brown paint was newer here than on the far side by the solarium. I broke a window on the newer annex and dropped down into the basement.
Immaculate inside. Ivory-coloured carpeting in the garage with maple flooring leading up the stairs. Maple walls, decorated with every music award possible. Grammys, Junos, a Best Original Song Oscar nomination letter. Photos of Chet Yates with Sinatra, George Harrison, some of the Jacksons. I double-took when I saw Yates next to Miles Davis, a rare smile on the Dark Prince’s face. Yates had a fearless fashion sense, a lot of purple suits, Holstein-patterned shirts, eccentric headware and all manner of jewellery. He was average height, round faced and curly haired like his daughter. Handsome, with a smile helped along by some sort of narcotic. If a fourth shot hadn’t rung out I would have stayed to look at everything. I went up the stairs to the main foyer and treaded on marble tile until I saw the sliding door leading out to the veranda.
I could hear him before I could see him. His hair was silver now and close-cropped. He’d traded the electric suits for a terrycloth robe and Bermuda shorts. Some kind of Aztec sun had been tattooed on his gut. As I watched he aimed a nickel-plated .38 at a spider plant hanging from the roof of the veranda and blasted it. Soil and white chunks of calcite sprayed the deck.
“Jesus Christ, Daddy,” Yeats called from below.
Her father grinned, held the gun to his temple.
“I’m getting tired, love. I’m tired all the time now. Don’t ’spect you to understand.” He spoke in a cockney-accented baritone. “Just know that your daddy — motherfucker, what are you looking at?” He took aim at a hummingbird feeder, still rocking wildly from being hit with a shard of the planter. He missed, the bullet sailing in the direction of the garden, though thankfully not towards Yeats and the other woman.
Six shots means he’s empty.
I slid open the door in a crouch but my eyes saw the empty brass jackets by his feet and the open box of ammunition on the plastic table. Chet Yates took aim at the feeder and pressed the nozzle up to it and pulled the trigger, shattering it. Amelia Yeats screamed.
I went through the door, thinking in headlines, FOOLHARDY P.I. SHOT BY ECCENTRIC RECORDING LEGEND. He saw me as my fist closed on the gun. I tapped him in the face with my elbow just hard enough to cause him to break his grip on the revolver. He fell to the deck, landing on his ass. Tears in his eyes, snot and blood cascading from his nostrils.
I opened the cylinder and dumped the ammunition into my hand. “He’s okay,” I shouted to Yeats. I checked the brass. Two live rounds, four expended.
I looked over at Chet Yates, holding the cuff of his robe to staunch his nosebleed.
“Any other ordinance?” I asked.
He shook his head.
As we waited for Yeats and the other woman to approach he pointed to the gun and said, “Gift from Colonel Tom Parker, that was.”
“Yeah?”
“The King had given it to him, is what he told me, anyway. Had a thing for guns, Elvis did.” He grinned nostalgically.
“Ever meet him?” I asked.
“Just once,” Chet Yates said. “A sweet man. A bit gormless, but sweet. Colonel Tom was a bit of a wanker, though.”
Roanna, the Filipino woman, was the old man’s live-in nurse. She sedated him and helped him to bed while Yeats and Kaylee and I gathered up the bullets and casings and dirt and shards of plastic. I’d pocketed the gun.
“He’s always been weird,” Yeats said, crouching with the dustpan as I swept. “He gets agitated once in a while and has these freakouts. But I’ve never seen him with a gun before.”
“Am I wrong in thinking he was a heavy drug user at any point?”
She looked at me like the answer was self-evident.
“Of course he partied back in the day. Lately though, he’s been withdrawn. He plays a lot of Nina Simone and Joni Mitchell records, and sometimes I catch him muttering to himself, ‘It’s all over,’ or, ‘They’re all gone.’ Ro and I want him to see someone, but there’s no way to convince him to go.”
“Hear that?”
From outside came the sound of a policeman’s knock, patient but firm.
“The pigs,” Yeats said.
“I just told them to come,” Kaylee said. “I didn’t say why.”
Patting my pocket, I said, “Where can I dump this?”
“Basement, maybe? There’s a pool down
there.”
I squeezed myself down an incredibly narrow and ornamented spiral staircase as Yeats admitted the officers. I heard her talking to them in a placating tone, explaining that some neighbourhood kids had set off M-80s in the backyard, upsetting her father, who had just been put to bed.
The pool room of Yates Manor was marble-tiled, brightly lit and dank. Both the pool and hot tub were tiled in orange with a design in blue and white on the bottom that I couldn’t make out. The water was scummy and undisturbed. I flattened myself on the cold tile, reached in and opened the cage around the filter. I put the gun and shells inside and withdrew my arm, slick and clammy.
I came upstairs and backed up Yeats’s story.
It was seven by the time Kaylee and I got back to my grandmother’s house. Most of the relatives had dispersed except for my Great Aunt June, Kaylee’s grandmother. The two old women were watching equestrian and killing the last of a bottle of white wine.
“Where’ve you two been gallivanting about?” My grandmother said.
“Work.”
“On Thanksgiving?”
“Is there any food left?”
“Want me to heat it up?”
“I can manage with cold,” I said.
“I thought you were in the basement playing those computer games,” Aunt June said to Kaylee. “Your cousin been keeping you safe?” To me she said, “She hasn’t been a nuisance, has she?”
“Furthest thing from it,” I said, lifting Saran Wrap off the turkey platter.
Kaylee smiled, a tinge of pride in her pale face.
After dinner, with the grandmothers asleep in front of the tube and the two of us hunched over the dining room table, Kaylee said, “That was fucking badass.”
“It was fucking badass, wasn’t it?”
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.”
I uncorked another bottle, the last of the case, and she pushed her mug forward expectantly. Here I was presented with the moral dilemma of the cool adult: do I cut her off for her own good, losing her trust, or do I continue to supply a seventeen year-old with liquor, staying cool and turning a blind eye to the consequences? I thought of myself at seventeen, thought, hell with it, and filled her glass to the brim. If that was her first drink, she was overdue.
“So is that kind of stuff usual?” she asked.
“No.”
“What mainly do you do? Spy on people?”
“Sometimes.”
“Like catch cheating wives?”
“That racket hinged upon obscure divorce laws from mid-last century,” I said. “Nowadays anyone can get a divorce for any reason. But occasionally you do get someone with an issue of trust.”
“Do you own a gun?”
“Two. Handgun and a shotgun. And they’re locked up at the office, case your next question was, ‘Can I hold them?’”
“Ever kill anyone?” Smiling drunkenly, ashamed a little at the childishness of the question.
“Several,” I said. “Once a year at least, just to keep in practice. You?”
“Not yet,” she said, “but I’m a quick learner. What kind of equipment do you use?”
“Eighty percent of it can be done with a computer.”
“And the other twenty-five, I mean, twenty percent?”
“Legwork, mostly.”
“Tell me about some of your cases.”
I told her in general terms about the Szabos.
“Sucks,” she said. “There’s no, like, leads or anything?”
“There’s a car thief who might know something.”
“You haven’t talked to him?”
“Not yet.”
“You haven’t tried?”
I drained my mug, topped it up, pushed the bottle towards her. All the wine glasses were in the dishwasher, so we used Aunt June’s Christmas gift from two years ago, a matching pair of coffee mugs with embossed horse heads on the front and horse-themed literary quotations on the back. Kaylee’s read, “His neighing is like the bidding of a monarch, and his countenance enforces homage.” Mine said, “There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.”
I told her, “If I talk to him, he’ll know he’s being watched. I figured I’d eschew direct confrontation till I can get a bead on him.”
I watched Kaylee struggle with the bottle. I reached over and steadied her pouring hand.
“Why not go to the cops? I mean the pigs,” she said, recalling Amelia Yeats’s term and giggling.
“Same reason,” I said. “If the pigs are involved — the cops — he’ll give us nothing. And if there’s even the slightest chance the Szabo kid is alive, I don’t want the kidnapper suddenly concerned about leaving evidence.”
“You think he’s dead?”
“Almost certain.”
“Szabo,” she said, turning the name over. “I remember seeing him on a flyer. If he’s alive, where do you think he is?”
“Obviously if I knew that —”
“No,” Kaylee said, “what I mean is, like, what kind of place would he be? Someone’s home?”
Anywhere from a home to a hole in the ground, I thought, then realized with disgust that I’d said it out loud.
Her black-rimmed eyes teared up. I passed her one of my grandmother’s neatly-triangled linen napkins.
“You can’t leave him like that,” she said.
“No.”
“You have to find him.”
“I wish it were that easy, cos,” I said.
“Yeah.” She stared at the inscription on the back of the mug. “‘His countenance enforces homage.’ The fuck does that even mean?”
I let her have the bed and watched with amusement as the dog, gorged on giblets and table scraps, curled up next to her. I sat in the old armchair with headphones on listening to Koko Taylor until I couldn’t take it and picked up the phone.
I was exuberant from helping Yeats, chastened by my talk with Kaylee, and more than a little drunk, but mostly I was overconfident. I’d helped a damsel and I’d seen the body of an old enemy. For a brief moment I felt like I was more than a poor bastard whose best-case scenario was not adding too much to the misfortunes of others. It was time to Do Something.
At the office I had a small file on Atero, but I kept the original sheet that Mira had given me in my wallet. I pulled it out and smoothed it, then looked up Theo Atero’s phone number. I asked for Zak.
“Who’s calling?”
“Mike,” I said.
“One moment.” Clump-clump-clump down the stairs, a brief back-and-forth between the brothers.
Then: “This is Zak, man. What up?”
“My name’s Drayton. Your contact info was in a cellphone I found on the bus this morning.”
“Don’t know no one that takes the bus. Turn it in to Lost and Found, man.”
“To be honest with you, Mr. Atero, the phone was in a jacket pocket on the seat next to me. In the other pocket was a paper bag containing a rather large sum.”
“Really.”
“Yes. You can understand my reluctance in turning this over to Lost and Found.”
“Totally,” Atero said. “What’d you say your name was?”
“Michael Drayton. Let me give you my office address. Could you come around tomorrow afternoon and pick it up?”
He could.
XII
Ko Business
Knowing Atero didn’t rise until late afternoon didn’t make me less anxious to get to the office early. By seven I’d quieted my stomach with a pot of tea, deposited an Anusol where the dog needed it, and warned my grandmother I might be late. I was at the office by 7:30. The lights were already on.
Inside, Katherine was at her desk, head lowered so her forehead almost touched the textbook. She looked up groggily at me.
“Biology,” she said.
I set the kettle to boil and lifted off the wall panel behind the door. Behind it was a wireless hard drive that backed up both computers, a fireproof document
box, and a smaller wooden box that held my Glock 31. I brought out the pistol and set about cleaning and loading it. After handling Chet Yates’s Elvis revolver, the automatic felt like a toy.
“I started at five this morning and I think I’m dumber now,” Katherine said. “Bio stinks. The midterm is straight memorization, a hundred terms. Prokaryotic and eukaryotic. Kingdom Phylum Class Something Family Genus Species. I can never remember what the ‘on’ stands for in ‘kids play catch on the farmer’s green shed.’ Organism? That can’t be right.”
“Can’t help you there,” I said. “Straight B-minuses in everything that wasn’t English or Crim.”
Her monologue of academic despair continued as I fed .357 shells into the gun’s clip. Eventually she got around to asking what I was doing.
“Getting ready for my meeting with Zak Atero,” I said.
“Here? When?”
“We agreed on this afternoon. By Zak’s sleep schedule that probably means four, but he could show earlier.”
“This is a person who might have kidnapped a child.”
“We don’t know anything for sure. Hence the meet.”
I tucked the box away, replaced the panel. I sat at the table with the Szabo file in front of me and the Loeb file like a hillock to my right. I placed the gun in the file cabinet by my side.
“You’re not worried that he knows where to find you?” Katherine asked me.
“Anyone with an internet connection knows where to find me.”
She sighed. “You could have told me beforehand.”
“I did. You’ve got hours before you should be out of here.”
“That’s what you want me to do, is it?”
She rolled her fancy chair over to the table so we were eye to eye.
“Can I be frank? I feel like you’re putting me in a box.”
I pushed the monitor and keyboard aside. “We’re going to have this conversation, are we?”
“Every time you do something like this I either have to agree with you or become this shrewish feminine stereotype who poo-poos anything the boys want to do and ruins their fun. And I don’t want to be in that position.”
