It was simple thermodynamics.
chapter eleven
I’d magnanimously given Wayne and Mary-Alice Sunday morning off and I was on my own, taking a break after assembling a steel shelving unit, dabbing my barked knuckles with a wad of toilet paper, when Skip Osterman ambled into the new studio. He was carrying two large takeout coffees from the Blue Parrot espresso bar in the Public Market. Skip and his wife Connie operated a deep-sea fishing and charter company out of the Broker’s Bay Marina. Skip was always at loose ends on Sunday mornings when Connie was at church. Otherwise, they were inseparable.
“How’s Bobbi doin’?” he asked as we prised the lids from the coffee containers.
I’d called the hospital for an update before coming to the studio. “The doctor thinks she’ll be waking up any time now,” I said.
“That’s good to hear. The cops have any idea who done it?”
“If they do, they’re not telling me.”
“My money’s on Loth,” he said, blowing on his coffee. He took a cautious sip, sucking it in with a lot of air. “After Bobbi tore him a new one at the public market last month, he was goin’ around cursin’ and swearin’ about how he was goin’ to get even with her some way or another. Maybe he did.” He took another noisy slurp of coffee. “Man, there’s gotta be something we can do about that guy. Bad enough smelling the way he does, but grabbin’ his crotch and makin’ dirty remarks to women. Constable Mabel says there ain’t much they can do. Whenever they talk to him ’cause someone’s complained, he goes on about bein’ a poor sick old man who ain’t never hurt no one. But Christ on a crutch, the other day he’s on the quay and Con is at the wheel on the flyin’ bridge as we’re comin’ in from a charter, two couples from a Calgary church group on the deck, and he yells out at her that she can sit on his face any time, even if she does smell of fish. Con ignored him, but I don’t care if he’s a sick old man, I’ll take a goddamn shark pike to him next time he talks dirty to her.” He scowled and gulped his coffee.
Between them, Skip and Connie knew just about everyone who kept a boat anywhere near Granville Island, so I asked him if he knew the Wonderlust, in particular who the real owners might be.
“I know the boat,” Skip said, “but I got no idea who’s behind the company that owns it. Whoever it is, they’ve let it get badly run down. I thought about maybe makin’ an offer on it, y’know, but Witt DeWalt told me not to bother, that everyone who’s made an offer that’s less than the asking price, and that’s everyone who’s made one, has got blown off. Con figures it’s a tax dodge. They’re happy to sit on it, cover the docking fees by renting it out for parties, in the meantime write it off as a loss until someone comes along dumb enough to pay the asking price.”
“Do you know Sam or Anna Waverley?”
“Seen ’em around. Her more ’n’ him. But that’s it. They have a thirty-eight-foot Sabre they hardly ever use. Good-lookin’ woman, I’ll say that, but Con’s talked to her a couple of times and says she’s not a very happy one. Never seen her smile. I heard she had a run-in herself with Loth a while back. April, I think.” He shrugged. “Name me a woman that hasn’t.”
“What happened?”
“I got it second-hand from Witt DeWalt. Loth was standing at the top of the ramp when Ms. Waverley came along the dock from her boat, dressed for running, and wouldn’t move out of the way when she tried to get past him. When she asked him to let her by, he laughed and called her a whore and said he’d let her by if she — well, you know. She had to squeeze past between him and the railing and Witt figures Loth groped her or pinched her, because she yelped and jumped into the air and called him a filthy pig. He acted like he didn’t know what she was talkin’ about and launched into his usual routine about bein’ a poor sick old man who never hurt nobody. Witt asked her if she wanted to call the cops, but she just said, ‘What good would it do?’ Witt said she was pretty upset, though.”
Skip finished his coffee and looked around for some place to dispose of the cup. I took it from him and tossed it into an overflowing waste bin.
“I’ll let you get back to work,” he said, standing.
“Gee, thanks,” I replied.
“Don’t mention it. Y’know, I don’t care if there is something wrong in his head, one o’ these days maybe somebody’s gonna pay that old man a visit where he lives and put the fear into him.”
“Where does he live?” I asked.
“On some old fishing boat in the Harbour Authority marina. According to what I heard, he claims he’s doin’ work on it in exchange for living there, converting it into a yacht, would you believe, but no one I know has ever seen him doin’ any work.”
Art Smelski, the off-duty paramedic who’d fished Bobbi out of False Creek, was refurbishing an old fishing boat he kept in the False Creek Harbour Authority marina. It was a common enough pastime, I supposed. Given the sorry state of the commercial fishing industry, you could pick up old fishing boats for a song. Nevertheless, I asked Skip if it was Art Smelski’s boat Loth was supposed to be renovating.
“No,” Skip said. “The boat Loth lives on belongs to a fella name of Marshall Duckworth. Some kind o’ hotshot lawyer that works for an organization that gets people who’ve been wrongly convicted out of prison — whether they’re innocent or not,” he added. “Con knows him and his wife from her church.” He looked at his watch, a big waterproof chronometer with a rotating bezel and more dials and knurled knobs than my father’s old shortwave radio. “Speakin’ of which, they should be lettin’ out about now. Gotta go.”
A few minutes after Skip left, Constable Mabel Firth and her partner walked in, both in street clothes, but armed, with their badges in plain view. They looked less bulky and imposing in plain clothes — when in uniform they wore Kevlar vests — but they both wore serious, business-like expressions, so I knew immediately it was not a social call.
“We came by to give you a heads-up,” Mabel said. “Detective Kovacs is mightily annoyed with you. Can’t say I blame him. What the heck were you doing at Anna Waverley’s house last night, anyway?”
“Having a very nice time, thank you,” I replied, which caused Mabel to scowl darkly and Baz Tucker to shake his head in dismay at my irreverent attitude. “I wanted to talk to her about what happened to Bobbi,” I added.
“That much we figured out for ourselves,” Mabel said.
“How do you know I was there, by the way? Who are you watching? Her or me?”
“Her. Until we track down the woman who hired you, or the fellow who paid you a visit at your studio, she’s our only lead. A slim one, I’ll admit, but dollars to jelly doughnuts it wasn’t a coincidence that the woman who hired you used her name.”
“She’s not a suspect, is she?” I said.
She shook her head. “A potential material witness at least. She says she was at the marina that night around nine, maybe she saw something. She claims she didn’t, but Kovacs has a suspicious nature. He figures there’s a reasonable probability that she knows who attacked Bobbi, maybe even witnessed the attack, but for some reason isn’t talking. He figures it’s likely because she’s afraid that whoever hurt Bobbi will come after her. What was your take on her? Could she be afraid of someone?”
“I didn’t get that impression,” I said.
“What sort of impression did you get?” Mabel asked.
“Of an intelligent, very