“I appreciate your concern,” I said.
“You especially shouldn’t let your daughter associate with them.”
To the best of my knowledge, the only homosexual with whom Hilly associated was Daniel Wu. I’d a damned sight sooner Hilly associated with Daniel and his “kind of people” than with the likes of Barry Chisholm. I was too polite to tell him so, though.
We had reached the entrance to the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, where Barry taught digital photography and computer graphics. Carefully leaning his bike against a wall, he unslung his backpack.
“I’ll pay for your slacks,” he said, taking out his wallet.
“Keep your money,” I said, and kept walking.
“It’s about time you showed up,” Bobbi said when I finally got to the studio.
“Lemme alone,” I grumbled.
Roberta “Bobbi” Brooks was my business partner. She’d started out as my assistant, but the year before I’d sold her a twenty-five percent share in the business. I’d have given it to her, to keep her from going out on her own, but she’d insisted on everything being legal and above board. I’d got the better of the deal; Bobbi was a fine photographer, maybe better than me. At thirty, she was prettier than the average girl next door, with large brown eyes and long brown hair she wore in a ponytail that stuck through the back of her baseball cap. In addition to the cap, she habitually wore jeans, which she filled out very nicely indeed, and a T-shirt, which she filled out hardly at all. In cooler weather, she added a faded jean jacket, sometimes a fleece vest. In the depths of winter she wore a waxed cotton Australian stockman’s coat over the jacket and vest. Sometimes, in summer, she traded the jeans for cut-offs, a sight that required a robust cardiovascular system.
“What’s eating you?” she asked.
“Nothing.” I handed her the single-use cameras from the party. “Is Wayne in?” Wayne was D. Wayne Fowler, our tech.
“He’s in the lab.”
“Have him send these out to be developed as soon as possible.” Although we had an old Wing-Lynch C41/E6 processor for developing colour negative and transparency film, it was less expensive, and a lot faster, to have casual snaps developed and printed at the photo finisher around the corner.
“What’s the big hurry?” Bobbi asked. “It wasn’t that great a party.”
“The police haven’t talked to you?”
“No. Why? Don’t tell me I missed something.”
I told her about the dead man on the roof deck.
“Whoa, spooky,” she said. “Older guy? Grey hair? Dressed like Bill Clinton?”
“I don’t know how Bill Clinton dresses,” I said. “But, yes, that sounds like him. Do you know him?”
“Nuh-uh.” She raised the cameras, dangling from their rubber band straps. “You think there might be a photo of him?”
“It’s a long shot,” I said. “Get doubles. The police may want a set.”
“Okie-dokie,” Bobbi said. “They should get a kick out of the one you took of Kevin grabbing your sister’s ass. Although she really shouldn’t have wriggled it in his face like that.”
Bobbi went into the lab to give the cameras to Wayne and I went into my office. It occupied a corner of the studio. The two interior walls were mostly glass, on which Hilly had pasted large cut-outs of tropical fish. I dumped Bodger, the old tabby who lorded it over the mice in the studio, out of the ergonomic chair I’d received as a gift when I’d left the Sun. As usual, he hissed irritably at me, so I fed him a couple of the cat treats I kept in my drawer in a futile attempt to regain his favour. He then curled up in a corner of the ratty old leather sofa opposite my desk and went back to sleep. I put my feet up and contemplated the photograph on the office wall, a night shot of the fifty-foot mural of the blue-jean-clad blond that had once adorned the south facade of the Hotel California on Granville, across Davie from my office window. The Hotel California was no more, replaced by a Howard Johnson’s. It wasn’t an improvement. At least I’d preserved the California girl for posterity. She was the stuff of fantasy, so I indulged myself for a moment or two, before putting my feet down and waking my computer.
At eleven Bobbi stuck her head into my office. I looked up from my computer, on which I had been preparing an estimate for a shoot, between hands of solitaire.
“Show time,” she said.
I coaxed Bodger off my lap, to which he’d relocated after cadging a couple more cat treats. He thumped to the floor with an offended mew. I stood and brushed at the cat hair on my second-best pair of khakis, straightened my collar, then followed Bobbi into the outer office. Beneath my feet I could feel the floor planking vibrate as the passenger elevator rattled and groaned up from the ground floor. A moment later, the door clanked open and a man emerged, dragging a cardboard box bungee-corded to a small hand truck with an extensible handle.
Willson Quayle was tall, well over six feet, slim and broad-shouldered and male-model handsome. He had a lot of thick, artfully tousled dark hair, and an easy, slightly lopsided smile that revealed perfect white teeth. His smile somehow never quite reached his eyes, though, which were a rich, chocolaty brown beneath craggy, immobile brows.
“Hey, Tom,” he said. His smiled widened, creasing his close-shaved cheeks but leaving his eyes untouched. “Mornin’, Barbie.”
“It’s Bobbi,” Bobbi said.
“Oh, god, is it? Geez, I’m lucky I can remember my own name sometimes. Sorry.”
“Yeah, okay,” Bobbi said.
“Just don’t let it happened again, eh?” He grinned. Bobbi glowered, but he didn’t seem to notice. He looked around the studio, as if sizing the place up.
“What’s in the box, Will?” I asked.
“Right,” Quayle said. He unsnapped the bungee cords securing the box to the hand truck, picked up the box, and carried it to the big table against the north wall of the studio. With a dramatic flourish, he tipped the contents of the box onto the table. “Ta-dah!”
A dozen or so garishly printed blister packs of varying size and shape spilled onto the tabletop. The larger packages contained action figure dolls. Some were human, startlingly female, dressed, if that’s the right word, in scanty sci-fi gladiator-like costumes, and armed with long pistols and short swords. The other action figures were creatures straight out of a nightmare, bipedal but grotesquely alien. I couldn’t tell if they were dressed or not, but all were equipped with harnesses hung with all manner of strange weaponry. The smaller packages contained more miniature weaponry, futuristic-looking handguns and rifles, as well as crossbows, swords, shields, and spears. Anachronism is alive and well in Toyland, I thought. The remaining packages contained additional costumes, obviously intended for the female action figures.
Willson Quayle selected one of the female figures and opened the blister pack. “I’d like to introduce you to Star,” he said, setting the figure on its feet on the table.
Although about the same size, height-wise, at least, as a Barbie doll, Star bore no resemblance at all to the willowy Barbie. Star was a squat, awesomely endowed creature, broad of shoulder, deep of chest, narrow of waist, and powerful of thigh, with straight, waist-length, coal-black hair and a fierce expression on her small face. Her costume, which didn’t look especially comfortable, consisted mainly of strategically placed faux leather straps and tiny silvery buckles.
“Of course, the physical proportions are somewhat exaggerated,” Quayle explained.
“No kidding,” Bobbi said, half under her breath.
Quayle opened another package and stood a second female figure beside Star.