Seaweed Under Water (10 page)

Billy's Smokes was a modular home situated at a fork in the road. A rusted Fargo pickup was parked outside, along with beater Studebakers, Dodges and Chevs. Billy used his front parlour as a duty-free tobacco outlet and cafe, and lived in the back. He was locking the glass doors of a cigar and cigarette display case when I entered. Half a dozen men were lounging about the place, smoking, coughing and drinking beer. Billy was short and wiry. The skin of his face and neck was deeply wrinkled; his fingers were like sausages from years of handling cold-water fishing lines. I introduced myself.

Billy slipped a bunch of keys into his pockets and said, “Silas Seaweed, eh? I've heard about you.”

“How about a bottle of Blue?”

Billy took one from his cooler, snapped its cap off and put it on the bar. “That'll be two bucks,” he said.

I gave him a toony and asked directions to Boss Rollins' house. Billy pointed to the road's left-hand fork and said, “It's another half mile. You'll see a culvert with water underneath; next thing you'll see is the HANE sawmill. Just keep going; Boss's house is the yellow bungalow at the end.”

I was going out of the store when somebody said, “He the money guy?”

Everyone laughed. I paused in the doorway and turned. The man who had spoken could have been anything between 30 and 50 years old. Stooped and wiry, wearing cheap shades, missing most of his teeth, he looked at me and said, “Check it out. He's no banker.”

Billy said, “Shut your mouth, Knot-head.”

It was an interesting moment. Billy followed me out to the MG. He took a can of chewing tobacco from his pocket, put a pinch between his cheek and gum and said, “Pay no attention. Knot-head is only one step up from retardation. As for the rest of these boys, they put up a good front except since HANE closed, front is all they've got left.”

“Who's the money guy?”

“Nobody, it's just a rumour,” said Billy, spitting a line of juice onto the dirt. “Some guy's supposed to be interested in buying the mill, giving these guys their jobs back. It'll never happen.”

Billy went back inside.

I resumed my journey, crossed the culvert and plunged deeper into more regions of sad shanties and trailers. The long-defunct HANE sawmill was locked up tight behind chain-link fencing. Half a dozen logging trucks stood among the weeds of a 10-acre clearing, along with pickups, front-end loaders and Caterpillar earth-moving equipment. The sawmill buildings were a group of architecturally dissimilar timber and corrugated-iron structures that had obviously been added one at a time during the mill's expansion phase. A pit bull, crouched on a mountain of sawdust, pointed its nose at the sky and howled as I drove past.

Boss Rollins' house stood on the slope of a hill. It had a roofed porch, stucco walls the colour of dried mustard and a red-tiled roof. A detached two-car garage with a dusty black Lincoln inside stood next to it. A few acres of the surrounding woods had been logged, graded and fenced. Apart from a section of carefully tended lawn around the house, the ground was littered with rocks left behind when the glaciers withdrew from here 10,000 years back. Goats and sheep, nose down in sparse grass, ignored me when I stopped in front of the house. The MG's water temperature gauge was registering in the upper range, I noticed, before I got out of the car.

This was black bear and cougar country. Waiting for somebody to answer my knock on the door I wondered idly how much livestock Boss Rollins lost to predators in an average year.

Nobody answered the door. I assumed that someone was about the place, because curtains fluttered in an open window. I went back to the MG and raised the hood. The fan belt was loose. I collected tools from the kit in the back of the car, selected an appropriate wrench and leaned inside the hood.

Somebody shouted, “Hey, you!”

A pot-bellied Native man with a round puffy face and thick black hair was eyeing me from the house. He looked angry, like an infant whose pacifier has just fallen out. A foot shorter than myself, he was sweaty and dishevelled and carrying a long-handled shovel. He was dressed in a white shirt, black pants and black, pierced leather cowboy boots with three-inch heels. Give him a steer's-head belt buckle and a tall black hat with feathers in it and he'd be a dead ringer for the guys who hawk turquoise souvenirs in the Mojave. So this was the witch. He didn't look dangerous; he looked furtive and ridiculous.

“What the hell do you want?” he yelled.

I smiled. He edged closer. I said, “Mr. Rollins? I'm Sergeant Seaweed, Victoria City Police.”

Boss Rollins tilted his face upwards to look me in the eye, heavy black brows pulled down, holding that shovel across one shoulder as if it were a rifle. His eyes were thick and oily—the eyes of an unstable man veering toward rage. I held his gaze and waited for him to speak.

“I asked you,” he said aggressively. “What do you want?”

“I'm a cop,” I said mildly, showing my badge.

He waved it away and said thickly, “A stranger drives on my property and works on his car like it's his fucking garage, how do I know he's a cop?”

“This isn't a joke, Mr. Rollins. I'm here to ask questions about your sister-in-law.”

My question startled him. Visibly agitated, Rollins drew his chin in toward his neck and a nervous reflex twitched his mouth slightly off centre. “Wait here,” he said, and strode to his house.

Tightening the fan belt, I began to think about witches and shamans—religious polar opposites. Rollins fiddled around with black magic. If stories about him were true, he was adept, capable of summoning malignant spirits from the world of the dead.

Shamans on the other hand commune with beneficent spirits conjured up in sacred places—caves high in the mountains or on lonely promontories overlooking remote lakes. There the shamans wait, fasting for days in conditions of appalling discomfort and pain, until possessed by enchantment. The intensity of such visitations temporarily endowed shamans with second sight and the power to heal.

A good 10 minutes passed before Rollins came down the lawn from his house. I had no idea whether he'd been making a phone call or had been conjuring up evil spirits, and tried not to worry about it. I had tightened the belt but still had my head under the hood when I heard approaching footsteps.

“I'm here,” he said, speaking to my back.

I lowered the hood and said, “Loose belt. Engine was overheating a bit.”

“What's this about Janey?”

I gave him a brief nod of acknowledgement. Without hurrying myself, I put my tool kit away and wiped my hands on a rag. When they were clean enough to suit me, I folded my arms, drew myself up to my full height and said, “You own the Rainbow Motel, correct?”

He said belligerently, “What is this, a cross examination?”

“Take it easy. Cops
do
talk to people. It's nothing personal.” I said in a pleasant conversational tone. “I should remind you that hampering police in the performance of their duties is a serious offence. Anybody rash enough to try it can be arrested for obstruction. After that, nosy policemen can come back here with search warrants; seize files, search hard drives. If you've ever visited a dodgy website they'll find out about it. You'll become enmeshed in a nightmare. Your life will be a living hell for years.”

Rollins' mouth fell open but no words came out.

I added, “On the other hand, you can cooperate. Then we'll leave you alone.”

He asked me what I wanted to know.

“I'm looking for Janey Colby. Maybe you can help me find her.”

His confidence returning, he said with a snicker, “Shouldn't be too hard. Try the East End of Vancouver. She'll be tits up in a gutter someplace.”

“Alright, I'll try just once more. To repeat: do you own the Rainbow Motel?”

“What do you think?”

“I don't
think,
I'm a cop. Do you have a particular reason for being unhelpful?”

“That's it,” he said, taking a step backwards. “I'm calling my lawyer, right now.”

“You're not phoning anybody. You're going nowhere till I'm through with you.”

“Who d'you think you're talking to? Nobody tells me what to do,” he snarled, taking another step backwards and turning on his heel.

I tapped his shoulder to get his attention, whereupon he whirled around and threw a clumsy, ineffectual punch. He was slightly off-balance. I brought up my right arm up and hit him in the face with the point of my elbow. There was a hollow crunching sound. Rollins fell to his knees, holding his bloody nose.

I'd made a big mistake and knew it immediately.

Rollins got up, yanked his shirt off and used it to staunch the bleeding. “I'll break you for this,” he said, speaking in a blubbery nasal whine that made his bombast ludicrous.

I felt hot, tired and disgusted with the way I'd handled myself. Nevertheless I said sternly, “I asked you when you last saw your sister-in-law and I want an answer. Savvy?”

Blood dripped down Rollins' bare chest and onto his fat belly. Tenderly fingering his nose he said, “You're dead meat, mister.”

“Answer my question.”

“I haven't seen Janey for weeks,” he said, his voice shaking. “How do I know when I saw her last? Maybe it was a month ago. I'm too busy to keep a diary.”

“Were you in the Rainbow Motel, two weeks ago?”

“Again, I don't know. Maybe I was, maybe I wasn't. I don't remember.”

“Let me refresh your memory. Two weeks ago last Friday is when somebody stole your speedboat.”

Surprise made him blink. “That fixes it. I was nowhere near the motel that day. I was here. The reason I know is because Karl Berger phoned me, told me the boat was gone.”

“All right, we've established something. Now, if you didn't see Janey two weeks ago, when did you last see her?”

Rollins had calmed. He said, “What's the big deal? Janey goes where she wants, when she wants. Am I supposed to be Janey's keeper?”

“Do you live here alone?”

“Mostly. A woman comes in to shove a vacuum cleaner around. She makes supper when I'm home.”

“Does she live on the premises?”

“She goes home every night.”

“What time?”

“It varies. Usually she's gone by six.”

I said, “Can anyone confirm that you were on the reserve when your speedboat went missing?”

“Probably, I'd have to think about it. I was probably at the sawmill all day. I'll ask my timekeeper, next time I see him.”

“The sawmill's closed, everybody's laid off. What's this about a timekeeper?”

“He's a timekeeper/watchman/dog-handler. If I didn't keep somebody at the mill they'd strip it clean in a month.”

I took out my cell phone and said, “What's your timekeeper's number?”

“Waste of time calling because it's Saturday. Weekends he comes and goes. Everybody's off fishing, or playing ball, or something.”

Rollins was lying. “Okay,” I said. “That's all, for now. You'll be hearing from me again.”

He stalked back to the house without another word, that bloodstained shirt dangling from his hand like a freshly killed game bird.

I started the MG and let it run while I wrote up some notes. By the time I'd finished, the engine's water-temperature gauge was registering in the high normal range. I shut the engine off and rechecked the belt. The tension wasn't great, but it was better than it had been. I figured I could make it back to the Texaco station okay. That assumption proved wrong.

I drove back to the main highway, turned left toward Mowaht Bay, and I was still accelerating when a deer bounded out of the woods into my path. One moment I was doing 50 kilometres an hour, the next moment I'd come to a full stop. The safety belt saved me. The deer bounced off the front bumper, picked itself up and limped into the bush. The MG's front end was concertina'd, and the headlights were bits of broken glass. Steam, gushing from a busted radiator, condensed in oily dribbles down the windshield. The steering wheel was jammed.

I called 411 to get Texaco Tommy's number. His line was busy.

A Toyota Land Cruiser appeared from behind a bend in the road. I put my thumb out. The Toyota skidded to a halt. A bearded man aged about 30, wearing brown cord pants, a red flannel shirt, caulk boots and an aluminum hard hat got out and surveyed the wreckage. He lit a cigarette with a match and carefully broke the match into two pieces before dropping it onto the roadway.

“Deer?” he asked.

“Right. It went thataway.”

“Yeah, they're tough, but it won't get very far. A cougar will be having it for dinner soon.”

“Lucky cougar,” I said. “I'm Silas Seaweed.”

“Urban Kramer,” he said. “Can I give you a tow? I've got a chain.”

“Thanks, but the steering is jammed. If you're heading into town maybe you could ask the Texaco guy to tow me in.”

“Sure, no problem,” Kramer said amiably. “You okay? Not hurt or anything?”

“I'm fine,” I replied, and gave him my card. “Here's my cell phone number. Ask the Texaco guy to call, confirm he can tow me in today, instead of next week.”

Kramer put my card into his shirt pocket and drove off.

It was late afternoon, still blistering hot. A rickety five-wire fence blocked entry to the adjacent forest. I noticed—in a place where a section of fence had fallen down—a well-used game trail. The injured animal's tracks wound faintly uphill through dense bush. Altogether, it was a sombre, shady backwoods. Shafts of diffused orange-coloured light filtered through the canopy creating grotesque shapes and shadows. On an impulse, I set out along the trail and in less than 10 minutes, I reached a spot from which Boss Rollins' house was visible. Rollins was digging a hole at the foot of his lawn. Odd. What was he doing? I watched from the trees for a couple of minutes before resuming my search for the deer.