Willows and Parker Box Set

by Laurence Gough

  “They try to get in touch with you?”

  “We got in touch with them first.” Felix frowned. “Can you imagine how I felt about killing that poor kid, when I finally sobered up enough to examine my emotions? Knowing his pals were going to have to go too, because I’m a tidy person and I worry a lot.”

  “Bad?” said Mannie.

  “A flair for understatement. Very rare in a Jewish person.” Felix’s mouth was full of egg. He stopped talking long enough to swallow. “Junior went through Steve and Naomi’s apartment. Nothing there but a bunch of cockroaches. So he drove his fucking Trans Am up to Squamish and tossed her dad’s place. Zilch. If anybody’s got my tape, it has to be Carly.”

  “Makes sense,” said Mannie.

  “You think so, huh? Then why haven’t you been out on the street looking for her?”

  Mannie shrugged. He toyed with his omelette, pushed a piece of mushroom around the circumference of his plate. “I don’t know, it seemed like a good idea to let things cool down a little.”

  “Seemed like a good idea to you, is that what you mean?” Felix stabbed viciously at another chunk of tomato. He chewed vigorously. A gelatinous glop of juice and seeds dribbled down his chin. He wiped it away with the back of his hand, licked himself clean.

  “Carly’s staying with a gimp named Walter. Skinny little guy used to be a jockey.”

  “Oh yeah, what’s he do now?”

  “Fences stuff. Mostly junk. Don’t worry about it, he’s got no connections whatsoever.”

  Mannie drained his glass. Felix poured him a refill, waved the empty bottle expansively at the city and ocean glittering far below them. “Nice, huh?”

  “Really nice,” said Mannie.

  “Laguna Beach is better, though. Down there, you got weather like this all year round. And where else can you shoot whales from your front porch?” Felix leaned across the table and patted Mannie lightly on the shoulder. “Junior’s got the address. You do this right, you got his job.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  Felix pointed at Mannie’s rings. “What is all that shit, ten carats?” He smiled. “My people live in an eighteen-carat world, Mannie. You want to move up the ladder, you know how to do it.”

  Mannie looked closely at Felix and saw he wasn’t kidding. “After I get Junior’s job,” he said, “what happens to Junior?”

  “Up to you, kiddo.”

  “I want a new piece, too,” said Mannie. And looked surprised. The words had just popped out. He hadn’t thought about it at all.

  “A gun?” said Felix. He glanced down at the huge chrome-plated Colt lying next to his plate, beside his coffee spoon.

  “No,” said Mannie. “A wig.”

  Real hair. Long and thick. Hair that he could wear with confidence in the shower or in the middle of a fucking hurricane. He saw himself down at Laguna Beach, the surf foaming at his knees, a couple of those leggy Californian blondes wrapped all over him. His hair tossed by the offshore breeze. A tan even better than Junior’s.

  It could all happen. He knew it could. All he had to do was stay lucky and move fast.

  Chapter 28

  The ball was painted dark green, with two glossy white stripes. It lay in a hollow, nestled between the roots of a chestnut tree.

  The hoop was about twenty feet away on a twisting downhill slope, barely visible behind the spindly green trunks of an intruding clump of vine maple.

  Orwell stared down at the ball and considered his options. He could swing under the ball, try to loft it high enough to luck his way through the tangle of the maples. Or he might bounce it off the chestnut, put some spin on the ball and hope for a lucky bounce that would send it curling around the barrier of the trees. Or he could simply play it safe, drive the ball straight ahead and leave his partner, Brynner, an easy shot next time up.

  The first two shots were clearly impossible. The third went against his nature. He mulled it over, taking his time.

  “Just knock it ahead about five or ten feet,” said Brynner, glaring over the bowl of his pipe.

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?” Brynner had intense dark eyes and an unkempt black beard, an unpleasant habit of nibbling furiously at the edges of his moustache.

  “Too easy,” said Orwell.

  “Fucking hell,” whispered Brynner, too quietly for anyone but Orwell to hear. “We can win this thing, eh? The whole bag of marbles! All you have to do is quit screwing around.”

  Orwell took a few practice swings. He shifted his stance minutely and then drew back and hit the ball with all the force and conviction he could muster. It struck the chestnut with a dull thud and shot off at a crazy angle, missing Jerry Goldstein’s wife by inches.

  “Fore!” yelled Orwell. There was a scattering of laughter.

  Brynner chewed at his moustache.

  Orwell watched a girl with short red hair line up her shot, drill her ball thirty feet across uneven ground and right through the heart of the hoop, strike a pose.

  “Fuck,” said Brynner.

  “I’m thirsty,” said Orwell. “I think I’ll go get something to drink.”

  “Just don’t come whining to me when your kidneys give out and transplant time rolls around.”

  Orwell looked at Brynner to see if he was kidding. It wasn’t possible to say. They were playing the second and final round of the match. Out of sixteen original players, there were only eight left: four teams of two. Orwell silently cursed the luck of the draw. Brynner was not a very amiable person. Orwell had a hunch the guy was out on a day pass from someplace with iron bars on the windows.

  He made his way out of the trees, over to where Judith was sitting in the sun in a webbed aluminium lawn chair. She was wearing a wide-brimmed white cotton hat with a scarlet band, a flimsy white summer dress that she’d pulled high on her thighs in order to catch some tan. Orwell sat down next to her on a Coleman cooler. She gave him a big smile.

  “Nice stroke, Eddy. If you’d put a little more weight behind it, you might’ve killed her.”

  “Scare tactics, that’s all. You cripple one of ’em, the rest fall into line real fast.”

  Judith was cradling a bottle of cheap white wine in her lap. Orwell watched her fumble with the screw cap, take a hit. Screw the cap back on. He held out his hand and she passed the bottle to him. He took a sip. The wine was lukewarm, brackish.

  “Brynner keeps making these incredibly rotten shots. So I end up looking like a dunce, trying to get out of all the jams he leaves me in. How we ever made it through the first round is something I’ll never know.”

  “The rest of us deliberately blew it so we could settle down to some serious drinking,” said Judith. The chair creaked as she leaned towards Orwell to retrieve the bottle.

  “Brynner’s about as much fun as a fucking bunion. If I was a quitter, I’d quit right this minute.”

  “You can always turn into a quitter, Eddy. You know what they say, it’s never too late to change.”

  Impulsively, Orwell reached out and squeezed Judith’s hand. “I’d like to quit being a bachelor,” he said. “Why don’t we get married.”

  “Who to?” said Judith, drawing back.

  “Each other, for Christ’s sake!”

  Orwell got down on his knees. He pulled the sterling silver box out of his trouser pocket, flipped up the lid. The diamond, a half carat of pure carbon crystallized in regular octahedrons and allied forms, caught the light and flashed sparks of red and green.

  “Say no!” someone shouted from the trees. There was a burst of laughter.

  Orwell flushed. He thrust the ring towards Judith. “Say yes,” he said. “Please say yes.”

  Judith tried the ring on. It fit surprisingly well. She slipped it off her finger, put it back in the silver box. “You’re the second man to ask me to marry him this week,” she said.

  Orwell stared at her. “I am?”

  “Parking violation. Meter had run out. The guy showed up just as I was sticking the ticket unde
r his windscreen wiper. Said he’d been waiting for me all morning long.”

  “Oh yeah? and he asked you to marry him?”

  Judith nodded. She drank deeply of the wine, holding the bottle in both hands. When she was finished drinking she put the bottle down on the grass and moved her chair around a few degrees. Orwell’s first thought was that she wanted to face him more directly, but then he realized she was simply chasing the sun.

  “He figured if we were married he’d be able to beat the ticket because I wouldn’t be able to testify against him in court.” Judith picked up the bottle and drank another inch. “A real kidder, a genuine comedian.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “I told him he needed a better reason than that, and so did I. You know what happened?”

  “No, what?”

  “He grabs the ticket and turns it into a cute little paper elephant. With a trunk, and ears that stick way out, stumpy legs and everything.”

  “He turned the parking ticket into an elephant?”

  ‘You should’ve seen his hands, Eddy. A blur, they moved so fast.”

  “No shit,” said Orwell. He chopped idly at the grass with the head of his mallet, gouging neat crescents out of the lawn. Judith was staring at him, looking at him as if she was waiting for him to say something. He took a few more swipes at the grass and then said, “Hey, wait a minute!”

  “What?”

  “This is the same guy you gave a ticket to last week, right?”

  “That’s right, Eddy.”

  “With the black Trans Am. We were talking about it at the juice bar at the club.” Orwell frowned. “The guy said he was waiting for you?”

  “He sure did.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “He asked me if I wanted to go for a drive,” said Judith. She didn’t see any point in telling Orwell where Junior had suggested they go, which was to the Hyatt Regency, or how he’d gone into extremely graphic detail about what he wanted to do to her once they got there. “I told him to forget it, I wasn’t interested. He jumped into his big black car with the tinted windows, and took off.”

  “Mad, huh. Burn a little rubber?”

  “All the way down the block.”

  “Punk. You think there’s any chance he might come back?”

  “Who can say,” said Judith, not sounding too worried about it. She reached down into her bag for a tube of coconut oil. Orwell watched the smooth brown skin of her thigh dimple under the pressure of her fingers.

  “What about us?” he said.

  “What about you and that cute little brunette detective named Claire Parker?” Judith shot back.

  Orwell blushed. “How did you hear about her?”

  “Never mind, Eddy.”

  “I just went out with her a couple of times.” He was whining. He cleared his throat, and frowned.

  “Three times,” said Judith. “You went out with her three times in two weeks. And the last time was to that expensive restaurant in the park, wasn’t it?”

  “Kearns told you, didn’t he?”

  “Don’t blame your partner for your troubles, Eddy. Blame yourself.”

  “It wasn’t anything serious. It was a last fling, that’s all. I mean, I didn’t ask her to marry me, did I.”

  Somebody tapped him on the shoulder. It was Brynner, his dark eyes glistening. “Your shot,” he said. “You two getting hitched?”

  “I doubt it,” said Judith. She applied a little more coconut oil. “I’m going to have to think about it,” she said. “It’s a nice diamond, but I’d never want to be a man’s second choice.’

  “Good for you,” said Brynner.

  Orwell struggled to his feet. There were grass stains on the knees of his white trousers. He twirled the croquet mallet in his hands, and glared at Brynner as if he was lining up his next shot, and Brynner’s bald head was the ball. Chewing on his moustache, Brynner slowly backed away.

  Chapter 29

  Willows borrowed the Duty Sergeant’s Bic pen and signed an unmarked chocolate-brown Ford Fairlane out of the car pool. He checked to make sure the cherry and the radio and the computer terminal worked, then wheeled out of the parking lot and on to Cordova.

  He drove down Cordova for three blocks, turned right on Jackson, made a quick left on Prior and accelerated up the concrete access ramp to the Dunsmuir Viaduct. Almost directly ahead of him the bloated, bone-white fibreglass roof of the domed stadium rose up to dominate the south-west quadrant of the city’s skyline. Off to his right, the old Vancouver Sun building looked as if it was waiting to be climbed by a giant ape.

  It was Monday night, a few minutes past ten. The temperature was in the high seventies, and holding steady. There was a breeze coming in from the ocean; the air smelled of iodine. Traffic was moderate.

  On the downtown core side of the viaduct Willows impatiently waited out a red light and then turned on to Howe Street, one of the main arteries that skirted the city’s financial district. He drove one short block down Howe and hit another red. As he sat in the idling Ford waiting for the light to change, he was suddenly filled with a sense of urgency and despair. Too much time had passed since the discovery of the bodies of Naomi Lister and her still-unidentified boyfriend. The vast majority of murder cases were solved in the first few days of the investigation or not at all. This one was slipping away from him, fading fast.

  At the corner of Robson and Davie, Claire Parker sat at a bus stop bench drinking grape juice out of a waxed cardboard carton, and reading the graffiti spray-painted all around her. Willows pulled the Fairlane tight against the curb and Parker stood up. She opened the Fairlane’s door and slid inside, adjusted her skirt. She shut the door and said, “Let’s roll, partner!”

  Willows just sat there, not moving. Parker was wearing a dark blue skirt and matching jacket, a creamy white blouse with an open neck. She drank the last of the grape juice and reached out the window and tossed the container into a litter bin. Willows still hadn’t moved. She turned to him and said, “Something wrong, Jack?”

  “No, not a thing. I was just admiring your outfit. Nice suit. Very businesslike. Makes you look like a lawyer.”

  Parker shrugged. “Eddy Orwell took me out to dinner.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “Have you ever been up on top of the Sears Building, that revolving tower?”

  Willows shook his head. “No, I can’t say I have.”

  “Real nice view,” said Parker, doing her best to mimic Orwell’s gravelly voice.

  “I can imagine.”

  “What Eddy kept wondering about, all through the meal, was the plumbing. How do they keep the pipes from getting all twisted up? When you flush the toilet, where does it all go? Fascinating.” Parker tilted the rearview mirror towards her, peered intently at her reflection. “Tell me something, Jack. Do you think I’m too old for Eddy?”

  “Everybody over the mental age of twelve is too old for Eddy.” Willows swung the mirror back into position, twisted in his seat to check the traffic, and hit the gas. “Why, did he give you the brush-off?”

  “I’m a free woman,” said Parker. “No encumbrances.”

  Willows let that one go by.

  The Fairlane was burning oil and the automatic transmission was out of adjustment, the bands were slipping. They were cruising down the twelve-hundred block Davie, between Bute and Jervis. There were hookers everywhere. Space was at a premium, the intersections filled to capacity, groups of two or three prostitutes at every corner. As they drove west, down the slope towards English Bay, the women faded and the boys took over. They looked right through the Fairlane. The four doors and blackwall tyres made the car instantly recognizable as a police vehicle — the two small whip antennae sticking out of the boot were simply icing on the cake.

  Willows drove past Jervis and pulled up next to a fireplug halfway down the block. A street-cleaning machine sloshed up the hill towards them, huge brushes spinning, jets of water spraying both sides of the street, sluici
ng the day’s accumulation of filth into the gutters. Willows turned off the engine. He rolled up his window and waited until the big white machine had roared past, then pushed open his door and got out of the car. The wet and steaming asphalt was a palette of colour — blurred smears of neon pinks, greens and blues.

  “All set?” said Parker.

  Willows reached under his jacket and shifted the angle of his .38 snubbie in its clamshell holster. He got out of his car and slammed the door shut, then examined his reflection in the car window, making sure that his jacket hung properly and that the gun didn’t show.

  The two detectives strolled up the sidewalk, Parker adjusting to Willows’ slow, rolling gait, the pace he’d learned during his years as a uniformed patrolman.

  *

  The experience they had with two women in front of the government liquor store on Alberni was typical in most respects of the way things had been going, and the way they went that night.

  The women were both hungry. It is not against the law in Canada to be a prostitute, but it is illegal to actively solicit business. Willows watched the women move with the flow of the traffic, all hips and mouths and pouting breasts as they patrolled the curb, smiling sightlessly into the glare of the lights and the glossy metal bodies of the slow-moving cars that cruised past them like the links of an endless chain. He and Parker were about thirty feet away when the nearest of the women noticed them. She said something to her companion and they both began to walk rapidly down the street, heading towards the alley.

  “Hold it!” Willows shouted.

  The women slowed, glanced uncertainly at each other, stopped.

  “It’s those six-inch spike heels,” said Parker. “If they’d been wearing flats, they’d have run for it.”

  The women turned to face the approaching cops. A chorus line of two. Twin sisters wearing frilly pink dresses in a clinging, translucent material. Blue nylons sprinkled with tiny silver stars. Hair cut short and ragged, dyed blonde with streaks of red and green and purple. Eyes sunk deep in blue shadow, cheeks heavily rouged, lips blood-red and glistening.