glared at me. “Alter what? Fuck’s that?”
“Altercation. Confrontation. Argument. Difference of opinion. Look it up in your thesaurus.”
He took a couple of steps toward me, an ambulatory mountain of noisome flesh.
The street was dark and quiet, the haloed street lights casting indistinct shadows in the fog. The few people about scrupulously ignored us, hurried on their way. I thought seriously about running away, too.
“You t’ink I’m stupid, eh? Maybe I dunno fancy words like you, but I ain’t stupid. Why the cops talk to me, eh? ’Cause you told ’em I’s the one that hurt her.”
“Okay, fine. You didn’t hurt her.”
He took a couple more steps toward me and I backed away. “I ain’t never hurt no one,” he said menacingly, brandishing his stout cane.
A figure emerged from the shadows. It was Norman Brooks. I was almost relieved to see him.
“Jesus, McCall,” he said. “This guy a friend of yours? You really gotta start hanging out with a better class of people.” He waved his hand in front of his face. “Christ, you smell like a three-week-old corpse. When was the last time you took a bath? The day they let you out of the joint?”
Loth waved his cane at Brooks, repeating his familiar refrain. “I ain’t never hurt no one. I’m just a poor, sick ol’ man. My lawyer, he says I was imprisoned falsely. He exonerated me.”
“I’ll be sure to pass that on to the families of the women you raped and murdered in Coquitlam.”
“I ain’t never raped no womens,” Loth roared like an indignant lion.
With surprising speed, Brooks reached out and yanked the cane out of Loth’s hands.
“Was it this stinking piece of filth that hurt my daughter?”
“No,” I said, no idea if it was true or not, just hoping to defuse the situation before it got out of hand.
“Gimme my stick,” Loth said.
“You don’t need this thing any more than I do.” He held it in both hands, as if he were going to snap it across his knee.
“I need my stick. I got art’ritis real bad in my hip.”
“Mr. Brooks,” I said. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
“Fuck you,” he said, but he tossed the cane at Loth. It rebounded off Loth’s broad gut and clattered onto the cobbles. Loth got stiffly down onto one knee and picked it up. He used it to help himself stand.
“I ain’t hurt yer fran,” he said to me.
“Do you know who did hurt her?” I asked him.
He shook his great head.
“Bullshit,” Brooks said. “You know who did it, don’t you, you sac of shit?”
“I ain’t know nothing,” Loth said, still shaking his head.
“Goddamn it,” Brooks shouted, and for a second I thought he was going to attack Loth.
“You ain’t listen, anyway,” Loth said. “You t’ink I done it.”
“All right, you didn’t do it,” Brooks said. “But you know who did. Tell me.”
“Or you do what?” Loth challenged. He waved his cane. “You ain’t gonna hurt no poor, cripple ol’ man.” He turned toward me. “Tell him, mister man. I don’ know who hurt yer fran. Them mens maybe.”
“What men?” I asked.
“The mens that go with the whores,” he said. “All them womens is whores, suck on men’s dicks for money, spread their ass cheeks. Tell him. Tell him.”
“Jesus,” Brooks said. “What’s he talking about? What whores? Is he crazy?”
“Whores,” Loth said again, and lumbered away, cane tocking on the cobbles, muttering and swearing to himself.
Brooks looked at me. “A fat lot of help you were. He knows who attacked my daughter.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe he does know something and maybe he doesn’t. I’m not sure what you expected me to do, though.”
“More than you did, that’s for sure,” he groused.
I looked at him. “Screw you and the horse you rode in on,” I said, then left him there and walked back to my car.
Just another quiet Sunday evening on Granville Island.
When I got home, the message light on the phone was blinking. I accessed my voice mail. Reeny’s voice was tinny and distant as the message played back.
“Tom? Damn, I’d really hoped to talk to you in person, not do it like this. Shit. Look, I guess there’s no easy way to tell you, except straight out, before you see it in some tabloid. I know you don’t read them, but — I met someone, Tom. He’s a really great guy. You’ll like him. Anyway, we got engaged last night. And, well, I don’t suppose there’s anything much left to say except I’m sorry things didn’t work out. You’re a great guy, too. Take care. I’ll call you when we get back to Canada. Maybe we can get together for a drink or something. Bye.”
As I erased the message and hung up the phone, I remembered what Bobbi had told me about not being sure that she and Greg had broken up. I had no doubt whatsoever that Reeny and I just had. I wondered why it didn’t hurt more.
chapter thirteen
I was at the studio early Monday morning. Things were starting to come together, but there was still a lot to do. It was another grey, drizzly day. Whether it was global warming, scalar beams, or normal meteorological unpredictability, the summer wasn’t shaping up to be one of the better ones on record, although celestially speaking it was still spring. The streets of Granville Island were almost deserted, locals staying home and dry and the tourists huddling in their hotel rooms and B&Bs complaining about the Pacific Northwest weather. I sat with my coffee in a director’s chair, feet on a table and gazing out the front window at the little quadrangle called Railspur Park, not thinking about Reeny’s call by trying to decide what I would tackle first, unpacking the dozen or so boxes of files and photo archives or finish painting the upstairs office. The darkroom I was leaving for Wayne. Mary-Alice and I had a meeting after lunch with an architectural firm that wanted a photo spread of its new offices, but otherwise we had left the week open to get the new studio up and running. When Mary-Alice arrived, she found me trying to make up my mind whether to give Reeny a call or send her a congratulatory card to let her know that I harboured no ill feelings and wished her well.
“Hard at it, I see,” Mary-Alice said.
“Yes, indeed,” I replied.
“Don’t strain yourself.”
“I’ll be careful.”
She poured herself a cup of coffee and pulled over another chair.
I stood up. “Enough woolgathering. Time to get to work.”
She scowled and sipped her coffee.
Wayne came in, followed by a gangly girl of thirteen or so who looked enough like him to be his sister. He introduced her as his niece Alison. She elbowed him in the ribs. “Oof. Sorry. Ali. No school today and my sister has to go out of town, so I said I’d keep an eye on her.”
“I’m a photographer, too,” Ali said. She unzipped her waist pack and took out a little Canon digital. I felt a brief stab of envy at the idea of photography for fun.
“But can you paint?” I said.
“Sure, I guess.”
“You’re hired,”