Lucy's Launderette (4 page)

As the elevator descended with me in it, I wondered what Paul Bleeker would think of the way I'd stood him up. In that moment, I didn't care. Until my brother had been dealt with, I wanted to crawl under a rock. I hailed a cab, got in and looked over my shoulder the whole way home. No one was following me. I paid the driver with the last of my spare change, raced through my front door and double locked it once I was inside.

I went into the bedroom and took off my all-purpose little black cocktail dress. I could hear the Viking in the other room. Without knocking, she opened my door and handed me an envelope. “This for you,” she told me.

“Who left it?” I asked. There was no stamp on it. She just shook her head in linguistic bewilderment and walked away.

I ripped it open. Scrawled on a tattered piece of paper were the words “I'M SENDING YOU TO THE PHANTOM ZONE.”

I ran to the phone and dialed the first number on my list. I was expecting another answering machine but a real voice said, “Sam Trelawny here.”

“It's Lucy Madison. Am I glad to get you,” I said, “I think I just got a threat.” I told him about Dirk's note.

“The guy moves fast,” he said. “Listen, just hang on. Don't panic. I know, easy to say when you're not there. There've been more reports. It seems Dirk is making his presence felt all over town. He was hanging around eating people's leftovers at a restaurant in the West End this afternoon. We're going to have him picked up as soon as we can locate him. You hear anything more from him, call me straightaway. Here, I'll give you my private cell-phone number. And, Lucy?”

“Yes?”

“Don't worry. We'll have him looking and behaving like Clark Kent at his desk in the Daily Planet in no time.”

I began to wonder what kind of face went with Sam Trelawny's plummy reassuring voice.

T
he next morning, I left for work at six-thirty, hoping the semidarkness would give me cover. I snuck out of my apartment dressed like an escapee from a black-and-white British movie. One of those dowdy sixties flicks.
Georgy Girl.
The
Carry On
gang. My hair was squashed under the kind of head scarf that you tie under your chin, a silk souvenir covered with sketches of the Eiffel Tower and Parisian urchin children. I wore a huge wooly coat with sloping shoulders, a pair of black gumboots and dark glasses. I had hoped to look a little like Jackie Kennedy sneaking past the paparazzi incognito, but in fact I looked more like Jackie Kennedy's cleaning lady. Taking these precautions was exhausting, but I counted on the fact that Dirk could sometimes be thrown by small things.

Along with the Superman disguise, Dirk had a few other personas in his manic closet. One was a tatty spy. During
one endless spring, Dirk had introduced himself as “Bond, James Bond,” then waved the plastic pistol in everyone's face and told them he was off to squash Goldfinger. For this Bond personality, Dirk had a very grotty white tuxedo, a garment he'd acquired from a bum in California, who'd claimed he'd got it from Our Man in Havana. The suit was several inches too short in the pants and jacket cuffs, covered with stains whose origins I preferred not to think about, and so creased you knew he and a dozen other people had slept in it.

He also had several sporting personas. Sometimes he pretended he was Tiger Woods, roaming around with an old golfing iron, swinging dangerously in all directions. I'd mistakenly tried to reason with Dirk, telling him that he was the wrong color to start with, would always be the wrong color, and how he lacked the discipline to be a golfing champion. This enraged him. I still hadn't learned that you can't reason with a man who's down on his lithium. I always hoped that I'd get through that thick, sick hide of his, get through to that other Dirk who had to be in there somewhere.

Maybe I was overestimating him. After all, Dirk had been no great shakes as a child either. He'd terrorized me when I was small by opening up
The Wizard of Oz
to the Wicked Witch of the West illustration. Her green face and clawlike hands had made my whole being curdle. Dirk used to chase me from room to room holding up the scary page and forcing me to look.

He'd drawn swastikas in indelible ink on the foreheads of every one of my dolls and hung them from the curtain rod in my bedroom.

He'd tormented me from the day I made my entrance into this life.

Was it any wonder I couldn't get through to him?

 

I clumped to work through the gloomy streets, dodging in doorways and scaring myself every few minutes with my own reflection. My first stop was at La Tazza, the little café next to the gallery. Lunging through the entrance, I was hit with the rich, dense aroma of ten different kinds of coffee. Ah, caffeine, my drug of choice. Behind the counter, a plump purple-hued girl moved lazily, taking glass jars down from shelves and pouring coffee beans into cellophane bags, folding the tops, and smoothing on the little gold labels as if it were a kind of meditation.

“Hi, Nelly.” She looked miffed for a second. “It's me, Lucy.”

Behind her back, we called her Nelly the Grape. She wore only the color purple, in every variation. Today, her skirt was a deep periwinkle shade, her blouse lilac—while her hair, angelized, glinted like garnets when it caught the light. Her nails, eyelids and lips were a similar wine shade.

“I didn't recognize you. How's it going? I don't know how you can sit there all day in a gallery full of penises. I'd get worked up…you know…being reminded…thinking about it.”

“I'm dead from the neck down. Numb from disillusionment.” I shrugged. “But at least this way, I don't forget what they look like.”

“Crappy love life, eh?”

“Nonexistent. Put one of those big gooey slices in a bag for me, will you, Nelly? What are they anyway?”

“It's a Black Forest slice, double fudge and cream, cherry filling, layers of chocolate, whipped cream and cherry along the top as well.”

“That ought to make up for two love lives.”

Nelly prepared my double latte and put the huge sweet gooey slice of empty calories in the bag. “Here you are.
Enjoy.” She unconsciously ran her tongue around her lips, like a big fluffy cat enjoying the cream.

I was ready to climb into the trenches. The enemy incursion would be hard to predict. It was silly to take chances.

I unlocked the gallery door, darted inside, locked it again, and got down to the serious business awaiting me.

I had to track down Paul Bleeker's number and let him know why I hadn't been at the Rain Room to meet him. Let him know that I hadn't meant to ditch him. That I was interested. That I still existed. But his number wasn't listed. I tried calling new listings, found nothing, gave up and opened the e-mails.

I got a jolt when I double-clicked on the incoming mail and there was a message from [email protected]— “Sorry, I couldn't make it last night, Lucy Luv”—I lingered over the “Luv” for a bit—“Something came up. Cheers. P.B.”

The reptile! He hadn't shown up after all. Well, it was a two-way dumping ground. I typed a new message. “Sorry I didn't show yesterday. Unavoidable business. Perhaps another evening? Lucy Madison.”

He was supposed to believe that I hadn't seen his message, that I didn't even know he'd sent one? All he had to do was look at the time on my message.

What I really needed to know was why? Why had he stood me up in the Rain Room? But then I'd stood him up, too, thanks to Dirk. Whatever Paul Bleeker's excuse was, if he even bothered with one, I'm sure that Nadine was to blame. She would have to add him to her list of scalps. It was impossible for her not to try. It came to her more easily than breathing. See desired object. Take desired object. It was as simple as that. And I knew from past experience that very few men could resist her allure. Translation: resist her money.

I stifled my disappointment with some of the gooey sweet slice.

The morning crawled. No superheroes or spies materialized. The only interruption was a middle-aged Japanese couple, tourists without a word of English. They tittered and chattered over some etchings for a good half hour and then made their choice. You would have thought they were buying a Van Gogh, they were so pleased with themselves. They picked out a monster member in lurid pinks and purples, then with much bowing and smiling, they put it on their VISA and took it away. One less willy in my life.

I surfed the net for a while then e-mailed Sky, “Help, I'm a prisoner in a Gastown weenie factory.”

She e-mailed back, “Aye, there's the rub.”

We agreed to meet for lunch at our usual place.

It was ten minutes to one when Nadine finally arrived. She wore dark glasses and when I said “Good morning” too brightly, she let out a grunt of disgust and retreated into her office. I was surprised that she didn't send me out to get her something to eat.

“I'm going for lunch,” I yelled in the direction of the door. When there was no answer, I put on my coat and headed off to meet Sky.

 

Evvie's Midnight Diner was one of those Naugahydebooth, dusty plastic aspidistra, twirly-stool-at-the-long-steel-counter kind of places near East Hastings. A hungry part of town. Evvie was actually a huge ugly-beautiful Lebanese man. His name was unpronounceable so everyone just called him Evvie. He had bought the place from the real Evvie back in Jeremy's day, sold it in the eighties, gone home to Lebanon, seen what a Swiss cheese had been made of his home country, hightailed it back to Canada, bought his old diner back,
and restored it to exactly what it had been in the seventies, right down to the liverish color of the booths.

Evvie's Midnight Diner had been a well-kept secret for decades, a haunt for vanilla drunks, Korea crazies, fresh air inspectors and actors waiting up to read their reviews in the morning papers. Now it was becoming fashionable again simply because it was so unfashionable. The real thing. Sky and I had given up being virtuous and eating at those health food places with the nut rissole burgers and grass cutting teas. Evvie's served cheap old-fashioned unhealthy food and piles of it.

Sure, there were salads on the menu at Evvie's, too, but it would have been frivolous for a person in my financial position to bypass the mountainous, double-cheese, bacon and mushroom burgers with the side of fries for a sagging lettuce leaf and an anemic tomato slice. Or the platter of battered and deep-fried halibut and prawn with loads of tartar sauce. It was good dollar value.

Let's be frank here. Only the rich can afford to starve.

And there was another problem. The food I left in the fridge at home disappeared mysteriously before I could get to it. I thought I was being clever, eating out, keeping my food out of the Viking's mouth. She'd denied touching any of it, just as I'd denied touching her Glug. I asked her if maybe her conquests didn't get hungry and thirsty in the night, and perhaps didn't make a raid on the provisions, but her eyes and mouth narrowed into a sneering expression and she said, “You jealous.”

 

Sky was sitting in our booth at the end of the diner. She was not alone. With her, was a man whose hair was just a little too blond. His trimmed mustache lurked on his upper lip like a small yellow rodent. His face was buffed to an unnat
ural shine. He wore a lavender-colored Lacoste T-shirt, a preppy gray knit sweater knotted around his shoulders, and a pair of jeans that were so tight I wouldn't have been surprised if he squeaked when he talked. He was fit though, and very neat. Nice and tidy right down to his fingernails. He must have been edging on forty—perhaps he was older—but he gave the impression of eternal forced youth.

He was running his hand up and down Sky's arm and if he kept at it much longer, he was going to leave her with no skin. There was no doubt about it. He had taken possession of her. And Sky seemed pretty happy to be possessed. She had a slightly goofy expression on her face and a bruised, trampled look about her. When I sat down at the table, she held out her hand, palm up, in a Ta-da gesture and said, “Lucy Madison, Max Kinghorn.”

So this was the guy who had hired Sky to manage the store, the famous boss from Seattle. I peered rudely.

Max didn't bother to stand up on my arrival as I might have expected from such a tidy polite-looking person. He must have sensed my hostility. He laughed a nervous, whiny, slightly nasal laugh and went back to the arm stroking as if his life depended on it.

I stretched out my hand to shake his, and to stop him from doing all that damned stroking.

“Sky's told me all about you,” I said, forcing myself to smile.

He whinnied again.

She had told me all about him. She'd gone into quite a lot of gory detail.

Max Kinghorn was the owner of the Retro Metro Boutique, but he lived in Seattle where he had other vintage boutiques. He was a strange bird. A vulture, to be precise. He stocked his stores by reading obituaries published up and
down the West Coast, from California to B.C. He was always ready to swoop down on the defunct's family and offer to take the horrid burden of dusty antiquated clothing, furniture and knickknacks off their hands. As vintage vultures go, I gathered he was the best in his trade. But Sky, I wanted to scream, Oh Sky, what about that little thing you told me about Max, that one, really important detail?

Max shifted, gave a few last frenzied strokes, then pecked Sky demurely on the cheek. “Well, I'm sure you ladies have a lot to talk about. I'll get going. I have business in Port Townsend.” Then he whispered to Sky, “Ciao, liebchen, I'll call you.”

I could picture it already, Max hovering and slavering as he waited to pick over the corpse down in Port Townsend, offering condolences to the bereaved family along with his certified cheque.

I watched him leave then glared at Sky across the table. “That's Max, Sky? The infamous Max?”

She glared back at me. “Don't get worked up about it. I told you I thought he was interesting.”

“I didn't realize you thought he was that interesting.”

“Just what do you mean by that?”

I held the menu high in front of my face. “I really shouldn't be having all this fried stuff but I just can't help myself. It's all so yummy and tempting.”

“Don't try to change the subject, Madison. Just spit it out.”

Sky looked fierce. She was already a dark, scrawny, pointy little person with spiky techno-punk black hair, and when she became fierce, she was like a Jack Russell terrier, hanging on to the object of her passion until she had ragged it to death.

“I love you, Sky. You're my best friend in the world, but if Max handcuffed you to the bed, beat you with rubber hoses, then drove over you with his car and left tire tracks, you'd
still look better than you do now. He's been staying at your place these last few days, hasn't he?”

Sky blushed, and she's not a blusher.

“He's so…so…”

“Gay?”

“That's one facet of Max's personality. Besides, he's celibately gay. For the last few years anyway.”

“That's a good one. Celibately gay. Except for the fact that he had sex with you. Or am I presuming too much? Did you have sex with him, too? It was sex he had with you last night, wasn't it?” I stared at a bruised area on her neck and raised my eyebrows.

Sky looked even fiercer. “Don't get worked up about it, Madison. In case you haven't noticed, men aren't exactly leaping out of the woodwork these days. Men I have something in common with, I mean. I'm as surprised as you are that he's good in the sack. But it's not just the sex either. It's a business relationship, too. He's looking at other boutiques around Vancouver. We might be…you know…expanding and consolidating.”