lives in Lions Bay now. So does Sean.”
Patrick fell silent then, and his boyish face took on a faraway expression, eyes focused on some distant point, some distant time. Shoe waited patiently, sipping his club soda, almost certain that Patrick was thinking about his cousin Mary. He had told Shoe about her. Mary was his mother’s eldest brother Albert’s only child. She had drowned in a sailing accident when Patrick was seventeen. She’d been nineteen. This past summer, when Patrick had been moving his uncle Albert, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, into a nursing home, he’d come across all of Mary’s things, neatly packed away in boxes in the basement of Albert’s house in Montreal. It had brought back a lot of painful memories, he’d said.
After a few seconds of silence, Patrick refocused and said, “Sean’s married to Allan Privett’s daughter Charlotte.” He smiled ruefully. “I had a major hard-on for her when I was seventeen, but she had this huge crush on Sean. She was only fifteen, though, and he thought she was a pest. Besides, Sean and Mary, well, let’s just say that they were somewhat closer than first cousins are supposed to be, if you get my meaning.” His voice trailed off and the faraway look returned momentarily. Then he said, “So, who knows? Unless—well, with Allan Privett’s backing, maybe Sean will be prime minister by the time he’s fifty. He asked me to work for him, you know.”
“Patrick,” Shoe had said, with mock horror. “Please don’t tell me you quit your job to go into politics.”
“Good lord, no,” Patrick had said, placing his hand over his heart, feigning pain. “I’m hurt you would even entertain such a thought.”
“Sorry,” Shoe had said. “What are you going to do?”
“I’ve got a couple of irons in the fire,” Patrick had replied evasively, “which I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to discuss right now.”
The traffic on the bridge started moving again. Shoe exited the bridge and descended into the wet green gloom of Stanley Park. Primordial rain forest loomed on either side as he turned off the wider Causeway onto Scenic Drive, a slower but more direct route to the Burrard Street Bridge across False Creek to Kitsilano. The rain stopped.
Patrick had suggested they get something to eat. “Victoria is out tonight,” he’d said. “With Kit Parsons.”
“Kit as in Christopher?” Shoe said, thinking of Kit Carson, the American frontiersman and “Indian fighter.”
“As in Katherine,” Patrick said. “Victoria met her when she took an interior design course. Kit was the instructor. Wait till you meet her. She’s only about five feet tall, but tough as nails. Very butch. I’m sure she’s a lesbian.”
They’d driven in Shoe’s car to the Kettle O’ Fish on Pacific, parking on Beach almost directly under the approach to the Burrard Street Bridge. After they’d ordered, barbecued tuna for Shoe, surf-and-turf and a half-bottle of California Chardonnay for Patrick, Patrick had asked, “How do you see yourself living after you retire?”
“Pretty much the way I’m living now,” Shoe replied. “I expect I’ll have more time to read and sail. I might not have anyone to sail with, though. You’re going to be too busy getting rich.”
Patrick smiled wryly.
“What’s with all these questions about my future?” Shoe asked.
“I guess what I’m trying to tell you,” Patrick said, “in a roundabout way, is not to expect things at Hammond Industries to remain quite what they’ve been for the last twenty-five years. Or the last ten, for that matter. Maybe it’s time for you to consider getting out too. While the getting is good, so to speak.”
“Is that what you’re doing?”
“Yes.”
“Is your leaving going to be the cause of things not staying the same?”
“No, but my leaving isn’t going help. I’m getting out before things start falling seriously apart. And, believe me, they are going to start falling seriously apart pretty damned soon. Bill’s getting old. He’s not going to be able to hold it together much longer.”
“No offence, Patrick,” Shoe said, “but am I detecting a hint of sour grapes here? I know you and Bill didn’t see eye to eye on whether the company should go public, but that’s hardly evidence he’s losing control.”
“Maybe not,” Patrick had replied. “But going public is the only way the company is going to survive into the twenty-first century. That’s not the only reason I resigned, though. It’s time for me to move on.”
And now it was time, it seemed, for Shoe to move on too, whether he liked it or not.
When Shoe got home, Jack was sitting on the back steps, in the light of the porch lamp, smoking a cigarette and twirling the putter from the incomplete set of clubs Shoe had inherited with the house. There was a plastic beer cup full of old golf balls on the step beside him. Jack stood as Shoe climbed the back steps.
“Cops were here looking for you,” he said. “Homicide dicks. Two of ’em.” Shoe opened the door and Jack handed him a card. “Said to call that number first thing in the morning. You kill someone?”
“Not recently,” Shoe said. “Do you remember Patrick O’Neill? He used to keep a thirty-eight-foot Hunter at the marina where I moored the Pete.” Shoe had helped Patrick buy the Hunter ten years ago when Patrick had first started working at Hammond Industries.
“Sure,” Jack said. “Skinny guy. Looks like an accountant. Nice lookin’ wife.”
“He was shot to death this afternoon.” He told Jack what little he knew about Patrick’s murder.
“Sorry to hear that.”
“You coming in?” Shoe said.
“I’m goin’ t’ finish my smoke first.”
Upstairs, Shoe looked up Muriel Yee’s telephone number—she had recently moved into a new town-house in New Westminster and he hadn’t yet committed her telephone number to his or the phone’s memory—and dialled. She picked up on the second ring.
“Will Victoria be all right?” Muriel asked when Shoe had finished filling her in.
“I think so,” he said.
Muriel was silent for a moment, then said, “He wasn’t serious about firing you, was he?”
“Yes, I think this time he was.” Since Shoe had been working for him, Hammond had fired him at least half a dozen times. It had never stuck.
“I’m sorry,” Muriel said.
“I’m not,” Shoe replied. “I’ve been thinking about retiring anyway.”
“Retiring? What will you do?”
“I haven’t thought it that far through yet,” he said.
Del Tilley hummed tunelessly as he cat-footed through the quiet corridors, past the empty cubicles and darkened offices. The rubber-cushioned heels of his custom-made boots made no sound on the heavy-duty industrial carpeting. He was a happy
