Seaweed Under Water Read online

Cole gave me his card. He said, “I’m investigating a speedboat theft. It went missing from this place a couple of weeks ago.”

  Two weeks ago! I felt a little frisson of excitement—maybe Te Spokalwets had sent this man to me.

  I said, “Karl Berger mentioned there was a missing boat. Making any progress?”

  “Sort of. I know when the boat went missing. Helluva thing. What happened was, a big black-hulled fishboat went through the Johnson Street Narrows at exactly 3 am two weeks ago last Friday. We know that, because the bridge operator logged it. What happened next is, the fishboat’s generator broke down and it lost all its lights for a few minutes. It would have been virtually invisible in the darkness, because there was no moon and it was slightly overcast. The fishboat was more or less drifting for a bit, before the crew got the emergency generator running. In the meantime, a speedboat rammed it. It’s practically certain to be the speedboat I’m looking for.”

  “Let’s hope you’re right.”

  “What I’m looking for now is a blue and white Starcraft aluminum boat, 22 feet long, with damaged bows.”

  “Has Karl Berger been cooperative?”

  “Yes. I can’t say the same for Harley Rollins, the guy who actually owns the boat. Why do you ask?”

  “Karl plays things pretty close to the chest, Mr. Cole. It would take years of psychoanalysis to determine why,” I said, giving him my own card. “Give me a call if you make any progress, will you?”

  “No problem. I suppose I can rely on a quid pro quo?”

  “Sure. You scratch my back, Mr. Cole, I’ll scratch yours.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I picked up the MG from outside Lou’s Café and drove over to police headquarters on Caledonia Street. The duty sergeant was behind a counter, doing two-finger exercises on a keyboard. Focused on his task, he didn’t look up when I entered. A

  middle-aged couple huddled on a bench in the waiting area, holding hands. I took the elevator up to Forensics. Victoria’s police headquarters was only a few years old, but faint institutional odours already permeated the place. The Forensics office was unoccupied. I left the evidence bag containing the plastic water bottle in “Killer” Miller’s in-tray, along with a note asking Killer to see if the fingerprints on the water bottle matched the prints found on the beer bottle that felled Jack Owens.

  I went back to my MG, gazed sightlessly across the street and did some thinking. I started the motor, drove down to Blanshard Street and headed north.

  It was turning into a brilliant day. The air was hot now. Along West Saanich Road the scent of pine resin was heavy in the air. Fifteen minutes afterwards, I was driving along a washboarded back road filled with ruts and potholes, running alternately between brilliant sunlight and dark evergreen shade. Forest Service signs advised me that the fire hazard was extreme. Snowmelt trickled down mountain creeks. The woods and the road were bone dry. Thin clouds of dust hung suspended in mid-air.

  As I was crossing over a one-way bridge, a tailgater honked at me. I ignored him. The road was too narrow for passing and besides, loose gravel, ruts, sharp turns, fallen rocks and avalanche-warning signs spoke louder than honks. After a slow descent, I reached the bluffs overlooking the sea. The jackass stopped banging his horn when I pulled two wheels onto the shoulder of the road and stopped. The tailgater was a young guy driving a four-by-four Chev. He gave me the finger and roared past.

  It was low tide. Fifty yards away on the rocky shore, a Vietnamese family was digging clams. Barefoot and stooped over, wearing wide conical straw hats and rolled-up pants, they looked like rice harvesters. Dall’s porpoises, leaping in the waves, demonstrated the joys of unfettered existence. Harlequin ducks—males and females in pairs—paddled among beds of kelp. I eased the MG back onto the road.

  The little beach town of Mowaht Bay opened up as the road widened and levelled out. About 30 more or less identical frame houses lay strung along the road, like washing on a line. I pulled up outside a ’60s-style Texaco station and got out of the car. From where I stood, I could see most of the town. Little Leaguers in baseball uniforms were straggling in twos and threes out of the houses and onto the sun-baked road. Throwing balls back and forth, trailed by barking dogs, they dawdled toward the playing fields of a distant school.

  A sign in a window informed me that the Texaco Station was closed for 15 minutes.

  The Bee Hive Diner, directly across the street, looked like, and turned out to be, a former E and N railroad caboose, painted a garish blue instead of the traditional red. The front of the diner stood on the street, its back on pilings. The tide rose and fell beneath it.

  A big man wearing a plaid shirt, heavy-duty black cords and yellow suspenders came out. After giving me a long, hard stare, he put a toothpick into his mouth and walked toward me. At almost the last moment he detoured toward the town’s government wharf, paused at the head of a ramp and gave me another long, hard stare, just as scary as the first one, before walking away and out of view among fishboats and other vessels. Maybe I reminded him of somebody he disliked; it happens to me a lot.

  I lost interest in him when I noticed the Mayan Girl, tied up alongside a tugboat. The last time I had seen that yacht, it had been moored outside the Rainbow Motel.

  I crossed to the diner, pushed the screen door open and stepped into the fuggy atmosphere of hamburgers and coffee. A counter ran along one side of the diner’s narrow room, upholstered booths along the other. Racks filled with magazines and paperbacks covered part of one wall. Windows looked out on the government wharf and spectacular views of Mowaht Sound. I sat at the counter. The diner’s short-order cook was lean and small, and looked to be in his late forties or early fifties. He fixed me up with flatware, a paper napkin and a glass of iced water then handed me a menu that probably hadn’t changed one iota since the diner had been created.

  The cook’s identical twin brother, wearing a ball cap and blue coveralls with Texaco embroidered on it, was sitting with his elbows on the counter, battling the Times Colonist crossword. The sea surged among the pilings beneath the diner’s wooden floor.

  An overweight kid with dye-streaked hair hanging down over his collar was sitting alone in a booth, drinking Coca-Cola and scanning Playboy. When I entered, the kid looked up. It was the tailgater. He hid his face among Hugh Hefner’s bunnies.

  I ordered coffee and checked the menu. When the cook brought my coffee, he tilted his head and raised his eyebrows. I ordered a hamburger and fries.

  “You want onion rings with that?”

  “Sure. Give ’em a good singe.”

  The Bee Hive didn’t have a Wurlitzer, but it had am radio. Little Anthony and the Imperials were singing “Tears On My Pillow.”

  Texaco man’s lips moved as he silently sang along. After a while, he pushed his ball cap back with a grimy finger and scratched his forehead. More time passed before he looked across the road to where my MG was parked and asked, “In a hurry for gas?”

  “After I’ve eaten will be soon enough.”

  Texaco man tasted his coffee, made a face and said, “I’m Tommy Slapp. That guy shuffling his skinny ass behind the counter is my brother, Ronnie. He calls himself a chef. Been making coffee here for 30 years, Ronnie has, and still hasn’t got the hang of it.”

  The chef polished his grill with a rag soaked in cooking oil before starting my hamburger and onions and fries. He said good-naturedly, “Pay him no mind. You’re sitting next to Tommy motor mouth. Pity it don’t have a muffler.”

  The kid got up and put the bunnies to bed in the magazine rack. Ronnie had eyes in the back of his head. Without turning he said loudly, “Don’t even think about it.”

  Looking aggrieved, the kid put money beside the till and took the bunnies home.

  “Jerk,” Ronnie said, without acrimony. “Comes in here, spills Coke all over my magazines then wants to sneak off without

  paying.”

  The coffee was almost strong enough to hold a spoon upright. “Coffee all right
?” Ronnie enquired.

  “Perfect,” I lied. “Just the way I like it.”

  Now Little Anthony was singing “Goin’ Out of My Head”—his all-time great.

  Distant rumblings announced the approach of an immense logging truck. Massively loaded with giant cedar logs, it created minor earth tremors going past the diner. One log was at least four feet across at the butt.

  Tommy said idly, “That’s one log Boss Rollins won’t be stealing.”

  “I wish them drivers would learn to slow down,” Ronnie grumbled. “One of these days they’ll shake this diner off its footings. It’ll slide down this goddam bank and end up in the Sound.”

  I said, “I didn’t know we had commercial trees that size left on lower Vancouver Island.”

  Texaco Tommy and diner Ronnie exchanged meaningful glances.

  I added, “You men have been around this country for a while. A woman called Jane Colby used to live here. Maybe you’d know her?”

  Texaco Tommy jerked as if somebody had just prodded him with a sharp stick. He said, “Who wants to know?”

  “Me, I’m a cop.”

  “What’s Janey done now?”

  “She’ll tell you herself, next time you meet her.”

  Tommy took my reproof in his stride. “I ain’t seen Janey for ages,” he stated, shaking his head. “How about you, Ronnie? You seen Janey lately?”

  Shrugging his shoulders, Ronnie used a shiny metal spatula to scoop my lunch onto a plate, added a sprig of parsley, slid it in front of me and refilled my coffee cup before I could stop him.

  I asked for another glass of water and said to Tommy, “Tell me about Boss Rollins.”

  “Boss is another famous character, but what the hell and who the hell he’s bossing nowadays is a good question,” Tommy said sarcastically. “Me and my brother’s been around this country since Boss Rollins was a ragged-ass punk, stealing logs to buy his first chainsaw.”

  “Anything Tommy says, officer, take it with a pinch of salt,” the chef said. “We were all ragged-ass punks, back in them days. Tommy bad-mouths the Boss because the Boss got tired of paying too much for Tommy’s gas. Boss made a deal with Esso, bought his own fuel tanks and saved himself a mint.”

  “Keep quiet and stick to slinging hash, Ronnie,” Tommy said. Leaning toward me he added in a stage whisper, “Be warned. This joint is ptomaine city. Only reason anybody eats here is because the next café is across the Sound.”

  “Pity you can’t sell the gas that comes outta your mouth, Tommy, ’cause you’d never be poor,” the chef joked.

  The hamburger was surprisingly good; the fries and onions crisp, the way I like ’em. I asked, “Jane Colby grew up here, I understand?”

  “Miss Popularity, that’s Jane,” the chef replied, adding with a broad wink, “Just ask my brother.”

  Suddenly deaf, Tommy bent his leathery neck and gazed at his crossword.

  The chef went on, “Tommy and Janey was high-school sweethearts, or might have been, if either one of them had ever went to high school. Then Janey up and married Neville Rollins. Tommy, he was heartsick. Aren’t that right, little brother?”

  Tommy’s lips twitched, but he didn’t rise to the bait.

  The chef went on, “At age 16, Janey was the sweetest bit of pussy on Vancouver Island. Talk about Miss Popularity. Tommy wasn’t the only one fancied her.”

  Tommy suddenly got up from his seat and slammed out of the diner.

  Ronnie grinned and said, “Tommy’s pissed, but he’ll get over it.”

  I speared a fork full of chips and, to encourage further musings, said lightly, “I’m told that Jane’s marriage didn’t last.”

  “To be fair, that weren’t Janey’s fault. Neville went missing. Got fed up with her and just took off, some think, but I don’t know. It was a big mystery, Neville just disappearing like that. Some folks say he got depressed and ate a shotgun, but folks will say anything. Start rumours out of pure wickedness.”

  “Somebody told me Neville was hard on Jane. That right?”

  Ronnie seemed to realize that he’d said too much. Instead of answering, he shrugged his shoulders.

  I finished my meal, declined more coffee and said, “How do I find Boss Rollins’ place?”

  “On the reserve. He’d be an idiot to live anywhere else. On Native land, he doesn’t have to pay no taxes. His house is up Sawmill Road, the second turning to the right after you leave town. There’s a Forest Service notice board just this side of the turnoff. That’ll be nine dollars.”

  The chef looked down at Tommy’s unfinished crossword and said, “What’s a six-letter word, beginning with L, which means ‘Appropriate to fare without meat’?”

  I shook my head.

  “Lenten,” the chef remarked complacently, adding, “Pay no attention to what my brother said about the Boss. Tommy’s a bit wooden headed, sometimes. Maybe a bit of jealousy there too.”

  I pondered Ronnie’s words for a minute and said, “Listen, all joking aside, was your brother Tommy a serious contender for Jane Colby’s affections?”

  “Hell no,” Ronnie answered with a laugh. “He’d have liked to be, but so would I, so would anybody. She didn’t take Tommy seriously; he never got to first base. Janey was fucking the reserve instead. One time, she had the hots for the Boss, but I guess all along it was Neville she really wanted.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Outside, Tommy was lying on a creeper beneath my MG. He scooted out from under and said affably, “Nice little motor. Bodyworks’ great, no rust. Ever think of selling it?”

  “Not seriously. I wouldn’t mind trading it for a ’39 SS Jag or a Riley Pathfinder.”

  “A ’39 SS, Jesus,” Tommy said, his eyes glazing over with the kind of look you encounter in strip clubs. He added, “Forget what Ronnie said about Janey. My first love was an Austin A90. I still haven’t got over her.”

  As I was pulling away from the station, Tommy said, “Drive carefully, pal. If you wander into the woods, watch out for Sasquatches.”

  Sawmill Road hadn’t been graded in years and it was another winding, washboarded, rutted, potholed disaster. Mowaht Bay Road had been bad—this was worse. Second- or third-growth forest grew thickly on either side, rising toward the crests of distant ridges to hide the sun. For the most part, the road fell steeply away to the right. Occasionally, I caught distant glimpses of the Sound. Ramshackle cabins and house trailers began to appear. Half-hidden among the trees, they were surrounded by gutted cars, cast-off appliances and neglected vegetable gardens. After a while, it became apparent that Sawmill Road was looping around the slope of a mountain and back downhill toward the Mowaht Bay Road. I went past a 30-foot wooden gillnetter, propped upright on blocks. Years earlier, somebody had removed most of the boat’s hull planking. Standing high and dry, its white oak ribs were like the bones of a gutted whale.

  Billy’s Smokes was a modular home situated at a fork in the road. A rusted Fargo pickup was parked outside, along with beater Studebakers, Dodges and Chevs. Billy used his front parlour as a duty-free tobacco outlet and cafe, and lived in the back. He was locking the glass doors of a cigar and cigarette display case when I entered. Half a dozen men were lounging about the place, smoking, coughing and drinking beer. Billy was short and wiry. The skin of his face and neck was deeply wrinkled; his fingers were like sausages from years of handling cold-water fishing lines. I introduced myself.

  Billy slipped a bunch of keys into his pockets and said, “Silas Seaweed, eh? I’ve heard about you.”

  “How about a bottle of Blue?”

  Billy took one from his cooler, snapped its cap off and put it on the bar. “That’ll be two bucks,” he said.

  I gave him a toony and asked directions to Boss Rollins’ house. Billy pointed to the road’s left-hand fork and said, “It’s another half mile. You’ll see a culvert with water underneath; next thing you’ll see is the HANE sawmill. Just keep going; Boss’s house is the yellow bungalow at the end.”

&n
bsp; I was going out of the store when somebody said, “He the money guy?”

  Everyone laughed. I paused in the doorway and turned. The man who had spoken could have been anything between 30 and 50 years old. Stooped and wiry, wearing cheap shades, missing most of his teeth, he looked at me and said, “Check it out. He’s no banker.”

  Billy said, “Shut your mouth, Knot-head.”

  It was an interesting moment. Billy followed me out to the MG. He took a can of chewing tobacco from his pocket, put a pinch between his cheek and gum and said, “Pay no attention. Knot-head is only one step up from retardation. As for the rest of these boys, they put up a good front except since HANE closed, front is all they’ve got left.”

  “Who’s the money guy?”

  “Nobody, it’s just a rumour,” said Billy, spitting a line of juice onto the dirt. “Some guy’s supposed to be interested in buying the mill, giving these guys their jobs back. It’ll never happen.”

  Billy went back inside.

  I resumed my journey, crossed the culvert and plunged deeper into more regions of sad shanties and trailers. The long-defunct HANE sawmill was locked up tight behind chain-link fencing. Half a dozen logging trucks stood among the weeds of a 10-acre clearing, along with pickups, front-end loaders and Caterpillar earth-moving equipment. The sawmill buildings were a group of architecturally dissimilar timber and corrugated-iron structures that had obviously been added one at a time during the mill’s expansion phase. A pit bull, crouched on a mountain of sawdust, pointed its nose at the sky and howled as I drove past.

  Boss Rollins’ house stood on the slope of a hill. It had a roofed porch, stucco walls the colour of dried mustard and a red-tiled roof. A detached two-car garage with a dusty black Lincoln inside stood next to it. A few acres of the surrounding woods had been logged, graded and fenced. Apart from a section of carefully tended lawn around the house, the ground was littered with rocks left behind when the glaciers withdrew from here 10,000 years back. Goats and sheep, nose down in sparse grass, ignored me when I stopped in front of the house. The MG’s water temperature gauge was registering in the upper range, I noticed, before I got out of the car.