“Probably,” I said. There was a hard click. It might have been Linda’s teeth snapping together, though. “Look, Hilly — ”
“I don’t want to go to Australia,” Hilly interrupted again. “I want to come and live with you.”
“Okay, fine.”
“Really?”
“Sure. But hear me out, okay?”
“All right,” she agreed warily.
“Someday you’ll regret not going to Australia with your mother.”
“No, I won’t.”
“Yes,” I said. “You will. Trust me. When you’re older, you’ll regret all kinds of missed opportunities. This will be one of them.”
“How do you know?” she challenged.
“Because I do. Regret things, I mean.”
“Like what?”
“That’s not important,” I said.
“So what you’re saying is you really don’t want me to come and stay with you?”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. All I said was that someday you’ll regret not going to Australia. Of course,” I added, “if you do go to Australia, you might someday regret not spending the year with me.” There was an angry hiss and a harder click as my former spouse banged down the phone.
“I knew she was listening in,” Hilly said.
“Weren’t you?”
“Yah, well,” she admitted. “So, I can stay with you?”
“Yes, you can stay with me.”
“Beatrix too?”
“Beatrix too,” I said. Beatrix was Hilly’s pet ferret, a sort of domesticated weasel. Cute, insatiably curious, but a domesticated weasel nonetheless. I wondered what I was letting myself in for.
“Oh, thank you, Daddy,” Hilly said. “Love you big time.”
Okay, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all.
Sea Village is a community of a dozen or so floating homes moored two deep along the quay between the Granville Island Hotel and the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, next to the Pelican Bay Marina. Some people, even some Sea Villagers, who should know better, insist on calling them houseboats, but houseboats are boats, and floating homes aren’t, even though they must be registered as such. A boat has a motor and a rudder and you can unhook it from the utilities and sail off into the sunset. Floating homes are houses that just happen to float, courtesy of the ferroconcrete hulls upon which they are built.
Mine was one of the smaller ones, in appearance not unlike a New England two-storey wood-frame cottage, except it was painted forest green and the roof was mostly flat and surrounded by a cedar railing. There was a kitchen, dining room, living room, and powder room on the first floor, and three bedrooms and full bath on the second floor. None of the rooms was large and there was no basement; however, there was a bilge in which you could store things that didn’t mind the damp. I’d lived in it for six years. For four of those years I’d paid a nominal rent to Howie Silverman, a friend and retired real estate developer, currently residing in Fort Lauderdale, plus the taxes, mooring fees, utilities, maintenance, and insurance. Two years before, though, I had purchased it (and Howie’s share in Sea Village Inc.) for, well, not a song exactly, but Howie had taken pity on me after my insurance carrier had gone south and I’d had to pony up a small fortune in repairs when a deadhead (not a Grateful Dead fan; a semi-saturated log that floats more or less vertically below the surface of the water) had cracked the hull when the tide had gone out.
Immediately across the finger dock from my house was Daniel Wu’s house. It was almost twice as big as mine, not the largest house in Sea Village, but a close second. Daniel was an architect, diminutive and sixty-odd years old, and one of my closest friends. We were sitting in his roof garden, surrounded by a small jungle of greenery. The sun had just gone down over the Granville Street Bridge, which loomed high over the western half of Granville Island, and I had just finished telling Daniel about finding the dead man on my roof deck.
“Never a dull moment, eh, Thomas?” he said.
“You’ve no idea who he might be? Have been?”
“No,” Daniel replied. “I recall seeing him, I think, but I probably thought he was just one of your better-dressed acquaintances. Have you spoken to anyone else who was at the party?”
“A few,” I said. “Maggie. Lester What’s-his-name, the guy who’s house-sitting Dr. Mac’s place, claims to be a writer?”
“Woznicki,” Daniel supplied.
“Bless you.” He smiled thinly. “Him, Freeman and Summer Thom, Lionel Oliphant, Geoff Booksa. No one seems to remember him, or if they think they might have seen him, they don’t know who he is or who he came with. Of course, they all want to speculate endlessly about who he might be, what he was doing there, and the cause of death.” I sighed. “Did you know that Geoff Booksa is allergic to oysters?”
Daniel shook his head. “No, I didn’t. How unfortunate. Your point being…”
“Evidently, someone brought smoked oyster canapés. Geoff reckons that’s probably what killed the guy. It would have killed him if he’d eaten one, he says.” I sighed again. “No great loss. I think I’ll just leave the rest of them to the police.”
“Were the paramedics certain he died of natural causes?” Daniel said.
“I don’t know how certain they were, but I sure as hell hope that’s what he died of.”
“There’s no reason to think otherwise, is there? Smoked oysters notwithstanding.”
It was my turn to smile thinly. “I guess not. I don’t like the idea of someone at my party being a murderer. I mean, since he died in — on — my house, I’d be the prime suspect, wouldn’t I?”
“I suppose so,” he agreed.
“I don’t need this,” I said glumly.
“I can recommend a good attorney,” Daniel said.
“Thanks heaps.”
“How’s life treating you otherwise?”
“Better,” I said. “We’ve got a new client coming in tomorrow with what, if all goes well, could be a very nice little contract. A toy company wants photos of a new product line for their website and Christmas catalogue. And Hilly might be coming to stay with me for a year or so.” I filled him in on the details.
“That’s wonderful news, Thomas.”
“Yeah, I think so too. I think.”
“You think?”
“I’m a little worried about what Hilly’s mother will do when she finds out a man turned up dead on my roof. Another reason to hope he died of natural causes. Or a food allergy. Linda threatened to seek full custody two years ago after the thing with Vince Ryan.” I massaged my right ear, the one Vince Ryan’s monstrous henchman had tried to remove from my head without benefit of anaesthetic. “She calmed down eventually, but she wants Hilly to go to Australia with her, and this could be the leverage she needs to force her to go. God knows what she’d do if it turns out the poor bastard was murdered.”
“Even if foul play is ruled out,” Daniel said, “a well-dressed stranger, with no identification, dies on your roof deck following an evening of drunken debauchery. The right judge could see that alone as sufficient grounds to award Linda full custody.”
“Hilly’s fourteen. Her wishes would be taken into account, wouldn’t they?” I said hopefully.
“Perhaps,” Daniel agreed.
“Maybe I just won’t tell Linda about it,” I said. “Her powers of omniscience are limited, after all.”
“If you say so.”
“And I don’t know about you,” I said, “but I wasn’t debauched last night. It’s been weeks since I’ve been debauched.”
“Weeks, Thomas?”
“All right. Months.” I sighed. “Many months.”
“You need to get out more.”
chapter two
With apologies to Bob Geldof (Excuse me. Sir Bob.) and The Boomtown Rats, I don’t like Mondays. But who does like Mondays? At least I was feeling more or less human again. In fact, despite having recently turned forty, the dead man on my roof deck, and the unnerving
prospect of having to find a school for Hilly, I felt pretty good. It was a beautiful late summer morning, clean and bright and unseasonably warm. The new client was coming in later that morning. My house was floating on an even keel, more or less. And it had come to me in the shower that if Hilly came to live with me for a year, I could put a temporary hold on child support payments.
My good mood was not to last, however. At a few minutes to eight I was shuffling along Johnston Street toward the Aquabus dock by the Public Market, minding my own business, thinking about what I could do with a little extra disposable income. As I dodged a huge blue-and-white ready-mix truck that rumbled through the gate of the Ocean Cement plant, one of the last remnants of Granville Island’s industrial past, I ran into Barry Chisholm on his mountain bike. Literally.
“Sorry,” I said as I picked myself up from the dusty cobbles and Barry examined his bike for damage. “I wasn’t watching where I was going.” If I had been watching where I was going, I wouldn’t have bumped into Barry and his bike; I would have crossed to the other side of the street and avoided Barry Chisholm altogether.
“Everything seems okay,” Barry pronounced with relief.
“It’s a goddamned mountain bike, Barry,” I said. “If you can ride it up and down a fucking mountain without hurting it, you can sure as hell ride it up and down me.”
“You should watch where you’re going,” Barry reminded me in an aggrieved voice.
“Yes, indeed,” I said. I poked at a tear in the knee of my best pair of trousers. My fingertip came away bloody. “I’m all right, by the way,” I said. “Thanks for asking.”
He frowned in puzzlement. “I didn’t.”
Barry Chisholm was a Bike Nazi, one of those fanatical cyclists who apparently believe that every street and path and trail on the planet had been put there for their exclusive use. With no regard for the rules of the road, Barry and his ilk run red lights and stop signs, then raise their fists in righteous indignation at automobile drivers who have the unmitigated gall to honk their horns and swear at them. They ignore crosswalks and ride on sidewalks, thumbing their bells or shrilling their whistles at pedestrians who are too slow to get out of the way. And although they consider themselves to be environmentally enlightened, they ride three-thousand-dollar carbon fibre bikes and wear Lycra shorts, high-tech cycling shoes, and plastic and polystyrene helmets. Most of them have pathetic social skills, if they have any social skills at all. Barry’s were certainly nothing to write home about.
I turned and began to trudge homeward to change into my second-best pair of pants. Barry wheeled his bike along beside me, pedal locks of his cycling shoes clicking on the cobbles.
“Is it true a man died on your roof deck?” he asked.
“No,” I replied.
“That’s what I heard.” “You shouldn’t believe everything you hear.”
“Eddy Porter said there were police and paramedics at your house and a truck from the coroner’s office on the quay.”
“Eddy Porter believes he was abducted by flying saucer people who put an implant in his head, for god’s sake.”
“You shouldn’t do that,” Barry said.
“Do what?”
“Use the Lord’s name in vain.”
“Goodbye, Barry,” I said. “Have a nice day.”
“Was he a homosexual?”
“What? Was who a homosexual?”
“The man who died on your roof. Was he a homosexual?”
“How the hell should I know?” I said, adding, although I knew better, “What bloody difference does it make?”
“Homosexuality is an aberration,” Barry said, expression serious. “It’s against God’s law. You should-n’t associate with those kinds of people.”
“I appreciate your concern,” I said.
“You especially shouldn’t let your daughter associate with them.”
To the best of my knowledge, the only homosexual with whom Hilly associated was Daniel Wu. I’d a damned sight sooner Hilly associated with Daniel and his “kind of people” than with the likes of Barry Chisholm. I was too polite to tell him so, though.
We had reached the entrance to the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, where Barry taught digital photography and computer graphics. Carefully leaning his bike against a wall, he unslung his backpack.
“I’ll pay for your slacks,” he said, taking out his wallet.
“Keep your money,” I said, and kept walking.
“It’s about time you showed up,” Bobbi said when I finally got to the studio.
“Lemme alone,” I grumbled.
Roberta “Bobbi” Brooks was my business partner. She’d started out as my assistant, but the year before I’d sold her a twenty-five percent share in the business. I’d have given it to her, to keep her from going out on her own, but she’d insisted on everything being legal and above board. I’d got the better of the deal; Bobbi was a fine photographer, maybe better than me. At thirty, she was prettier than the average girl next door, with large brown eyes and long brown hair she wore in a ponytail that stuck through the back of her baseball cap. In addition to the cap, she habitually wore jeans, which she filled out very nicely indeed, and a T-shirt, which she filled out hardly at all. In cooler weather, she added a faded jean jacket, sometimes a fleece vest. In the depths of winter she wore a waxed cotton Australian stockman’s coat over the jacket and vest. Sometimes, in summer, she traded the jeans for cut-offs, a sight that required a robust cardiovascular system.
“What’s eating you?” she asked.
“Nothing.” I handed her the single-use cameras from the party. “Is Wayne in?” Wayne was D. Wayne Fowler, our tech.
“He’s in the lab.”
“Have him send these out to be developed as soon as possible.” Although we had an old Wing-Lynch C41/E6 processor for developing colour negative and transparency film, it was less expensive, and a lot faster, to have casual snaps developed and printed at the photo finisher around the corner.
“What’s the big hurry?” Bobbi asked. “It wasn’t that great a party.”
“The police haven’t talked to you?”
“No. Why? Don’t tell me I missed something.”
I told her about the dead man on the roof deck.
“Whoa, spooky,” she said. “Older guy? Grey hair? Dressed like Bill Clinton?”
“I don’t know how Bill Clinton dresses,” I said. “But, yes, that sounds like him. Do you know him?”
“Nuh-uh.” She raised the cameras, dangling from their rubber band straps. “You think there might be a photo of him?”
“It’s a long shot,” I said. “Get doubles. The police may want a set.”
“Okie-dokie,” Bobbi said. “They should get a kick out of the one you took of Kevin grabbing your sister’s ass. Although she really shouldn’t have wriggled it in his face like that.”
Bobbi went into the lab to give the cameras to Wayne and I went into my office. It occupied a corner of the studio. The two interior walls were mostly glass, on which Hilly had pasted large cut-outs of tropical fish. I dumped Bodger, the old tabby who lorded it over the mice in the studio, out of the ergonomic chair I’d received as a gift when I’d left the Sun. As usual, he hissed irritably at me, so I fed him a couple of the cat treats I kept in my drawer in a futile attempt to regain his favour. He then curled up in a corner of the ratty old leather sofa opposite my desk and went back to sleep. I put my feet up and contemplated the photograph on the office wall, a night shot of the fifty-foot mural of the blue-jean-clad blond that had once adorned the south facade of the Hotel California on Granville, across Davie from my office window. The Hotel California was no more, replaced by a Howard Johnson’s. It wasn’t an improvement. At least I’d preserved the California girl for posterity. She was the stuff of fantasy, so I indulged myself for a moment or two, before putting my feet down and waking my computer.
At eleven Bobbi stuck her head into my office. I looked up from my computer, on which I had been
preparing an estimate for a shoot, between hands of solitaire.
“Show time,” she said.
I coaxed Bodger off my lap, to which he’d relocated after cadging a couple more cat treats. He thumped to the floor with an offended mew. I stood and brushed at the cat hair on my second-best pair of khakis, straightened my collar, then followed Bobbi into the outer office. Beneath my feet I could feel the floor planking vibrate as the passenger elevator rattled and groaned up from the ground floor. A moment later, the door clanked open and a man emerged, dragging a cardboard box bungee-corded to a small hand truck with an extensible handle.
Willson Quayle was tall, well over six feet, slim and broad-shouldered and male-model handsome. He had a lot of thick, artfully tousled dark hair, and an easy, slightly lopsided smile that revealed perfect white teeth. His smile somehow never quite reached his eyes, though, which were a rich, chocolaty brown beneath craggy, immobile brows.
“Hey, Tom,” he said. His smiled widened, creasing his close-shaved cheeks but leaving his eyes untouched. “Mornin’, Barbie.”
“It’s Bobbi,” Bobbi said.
“Oh, god, is it? Geez, I’m lucky I can remember my own name sometimes. Sorry.”
“Yeah, okay,” Bobbi said.
“Just don’t let it happened again, eh?” He grinned. Bobbi glowered, but he didn’t seem to notice. He looked around the studio, as if sizing the place up.
“What’s in the box, Will?” I asked.
“Right,” Quayle said. He unsnapped the bungee cords securing the box to the hand truck, picked up the box, and carried it to the big table against the north wall of the studio. With a dramatic flourish, he tipped the contents of the box onto the table. “Ta-dah!”
A dozen or so garishly printed blister packs of varying size and shape spilled onto the tabletop. The larger packages contained action figure dolls. Some were human, startlingly female, dressed, if that’s the right word, in scanty sci-fi gladiator-like costumes, and armed with long pistols and short swords. The other action figures were creatures straight out of a nightmare, bipedal but grotesquely alien. I couldn’t tell if they were dressed or not, but all were equipped with harnesses hung with all manner of strange weaponry. The smaller packages contained more miniature weaponry, futuristic-looking handguns and rifles, as well as crossbows, swords, shields, and spears. Anachronism is alive and well in Toyland, I thought. The remaining packages contained additional costumes, obviously intended for the female action figures.
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