Loth — I didn’t know if it was his first name or his last — had been loitering about Granville Island since the New Year. He was a huge old man, seventy if he was a day, two or three inches shy of seven feet tall and weighing in at three hundred pounds or more. He was immensely strong. I’d seen him lift the rear end of a Ford Focus clear off the ground, for reasons known only to him. There was a rumour making the rounds that he was an ex-con, recently released from the Kent Institution, the federal maximum-security prison in Agassiz, the Corn Capital of B.C., where he’d been serving time for manslaughter. I’d never put much stock in it.
“You, mister man,” Loth called out as he dropped his paper bag with a glassy thud onto the pavement and heaved himself off the crane pad. He loomed toward me, his stout wood cane bowing under his massive weight. “Any work you got?” “What?” I asked.
“Work. You got work?”
“For you, you mean?” I said, backing away from him.
He kept coming and I kept backing away. He was huge. And he had a body odour that would peel paint, an overpowering mix of dried sweat, urine, and what smelled like rotting meat. I imagined that the only reason he wasn’t surrounded by flies was that any fly that got too close would instantly drop dead from the toxic stink.
“O’ course for me. Who else you see, yeah?” He waved his cane. “I paint good. Carpenter, too.”
“Sorry,” I said. “No.” He accepted it with a shrug.
“I hear about yer fran, yeah?” he said.
“My what?”
“Yer fran,” he repeated. “Mouthy cunt with no tits. Someone beat her up good, yeah.” He laughed and the alcohol fumes on his breath made my eyes water. “Mebbe now she learn to keep her mouth shut, ’cept when she sucks on men’s dicks, yeah.”
He howled with laughter and, leaning on his cane, shambled off across the lot toward the Granville Island Hotel to entertain the guests there. My heart was thudding and I realized I was holding my breath. What part of fight or flight was that? I wondered.
I picked up the bottle and paper bag he’d discarded and headed toward the ramp down to Sea Village and the safety of home. Home was a small, two-storey cedar-plank cottage, painted forest green and built on a reinforced concrete hull. The roof was flat, a deck surrounded by a cedar railing, the access shed sticking up in one corner like an afterthought. It had three bedrooms, one and a half baths, a practical kitchen, and a small sunken living room containing the aforementioned sofa.
As I started down the ramp, someone called, “Mr. McCall, oh, Mr. McCall.” I turned to see a man striding toward me along the quayside, briefcase dangling from one hand, BlackBerry clutched in the other. His name was Blake Darling and he claimed to be a real estate broker. He was as slick and slippery as he looked in his natty yellow jacket. Ignoring him, I started down the ramp again.
“Wait, sir, please,” he called. “Just a moment of your time.”
“I have nothing more to say to you, Mr. Darling,” I said. “Nothing has changed. I wasn’t interested in selling yesterday, I’m not interested today, and I won’t be interested tomorrow. Neither are any of my neighbours. Give it up. You’re only wasting your time, and your client’s money.”
“I never waste either,” he said. His voice was high-pitched and grated on the ear like feedback from a cheap guitar amp. “Time is money, as they say. Feel free to ask any of my clients if they’ve gotten their money’s worth. My list of satisfied clients is quite long.”
“You’re becoming a nuisance,” I said. “Some of my neighbours are talking about applying for a restraining order against you.”
“They’d just be wasting their time,” he said.
“Look, why can’t you get it through your head that none of us is interested in selling our shares in Sea Village?” Which was the only way to acquire a house moorage, as there was no room to expand along the quayside.
“My client is a very determined man, Mr. McCall. He usually gets what he wants.” He chortled and smiled, as if at some secret joke. “He didn’t get to where he is today by taking no for an answer. Neither did I.”
“Well, I hope he — and you — can handle the disappointment,” I said. “But even if someone was willing to sell, your client, whoever he is, would likely never be approved by the board, of which we are all members. To paraphrase Groucho Marx, Mr. Darling, anyone who’d hire someone like you to represent him isn’t the kind of neighbour we want.”
“There’s no need to be rude about it.”
“Nothing else seems to have worked.”
“You haven’t heard the latest offer.”
“I don’t want to. It doesn’t matter. Go away.”
“It’s a very good offer,” he said.
“Whatever it is,” I said, knowing it was pointless to try to get the last word, “it won’t be good enough.”
“How will you know until you hear it?”
“Good day, Mr. Darling.” I turned and walked down the ramp to the floating docks.
“I won’t give up, Mr. McCall,” he called out to my back.
I wondered if Loth was available for part-time security work.
“You think this Loth character might be the one who attacked Bobbi?” Greg Matthias said quietly. We were in Bobbi’s room. She was out of intensive care, but still in a coma and hooked up to an IV pump and monitors. She was in a semiprivate, but the other bed was unoccupied.
“Detective Kovacs asked me if we’d pissed anyone off lately,” I said. It wasn’t until my encounter with Loth that afternoon that I’d remembered Bobbi tearing a strip off him at the Public Market a few weeks before; he’d been making fun of a wheelchair-bound little person named Francis Peever, who taught at the Emily Carr Institute. “Loth looked like he was ready to kill her before Mabel and Baz arrived to break things up. And he strikes me as the kind who might hold a grudge.”
“Does he strike you as the kind who would send a woman made up like Marilyn Monroe to lure you to the marina in order to beat the living daylights out of you?”
“Well, no, when you put it that way,” I conceded.
He scratched a note in his book. “We’ll check him out.”
On the bed Bobbi whimpered and stirred, setting off a flurry of bleeps from the machines, then lay still and quiet again. Presently, the machines settled down again, too.
“The doctors say that’s a good sign,” Matthias said.
“I hope they’re right.”
I’d been thinking about what Mary-Alice had said. I was reasonably certain I wasn’t in love with Bobbi, but I was also reasonably certain that I couldn’t be absolutely certain I wasn’t. Naturally, because Bobbi was a very attractive woman, in a wholesome girl-next-door kind of way, I’d entertained the possibility of a romantic relationship, but I’d never considered it very seriously for very long. In point of fact, I suspected that if I suggested it, in all likelihood Bobbi would laugh, which would tend to dampen my enthusiasm.
There was no doubt in my mind, however, that I would be equally willing to throw myself in front of a bus to save her as I would to save my daughter Hilly, Mary-Alice,