Essex continued her weekly calls like clockwork. Her tone became more exultant. She explained how Tabitha’s death was merely a settling of accounts, “the delayed yet inevitable response to her betrayal.” Our conversations ended with her saying I’d never hear from her again, that this was it. Yet her tone would soften and she’d linger over the parting.
In the meantime I sanded and painted the walls and did a satisfactory job on the rest, so that the superintendent, a Lebanese man named Amir, said I could pass on fixing the woodwork.
“Is all be gone soon anyway,” he said one afternoon when he came by to collect the rent. We stood out in front of the building, watching the cage of scaffolding go up on a property across the street.
“Condos, too?” I asked him.
“Rentals. Three fifty square foot.”
“Good size. Who doesn’t like to take a piss and cook eggs without leaving your bed?”
He laughed and asked if I wanted to join him in his office for a drink. We sat in his first-floor box with its odd domestic carpeting and hodgepodge of furniture. A desk and file cabinet, sofa. I’d been transacting business with Amir for six years, off and on, and I’d never been inside.
Amir had quite the collection of single malts. “My brother, he works for the Liquor Control,” he explained. He poured us each a dram of Arran Twelve into a paper cone.
The company he worked for had buildings up and down Vancouver Island. He’d be taking over the business there, moving his family.
“Think you’ll miss the city?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said. “My kids’ll change schools. They lose their friends, it will be hard. But I miss change. I move a lot before I come here. When I meet my wife, we find a house and we stay. Thirteen years,” he said sadly.
“The tower they’re replacing us with,” I said. “Any word on the low-income housing?”
“Thirteen units.”
I scowled. “Not even ten percent.” Meanwhile the rents of the surrounding buildings would skyrocket, pushing out however many hundreds of people.
“Is their building,” Amir said.
“Is my neighborhood.”
“You’ll go back up the street?” he asked.
I held out my free hand, who’s to say, and sipped scotch with the other. “I’m not sure Jeff wants me back. I wouldn’t, I was him. My side of the business tends to operate at a loss.”
“Is like a marriage, uh?”
“With worse arguments,” I said. “And better sex.”
As we were talking someone rapped on the office door. Through the slats of the blinds I saw a short and malformed silhouette. Amir opened the door to reveal a man in a dirty cream-colored dress shirt and slacks. He had an eyepatch, a cane, and sundry bruises decorating the exposed flesh of his arms, face, and throat. I recognized him as Miles, the man Chris Chambers had assaulted out back of the Crossroads Inn.
“I’m looking for David Wake-something,” Miles said.