Accidental Deaths (A Willows and Parker Mystery)

by Laurence Gough

  “Be right with you.” Frank kept counting, reached sixty, and flipped Rog over and held his weary grey head clear of the burbling water. Rog lay quietly in Frank’s arms, unresisting. For the moment, he was content merely to be alive.

  Frank said, “I want my room back.”

  “Fuck you,” said Rog weakly.

  “I mean right this minute,” said Frank. “Long as I’m staying in this wonderful hotel, I don’t want nobody but me and your beautiful daughter sleeping in our bed. You might even think about sealing the room after we leave. Making it into a kind of shrine.”

  Rog struggled to sit up. Frank let him. Rog said, “You think she’s beautiful?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Unusual,” said Rog. “Or maybe interesting … ”

  Frank pushed him away. “Beat it. Go clean up the mess you made; get me back my room.”

  Rog scrambled out of the pool. Splashing and dripping, he made his getaway.

  Frank said, “Sorry. Lost my temper.”

  “Don’t apologize. It doesn’t suit you.”

  Frank grinned, tilted his head and shook some water out of his ear. “Rog doesn’t want you getting mixed up with a guy lives out of a suitcase. Can’t say I blame him.”

  “That’s not exactly the worst thing about you.”

  Frank nodded. True enough. He said, “Want some more champagne?”

  “No thanks. I’m going to go take a shower.” Marble stairs led out of the water. Lulu paused with a foot on the top step, looking down at him.

  What a pose. Frank was glad he’d decided against the Speedo. He said, “You mad at me?”

  “Chlorine’s murder on my skin. If I don’t rinse myself off, I’ll get a rash like you wouldn’t believe.” She held out her hand. “Come with me. I wouldn’t want Daddy to see me alone and think we’d had a fight.”

  The red message light was flashing when they got back to the suite. There were dark footprints on the carpet. Frank checked the closet. More wet carpet. His suitcase had been put back exactly where he’d left it, his shirts and the grey sports jacket neatly rehung. Good old Rog had done what he was told without even taking the time to get changed.

  Lulu peeled out of her bikini, sat down on the bed and dialled the operator. She listened for a moment and then hung up and turned to Frank. “Newt’s left half a dozen messages. He wants you to call him at home.”

  Frank said, “Yeah, okay.”

  Lulu stretched out on the bed. She smiled at him and said, “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Lust.”

  “That’s your lust look?”

  “I got two or three of them. This one’s been my most successful, over the years.”

  “Irresistible, is it?”

  “So far.”

  Lulu smiled. “Well, it certainly seems to be working on me. C’mere a minute, Frank.”

  “What about the chlorine?”

  “We’ll think of something.”

  Afterwards, Frank made the call. Home for Newt could be any one of several addresses, but the house at Laguna Beach was the best bet, so Frank tried there first.

  Newt answered on the third ring. Without preamble, he said, “You’re surprised you got through to me, right? My answering machine broke. A new one’s on the way, but it ain’t here yet, so what can I do?”

  Frank said, “You been watching George Raft movies again?”

  “Maybe. Why?”

  “You called me, remember?”

  Newt had to think about that one. Frank could hear the waves pounding the beach. Or maybe it was the sound of his boss’s brain in high gear. Newt was a wealthy man but not particularly powerful or smart. Inherited money. Sometimes it was a blessing, sometimes it was a curse. Without it, Newt’d probably have a job at a car wash somewhere, if he was lucky.

  Newt said, “I expected to hear from you by now. You got a problem?”

  “Nothing serious.”

  Lulu had left the bathroom door open. She turned on the shower.

  Newt said, “What’s that noise, Frank?”

  “It’s raining.”

  “In the middle of the summer?”

  “Hey, this is Vancouver. People go down to the beach to grab some tan, they take two things — a paperback and an umbrella.”

  Lulu began to sing “Mack the Knife.” She had a real nice voice, even better than Bobby Darin.

  Newt said, “Somebody singing?”

  “Right across the street” said Frank. “Listen, I’m out of quarters, gotta run.”

  “Be there much longer?”

  “What, here at the phone booth?”

  Newt shouted, “Fuck!” into Frank’s ear. Frank heard a grunt and then glass shattering. Newt yelled, “Lemme tell you this, Frankie! Your sense of humour is the only sense you got, and you ain’t quite funny enough to make a living!” Newt breathed raggedly into the phone as he struggled to get himself under control. After a moment he said, “You gonna be staying in Vancouver much longer?”

  “No way. It’s been raining ever since I got here. A regular flood. There’s people drowning on the sidewalks, it don’t even make the papers.” Frank let his voice get serious. “Couple more days, maybe three.”

  “That’s an expensive hotel, Frank. I checked it out. Cheapest room they got is a hundred-twenty a night.”

  Frank didn’t see the point of getting into another argument.

  “Gotta be running up a tab,” said Newt.

  “I’m a professional. What you wanted, remember? A guy who could get the job done nice and quiet. Jeez, I’m cruising around town in a Ford. A two-door. No sun roof or nothing. Gimme a break.”

  Newt sighed wearily, an exhalation of noxious gases that Frank knew all too well. Stale Marlboro cigarette smoke. Scope mouthwash. Mexican beer. Frank recoiled, reflexively jerked the telephone receiver away from his mouth.

  Newt said, “You give me a fuckin’ break, Frank. Stop spending my hard-earned money and get it over with and come home.”

  Frank said, “Listen, it ain’t … ”

  Newt hung up.

  Click.

  Just like that, the miserly little twerp.

  Frank gripped the receiver in both hands and rotated his wrists in opposite directions. Chunks of plastic hit the walls and ceiling, ricocheted off the window.

  “How’re we going to call room service to tell them we need a new phone?” said Lulu, from the bathroom doorway.

  “It’s okay, I think I can fix it or we can get a new one.”

  Lulu giggled. “You’re a funny guy, Frank. Want to go shopping?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “You do?”

  “Is something terrible gonna happen?”

  “Maybe.”

  He watched her dress. She put on a pink blouse with a high neck, a full-length white summer skirt of a material light and frothy and translucent as the champagne they’d had in the whirlpool. White panties. No bra. She made up her face as if it were a mask; when she was finished Frank didn’t know what to think. It was her but it wasn’t her, it was weird. She looked as if she were terribly sunburnt, raw. She used something like a pencil to draw a pair of dark eyebrows across her skin. Glued on dark eyelashes that were like tiny pushbrooms without handles. Added lipstick that turned her mouth into a bruise. The way she worked, so slow and deliberate, it was like she was an artist drawing a self-portrait on the paper-white canvas of her body. Frank was bewitched. He watched her add mirror sunglasses, a mauve wig and wide-brimmed pink straw hat.

  When she was finished, she turned to him and said, “How do I look?”

  “Good, good.”

  Frank was pretty sure he could see the shape of her breasts through the thin silk of her blouse. It made him feel restless and cranky, to think that any fool could look, any fool could see.

  “Something wrong?”

  “The shirt … ”

  “Blouse.”

  “It’s kind of … ”

  “Revealing?” />
  “Yeah.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  Frank said, “To be blunt, I got to tell you I don’t like it.”

  “Don’t worry. Remember, anybody can look, but only you can touch.”

  Frank decided to let it go. He said, “I happened to pass you on the street, I doubt I’d recognize you.”

  “That’s the idea, honey-pie.”

  They took the elevator down to the lobby, strolled past the front desk and model steam-engine. Frank looked for Rog but didn’t see him. As they stepped through the automatic doors and on to Robson Street, Lulu handed Frank a white parasol. He popped it open and held it up to shield her from the corrosive sun. They crossed Howe and walked up Georgia past the skateboarders, fountain and the pair of big stone lions flanking wide granite stairs that led to a cul-de-sac; huge doors that would not open. Legions of sweaty tourists risked a gallery of frisky pigeons to climb those steps, try the doors and find them forever welded shut. It was an architectural joke not even the locals understood.

  The light on the street, reflected off a thousand car windshields, was dazzling. Lulu guided him through the glare towards Eaton’s Mall. She wanted to get him a watch. Frank said he didn’t need a watch — he already had one.

  Lulu said, “When you wear a Rolex, people look at you and know that you’re a success.”

  “What do I care what people think?”

  Lulu stared solemnly up at him. “Sometime soon, let’s buy a book on outer space. One with lots of pictures, so you can show me what planet you were born on.”

  “Fine,” said Frank, smiling.

  They took an escalator up to the mail’s second level, strolled through the shiny brass portals of a jewellery store, the name over the door, Wexler’s, scrawled in brass letters two feet high. The man behind the counter was in his late fifties or early sixties, chubby and balding, dressed in a dark grey suit, grey shirt with button-down collar, a tie in wide dark-blue and maroon stripes. He smiled and said, “May I help you?”

  Lulu adjusted her mirror-lensed glasses. “We’re looking for a Rolex. Gold, no diamonds. You Mr. Wexler?”

  “Paul Wexler.” The guy produced a tiny brass key, unlocked a glass display case. Frank glanced casually around. Polished glass display cases took up most of the floor space. The carpet was pale bronze. Everything in the store was gold, or gold-coloured. The walls were covered in paper that looked like sheets of gold. The glass display cases reflected slivers of gold light. A piano played waterfall music from hidden speakers. The air was still and cold. Wexler’s icy fingers helped Frank with the lizard strap of his Seiko, slipped the Rolex over his wrist.

  “It looks very good on you, don’t you think?”

  “How much?” said Lulu.

  “Thirteen-five.”

  Thirteen thousand dollars for a watch? Frank’s wrist stung.

  Lulu’s credit card fluttered across the counter and dropped to the floor at Wexler’s feet.

  Lulu said, “I am sorry.”

  Wexler bent to retrieve the card. Lulu winked at Frank. Wexler came up frowning.

  “Excuse me, this … ”

  Lulu snatched the card out of his hand and punched him on the nose. The jeweller staggered back, eyes wide with shock. There was a smear of blood on his upper lip. He reached for his handkerchief. Lulu turned to Frank. “Better deck him before he hits the alarm.”

  Frank caught Wexler on the chin with a hard right. The jeweller folded like a cheap accordion and vanished behind the counter. For a moment his handkerchief marked the spot where he had stood. Lulu plucked it out of the air, used it to wipe stray fingerprints from the glass counter. She scooped up Frank’s Seiko.

  Frank leaned over the counter. Wexler’s mouth was open. His chest rose and fell steadily.

  Frank said, “He’s gonna be okay.”

  “Good for him.”

  As they rode the crowded escalator down to the lower level, Lulu said, “How long is he going to be out?”

  “Five minutes, somewhere in there.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Maybe less. It’s a nice watch, but you can pick one up on the street for five hundred bucks. I mean, I sure ain’t gonna kill anybody for it.”

  “We better get out of here.”

  “I’m glad you got a plan,” said Frank. “For a minute there, I thought we were gonna have to take it one step at a time.”

  “Think we can get back to the hotel in five minutes?”

  “Easy,” said Frank, “but there’s no hurry. Wexler’s gonna be groggy as hell, probably have a mild concussion. It takes a lot out of a guy, getting kayoed. By the time he gets his act together, dials nine-eleven … ”

  “We should’ve ripped the phone out of the wall, is that what you’re telling me?”

  “The operator’ll ask him if it’s an emergency. He’ll start yelling at her. Lose his temper. It’ll take at least ten minutes for the cops to show up, maybe longer. From their point of view, what’s the rush? There’s no chance they’re gonna catch anybody. We’re long gone, and they know it. Besides, they don’t care if they get us.”

  There was a security guard near the Georgia Street exit, but he had his back to them, his eye on a Japanese girl in skin tight jeans and a halter top.

  Lulu pushed the door open. Frank wished she’d let him do that for her. He kind of enjoyed it. She said, “The cops don’t care if they catch us? How can that be?”

  Frank had to back up a little. “Yeah, they care. But not as much as they ought to. See, there’s nothing to motivate them, no sympathy factor. They'll never be able to afford to buy one of Wexler’s thirteen-thousand-dollar watches, and they know it.”

  He moved around to Lulu’s left and popped open the parasol. She smiled at him, snuggled up close.

  “And also,” Frank continued, “they’d never say it out loud but they gotta be thinking that if a guy carries a million-dollar inventory and is too dumb and too cheap to hire a minimum-wage clerk for backup or even spend a few bucks on a security camera, then he deserves everything he gets.”

  “How do you know there wasn’t a camera?”

  “First thing I looked for.”

  There was a tourist bus parked in front of the hotel, diesel engine pushing black smoke across the sidewalk. Frank folded the parasol. If this was his hotel, he’d tell the dumb-ass drivers to turn off their engines or park somewhere else.

  The automatic doors snapped open with a flourish of glass and polished mahogany. The restaurant was to their right, and then the bar. Frank was thirsty, but guided Lulu towards the bank of elevators because he figured it was probably a good idea to get her out of those Deep-South clothes and wig. He jabbed at a button with his thumb. The elevator opened wide to receive them.

  Frank held Lulu in his arms as they were carried imperceptibly upward. Her wig was askew and her eyes overflowed with tears.

  Post-robbery syndrome. Frank had seen it many times before.

  Despite the crooked wig, swollen eyes and scarlet cheeks, nose full of mucus, banshee wail of distress and flood of salty tears that drenched his new shirt, Frank thought she was absolutely stunning.

  Why in hell would Rog grudgingly acknowledge that his stepdaughter was unusual- or interesting-looking but refuse to admit the obvious — that she was beautiful, a stunner?

  There was no room in Frank’s heart for that old saw about beauty being in the eye of the beholder.

  It never occurred to him that for the first time in his rough-and-tumble life, he wasn’t spending every last minute looking out for himself. He’d fallen head-over-heels in love, but due to his complete lack of previous experience, failed to recognize the symptoms.

  9

  Mel Dutton exchanged the 50-mil for the 35-mil wide-angle, shot half a dozen frames and then took out his pen and noted the case number, date, subject, type of camera, lens, film used and shutter speed and f-stop in his photo log.

  Willows stood there, waiting patiently for him to get the job
done. He'd shared enough crime scenes with Mel to know that there was no point in trying to hurry things along. Dutton didn't react well to pressure. He had a tendency when pushed to push back or, if rank made that impossible, to turn surly, slow down to the point where people were gritting their teeth. He considered himself an artist, and over the years had slowly cultivated what he conceived to be an artistic temperament. Willows had visited Dutton’s home, had a beer with him and admired the beautifully framed colour photographs that covered his walls. Dutton had talent, all right. Especially if you got a kick out of looking at gruesome close-ups of people who’d died violently and bloodily.

  Dutton exchanged the Nikon for a 4 X 5 format Pentax. He loaded the camera with Kodak Plus-X, a fine-grained black-and-white film, then attached it to a small wooden tripod. He adjusted the length of the legs and placed the tripod so the camera was directly above a footprint etched in blood. He placed two folding wooden rulers next to the footprint, the

  first ruler parallel to the long axis of the impression, and the second adjacent to the heel print, at right angles to the first ruler. He was the only photographer he knew who didn’t use a metal tripod. Metal was cheaper and much less heavy; a major consideration when you were packing fifty or more pounds of equipment to a fifth-floor walkup. But Dutton always used a wooden tripod and never intended to change. If you asked him why, he’d tell you it was because wood was less subject to vibration. But the truth was he believed wood to be artistic.

  Kneeling, he peered through the Pentax’s viewfinder. Light from the restaurant’s window fell on the footprint at a sharp angle, creating a pleasing pattern of shadows and highlights.

  Dutton moved the tripod six inches to the left. He said, “Would you mind holding that pose for maybe another twenty minutes or so, kid?”

  Parker glared at him. He ignored her, bracketed the f-stop as he power-wound through a dozen frames. He straightened and his knees creaked ominously. He said, “Handsome, wasn’t he?”

  Parker said, “Why don’t you ask him out, Mel. He probably wouldn’t say no.”

  Dutton laughed, took a couple more shots.

  “You going to be much longer?” said Willows.