by Sam Wiebe
One night after work I mentioned it might be time to sell. She looked at me as if I’d blasphemed.
“Your father and I built this home,” she said. “That means nothing to you?”
I was sitting on her couch, drinking a beer, wondering what I could say that I wouldn’t regret. My biological mother had given me up to her much older sister, knowing that, whatever her faults, Beatrice Wakeland was reliable. She and her cop husband had proven so in raising me. That quiet, incomprehensible childhood had also proven that the woman I thought of as my mother would never willingly invite change into her life.
Kay, stretched on the carpet with her dinner plate on the ottoman, saved me from tempting my fate. “If you did sell,” she said, “it’d make you a millionaire.”
“And that’s a thing a person should want?”
“I’m just saying, Aunt Bea.”
My mother looked at me. “And you think she’s right?”
“If it makes you happy being here, you should stay.”
She nodded in a way that told me it did, and she would, and I hadn’t needed to say so.
“And when I’m gone you’ll live here,” she said. “Maybe settle down by then. That nice girl you were seeing, Sonia.”
“The one you told, first time you met her, she looked whiter than you’d expected?”
“I only meant she was pretty.”
Kay slunk out with her dishes. I put the beer bottle on the carpet and stood up, ready to fire back.
I thought of Betsy Sorenson, how she’d described her fights with Tabitha, fights like the one I was gearing up to have. Tonight Mrs. Sorenson would be alone in her house, willing to give anything to have one more argument with her daughter.
I had no moral high ground. It was my mother’s place. She could decorate it with whatever illusions she had left.
The days clicked by with no news on Chambers. Friday, nothing. The weekend, nothing. Monday morning, word from the department spokesperson that a decision on Chambers would be reached by the end of the week.
Tuesday Chambers shot himself.
Sixteen
Over the last week, a single frame of the video had accompanied each mention of Chris Chambers’s alleged misdeeds. Now, his scowling visage gave way to a smiling headshot of the officer in his dress blues, younger and without the mustache. Innocent was too strong a word—his youthful self looked proud and naïve, spared two decades’ worth of compromise.
Footage of a teary-eyed Misha Van Camp aired that evening, but the audio was the newscaster’s paraphrase of her words. Chambers’s sobbing girlfriend hadn’t emitted a single quality sound bite.
Van Camp had seen no indication that her boyfriend was a violent man. His work was violent but he wasn’t. The past week she’d noticed the stress take its toll on Chambers. She’d heard him making phone calls, sounding desperate, fidgeting as he waited.
She’d left for work that morning like any other. They’d been planning to go out for Thai food in the evening. The call had come while she was on her break. Her neighbor heard the gunshot and phoned Chris’s cell phone first, since he was a police officer. When he didn’t answer, the neighbor had phoned Emergency.
Police found Chambers’s front door unlocked. A note on the stairs was addressed to the officers, apologizing, asking them to tell Misha, but to please not let her see him like that.
Chambers reclined in his bathtub, in his uniform, his brain matter blasted in a peacock’s tail around his empty, slack head. He’d shot himself through the eye. No doubt he’d heard of too many accidental survivors to aim through the mouth.
There was some confusion as to whether he would receive a full police burial, but his fellow officers insisted. Whatever else he was, Chris Chambers had once been one of them.
Seventeen
“I assume you had a hand in this,” Anthony Qiu said. We were sitting at a corner booth in the empty Monte Carlo. It was late morning, edging toward opening hours, though nothing was set up. He’d spread newsprint over his end of the table and was cracking peanuts, dropping shells onto the financial insert.
I didn’t answer him. It was too early for a drink, and I didn’t feel like I’d earned one yet. What I felt like was a cigarette, but I’d quit, a fact I needed to remind myself of.
“Chris was a good man,” Qiu said. He raised his mimosa. “He will be missed.”
“He was an asshole.”
“Respect, David.” Qiu looked less angry than dismayed at the lack of decorum.
“And so are you,” I said. “Let’s be honest, Tony, what the hell are you doing? Well into the two thousands, and you’re shaking people down for shylock money? When there’s a Quick-Day Loans on the corner of every poor neighborhood, you need to muscle chumps like Irigary and Tranh?”
“I inherited a business,” Qiu began. He’d been too shocked to interrupt, but now his expression turned sullen.
“So did I,” I said. “But I realized pretty early that I wasn’t suited for that business, so I found something else. Why don’t you just run your restaurant, water down your liquor, and overcharge on food like everyone else? You don’t need the grief.”
Qiu’s laugh was brittle but sincere. “You have more nerve than anyone I’ve met, David. I appreciate it, though talk like that usually leads to a bad end.”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t have to. You could decide not to send your thugs after me. That way I won’t have to deal with them, the way I’ve dealt with everything else you’ve sent. This could end right now.”
“Let bygones be bygones? That what you’d recommend?”
“Either or,” I said. “I’ve got nothing else on my plate. I’m out of the PI business for now. If you’re really hankering for a blood feud, my schedule is wide open.”
He grinned. “No one wants that,” he said. “People like Chris are hard to come by.”
“Bent cops?”
“Reliable bent cops—and friends. I hate to let any advantage go, no matter how small, and Chris wasn’t a small advantage.”
“I bet the pressure’s tremendous,” I said.
He looked at the rubble amassed beneath his hands, then cracked and shelled another peanut, adding to the pile. He sighed.
“Between the triads, the Malays, the Exiles, and the gangs from Surrey, it’s a crowded playing field.”
“So get out.”
“Impossible,” he said. “My father-in-law chose me. His people wouldn’t let me walk away. They’d replace me. Their replacement might see less of the big picture, but he’d be much more ruthless. No, David, I hold a pretty weak position, but I’m holding it all the same.”
I had to respect him, even if I knew what was coming.
He said, “I don’t think we’ll be seeing much of each other any more. I can’t spare the people. You win, David. Truce it is.”
“It’s the smart play,” I said, shaking his proffered hand despite the flecks of peanut shells on his fingers.
“Good-bye, David. Best of luck.”
I left the Monte Carlo and walked toward my office on Pender. Qiu had lied about everything but the pressure he was under. That told me he was coming. He didn’t care about avenging Chambers, but others expected it. At a certain point you become what they expect you to be. A reluctant gangster, a crooked cop, a disgraced PI. Most people bend without even thinking there’s another option. Those who don’t either break, or they find out what they’re capable of.
Eighteen
A black unmarked Interceptor was parked at an angle beneath my office. An argument out front. As I crossed Pender I realized the man with his back to me, pacing along the gutter, was Ryan Martz. He was wearing a track jacket and jeans, his shaved head stubbled and a week’s beard growth on his neck. Sonia stood between him and the door, hands in the pockets of her trench coat, enduring Martz’s tirade.
Martz turned, saw me, and charged.
“The hell did you do to Chris?” he said, shoving me back into the street.
&nbs
p; “You want an answer,” I said, “or do you want to swing at me?”
He wanted to swing at me. His knuckles stung my left forearm. I backed up, warding off his fists with my own. He grabbed for me and I broke his hold.
“I fucking knew something was up when you asked about him,” he said. He nodded at Sonia. “I didn’t get it till I saw her here, waiting for you. Remembered she’d come to me for advice. I told her to ignore it.”
“You were wrong,” I said.
“So the right answer’s killing him?” Martz’s hurt was fueling his rage. “Can’t fucking believe you two.”
Car traffic was minimal but we soon picked up a small crowd of onlookers. Sonia hurried to put herself between us as Martz approached. I had my hand up to deflect.
He swung wildly. He was stronger than me, in better shape. His blows stung.
Sonia grabbed his arm. “Stop it, Ryan.”
He shrugged her off. When she grabbed for him again he gave her a hard shove that caught her off guard, and when he turned back to me I caught him with a right to the face. It wasn’t a great punch and it didn’t land where I’d wanted it to, but he hadn’t seen it coming.
He struggled up. “You want to do this?”
I pointed at the gun beneath his jacket. “Gonna shoot me?”
Taking shallow breaths he opened the car door and flung the gun onto the seat. When he turned I came at him. I tagged him with basic combinations, jabbing to keep distance. He bulled back, taking the punches to seize hold of me. We spilled out into the street, landing amid a ruckus of car horns and passerby.
He was first up and kicked me in the side, too high to catch the ribcage. His padded boots hurt like hell. He tried for another and I took that, rolling away and finding my footing. He was on me immediately, throwing haymakers.
I covered my head. His punches rained down, driving me toward the concrete. When I was nearly doubled over I swung for his ribs. The punch was low and wide, tagging the kidneys. An instant DQ if the fight had rules.
There was a lull in his flurries. Kidney shots fucking hurt. I hooked my left arm around his torso to steady him and pounded on his sweetbreads until he collapsed on top of me. I rolled, facedown in the street. Martz’s hand snagged the back of my collar, raising me up. The ground collided with my forehead.
His knee was on my shoulder. The street was wet and tasted like spilt gasoline. I raised my head up and grabbed for the front of his shirt. The fabric was still. He’d stopped fighting.
Looking up I saw a patrol car, its blue and reds on. No siren.
One of the officers had a bemused look on his face. “Where’s your sidearm, Ryan?” he asked.
Martz was having a hard time breathing. He pointed at the car.
“Whatcha got there?” the officer said, looking at me.
“Personal,” I managed to say.
Martz nodded. The officer chuckled, looking from his unsmiling partner to Martz. “You two about finished?”
He let go of me. I sat up and looked at Martz, sitting back on his bent legs. He nodded. I nodded. I started to stand and he decked me. It was a good punch. A wonderful punch. It kept me from standing up in a hurry.
“Now we’re done,” Ryan said.
The officer helped him up. The other one helped me scoot over to the curb. I sat there and waited until all the cars were gone. Sonia had gone, too.
It took a long while to remember how to stand, but walking came back to me with relative ease. Inside my building I leaned on the railing as I climbed the stairs.
In my office I sat at the table and went through the equipment I’d relocated from Wakeland & Chen headquarters. Cameras, case files, a Smith & Wesson revolver, a first aid kit. I brought out the latter. Triangle bandages and medical adhesive, scissors and aspirin and a bottle of distilled water. I took the aspirin and wet the bandages for a compress. The water was warm as fresh blood.
Nineteen
Chambers received the works. Bagpipes and dress blues. A few words spoken by the deputy commissioner. The same service my father had received. Cautions about the stresses involved in police work pervaded the media for a few days.
The party line maintained that Chambers was a good officer who’d met with trouble and hadn’t been able to deal with it. Maybe there was even some truth to that. In any case, Chambers had inspired some loyalty from the people he served. His funeral was a grand one.
No word from Blatchford. No word from Essex. I didn’t see Nagy or Wong or their beige Nav. The bruises faded to dull yellows and the cut on my forehead began to knit.
In the meantime, I cleaned the office to where it looked better than it had before I’d wrecked it. I put time in on old cases that didn’t pan out. I read the book Essex had left me, Ishiguro, but it didn’t hold any clues. She’d personalized it, signing To D.W. in elegant blue cursive. If it had to be someone, I’m glad it was you.
The morning after the funeral I showed up at the office before three. Early rush hour traffic turned Pender Street into a circus, pedestrians streaming up the street toward the bus lines and Skytrain stations. As I approached the door I saw Sonia leaning against it, a brown-bagged bottle in her hand.
“Suggested stress leave pending redeployment,” she said. “After Chris, they’re worried. I’m off for a month to recover my wits.”
“Plans?” I asked.
She held up the bottle. “Just this. It’s Tuesday. Time we come clean with each other.”
“Everything?”
She nodded. I unlocked the staircase door and held it open. “After you, then,” I said.
Twenty
“This is going to hurt, isn’t it?”
“I think we both need this, Dave. Unless you have someone to confide in I don’t know about.”
“All right. Pour the whiskey. I’ll go first.”
“Absolute honesty.”
“Nothing but.”
“How often do you think about me?”
“All the time. You?”
“Sometimes.”
“Honesty.”
“More than sometimes.”
“Ah.”
“But not all the time. How guilty do you feel?”
“About Chambers? I don’t know. I wish he hadn’t’ve.”
“Same.”
“But it hasn’t kept me up nights. Least so far.”
“What does?”
“What do I feel guilty about? Tabitha Sorenson. I feel helpless. Culpable. I don’t even know what I feel.”
“What about your police career?”
“Ask me three drinks from now. And anyway it’s my turn.”
“Go ahead.”
“When I left, did it ever occur to you to quit?”
“No.”
“Just like that.”
“When you lost your job, Dave, you were angry at everyone. Disappointed in me, in Ryan. I couldn’t’ve helped you by quitting. You needed to go somewhere by yourself.”
“So you think I deserved it.”
“I don’t know all the details.”
“Honesty.”
“Then yes. You seemed constantly out to live down your father’s reputation. It made you erratic. And us sleeping together made you overprotective. I needed to get my hands dirty and you were always trying to mediate between me and the job. Like you didn’t trust me.”
“I don’t think I like this honesty shit.”
“I’m having another if you are.”
“Pour. I guess I hate to ask—after I left, there was someone else?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“Who was better?”
“Oh please.”
“Honesty, ma’am.”
“You.”
“I knew it. By a lot, right?”
“No. When you and Ryan were fighting you could’ve talked him down.”
“Is that a question?”
“You saw him shove me and wanted to hit him. Right?”
> “Yes.”
“See what I mean by overprotective?”
“Do you honestly think, Sonia—know what, never mind.”
“Go ahead.”
“Nah.”
“Say it. Please.”
“Fine. We both know the objections about female officers are just excuses, old boys’ club shit.”
“But . . . ?”
“Do you ever think there’s maybe a small, tiny, miniscule kernel of a point to that argument?”
“You obviously do.”
“Why I didn’t want to mention it. I know you’re an amazing cop, better than me or Ryan. But if I took a door with him backing me up I’d feel less apprehensive.”
“That’s because you loved me.”
“That’s part of it, sure. But you’re sympathetic-looking. Caveman bullshit kicks in. Just confuses things.”
“Maybe things ought to be confusing.”
“Maybe. Your turn.”
“Did you help me because you hoped I’d sleep with you again?”
“Well.”
“I fucking knew it.”
“You make it sound like payment. In my head it was more like gratitude.”
“Oh, David, dearest, you saved me. I realize now what a fool I’ve been. Could you ever see fit to forgive me for not recognizing your amazingness? Would it help if I took off your pants?”
“About that, but in reverse order.”
“Jesus, Wakeland. You are fucking hopeless, know that?”
“Sure. But it’s not like your head’s bolted on straight either. One more?”
“About half. That’s good.”
“What would it take, just out of curiosity?”
“Seriously? I’m not sure. I don’t think we can trust each other.”
“Is that a prerequisite?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact.”
“Then ask me anything.”
“What’ve I been doing?”
“Ask me something I’d lie about or evade.”
“I already did.”
“The job.”
