The Arx Page 10

  When he woke he felt like he’d been in a train wreck. His body ached with a brutal combination of strained muscles, scrapes, scratches, and bruises. His left ankle was stiff and swollen, and throbbed painfully. Slowly he remembered what had happened the night before, and once again had to stamp down a panic attack.

  He’d killed a man. It had been in self-defense, but the man was no less dead. Though he’d been a police detective for many years, it was only the second time Frank had ever taken the life of another human being. He was still having trouble dealing with the first time.

  He stumbled out of bed, showered, and dressed. Putting on his pants he felt for his wallet, and remembered the one he’d taken from his attacker. He grabbed his jacket, removed the wallet, and looked inside. It held a few hundred dollars in cash, one platinum VISA card, and a driver’s license with his attacker’s picture. The name on the cards meant nothing to him.

  Stuck behind the cash was a slip of paper. He pulled it out. It was a photograph, the size of a passport photo. It wasn’t his assailant. The man in the picture looked in his early thirties, thin, with longish ginger hair and a goatee. Frank turned it over. On the back were hand-written two names: ‘Lawrence Retigo, Apartment 401 – 754 Newbury Place’. Lower down, almost as an afterthought, was written: ‘Ricky Augustus, Mountain View Psychiatric Clinic’. Neither of the names meant anything to him. He placed the picture in his own wallet.

  He turned on the TV, and was relieved to find nothing about the killing on the news. If the body had been found it might make it into the afternoon paper, which would be out any time. Nervous at home, he went for a walk, detouring to a coffee shop to grab a cup while he waited. He saw the paper delivered to the convenience store across the street and rushed out to buy one, dreading, against all logic, that he’d see his picture splashed across the front page.

  Back at the coffee shop he rifled through the paper, searching for news of the death. Nothing. He was surprised and puzzled, but breathed a sigh of relief.

  He scanned through a second time to double check. Again there was nothing, but a name in a small piece near the back caught his eye and floated unanchored in his memory for a few seconds. At first he wasn’t sure what he’d seen. He had to re-read several articles before he located the name that had drawn his attention: ‘Lawrence Retigo’. He pulled out his wallet and checked the back of the photograph from his assailant’s wallet. He read the article:

  Local Reporter Dead

  A man killed in a tragic car accident a month ago has now been identified. Lawrence Retigo, a reporter for the community newspaper ‘CityLine’ died when his car crashed through a guard-rail on Highway One and rolled several times down an embankment before bursting into flames. Retigo’s dental records had to be used for identification. The cause of the accident is still under investigation, but no foul play is suspected at this time. Speed and alcohol are believed to be involved.

  Mr. Retigo was well-known in journalistic circles and had been a fixture at CityLine for more than five years, primarily covering local events and human interest stories. His editor, Harold Rawlings, said of Retigo: ‘He was an able journalist who was well-liked by his peers – he will be sorely missed’.

  It occurred to Frank that there was something familiar about Retigo’s address. He racked his brain for an answer and when one finally came, the hair at the back of his neck stood on end.

  Frank was stretching his goodwill with Art Crawford to the limit, but he convinced his friend to check out the VISA card and driver’s license Frank had removed from his attacker’s body.

  Frank spent a gut-wrenching morning the next day waiting for the result, knowing he risked being implicated in a murder.

  “Nothing,” Art said when he finally contacted Frank. “As far as I can make out, both the credit card and driver’s license are bogus.”

  “As for the other thing,” Art said, “yeah, a body was found out near the university. They’re investigating. What the hell are you mixed up in, Frank?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Frank said. “Thanks, Art. I owe you big time.”

  He searched the web for a picture of Retigo and eventually found one. It confirmed that Retigo was the man in the photograph from his assailant’s wallet.

  But who was the other name – Ricky Augustus?

  The next day, Frank tensed as Rebecca got up from her desk to study the bruises and scrapes on his face.

  “What happened to you?” she asked. “Not another bar fight.”

  When he’d answered the phone that afternoon she said she’d been calling him for a day and a half, worried that something had happened. He’d chewed her out for breaking their agreement and using the phone.

  Now he cursed himself for agreeing to come to see her.

  He smiled. “My bar fighting days are over – I hope.”

  “Come on Frank, what's going on?”

  “I think I had a run in with somebody from Kaffir.”

  He told her about following Catherine Lesko, staking out the mansion and about the man attacking him. He didn’t mention that he’d tried to break in, that his attacker had tried to stage his death, the man’s wallet, the photograph, Lawrence Retigo, or most importantly, that he’d killed somebody.

  “So someone caught you sneaking around outside the mansion and attacked you,” Rebecca said. “You sure you didn’t just get mugged?”

  “In Point Grey? Anyway I think I’d know the difference.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  Frank shook his head.

  “So what happened to the guy?”

  Frank’s body tensed. Shit, I’ve opened a can of worms now.

  “He took off,” he lied.

  Rebecca stared at him.

  “You don’t believe me,” he said.

  “It just seems far-fetched. What you’d expect them to do is call the police. What are you doing creeping around somebody else’s property anyway – especially in that neighbourhood. You’re going to wind up in jail again. The cops might not be so sympathetic next time.”

  He realized that if he said any more he’d be forced to tell her everything. His first thought had been that by telling her he’d impress on her the level of danger facing them. He hadn’t thought about how she’d react.

  “Anyway, how does it involve Kaffir?” she said. “Some billionaire’s security guy works you over. Pretty heavy-handed, but I don’t see the tie-in with Kaffir.”

  “You’re right,” Frank said. He decided not to mention the relationships he’d found between the women he’d been following and Kaffir. “There’s nothing to say Kaffir had anything to do with it. I’m over-reacting.”

  Again she eyed him strangely. “Aren’t you going to the police?”

  “So they can arrest me for loitering?”

  “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

  Frank waved a hand dismissively. “Forget it. It’s nothing. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. You’re right; it was probably just some gung-ho security guy.”

  She stared at him for a few seconds, unconvinced.

  Finally she said, “You look terrible, Frank. Maybe it’s time to take a breather.”

  His fingers dug into the arms of the chair.

  “Remember our deal,” she said.

  He calmed himself. “I hope you’re not going to invoke ‘the deal’ every time we hit the slightest snag…”

  “The slightest snag? Have you looked at yourself in the mirror?”

  “Look, everything’s fine. I just don’t want to talk to the cops. They figure I’ve lost it as it is. They’d just think I was delusional.” As the words escaped his lips, a thought occurred to him: Rebecca might think he was delusional too. He put the thought aside.

  He realized that just by being here he was putting Rebecca in danger.

  The Bad Side of Town

  CityLine News occupied the bottom floor of a crumbling brick building at an address perilously close to the Downtown Eastside, the poorest and m
ost infamous neighbourhood in Vancouver, where the hollow-eyed, skeletal frames of junkies shuffled along the sidewalks, and discarded condoms and syringes littered the alleyways. CityLine had the look of a business that was barely staying afloat.

  Frank pushed open the graffiti-plastered front door, walked down a short hallway, and ended up in a dingy reception area.

  “I’ve got an appointment with Harold Rawlings,” he said to the black-clad and heavily pierced girl behind the desk.

  “Just a sec,” she said, chewing on her gum. She pressed a button on an antiquated intercom.

  “Mister Rawlings, a Mister…” she let go of the button and looked up at Frank.

  “Detective,” Frank corrected her. “Detective Frank Langer. I called earlier.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “About Larry.”

  She pressed a button again. “A Detective Langer to see you.”

  “Send him in,” crackled a voice at the other end.

  The girl nodded towards a hallway on Frank’s right. “First door on the left.”

  Rawlings’ office was a disaster, his desktop obscured by stacks of paper, the drawers of the filing cabinets blocked half open by bulging folders stuffed into them.

  Rawlings appeared to be in his fifties. His gray hair was mostly gone on top. He wore what was left of a suit – that is, the pants, a dress shirt, and tie loosened so it hung ludicrously below his unbuttoned shirt collar.

  “Thanks for seeing me,” Frank said, shaking Rawlings’ hand.

  “Have a seat,” Rawlings said, taking a seat himself behind his desk. “So – you wanted to know about Lawrence Retigo.”

  “That’s right,” Frank said.

  “You know, I talked to the cops already.”

  Frank tensed. “Yeah, I’m aware of that.” He winged it. “Some new leads have come up that might have a bearing on the case.”

  Frank leaned forward with his elbows on Rawlings’ desk. “We’ve come across information indicating that Lawrence Retigo’s death may not have been an accident.”

  Rawlings sat up straight in his chair and his eyes opened wide. “What the hell would make you think that?”

  “I’m not at liberty to reveal anything at this point,” Frank said. “I’d just like to know if Retigo was working on anything that might have gotten him killed.”

  Rawlings threw back his head and laughed. “Lawrence Retigo?” He wiped his eyes on his sleeve and shook his head. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be insensitive. Not to speak ill of the dead, but Larry wasn’t exactly our star reporter. He covered stories like the woman with a potato chip shaped like Elvis’s profile, or the guy who could eat a hundred hot-dogs in one sitting.”

  “He was never given any bigger assignments?”

  Rawlings shook his head. “He was always a bit of an oddball. But he really started to go strange a couple of months ago – even for him. Losing it, you know? I was actually on the verge of letting him go. I kept him on mostly out of sympathy, hoping maybe he’d get his act together. Well, now it’s out of my hands.”

  “Losing it how?”

  “He jumped at the slightest sound. Kept the blinds beside his desk shut tight all the time. More than once I saw him peeking through the slats, like he was looking for somebody. Sometimes he’d take off in the middle of the day and not say where he was going.”

  “There wasn’t anything he was working on that stands out – that could have made him a target?”

  Rawlings shrugged. “Lately he was always hunkered down working at something, even when I hadn’t assigned him any stories. Larry always took his job pretty seriously. You’d think he was covering the moon landing instead of a cat stuck in a tree. But lately he got real serious – way worse than before. I asked him a couple of times what was going on, but he wouldn’t say.

  “Anyway, you never know when some harebrained idea might turn out to be something. I didn’t see any harm in it – maybe I was wrong.”

  “Anybody around the office he might have confided in?”

  “He wasn’t tight with anybody here, especially lately. Everybody avoided him like the plague. He was too out there…”

  “What about friends, or girlfriends?”

  “I think he had a sort of on-again, off-again relationship with some girl named Grace. I don’t think it was all that serious. I never met her, but I might still have her name and address somewhere. He gave her as his next of kin – how pathetic is that? I can find it for you if you want.”

  “I’d appreciate that.”

  Rawlings fought to pry open one of the drawers of the filing cabinet, hauling out sheaves of paper in the process and tossing them on top of the already large stack on his desk. Frank smiled, trying to imagine the man’s filing system.

  With surprising speed, Rawlings snapped out a sheet of paper and copied something from it to a post-it note. He handed the note to Frank. “I don’t know how current this is – she might not still be there. Anyway, that’s all I’ve got.”

  “Great,” Frank said. He rose from his chair, stuffed the note into his wallet, and turned to leave.

  “That’s it?” Rawlings said.

  Frank nodded. “For now.”

  “By the way,” Rawlings said as Frank reached the door. “Aren’t you guys supposed to show your badges before you interview somebody?”

  Frank’s throat tightened as he looked Rawlings in the eye. “You want to see my badge?” he said. He made as if to reach into his jacket pocket. There were a few seconds of strained silence.

  “N…No,” Rawlings finally spoke. “I guess that won’t be necessary.”

  Detective Frank Langer’s approach to an investigation was a lot like that of an artist to his work of art. Like a painter facing an empty canvas, Frank started with nothing, with zero knowledge about the new case. As the painter added brush-strokes until the finished work matched the image in his imagination, Frank pieced together bits of information until they coalesced into something real.

  But while an artist imposed his own vision on the medium in which he worked, it was Frank’s job to allow the information he’d gathered to drive the investigation, to impose some form upon his mind. He maintained a holistic, unbiased impression that transformed itself like a Rubik’s cube when an important piece of the puzzle surfaced.

  And while the artist typically defined the largest areas of a piece at the beginning, gradually refining the image into greater detail, in Frank’s work tiny details that weren’t in themselves important, but lent colour to the investigation, drifted in continuously, while profound revelations that completely altered the direction of the case could come at any time.

  Frank’s gut told him that one of those revelations had fallen in his lap when he took his assailant’s wallet. He opened his notebook and re-read Retigo’s address on Newbury Place, in a rundown section of the West End. He didn’t really need to check the address. As it happened, he’d parked next to Retigo’s building several times before.

  Lawrence Retigo lived across the street from Catherine Lesko.

  On the phone, Grace Hatcher had sounded nervous and suspicious, but when Frank told her that some questions had been raised about Retigo’s death, she reluctantly agreed to meet with him. She insisted on someplace public. They settled on a Blenz on Robson Street.

  Frank got there early and staked out a quiet table in the corner. The place wasn’t busy; they weren’t likely to be disturbed.

  “I’m a little overweight,” she’d admitted as she gave a description so he’d recognize her.

  That’s an understatement, he thought when she walked in and introduced herself. Her appearance was deeply at odds with her name. She wasn’t a very attractive girl – obese, with frizzy black hair like steel wool and freckles that would look cute on some girls but for some reason didn’t on her.

  She wore a tank top and skin-tight Capri pants that emphasized her bulges in all the wrong places. Conspicuous on her right wrist was a charm bracelet with a jumbled mass of figures th
at jingled whenever she moved her arm.

  After his experience with Rawlings, Frank didn’t want to take any chances. He brought the fake but realistic-looking police badge he’d gotten as a gag gift at one of the parties at the squad. He was glad he did; she asked to see his badge first thing and his quick flash of the fake was enough to convince her.

  Frank ordered her a coffee and a blueberry muffin and they sat down to chat.

  “You look kind of beaten up for a cop,” she said as she dumped three packets of sugar into her coffee.

  Frank tensed. He decided to take the offensive. “We’re not here to talk about me. We can have this conversation down at the station if you want.”

  A panicked expression swept across her face.

  She’s got something to hide, Frank thought. Good.

  “Relax,” he said. “I don’t care what you’re into. I just want to know about Lawrence Retigo.”

  She sat back in her chair.

  “Larry and I were never that close,” she said, her hands wrapped around her coffee cup. “He was just somebody to hang out with.”

  “How often did you see him?”

  “We spent a lot of time together when we first met.” She smiled. “He was fun then, always laughing and making jokes. We had some laughs.”

  “There was nothing strange about him?”

  “Strange how?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Well, I was kind of creeped-out by some of his ‘preferences’ in bed. I won’t go into detail – let’s just say there was lots of rope and plastic sheeting involved. I never dreamed I’d be going to Home Depot for marital aids.”

  Her bracelet jingled as she brushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “I could handle that, but a few months ago things changed.”

  “Changed?” Frank said.

  She took a big bite out of her muffin. “He turned into some kind of paranoid dick-wad. Said he was onto some big story that would make us both rich, but he’d never tell me what it was. I started seeing him less and less, and when I did he wasn’t the same guy from before. It was like he wasn’t there – like he was always someplace else.