Overexposed

by Michael Blair

  “No,” I said.

  “Did anyone else speak to him?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “So what the hell was he doing here?” He seemed genuinely perplexed.

  “He’d been asking around about you,” I said.

  “What do you mean, asking around? Asking who?”

  “Reeny. Your cousin Tim Fielding. Your mother.”

  “Mona?”

  “Perhaps he wanted to speak to me about you as well.”

  “What kind of questions was he asking?”

  “Had they heard from you recently? Did they know how to get in touch with you? That sort of thing. He told your mother he was a cop, even showed her a badge.”

  “Which he could’ve bought in any toy store.” He looked thoughtful for a few seconds, then said, “Maybe he was just being careful.”

  “About what?”

  “Or maybe he wanted to change the location of our meeting,” Hastings went on, ignoring my question. “I’ve been moving around a lot lately, not exactly easy to get in touch with. I gave him Tim’s name and cellphone number, just in case. Tim must have put him onto Reeny and Mona. He’s always had a bad habit of running off at the mouth.” He tossed back the rest of his drink, went to the bar, and splashed more vodka over the ice in his glass.

  “Where have you been for the last two years?” I asked.

  “Around,” he replied. “The States, Mexico, Europe, Southeast Asia for a while.”

  “Doing what?”

  “This and that. Getting by. Look, I really don’t think Zim was here to talk to you about me. In the first place, how would he make the connection between us? We spoke to each other, what, three, four times two years ago? There must’ve been some other reason for him to be here. Was Reeny here that night? Or any other night?”

  “No.” He didn’t look as though he believed me. “What does Reeny have to do with this?”

  “You’re sure you didn’t speak to him at all, not even to say hello, how are you, are you having a good time?”

  “I’m sure. What — ”

  “And the cops have no idea who he is? Didn’t he have any ID?”

  “No. Look — ”

  “What happened to it?” “I don’t know. Damnit, answer my question. What does Reeny have to do with this?”

  “Nothing. Not a thing. Except that when Zim spoke to her, maybe she mentioned your name.”

  “She says she didn’t.”

  “So what the hell was Zim doing here?” he wondered again. “Damnit.” He swirled the liquor in his glass, ice tinkling, then took a quick slug.

  “What exactly was the nature of your business with Zim?”

  “Nothing you’d be interested in,” he replied.

  “Try me.”

  “Some other time,” he said. He finished his drink and stood. “I gotta run. Thanks for the drink.”

  Against my better judgement, what little I possess, I said, “Don’t you want to see Reeny? She should be back soon.”

  He shook his head. “It’d just complicate things,” he said. “Anyway, I doubt she’d want to see me.” I sure as hell wasn’t going to correct his misapprehension. “Besides,” he added, “she’s got you now, doesn’t she? She doesn’t need me.”

  Damned right she doesn’t, I thought.

  “How long after I left did you and Reeny get together? Not long, I’ll wager.”

  “We’re not together,” I said. “At least not in the way you’re implying. She’s just staying here until her house in Ladner is vacant.”

  “You’d like to take my place, though, wouldn’t you? Be Reeny’s protector?”

  “She doesn’t need my protection, any more than she needed yours.” And a fat lot of good it did her, I added to myself.

  His face tightened. “Don’t be taken in by that tough, self-reliant liberated woman act, McCall. It’s just window-dressing. She might look strong and confident on the surface, but deep down she’s really a very needy, dependent woman. Very high maintenance, you might say.”

  “Is that why you left, then? Because you couldn’t handle the maintenance?”

  “There was a little more to it than that.”

  “I doubt it,” I said.

  He headed toward the door.

  “You know Pendragon burned?” I said.

  “Yeah. Damn. I loved that boat.”

  “So why’d you sell her?”

  “Let’s just say exigent circumstances.”

  “You could have at least given Reeny some warning.”

  “Yeah, well, tell her I’m sorry about that.”

  “And I’ll tell her how sorry you were to have missed her.”

  “Sure you will.”

  He opened the door, peered to the left and the right, then slipped out into the night. A moment later I heard an outboard motor start up and move away slowly.

  Was there such a thing as a low-maintenance person?

  I asked myself this question after Hastings left and while I waited for Reeny to return from dinner with her family. If there was, I’d never known one. I certainly wasn’t low maintenance; I needed regular tune-ups, my oil changed every couple of months, and my tires rotated twice a year. I was willing to concede, however, that there were higher maintenance people than me in the world. On the other hand, while there were also probably lower maintenance people, there was, I was damned sure, no such thing as a low-maintenance relationship. Relationships were like cars or sailboats or houses: they required upkeep. Some more than others, without a doubt, but they all required work on the parts of both parties involved. Both parties had to be prepared to get their hands dirty from time to time, if they expected the relationship to outlast the warranty period. My former spouse hadn’t been. Linda believed that any relationship that required effort to maintain was obviously flawed from the start and should be recalled. So, evidently, did Chris Hastings.

  When Reeny got back at 11:15, I still hadn’t made up my mind if I was going to tell her about Hastings’ visit.

  “Hello,” she said cheerily when she saw that I was still up.

  “Did you have a nice evening?” I asked, grateful for a reason to turn off the television news. I should subscribe to cable or get a satellite dish, I thought; maybe they save all the good news for cable or satellite.

  “It was all right,” she said. “Families can be such hard work sometimes.” She deposited her bag at the foot of the stairs and hung her jacket on the newel post, then came into the living room. “How was your evening?” She read my expression. “What is it?” she asked in a worried voice. “Did something happen? Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I had a visitor.”

  “Oh? Who?” I hesitated. The answer must have been written in my eyes. “Was it Chris?” she asked. “It was, wasn’t it? Where — ” Her voiced choked off. She collected herself. “Where is he now?”

  “He left,” I said.

  “That much is obvious,” she said sharply. “Sorry,” she added. “I — ” She paused, shook her head, continued: “Didn’t — did he know I was staying here?”

  “Yes,” I said. Tears glittered in her lashes. She wiped them away, almost savagely, with her fingertips. “Reeny,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “If he didn’t want to see me,” she said, voice like the scrape of a steel rasp, “what did he want, then?”

  I told her. She was quiet for a long time afterwards.

  “This Tobias Zim,” she said finally. “Could Chris have had something to do with his death?”

  “That’s a hell of a leap,” I said, although truth be told the thought had also occurred to me. “I’m sure he didn’t.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Okay,” I conceded. “I can’t be certain, but I told you what Sergeant Matthias said, that the coroner was having trouble determining the cause of death. What I am 99.9 percent sure of is that Chris wasn’t here that night. So what did he do, administer some exotic, slow-acting poison that t
he coroner can’t identify? Not only isn’t it Chris’s style, he said he never met Zim in person.”

  “Maybe he was lying.”

  “I’m sure he was,” I said. “But if Zim, or whatever the hell his name was, was murdered, the medical examiner would probably have found the cause by now.”

  She nodded. “I suppose you’re right,” she said. “Are you going to tell the police Tobias Zim’s name?”

  “Is there a reason I shouldn’t?”

  “Even though it might not be his real name.”

  “But it may also be his real name,” I said. “It’s at least a place for them to start.”

  “Are you going to tell them where you got it?”

  “They’ll want to know.”

  Her eyes assumed a faraway look and she didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Finally, she looked at me and said, “Fine. Tell them whatever you want.”

  I tried to ignore the coldness in her voice. “Chris said Zim was a business associate, but not what kind of business it was. When Chris disappeared, the police alleged he was dealing or smuggling drugs. Was he?”

  “If he was, I didn’t know anything about it.”

  “That doesn’t mean he wasn’t, just that he kept you out of it.”

  “I suppose,” she agreed. “If he was, it was just grass, though. He didn’t approve of hard drugs. Are you thinking that Zim may have been in the drug business too? Chris also wrote television crime documentaries. Maybe Tobias Zim was an underworld informant. Chris was always meeting with low-level criminal types. He was almost childishly proud of his association with bad guys.” The thought that the man who’d died on my roof may have been a mobster frightened me a little. Maybe more than a little. “Or,” Reeny added, “he might have been a producer Chris was pitching an idea to.”

  “He was pretty evasive when I asked him if his business with Zim was on the up and up.”

  “Chris always tended to play things close to the vest,” Reeny said. “Afraid someone was going to steal his ideas.”

  We could have stayed up all night speculating about Chris Hastings and Tobias Zim, or whatever his name was, but I had a big day ahead of me. At least, I would if Willson Quayle made good on his promise to deliver the cheque first thing in the morning. Reeny wasn’t scheduled to go back to work until Tuesday, though, and decided to stay up for a while longer.

  “I’m too wound up to sleep,” she said.

  I went upstairs to get ready for bed, my thoughts circling like old-time TV Indians around the settlers’ wagons. It seemed to take a long time for me to fall asleep. When I finally did fall asleep, however, I slept like the proverbial dead until my alarm went off at six-thirty. Reeny was in the kitchen when I got downstairs a little before seven, dressed for her morning run and pouring water into the top of the coffee maker.

  “Morning,” she said cheerfully. “Coffee will be ready in a few minutes. Think you can hold out that long?”

  “I think so,” I said with an exaggerated growl.

  “See you later then,” she said, and trotted out of the kitchen.

  When I logged into my Internet account later that morning to check my email, there were some two dozen messages in my mailbox. They took ten minutes to download via our dial-up service. And they were all junk, every single damned one of them. There were offers of a good time, vicariously speaking, from ladies of questionable virtue, just click here. There were offers promising to enhance the equipment necessary to enjoy the aforementioned good time, chemically or mechanically, just click here. Fully half, however, seemed to originate in Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, or Sierra Leone, promising untold riches, just click here, providing details of your bank account into which the funds will be transferred.

  “At least if we had a high-speed connection they’d download faster,” Bobbi said.

  By nine there was still no sign of Willson Quayle or the cheque. We had nothing else on for that day, but we kept busy for an hour or so bringing Mary-Alice up to speed. At 9:50, the freight elevator rattled and clanked into life, but when the doors opened it was a local delivery company with the new computer equipment. D. Wayne Fowler’s eyes glittered with lust as we stacked the boxes in a corner.

  “You keep your hands off this stuff until we get the cheque to pay for it,” I told him.

  Bobbi came into my office a few minutes before noon. I was feeding Bodger treats from my desk drawer in a futile effort to coax him off my ergonomic chair.

  “We should call his office,” she said. She picked Bodger up, held him in the crook of her elbow, and stroked his tattered ears. He rumbled and drooled with pleasure.

  When I sat down, I could feel Bodger’s residual body heat through the seat of my pants. I found Willson Quayle’s card, pressed the speakerphone button on my phone, and dialled Quayle’s number.

  “Thank you for calling Rainy Day Toys Incorporated,” a professionally pleasant female voice intoned. “If you know the three-digit extension of the person you wish to reach, dial it now. To hear — ”

  I dialled Quayle’s three-digit extension. After three rings, his voice mail answered.

  “This is Will Quayle. Sorry — ” I jabbed the pound sign key to bypass his message.

  “Will,” I said sternly. “This is Tom McCall. It’s noon Monday. We haven’t received your cheque yet. If we don’t receive it by end of business today, I’m afraid we won’t be able to proceed with the project. Thank you.”

  I stabbed the speakerphone button, hanging up.

  “You mean it?” Bobbi said, brown eyes wide.

  “Damn right.” She stared at me. “What?” I said.

  She shook her head, ponytail swishing.

  “Don’t just stand there staring at me,” I said. “Go out and drum up some business.”

  “What do we do about Mary-Alice?”

  I went out into the studio. Mary-Alice was sitting at the reception desk, playing solitaire on the ancient Macintosh computer thereon. In computer years, of which I reckoned there were twenty per person year at least, it was long overdue for retirement. I wondered if there was a way we could afford to keep the new equipment in the event Willson Quayle didn’t come through with a cheque. Probably not.

  Mary-Alice looked up as I approached the desk.

  “If I’d known it was going to be this hectic,” she said, “I’d’ve held out for more money.”

  “It looks like you came in for nothing,” I said. “You might as well go home. I’ll call you if the situation changes.”

  “There’s nothing at all for me to do?”

  “I’m sure we could find something,” I said. “I’m just not sure we could pay you.”

  “Let’s not worry about that now,” she said.

  So I left Mary-Alice to amuse herself and went back into my office to try to figure out how we were going to get through the next couple of months. We had a number of jobs on the books, small assignments from regular clients, West Coast Hotels, Garibaldi Air Services, and the City of Vancouver, plus a couple of bigger one-off projects, although nothing on the scale of Rainy Day Toys. Things were going to be tight. By four, we still hadn’t heard from Willson Quayle. I gathered Bobbi, Wayne, and Mary-Alice around the reception desk. I had just started to tell them that, even if Quayle came through with a cheque now, we’d lost too much time and I had no choice but to scrub the project, when the door from the stairwell opened and Willson Quayle came into the studio, with a bright, broad smile on his face. There was a manic gleam in his eyes, though, and his left eyebrow seemed to have acquired a twitch. Perhaps his Botox injections were wearing off.

  “Tom. Barbie. Duane. How you doing?” He looked at Mary-Alice. “Hi, there,” he said, reaching down and grabbing her hand. “I’m Will Quayle.”

  “I’m Tom’s sister,” Mary-Alice said stiffly, pulling her hand from Quayle’s grasp.

  “Is that right? Well, you’re a darn sight prettier than he is, aren’t you? What do I call you? I can’t just call you ‘Tom’s Sister’ now, can I?�
��

  “Will, meet Mary-Alice,” I said.

  “A pleasure to meet you, Mary-Alice.” He turned his attention to me. It was as if Mary-Alice, Bobbi, and Wayne had suddenly ceased to exist, if they’d ever existed at all. “Tom,” he said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to get back to you sooner, but you know how it is.”

  “Sure, Will,” I said. “I know how it is.” Behind Quayle’s back, Bobbi made a face. I ignored her. “The thing is, Will, under the circumstances, I’m afraid we’re not going to be able to proceed with the project. I hope you know how it is.”

  “Tom,” Willson Quayle said, eyebrow jumping. “Tell me you don’t mean that.”

  “I mean it, Will. There’s absolutely no way we can make the U.S. Thanksgiving deadline now. Not with the workload as specified. If you want to go back to the original proposition, product photography only, we can probably work something out, but you’ll have to find someone else to handle the other stuff.”

  Quayle shook his head. “There isn’t enough time to find someone else. You’re really putting me on the spot here, Tom.”

  “I wish we could help you out, Will, but I told you last Monday I didn’t think there was enough time even then. Now we’ve lost a week. More than a week.”

  “C’mon, Tom. You don’t expect me to believe that you didn’t factor plenty of slack into your proposal, do you?” He smiled, but it was strained. “All right, I know a bargaining tactic when I see one. Okay, fine, you want more money. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “It’s not a question of money, Will. It really is a question of time. You want to give us more time, then we can talk. Otherwise…” I shrugged and let my voice trail off.

  “We had an agreement,” Quayle said, voice hardening. “I thought you were good for your word.”

  “I am,” I said. “But you evidently aren’t. You promised to reply to our proposal within twelve hours, but it took you almost four days to get back to us.”

  “I told you what happened,” Quayle said.

  “Yes, you did. Not your fault, you said. Your boss got fired for selling trade secrets, you said. But then you promised you’d have a cheque for us first thing this morning. Where is it? Do you have it with you?”

  “No, I don’t. But I will. Soon. You’ll have it as soon as the contract is signed.”