Last of the Independents

by Sam Wiebe

  “No idea who they were waiting for? Someone local, someone passing through?”

  “No idea. Can I go now?”

  “Never said you couldn’t,” I said. “But we’ll wait for your friend to show up all the same.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “She’ll knock any minute now,” I said. “Open the door maybe an inch and tell her to toss her gun inside. Then you can go.”

  Shoshona spent three minutes attempting to convince me I was wrong, but soon enough we heard a soft knocking. Shoshona persuaded Di to toss the small pearl-handled revolver inside. “Now can I go?” she said.

  “We’ve got a house to check,” Fisk said. “People to talk to. Uh huh. I do understand that, sir. An extra day would be appreci— one more day. I understand. Yes sir. Goodbye.”

  “Bureaucrat,” Fisk said after he’d set the phone down. He said to me, “The Superintendent doesn’t see why I need two extra days. He said tomorrow’s my last.”

  “I’ll drop you at the ferry tomorrow night, then.”

  I was on the bed. Fisk stood in the doorway. My gun was at hand, Di’s revolver in the bedstand next to the poems.

  “The kid was still alive in May,” Fisk said. “That ought to give you hope.”

  “It does.”

  “The suicide’s tough to figure.”

  “He’s alive,” I said, startling myself with the words.

  “You feel it, do you? In your bones?”

  “No,” I said, “I just think it. I haven’t thought it before seriously but I think it now.”

  Alive.

  XXIV

  The Friends of Michael Drayton

  Loretta Dearborn left two more messages. Katherine finally phoned her back Tuesday. With an hour before her French lab, she put in the call from one of the payphones in the Langara College atrium. She could barely hear Mrs. Dearborn’s responses over the throng of students pushing to get in and out of the lecture theatres.

  “I wish to speak to Michael Drayton and he alone,” Mrs. Dearborn said.

  “Mike is on the Island right now.”

  “They don’t have phones on Vancouver Island?”

  “You know what cellphone satellites are like,” Katherine said, covering for my technological ineptitude. “I swear I’ll pass whatever it is straight on to him.”

  “It concerns the disappearance on the news.”

  “Then Mike will want to hear it when I tell him.”

  “Has he checked the house on the 500 Block of Fraser Street?”

  “What do you know about that house?”

  “Young lady,” Mrs. Dearborn said, “I was a secretary for the Toronto Dominion Bank for thirty-seven years. If I displayed telephone manners like yours, I’d’ve never been hired in the first place.”

  “I’m really, really sorry,” Katherine said.

  Before sharing her information, Loretta Dearborn told Katherine that she’d phoned the police several times a week until they stopped answering her calls. She tried to phone Mr. Szabo himself, but his phone manners were every bit as bad as Katherine’s, in fact much worse. She tried to take into account the difficult circumstances, but that was no excuse for profanity and derogatory comments.

  Next she’d tried Aries Investigations, who were handling the Szabo case. Roy McEachern she found utterly charming. He spoke like a gentleman, thanked her for her diligence and foresight, and assured her he’d act immediately on her tip. Unfortunately, Mr. McEachern became harder and harder to get hold of on the phone, and his manners became more brusque, until finally like the cops he broke off contact with her. A shame, because he seemed so nice and forthright.

  So Mrs. Dearborn sat on her information until she chanced across a local news segment the other day. The handsome Indo-Canadian anchor was discussing the Szabo disappearance. She learned that Cliff Szabo had replaced Mr. McEachern with a Mr. Drayton. Mr. Szabo and the newscasters urged the public to come forward with information. Mrs. Dearborn decided to try one last time.

  “I’m sure Mike and Mr. Szabo will thank you for all that,” Katherine said. “If it’s not too much trouble, could you tell me what you know?”

  “I’ve lived on Fraser Street for fifty-one years, since driving out here from Morden, Manitoba, with my husband. I can tell you from observation that the neighbourhood is not what it used to be. Used to be families lived in those houses and I could name you each one. The Robinsons, the Russos, the Van der Meersches. Now they’ve chopped all these homes into separate apartments, and the ones living upstairs don’t know the people below them.”

  “That’s true,” Katherine said.

  “And so many Chinese.”

  “Ma’am, if you don’t mind, could you get to the point?”

  “That house on the corner of 500 Block used to belong to Gus and Louise Crane. A nicer couple than you’re apt to meet these days. When they passed on, their son Martin took over the house. Then Martin moved to Saskatoon and sold it to a family named Bellows. I couldn’t tell you how it passed into the hands of those prostitutes, but that’s who was living there when the child went missing.”

  “What did you see?”

  “I do not begrudge a person a cat, even two or three. I’ve owned my share over the years. But those women had four, none of them spayed. They seemed to play host to every cat in the neighbourhood. It was ridiculous. And when they left, they left the cats. Some animal lovers.”

  “I hate that, too,” Katherine said, still looking for a means to speed the old girl up.

  “Anyway, I tried to tell the policeman, a crass young man named Fisk, but he didn’t want to listen. I saw the three women who lived there drive off in a very small car with a bicycle sticking out of the trunk. The trunk was tied down with that elasticky rope, I don’t know what it’s called. People use it to jump off bridges and other foolishness.”

  “Bungie cord,” Katherine volunteered.

  “The women had a boy with them. I didn’t see him all that well, but I do know he had brown hair. I’d never seen any of them with a child before. I told that to Constable Fisk and to Mr. McEachern. They both said they’d look into it but they never did.”

  “Mike is a bit more thorough,” Katherine said, or at least that’s what she reported to me that she’d said.

  “Then I saw the police cars out front of that place the other day and I thought, ‘Finally.’ And when Mr. Szabo mentioned Mr. Drayton on television, I decided to call.”

  “He’ll thank you personally when he gets back,” Katherine said.

  “Did they talk to the one who returned, do you know?”

  “The one what?”

  “The girl, dear.”

  “One of the three girls came back?”

  “She lives down the block from me,” Mrs. Dearborn said. “The little yellow house on the corner. The MacReady’s home, at one time. She rents the downstairs. I don’t see her too often on account of the hours she keeps. Back to her wicked ways, I’m sure.”

  “And she’s still there?”

  “As far as I know, Miss.”

  “When did you see her?”

  “June or July? I made a note of it, I could check.”

  “Just the one time?”

  “A few times in June or in July.”

  “But not recently?”

  “Well not yesterday, but four months ago is fairly recent.”

  “I promise I’ll look into it,” Katherine said, and hung up without saying thank you, a point of contention between them in the weeks to come.

  Katherine tried my cell, couldn’t get through, left a message at the Country Cabin Motel. Then she called Mira Das and explained the situation to her. Mira and another constable met the real estate agent at the yellow house. The name on the lease agreement was Deirdre Hayes.

  The agent pulled up in a Suburban with a raised chassis and monster wheels. Mira described him as looking like a pro wrestler’s manager. Mira asked him if he also rented the house with the cats. He explained
that the company he worked for owned about fifty houses in Vancouver, most partitioned into suites. Because of the condition and small size of the suites, it wasn’t uncommon for tenants to pick up on short notice, forfeiting their half-month’s deposit. In some cases it took a few months to get in, clean things up, assess what renovations were needed, and get the suites back on the market.

  “No landlord takes that long,” Mira said. “You’re saying you’ve had a vacant apartment, overrun with cats, that you didn’t go inside for seven months? And you rented another suite to the same woman three months later? Hard to believe, sir.”

  “Believe what you like,” the agent said.

  He unlocked the ground level suite and let them inside. Mira was prepared for another horror scene. The suite was small and narrow, a single room with a kitchen at one end and a shower stall and toilet at the other. Fridge empty. Cupboards bare. A small bag of vet-approved gourmet cat food on the counter next to the hot plate. To Mira it looked like someone had cleaned the place at least a month ago, and it had sat empty ever since.

  “When was the last rent payment?” Mira asked the agent.

  “I’ll check the books,” he said. He kept these in his truck. Mira and Constable Mander waited as he flipped through a big dirty binder covered in stickers.

  “Post-dates through July of next year,” he said.

  “And the last few have gone through?”

  He flipped. “Looks like.”

  “You know you’re obligated to go through a rental suite once every six months,” Mira said.

  “Fifty houses. Eighty-seven suites. Think it’s easy? Because it’s not.”

  “And the other house?”

  Flip. Gusts of air from the corner of his mouth as he found the page. “Post-dates to August. May’s was the last that cleared.”

  “And you didn’t follow up on that? And don’t tell me about the fifty houses again.”

  “This isn’t my area of concern,” the agent said.

  “It will be if I bring you to the station,” Mira said. “You know this ties into the abduction of a child?”

  That rocked him. “I just handle houses, okay?”

  “Last time: why didn’t you follow up when the check bounced?”

  He shrugged and spread his hands. “They’re whores. Do I really want to know the ins and outs of a whore’s business? No pun intended.”

  “Either you got money from them off the books, or your boss told you not to pursue it. Maybe both.”

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Which was it?” Mira gave him a second. “Okay, let’s go down to the station and discuss this further.”

  “All right,” the agent said. “There’s a guy who works for my boss name of Zak. He gave me six thousand dollars towards their rent and towards fixing up the place. I don’t know if he gave it to me on instructions from his boss or it was his own idea, but I took the dough and did what he asked. I mean, I don’t know that side of the business, just enough to know I don’t want to know.”

  “Name of the business?”

  “C and C Properties.”

  “What do the C’s stand for?”

  “Crittenden and Chow.”

  Deirdre Hayes, Dawn Meeker, and Barbara Della Costa leave Vancouver with Django James Szabo in March. Barbara and Dawn appear in Prosper’s Point soon after. Maybe Deirdre was with them, but in any case she returned to the city in June. Perhaps she had a falling out with the others. Perhaps she wanted to check on her cats.

  Deirdre rented the downstairs suite of the yellow house in June. There was no evidence she’d done more than drop her luggage by the door and her toiletries by the bathroom sink.

  Dr. Boone’s final pathology report would put Barbara Della Costa’s death in early June. The evidence suggested that someone else moved the car to the shed in order to prevent the discovery of Barbara’s body. Two missing women, one missing boy, one corpse. Only one other person seemed to know anything about Dawn Meeker.

  Zak Atero’s video confession was good television, but had no weight in court. His position, given through counsel, was that the tape was coaxed from an unwell man suffering from withdrawal. Atero declined to be interviewed and made it clear that all such requests should go through counsel.

  There are ways around this, from coercion to deception to outright violation of a person’s rights. Zak Atero wasn’t smart enough to avoid these on his own, but with his brother to tell him to keep quiet and leave it to the attorneys, he might as well have been.

  But Theo was out of the picture, until he walked out of the hospital Wednesday morning intent on killing me. On Tuesday night, though, Mira Das picked up Zak using one pretext or another and managed to maneuver him into an interview room and have him waive his right to counsel.

  Mira is neither violent nor comfortable bending the rights of a suspect to secure a confession, which is probably why, unlike myself, she’s still a police officer. She is, however, a brilliant interviewer. By the end of her talk with Atero, he had admitted to stripping and burning my Camry. He’d also given them as much as he could about Dawn Meeker, his fellow addict and sometime bed partner. He knew she was from a small town somewhere on the Island. He knew her parents were dead and had left her nothing. He knew her foster father had forced her to perform fellatio. He knew she had a brother and that the brother knew about the foster father’s abuse. The brother promised her that one day they would have revenge. The brother lived on the Island but his work brought him to the Lower Mainland frequently. He didn’t know names — hadn’t, in fact, known that Dominique’s real name was Dawn.

  This was communicated to me on Tuesday night by Mira, at about the same time Zak was telling his brother what he’d just admitted to.

  Getting out of the bed was the hard part. No doubt Theo’s entire body still ached from the beating. The cracked ribs made it hard to draw breath. The sprained fingers made wielding a bat or a knife cumbersome. He could shoot a pistol left-handed, but to hit anything he’d have to be at arm’s length to the intended recipient.

  I’d seen his target pistol in his room, but that wasn’t the weapon he brought to the office with him. Most likely he had a source for untraceable firearms, boosted from private residences or bought at gun shows. The weapon he brought was a .32 snubnose revolver with a blued finish, a weapon for personal defense, to be pulled from a closet safe or a handbag when the owner feels threatened.

  He didn’t stop at his house but wore the clothes he’d been admitted in, zipping up his suede jacket to conceal the blood on his shirt. He purchased a toque and a pair of gloves at the Bay and made one other verifiable stop at the Blue Papaya.

  Lloyd Crittenden had washed his hands of the Atero-Drayton feud, but Theo had markers and called them in. I’d been wrong — Theo’s job at Landmark Logistix was more than a tax dodge. It was a strategic placement, since a warehouse bonded to deal with shipping containers from overseas offered all sorts of possibilities. Theo would have preferred working with cars, his and his brother’s passion. Doubtless he reminded Crittenden of this sacrifice.

  He left the restaurant with David Chou, Zak’s partner and fellow Crittenden bag man, and two other men, newly-arrived immigrants from Mainland China with criminal records there. Perhaps at this point he bought his toque and gloves, but I think it more likely they proceeded straight to my office.

  Of course, on Wednesday morning I was far from the office — in point of fact I was in a field several kilometres outside of Prosper’s Point, watching the house of the person ultimately responsible for keeping Django Szabo from his father. Katherine was at school, Mira had begun her seven-day rotation off, and my grandmother was sleeping in after a late night at the casino. Only Ben was inside the office. I’ve mentioned that he was drawn there. Like Katherine he enjoyed spending time inside, even when I wasn’t around. Maybe especially then. Alone with a hot beverage and a book or a computer, the office could seem like a person’s own Fortress of Solitude in the midst of the city.
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  He got the keys from Katherine on Tuesday, telling her that a present had arrived for me and he wanted to put it up as a surprise. Ben had pushed me to buy an Orson Welles poster for the office wall. When I reminded him what he’d said about Citizen Kane and Speed, he brushed it off as if it had never happened. One day he told me he was ordering a poster for me whether I wanted it or not. He pulled up the website on his PDA. He said I could choose between Touch of Evil and The Stranger.

  “He’s a corrupt cop in Touch of Evil,” I’d said. “What is he in The Stranger?”

  “An escaped Nazi.”

  “Settles that, doesn’t it?”

  Inside, he thumb-tacked the poster crookedly and without smoothing it, so it hung off the wall like a sail full of wind. He made himself an instant hot chocolate with those vile de-moisturized marshmallows. He sat down at my table, to do what I don’t know. I can guess. Before I’d left, I’d taken care to lock the Loeb file in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. When I returned to the Mainland and saw the damage to the office, I noticed that the bottom drawer was still locked, though the cabinet itself had been overturned. Parts of Cynthia Loeb’s life had been strewn about the office, torn, crumpled, pissed on, along with other files and furniture. I suspect Ben opened the cabinet and was reading through the file when Theo Atero and the others broke in.

  I’d told him in the first few days when we met that finding people was less about deduction than diligence. Even something as ephemeral as luck was in fact brought on by hour upon hour of intense scrutiny, legwork, brainstorming, list-making, canvassing, and conversation. The more time that went into the case, the greater chance of something new turning up — a witness’s memory dislodging a vital detail, a surveillance tape popping up showing little Cynthia Loeb and whoever was with her when she disappeared. I told him, even if the connection between hard work and luck isn’t apparent, it exists. I do believe that.

  Maybe he had the file out hoping to strike gold, and maybe he had it out to add a few more hours’ study to the case. Maybe he simply missed his sister, and reading through that mountain of recollections and facts was a way to connect with her, the spirit of her, if only in its absence. His attention wasn’t on the surveillance monitor. He didn’t hear the door chime. The first inclination he had about what was to happen was when Theo Atero’s people broke down the upstairs door.