Seaweed Under Water Page 4

  “I’ve been missing you, Silas, you don’t call me any more,” she said, standing up and looking down at me.

  It was too dark to see her eyes. “I think about you all the time,” I said.

  She touched the top of my head with her fingers and was turning away when I took her in my arms. She undressed in my cabin with the window at her back. The curtains were open, and she looked beautiful in the moonlight.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  In Coast Salish mythology, the world’s creation and its transfiguration into modern form occurred long, long ago. In this mythology, the principal figure is Raven, who created living creatures from mud and other inanimate substances. Raven created more than men, snails and whales: Raven created truth and beauty. Sometimes known as The Trickster, Raven also created opposites, which is why we have disorder in the world. The next morning, after Felicity left, Raven disordered my mind with memories of Felicity taking her clothes off.

  I drove into town on autopilot and made it all the way without killing anyone. After breakfast at Lou’s, I took a walk. Douglas Street was thick with vehicles and pedestrians. I crossed Fisgard on a green light, thinking about Felicity Exeter but keeping a lookout for street hustlers. One then-popular swindle involved an “accidental” sidewalk collision, followed by a dropped and smashed valuable, such as expensive prescription eyeglasses and a demand for immediate cash reparations. Variants of this classic con have been practised for centuries.

  On Fisgard Street, a young woman with a pierced nostril tried to sell me a subscription to a magazine published by victims of violence. She was from Calgary and lived in doorways. She had a grey, pinched, angry face and seemed on the verge of collapse. I took her over to the Good Samaritan Mission and got her fixed up with one of their counsellors. Afterwards I walked through Chinatown to my office. PC let herself out when I let myself in. I picked up the junk lying on the floor beneath the mail slot and threw most of it into the wastebasket. That reminded me of the fireplace ashes I’d found in the Rainbow Motel. Somebody had been burning papers—was that significant?

  Back in the 1870s, when public hangings were still the rage, and this building was new, my room had been a harness maker’s shop. Sometimes, if it’s raining or humid, I detect nebulous odours of saddle soap and leather. I opened the curtains and looked across the street at Swans Pub. Swans looks as if it has been there forever. It hasn’t. For the first century of its existence, it had been a grain and seed warehouse.

  An elderly lady came out of Fantan Alley pushing a cream-coloured baby carriage inhabited by a cream-coloured toy poodle. The poodle had a red ribbon tied about its head and was wearing a red silk jacket. The lady, elegantly attired in a long dress of cream-coloured lace, had on a cream straw hat the size of a bicycle wheel. A couple of sweaty, sorry old bums in pee-stained khakis were sitting on the sidewalk, swigging from something concealed in a brown paper bag. They gallantly offered the lady a drink. She sailed past with her nose in the air.

  The sun was rising above Swans’ roof. In a few minutes, the area inside my window would be like a tanning salon, but that didn’t worry me. What worried me was the raven, staring down from Swans’ parapet. Corvus corax is a large bird. When our old people see one, they usually refer to him as Te Spokalwets (the same term we use for ghosts). In the best old stories, Raven is a mythological helper, who often steps in with a message when humans lose their way. I watched the raven for five minutes, before it flew off, leaving a message on the sidewalk that missed the bums by an inch.

  It was definitely hot. If I hadn’t been wearing a T-shirt, I’d have loosed my collar and rolled up my sleeves. I sat at my computer and checked e-mails. A message from headquarters announced that Detective Chief Inspector Bulloch was retiring. Detective Inspector Bernie the Tapp had been appointed acting Chief DCI. I sent Bernie a quick congratulatory e-mail, got up and stood looking out the window again, thinking about Detective Chief Inspector Bulloch.

  Bulloch and I had gone a few rounds together over the years. Now, to my surprise, I found myself feeling sorry for him: 60 years old, facing an uncertain future, with fallen arches, a boozer’s unlovely nose, hemorrhoids, divorced, and his son telling him to go fuck himself.

  Beyond the window, the sun was climbing behind office buildings and microwave towers. Lowering my gaze, I noticed spots of black powder lying on the broad old-fashioned windowsill. It looked like soot. Something caused me to raise my eyes. A dark, mouse-size object was hanging from the curtains. It was a bat. I wondered how it had got inside the room. Maybe it had come down the chimney. More probably, it had flown in through the doorway, perhaps at night, while the janitor who cleaned the place had left a door open. When I checked, I saw fresh soot lying in the fireplace.

  I left the bat alone and opened the door to let it go—if it wanted to go—before PC ate it.

  What was going on? Bats in my office, ravens eyeing me from vantages, and all this on the same day? Unwilling to waste further time in the realm of the incomprehensible, I returned to my computer and ran a search on Neville Rollins.

  Rollin’s file officially confirmed some things I’d already heard. Twenty-odd years previously, Neville Rollins had married Jane Marie Colby. Two years later, Neville Rollins was reported missing. What Fred Colby had omitted to mention during our conversation, was that his daughter, Jane, had been charged with Neville’s murder.

  Bernie Tapp had been a rookie detective constable at the time. His superior, Bulloch, then a detective sergeant, had been on duty when Tess and Harley Rollins came in to report their brother missing. According to them, Neville had disappeared after a furious argument with his wife. The Rollins’s then went on to accuse Jane Colby of murdering their brother and hiding his body.

  When questioned by Bulloch, Jane Colby’s testimony had been nervous and contradictory. She denied killing her husband and suggested that Neville had simply run away from their unhappy marriage. During the following week, Bulloch subjected Jane Colby to a relentless grilling. She stuck to her story. After reviewing the evidence against her, Crown prosecutors concluded that there was insufficient likelihood of a conviction. Against Bulloch’s strenuous objections, Jane had been released. No trace of Neville had ever been discovered. After seven years, a judge declared Neville Rollins legally dead. Following which, for reasons best known to herself, Jane had reverted to using her maiden name.

  The bat unhooked itself from the curtain and circled the room before flying out the door. I wished it luck. Next, I ran a search on Harley Rollins.

  Harley’s was a classic rags-to-riches story of a poor kid, born handicapped on an impoverished Indian reserve, who had re-

  created himself as a multi-millionaire businessperson. Along the way, Harley had been arrested and charged for tax evasion (two convictions), stealing Crown-owned timber (no convictions), Driving Under the Influence (one conviction) and intimidating Crown witnesses (one conviction). He had also been charged with causing grievous bodily harm to persons well known to police. He was also a dangerous witch.

  I opened a drawer and got out my phone book. The listings told me that Rollins, Harley, had a rural-route address near the village of Mowaht Bay, a good hour’s drive from Victoria. Just for the hell of it, I phoned Harley’s number. A recorded voice asked me to leave a message, an invitation I declined. I was wiping soot from my windowsill when I saw Denise Halvorsen come out of Fantan Alley and head my way down Pandora Street.

  Denise was a good-looking constable, about 25 years old. She had been with the VPD less than a year, during which time we’d established a strong platonic friendship. Her Scandinavian beauty was very appealing, and I loved her dry sense of humour. Occasionally, usually at Denise’s instigation, we’d have lunch together.

  I watched as the bums, still swigging what was left in their brown paper bag, offered it to Denise. She chose to ignore them and came inside my building. I heard her pass along a corridor to the washroom.

  I sat back and put my feet on the desk, pic
ked up the phone and called Henry Ferman. He didn’t answer. Henry probably had call display, and a bad conscience.

  Out in the corridor, a woman yelled, boots rattled across linoleum flooring, and Denise raced into my room, both hands folded across her head.

  “A bat! A bat attacked me!” she yelled. “It flew into my hair!”

  I gave her a reassuring hug (something she didn’t resist), stroked her hair and murmured vague reassurances. Something soft and moist attached itself to my cheek. It wasn’t a leech; it was Denise’s lovely mouth. But before I knew it, she became her ordinary no-bullshit self. Lately, she’s been acting nervous and strange when I’m around—swearing unnecessarily, for example, and pretending to be more case-hardened than she actually is.

  “Christ, it’s hot in here,” she said. “No wonder I went crazy. Why don’t you keep those curtains closed?”

  “It’s against standing orders. I’m supposed to be visible and accessible when I’m working in here.”

  “Since when did you start working and obeying orders?”

  I cleared my throat and said, “Feel like a trip to Mowaht Bay?”

  She gave a faintly mocking laugh. “Me? Go to Mowaht Bay? No thanks. I watched Deliverance on TV once. That’s the movie featuring Burt Reynolds, banjos and incest. It put me off places like Mowaht Bay for life.”

  “Did you know that Jane Colby used to live there?”

  Denise stopped patting her curls and put her cap back on. Absently adjusting the Glock automatic belted to her shapely waist she added, “No, I didn’t. Poor Janey, she used to have a lot of class, now she’s pathetic. The last time I saw her she was drunk in Pinky’s bar.”

  “You told me you’d gone there to check out an assault.”

  “That’s right.”

  I asked, “And when was that, exactly?”

  Looking at me with vague conjecture, Denise said, “About a week ago.”

  “Can you narrow it down a bit?”

  “I can, as a matter of fact,” she replied, taking a spiral-bound notebook from a pocket. After consulting notes she said, “I was on night patrol with Bob Fyles. But it wasn’t a week ago, it was two weeks ago.”

  “Time flies.”

  “Yes, Silas, it does. That’s a very profound observation.”

  “You were saying?”

  “It was a Friday night. Exactly 14 days ago. Pinky’s barman called 911 to report that somebody had bopped a patron with a beer bottle. A typical boozy TGIF punch up. We called an ambulance at 11:40 pm. Not for Janey, for the guy with a damaged skull. The ambulance carted him away at 12:05 am. Fyles and I left Pinky’s shortly afterwards.”

  “Who was the victim?”

  “A man named Jack Owens.”

  I remembered Fred Colby telling me that Jane and Jack Owens had been an item, but had broken up. Was this some lovers’ quarrel? “Did you recover the weapon?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Fortunately the bottle didn’t break. Bob took it to forensics. A nice set of prints.”

  “Jack Owens isn’t an unusual name, I suppose. The one we’re talking about is that accountant guy?”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “So. Owens ended up in hospital. What happened to the perp?”

  “I don’t know; he was long gone. Some bodybuilder type, we heard. Nobody knew him of course. I can still picture Janey, flopped inside Pinky’s when we left.”

  “Was she involved in the scrap?”

  “I can’t imagine how. When I saw her, she was too drunk to even stand up.”

  “Did she egg that bodybuilder type on?”

  “Not according to the barman. It was a free-for-all and Owens just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “How well do you know Jane?”

  Denise shook her head. “Not particularly well, she’s more of an acquaintance than a friend. We’ve known each other long enough to speak on a first-name basis if we meet.”

  “You called her Poor Janey.”

  “Ye-es. It’s true, she’s sliding downhill again.”

  “Again?”

  “Yeah, well, you know, give a dog a bad name,” Denise said, moving uneasily. “She used to swing a little. One of those girls who asks guys to leave money under the pillow when they leave in the morning. That ended a while ago, I believe. Except that now she’s drinking too much. If things go on the way they seem headed, she’ll end up drooling on sidewalks.”

  Denise then went on to tell me of the many tragic cases she’d seen on the streets lately. Demented forlorn people, battered into despairing apathy, or obsessed with the junk piled up in their rusty shopping carts.

  “Yeah, it’s terrible,” I agreed absently. “And by the way, did you know that Jane has a mentally handicapped daughter?”

  “No. I didn’t.” As she said this, Denise got up from her seat and walked about the room. She said grumpily, “And by the way. We don’t say mentally handicapped these days. We say challenged.”

  “Her name is Terry. She’s about 20, lives in a care home on Crowe Street. Pretty girl.”

  “Girl?” Denise retorted, with a rising inflexion.

  “Sorry, woman.”

  “Pretty, you said?”

  “I think so.”

  Denise gazed at her fingernails; her expression softened. “I suppose Janey was pretty too, once.”

  “I’m trying to get a picture of her, but it’s like looking at a kaleidoscope. Every time I think I’ve got a picture of the real Jane Colby, I meet somebody who shakes the kaleidoscope, and the pattern changes. She plays the piano. She’s a mother. Sometimes she’s a caring mother, and sometimes she’s not. She’s a drunk.”

  I was about to add possible murderer to the list. Denise interrupted me by saying,“The drunk bit is new. Janey’s a good-time girl, at least since I’ve known her, but her drinking used to be moderate. The worst of it is, she’s turning into an unhappy drunk.”

  “I’m not sure what that means. Do you mean she’s an unhappy woman who drinks? Or a woman made unhappy by drink?”

  “Hell if I know, Silas. Too deep for me.”

  “Jack Owens and Jane Colby were an item. She lived in Owens’ house for a while.”

  Denise seemed astonished. She hitched her heavy belt up and put her cap on.

  Then I guessed out loud that the bodybuilder might be Jane’s new boyfriend, and that she’d sicced him on Owens, her old boyfriend. When Denise said she doubted that, I told her about Jane being accused of murdering her first husband. That left Denise shaking her head in wonderment. I asked her to wait while I tried to reach Henry Ferman again. He still wasn’t answering his phone. I decided to pay him a visit.

  Denise and I left the office together. I locked up after closing the curtains. Across Pandora Street, a kid with studs in his nose and a Mohawk haircut with foot-long spikes started ogling Denise. Grinning and winking, he adjusted his crotch. Fortunately for Denise, the two fuckups who had offered her a drink previously got up and told the kid to beat it. It was a good thing that, though their brains were dead, their chivalry was not.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Matbro Building on Fort Street was another heritage-brick holdover from Victoria’s Gold Rush era. I entered it through a door located between a one-chair barber’s shop and a bookstore. A wall directory in the Matbro’s lobby listed astrologers, telemarketers, a hypnotherapist and a person who sucks wax from your ears using hollow candles. The building’s ancient elevator was out of order, so I hiked up to the second floor. The office that I wanted was behind a pebbled-glass door marked HENRY FERMAN INVESTIGATIONS.

  In l974, Henry had been in Canada’s far north, checking trap-lines, when he and his dog team went through the ice of a frozen lake. Henry lost his outfit but crawled ashore and got back to camp with nothing worse than frozen ears and feet. Nowadays, he hid what was left of his ears beneath a toupée. Indoors, and sometimes outdoors, he wore padded carpet slippers. His top speed wouldn’t challenge a tortoise. What Henry lacked in speed
, he made up in smarts.

  His waiting room was larger than a domestic refrigerator but smaller than the back of a pickup truck. There was nothing inside it worth stealing, unless you count two rickety folding chairs and an Arborite coffee table with cigarette burns. Two long fluor-escent tubes buzzed up on the ceiling. I was scanning the place for bugs when a chair scraped across the floor of an inner room. The inner door swung open. Henry Ferman grinned out at me and said, “I’ll be blowed; it’s the old dog catcher.”

  I asked, “All right, where is it?”

  Henry pointed with one of his walking sticks.

  After a long close look, I located a video camera’s dark lens, about the size of a match head, buried in the scrolls of a cornice moulding. “Congratulations,” I said. “You had me fooled.”

  “That’s a nice little camera, made in Hong Kong. The whole unit is about the size of a thimble. I’ve been using a lot of them lately. Setting them up in convenience stores, gas stations.”

  “How about the Rainbow Motel? You got video cameras set up over there?”

  Instead of replying, Henry hobbled back to his desk, propped his walking sticks against a wall and sat down.

  Henry’s place of business looked more like an electronics repair shop than a PI’s office. There were a couple of filing cabinets, a Mac computer and a fax machine, although most of Henry’s rented space was occupied by floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with microphones, cameras, video monitors, long-

  distance listening devices and boxes of spare parts. A six-inch TV monitor, mounted on Henry’s desktop, displayed a grainy image of his waiting room. Henry saw me looking at it and said, “The picture quality on those miniature cameras isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough for most purposes.”

  I sat down, crossed my legs because there wasn’t enough space to stretch them out and said, “I saw you come out of the Rainbow Motel, Henry. This could be important so level with me. Were you installing cameras?”