Seaweed in the Soup (32 page)

“That's what he said? A bit of trouble? Let me give it to you straight. Lightning Bradley is the central figure in a murder inquiry. I need to find him, and soon.”

“I don't know and I don't want to know where Lightning is, Silas, because my life is complicated enough already,” she said, making a dramatic show of covering her ears and sprawling full length on the loveseat. As if accidentally, her negligee had opened. Her enormous breasts and that black triangle of hair below her belly were on full display.

I chewed my knuckles, admiring quite dispassionately Candace's crude attempts at seduction.

“I'm all yours, baby,” she whispered, beckoning me with a crooked finger. “I've had the hots for you for years. Come on, give it to me.”

I didn't want professional sex. I waved my hand with an impatient gesture. “It's imperative I track Lightning down now, Candace.”

“Aw hell, I told you, I don't know where he is,” she said, giving up on her Mata Hari act and getting to her feet. “I would if I could, but I can't help you.”

Money is always a useful gambit in these situations. I opened my wallet and removed ten twenty-dollar bills, one at a time. Candace eyed them with a carnivorous smile.

I said, “This money is all yours, if you tell me what you know.”

She lit a cigarette and then strode back and forth, smoking furiously. She said at last, “There is a little something, maybe you can use it. Lightning's a slippery cat, I don't trust him, but he thinks I do. I run a cash business.”

“Or VISA. Your ass isn't the only thing that moves with the times, as I recall.”

A thin smile appeared. “One time when we were together, Lightning didn't want to pay. He said his card was maxed out, that he'd run out of cash. It happens a lot in my business, but I don't sleep with guys on credit. They either stuff money between my tits before they leave, or there's a shouting match. The way it turned out, we had a shouting match. Then I made Lightning call a taxi. The two of us went over to this parking lot at the back of Pic A Flic Video. Do you know the place I mean?”

I nodded.

Candace said, “I stayed in the taxi. Lightning told me to wait while he brought me the money he owed. What could I do? I had no choice but to wait. I saw him walk down that narrow lane behind Pic A Flic towards that Starbucks outlet before I lost sight of him. I couldn't say where he went after that. Lightning was gone about ten minutes before he came back. I went home and that was that.”

“Just one more thing. Whose taxi was it?”

Candace shrugged, shook her head and said negligently, “I can't remember.”

“I give you two hundred bucks, and you give me the runaround? I need to know who drove you to Pic A Flic.”

“I think it was a black Cadillac taxi. One of those big old Cadillacs? You're a policeman, ask around, it shouldn't be too hard to find him,” she said, taking my money and sauntering towards her bedroom with it. Posed in the bedroom doorway with one knee bent, the other straight, one arm stretched up along the jamb, she said, “Say, big boy. Got anything left in that wallet?”

“Candace, when you walk away from me like that, your behind looks like two fresh honeydew melons.”

“Implants, it's the latest thing,” she said. “Do you like 'em?”

“I certainly do,” I said sincerely.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

I wasted a couple of days, wandering the street near the Pic A Flic shop, calling taxi companies and just generally trying to find Lightning Bradley, before Candace phoned me again. It was ten o'clock at night. I'd had a couple of drinks.

She said, “How would you like to give me another present?”

“What for?”

She said coyly, “Just on general principles.”

“With you, Candace, principle doesn't enter into it.”

“Okay, how about for value given and received?”

“As long as it doesn't involve sweaty tussling on your king-sized bed.”

“You should try it sometime. Look up at the ceiling mirrors and admire my educated ass.”

“It's not your educated ass that I'm interested in, it's your information.”

“Okay, spoilsport. Put another two hundred dollars in your pocket and meet me at Pinky's.”

“You want another two hundred, and that's it?” I said sourly. “Give me a hint.”

“I've given you a hint, darling. See you at Pinky's in an hour, don't be late,” she said sweetly, and hung up.

Unless Candace was stringing me along, it was showtime. While looking at the rain trickling down my windowpanes, I tried to make one and one equal four, gave up, and phoned Ravi. The taxi dispatcher told me that Ravi was out. I called headquarters and asked for Bernie Tapp. Second time lucky—Bernie was working late.

“It's me,” I said, when Bernie came on the line. “There's no time to explain but I need a wire, tonight. Right now, in fact.”

Bernie's answer was a long drawn-out sigh.

I said, “Time is running out, Bernie.”

Another long sigh, then, “Where are you?”

“I'm at home.”

“A wire? How about asking me for something simple? A ten-thousand-dollar unsecured personal loan, for example.”

“Just a simple wire.”

“Meet me in the tool crib, but don't make a fuss coming in because mistrustful eyes may be looking and suspicious ears may be listening. A wire will be ready when you get here. I just hope this doesn't land us both up the creek.”

I was wearing jeans, moccasins, and a logger's thick woollen shirt. My hair was growing back nicely. My face looked almost normal, and a lingering dread that the blows to my head might have permanently disabled my brain was fading.

I exchanged my moccasins for Magnum Stealths, put a shoulder holster on under a red Gore-Tex jacket, got my car keys from where they'd been gathering moss in a drawer and strapped a dagger to my right ankle. Loaded for bear, I went out. I'd been running the MG's engine occasionally to keep the battery charged. The MG started immediately. The streets were dark, wet and desolate. It was a good night for dirty tricks and a bad night for motorbikes, so business was slow at Pinky's except for a knee-walking drunk with full-sleeve tattoos on his brawny arms and a slinky woman wearing, in essence, a bikini. Of Candace, however, there was no sign. Doyle was minding the bar as usual. When he deigned to acknowledge my existence, he made an elaborate show of opening a drawer, peering inside it for a long moment, and then he was slow to take my order.

I ordered a double Chivas Regal with water on the side.

“I've just checked your tab, you owe me a hundred bucks,” Doyle said, leaning across the bar and giving me a sample of his halitosis. “It's against my principles to advance credit to the unemployed.”

I raised my eyebrows.

Doyle pointed at the club's ATM. “Your money is waiting over there, and if it's not, you are barred from here till it is.”

I drew money out of the ATM, plunked a hundred on the bar, and added another twenty. When my drink came, there wasn't any change.

I tasted the Chivas, put my glass on the bar and said, “Doyle. I'm waiting for the ten dollars that you owe me.”

Doyle scowled.

“I'm his witness. Better give him the money, Doyle,” Candace said, sliding onto a stool beside me. “Silas will need it to buy me a drink.”

Doyle's scowl deepened.

I said to Candace, “Where did you spring from?”

“We're having a party in the back room. Just me and a few very close and dear friends. Feel like joining us?”

“No thanks.”

“Do you have my little present for me, Silas?”

I handed her two hundred while Doyle wasn't looking. When Candace's champagne cocktail arrived, and Doyle withdrew to the end of the bar, she drew a scrap of folded paper from between her augmented breasts and gave it to me. Warmed by her body, the paper had an address written on it. I finished my drink and went out.

≈  ≈  ≈

I drove into a street of neat middle-class houses located near Victoria's Craigdarroch Castle and did a U-turn before parking so that I could make a quick getaway if necessary. I reached beneath the dashboard, took my Glock from its clip and put it in my shoulder holster.

The house that interested me was a 1960s colonial with white cedar siding. Four slender octagonal pillars supported its long porch. The doors and window shutters were painted pale blue. Wooden stairs creaked as I walked up to the porch and put my finger to a buzzer. After a couple of minutes, curtains moved in a side window and Lightning Bradley materialized behind the dark glass. His face seemed disembodied, like a ghost summoned up by black magic. When he recognized me, Bradley's eyes widened. A grin spread across his white face like a thin smear of black paint. The face receded into darkness. After a few seconds, the front door opened. I went into an entrance hall, where Lightning was waiting for me with a gun in his hand. I became aware of low voices in the background.

Lightning was wearing a rumpled dark navy suit and he had lost weight. I smelled liquor on his breath. Gazing at me with a mixture of hostility and apprehension, he said, “Sorry, pal, I've got to ask you to unbutton your coat and put your hands behind your back.”

Lightning took my gun away and put it in a drawer in the hall table. Patting me down, Lightning was careless. He missed the wire. His hand closed around the wallet in my pocket, but he missed the dagger strapped to my leg.

After checking my wallet for improvized explosive devices, Lightning dropped it on the hall carpet. “Now you can pick it up,” he said, with a fraudulent grin. My neck hairs prickled when I stooped for the wallet and exposed my back.

“I've been half-expecting you,” he said. “Candace told me that you might show up tonight, but you know what women are. You can't always trust 'em, can you?”

“I ought to have known,” I said, giving vent to a spasm of irrational disgust. “Candace is playing both ends against the middle, like everybody else in my goddamn life. She charged me two hundred. How much did you give her?”

“Money and fair words,” Lightning said with a widening grin.

He pointed down the hallway. “We've got a little catching up to do, you and me. So let's talk. You first, it's that room on the left.”

I preceded him into a dimly lit living room.
Jeopardy
was playing on a widescreen TV. He switched it off. “Game shows are all I watch these days. I used to like
National Geographic,
but what with one thing or another, I don't have the attention span any more. There was a show on last night, about these mist gorillas. African gorillas that live in the mist somewhere. Poachers keep shooting them, it's a shame. Why doesn't somebody do something?”

Lightning sat down in a straight-backed chair. A bottle of Bombay gin and a blue glass tumbler stood on a side table at his elbow. I parked myself on a chesterfield, facing Lightning across the room.

Lightning placed his gun within easy reach on the side table and poured himself another gin. Old acne scars that must have shattered his adolescence and poisoned the rest of his life ravaged his skin. Gravity and late middle age was giving him bulldog jowls and a corrugated neck. Some guys have all the luck. Feeling almost sorry for him, I watched Lightning sip a little gin.

He said flippantly, “So, Silas. What do you know?”

“I know how this whole mess started. I know how it will end.”

“Did you figure it all out by yourself, or did somebody have to tell you?” he said with a patronizing sneer.

“I don't put a lot of credence in other peoples' opinions, because most of what I've been listening to lately is lies. Including your lying lies.”

“Are you calling me a liar?”

“Of course, I am because you are a dyed-in-the-wool liar,” I said in a mild conversational tone. “You are a liar and a fraud. You are an asshole front, back and sideways.”

He smiled as if I'd paid him a compliment.

I said, “Let's start with when you and Constable Ricketts answered a suspicious-persons call. You were in a blue-and-white. Constable Ricketts was driving.”

“Sure. We were looking for a couple of your Native sisters who'd been spotted walking on Collins Lane.”

“When you spotted the two women, Ricketts stopped the blue-and-white, and the pair of you followed them into the bush. You lost them. Instead of just giving up the chase, which is what you did, Ricketts kept looking. You went back to wait in the blue-and-white.”

Lightning had a faraway expression. “Go on,” he said, “this is better than
Jeopardy
.”

“After a while, Ricketts called you on his cellphone. He'd stumbled across a murder. I guess you were in a hurry to join him, because while you were driving over there you ran the blue-and-white into a sports car. It was an unlucky accident, but maybe you were a little careless as well.”

Lightning nodded. “Right. I came to your office and I told you about that accident myself. Maybe I shouldn't have.”

“I remember that visit well, and you were half-right for once. The car you ran into wasn't a black Mercedes, which is what you said it was. It was a white Nissan. You should have kept the accident business to yourself, though. Still, what you told me that day and what I know now, are two different things. I know that there was more to your story than what you told me.”

“Thirsty, Silas? There's a glass on the mantelpiece if you want a drink.”

I shook my head.

“Well, I'm having another,” Lightning said, topping up his glass.

“How long have you known Tubby Gonzales?”

My question caught Lightning like a physical blow. He gave a sudden involuntary start. Gin from the bottle slopped onto the side table instead of into his glass.

I said, “Victoria's cocaine market is growing every day. Tubby Gonzales had been supplying a share of it, but nothing lasts forever. Outsiders have been watching Victoria's skyrocketing drug trade, and they all want a piece of the action. Then Tubby Gonzales did some nosing around and found out that a Big Circle Boy had just moved from Vancouver to Victoria.”