“Sheesh, you coulda called him,” Murch muttered, gesturing to the couches.
“It’s fine,” Harris said, sitting. “It really is.”
So they turned to the envelope, Purma extracting a single sheet of paper and cutting right to it: there was no money, no bank accounts. Roen was on welfare by the end.
“You saying he didn’t own that place on the island?” Murch with this hands spread.
Purma read on. The contents of his apartment were what remained. And Roen had left instructions for the dispersal of these: Let any friend of mine take one thing, if any useful thing might be found.
Poetic, Harris thought. And emotion surged, affection and regret.
“I already took a guitar with no strings,” Purma said. “His other so-called friends don’t deserve shit. But you two have a look.”
An awkward silence fell, but there was no refusing. So Harris took the key from Purma and she stood to leave. Almost, but not quite.
“Harris,” she said, “you saw him near the end.”
Yeah, he’d told Murch already. “A couple months back.”
“Any chance it was three weeks?”
Harris squinted. “Don’t remember. It was a random thing.”
In Chinatown. Lunch with a friend. Harris turned a corner and there he was. Skinny as hell. Harris didn’t recognize him at first, not until he swept the hair out of his eyes and held up a hand in greeting. The wheelchair was for his ankle, Roen explained. Twisted it falling out of a friend’s truck.
“All right,” Purma said, shouldering her bag, turning toward the door. But then not leaving. Harris waited, dread mounting.
“Either of you remember a guy named Jimmy?” she asked.
Not this, Harris thought, wondering how far Roen had spread his secret story. But he only shook his head and squinted again. Murch had stopped texting and was listening too.
“Guy who owned the B&B,” Purma said. “Well, he’s dead too. It was in the news.”
“Missed that,” Harris said. “What’d he die of?”
Of being burned alive in his Dodge Viper parked out behind the old grain terminal, Purma said. Hands tied to the wheel so cops weren’t thinking fuel leak. “That was a month ago,” she explained. “A couple weeks later, Roen. Is that weird?”
Murch picked up his phone again. Harris shrugged, made a face like, Who knows?
Purma with her hand on the door handle. But with one more thing to say, Harris sensed. Purma and her dramatic last words. She turned to face him again.
“You didn’t go drinking with him, did you, Harris? You couldn’t have known. But he was six weeks clean. And best I can figure, he picks up a beer at the Union Tavern and a week later he’s dead.”
Harris frozen, hands spread. No, no. He never did. And with that Purma was out the door. Gone.
4
Murch had work still to do, so they made plans to meet at Roen’s place. Harris walked down Hastings Street into the Downtown Eastside, buoyed in mood by the dereliction still to be found there. Spiffy restaurants on the 100 block, sure. CrossFit gyms and beardos with purse dogs. But east of that, it all skidded back to the gritty norm. Boarded-up buildings. Parks full of drifting figures in hoodies with gym bags full of whatever had been most recently stolen. Bad dental situations. Scabby arms. Harris couldn’t deny the faint encouragement — now under the milky gaze of a hooker on Carroll Street — of realizing his own problems might be smaller.
Murch was late. Forty minutes. The light was failing and the air was cool. Harris hadn’t dressed for standing around the Downtown Eastside. He was shivering and ill-tempered by the time he saw Murch clicking up the sidewalk on leather heels, communicating with hunched shoulders and a grunted first greeting that his own life had by far the greater concerns. Files. Clients. Kid dramas. A hot dinner waiting at home served up by a nanny from Manila.
“You could have started,” Murch said. “Like I’m dying to get my hands on Roen’s shit.”
Six floors up, no working elevator. The woodwork squealing underfoot, every door leaking garbled voices, moaning, arguments. At Roen’s apartment Harris fumbled the key into the lock, then pushed the door inward so they could process the two hundred square feet of squalor that had been Roen’s final plot. Broken toilet, dangling sink, peeling walls. Clothes spilled out of garbage bags. Food wrappers covered the fraying carpet. There was a metal counter down one wall strewn with evidence of complex cookery: burnt spoons, a one-ring burner, dirty glassware. There was the sagging bed frame where Purma said the body had been found. No mattress. But a striped blanket with tattered edges, blackened blood spatters across the headboard and the wall.
Murch, surprisingly, did not recoil. He stepped past Harris, navigating through the garbage and crusty clothes to the center of the room where he stood still, taking it in. He seemed oddly at ease in the midst of the carnage, the evidence of crushing poverty and dire disease.
“He was good-looking, remember, me droogs?”
“Yeah,” Harris said. “I do remember.”
“Got to fuck whoever he wanted,” Murch said, with no evident malice. Another pause, then an impatient gesture. “So we doing this or what?”
Finding a useful thing did not seem likely. But Murch started looking down that side counter, opening drawers. And Harris, feeling lost, moved across the room to the window, where he looked down onto West Cordova, to the ebb and flow of people there, shrunken shapes in the lengthening shadows. There was a plastic bag looped over the inside handle and left to dangle outside. DIY refrigeration. Harris cracked the window and pulled it in: moldy cheese, two black bananas, a pint of milk gone yellow and pungent. He found himself drifting, Roen’s last groceries in his hand, thinking of his own place in Kits, the creaking couch, the beer and French Rabbit in the fridge, the bloody bandages in the garbage under the sink. How distant was he from the situation here? How many pints of sour milk away?
A car horn on the street below brought Harris back to the moment. He registered silence in the room. Murch had been behind him, working his way down the strewn counter, clattering and talking. Now nothing. A stillness, the air suspended.
Harris turned slowly, just until he picked up Murch in his peripheral vision. Back corner of the room. Murch with a ratty gym bag, groping inside. The sound of a zipper. Then this: the muted jangle of keys. And Harris could see them now too. In the very corner of his eye, a guitar-shaped fob. All access, motherfuckers.
A faint smile creeping across Murch’s features, one of remembrance and calculation, as those keys slid into his jacket pocket without a word.
5
Maybe the keys were a memento. Maybe Murch was going to hang them from the rearview mirror of his black Mercedes parked opposite his firm’s office in a reserved street spot that must have cost him ten grand a month. Maybe. But after four days staking out the car in question, Harris knew Murch had other ideas.
Harris in his Car2go. He watched Murch saunter out of his office at 5:30 p.m. sharp three days running and drive home to Point Grey. Day four, Friday, here came Murch two hours early in jeans and one of those oilskin hunting jackets, carrying an overnight bag and looking pressed for time.
Rushing to catch a ferry, Harris thought, sliding lower in his seat. There would be a flashlight in that overnight, a sweater, extra socks. A ring of keys. You thieving bastard.
Harris’s gamble was the cost of a one-way chartered float plane that would get him onto Saturna ninety minutes ahead of the ferry. And once Murch had pulled out and headed southbound against his normal patterns, Harris wheeled his car around and sped to the seaplane terminal in the inner harbor.