cover the docking fees by renting it out for parties, in the meantime write it off as a loss until someone comes along dumb enough to pay the asking price.”
“Do you know Sam or Anna Waverley?”
“Seen ’em around. Her more ’n’ him. But that’s it. They have a thirty-eight-foot Sabre they hardly ever use. Good-lookin’ woman, I’ll say that, but Con’s talked to her a couple of times and says she’s not a very happy one. Never seen her smile. I heard she had a run-in herself with Loth a while back. April, I think.” He shrugged. “Name me a woman that hasn’t.”
“What happened?”
“I got it second-hand from Witt DeWalt. Loth was standing at the top of the ramp when Ms. Waverley came along the dock from her boat, dressed for running, and wouldn’t move out of the way when she tried to get past him. When she asked him to let her by, he laughed and called her a whore and said he’d let her by if she — well, you know. She had to squeeze past between him and the railing and Witt figures Loth groped her or pinched her, because she yelped and jumped into the air and called him a filthy pig. He acted like he didn’t know what she was talkin’ about and launched into his usual routine about bein’ a poor sick old man who never hurt nobody. Witt asked her if she wanted to call the cops, but she just said, ‘What good would it do?’ Witt said she was pretty upset, though.”
Skip finished his coffee and looked around for some place to dispose of the cup. I took it from him and tossed it into an overflowing waste bin.
“I’ll let you get back to work,” he said, standing.
“Gee, thanks,” I replied.
“Don’t mention it. Y’know, I don’t care if there is something wrong in his head, one o’ these days maybe somebody’s gonna pay that old man a visit where he lives and put the fear into him.”
“Where does he live?” I asked.
“On some old fishing boat in the Harbour Authority marina. According to what I heard, he claims he’s doin’ work on it in exchange for living there, converting it into a yacht, would you believe, but no one I know has ever seen him doin’ any work.”
Art Smelski, the off-duty paramedic who’d fished Bobbi out of False Creek, was refurbishing an old fishing boat he kept in the False Creek Harbour Authority marina. It was a common enough pastime, I supposed. Given the sorry state of the commercial fishing industry, you could pick up old fishing boats for a song. Nevertheless, I asked Skip if it was Art Smelski’s boat Loth was supposed to be renovating.
“No,” Skip said. “The boat Loth lives on belongs to a fella name of Marshall Duckworth. Some kind o’ hotshot lawyer that works for an organization that gets people who’ve been wrongly convicted out of prison — whether they’re innocent or not,” he added. “Con knows him and his wife from her church.” He looked at his watch, a big waterproof chronometer with a rotating bezel and more dials and knurled knobs than my father’s old shortwave radio. “Speakin’ of which, they should be lettin’ out about now. Gotta go.”
A few minutes after Skip left, Constable Mabel Firth and her partner walked in, both in street clothes, but armed, with their badges in plain view. They looked less bulky and imposing in plain clothes — when in uniform they wore Kevlar vests — but they both wore serious, business-like expressions, so I knew immediately it was not a social call.
“We came by to give you a heads-up,” Mabel said. “Detective Kovacs is mightily annoyed with you. Can’t say I blame him. What the heck were you doing at Anna Waverley’s house last night, anyway?”
“Having a very nice time, thank you,” I replied, which caused Mabel to scowl darkly and Baz Tucker to shake his head in dismay at my irreverent attitude. “I wanted to talk to her about what happened to Bobbi,” I added.
“That much we figured out for ourselves,” Mabel said.
“How do you know I was there, by the way? Who are you watching? Her or me?”
“Her. Until we track down the woman who hired you, or the fellow who paid you a visit at your studio, she’s our only lead. A slim one, I’ll admit, but dollars to jelly doughnuts it wasn’t a coincidence that the woman who hired you used her name.”
“She’s not a suspect, is she?” I said.
She shook her head. “A potential material witness at least. She says she was at the marina that night around nine, maybe she saw something. She claims she didn’t, but Kovacs has a suspicious nature. He figures there’s a reasonable probability that she knows who attacked Bobbi, maybe even witnessed the attack, but for some reason isn’t talking. He figures it’s likely because she’s afraid that whoever hurt Bobbi will come after her. What was your take on her? Could she be afraid of someone?”
“I didn’t get that impression,” I said.
“What sort of impression did you get?” Mabel asked.
“Of an intelligent, very lonely and very unhappy woman,” I said.
“Do you think she’s telling the truth about being at the marina that night?”
“What do you mean? Why would she lie about being there?”
“The thing is,” Mabel said, “no one remembers seeing her. It’s a busy area, even at that time of day. Our canvass hasn’t turned up anyone who saw her along her usual running route that night, either.”
“You’re thinking maybe she wasn’t there?” I said.
“It’s a possibility we have to consider.”
“I don’t get it. Why say she was if she wasn’t?”
“Search me,” Mabel said. “On the other hand, maybe she was there, but didn’t want to be seen, so she said she was there just in case she was spotted.”
I shook my head. Someone, maybe Greg Matthias or Mabel, had once told me that the first rule of police work was to keep it simple, that the most obvious explanation for something was usually the right one. “No one saw Bobbi, either, right?”
“Yeah,” Mabel said. “Look, Tom, I know you. You’re inclined to always think the best of people, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but how has it worked out for you?”
“It hasn’t always been good for my insurance rates,” I agreed.
“Cops, particularly detectives, but street cops, too, have a tendency to be more realistic, pessimistic, even.”
“No,” I said, with mock incredulity.
“You said Anna Waverley was intelligent …”
“Yes,” I said.
“While your average crook isn’t all that bright, some are brighter than others. The smartest ones stick as close to the truth as possible, even if it means admitting to something that might be construed as circumstantially incriminating. A robbery suspect admitting to being in the vicinity of a robbery, for instance. They know it’s not half as damaging as getting caught in an outright lie.”
“So what you’re saying is that Anna Waverley admitted to being at the marina because
