Last of the Independents. Sam Wiebe
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Yeats was telling me about the studio.
“I named it after a band I started in grade ten with a girlfriend of mine. We’d do Heart and Zep covers, as well as our awful originals. We were playing up that are-they-lovers angle. Got us an opening slot on a Bif Naked tour. We were never as good live as we were in the studio, since Alison was always nervous singing in front of an audience. But it was the first time I did something musical that didn’t have anything to do with my dad.”
“We really have to go,” Katherine said over my shoulder.
“Your dad was who?” I asked, standing up but keeping my back to the door.
“He still is,” she said. “Chet Yates. The producer.”
“Wow,” I said, not recognizing the name.
“Yeah. When your dad’s photo album has pics of Hendrix and Syd Barrett, you’re kind of in the music biz whether you want to be or not.” She gestured at the room, the studio, the building. “But I’ve done all right for myself.”
“Who’ve you worked with?” I asked, but Katherine insisted and I let myself be dragged from the room. Amelia Yeats waved and walked us out, trailing behind to lock the door.
“Any other questions, call,” she said.
In the confines of the van, Katherine said to me, “It’s ten past one.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m late getting the car back, Mike.”
“Yeah.”
“What a self-centred ass.”
“Her or me?”
“Both.”
“I thought she was all right.”
“No kidding,” Katherine said.
V
Puritans and True Believers
Eyeball three parts Canada Dry club soda, add one part President’s Choice red grape juice, a thimble’s worth of lemon juice and the same of lime. It’s important to add the ingredients in that order, as the grape juice is heavier and won’t mix properly if added first. My grandmother took these tonics medicinally at two in the afternoon and again at seven, claiming they levelled off her blood sugar and took the place of a diuretic. When she called down to ask if I wanted one, I was as dead to the world as one of the Kroons’ customers. I mumbled a yes instead of asking for tea.
I’d spent Saturday night back in the funeral home, and had the same to look forward to tonight. I’d lasted about thirty hours tweaked on caffeine and a disappearing-reappearing Yeats-inspired erection. I took a shower in the basement stall, then dressed and headed upstairs.
My grandmother had set up one of her TV trays on the back porch. We sat and looked at the carnage wrought by last night’s windstorm. That morning, when I’d delivered my dog from the throes of constipation, the laurel bushes that served as a fence between us and our neighbour had been rocking ferociously. Now, as I ate half the tuna sandwich my grandmother made, I watched the dog inspect the fallen branches and root beneath the laurel leaves that carpeted our backyard.
“You sure you don’t mind doing the yard?” My grandmother’s way of introducing a chore she wanted done.
“No big deal, Gran.”
“And the doorframe, you’ll take care of that?”
“I’ll get it done.”
“I know. You’ve just been busy. Like your grandfather, always working even when you’re not.”
We watched the dog toy with the slack clothesline, fumbling a clothes-peg about the yard with her snout.
“Too bad that’s not a power line,” my grandmother said.
At 3:00 a.m. I woke up behind the desk in the Kroons’ office, bathed in the glow from the laptop. I could hear what sounded like plastic being dragged across concrete. The screen showed no movement in the nearby rooms. I stood up, conscious of the bulge in my pants, thinking if I’d attended to that and ignored the yard work, I probably wouldn’t have fallen asleep. I was glad there wasn’t a camera on me.
I trained my Mag-Lite on the carpet, walked to the door of the embalming room, and threw the door open. It slammed off the wall. I hit the lights. Nothing.
The sound had stopped. I killed the lights and shut the door. Down the hallway and back to the room, silence except for my own footfalls. At the door to the office I heard the same scraping sound from the break room. I trained the light through the glass door and saw a mouse beat a swift retreat to the darkness of the space behind the cupboards.
I relaxed, thinking, that’s exactly how the situation plays out in a horror movie, right before Jason Voorhees appears and eviscerates some unsuspecting co-ed.
I went back to the office and sat down behind the desk in the darkness and the silence. I turned off the Mag-Lite.
“Guess there’s nothing to be afraid of,” I said, hoping it was true.
Monday afternoon I stumbled sleep-deprived into my office, collected my notes and the list of questions I’d prepared, and headed out to interview the proprietor of Imperial Exchange and Pawn, the last place Django James Szabo had been seen. I was at the door when I remembered to dump the receipts I’d just collected on the table and Katherine’s package on her desk (a special-delivery box that contained some kind of sex toy she’d been too embarrassed to have sent to her home because her father opens her mail). As I did this I chanced to look up at the car calendar and noticed it was Labour Day, a statutory holiday, and nothing was open. The only person foolish enough to be in their office on this fine rainless afternoon was me.
Tuesday I was outside of Imperial Pawn at 9:54 a.m. I spent the minutes in my car sucking back a London Fog and holding Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class in front of me and trying to make sense of the letter-like markings within it. It was the kind of book where you have to read every sentence at least three times to figure out what’s going on, and by then you’ve forgotten the context. I try to alternate reading something educational with reading something fun, a sort of Nabisco Frosted Mini-Wheats reading program. I’d finished the Leonard on Monday; before that it had been Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer. I liked Hoffer: every other sentence read like it could have been on a fridge magnet. The Veblen was harder going. Occasionally, though, you’d come across something like this:
As has been indicated in an earlier chapter, there is reason to believe that the institution of ownership has begun with the ownership of persons, primarily women. The incentives to acquiring such property have apparently been: (1) a propensity for dominance and coercion; (2) the utility of these persons as evidence of the prowess of their owner; (3) the utility of their services.
I was struggling with that when I saw a hairy arm twist the sign on the door to WE ARE OPEN. A moment later, the neon sign flickered to life. It was 10:02 a.m.
Imperial Pawn was located on the corner of a strip mall. There were a few parking spaces in front of the shop, and a larger lot around back. Cliff Szabo’s Taurus had been parked on the side street. I’d looked the area over when I arrived, as if the months between the disappearance and now might have left some trace. But of course there was nothing to see. No traffic cameras, no nearby stores. Across the street were a Value Village and a large, empty parking lot. Doubtless the people there had been grilled by the police, but I made a note to ask them again once I finished with Imperial Pawn.
An electronic bell dinged when I entered the store. “Morning,” I said to the corpse behind the counter. He was sitting on a stool behind a cash register, arms crossed as if daring business to shows its face. Thick beard and thick eyebrows, a Chia Pet growing on each arm. A flattened Roman nose. He gave the slightest of nods.
Glass counters ran nearly the length and width of the store. Under the glass were cameras and iPods and Xboxes and paintball gear and jewellery. A shelf