Evil Eye

by Michael Slade

  "It looks to me like an incised wound made by a sharp blade."

  "By a kitchen knife?"

  "Possibly."

  "A wound suffered by a cook?"

  "Yes, the sort of slice you get when a knife slips while cutting food."

  "The sort of slice you get when a knife slips while cutting food," Knight echoed, aiming a meaningful glance at Wilde. "Thank you, Doctor."

  The Vulture sat down.

  SKY-HIGH

  West Vancouver Wednesday, January 12, 1994

  On the passenger's seat of the stolen four-wheel drive sat the Rorke's Drift trophy box. Parked waiting, Evil Eye listened to African hatred whispering through the lid, urging the zombie to wreak revenge in Redcoat blood.

  A sea of blood.

  To which end, the psycho was advancing.

  Evil Eye's plot was taken from 1988's Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver, where Sikh terrorists paid an attendee with terminal cancer a fortune for his soon-to-

  be-fatherless family in exchange for blowing India's prime minister to bits. Tipped to the plan, and despite ■ Maggie Thatcher rebuffing their suggestion of a general I rectal search, the Force had thwarted the assassination ! just in time, though Gandhi didn't escape a subsequent ! attempt back home. This time, the Force itself was the ! target.

  Today was a dry run. To test the equipment.

  Nothing revolted Evil Eye more than a happy family.

  Like this family.

  The car was parked by the side of the road at this end of a cross-country trail on Hollyburn Mountain sky-high above English Bay. The four-wheel drive was parked further on, where Evil Eye sat in the driver's seat and watched with binoculars.

  Though snow was new to the city sprawled below, up here in Cypress Bowl it had flurried on and off since Christmas, whitening ski runs and cross-country trails. Now a slushy tumble fell from clouds so low it seemed you could reach up and touch them, which the young girl tried to do while her parents and older brother knocked packed snow from their ski equipment before lashing it to the roof rack.

  Adults in front, kids in back, the family got into the test vehicle.

  When the car began the long zigzag switchback down the mountain face to West Vancouver along the shore of English Bay, Evil Eye followed with a remote control in hand.

  The mountain road was deserted.

  Today was a workday.

  The Christmas vacation was over and students were back in school.

  Just preschool kids and their yuppie parents could fart away the morning.

  Like this doomed family.

  As the test vehicle approached the curve where the trap was set, the young girl turned in the back seat to wave at Evil Eye through the window.

  The psycho waved back with the remote control, one finger pushing the button to blow the detonators. Boom!

  went a small wad of cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine putty behind one tire, the blast spinning the family car like a whirling pinwheel across this hairpin curve, as Boom! blew another wad of putty beneath the barrier along the edge of the road, blasting the railing sky-high to open a yawning gap in the fence above the precipitous plunge down the mountainside, through which the out-of-control vehicle spun off the slippery road for launching like a shot put.

  Boom! echoed the explosion below as Evil Eye drove on.

  TROPHY BOX

  Port Coquitlam

  Pursuant to court order, two sheriff's deputies in brown uniforms drove Nick caged in back of a brown car from the Pretrial Center to the crime scene. Snowflakes drifting lazily from a somber gray sky slushed the windows, slicked the road, and curtained off the street. Half human, half snowman, Vic Knight stood at the curb in front of Dora's home. The Brownies parked where Nick parked the day his mother died.

  A Coquitlam Mountie broke the evidence seal on the back door. Paint scratched from the wood near his boots revealed where Jinx had wanted in. The house had been sealed in early December after forensic techs finished combing for clues, and hadn't been entered since. Stomping snow from his shoes, Nick stepped into the kitchen where his mom had died.

  Claws of emotion picked at the scars patching his heart. Where Mom had stood at the sink every day of his youth, preparing meals or washing dishes while he tussled with homework at the Formica table, there were ugly brown stains from her blood. The fading photo of her as a girl feeding a sty of pigs (he'd nicknamed her Piglies, a term of endearment she endured with grace);

  the canisters of Murchie's tea (Queen Victoria blend her favorite) lining one shelf; woven garlic braids from the Tree of Life Garden; wherever he looked there were signs of her. Signs of her, but never again Mom herself.

  "I want this over/' Nick said flatly. "Let's get it done/'

  Kitchen to parlor to hall to bathroom to his and her bedrooms, Knight and Craven searched the cramped pioneer house.

  "Anything missing?"

  "Not that I can tell."

  "Basement?"

  Nick shook his head. "The house is built on stones with a sump."

  "And up there?" Knight asked, pointing to a set of stairs off Dora's walk-in closet.

  Nick took a deep breath. "Mom's private space. Off bounds to me as a kid."

  We all have a decade that defines who we are—the

  ten-year stretch we'd live in if we had a time machine.

  Nick's mom was shaped by the fifties, an era she never

  left. Preteens, he stood at the bottom of these creaky

  stairs, listening to her play 45s up there while she sewed.

  Teddy Bear" by Elvis, "Ain't That A Shame" by Fats,

  'Breathless" by the Killer, Jerrah Lee. Though he was

  only three when 1960 dawned, in many ways Nick was

  a creature of the fifties, too. "Here Comes Summer" by

  Jerry Keller, "A Lover's Question" by Clyde McPhatter,

  'The Great Pretender" by The Platters, "Since I Met

  You Baby" by Ivory Joe Hunter: the songs from the

  attic still haunted him.

  "Climb," said his lawyer. So for the first time in years, Craven climbed.

  From his mother's bedroom facing Colony Farm, the closet steps ascended to the front of the house where a door opened right into the peaked attic. A bare bulb on the landing cast the only light, until Nick flicked the switch in her time machine.

  The fifties was an era of Cold War tension, H-bomb angst, redbaiting, racism, and stifling conformity. But not to Dora. For here was her collection of golden age dolls, rescued from garage sales for a buck and change: Toni, Miss Curity, Little Miss Revlon, and bountiful Barbie

  with what it takes to make a grown man cry . . . Here was her collection of cartoon watches: Mickey Mouse, Porky Pig, Howdy Doody, Popeye, and Woody Woodpecker . . . And here were her collections of brass buttons, board games, carnival glass, music boxes, playing cards, puppets, and other refugees from rummage sales. Amazing the floor didn't buckle under the weight. The peaked roof was plastered with a photo collage, yellow edges curling as time passed by. Brando as The Wild One and Jerry Lee Lewis on full-stride piano and Elvis in his gold lame suit. Crowding around these icons like groupies were overlapped photos of fashion models, all clutch coats and wasp waists and hoop skirts and saddle shoes and pink pedal pushers with cat's-eye glasses. . . .

  "Mom was a pack rat," Nick said, "who sewed consignment clothes here to make ends meet." He pointed to a dressmaker's dummy masked by shadows.

  "A farm girl?" Knight asked. "The photo of pigs downstairs?"

  Nick nodded. "Lethbridge, Alberta."

  "You were born when she was how old?"

  "Eighteen."

  "Married?"

  "Spur of the moment. She eloped at sixteen without her parents' consent. Dad was a Member, ten years older than her. Drove to Reno. Came back hitched. And never talked about him after he died."

  "When was that?"

  "Fifty-six. Suicide. Got drunk and shot himself the night I was born."

  "Strange," Kni
ght said, eyeing Dora's collage. "The prairies. The fifties. Demand to conform if married to a cop. Yet all the men on her fantasy wall are outcasts and rebels."

  Nick shrugged. "New life. Birth of rock 'n' roll. We moved here the month after Dad died."

  "From Lethbridge?"

  "Medicine Hat. That's where I was born. Mom stayed with Aunt Eleanor—she was a midwife—till after my birth."

  "Complications?"

  "The doc predicted twins. A prairie quack. He was wrong."

  "Wait a minute . . ." Knight said.

  "I already checked. I'm the only birth registered to Mom. I searched B.C., Saskatchewan, and Manitoba vital statistics, too."

  "Was Eleanor your aunt? Or your mom's?"

  "She was my dad's sister. Eight years younger than him, two years older than Mom. Died in November from a fall in the house where I was born."

  "Your mom have any siblings?"

  "An only child. Her parents were strict Mennonites and she married outside the faith. 'So never darken our door again.' "

  "She didn't remarry?"

  "No," said Nick.

  "What sort of men did she date here?"

  "None but me. Night and day she worked herself to the bone."

  "Attractive?"

  "Worry and stress ruined her face."

  "Was it she couldn't replace your dad? Or had she had enough of men? Men in the flesh"—Knight swept the collage—"if not in fantasy."

  "She was a good mom," Nick said simply.

  "So I see."

  The lawyer crossed to a battered desk besieged by teddy bears. Bears on the floor to the left were black, bears to the right were beige. The bear on the desk was half-made: sewn but not stuffed. On the wall facing the chair was a picture of Hawaii.

  "Black bears go to Africa. To Somalia," said Nick. "Beige bears go to Children's Hospital. A pastime after she quit work at Riverview last June."

  "Doing what?"

  "Laundry and food. For thirty-five years."

  Squatting, Knight pulled a mutant from the pile of beige bears. But for tufts, the fur was gone from its threadbare head, while bits of strawlike stuffing stuck through holes not patched with yarn. Both glass eyes retained an intelligent stare, and minus a black strand or two a nose tipped the worn snout, but when Knight unwrapped the baby blanket cinched under its chin, the

  bear's body had less substance than a plucked anorexic chicken.

  'This poor beat-up thing will never find a home."

  "That," said Nick, "is my teddy bear."

  "Name?"

  "Teddy Bear."

  "Now that's original."

  "Damn right," Nick said. "The original name. Teddy's bear, actually."

  Knight had his client talking, loosening up. Cops were tough nuts to crack and loath to show faults. Us and them, and lawyers were definitely them. The bear in the lawyer's hand, like those on the floor, was tailor-made to form and retrieve boyhood memories. "Roosevelt, wasn't it? Theodore, not Franklin?"

  "Turn of the century, a Washington cartoonist drew a caricature of him, gun down, refusing to shoot a bear cub. In Brooklyn, a Russian immigrant sold toys made by his wife in their small candy store. He had her sew a plush brown bear and placed it in the window beside a copy of the cartoon with a label Teddy's Bear. Worried he needed White House permission to use the President's name, he screwed up courage to write Roosevelt. Teddy replied he couldn't imagine what good his name would be in the stuffed-animal business, but the merchant was welcome to use it. For the psychological good of the world, what President ever made a better decision?"

  "Your mom tell you the story?"

  "Yeah," Nick said.

  "Your bear was her model?"

  "Sewed when I was born. She gave me two. Beige and black. The black one's lost."

  "How'd he get so battered?"

  "Insecure childhood and lots of love. Nothing will see you through times of turmoil like a faithful teddy bear."

  Knight passed him the tattered relic. "Meet your new cellmate."

  "Didn't you have a teddy bear?"

  "No," Vic said.

  "That explains why you're now a lawyer. All that festering boyhood emotion crying to get out. Repressed,

  frustrated, you beat up those caught in the playpen for bully boys."

  A rare thing happened. Vic Knight laughed. "A teddy bear will make me a kinder and gentler lawyer? Just what you need."

  Kneeling, Nick rummaged through the pile of beige bears like a kid sorting toys in a toy box. "Mom would be pleased if I salvaged your soul with a bear sewn by her—"

  He stopped.

  Turned.

  And scowled at Knight.

  "Her files are gone. The cabinet was here." Clearing bears from the floor revealed parallel scars gouged beside the desk. "Mom kept a file for the current month downstairs in the kitchen drawer. In it went bills and letters, whatever came by mail. Each month, she juggled money to get us through. A new file meant the old file was stored here."

  "How far back did the files go?"

  "I have no idea. But the cabinet dated back as far as my memory."

  "The letter found in the kitchen drawer was in her current file. If something stored up here compelled the killer to club her to death—"

  "Club ..." Nick said, with a quick blink the lawyer caught. Trained to detect the telling lie, the pregnant pause, the lost memory that suddenly flashes through a witness's mind, Knight knew his probing had just struck gold.

  "The trophy box," said Nick.

  VICTORIA CROSS

  Of all Imperial decorations, the Victoria Cross—the VC—carries the highest prestige. In 1856 the only medals awarded to British fighting men were for good conduct and long service. The queen wanted recognition of "Officers or Men who have served Us in the presence of the Enemy and shall then have performed some single act of valor or devotion to their Country." She decreed "neither rank nor long service nor wounds nor any other circumstance or condition whatsoever save the merit of conspicuous bravery or devotion shall be held to establish a sufficient claim to honor."

  From the beginning, since it was first struck at the end of the Crimean War (best known for that fateful Charge of the Light Brigade), the bronze medal has been cast from Russian guns seized at Sebastopol. The medal, suspended by a 1V4" red ribbon, is worn on the left breast and takes precedence over all other awards. The VC is a cross pattee with the Royal Crest (Lion over Crown) in the center, above a semicircular scroll with the words "For Valor." Engraved on back is the name of the bearer and date of his brave deed.

  Queen Victoria insisted the medal be forfeited on conviction for "any infamous Crime." Gunner Collis of the Royal Horse lost his for bigamy. Forfeiture stopped in the reign of King George V: "Even were a VC to be sentenced to be hanged for murder, he should be allowed to wear the VC on the scaffold."

  The most VCs awarded for a single action were eleven to the defenders of Rorke's Drift. The most VCs won by any regiment in battle were seven by the 24th Regiment of Foot at Rorke's Drift. . . .

  "Fittingly, I found the box on Victoria Day," Nick told Knight in the attic. "I was nine, inquisitive, and alone in the house. The rule was I could play anywhere but up

  ,

  here. I yearned to know if the attic hid secrets about my dad. . . .

  Nick stood in his mother's closet and gazed up the stairs. Flicking the wall switch at the bottom spilled light from a bare bulb down the steps. Creak . . . creak . . . creak ... his feet began to climb.

  Topping the stairs, he paused to squint into the dark attic, and froze when someone stared back from the shadows. Locked in a Mexican standoff, neither moved . . . until Nick tugged a cord within to flood the peak with light. A dressmaker's dummy in a scant bikini silently laughed at him.

  Mom's attic was crammed with relics from rummage, jumble, and garage sales. Beside the padded female form on a wooden stand stood a new Singer sewing machine and an old treadle model. Supplied from crates of castoff clothing yet to be
cut up, fabric scraps were laid out on a cutting board. Used patterns from yesteryear poked from boxes lined with bobbins and odd spools of thread, behind which, stored in the darkest corner, Nick found a dusty, cobwebbed trunk labeled tedmond "ted" craven, rcmp.

  The key in the lock unlocked it.

  The boy raised the lid.

  On top was the brown, wide-brimmed Stetson of the Mounted Police, a Smith & Wesson .38 pillowed on the Red Serge tunic beneath. Caressing the service revolver his dad used to shoot himself, Nick stuck the handgun, fugitive style, in the waistband of his jeans. Then he carried the Stetson and tunic over to the dressmaker's dummy.

  A stack of 45s hovered on the record changer. Nick played them as he dressed the dummy in his dad's Red Serge. Whirling the overhead fan brought the tunic to life. Tilting the Stetson forward hid the featureless face. "Hi, Dad," he whispered.

  In eighteen and fourteen we took a little trip,

  Along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty

  Mississip

  We took a little bacon and we took a little beans.

  And we met the bloody British near the town of New

  Orleans . . .

  Returning to the trunk, he removed the rest of the clothes. Beneath lay pictures of Redcoats—Mounties?— unlike those Nick had seen. Redcoats comforted a dying man. Redcoats fired on civilians without guns. Redcoats fought black Africans. Redcoats galloped the Musical Ride. At the bottom of the trunk, Nick found an oblong box.

  We fired our guns and the British kept acomin'. There wuzn't nigh as many as they wuz a while ago. We fired once more and they began to runnin' On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico . . .

  rex Lancelot craven was carved into the ebony lid. Engraved on the brass plaque below was rorke's drift. Inside were two compartments lined with velvet. On red plush in the upper half lay a tarnished lunger, the twenty-two-inch socket bayonet of the British Colonial Army. Pinned across the blade was a bronze medal. In feeling the tip of the lunger, Nick drew blood.

  They ran through the briars and they ran through the

  brambles

  And they ran through the bushes where a rabbit

  couldn't go.