Seaweed in the Soup (23 page)

When the dispatcher came on, I said, “This is Silas Seaweed. I'm in the Clarion Towers on Humboldt Street. At the moment I am standing in the corridor outside Tomas Gonzales' apartment on the twenty-third floor. Tomas Gonzales is inside. He has been murdered. Better get Serious Crimes over here right away. Don't bother to call CDI Tapp, because he's ill, sick in bed.”

Maybe the dispatcher was a poor listener, and maybe he was just following protocol, because Bernie Tapp showed up before the Serious Crimes mob did. Bernie had probably self-medicated with something powerful, because apart from a slight lethargy, he was his normal self. He found me outside the building downstairs, pacing back and forth under the eyes of those precast concrete gargoyles, while I reoxygenated with clean, unscented, unfiltered fresh air.

“Jesus Christ,” Bernie said, after looking at what was left of Tomas Gonzales. “There's a serial killer out there somewhere.”

“Unless it's a copycat crime. Here's another thing. Gonzales might have been offed by more than one assailant. He was a big powerful man. Tough. No easy pushover for somebody working on his own.”

“Unless Gonzales was sucker-punched. Taken suddenly unawares. That way a girl could have done it. A kid, even. Clobbered Gonzales with a bottle, say, and then taped him to that chair.”

“A woman didn't do this, a kid didn't do this. It's impossible.”

“Impossible?” Bernie said. “Nothing is impossible.”

I shook my head. “A man did this, Bernie, and you know it.”

“Jesus Christ,” Bernie said. “Let me tell you something. Women can stand the sight of blood better than any man. Women get pissed with people the same way men do. They bear grudges, get depressed. Grievances build like steam pressure builds in a kettle. The next thing you know, the lid blows off. Something snaps, and she grabs a rolling pin or a bottle. She looks at the back of his head, and smack! He's a goner, just like Gonzales here.”

“Not like Gonzales. I agree that in a fit of rage a woman might knock somebody out with a bottle. But she doesn't then drag him into a chair, tie him down with duct tape and then torture him for hours.”

“Silas,” Bernie said impatiently. “You're talking about a normal woman. I'm talking about a nutcase. The Beast of Belsen was a woman.”

“What? You're pissed at the killer and now you're pissed at me too?”

Bernie summoned a weary grin. He rubbed a hand across his forehead and was about to say something when a voice said, “Excuse me, Chief. No offence, but shouldn't you be wearing booties?”

It was a crime-scene tech, one of the bunnysuiters. He was standing in the doorway, and he was right. Bernie and I ought to have been wearing booties instead of contaminating the scene of the crime with our dirty size twelves. Bernie and I left the apartment and waited in the corridor until Nice Manners arrived.

Visibly annoyed, giving me the icy stare, Manners asked, “What are you doing here?”

“He found the body, Nice,” Bernie growled. “Keep your shirt on, for chrissake.”

After that, I kept quiet and tried to stay under Manners' radar while Bernie brought him up to speed. A constable handing out blue booties, white paper suits and rubber gloves to whoever needed them offered them to us. Bernie and I declined. We had seen all we wanted of Tomas Gonzales and his apartment for the time being.

Manners, pulling a bulky white paper suit over his day clothes, said, “Raymond Cho: dead. Maggie Bradley: dead. Larry Cooley: ditto. In addition, three people are dead due to that arson at Twinner Scudd's club. And now Tomas Gonzales is dead.”

“If it is Tomas Gonzales,” Bernie demurred. “It probably is, but you can't be certain by looking at what's left of his face. I've never seen the likes of it.”

Manners zipped his white suit up. Stooped down to put his blue booties, on he grunted breathlessly, “Seven murders in less than a week. Are these cases all connected in some way?”

Bernie shrugged. I didn't say anything.

But Manners' question had been rhetorical. He straightened up and went on, “I'm wondering if these murders are all tied to that first killing, the one on Collins Lane? Raymond Cho was involved with drugs, and he was murdered with brutal violence. Ditto Larry Cooley. Ditto Tomas Gonzales. Ditto Maggie Bradley.”

Bernie shrugged. “Maggie wasn't a drug trafficker.”

“Not directly, perhaps,” Manners said. “But who's to say that her husband wasn't? After all, we found traces of cocaine in Bradley's house, and in his Crown Royal.”

“Lightning Bradley is a dumb asshole. He's a drunk, which means he's an addictive personality, so he probably fooled around with cocaine once or twice,” Bernie responded. “I don't think he was a trafficker. Besides, cocaine is ubiquitous. Nowadays there's traces of it in a majority of used 20 dollar bills.”

“Ah yes, well, it's not quite that simple,” Manners said. “Forensics now tells us that the cocaine traces we found in Cho's BMW had been cut by the same ingredients and in the identical proportions to the traces found in Bradley's Crown Royal. They were all from the same batch.”

Bernie nodded.

Looking at me, but without meeting my gaze, Manners added, “Chief Tapp tells me that you interviewed Twinner Scudd, Larry Cooley and Gonzales recently. So who do you like for this, Sergeant?”

I said without hesitation, “I didn't interview Cooley, but my guess is Twinner Scudd, although I think that the Big Circle Boys and the Red Scorpions should be added to your list of suspects.”

Manners responded by pulling the paper suit's hoodie over his head, and going into Gonzales' apartment.

“Twinner Scudd?” Bernie said doubtfully. “Don't tell me you're coming around to my way of thinking?”

“It makes no difference what I think, Bernie. Manners doesn't put any weight in my opinions.”

Bernie let that one go. He said “So long,” and went home. It had been a very long day; I probably should have done the same.

The sky was full of thin whirling clouds when I drove back to my office, thinking and trying not to think about Tomas Gonzales' unlovely corpse, and his grisly encounter with the finality of death. The smell of death was in my nostrils; the taste of death was in my mouth. Rather than gargling with mouthwash, I brought out the office bottle and poured myself a stiff one.

Then I logged on and spent a few minutes investigating Larry Cooley. That was something I ought to have done much earlier. Cooley's real name was Millray.

Larry Millray was a self-made character who had made several unsuccessful attempts to reconstruct himself with the faulty psychological building materials that nature had given him to work with. He was booted out of Queen's, then Dalhousie, when they found out he'd registered with forged transcripts. After that he lowered his sights, and took a welding course at a community college in Red Deer, Alberta. Millray passed bottom of his class and then worked on a northern pipeline project until inspectors took a closer look at his work and he was let go. He had two convictions for assault, the second of which had earned him six months in minimum security. When he came out, he got into the condo time-share racket. A few scandals later, and another minimum-security jolt, he changed his name to Cooley (his mother's maiden name) and then somehow slithered his way into P.G. Mainwaring's enchanted circle.

There were no voice mail messages; no snail mail lay on the floor underneath my letter slot. There was just me, and that miserable night. I keep a portable radio in my desk, and I switched it on to lighten my mood. It was tuned to KPLU, a National Public Radio jazz and blues station broadcasting out of Tacoma. B.B. King was singing about the bro in Korea—the war that nobody remembers any more. The Obama/McCain election was in its death throes, and a newsbreak came on. Palin and her cohorts were accusing Obama of being a closet terrorist, an actual socialist and a secret Muslim. I was already sick of America's election slanders and phantom campaign issues, so I turned it off in disgust. I had the whole silent building to myself, or thought that I had, until I heard water running along pipes. I padded soft-footed along the corridor to my private washroom and used a key to let myself in. The room was empty, although water swirled in the bowl of my toilet. Evidently, I wasn't the building's only occupant. That ghost was back. I stayed in the corridor, thinking and waiting. After a while, footsteps clattered down the wooden stairs from the second floor. A pair of gorgeous female legs came into view, then the rest of her.

It was P.G. Mainwaring. She looked tired, not as vivacious as I remembered. Dark circles ringed her eyes, but she was still exceptionally lovely.

“Miss Mainwaring,” I said. “What are you doing here at this hour?”

“I've been working,” she said obscurely, coming to a stop at the foot of the stairs. “I should ask you the same question?”

“I've finished work for the day. Now I'm drinking whisky. Would you like a cup?”

“It may be time to enlarge your social repertoire. All you do is offer me alcohol.”

“If I could get you to drink some alcohol, I'd extend my range.”

She was holding herself stiffly. “A drink might be fun, although I don't normally drink distilled beverages from cups. There's always a first time, I suppose,” she said, relaxing her rigid stance. “Let me have a look at your office, first.”

She moved towards me with easy graceful strides, wearing an unbuttoned green raincoat that showed off a curvaceous figure beneath a black blazer, a cream turtleneck sweater and a tartan skirt with a lot of the same green in it. I couldn't read her eyes. The hem of her coat brushed against me as she went past into my office. She had on a perfume, something unusual, but I'd smelled it before, and I wasn't sure that I liked it.

“By the way,” I said. “Thanks for inviting me to your memorial dinner. I'm sorry I didn't make it, but I was tied up.”

“You can't be too sorry because you didn't RSVP me either.”

“As I say, I was tied up, but I'd have enjoyed the dinner.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Perhaps unconsciously, she leaned against my desk with one hip out, like a hooker. I studied her and noticed for the first time that age was bringing faint wrinkles to her cheeks and tugging down the flesh under her chin.

PC was out on the prowl. The only things for P.G. Mainwaring to admire were my crummy desk, crummier visitors' chairs, pathetic metal filing cabinets, a drab fireplace, those pictures of British queens and some missing-kid notices.

“How long since this room has been painted?” she said, as regal in her disdain as their Britannic majesties glaring down at us from their frames. “And you should start using room freshener, because I smell cat.”

“It smells of cat because a cat is the principal resident, I'm just her designated victualler. As for the paint, the landlord's a cheapskate. This office hasn't been painted in years.”

I pointed at the swiveller behind my desk. “Somebody shot me in 2005. I was sitting in that very chair. The gunman was across the street, hiding on the roof of Swans pub. Most of the bullets went into the walls instead of me. Even then, the landlord wouldn't spring for a complete paint job. All he did was spackle the holes and do a bit of touch-up.”

“How dreadful for you,” she said. “Were you badly injured?”

“Not terribly. The doctors had me on morphine for a while, which was actually quite pleasant.”

“And I suppose pretty girls thronged to your bedside, signing their names on your plaster casts, bearing grapes, flowers?”

“Well, yes, a few of them did. One of the pretty girls was called Sarah Williams. She's a friend of mine. I think you must know her, because she's mentioned your name to me at least once, although not recently.”

P.G.'s eyes widened.

I went on, “When I got out of hospital after being shot, I was on paid disability for a few months, which was another plus. I went down to Nevada to recuperate and play a little poker. I even won a few bucks. All in all, being shot turned out to be a positive experience.”

“Did you find the man who shot you, and send him to prison?”

“Yes and no. I broke his nose, put him on a boat and sent him to South America.”

“How extraordinary,” she said, adding in an offhand manner, “You mentioned Sarah Williams. Is she a friend of yours?”

“I run into her occasionally.”

“Accidentally, or on purpose?”

“Never you mind,” I said jokily. “And by the way; that perfume you're using. Is it patchouli?”

“How clever of you to notice. It's an old-fashioned perfume, but then, I'm an old-fashioned girl.”

I showed her my pearly whites. “Why don't you sit down? Make yourself comfortable, and I'll pour you that drink.”

She wrinkled her nose. “I don't think so, because I have a better idea. Follow me.”

This is getting better and better, I thought, trotting dutifully behind her, admiring those lovely legs and swaying hips as P.G. Mainwaring preceded me up the stairs to the second floor.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I seldom visit the second floor. Occasionally, when I tramp up the stairs to visit Nobby Sumner's roof garden, for example, I glance in passing along narrow corridors and see frosted glass doors leading to anonymous offices. For the most part, the building's tenants are obscure underachievers like me. Dicey manufacturers' agents, bitter ambulance chasers, a woman who deals in paper ephemera, a podiatrist, jaded astrologers and the like, along with dot.com startups that hang on for a year or two and either go broke or make good and then move on to more ostentatious addresses.

P.G. Mainwaring led me to an inconspicuous door under the stairs. The world is full of surprises. Instead of an office, we went into a large windowless private library with fat leather armchairs, cherry furnishings and sumptuous rugs. When she flicked a switch, sconced wall fixtures lit a banker's desk with a soft golden glow. Ship paintings and oil portraits shared the walls with shelved books. The dark red carpet was luxuriously deep. A door led off to a washroom. Hidden behind a folding screen was a tiny kitchen with a minute sink, a kettle and a two-burner hotplate of ancient design. The ceiling was decorated with elaborate plasterwork urns and swags. After I had helped her off with her raincoat and hung it on an antique brass whatnot, P.G. Mainwaring went to a corner and swung a hinged panel aside to reveal a small wet bar.