Crazy Lady

by James Hawkins

  “Oh yeah,” says Brougham, seemingly at ease. “Good guy, used to be on the force — reliable.”

  “Ex-cop,” explains Phillips putting down the phone. “Are you sure he’s the man?”

  “How else did Kylie’s sweater get in his bedroom?” snaps Trina, stuffing her daughter’s garment into his nose. “She gave Janet this to wear.”

  “I get the point,” he says, brushing it off. “But these are serious allegations. He could do time, big time, for this if you’re right.”

  “I’m right…” she starts, then turns to include her partner. “We are right.”

  Craddock’s cellphone makes him jump as he sits worriedly by the side of Janet’s bed gently massaging her hand.

  “It’s me,” whispers Brougham. “What the fuck have you done?”

  “What?”

  “The RCMP are asking questions. Phillips didn’t let on but I reckon that stupid Button woman has figured out who you are.”

  “Shit.”

  “So what have you done?”

  “Nothing, Dave.”

  “Don’t try snowing me. I was the one who put you onto the woman. I’m in this as well. So what did you do with her?”

  Craddock hesitates long enough to annoy his ex-partner.

  “I said —”

  “OK, Dave. Look, I’m in a bit of a bind. She needs a doctor.”

  “What?”

  “It was that crazy broad Button and her sidekick. They staked my place out. Look, I never meant to hurt her.”

  “All right. Where are you?”

  Mike Phillips has also been on the phone, assembling a small team, and fifteen minutes later he briefs half a dozen men in his office and assigns tasks.

  “His name is Craddock,” he says pointing to one of the sergeants. “Ex–City detective — friend of Dave Brougham. Get everything you can on him. He’s supposedly a PI, but he sounds like a shit one.”

  Phillips turns to the next officer. “Brougham, sergeant, Vancouver City — get me the works. You two,” he says, moving around the room. “Get a search warrant on Craddock’s joint and take a forensic team. If my info is right he’s had a hostage there for at least a couple of days.”

  “Name?” asks one of the team.

  “Thurgood — Janet Thurgood. The woman linked to Constable Montgomery’s death a few weeks ago.”

  “Evidence for the warrant?” queries one of the men as he furiously takes notes.

  “This sweatshirt,” says Phillips passing around the bagged item while covering for his informant. “It was found on the driveway of the house by one Mrs. Trina Button, a friend of the missing woman.”

  “And she can positively ID it?”

  “She can,” continues Phillips, “and I’ll have a statement to that effect for you in about ten minutes.”

  “Sounds good enough.”

  “Right,” continues Phillips, pointing to the two unassigned officers. “You two start asking questions on the street. I want him found fast.”

  “OK, boss.”

  “And put out an APB on a vehicle as soon as we know what he’s driving.”

  Finding Craddock’s car will be little help to the officers. Now that the ex-cop has finally woken up to the enormity of his actions he’s tucked the vehicle away in a dusty corner of the airport’s parking garage and rented a replacement from Avis.

  Dave Brougham pulls alongside the hired car in the hotel parking lot half an hour later with a friendly doctor in tow. Then he pulls his ex-colleague into the bathroom, slams him against the shower cubicle, and shuts the door.

  “What the fuck have you done to her?”

  “Nothing, Dave. She just passed out on me.”

  “You weren’t screwing her.”

  “No way. I’m a pro, Dave. Everything was cool till that freaking Button woman set up camp on the street. She’s the one who needs screwing.”

  “Leave her to me. I owe her anyway.”

  A gentle rapping on the door signals that the doctor has finished.

  “That was quick…” starts Brougham, putting on a smile as he opens the door, but the doctor isn’t smiling.

  “We gotta get her to a hospital stat.”

  “I’m not sure…”

  “She’s in a bad way. Dehydration, malnutrition — for some time I’d say. Could be anorexia, but look at her. I bet she doesn’t weigh a hundred pounds. Her blood pressure is on the floor and her reflexes are slower than a city bus. She has to go to a hospital.”

  “OK,” says Brougham backing Craddock into the bathroom again. “Give us a minute, will you?” Then he turns on his ex-colleague. “You’re out of this all right. You’d gone before I arrived.”

  “But…”

  “No buts. You’re out. Just get your ass out of here damn quick. Pack yourself a big bag and take off. Get some distance until it blows over.”

  “What if she croaks?”

  “You’d better hope no one ever finds you ’cuz your name is all over this — understand? And nothing I say can change that.”

  “But, Dave…” Craddock is still protesting as Brougham opens the door and heads for the bedside phone for an ambulance while telling the doctor to grab a cab. “I’ll take it from here, Doc,” he says. “You might as well get going.”

  Craddock’s mind whirls in indecision as he drives back to the airport garage. His own car will mark him wherever he goes, but if he sticks with the rental for any length of time his Visa bill will arrive by truck. In any case, he has no idea where to lay low.

  “Maybe I should get some sun,” he says checking out the leaden Vancouver sky and trying to cheer himself as he reaches the terminal buildings and hears the roar of a jet taking off. Then he brightens. “Why not?”

  The RCMP forensic identification team are already taping off the sidewalk and garden of Craddock’s house by the time the search warrant arrives. A knot of spectators have been drawn down their leafy driveways by the multitude of flashing lights to huddle under umbrellas on the sidewalk. “I think there’s been a break-in,” Kathy Anderson, the next door neighbour, is explaining, pointing to the damaged garage door, when one of the uniformed officers approaches.

  “Would any of you ladies happen to know where Mr. Craddock is?” he asks as if he’s not particularly concerned.

  “He was here yesterday,” offers Kathy. “But his car was gone this morning.”

  “Does he live alone?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “What’s going on, officer?” asks another of the neighbours, but the constable blanks her out and turns back to the house.

  “I’m gonna call the papers,” the woman whispers to the group. “I bet there’s a body in there. I always said he was weird. Coming and going at all times of the night.”

  “Oh my God!” exclaims Kathy Anderson. “Maybe he’s a mass murderer. What if the place is full of bodies?”

  Craddock’s house is devoid of dead bodies, but by the time the forensic team have pulled in all their equipment and began taking photographs the first pressmen have arrived intent on finding some.

  “Who tipped them off?” fumes the sergeant in charge as he peers from Craddock’s window, but he knew it was only a matter of time.

  “No comment,” he announces a few minutes later when a couple of microphones are stuck under his nose, so the reporters turn to the rapidly expanding cluster of neighbours for information.

  “He used to be a policeman,” Kathy Anderson explains, but beyond that little is known of the occupant.

  “He seemed like a nice man,” says another, leaving the reporter muttering into his recorder, “They always say that.”

  The arrival of a television unit complete with satellite dish adds to the weight of the situation, but the camera team are fishing just like everyone else.

  “I think our bird has flown,” Mike Phillips explains to Trina and Daphne an hour later as they stand at a receptionist’s desk at Vancouver’s General Hospital waiting for news of Janet.

  �
��How did you find out she was here?” asks Daphne.

  “Whoever booked her in had no documents for her: no health card, no passport, no driver’s licence, no credit card — nothing. I’m guessing it was Craddock but we should be able to ID him when we take a look at the security tapes.”

  “But they took her in?” questions Trina.

  “Apparently she’s pretty far gone,” says Phillips.

  “They weren’t going to turn her away over a technicality. They were suspicious and gave us a call.”

  “So, where’s Craddock flown to?” Daphne wants to know, but Mike Phillips shrugs.

  “We’ve circulated his licence plate. My guess is that he’ll head south for the U.S. We’ve tipped off the border crossings.”

  Craddock is heading south, way south, though he’s not driving.

  “You’re in luck, Mr. Davies,” says the cheerful desk clerk at Aloha Airways. “We can get you to Honolulu by seven this evening, allowing for the time difference.”

  “Great,” he says, handing over the dodgy driver’s licence and credit card that he obtained when he set himself up as a PI.

  It is late in Paris, the City of Lights, and, spurred by his visit to Versailles, Bliss sits on the balcony of his hotel across the mist-covered Seine from the Champs-Elysées and the Place de Concord with ten handwritten pages under his belt. “The Louvre, Bastille, and Notre Dame in the morning,” he resolves as he prepares to close his journal for the day, and his eyes follow the riverbank lights along the Seine to the distant buildings. But he’s not interested in old masters, Egyptology, or religious relics. He wants historical colour to bolster the credibility of his historical saga. He wants to view the buildings as they were in the time of Louis XIV when Paris was the centre of the world. He wants to walk the streets and corridors where French aristocrats walked long before the Revolution, absorbing the ambience of the ancient city. Above all, he wants to know how Prince Ferdinand might have felt as he tasted the heights of Parisian life before his self-incarceration in Ste. Marguerite’s fortress, and he spends a few minutes in the mind of his hoodwinked romantic as the prince offers thanks to his false god.

  “‘My liege,” writes Prince Ferdinand to his king, Louis XIV, “soon my great château will be finished and I will send a courier to my heart’s desire expressing my love for her and asking for her hand for eternity. I will send her the key to the château, a key that will in turn open my cell door. I will say to her, ‘This mask will keep me from all eyes and a prisoner’s cell will keep me from all temptation. My body shall remain as pure and unsullied as my heart, and only my true love will ever look upon me again. I will be imprisoned unto eternity unless the one whom I desire accepts my solicitation and raises her flag over the château to signal an end to my torment.’”

  Back at Vancouver General Hospital Trina pulls Daphne away from Mike Phillips on the pretext of visiting the bathroom.

  “There’s no point in sticking around here; we need to get after Craddock.”

  “Where —” starts Daphne, but Trina cuts her off.

  “According to the manual, when looking for a missing person you always start from the last place they are known to have been.”

  “Here, probably,” suggests Daphne, implicating the emergency department’s reception desk

  “Possibly. But the ambulance driver said they picked her up from a hotel near the airport and the guy followed in his car.”

  “The airport would certainly be a good place to fly from,” admits Daphne.

  “Quite.”

  One quick drive around the hotel parking lot tells Trina that Craddock is no longer in residence, and a twenty-dollar bill gets her no further. “He probably paid cash and gave a false name,” she tells Daphne once the desk clerk has pocketed the cash and conveniently turned his back on the register.

  “Let’s try the airport then,” suggests Daphne with nowhere else to go.

  The international departure area bustles with early afternoon travellers hoping to escape the midwinter blahs, and the two women quickly realize that they have little hope of finding Craddock based only on the distant glimpse that they had at his front door.

  “Let’s try the parking,” suggests Trina after a few minutes, and Daphne rides shotgun with her head out of the window as they race around the multi-storey garage scanning the blur of licence plates for Craddock’s Impala.

  “Stop,” yells Daphne more than once, but each time the numbers are off.

  Then Trina spots the wanted vehicle, spins her baseball cap, slams on the brakes, and yelps, “Gotcha.”

  The tires of a British Airways’ jumbo from Heathrow puff smoke as they heavily hit the runway on the other side of the airfield, and as the monster taxies towards the terminal, Joseph Creston fidgets impatiently, waiting for the moment when he can switch on his cellphone and connect with Craddock. But it won’t happen today. The Aloha Airways Boeing 757 carrying the PI is already revving up for takeoff at the other end of the same runway.

  “I’ve seen this in the movies,” says Trina as she bends the end of a wire coat hanger into a hook and rams it down the side window of Craddock’s car. Five minutes and three coat hangers later she gives up, pulls a heavy metal jack from the trunk of her car, and slams it through the glass.

  “Oh my goodness, Trina,” shrieks Daphne, but the elderly woman is inside the car in seconds rummaging through the glove compartment. “Look at this,” she cries triumphantly as she pulls out an expired driver’s licence bearing Craddock’s photograph.

  “OK. Let’s get outta here,” yells Trina grabbing the licence, and a few minutes later, as Joseph Creston is fighting his way to the front of the line at the immigration desks downstairs at the international terminal, the two women are racing from airline booth to airline booth upstairs in the departure area, asking, “Have you seen this man?”

  Twenty minutes later Creston emerges through the arrivals gate to an anxiously smiling wall of people, but he wouldn’t recognize Craddock’s face even it were there. Upstairs, the detective duo have much more success with Craddock’s image, and Trina has a pleading tone as she calls her husband, Rick, on her cellphone, saying, “I know it’s short notice, dear, but Daphne’s looking very pale. I just think she needs a few days in the sun, that’s all.”

  “But…” protests Rick, then he gives up.

  “You and the kids can manage,” she carries on without a breath. “It’s only Hawaii for goodness’ sake. It’s not like the end of the Earth.”

  “I don’t know why that man puts up with you,” laughs Daphne as Trina closes her phone and turns to give her credit card to the Aloha Airways clerk.

  “’Cuz he loves me, Daphne,” replies the Vancouverite. “’Cuz he loves me.”

  David Bliss is singing a similar song in Paris as he phones his daughter to tell her that his book is progressing. “I really do love her, Sam,” he bleats, and she sighs in exasperation.

  “I know, Dad. You’ve told me a million times. Now get on and finish that damn book. The sooner it’s done the quicker you can get her back.”

  “Do you really think she’ll come back, Sam. Honestly?” he questions, as he has questioned himself a thousand times a day since Yolanda left.

  “If she has any sense she will.”

  “But what if she doesn’t?”

  “Bestseller, Dad. Just remember that: bestseller. You’ll be so famous you’ll have women tripping over themselves to get to you.”

  “I don’t want that,” he shouts vehemently. “I just want my Yolanda.”

  “Then keep writing.”

  “Mason,” yells Creston into his cellphone as he wanders the near deserted arrivals concourse. “Have you heard from Craddock?”

  “I thought he was meeting you.”

  “He’s not here and his phone’s not answering.”

  “I don’t know —”

  “What’s happening there? Did you get hold of your man at the Yard?”

  “He wants four thousand.
He says it’s risky but he’ll do it.”

  “Give it to him. Cash. Nothing traceable, and let me know when it’s clear. I want a cast-iron guarantee, all right?”

  “All right.”

  “Make sure you tell him that: cast iron. I don’t want any more foul-ups, no more surprises. I don’t want Symmonds or anyone else ever popping out of the woodwork.”

  “OK, J.C. But how are you going to get hold of Craddock?”

  “He gave me an address. I’ll take a cab if he doesn’t show up soon.”

  Craddock’s face is also the subject of discussion at the news desk of Vancouver’s local television station. “Does anyone have a picture of this guy?” yells the red-faced news producer trying to put the evening’s broadcast together. “Do we know anything about activity at the scene? What the bejesus is going on? Will someone please tell me.”

  “They’re keeping tight-lipped,” says the reporter, turning his back on the crowd outside Craddock’s house and whispering into his microphone.

  “One of their own,” suggests the producer knowingly. “Nothing closes ranks faster than a cop off the rails.”

  “Apparently he’s been off the job a couple of years,” continues the reporter.

  “Is there a story there? Booted off for being happy-handed with a prisoner perhaps?”

  “Tight-lipped,” reiterates the reporter. “No one’s talking here. Only speculation.”

  “We need something,” spits the producer into his microphone as he flicks switches to bring up a picture on his monitor. “Camera two, pan the crowd again, pull up a few nervy faces — mother clutching a kid, that sort of thing.” Then he flicks back to the reporter. “Graham, give us a voice-over. Something about worried neighbours fearing the worst as teams of heavily armed men surround this innocent looking house in their upscale suburban neigh-bourhood… you know the routine.”

  “Gotcha, Paul,” says the reporter as the camera begins its pan.

  The tropical sun has just dipped over the horizon into the Pacific Ocean when Craddock emerges as Paul Davies from the immigration hall at Honolulu International.