equivalent of a full-frontal lobotomy. The series was wildly successful, spawning a line of merchandise that included a fully poseable Magnus Kane action figure (the brooding, leather-wearing, curtain-of-black-hair-across-his-forehead antihero, the one person in Neo Vancouver immune to the effects of the drug) and a T-shirt that said PROUD SLAVE OF THE PARAGON CORPORATION. Ben was wearing one of those shirts underneath his jacket, stretched and bunching in an effort to contain his amorphous trunk.
He spent more time in the office than Katherine did. Perhaps in the cobbled-together furniture and the high-tech gadgetry he saw the clubhouse or the neighbour’s tree fort he’d been excluded from. My office has that effect on some people. Most, though, like the Kroons, find the outside world an immensely desirable place after fifteen minutes in the cramped second-storey shoebox that houses my business.
“Talk to your mother lately?” I asked Ben.
“Why? Anything develop?”
“No.”
“So why bring it up?”
“She likes to see you.”
“What she likes is to run me through the gauntlet of her disapproval,” Ben said. He affected an elderly lady’s voice. “You know, Benjamin, I’m not one of those mothers who hover over her children nitpicking every last detail. But would it hurt you to wear some lighter colours, even a white, for heaven’s sake? And while I wouldn’t say you’re fat, let me remind you, your father had to do an hour’s worth of cardio every day to keep his figure. Tell you what, Benjamin. I’m going to send you home with a nice case of lentil soup.”
“Imagine that,” I said. “A nice old woman wanting to make sure her son takes care of himself. What an unreasonable bitch. Anyway, she asks about you. Try to fit in a visit this fiscal quarter.”
Katherine pushed back from her desk, stood up, and picked pieces of chair stuffing off her ass, compliments of a ripped seat cushion. I made a mental note to duct-tape the chair tomorrow.
She said, “Gordon Laws says thank you, says his son’s on the next plane home. You can pick up the check on Monday.”
“He should thank you; you’re the one who found him.”
“In under an hour,” Katherine said. Her searches were usually only tangential to the case. Laws’s son David was the first person she’d located. I’d been waiting all week for her to ask for a raise. I was planning on countering with a piece of the business, meagre but steady. Instead she said, “Just to let you know, school’s back next week.”
“Thought it wasn’t till —”
“— After Labour Day, which is next Monday.”
I looked again at the auto calendar, the unchanging centre placard reading MORRIS CARGILL’S ACCOUNTING AND TAX PREPARATION: WE CHARGE BY THE HALF HOUR!
“So it is,” I said. “What about nights? Weekends?”
“No nights, have to study. Saturdays yes, no Sundays. A possibility of Wednesdays if I can switch French labs, but I won’t know till the second week when people start to drop.”
“La langue de l’amour,” Ben said.
“More like the language of government service,” Katherine said. “You know how much better your prospects of a government job are if you’re bilingual?”
Ben said, “What I like about you, Hough, is that you’re a starry-eyed idealist. You really set your sights high.”
“Let me know about Wednesdays,” I said, as Katherine smoothed the collar of her wool coat. She nodded her goodbyes, slipped into the straps of her backpack, and began her descent. I watched her on the monitor as she reached the bottom of the stairs, threw open the front door, and stepped out into green-tinted sunlight.
“Developing a thing for her?” Ben asked me.
“It’s employer-employee concern,” I said. “I’ve never had underlings before. It’s empowering.”
“Who’s Gordon Laws?”
“A wealthy man with an estranged son. After a twenty-year lost weekend, he finds himself owning a couple of car dealerships, wonders what happened to his family. His son took his ex-wife’s ex-boyfriend’s last name. Katherine found him on one of those social networking sites. Amazing how much info people will volunteer for public scrutiny.”
“They all think they’ll be famous,” Ben said. “Not realizing, of course, you have to be famous for something, even if that ‘something’ is being a contemptible prick. Gordon Laws and his offspring sound like raging bores.”
“You don’t know the first thing about either of them.”
“I can spot a raging bore. Hundred dollars says I’m right.” Ben stood and walked to Katherine’s chair and sat down, the torn cushion emitting a wheeze. “I’ve got a case for you.”
I nodded at the Loeb file. “You’re telling me.”
“Something else,” he said.
While we were talking I’d been drafting an email to a woman’s shelter in Toronto, sending them age-enhanced photos of Cynthia Loeb and requesting they post them and keep an eye out. She’d be fourteen this year. Some of the photos had been aged ten or twelve years to account for possible amphetamine or crack addiction. The combination of drug-damaged skin and a little girl’s eyes and smile was unsettling. I fired off the email and turned my attention to Ben.
He said, “I don’t have all the details, but the guy sounds like he’s in dire need of a private eye.”
“Is the melodrama necessary? Out with it.”
“Remember the choices I had for community service?”
“You parleyed your way into attending Pastor Flaherty’s group.”
“Right, Coping Without a Loved One. The Father invited my mom once. You can imagine how that went. Anyway, I showed up, got the signatures, figured we were finished. The good Father, however, turns out to be a big video game fan, and he keeps in touch. We were talking one day and you came up.”
I leaned back in my chair until my head touched the wall. “Oh?”
“He thinks highly of you, despite your attitude to him.”
“‘Attitude’ meaning the fact I don’t give discounts to people of the cloth?”
“‘Combative to people of faith’ is how he described you.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said, ‘Apt.’ Like that’s not true?” Ben stood and grabbed his jacket from the bench, pulled from its pocket a flyer folded lengthwise.
“Yesterday he asks to meet me for coffee. I’d given him some back issues of the spinoff comic. I figured he wanted to take me to task for the blood and gore and godlessness. Instead he hands me this to give to you and asks if you’ll meet with this guy to discuss taking over the case.”
I
