Seaweed in the Soup (33 page)

“How did Gonzales know that?” Bradley inquired negligently.

“Hell, Bradley, you know the answer to that as well as I do. The VPD is full of blabbermouths. Cops who'll call the press when something juicy happens. Traitorous cops with friends on the street . . . ”

Lightning tried to interrupt me, but I kept talking. “The drug scene is wall-to-wall with finks. The ordinary crackster will sell his own mother for a five-dollar rock. Somebody blabbed, Tubby got to hear about it, and he traced Raymond Cho to that house on Echo Bay. Raymond Cho, alias Ronnie Chew. Tubby Gonzales murdered Cho by cutting his throat.”

“Cho's isn't the only throat that Gonzales cut.”

“I know, Lightning. I know more than you think I know. So just be patient, I'll get around to that in a minute.”

A lopsided sneer pulled Lightning's mouth out of shape, but he kept quiet when I said, “Tubby Gonzales just happened to be watching Cho's house on the night that Cho brought two young Native women home. Gonzales bided his time till the women left. Then he went in. Gonzales suspected that Cho had cocaine stashed in the house. Gonzales tortured Cho until he told him where the cocaine was. Then Gonzales killed Cho and drove away. Things spiralled out of control almost immediately.”

Lightning was gazing at me with rapt attention. He said, “Keep talking.”

“Things went out of control because the car that Tubby was driving ran into your blue-and-white. Gonzales lost control of his car, and it veered off the road. You escaped injury although your car sustained heavy damage. When you stopped and checked, you found Gonzales behind the steering wheel. I assume he was either knocked out or dazed temporarily. You found Cho's cocaine in Gonzales' car and stole it. Coke worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. You left Gonzales to fend for himself and drove to the murder scene. How am I doing so far?”

“You're doing fine, Silas. I couldn't have described things better myself.”

Lightning wasn't looking at me then. He was staring into a deep dark hole. His gun was within easy reach of his right hand. I could see the safety catch, and it was off. He may not have been listening when I went on, “Unfortunately for you, Gonzales probably wasn't totally unconscious when you robbed him. He either knew then or figured out later that you had taken the cocaine. Gonzales wanted it back, so he went to your house. You weren't there. Gonzales found your wife Maggie instead. She was helpless and alone, in a wheelchair. He tortured Maggie to death.”

“Yes, he did,” Lightning said. “Gonzales tortured my wife. He thought Maggie would know where the cocaine was, but she didn't know.”

Lightning's voice sounded normal, but a single tear squeezed from the corner of his left eye and trickled down his cheek. “Maggie didn't know anything about the cocaine. It was one of the few things about me that she didn't know. Maggie knew about my womanizing, she knew a lot of bad stuff about me.”

“Yeah, right,” I said derisively. “You've done a lot of bad things in your time.”

“I came home and found Maggie dead. It was horrible,” Lightning said. “I knew that Gonzales must have done it. But what goes around comes around, and then it was my turn. I caught him unawares in his apartment. I treated him the way he'd treated my wife. I enjoyed every minute. I enjoyed watching him bleed and squirm, I kept him alive as long as I could, till his heart stopped.”

“I know you did. I can even understand that part of the story, in a way. But I don't understand the rest of it. Maybe you'd like to tell me.”

He looked at me without making eye contact, and shrugged.

“Go on, tell me,” I said, “try to make me understand.”

“It was a dirty trick I played on you, Silas. I'm sorry.”

“You're sorry?” I said, revulsed. “What did I do to deserve it?”

“Nothing,” Lightning said, pouring himself another drink. “You didn't do a goddamn thing to deserve it. But I was a little crazy back then, Silas. I thought it was my way out. I thought I could get away with it.”

Disgust must have shown on my face. I stood up and took a step towards him. Lightning picked up his gun and said, “Make another move towards me and you're dead. You're more use to me dead than alive.”

I sat down again.

“You were wrong about some of the details. Cho had four kilos of cocaine in his house,” Lightning said. “It was worth a fortune, a million bucks at least, if I'd only known how to market it properly. I had the coke, but it became a curse. I was trapped. I knew that Bernie at least would figure it all out and get me eventually. Then I had an idea. I threw Bernie a patsy.”

“Yes, me. I was to be your patsy.”

“Yeah, why not?” he grinned lopsidedly. “It was either my ass, or yours.”

“You're the one who mugged me from behind when I came ashore off Twinner Scudd's boat. You're the one who put coke up my chimney.”

“Correct. After stashing the coke, I called the
Times Colonist
. The TC called Nice Manners. Manners hates your guts, he was only too ready to believe the worst of Silas Seaweed. Manners would love to hang this whole case around your neck, because you're not everybody's best friend, are you?”

“You're crazy.”

“Crazy or not, I've made plans. I'm flying out of here tomorrow. Me and Candace.”

“Does Candace know about that yet?”

“Not yet. But she knows that I'm worth big money, which is what interests her. She'll do whatever I want her to do.”

He was right. I said, “Manners wants to see me fall, but Bernie Tapp doesn't. I cut corners, I tell the odd fib, but I'm not a murderer. Bernie will get you eventually. You might be on top of the world now, but the only way you can go is down. You'll spend the rest of your life running and worrying. Worrying and fretting. Because every time you hear a knock on the door, it might be the police.”

“I've given that a lot of thought too,” Lightning said.

With the gun in one hand, he reached into his pocket and brought out a wrapped candy. He struggled ineffectually, trying to get the wrapping off with one hand, and then he gave up trying and threw the candy across the room for me to catch. “Here, Silas,” he said. “I'm not all bad. Have a breath mint, maybe it'll sweeten you up a little.”

I caught it on the fly, threw it back and said, “I'd prefer to have some of that gin now.”

Lightning's lopsided grin reappeared. “There's only a few drops left, sorry.”

He kept the gun pointed at my chest, but didn't argue when I went across the room, grabbed the gin bottle, and went back to the chesterfield with it.

“Remember what else you said to me in my office one day, Bradley? You told me that I was one of the few people in the force who ever treated you right.”

“Yeah. I know, and I'm sorry. It's like I've always said, Silas. You're a White man inside.”

Sighing, Bradley picked up the candy and put the gun on the side table while he removed the wrapping. He put the candy in his mouth, said, “Well, here goes. It's been nice knowing you,” and chomped down on it.

Lightning's face reddened almost instantaneously; he slumped backwards.

I leapt from my chair and was across the room in a second, trying to open Lightning's jaws and take what was left of the candy out of his mouth, but the tendons of his face and neck were already rigid with seizure.

Lightning was dead.

I opened windows to dissipate the smell of burnt almonds and went outside to the porch.

It had stopped raining, and the stars had come out. Bernie Tapp and other officers appeared from the darkness where they had been staked out.

“Lightning was ready to go. He took cyanide, I couldn't stop him,” I told Bernie.

“Good riddance because the wire worked, we got every word,” Bernie said. “It's just as well.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

I wanted us to go by road, but Old Mary Cooke and Chief Alphonse were adamantly opposed. So I arranged to borrow Charlie Mangrel's aluminum skiff and we went by boat instead. I got down to the Warrior wharf at ten o'clock, as arranged. Old Mary and Chief Alphonse showed up only a half hour late, but an hour later Little Sam the medicine man was still missing. I went looking for him.

I found Little Sam asleep on a stool in his workshop. Across his knees was a slab of cedar upon which he had used black and white pigments to represent a rudimentary human figure. Approximately three feet long, a foot wide and an inch thick, the figure had a black hat, a white shirt with black chevron stripes, and black trousers. It had an eyeless face and no mouth. The figure had no arms either. Instead of feet, its legs terminated in a single wedge-shaped point. It was an earth-dwarf manikin.

The four of us left the Warrior Bay jetty at about noon and we headed out towards Echo Bay. Buffleheads rode the waves like corks. The tiny ducks had come back again after breeding and spending the summer on northern Vancouver Island. Buffleheads are monogamous and brave. They can live through ten cold winters. Sometimes I recognize the same pairs diving for minnows and crustaceans around Colby Island. It would be nice, I thought, to be like a bufflehead and have a steady reliable girlfriend.

The Salish Sea was calm for a change. When the sun came out, the water shone like mercury, although things were a bit choppier in the tiderips around Trial Island. We reached Echo Bay without getting wet, and I carried Old Mary ashore on my back. She weighed a ton.

Tudor Collins was waiting for us on the beach. He helped Chief Alphonse and me to half-drag and half-shove Old Mary Cooke up the ravine and over the rimrock to the petroglyph site.

When Old Mary Cooke got her breath back, she sat on the ground with her skirts covering her legs and told us a story about wolves.

In addition to Little Sam's earth-dwarf manikin, we'd brought a shovel, a wooden coffin and the shaman's medicine bag that Ricketts had found months earlier.

Little Sam threw bones in the air. Old Mary Cooke, Chief Alphonse and Tudor Collins watched attentively as I dug a hole with the shovel, crawled underground into the sandstone cave and picked up the mummified corpse. I could feel loose stick-like bones moving under his leathery skin when I carried him out to Old Mary Cooke. She wrapped the corpse with cedar-bark cloths, and then I placed him carefully in the coffin along with his medicine bag.

“He won't get out of that coffin in a hurry,” Tudor Collins observed as I nailed the lid down.

I dragged the coffin into the cave, propped the earth-dwarf against it and then, after a last look at the pictographs painted on the cave's sandstone walls, I crawled out and blocked the entrance with tamped-down earth.

“There won't be nobody meddling with that fellow no more,” Little Sam announced portentously. “That earth-dwarf will see to that.”

Old Mary Cooke gave Chief Alphonse, Little Sam and me small pieces of white bark cloth as a remembrance of the dead. She gave Tudor Collins a ten-dollar gold piece for the inconveniences he'd been subjected to.

“Little Sam is right. That old shaman will rest easy now,” Old Mary Cooke told us. “He won't be reaching out to people no more.”

≈  ≈  ≈

I put a fresh shirt and tie on, brushed my uniform, spit-polished my Magnum Stealths, adjusted my cap to a rakish angle and glanced out the window. Brisk winds and heavy waves were delivering fresh loads of winter firewood to the Warrior Band's Beach. A long ribbon of black funnel-smoke trailed a freighter inbound from the Pacific along Juan de Fuca Strait. Rays of sunlight slanted through breaks in the clouds above Colby Island. Farther north, storm clouds showed where it was raining hard on the Malahat.

I went out to the MG, drove to police headquarters and failed to find an empty stall in the underground parkade. I had to back out onto the street and pay two bucks for a temporary parking slot outside the Memorial Arena. Two lousy bucks. Money out of my own pocket, because I no longer had an expense account. It seemed like a bad omen. One more thing I'd miss about being a cop.

Bernie was in his office, feeding pigeons. It helps to lower his blood pressure. Bernie acknowledged my arrival with a grunt and tapped the Raymond Cho murder book that was lying on his desk.

“I've got to hand it to you, pal. You're a dope about most things, but you were right all along about Tubby Gonzales and nearly everything else. We couldn't have broken the case without you. Congratulations. Too bad Mallory's gonna boot your ass. You could have rejoined the detective squad full time. Put your abilities to better use.”

I sat down and thought about Tubby Gonzales. Bernie opened a leather pouch and filled a corncob pipe with dark shag tobacco.

“Tubby wasn't very clever, but he was too clever for his own good,” I remarked sagaciously.

“Yeah, there are a lot of half-smart people in this town.”

“Just so I'm sure, Bernie. There's nobody left who thinks that Ruth Claypole or Maria Alfred had anything at all to do with Raymond Cho's death?”

“Hell no, even Nice Manners accepts that now. Tubby Gonzales killed Cho. Ruth and Maria just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Gonzales planted that slavekiller club to muddy the waters.”

Bernie tamped tobacco into the bowl of the pipe with his thumb. “Tell me again how it went, just so I've got it fresh in my mind.”

“This is the way it went. The girls had gone when Gonzales entered Cho's house. Gonzales murdered Cho after torturing him to find out if he had any cocaine. Gonzales made off with four bricks, and those bricks ended up with Lightning Bradley.”

Somebody knocked on the door. “Come!” Bernie shouted.

Mrs. Nairn came in. “Superintendent Mallory is ready for you now, Chief.” To me she added, “We're going to miss you, Silas. Good luck.”

“Luck won't enter into it,” Bernie said crustily.