Seaweed Under Water (6 page)

I was about to add possible murderer to the list. Denise interrupted me by saying,“The drunk bit is new. Janey's a good-time girl, at least since I've known her, but her drinking used to be moderate. The worst of it is, she's turning into an unhappy drunk.”

“I'm not sure what that means. Do you mean she's an unhappy woman who drinks? Or a woman made unhappy by drink?”

“Hell if I know, Silas. Too deep for me.”

“Jack Owens and Jane Colby were an item. She lived in Owens' house for a while.”

Denise seemed astonished. She hitched her heavy belt up and put her cap on.

Then I guessed out loud that the bodybuilder might be Jane's new boyfriend, and that she'd sicced him on Owens, her old boyfriend. When Denise said she doubted that, I told her about Jane being accused of murdering her first husband. That left Denise shaking her head in wonderment. I asked her to wait while I tried to reach Henry Ferman again. He still wasn't answering his phone. I decided to pay him a visit.

Denise and I left the office together. I locked up after closing the curtains. Across Pandora Street, a kid with studs in his nose and a Mohawk haircut with foot-long spikes started ogling Denise. Grinning and winking, he adjusted his crotch. Fortunately for Denise, the two fuckups who had offered her a drink previously got up and told the kid to beat it. It was a good thing that, though their brains were dead, their chivalry was not.

CHAPTER SIX

The Matbro Building on Fort Street was another heritage-brick holdover from Victoria's Gold Rush era. I entered it through a door located between a one-chair barber's shop and a bookstore. A wall directory in the Matbro's lobby listed astrologers, telemarketers, a hypnotherapist and a person who sucks wax from your ears using hollow candles. The building's ancient elevator was out of order, so I hiked up to the second floor. The office that I wanted was behind a pebbled-glass door marked HENRY FERMAN INVESTIGATIONS.

In l974, Henry had been in Canada's far north, checking trap-lines, when he and his dog team went through the ice of a frozen lake. Henry lost his outfit but crawled ashore and got back to camp with nothing worse than frozen ears and feet. Nowadays, he hid what was left of his ears beneath a toupée. Indoors, and sometimes outdoors, he wore padded carpet slippers. His top speed wouldn't challenge a tortoise. What Henry lacked in speed, he made up in smarts.

His waiting room was larger than a domestic refrigerator but smaller than the back of a pickup truck. There was nothing inside it worth stealing, unless you count two rickety folding chairs and an Arborite coffee table with cigarette burns. Two long fluor-escent tubes buzzed up on the ceiling. I was scanning the place for bugs when a chair scraped across the floor of an inner room. The inner door swung open. Henry Ferman grinned out at me and said, “I'll be blowed; it's the old dog catcher.”

I asked, “All right, where is it?”

Henry pointed with one of his walking sticks.

After a long close look, I located a video camera's dark lens, about the size of a match head, buried in the scrolls of a cornice moulding. “Congratulations,” I said. “You had me fooled.”

“That's a nice little camera, made in Hong Kong. The whole unit is about the size of a thimble. I've been using a lot of them lately. Setting them up in convenience stores, gas stations.”

“How about the Rainbow Motel? You got video cameras set up over there?”

Instead of replying, Henry hobbled back to his desk, propped his walking sticks against a wall and sat down.

Henry's place of business looked more like an electronics repair shop than a PI's office. There were a couple of filing cabinets, a Mac computer and a fax machine, although most of Henry's rented space was occupied by floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with microphones, cameras, video monitors, long-
distance listening devices and boxes of spare parts. A six-inch TV monitor, mounted on Henry's desktop, displayed a grainy image of his waiting room. Henry saw me looking at it and said, “The picture quality on those miniature cameras isn't perfect, but it's good enough for most purposes.”

I sat down, crossed my legs because there wasn't enough space to stretch them out and said, “I saw you come out of the Rainbow Motel, Henry. This could be important so level with me. Were you installing cameras?”

Henry took his toupée off. Without it, he was as hairy as an apple. He scratched his scalp and said, “This damn rug. It itches like crazy.”

“I guess it does,” I said, not unkindly. “What's it made of, re-cycled scouring pads?”

Henry reached below his desk and produced a moulded-Styrofoam head with a happy face drawn on it with black felt marker. Henry placed the toupee on the foam head and said, “This is Mr. O'Haira.”

“Hello, Mr. O'Haira.”

“The first rug I bought was made of real hair. I asked the guy who sold it to me where the hair comes from. It seems there's an industry based in Mexico. Buyers go from village to village collecting women's hair. The women put the money toward their weddings.” Grinning, he added, “Under NAFTA it's classified as slow-growth commerce.”

“Fascinating as this all is, Henry, I'd still like you to answer my question.”

“Which question was that?”

“I asked if you'd installed bugs in the Rainbow Motel.”

“I admit nothing. Even if I did, so what? It's no crime to install closed circuit surveillance equipment on private property.”

“That depends,” I said reflectively. “It's probably not illegal to install them in a motel's public entrance. Not in bedrooms. Not in washrooms.”

Henry's face composed itself to blandness. He looked at the yellow light streaming through his windows and said, “This sunny weather, I love it. It's why I came down from Whitehorse. They talk about planetary warming, but I don't know. It can't get too warm for me.”

“Mr. O'Haira,” I said. “Please ask your boss to turn round.”

Henry swiveled his chair around to face me again. His eyes were wary.

I said, “Henry. Tell me about the Rainbow Motel, and Harley Rollins.”

Henry laughed nervously. “Boss Rollins? He's a hard-ass logger.”

“What else do you know about him?”

“Millionaire. Owns a sawmill, I believe. Maybe a bunch of other stuff, but it's all hearsay. I do business with that manager, Karl Berger, I‘ve never actually met Rollins.”

“Do you know his sister-in-law?”

“Who?”

“Jane Colby. She was married to Neville Rollins.”

Henry took a deep breath and then blew air out of his narrowed lips while he chewed that over. He shrugged and said, “As a matter of fact, I do know her. Slightly.”

I already knew the answer, but I asked anyway: “Jane goes by the name Colby, now. Did she and Neville divorce?”

“Hell if I know,” Henry said.

“You seem to know quite a lot, though. How come?”

“Just business. I'm a detective, I know all kinds of mostly useless information,” Henry said idly. “What's your interest in her?”

“Jane has been missing a few days, but perhaps you knew that too?”

Henry rubbed the crown of his head with a hand and said, “We're not that close, Silas. I don't keep tabs on her.”

“Okay. But it might help my enquiries if you have videotapes of her comings and goings.”

“Sorry.”

“You don't have videotapes of her coming and going at the Rainbow Motel?”

“I just answered that question.”

“Henry. I bow to no one in my admiration of your probity and veracity, but these denials have a ring of disingenuousness.”

Henry leaned back in his chair and sighed deeply. His slippered feet poked beneath the desk like giant woolly caterpillars.

I said, “The circumstances surrounding Jane Colby's disappearance are beginning to look sinister.”

The corners of Henry's mouth turned down as he reached into a desk drawer and brought out his office bottle and two plastic glasses. He splashed Montreal Scotch into them and shoved one toward me. It tasted like iodine, but I didn't say no when he offered me a refill. After he got settled again, Henry asked, “Okay. What do you want to know?”

“I want to know if you have installed closed circuit videotape cameras or other electronic bugging equipment in the Rainbow Motel.”

“The answer is no.”

Henry stared down his nose and made a blubbery sound by blowing more compressed air between his lips. I waited. Henry said, “All right. I'll tell you. I never installed any equipment in the Rainbow Motel. A while back, I
sold
them some video equipment, that's all.”

“Who are
them
?”

“Karl Berger.”

“You didn't help Karl to install it?”

“No. Next question.”

“When is the last time you saw Jane Colby?”

“Can't remember, I haven't seen her for months. Probably ran into her on the street or something. Whenever it was, it was ages ago.”

“Did you know she kept a room at the Rainbow Motel?”

“No,” Henry said, with genuine surprise in his voice. “She has a house in Fairfield. What's she need a motel room for?”

“Good question,” I said, getting up to leave. I added. “By the way, do you have call display on your telephone?”

“Yes. I get a lot of unwanted calls.”

“You still haven't told me what you were doing in the motel earlier.”

“You're a cop; your paycheque is paid by the government every month. You don't have to worry about paycheques bouncing, being late, being short,” Henry said in a flat monotonous voice. “In the real world, things are different. Karl Berger is a slow payer. The sonuvabitch stiffed me out of nearly three grand. I was trying to collect.”

“What will you do next? Sue him in small claims?”

“I don't know, I'm still thinking about it.”

“So long Henry,” I said, getting up and shaking his hand. “I'll be thinking things over too. If I come up with any bright ideas, I'll let you know.”

“Yeah, fine, you do that, Silas,” he said, although he didn't sound optimistic.

≈  ≈  ≈

At Government and Superior, Raven was creating traffic jams. Two ambulances and a couple of prowlies were parked across the intersection with emergency lights flashing. Four uniforms directed traffic. Paramedics were tending an elderly woman splayed out lifelessly on the tarmac.

Two rubberneckers were discussing the mishap. “Hit and run,” one man growled. “Some maniac ran a light and bowled her over.”

“You saw it happen?”

“Sure, right in front of my eyes. A Camaro, I think. Maybe it was a Mustang. Skidded round that corner like a bat outta hell, burning rubber till it went out of sight.”

“What colour car?”

“Dark. Maybe dark green.”

“Let's hope they catch the bastard and dump him in a bath of cyanide.”

That was enough Christian charity for me. I entered a nearby government building and rode an elevator to the fifth floor. Mr. Bonwit, the man I wanted to talk to, was behind a door guarded by a secretarial dragon. I'd arrived without an appointment so she gave me a grilling. I stated that I was a policeman on a routine enquiry. It didn't help. She interpreted my arrival as an immediate threat to herself, her boss, pension plan and working conditions.

Breathing down her short, cute, fire-throwing nose, she said, “You should have phoned first. Mr. Bonwit is in conference, you'll have to wait.”

“Suits me. I'll just rest comfortably alongside your air conditioner for a few hours. Hustling poolroom bums in weather like this is no joke, believe me.”

She scowled, pointed to a steel-and-leather contraption. I lowered myself into it and crossed my legs. After giving me a long, frightening glare, she addressed herself to a computer, finger-and-thumbed herself along Cyberspace Highway for a minute, then looked out the window and noted, “Traffic's moving again.”

I extracted myself from the contraption. “Old woman accident fatality,” I said, looking down on the street. “Now they're trucking her away in an ambulance. She was mowed down by a hit-and-runner in front of witnesses, but nobody saw anything useful. If you ask me, that's a metaphor for modern life.”

The secretary sniffed. “That's a very dangerous corner. You take your life in your hands every time you try to cross, even when the light's green.”

“Well, there you go,” I said. “Nobody's got time for patience or courtesy these days.”

“It's like I keep telling my friend. Slow down, I tell him. It doesn't do a blind bit of good.”

“Courtesy's as dead as a stuffed alligator. Everybody's in a hurry, nobody's going anywhere.”

Friendlier now, she glided across to Mr. Bonwit's door, knocked, opened it six inches, poked her head through the opening and exchanged words with the room's occupant. Next, she held the door wide open and said sweetly, “You may go in, sir. Mr. Bonwit can see you now.”

I went in. The office was deserted, except for Mr. Bonwit, seated behind a massive glass-and-chromium desk. The room had only one door so the people with whom he had been in conference must have jumped out the windows. Bonwit was as sleek as a cat. Longish black hair lay flat against his head and curled slightly along his white collar. He had a narrow face, shrewd dark eyes, dark eyebrows, pale skin and pale lips. I showed him my badge and told him who I was.

Mr. Bonwit stood up, put his hand out and said, “I hope you haven't been kept waiting long, Sergeant. Please take a seat.”

I sat down and said, “I'm making enquiries about a woman called Terry Colby. Terry is living in a care house on Crowe Street, where, I guess . . .”

“If she's a ward of the government, you might be wasting your time,” Bonwit interrupted apologetically but firmly. “As you undoubtedly know, our files are confidential.”