The Goldfish Bowl (9 page)

Bradley chewed on his cigar. He spat a fleck of tobacco into the sink. “We’re all ears, George.”

“It was white, a floppy white hat with a wide brim. Like a woman might wear out in the garden, in the summer.”

“Must’ve been hard to see his face, under a hat like that.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“But you’re sure it was a man, that it was a man wearing makeup and a woman’s clothes.”

“See, he probably heard me coming down the hall. He was looking right at me when I came into the room, as if he was expecting me. And that’s when I saw his face, the face of a clown.”

“How d’you mean, George?”

“He had big pink spots on his cheeks, and he was wearing too much lipstick. When he smiled at me, his mouth seemed to stretch right across his face. There was lipstick on his teeth, they were stained red with it. At first I thought it was Dave’s blood, that he’d been feeding on Dave.” Franklin paused to light a fresh cigarette from the stump of the old. “Can I go get an ashtray?” he said to Willows.

“Use the sink,” said Bradley. “You said he smiled at you?”

“Right.”

“Then what?”

“The duck started quacking again. A terrible noise, wet, choking. I stood there listening to it, and I couldn’t understand how a child’s toy could make a noise like that. I thought I must be going crazy. And then I saw that the man in the window had a rifle, and that he was pointing it at me …”

“Keep going, George.”

“We looked at each other. The duck screamed. And then that fucking gun went off, and I felt the heat of the muzzle blast and I knew that I was dead.”

Hunched on the toilet seat, Franklin stared once more into the barrel of the rifle. His face was slick with sweat, lumpy, bloated with remorse, colourless except for a faint subterranean tinge of glaucous blue. He gave Willows an odd, accusing look. “How could he have missed me, Jack?”

“Better him than us,” said Willows. The bathroom was thick with smoke. He opened the door a few inches and looked out. The hallway was empty. He opened the door a little wider.

“You leaving?” said Franklin anxiously.

“Not until you do.”

“After he shot at me, he turned his back on me and climbed the rest of the way out the window and crouched on the ledge. I could see he was going to jump. He spread his arms I took a bead on that big white hat he was wearing, and pulled the trigger. The gun went off but he didn’t move. I aimed at the middle of his back and fired at him and fired again and kept firing until my gun was empty. Then I saw that he was gone.”

“Then what, you went over to the window?”

“No, I couldn’t.”

“Why not, George?”

“Because it wasn’t the duck I heard making that wet noise. And it wasn’t the duck that was screaming, either. It was my partner, it was Dave.”

Bradley took the cigar out of his mouth and massaged his face. “Just one more question, George.”

“Shoot,” said Franklin.

“When Dave was inside the walk-in closet, did he turn on the light?”

“What light?” said Franklin.

“Never mind,” said Bradley. “Forget it.” He’d taken a quick look in the closet while Milne was working on Atkinson’s corpse. There was a ceiling fixture, but when he’d flicked the switch the light had not come on. Tapping the bulb gently with the tip of his ballpoint pen, he’d discovered it was loose, that it was only screwed partway into the socket. The closet had been deep, the racks jammed with clothes. It would have been easy for the killer to hide there, easy for Atkinson to miss him.

The Closet Killer. Wonderful. He could already see the headlines. Sighing inwardly, Bradley stood up. He rubbed the small of his back, massaging away the stiffness. “Tell Goldstein to check the closet for prints,” he said to Willows. “Make sure he dusts down the light bulb and the wall in the area of the electric switchplate.”

“Okay,” said Willows.

Bradley looked down at Franklin. Franklin was sitting on the lid of the toilet with the posture of a man who was prepared to sit for ever. Bradley indicated Franklin and said, “You better take him downtown. Get a statement from him and then take him home.”

Willows tapped Franklin on the shoulder. “Let’s go, George.” Franklin nodded wearily. Willows helped him to his feet, and at the same time reached deftly under his raincoat and took away his gun.

Franklin gave him a surprised and wounded look. “Regulations,” said Willows. “Nothing personal.”

“I want it back as soon as possible,” said Franklin. “I’m gonna need it to get the guy who shot Dave.”

“Don’t worry about that,” said Willows. “We’ll get him.”

“Blow his head off,” said Franklin. He thumped a fist into his open hand, and then sat wearily back down on the toilet.

Atkinson’s body lay on the stretcher in a dark green plastic bodybag. One of the ambulance guys smiled at Parker as he yanked on the bag’s zipper. “Teeth must be out of alignment,” he said, and gave her a wink.

Appreciative chuckles from his partner. A wide grin from Farley Spears. A snigger from the cop lounging in the doorway. Even a little twitch of the lip from Jerry Goldstein. Parker didn’t get the joke until they wheeled the stretcher around and she saw Atkinson’s upper plate leering at her.

In the bathroom, Mel Dutton was using the Nikon with the 28mm lens to take a series of photographs of the dead goldfish floating in the toilet bowl. He was conducting a little experiment, bouncing his flash off the bathroom wall in order to cast the far side of the bowl in deep shadow. Each time he took a picture, the top of his bald skull glowed with an incandescent brilliance, as if lit from within by a sturdy filament of bones.

IX

WOHLFORD SWUNG FLUIDLY, from the hips. The ball seemed to jump off the end of his bat. Freddy could tell by the sound of the blow that it was on its way to the upper decks. Outta there. They all sounded the same, homers. You heard one, you’d heard ’em all.

Freddy turned his back on the television as Wohlford rounded third base. Wohlford was smiling, and Freddy was smiling too. He had twenty bucks on the game and it was six-zip Toronto, bottom of the eighth.

Freddy reached out and hooked a bottle of Cutty Sark towards him with his left hand, a hand that was slick with scar tissue. A lot of people stared at the hand, and Freddy didn’t blame them. The hand was mangled real bad, the three middle fingers chewed off right down to the knuckles — the stumps so short he had to wear his wedding ring on his thumb. Freddy took two glasses from the mirrored shelf behind him and poured an ounce of Cutty freehand into each glass, then deliberately splashed in another half-measure. Freddy picked up the two glasses, balancing them in the palm of his good hand, and started towards Jack Willows, who was sitting as always in the end booth with his back to the wall.

Freddy was still twenty feet away when Willows saw him moving in, and whatever it was that Willows was saying to the woman sitting opposite him, he let it drop. Freddy was curious, and he guessed it showed. Willows drank a fair amount but since Norm Burroughs had dropped out of the picture, Willows had been drinking alone. Until now, that is. Freddy checked out the woman as he placed the drinks on the table.

“Thanks, Freddy,” said Willows, dismissing him.

“You folks ready for something to eat?” said Freddy. He smiled at the woman. She’d noticed his hand but she wasn’t staring at it or away from it, and he liked that. “Maybe something to nibble on, a bowl of peanuts?”

“Nothing,” said Willows.

“Call me if you change your mind,” said Freddy, still looking at the woman. He gave the table a quick wipe with the damp cloth he carried slung over his arm, and then turned away, heading back to the bar. He’d catch the last of the baseball and then maybe go back with a plate of chicken wings hot out of the microwave. See if Willows would swap a free meal for an introduction to his new friend. Freddy had heard a rumour that Willows was having serious problems with his marriage. Maybe she was the reason why.

Parker waited until Freddy had moved out of earshot and then nudged the twenty-dollar bill that Willows had dropped on the table when they’d first sat down, and that had remained untouched through three rounds. “I’m kind of surprised they let you run up a tab in a place like this,” she said.

Willows tilted his glass. He watched the glass fall away from the Scotch, the ice settle. After a moment he let the glass swing back to a vertical position. He put the glass down on the table. “Freddy and I go back a long way,” he said at last.

Parker waited. Now that she’d got him talking, she wasn’t going to rush him.

Willows sipped at his drink and then said, “Freddy used to make a pretty heavy dollar working the piano bars around town. But he was one of those guys, when he wasn’t working, he liked to play. And he didn’t much care who he was playing with, if you know what I mean.”

“He got mixed up with the wrong crowd?”

“The wrong woman,” said Willows. “You know the Redstone Hotel, over on Cordova?”

Parker nodded. The Redstone rented rooms by the day or by the hour. It was a dump.

“About two years ago, the night clerk dialled a 911, told the dispatcher he had a customer sounded like he was in more than the usual amount of pain. Norm and I caught the squeal, drove down there.” Willows shook his head, remembering. “That was the only night clerk I ever met who had a talent for understatement.”

Parker smiled. “How d’you mean?”

“Freddy had checked into a room on the third floor, right at the back of the building. But we could hear him down in the lobby just as clearly as if he was standing next to us. He was screaming his head off. He sounded as if he was dying. You ever been in the Redstone?”

“Not yet,” said Parker.

“It’s the kind of place, even if there was an elevator, it wouldn’t work. Norm and I pulled our guns and ran up three flights of stairs, down the hall. The door was locked. Norm kicked it in, and in we went.” Willows drained his glass. “Freddy was sitting on the floor by the window, chained to the radiator. There were three other guys in the room, and a woman. The woman and one of the men were lying on the bed, drinking from a bottle of Red Devil wine. The other two guys were kneeling on either side of Freddy. One of them was holding him down while his buddy was feeding what was left of Freddy’s hand into an electric blender.”

Parker glanced behind her, at Freddy working the bar, happily mixing drinks. “Why were they hurting him, what had he done?”

“Screwed around with the wrong guy’s wife.” Willows smiled. “He said at the trial he’d never understand why they stuck his fingers into that machine, instead of a more relevant appendage.”

Parker laughed, perhaps a shade too loudly. She became alarmed. Was it possible she’d already had one too many? She looked down at her glass and saw that it was almost empty. So far, she’d had no more than two or possibly three drinks. Four at the most. She wondered if Willows might be trying to get her drunk. Somehow it didn’t seem his style. She finished her drink and put the empty glass down on the table, pushing it away from her, watching it glide smoothly across the varnished wood on interlocking rings of condensation. Looking up, she found Willows staring at her.

“Something on your mind?” she said.

Willows nodded. He looked serious.

“What is it?”

“Yesterday morning,” said Willows, “I ran into Shelley Rice in the service elevator at 312 Main. Or maybe I should say that Rice ran into me. He was on his way to a holding cell. He’d been busted. Possession with intent. You happen to know a couple of narcotics cops named Orwell and Kearns?”

“I know them.”

“You turn them on to Rice?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Why not?” said Parker.

Willows stared hard at her for a moment and then slid out of the booth. He walked a few steps away from her and then changed his mind and came back and sat down beside her. His hip pressed up against hers, but there was no warmth in his eyes. She moved a little closer to the wall, putting a bit of space between them, and at the same time turned to face him more squarely. He picked up her empty glass and made the ice rattle, then put the glass back down. “Look, when we were at Rice’s house, I told him that if he cooperated with us we wouldn’t give him any trouble. I gave him my word that we weren’t interested in drugs, and you heard me do it.”

“You gave him your word,” said Parker. “I didn’t give him mine.”

“That’s bullshit. We’re supposed to be partners. I was speaking for both of us.”

“No you weren’t. You might’ve thought you were, but you were wrong. For Christ’s sake, Rice was a dealer!”

“That isn’t the point.”

“It damn well is,” said Parker angrily. “It’s exactly the point.”

They were sitting so close together that Willows could see tiny flecks of gold in Parker’s eyes. He thought for a moment and then said, “What if Rice hadn’t been a dealer, what if he’d been a pimp. Would you have handed him over to vice?”

“No,” said Parker firmly.

“So you weren’t just out to score some points. There’s more to it than that. You’ve got something against dealers. Something personal?”

“A brother who’s a junkie,” said Parker. She gave that a moment to sink in and then said, “Now you tell me something. Does the fact that Norm Burroughs was buried this afternoon have anything at all to do with the hard time you’ve been giving me?”

Willows stared at her, stunned into silence. Finally he said, “How did you know about Norm?”

“I was there,” said Parker.

“Why?”

“He was your old partner. I’m your new partner. It seemed like the right thing to do, that’s all.”

“He told me you visited him in the ward.”

“Just once. We didn’t get along too well.”

“Norm was like that,” said Willows. “He was a spiky bastard, didn’t have a lot of friends.”

Willows smiled, and Parker said, “What are you grinning about, what’s so funny?”

Willows hesitated, and then started to tell her about the night he and Burroughs had deliberately rammed a moving freight train, destroying a brand-new squad car with less than fifty miles on the odometer.

Behind the bar, Freddy was using his remote to flip through the channels when a flurry of motion caught his eye. It was Willows’ date, waving a couple of empty glasses in the air, signalling for fresh drinks. Freddy put the remote down on the counter. He waved back, scar tissue shiny under the lights, then popped the chicken in the micro and reached for the bottle of Cutty Sark.