Depth of Field Page 2

  After nine years in the Davie Street studio we were moving to a storefront studio on Granville Island in False Creek, the narrow inlet that separates most of Vancouver from the West End and the downtown core. I lived in Sea Village, a small community of floating homes moored two deep along the quay between the Granville Island Hotel and the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. Granville Island was the former industrial heart of Vancouver, converted in the early seventies by the federal government to a trendy arts, recreation, shopping, and tourist area. It was still managed, with surprising competence, by the feds through the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. The move was Mary-Alice’s idea. I wasn’t quite sure yet that I liked it.

  I stood up. Bobbi didn’t move. I sat down again. “What’s the matter?” I asked. “Need I remind you that you thought relocating to Granville Island was a good idea?”

  “That’s not it,” she said.

  “So what’s bothering you?”

  “It’s Greg.”

  Oh-oh, I thought. Greg was Detective Sergeant Gregory Matthias of the Vancouver PD Major Case Squad, Homicide Division. Bobbi and he had been seeing each other since they’d met the previous fall, during his investigation into the death of the man whose body I’d found on the roof deck of my house the morning after my fortieth birthday party. Had it become serious between them, I wondered, while I wasn’t looking?

  “What about him?” I asked cautiously. I tried to keep things between Bobbi and me strictly professional, generally with only moderate success, when I was successful at all.

  “I think we’ve broken up,” she said.

  “What do you mean, you think you’ve broken up? Don’t you know?”

  “No.” She shook her head, rather too vigorously, I thought. Her long, brown ponytail swished, like a horse swatting at flies.

  The situation wasn’t one with which I was familiar. Typically, when I broke up with someone, it was made abundantly clear, in no uncertain terms, that the party in question never wanted to see me again, ever. Linda, my former spouse, had hired lawyers to make her point. So far, to the best of my knowledge, none had hired a hit man. So far …

  “It was tough enough growing up with a cop,” Bobbi said. Her father had retired a few months earlier from the Richmond RCMP detachment. “I thought dating one would be easier, but …” She shrugged.

  I looked at her. Her eyes were dry and slightly bloodshot, and the corners of her mouth drooped. When she put her heart into it, she had a megawatt smile, but I’d seen far too little of it lately. Now I knew why. “Does Greg know?” I asked.

  “I think so,” she said. “I’m not sure. We’re having a late dinner to work it out.”

  “I’m really sorry, Bobbi,” I said. “If there’s anything I can do to, you know, well, help …”

  She stared at me in mock horror, as if my offer of aid in matters of the heart was akin to Willy Picton offering to cook barbecue. Then she smiled, releasing a couple of kilowatts. “It’s no big deal, Tom. Win some, lose some. Thanks for caring, though.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said, thinking that maybe it was a bigger deal than she let on.

  We got to work. Half an hour later, Mary-Alice arrived.

  Mary-Alice was younger than me by slightly less than two years, but had always treated me as though I were her slightly slow younger brother. She had become a partner in January, buying fifteen percent and taking over the marketing and administrative aspects of the business, leaving Bobbi and me free to concentrate on the photographic and creative end of things. I was still the majority shareholder — Bobbi owned twenty-five percent — and remained more or less in charge, but I had gone along with Mary-Alice’s proposal to relocate to Granville Island. Digital photography was putting a lot of traditional commercial photographers out of business, or at least forcing them to adapt. The new digs, which along with a studio space and a small darkroom, included a gallery and retail area, would allow us to tap the consumer and tourist trade, while still maintaining our commercial business. Bobbi was dead keen, as was D. Wayne Fowler, our lab guy, who was equally at home with traditional and digital photography, not to mention the computers, and was a fair hand with a camera himself. As I said, I wasn’t sure …

  Especially considering the amount of junk we had accumulated over the years. A good deal of it went down the freight elevator and straight into the rented Dumpster or recycling bins, and we’d actually managed to get a few bucks for the old Wing-Lynch film and transparency processor, as well as for some of the redundant darkroom equipment, which had already been carted away by the buyers, but there was nevertheless a daunting amount of photographic and office equipment, furniture, file and storage cabinets, and miscellaneous bits and pieces to pack up before Saturday. By two o’clock, despite the best efforts of the four of us, we seemed hardly to have made a dent, so we took a break.

  “Whose bright idea was this, anyway?” Mary-Alice wondered aloud as she collapsed onto the sofa in my office and raked webs of dust out of her pale blonde hair.

  “YOURS!” Bobbi, Wayne, and I shouted in unison.

  “Why the hell didn’t you try to talk me out of it?”

  “We did,” I said. Wayne handed out cans of Coke.

  “You should’ve tried harder,” Mary-Alice said, nodding thanks. “You could have at least told me how much rubbish you had hidden away.”

  “I didn’t realize myself how much there was,” I said.

  “I hope everything f-fits in the n-new place,” Wayne said.

  We put in another couple of hours, then ordered pizza, courtesy of Ms. Anna Waverley. Mary-Alice had given me a hard time about accepting a cash client, but I told her we did a fair amount of cash business and, yes, we declared it. I wasn’t sure she believed me. Any more than she believed me when I told her I would try my best to talk Jeanie Stone out of doing a pin-up calendar. Mary-Alice subscribed to the philosophy that the customer — or the boss — was never right.

  Bobbi hung around the studio with me for a while after Mary-Alice and Wayne left. The place looked as though a herd of hyperactive rhinos had stampeded through it — and back again. Bodger wouldn’t come out from under the sofa, even for Bobbi.

  “You still think this was a good idea?” I asked her.

  “I’ll miss this place,” she said. “But, yeah, I think the move is a good thing. We were getting in a rut.”

  “I liked my rut,” I said. “It was familiar, comfortable. It took me a long time to break it in.” Truth be told, though, I had been feeling a vague sense of discontent of late, as if things weren’t turning out quite the way I’d expected them to when I’d started the business. Nothing I could put my finger on, just a nebulous feeling that a change was in order — just not this one.

  “What’s the news from Hilly?” Bobbi asked.

  “I got a postcard yesterday,” I said. Hilly — short for Hillary — was my soon-to-turn fifteen-year-old daughter. She’d been in Australia since the fall, with her mother and her stepfather Jack, the Fat Food King of Southern Ontario. She liked it Down Under well enough, but was eager to get back home to Toronto and her friends. “She says hi.”

  “Say hi back.”

  “Will do,” I said.

  After a short silence, she said, “How’s Reeny doing?”

  “All right,” I replied. “I guess.”

  “She’s still in France, then?”

  “Germany,” I said.

  Irene “Reeny” Lindsey was an actress I’d been seeing since the previous September. Except that I hadn’t been seeing much of her in recent months. Reeny was the co-star of Star Crossed, a syndicated sword-and-sex sci-fi series in which she played Virgin, a time-travelling bounty hunter who’d come to present-day Earth with her companion and senior bounty hunter, Star, to track down evil shape-shifting alien outlaws and bring them to justice, generally shedding most of their clothing along the way. It was almost painfully cheesy, but it had earned Reeny and her co-star Richenda “Ricky” Rice a huge cult follow
ing, not to mention quite a few dollars. The third season was being shot in Germany.

  “Uh, look at the time,” I said. “You’d better saddle up.”

  “Right,” Bobbi said.

  I helped her lug her gear down to the van, although she didn’t really need my help, then went back upstairs, got a Granville Island Lager out of the film fridge, another thing digital photography had made more or less obsolete, and put my feet up to await the arrival of Jeanie Stone. I hoped she wouldn’t be too put off by the mess — and that she brought more beer.

  chapter two

  I was dreaming of Reeny when the telephone rang. In that weird way of dreams, the ringing was integrated into my dream, interrupting our lovemaking on the roof deck of my house, which became Pendragon, the old sailboat Reeny had lived on until it had burned to the waterline the year before. Linda, my former spouse, said, “Aren’t you going to answer it?” as she sat naked on the ironing board in the kitchen of our first apartment, clipping her toenails. “No,” I replied, bailing the water from the bilge of my house with a cowboy hat. The ringing continued, so I tumbled out of bed and stumbled down the hall into my home office to answer it.

  “H’lo,” I mumbled.

  “Tom? It’s Greg Matthias.”

  “Greg?” I peered at the clock radio on the bookcase under the window. It read 1:53 a.m. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Bobbi,” he said. “She’s in Vancouver General emergency.”

  A jolt of adrenalin seared away the cobwebs. “What happened? Is she all right?”

  “She was found floating just offshore under the Burrard Street Bridge,” he said. “We’re not sure what happened, but it looks like she was attacked. She hasn’t regained consciousness.”

  The Burrard Street Bridge spanned False Creek about a quarter kilometre west of Granville Island, a little more than a stone’s throw from the marina where she’d gone to photograph Anna Waverley’s boat.

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” I said.

  Twenty-three minutes later I was standing with Greg Matthias beside Bobbi’s bed in the emergency ward of the Vancouver General Hospital. She lay on her side, a tube down her throat, connected to an oxygen feed, and an IV in her arm, connected to an IV pump and a bag of clear fluid. Her face was a mass of raw, red abrasions, purpling bruises, and deep lacerations, some of which were closed with butterfly bandages, some with stitches. There was a strip of tape across the bridge of her nose and dried blood at the rims of her nostrils. Her eyes were swollen shut and beginning to blacken, and her left eyebrow was shaved partly away so a cut could be stitched. I could see the ends of black threads protruding like tiny worms from between her cruelly distended and discoloured lips and dried blood caked the corners of her mouth. A big gauze bandage bulged behind her right ear. A bundle of coloured wires snaked from the loose neck of her hospital gown, attached to electrodes glued to her chest. More electrodes were affixed to her head. A sensor was clipped to the tip of the first finger of her left hand. All were linked to machines that beeped softly and displayed her vital signs on colourful LCD screens that looked more like video games than medical monitors. I wanted to take her hand, but the knuckles of both hands were like raw hamburger and two fingers of her right hand were splinted.

  “It was touch and go for a while,” Matthias said. “She’s stable now.”

  My gut was twisted in knots and my eyes burned. “When do they think she’ll wake up?”

  “They say it could be minutes, hours, or days. She’s taken a terrible beating, Tom. There’s no indication of major internal trauma, but they’re worried about intra-cranial swelling. And there’s no way of knowing how long she was in the water or how long her brain may have been deprived of oxygen. She’s fortunate that it was an off-duty paramedic who found her. He was able to give her CPR right away and undoubtedly saved her life.”

  “Excuse me, gentlemen,” a woman said behind us. Matthias and I turned to see a tiny Asian nurse who looked like a teenager but whose no-nonsense manner left no doubt about who was in charge. “Would you go back to the waiting room, please? The doctor would like to examine the patient. We’ll let you know if there’s any change.”

  “Have you called her father?” I asked, as we walked to the waiting room. Matthias was out of uniform, in jeans rather than his usual suit and tie.

  “I tried,” he said. “There was no answer. We asked the Richmond RCMP to send a car around to his home, but I haven’t heard if they’ve found him.”

  There were two uniformed VPD cops in the waiting area. “When can we talk to her?” one of them asked Matthias.

  “Obviously not till she wakes up,” he replied.

  “How long should we wait?”

  “Why don’t you go back out? Someone will let you know if there’s a change.”

  The cops left. We were alone in the waiting area then, except for the triage nurse behind his Plexiglas window. I doubted it would be quiet for long. Matthias asked me if I wanted to risk a cup of coffee from a machine against the wall.

  “Why not?” I said. “We’re close to medical attention.” He paid.

  “Pardon me for sounding like a cop,” Matthias said when we were seated with our coffee, “but was Bobbi working last night?”

  I told him about Ms. Waverley and her boat. He made notes while I talked, then asked me to describe Ms. Waverley, which I did.

  “Do you know if Bobbi met her at the marina?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t. She left the studio a little past seven and I haven’t spoken to her since.”

  As I sipped the coffee, I remembered Bobbi telling me that she and Matthias were supposed to have had a late dinner to discuss their relationship. The coffee tasted awful, weak and bitter, but it was hot and I needed the caffeine. Obviously, Matthias and Bobbi hadn’t met, so I didn’t bring it up. I took another sip of coffee instead. It hadn’t improved.

  “Do you have an address for her?” Matthias said.

  “Eh?”

  “Anna Waverley. Do you have an address for her?”

  I shook my head. “Only that she lives in Point Grey,” I said. He made another note. “She paid cash up front,” I told him. “I was supposed to do the job, but I had to meet with one of our other clients, so Bobbi took it.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Matthias said.

  “Nevertheless, I feel responsible.”

  “I understand,” he said. He looked as though he was having trouble framing his next question. I beat him to the punch.

  “The client’s name is Jeanie Stone. I’ll have to get back to you with her contact information. She left a few minutes past nine. I got home around ten, watched a little TV, and went to bed at eleven-thirty. Not much of an alibi, is it?”

  “I’ve heard better,” he said, smiling thinly. “Where did you meet with her?”

  “At the studio,” I said. I took a breath and asked, “Was she raped?”

  Matthias shook his head. “It doesn’t appear so.”

  “From the look of her hands, she must’ve put up a hell of a fight,” I said. “Whoever attacked her wouldn’t have escaped unscathed. That’ll help you find the bastard, won’t it? And convict him when you do?”

  “Perhaps,” Matthias said, in a voice like glass. “We ran an assault kit and took scrapings from under her fingernails, but the doctor who examined her thinks her hands were stomped on.”

  Anger rose in my throat. I swallowed it and drank some more of the cooling coffee, but it just made me more nauseous. There was a water fountain by the coffee machine. I got up, drank some water, then dumped the coffee into the drain and refilled the cup with water.

  “Sorry,” I said when I’d returned to my seat, not sure what I was apologizing for.

  “It’s me who should apologize,” Matthias said, running his hand through his hair, which was the colour of wet sand. “I forget sometimes that not all my friends are cops.”

  I found it strangely reassuring that Greg Matthias thought of me as a
friend, even though I didn’t know him all that well. It made me feel as though my world was a slightly safer place somehow, until I remembered why I was sitting in the emergency waiting room of the hospital.

  We turned at the sound of a commotion by the entrance to the ER. The two uniformed cops were confronting a heavyset, middle-aged man who was waving his arms and shouting, trying to push his way past them. It was Norman Brooks. He’d put on weight since the last time I’d seen him.

  “That’s Bobbi’s father,” I said to Matthias.

  “Yeah,” Matthias said. “Christ, is he drunk?” He got up and went to the entrance. I followed. “It’s all right,” Matthias said to the uniformed cops. “I’ll handle this.”

  “Who the fuck are you?” Norman Brooks demanded.

  “Greg Matthias. I’m a detective sergeant with the Vancouver police. I’m also a friend of Bobbi’s.”

  Brooks glared at me. His chin was stubbly and eyes were bloody and a match would have ignited the alcohol on his breath. Did he drive to the hospital in that condition? I wondered, with a feeling of horror.

  “McCall,” he barked. “Where’s my daughter? What the hell’s going on?”

  Bobbi’s father and I had never got on. The very first time we’d met, he’d evidently taken an instant dislike to me. I had no idea why; I’d always treated him with deference and respect, but to no apparent avail.

  “Mr. Brooks,” Matthias said, taking the older man by the arm, leading him toward the chairs. “Try to calm down, please. Would you like some coffee?”

  “Take your hand off me,” Norman Brooks said, trying unsuccessfully to wrench his arm from Matthias’s grasp. “I want to see my daughter, goddamn it.”

  “Then settle down,” Matthias said sternly. “Okay?” Brooks glared at him, face flushed. Matthias gave his arm a squeeze that made him wince. “Okay?”

  “Yeah, okay,” Brooks said.

  “Because if you don’t settle down, I’ll have these officers arrest you for being drunk and disorderly and you’ll spend the night in jail. Understand?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I understand. Now let me see my daughter.”