by L. R. Wright
Susan agreed, of course. And why wasn’t this realization creating euphoria? Why did she feel so damn uneasy about Ivan’s sudden freedom?
“So what’s your advice to me?” asked Ivan.
“My advice?” Susan responded. “Okay. I think you should write her a letter. ‘Dear Denise: This is to inform you that we’re getting a divorce. My lawyer will be in touch with you in due course. Sincerely, Ivan.’ ” She tilted her head and smiled at him.
It was probably the melodramatic way in which the marriage had ended, she thought, that was causing her to feel solemn about the whole business. Instead of overjoyed. Like she ought to.
Chapter 19
ALBERG SWUNG THROUGH downtown Vancouver, hands in his pockets, savoring the mild breeze that made its way up from the ocean that could be glimpsed at the northern end of the streets, even noticing the spring flowers overflowing the curbside planters. He was enjoying his anonymity.
Alberg was aware that his enduring wish to remain unnoticeable was often antithetical to his effectiveness as a police officer. But there you are, he told himself: life was full of contradictions. He was known by sight to the whole damn town of Sechelt, even though he continued to eschew the uniform in an attempt to remain inconspicuous. This had been at first wholly successful, but after more than ten years...
What freedom, he thought exultantly, wheeling along the street. Nobody even glanced at him—he might as well be invisible. Except of course for those who wanted his money. There was a battalion of them—men and women, boys and girls—spread throughout the downtown core like sentries, or infiltrators. Many were pathetic indigents: most of these were addicts, many of them were sick, and some were half as old as Alberg’s daughters. He tried to look away from them, from the figures draped against the corners of buildings or huddled on threadbare coats spread on the pavement. He found it interesting that today, anyway, their requests for cash were all so polite. “Spare change, ma’am?” they would say to a woman hurrying past, her smooth nyloned legs scissoring, head high, briefcase swinging; and when she ignored them, they nonetheless offered a quiet “Thank you.” Alberg sensed the background rage, though, and felt reluctant admiration for their self-control. In the three blocks between Pacific Centre and his destination he gave a loonie to every panhandler he passed, and ended up at the office of Reg Washburn, private investigator, eight dollars poorer.
As he entered the building he resolved not to describe to Reg the decrepit digs in which he had expected to find him. He had certainly not expected a soaring glass tower with potted trees and a fountain in its lobby.
He took the elevator to the seventeenth floor, less than halfway up, and walked silently along the carpeted hallway to a wide wooden door flanked by narrow windows of clouded glass. A small brass plaque identified the business within. Alberg pushed down on the bulky brass door handle and went inside.
Behind a long low desk sat a middle-aged receptionist who was talking on the telephone, the receiver clutched between her shoulder and her chin, while typing furiously away on a computer keyboard. She looked up at Alberg and smiled.
“Okay, sure, I understand,” she said soothingly into the phone, “you’re upset. Who wouldn’t be? I’ll give him your message and I’m sure you’ll be hearing from him later today.” She listened for a moment. “Okay. Sure. No problem.” She hung up and spun her chair around. “I’m Louise,” she announced. “And you must be Mr. Alberg. He’s expecting you.”
A few minutes later he was sitting in Reg’s office with a mug of coffee steaming on an end table next to his chair. Reg was at his desk, hands behind his head, grinning at him.
Reg Washburn had spent twenty years in the RCMP, the last six with E Division in British Columbia, before taking early retirement. “So you want to know what it’s like being a PI,” he said.
“Yeah,” said Alberg.
“Which means you’re thinking of getting out.”
“I guess I am,” answered Alberg.
Reg lowered his arms and rested them on the desk. “Must admit, I’m surprised.”
“So am I,” said Alberg. Reg looked at him appraisingly. “What do you see yourself doing, as a PI?”
Alberg shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t know, for god’s sake. That’s why I’m here—I don’t have a real clear idea about what to expect.”
“Yeah,” Reg persisted, “but if you had your druthers, what kind of stuff do you think you’d want to take on?”
“Pretty much what I’m doing now, I guess,” said Alberg. “Except I want to make all my own decisions, I don’t want anybody breathing down my neck, and I want somebody else taking care of the goddamn paperwork.”
“You won’t be able to pick and choose, you know, Karl,” Reg said seriously. “Not at first. You gotta establish your specialties—find yourself a niche. This takes time. And meanwhile, you gotta take what’s offered.”
“What’s your niche?” said Alberg. “Fraud?”
“Fraud, yeah,” Reg agreed, nodding. “As you might expect. But I’ve got two partners, so fraud’s not all we do. And some stuff we contract out to other agencies.”
The large window behind Reg’s desk looked out on a collection of mostly new downtown buildings that had been built to look old, most of them constructed of red brick and crowned with incongruous triangular embellishments of glass framed in blue-painted wood. The shorter, humbler structure immediately next door, however, was an older vintage. A wide puddle had collected in a depression in its flat roof, and a large seagull was standing in the middle of the puddle, cleaning itself.
“Sometimes we’re hired to investigate open cases,” Reg was saying. “If the family of a dead guy isn’t happy with the pace of the police investigation, for instance. We had one of those last year.”
“Oh yeah?” said Alberg. “You got any at the moment?”
Reg shook his head.
“Okay, so tell me what you are working on,” said Alberg, picking up the coffee mug.
Outside Reg’s office was a larger space containing two desks, each with a telephone, a computer terminal and a printer; a write-on bulletin board that took up almost an entire wall; a water dispenser; a table that held a coffeemaker, several clean mugs, bowls of sugar and sugar substitutes, and some spoons; and a small refrigerator.
Reg reached for some folders and thumbed through them. “A missing person. Another missing person—both adults. A stalker.” He looked up. “That one’s a doozy. Plus we’ve got one, two, three—six insurance frauds, altogether. And here’s an employee theft. And a domestic. This one’s a cheating spouse. The wife. Our client’s the husband.” He put the files back.
“Do you get a lot of domestics?”
“Yeah, well, we could take on a lot more than we do. Mostly they’re process serving, surveillance—not very interesting stuff. But sometimes—missing kids, for instance—they can be good cases.” He narrowed his eyes, assessing Alberg. “You’d do well at this, Karl.”
Two large trees stood at either side of the window behind Reg’s desk: Alberg thought they were the same kind that were in Cassandra’s library. The office also contained two more plants—cacti, he thought they must be—that were almost as tall as he was.
“Oh yeah?” he asked. “Why?”
“I mean once you get established, maybe find yourself a partner. And assuming that you’re not gonna need to take cases strictly for the money.” Reg lifted his eyebrows in tactful inquiry.
“I haven’t done the number-crunching yet,” Alberg admitted. “I’m jumping the gun a bit here.”
“You’ve put in the years, though, right?” said Reg.
“Yeah.”
“The reason I think you’ll do well, and have a good time, too, is—” He took a quick slurp of coffee and set his mug down: it was a dark purple mug with his name on it in white script. “First off, I tell my people that their best source of information is always the client. The client always knows even more about the target than he thinks he does. So I tell them that i
nterviewing is of primary importance. And that they should—especially during the first consultation—shut up and listen. You know where I learned all this? I learned it in Kamloops. From you. Watching you work.” He sat back, folded his arms, and grinned at Alberg, rocking slightly, back and forth in his chair.
Alberg, mildly flustered, lifted his hand to smooth his hair. “Hmmm,” he said.
“And secondly,” said Reg, leaning forward again, “there’s a lot of flakes out there, Karl. And some of them—well, you take—well you know that in the elite squads, for instance—police squads—homicide, drugs, like that—there’re occasions when it gets hard for some of them to walk the fence. Hard for them not to see a deal. So, you get a guy like that, he’s persuaded to resign—he’s a rogue cop. And where does he go? He hangs out his shingle.” Reg shrugged, opening his arms wide. “So it’s important to have guys like you and me out there, too.”
“Huh,” said Alberg. He looked around the office at the prints, tastefully framed, that hung on the walls. And inspected Reg, white-shirted, wearing a tie, his suit jacket hung over the back of his chair. Reg looked relaxed and prosperous.
Reg said, “Now you’re gonna want to know the ins and outs of income versus expenses and all that, right?”
“Whatever you can tell me, I’d be grateful,” said Alberg.
***
An hour later Alberg left the building, feeling somewhat dazed but mostly exhilarated. He checked his watch and decided to treat himself to fish and chips at Troll’s in Horseshoe Bay before catching the six o’clock ferry.
He might want a partner. And he’d have to get registered. And decide where to set up shop, and what kind of work he’d try to get. Did he want to take on a bunch of cases for lawyers, usually defense attorneys? Reg had talked about locating witnesses, reconstructing crime scenes, conducting murder investigations—that stuff sounded interesting, Alberg thought, striding toward the parking lot beneath the Pacific Centre shopping mall, where he’d left his car. And some of the domestics Reg had told him about had sounded interesting, too.
He remembered Cassandra asking him soon after they had met what he liked about his job. “Figuring things out,” he had replied. “Talking to people, thinking, finding out what happened, who did it, why they did it—that kind of thing.”
And Cassandra had said, “What about justice?”
Justice wasn’t in his purview, he’d told her. He had said this almost lightly, as if justice were a thing probably unobtainable, maybe insignificant, and certainly beside the point.
Alberg realized that he felt differently now, about justice as a philosophical reality and a worthwhile goal. But he still saw little relationship between genuine justice and the legal system he served.
He found himself whistling as he walked along, meditating on his future.
When he got to the end of the block and had to wait for a light to change, he glanced to his left and saw a man approaching, driving a motorized scooter that had three large wheels. The man’s withered legs were partially wrapped in a blanket, and he was wearing a peaked cap. He was about Alberg’s age, with gray hair and a thick, neatly trimmed gray beard. An antenna had been attached to the back of the scooter. The man swiveled and came to a stop beside Alberg. He glanced up at him and gave him a wink, his face otherwise expressionless. Alberg nodded back. A small, tattered pennant flew from the scooter’s antenna and as the light changed and the man steered deftly into the crosswalk, Alberg saw that there was printing on it: Vancouver City Police, it read.
Alberg followed him, slowly, across the intersection.
***
Eddie unlocked the door to her house, went inside, pulled off her jacket and hung it up, loosened her tie, and threw herself down on the living room sofa. She couldn’t get Andrew Maine out of her head. Hunched over like a turtle, he had been, hurting so much that he hadn’t been physically able to straighten his body. Alone in his house, she knew that he would lie on his bed in the fetal position, reliving again and again those painful conversations with his wife that had not ended in reconciliation. Eddie knew she shouldn’t do this. It was like prodding a partially healed wound, or an aching tooth. Inquisitiveness in itself was neither good nor bad; in fact, it was obviously a useful tool. But it sometimes became self-indulgent, and led to extravagant leaps out of the realm of logic and into exaggeration, occasionally even fantasy. Imagination was a vital ingredient in good police work—but only when firmly disciplined and controlled.
Eddie knew a lot about discipline, about control.
All she had seen or sensed in Andrew Maine was pain, plus a certain amount of righteous anger. She was disappointed not to have found a suspect, but she was also disappointed in Andrew himself. Although she envied his naïveté, the simplicity of his thinking—even the austerity of his attitudes—she now judged his sweetness to be compromised by prejudice.
Eddie covered her eyes with the back of one hand and let her other arm hang down toward the floor, her fingertips brushing the carpet. When the phone rang she reached for it automatically, preoccupied with Andrew, and with his wife’s so far inexplicable homicide.
“Ah, good,” said Alan. “I refuse to talk to your machine.”
Eddie sat up. “Why are you doing this?” she said evenly.
“Why am I keeping in touch?” he asked, pretending to sound astonished.
Eddie put the receiver down, gently, and pulled the jack from the wall.
Quickly, she showered and changed. Plugged the jack back in. And left the house, furious with herself.
Half an hour later she was in a bar, nursing a beer and waiting for a roast beef sandwich, when Cindi Webster materialized next to her.
“Is it okay if I sit down?” asked Cindi. “Or are you waiting for somebody?”
“Go ahead,” said Eddie, glancing at her watch.
“I almost didn’t recognize you,” said Cindi. She waved at the bartender and ordered a beer. “Out of uniform.”
The place was almost empty, but then it was only seven-thirty. Eddie wondered what kind of social life was available to her, while living on the Sunshine Coast, outside the detachment. Would she get desperate and end up fleeing to Vancouver whenever she got the chance?
“Are you eating?” asked Cindi.
“Yeah, I’ve ordered a sandwich.”
“Who’s that guy, that officer, he’s—I don’t know his name, but I saw him in here one day last week.” Cindi pushed her hair back. “I’m letting it grow,” she said, “so I can put it in a ponytail or something. It drives me nuts hanging around my face like it does.” She glanced at Eddie, who had pinned her braid onto the top of her head and covered it with a Roughriders cap. “How long did it take for yours to get that long?”
“I haven’t had it cut for five or six years, I guess,” said Eddie. She drained her glass and signaled for another beer.
“Anyway. He’s tall and he’s got dark hair and a mustache.”
Eddie looked at her blankly. “Who?”
“The officer I told you about. Do you know who he is? I mean, his name? And is he married?” She drank some beer and looked expectantly at Eddie. She’d dumped her shoulder bag on the floor by her feet. She wore sneakers, jeans, and a pink T-shirt, and a navy cardigan tied around her waist.
“I think I know who you mean,” said Eddie. “He’s a constable. His name is Cornie Friesen. Don’t know if he’s married or not. Do you want me to find out?”
Cindi was frowning into her beer glass. “The thing is, I’ve sworn off sex, so I don’t know if there’d be any point.”
Eddie shifted on the stool to look at her more closely. “Hmmm,” she offered. “And how come you’ve done that?”
The bartender set a large plate in front of her and drummed on the counter. “Ta-da!” He leaned toward her. “Hope you enjoy it, Sergeant.”
Eddie watched him retreat. Jesus. She’d been here how many days? And everybody in town knew who she was already.
“Because of STDs,
” said Cindi. “So far so good,” she said, knocking on her head, “but I want to have babies someday. And you can’t be too careful.”
Eddie’s stomach took a sudden nosedive, like a broken elevator. She was so lucky. She still couldn’t believe her luck, to have gotten out of the thing with Alan not pregnant; not infected with anything in fact, neither germ nor sperm. The only damage she had suffered was some softening of the brain, and she thought she had escaped before that had become irreversible.
She poked at the contents of her plate, a pile of chips on one side and a roast beef sandwich on the other. “Look at that,” she said wonderingly to Cindi. “They’ve cut the crusts off the bread.” She lifted the top slice: thinly carved beef, mustard, mayo, plenty of cracked black pepper.
“On the other hand,” Cindi was saying, “I’ve got to try them out, right? I mean I can’t wait until the wedding night, right?”
Eddie took a bite and made a sound between a moan and a laugh. “This is so good,” she said. “I can’t believe it.”
“I know sex isn’t everything,” said Cindi, “but you’ve got to do it for such a long time, it better be at least good, am I right?”
“You’re talking about marriage?”
“Yeah, of course.” Cindi leaned back and gathered her hair in her hands. “How much longer’s it going to take, do you think? Before it’ll all tie back?”
“You’re nearly there,” said Eddie, checking it out. “Another—I don’t know—a couple of months, maybe.”
The door opened and two off-duty police officers entered—Joey Lattimer and Frank Turner—stopping off for a drink on their way home, Eddie figured. She watched them scan the bar as they headed toward an empty table, and waited for them to spot her. When she had met them she had entered Turner in the “civilized” column in her own private ledger, and had reserved judgment on Lattimer, who had leered at her, but maybe out of nervousness.
“That’s him,” said Cindi in an excited whisper. “That’s the guy I meant before. The one in the leather jacket—the one with the mustache. Oh jeez.”
