Among the Departed

by Vicki Delany

  “We were listening to Alanis Morissette and Mr. Nowak yelled at us to turn it down. Nicky said she could hardly hear the music it was so low, and her dad came into her room and said if she didn’t turn it town, I’d have to go home. She got mad and turned the CD player off.” Moonlight shrugged. “It wasn’t much fun after that. Nicky was mad and didn’t want to do anything. I wanted to play the CD, even if it had to be on low, but she said no.”

  “Do you remember what time this was?”

  “We watched ‘Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman’, and then went up to Nicky’s room to listen to music.”

  “Did you see Mr. Nowak the next morning?”

  “He was at breakfast. We had pancakes and pop tarts and chocolate milk.” Moonlight didn’t look at her mother. “Then Mom came to pick me up ’cause Nicky was going to church.”

  “Thank you, Moonlight. That’s been a help.”

  “What happened to Mr. Nowak anyway? Did he run away from home?”

  “We don’t know at this time. Lucky, I mean, Mrs. Smith.” The policeman’s voice changed when he spoke to her mom. Kinda gruff and soft at the same time, as if he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be saying. “Did you see Brian Nowak when you picked up Moonlight?”

  “No. I didn’t go inside. I phoned before I left home and Moonlight knew to be waiting. I beeped the car horn and she came out almost immediately.”

  Sergeant Keller got to his feet.

  “Was that important?” Mom said, in a low voice as if she didn’t want Moonlight to hear.

  “Aside from his family, it seems that Moonlight might be the last person to have seen him.”

  “Do you know what happened?”

  “He’s simply disappeared.”

  “Did he take anything with him? Clothes, money, credit cards?”

  “Sorry, Lucky, Mrs. Smith, but I can’t comment at this time.”

  “I’ve missed the bus,” Moonlight said.

  “I’ll drive you to school, if your mother will let you ride in the police car.”

  “Certainly not,” Mom said. “I’m not going to have my daughter arrive at school under armed guard as if she were a common criminal.” She turned and tossed the remains of her coffee into the sink. Sergeant Keller gave her a long look that Moonlight couldn’t interpret.

  Chapter Six

  John Winters did not want to come anywhere near a case that had even the slightest possibility of touching his wife. They’d been through that a year ago, when Eliza’s former photographer had been murdered, and the strain had almost broken their marriage. Even now fissures remained, patched over, but still there, lurking under the surface.

  She’d gone to Vancouver, to do some thinking she said, and he’d spent months of restless nights worried that she was thinking about whether she wanted to remain married to a man who could think her capable of murder.

  She came back to Trafalgar because, she said, she loved him, and realized she also loved this quirky town. She’d thrown herself into the art gallery business and seemed to be happier than she had for a long time. It was hard for her, he suspected, even though she’d never admit it, to see her career as a model so prominent she’d been on the cover of Vogue and walked the Paris runway for Chanel, morphing into gigs shilling for dishwashing detergent and minivans.

  Whether he wanted a case to affect Eliza or not didn’t matter one bit. It was possible that Kyle Nowak, Eliza’s prospective client, might be the son of the owner of the bones.

  Molly Smith had told Winters about Brian Nowak on the ride back to town. “Obviously, it could be anyone. A guy went hiking sometime back in the seventies and not a trace of him was ever seen again. My dad told us about him when he taught Sam and me to live in the wilderness. Anyone who was kidnapped from any place in B.C. or Washington might have been dumped on the mountain. But there was this one case in particular, a guy who just up and disappeared when I was in grade eight. I knew his daughter. Keller was the detective at the time.”

  “You mean the chief constable?”

  “Yes. He was with the TCP for a number of years before he went to Calgary.”

  “Did he suspect foul play?”

  “I can’t say. I didn’t know what the police thought or not, but the man was never found. It comes up every once in a while. People say, I wonder what happened to…”

  “Name?”

  “Nowak. Brian Nowak.”

  Nowak. Eliza had mentioned that name recently.

  “Did he have a son?”

  “Two kids. My friend Nicky and her brother Kyle. Nicky’s left, but Kyle still lives in town. If he’s the person I’m thinking of.”

  Winters opened the box that had been sent over from the basement of city hall. A cloud of dust rose up to greet him. It had been a long time since anyone had showed any official interest in the disappearance of Brian Nowak.

  A quick glance revealed the chief constable’s handwriting all over the files. Winters flipped through the pages.

  Brian Nowak had last been seen by his wife when she returned from church on Sunday morning. Their son, Kyle, was with her but the daughter, Nicky, had stayed to play baseball with the young people’s group and would be brought home by one of the parents. Shortly after, Nowak had gone to the corner store to buy cigarettes.

  He neither arrived at the store, nor returned home.

  He had not been seen or heard from in the fifteen years since.

  Other than members of his family, the last person to report seeing Nowak was a thirteen-year-old girl who’d spent the previous night at the Nowak home and said Mr. Nowak had been at breakfast Sunday morning.

  Her name was Moonlight Smith.

  Kyle Nowak wasn’t a common name; chances were good the artist Eliza met was the son. Winters flicked through the files for the wife’s name. Marjorie.

  It was still too early to reopen the Nowak case. As Molly had said, the bones could belong to just about anyone, and the penny could have fallen out of a hiker’s pocket and lain on the ground until snowmelt washed a few old bones downhill to come to a rest on top of it. Before getting any deeper into this, he’d have to wait for a forensic analysis of the age of the bones, and any other details they might be able to pry out of the scatterings of a skeleton.

  As a courtesy, he’d pay a visit to Mrs. Nowak, let her know they had a possible lead. If the finding did turn out to be the remains of her husband Winters would have an investigation on his hands.

  He reached for the phone on his desk and asked, “Barb, is Paul free?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell him I’ll be right there.” Winters picked up the file box and headed down the hall. Barb Kowalski, the office administrator and chief’s assistant, was struggling to get her right arm into her coat. She glanced at the box in his arms. “Paul has a dinner meeting with Rotary at six. Don’t let him get so wound up in old cases he forgets.”

  “I heard that,” Keller shouted from his office. “I have a wife, thank you Barb, I don’t need a nanny also.”

  “Yes you do,” she called back. “See you tomorrow.”

  She grinned at Winters and left. Barb had been with the Trafalgar City Police for almost thirty years, much longer than anyone else. Everyone, including Keller, knew who really ran the building.

  Winters went into his boss’s office. He put the box on the desk and Keller eyed it with interest. “Cold case?”

  “Perhaps. Does the name Nowak mean anything to you?”

  Keller leaned back in his chair. “It certainly does. I was the detective sergeant here at that time. It was my case, and it’s one of those ones that still rankles. Don’t tell me you found the old bugger?”

  Winters explained what had been found. “There’s a guy in town name of Kyle Nowak, would that be the son?”

  “It is.”
r />   “The wife? Marjorie?”

  “Still living in the old house. Marjorie rarely steps outside her garden gate any more, and I hear the boy is reclusive himself. It was hard on them. Husband and father simply vanished. Not only did he up and leave his family, but Marjorie had no means of support. The family’s assets, limited as they were, were frozen. She ended up on welfare.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  “Unofficially, I think the guy walked out. There was never the slightest indication of foul play, and no reason to believe anyone would want him gone. He wasn’t the type to have the mob as enemies and I didn’t find any trace of hidden vices such as gambling debts or drug addiction. He didn’t take anything with him and that looked odd, I’ll admit. Other than his wallet, which he had on him when he supposedly went to the store for cigarettes.”

  “Wouldn’t a man leaving home take at least some clothes, shaving kit?”

  “You’d think. The wife, of course, insisted that Nowak was a happily married family man who had no reason whatsoever to contemplate leaving them. They were church-going. Catholic. The picture of domestic bliss. Not that that matters, in my experience.”

  “You must have had a reason to suspect he walked out.”

  “Gut instinct. Not that that’s worth much either. Perhaps I just didn’t like Marjorie, the wife. Weak, whiny little thing, I thought. I wondered at the time why anyone would want to live with a woman like that.” Keller shook his head and took a long pull on the can of Coke by his elbow, one of many he consumed over the course of a day. The scent of tobacco was an invisible cloak clinging to the man’s clothes and skin. His eyes drifted away. “’Course you never know what attracts one person to another, do you? Or what goes on in other people’s marriages.

  “I’m glad Eliza’s back,” he said, apropos of nothing.

  “She was only in Vancouver,” Winters replied, defensive hackles rising. “She needed a break.”

  “Sorry. Back to Nowak. I uncovered one piece of evidence in all the time I spent on the investigation. Only one thing that possibly had any bearing on what happened to him.”

  “And?”

  “Three weeks before he disappeared, he sold ten thousand dollars worth of Royal Bank stock. The cash sat in his bank account for one week, and then it was gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Gone. He withdrew ten thousand in cash. And didn’t use any of it to buy cigarettes.”

  “Did his wife have an explanation?”

  “Says she didn’t know about it. He’d inherited some money when his mother died about five years before. He told Marjorie he was investing it, but she didn’t know what he did with it. She didn’t seem to know, or care, anything about their finances. The money didn’t go through their joint account, and she didn’t know he had a personal one. Which, I might point out, he’d only opened in time to store the money.”

  “I assume the cash was never located.”

  “Right on that.”

  “Looks suspicious.”

  “Talk was rampant around town, as you can imagine. Nowak and Marjorie had the usual sort of friends, neighbors, people from church, his work. But the man himself didn’t seem to have any real buddies. Anyone he’d talk to. I mean if he was considering running off.”

  “Lots of men of that generation don’t have good friends of their own. Our generation, I guess.”

  “True.”

  “You checked with his family? Extended family?”

  “Yup. Parents both dead, one brother. The brother claimed he hadn’t seen Brian since Christmas the year before the previous one, nor had he any idea where he could have gone.”

  “Did you think about suicide or getting lost? A walk into the mountains, not able to find the way out?”

  “Sure. Except for one thing—he didn’t take his car. He didn’t get a lift, least not with anyone we were able to locate. No one reported seeing him walking along the highway heading out of town. We did a search of the mountainside near his home and came up with nothing. Even had a psychic show up one day about a month later, saying he could lead us to the grave. It was a grave all right—where someone had buried their damned dog in a quiet spot in the forest overlooking town.”

  “I’m going to wait until tomorrow and see if Ron comes up with anything more. I should pay a visit to Mrs. Nowak. She deserves to know we might be reopening the case. If we do have to reopen it, I’d like to get a feel for her.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Want to come?”

  “You bet.”

  “He had a daughter, Nicky. Know anything about where she is these days?”

  “She was a pretty little thing, friends with Molly Smith, I remember. She’s not in Trafalgar, but I don’t know where she ended up. Better than her mother and brother, I hope.”

  ***

  The man stank.

  Most of them stank, but on a scale of one to ten, this one was a ten.

  He grunted and rolled off her, letting rip with a huge fart. He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled on his socks. “Good one.”

  “You’re the best, babe,” she said, trying not to breathe.

  He got to his feet with a groan and went to the bathroom. He didn’t bother to close the door, and she could hear the sound of urine splashing into the toilet and water in the sink. He came back, his belly so big and his cock so small it was almost invisible, and pulled on his clothes. He slapped a couple of bills on the bedside table. “Next week?”

  “I’m already dreaming about it,” she said with a soft purr.

  He slapped her naked rump and left.

  Pig.

  She rolled out of bed. She needed a shower, but first things first. She checked the notes.

  An extra hundred bucks.

  If she had to be a whore, she might as well be a good whore.

  Nicole Nolte stood under the shower for a long time. She imagined she could fell the man’s sweat running off her body, swirling around the drain, disappearing into the sewer.

  She stepped out of the shower, dried her hair and made up her face. She studied herself in the mirror. Time to change the hair color, maybe. Shake things up. Perhaps she should go blond. She ran her fingers across her flat belly. Not an ounce of flab.

  The bedroom door opened and footsteps crossed the floor.

  “Don’t you ever knock,” she said, coming out of the bathroom.

  He stood at the dresser, counting the money. “Anything more?”

  “No. Not that I’d tell you if there was.”

  “You’re getting a real mouth on you, Nicole.”

  “So the customers tell me. Particularly when we play Christmas candy cane.” She licked her upper lip, stood naked in front of him, and held out her hand. “Give it to me.”

  He handed her a paper packet. She held it to her nose and breathed deeply. She wouldn’t take it here, not in front of him.

  “I got into his wallet,” she said. “First time I was able to convince him to take a shower before coming to bed.”

  “Good girl. What’d you find?”

  “Driver’s license, of course. With address.” She opened the dresser drawer and pulled out a scrap of paper. “It’s all here. Also a picture of a scrawny broad who’s had her face done and two kids. A couple of school pics of the same kids.”

  “Where’s he live?”

  She tossed her clothes onto the bed, stepped into her thong, and fastened her bra behind her. “West Vancouver. Nice area. Big houses.” She sat on the edge of the bed and pulled on pantyhose. She put on a white blouse and gray suit with skirt cut just above the knee. It was the middle of the day, lunchtime, and she had another appointment when the offices downtown closed.

  Her partner called himself Joey Stewart. He was a rat-faced Scotsman with bad
skin and a worse accent. She didn’t like him much, didn’t trust him at all, but she needed him and he needed her and they kept their eyes on each other.

  She’d told him from the beginning that he wasn’t getting any extra benefits from their business relationship. Sometimes he tried to play the tough guy, as if he were some kind of pimp. She slapped him down fast enough.

  If he thought he could walk in on her anytime he liked, then he’d just have to watch her strut around the room and wiggle her butt and know he wasn’t getting any. Ever.

  Nicole Nolte, once named Nicky Nowak, wasn’t a whore.

  She was a businesswoman.

  She and Joey ran an escort service. With a difference. They had only one escort—Nicole. Joey advertised in the seedier papers and on the Internet with pictures of beautiful, sexy women. The customers only ever got Nicole. Not many were dissatisfied.

  Some of them wanted dates and she could do glamour. Some of them just wanted a fuck and she could certainly do that. Joey tried to weed out the one-timers, but some always got through, a waste of time and effort although it paid well. They made their real money off the ones who wanted a regular encounter. Wednesday lunchtime, Tuesday and Thursday before work, Friday for drinks. This one, the fat banker with a flatulence problem, called himself Matt Jones, real name Matthew Packer, visited her every Wednesday from twelve to one. He’d been coming for two months, and today for the first time she’d been able to get into his wallet and obtain the information she needed.

  Joey rented this apartment, small but in a fashionable building downtown, and had mounted cameras in the ceiling and the headboard of the bed.

  It was unlikely Matthew would be showing up next Wednesday. Nicole had pinched a business card on their first date—no point in continuing if he were a shop clerk or something—and the day after tomorrow he’d get a package in the office mail. A couple of pictures of him in action, Nicole’s face blanked out. She made sure to change the color of the sheets from one assignation to the next, so it would be obvious the pictures were taken on different days. The package would include a photo of his house, taken by Joey. Even better if he could snap the wife or one of the kids. Twenty thousand dollars and he’d never hear from them again.