Accidental Deaths (A Willows and Parker Mystery)

by Laurence Gough

  The waiter arrived with the bill. Newt reached for his jacket, pushed away from the table and headed for the washroom. Frank studied the bill, then turned and looked behind him. Newt was at the phone, pushing buttons.

  Frank wondered if Rikki would be waiting for him in the parking lot. He decided no, the parking lot’d be too risky. Newt would worry about Lulu, that she might start screaming, making noise.

  The hotel, then. Probably in his suite and not until they’d managed to separate him from his woman.

  The bill was two hundred and ten dollars and change. Not a bad dent, considering the wine came to almost a hundred, and Newts cake all by itself was just under eight bucks. Lulu helped Frank work out the tip. Since he’d red-lined his credit card, he had to pay cash. Newt came back to the table, looking impatient. Frank dropped a fat wad of five- and ten-dollar bills on the table, slipped his arm around Lulu’s waist and gave her a quick kiss. He wanted to tell her not to worry, that everything was going to turn out fine, but somehow, he couldn’t quite bring himself to speak the words.

  Newt said, “I’m gonna take a leak. Wait for me at the car.”

  Frank didn’t like the way Newt was staring at him, as if his bladder problems were all his fault. Or maybe it was Rikki he was mad about. Well, what was Frank supposed to do, wave his napkin in the air and hope Rikki would drop out of it? Hardly believing his luck, he watched Newt stroll stiff-legged across the restaurant and turn off down a narrow hallway.

  “Got any quarters?”

  Lulu started digging into her purse. Frank resisted the urge to tell her to hurry up, it was a question of life and death.

  There was a public phone in a little alcove next to the washrooms. Frank dialled the hotel. No answer. Wherever Rikki was, it was somewhere else. Frank glanced over his shoulder, hung up and quickly dialled major crimes. A guy answered this time, a male with a soft, confident voice. No Parker. No Willows. Frank pitched his voice as high as it would go and said, “You getting this on tape?” There was no answer. He gave the guy the name of the hotel and Newt’s room number and told him if the cops were still looking for the guys who shot Barry Chapman, it was a good place to start. Naturally the dispatcher asked him for a name. Frank hesitated for a moment and then figured what the hell, if he was gonna be a snitch he might as well do the job right. He gave the guy Newt’s full name and Rikki’s and then brief and not entirely objective descriptions of both of them. Then he said, “You get all that?” The dispatcher wanted to know who was calling. Almost as an afterthought, Frank told him about Rikki’s plan to bump Claire Parker.

  Then he and Lulu went out to the parking lot to see what was there.

  CD logged Mrs. Grebinsky’s call as Frank was hanging up, and dispatched a blue-and-white to the scene. By then, Parker and Willows had done what they could at the Japantown crime scene and were on their way back to 312 Main to hit the paperwork. Parker’s address leapt out at her from the unmarked car’s Motorola radio. Willows made an illegal left turn, pulled up next to a pay phone and called central dispatch. Dispatch filled him in on the reported threat to Parker’s life. Whether Rikki had accidentally shot himself or committed suicide was at that point unclear. In any event, he’d taken himself out of the picture. Newt, however, was still alive and well and presumably at the hotel. Dispatch had already alerted the Emergency Response Team.

  Willows informed dispatch that he and Parker would be joining the party.

  Back at the hotel, there was still no sign of Rikki. Newt excused himself and went to the bathroom, flushed the toilet repeatedly to cover the dismal growl of his retching. He splashed cold water on his face, gargled with mouthwash the colour of diluted blood, and retrieved the twin of Rikki’s .40-calibre Smith & Wesson semi-auto from its new hidy-hole at the bottom of a stack of fluffy hotel towels. He ejected the magazine to make sure the bullets hadn’t mysteriously disappeared. Nope, they were all there. He slammed the magazine home and racked the slide, gingerly lowered the hammer and stuck the gun in his jacket pocket and checked himself out in the mirror, ran his fingers through his hair. He was looking good. But now what? He’d thought about it all through the ice cream, and there was no longer any doubt in his mind that Frank’d figured out what Rikki’d planned for him, and somehow beat him to the punch.

  Newt was terrified. Rikki had been quick as a bolt of lightning, Newt the thunder that had followed in his wake. All noise, all noise. He had no illusions about what was next on Frank’s agenda. The way Lulu had come on to him was a dead giveaway.

  Newt softly opened the bathroom door. Lulu and Frank stopped talking and turned to look at him. He gave them a wan smile, adjusting his tie. “Guess I must’ve ate something that didn’t agree with me.”

  Frank said, “I tried the front desk, both restaurants and the bar. Nobody’s seen him.”

  Lulu said, “Anybody in the mood for a swim?”

  Frank smiled. He was pretty sure he knew what his baby had in mind — she wanted to bounce Newt’s skull off the tiles, ease him into the deep end of the pool and hold him under until he’d run out of bubbles.

  Lulu was staring at Newt. He shook his head, no. Where in a bathing suit could you hide such a big gun?

  Lulu said, “Frank, you want to come along and keep me company?”

  Newt caught the look that passed between them. What was going on, what were they up to?

  He suddenly realized why Frank had been gone so long when he made the trip to the liquor store. Somehow, he’d done Rikki.

  Newt pulled the Smith. He said, “Rikki’s dead, ain’t he?” Frank looked surprised, but Lulu didn’t. Newt said, “All I want is out. That’s all. Out. Is it so much to ask, Frank, after all we’ve been through?”

  Frank took Lulu’s arm and started towards the door.

  Newt said, “Hold it.”

  Frank waited.

  Newt said, “I need somebody to drive me to the airport.”

  “No problem.”

  “Not you, Frank. Her.” Newt aimed the gun at a spot midway between Lulu’s breasts. He said, “Just do me this small favour, Frank. Go stand by the TV and don’t move an inch.” Frank said, “This is really dumb, Newt.”

  Newt waited until Frank had moved and then went over to Lulu and slipped an arm around her tiny waist. He opened the door. The corridor was empty. Newt said, “I ain’t gonna hurt her. Just remember, the best thing you can do is to stay put.” Frank said, “I don’t know where Rikki is or what happened to him.”

  Newt shut the door. He buried his nose in Lulu’s ear and sniffed deeply. “I’m crazy about your perfume.”

  “Giorgio,” said Lulu, pushing him away. She added, “Frank’s going to kill you.”

  “I don’t think so — why would he bother?”

  “Because he loves me.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  It was no more than fifty feet down the hall to the bank of elevators, but by the time he got there, Newt was drenched in sweat, winded. He pushed a polished brass button. There was a faint rumbling noise, and then the maw of the closest elevator slowly opened wide. In they went, Newt dragging her all the way. He said, “Rikki made a move on Frank, didn’t he?” Lulu kept silent. Newt said, “I know Frank. He isn’t the kind of guy likes to swing first.” The polished brass doors slid shut. Newt stabbed at the button for the lobby. The elevator twitched spasmodically as if awakened from a deep sleep.

  Lulu tried to move away from Newt but he held her close, the gun pressed up against her, into the small of her back.

  Could Frank catch up with them, using the stairs? She doubted it.

  Newt said, “Gimme any trouble, I’ll blow your brains out.”

  To underline his point, he tapped her gently on the skull with the barrel of his gun.

  Lulu twisted towards Newt, as if to embrace him. She grabbed the gun and held on tight. The move was purely defensive, but Newt thought she was trying to take the weapon away from him, and fought her for it. She kneed him in the groin. His legs buckled.
She grunted and kneed him again. His eyes filled with water. All those sweaty calisthenics had made her so damn strong. He tried to shake loose but it was like trying to pull bark from a tree. Never had he been so intimately embraced.

  Lulu worked a finger inside the trigger guard, tried to knee Newt again. His right thigh went numb. Their rate of descent slowed. The elevator doors slid open.

  Newt saw that the lobby was full of cops — there were dozens of them, too many to count, guys in uniform and an ERT team in cammies, detectives with their badges clipped to their suits, the tightly packed mass of them waiting to get on the elevator. Tight, empty faces. The smell of sweat, gun oil. He spotted Phil Estrada, and Roger, both of them lurking in the background, squinty-eyed and empty-handed. His eyes locked on Claire Parker just at the moment Lulu chose to slide her teeth into his wrist, gnaw him mercilessly. He screamed, jerked away from her. The Smith's hammer fell in slow motion, struck and ignited the primer. The copper-jacketed hollow point ripped through Newt’s soft tissue at a velocity of 975 fps.

  Newt’s gaping mouth filled with a white heat. His flushed cheeks ballooned comically. Smoke got in his eyes. Blood splashed across the burnished copper wall of the elevator. His eyes seemed to deflate, sink into his skull. His ruined head snapped back. A tooth glinted in the overhead lights.

  Lulu held him tightly for a moment — just long enough to register the memory.

  Then let him drop.

  27

  Inspector Homer Bradley flipped open the lid of the ornate Haida-carved cedar box his brand-new ex-wife had given him on the courthouse steps so many years ago, as she’d kissed him goodbye for the very last time.

  The box was empty. It was damn near inconceivable, but during the night somebody had strolled into his office and stolen over seventy dollars’ worth of the best cigars that Havana could make.

  He flipped the lid shut and then quickly flipped it open again. Damn. He said, “You’re absolutely sure you never saw the guy before last night?”

  Parker said, “How could I forget somebody with a name like that? Rikki Acapulco. Inspector, how could anybody forget a name like that?”

  Bradley had been up all night, and it was now pushing noon of the following day. Lack of sleep had left him in a somewhat spiky frame of mind. But he had to admit that Parker had a point. He said, “You faxed Rikki’s pic and prints to L.A.?”

  Parker nodded, suppressed a yawn.

  Willows said, “And Acapulco, and Mexico City, because of the tattoo.”

  “What tattoo?”

  Bradley reached for Rikki’s file. At the moment, it was flatter than his wallet, but he had a hunch that as soon as they got past Rikki Acapulco’s AKA and found out who he really was, the file would assume the size of a telephone directory. Newt, of course, they already knew about.

  “He had a tattoo on the inside of his upper thigh,” Willows said.

  Bradley couldn’t help himself; he snuck a quick look at Parker.

  Parker was ready for him. She said, “It wasn’t all that artistic, basic pin-and-ink stuff.”

  “Yeah, but what did it say?”

  “Mexico City.”

  “In English?”

  Willows said, “No, it was in Spanish.”

  Bradley leaned back. He felt vaguely disappointed, but wasn’t sure why. He said, “loo early to get anything back, I suppose?”

  Willows said, “From Mexico, yeah.”

  “You heard something from Los Angeles?”

  Parker said, “They’ve been looking for Rikki, AKA Ricardo Montalban AKA Yves Montand AKA Thomas Gomez … ”

  “Wait a minute,” said Bradley. “Montalban and Montand are actors, aren’t they?”

  “So’s Gomez. He’s probably best known for his work in Key Largo and Beneath the Planet of the Apes.”

  “Great, but what’s he done lately?”

  “Nothing much,” said Parker. “He died in nineteen-seventy-one.”

  “What was Rikki’s real name, or does anybody know?”

  “They think it’s Emilio Fernandez, but they’re not sure. Nobody is.”

  Willows said, “Rikki was the kind of guy who changed his

  name more often than he changed his socks. A human chameleon.”

  “What’d L.A. want him for?”

  “Everything from shoplifting a case of toilet paper to first-degree murder. A couple of days before he and Newt flew up here, the body of a young woman named Annette Mickleburgh was found in a vacant lot in Glendale. Newt had asked her out a few days before she was killed. She’d told her fellow employees all about it — Newt’s Porsche and his house on the beach … ”

  “So why Rikki?”

  “He left his fingerprints all over her neck.”

  Bradley turned to Parker. “And the way Frank Wright tells it, Newt and Rikki came up here to bump you off.”

  Parker nodded. “Because you shot Newt.”

  “That’s Frank’s story,” said Parker. “So far, he’s sticking to it.”

  “Good motive, revenge.”

  Parker didn’t say anything.

  Bradley said, “You buy it?”

  Parker shrugged. “There are a few holes. Nothing we could lead a prosecutor through.”

  Bradley said, “Share your thoughts with me, Jack.”

  “I think Newt hired Frank to hit Claire. Frank can’t remember where he’s spent the past couple of years, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was in California, working for Newt. Maybe Frank couldn’t set things up to Newt’s satisfaction, or maybe he decided he didn’t want the job. Either way, I think that’s why Newt and Rikki came to Vancouver.”

  “Barry Chapman, the gunshop owner?”

  Willows said, “Chapman had a closed-circuit video camera — the same kind of setup used by the banks. We’ve got the whole thing on tape, from the moment Rikki walked in the door right through the bludgeoning, theft of the guns, everything.”

  Bradley smiled. “Rikki liked movie-star aliases, and then turned into a star himself, and didn’t even notice.” He checked the cigar box again. Still no magic. “What about the albino?”

  “Lulu.”

  “Yeah.”

  “No priors, but I’d say she was working the hotel, met Frank sometime after he checked in.”

  “Love at first sight,” said Bradley.

  Parker said, “It happens.”

  Bradley said, “Yeah, I saw it on TV a couple of weeks ago.” He used his index fingers to play a little tune on the cigar box. “The Joey Ngo inquest?”

  “Scheduled to start next Tuesday.”

  “So, except for a little paperwork, you two’ve got a clean plate.” He leaned forward. “You’re unemployed!”

  Parker glanced at Willows, looked away.

  Bradley said, “The Japantown killings. Just between you and me, Kaplan and Wilkinson are in way over their heads, the case is almost twenty-four hours old and we’ve got nothing, zilch. I want you to take over, point them in the right direction.”

  Willows said, “Inspector, my kids are flying in from Toronto tomorrow, at noon.”

  “Sean and Annie?”

  Willows nodded. “My vacation was supposed to start yesterday, at end of shift.”

  Bradley cocked an eyebrow. “You’re letting them ride alone on the plane?”

  “No, there’ll be a pilot on board.”

  “Eddy’s the comedian, Jack. How long are they gonna be in town?”

  “Three weeks.”

  “Three weeks! You take’em to the zoo, then what?”

  “We’re going over to the Island. I rented a cabin on Long Beach.”

  “Nice.” Bradley turned to Parker. “You’ve got the next few weeks off too, right?”

  “That’s right, Inspector.”

  “And where exactly are you going to be spending your summer vacation?”

  Parker glanced at Willows, quickly looked away.

  Bradley grinned lasciviously. “You’re going to have to tell me all about it wh
en you get back.”

  “Not a chance,” said Willows.

  28

  This was how it went with Joey.

  The air was warm and soft. In the darkness, it moved across his body the way Emily had touched him, so gently, so sweetly.

  He still couldn’t believe he killed her. He knew he had done it, but somehow it didn’t seem real. Or was it that nothing else was real?

  He had thought his brother worked as a cook, but it turned out the restaurant where Cherry arranged to meet him had gone out of business. Cherry used the place to store and sell stolen cigarettes and that’s why he wanted Joey there, to help him move a couple hundred cartons of Camel Filters. But first they walked up the street to the grocery store for the sweet potato. Back at the abandoned restaurant, Cherry had shown Joey how the sweet potato could be used for a silencer. Alone with his brother, Joey had wanted to tell him what he had done, confess his sins. But as they’d talked, it became clear that Cherry didn’t give a damn about Emily. He believed the bullets that killed her had been meant for him. His only concern was finding out who had done the shooting, and why.

  Joey wouldn’t meet his brother’s eyes. He stared at a picture of a water buffalo in a rice paddy, that was thumb-tacked to the wall.

  Then Cherry put his hand on his shoulder and smiled into Joey’s eyes as he’d told him that he’d seen him in the black Honda CRX, refused to believe it at first and then worked it all out, that Joey had intended to blast him, not Emily.

  After that he had picked up the telephone and called the police, spoken to Claire Parker.

  Joey’s shame turned to rage. There was a struggle, another accident. It was an accident. As he sat there in the apple tree, he told himself over and over again that his brother’s death could not have been anything but an accident — something he hadn’t planned or expected and had no control over, that had simply happened.

  In the days that followed, he phoned Claire Parker several times but always found himself unable to speak. Hoping it would be easier if he could talk directly to her, he’d gone all the way across town one night to her apartment. But then, as he stood on the sidewalk, she had come to the window and looked out, and he’d lost his nerve, slipped away and never gone back.