summer morning, clean and bright and unseasonably warm. The new client was coming in later that morning. My house was floating on an even keel, more or less. And it had come to me in the shower that if Hilly came to live with me for a year, I could put a temporary hold on child support payments.
My good mood was not to last, however. At a few minutes to eight I was shuffling along Johnston Street toward the Aquabus dock by the Public Market, minding my own business, thinking about what I could do with a little extra disposable income. As I dodged a huge blue-and-white ready-mix truck that rumbled through the gate of the Ocean Cement plant, one of the last remnants of Granville Island’s industrial past, I ran into Barry Chisholm on his mountain bike. Literally.
“Sorry,” I said as I picked myself up from the dusty cobbles and Barry examined his bike for damage. “I wasn’t watching where I was going.” If I had been watching where I was going, I wouldn’t have bumped into Barry and his bike; I would have crossed to the other side of the street and avoided Barry Chisholm altogether.
“Everything seems okay,” Barry pronounced with relief.
“It’s a goddamned mountain bike, Barry,” I said. “If you can ride it up and down a fucking mountain without hurting it, you can sure as hell ride it up and down me.”
“You should watch where you’re going,” Barry reminded me in an aggrieved voice.
“Yes, indeed,” I said. I poked at a tear in the knee of my best pair of trousers. My fingertip came away bloody. “I’m all right, by the way,” I said. “Thanks for asking.”
He frowned in puzzlement. “I didn’t.”
Barry Chisholm was a Bike Nazi, one of those fanatical cyclists who apparently believe that every street and path and trail on the planet had been put there for their exclusive use. With no regard for the rules of the road, Barry and his ilk run red lights and stop signs, then raise their fists in righteous indignation at automobile drivers who have the unmitigated gall to honk their horns and swear at them. They ignore crosswalks and ride on sidewalks, thumbing their bells or shrilling their whistles at pedestrians who are too slow to get out of the way. And although they consider themselves to be environmentally enlightened, they ride three-thousand-dollar carbon fibre bikes and wear Lycra shorts, high-tech cycling shoes, and plastic and polystyrene helmets. Most of them have pathetic social skills, if they have any social skills at all. Barry’s were certainly nothing to write home about.
I turned and began to trudge homeward to change into my second-best pair of pants. Barry wheeled his bike along beside me, pedal locks of his cycling shoes clicking on the cobbles.
“Is it true a man died on your roof deck?” he asked.
“No,” I replied.
“That’s what I heard.” “You shouldn’t believe everything you hear.”
“Eddy Porter said there were police and paramedics at your house and a truck from the coroner’s office on the quay.”
“Eddy Porter believes he was abducted by flying saucer people who put an implant in his head, for god’s sake.”
“You shouldn’t do that,” Barry said.
“Do what?”
“Use the Lord’s name in vain.”
“Goodbye, Barry,” I said. “Have a nice day.”
“Was he a homosexual?”
“What? Was who a homosexual?”
“The man who died on your roof. Was he a homosexual?”
“How the hell should I know?” I said, adding, although I knew better, “What bloody difference does it make?”
“Homosexuality is an aberration,” Barry said, expression serious. “It’s against God’s law. You should-n’t associate with those kinds of people.”
“I appreciate your concern,” I said.
“You especially shouldn’t let your daughter associate with them.”
To the best of my knowledge, the only homosexual with whom Hilly associated was Daniel Wu. I’d a damned sight sooner Hilly associated with Daniel and his “kind of people” than with the likes of Barry Chisholm. I was too polite to tell him so, though.
We had reached the entrance to the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, where Barry taught digital photography and computer graphics. Carefully leaning his bike against a wall, he unslung his backpack.
“I’ll pay for your slacks,” he said, taking out his wallet.
“Keep your money,” I said, and kept walking.
“It’s about time you showed up,” Bobbi said when I finally got to the studio.
“Lemme alone,” I grumbled.
Roberta “Bobbi” Brooks was my business partner. She’d started out as my assistant, but the year before I’d sold her a twenty-five percent share in the business. I’d have given it to her, to keep her from going out on her own, but she’d insisted on everything being legal and above board. I’d got the better of the deal; Bobbi was a fine photographer, maybe better than me. At thirty, she was prettier than the average girl next door, with large brown eyes and long brown hair she wore in a ponytail that stuck through the back of her baseball cap. In addition to the cap, she habitually wore jeans, which she filled out very nicely indeed, and a T-shirt, which she filled out hardly at all. In cooler weather, she added a faded jean jacket, sometimes a fleece vest. In the depths of winter she wore a waxed cotton Australian stockman’s coat over the jacket and vest. Sometimes, in summer, she traded the jeans for cut-offs, a sight that required a robust cardiovascular system.
“What’s eating you?” she asked.
“Nothing.” I handed her the single-use cameras from the party. “Is Wayne in?” Wayne was D. Wayne Fowler, our tech.
“He’s in the lab.”
“Have him send these out to be developed as soon as possible.” Although we had an old Wing-Lynch C41/E6 processor for developing colour negative and transparency film, it was less expensive, and a lot faster, to have casual snaps developed and printed at the photo finisher around the corner.
“What’s the big hurry?” Bobbi asked. “It wasn’t that great a party.”
“The police haven’t talked to you?”
“No. Why? Don’t tell me I missed something.”
I told her about the dead man on the roof deck.
“Whoa, spooky,” she said. “Older guy? Grey hair? Dressed like Bill Clinton?”
“I don’t know how Bill Clinton dresses,” I said. “But, yes, that sounds like him. Do you know him?”
“Nuh-uh.” She raised the cameras, dangling from their rubber band straps. “You think there might be a photo of him?”
“It’s a long shot,” I said. “Get doubles. The police may want a set.”
