Funny, how you could have a relationship with a person, go to bed with them and everything, but there were still lots of things you couldn’t talk about. Or maybe that was just her …
“Jan?”
Sandy turned off the engine. They were parked in the small gravel lot behind the tattoo parlour. Sandy was staring at her, a quizzical look in his eyes. He said, “All set?”
“Yeah, sure.” Jan helped Tyler with his safety belt. She pushed open her door, and jumped lightly down from the truck, and fumbled in her jeans pocket for her keys. Sandy lowered the truck’s tailgate. Jan unlocked the back door. She took Tyler’s hand and the two of them went inside. A previous tenant had painted the windows midnight-blue, then scratched dozens of tiny star shapes into the paint. Jan had never found the time or energy to scrape the paint off the glass, and anyway, it was a neat effect, especially at night. She flicked the light switch. Her studio was exactly as she had left it. Sandy pushed through the door, awkwardly carrying half a dozen cardboard boxes they’d picked up at a nearby liquor store. Jan was suddenly terribly depressed. It hadn’t been much of a business, but it had been all hers. It went against the grain to give it up.
She said, “This really sucks.”
Sandy nodded. He said, “It’d suck a lot worse if your landlord grabbed all this stuff, and you had to buy it back at auction.”
“Like I could afford to do that.”
“Well then, there you go.”
Sandy and Jan warily eyed each other. Harvey had failed to check in to confirm he’d stolen a getaway vehicle. The robbery was less than twenty-four hours away, and they were both feeling a little tense.
Tyler said, “What am I supposed to do?”
“Help your mom, if she needs help. In the meantime … ” Sandy reached into one of the cardboard boxes. He handed Tyler a small container of chocolate milk, and a stack of comic books.
“Wow! Thanks a lot!”
“You’re welcome.”
Jan said, “You can sit over there, on that bench by the window.”
Tyler made himself comfortable. He chose a comic, and started reading.
Jan had a padded bench, for customers who needed to stretch out. She also had a dentist’s chair that dated from the twenties. The chair was probably the single most valuable item she owned. It weighed about a million pounds, but could easily be disassembled into manageable parts. Sandy went back outside to get his tool kit from the truck. Jan got busy putting jars of dye in the cardboard boxes, wrapping each jar in a protective half-sheet of newspaper. She was hardly aware of Sandy taking the chair apart.
As Jan worked, star-shaped beams of light from the blue-painted windows flowed randomly and silently across her body. Her mood gradually brightened. Life was change. She had hopes and ambitions, but really she had no idea what her future held. All she knew for sure was that she and Tyler were moving on, in their brief flight through space and time. She manipulated her body so a star-shaped beam of light drifted up her arm and across her chest. She turned slightly, so the star settled on her breast like a celestial nipple. Tyler was absorbed in his comic. She softly called Sandy’s name.
He smiled when he saw what she was up to, but there was no spark of lust in his eyes, only sadness.
Jan said, “What is it? What’s wrong?”
Sandy took her in his arms. He held her close, but didn’t say a word.
Chapter 19
Thumb pie
Granville Street was in flux. The street had once been the city’s main artery, in the sense that a lot of hot blood had flowed through it. Movies, nightclubs, restaurants. Back in the sixties, Granville had it all. If you were a hip guy from the suburbs, a rite of passage was hanging your naked butt out the window of your buddy’s car as he cruised slowly up Granville on a weekend night, mooning a few thousand pedestrians. Traffic had been chaotic, naturally. The city council of the time had decided in its collective wisdom to close the street to all traffic except buses and taxis and cop cars. It was a brilliant solution — assuming they intended to kill the street. An inexplicable ban on neon signs made a bad situation even worse. The construction of the Eaton’s building, with its endlessly bland wall of tiny urinal-white tiles, added to the mess. For the past couple of decades, city politicians had toyed with the brilliant idea of reopening Granville to traffic. For reasons not accessible to the general public, they’d always caved in to the Whining Bus Drivers lobby.
Aldo and Jackie waited at the curb for a bus to roar past and then trotted across the street and into the Eaton’s building — now reincarnated as Sears. Aldo held his breath as they passed the area of the store devoted to perfumes and toiletries. Jackie inhaled deeply, and winked at an attractive if somewhat over-primped young woman dressed like a dental assistant, who stood in the aisle offering a deluxe boxed set of perfumes. All down the length of the aisle, similarly dressed women mutely offered other products to the passing shoppers.
Jackie said, “It’s like Cairo, in that Lonely Planet episode … ”
Aldo missed his brother’s witticism, because he was already on the escalator, standing bolt upright as he rose majestically into the department store’s upper reaches. He made eye contact, tapped the crystal of his watch and loudly hissed at his brother to hurry up. Jackie glanced around. No one had witnessed the insult to his manhood. Lucky for Aldo. Jackie stepped onto the escalator and was carried effortlessly upwards.
Did Heaven have escalators? No, of course not. What would be the point of a system of public conveyance when everyone had wings and could fly about wherever they chose? Aldo retreated down the escalator steps towards him. Jackie took a few steps upwards.
The cavernous self-serve restaurant was busy but not crowded. The brothers, as was their habit, drifted apart as they browsed the dessert selection. Neither risked the calories. They poured cups of coffee, paid separately, and flowed back together like two complicated amoeba.
Jackie said, “Where’s Wilbur?” He glared down at his watch. “He’s going to be late any minute now!”
Aldo emptied five packets of sugar into his coffee, stirred briskly, and added two containers of cream.
Jackie took his coffee black. He said, “That’s a meal all in itself. You’ve made a kind of soup.” He glanced anxiously around. “Cousin Wilbur’s a toad. I’ve only met him twice, but I disliked him both times.”
“Me too,” said Aldo. He drank some coffee. “But who else do we know who’s willing to sell us an unregistered handgun?”
“Nobody.”
“You’re worried, aren’t you?”
“About what?”
“The robbery, what else? We don’t know those people. They don’t know us, either. Anything could happen.” He pointed at Jackie with his spoon. “You know it could.”
“What are you talking about?”
Aldo jerked his head sideways. Jackie turned and looked over his shoulder just as Cousin Wilbur slapped him on the back.
“Aldo!”
“No, I’m Jackie.”
“You guys look so much alike! You could be brothers!” Seasonally, Wilbur found low-paid employment as a gnome, or Santa’s Little Helper. During the rest of the year he sat around plotting and scheming and thieving, and growing his beard. Jackie and Aldo made room as he grabbed a chair and sat down at the head of the small table. Wilbur lived in Surrey, a distant, semi-rural suburb notorious for its high crime rate. Car theft and simple break-and-enter and drug addiction were the municipality’s specialties, but the area wasn’t above an annual mass murder or two. Wilbur was a small-time thief with a rap sheet as long as his memory. Demographics-wise, he fitted right in. He snapped his stubby fingers. “Where’s the money?”
Jackie handed him a sealed envelope. Wilbur ripped it open and counted the thin wad of twenties. He pushed back his chair and stood up and started to walk away.
Jackie said, “Hey, wait a minute. What about the … ”
Wilbur shook his head and rolled his eyes in mock-exaspera
tion. He said, “It’s in your coat pocket, Jackie. Be careful. It’s loaded.”
Jackie waited until Wilbur had passed from view, then dipped his hand in his pocket. The gun was hard, and warm. He spread his thumb and index finger. “It’s this small.”
Aldo swung his chair around so he could sit close to his brother. “Show me.”
The gun settled into Jackie’s hand like an egg into a nest. It was satisfactorily heavy. He pointed the gun at his brother. “Stick ’em up!”
“Give me that, you fool.” Aldo snatched the weapon out of Jackie’s hand. The gun was chrome-plated. Made in China was stamped into the two-inch barrel. It had a relentlessly lethal quality to it, like a small but deadly snake. Aldo’s index finger found its own way inside the trigger guard. He pointed the gun at his brother’s foot and said, “Bang!”
“Bang! Bang! Bang!” Said Jackie.
“Ka-pow!” Said Aldo. He put the gun in his pocket.
Jackie grabbed him by the lapels. “Give that back, it’s mine!”
*
Easy money
When they’d loaded everything into the bed of the pickup truck, and collected Tyler, Sandy said, “There’s a guy I know, owes me a favour. I told him what you’ve got; he said he’d take it all, give you three grand, sight unseen.”
“Three thousand dollars?” Jan was not much short of astounded. She’d said, “Whoever this guy is, he must owe you a big one.”
“Not really. You interested?”
“Three thousand is more than it’s worth.”
“Better take it, then.”
Tyler said, “Can I beep the horn now?”
“Sure.”
Tyler leaned on the horn until Jan told him to please cut it out, he was giving her a headache.
Sandy said, “What do you want to do?”
“Sell.”
They drove over the hump of the Granville Street Bridge, Fairview’s million windows glittering in the light of the sun. Sandy made a right on Broadway. He drove a couple of blocks past Burrard, made a right turn, and then a quick left, down the alley that gave access to the buildings fronting Broadway. He stopped, and then backed up in a wide circle, until the tailgate was inches from a loading dock marked by a faded sign that said Terminal City Auctions. Tyler had fallen asleep, lulled by the sound of the truck’s engine, and the summer heat. Sandy punched buttons on his cellular, put the phone to his ear. He said, “Were here. Open up.”
He folded the cellular and started to get out of the truck. Somebody inside the building pushed open a wide door. A tall man wearing black jeans and a black leather vest over a white T-shirt stepped onto the loading dock. He had curly blond hair and a pale complexion, and wore a lot of silver jewellery. Sandy climbed up on the dock. The two men hugged, and then Sandy turned and pointed at Jan, or the stuff in the back of the truck, Jan wasn’t sure which. The man said something that made Sandy smile, and then he turned and disappeared into the building. Sandy walked across the dock to the truck. He lowered the tailgate, and then jumped down to the asphalt and got back into the truck.
Jan lit a cigarette. She rolled down her window and flicked the match out of her life.
Sandy said, “He’s going to sell it at auction, probably next Wednesday. He gets more than three grand, the usual commission applies.”
“What if he gets less?”
“That’s his problem.”
Jan said, “His, or yours?”
The truck rocked on its springs. Jan turned and looked behind her. Three men were stripping the truck of her possessions. They weren’t particularly large or muscular, but they were very fast. When everything was gone, it was somehow as if it had never existed. Sandy handed her a bulky white envelope.
“What’s that?”
“Your money. Count it.”
The envelope wasn’t sealed. Jan opened it. The bills were all twenties. None of them were crisp and new, and as far as she could tell, there were no sequential serial numbers. She counted the money and came up forty dollars short. Frustrated, she scrunched up a fistful of bills.
Sandy said, “Here, let me count it.”
Jan pushed him away with her shoulder. She said, “Forget that.”
She counted the bills again, laying out stacks of ten on the dashboard and in her lap. She took her time, and when she was finished, she knew the count was right. She gathered the money together and put it back in the envelope and shoved the envelope deep into her purse.
Sandy said, “Okay, you satisfied?”
“Not really.”
He leaned against the truck’s door, and draped his arm over the steering wheel. “What’s the problem?”
“Three thousand dollars in cash, and no receipt.”
“It’s a cash business, Jan.”
Jan rolled down her window and flicked her cigarette butt into the alley. She glanced at Tyler. “Like hell it is.”
Sandy sat up straight. He said, “You got three thousand dollars in your pocket. No need to worry about next month’s rent or putting food on the table. That’s more than most people have got.”
“What’s your point?”
“You’re young, good-looking. You know how to dress, how to behave. You’re well-spoken, and healthy. You think for one second that prison made Harvey a better person? He’s going to mess you up, Jan. Me too, if he gets the chance. Forget the robbery. There’s no such thing as easy money, any more than there’s such a thing as an easy death.”
Jan stole a quick look at Tyler. Still sleeping.
Sandy said, “Think a nine-to-five job would be hard? Imagine yourself in prison, wearing an orange jumpsuit every single day of your life for the next five years. Think about Tyler in foster care, going to bed every night trying to figure out why his mother abandoned him.”
“I’d never do that. Never.” Jan lit another cigarette, pulled smoke into her lungs, pinched the match between her fingers, flicked it out the window. “Tyler’s the reason I’m doing this, dammit!” She was so angry she could have hit him. She said, “Three thousand dollars is nothing. Nothing!”
Sandy said, “i’ll drive you home.” He’d spoken so quietly she’d hardly been able to hear him. He put the truck in gear, and backed cautiously into the alley.
Neither of them said a word during the ride back to her apartment. When they got there, Sandy shifted into park but didn’t turn off the engine.
Jan said, “I guess you wouldn’t come up even if you were invited, which you’re not. You going to be here, in the morning?”
“Ten o’clock, sharp.”
Jan nodded. The way it was set up, she and Harvey and Sandy would meet at her apartment the following morning, and go over the robbery one last time. The heist was set for eleven forty-five that day. If everything went right, the robbery wouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes, tops. They’d finish up at noon, just as tens of thousands of downtown office workers hit the street.
Sandy said, “After that, it’s over.”
“You mean, between us?”
“That’s right.” Something lurked in Sandy’s eyes that Jan had never seen before. A dark, bitter sadness. He said, “You wake up in the middle of the night, decide retail sales might not be so bad after all, call me on my cellphone.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“I mean it, Jan. Harvey’s a loose cannon. And Aldo and Jackie — what does anybody know about them? Less than nothing.”
“So what? What does anybody know about anybody? What do I know about you?” Jan jabbed his chest with her finger. “As far as that goes, what do you know about yourself?”
Sandy looked out the windshield at the heat and glare of the world. After a long moment he said, “Doesn’t matter what time it is, you have a change of heart, pick up the phone.”
Jan said, “Harvey and I don’t need you. We can do the job ourselves.”
Jan unbuckled Tyler and half-dragged him, moaning and complaining and blindly clutching at his comics, out of the truck. Sandy watched her
and Tyler jaywalk across the road, and cut across her building’s parched lawn. Jan yanked open the glass door with its faded gilt lettering. She and her son disappeared into the elevator. Sandy told himself he had done what he could, but he didn’t quite believe it. Jan appeared at her living-room window. He gave her a tentative wave. She didn’t wave back. Maybe she was looking at him and maybe she wasn’t. She reached out and pulled the drapes.
*
Butler did it
Willows’ pager chirped. He checked the readout, unclipped his cellphone from his belt holster, speed-dialled the coroner’s office, and identified himself to the woman who answered the phone.
“One moment, please.” There was no canned music. Was that legal? Willows tried to think of a tune. Christy Kirkpatrick, Willows’ all-time favourite pathologist, identified himself.
“Jack, that you?”
“Hi, Christy. How’s it going?”
“I took a second look at the Colin McDonald photos. Thought you might be interested in the results.”
Willows waited.
Kirkpatrick said, “This is just a preliminary, but it’s accurate.”
“Let’s have it, Christy.”
“Colin McDonald was attacked with a sharp-edged weapon, either a heavy knife, or a meat cleaver. But not until after he’d died.”
Willows was stunned. “You’re sure?”
“Jack, please.”
“How did he die?”
“A shepherd bit him.”
Was Kirkpatrick trying to be funny? The pathologist was in his seventies, long overdue for mandatory retirement. Willows had long ago given up trying to figure out who Kirkpatrick knew or how many strings he had to pull to keep his job.
He said, “What did you say, Christy?”
“A shepherd bit him.” Christy chuckled. “A dog, Jack. Somebody’s puppy used McDonald for a chew toy. Punctured his spinal cord. The cleaver was used to cover up the wound. Any of your suspects own a pooch?”
A Cloud of Suspects Page 23