I pressed the flash button to switch back to Mary-Alice’s call. “M-A? You still there?”
“Where the hell else would I be? The traffic hasn’t moved a goddamned inch since you put me on hold. This fucking fog. Whoever heard of fog in June?” I heard the bleat of her little Beamer’s horn. Mary-Alice wasn’t the most impatient person on the lower mainland, but she was a close third. “Who were you talking to? Jeanie, right? God, men,” she added disgustedly. “You just want to see her naked, don’t you?” She then became the second person inside of a minute to hang up on me without letting me get a word in.
My fancy ergonomic chair wobbled and creaked as I slumped back with a sigh. The chair had been a parting gift from my co-workers at the Vancouver Sun when I’d left almost ten years before to start my own business, and it was showing its age. I knew how it felt, if I may be permitted to anthropomorphize.
“Do you want to see Jeanie naked?” Bobbi asked.
“What? No, of course not.”
“Why not? She’s very attractive. For a lumberjack.”
“She’s not a lumberjack.”
“Lumberjill, then.”
“She’s a ‘forestry worker.’ She drives some kind of big machine that bites trees off at the roots.” Bobbi was right, though: Jeanie was attractive, very much so, in a fierce and brawny kind of way, and I thought she’d make a very interesting study in black and white, clothed or not. I just didn’t want to arm-wrestle her.
“If you want, I’ll talk to her,” Bobbi said. “So you can go shoot Ms. Phoney Boobs’s boat.”
I shook my head. “I’d better do it,” I said. “Mary-Alice has really got Jeanie’s feathers in an uproar. Would you mind doing the Waverley job?”
“Sure,” she said with a shrug. “No problem.”
“Thanks. All right, let’s get to work. We’ve still got a lot of packing to do before the movers come on Saturday.”
After nine years in the Davie Street studio we were moving to a storefront studio on Granville Island in False Creek, the narrow inlet that separates most of Vancouver from the West End and the downtown core. I lived in Sea Village, a small community of floating homes moored two deep along the quay between the Granville Island Hotel and the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. Granville Island was the former industrial heart of Vancouver, converted in the early seventies by the federal government to a trendy arts, recreation, shopping, and tourist area. It was still managed, with surprising competence, by the feds through the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. The move was Mary-Alice’s idea. I wasn’t quite sure yet that I liked it.
I stood up. Bobbi didn’t move. I sat down again. “What’s the matter?” I asked. “Need I remind you that you thought relocating to Granville Island was a good idea?”
“That’s not it,” she said.
“So what’s bothering you?”
“It’s Greg.”
Oh-oh, I thought. Greg was Detective Sergeant Gregory Matthias of the Vancouver PD Major Case Squad, Homicide Division. Bobbi and he had been seeing each other since they’d met the previous fall, during his investigation into the death of the man whose body I’d found on the roof deck of my house the morning after my fortieth birthday party. Had it become serious between them, I wondered, while I wasn’t looking?
“What about him?” I asked cautiously. I tried to keep things between Bobbi and me strictly professional, generally with only moderate success, when I was successful at all.
“I think we’ve broken up,” she said.
“What do you mean, you think you’ve broken up? Don’t you know?”
“No.” She shook her head, rather too vigorously, I thought. Her long, brown ponytail swished, like a horse swatting at flies.
The situation wasn’t one with which I was familiar. Typically, when I broke up with someone, it was made abundantly clear, in no uncertain terms, that the party in question never wanted to see me again, ever. Linda, my former spouse, had hired lawyers to make her point. So far, to the best of my knowledge, none had hired a hit man. So far …
“It was tough enough growing up with a cop,” Bobbi said. Her father had retired a few months earlier from the Richmond RCMP detachment. “I thought dating one would be easier, but …” She shrugged.
I looked at her. Her eyes were dry and slightly bloodshot, and the corners of her mouth drooped. When she put her heart into it, she had a megawatt smile, but I’d seen far too little of it lately. Now I knew why. “Does Greg know?” I asked.
“I think so,” she said. “I’m not sure. We’re having a late dinner to work it out.”
“I’m really sorry, Bobbi,” I said. “If there’s anything I can do to, you know, well, help …”
She stared at me in mock horror, as if my offer of aid in matters of the heart was akin to Willy Picton offering to cook barbecue. Then she smiled, releasing a couple of kilowatts. “It’s no big deal, Tom. Win some, lose some. Thanks for caring, though.”
“You’re welcome,” I said, thinking that maybe it was a bigger deal than she let on.
We got to work. Half an hour later, Mary-Alice arrived.
Mary-Alice was younger than me by slightly less than two years, but had always treated me as though I were her slightly slow younger brother. She had become a partner in January, buying fifteen percent and taking over the marketing and administrative aspects of the business, leaving Bobbi and me free to concentrate on the photographic and creative end of things. I was still the majority shareholder — Bobbi owned twenty-five percent — and remained more or less in charge, but I had gone along with Mary-Alice’s proposal to relocate to Granville Island. Digital photography was putting a lot of traditional commercial photographers out of business, or at least forcing them to adapt. The new digs, which along with a studio space and a small darkroom, included a gallery and retail area, would allow us to tap the consumer and tourist trade, while still maintaining our commercial business. Bobbi was dead keen, as was D. Wayne Fowler, our lab guy, who was equally at home with traditional and digital photography, not to mention the computers, and was a fair hand with a camera himself. As I said, I wasn’t sure …
Especially considering the amount of junk we had accumulated over the years. A good deal of it went down the freight elevator and straight into the rented Dumpster or recycling bins, and we’d actually managed to get a few bucks for the old Wing-Lynch film and transparency processor, as well as for some of the redundant darkroom equipment, which had already been carted away by the buyers, but there was nevertheless a daunting amount of photographic and office equipment, furniture, file and storage cabinets, and miscellaneous bits and pieces to pack up before Saturday. By two o’clock, despite the best efforts of the four of us, we seemed hardly to have made a dent, so we took a break.
“Whose bright idea was this, anyway?” Mary-Alice wondered aloud as she collapsed onto the sofa in my office and raked webs of dust out of her pale blonde hair.
“YOURS!” Bobbi, Wayne, and I shouted in unison.
