Seaweed on Ice Read online

  “How about corned-beef hash and eggs with whole wheat toast?”

  “Coming right up, pal.”

  I headed for my usual booth by the window, but Sammy Lofthouse had beaten me to it. I heard his penetrating voice first, then barks of laughter as he applauded one of his own jokes. Chantal Dupree was sitting across the table from him, her eyes full of mischief.

  Chantal was a sidewalk entrepreneur who went into business when cops started arresting johns instead of prostitutes. Lofthouse was her lawyer, a short, fat man who resembled an overweight chimpanzee, although bald, red-faced, cigar-smoking chimpanzees must be rare if they exist at all. In motion or while speaking, Lofthouse moved his long arms as if swinging from branch to branch.

  When she saw me, Chantal parted her glossy red lips in a welcoming smile. She was wearing low-slung corduroy pants and a silk shirt that revealed a bare midriff. Her hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail. She shuffled sideways along the bench to let me sit beside her.

  Lofthouse leaned across the table, winking and leering at Chantal as he said, “Hey, Seaweed. You hear the one about the guy had the ecstasy franchise for Rollin’ Stones tours?”

  I shook my head, tuned Lofthouse out and brooded about Isaac Schwartz. My nose and my brain told me there had been a woman in Isaac’s bed; my instincts told me something else.

  When I came back to reality, Lofthouse was concluding his joke. “So Mick said, ‘Don’t stick it in there, yer silly cow. Yer supposed to stick ’em in yer mouth.’”

  Overcome with hilarity, Lofthouse banged a hand on the table and wiped away tears of mirth with a white handkerchief. Still chuckling, he said, “So, Seaweed. I hear you’ve been travelling.”

  “True. I was in Reno.”

  “What’s the big attraction?” Lofthouse asked sarcastically. “Reno’s just a bunch of blue rinses trolling for husbands. Stop wasting your money; try Club Med.”

  “Right now I’m saving up for a trip to my podiatrist,” I said.

  “I go down to Ixtapa, or Turks and Caicos, get my oil changed,” Lofthouse went on. “Club Med’s wall-to-wall with gorgeous secretaries from Houston and Vancouver. They meet a gentleman like me, a man with a law degree, lots of fancy moves, and they think they’ve died, gone to heaven.”

  Chantal smiled indulgently. Lofthouse glanced at the I’ve-got-it-made Rolex strapped to his hairy wrist and said, “Jeez, you guys are holding me up. I’m due in court.” He spread his hands on the table and pushed himself to his feet. Without another word he waddled out of the café, simian arms swinging. Soon he’d be performing in the Blanshard Street courthouse, his barrister’s gown flapping, white necktie askew, doing a song-and-dance routine for one of British Columbia’s Supreme Court judges.

  I looked at Chantal over the rim of my cup and said, “You’re up early.”

  “For a change. The weather kept the customers home last night, so I went to bed by myself. Now I got to do some Christmas shopping.”

  Lou arrived with my breakfast. The restaurateur was short, pudgy and dour. He had been born in what used to be called Yugoslavia. Quick to anger, Lou was by temperament more suited to guerrilla fighting than hamburger flipping. “I hear Isaac Schwartz is missing,” he said as he put down my plate.

  News had travelled fast. “Who told you that?”

  “Moran.” Lou crossed himself and added, “Poor guy. I always felt sorry for Isaac.”

  I noted the past tense but let it go. “Why?” I asked.

  “I dunno. He always had a sad-sack look about him,” Lou said as he hurried away.

  Chantal dragged a huge handbag from the seat beside her and began to repair her makeup. Staring intently into a pocket mirror, she applied a fresh glossy red layer to her pouting lips. Satisfied, she dug her fingers into my thigh and rubbed a leg against me. It was just a professional reflex. I stood up to let her out of the booth. She grabbed a faux-fur coat from a hook, slung it across her shoulders and walked toward the door, wiggling her hips and drawing interested glances from a workman in coveralls and steel-toed boots. She paused by his table, gave him a heavy-lidded smile and said hello. Within a minute she was sitting beside him. I heard her say, “You heard about the guy had the Rolling Stones ecstasy franchise?”

  A flurry of hailstones rattled against the café windows, melting almost the instant they landed. I cleared a little circle on the fogged-up glass with a paper napkin. Across the street, two men were mixing it up in Swans parking lot. Lofthouse was one. The other was a hulking, barrel-bellied Native man wearing a navy pea jacket and a black toque. He grabbed Lofthouse by the throat and pushed him roughly against a white Cadillac. When he released his grip, Lofthouse slid to the ground.

  I’ve seen worse violence in kindergarten playgrounds and decided to stay out of it. Lofthouse picked himself up and leaned against the Caddy, gulping air. The Native shook his fist under Lofthouse’s nose before stomping away. Lofthouse unlocked the Caddy and slumped into the driver’s seat. Minutes passed before he drove off.

  I was spreading marmalade on what was left of my toastwhen Bernie Tapp came into the café. “I thought you’d still be here,” he said. “Let’s go. There’s a chopper waiting for us at Ogden Point.”

  He wasn’t asking, he was telling. I left a 10-dollar bill on the table and followed him outside.

  Winds solid enough to lean on were hammering the city when Bernie aimed his unmarked Interceptor along Wharf Street. A nor’wester rippled the dark waters of the Inner Harbour and a flurry of snowflakes appeared, suddenly white against the grey sky. Bernie was driving too fast. “Slow down,” I told him. “The streets are covered with black ice.”

  “Black ice is an urban myth. Ice is white.”

  “Ice comes in all kinds of colours. Black and white. Yellow.”

  “Yellow, maybe. I’m telling you, there’s a whole myth industry, cranking these yarns out for a gullible public.”

  “Don’t talk to me about myths,” I said. “I’m Coast Salish, remember?”

  “That’s why I’m taking you to Mowaht Park.” Bernie took one hand off the steering wheel, produced a single wooden kitchen match from his pockets, struck it with a thumbnail and lit his pipe. It was two-handed driving weather. Bernie didn’t seem worried, but I was. To divert myself, I started thinking about Mowaht Park.

  The Mowaht is a 10,000-hectare chunk of undeveloped real estate situated on the remoter shores of southern Vancouver Island. Its closest boundary is more than 20 miles from Victoria. Over a hundred years ago the property was gazetted as a park. Back then, responsibility for policing and administering the park was assigned to the City of Victoria. It’s been that way ever since. For more than a century, the Coast Salish Nation has been arguing with Ottawa about who actually owns it.

  The police helicopter was warmed up and waiting for us at the Ogden Point heliport. Bernie and I were airborne five minutes after we reached it.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Mowaht Sound is a pear-shaped saltwater inlet with a narrow mouth, about 10 miles across at its widest point and 30 miles long. After a 10-minute chopper ride, Tree Island rose up ahead. An ocean-going freighter was moored to a pier alongside a sawmill. Dozens of anchored log booms floated along the sound like links in a chain. The helicopter pilot altered course slightly. Far away, mice were scampering across a snowy ridge. The pilot handed me his binoculars. When I put the binoculars to my eyes the mice became a herd of deer, led by a stag with an immense rack.

  Bernie took the binoculars. After eyeing the surroundings, he pointed. The chopper pilot nodded and did a flyby along the banks of the sound to check for landing sites. Minutes later we put down on the muddy shore. “The guy who phoned us, Ted Meyer, he’s supposed to be waiting here someplace,” Bernie yelled above the noise of the engine.

  The pilot stayed put with the chopper as Bernie and I started walking. An oily swell was washing snow off shelves of sedge, and a flock of Canada geese and a dozen white swans were dining on eelgrass in the shallows. Th
ree damp, bedraggled raccoons feasted on clams. At our approach the mother raccoon looked up, nose twitching, then loped unhurriedly into the bush with a clam in her mouth. Two kits scurried along behind her.

  We tramped along the mud banks for half a mile or so and finally two figures materialized from beneath the trees where they had been sheltering. They were wearing sou’westers and yellow oilskins over rubber waders. A runty middle-aged man with protruding eyes and a nose covered in burst capillaries looked us up and down. “We seen you land with the ’copter. I’m Ted Meyer. This here’s my boy, Albert.”

  Albert was a skinny teenager with a slack jaw and a perpetual half grin. He let his father do all the talking.

  “I’m Detective Inspector Tapp, Victoria PD,” Bernie said. “This is Sergeant Seaweed.”

  “It took you long enough to get here,” Meyer snapped. “We’re about froze to death, waiting.”

  “That right?” Bernie said harshly. “If you’d given us better directions or signalled from the beach, you wouldn’t have had to wait so long.”

  Taking the rebuff in his stride, Meyer pointed along the shore. “He’s at Johnny Creek, up there a ways. Albert never seen a dead person before, so he was pretty leery when we found him.” Meyer smirked at his son. “Ain’t that right, son? Scared, weren’t you?”

  Albert blushed and nodded.

  “But the dead guy, he was getting ready to drift away on the tide,” Meyer continued. “What did I do? I made Albert help me move him. Between us, we pulled him outta the water. We had to go all the way to a payphone by the mill to call you guys. Wasted half a day on this deal already.”

  Bernie smiled nastily. “You were sure he was dead?”

  Meyer’s jaw dropped. “’Course he was dead,” he shot back. “Crabs had chewed his eyes out, for one thing.”

  Bernie suddenly changed tack. “What were you two doing out on the water in this weather?”

  Meyer’s negligible chin jutted. “Me and Albert don’t take no notice of weather.”

  It was a cockeyed answer; Bernie kept smiling.

  Meyer shrugged. “Anyways. When we spotted him first, this dead person, there was some guy messing with him.” Meyer licked his lips. “He was an Indian guy, dressed funny.”

  “Indian?” Bernie asked innocently. “You saw a South Asian male?”

  “No,” Meyer said, tipping his head toward me. “An Indian same as him.”

  “Did you recognize him?”

  “No. Never seen him before. If I saw him again I’d know, though. I sure would. Anybody would. He was wearing a cone-shaped grass hat and a kind of grass cloak. When he seen us coming, he took off into the bush. He was moving pretty good, wasn’t he, Albert?”

  Albert nodded again.

  “Fine,” Bernie said. “Let’s go see the body. Lead the way, Mr. Meyer.”

  Meyer looked at our footwear. Bernie was wearing walking shoes with mesh uppers; I had on leather boots. Meyer said hesitantly, “I hope youse are ready to get wetter’n you are already.”

  He turned his face into the weather and set off. The rest of us followed behind, in single file. The mud banks grew wider and became a viscous grey muck that buried our feet and sucked at our ankles. The adjacent forest was a dense and almost impenetrable mass of trees behind a screed of driftwood and other flotsam. Barnacle-encrusted arbutus trees and cedars leaned over the mud. In many places we had to duck branches or splash through shallow water to get around obstructions.

  The mouth of Johnny Creek was in a cove scattered with rocky outcrops. Fat harbour seals had hauled themselves out of the water and lay dozing on an islet a hundred yards out. The sleek animals raised shiny dark heads, showed us their whiskery faces and went back to sleep.

  The creek had carved a deep, wide channel across the beach to where a blue heron was fishing. Miffed by our presence the heron took to the air, squawking, and flew off. The four of us stood on a large smooth rock, taking a breather. I gazed down into the water. Gardens of kelp undulated in swells. Ten feet below the surface, dogfish and rock cod drifted across dense mats of starfish and clamshells. Crabs and bullheads, trapped in rocky tide pools, darted amid beds of blue mussels and red sea anemones.

  “That’s it,” Meyer said, pointing ahead to where his aluminum boat lay aground on the beach. But when we reached it, Meyer stared around in consternation. “This is where we left him,” he said uncertainly. “He was lying right here.”

  There was no dead man there now. The rising tide was flooding the footprints and depressions made earlier when the Meyers had dragged something heavy. Beneath the trees, the Meyers’ footprints were clearly distinguishable. Additional tracks had been made by others and led to a trail through the bush.

  “He was right there,” Meyer insisted. “We jammed him up on them rocks, my boy and me. That Indian must’ve moved him.”

  Bernie hunched his shoulders and let them fall. After thinking things over he turned his back on the water and headed along the trail. I followed him up a steep bank. Tangles of blackberry, Oregon grape and salal bushes fought for space between firs and cedars. Underfoot, slippery boulders lay barely visible beneath vines, exposed tree roots and ferns. Alongside us, Johnny Creek rushed toward the sea. Away from the shore, the ground inclined steadily upward. Trees werecoated with thick green moss, and orange-coloured mushrooms sprouted from rotting deadfalls. The trail—covered with shod and unshod footprints—was as easy to follow as a railroad track.

  I heard Bernie panting ahead of me. “Wait a minute,” I called.

  He stopped walking and looked back at me.

  “We’ve lost the Meyers,” I said.

  Bernie scowled. “We’ll give ’em a minute to catch up.”

  “I doubt we’ll see either of them till we go back to the beach.”

  His scowl deepened.

  I said, “Summertime, this is a great place for picking berries, but most people would rather go 10 rounds with Mike Tyson than come up here.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s supposed to be haunted.”

  “You’re yanking my chain, pal.”

  “People see bog apparitions—otherwise known as will-o’-the-wisps. In Coast Salish mythology, bog apparitions are exceedingly evil spirits. It’s believed those who see them will soon die.”

  Bernie spat on the ground and said, “Yeah, right.”

  We resumed our walk and plodded together around an old beaver meadow, half swamp and half grass, to reach a spot where long ago somebody had built a cabin. Ten feet square, it was built in the traditional Coast Salish way, with split cedar. Wall planks were stacked between heavy vertical posts. Wide roofing planks could be pried apart to let daylight in or smoke out. Instead of a door, a woven cedarbark mat hung over a low opening in the east-facing wall. Beetles and ants were busily converting the cabin’s ancient wood into elemental soil. The roof sagged, and the walls were rotten where they touched the ground. The whole ramshackle building was leaning precariously; soon it would collapse like a house of cards. A few more years, and hardly a trace of it would remain.

  “My father brought me here once, when I was a kid,” I told Bernie.

  “We’re going inside.”

  “Me first,” I said.

  I hailed the house. The only reply was a woodsy echo, so I got down on all fours, pushed the rotting cedarbark mat aside and crawled in. My head brushed against something in the darkness, and I heard a sound, like pebbles rattling inside a wooden box.

  Grey light seeped into the cabin through holes and chinks. It was unfurnished, apart from a foot-high sleeping platform against the back wall. The sweet smell of balsam rose from a mattress of feathery boughs. When my eyes had adjusted to the dimness I saw that the rattling had been created by a string of dried deer hoofs dangling across the entrance. Bernie, crawling inside after me, set them rattling again.

  A naked, eyeless corpse lay on the platform. His head had been shaved and his sparse grey hair had been rolled into a ball and placed between
his thighs. His face and body were painted with lines, circles and ellipses of fantastic design. His clothing was bundled beside him. One shoe had a missing heel.

  “Moran called me from the gym early this morning,” I said. “Told me Isaac Schwartz was missing. I checked it out, but I never got around to calling Missing Persons.”

  “Well, he’s not missing anymore,” Bernie said. “But what does all this mean? Why would somebody shave his head, paint the body like this?”

  “I don’t know. It’s off kilter. That ball of hair should be hanging in a tree, outside.”

  “What about those deer hoof things?”

  “Noisemakers. Put up in the doorway when somebody dies to stop evil spirits from entering. Traditionally, when a Native man died his body was prepared by women inside his house and placed facing the door. It was also customary to cover the dead man’s head with a wooden hat, paint his face black and give away his treasure. Mourning usually lasted four days. After that, depending on his status, his body was either cremated or disposed of some other way.”

  “Buried, you mean?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes corpses were put into canoes or into little houses standing on posts above the ground. Sometimes they were left up in trees.”

  “Yeah, Native corpses, not Jewish ones,” Bernie said sourly. “You’re talking past tense, I hope. Surely this kind of stuff doesn’t happen anymore.”

  “Correct. White folks hated to see human remains dangling from trees and made us put a stop to it.”

  Bernie studied the body again. “What this says to me is that it was some kind of ritual murder. Was he killed by a Native?”

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  “Who built this place?”

  “Chief Mishtop. He died years ago.”

  “What was a chief doing up here, anyway? It sure isn’t the Hilton.”

  “Mowaht Mountain is a holy place. Mishtop used to ascend the mountain at daybreak and beseech Sun Father to bless our people.”

  “Didn’t chiefs go in for human sacrifice in the old days?”