Seaweed on the Rocks Read online

  “Not if it’s heated enough.”

  “Maybe you’ve got stiqa’yu.”

  “Stiqa’yu? I don’t know that word.”

  “It’s an old Snohomish word for wolf spirit,” the chief explained. “Wolves eat carrion, so people with wolf spirit make good deer hunters. Snohomish Steve had stiqa’yu. He was the man people hired to dig up corpses and put them into new graves. Stiqa’yu helped him to handle the half-decayed bodies. He would put decayed flesh in his mouth to show his power.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  Instead of answering my question, the chief said, “Why do you use candles?”

  “Ambience.”

  “Do you like listening to that noise or would you rather hear music instead?”

  I can take a hint, so I put Bessie Smith back to bed. The cabin was heating up nicely.

  “I phoned the band office earlier, Chief. Did you get my message?”

  “Yes. Maureen told me that you’d found Marnie Paul up Donnelly’s Marsh way. Thank heavens. The poor little kid has the heebie-jeebies, I guess?”

  “Marnie’s not a drunk, Chief. She’s a methamphetamine and heroin addict.”

  “We’ll work on it, you and me, get her healthy again.”

  “That might be tough. Marnie’s pretty far gone. They’re treating her for an overdose at the Good Samaritan Mission.”

  “How would you rate her chances?”

  “Not as good as mine,” I suggested.

  The chief folded his arms and stood gazing out the window at the slivered moon in the windswept sky as I described Marnie’s mouth sores and told him about the grizzly bear that I may or may not have sighted at the old Donnelly house.

  He remained silent for a long moment and then, instead of addressing my topic, said mildly, “Johnny Scranton came in just now and I watched him unload his catch at the jetty. He was trolling off Sooke in eighty feet of water, picked up some nice twenty-pound springs and an eighty-pound halibut.”

  “Not bad. What was he using?”

  “Herrings,” the chief said. “Frozen herrings and crocodile lures.”

  The lasagna was burnt black around the edges, but I dumped it onto a plate, carried it to the table and ate it. It was delicious.

  The chief sat down on my sofa and said, “So Marnie was hiding out at the marsh. That took some nerve.”

  “Her and Hector Latour. The Donnelly house is a perfect hideout.”

  “If you’re not afraid of ghosts . . . ”

  “Or ghost stories. People see something a little unusual and it triggers big crazy ideas.”

  “And some people think with their heads too much. There are other ways of seeing. I hear about weird sightings all the time.”

  “What kind of sightings?”

  “Dancing hamatsa men with human skulls tied around their waists. Bears with noses like pigs. Ghosts.”

  “For drug addicts there are worse things than ghosts. Besides, Marnie and Hector are stoned most of the time. With them, hallucinations are normal.”

  Shaking his head absently, the chief said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you, Silas. This methamphetamine stuff I keep hearing about. What is it?”

  “It’s a cheap chemical stimulant, very addictive, and it sells on the street for about a quarter of the price of crack cocaine. You can get instructions how to make crystal meth on the Internet. The ingredients are all readily available, but it’s not as easy to make as people think. Kids get burned trying to make it . . . or blow themselves up.”

  The chief was silent for a while. Then he said, “I was thinking maybe the Donnelly’s Marsh curse had run its course because nothing lasts forever, but it’s still a very evil place. Pity. There’s good clamming along that shore.”

  I poured myself another cup of tea.

  “Okay,” the chief said, “I’m out of here. Got any Imodium?”

  I shook my head.

  “Too bad. I just hope you don’t have to spend all night on the crapper,” he said, standing up. “I got business to attend to now.”

  Turning to leave, the old man staggered slightly and as he walked out into the cold night clad in his bearskins, he looked exhausted and feeble. This put me in a predicament. I knew the chief was on Vision Quest business, and as such, it was a strictly private affair between him and his personal spirits. Oh, the hell with protocol, I thought.

  The moon, sliding between rain-sodden clouds, was throwing grotesque shadows when, against all the rules, I followed the chief into the night. There was barely enough light to see him moving slowly along the seldom used waterfront trail. After half an hour he reached a small, bag-shaped cove encircled by forest, and he paused there for a moment gazing out to sea. A screech owl hooted, and suddenly in that queer, murky half-light, the chief dematerialized—one second he was there, the next he’d gone.

  Rain began to fall coldly again. I hunkered in the dryish area beneath a big old cedar tree and settled down to wait. After a while Chief Alphonse emerged from the bush carrying a bundle of nettles and leafy twigs. He walked right past without seeing me and went down to the water’s edge, laid his bundle down and began to collect handfuls of gritty seaweed. I stayed where I was while the old man took his bearskins off and scrubbed his naked body with seaweed, nettles and twigs. Then, scratched and bleeding, he walked chest-deep into the sea. I don’t know how long he had been in that frigid water when out at sea something flashed and came towards the land in zigzags like lightning. I closed my eyes but I could still see that lightning. It was accompanied by an icy wind that whistled in the trees, making noises that sounded like unhappy children.

  I never go into the bush without matches or a lighter, so I went looking for and soon found an old fir stump that was full of pitch. I cut slivers of kindling with my pocket knife and got a fire started inside the stump. The rain had stopped again, and the slivered moon had reappeared from behind dark clouds, and in that queer half-light I could see that something limp and white was flopping about in the surf like a giant fish. It was Chief Alphonse, bleeding at his mouth, ears, temples and from the pits at the base of his neck. I wrapped him up in his bearskins and carried him to the fire.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The vacant lot behind Swans pub where I usually park my car is being developed, and I had to cruise Victoria’s rainy streets for five minutes before finding a spot near the Store Street kayak shop. A hairy piss-bum trudged past, pushing a shopping cart loaded with the burden of his life. His trousers were several inches too short for his skinny legs, and his arms and head poked through holes in the green plastic garbage bag that he wore instead of a raincoat. He paused at a phone booth, checked it for quarters and resumed his endless trek.

  Lou’s Cafe—crowded with raincoats—smelled of damp clothing, fried food and coffee. Lou, sweating over his grill, was busier than a cat in a doghouse because the latest in a long line of his waitresses had quit to work in Alberta’s oil patch. Men in hard hats and steel-toed boots were sitting in the booths quarterbacking last Saturday’s Ducks versus Canucks game. Graveyard-shift workers, homeward bound from Esquimalt’s dockyards, swigged coffee. I filled a cup for myself at Lou’s percolator and stood in a corner to wait for an empty seat. When the eight-o’clock whistle sounded, the hard-hat brigade trooped off to work, and I bagged a table by the windows.

  After a while, Lou came over to take my order. He is a short, angry former Yugoslavian guerrilla fighter with eyebrows like worn-out toothbrushes. I think he is bald, but I’ve never seen him without a hat on. That day he was wearing a Boy Scout’s beret covered with merit badges that were a perfect match for the tomato stains splashed down his white apron. “Is crazy,” he said. “What I going to do about getting girls?”

  “Use deodorant,” I kidded him. “Smile more.”

  “Sonsabitch. Already I paying waitresses ten bucks an hour plus tips. What more they want?”

  “Thirty dollars an hour plus benefits in boom towns full of sex-starved oil millionaires.”
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  “Oil patch wages is disgrace. Construction wages is disgrace. Government got to do something.”

  “How about three eggs over medium, crispy bacon, hash browns and whole wheat toast?”

  Lou hurried away.

  Gales of laughter were erupting across the room, where Cynthia Leach and a clutch of highly buffed women were exchanging obscene jokes about George Bush and Tony Blair. After paying her bill, Cynthia came over to say hello. A rookie porn-squad constable on VPD’s entrapment detail, she had been strolling all night, and she looked sexier than Cialis in black fishnet stockings, red shoes with six-inch spikes and a faux fox jacket barely long enough to cover her Kevlar vest. She gazed at me with dreamy blue eyes that—if she stayed with the porn squad much longer—would acquire a cynical cast. After the usual palaver, I asked if she had any idea where I might find Hector Latour.

  “Hector the Protector? I don’t know diddly-squat except somebody told me he’d gone to ground. Why?”

  “Sit down and I’ll tell you about it.”

  “Sorry, can’t. Gotta run.” But she paused long enough to study my face closely and then ask, “You all right, Silas?”

  “Sure. Why shouldn’t I be?”

  “No reason. You look a bit peaky is all. Now I really gotta run. If I don’t get some shut-eye, I’ll collapse.”

  After breakfast I went next door to my office and let myself in. PC was out, and the room smelled like dirty laundry. I left the door ajar, changed PC’s kitty litter and opened the window blinds. Puddles reflected Victoria’s grey morning sky, but the trees in the vacant lot beside the Janion Building showed fresh green leaves, shiny with rain. A Slegg Brothers truck was backing into the construction site behind Swans pub, where hard hats were doing things with concrete vibrators and steel-reinforcing rods. In the damp morning air, I heard a locomotive shunting back and forth near the E & N roundhouse a half mile away.

  Headquarters had sent me a framed photograph of Queen Elizabeth II. She wore a jewelled crown, a remote smile, blue silken robes and her purple Honi-soit-qui-mal-y-pense sash. I borrowed hammer and nails from the janitor’s closet and hung today’s majesty on my wall next to her great-great-grandmother. After that, I stood at the window gnawing thoughts while I watched a truck-mounted crane dump construction debris into heavy-duty trucks. I phoned Acting Chief Detective Inspector Bernie Tapp to ask for the latest on Hector Latour.

  “Everybody’s looking, but Hector’s cleared off somewhere. If we’re lucky, he’s on a slow boat to China. And what’s this I hear about you having AIDS?”

  “Somebody blabbed?”

  “No, I’m a mind reader,” Bernie replied, treating my banality with the derision it deserved. “The point is, is it true?”

  “Possibly, except it’s not AIDS. It’s HIV and Hep C. I’ll know for sure when I get the test results in four weeks.”

  “Okay. Meantime, keep your dick in your pants.”

  The dialtone kicked in to tell me he’d gone. I was still processing my indignation when the phone rang again. This time, Fred Halloran, a newspaper reporter, wanted to know if I had anything to say about the squatters illegally camped in Beacon Hill Park.

  “Why should I care?”

  “Two hundred acres of prime Victoria real estate is being used as a tent city, and your people used to own it.”

  “My people? I suppose you’re referring to the Coast Salish people.”

  “You catch on quickly sometimes. So how about it, Silas? Any remarks?”

  “In the olden days the Coast Salish used to cultivate camas lilies on that land. They’re full of calories, but they taste awful, make you fart and give you the trots. You want to get rid of squatters, feed ’em camas bulbs, then stand back and watch ’em run,” I said and hung up.

  As I usually record such calls, I reached for paper and pen. The pen was dry. Then I remembered the white ballpoint that had fallen from Hector Latour’s backpack—the pen marked Dr. Lawrence Trew, Hypnotherapy. It was still in my jacket pocket, and I used it to write my note. The next thing I found myself doing was phoning Trew’s office. All I got was his voice mail. I looked up his home number and tried that with the same result.

  I closed the blinds, locked up and went out into a light drizzle. PC was perched on the construction hoarding across the street, keeping an eye on things.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  The Matbro Building on Fort Street is another of the old brick holdovers that date back to Victoria’s gold-rush era. I know the building well because Henry Ferman—a private eye who specializes in video surveillance—has an office on the second floor. I entered the lobby through a door located between a one-chair barbershop and a used-book emporium. The wall directory told me that Lawrence Trew had an office on the second floor. The elevator was out of order, so I hiked up the stairs.

  The legend on the glass panel in the door read “Dr. Lawrence Trew, Hypnotherapy”. Intriguingly, the paintwork between Trew’s door and its jamb was damaged—splinters of bare wood showed where somebody had inserted a jimmy or a heavy screwdriver. But the door was locked, and nobody answered when I pounded on it. I was gazing speculatively at its shiny new brass lock when a cleaning woman emerged from a broom closet down the corridor.

  I watched her plug an extension cord into a wall socket and began shoving a vacuum cleaner towards me along the hall carpet. “You’ll be lucky,” she said, looking me over with good-humoured curiosity. “Nobody’s seen Dr. Trew all week.”

  Her accent told me she was English. She wasn’t as handsome as Queen Elizabeth, though she was nearly her majesty’s age, and I imagined that if she were to remove her headscarf, she’d reveal the same tight silver curls as well. A plastic ID tag dangling from her neck said that she was Mrs. Irene Adams.

  “Is he on holiday?” I asked.

  “No, he’s ill,” Mrs. Adams said. “Because he was robbed, wasn’t he?”

  “Was he?”

  “Two layabouts broke his door down. Bold as brats at nine o’clock in the morning,” she said, cigarette ash cascading down her apron whenever her lips moved. “They were filling their pockets when the doc walked in on ’em.”

  I had a feeling that Mrs. Adams and I were going to get along.

  “Tell me more,” I said, showing her my badge.

  “Oooh! You’re a policeman, and the doc told me never to tell nobody,” she said in consternation. “Now I’ve put my foot among the pigeons.”

  “It’s all right, don’t worry about it.”

  “It’s too late to worry—the horse is out of the barn, isn’t it?”

  “So Dr. Trew was robbed?” I said to encourage her.

  “Robbed and beaned,” she said, warming to her tale. “Brained him they did, with one of his own brass candlesticks.”

  “Dr. Trew’s not in hospital . . . ”

  “Oh no, he wasn’t hurt serious. Just a bit shook up and a headache.”

  “Did Dr. Trew tell you what the burglars looked like?”

  “He didn’t have to, did he? I saw ’em myself, didn’t I? Indians like you they was, only a bit scruffier. One was a thin little runt with yellow hair—I suppose he dyes it. The other was a young girl—dressed all in black she was. They ran right past me, the pair of ’em. They gave me such a fright I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since.”

  Mrs. Adams removed the half-smoked cigarette from her mouth, nipped off the butt with calloused fingers and dropped the stub into her apron pocket. I waited while she vacuumed the still-glowing butt off the carpet. Mixing burning cigarette butts with highly combustible carpet dust causes many fires, but instead of cautioning Mrs. Adams, I asked her if it were possible to view Trew’s office. Without hesitation, she produced a master key and unlocked the door. She tried to follow me in, but didn’t make any fuss when I shut her out.

  The hypnotherapist had a two-room-plus-washroom suite—a swanky reception room stocked with up-to-date editions of Vanity Fair and Vogue, where clients could swoon over pictures of Paris Hilton�
��s jewellry while the client ahead was being mesmerized, and a consulting room that lay behind a soundproof door. The entire suite had oak wainscotting, antique wallpapers, crossbeamed ceilings and comfortable leather chairs. Trew’s glass-topped desk, steel-and-leather recliner and red-leather chaise lounge must have cost nearly as much as the Canucks had paid to acquire their latest goalie. What appeared at first glance to be a carved oak sideboard turned out to be a filing cabinet. An oak bureau concealed a safe. Built-in shelves displayed dark leather-bound books that were interchangeable with those in Joe McNaught’s office. A framed certificate dated 1989 indicated that Lawrence Trew had graduated with his MD from McGill, another one declared him a licentiate of Portmann’s Hypnotherapy College.

  After poking around ineffectually among Trew’s files, I checked out his desk drawers, which contained the usual—paperclips, staplers, a bottle of liquid paper, an eraser, elastic bands and stuff like that. I didn’t find any alcohol, drugs or complimentary ballpoints. The only thing on the desktop was an ivory telephone, and when I picked it up, it beeped intermittently before the dial tone kicked in. The secrets lodged in Dr. Trew’s telephone would soon be known to Victoria’s detective squad. I swivelled around in Trew’s chair, preparing to stand, when something caught my eye. On the parquet floor between the Persian rug and the wall was a small faint rusty stain that looked like dried blood.

  I was still sitting behind Trew’s desk, looking at the stain, when a lovely Native woman entered. She was about thirty and moved with an athlete’s fluid grace. She was tall with huge golden eyes and skin the colour of cappuccino. Her hair was parted in the middle and fell to her shoulders in loose waves. Beneath her unbuttoned oatmeal-coloured tweed coat, a creamy turtleneck sweater and a short tartan skirt with a lot of red in it showed off her shapely figure.

  “Who are you and how did you get in here?” she asked. Her eyes were cool and—given half a chance—I’d have been willing to put some warmth in them.