Seaweed on the Rocks Read online

  “I’m a policeman, who are you?”

  “One of Dr. Trew’s clients.”

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “That’s hardly any of your business,” she informed me tersely. “Do you know where he is?”

  “Not at present. When is the last time you saw Dr. Trew?”

  She tilted her head. “Ten days ago, perhaps more.” Then she demanded with a little more force, “How do I know you’re a policeman?”

  I showed her my badge. “Now I think it’s your turn to tell me who you are.”

  “Well, I don’t,” she said with the same calm enunciation.

  I grinned at her—or thought I did until I saw my leer reflected in the window. Miss Wonderful walked out without smiling or saying goodbye.

  I gave her a minute. Then, leaving Trew’s office unlocked, I went downstairs and stepped into the street just in time to see her get into a late-model blue Lexus SUV. Before she drove off I noted its licence number and then traipsed back up to Trew’s office. Using his desk phone, it took me all of five minutes to determine that the blue Lexus was registered to Charlotte Fox. It took me one minute more to find Ms. Fox’s file in Trew’s cabinet. The file’s bare-bones information was to the effect that she’d presented for grief counselling following the death of her father. I also learned that consulting Dr. Trew was an expensive pastime. Ms. Fox had been seeing him once a week for two years, more or less, at a cost of two hundred and fifty dollars per visit. Her account was overdue, and a reminder had been sent. As I returned the file to the cabinet, I was thinking that the name Charlotte Fox sounded vaguely familiar. I thought I’d give her a call one of these days.

  There was a soft thud as something struck Trew’s outer door. When I checked, I found a morning newspaper lying in the corridor. Obviously he hadn’t expected to be away this long, or he would have cancelled his paper. I glanced at the headlines. Another roadside bomb had killed six Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. In Victoria the average price of an ordinary house now exceeded half a million dollars, and militant squatters had declared Beacon Hill Park to be a free state.

  I went back into Trew’s office and sat behind his desk. After some heavy thinking, I used his phone to call Cynthia Leach. Answering after the sixth ring, she sounded sleepy. I apologized for waking her up.

  “Never mind me, Silas. What’s this I’ve been hearing about you having AIDS?”

  “I’m fit as a fiddle. It’s nothing, just a few routine medical checks. Have you any idea how the rumour got started?”

  “No, but didn’t somebody say that rumours are condensed facts?”

  “The reason I’m calling is, do you remember me asking you about Marnie Paul and Hector Latour?”

  “Yes . . . ”

  “You told me that you didn’t know diddly-squat about Hector. Then you added something about Hector going to ground. Correct?”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I’m curious about the actual words you used. I don’t think you’re the sort of person who’d usually say ‘going to ground’. ”

  There was a long silence followed by, “Funny you should say that. I ought to have mentioned it earlier, but there was a bit of street buzz about Hector and Marnie last night. Some John was driving around in a BMW asking for them.”

  “Did you get the BMW’s number?”

  “No, I didn’t see the car myself. I was told about it is all. But I think there are people out there who do know where Hector’s hiding, because one of the people I spoke to said she didn’t know, quote, diddly-squat about him, unquote. Then she said she guessed he’d gone to ground, making a kind of a joke of it, you know.”

  “I’ll need that BMW’s registration number.”

  “It’s probably in my bad-date book. I’ll look my BMW numbers up and email them to you.”

  I thanked her, put the phone down and leaned back in Trew’s very comfortable leather chair. After some unproductive brooding, I left the office thinking that I’d like to have a chair like that one day.

  Out on Fort Street, a pavement princess was sitting on the sidewalk with her back to a lamppost and her legs stretched out. From a distance of five yards, her shaven head resembled a skull. Up close her face was too pale, her lips too red, her gaze too dreamy. It was still only April, but she was dressed for summer in shorts, flip-flops, and a cotton tank top decorated with yellow butterflies. Tweaked out on crank, she was using a cigarette lighter to singe the downy golden hairs off her pale skinny arms. A baseball cap lay between her feet, but there was more copper in her ear rivets than in the cap. I told her to move on. She flipped me the bird and called me a nasty name—as was her right. Besides, under Canada’s nitwit legal system I had no power to influence her behaviour whatsoever, and she knew it. If she wanted to incinerate her arms and turn the colour of verdigris every time it rained, that was strictly her business. I wished her good luck and left her to it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Victoria’s Beacon Hill Park is two hundred acres of ornamental ponds, cricket pitches and tree-shaded bowers. Cooper’s hawks, bald eagles, nervous squirrels and numerous species of waterfowl inhabit the park full time, but during the past few weeks the wildlife had been sharing its space with illegal human squatters.

  After driving over to the park, I tramped a woodsy trail past the Cameron Bandshell and around the children’s petting zoo to reach a sloping meadow overlooking the sea. The lush grass was colourfully varied with balsamroot, satin flowers, blue camas, chocolate lilies and blue violets. Hummingbirds buzzed among purple and pink rhododendrons.

  About a hundred of Canada’s homeless had set up camp on a stretch of level ground. Some had built semi-permanent shacks using salvaged wooden pallets, bits of canvas, sheet metal and old planks. Others had pitched tents. Smoke drifted up from tin stovepipes and open fires. A large white banner strung between trees read: BEACON HILL ESTATES—CHOICE LOTS STILL AVAILABLE.

  Death camas—so-named because the whole plant is poisonous—was flourishing amid the construction debris and the garbage. The scent of lilacs and apple blossoms was leavened by the stink of rotting vegetation, human waste, woodsmoke and skunk cabbage. Broken glass lay here and there. Two trees—their rootballs loosened by the squatters’ ill-advised digging—had blown down in a recent gale, and their craters were now filled with rainwater. Dogs barked. People moped around, smoking joints. But apart from three teenaged boys riding around on trail bikes, nobody seemed to be having any fun.

  A thin woman with grey hair and slightly prominent blue eyes was on her knees beside an open fire, trying to heat milk in a frying pan. She held a sleeping baby in one arm. The wide nostrils of her upturned nose showed darkly. “What do you want?” she asked suspiciously as I approached.

  “I’m looking for Hector Latour,” I told her. “Maybe he’s around here someplace.”

  She cocked her head and gave me an empty stare. “I wouldn’t know, I’m sure,” she said in a ladylike way. “What’s his name again?”

  “Hector Latour. A Native man who dyes his hair yellow.”

  “Oh, Natives,” she said inscrutably.

  She seemed sad and pathetic. I wondered if she was the baby’s mother, but she seemed too old. I tried to guess her age. Forty? Fifty? She seemed out of place here, but just thinking about the route she’d travelled to reach this hopeless dead end was enough to give me a headache. I smiled at her and was moving on when she called me back.

  “On second thought, I might have seen him,” she said, standing up and rocking the sleeping infant. “A Native man with dyed yellow hair, I mean, although I don’t think he’s here now. What did you say your name is?”

  “Roger Bannister.”

  “And I suppose you and Hector used to run around together,” she said with a smile that took twenty years off her face.

  As I turned away, Fred Halloran walked up to me. He’d been skulking around the camp, his notebook open, digging up dirt for the next edition. Fred was always on the spot when thin
gs happened, and when things didn’t happen, he was on the spot inventing stories about things that might happen. He asked me where all the camas bulbs were.

  I pointed to the blue flowers that were blooming profusely as far as the eye could see. “The bulbs are underneath those things. In the old days the Native people dried them out then buried them in sand. When they were completely dehydrated, the bulbs were warmed in hot water and served in big white clamshells.”

  “In the old days?”

  “Hell yes. We’ve moved on, Fred. Tonight the band cafeteria is offering us our choice of consommé au citron or lobster bisque, hearts of palm salad and noisette of lamb à l’Indienne with a bit of sabayon au Grand Marnier to follow.”

  Fred was scribbling in his notebook when I went back to my car. I sat in it for a while, gazing down Douglas Street towards the sea. Most people don’t know that Beacon Hill is an ancient Lekwungen burial site and as such is hallowed ground to Coast Salish people. Stone memorial-cairn remnants can still be found on the park’s southeastern slopes. I’d been thinking about burials and ghosts and hauntings a lot lately, and now an unbidden ghost from my distant past had showed up to remind me that long ago I’d smoked plenty of dope and tobacco. Sometimes—not often—I regret giving them up. After all, cigarettes have their uses. Cigarettes and matches give fidgety hands something to do. For tongue-tied swains, offering women cigarettes and the whole ritual of lighting them are valuable social gambits. In the good old days before cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, everybody smoked. This was a boon to Christmas shoppers—if you had smokers on your list, you could always give them another ashtray. And there was something irresistibly sexy about the way film goddesses like Rita Hayworth used to lean back in their chairs, cross their legs and blow smoke into the eyes of adoring male actors.

  I occupied the time it would have taken me to smoke two Export As brooding about where Hector Latour might be. Then I watched an old woman pushing a walker come out of an apartment building across the street, and I marvelled at a gull’s flight mirrored by its passing shadow on the sidewalk. And that, too, reminded me of something.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  When I got back to my office, I found two reports had been slipped through my mailbox. The first, dropped off by Cynthia Leach, was the bad-date driver’s-licence list she’d promised. The second, from headquarters, was an updated missing kids list. Two eight-year-old Harris Green boys had failed to return home overnight. I posted their pictures on my bulletin board.

  The sun was shining by the time I’d caught up on routine business and walked back across town to the Matbro Building, this time headed for Henry Ferman’s second-floor office.

  Henry’s one-room suite plus washroom is like Lawrence Trew’s suite in the same way that a garbage scow is like the royal yacht. The only magazines in his waiting room are dog-eared circa 1970 issues of Popular Mechanics. His inner sanctum smells like oily rubber, and it resembles an electronics-repair shop more than a private-eye’s office. He has a couple of filing cabinets, a computer with more ports than the British Navy, and a fax machine. Most of his remaining space is devoted to floor-to-ceiling metal shelves laden with microphones, cameras, video monitors, long-distance listening devices and boxes filled with other electronics junk. A six-inch TV monitor mounted on a swivel bracket bolted to his desk displays a grainy image of his waiting room.

  I found him sitting behind his cluttered desk reading a paperback copy of The Sun Also Rises and wearing a toupée that would have gone unnoticed on a coconut. In 1964 Henry had been in Canada’s far north, checking traplines, when he and his dog team crashed through the ice of a frozen lake. Henry lost his rig, but crawled ashore and made it back to camp with nothing worse than frozen ears and frozen feet. Hence the toupée and the fact that indoors (and sometimes outdoors) he now wears padded carpet slippers. His top speed wouldn’t challenge a tortoise. But what Henry lacks in velocity, he makes up for in acuity.

  When he saw me, his frown was as meaningful as an eviction notice. “Sorry,” he said mournfully. “I’ve already donated. The policeman’s benevolent association may have better luck next door.”

  I sat down, looked at Henry and said, “Lawrence Trew’s office was burgled recently. I think you’d know something about it.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because you’re a private investigator, not a whirling dervish.”

  Henry chewed his lip and shrugged. “What’s to know? The only thing Larry Trew and me have in common is we work in the same building. I like Larry—which makes two of us.”

  “Is he a portly, bald, harried-looking man who beats his children and wears dowdy brown suits?”

  Henry shook his head. “Larry’s a single dude who looks like Leo DiCaprio. Wears blue-chalk pinstripes and five-hundred-dollar Mephistos.”

  “Vain?”

  “I’d be vain if I had Larry’s looks, clientele, sex drive and money. What he’s doing with an office in this building is beyond me.”

  “It’s beyond me, too. According to Mrs. Adams, the cleaning lady, Trew hasn’t been in his office all week.”

  “Right. He told me he’d be out of town for a few days—business.”

  “He didn’t say where?”

  Henry shook his head. “I’d like to help, but there’s nothing else I can tell you. We’re not exactly pals. All I do is pass him in the corridor sometimes. We just nod and say hello.”

  “You haven’t done any PI work for him, put bugs in his office, shined his five-hundred-dollar shoes?”

  Men who spend years sharing remote Arctic wildernesses with grizzlies and wolves don’t scare easily. Instead of answering my questions, Henry took his toupée off and placed it carefully upon a moulded Styrofoam head, which he then set gently on the floor by his feet. The shrivelled nubs of Henry’s ears resembled the hallucinogenic mushrooms my people eat when they get tired of ordinary reality.

  I said, “You’ve never discussed the burglary with Mrs. Adams?”

  “It’s all we talk about now. It’s the most exciting thing that’s happened in her life since Donald Trump’s hair fixative let go on TV.”

  “Trew’s office could have been burgled by Hector Latour and Marnie Paul. Hector had a string of hookers till drugs fried his brains. Marnie was the only girl he had left.”

  “What’s it to you, Silas?”

  “Marnie and I lived on the same reserve. When she was little, I used to drive her to ballet class.”

  Henry flushed and his glance shifted to a wall clock.

  I said, “Lawrence Trew has dropped out of sight. It makes me wonder if he’s dead.”

  Henry licked his lips, the wrinkles on his brow deepened, but he didn’t say anything.

  “This is the way I’ve got it figured,” I continued, leaning forward. “If Hector and Marnie did break into Trew’s office, I expect they were looking for drugs. They may have thought he was a real doctor of medicine instead of a hypnotherapist. Once inside Trew’s office, they didn’t find anything they could snort, smoke or inject, so they mitigated their damages by stealing everything they could carry. A gold-plated desk set, maybe a picture or two. Complimentary ballpoint pens with Trew’s name on them. Candlesticks.”

  In the silence that followed, I could hear the distant whine of the vacuum cleaner. Henry transferred his gaze to the window. Three miles away the white observatory dome atop Saanich Little Mountain was reflecting the sun’s strengthening rays. He lit a cigarette, blew smoke out the side of his mouth, and said, “Well, Silas, how is life otherwise?”

  “Less of the other, none of the wise.”

  “So it’s true then what I’ve been hearing?” he said. “You’ve only got a few months to live?”

  “There’s some crazy talk about me right now. Tell you what, though. You’ll know the stories are true when you see me driving around town in a rented Porsche and smoking cigars.”

  Henry brought out his office bottle, splashed some of its contents into a couple o
f transparent plastic cups and slid one cup across his desktop for me to pick up. It was Italian Red, and I figured Henry’s taste buds must have disappeared along with his dog team, because he poured his drink down with evident relish. Licking his lips like a dog that’s just scarfed up a hundred millilitres of Russian caviar, he said, “Why do you think Larry needed candlesticks in his office?”

  “Hypnotherapy aids?”

  “I thought they used gold watches and chains. You know, swinging them like pendulums.”

  “Quite possibly. You said he was a swinger.”

  “Don’t get me wrong—I really like him. Maybe I’m a little jealous.”

  Henry’s glass was empty. He filled it up again, sighed and said, “Yes, Larry did consult me. There’s that burglary you already know about, and as you guessed, the burglars didn’t get any drugs because Lawrence isn’t a real doctor anymore, but they did steal a bunch of small stuff. Pictures, some other knick-knacks of little value. Larry didn’t care because he was insured. What bothered him was the thieves took a bowling trophy.”

  “A little statuette of a guy balanced on one leg holding a bowling ball?”

  Henry squinted at me. “I’m trying to imagine a guy balancing a bowling ball on his leg.”

  “A guy balanced on one leg holding a bowling ball in one hand.”

  “Hell no, this trophy was a silver cup. It was an engraved sterling silver cup that had been awarded to Larry’s mom. It had sentimental value, so he asked me to try and get it back.”

  “Keep talking.”

  “Hector and Marnie, if that’s who the thieves are, unloaded the stuff at Titus Silverman’s place.”

  “You’re certain about that?”

  “Like I said, the cup was engraved. I found it in Titus’ shop.”

  I thought that over. Titus Silverman was a mid-level, mid-career villain who enjoyed shooting BB pellets into people’s eyes. “Then what? Did you talk to Silverman about it?”

  Henry scowled. “Speak to Tight-ass? Hell no, he’s a maniac. Think I’m nuts? I haven’t told anybody till now. I was going to tell Larry, but I haven’t had the chance yet.”