Last of the Independents (13 page)

I
t took me hours to unclench. When I got home my grandmother was watching some sort of crime drama on TV, the kind that adds a gloss of titillation to the weekly rape-murders before wrapping everything up by 7:58 sharp.

I fixed dinner and then dragged my dog for a walk. I tried to tell myself, and the dog, that I'd actually done something to advance the case. Neither of us seemed all that certain.

Snake's Eye

C
rittenden
waited until Friday to contact me. Cliff Szabo had come by that morning for our weekly meeting, and I'd given him a rough account of what I'd been up to, omitting Crittenden and Zak Atero for the moment, which meant I told him nothing. Better nothing than not enough was my thinking: after his reaction to Ramsey, I was reluctant to give Cliff any provocation. All I had was a tenuous thread connecting a pawn shop owner to a car thief and the thief's boss. Adding an irate father to the mix wouldn't help anyone.

When Crittenden phoned, I was leaning back in my chair, mind on Amelia Yeats. Ben was chewing Katherine's ear about the superiority of Christian Bale's Batman to all others. I took the call on the balcony, trying to distance myself from the conversation in the office and the steady hum of my own dirty thoughts.

“Mr. Drayton? Michael Drayton?”

“This is he.” Up the block two silver-haired cops were talking to a woman with a shopping cart full of liquor boxes and camping gear.

“You've been expecting a call from me.”

“Mr. Crittenden.”

“Do you know me?”

It seemed a strange question to ask. “I know you're married to the niece of Anthony Chow, who owns property around the Lower Mainland, some of which might be legitimate.”

Laughter over the cell-to-cell static. Up the street the cops were trying to calm the woman down and help her collect the mess of tent pegs and string which had fallen through the grated bottom of the cart and wound around the rear axle.

“You've done your homework,” Crittenden said. “In point of fact Anthony is chiefly a restaurateur, and I oversee a few of his establishments.”

“Making Zak Atero, what, delivery boy?”

“How about we continue this conversation in person?” Crittenden said. “Do you know Blue Papaya on Richards? I can send a car for you.”

The cops up the street were moving on, leaving the shopping cart lady to work out her own problems.

“I can walk it,” I said.

“If noon works, I'll see you then.”

It was 10:14 a.m. by the computer's clock. In the time I was on the balcony Ben and Katherine had resolved nothing.

“Can I be honest?” Katherine said to him. “Much as I love elaborate theories about different incarnations of Bruce Wayne, know what I like better? Getting my work done so I can study. Some of us have jobs that require we do them.” With a false smile she turned back to her keyboard as if the matter were settled.

“Did your first-person shooter problem resolve itself?” I asked Ben, settling into my chair so I could view the clock without straining my neck.

Ben shrugged. “They're going ahead with it. Evidently I don't have as much clout as I thought.”

“None of us do.”

“Anyway,” he said, “I was asking Hough what she was going as for Hallowe'en, and that prompted me to recall the most traumatic incident of my pre-teen years. Do you want to hear it?”

“God no,” Katherine said without looking up.

“Well in that case,” Ben said, and launched into his anecdote.

I was weighing the idea of taking my gun with me. I decided against it. I decided if Crittenden wanted a shootout he wouldn't have invited me so cordially, and if he wanted to threaten me, then possessing a gun wouldn't tip things in my balance. Better he saw me as a civilian.

Ben said, “It was right after the
Animated Series
came out, and guess what I wanted to go as for Hallowe'en. I remember they had an amazing costume at the mall, utility belt, cowl, the works. My mom said we couldn't afford it.”

“What a hardship,” Katherine said.

“I begged and pleaded, and eventually Mom said she'd make me one. Her mom was a seamstress. Mom didn't carry on that tradition — too bourgeois for her when she was growing up — but she had all the sewing stuff, her mom's Jay-gnome and the rest.”

“It's pronounced Ja-no-me,” Katherine said. “Janome. In Japanese it means ‘snake's eye.'”

“Anyway, day and night Mom worked on this costume. I think she actually had to start over again because the first one was too small. Day of the class Hallowe'en party she let me try it on. I was so stoked.”

While Ben spoke I thought,
I am scared shitless
. I put that thought under glass and examined it, like a fresh specimen on a lepidopterist's table. I decided that instead of the gun I'd bring my fold-out pocket knife. Useless in a fight, but it worked well enough as a totem. I ran my hand over the wood handle with its steel fasteners and felt a little better.

Ben said, “My Mom's costume, God bless her, was a mess. The cowl was a toque with floppy triangles stitched on. The cape was safety-pinned to a pair of my dad's long underwear.
Brown
long underwear. A utility belt made of yellow felt, and for some reason, fingerless gloves. I mean, just picture a fat kid in that getup.”

Katherine was laughing despite herself.

“So I get to the party and of course there's eight other Bat-men, all in their badass store-bought costumes, and me, looking more like the piano-playing dog from
the Muppets
. Believe me I got my ass kicked. I put it all on my mom. She was so upset she swore off sewing. When I think back I remember the physical beating, then the anger at my mom for trotting me out in that sacrificial lamb costume, and then the shame from years later over how bad I made her feel after she worked so hard. ‘It's the thought that counts' doesn't fly with kids. That is trauma.”

“I went as a spider one year,” Katherine said. “Cotton batting web draped around my real arms to hold up the two fake ones, and yes I know a spider has eight, but mine had four. I remember everything coming loose and unfurling, and some poor girl, I think it was Sarah Whitehead, tripped over it and sprained her ankle.”

“Homemade costumes are the worst,” Ben said. He turned to me. “Any horror stories?”

“I went as a cop for seven years running,” I said. “One year, though, I was big into pro wrestling and I went as —”

“Macho Man?” Katherine asked. “Jake the Snake?”

“Worse. Bret ‘the Hitman' Hart. Pink leotard, drug store shades, Intercontinental championship belt made of aluminum foil. Now
that
was an ass-kicking.”

“Dear God,” Ben said. He made the sign of the cross over me as I mimed being dead.

T
he tinted windows of the Blue Papaya had been trimmed with paper pumpkins. A gauze cobweb hung over the door. The inside was lit partly by blue neon, and the chairs and tablecloths were black. Sarah McLachlan emoted from the speakers flanking the bar. I nodded to the hostess, a bottle blonde of advancing years, and followed her through the swinging doors into the muggy kitchen.

Off to the right, down a narrow hallway made narrower by two freezers, was an office, little more than a doorless cubbyhole. A cigarette-burned desk held an old beige and grey computer and an even older dot matrix printer, which spewed out faded type in intermittent screeches. There was room for two chairs. One of these was taken up by a stout dark-haired woman with an inscrutable face and eyes that sized you up and dismissed you without registering the slightest emotion. If I'd stuck out my hand and said “My name's Mike, what's yours?” her response would have been at most a shrug of indifference. Probably not even that.

“Crittenden,” I said.

“Not here.”

“Where would he be, then? He asked to see me.”

She glowered. Behind me a server ran past with a steaming platter of noodles and seafood. The kitchen smelled of bean soup. Clouds of flour and starch drifted through the beams of harsh light from the neon overheads. The floor was tacky.

We held each others' gaze until I sneezed and she shot back in her chair, in a way that might have been warranted if I'd unholstered a gun. Her chair hit the back wall, dislodging papers from the wobbly shelf behind her head.

“Sorry,” I said. “Haven't felt like myself since that last trip out to my brother's swine and chicken farm. Think I might've picked up some type of flu.” I coughed, bringing my hand to my mouth seconds too late, then wiping my mouth and using that hand to prop myself in the doorway. “Any chance you could find Crittenden for me?”

She sprang out of the chair and squeezed past me. I watched her weave through the crowded kitchen and head up a tight spiral staircase in the corner behind the deep fryers. As she ascended, she was wiping imaginary germs off the sleeves of her fur-lined leather overcoat.

Eventually she came down trailed by a thin caucasian with silver-blond hair. He wore a herringbone sweater, navy slacks, thin gold chains around his neck tucked inside the collar of the dress shirt he wore beneath the sweater. He had rough hands and a creased face. His silver and bronze beard was a week's growth past being well-groomed, which may have been the fashion he was shooting for. His grey eyes regarded me benevolently. Behind the manners was an indifference that gave me the sense that Lloyd Crittenden had killed people, deliberately and up close.

“You're early,” he said. “Would you like to talk up in my office, or would you prefer a booth in the restaurant? Have you eaten yet?” He turned towards an Asian man who was dumping a box of frozen squid into a deep fryer basket. Crittenden said something in Chinese to the man. Then he touched my sleeve and motioned me back to the dining room.

He sat in the corner booth facing the street and I took up the chair across from him. With easy cheerfulness he said, “How do you feel about a nice single malt?”

“I'm more of a bourbon man,” I said. “But it's like Faulkner said: between Scotch and nothing I'll take Scotch.”

He grinned. “I think we can accommodate you.” He pointed past my head to a bottle on the shelf behind the bar. The barman nodded. Turning back to me, Crittenden said, “Faulkner fan, are you?”

“Not particularly, but I went to college.”

“One of my great regrets,” he said. “When your father's a commercial fisherman and his father's a commercial fisherman, you don't put as much value in education as you should. I did have an aptitude for history. I could have been good at it, I think.”

“You're fluent in Cantonese,” I said. “That's a feat. Just the other day I was thinking I should learn Mandarin.”

“It's the business language of the future,” Crittenden said. “My family's from Macau, so both dialects are second nature. One of the benefits of colonialism.”

“At least for the colonizers.”

The barman abandoned his post long enough to bring over a decanter of amber whiskey and a carafe of water. Crittenden himself built the drinks.

“Basil-Haden,” he said. “The Reserve. What should we drink to?”

“The confusion of our enemies,” I said.

He held his glass up to mine. “That could be a tall order, Michael.”

“Long list of enemies?”

“No,” he said, “only that there might be some overlap between one's enemies and another's employees or friends.”

I took a sip of bourbon. Christ, it was good. Lloyd Crittenden knew how to mix a drink.

“I don't think it has to go that way,” I said. “We're both here to make a buck. There's no reason everyone can't come out ahead.”

Crittenden nodded as if seriously considering this. “At whose expense are we profiting?”

“My client's. Atero knows something about a missing kid. My client's a well-off family member who wants to see the kid returned.”

I dug in my pocket, aware that this garnered the attention of the two men in the booth to my left. I came out with Madame Thibodeau's card and flipped it onto the table.

“I work with this quack psychic,” I said. “She snags grieving relatives, puts them on the installment plan. I supply details that she can pull out of thin air. Some of these marks she strings along for months, even years.”

Crittenden nodded. “It sounds lucrative,” he said. “How does Zachary Atero fit in?”

I explained what I knew about Django Szabo's disappearance and Atero's connection. I said, “This rich relative's starting to think my partner's a fraud. She went to the metaphysical well one time too often, and now he's saying there's no more dough without results.”

“There will be others.”

“He's also saying the reward for the kid is a cool seventy five.”

“Thousand.”

“Maybe that's chicken feed to you,” I said, “but say I get him up to a hundred fifty? Or higher?”

Crittenden finished his drink. “How exactly would you accomplish that?”

“Simple,” I said. “Atero turns the kid over to me. I mail one of the kids' garments to the rich uncle, maybe douse it with a little red dye first. We make the uncle think the kid's in dire peril, then arrange it so it looks like I saved the kid at the last minute. Once I get the money, we split it between us and go our separate ways.”

“You, me, your partner, and Zachary.”

“Long as I get mine, I'm happy leaving my partner out. How you divide your and Atero's shares is none of my business.”

Crittenden nodded. “It sounds lucrative,” he repeated. “Unfortunately, Michael, I'll have to pass. Another drink?”

“If you're having one. Why exactly do you have to pass?”

“Because,” he said, “I don't believe a word of what you've said. I don't believe Clifford Szabo could be called a ‘rich relative' by even the most generous definition of the term. I don't believe you'd seriously entertain any kind of partnership with this psychic, and if you had, you wouldn't locate your office in such a ramshackle building, with such little attention paid to looking legitimate. And,” he said, setting the refreshed drink in front of me, “pardon me for offering a judgment of your character based on the short time we've been conversing, but you're not capable of that kind of deception. I didn't go to college, but I'm a great reader of faces. I can tell from yours that you're neither a killer nor a scoundrel.”