Seaweed in the Soup (14 page)

When that house had been built, the window had afforded sweeping views of tree-covered hills, sawmills, Esquimalt Harbour, shipyards and docks busy with steamships loading timber for Europe. Now the window looked out on a sea of houses and commercial buildings.

Topham brought out a photo album and placed it on the table. When he had found what he wanted, he put his finger on the page and closed the album to prevent my seeing what was in it.

Topham said, “So what about it, mister? How much money are we talking about?”

Poverty, not greed, made his face suddenly ratlike and sly.

“Twenty,” I said, giving him a mean-eyed stare.

Topham opened the album. It was a disappointment. Instead of photographs, the album contained dozens of amateurish pencil drawings.

“That's Maria,” Topham said proudly. “See the way the light comes from over her left shoulder and makes kind of a halo around her face? I sent it to a magazine, it's what you call a life study.”

Topham had the best of the bargain. Raymond Cho's digital camera had provided all the photographs of Maria that we could use. Topham's cookie-cutter sketch showed a square-faced girl. To me it was completely useless. But I felt sorry for the old guy, so I gave him the twenty, shoved the drawing in my pocket, wished Topham good luck and went back down the stairs.

Along the street from Topham's house was a corner store. I went in to pick up the day's newspaper and idly checked the shelves: groceries, soaps, shampoos, Aspirin, soft drinks, potato chips and Cheezies.

Baking soda, metallic scouring pads and butane lighters. A crackhead's holy trinity, but not much needed nowadays when dealers sell ready-made crack. Mix a little soda with a hit of coke, add drops of water, fire it up with the butane lighter, let it cool enough to crystallize and you've got yourself a pipeful. If you stick a chunk of scouring pad in the stem of your pipe, it will collect some of the vapours. Fire up the scouring pad later for a weak hit when the jitters set in.

The woman minding the shop was a cheerful black Jamaican wearing a muumuu. Wide-hipped and narrow-shouldered, she surmised that I was a stranger in town. She had no prejudices against Natives, and had a room at the back I could rent for 20 dollars a day. Less, if I took it by the month.

The Collins Lane murder had already been shunted to the fourth page.

I went home and called Bernie, told him I'd struck out at the Ballard Diner.

“What do you mean, struck out?”

“The guy who runs the diner wouldn't co-operate.”

“You should have leaned on him. Withholding evidence from police is a crime.”

“The only way to eliminate crime is to legalize it,” I observed philosophically.

“So I've heard, but don't worry your little pointed head about it,” Bernie said tersely. “I'll get a search warrant.”

That sounded good to me. I spent the day wandering around town. Then I went home and had a long afternoon nap, because I was expecting a long, busy night.

CHAPTER TEN

The ringing phone woke me up following a long complicated dream involving feral cats and a roll of barbed wire that I forgot almost entirely the moment my eyes opened. It was Bernie Tapp. He said, “Bad news, Judge Numbnuts turned me down when I applied for a warrant to search the Ballard Diner.”

“Now what?”

“Damned if I know. Plan B, I guess.”

There was a long silence, after which Bernie grunted and hung up.

I got off the bed and walked around restlessly. My mind swirling with bad ideas, I mixed myself a rye and ginger with plenty of ice. Swigging occasionally, I cleaned myself up at the kitchen sink, applied deodorant, swallowed the rest of my drink, brushed my teeth with Colgate instead of having another drink, and then I got dressed in a black cotton shirt, and charcoal grey loose-fit trousers. Black socks. Attired like that, in the proper arena, I could pass as a small-time wannabe drug dealer, fink, petty crook, or as a standard-issue small-town semi-tough long-haired asshole. It would also make it harder for people to see me in the dark. According to my good Chinese Rolex, it was ten-thirty. From my open window, the onshore wind was pleasingly cool. White surf, boiling onto the beach, broke the surrounding darkness. The Milky Way sparkled above. Somewhere in the night, an amorous dog was broadcasting its lament. I knew how he felt because I felt the same way. I always do when I haven't seen Felicity Exeter for a while. Enveloped by shadows, trying not to think about Felicity, I went out to the MG.

≈  ≈  ≈

Nanaimo's is a private nightclub located in a former union hall half a mile from the Ballard Diner. I didn't know the Native bouncer guarding Nanaimo's front entrance, but he reminded me of a heavyweight coal miner that I used to know. The bouncer wore a cheap three-piece black suit and he spoke with a voice thickened by years of overindulgence in duty-free cigarettes. A gold chain dangled from his vest pocket. His white shirt had a celluloid collar. His large square head was as bald and as shiny as a sea-washed pebble. Black hairs sprouted thickly from his ears and nostrils, and from the backs of his large square hands. With a droopy nicotine-stained Fu Manchu moustache and highly polished black steel-toed boots, at first glance he looked to be a figure of fun, but menace lurked in his dark eyes. I paid the club's twenty-dollar membership fee and scribbled a pseudonym on a membership-application form. After patting me down for concealed weapons, the bouncer waved me on through.

Interior decorators had stripped the union hall of the honest working-class ambience it had once possessed. Instead of lecterns, a proscenium arch stage, patriotic flags and photographs of labour martyrs, I was confronted by a retro-style '80s disco with strippers' poles, dancers' cages, and a lit-from-below glass dance floor. The patrons noisily milling around that night were the usual mix of men who longed to be successful property developers and girls who wanted to star in movies opposite Brad Pitt. Pill pushers roamed, preppy Uplands chicks flaunted their first tattoos for disinterested loggers, crooks, oilpatch roughnecks, and a local poet wearing brown corduroys and a black turtleneck holding hands with a Japanese fraud who slaps paint on canvas with floor mops at ten thousand a pop.

Cocktails were twelve dollars, draft beers were seven-fifty.

Clubbers were coming and going in and out of a billiard room, two bars, an illegal cigar lounge, and a private room labelled
The Landlord's Snug
. The Pet Shop Boys were performing inaudibly on one big flatscreen television. Prince was eating a microphone on another big screen.

A pair of wide French doors gave onto an open-air deck. I sat at the deck's last remaining empty table, and rested my elbow on a wooden railing. I was admiring the builder's yard next door when a waiter attired like the bouncer arrived. Another Native hard man, he had wide cheekbones, narrow eyes, and thick dark hair trimmed closely to his head. I ordered a double Chivas over ice with water on the side. Victoria's lights twinkled in the darkness.

A woman sitting alone at a table adjacent to mine introduced another permutation into the chess-like game that I was trying to play that night. Her eyes were a very deep blue. She was about 40, with long wavy black hair, wearing a white dress made of smooth clingy fabric. The martini glass on her table contained a cranberry-coloured liquid. She had the regal manner and bearing of someone born to money and she looked out of place, sitting alone in a club. She looked the way Gina Lollobrigida looked back in the '50s. She caught me admiring her, or maybe she didn't after all, because her deep-blue eyes bored a hole right through me. On her face was the taut passionate expression you observe on people who are navigating life-altering events. Disastrous illnesses or divorces, for example. You see much the same look on heroin junkies late for a fix. I finished my first drink. When the waiter came over again, I ordered another Chivas and asked him what the woman at the next table was drinking.

“Cosmos,” he said.

“Is she a regular here?”

“I've never seen the lady before.”

“Give her my compliments, and ask her if I may buy her another Cosmopolitan.”

The waiter did so. After glancing at me coldly, the woman fished inside a small leather handbag, brought out a small thin white rectangular object, and handed it to the waiter. The object looked like a business card, but it could also have been a tiny heat-sealed cellophane bag stuffed with fine white powder. The waiter slipped the object into a pocket. She and the waiter exchanged a few quiet words, after which the waiter looked at me, and raised his shoulders a trifle to let me know that I'd struck out. As he left the patio, the waiter brushed past a man who was standing in the doorway.

It was Tubby Gonzales. After glancing around and seeing that all the tables were taken, Gonzales turned away without noticing me.

The waiter returned to the patio with two drinks on his tray. He placed one of the drinks on the woman-in-white's table and said something that made her laugh. Still grinning, the waiter delivered my drink. “The lady is a little amused. She thinks you must be short-sighted. She thinks you mistook her for a pick up.”

“A reasonable assumption, unless she's waiting to meet someone.”

“A woman like her, that's almost a certainty.” His grin faded as he added, “Maybe you have the wrong idea about her occupation, my friend. The first time we find a hooker working the club, we boot her ass out the door. The second time, we boot her ass out the door and break her legs.” He walked away.

I gave it ten minutes. Nobody had joined her, so I stood up and spoke to her. I said, “I beg your pardon, ma'am. Please forgive me if you think that I insulted you, because it wasn't intentional. I am a stranger in a strange land.”

She acknowledged my existence with a slight nod, but continued to gaze out towards the dimming horizon. She was quite slim and beautiful.

After a beat I sat down again and tried to ignore her. She waited a few more minutes to let me know that my existence wasn't important, but afterwards she gave me a speculative look and remarked in a voice no louder than necessary, “I suppose many people tell you that you are very good-looking. I expect you get all the girls you want?”

“Oh, come on.”

Her voice was as soft as thistledown. “I must say that nobody would mistake you for a stranger in these parts, although maybe you're Haida or Tsimshian. I'm not an expert on BC's Native tribes.”

“I'm Coast Salish, so at least one of your assumptions about me is correct. The word Nanaimo derives from Snuneymuxw, a Coast Salish word which means meeting place. Before the Dunsmuir coal mines were developed, a lot of my people used to live in Snuneymuxw. Traditional Coast Salish territory stretches all the way from Seattle northwards as far as Cape Mudge. I happen to live in Victoria.”

“I happen to live in Qualicum Beach. Most of the time that is,” she responded with slightly more warmth. “My grandfather was an architect. He designed some of James Dunsmuir's buildings. He designed this building too. It used to be called the Ginger Goodwin Memorial Hall.”

I spread my hands. “Then we have something in common. When James Dunsmuir arrived here from Scotland, a century and a half ago, Native Indians told him where to find Vancouver Island's coal.”

“I know they did, and more fool them. Dunsmuir parlayed his coal mines into a knighthood, and into one of the largest fortunes in the British Commonwealth.”

She looked over my shoulder. Her date had just shown up. Tall and good-looking, about thirty years old, he had longish black hair and a detached, almost feline manner. He had on a Hawaiian shirt, cargo pants and deck shoes. He looked at me, scowled, and then turned to the woman and said, “Is this guy bothering you?”

She said wearily, “Oh, Larry. Please don't start that again.”

She rose to her feet and said to me, “Thanks for offering to buy me a drink, it was very kind of you, another time perhaps. Now I have some business to attend to. Goodbye.”

Trailed by the newcomer, she went out. I finished my drink and left the deck's relative quiet for the club's noisy main room. In there, it was standing room only by then. The waiter who had served my drinks was tending a cash register. I said, “Hearing loss must be an occupational hazard. How do you put up with it?”

“There are no conditions of life to which a man cannot accustom himself, especially when they are accepted by everybody else.”

“Nicely put.”

“The words are Tolstoy's, sir, not mine.”

“That woman. What's her name?”

“I have no idea, my friend.”

“How about Larry, her hunky boyfriend?”

“Larry Cooley? Oh yeah, he comes around here occasionally.”

“I'll pay my tab now.”

“Interesting concept, this club,” I added, as he rang up my bill. “Glum instead of glitter. Native waiters in three-piece suits instead of hotties in shorts. It's working, though. The owner must be an original thinker.”

“He is original in many interesting ways.”

“Who is he, by the way?”

Evidently this was a touchy subject; the slight warmth that had been in the waiter's eyes plunged to zero as he handed me my bill. I owed him about thirty dollars. I gave him two twenties and told him to keep the change.

“Come in again sometime,” he said, instead of answering my question. “Maybe you'll have better luck with women.”

A half-remembered Tolstoy quotation flitted into my mind, but I couldn't remember exactly how it went. I thanked him in Russian: “Spasiba.”

“Pozhaluista, sir.”

As I turned to leave, I noticed Tubby Gonzales standing at the bar. I grinned at him, and went out.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

By then it was late enough for the business that I had in mind. I drove a quarter of a mile and parked the MG in a back lane off Esquimalt Road. I put a few items from the MG's toolkit into a canvas sack and toted it along dark narrow streets to the Ballard Diner. The diner had closed for the night, but its inside and outside lights had been left on. Gravel crunched beneath my feet as I approached the diner's front door. Using a two-pound hammer and a tapered steel punch, I drove the pins out of the door hinges, dragged the door open, and went inside. I had a Maglite and thought about turning the diner's lights off while I poked around, but decided against it. If any reasonably observant patrolman cruised past on his regular beat and noticed that the lights were out, he'd stop and take a closer look anyway.