“We’ve got his Palm,” Matthias said, “but he didn’t have a laptop with him. We didn’t find it in his car or at his home, either. Any idea where it might be?”
“The Palm was his own,” Shoe said, “but the laptop belonged to the company. We haven’t been able to locate it.”
“If it turns up, maybe you could let us know.”
“I’ll do that. Do you think I could get a copy of his appointment file from the Palm?”
“I’m not sure we could give it to you if we wanted to,” Matthias said. “O’Neill’s Palm is password protected and we haven’t been able to unlock it. According to our techs, the only way to bypass the password is to do a hard reset, which erases everything. They’re working on it. You wouldn’t happen to know his password, would you?”
“Sorry, no.”
Matthias was silent for a moment, then said, “Look, I could tell you not to nose around, although I get the impression that it wouldn’t do any good. But if you get in the way, or if we think you’re obstructing our investigation in any way, we’ll come down on you like a ton of bricks. A metric tonne at that. Understand?”
“Yes,” Shoe said. “I surely do.”
Matthias stood up. Worth tossed her empty coffee cup at the waste bin, missing by a good foot. Matthias sighed, retrieved the cup, and dropped it into the bin.
At a few minutes past three, Shoe was standing on the sidewalk in front of the dry cleaning store on Cordova. Barbara Reese came out of the store at 3:15. She was looking down, fastening her coat, long umbrella hooked over her right wrist, and so did not see him until he said, “Hello.”
Her head popped up and for a brief moment there was a spark of fear in her eyes. It faded as she smiled tentatively. “Oh, it’s you.” Then her expression grew troubled. “You were lying the other day, weren’t you? You are with the police.”
“No,” Shoe said. “I’m not a cop. I was once, a long time ago, but not now.”
“But this isn’t a coincidence, is it? Your being here? Are you—” She frowned, searching for the word. “Are you stalking me?”
“I apologize if it seems that way,” Shoe said. “As I told you, I knew your husband. After he died I tried to get in touch with you, to see if there was anything you needed, but by the time I learned where you lived, you had moved. You didn’t leave a forwarding address and your mother and your in-laws would tell me only that you’d left Vancouver.”
“I didn’t tell anyone where I was going,” Barbara said. “I didn’t really know myself. We moved around a lot for a while—Edmonton, Toronto, Niagara Falls, Buffalo, Winnipeg—before we finally settled in Calgary.”
“We? Did you marry again?”
“Uh, no. I meant my kids and me.”
“I’d like to talk to you,” Shoe said. “But I don’t want to make you late for work. Perhaps I could take you to dinner sometime.” Sunday, he knew, was the only evening she had free.
“You offered me a ride the other day,” she said. He nodded. “You can drive me home, if you like.”
“Home?”
“I was let go from the bar last night.” “I’m sorry,” he said. “Yes, I’d be pleased to drive you home. My car’s this way.”
They walked to his car, parked around the corner.
“I guess you’re not a cop after all,” she said when she saw the Mercedes. “Cops don’t drive cars like this.” Shoe opened the passenger door for her, held her arm as she got in. In the car she gave him directions, although he knew where she lived. When they were underway, she said, “How did you know my husband?”
“We worked together,” Shoe said. It wasn’t the truth, but it would do for now.
“He never stayed in any one job for very long,” Barbara said. “How well did you know him?”
“Not well,” Shoe said.
“But you must have gone to a lot of trouble to find me. For someone you didn’t know very well. Why?”
“I wanted to repay a debt I owed him,” Shoe said.
“What kind of debt?” she asked suspiciously. “Not money? Usually he owed other people money.”
“No, it wasn’t money,” Shoe said.
She was silent for a few minutes, looking out the side window. After a couple of blocks she turned to him and said, “How did you find me? I didn’t come back to Vancouver till six months ago to look after my mother. She died on Labour Day.”
“Yes, I know,” Shoe said. “I was looking through some back issues of the Vancouver Sun a few weeks ago when I saw her funeral announcement. It was two months old, but I went to the funeral home and told the director I was an old friend of the family who had missed the funeral. He gave me the phone number of the dry cleaning store.”
“I can’t afford a phone,” she said. “My mother didn’t have insurance and I still owe the funeral home three thousand dollars. I don’t know how I’m going to pay them now that I’ve lost the job at the bar. I barely make enough at the dry cleaning store to cover my rent.” Her eyes sharpened. “So, if you want to repay your debt to my husband by offering me a job...” Her voice trailed off.
“I can see if there’s anything available where I work,” Shoe said.
“You look like you work in an office,” she said. “I used to work in an office a long time ago, but they all use computers now. I wouldn’t know a computer from a dishrag. All I know is waiting on tables and clerking in stores.”
“My employer owns several retail stores.”
She leaned forward and pointed through the wind-shield. “That’s where I live,” she said.
Shoe double-parked in front of a rundown five-storey building on the fringes of the area of Vancouver known as the Downtown East Side, into which the city had corralled most of its homeless population, along with its pushers, addicts, pimps, and whores. The ground floor of the building was occupied by an Asian grocery. The entrance to the apartments on the upper floors was a narrow doorway beside the grocery. Taking a notepad from the glovebox, Shoe wrote down his home and office phone numbers, tore out the page, and handed it to her.
“Call me on Friday,” Shoe said. “I’m sure I can find something for you in one of my employer’s companies.”
She took the slip of paper, looked at it, then at him. Her dark eyebrows were knit with uncertainty.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“You seem like a nice person,” she said. “And I suppose I could use all the help I can get right now.” Her right hand was on the door release. He waited for her to continue. She looked at the slip of paper in her left hand, then held it out to him. “But whatever you think you owed my husband, you don’t owe me anything.”
A police car moved up behind and the cop at the wheel blipped the siren a couple of times, probably figuring Shoe was a john out slumming. Barbara opened the door and started to get out of the car.
“Please,” he said. “Let me take you to dinner. I’ll explain.”
She shook her head. The siren blipped again.
“But you’ll call me? About the job?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe. I’ll think about it.”
Barbara got out of the car and closed the