“How are you getting on?” Matthias asked eventually.
“Trying to keep busy,” I said. I remembered my visitor, and told Matthias about him. “He wouldn’t tell me his name, but he wanted to know who hired us to photograph the boat.”
“Could he have been the owner’s lawyer, trying to head off a personal injury suit?”
“That’s what I thought at the time,” I said. “He was too blunt and to-the-point for a lawyer, though, leastways the ones I’ve known. But he could be employed by the boat’s owner in some capacity, I suppose.”
“Give me his description again,” Matthias said.
I did, then we sat for a while longer without speaking. A nurse came in, smiled at us, then checked Bobbi’s IV, catheter bag, and the readings on the medical monitors. She smiled at us again as she left. It was nine-thirty, but visiting hours were flexible. It didn’t hurt, either, that Matthias was a cop, and familiar to a number of the nursing staff.
“I spent some time here last year,” he explained when I commented on it. “My partner was recovering from an injury.”
I’d met his partner only once the year before, but I remembered her well, a strikingly handsome woman named Isabel Worth. “She was shot?”
“No,” he said with a dry smile. “She broke her arm when she fell off the Stanley Park seawall while trying to apprehend a suspect.”
“Are you still partners?”
“I should’ve said former partner,” he replied. “She retired six months ago on partial pension and moved to Pemberton to raise horses and run a mountain trail guide business with her uncle. I’ve got a couple of years to go before I pull the plug, then I’m going to join her.” He looked at Bobbi for a second or two, then back at me. “What you said about you and Reeny Lindsey, that you liked each other well enough but that there was something missing? Same with me and Bobbi. Well, Isabel and I discovered after she retired and moved to Pemberton that whatever the thing is that’s missing between you and Reeny or me and Bobbi isn’t missing between me and Isabel.”
As we left Bobbi’s room and walked to the elevator, I said, “Last night, on the local news, there was a story about Bobbi’s attack. It reported that she was still in a coma. Do you think there’s any chance that whoever did this might try to finish the job? I mean, when she wakes up, she’s probably going to be able to identify him.”
“That kind of thing only happens in the movies,” Matthias said. “Besides, this place has good security. All the staff wear picture IDs and after ten-thirty you can’t get in without clearance from the ward.”
“Are visitors screened during the day?”
“No,” he said, “but it’s pretty busy during the day. You’d have to be crazy to expect to get away with harming a patient without getting caught.”
“Crazy is just what I’m afraid of,” I said.
“Security is aware of Bobbi’s situation and will be keeping an eye on her. Look, Bobbi isn’t the first assault victim who’s been here for a while. We haven’t lost one yet.”
I was comforted, but not much.
chapter seven
The strangely unseasonable weather had moved in again. Fog haloed the street lamps, the lights of the cars and shops, the bulbs strung along the frame of the freight crane in the parking lot, hanging like a shroud over False Creek and cool on my face as I walked from my car toward the ramp down to Sea Village. It had been only two days since Bobbi’s attack and I told myself it was unreasonable to expect the police to have made much headway in the case, but I was discouraged nonetheless. Nor was I encouraged by the rate of Bobbi’s progress. I blamed it on being raised on television, where the bright young detective catches the bad guys or the brilliant but irascible doctor pulls his patient back from the brink of death just in time for the final commercial break. Real life didn’t work like that, I had to remind myself. In real life, the bad guys often got away. In real life, likely as not the doctor working on your kid’s case had graduated at the bottom of his class, drank too much, and was in the middle of a messy divorce. Who needed real life?
A man was sitting on the bench under the lamppost by the top of the ramp, wreathed in fog and cigarette smoke. He stood as I approached, a little unsteady on his feet, dropped the cigarette, and ground it out under his toe. It was Norman Brooks. Swell, I thought. Reality, as someone once said, bit. After which, I supposed, it sucked.
“Were you at the hospital?” Brooks asked gruffly, breath stinking of alcohol.
“Yes.”
“How is she?”
“The same. Haven’t you visited her today?”
He lowered his head. “They kicked me out.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.
“Yeah,” he replied. “I bet.”
“Maybe you should try visiting her sober,” I said. He stiffened. “Fuck you,” he growled.
“Good night, Mr. Brooks,” I said, and started down the ramp.
He grabbed my right arm in a vice-like grip. “Don’t you walk away from me. I want to talk to you.”
I twisted free. He’d hit a nerve, literally, and my right hand tingled painfully. “Go home,” I said, rubbing my arm. “Get sober. Then maybe we’ll talk.”
“Jesus, you’re an asshole. I don’t know why my daughter thinks you’re so great to work for. I think you’re a pussy.”
“You’re mixing your meta-orifices,” I said.
He growled deep in his throat. “I know my daughter was assaulted on that boat, but I figure it was really you they were after. You pissed somebody off.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” I agreed glibly.
“Was it this Waverley guy? You fucking his old lady or something? I heard she’s not too fussy. Or maybe you put nude pictures of her on the Internet. I checked you out. You like taking dirty pictures. Like of those lezzy twin sisters who run that porn website downstairs from your studio.”
“First,” I said, “I don’t know Mr. or Mrs. Waverley, carnally or otherwise, so I’ve no idea when or how I might have pissed either of them off. Second, as for taking nude photographs, it’s a dirty business, but someone has to do it. And third, Bobbi and I both work on Meg and Peg Castle’s annual calendar. They’re nice people, by the way, both married with kids.” I wondered if he knew that when Bobbi was in university she’d earned extra money by posing nude for life study classes. If not, it wasn’t my place to tell him. “And four, even if Mr. Waverley wanted to beat the crap out of me for some reason, why take it out on Bobbi?”
“So it was one of your drug-smuggling pals looking to settle a score.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “I don’t know any drug smugglers.” Well, maybe I did. Sort of …
“Don’t give me that wide-eyed innocent crap,” Brooks said. “I told you, I checked you out. I’ve still got connections. Christopher Hastings and his girlfriend were smuggling dope to the States in that old boat of his, till someone set fire to it. Hell, for all I know, it was you that did it. Now she’s your girlfriend and she’s graduated from dope smuggling to making cheap porn.”
“Now that you’re retired from the Mounties,” I said, “I hope you aren’t planning to set up shop as a private detective.”
“Eh? Why?”
“Because you’re a lousy investigator. Maybe Chris