“Since when?” she said.
“I just want to talk to Anna Waverley, the woman who owns that boat.” I pointed toward the Wonderlust. “Bobbi was supposed to meet her last night, to take some photographs of the boat. Maybe she saw who attacked her.”
“Have you spoken to her?”
“No. She’s not aboard.”
“Leave it to the RAS investigators, Tom. They’ll be here in a minute. Go on home now,” she said sternly, as if speaking to her ten-year-old. When it was obvious I wasn’t going to leave, she said, “I understand how you feel, Tom. Bobbi’s my friend, too. Look at it from our point of view. You could be a suspect yourself. I know,” she added quickly, holding up her hand to cut off my response, “it’s ridiculous, but tell that to the suits. As far as they know, you and Bobbi could’ve had a falling-out over business. It happens all the time. Or maybe you were more than just business partners and had a lover’s quarrel. See how it can get complicated?”
“Heads up,” Baz Tucker said quietly as two men came along the quay, dressed almost identically in suits so plain they were like uniforms.
“Which one of you is Firth?” the older of the two men asked. He was in his mid-fifties, with watery blue eyes and a pale, acne-scarred complexion. His partner was in his thirties, with a smooth, olive complexion, and full, almost voluptuous lips that I imagined many women would envy. There was nothing even remotely feminine about his piercing, dark eyes.
“I am,” Mabel said.
“I’m Kovacs. He’s Henshaw. Who’s this guy?”
“Tom McCall,” Mabel said. “The victim’s partner.”
“As in husband? Boyfriend?”
“Her business partner.”
“Okay,” Kovacs said. “But he still shouldn’t be here.”
“I told him that.”
He turned to me. “We’ll come find you when we need to talk with you.”
“I’ll save you the trouble,” I said.
He turned his head slightly, squinted one pale blue eye and peered at me with the other. “Are we gonna have a problem with you?”
“A problem? With me? Heck, no.” Mabel looked as though she wished she were home in bed.
He scowled and shrugged and said to Mabel and Tucker, “We can take it from here.” He and his partner went into the marina office.
Mabel turned to me. “Go home.”
“I’ll just hang around out here till they’re finished talking to the marina operator.”
She heaved a sigh of resignation, then she and Baz left. A few minutes later, the detectives came out of the marina office.
“You still here?” Kovacs said.
“So it would appear,” I replied, which earned me another scowl.
“Tell me about the woman who hired you to take pictures of her boat. What’d she look like?” I assumed Greg Matthias had passed on the information I’d given him.
“She had medium-length blonde hair,” I said, “but her eyebrows were dark, almost black. She had an oval face with big green eyes and even features. Good teeth, except for a slightly crooked left upper incisor. She wore a little too much makeup perhaps, but she was quite attractive. In her early thirties. Say five-six in her bare feet. Well built, but Bobbi didn’t think it was all natural. She may have been joking, though.”
“That’s a very detailed description,” he said. “Mostly we get crap. You got a good eye. I suppose that comes with being a photographer.”
“I suppose so,” I said.
He consulted his notebook. “And she told you her name was Anna Waverley and that she got the boat as part of her divorce settlement.”
“That’s what she told me.”
“Who’s Bobby?”
“My partner, the victim. Bobbi — with an ‘i’ — Brooks.”
“Right. Bobbi. Short for Roberta. Does she usually work alone?”
“Not always, but we both do from time to time, especially when we’re busy. Depends on the job. I would have taken this one, but something came up with another client.”
“Did Anna Waverley give you a billing address?”
“No. She paid cash. Something to do with her divorce. She told me she lived in Point Grey, or rather that she got the house in Point Grey in her divorce settlement, but I assumed she was staying on the boat. She isn’t aboard now, though. She told me she had a possible buyer who was leaving for Hawaii today, which is why she needed the photographs last night.”
“All right, thanks.”
He nodded to his partner, then they both walked down the ramp onto the floating docks. I guessed the younger detective hadn’t lived in Vancouver long, or else he hadn’t spent much time on the water; he walked with the exaggerated care of a drunk as the linked sections of the floating docks rolled beneath his feet. As they climbed aboard the Wonderlust, I went into the marina office. The man with the Seattle Mariners baseball cap was behind the counter.
“I know you,” he said. “You live in Sea Village, right? It was your house that almost sank a few years back, wasn’t it?”
“It was,” I confirmed.
“Bernie Simpson, the salvage guy who patched her up, he’s my uncle.”
Living on Granville Island was like living in a small town or a large goldfish bowl. Everybody knew everybody else’s business. The residents of Sea Village were the only permanent residents, except for a few who lived (semi-illegally) on boats in the marinas. We tended to stand out and were frequently the subject of local gossip, not all of which was undeserved. A few years before, a small deadhead — not a Grateful Dead fan, but a water-saturated log that floats below the surface, usually more or less vertically — had drifted under my house. When the tide had gone out, the log had cracked the ferroconcrete hull and my house had begun to sink. The barman at Bridges had probably known about it before I had.
“Name’s Witt DeWalt,” the Mariners fan said, sticking out his hand. “What can I do for you?”
I introduced myself and said, “Did the police tell you that a woman was assaulted near here last night?”
“Yeah. They did.” He shook his head slowly. “Terrible.”
“The woman who was assaulted is one of my closest friends and my business partner. We’re commercial photographers. We were hired to take photos of Ms. Waverley’s boat. Bobbi, my partner, she was supposed to meet Ms. Waverley here at eight last night. You didn’t happen to see anything, did you?”
“Sorry. I got off at six. But you sure you got the right boat? The police asked about the Wonderlust.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, like I told them, there must be some kind of mistake, then. The Waverleys don’t own that boat. It’s owned by some company that’s just a number. They’ve been trying to sell it for months, except they haven’t been taking care of it. The Waverleys have a sailboat.” He waved in the general direction of the docks. “Thirty-eight-foot Sabre called Free Spirit. They don’t use it much, either, but take better care of it.”
“Anna Waverley,” I said. “Is she blonde, about thirty, with green eyes and, um, a full figure?”
Witt DeWalt shook his head. “Not even close. She’s at least forty, maybe a bit more. Slim on top, a bit huskier down below. What you