Brazuca watches from his car as a frail effigy of Sebastian Crow drifts slowly around the park with Whisper at his heels. It’s near ten p.m. and they are the only figures in sight. Crow stops at a bench, puts a hand on the back of it for support, and coughs into the sleeve of his jacket for several long seconds. Then he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and they make their way back to the town house across the street.
Brazuca feels an inexplicable fury toward Nora for dragging him into this. Wasn’t there supposed to be a dog walker? He should have just passed the whole thing off to Warsame, who, with a remarkable sense of prescience, has once again gone off the grid on some assignment or another. It takes Crow a full minute to climb the steps to his front door. Whisper waits patiently at the bottom until he’s on the landing, then bounds up to join him.
The image of Crow, bent over a bench and in pain, lingers. Brazuca doesn’t manage to shake it until nearly an hour later, standing outside the upscale Gastown restaurant that Clementine’s dealer Priya had mentioned.
“You going in or what?” says a woman behind him. She’s dressed like a showgirl, with big curls and heels so high her feet are contorted at almost a ninety-degree angle.
Brazuca steps aside to let her pass. “Sorry.” She doesn’t look back at him, though, or even acknowledge that she’s heard.
He walks to the twenty-four-hour vegan diner across the street and sits at a window booth with a view of the front entrance and windows of the Lala Lair.
Picking slowly at something called a supergrain power salad, he keeps an eye on the window. Just past midnight, a slim East Indian man wearing tailored slacks and a mock turtleneck steps out of the Lala Lair, careful to keep out of view of the camera mounted above the front entrance, lights a cigarette, and makes a phone call. For the past two nights, Brazuca has been watching the man do this exact thing. Yesterday, however, he’d ordered a quinoa burger instead of a power salad and his stomach has yet to forgive him.
A woman in a slinky blue dress, with a glittering purse, slides into the seat across from Brazuca. “Hey,” she says, yanking up the front of her dress.
Brazuca blinks. It takes him a full second to recognize Clementine’s sister. “Grace, what are you doing here?”
“Oh, I’ve been at the Lala Lair every night this week. Such a fun name to say, don’t you think? The Lala Lair. Lalalair. Try that three times in a row. Do you like my dress?”
The dress in question is very fitted everywhere but up top and meant for someone with cleavage. “It’s nice.”
“Liar. It’s god-awful. Can’t stay up no matter what I do. It’s my sister’s,” she explains. She looks down. “This purse, too. You know, I think I’m gonna keep this one. Anyway, what was I saying? Oh yeah, my sister. Her tits were fake, so she probably didn’t have to worry about filling it out.”
“You shouldn’t be over there,” he says, nodding to the upscale lounge across the street.
“Well, I couldn’t stay away, could I? I heard you and that other slut talking by the elevators. Yes, I was listening at the door. What was I supposed to do? Not eavesdrop on her dealer? She mentioned the Lala Lair and I figured it had something to do with Cecily. Somehow. What have you found out? And why are you at this hippie diner instead of across the road?”
“A man’s gotta eat,” he says, his voice flat. She doesn’t have to know that he’s already been in there, scoped it out, and tried to glean as much information as he could without drawing unwanted attention.
They stare at each other. Under the layers of garish makeup, inexpertly applied, her expression is serious. She pulls a flash drive from her purse and passes it to him. “I have a friend in criminology at UBC who’s been looking into drug traffickers for his thesis. He gave me some material on Wild Ten.”
“Don’t call it that. You’re just romanticizing it.”
“It is the street name for it,” she insists. “He says it’s relatively new, but it’s catching on. There are these underground drug labs in China that make bootleg fentanyl. They’re also playing around with the chemical structure of the drug and creating new versions, as well. Like Wild Ten. Makes it really hard to regulate.”
He passes the drive back to her. “Grace—”
“I want to know what happened to my sister as much as you do. And not because I’m collecting a paycheck,” she says, clearly unaware that when it comes to digs like that, he’s practically Teflon. Everyone’s got to make a living. They can’t all be urban planners.
The waitress comes over with a bill and Brazuca pays in cash. When she leaves, he gives Grace a hard look. “You know what happened to your sister. She overdosed and died. End of story. You shouldn’t be here or across the street, either. Go home, Grace.”
“Don’t tell me where I should be,” she hisses.
“I’m serious. Don’t you have school or something?”
“We had sex once, you asshole. You don’t get to talk to me like that. I’m a grown woman. I can be wherever I want.” She slides off the chair clumsily, slinging the fancy purse over her shoulder, and curses as the chain strap gets caught in her hair. “Jesus,” she says, as she walks toward the ladies’ room, attempting to untangle it.
As soon as she’s out of sight, Brazuca leaves the diner and crosses the street. With the hood of his jacket up, he stumbles toward the alley, allowing his limp to throw him off balance. Bracing a hand on the brick wall in the alley behind the Lala Lair, he swears as his zipper gets caught and he struggles to get it free.
A sleek BMW pulls into the laneway, picks up a passenger who has just exited the back door to the bar, and honks at him to move. He raises an arm automatically to cover his face from the glare of the headlights and flips the driver the finger.
The passenger window rolls down and the man in the turtleneck tries to get a good look at Brazuca, who is partially shielded by his hood. “Move.”
“Yeah yeah, just a sec, dude.” Brazuca’s voice is gruff, as nondescript as he can make it. He pushes away from the wall and walks toward the street, where he immediately slips into the shadows of a doorway. When the car turns onto the road, lit from a streetlight just off the alley, the license plate is perfectly visible. He snaps a quick photo with his phone. “Gotcha,” he says quietly, though no one is there to hear him.
He makes a call to the same number he texts the photo to. The voice that answers the phone is both confused and angry. “What the fuck?” mutters Detective Christopher Lee from the Vancouver Police Department. “You know some of us have real jobs to go to in the morning.”
“Nice to hear your voice, too, sweet cheeks. Need a favor. You owe me.”
“You gave me one tip in all the time you’ve been off the force. One.”
“Sometimes one is all you need. Sent a plate number to you. Driver picked up the manager of the Lala Lair.”
There’s a brief silence as Lee turns that around in his mind. “The Lala Lair, eh? Yeah, heard some whispers back when I was in the Gang Unit.”
“Find out if there are still whispers?”
“What’s that, Your Majesty? You’re buying beer this weekend?”
“Yeah, okay,” says Brazuca, who never bothered to tell his old partner that he’s an alcoholic and, apart from a recent relapse, has been mostly sober for two years. “I’m buying beer. I’ll let you get back to your beauty sleep.”
“Damn right,” says Lee. “Just because you’ve let yourself go doesn’t mean we all have to.”
Pulling his hood closer to his face as he rounds the corner, Brazuca sees a woman in an ill-fitting dress hailing a cab. She’s not wearing a jacket, and has her arms wrapped around herself to ward off the chill in the air. Even though it’s been a mild fall, it’s not exactly weather to forget your jacket in. But it’s possible she’s not thinking clearly these days. “Gotta go,” Brazuca says to Lee.
“You could have waited till morning for this shit.”
“You were up anyway.”
There’s a click on the other end of the line as Lee hangs up. The cab zips past the woman without stopping. “Asshole!” she shouts. When she notices Brazuca walking toward her, she angles her body away.
“Hey,” he says. “Wanna make me feel like a whore?”
Grace turns back to face him, narrowing her eyes. “You know, sex work is no joke. It’s a lot of people’s livelihoods. You shouldn’t be poking fun at it.” This is said with absolutely no acknowledgment of the fact that she’d started this kind of comment, back at her sister’s fancy apartment, paid for by the man Clementine was sleeping with.
“Who’s laughing?”
She shrugs. “As long as we’re on the same page.” Then she slips her small hand into his, he suspects more for balance than anything else, as they make their way to his car parked in the lot down the block. She directs him to the English Bay condo. On the elevator ride up, she opens his jacket and steps into his arms. He can see right down the front of her dress, which is probably her intention.
He could get used to women using him for sex, he realizes. And at least she’s honest about it. But still, he can’t quite figure her out. She seems like too sensible a woman to let grief overtake her like this. Seems people have become more complicated or he has become simpler. But he doesn’t understand how either could have happened without some kind of advance warning.