by Sam Wiebe
“And you gave her that?”
“I gave her some skills for decoding the culture. And I don’t mind answering questions, but I’d like to ask you one.”
“Shoot,” I said.
“I researched you,” Mastellotto said. “When you left your name with my office mate, I looked you up. You didn’t last very long on the police force.”
“That’s not a question,” I said.
“It is, by implicature. What did you do that was so bad you were kicked out, or off, or wherever ex-cops get kicked?”
“I resigned,” I said.
“Of your own volition?” He held up his hand, smiling. “If you don’t want to answer, you don’t have to.” But he waited, testing me.
I said, “I’m not a fan of bullies.”
“Is that an accusation?”
“It’s the answer you wanted,” I said, adding, “I may have hit someone who was hitting someone.”
“Bullied them, you mean.”
“You want to put it that way.” I shrugged. “I’m a complicated man. Like that other private eye.”
Mastellotto slowly grinned.
“It’s good for a person to discover their threshold for truth. Please continue the interrogation.”
“What do you remember about Tabitha?”
“Fearless and inquisitive,” he said. “Not my best student but maybe my most thorough. She went through a typical freshman falling-out with her petit bourgeois parents. Only Tabitha followed through. She moved out to avoid living with that degree of compromise.”
“Where did she move when she left home? Do you have an address?”
He wrote something down on a lime-green Post-it pad. “The Lincoln,” he said, tearing off the sheet and handing it to me. “It’s a low-rise a few blocks from here. A lot of students stay there.”
“What else did you encourage her to do to show her commitment to la causa?”
“As I said, I merely—”
“Right, you just lay out the truth for them,” I said. “You don’t think encouraging a confused woman who’s just out of her teens to forsake her mother and sister makes you a bit of a—”
“Defiler of innocence?” he said, grinning. “Misleader of youth?”
“Douche,” I finished.
“But is it on par with beating a man with a nightstick?”
I leaned forward, over the desk, till the grin on Mastellotto’s face had been replaced with a sort of gleeful apprehension. He was enjoying the fact of his own instinctive fear.
“Riot baton,” I said. “And I guess that depends on what condition I find Ms. Sorenson in.”
I’d hoped that was the kind of response to sober him, leave him mulling things over until I could come back and find him more cooperative. But it was a game to him. He’d impacted her life, maybe in some way cut it short, and still she wasn’t real to him. He flung his own rejoinder at my back as I passed out of the office, steering past the same hopeful students lurking near the door.
“When you live in the shadow of the gallows, it’s but a matter of time before the rope finds your neck.”
Twenty
Dana Essex was in her office this time, back to back with a balding man who seemed to have been folded in three and molded around his desk. She seemed nervous when I showed up, perhaps at having the investigation in close proximity to her work. But then she always seemed nervous, anxiety dripping off her like cheap sunblock.
“I’m just going to walk my friend to his car,” she told Slouch.
As we took the stairs down I told her I’d spoken to Mastellotto.
“Do you think Paul knows where she is?” Essex asked.
“I get the feeling he knows something,” I said. “He’s charismatic and knows how to make a game out of the truth. I could see Tabitha, young, impressionable, falling for it.”
“I’d like to think she was stronger than that,” Essex said.
The bell sounded. We crossed the courtyard through a throng of gabbing students. The heron was gone.
“Did she ever mention Dalton or Cody Hayes?” I asked. “Or the League of Nations?”
“Not that I recall.” Essex covered her mouth. “The street gang?”
“They’re involved,” I said. “I’m not sure exactly how. But you might want to brace yourself for certain possibilities.”
“Death, for instance?”
The parking lot had filled to capacity. Cars streamed into the hardpacked dirt lot nearby.
“I’ve considered that prospect,” Dana Essex said. “Quite often, actually. I accept it. All the same, I’d like you to keep looking.”
At my car, I leaned on the Cadillac’s side panel. Clouds sped across the sky, colliding into one another. Dana Essex rubbed her shoulders. Without looking at me she said, “Everything’s become so muddled. I don’t know how I ended up here. Maybe this whole enterprise is foolish.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“If I knew I was passionately in love, willing to dive into the grave like Hamlet, that would be different. But I honestly don’t know what I feel. Passion? Concern? Talking with her, knowing she’s so much younger and more worldly—the idea it could be mutual and that I’ve not completely misread the situation, as I’m wont to do.” She put on an embarrassed smile and wiped at her tearless cheek. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” she concluded.
“Maybe that’s a positive,” I said.
“I feel new to myself. It’s one thing to accept the sexual preferences of your friends and colleagues and another to confront that within yourself. I know I have nothing to be ashamed of, but I’m battling my upbringing.” She laughed ruefully. “Dana Essex, the Human Dialectic.”
“I used to have feelings about the drummer from Alice in Chains,” I said. “Even now, the right guy comes along, who’s to say?”
“You don’t have to patronize me.”
“No, I’m just—”
She reached to touch my shoulder and she nodded.
“It’s strange, you’re the first person since Tabitha I’ve felt comfortable talking to. Really talking.”
“For the rate you’re paying me you should expect some comfort.”
It was the wrong thing to say. She nodded and smiled but the connection was broken. I watched her walk back to the campus, shouldering her cares and worries, joining others headed inside who no doubt shouldered their own.
Twenty-One
I drove four blocks to the apartment Tabitha had lived in, and waited for the landlord to come back from lunch. The Lincoln was a prefab block-long building with only the most minor architectural embellishments. Mold streaked down from the gutters like black eyeshadow marred by tears. The lobby was as impersonal as a government office, overseen by a seated guard in a neon-yellow windbreaker.
Gaspar Boucher showed up forty minutes later. Native or Métis, he worse his black hair tucked under a foam-fronted cap with USS CONSTELLATION in gold lettering above a gold-garlanded naval insignia. We shook hands. His forceful grip quivered the flesh that hung off his forearms. He led me into a carpeted office on the third floor, sat behind his desk, and regarded me with amiable indifference.
“Can’t say I remember her specifically,” he said. “Though I sure know the type. College kids aren’t the most dependable.”
“She take a run-out on you?”
“More than possible,” Boucher said. He turned his chair and dug into a filing cabinet, coming up with a gray file he slapped on the desk.
“After a year they’re allowed to take off with a month’s notice, else they default their deposit.” He scanned the file. “This one never gave her thirty days.”
“She leave a forwarding address?”
“’Course not. I phoned around, talked to the credit agency, but that was that.”
“Her possessions?”
“Auctioned off what we could to recoup the rent she owed, then dumped the rest at the Sally Ann. She’s still in the red”—he squinted at the page—“t
hree hundred and some odd cents. For a college kid, that’s halfway almost respectable.”
I opened my wallet and began peeling out twenties. “I have a proposition,” I said. “I’d like you to hire me to get your money back. I’ll give you the three hundred right now. Deal?”
Boucher looked at the pile of money on my side of the desk, at my face. He nodded to himself. He spun the file around and picked up a sheet.
“’Course,” he said, “this is what you’re looking for. Her sig on the credit check form. I hire you, makes it easier for you to check her credit history.”
“And her account’s in the black. Win-win.”
“Could be,” Boucher said. “Who’s looking for this girl? She have a rich daddy?”
“It’s more about romance than finance.”
He nodded. “Romance is all well and good but it doesn’t ’zactly feed a family, does it. I think this sheet’s worth another five.” He smiled. “If you don’t have it on you I don’t mind waiting.”
I got comfortable in the chair. “I’d maybe go an extra fifty.”
“I’m betting you’ll go the full five hundred.”
“There are other ways of getting the info,” I said. “But I guess a hundred and fifty wouldn’t exhaust my expense money.”
“Keep going, hoss.”
“One sixty, makes it easier to take out of an ATM.”
Boucher laughed. “I got the time to wait.”
“Not me, I’m very popular and busy. I leave this room you get nothing.”
He shook a toothpick out of a jar and inserted it between his bottom row. “Guess I could agree to four, let you save some face.”
“You’re a shrewd bargainer.”
“We’re the best bargainers,” he said. “Best thing Hudson’s Bay ever made are those point blankets they sold to us. Highest quality ’cause they knew we couldn’t be duped.” He studied the toothpick. “That’s why that stereotype bothers me, the dumb Indian, doesn’t understand the value of things. You people”—he said it friendly—“want to think you put one over on us, rather than using force to take what you wanted.”
“Other words, you got robbed, you didn’t get cheated.”
His laugh was a sharp quick grunt. “Yeah. ’Zactly. I like that. Might use that.”
“I might go three.”
“Then you’ll go three sixty.”
I counted out twenties, tens, and fives, and pushed the pile across the table.
“Five short,” he said.
“It’s what I got.”
Boucher’s arm swept the bills up. “Anything for love,” he said.
Twenty-Two
That evening, parked under the bridge, I watched Chris Chambers and Sonia Drego walk out together, talk, part, and head to their respective vehicles. No sign of unease between them.
I followed Chambers across the bridge and onto the off-ramp. On Pacific Boulevard he sped through a lingering amber, disappearing into the stream of luxury sedans pouring out from the financial district.
I made a right on Pender, reasoning that Chambers was headed home. Traffic was heavy on Hastings, but moving. When I turned onto Skeena I began looking for Chambers’s white Lexus. It wasn’t parked in the area around his condo. No lights on inside.
As I parked, I dialed Sonia. She answered and said breathlessly, “I have two minutes before my class starts. Is it critical?”
“I lost Chambers in the corridor,” I said.
“He’s not at home?”
“No one’s there.”
“His girlfriend works the odd modeling job. He might be with her.”
“Where would that be?”
“You’re the detective,” she said.
“What’s her deal?”
“Misha? They’ve been together almost a year. She moved in a few months ago.”
“They seem in love.”
“They do,” Sonia said. “Nauseating, isn’t it?”
“Think she’s the source of his stress, or whatever it is?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ever hear of Anthony Qiu?”
“No.”
“He’s worth running through CPIC,” I said. “Loan-sharking and probably a lot more. Chambers and his girl ate in Qiu’s restaurant two nights ago.”
“Interesting.”
“What class are you taking?”
“No-gi,” she said. “Advanced combat defense. Judo and jiujitsu.”
“What do you wear for something like that?”
“Bruises,” Sonia said. “I have to go.”
I coasted back downtown, traffic lighter now. On Main Street, activists had painted slogans over the old police building across from the courts. AFFORDABLE HOUSING NOT CONDOS, GENTRIFY THIS, and the like. A crew with stepladders and buckets were busy erasing the graffiti. By tomorrow it would be washed away. Some crimes vanish.
There was a martial arts dungeon off Alexander. I headed toward it thinking Sonia probably wouldn’t be there, and when I saw her car I thought I’d just drive past. But I found myself descending the steps and slipping off my shoes, enveloped in the humid air of the studio.
Class had wrapped and half the lights were off. I watched Sonia toss a demonstration punch at a short Brazilian man with hairy wrists. With a smooth motion he caught up her arm and flung her across his body, dumping her onto the floor with sickening force. She went limp and rolled to one knee, a defensive pose.
Her instructor noticed me and waved. “We’re finished,” he said.
“Thanks, Roland,” Sonia said. She was wearing a purple sports top over drawstring yoga pants. The bruises were there, especially her back and left shoulder. “What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Just in the neighborhood,” I said. “You fall pretty well.”
“Ex-boyfriend,” she explained to Roland.
Her instructor nodded. “I’ll finish my paperwork,” he said, withdrawing into a back room.
The gym had posters on the walls of Gracie fighters and way-of-the-warrior type sayings. The mats and equipment had years on them. Scuffs on the floor.
“Take off your socks,” Sonia said.
I started to comply. “Any reason, other than you like the sight of my feet?”
“I need an untrained sparring partner, and like you said, you’re in the neighborhood.”
Sonia watched while I shed my coat and placed wallet and keys near my footwear. I’d boxed in my teens, working out of the old Astoria basement. As I approached her, my feet fell into the stance.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Attack me,” she said. “Like you mean it.”
I swung a lazy left near her ear. She caught it and stepped into me, mimicking her instructor’s moves. I tumbled over her and landed badly, my head smacking the wood beneath the mat.
“Don’t fuck around, I want you to really try.” Sonia held out her hand. I took it, feeling the pulse in her wrist. I stood.
“I can’t do that,” I said.
“I want you to.”
“Swing at you.”
“And hold back nothing.”
I shrugged and moved in. I jabbed at her. She caught the second one and tripped me. I landed on my ass.
“You’re not trying,” she said.
I stood up. This time instead of throwing a punch I got my hands over her shoulders and shoved. It was a hard shove and she back-pedaled, taken aback but nodding. “Again.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not comfortable with this.”
“Hit me like you would if I was Ryan asking you to.”
“You don’t want that,” I said.
“Hit me, Dave. You can’t hurt me.”
“Get someone else.”
She approached me and kicked my thigh. I backed up. She aimed another kick toward my shin. It missed but her foot stamped the floor with all her weight.
I reached out and she slapped me. I grabbed for her and she trapped my wrist, ducked, coming up behind me with my wrist trapp
ed. I shook her off, easier than she would’ve liked.
“I know you think this is going to make you invincible,” I said. “My father would say, a good big man will always take a good small man. The whole reason they have weight classes, Sonia—”
“Shut up,” she said. “Come at me.”
I did. I swung at her and found myself on the floor. I pushed up and bulled into her, propelling her backward. She rolled and came up on my left. I was breathing heavily.
“You don’t want to lose to me,” she said. “Well, I don’t want to lose to you. Or anybody. Can you do better?”
I swung hard. The fist caught her bruised shoulder. Pain welled up in her face, her dark eyes on the verge of tears. I dropped stance.
Her kick caught me in the solar plexus and rattled my lungs. I stepped back and held out a hand to keep up distance. She seized it and began another throw. I let myself become dead weight and collapsed her knees, bringing the both of us down.
I had her wrists. She was struggling. I pinned them and sat atop her. Her legs thrashed beneath me. Her jaw locked in a grimace. She tried every movement, but I was clamped down for good. I could hear our breathing and looking down I saw her nipples erect through the fabric of her shirt. She was staring at me with raw hatred. I felt sick, like watching the throes of a small animal attempting to escape a hunter’s trap.
I let her go and rolled off. She sprang up. Wiping the hair out of her face, she said, “I shouldn’t’ve put you in that position. I’m sorry.”
I stood and rubbed my back. “Impressive moves,” I said. “If the size difference wasn’t so—”
“Yes, I understand, all right. Let’s not keep talking about it.”
I walked her out to her dust-caked Mazda. Sonia still wore her gym getup, her coat and gear bag under one arm. She dug in the bag for her keys. Teens passed us on the sidewalk, midweek revelers, leaving a contrail of dope and tobacco and fading laughter.
Sonia stored her bag in the trunk of her car. Coming around to the driver’s side, she paused and looked at me, waiting on the pavement.
“What’s Chris Chambers got on you?” I asked. “Or you on him?”
She shook her head and shrugged, eyes wide, as if scanning for extra meaning in the nearby world. “I don’t know. I don’t understand why I do some things. Like back in there. I don’t know what I wanted out of that.”
