Last of the Independents. Sam Wiebe
her desk, stood up, and picked pieces of chair stuffing off her ass, compliments of a ripped seat cushion. I made a mental note to duct-tape the chair tomorrow.
She said, “Gordon Laws says thank you, says his son’s on the next plane home. You can pick up the check on Monday.”
“He should thank you; you’re the one who found him.”
“In under an hour,” Katherine said. Her searches were usually only tangential to the case. Laws’s son David was the first person she’d located. I’d been waiting all week for her to ask for a raise. I was planning on countering with a piece of the business, meagre but steady. Instead she said, “Just to let you know, school’s back next week.”
“Thought it wasn’t till —”
“— After Labour Day, which is next Monday.”
I looked again at the auto calendar, the unchanging centre placard reading MORRIS CARGILL’S ACCOUNTING AND TAX PREPARATION: WE CHARGE BY THE HALF HOUR!
“So it is,” I said. “What about nights? Weekends?”
“No nights, have to study. Saturdays yes, no Sundays. A possibility of Wednesdays if I can switch French labs, but I won’t know till the second week when people start to drop.”
“La langue de l’amour,” Ben said.
“More like the language of government service,” Katherine said. “You know how much better your prospects of a government job are if you’re bilingual?”
Ben said, “What I like about you, Hough, is that you’re a starry-eyed idealist. You really set your sights high.”
“Let me know about Wednesdays,” I said, as Katherine smoothed the collar of her wool coat. She nodded her goodbyes, slipped into the straps of her backpack, and began her descent. I watched her on the monitor as she reached the bottom of the stairs, threw open the front door, and stepped out into green-tinted sunlight.
“Developing a thing for her?” Ben asked me.
“It’s employer-employee concern,” I said. “I’ve never had underlings before. It’s empowering.”
“Who’s Gordon Laws?”
“A wealthy man with an estranged son. After a twenty-year lost weekend, he finds himself owning a couple of car dealerships, wonders what happened to his family. His son took his ex-wife’s ex-boyfriend’s last name. Katherine found him on one of those social networking sites. Amazing how much info people will volunteer for public scrutiny.”
“They all think they’ll be famous,” Ben said. “Not realizing, of course, you have to be famous for something, even if that ‘something’ is being a contemptible prick. Gordon Laws and his offspring sound like raging bores.”
“You don’t know the first thing about either of them.”
“I can spot a raging bore. Hundred dollars says I’m right.” Ben stood and walked to Katherine’s chair and sat down, the torn cushion emitting a wheeze. “I’ve got a case for you.”
I nodded at the Loeb file. “You’re telling me.”
“Something else,” he said.
While we were talking I’d been drafting an email to a woman’s shelter in Toronto, sending them age-enhanced photos of Cynthia Loeb and requesting they post them and keep an eye out. She’d be fourteen this year. Some of the photos had been aged ten or twelve years to account for possible amphetamine or crack addiction. The combination of drug-damaged skin and a little girl’s eyes and smile was unsettling. I fired off the email and turned my attention to Ben.
He said, “I don’t have all the details, but the guy sounds like he’s in dire need of a private eye.”
“Is the melodrama necessary? Out with it.”
“Remember the choices I had for community service?”
“You parleyed your way into attending Pastor Flaherty’s group.”
“Right, Coping Without a Loved One. The Father invited my mom once. You can imagine how that went. Anyway, I showed up, got the signatures, figured we were finished. The good Father, however, turns out to be a big video game fan, and he keeps in touch. We were talking one day and you came up.”
I leaned back in my chair until my head touched the wall. “Oh?”
“He thinks highly of you, despite your attitude to him.”
“‘Attitude’ meaning the fact I don’t give discounts to people of the cloth?”
“‘Combative to people of faith’ is how he described you.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said, ‘Apt.’ Like that’s not true?” Ben stood and grabbed his jacket from the bench, pulled from its pocket a flyer folded lengthwise.
“Yesterday he asks to meet me for coffee. I’d given him some back issues of the spinoff comic. I figured he wanted to take me to task for the blood and gore and godlessness. Instead he hands me this to give to you and asks if you’ll meet with this guy to discuss taking over the case.”
I spread the flyer on the table. A black-and-white school photo of a slightly-disheveled, dark-haired boy, defiantly unsmiling. I could almost hear the photographer coaxing him, aware of the two hundred other brats she’d have to shoot that morning, telling the kid, “Don’t you want to look nice in the yearbook?” The kid thinking, “Hell no.”
Above the photo were the words
DJANGO JAMES SZABO.
TWELVE YEARS OLD.
DISAPPEARED MARCH 6th.
MISSED BY HIS FAMILY.
IF SEEN, CONTACT VPD MISSING PERSONS
SO WE CAN RETURN DJANGO TO HIS FAMILY.
Phone number and email address followed.
“He’s been on the news off and on,” Ben said. “He’s not the most photogenic kid, and the dad’s six kinds of crazy. It never became the big news story it should’ve.”
“The dad goes to those meetings?” I said. “After six months?”
Ben said, “No, but Pastor Flaherty is campaigning for him to come. Mr. Szabo mentioned he was unhappy with the people he hired, so the Pastor asked me to ask you if you’d see him. Will you?”
“I don’t know yet,” I said. “Who did Szabo hire first?”
“Aries Security and Investigative Consultants.”
“There’s ten grand down the toilet,” I said. “Tell the Pastor I’ll meet him tomorrow morning at the mission, nine if he can make it.”
The new door I’d put on my grandmother’s house was wedged in its frame. The book on household carpentry I’d been following recommended shaving the frame down half an inch, but in my wisdom I’d thought I could get a more perfect fit by only shaving a third. Now that winter was slouching towards us the wood was expanding. The crown moldings I’d installed in the living room had cracked and the banister on the basement stairs had started to warp. The doorframe was only the latest casualty.
I wrenched the door open and found myself enfolded in the smell of chicken and pipe smoke. She was asleep on the couch, her TV trays in front of her, a separate one for the ashtray and clickers. Some asinine game show silently emitting from the TV.
I found a plate waiting in the oven, baked chicken, boiled and buttered potatoes, green beans, and corn. Everything cold, waiting for me to flick the dial on the oven.
The pile of dishrags and dirty laundry in the middle of the floor raised its head and whimpered in my direction. I put down a plate of dry kibble moistened with chicken juice. The dog made no move to get up. I took the cold