Seaweed in the Soup (19 page)

“I never saw Ronnie dead. I keep telling you, he was alive the last I seen him.”

Bernie said, “Maria. You say that there were just three of you in the house that night?”

She nodded.

“I want you to cast your memory back to the time Raymond Cho was killed.”

Maria's face fell. “What are you talking about? How many times before you bastards will understand I don't know nothing about nobody being killed.”

Upset and apparently confused, Maria burst into sobs. I resisted a strong temptation to pat her shoulders and speak comforting words. Even Bernie seemed affected.

“Just a couple of things more,” Bernie said in a kindlier voice. “Take it easy, Miss, we'll soon be done . . . ”

“Goddamn, you're trying to make me say things that aren't right and put words in my mouth,” she cried. “I ain't saying no more till that lawyer gets here.”

“Tell us why you ran away from the house, first,” Bernie said patiently.

Shaking her head, staring down at the table, she said in a low voice. “We took a few things as souvenirs. Ronnie said he'd give us presents. Me and Ruthie ain't hookers, but we thought we'd earned 'em. I took a ring and a pearl necklace.”

“Then you murdered him,” Bernie said flatly.

Maria leapt to her feet. “Bastards,” she cried. “Bunch of lying cheating pigs. I'm not saying nothing no more, that's final.”

Bernie switched the tape recorder off. By then I'd modified my opinion of Maria. She could have ratted on her friend and waltzed, which counted for something.

When we left the interrogation room, the guard was waiting for us. He led Maria through a barred gateway and locked it. Smirking, speaking from behind the safety of the bars, he said, “I told you. Didn't I tell you guys that you wouldn't get nothing out of her?”

That set Bernie off again. Dangerously unbalanced when his hair-trigger temper is aroused, his face the colour of a beetroot, he reached for the gate and shook it.

I said, “For Christ's sake, Bernie, get a grip of yourself.” Bernie stiffened, but he didn't say anything. By the time we left the jail, he was his jovial self.

We had gone to the jail separately. Bernie followed me back to my cabin in his Interceptor. I brought a bottle out and we had a few drinks, talked things over.

“Maria's no killer, her friend did it,” Bernie said “This is nice Scotch. Is it single malt?”

“It's Chivas Regal. I don't think either of them did it.”

“Listen to me, Silas. If I find a dead guy with puncture wounds to his neck, I look for a fucking vampire. If I find a guy with his throat cut, in a room where a little while earlier he'd been playing hard-core sex games with a couple of girls, I concentrate on the girls. It's complicated I admit. We don't have all the answers, but we have some of the answers. To add to our existing headaches, the stains on that slavekiller weren't blood. They were some kind of chemical, Forensics haven't identified them yet.”

I smiled indulgently.

“I suppose, being Indian and all, you can afford these fancy brands because they're duty free,” Bernie said, shoving his empty glass across for a refill.

“And not only booze. If I flash my status card I can load up on duty-free gas, groceries. Duty-free cigarettes are so cheap I'm thinking of taking up smoking again,” I crowed, filling his glass up. My smile fading, I said, “I saw people pushing drugs openly in Centennial Square a couple of days ago.”

“Yeah, we know about it. Rope a dope. The only thing we don't yet know is where they're getting product. We think Gonzales is their supplier and one of these days we'll find out for sure.”

I nodded.

“There's been a development,” Bernie said. “Vancouver told us more about Raymond Cho. Their story is that two months ago, Raymond stole two million dollars cash from his own mob.”

≈  ≈  ≈

I don't know what time it was when I stripped down, cleaned myself up at the kitchen sink and put on fresh clothes, but it was probably two in the morning, perhaps a little later, when I got to Felicity's house. The lights were all on; the front door wasn't locked. Somebody had done a good job of cleaning the house though—there was no remaining evidence of last night's party.

Felicity was alone, lovely, asleep. Flaked out on a couch in the lounge. I was close enough to her to smell the subtle perfume she was wearing. Longing built up inside me like an electrical charge, but I didn't want to wake her so I went into the kitchen, found a half bottle of Pinot Grigio, poured an inch into a glass and drank it. When I went back to the lounge, Felicity wasn't there. She was in bed.

“Hello, Silas,” she said, the barest suggestion of tremor in her voice. “Kiss me, Silas.”

I took my clothes off and got in beside her.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Victoria's residential and commercial belt has been expanding rapidly in recent years. After a few twists and turns, I was happy to leave Douglas Street's heavy traffic behind and turn onto Burnside Road. More miles of quiet farms and woodsy calm brought me to Jinglepot Road. Scarcely better than a lane, the Jinglepot winds up over a slope in the foothills and along a ridge. It was five degrees hotter up there than downtown. The air smelt faintly of burning sage. The place I wanted was a modest pre-war bungalow. Screened from the road by tall poplars, it had blistered paint and curling asphalt roof shingles. Off to the right, half-overgrown by blackberry bushes, was a low concrete building that looked like a military gun emplacement. The bungalow's unkempt lawn was dotted with cedar lounging chairs, kids' tricycles, a baby buggy and several multicoloured balls. I left my car at the side of the road.

Afternoon sunlight streaming through the poplar trees created moving patterns on the cracked cement pathway leading up to the bungalow's front door. I pasted a Fuller Brush man's smile on my face and knocked. After a long interval a middle-aged woman wearing a headscarf and paint-spattered overalls opened the door.

Looking a trifle flustered, she said, “Are you here about the room?”

I flashed my police badge. “Good morning, ma'am. No, I'm not here about the room. I am Sergeant Seaweed, Victoria PD. I'm here about Maria Alfred.”

“Maria,” the woman said, her tentative smile fading. “She's my tenant. I haven't seen her for a few days.”

“And you are?”

“Jenny Victor.”

Before I could get a word in edgewise, she went on with growing indignation, “The thing is, we need Maria's rent money to make our mortgage work, and she's in arrears. My husband and I bought this house six months ago. It's a bit of a wreck, and we're renovating. But it's hard, you know, because he has a full-time job in town and the way the price of building materials keeps going up . . . We think Maria's taken off without paying us what she owes.”

“When's the last time you saw her?”

“Oh I don't know,” she said unhappily. “Last week I guess.”

“If you don't mind, I'd like to take a look at her room.”

“Well, I suppose . . . ” Mrs. Victor was saying when we heard a slight thudding noise followed immediately by a child's wails.

Throwing up her arms in consternation, Mrs. Victor retreated indoors. I followed her along a hallway into a kitchen at the back. A cute two-year-old with a mane of blonde curls and a rosebud mouth had fallen off a chair while trying to climb onto a table. Mrs. Victor swung the sobbing infant into her arms and began to walk up and down, patting the infant's back and making shushing noises.

Mrs. Victor seemed physically inert. Worn out at 40-something. She seemed slightly too old to be the child's mother. When she remembered my existence, Mrs. Victor pointed to a door that opened off the kitchen and said, “Maria's room is down there.”

I went down a steep flight of steps into a dingy low-headroom basement with exposed ceiling joists and wall studs. Half-stooped to save my head from injury, I groped around in semi-darkness until I found another door, opened it, located a light switch, and turned it on. Nothing happened until, after more blind groping, I located a lamp set on a low bedside table. It lit up when I turned it on. Floorboards creaked above, where Mrs. Victor was pacing back and forth.

Maria Alfred's rented room was only about twelve feet square. It was evidently a recent addition to the house. The room's gyproc ceiling and walls were a bilious shade of yellow; the linoleum floor was bumpy. The furniture consisted of a single bed covered with a white candlestick bedspread, a single bamboo chair with a yellow cushion, a chest of drawers and a circular picnic table with a matching plastic garden chair. A cheap wooden desk placed beneath a wall-mounted mirror doubled as a dressing table. A folding Chinese screen concealed a built-in closet empty except for wire coat hangers. The drawers had been cleaned out. A metal wastebasket contained nothing except discarded tissues. The room was clean, and the floor appeared to have been recently waxed. After thinking, I removed the drawers from the desk. When I did so, a photograph that had been wedged behind one of the drawers fluttered to the ground. It showed a group of twelve girls standing outside a country schoolhouse. I turned the photograph over. Girls' names were written on it in immature pencil lettering. One of the girls was Maria Alfred. Ruth Claypole was another.

I put the photograph in my shirt pocket and went back upstairs. A well-tended vegetable patch that would have gladdened any gardener's heart bloomed nicely in the backyard. There was no sign of the infant. Mrs. Victor was filling a bucket at the kitchen sink. She squirted some liquid detergent into the bucket, and then turned towards me, folded her arms and leaned back against a counter.

“Satisfied?” she said, with a kind of resigned fatalism. “Find what you wanted?”

I handed her the photograph. “I found this in the desk. Recognize anyone?”

Without hesitation, she pointed to Maria and said, “That's her.”

“Recognize anyone else?”

After a long look, Mrs. Victor shook her head.

I said, “Maria has done a runner, obviously.”

“Of course she has. Now we're faced with the expense and trouble of advertising and interviewing tenants all over again. Maria was only with us two months. It's pathetic. You try to do the right thing, and this is all the thanks you get.”

“When Maria moved in, I suppose you got her to sign a rental agreement?”

“Well, no,” Mrs. Victor replied with awkward self-consciousness. “I guess we never got around to it.”

“You didn't check with Maria's previous landlord, ask to see references?”

“Well, no,” she said reticently. “Not that I remember. We took Maria on trust. She seemed all right to us.”

“So you don't know where she came from, where she lived before?”

“We never talked much, come to think of it, because we didn't have much in common. I have an idea she came from one of the islands up Desolation Sound way. Maybe Quanterelle Island. That's about all I can tell you.”

Steam rose from an electric kettle. When the kettle clicked off automatically, Mrs. Victor turned towards it. Speaking with her back to me, she said in a nervous voice, “I'm making myself a cup of instant. Excuse me if I don't offer you one, but I'm a bit rushed. If there's nothing more, I'd like you to leave now.”

I leaned back against the table, put my hands in my pockets, and said rather sternly, “Maria's room has been stripped. Am I supposed to believe that she came in here while you were out of the house and took her things away?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Victor replied reluctantly. When she turned to face me again, her glance slid away and her cheeks reddened.

I waited. Mrs. Victor's shoulders slumped, and she covered her face. “We were keeping Maria's stuff in lieu of rent,” she began to say, and then she started to cry. Tears squeezed between her eyelashes. “It's so hard, you don't understand. Everything's going wrong. The house, my husband's job. I'm sorry.”

Feeling like an asshole, I said roughly, “Show me where you put Maria's stuff.”

Stooping, her arms folded across her narrow chest, she led me to a backyard shed and flung the door open. Maria Alfred's possessions had been stuffed into two large orange garbage bags and were lying against a wall along with miscellaneous garden tools.

Without saying anything, I picked the bags up and put them in my car. I felt miserable; even the sky was clouding over. When I got behind the driving wheel, I glanced at the house. Mrs. Victor was watching from a window.

Cops know that people lie all the time. You get to expect it from everyone—not just villains and psychopaths, but from people who go to church on Sundays. Lying to cops is standard practice.

I went back to the house and knocked. Mrs. Victor opened the door about six inches, enough to show me her nose and eyes, red from weeping.

I hardened my heart and said sternly, “You're sure that I've got everything?”

“Everything. You've got everything. I swear, we weren't going to steal it.”

“Thanks, and good luck with renting your room. Next time, I advise you to get your tenant to sign a rental agreement. Standard forms are available free from the rentals branch office on Wharf Street. Check people's references too, and make sure the first month's cheque doesn't bounce before the tenant moves in. If everybody was honest, Mrs. Victor, my job would be superfluous.”

Sometimes, I really hate being a cop.

It was raining by the time I got back downtown.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The desk phone was ringing when I slung the orange plastic garbage bags into the corner of my office. Taking my time about it, I then picked up the mail littering the floor beneath my letter slot and put it on the desk. When I opened the window blinds and looked out, it was still raining. The mail was mostly junk. I wasn't ready to start poking through the garbage bags just then. To deflect my thoughts, I cracked the office bottle and poured myself a drink. Felicity thinks I drink way too much, and she's probably right.