Irritation to anger, to disappointment, to worry, falling finally into fear.
Tim Blatchford kept to his own unfathomable time code, which didn’t accommodate my need for regular reports. He was also more than capable of defending himself. I kept both facts in mind over the course of the next day, resisting the urge to bombard him with texts, limiting my calls to once on the hour.
But by nightfall he still hadn’t called, and it was clear something had happened.
Kay hadn’t heard from him, either. “You’re worried?” she asked when I phoned her.
“Getting there.”
“How well exactly do you know him?”
“Why?”
“No reason, I guess.” She hesitated before saying, “We don’t really know what he’s been up to. I mean, maybe he’s—I dunno.”
“Go ahead,” I said.
“Okay. Back in Hamilton, at the church, when he refused to go inside. Remember?”
“He was fucking with me,” I said. “It’s what he does.”
“Sure. But maybe he didn’t want to be seen by the father, y’know? Maybe they’d seen each other before.” She forced herself to proceed. “Maybe he’s the person we’re looking for.”
I was ready to scoff but I waited, let the idea play out. It was hard to stomach—the thought that I’d unknowingly hired the man I was trying to find. I could be stupid, but hopefully not that stupid.
“It doesn’t work,” I said to Kay. “Tim’s not whoever Dana Essex met at Milton.”
“But he might know that person, or know Essex some other way. I’m just saying, he was at the office right before the murder.”
“Looking for work.”
“Maybe,” Kay said. “Anyway, I hope you find him.”
I called the wrestling promotion he worked for but the promotor said he’d no-showed. The promotor added, if I saw Blatchford, tell him there’d better be a good fucking excuse for blowing off his cage match with El Phantasmo.
I drove to Blatchford’s address, a carved-up house off Renfrew. The house was squat but still taller than its neighbors, with a mansard roof that gave it the look of a beige-painted barn. Twenty years ago it might’ve been owned by a single family, who might’ve maintained it with something like love. No more of that in this neighborhood. Parked cars jammed the narrow street, but I was the only person visible. Together/apart, as only Vancouver could do.
There was no outside staircase leading to Blatchford’s flat. I knocked at the door of the downstairs resident. I heard movement inside, and waited on the weatherbeaten patio, staring at the dead plants that hung from the chained box planters above the railing.
The door opened. A barefoot man in sweats and an unbuttoned dress shirt stepped out, nodded, and lit a cigarette. I told him I was looking for Tim.
“His place is upstairs but he’s not here.”
“He got in late yesterday. He must’ve left early this morning. But that’s normal for Tim.”
He was smoking Belmonts and offered me the pack. I managed to decline. “You know him pretty well?”
“Sure.” Letting me infer from that what I wanted.
“I’m a friend of his,” I said, “and his employer.”
“Two things that don’t usually go together.”
“I think he’s in trouble. I’d like to take a look at his place.”
“Trouble.” The man smoked and considered the term. “What’s he done and who’d he do it to?”
“He hasn’t been in touch and he was supposed to be. And yes I know he’s unreliable, but this is beyond that. I’m thinking he’s hurt.”
He took a last long drag on his cigarette. “I got his spare set around somewhere. Let’s take a look.”
Inside, up the stairs, a fumbling of keys. “Your name’s Wakeland, right?” He examined the key ring. “Think he’s mentioned you.”
“All praise, I’m sure.”
“I wouldn’t call it praise, exactly.” He forced the door inward to line up so the lock would turn. “Tim seemed happy to be working with you. Didn’t tell me what he was doing, but sounded serious about it. Tim needs that—without a goal he just flails about.”
“I know the feeling,” I said.
“He said you had that in common.” He got the door open, sighed in recognition of the effort. “Stuart Royce, by the way. Tim’s on-again, off-again, guess you could say.”
Blatchford’s apartment shocked me in that it wasn’t a shithole. The long narrow room terminated in a shower closet, and had a cramped, lived-in feel. Hot plate and fold-down bed. Clothes on the floor, neither folded nor strewn. A stool next to the washstand served as a catchall for papers, flyers, chopsticks, and bills.
Nothing on the walls save for a signed poster of Roddy Piper, sunglasses on, ready to kick ass and chew bubblegum.
“It’s as he left it,” Royce said.
“He didn’t say anything to you, where he was going?”
“Let me think.” He stooped to tuck a tendril of bedsheet back onto the mattress. “Something about the Island.”
“When was this?”
“Yesterday night, after he got back from Creston. He phoned that guy and got into it with him, and then—”
“What guy? You’re talking about Dale Petrie?”
“That sounds right.” Royce’s laconic indifference let up enough for a note of irritation to creep into his voice. “He told Tim to fuck off, and you know Tim. And when Tim called again, he said he didn’t know where Tim was from, but where he was from, fuck off meant fuck off.”
Before Blatchford had even made the trip to the Island, he’d tipped off Petrie. “Why would he phone?” I asked.
“If I had an answer for half the things Tim does.” Royce didn’t finish the sentence. I pictured Blatchford phoning while drunk, exhausted from the drive, thinking a quick wrong-number call would confirm that Petrie was the one.
I thanked Royce and walked home. Inside my apartment the lights were on, the stereo spinning a Joni Mitchell album. The bathroom door opened and Sonia came out, pulling back her hair and threading it through an elastic.
“Food’s on its way,” she said. “General Tso’s and some of those green beans you like.”
For a moment it all seemed wrong, a cruel joke. This wasn’t what I came home to. It was what I wished to come home to. I allowed myself to be enfolded into the domestic fantasy, kissing her, feeling the heat from the shower roll over us as we stood in the hall.
I explained to her what I thought had happened to Blatchford.
“We could phone the Mountie detachment in Ladysmith,” she said. “Then head over tomorrow morning.”
Again, that hesitation. It felt odd relying on anyone, let alone her. Now firmly entrenched in this fantasy, I didn’t want to lose my hold on Tuesday night Chinese, on curling up on the couch. But the truth wasn’t a choice between those two worlds. It was accepting they could co-exist.
“We can eat in the car on our way,” I said.