Dan Sharp Mysteries 4-Book Bundle (7 page)

Dan grimaced. He didn’t know what honour killings were, but he could guess. Had she told Arman? She looked aghast.
No!
Arman would be furious — he might even tell her family. Didn’t Dan know her brother well enough by now? Anyway, she’d already decided to have an abortion.

Dan’s stomach spasmed. It sounded worse than the spectre of marriage. He haltingly suggested an arrangement between them, wondering yet again if she were trying to snag a citizenship.

She turned her mocking eyes on him, reminding him even more of Arman. “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said.

“Why?”

She saw his hesitation and reached out a hand to him. “I didn’t expect you’d be emotional about this,” she said.

“Am I?”

She nodded vigorously. “Oh yes, clearly you are. No offence, but I have ambitions to be more than a housewife, and I think you may realize one day that you’re gay.”

Dan’s eyes flickered away.

“Besides,” she continued, “no one in my family has ever married outside our culture. It would be a disaster.”

The double slap came as a shock. “I’d keep it,” he blurted out. “I’ll raise the child.” He had no idea what that entailed, and years later he often wondered at his outburst, but somehow the thought of saving the baby was foremost in his thinking.

“You’d do what?”

“I’ll look after it. I’ll raise it.” The idea had taken control of him, driving his impulses.

Somehow it was imperative to make her understand this baby meant more to him than anything in his life so far. He rambled on, spinning himself deeper and deeper into his daydreams, his improvised fables of fatherhood. He thought she’d refuse, but her whimsical side won out. To his surprise, she agreed to consider it.

She began to scheme. She had an aunt, rumoured to be a lesbian and considered even more of a renegade, who lived in California with a bunch of crazy artists. The aunt could take her in for the final months of the pregnancy, which, she calculated, would coincide with the end of school and summer holidays. If all went well, she wouldn’t be showing before then.

Her light-hearted smile returned. It was an adventure. Suddenly she was Holly Golightly making an impromptu appearance at the Go-Go-A-La-Mode, clearing everything up for him where he thought he’d come to rescue her. Afterwards, Dan was never sure if he’d made up his mind or if she’d made it up for him.

“Let me think about it,” she told him.

Years later he related the story to Donny, who sat quietly through the tale of youthful courtship and terror.

“So you fucked her to be with her brother?”

Dan looked sourly at him. “No — I fucked her because I was drunk.”

“Ah! That’s different. I’ve always said we’re all just one beer away from being straight.” Donny winked. “I think it’s cool that the kid owes his life to a pint of Heineken. You should have named him after it.”

The prospect of a child to look after made a huge change in Dan’s life, far greater than he could have imagined. He suddenly found himself willing to do anything as long as it would bring in money. Anything but hustling — that part of his life was over. There’d be no lonely middle-aged men this time to take him in and provide. Providing was what Dan would be doing.

It was agreed that Kendra would return to school in the fall, after the baby’s birth. In the meantime, Dan would do whatever he could to bring in money. She would remain independent and they would live apart. Custody agreements could be drawn up later, but she already knew she didn’t want to raise a child.

Dan had signed up for a third year at university, but even before his acceptance came through he realized he wouldn’t be able to afford the tuition. Somewhere along the line, practicality won out.

He bought a newspaper and dug out the classifieds. With his limited experience and incomplete degree, there was little he was qualified for that would support a family. The smiling man who answered his call and greeted him an hour later made him feel he’d been waiting for someone like Dan forever. That probably wasn’t far off. The sort of people who tracked insurance scammers were little short of sociopathic misfits, Dan learned. While there was no shortage of those in the city, few were capable of holding down jobs, and the ones who were seemed even more dubious specimens of humanity than the supposed criminals they were tracking. If they were good at exposing scammers, it was because cheating was in their blood, low-life losers who thought, pissed, and shat scams till they became experts at them.

Dan accepted the comedown in expectations — from stalking bones in the Sahara to stalking flesh-and-blood rats in the gutters of the city — with equanimity. At least he was making money. He reported to the townhouse on Queen East near Logan each morning at seven a.m. before hitting the road with his assignments. This meant tracking a wide range of people who were in some way disabled — from those who’d lost the use of limbs, through those claiming whiplash and soft tissue injuries, to people with repetitive strain syndrome. Some had found themselves dismissed from their jobs outright. Others were luckier, having had the relative good fortune to have their mishaps occur at the workplace, making it harder for their employers to get rid of them. All became targets for insurance companies looking for an excuse to opt out of paying benefits.

While waiting for lawsuits to be settled, some disappeared and were last heard from at Tijuana addresses or luxury chateaus up north. Others were luckier in having spouses support them for the duration. Still others, having lost their income, got swallowed up by welfare rolls or were glad-handed from relative to relative while waiting out the endless doctor reports and psychiatric assessments — the company doctors always finding reasons why the claimant should be working and the lawyers’ doctors finding equally valid reasons why they should not. It was all a matter of perspective, unless you happened to be the sufferer.

This was where Dan came in. He was there to challenge the perspective. He became adept at disguising himself outside claimants’ homes, snooping through their garbage, and making discreet enquiries of the people next door who were sometimes only too eager to divulge their neighbours’ secrets. “He operates a business in his basement, customers come and go at all hours.” Or, “I see her working down at the pub on the corner on Sundays.” Many of those Dan caught in lies later expressed shock that the young man on their corner had been able to keep invisible till it was too late. After a handful of incriminating pictures, the potential lawsuits and hoped-for insurance payments became history.

His first month on the job, he located ten claimants who’d been impossible for others to find. He got incriminating pictures of seven. His supervisors were impressed and commended him every chance they got. He’d had misgivings about a couple of the ones he’d shadowed, wondering if they really were scamming or just making do the best they could. A guy who claimed to have a bad leg and got caught playing football was one thing, but several claimants he’d photographed doing everyday things that had to be done, like it or not. The pictures didn’t show whether it had been easy for them to perform those tasks or how costly it had been in terms of pain and suffering.

He expressed his concerns to a supervisor. She gave him a wormy smile, the veins of a chronic drinker mapping her nose. “We know,” she said. “It’s a tough call. Just get the pictures and don’t worry about it. Let the courts decide who’s lying.”

“Luck of the draw,” a co-worker told him with a shrug. “Hey! It’s not up to us to judge.”

The more he got to know his colleagues, the more Dan realized he was working with people who’d rubbed themselves sideways against the law more than the norm. Confessions of impaired driving, assault, tax evasion, drug possession, and fraud were commonplace amongst his co-workers. Most of them talked freely about their pasts. Some bragged about the things they got away with. One admitted he was working off the payments of a paternity suit. Dan began to feel he’d been drafted into the city’s virtually unemployable fringe set.

One cold April afternoon, he watched an older woman hobbling around her front walk with a shovel. She wore oversized rubber boots and a ragged overcoat. With a record snowfall blanketing the city, her movements hardly made a dent in the drifts thrown up by a street plough. According to the report, a fall had left her unable to fill her duties at a stationery factory where she’d worked for the past twenty-seven years. She was widowed, the mother of a thirty-year-old. If she’d been Dan’s mother, he thought, she wouldn’t be out there shovelling for herself.

He rolled down the windows and took a couple of pictures then sat watching, his breath hanging on the air. The woman stopped every few seconds to draw a lungful of oxygen and stretch her left arm. Dan saw the pain in her face. He put the camera down and stepped out of the car.

She looked up when he approached.

“Do you need some help?” he asked.

She leaned on the shovel and regarded him. “I hurt my arm.”

“I can see that.”

He took the shovel and cleared her sidewalk with a dozen brisk motions.

“Thank you, sir,” she said.

“It’s no problem.”

She stood there watching him. “They told me I’d better watch out for anyone with a camera. They said the insurance company would take pictures of me and show the court.”

He smiled. She’d known he was there. “What did you say?”

“I said I’d tell the court the insurance company didn’t pay me my money for six months now, so I didn’t have no choice but to shovel my own snow. Otherwise somebody’s goin’ to get hurt like I did and then they’ll sue me!”

“You live all alone?”

She nodded. “My husband died. My son got married and went back to Jamaica. I ast the neighbour’s boy would he shovel for me. He said he couldn’t be bothered for no five dollars. I’ll give it to you, if you want it.”

She held out a bill.

Dan shook his head. “You keep it,” he said, jabbing the shovel into a drift.

Back in his car, he yanked the film from the camera and returned to work to hand in his resignation. The baby was four months away.

A week later, another ad held out hope. If he could locate insurance scammers, Dan felt, surely he could locate other missing people. The office might be a dismal shade of grey that reflected in the faces of everyone who worked there, but it seemed a long step up from what he’d been doing. His colleagues were an interesting mix of former police officers and private investigators. What the walls lacked in colour his co-workers made up for in personality.

Somehow he talked himself into the job, beginning with a research position. Dan found he had the right stuff to find people who went missing for more compelling reasons than avoiding insurance investigators. He still suffered qualms over tracking down someone who might not want to be found, but he no longer felt he was enabling insurance companies to punish innocent people for doing what others did: living their lives as best they could.

A personal tape recorder, a high-speed camera, and a flashlight became his stock-in-trade. He wrote down all the relevant facts on a thick notepad, then memorized them and looked for ways to connect the dots. Theories without facts were useless, he soon learned, but facts that didn’t stand up to testing were a waste of time.

Somehow he made it through the first year, then a second, with most of his personal beliefs intact and Ked growing like an errant weed he’d planted on a whim and was surprised to find waiting for him each morning when he woke.

He hired a nanny and trundled off to work and back again each day, spending his evenings alone with this bundle of living, breathing flesh that seemed as much a part of him as his own arm.

At times, the boy was his only companion apart from the TV. He tried to juggle Ked on his knee and watch the jabbering shows about raising kids and having a rewarding life at the same time. The ones where privileged women argued about epidurals and hiring midwives. In truth, the task was lonely and demanding and he seldom seemed to get outside of an insular world that had shrunk to almost nothing. There were days when he still wished he had a career that was impressive-sounding, but that thought died when he celebrated his twenty-fourth birthday alone.

Six

Anger Management

The morning passed with little excitement. The bottle of Scotch did not put in an appearance. Just before one o’clock Dan went off to the coroner’s office on Grosvenor Street, but the body of the missing person fifty-five Division claimed to have a possible match for turned out to be someone else. Someone who didn’t even vaguely resemble the person in Dan’s file, apart from being human and male. There were doubts even about the latter, considering the raised mammaries that appeared to have been a botched home job injecting silicone under the skin with a hypodermic. Another victim of do-it-yourself beauty school etiquette. All went well for these home-style girly-boys until they misjudged the position of an artery and sent the polymer mainlining into their hearts and lungs. By then it was too late. Death came grisly but swift, and the rictus masks left for their discoverers weren’t too pretty either.

At least the Serbian boy would be going home soon. When he’d left, it had probably been a merry send-off — women in babushkas and kerchiefs smiling and sipping Turkish coffee, bristle-faced men offering their worldly wisdom and passing the
šljivovica
from hand to hand while the children romped around the room, not understanding why they were celebrating their older cousin’s leave-taking, but glad for the sweet rolls. Dan didn’t want to think about the bumpy coffin ride back in the bottom of a cargo plane, the seven-hour flight to repatriate him, the teary return that awaited him in his homeland two years too late.

The sky threatened drizzle as he walked north on Yonge Street, keeping his distance from passersby who seemed to have nothing better to do than throng the intersections looking fashionable. He stopped for lunch at Spring Rolls. The downstairs was filled with a noisy young crowd who seemed to think it a glamorous social event rather than simply a quick, cheap eat. He bypassed the clamorous lunchers and went upstairs, where it was only slightly less crowded. A waiter waved him curtly to a window table. The man’s face betrayed annoyance at having one customer take up a spot for two. Dan could remember when the place barely got half full. Whenever he found a convenient location to eat, it turned trendy in a couple of months. Then the wait time increased, the food went downhill, and the service got snarly. So much for Toronto’s exalted dining experience.