Last of the Independents. Sam Wiebe
After the Kroons were gone I slid my sandwich forward to the edge of the table. “So what do you think?”
Katherine swiveled around in her chair. A high-school rugby player, now a student at Langara College, Katherine was stockily built and only feminized, in the traditional sense of the word, in the light eye shadow she wore, the berets in her black hair, and the layer of foundation she used to hide her freckles.
She had become the second employee of Hastings Street Investigations eight months ago, doing four hours of clerical work a week. When her course load lessened in the summer, I’d brought her in Monday to Thursday. I’m proficient with computers but I hate them, and worse, am the type of person who tries to pass this hatred off as a distinction rather than a deficiency, the mark of a genius whose intuition is hamstrung by binary code and random access memory. So much of modern investigating is simply knowing which database to search. I was happy to turn much of that work over to Katherine, freeing me up for the kind of jobs my antiquated skill set was better suited for. Like camping out in the basement of a funeral home, waiting for a necrophiliac.
“I’m just glad my grandpa went through Forest Lawn,” Katherine said. “Can you imagine the audacity, them not telling the cops?”
“It would ruin them.”
“Maybe they should be ruined. How’d you feel if that was your aunt, or if it was you?”
“It’s dead tissue at that point.” I finished my sandwich, wadded up the wrapper and missed a three-pointer into the wastebasket next to the door. Through the window, the afternoon sun was making one last effort to break through a chalk-coloured sky.
“So you wouldn’t mind, after you’re dead, someone having their way with you?”
“I couldn’t mind because I wouldn’t be there.”
“But the family, Mike.”
“I doubt the Kroons will tell them.”
“Then I guess that makes it a victimless crime,” Katherine said.
“The Kroons are the victims.”
She rolled her eyes, one of her handful of annoying tics that meant “I give up, I can’t reason with this idiot.” She returned to her search. I finished typing my meeting notes and forwarded them to her. I was passing her the contract when the buzzer rang. Katherine looked over at the television monitor to her left and said, “Your friend is on his way up.”
“Which one?”
“How many do you have?”
A moment later Ben Loeb crashed through the door and collapsed wheezing on the clients’ bench. He shed his jacket and took several gulps of air before saying, “I just saw the weirdest pair of twins.”
“Father and son,” I said.
“Clients?”
“Can’t really go into it.”
“They run a funeral home and someone’s having their way with the corpses,” Katherine said. “And your hero here thinks it’s no harm, no foul.”
“Undertakers. That’s why they looked so weird.” Ben dug through the pockets of his sweater, found his notebook, and jotted something down. “They did have that Bonasera vibe. What did they want? Did they entreat you to beat someone up for them?”
“Obviously they wanted the corpse-humper stopped,” Katherine said.
“That’s about the gist of it,” I said.
“And you took the job?” When I nodded, Ben’s head sank.
“What?” Katherine said. “You don’t think necrophilia is a serious crime? You’d be happy with someone defiling your lifeless body?”
“It’s kind of flattering,” Ben said.
Not only did she roll her eyes but her head followed, and her body followed her head, as she turned back to her screen, done with us, muttering, “Peas in a fricking pod.”
Ben looked at the Loeb file on the corner of the table, and the Loeb file looked into Ben. Five years ago nine-year-old Cynthia Loeb had walked four blocks from her home on Seventh Avenue into a 7-Eleven where four witnesses saw her. Her exit was on the security tape, but she had never been seen again. There had been bogus sightings, anonymous tips, a scrapbook’s worth of news clippings, dozens of VPD and RCMP bulletins, spots on local and national news. Dozens of serious-voiced blond anchors had intoned, “The search continues for,” “Months after the disappearance,” and “The family continues to hold out.” All that was left now were numbers and names.
Cynthia and Ben’s father had died of angina, a condition which existed before the disappearance but caused their mother to state that he had died of a broken heart. He may very well have. Mrs. Estelline Loeb hired me thirty-two months before that day with the Kroons. I had failed her, her husband had failed her, the police and the media, the support groups, the talk show hosts, and her son, Ben, had failed her. Her optimism never faltered. Her hope never waned. The Loeb file grew to Jarndyce and Jarndyce proportions, a labyrinth of dead ends. I nicknamed it “The Impossible Case.” I stopped accepting her money. But the first of every month I received a phone call from her. We’d discuss what witnesses needed to be re-interviewed, what agencies hadn’t been contacted recently, whether a fresh round of flyers should be put up. She never cried or fell into hysterics, or emoted at all beyond cheerful, blind optimism. To fail her so consistently, so spectacularly, had broken my heart.
Her son Ben was different. He’d been twenty when his baby sister disappeared — there was a middle child, Izaak Junior, who had died in infancy — and after two years of brooding and sulking, overindulging in every vice he could find, Ben’s life, according to him, went pretty much back to normal. Not that he wasn’t moved every time he saw the file, but he’d resigned himself to his sister’s absence in a way his mother hadn’t and couldn’t.
“Benjamin Loeb,” so an article in GamePro read, “is one of the hottest video game writers to come on the scene in the last decade, bringing the sensibilities of William Gibson to the world of Hideo Kojima and Drew Karphyshyn.” Ben kept a laminated copy of the article in his wallet. He’d been blocked since developing the third installment of Your Blood is a Drug! — a role-playing game he’d written about a dystopic future where the majority of people volunteer to undergo the chemical equivalent of a full-frontal lobotomy. The series was wildly successful, spawning a line of merchandise that included a fully poseable Magnus Kane action figure (the brooding, leather-wearing, curtain-of-black-hair-across-his-forehead antihero, the one person in Neo Vancouver immune to the effects of the drug) and a T-shirt that said PROUD SLAVE OF THE PARAGON CORPORATION. Ben was wearing one of those shirts underneath his jacket, stretched and bunching in an effort to contain his amorphous trunk.
He spent more time in the office than Katherine did. Perhaps in the cobbled-together furniture and the high-tech gadgetry he saw the clubhouse or the neighbour’s tree fort he’d been excluded from. My office has that effect on some people. Most, though, like the Kroons, find the outside world an immensely desirable place after fifteen minutes in the cramped second-storey shoebox that houses my business.
“Talk to your mother lately?” I asked Ben.
“Why? Anything develop?”
“No.”
“So why bring it up?”
“She likes to see you.”
“What she likes is to run me through the gauntlet of her disapproval,” Ben said. He affected an elderly lady’s voice. “You know, Benjamin, I’m not one of those mothers who hover over her children nitpicking every last detail. But would it hurt you to wear some lighter colours, even a white, for heaven’s sake? And while I wouldn’t say you’re fat, let me remind you, your father had to do an hour’s worth of cardio every day to keep his figure. Tell you what, Benjamin. I’m going to send you home with a nice case of lentil