Accidental Deaths (A Willows and Parker Mystery)

by Laurence Gough

  Frank said, “Hold on a minute. You told me Roger was your father.”

  “My stepfather. Sort of. Number six. Mommy chewed men up like they were potato chips. Couldn’t find the right one, I guess.” Lulu gave Frank a look so bold and direct it seemed to squeeze the air right out of his lungs. “Not like me,” she said softly, and turned the page.

  A guy on a BSA. One leg hooked over the gas tank, arms folded across his black leather chest.

  “Daddy number two,” said Lulu. “Walter. He was a self-employed thrill-seeker. He’d find a small town on a river, set up a portable ramp and folding bleachers and fly his bike over the water to the other side. You could watch for free, or spend a couple of dollars on a seat and get an autographed picture thrown in. He crashed about once a week, on purpose. He said it was to keep the crowds up, but Mom believed he wiped out for the pure joy of it. He was my first real dad, the first one I ever remembered anything about, I mean. Mom told me that stuff about Trevor and the train. I was five years old and working the bleachers selling motorcycle key chains the day Walter broke his neck.”

  “Killed, was he?”

  Lulu nodded, and turned the page. Marriage in the House of Mirrors.

  Frank said, “What’s the deal?”

  “That’s my mother. Beautiful, wasn’t she? But kind of philosophical. Oh well, nobody’s perfect.”

  Frank didn’t get it.

  “All those reflected images,” said Lulu, “which one is real? Who can tell? Let’s say you go out to dinner. You’re with the person, and she’s with you. But maybe both of you are somewhere else.”

  Frank nodded. Now he understood. Mostly, wherever he happened to be, he wasn't there at all. For example, when he was waiting for the Hertz guy with the nose hair to process his rental, he was thinking about a movie he’d recently seen, reliving a scene. Gene Hackman was in a parking lot with a pretty girl and her boyfriend. Hoods were after them. Gene was scuffling around, yelling at the chick and her date, trying to find out why the hoods were shooting at them. It wasn’t the way Frank would’ve played it. At a time like that, who cared about motive? People were shooting at you, take a hike. At as little as twenty feet, a pistol in the hands of the average shooter was almost useless. This he knew from personal experience, and from sharing Kodak moments with cops and guys in the joint. Frank knew a black guy from Toronto someone had tried to take out in a toilet stall. Barely room in there to pull the trigger, they’d fired six shots at the guy and all the damage done was he got singed by the muzzle blast.

  On the other hand …

  It was as if she’d been reading his mind. Or maybe his hand had come up … the scar tissue had become like a medallion to him, a Saint Christopher’s medal, something he turned to in moments of crisis.

  “That’s a bullet wound, isn’t it?”

  Frank shrugged. “No bullet was ever recovered — it was what they call a through and through. But a guy took a shot at me, pointed a gun and pulled the trigger and down I went. So, yeah, it’s fair to say that’s what it is, a bullet wound.”

  “And there’s one in your back.” She stroked the hard ridges of his belly. “And another in your stomach. You were shot three times and left for dead, is that what happened?”

  It was strange, the way he didn’t mind that he was wrong about her, that she was asking about his scars after all.

  Frank told Lulu about the shootings, the three separate and extremely distinct times in his life people had pulled a trigger on him. The chest wound had been a cop doing his job. Case closed. No hard feelings. The one in the small of his back he remembered best of all, even though it’d gone down a long time ago and of course he hadn’t even seen it happen. He was at a friendly high-stakes cribbage game, couple of jerks decided to make some easy money. First night of his life Frank’d gotten along with the cards. Almost eight grand sitting in front of him and he’d lost every dime. Not that he said a word. Put his hands on his head and froze, just like they told him. Problem was his size, how big and tough he looked. Freaked out the punks and they drilled him just to make sure. “What about this one?” She touched his stomach.

  “My innocent bystander story. Happened a few years ago. A woman shot me.” Frank smiled. “If you want to know was it an act of passion, the answer is no. She was aiming at the hotshot asshole I worked for at the time, guy named Gary Silk. Made a forty-five calibre mistake, and hit me instead.” Frank sketched out his life in servitude, told Lulu all about Gary and how he treated women, what happened to the poor sap in the end.

  “How could you work for a creep like that?”

  “I needed the money.” Frank turned the page. There was a black-and-white shot of Lulu’s mother in sequins and parasol, balanced on a high-wire. He grinned and said, “So that’s where you got your agility, huh?”

  Lulu blushed. Frank’d never had to deal with an embarrassed albino before. It was a unique experience. Reminded him of a weird thing his own mother used to do — cut white long-stemmed geraniums from a neighbour’s garden where they grew through the fence and arrange them in a vase filled with fresh water, add food colouring until the water was stained red. Over a period of several days the white flowers would turn pink. This was exactly what happened to Lulu, except remarkably speeded up.

  Lulu turned the page, kept turning pages. There were lots of dead stepfathers. They were on number five when the bedside phone warbled like a heavily sedated canary. Frank got there first but Lulu said, “It’s for me,” and snatched the phone out of his hand, flipped her ghostly white hair out of her ear and said, “What is it now?” in a voice suitable for grating cheese.

  Frank sipped at his champagne, inhaled a noseful of bubbles. He viciously pinched his nostrils shut to stop himself from sneezing.

  Lulu said, “Are you sure?” There was a pause and then she added, “No, I’m not in the least bit interested. And I don’t think I ever will be, either.”

  She handed the phone to Frank. “It’s for you; hope you’re in the mood to chat with a California slimeball.”

  Frank said, “Hello, Newt.”

  Junior Newton said, “Frank, it’s my dime. Put your fuckin’ hand over the phone if you can’t stop the bimbo from making insulting remarks.”

  “Nice of you to call, Newt.”

  Frank could hear traffic sounds in the background. The blare of horns, screech of tires. Newt was calling from a pay phone, which meant he was worried again about his lines being tapped.

  Newt said, “So, how’s it going?”

  Frank said, “Not bad. Had Nova Scotia lobster for supper. Tastes kind of like chicken.”

  “That your waitress, picked up the phone?”

  Frank said, “I should be back tomorrow night, if it goes okay.”

  “Tomorrow night?”

  “Assuming no problems.”

  “I want receipts for everything, Frank. Don’t think you can bill me a hundred bucks for a lobster dinner and then sneak over to McDonald’s for a burger and fries. I’m not as old as I look, but on the other hand, I wasn’t born yesterday. Know what I mean?”

  “I doubt it.”

  The operator broke in. Newt said he didn’t have any more fuckin’ change, baby. The line went dead.

  Frank tossed the phone on the bed.

  Lulu said, “I’m not going to hang up, just in case he decides to call back.”

  “What’d he say to you?”

  “Nothing you’d want me to have to listen to a second time.”

  Frank said, “Want to look at some more pictures?”

  Lulu backhanded the remains of their meal off the bed and stretched out on the bed.

  “Like this pose?”

  “Nice,” said Frank.

  “How about this one?”

  “Even better.”

  Frank said, “Roll over.” The Lycra was seamless, impenetrable. So tight and slippery smooth you couldn’t get a grip on it. There had to be a zipper, but where was it?

  6

  Newt
loved the endless sunshine and the easy money and easy women, the way the ocean looked at certain times of the day. But that was about it — everything else in Southern California could shrivel up and die for all he cared. The smog was killing him. All those hundreds and thousands of people on the freeways burning up millions of gallons of gas, polluting the atmosphere. They even made jokes about it; how they didn’t feel comfortable if they couldn’t see what they were breathing. Crazy. He downshifted into second, gunned the Porsche’s engine and pulled up against the curb.

  He checked the pay phone first, to make sure it was in working order, then trotted across the street to a liquor store for some quarters. The clerk said he didn’t have any change to spare. Newt squinted at him and snatched a bottle of Wild Turkey Kentucky bourbon off the shelf. The tab was nineteen dollars eighty-five cents. He threw a fifty down on the counter. The clerk gave him three tens and a dime and a nickel in change.

  Newt said, “Okay, I’m a legitimate customer, you made a sale, now gimme five bucks’ worth of fuckin’ quarters, you asshole.”

  The clerk stared at him.

  Newt thrust a ten-dollar bill in the clerk’s face. “Hurry up, move it, I gotta make a phone call!”

  The clerk pointed out the door. “There’s a Bank of America three blocks down. Or maybe it’s five or six, or eight, or even more. You’ll see it on the left. Or the right. You can’t miss it. Or maybe you could.”

  Newt scooped his ten and the brown paper bag full of Wild Turkey off the counter. He held the bottle low, by the neck.

  The clerk crouched slightly and reached below the counter, grasped the .45 and thumbed back the hammer. He’d shoot right through the counter’s cheap fibreboard kickwall. It’d take him no more than half an hour to sweep up the blood and splinters, slap a little masking tape and a fresh coat of paint over the holes. Half an hour, and nobody would ever know the difference.

  Newt saw the look in the clerk’s close-set eyes and recognized he was in deep trouble, up against a guy who made six bucks an hour and bought his clothes at Sears and figured he was in control of the situation. Now, why would that be, unless the dude happened to be a trigger-happy psycho with a gun? But what were the odds, how many trigger-happy psychos could there be? In a Los Angeles liquor store, one hundred per cent. Newt backed out of the doorway, into smog-raddled sunlight and off the premises. He grinned, and gave the clerk the finger.

  The clerk sighed. Skinny little bastard knew the law. He popped him now, cops’d kick his ass all the way to court. He eased the safety back on, dropped the gun and grabbed a pen.

  Newt’s Satan-black Porsche Cabriolet was parked by the pay phone. He climbed in and red-lined it and popped the clutch. The car leapt away from the curb. The clerk ran out on the sidewalk and wrote down the licence number on the back of his hand, used the pay phone to dial 911.

  “There’s a black Porsche on Mulholland, heading east. A ragtop. Vanity plate is NEWT. Yeah, that’s what I said. NEWT. Asshole’s whacked out of his gourd, a boozer. He waved a gun at me.”

  A disembodied voice requested his name and number. The clerk knew the drill.

  Hang up fast.

  7

  Willows scooped beans into the grinder, gritted his teeth and pressed the button. The stainless steel blades chopped the mix of Colombian and Dark French into a fine powder. He dumped the coffee into the filter, inserted the filter into the machine and turned it on. The toast popped. He lightly buttered both slices and sprinkled on a mix of cinnamon and sugar, poured a dollop of milk into his coffee mug — it saved dirtying a spoon.

  Bachelor habits. He took his breakfast out on to the sundeck, eased into an old-fashioned deck chair with a maple frame and a canvas seat in faded stripes of yellow, red and green. He balanced the mug on the rail and the plate of cinnamon toast in his lap. The sky was bright and clear, but it was early; the sun was low on the horizon and it was still cool, in the high sixties. At this time of year, mid-summer, it might hit ninety before the day was done. Willows bit into the toast.

  The neighbour's Siamese cat skulked in the unmowed lawn. A Stellar's jay shrieked horribly at the cat from its perch high up on a branch of a plum tree, and a fat black squirrel, its fluffy tail held low for balance, trotted confidently along the high-tension wires running parallel to the lane.

  His neighbour's dog wandered down the lane, sniffed the base of a telephone pole and then continued on his way.

  Urban wildlife.

  Willows wished he was working a creek somewhere in the interior of the province or on Vancouver Island, hip-deep in clean water, stalking a two-pound rainbow. It was late July and his holidays were scheduled for the last three weeks of August. No chance of any fishing, though. His children were flying in from Toronto; it’d be the first time he’d seen them since Christmas. Sean was an outdoor fan, but Annie was a city girl through and through.

  Willows sipped his coffee. The squirrel crouched and then leapt from the power line across three feet of air and vanished in the thick greenery of a plane tree.

  Seven o’clock in the morning, a beautiful day, the only blemish in the pale blue sweep of sky a baby cloud the sun would quickly burn off.

  Willows finished his toast and drank the last of his coffee and went inside to pour himself another cup. The newspaper thudded against the front door.

  When he came back out on to the deck, the cat saw the rolled-up newspaper in his hand and scooted between the fence pickets into the safety of home ground. Willows tossed a crust of bread into the yard. The jay tilted its shiny blue-black head and then swooped low, snatched the crust into its beak and was back in the plum tree so fast it was almost as if it had never moved.

  The front-page story was about the death of a local hooker — the eighteenth unsolved murder of a prostitute in the city during the past eight years. Another hooker, a friend of the dead woman, seemed to think that if it was doctors who were getting bumped off, the police would work harder to solve the crimes.

  Well, maybe. But on the other hand, doctors tended not to wander the streets selling their bodies, mixing it up with violence-prone types like drug dealers and pimps, the kind of scum who had to pay cash to fall in love.

  The phone rang.

  Willows had left his watch in the bathroom, but if he leaned back in his chair he could see the electric clock on the kitchen stove through the open door. Quarter past seven. The phone rang again, strident and demanding. It was odd how the sound of the ringing changed according to the time of day.

  It occurred to him that it could be his wife, Sheila, calling from Toronto, where it was already quarter past ten. He went into the kitchen and picked up.

  Parker said, “Jack, I’ve got a flat. Can you give me a ride downtown?”

  “You’ve got a flat tire and you want me to change it for you. If that’s what you’re saying, Claire, speak up.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying, Jack. What I’m saying is that I’ve got a flat tire. And yes, the spare’s flat too.”

  Willows said, “I’ll be there in about three-quarters of an hour. A little past eight.”

  “I’ve got some paperwork to catch up on. Tell you the truth, I was hoping to get in a bit sooner.”

  “If you’re in a hurry, maybe you better call a cab.”

  “A taxi’ll cost me ten dollars, Jack, and you drive right by me on the way to work!”

  “A little past eight,” said Willows. “Meet me at Burrard and Eleventh.”

  Parker often thought that female detectives and bank employees and maybe lawyers must shop at the same stores, because the narrow range of clothing that was considered suitable for women in the three professions was virtually identical.

  Today she was wearing a lightweight dark blue poplin suit, the skirt cut full so she could stretch her legs, in the event she had to pursue a criminal at full gallop. White blouse. Dark blue shoes with sturdy heels. A black purse. She kept her gun, a snubnose .38 Special, in a low-profile clamshell holster clipped to her skirt
in the small of her back.

  Parker was sitting by the kitchen window, drinking coffee, idly looking out at the streetscape, when she saw Willows’s Oldsmobile waiting for traffic to clear before he made the turn at the end of the block. She emptied her cup into the sink, grabbed her purse and hurried out of the apartment. Part of the reason she and Willows got along as well as they did was because they were both always in a hurry; neither of them liked to be kept waiting.

  Willows had installed seat belts in the Olds; Parker buckled up and then turned down the radio, which was tuned to an all-news station. She said, “I got a phone call this morning.”

  “Somebody wants to clean your carpets.”

  Parker smiled, shook her head.

  “Chimney?”

  “Cherry Ngo. At least, it sounded like Cherry. I’m pretty sure it was him.”

  Willows braked for a stop sign, shifted into first gear. A cop on a Harley cruised through the intersection. Willows watched him go by. Never catch him riding one of those beasts. He hit the gas, turned after the bike. The motorcycle was moving at a steady twenty-eight miles per hour. Willows signalled, pulled into the next lane and swept past. The cop ignored him.

  “Terry O’Brien,” said Parker. “He recognized the car, probably figured you were trying to sucker him into pulling you over.”

  “Tell me about the call.”

  “I was in the shower. The answering machine picked up. He didn’t identify himself; all he said was that he had something he wanted to talk about and he’d try me again at work.”

  “Interesting.”

  Parker nodded. “Yeah, isn’t it.” Like virtually all cops, she had an unlisted phone number.

  Farley Spears was the only homicide detective at his desk when they arrived at the third-floor squadroom. A red light was flashing on Eddy Orwell’s phone and Farley was staring at it but making no move to answer.

  “Problem?” said Willows.

  “It’s Judith. Must have an automatic redial; she’s driving me crazy.”