This was where Dan came in. He was there to challenge the perspective. He became adept at disguising himself outside claimants’ homes, snooping through their garbage, and making discreet enquiries of the people next door who were sometimes only too eager to divulge their neighbours’ secrets. “He operates a business in his basement, customers come and go at all hours.” Or, “I see her working down at the pub on the corner on Sundays.” Many of those Dan caught in lies later expressed shock that the young man on their corner had been able to keep invisible till it was too late. After a handful of incriminating pictures, the potential lawsuits and hoped-for insurance payments became history.
His first month on the job, he located ten claimants who’d been impossible for others to find. He got incriminating pictures of seven. His supervisors were impressed and commended him every chance they got. He’d had misgivings about a couple of the ones he’d shadowed, wondering if they really were scamming or just making do the best they could. A guy who claimed to have a bad leg and got caught playing football was one thing, but several claimants he’d photographed doing everyday things that had to be done, like it or not. The pictures didn’t show whether it had been easy for them to perform those tasks or how costly it had been in terms of pain and suffering.
He expressed his concerns to a supervisor. She gave him a wormy smile, the veins of a chronic drinker mapping her nose. “We know,” she said. “It’s a tough call. Just get the pictures and don’t worry about it. Let the courts decide who’s lying.”
“Luck of the draw,” a co-worker told him with a shrug. “Hey! It’s not up to us to judge.”
The more he got to know his colleagues, the more Dan realized he was working with people who’d rubbed themselves sideways against the law more than the norm. Confessions of impaired driving, assault, tax evasion, drug possession, and fraud were commonplace amongst his co-workers. Most of them talked freely about their pasts. Some bragged about the things they got away with. One admitted he was working off the payments of a paternity suit. Dan began to feel he’d been drafted into the city’s virtually unemployable fringe set.
One cold April afternoon, he watched an older woman hobbling around her front walk with a shovel. She wore oversized rubber boots and a ragged overcoat. With a record snowfall blanketing the city, her movements hardly made a dent in the drifts thrown up by a street plough. According to the report, a fall had left her unable to fill her duties at a stationery factory where she’d worked for the past twenty-seven years. She was widowed, the mother of a thirty-year-old. If she’d been Dan’s mother, he thought, she wouldn’t be out there shovelling for herself.
He rolled down the windows and took a couple of pictures then sat watching, his breath hanging on the air. The woman stopped every few seconds to draw a lungful of oxygen and stretch her left arm. Dan saw the pain in her face. He put the camera down and stepped out of the car.
She looked up when he approached.
“Do you need some help?” he asked.
She leaned on the shovel and regarded him. “I hurt my arm.”
“I can see that.”
He took the shovel and cleared her sidewalk with a dozen brisk motions.
“Thank you, sir,” she said.
“It’s no problem.”
She stood there watching him. “They told me I’d better watch out for anyone with a camera. They said the insurance company would take pictures of me and show the court.”
He smiled. She’d known he was there. “What did you say?”
“I said I’d tell the court the insurance company didn’t pay me my money for six months now, so I didn’t have no choice but to shovel my own snow. Otherwise somebody’s goin’ to get hurt like I did and then they’ll sue me!”
“You live all alone?”
She nodded. “My husband died. My son got married and went back to Jamaica. I ast the neighbour’s boy would he shovel for me. He said he couldn’t be bothered for no five dollars. I’ll give it to you, if you want it.”
She held out a bill.
Dan shook his head. “You keep it,” he said, jabbing the shovel into a drift.
Back in his car, he yanked the film from the camera and returned to work to hand in his resignation. The baby was four months away.
A week later, another ad held out hope. If he could locate insurance scammers, Dan felt, surely he could locate other missing people. The office might be a dismal shade of grey that reflected in the faces of everyone who worked there, but it seemed a long step up from what he’d been doing. His colleagues were an interesting mix of former police officers and private investigators. What the walls lacked in colour his co-workers made up for in personality.
Somehow he talked himself into the job, beginning with a research position. Dan found he had the right stuff to find people who went missing for more compelling reasons than avoiding insurance investigators. He still suffered qualms over tracking down someone who might not want to be found, but he no longer felt he was enabling insurance companies to punish innocent people for doing what others did: living their lives as best they could.
A personal tape recorder, a high-speed camera, and a flashlight became his stock-in-trade. He wrote down all the relevant facts on a thick notepad, then memorized them and looked for ways to connect the dots. Theories without facts were useless, he soon learned, but facts that didn’t stand up to testing were a waste of time.
Somehow he made it through the first year, then a second, with most of his personal beliefs intact and Ked growing like an errant weed he’d planted on a whim and was surprised to find waiting for him each morning when he woke.
He hired a nanny and trundled off to work and back again each day, spending his evenings alone with this bundle of living, breathing flesh that seemed as much a part of him as his own arm.
At times, the boy was his only companion apart from the TV. He tried to juggle Ked on his knee and watch the jabbering shows about raising kids and having a rewarding life at the same time. The ones where privileged women argued about epidurals and hiring midwives. In truth, the task was lonely and demanding and he seldom seemed to get outside of an insular world that had shrunk to almost nothing. There were days when he still wished he had a career that was impressive-sounding, but that thought died when he celebrated his twenty-fourth birthday alone.
Six
Anger Management
The morning passed with little excitement. The bottle of Scotch did not put in an appearance. Just before one o’clock Dan went off to the coroner’s office on Grosvenor Street, but the body of the missing person fifty-five Division claimed to have a possible match for turned out to be someone else. Someone who didn’t even vaguely resemble the person in Dan’s file, apart from being human and male. There were doubts even about the latter, considering the raised mammaries that appeared to have been a botched home job injecting silicone under the skin with a hypodermic. Another victim of do-it-yourself beauty school etiquette. All went well for these home-style girly-boys until they misjudged the position of an artery and sent the polymer mainlining into their hearts and lungs. By then it was too late. Death came grisly but swift, and the rictus masks left for their discoverers weren’t too pretty either.
At
