Read Death On a No 8 Hook (A Willows and Parker Mystery) Online
Authors: Laurence Gough
Junior wandered aimlessly through the big house, his hands in his pockets and his mind a blank. He hit a cross-current and realized he was hungry, followed his nose into the kitchen. A skinny kid in a Kung-Fu outfit was hunched over the stove. One of Misha’s relatives. Impossible to say how old he was — not that it mattered. He was using a big wooden spoon to push a colourless mix of noodles and small bits of stringy meat around a stainless steel wok. Junior, peering over the kid’s shoulder, decided the food smelled a whole lot better than it looked.
Turning away from the stove, Junior yanked open the refrigerator door. He was in luck. There was a big plate of crab sandwiches left over from lunch, and an open bottle of Robert Mondavi Fumé Blanc. Junior pulled the cork with his teeth. The sandwiches were tiny, without crusts, and had been cut in weird shapes. He ate six of them, washing each one down with a good healthy slug of wine.
There was nobody in the oak-panelled den or in the living or dining-rooms. Nobody in the can. Nobody out by the tennis court or sixty-foot pool. Junior made his way back through the house to the front porch. He scratched his sunburned nose and peered out at the ocean. After a while he went upstairs, to the top floor of the house. He was wearing a pair of white leather Hi-Toppers, baggy white shorts and a surfer shirt covered with palm trees and hand grenades that at first glance looked like pineapples. The Hi-Toppers made no sound on the thick wall-to-wall, but Felix was alerted by the click of the latch and his rheumy grey eyes were focusing on the door as Junior opened it.
Junior grinned. “Hey there, Felix. Hope I didn’t wake anybody up.”
Felix wiped a smear of saliva from his chin. He yawned and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. Junior watched him struggle to sit up, made no attempt to help as Felix’s bony arms and sagging flesh sank into the downy berm of the pillows. Felix’s dentures were in a Duralex glass on the night-table beside the bed. He spilled a little water getting them out of the glass and into his mouth. When his teeth were firmly in place he gave Junior a big, dripping smile.
“Nice to see you, big fella!”
“I don’t think I much care for that thirty-weight tone of voice of yours,” said Junior. But he stepped inside the room and shut the door.
“Quiet!” hissed Misha.
Junior gave her a look like she was something he’d found wedged between his two front teeth. She was lying on the far side of Felix’s monstro canopied four-poster, watching a Japanese movie on a big screen suspended from the ceiling at the other end of the room. She had a bulky pair of Sony headphones clamped on her head and there was a young girl sleeping in the crook of her arm. The girl was lying on her side and from where Junior was standing he couldn’t see her face. He wondered if he knew her. The way Felix and Misha ran through them, it was pretty unlikely.
“Live from Osaka,” said Felix, waving a mottled hand at the screen. “Up on the roof I got one of those big white fibreglass things with a wire sticking out of the middle.” He paused for a minute, thinking hard, and then pounded a pillow in apparent frustration. “There’s a name for the fuckin’ thing, but I can’t remember what it is.”
“A fuckin’ dish,” said Junior.
“I got stuff coming in from all over the globe, they bounce it down at me from satellites. American ones, French and Russian and German. Even the Italians got one up there.” He chuckled. “I can watch Clint Eastwood westerns all day long if I feel like it.”
“Terrific.”
“And all the sports you can imagine. Not just baseball and football and hockey and shit like that. You ever heard of jai alai?”
“You forgot to mention lawn bowling,” said Junior. He drank some Robert Mondavi and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Who’s the girl?”
Felix shrugged. The tangled sheets were down around the girl’s waist, bunched at the curving swell of her hips. Her skin was very dark, and Junior had assumed she was yet another of Misha’s numerous relatives, or maybe the friend of a friend. But now Felix gave the sheet a yank, pulling it down to her knees, and Junior found himself staring at a tiny white triangle of untanned flesh. He wondered what beach the girl hung out at, where it was in California you could get away with wearing a bikini that small. He swallowed.
“You like?” said Felix. He tugged at the girl’s smooth brown shoulder, rolling her over on her back. She had small breasts, large nipples. Her eyes were closed and her lips were slightly parted. Junior could just make out the tip of her tongue, pink and wet. He watched Felix slide his old man’s hand down and across her smooth flat stomach, explore her belly button with the tip of his little finger.
Push hard.
The girl’s eyelashes fluttered. She muttered something thick and incomprehensible, and tried to roll back over on her side.
“She thinks you’re real cute,” Felix translated. “In fact, she can hardly keep her eyes off you.”
The girl started snoring. Felix pinched her nostrils shut. Without waking, she slapped weakly at his hand. Junior watched her breasts jiggle.
“You know what happened this afternoon?” said Felix. “I tuned my satellite dish in on the fair city of Vancouver, Canada. And you know what? It seems a girl called Naomi Lister drowned herself to death in some creek about sixty miles out of the city.”
“No shit,” said Junior, sounding bored.
“So now what’s your opinion of Mannie Katz, huh?”
“My opinion is I got a whole box of wadcutters with his name on ’em. Big soft-nosed bullets that mushroom on impact, knock chunks off him big enough for hamburger patties.”
Felix grinned. “What a thing to say!”
“I’d like to stick my Colt in his eye and pull the trigger.”
“You’re a tough cookie, Junior. I’ll say that much for you.”
“Blow his fucking head right off.”
Felix patted the bed. “You need an outlet for all that repressed anger,” he said. “Why don’t you come on over and join us?”
Junior finished the last of the wine. It tasted warm and fruity. “How old is she?”
“Sweet sixteen.”
“Bullshit.”
“No, really. She showed Misha her driver’s licence. She’s from Ignacio.”
“What, the Air Force base?”
“Her daddy’s in Germany. He’s a button pusher. Got himself one of those big Pershing missiles.”
“Let’s hope he doesn’t get mad and point the fucking thing at us.”
Felix smiled condescendingly. The only time Junior made jokes was when he was nervous, and they both knew it. He patted the bed again. “Why don’t you get naked and shake hands with our new friend.” He smiled. “I think you’ll find she’s got a very good grip.”
“When she’s conscious, anyway.”
“Hey, why be so picky?”
“I’m in a picky mood.”
“Pick on me,” said Misha.
Junior realized that the movie had ended and that another one was about to begin. He looked at Felix. Felix stared unblinkingly at him, his dark and glittery lizard’s eyes giving away nothing. Junior let the empty wine bottle drop to the rug. He unbuttoned his shirt and took it off, tugged at his belt, unzipped his fly. The moppet from Ignacio was awake and all three of them were watching him, now. He kicked out of his Hi-Toppers. There was a network of blue veins in Felix’s drooping eyelids. Junior paused.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Felix. “All I’m gonna do is watch.”
“Where have I heard that before?”
Felix rolled his eyes.
Junior let the shorts drop. His penis was limp and accordioned, his testicles drawn up snug. He moved towards the bed, threw himself full length on the girl from Ignacio, kissed her mouth.
Misha’s tongue fluttered in his ear. She whispered something to him in Japanese.
“Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” Junior said to the girl.
Misha giggled, hiding her mouth behind her hands.
“We found her in L.A.,” said Felix. “Slinging quiche in one of those tacky vegetarian joints over on La Cienga.”
“No shit,” said Junior. “That’s just amazing.” He kissed the girl again, bit gently on her lower lip. She moaned softly, but he couldn’t have said why.
The metallic cricket sound of a power winder intruded. Junior glanced up to find Felix peering at him through a stubby 28mm wide-angle lens. He remembered his anger the first time this had happened, and Felix’s solemn advice: If you wanna look good in the sack, kiddo, never stop smiling.
Inspector Bradley’s office was on the third floor of police headquarters at 312 Main. The room was not large and it contained too much furniture. There was a battered cherry-wood desk, a black leather recliner chair, three varnished wooden chairs, and several gunmetal grey filing cabinets. The desk and leather chair were Bradley’s personal possessions; signs of his seniority and rank.
There was only one window in the room. It was a small window and it had been painted shut, but it faced north, towards the inner harbour and bluish bulk of the mountains. Reluctantly, Bradley turned away from the picture postcard view. Lowering himself gently into his leather chair, he leaned back and rested his clasped hands on his slightly protruding stomach.
Above him hung a quartet of bare neon tubes suspended from the ceiling by thin chains. There was something wrong with the circuitry, a bad connection somewhere. The lights made a constant buzzing noise that Bradley found impossible to block out when he was feeling overworked, tired. The noise was bothering him now, had been pressing in on his nerves all day long. He flipped up the lid of an ornately-carved cedar humidor and selected a cigar. Parker and Willows were sitting in front of him, perched on two of the varnished chairs. He pointed the cigar at Willows and said, “You read the coroner’s report, Jack?”
“Yeah, I read it.”
“Then I don’t have to explain why I look so unhappy, do I?”
Willows didn’t bother to answer. Although Bradley looked exactly as glum as always, neither more nor less, Willows wasn’t about to say so.
Bradley fished a big wooden kitchen match out of his jacket pocket. He flicked at it with his thumbnail. “Look what we’ve got,” he said. “A whorehouse on wheels, hot-wired with prefabricated alligator clips. Strapped to the steering-wheel, a Timex watch with the crystal smashed and the hands stopped at the probable time of the murder. In the back seat we have a bed and on top of the bed a much-punctured juvenile dressed like a hooker, no I.D.”
Bradley chewed on his cigar. “Under the corpse, we find some skin mags and a cash register receipt. And except for the knife sticking out of the victim, that’s it. No other physical evidence whatsoever.”
He pointed his cigar at Parker. “Claire and Farley Spears were trying to find out where the dirty magazines had come from when Spears came down with the mumps, or whatever the hell it is he’s got.”
“Chickenpox,” said Parker.
Bradley ignored her. He flashed a dazzling smile at Willows. “How was the vacation?”
“Great,” said Willows without enthusiasm.
“Well, it’s over now, Jack. So let’s get out on the street and hit that grindstone, okay?”
When Parker and Willows had gone and his office door had swung shut behind them, Bradley struck at the match again, and this time it flared into life. He touched the outer edge of the flame to his cigar, concentrating hard. When he had the cigar burning evenly, he blew out the match and tossed it into the metal wastebasket beside his desk. The lid of the humidor was still up. He flipped it shut and pushed the little box away from him. Smoke drifted upwards towards the harshly buzzing lights. He rubbed the back of his neck and then yanked open the top drawer of his desk, looking for his bottle of aspirins.
Bradley lost aspirins the way other people lost ballpoint pens. They were never where he left them. Never! Frustrated, he slammed the drawer shut. He couldn’t understand it.
It was as if the goddamn things had legs.
There is a phenomenon known to the medical profession in general and forensic pathologists in particular as “gravitational sinking”. The phrase refers to the areas of discoloration, huge dark bruises, that gradually appear on an unattended corpse and are a consequence of blood slowly settling to the lower areas of a body.
When the morgue attendant rolled open the stainless steel drawer containing the mortal remains of the unidentified white male, preliminary case and tag number 19H88, whom Parker had discovered in the back of the stolen Econoline van, Willows saw immediately that there was very little evidence of gravitational sinking. This came as no surprise, since he’d already examined Mel Dutton’s Polaroid shots of the body and the inside of the van. There had been blood everywhere, hard and shiny as a carapace in the glare of the camera’s flash. Of the seventy-two stab wounds that had been inflicted on the victim, three had severed major arteries. The dying boy had pumped himself dry with the final beats of his heart; there was not enough blood left in his body for gravitational sinking to occur.
Willows leaned forward and pulled down the pale blue rubberized sheet that covered the body, exposing the coroner’s sternum-to-pubis Y-shaped incision and the hurried, looping, Raggedy-Ann stitches left by a busy intern.
During the first few hours following the death of a human being, the temperature of the body drops by about three degrees per hour. Then, gradually, the rate of heat loss slows until it is one degree or less per hour. The boy had now been dead more than thirty-six hours. His corpse was as cold as it would get during his stay in the morgue: 38 degrees Fahrenheit and holding steady. Willows picked up a hand. Death reached up at him through the network of nerve endings in his fingertips. He twisted the wrist, slowly turning the arm back and forth under the shadowless white glare of the lights.
There was a deep, wedge-shaped chunk of flesh cut out of the boy’s forearm, and on the bottom edge of the cut, a tiny half-circle of blue. Willows examined the arm carefully, and then let it drop. It hit the stainless steel drawer with a dull, meaty thud.
“Looking for anything in particular?” said Parker.
“Yeah, you know what a Smurf is?”
Parker nodded, smiling. “A little cartoon eunuch that looks like a Pillsbury Dough Boy, except it’s bright blue.”
“A fan, are you?”
“Sometimes on Saturday I go over to my sister’s for breakfast. She cooks the pancakes while I watch Smurfs on television with her little girl.”
Willows leaned forward so he could look directly down at the boy’s face. The eyes were pale green. He pulled back the upper lip, exposing the same large white teeth he’d seen in the black and white picture he and Rossiter had found in Naomi Lister’s shorts.
The rubberized sheet made a faint whispering sound as he pulled it back over the boy’s body. Spooky. He let the sheet drop. It billowed like a sail in the wind and then settled snugly around the corpse.
“You know Eddy Orwell pretty well, don’t you?” said Parker unexpectedly.
“I’ve spent some time with him.”
“Friday night, at that restaurant in the park, he was really nervous. As if he had something on his mind, you know what I mean?”
“No,” said Willows, “I’m not sure I do.”
“When I hit that Econoline van, pulling out of the parking lot…” Parker paused. She stared down at the outline of the body. “You know what I thought when I saw that kid lying there?”
“No, what?”
“That it was a joke, some kind of stupid prank. I thought Eddy Orwell and his dumb-ass pals from vice had paid the kid a few dollars, chipped in for a bottle of ketchup, and were squatting out there in the bushes laughing their heads off at my expense.”
Willows walked around Parker to the foot of the stainless steel drawer. A large brown paper bag was nestled between the boy’s ankles. He opened the bag and turned it upside down, shook out a pair of Nikes, socks, a banana-coloured shirt and white linen pants. Flakes of dried blood fell on the rubberized sheet as he went through the clothing. He took out his pen and notebook, and wrote down sizes and brand names.
“Then,” continued Parker, “I realized I was looking at real blood, the body of a kid so young he wasn’t even out of his teens. And do you know what my reaction was? Anger. I was furious, and I took it out on poor Eddy!”
Willows pushed the clothes back in the brown paper bag. He gave the drawer a push. It was on nylon rollers, and slid shut easily and silently.
“The guy spent a small fortune buying me dinner,” said Parker, “and I made him feel like a jerk.”
Willows smiled. “Sometimes when Sean fell down and hurt himself, I’d get angry at him, mad because he’d been so careless. Of course, the real reason I was upset was because my son was in pain and there was nothing I could do about it. You still mad at Eddy?”
“No, I want to nail the bastard who killed that kid.”
“And the kid’s girlfriend,” said Willows.
Parker stared at him.
Willows started towards the double doors with their small panes of frosted and wired safety glass. “Let’s go get a cup of coffee, Claire, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
At the Denny’s on Burrard a smiling waiter with a round face crammed with pale orange freckles led them to a horseshoe-shaped booth next to the window. Willows ordered coffee and a jelly doughnut. Parker thought about it for a long time, and then asked for a pot of lemon tea.
Out in the bright, sun-splashed street, a tourist bus cruised slowly past. The bus was a big fire-engine red double-decker imported from London. Parker squinted into the glare as shards of light bounced off the two rows of polished windows that ran the full length of the vehicle. Many of the people in the bus were staring at her as if they had never seen anyone eat at a Denny’s before, and she was the advertised highlight of the tour. She repressed an urge to favour them with a regal wave of her hand. She knew Willows well enough to be certain that he’d consider such a gesture badly misplaced.
The waiter came back, interrupting her line of thought. Parker nodded her thanks. She lifted the lid of her teapot and looked inside, dropped a thick slice of lemon into her cup. She liked her tea hot and strong. She filled her cup and then used her spoon to retrieve the slice of lemon, and ate the pulp.
“Vitamin C,” she said to Willows, who was watching her from across the table.
Willows poured cream into his coffee. He used his knife and fork to dice his doughnut. It was a mannerism he had picked up a long time ago, from a detective named Norm Burroughs. The first time Burroughs had eaten a jelly doughnut, Willows had thought he was trying in some misdirected way to be genteel. But Burroughs was simply practical — taking care of his clothes.
When he’d finished eating, Willows signalled the waiter for more coffee, and dabbed at his mouth with a paper napkin, wiping away a few granules of sugar. He crumpled the napkin into a ball and threw it on the table. Then he told Claire Parker about the drowned girl, the blue tattoo of a Smurf she’d had on her arm, and the three twenty-dollar bills wrapped around the black and white snapshot of the boy now lying coldly in the morgue.
“What do the Mounties think?” said Parker when Willows had finished.
“Naomi Lister went swimming and bumped her head on a rock and drowned. Death by misadventure. Nice and simple. No muss, no fuss.”
“They think she was all by herself up there on the mountain?”
“There’s an old overgrown road up there, a Forest Services fire-break. We found tyre tracks.”
“She was with a boyfriend, right?”
“That was the supposition.”
There had been two fat slices of lemon on Parker’s plate. She picked up the second slice and bit into it and chewed slowly, savouring the bitterness of the fruit. She swallowed and said, “You think her boyfriend drowned her, and then came down to the city and killed the kid?”
“No,” said Willows, “I don’t.”
Parker waited a moment, and then said, “Did she actually have a boyfriend? Are the Mounties looking for anyone in particular who she might’ve gone swimming with?”
“Her father said she went out with anybody in pants. But nobody in particular. He also mentioned that she’d been living down here in Vancouver for the past year or so.”
“You mean in the city?”
“Yeah, right.”
“What was she doing, did he know?”
“Nope.” Willows used the tines of his fork to scrape some jelly from his plate. “But whatever it was, she was making a lot of money at it.”
“Prostitution,” said Parker firmly. “If we ask around on the street, we’ll soon find out who her friends were.”
“That’d be nice,” said Willows. “Because I’m kind of in a hurry to solve this one.” He flagged the waiter and asked him for a copy of the Yellow Pages.
“And more hot water,” said Parker, “and a couple more slices of lemon.”
When the waiter returned he was carrying the phone book, a pot of fresh coffee, and a large whole lemon on a plate. He served the lemon to Parker, and then filled Willows’ cup. Willows added cream. Parker picked up the lemon. She bent her arm at a ninety-degree angle and crooked her wrist, let go of the lemon. It dropped and hit her bicep. At the moment of impact she flexed her muscles. The lemon rebounded upwards, back into her open hand. She dropped the lemon again, and kept dropping and catching it while Willows turned the flimsy pages of the phone book.
“What are you looking for?” she said at last.
Willows’ index finger moved down one page and up the next, and then stopped. He tore out the page and folded it up and put it away in his pocket, then shut the phone book. “There are only three tattoo parlours in the entire city,” he said. “Two of them are on Hastings, the third’s in the six hundred block Davie.”
Parker nodded. Many of the downtown core’s teenage hookers hung out on Davie. Although neither she nor Willows had much faith in coincidence, it was hard not to feel a little optimistic about this one.
“I’ll phone the Squamish detachment and get them to wire down a photograph of the Smurf tattoo on Naomi Lister’s arm,” said Willows.
“I doubt if it’ll do much good,” said Parker. “Do these tattoo joints keep customer records? It’s all walk-in trade and cash over the counter.”
“You’re probably right,” Willows conceded. “But it won’t take long to check it out.”
“The street’s something else again. We flash the morgue snaps around, it might get us somewhere. Two dead hookers should give us a certain amount of leverage with the survivors.”
Willows glanced at his watch. The street didn’t start to wake up until ten or eleven — they were in for a late night.
Parker, reading his mind, said, “What do you want to do in the meantime, have you got any plans?”
“I plan to buy some chewing-gum,” said Willows. He reached for the bill. “My treat, Claire.”
Parker thanked him, but not with a great deal of enthusiasm. Next time it would be her turn to catch the tab. Willows had a knack for changing the price of a pot of tea into a free three-course meal.
*
There were eight grocery stores and one supermarket in the five-block strip between Broughton and Burrard, each store squeezed in among dozens of night clubs, sex shops, and fast-food joints. Seven of the eight stores sold the kind of magazines that had been found in the back of the Econoline van. Willows and Parker walked down one side of Davie and back up the other, buying a single pack of sugar-free gum at each of the stores, asking for and receiving a cash-register receipt every time they made a purchase.
The receipt from the sixth store they visited matched the Xerox copy of the one they’d found in the van. The receipt was stamped on a thin white slip of paper measuring two by two-and-a-half inches. At the top of the slip there were four short vertical bars and then a space and two more bars. Below the two bars there was blank paper, an asterisk followed by the price of the gum, and then a capital “A” and a plus mark. One line down, the asterisk and the price were repeated, but this time the price was followed by a capital “T” and a four-digit number and, finally, the day’s date.
Willows pulled out his worn leather wallet and flashed his gold shield. The girl behind the counter was Chinese, in her early twenties. She looked startled, and then confused, and then a little bit guilty. It was a typical response — none of the expressions that had fleetingly crossed her face had meant a thing, and Willows and Parker both knew it. Parker gave the girl a reassuring smile. She introduced herself and Willows, and asked the girl what her name was.
“Cheryl,” said the girl. She hadn’t stopped staring at Willows’ shield. He folded his wallet and put it back in his pocket.
“Last Friday,” said Parker, “someone came in here and bought four sex magazines.” She named the magazines. “Do you remember the sale?”
“I’m sorry, no,” said the girl. For emphasis, she shook her head. Her ponytail waggled from side to side. “What did he look like,” she said. And then, “Was it a man or a woman?”
“We don’t know,” said Willows. “Probably a man, but we can’t be sure.”
“What time was he here?”
“In the evening. Why, what difference does it make?”