Ripper (31 page)

No sooner had Alex and Zinc entered than Lou Bolt approached with an extra glass in his hand. "Bubbly?" he said, bowing as he offered the champagne to Hunt. "I assume you don't drink," he added offhand, glancing at Chandler's brow.

"Ice?" Hunt said, feeling the chill of the glass.

"Elvira thinks of everything," Bolt replied, indicating

three ice buckets on top of the cabinet. "Even brought a cooler of ice from the Mainland."

"Roof's leaking," Chandler said, noticing drips from above plopping into the buckets.

"Must be new," Bolt said. "There's no water damage. If your room's above, Alex, you can share with me."

"Thanks," Hunt said dryly, "but it's the room next door."

"My room!" Bolt said, eyebrows raised. "Guess I'll have to share with you."

Probably punched holes in the roof himself,
thought Zinc.

Luna Darke joined them, dress cut to her navel, the depth of her cleavage attracting Hunt's eyes before it did the men's. Dolly Parton meets Twiggy, Darke's grin taunted.

"You should see the bed in our room," she said. "Katt was so entranced, Elvira assigned it to us. The bed's a four-poster so big Henry VIII could have screwed all six wives at once. Wanna bet Craig II had orgies on its springs? They cry out for a
menage a trois,
or
quatre,
or
cinq,
et cetera." She winked at Alex. "Hot thought, huh?"

"Yoo-hoo, Alex." Elvira approached the group. "I need your opinion, dear," she said, leading Hunt away. Frumped up in a matronly ball of pink chiffon, she reminded Zinc of Margaret Rutherford as a plump Miss Marple.

"I told you," he heard Franklen whisper to Hunt in conspiracy. "Nelson Eddy and
Rose Marie."

Leaving Bolt to ogle, and Darke to flaunt her breasts, Zinc worked his way around the table, noting the seating arrangement. Each place card bore a tiny skull & crossbones. The arrangement was:

                  Zinc Chandler

Stanley Holyoak   
Adrian Quirk   
        Katt Darke    
Alexis Hunt              
      Glen Devlin    
Lou Bolt                 
       Wynn Yates    
Luna Darke               
      Colby Smith    
Barney Melburn                
    Pete Leuthard    
Al Leech                 
 Elvira Franklen    
Sol Cohen                    
                        Death

Sorry, Elvira,
Zinc thought.
Hope I don't mess things up. Now what's the best excuse to pull the old switcheroo? Got it. Quirk.

Katt and Colonel Sanders's double flanked Quirk's wheelchair, parked between the fireplace and the ocean windows. According to Elvira's thumbsketch in the cab, Dr. Stanley Holyoak, late of Shaughnessy Hospital, was the foremost Sherlockian this side of the Atlantic. Zinc joined them as Katt asked, "What's a pastiche?" She was drinking champagne with the men. "Looks like I'm about to get busted," she said, hiding the glass from the Mountie.

Zinc pulled an Alex, and swiped her hat. Too small, it sat on the top of his head like Stan Laurel's bowler. The figure of Death on the Tarot card had its own place at the table.

"The Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse," quipped Quirk. "Behold the pale rider."

"A pastiche," said Holyoak, "is a story that finds its origin in someone else's work. Unlike a parody which pokes fun at its source, a pastiche is a serious imitation. I write Holmes pastiches. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle penned four novels and fifty-six stories about the Great Detective and his friend Dr. Watson. His work we call the Canon. By 'we' I mean Sherlockians who meet in scion groups around the globe. Groups like the Baker Street Irregulars in New York, the Northern Musgraves in Britain, the Red-Headed League in Australia, the Stormy Petrels here."

"Cool," Katt said. "But what do you write
about?”

"In my case, unresolved puzzles in the Canon."

"Puzzles like what?"

"My story 'The Case of the Oxford Don' found its source in 'The
Gloria Scott,'
Holmes's first case. In Conan Doyle's story, Sherlock speaks of 'the two years that I was at college' without naming the school. A man of his intellect would have attended Oxford or Cambridge, but how do we solve which? Holmes tells us Victor Trevor was 'the only friend I made . . . and that only through the accident of his bull-terrier freezing onto my ankle one morning as I went down to chapel.' From clues in the Canon we've deduced Holmes was a freshman in 1872. Back then, first-year men at Oxford lived
in college,
and only took lodgings in town during their
third year.
Cambridge men, however, lodged in town from day one. As dogs aren't allowed within the grounds of either school, if Holmes was going from lodgings to chapel does that mean he attended Cambridge as only there could Trevor's dog have chomped his ankle?"

Franklen tapped a glass with a spoon to summon the sleuths to the table. "The 'Seance with a Killer' is about to start," she announced. Gripping the high-backed wheelchair by its handles, Zinc kept pace with Katt and the doctor so Quirk could hear his theory.

"In my story," Holyoak said, "Oxford wins. What if Holmes stepped into the street to buy a paper on his way to chapel? Is that when the dog nipped his ankle? What if the college he attended was one of those at Oxford with buildings on both sides of the street? What if the dog was smuggled in as a practical joke? What if the dog was frightened outside and sought refuge in the grounds? What if Holmes, for a change, went to chapel in town . . ."

Zinc tuned the conversation out as Katt and the doctor took their seats at the table, and picked up on Bolt's renewed sexual harassment of Hunt. "You'll have more room if you take my place," he said to Quirk, moving the chair at the head of the table to the space reserved for the wheelchair on the other side.

"I'll be fine over there," Quirk replied, as Zinc parked the wheelchair at his place.

"I insist," the Mountie said, moving to catch Alex before she sat beside Bolt. "You'll be warmer by the fire," he said, offering her his chair.

"Thanks," Alex said with obvious relief, switching places with Zinc to sit down in front of Quirk's name card while Chandler sat beside Bolt.

"Silk purse made into a bull's ear," Lou complained.

The new arrangement at the head of the table was this:

                Adrian Quirk
Stanley Holyoak  Alexis Hunt

        Katt Darke  Zinc Chandler
       Glen Devlin  Lou Bolt
    
    
"Fifteen sleuths arrive for dinner at Castle Crag," Franklen said. "One of them brings Death as an uninvited guest." She indicated the place card at the far end of the table. "Let's begin by finding out who the sleuths are. Sol, you're busy with dinner so you go first."

Chef Boyardee left the hearth and walked to the head of I he table. There he stood with both hands on the back of the wheelchair like a predinner speaker at a podium. At five-foot-one, maybe two, little more than his head was visible over Quirk.

"My name is Sol Cohen, and I'm your chef tonight. I own Restaurant Murder & la Carte on Granville Island, and was hired by the lord of the manor to cater this party. Our meal this evening begins with . . ."

As Cohen described the appetizer and entree to follow, Zinc recalled Elvira's thumbsketch in the cab. Sol was head chef at a downtown hotel when he bought a bankrupt bistro on the island in False Creek. As a gimmick to promote his new restaurant, Sol self-published
Murder on the Menu,
a novella set in his eatery the mystery of which revolved around his "secret recipes." Thanks to a cheaper dollar and the fact it's hard to find America as it was in the States, Vancouver has become Hollywood North. Each meal at Murder & la Carte came with the latest edition of Sol's ever-changing book, while the stars among his clientele considered it trendy to have themselves written in as diners. The original plot saw a film crew dock on the island to eat at Sol's after a day without food, shooting up Indian Arm. The film was about a husband and wife plotting to kill each other, so the director ordered his leads Sol's famous beef Wellington
aux champignons.
The pastry came puffed "his" and "hers" ready to cut asunder, and Sol was asked to halve it with the prop knife from the movie. After the table was cleared and the dishes were in the washer, the male lead dropped dead from poison in the food. If he and his screen wife ate the same dish and nothing else, and if Sol who cooked and set the table wasn't involved, how was the poison administered to the hapless star?

Answer: the director had smeared it on the "his" side of the prop's blade.

". . . followed by beef Cohen with peppercorn sauce, or lamb
a la moutarde,"
the chef continued.

"I'm hot," said Quirk.

Beads of sweat dotted the disabled man's brow, while Cohen, closest to the fire after manning the hearth, glistened with perspiration. The issue raised, Zinc felt uncomfortable too, his neck sausaged in the collar of his wool tunic, so he reached to undo the top button, and that's when the glass of the cabinet beyond Death's place at the foot of the table exploded into the room.

For a moment Chandler thought Franklen had gone too far, hiring Industrial Light & Magic to put on her show, shards of glass spraying the table and tinkling to the floor, the large pieces smashing into fragments as they hit, while candles jumped from their candlesticks to roll across the cloth, and
shhhhewwwh
shot a streak past his startled eyes, the jet stream behind it causing him to blink, before
shhunkk
a hole was punched through the back of Quirk's wheelchair in line with a cut slashed across the side of his neck, followed by a jet of blood that arced like a fountain over the table from where Cohen stood.

"Hit the floor!" Zinc shouted. "Everybody down!"

As if reacting to the order, Cohen crashed to the rug. The back of his head bashed the fireplace stones with an ugly squashing sound. Blood bubbled from his mouth like rabies froth, while pump, pump, pump, arterial geysers spurted in time with his heart. The chef's hat shriveled in the flames that ignited his oil-slicked hair.

Quirk's wheelchair was pinned to the table by Sol's dead weight behind it. Shouting for help, the disabled man toppled it to one side, pulling himself free like a child learning to crawl, dragging his immobile legs as he frantically churned with his arms.

Chairs tumbled this way and that as the sleuths hugged the floor, those scrambling under the table bonking heads with their counterparts.

Zinc pushed back, crouched, and gripped his chair like a shield. Then he moved toward the cabinet through the shattered glass of which the shot was fired.

One hand releasing the chair, Zinc went for his Smith.

The instinct was there.

But not the gun.

Hidden among the sleuths in the room, Skull watched Chandler.

Hidden among the sleuths in the room, Crossbones watched Skull.

Ripper's Cross

Approaching Vancouver 

7:02
P.M.

"Sorry, son," DeClercq had said. "Something I had to finish." He'd turned his attention from the Tarot cards in
Jolly Roger
to the freckle-faced kid sitting by the window. "Did you find Sea Island in the Fraser River's mouth?"

"Here," the boy said, placing his map on the empty seat between them, a nail-bitten finger stuck to where the runways met.

The moment DeClercq glanced at the map he saw the Ripper's Cross. Lynn Canyon Suspension Bridge and the Dogfish Burial Pole marked its stem. The left arm of the crossbar was tipped by Musqueam Park. Like the
tau
cross the Ripper had signed in East End London, the Vancouver cross pointed west, more upside down than upright. DeClercq withdrew his Visa card from his wallet as he imagined a line from Musqueam Park across the stem at right angles to the North Shore. Inserting the card into the slot that released the Airfone, he waited for a dial tone, then rang Special X.

"Inspector Chan."

"Me again."

"You read my mind? Communication's trying to patch a call through to
you.
An escort named Lyric Stamm's gone missing from Hans Stryker's stable. She had a 'date' last night and didn't return. The trick arranged to meet her at the Top Hat Club. Said she'd recognize him by his 'white dress tie.' "

"Stamm's dead," DeClercq said. "They plan to hang her tonight. The North Shore. Lighthouse Park. Near my home."

"Wow," Chan said. "You
do
read minds?"

"Long story. Tell you when I get in."

"If
you get in. Fifty/fifty chance. Warning is to brace for a hell of a storm. Weather office says it may rival Typhoon Frieda in '62."

"Where's the storm now?"

"West coast of the Island. It's circling but could break out. No planes up or boats out there. If it moves east, you're off to Abbotsford or Seattle."

"Pray," DeClercq said.

"That'll help. God listen to you? He's always been deaf to me. What makes you think the body will be hung tonight?"

"Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, they hung Marsh. Wednesday night/Thursday morning was the double event. Tonight/tomorrow morning, they'll hang Stamm. If we don't catch 'em now, a mass slaughter follows."

"Want a car at the airport?"

"Mine's in the lot. I'll get Napoleon and meet you at Lighthouse Park."

"Rabidowski?"

"You read minds, too? If Skull & Crossbones arrive, sic the Mad Dog on 'em."

All that was several hours ago, somewhere over the East, before the flight across the prairies took an eternity. To pass the time, Robert had sketched the latest Ripper's Cross, wondering why he hadn't drawn the symbol earlier. True, he'd been preoccupied with building cases against Stephenson/D'Onston/Tautriadelta and Samson Marsh, but there was a time when his mind could process a dozen matters at once. A million brain cells die every three weeks he'd read, and as they're never replaced we have to make do with less.
Getting old's the shits.