Last of the Independents

by Sam Wiebe

  “After a very thorough job,” Kroon said, “which we all appreciate.”

  “All of you should be cautious until the new security measures are installed, which will be next week. For the next few days the building will be vulnerable. Be careful exiting and entering the building and make sure to safeguard your valuables.” I swept a hand over the brochures I’d fanned out on one of the tables, How to Protect Your Work Environment and the like. “Feel free to browse the literature. There are some excellent steps you can take to feel safer. I won’t take up any more of your time. Enjoy your party.”

  Polite applause. “What’s that about?” someone asked.

  “Corpse Fucker,” Kurt whispered.

  “Watch your language,” the older Thomas Kroon said.

  Carrie asked me, “What new security is going in?”

  “Reinforced steel doors with electronic key cards which record who comes and goes from what room. Additional cameras and a few other surprises.”

  She turned to the Kroons. “And when was the office supposed to find out about this?”

  “We’ll discuss everything Monday,” the younger Thomas Kroon said, peering at me with a raised eyebrow. The security measures were new to him. Before he could cross the room to ask me about them, he was waylaid by Supreet the former office manager. I made my escape.

  “And here I thought you’d be the one to cheer me up,” Ben said. He put his plastic tray down on the plastic table and squeezed his bulk onto the stool to my right.

  “Just preoccupied,” I said, stowing away my book. I transferred my tray to a nearby table, keeping the half-finished soda in front of me. From where we sat, with our backs to the kid’s ball room, we could watch rush hour traffic battle inertia along Marine Drive.

  Ben unwrapped his chicken burger, removed the top of the bun, set the tomato aside and squeezed a packet of ketchup onto the exposed patty. “So you don’t want to talk about it?” he said. “Because unlike some friends, if you tell me you don’t want to talk about something, I won’t force you to.” With a mouth full of food he added, “Unless you’re really dying to, and you just don’t want to seem too eager to unpack your heart. Then I might consider pursuing it.”

  My reluctance stemmed from the fact that I’d been contemplating the Szabo case, comparing details with Cynthia Loeb’s disappearance. The circumstances couldn’t have been more different — years apart, one grabbed in her neighbourhood, the other in a commercial district, Django missing with the car and bike, Cynthia with the clothes she was wearing, a dollar seventy-eight in change and one of her mother’s berets affixed in her hair. The similarities had to do with the effect the disappearances had on their families. Cynthia Loeb, Django Szabo. Cynthia Szabo, Django Loeb. Not the subject I’d choose to bring up with the brother of one of the missing.

  I said to Ben, “I guess I’m disappointed in myself. I thought I’d been disabused a long time ago of the notion that everything has an easy and accessible answer. I recognize that some cases don’t solve. Some of them you know but you can’t prove. Others you know and can prove but no one’s listening, or the ne’er-do-well perp’s cousin is the Minister of Finance or some other bullshit. I know I have no reason to believe we’ll find this kid alive, but I keep thinking, that’s not good enough. I’m getting stupid, because I’m starting to believe that whoever’s out there might actually be listening to me.”

  “Who’s that?” Ben asked.

  “I don’t know. God?”

  “Do you believe in God?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “No.”

  “But I’ll tell you, if prayer’s what helps get that kid back, I’d be first in line at the candle store.”

  “I’m pretty sure the church supplies those,” Ben said.

  “They wouldn’t let you bring your own to — what’s it called? Mass?”

  “I don’t know, I’ve never been.” He balled up the burger wrapper and stuffed it in the empty french fry sleeve. “My family’s Jewish if you go back far enough, but both my parents were free thinkers.”

  “Mine are cultists.”

  “There’s a double date,” Ben said.

  Staked out a block from Kroon and Son, we talked about Ben’s game design problems. More specifically, he talked and I listened. I kept my gaze on the door. At 7:30 the party broke up, and by nine the building was shut down for the long weekend.

  “At least we all agreed to make the game a prequel,” Ben said. “They’re working from the backstory I established in the first two games and the spinoff graphic novel. I’d hate to put any important character developments in Choad Boy’s hands. I admit adding vehicles was a decent idea. We could never make those work with the physics engine we were using. But his great storyline idea? Rosalind and Magnus break out of prison. I mean, that was old back in the days of Wolfenstein.”

  “You sound happier,” I said.

  “I’m not, I’m just ultra-busy making sure Choad Boy doesn’t screw things up.” He realized we weren’t driving anymore and undid his seatbelt. “You’re going to want to open your window.”

  “Christ,” I said, as the smell of flatulence filled the car. I popped open the skylight. “Sure you’re not one of the corpses in there?”

  After hours, the industrial park was uninhabited save for the odd janitor or night crew heading to one of the warehouses. We were parked on a winding road with no curb, the car conspicuous but far enough from the doorstep of the mortuary not to arouse suspicion. Every car that passed us appeared first as a pair of headlights, giving us time to duck in our seats.

  Everything I’d told the funeral workers was designed to flush out the Corpse Fucker, make him think he had a brief window to misbehave before the new security made sneaking in harder. That meant deceiving both of the Kroons, my clients. I was fine with that.

  “Drayton,” Ben said. “What was your gut reaction to the Szabo case? Did you think it would solve?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “The state in which the kid disappeared tells you everything,” I said. “Most missing persons cases are either runaways or custodial disputes. There was none of that with Django. His home life wasn’t great but it was all he knew. He didn’t have anyone to run to, and no relatives that would want to take him from Cliff.”

  Ben was silent. Don’t ask, I thought.

  “Is that the same feeling you got with Cynthia?”

  “Course not,” I said, mustering as much of a poker face as I could. Luckily it was dark and he was staring out his window.

  “Really?”

  “I still hold out hope,” I said, which wasn’t false. “So should you. Car coming.”

  We slumped down in our seats so we could just see over the dash. The sedan slowed as it passed the mortuary but didn’t stop.

  “It’s just that what you said was similar to how it was with Cynthia,” Ben said. “No reason to run away and no custody problems.”

  “Was she in a car that got swiped?”

  “No.”

  “And was she in a high-crime area, like near a pawn shop?”

  “Obviously not.”

  “So the circumstances are totally different, right?”

  The lies felt like bile in my throat. She’s dead and you will never see her again. Accept it.

  “Don’t confuse one case with the other,” I said. “I wouldn’t lie to you about this. In fact, next week I’m talking to a Vice cop who has a whole new angle on things.”

  “Really?”

  “I’ll tell you more when I know more,” I said.

  Ben was silent. I thought about his mother and Madame Thibodeau. I’d felt good about keeping the psychic from sinking her talons into Mrs. Loeb. And yet how was I any better? I liked to think I was different because I wasn’t after her money, and because I tried to be honorable. In the end, though, I was another bullshit artist, plying her with false hope. I should tell Mrs. Loeb and her son that Cynthia was never coming back. Help to puncture t
he last of their delusions rather than bolstering them. That was the right thing to do. It was also merciless.

  I remember my grandfather coming home one day after being first on the scene of a homicide. The victim, sixty-seven and asthmatic, lived on the first floor of a high rise. The killer had smashed through the sliding patio door looking for valuables, thinking no one was home. He’d tied her up, robbed her, raped her, and cut her throat. He didn’t nick a major blood vessel and she remained alive for two hours, struggling and bleeding until giving up the ghost shortly after my grandfather arrived. He didn’t talk to us when he got home that night.

  Weeks later the woman’s older sister requested my grandfather visit her in the palliative care unit of Peace Arch Hospital. I drove with my grandfather, we were going fishing after. The bed-bound woman demanded to know the particulars of her sister’s murder. My grandfather obliged her.

  He told it honest, from the defensive wounds on her hands to the damage to her face and eyes. The woman took it all in, nodding but otherwise blank, letting this information pour into her.

  When he was finished, she thanked him for his candor. We made to leave. She called him back: “Constable.” We paused and turned back to her but she said nothing. She had blue eyes and the pupils flitted from my grandfather’s face to mine. Finally she said, “I’d like to think my sister wasn’t in any pain when she passed.”

  What’re you, an idiot? I remember thinking. I looked to my grandfather to see how he’d answer. Actually, ma’am, your sister was in a hell of a lot of pain and it lasted a hell of a long time.

  But he said, “That’s right. The coroner told me she didn’t feel none of it.”

  I wondered whether it was strength or weakness that made him say it. Thinking back on the way she phrased that question, I’m sure she knew the truth. I think what she wanted was to be able to tell other people, “The police said she wasn’t in pain.” Maybe by repeating that, she could program herself to believe it was true, and in so doing, give herself and her sister some measure of peace.

  Headlights in the rearview mirror. The same sedan coming back. It pulled into the mortuary loading area, a nondescript Cadillac, black in the lamplight. A company car.

  The dashboard clock read 9:40 p.m. “We’ll wait a few minutes,” I said.

  “He could do his business in that time.”

  “It’ll take a couple minutes for him to wheel them out of the fridge,” I said.

  We waited in silence, which I was grateful for. At ten to ten the lights went on in the offices, then clicked off a minute later.

  “Now,” I said.

  We walked up the path the car had taken, into the lot and around the side. I took out the key ring I hadn’t returned and silently opened the doorlock.

  I said, “Follow me. Hang back a bit. Don’t say anything.” I didn’t look back to see if Ben had understood.

  Single file we crept down the hall. I put my hand on the door to the embalmer’s room, nodded one, two, three, and moved inside.

  In the darkness I collided with someone. A slight figure, surprisingly strong. Off-balance, I struggled to keep a grip. The figure pivoted and my forearm shattered on the concrete wall. The burst of pain was accompanied by a numbness that meant something was broken. With my good hand I seized the figure and slammed it to the wall, feeling the body go limp as I repeated the gesture.

  Ben hit the lights. I watched the older Thomas Kroon slide to a sitting position by my legs. I could see tears on the cheeks of the old man, his face contorted with humiliation and sorrow.

  In the centre of the room a cadaver in a hospital gown had been laid out on a gurney. The dead old woman’s eyes were closed, her posture supine, her expression — how do you judge the expression of a corpse? The muscles in her face were slack, which leant her a kind of peace. Her bloodless mouth had been pried open. She looked as if waiting to be kissed.

  “How’s your arm?” Ben asked.

  “Hurts.” I set it on top of the nearest supply cabinet and looked over at Kroon. “The hell did you do that for?”

  “I am so sorry,” he said. “I am so ashamed.”

  With my right hand I worked my cell out of my left pocket, tossed it to Ben. “His son’s number’s in the contacts.”

  “I don’t want to live,” Kroon the Elder said.

  “Shut up. Sit there.” To Ben: “Pair of cuffs in the trunk of the car. Grab them, will you?”

  “Shouldn’t we take you to a hospital?”

  Through my teeth I said, “Faster you get the cuffs, faster we can go.”

  “All right.” Ben ducked out.

  I leaned back against the wall a few feet from where Kroon sat. The endorphins were slowly kicking in and the pain was almost tenable. Almost.

  “I’m so ashamed,” Kroon repeated. He blew snot on the front of his shirt. “In that cupboard there’s a bottle of chloroform. Half a cup is fatal. I can’t bear to see my son.”

  “Don’t think about it.”

  “My whole life has been a waste,” he said. “When I saw Ethel laid out there, I remembered seeing her in Church years ago. Tried to summon the courage to ask her out, but she was a year ahead of me, and always with older boys, and so very beautiful. After how many bodies over how many years, I saw her laid out and I thought, what a waste. I never had the courage, and I knew her husband hadn’t made her happy.” He wiped his nose. “And the others, all beautiful, all gone.” He looked over at me. “I’m sorry about your arm. I am so ashamed. Please let me get to my cabinet.”

  Drops of sweat hit the floor. “Unless you named me in your will, you sit your ass down.”

  “What’s going to happen?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Ben came back and tossed me the cuffs, which bounced off my good shoulder and hit the floor. I stared at him. He walked over, picked them up and clasped them around Mr. Kroon’s wrists.

  “Why?” Ben asked him, looking from the cadaver to the sobbing man on the ground.

  “Missed his chance with the original victim,” I said. “She could’ve been his first girlfriend.”

  Ben leaned towards me and said sotto voce, “Guess he made sure he was her last.”

  XIX

  The Ethics of Extortion

  A tired-looking doctor glanced at the X-rays and called it a hairline fracture of the ulna. A typical sports injury, she assured me, as common as a cold. My arm was cast by a nurse named Sunny who told me she’d personally set three other broken arms this week. I asked her in a city the size of Vancouver was that a lot or a little. She said she didn’t know.

  Ben drove me home and called a cab for himself. I made it downstairs, still reeling from the anesthetic, and found my bed in the dark. The dog inspected the cast. I pushed her snout away from the plaster. I lay sweating on top of the covers until sleep came. When I woke up in the late morning I found myself fully-dressed and still wearing shoes.

  Upstairs I answered my grandmother’s questions and drank orange juice. Once she was satisfied the person who broke the arm wasn’t in league with the firecracker-throwers, she asked me if I’d be home tonight. I told her not to plan on it.

  “You will pick up the candy, though? And the pumpkin?”

  “I’ll take care of it.” I rinsed out my glass. “Should I get someone to stay with you?”

  “Not necessary.”

  “You have my cell.”

  “Don’t forget the candy.”

  Driving with one arm took getting used to. For the end of October the weather was balmy. A pleasant breeze stirred the laurel bushes. The sun shined through cloud cover. It would be a busy Hallowe’en for the trick-or-treat crowd. Doubtless someone would go missing. A kid in a dark costume, garbage bag swinging against her legs as she strays away from the cluster of kids, eager to hit the next house and the next. The parents hanging back to gab with other parents or exchange sheepish smiles with the home owners as the kids trample through the garden to the house next door. Or maybe everything would
work out for everybody. The dangers of Hallowe’en are always over-stressed. Maybe what makes it an appealing holiday is just those dangers, that mockery of death and tempting of one’s fate. Those were feelings that don’t get expressed in the December holidays.

  I ran the errands first, picking up a box of Cadbury’s assorted miniatures and a pumpkin the size of a severed head. Ichabod Crane, Bing Crosby, and the Disney cartoon. I wondered if there were still assholes out there who handed out raisins and toothbrushes. Probably more than before. That was how the world was heading. Safe and joyless. Anyone who doubted that had only to turn on the radio. Sometimes it didn’t seem so bad to go missing.

  I parked in front of the funeral home, surprised to see that it was open and the weekend staff were going about their business. The younger Thomas Kroon noted my cast, smiled apologetically and led me to his office. He unlocked it, led me in, locked it behind us.

  His father sat in a client’s chair to the left of the desk, a nylon hockey jersey spread over his lap to cover the cuffs. I unhooked him and settled into the other chair. He massaged his wrists, left to take a leak, returned with a mug of coffee.

  “You did all of them?” I asked him. He nodded. I turned to his son. “And you had zero idea it was him?”

  “Would I have hired you if I knew?”

  “Why did you hire me?” I asked the old man. “Didn’t you think I’d find out?”

  “I’m so ashamed,” the older Thomas Kroon said.

  “Don’t start,” I said. “The question is, what happens now?”

  “What’s your suggestion?” Younger asked me.

  “First off and non-negotiable, this can’t continue.”

  Both Kroons agreed it couldn’t.

  “He —” I pointed at Elder “— can’t work here. He needs counseling and supervision.”

  “My therapist recommended someone,” Younger said. “Funny. My father always said those people were full of shit.”