Seaweed Under Water by Stanley Evans Read Free Book Online Page B

adjusted his crotch. Fortunately for Denise, the two fuckups who had offered her a drink previously got up and told the kid to beat it. It was a good thing that, though their brains were dead, their chivalry was not.

CHAPTER SIX
    The Matbro Building on Fort Street was another heritage-brick holdover from Victoria’s Gold Rush era. I entered it through a door located between a one-chair barber’s shop and a bookstore. A wall directory in the Matbro’s lobby listed astrologers, telemarketers, a hypnotherapist and a person who sucks wax from your ears using hollow candles. The building’s ancient elevator was out of order, so I hiked up to the second floor. The office that I wanted was behind a pebbled-glass door marked HENRY FERMAN INVESTIGATIONS.
    In l974, Henry had been in Canada’s far north, checking trap-lines, when he and his dog team went through the ice of a frozen lake. Henry lost his outfit but crawled ashore and got back to camp with nothing worse than frozen ears and feet. Nowadays, he hid what was left of his ears beneath a toupée. Indoors, and sometimes outdoors, he wore padded carpet slippers. His top speed wouldn’t challenge a tortoise. What Henry lacked in speed, he made up in smarts.
    His waiting room was larger than a domestic refrigerator but smaller than the back of a pickup truck. There was nothing inside it worth stealing, unless you count two rickety folding chairs and an Arborite coffee table with cigarette burns. Two long fluor-escent tubes buzzed up on the ceiling. I was scanning the place for bugs when a chair scraped across the floor of an inner room. The inner door swung open. Henry Ferman grinned out at me and said, “I’ll be blowed; it’s the old dog catcher.”
    I asked, “All right, where is it?”
    Henry pointed with one of his walking sticks.
    After a long close look, I located a video camera’s dark lens, about the size of a match head, buried in the scrolls of a cornice moulding. “Congratulations,” I said. “You had me fooled.”
    â€œThat’s a nice little camera, made in Hong Kong. The whole unit is about the size of a thimble. I’ve been using a lot of them lately. Setting them up in convenience stores, gas stations.”
    â€œHow about the Rainbow Motel? You got video cameras set up over there?”
    Instead of replying, Henry hobbled back to his desk, propped his walking sticks against a wall and sat down.
    Henry’s place of business looked more like an electronics repair shop than a PI’s office. There were a couple of filing cabinets, a Mac computer and a fax machine, although most of Henry’s rented space was occupied by floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with microphones, cameras, video monitors, long-
distance listening devices and boxes of spare parts. A six-inch TV monitor, mounted on Henry’s desktop, displayed a grainy image of his waiting room. Henry saw me looking at it and said, “The picture quality on those miniature cameras isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough for most purposes.”
    I sat down, crossed my legs because there wasn’t enough space to stretch them out and said, “I saw you come out of the Rainbow Motel, Henry. This could be important so level with me. Were you installing cameras?”
    Henry took his toupée off. Without it, he was as hairy as an apple. He scratched his scalp and said, “This damn rug. It itches like crazy.”
    â€œI guess it does,” I said, not unkindly. “What’s it made of, re-cycled scouring pads?”
    Henry reached below his desk and produced a moulded-Styrofoam head with a happy face drawn on it with black felt marker. Henry placed the toupee on the foam head and said, “This is Mr. O’Haira.”
    â€œHello, Mr. O’Haira.”
    â€œThe first rug I bought was made of real hair. I asked the guy who sold it to me where the hair comes from. It seems there’s an industry