Bed of Nails

by Michael Slade

  “Canada’s Golgotha. A sculptor cast the myth in bronze after the war. In it, the soldier hangs crucified in his great coat as Germans mock him from below like Romans did Christ. The rendition outraged postwar Germans, and they demanded that we prove the atrocity really occurred. When we couldn’t, the offending sculpture was crated up and stored away for fifty years.”

  “It’s like that guy in Wyoming,” said one of the undertakers from body removal.

  “What guy?” the coroner asked, shifting his attention to an anecdote that he could include in his memoirs. Out came pen and notebook to jot the salient details.

  “It was in the paper a few years ago. Some rednecks in Wyoming, or one of those cowboy states, abducted a young gay man and drove him out onto the prairies. They pistol-whipped him until his skull caved in, then left him lashed to a fence for eighteen hours to freeze to death. How many murders are there annually in the States? How many gays endure hate crimes every year? Few of those make the news, but that one caused a fuss. Politicians fronting the Christian right had to cope with the martyr image of a gay, who supposedly sinned against God’s law, being crucified on a fence.”

  The coroner smiled as he scribbled notes. “Crucifixion carries baggage.”

  On that note, Zinc turned and crossed the threshold. A short entry hall with a bathroom on the left expanded into a wide room overlooking the front street. The last words Zinc caught from the coroner were “Find out if this vic was gay.”

  The trouble with a rumor is that it distorts the facts. Zinc had no idea what crime-scene hearsay had spawned the image of crucifixion in the old boy’s mind, but there were problems with bringing this reality into line with that description.

  The entrance to Vancouver’s harbor is dubbed the Lions Gate. It takes that name from two North Shore mountain peaks, which are called the Lions because they resemble a pair of crouching cats. In pioneer times, lumber equaled money, so a skid road slid logs down the mountainside to the harborfront village of Lonsdale, which was basically a few shacks around a rickety dock. The passing years upgraded the skid road into Lonsdale Avenue and transformed the village of Lonsdale into North Vancouver. Befitting its new status as a world-class city, North Van needed a decent hotel, so the Lions Gate was constructed on Lower Lonsdale.

  Recently, the heritage hotel had been refurbished to meet the party vices of Hollywood North. Thanks to a worthless Canadian dollar, filming was frantic on the North Shore. High rollers from L.A. would blow into town and head straight to the Lounge Lizard bar on the ground floor of the Lions Gate. There, they could score blow to snort up their addicted snouts, then, should one of the high-class hookers who hung out around the bar catch their fancy, they could rent a room upstairs to get blown or to high-roll around in the hay.

  A room like this.

  The room was actually two rooms converted into one. The central support was a T-beam from the days when it was common for local mills to churn out timber thirty inches in diameter and seventy feet long without a single knot. Standing alone, the flanking wall gone, it looked like the cross on which Christ was crucified. The beam, however, wasn’t upside down, so it didn’t qualify as an inverted crucifix. Only the victim hung in reverse, his naked body dangling from the cross-arm of the T by a rope cinched around his right ankle. His left leg was bent so it crossed behind his right thigh, and it had been tied in place to hold it there. Crucifixion requires outstretched arms, but this man’s wrists were cuffed together at the small of his back. The only connection with what was done to Christ was the crown of thorns that trickled blood from the victim’s brow. But on closer inspection, that too was exposed as a distortion, for what Zinc saw when he squatted beside the body—careful to avoid the blood pooling around the cross—was that the thorns were actually a nimbus of nails hammered into the dead man’s skull.

  This wasn’t a crucifixion.

  It was an occult symbol.

  A symbol just as powerful to those who believe in Magick.

  “The Hanged Man,” Zinc said.

  “Yep,” Sergeant Kidd agreed, joining him near the strung-up body.

  “The coroner said he was crucified.”

  “I’m probably to blame. I told him the vic was tied upside down to a T-cross.”

  “Rumors,” scoffed the inspector.

  The black Mountie nodded. “I never believe them. As often as not, the best ones turn out to be bogus.”

  It occurred to Zinc that he had heard a rumor about Rachel Kidd and a cross of another kind. Not about the sergeant herself, but about her father.

  Born in Birmingham, Alabama, during the civil rights era, Rachel had been a fetus in her mother’s womb on the night that four Klansmen in ghostlike sheets and pointed hoods grabbed her dad. They drove him to a deserted field and lit a burning cross, then, having staked him to the ground at the foot of the fiery symbol, the racists castrated the screaming man with a razor blade. According to the rumor, they passed his severed testicles around in a paper cup so each could raise the hem of his hood to spit on the bloody trophies. The cops who’d investigated were Klansmen too, so that’s why the Kidds had moved to the Pacific Northwest, where Rachel eventually donned red serge and became the first black promoted up the Mounted’s ranks.

  Tall, lithe, and lean, the sergeant was currently posted to North Van GIS, the homicide squad of the local detachment. A body found at the foot of the Lions fell within Kidd’s jurisdiction, but the hierarchy of command was such that a murder with leads outside the country might be usurped by Special X. Protocol had demanded that Rachel place a courtesy call to Zinc’s unit, the Special External Section at RCMP H.Q. across the harbor.

  “The vic’s from L.A.,” she said, crouching beside the inspector.

  “Name?”

  “Cardoza. Romeo Cardoza.”

  “You’re kidding? Who the hell would name their kid Romeo?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Cardoza?”

  “Very funny.”

  “Mind if I ask a question, sir?” Rachel asked.

  “No.”

  “Who would name their kid Zinc?”

  Chandler’s natural steel-gray hair had been that color since birth. Its metallic tint gave rise to his name. Six-foot-two and almost two hundred pounds, Zinc had a physique muscled from hard work on the family farm in Saskatchewan during his youth and workouts since. Rugged and sharp-featured, his face was hard and gaunt, his good looks marred by the strain of fighting back from two serious wounds: a bullet to the head while hunting a killer named Cutthroat in Hong Kong, and a knife to the back on Deadman’s Island to stop a psychotic who thought he was Jack the Ripper.

  “You’re sure you want to ask that question, Corporal?”

  “Yes,” said Rachel.

  “You’re quite sure, Constable?”

  “On second thought …”

  The Mounties shared a laugh, then, all kidding aside, the two got down to work.

  “L.A., you said?” Zinc asked.

  “Yeah, a movie producer. He flew in yesterday afternoon on Air Canada.”

  “Staying here?”

  “Uh-uh. The Hyatt over town. No one stays here. The Lions Gate is where you score … in more ways than one.”

  “Sex? Drugs?”

  “Down in the bar. The rock-’n’-roll’s up here. Rock in the form of cocaine. Roll in the form of fucking.”

  “What brought Romeo to Vancouver?”

  “Money problems. His studio’s shooting a film up here that’s way over budget.”

  “Title?” Zinc asked.

  “Bed of Nails.”

  The beam from which the hanged man hung was halfway across the double room. The techs had finished with the half at the inspector’s back and were now searching the half beyond the beam for clues. They had cleared an area around the path of contamination to the queen-size bed against the far wall. There, while Zinc and Rachel squatted near the suspended corpse, Dr. Gillian Macbeth, the forensic pathologist, examined the state of the bedding. “Bed of Nai
ls,” Gill echoed, waving Zinc toward her. “Fitting title. Get a look at this.”

  The room took on a definite chill as both Mounties approached the bed. Sandwiched between the women, Zinc watched his breath condense in imaginary puffs. There was no love lost between Rachel and Gill, and that, more than anything, explained why the coroner was cowering out in the hall. These two had issues, as yet unresolved. Macbeth was an attractive surgeon on the gray side of forty. Having spent her fertile years building a successful career, she’d taken a stab at motherhood as her bio clock ran down. The father-to-be was a corporal with Special X, who Kidd had mistakenly arrested for the murder of his mother. That freed the actual killer to plant a bomb on the cruise ship that sailed the Mounties off into the sunset for their Red Serge Ball. The explosion had hurled Gill into a cruel aborting sea, and—tick … tock … tick—her bio clock ran out. Zinc’s girlfriend, Alexis Hunt, wrote a book about the case. In print, Gill had challenged Rachel’s competence as a cop, and Kidd was convinced that had damaged her career. It was all the two could do to be outwardly civil to each other, while daggers thrown by their scornful eyes whizzed over Chandler’s shoulders.

  “Here’s where it happened,” Gill said, indicating the rumpled bed. “See the hammer? And the extra nails?”

  The bloody tools flanked the gore-spattered pillow.

  “That wad looks like a gag.”

  “Likely stuffed in his mouth. To silence him while they hammered the nails into his brain.”

  “They?” Zinc said.

  “Two killers would be my bet. The base of his penis and his anus are both chafed raw.”

  “A two-on-one?”

  “That’s how I see it.”

  “A female in front and a male behind?”

  “Or two males, front and back, to form a daisy chain.”

  “Or two females,” Rachel interjected. “One laying him while the other reamed him with a dildo.”

  “Semen?”

  “Just his. On his flaccid penis. They likely used condoms for safe sex and to capture DNA,” Gill said.

  “Find any safes?”

  “No,” said Rachel.

  “Tidy killers.”

  “Hip to forensics.”

  “Short nails,” Zinc said, eyeing the pillow spikes.

  The pathologist nodded. “The nails are short for a slow death. Just long enough to punch through the skull and pierce his brain. Judging from the blood sprays, they moved around. I think the nails were hammered in while the three had sex.”

  Zinc conjured up the crime in his mind’s eye. High-rolling Romeo flies in from Hollywood. He taxis from the airport to the Hyatt Regency downtown, and later proceeds across the Lions Gate Bridge to the Lions Gate hotel, here on the North Shore. Why? To meet someone connected with the troubled Bed of Nails? Or was it to score some action?

  “Find any drugs?” he asked.

  “Yeah, over here.”

  The answer came from one of the techs examining a table by the front windows.

  “Coke?”

  “You got it. Chopped with this.”

  The man held up a tarot card in a plastic evidence bag.

  “The Hanged Man,” Zinc said. “A calling card?”

  “It was used to chop six lines on this table. You can see traces of powder.”

  Zinc continued laying out the scenario in his mind. The high roller makes a connection in the bar downstairs. Romeo rents this room for a snort and a fuck. The three do two lines each at the window table, then strip off their clothes and climb into bed. Things turn kinky when Romeo’s sex partners cuff his hands together at the small of his back and stuff the gag wad into his mouth. With one working him in front and the other behind, the two get their sexual kicks by adding spurts of blood from Romeo’s brain. Nail by nail, they hammer a halo around his skull. The shallow depth keeps him from dying too soon. The one in front gets death-throe pumps from his groin. The one behind enjoys the clenches of his anal sphincter.

  Bang …

  Bang …

  Bang …

  Like Maxwell’s silver hammer in the Beatles’ song.

  Until …

  Clang …

  Clang …

  Clang …

  They’re sure he’s dead.

  After that, they drag his body over to the beam and string him up like the Hanged Man on the coke-cutting card.

  “Who found him?” Zinc asked.

  “A chambermaid. She came in this morning to make up the room and here he was,” said Rachel.

  “Anything stolen?”

  “The coke and the cash in his wallet. Unless he traveled on plastic without a bill to his name.”

  “May I see that card?” Chandler asked the tech.

  The Ident cop handed him the coke cutter sealed in the plastic bag. Zinc noted the nimbus around the Hanged Man’s head. Did that explain the halo of nails hammered into Romeo’s brain?

  “If you ladies will excuse me, I’m going down to the bar.”

  “Drinking on duty?” Gill teased.

  “Looking for Romeo’s Juliet.”

  HOOKER

  The world’s oldest profession was almost as old as Vancouver itself. Whisky—the basic necessity of any frontier town—arrived on the south shore of Burrard Inlet in 1869, when Gassy Jack Deighton built a saloon to found what is now this city. Sex—an even more basic necessity if there is to be urban growth—arrived with Birdie Stewart in 1873, when she opened the first cathouse in what had become known as Gastown, kitty-corner from the booze and two doors away from the Methodist parsonage. The demographics of the day were bullish for business. Horny men outnumbered loose women twenty to one.

  By the turn of the century, Dupont Street was Vancouver’s colony of vice. A card game, an opium pipe, pleasures of the flesh—whatever your desire, come down to Chinatown. The red-light district got a boost in 1906, when the San Francisco earthquake shook the booties of a lot of brothel madams north. The Americans—as they are wont—brought their advertising and marketing skills to this den of iniquity, and before long there were scantily clad temptresses on wanton display in bordello windows and harlots in gaudy garments flouncing about on the streets.

  Vancouver, back then, had a puritanical streak. Loosely defined, a puritan is a prig who loses sleep knowing that someone, somewhere, may be having fun. The shocking revelation that churchgoers saw “boys in that vicinity who could not be older than fifteen or twenty” was too much, and it forced the police to crack down with a “no flouncing” order.

  The breakup of Chinatown’s vice colony spread 112 whorehouses to other parts of the city. The hooker history of Vancouver from then on became one of cops chasing Pearls, Violets, and Carmens all over town. Each time the vice squad closed a house of ill repute, the pros found new lodgings at accommodating hotels. B.C.’s Liquor Control Act was such that you couldn’t license a bar or pub unless you offered rooms, so the city was inundated with drinking establishments that kept empty cribs on the upper floors. That law was tailor-made to turn every booze can into a knocking shop. A working girl could troll for dates downstairs at the bar, then rent a private room upstairs by the hour.

  Ergo, the Lions Gate. In its present form.

  Those who make their living on their backs and their knees won a decisive victory in the Penthouse case. For three decades, the Penthouse was the hottest club in town. That’s where visiting celebrities like Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack hung out. With no rooms to let, it was a “bottle joint,” unlicensed premises where BYOB was the rule. The club charged dearly for glasses, ice, and mix. On any given night, a patron also had his choice of somewhere between 30 and 150 hookers to take elsewhere on his arm. Those were the days before ATMs, so the Penthouse made a killing off credit card advances. For instant cash to pay for prospective athletics, the patron paid the club a 20-percent surcharge. For that, he also got his picture taken by the cops, who surreptitiously photographed each couple leaving the premises.

  The Penthouse trial w
as a cause célèbre. The owners were charged with living off the avails of prostitution. “Sure, we took the 20 percent,” was their defense, “but it was none of our business what the patrons did with the money.” Of the seven hundred photos snapped by the cops, only two hundred were offered by the Crown as evidence. The rest, according to one detective, were a blackmailer’s wet dream, for the men caught in the photos were prominent lawyers, doctors, celebrities, and politicians from across the colorful spectrum of Vancouver’s establishment.

  With the Penthouse shut for the two-year duration of the case, the working girls went back to flouncing on the streets, only this time they let it all hang out in the ritzy West End. The public hue and cry deafened city hall, so when that two-million-dollar fiasco at taxpayers’ expense resulted in acquittal of the club on all counts, Vancouver was relieved to see the girls retreat into bars.

  Today, Sin City is a wide-open town. There’s a hooker bar to cater to every demographic. For Hollywood high rollers, the Lounge Lizard at the Lions Gate is the in place. Feel free to transact business in the bar. Just don’t flounce on the streets.

  The Lounge Lizard was slithering with the lunchtime crowd when Zinc entered through the lobby door and made his way to the bar. Because the hotel dated from pioneer days, the decor was British Empire gentlemen’s club in style and atmosphere. Dark wood walls with plenty of brass and overstuffed wing chairs around cocktail tables. Folks transacting business tended to congregate at the mirror-backed bar, which spanned the entire length of the off-street wall.

  Bar stools were at a premium just after high noon. Luckily for the Mountie, a movie mogul had just negotiated a nooner, so Zinc procured one of the seats vacated by the happy hooker and her john. The other stool fell to an asexual academic whom the cop pegged as a radical feminist here to research her master’s thesis in women’s studies.

  “I don’t muff dive,” said the blonde hooker on her other side.

  “You’re a pawn, don’t you see?” countered the feminist.

  “Oh? How so?” replied the blonde.

  “In a patriarchal world, men are ultimately responsible for forcing women into prostitution.”