“He works odd shifts.”
“Is there any sign of the van?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Not yet. You should probably make an official report so you can start the insurance process.”
“I faxed a copy of the registration and the serial numbers of the cameras and a list of the other equipment she had with her to Kovacs this morning.” Along with the van, our “new” Nikon digital SLR and Bobbi’s older Canon 35 mm SLR were also missing, as well as tripods, a couple of slave strobe flash units and stands, plus miscellaneous lenses, light meters, battery packs and chargers, cables, and whatever else Bobbi hauled around with her. “I’ll call the insurance company this afternoon and see what else I need.”
Matthias stood. “I’ll need to talk to Wayne Fowler and your sister.”
“They’re in the back, packing files,” I said, standing as well.
“Are you going to see Bobbi later?” he asked, as we went out into the studio.
“If I can,” I said. “I don’t feel like going another round with her father, though.”
“Can’t say as I blame you. I’m going to try to drop by around six. Why don’t you meet me there? Safety in numbers.”
“All right, I will,” I said.
We went into the back room. The rotating “light lock” door to the darkroom had been removed and stood forlornly in its frame against a wall, yet another victim of the Digital Age; we hadn’t been able to find anyone who wanted it and there wasn’t space for it at the new studio. Wayne and Mary-Alice were in the darkroom, filling a couple of cartons with plastic jugs, bottles, and cans of old chemicals to be hauled to the hazardous waste recycling depot.
“I’ll leave you to it,” I said to Matthias.
We shook hands and I returned to my office to continue cleaning out my desk. A few minutes later, Mary-Alice came into my office.
“Greg seems to be handling it well,” she said. “Wayne’s a basket case, though.”
“He’ll be fine,” I said.
“How about you?”
“What about me?”
“Come on, Tom. I’m not a complete idiot, no matter what you think. I know how you feel about Bobbi.”
“I’m not sure you do,” I said.
“You’re in love with her.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Mary-Alice. Bobbi is my friend and, yes, I probably love her. Maybe not quite as much as I love Hilly, and maybe not even as much as I love you. But I am not in love with her. Not in the sense you mean. Romantically.”
“Bullshit. Do you expect me to believe that you and Bobbi have worked together for almost ten years without sleeping together even once?”
“I can’t help what you believe, Mary-Alice.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just what it sounds like,” I said.
The year before, Mary-Alice had been convinced that her husband David had been having an affair with his nurse/receptionist, and two years before that, that our father, a retired engineer, had been having an affair with Maggie Urquhart, my Sea Village neighbour. The latter suspicion had proved, at least so far as I was concerned, to be unfounded; I had no opinion about the former. Mary-Alice’s faith in her own infallibility was as unshakeable as the Pope’s. Of course, just because Mary-Alice, or the Pope for that matter, believed something to be true didn’t necessarily make it not true, although in this case, she was dead wrong.
I ushered her to the door of the office and out into the studio. “We’ve still got a lot to do by Saturday,” I said, but I could tell from her expression that the subject was only temporarily closed.
chapter five
I left the studio at a little past three, hoping to catch a short nap, a shower, and a bite to eat before meeting Greg Matthias at the hospital at six. There were a number of things I wouldn’t miss about the Davie Street studio: the creaky, unreliable freight elevator; the leaky windows; Dingy Bill, the incontinent homeless man who occasionally camped out in the stairwell; and clients’ complaints that they could never find parking. One of the things I would miss, however, was the twice-daily commute to and from work. The half-kilometre morning walk from my house to the Aquabus dock by the Public Market, the short ferry ride across False Creek, and the slightly longer hike from the ferry dock at the foot of Hornby Street to the studio gave me time to switch mental gears and prepare myself for the daily grind. The return trip at the end of the day helped me relax and recharge my depleted psychic batteries. And it was about the only exercise I got. The new studio space was at most a five-minute walk from home, hardly time at all to change modes, recharge batteries, or burn off a pint of Granville Island Lager.
Disembarking from the tubby little Aquabus ferry at the dock by the public market, I climbed the steps to the quay and trudged toward home along Johnston Street, past the Ocean cement plant, one of the last vestiges of Granville Island’s industrial past, and the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, where a pair of students were wrapping another in clear plastic packing tape while a fourth video recorded the process. I might have paused to watch, just to see if I could figure out what the hell they were doing, and why, but I was so tired that all I could focus on was the siren song of the sofa in my living room. As I angled across the parking lot toward the ramp down to the Sea Village docks, I saw Loth sitting on the end of the raised pad of the old freight crane in the middle of the lot, drinking something from a brown paper bag. Unfortunately, Loth also saw me.
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