Last of the Independents. Sam Wiebe

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СКАЧАТЬ Mondays, or the first day back after the weekend,” Elder said.

      I looked over at the vintage car calendar nailed to the wall above Katherine’s computer. Today was Wednesday, the 2nd of September. September’s car was a ’50 Ford painted a milky orange hue. The colour of peach yogurt when it’s been stirred up.

      “I’ll come by Friday, talk to your staff,” I said. I rose out of the chair and shook both exceedingly dry right hands.

      Thomas Kroon the Elder said, “Would it be all right if we introduced you as a security consultant rather than a private investigator?”

      “As you like. You’re open weekends?”

      “Three-quarter days,” Younger said.

      “I’ll need a key and your security codes when I come by on Friday. I’ve got my own equipment, and I might have someone stay overnight. Keep this between the two of you.”

      “No worry about that,” Younger said. “Believe me, this isn’t the kind of thing we like to advertise.”

      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 СКАЧАТЬ