Accidental Deaths (A Willows and Parker Mystery)

by Laurence Gough

  Reikerman flushed.

  Willows said, “Oh, and one more thing … ” Reikerman stared at him.

  Willows smiled. “Don't look back.”

  10

  Frank was amazed to discover what a jar of creamy white paste and handful of Kleenex could do for a girl’s complexion. By the time she came out of the shower, less than half an hour after the big heist, Lulu’s pale flesh was a whitish vapour, hardly more substantial than compacted fog, and her hair was the shimmering silvery colour of bleached candy floss.

  There was a darkening patch of skin in the hollow of her throat, though, where Frank had smooched with a little too much passion.

  She caught him staring and said, “I bruise easily, don’t I?”

  Frank nodded. He was conscious of the gold Rolex on his wrist; the weight made him feel a little off balance.

  Lulu finished towelling herself off and wriggled into a midnight-blue Lycra bodysuit, the space-age stretch material spangled with dozens of glossy five-pointed gold stars. She turned her back on Frank and lifted her hair out of the way. “Zip me up.”

  Frank did as he was told.

  Lulu turned to face him. She held his hands and looked him in the eye. “Are you mad at me?”

  Frank shrugged. “Not exactly.”

  “I’m a spontaneous sort of person, Frank. But I’ve always been willing to learn from my mistakes. Tell me what you think I did wrong, okay? Let’s talk it over, clear the air.”

  Frank said, “Never shit in your own back yard.”

  Lulu’s eyes widened. She lifted a hand to her mouth. Mock shock. Or maybe it was the real thing. She said, “Excuse me?”

  Frank said, “There’s jewellery stores all over town. It wasn’t smart to pick one so close. What if the guy finishes talking to the cops and decides to stroll over here to the hotel and have a drink in the bar, try to wash away the shakes?”

  “He’d probably go to the bar in the Georgia, it’s closer and cheaper.”

  “That ain’t the point. The point is, he could come in for lunch. Or maybe to make a deposit in the bank down in the lobby.”

  Lulu shook her head. “No, he’d do his business at the Commerce in the mall. That’d be a lot safer, he wouldn’t have to go outside at night, risk the streets.”

  Frank rubbed his jaw. He said, “We ain’t on the same wavelength. What I’m trying to get across to you is that Wexler was too close. Like a neighbour. He could bump into you at any time. Then what?”

  “You tell me.” Lulu let go of Frank’s hands. He couldn’t tell if she was pouting or getting ready to have a good cry.

  There was a purple tub chair on castors by the window. Frank went over and sat down in it and put his feet up on the window ledge. “Probably he’d trot over to the nearest phone and call the cops. And the cops would arrest us and throw us in jail.”

  “They’d have to catch us first.”

  “I doubt that’d be much of a problem for them. What d’you think, they’re gonna give us advance warning? ‘Hi, we got a warrant, we’re on our way over.’ Is that how you think it works; they call ahead, give you time to tidy up the apartment?”

  Lulu said, “Please don’t be sarcastic. It’s mean and it isn’t fair.”

  “What happens,” said Frank, “is the door caves in and all of a sudden the room’s full of cops pointing guns at you. And that’s it. Game over.”

  He looked out the window at what he could see of the city. He wondered how many crimes were going down right that minute. Not just big stuff, armed robbery and so on, but even teeny-weeny crimes like stealing a pen from the office, or taking an extra ten minutes at lunch. Hundreds of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of scams. It was something he believed, a truth he held tight. Everybody was a thief. Everybody.

  Frank tore the filter off a cigarette, cranked his Zippo and inhaled deeply. He said, “Know what’d happen next, after they booked us and got our fingers inky and told us not to say cheese and snapped our pictures?”

  “No, Frank. What happens next?”

  “Rog would spend some of his dope money on a lawyer, arrange your bail.”

  “That doesn’t sound so terrible.”

  Frank said, “You weren’t listening. I said Rog would bail you out. Me, he’d leave right where I was.”

  “He would not.”

  “Maybe you don’t think so, but you’re wrong. He’d leave me to rot, and he’d do it for two good reasons. First, he’d blame me for the robbery, figure it was my fault.”

  Lulu said, “I’d tell him what happened. That it was my idea, not yours.”

  “He wouldn’t believe you, not for a minute. And I wouldn’t blame him.”

  There was a noise out in the corridor. Shouting. A door slammed shut. Frank saw Lulu’s body stiffen, the leap of fear in her eyes.

  He said, “Second, Rog’d figure that if he paid my bail, I’d skip town and he’d forfeit, lose his five grand or whatever. Which means I’d be stuck in remand until I went to trial, unless Newt took pity on me, which is very unlikely.”

  “How long would that take, to go to trial?”

  Frank said, “Six months, if I was lucky.”

  “Six months — you’d miss Christmas!”

  Frank said, “With my record, I’d miss a couple of Christmases, at least. You wore a disguise, but Wexler’d pick me out of a lineup like a maraschino cherry off a fudge sundae.”

  “You’re a good man, Frank.”

  Frank said, “Huh?”

  “So patient with me.” She smiled. Her teeth were translucent, her gums the soft pink of bubble gum. “I guess it was pretty irresponsible, what I did. Next time we’ll get it right. Case the joint, and all that stuff.”

  “There isn’t gonna be a next time.” Frank squashed his cigarette butt out in the ashtray for emphasis.

  Lulu sat down in his lap, snuggled up, put her arms around him and held him tight. “I just loved the way you leaned over the counter and punched him on the nose. Like it was all in a day’s work. You were so casual, so relaxed.”

  “Chin,” said Frank. “I hit him on the chin.”

  “He was out on his feet, wasn’t he? I saw his eyes roll up in his head. It must be a weird feeling to get knocked unconscious.”

  Frank said, “What if he’d bashed his head against the floor and got brain damage, couldn’t talk right, slurred his words or whatever? What if I’d killed the poor guy? That’d be pretty ironic, wouldn’t it — doing twenty-five years for stealing a watch.”

  “God, they probably wouldn’t even let you keep it, would they?”

  Frank said, “A long time ago, when I was hardly more than a kid, I had a short career as a pro boxer.”

  “What did they call you?”

  “They called me Frank Wilder.”

  “The Wild One.”

  A lucky guess, but it struck home. Frank ducked his head. “Yeah, they called me that for a while.”

  Excited, Lulu bounced up and down in his lap. “What happened? Tell me about it!”

  “I had eight fights. The first five times I climbed in the ring, my opponent went down in the first minute of the first round, the first time I hit ’em.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “First punch. A roundhouse right. Pow!” Frank made a fist and demonstrated his style. “Five fights, and then my contract was picked up by a guy named Herb Munsch. Herb figured he had a hot property. He spent some money on me, invested in sparring partners and steaks. The next two fights it was just the same. First round, first punch. Pow! and down they went.”

  “Were you ever on TV?”

  “Herb pulled some strings, got me a bout on TSN. If I did okay, they were gonna broadcast the fight in the States. Big time.”

  “God, how exciting!”

  “For the big fight, Herb bought me a new outfit. Green trunks with white stripes and a pair of matching shoes, white with green tassels.”

  “You must have looked incredibly handsome. The women wer
e all over you, weren’t they?”

  Frank shook his head. “Herb wouldn’t let ’em near me.”

  “Good for Herb.”

  Frank smiled, a slow remembering. Some of the women had been a lot smarter than Herb, as it happened.

  “What’s so funny?”

  Frank said, “I go in against the guy and right away I know I’m in trouble. I’m throwing everything I got at him but I can’t get through his defence. Meantime, he seems happy enough to just sit back, let me wear myself out. The crowd’s booing and tossing stuff in the ring. I’m mad, confused. Five seconds into the fourth round, I wind up for a punch and he hits me with a right jab and down I go. That’s it.”

  “What? You lost the fight, you let him beat you?”

  Frank said, “I was too slow. I was strong, but not fast enough, not for the pros. You wondered what it felt like to get knocked out. Did I see stars, or a bunch of bluebirds flying around in circles, going tweet tweet? What there is, is nothing. I was out cold for almost three minutes. The crowd went nuts. A lot of guys lost a lot of money on me, and weren’t too happy about it. But that was Herb’s problem, not mine. I spent the night in emergency. They thought my jaw was broken. I had X-rays, they even gimme a CAT scan. The next morning, Herb comes around to pick me up, takes me out to lunch at a real nice restaurant. While we’re eating he tells me that right after the count, as I’m lying there out cold on the apron, he jumped into the ring with a gun in his hand. He’d dropped fifty grand on me, and all he could see was red. Figured I’d thrown the fight. If I’d been faking it, he told me, he’d have shot me right there in front of everybody.” Frank shrugged. “And that was that.”

  “The end of your career.”

  “Yeah. I worked for years as a bouncer, and got by because people mostly left me alone because of my size, and I usually got in the first punch. I still had the old magic — if I did have to hit a guy, down he went. But the jaw, it looks good, but it’s solid glass.”

  Lulu said, “They don’t have any bouncers here in the hotel. Not what they call bouncers, anyway. There’s security, though. Mr. Phil Estrada’s the man in charge. Maybe you’ve seen him around. He wears three-piece suits and is always smiling and looks as if he just came from the barber’s, which he probably did, because Daddy told me one of Mr. Estrada’s perks is unlimited free haircuts at the shop in the mezzanine, and he gets a trim three times a week, Saturdays and Mondays and Wednesdays. So I guess if the hotel had a problem, he’d be the one to take care of it.”

  “It don’t matter where you go,” said Frank, “there’s always a guy who specializes in problem solving, quieting things down.”

  “Phil gets complimentary manicures, too. But Sheila refuses to do him more than once a week.”

  Frank said, “It’s a handy skill to have, the ability to make people cool down and behave reasonably. There’s always work to be had. You can make a decent living, and it ain’t all that dangerous, most of the time.”

  “I like danger. It’s good for the soul.”

  “But bad for the heart,” said Frank, who’d been there and back, and knew the territory all too well.

  Lulu’s instinct was to argue with him, but she made an effort and managed to hold her tongue. Frank had a melancholy look on his face. She wondered what he was thinking. It never did much good to dwell on the past — it couldn’t be changed no matter how strong your needs. Part of the reason she’d been attracted to Frank was because he seemed like a man with his feet on the ground and his eyes on the horizon.

  But what was his reason for spending time with her?

  She knew what she looked like. People, men and women alike, couldn’t take their eyes off her. But it wasn’t because she was exotic, an endangered species, fragile and beautiful and rare. It was because she was strange, because she was weird, a circus freak, different.

  She said, “Let’s get out of here, go downstairs and have a drink.”

  The phone rang. Frank stared at it for a moment as if he’d never seen a phone before and had no idea what it did or why it would make such a strange sound.

  Lulu said, “You going to answer it?”

  Frank said, “It might be somebody I know.” He moved, and Lulu slipped off his lap. He said, “Yeah, let’s go down to the bar, get a drink.”

  The soundproofing was excellent. When Frank shut the door to the room, the noise of the phone was immediately cut off. But Lulu somehow knew it was still ringing, silently pursuing them, and she felt that as long as she and Frank were in the hotel, the unknown caller would let the phone ring on and on, that the ringing would never stop.

  In the bar, they found an empty booth with a clear view of the lobby. Lulu wanted them to drink vodka martinis. Frank had been trying to cut down on hard liquor, due to the stormy effect it had on his head and stomach. But since he’d given her such a hard time about the jewellery store, he decided not to argue.

  The martinis arrived, and then a waiter drifted by with a tray loaded down with deep-fried chicken wings. The chicken looked good and it was free and Frank was hungry. He told the waiter to leave the tray. The guy said he couldn’t do that, it wasn’t allowed. He had an accent. Italian, maybe. Frank grabbed the tray away from him. Nobody seemed to notice except the bartender. Frank tried to remember his name. Jerry. Frank waved at him and signalled for a fresh round of drinks. The waiter said something in Italian, and minced off to the kitchen. Frank offered the chicken to Lulu. She wasn’t hungry. He gnawed the meat off a wing, dropped the bones in his empty martini glass.

  The fresh drinks arrived. Doubles, with five olives in each glass.

  Frank ate an olive and then a chicken wing and then another olive and another wing. He was just getting into the rhythm of olives and wings when Lulu said his name in a way that made him break stride, pause in his chewing and swallowing and glance up.

  The guy standing there was about five-eleven, no more than a hundred fifty pounds. He was wearing a black silk suit over a crisp white shirt and black silk tie. There was a black silk handkerchief in the breast pocket of his jacket. Frank glanced down. The guy’s socks were black silk. There were no tassels on his shoes. Frank looked up, mildly curious. The guys mouth was a little too small and his nose was a little too straight. He wore a gold ring with a blood-red stone on the pinky finger of his left hand. His hair was black, with a faint bluish sheen along the sides, and he wore it short except at the back, where it was long enough to reach his shirt collar.

  Frank wondered about that, the streak of blue hair that merged into the black. It was so shiny, slippery looking. It reminded him of a fish. The guy was kind of fish-like, if you thought about it. So thin, so sleek. Frank leaned forward in his chair, offered his hand. Just for a moment, a fraction of a second, the guy looked a little startled. Recovering, he reached out to shake. It came as no surprise that his nails were perfectly cut, glistening with lacquer. Frank said, “How ya doing, Phil.”

  Phil Estrada glanced at Lulu. It was clear he didn’t much care for the fact that she’d obviously told Frank about him before they’d had a chance to meet, described him to the guy. Phil wondered what words Lulu had used. One time when she’d had a few, she’d told him he looked like a hairdresser for dead people. The words would come back to haunt him on his deathbed, he was sure.

  Frank said, “Sit down, have a piece of chicken.”

  “I can’t stay. I only got a minute.”

  Frank said, “The waiter complain about me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You guys related?”

  Estrada shook his head.

  “But you’re Italian, right?”

  “Of Italian descent.”

  “How long you been with the hotel?”

  “Longer than you, Frank” Smiling, Estrada flicked an invisible speck of lint from the sleeve of his jacket. The way his hand moved, it might have been Frank he was getting rid of, not the lint. He rested his manicured hand on Lulu’s shoulder. “Frank, I been talking to Rog and he says you
seem like a real nice guy. That don’t give you a licence to make trouble. Capice?”

  Frank didn’t like Estrada’s hand on her, didn’t like him resting any part of his weight on her. And he didn’t like the way Estrada kept looking at her, either, with his fish-eyes shiny and black and dead as olives.

  Frank wiped his hands on the tablecloth and stood up. Phil Estrada shot his cuff, checked the watch that glittered like a golden egg in the nest of coarse black hairs on his wrist. Lifting his heavy eyebrows in mock astonishment, he said, “Later than I thought, gotta run,” and turned his back on Frank and slowly walked away.

  Lulu finished her martini in one long gulp. She said, “How much longer are you going to have to stay in town, Frank?” Frank shrugged. “Couple of days, maybe three. It depends.”

  “There’s a Travelodge a couple of blocks away. Or we could stay at the Meridien or wherever you like.”

  Frank said, “I like it here.” He lit a cigarette and dropped the match on the carpet.

  Lulu said, “Why go looking for trouble, Frank?”

  Frank smiled, “Because if you’re gonna get your fair share, sometimes that’s what you have to do.”

  11

  The closest grocery store was two blocks south of the restaurant, squeezed in between an Italian restaurant and a shoe repair. A bright green and white awning protected sidewalk shoppers while they browsed over wooden boxes filled to overflowing with rows of cucumbers and celery, pyramids of tomatoes, half a dozen different varieties of apples from the Okanagan and Washington State, oranges trucked in from California, mounds of bright green snow peas, clumps of yellow bananas that lay like misshapen fists …

  Parker said, “Lettuce, apples and grapes … What else do we grow around here; can you think of anything?”

  “Cranberries,” said Willows.

  “Cranberries?”

  “There was a thing on the news a few months ago. I’d fallen asleep during the sports report. When I woke up, they were in the middle of a piece on bogs. Cranberry bogs.”