The Homeless Millionaire

I woke up the next day feeling way below average, yet again. I had spent the whole previous afternoon and evening celebrating being the avenging angel. Being the avenging angel was strong stuff and it went right to my head, helped along by Captain Morgan. He really had a good party up there, and he'd behaved the way drunk pirates do. It hurt the next day.

By the time I'd finished my third coffee and sixth shortbread, it finally got through to me that the cops would be looking for me anyway. Even after they'd confirmed 100% that Peter Schmidt had been the highway rapist/killer, they'd still want me. Given Schmidt's record, they'd believe it was done in self-defense. But they'd still want to rap my knuckles with a suspended sentence, or something like that.

I was pretty sure I'd end up having a criminal record. I had a million-dollar stolen painting in my bag. Getting a criminal record for killing Schmidt was a surefire way to attract extra attention from the cops. And once they started digging and poking around, they might discover the avenging angel was also a thief wanted for the biggest art heist in Canadian history. I would do well to keep my head down for a while. I'd been so lucky to meet Harry! His house on Anvil Island was the ideal hiding place.

It was then that I remembered that whole 4-3-1 business that had started off in what seemed like another era: when I was working with Roch on the house his aunt had lived in. I had weak mental defenses because of my hangover, and as a result I spent most of the day totally freaked out by this numbers shit.

It was pitiful. I walked from the kitchen into the room and back again smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and munching on that f.u.c.k.i.n.g shortbread until my eyes were close to popping out. Around two in the afternoon I finally broke down and had a Kokanee True Ale. It tasted terrible but it calmed me down, so I had another.

Halfway through the third one, I began feeling almost normal. I reminded myself I was likely running into the 4-3-1 combination simply because I was on the lookout for that combination. I reminded myself that no one except Harry knew where I was, and that Harry didn't know about my criminal career. My paranoid partner sneered at that. He reminded me that everything and everyone got found out, sooner or later.

I had to shut him up. I had another Kokanee True Ale and discovered, to my horror, that I was beginning to get used to the taste. So I went to the kitchen and made myself a big breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon. That knocked out both me and my paranoid pal.

Me and my paranoid pal had a couple of after-meal cigarettes and spent an hour napping on the sofa. Then we had a couple of coffees and smoked several more cigarettes and watched the weather change from rain to sunny inside twenty minutes.

My partner tried a different tack: I was a real bastard for walking out on everyone like that. My poor parents! They'd put in so much work to make me a civilized human being. You hate babies, don't you, my paranoid pal said to me. They scream and cry and shit themselves. Imagine taking care of something like that for a couple of years. No wonder parents got snappy as time went by.

I was spiraling into a major guilt trip so I forced myself to have a cold shower. It was so f.u.c.k.i.n.g awful that it instantly made me feel better. My paranoid pal had run off to hide, clutching his balls. His teeth were chattering too hard for him to speak.

I smoked a cigarette by the window watching the sunlight play outside. It inspired me to put on my jacket and step out of the house. It was a bad move.

It was cold in spite of the sun, there was a breeze that seemed to pierce right through everything I was wearing. And there was a boat passing Harry's pier, not more than a hundred yards away.

It was a small sailboat. Its hull was dark blue; the guy who sat in the back holding the tiller had the good taste to paint it that. He was wearing a color-matched dark blue windbreaker and one of those stupid little fishing hats with a soft brim. He was looking at me when I emerged out of the house, and kept looking at me for a while. The natural thing to do would be to give him a wave, but I remembered Harry had cautioned me about that.

So I busied myself in lighting another cigarette with my brand new Zippo lighter and to my amazement its flame didn't go out in spite of the breeze, just as advertised. I did get a taste of lighter fuel with the first couple of hits, though.

I threw what I hoped appeared to be a casual glance in the boat's direction as I put the lighter back in my pocket. That f.u.c.k.i.n.g guy was still watching me, worse, the moment I looked his way he quickly turned his head away. He was pretending that he wasn't watching me! This was seriously worrying.

Fortunately, the wind gusted right then and forced that asshole into hurried action with the sail rope and the rudder. I took this opportunity to step back inside the house and close the door. I exchanged a few jabs with my partner, who was eager to exploit the potential offered by the guy in the sailboat.

I told him he was full of shit, that I was likely the first person the guy in the boat had seen in several hours, and so it was natural for him to stare at me a little. And that he could stare at me all day if he wanted to, without any harm being done. No one knew what the museum thieves looked like. No one knew what Peter Schmidt's killer looked like.

Ah, but we don't really know about the museum thing, said my paranoid pal. It's been a while, and who knows what had happened in the meantime. Roch could be getting a truncheon shoved up his a.s.s at a police station.

He had a point there. I walked around the room, smoking and thinking about Roch. Would he give me away if they promised they'd cut his own sentence in half, say five years instead of ten? I thought that he wouldn't, but I wasn't so sure about Michel.

I decided that I would have to visit Lion's Bay and call Roch from the post office. We'd been friends long enough to have developed our own private code. If I somehow worked the phrase 'can't say much' into my opening line, he'd know not to ask any questions. And he would give me the gist of what was going on at his end with a couple of perfectly innocuous remarks about the weather, what he'd had for breakfast, and the progress he'd made renovating his aunt's former home.

There was no way I'd be making the trip that day, though. The weather was tricky and it was already quite late, just past two in the afternoon. There was a three-hour difference between Vancouver and Montreal. By the time I got to the phone, it would be past six over there and getting dark and I didn't think Roch would be working this late.

While I was thinking about all that I got my wallet out and counted my money. I had just over ninety dollars left, and that was counting the forty Harry had given me. It wasn't much to go on for the next six weeks, I would spend a third of that on cigarettes alone.

It was time for a serious review of my financial situation. My paranoid pal was in great anticipation, rubbing his hands and grinning.

I would probably have no money left by the time Harry paid me out the five hundred he'd promised. That would be in the second half of November. And then I'd have to rent a place; a decent room or a bas.e.m.e.nt studio would cost fifty a week, easily. There would be a deposit to pay, too. All in all, I had at most six weeks to find myself a job that paid well enough to cover my rent and living expenses.

I had the feeling that Harry could be helpful with finding a job. I also had a couple of day-old newspapers with classified ads.

So I sat myself down on the sofa and began looking through the Help Wanted ads. There was the usual smattering of part-time bar and restaurant help jobs. I could also begin a promising career in sales of all sorts: life insurance, real estate, vacuum cleaners, electric appliances, book club membersh.i.p.s, and so on. And then:

Night-time receptionist/watchman at BELLA NOTTE bed&breakfast, Burnaby Heights, next to Montrose Park. Shifts 8 pm - 8 am, six nights a week. Some light housekeeping duties. Call 604 448 431 for an appointment.

Montrose Park. The phone number ending in 431. And a job that sounded pretty much like the one I had at the Montrose Hotel back in Montreal.

I had an instant strong urge to find out more about that job. I couldn't take it, I was beholden to Harry for the next six weeks. But I had to know more. I would have to visit that place once I was in Vancouver, just to see what it was like.

I spent a long time staring at the wall across the room, imagining what went on in the Bella Notte bed & breakfast. I even had the crazy idea to go and stay there a couple of nights once my island job was over.

Soon enough it was dark and I had to light the lamp to keep on reading the papers. There were multiple articles about Peter Schmidt, most of them with a photograph of his fat mug. He was smiling in all of them: the friendly fatso from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. The cops had definitely connected him to two murders, which left another six or seven waiting for a credit. It was likely that they were all his doing. But also, it could be that there was a second psycho on the loose. There was no shortage of freaks, these days.

I made myself dinner and then had a go at the periodicals and it was freak city: all about people lying and stealing and killing each other. So I put the magazines away and had another go at the bookshelf. I selected a big fat book about the Battle of Jutland, partly because it had lots of photographs.

The Battle of Jutland was a sea battle fought in 1916 between the main battle fleets of two empires: Britain and Germany. It was immense, with dozens of heavily armored sh.i.p.s shelling the shit out of each other. The twentieth century had only just begun, and the tactics used were very nineteenth century: lines of sh.i.p.s engaged in a complicated dance around each other. Each side wanted to bring as many guns to bear on the enemy as they only could, while minimizing the number of guns the enemy could use on them.

They kept at it for two days, May 31st and June 1st, with a whole series of individual battles fought between different battle groups, over an area as big as Belgium. The Germans got a much better sh.i.p.s sunk/sh.i.p.s lost ratio, but both sides claimed victory. The battle changed nothing in terms of war progress for either side: it was just another sacrifice on the altar of the God of War.

Nearly ten thousand sailors died on both sides. But that was in an age when losing ten, twenty, thirty thousand soldiers in a single day of battle was perfectly acceptable. After all, they all got into Heaven by virtue of sacrificing their lives for their countries. And once in heaven, they led an endless afterlife of bliss. Some of the more famous dead got streets and other places named after them. Hopefully they could read the street nameplates from up there.

And the Americans were kvetching about losing a couple of dozen guys in Vietnam! They were transporting wounded guys to hospital by helicopter, spending tons of money to save a single life! It was almost as if they didn't believe there was all this bliss waiting up above. It was almost as if they'd stopped believing in God. Religion was just a ritual calculated to make the faithful feel better about life generally, and their own coming death specifically.

That book about the Battle of Jutland really improved my mood. Books about people killing each other always did that. That's why they were so popular. Movies with lots of corpses did very well, too.

But I was especially affected because it made killing Peter Schmidt about as significant as killing a bloodthirsty mosquito.

My paranoid partner had a go at me right before I went to sleep, but was forced to retreat empty-handed.

I went to sleep feeling happy and lucky to be alive.