Last of the Independents (10 page)

Katherine was spending more time at the office, studying in the evenings for her midterms at the end of October. I saw less of Ben, who would stop in, try to goad one of us into an argument and finding no takers, announce that he was heading to the Comic Shop or Golden Age Collectibles for intellectual stimulation. Aware that even this last comment was his way of starting an argument, we ignored him. For Ben, after the high of the bug planting, lingering in an office watching two people write emails to other people in other offices was a letdown. Part of me agreed with him.

I'd become embroiled in a minor legal dispute with a private school in New Westminster. The principal had hired me to ascertain whether or not one of their Social Studies teachers was a pedophile, after an unfounded rumor about a locker room peep show reached some concerned parents. After two weeks of stakeouts I'd concluded that he wasn't a pedophile, at least not a practicing one. His taste in porn ran to the exotic but legal; I found this out by staring into his apartment window three straight balmy days in July. I could see the back of his head and the monitor of his computer through the bedroom window, while in the living room his wife watched the daytime soaps she'd recorded earlier in the day.

The principal was relieved, said the check would be mailed after the mandatory two-week processing period. Mid-September I received a sheaf of paperwork, including an employee records form, federal and provincial tax sheets, two workplace safety checklists which I had to sign after reading the accompanying booklet, a direct deposit form, a questionnaire about my marital status and whether or not I smoked, and a release for a background check. I wondered who they'd hire for that. Even though I don't have a home computer, I was glad my bedroom had no windows that looked out on the street.

I'd made Katherine fill out all that crap and run interference when they phoned to get a photocopy of my driver's license and SIN card. The afternoon of Wednesday the 7th, I'd just finished dashing off a “More-in-sorrow-than-in-anger” type missive informing them that if I didn't have the three grand and change on my table, in cash, by Hallowe'en, I'd take them to court, when Katherine told me someone was coming up the stairs.

I didn't need to look at the security monitor to know who it was. The dog jumped up with more verve than she'd mustered in the last two weeks. She was sniffing at the office door when Mira Das opened it. Not even in the room yet, Mira squatted down and accepted a lick on the face.

“Missed you too, Babe,” she said. Looking up at me she said, “How's she doing?”

“Better for seeing you.” I stood and introduced her to Katherine. “Constable Mira Das of the VPD. Katherine Hough.”

“Pleasure,” Mira said.

“Same,” Katherine said. She picked her coat off the balcony. “I'll go get lunch, let you two talk. Want anything from the sushi place?”

“I'm not picky. Improvise.”

When she was gone Mira settled into one of the clients' chairs. “The last time I was in here you didn't have furniture. Or a secretary.”

“She's more of a junior partner than a secretary,” I said. “Hildy Johnson to my Walter Burns. As for the furniture, it's getting better. Although part of me kind of liked that ramshackle look.”

“You need a piece of art for the wall behind you,” she said. “Or a fish tank.”

“How about a great big tactical map with colour-coded pushpins?”

“Lovely.”

The dog leapt onto Mira's lap and nuzzled her neck.

“I have something for you,” Mira said, producing a creased piece of paper from one of the pockets of her uniform. She pushed it across the table to me.

Unfolded, the type read:

Zachary (Zak, Zack) Atero

5'7” Caucasian

Brown and Brown

Tattoos: ‘Shawna,' left bicep. ‘Devo,' right wrist.

Prior arrests for controlled substances, vandalism, vehicular theft.

No current record of employment.

Last Known Address: 412 Crookback Drive, Edmonton, Alberta

Sibling, Theodore (Theo) Atero, lives on West 60
th

“Just don't tell anyone you got it from me,” she said. “Especially Gavin.”

“Won't leave the room,” I said. “Thank you.”

As I moved to take my place behind the table, she stood and kissed the dog one last time before heading to the door. “Take care of him,” she said to the dog. To me she said: “Behave yourself.”

The Impossible Case

O
ften
the trouble isn't a lack of evidence but a deluge. If you post ten sentences a year online, in forums or on social networking sites, FAQs or blogs, you've left ten clues to your location, personality, activities and mindset. And how many people post ten times that much over the course of a day?

Zak Atero wasn't a particularly garrulous net user, but he'd kept an online journal for a few years. That led me to an automobile message board he frequented, though all of his posts were at least two years old. His forum responses ranged from “UR A FAG” to detailed, considerate advice on repairing the fiberglass bodies of vintage Corvettes. Sometimes in his posts he would give himself credentials he didn't have, in order to make his opinions seem more authoritative. Once, after another poster claimed to have worked on the Sunfire, Zak claimed to have met with Ford officials and offered them “tens of suggestions” which the company used in designing the new Mustang.

Getting into Zak Atero's social sphere was slightly more complicated. Hastings Street Investigations employs two fictional people for the purposes of making friends with strangers. Ned Freen and Melissa Abandando don't exist, but through them Katherine and I can find information denied to our real selves. As Melissa, Katherine friended two of Zak's former high school buddies. One of them had configured Zak's posts to appear as updates on the friend's side. By scrolling back a few years, Katherine could view Zak's most popular comments without being authorized. I would struggle to think of something like that, which is why I keep my own internet profile almost nonexistent. For Katherine it came instinctually.

After reading through his journal, I knew seven important things about Atero. I wrote them down in a list:

Atero:

• Is passionate about cars and very little else. His father was a mechanic and his brother shares his passion.
  
• Moved from Alberta to B.C. about the time he'd stopped posting to be close to his brother and to get better drugs.
  
• Went through a string of jobs in Alberta, quitting for various reasons: the manager was a dick, his co-workers accused him of stealing gratuities, the muffler shop wouldn't give him a week off to go to a car meet.
  
• Lives with his brother now.
  
• Does something illegal for money.
  While he didn't talk about it, he wrote an awful lot about how he wasn't allowed to talk about it.
  
• Was responsible for the death of a woman when he was nineteen.
  According to his journal, it was entirely her fault. Zak was obeying the signs, and actually under the speed limit. She was walking along the shoulder, a grey mass in his peripheral vision. Her feet strayed over the line. The accident left him “bummed.”
  
• Had asthma as a kid.
  In recent pictures he looked thin-chested, furtive, utterly unobtrusive. He'd never go for your throat, but he wouldn't forgive an insult, either.
  

Before I braced Atero I wanted to know him well enough to predict him. That meant finding and following him. Easy enough, though Atero's schedule clashed absolutely with mine. Except for weekends when I was stationed in the Kroons' building waiting for the Corpse Fucker, I was usually in bed by midnight and at the office by eight. Atero woke up between one and three in the afternoon and usually went to bed after sunrise. Disrupting my sleep schedule is part of what I get paid for — except of course I wasn't getting paid. Cliff Szabo's tithes would barely cover Katherine's salary.

Financially, then, the Kroons were subsidizing the Szabo case. I had other means of making money if I needed it. Odd jobs came up, favors for out-of-province lawyers and PIs. If my finances were dire, and they tended to reach that point at least once a year, I could subcontract to a security firm. The pay was shit, the hours long, the uniform itchy and confining and as fashionable as clown shoes, but it allowed me to keep the business going. That was everything.

Thomas Kroon the Younger came to the office around noon on Friday. I was dialing Ben to see if he wanted to tag along while I followed Atero, but his phone went straight to message. I'd tried him twice so far.

Kroon sat down in one of the client's chairs, thankful he didn't have to balance on the old bench. “Place looks better,” he said. “A comfy chair makes all the difference.”

“How's your father?” I asked him.

“Sick with the sniffles, though if you talked to him he'd make you think it was dengue fever. How 'bout your associate with the weak stomach?”

“Not answering his phone,” I said, hanging up.

“Anyway, Mike, I won't take up too much of your time, but I do got to let you know there's a financial situation at the home.”

“Is there?”

He nodded his reddish-brown square of a head. “'Fraid so. Lease on our facility has been renegotiated. It's costing us a couple more points. Nothing drastic, understand, but it makes it hard to justify certain expenses.”

“I see.”

“We're not talking about termination, just putting an end date in place. An exit strategy, if you will.”

“Sort of like our neighbours to the south and their Middle Eastern adventure.”

Kroon shrugged. “Pop thinks you do a hell of a job. I'm right there with him. But the Corpse Humper seems to have vamoosed, making you standing guard a bit redundant.”

“I see.”

“So let's scale things back to Saturdays and Sundays, and let's say at the end of the month we call the game.”

“Reasonable,” I said.

“You disagree?”

“With the scaling back? No. What I object to is giving the Corpse Fucker — Humper, whatever you want to call him — a pass. My other associate, Katherine, almost insisted the police be involved. I was content to keep them out knowing that, if pursued long enough, eventually we'd put an end to the incidents.”

“That's what we all want,” Kroon said.

“I don't consider a dead body particularly sacred.”

“Neither do I.”

“But it's wrong for the bodies to be violated. If dropping this could lead to another incident, then I do object.”

“How can you if you're working for us?”

“I object morally.”

He grinned. “Hard to put noggin to pillow knowing the big bad Corpse Humper's out there, uh? I'm right there with you. Difference between us is, for me, no question about it, finances top morals. You willing to work gratis, order to catch this guy?”

“I can't,” I said, thinking but not adding that I already had my charity cases, and both of them trumped the Kroons'.

“So how can we come to an accord on this?” Kroon the Younger said. “Some way we can do business and part friends?”

“Give me till Remembrance Day,” I said.

“You can catch him in that time?”

“Yes.”

“You guarantee it?”

“Of course not.”

“Remembrance Day is what, the 11th?” He turned it over in his head. “Yeah, I can do that.”

He stood and extended a lanky arm across the table. “Glad we got that squared away.”

As Kroon left I dialed Ben again. On the sixth ring a subdued voice said, “Yeah?”

“Where've you been?”

“In the bath.”

“For the last three hours?”

“I'm fine, Mike.”

“Out with it.”

“I got some news, okay?”

“Bad?”

“Bad, yeah. And no I don't want to talk about it.”

“Someone found your sister's body?” A white wall appeared on my mind's peripheral. Pain, relief, gladness, sorrow, and the exuberance of knowing that finally these emotions could be expressed.

But Ben said, “Not about her,” and the wall sank back below the horizon. “I don't want to go over it on the phone.”

“Fair enough. Interested in coming with me on a stakeout?”

“I guess.”

“You've only been begging me for months.”

“That was then,” he said.

I closed up the office, set the alarm. The trees had begun to drop their multicoloured burden, clogging drains and sewers along the side streets that I took to get to Ben's building. Some of the houses I passed were already festooned with Hallowe'en decorations, corpses and mummies. A few even had their Christmas lights up.

I drove with the windows down, savoring the last few days of the year before the lack of heat became noticeable. Fall is the best season, and in Vancouver, at least, it seems the shortest.

I kept thinking about Amelia Yeats. I found it hard to keep my bearings around her. What threw me, and I only clarified the thought while pulling into a parking space in front of the building next to the Djembe Hut, was that Yeats was the most self-sufficient person I'd ever met. Mira had been strong, but she had needs, for companionship, for sex. Yeats didn't seem to need anyone. If she went with me it was out of desire or whim. My worry was that she'd take to me briefly, like a new toy, only to lose interest when another novelty came into her field of vision. I wondered what that would be. A performance artist? A human spider who climbs buildings with suction cups? I was already pondering the dissolution of our relationship, and being aware of this made me think I'd blown the kiss out of proportion. It had been a chance occurrence, with no guarantee to repetition. I didn't know what it had been. In relationships, I am the last person to spot the obvious play.

Ben wasn't waiting by the curb. I locked the car and took the staircase at the side of the building, banged on the door at the top. A Jamaican woman holding a baby opened the door. She nodded to the end of the hallway behind her, a door with a cardboard skeleton thumbtacked to it. “Ben in there.” Smells from the kitchen, chicken and peppers. I pounded on Ben's door and made the brass-jointed skeleton dance.

“Come in.”

Ben sat on the edge of the bed, dressed in cords and a hoodie, sneakers laced and tied. A cigarette burned between his fingers. He'd been crying.

“You need to tell me about this,” I said, leaning on the doorframe.

“All right. In the car.”

But in the car he didn't want to talk, either. I drove to a Subway where we ordered sandwiches and I filled my Thermos. I keep a case of water in the car, along with a Costco-sized box of granola bars, the nutritive kind, not the ones with chocolate coating. In the event that following Zak Atero kept us car-bound for the next twelve hours, we wouldn't suffer for food.

Following Zak proved more challenging than that. At five he came out of his brother's house and peeled out of the cul-de-sac in a white Eagle with a Jesus fish bolted above the rear plate. He was an impatient driver, cutting people off, making snap turns without signaling. When he made a right off Granville I nearly lost him. By making the next right and crawling back, I found the Eagle in the parking lot of a Save-On. Someone was in the car with Atero.

After a moment the two men climbed out of the car and crossed the lot to a Cold Beer and Wine. They were inside for seven minutes before Atero came out carrying a flat of beer and the other man, stocky, Chinese, clutching a paper bag.

“Some sort of payoff,” I said.

“How can you tell?” Ben asked me.

“The paper bag.”

“Alcohol comes in paper bags, case you weren't aware.”

“The bag wasn't shaped to a container or bottle. It's half rolled-up, creased, so it wasn't new.”

“Do you know who the Chinese guy is?”

“No.”

Atero placed the beer in the car. The other man held onto the bag. They pulled out of the lot, headed east, made a left on Cambie. A few blocks north they pulled into a strip mall of predominantly East Asian shops. Atero idled while the other man dashed into a Mumbai Sweets and emerged moments later with another wadded-up paper bag.

They made four other stops before Atero dropped his partner at a parking garage near the Chapters on Broadway. The man walked down the ramp as Atero sped off.

“Here's my guess,” Ben said, upright in his seat now, a bit of his vigor restored. “My guess is they're the world's least efficient garbage removal company.”

Atero was picking up speed as he dashed through lanes and ran stale yellows. I got caught behind a light and he was soon out of view. Moments later I was two cars behind, and we went over the Granville Street Bridge together.

“Drugs?” Ben asked me.

“Or protection money. Could be anything.”

“Think they do this every week?”

“I wouldn't be surprised.”

“I bet they don't reuse those paper bags,” Ben said. “I hate to think of them piling up in some landfill.”

“We could ask him,” I said.

“What does any of this have to do with the disappearance?”

“Beats me.”

Zak Atero took a circuitous route home, over the Granville and back up the Cambie by way of a few one-way streets and alleys. It was a route designed to lose a tail, but he drove it mechanically, with no heed to what cars were in his proximity. I kept back for the most part. When he went down the alley I hung a right and then a left so that I was in front of him when he came out. I waited for him to pass me. Despite my best moves, if Atero had been looking he would have lost me easily.

He parked in front of his brother's house, a grey and brown Vancouver Special that had survived half a century without attaining much in the way of dignity. Atero went around the back. I parked in the alley with the lights off and watched through the kitchen window. His brother was beefier, his hair fairer and thinning, but they had the same axe-blade of a face, close-set eyes and narrow, high-bridged nose. The house could stand a re-siding, the eaves were clogged with mucilage from the backyard trees, and the deck, which sloped towards the alley, was in need of buttressing.