Serious Crimes (A Willows and Parker Mystery)

by Laurence Gough

  “You recognized him, then?”

  “I’ve known him for many years. But we were not friends.”

  “Did you identify him right away?” Lee’s face was glazed with a thin coating of ice and frost. Willows waited for the answer.

  “No. After I made the call. Even though I initially only took a quick look, the face was vaguely familiar to me…” Yang shrugged.

  “Where do you live, Doctor?”

  “The Kerrisdale district. Do you know it?”

  “Yes, of course.” Kerrisdale was on the south side of the city. There were views of the Fraser River Delta, the airport. It was an expensive neighbourhood, large lots and big houses full of doctors and lawyers and their well-dressed wives, Filipino nannies and kids that wore dark blue uniforms and hardly knew a public school system existed.

  Yang watched Parker fill the pages of her notebook. His face was devoid of expression. Willows noticed that he hardly ever blinked.

  Willows said, “Could we have your address, please?”

  Yang slipped a pale yellow leather billfold from the breast pocket of his suit, flipped it open and handed Parker a business card.

  “What time did you leave home this morning, Doctor Yang?”

  “At a few minutes before six o’clock.”

  “Are you married?”

  “Yes, certainly.”

  “Was your wife awake when you left the house?”

  “She drank tea with me.” Yang frowned. “Have you begun to suspect me after all, Detective Willows?”

  Willows had a job to do, but he had to be careful. He had no doubt that Yang was very well connected. He smiled and said, “At this point, we still don’t know for certain that a crime has been committed. When there is no crime, how can there be a suspect? The more questions I ask now, the fewer I’ll need to ask later. In any case, my only wish is to trouble you as little as possible.”

  “I am greatly troubled already. The serenity of my beautiful gardens has been disrupted.” Yang indicated the macabre corpse with a wave of his hand. “This will be in the newspapers, on the radio and television…”

  “We’ll do our best to keep the media on the other side of the wall,” said Willows.

  “That would be very much appreciated. And now, if there are no further questions…”

  “Not right now, no. Thank you for your time, Doctor Yang.”

  Yang gave Willows an almost imperceptible bow, as if it was a reflex action that he was not entirely able to control. He turned and walked down the path towards his office. His back was rigid and the movement of his arms and legs was stiff, mechanical. “What d’you think?” said Parker.

  “I think he’s a little nervous. But I can’t say I blame him.” Willows turned to look at the body. “Know what else I think?”

  “No, what?”

  “That it’s too early in the morning to have to deal with something like that. C’mon, let’s go talk to Eddy.”

  Orwell and a couple of uniforms and the ME waited where the gracefully curving shoreline of the pond was closest to the body. A cop named Mel Dutton stood a few feet away from them, inserting a fresh roll of 400 ASA colour film into his Nikon.

  “Get some good ones, Mel?”

  “Two-hundred-mil telephoto.” Dutton snapped the back of the camera shut, advanced the film. He handed the Nikon to Willows. “Here, take a look.” Willows squinted through the viewfinder. From head to toe, Lee’s body was encased in varying thicknesses of ice.

  Willows handed the camera back to Dutton. “Why hasn’t he been moved?”

  “Because that ice is less than two inches thick and the water underneath it is about four feet deep and so cold it’d freeze your balls off.” He grinned at Parker. “If you had any, that is.”

  Orwell was watching them, but keeping his distance. Willows caught his eye. “You call the fire department, Eddy?”

  “They’re on the way,” said Orwell, strolling over. He had his hands in the pockets of his black leather trench coat. His blond hair was combed straight back and it looked soaking wet, but wasn’t. Willows could smell the gel.

  “How’d he get inside?”

  “There’s a door over there.” Orwell took his hand, sheathed in a skin-tight black leather glove, out of his pocket. He pointed. “Behind that column.”

  “Nice coat,” said Willows. “Nice gloves, too.”

  “Thanks,” said Eddy, warily. He slipped his hand back in his pocket.

  “I heard a rumour you asked the Chief if you could trade in your Smith for a Luger. True?”

  “Very funny, Jack.” The look Orwell gave Willows was intended to be sardonic, but came across as merely wounded. He turned and marched back to where Willows truly believed he belonged — with the uniformed cops.

  “Sometimes,” said Parker, “the telephone rings and I’m in such a hurry to answer it that I get out the wrong side of the bed. And then I’m grumpy all day long. That what happened to you, Jack?”

  “Never. Was it Yang who dialled nine-eleven?”

  Parker nodded.

  Willows began to walk in the direction Orwell had pointed out. The switchboard operator would have logged and taped Yang’s call. He’d listen to it later that day.

  The winter sun, low on the horizon, was a pale, shimmering ball of light. The smooth surface of the pond glittered coldly. Lee’s milky-white corpse sat hunched in the middle of the expanse of ice, solid and unmoving, as if it had been there forever.

  Parker said, “We’re going to have to drain the pond, we hope to find anything.”

  “And probably all we’ll find is that we wasted our time.”

  “Eliminating possibilities is never a waste of time, Jack,” said Parker sweetly.

  The moon door, two dark, polished half-circles of mahogany, stood out in stark contrast to the gardens’ white-painted wall. The wood was shattered in the area of the lock. Willows studied the deep indentations in the polished surface. It looked like the door had been kicked in by a horse. He said, “Dutton take any shots of this?”

  “Not yet.”

  “All that ice… Yang must have pretty sharp eyes.”

  “The face is clear enough.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” Willows wondered if he was due for a trip to the optometrist. He turned and whistled shrilly. Dutton glanced up. Willows waved him over.

  During the past year, Dutton had put on twenty or maybe twenty-five pounds. His heavy coat and the cameras slung around his neck gave him added bulk. His chin shook as he waddled down the walkway towards them. His eyes were watering and his bald head was pink from the cold.

  “Take a few shots of the door, Mel. See the heel marks?”

  Dutton nodded. The sun wasn’t bright enough to cast shadows. He’d have to use the flash.

  Willows crouched, studied the grass in the area of the door. They’d have to sweep the whole area, probably end up with a garbage bag full of litter. He fumbled in his jacket pocket for his tape measure, pulled six inches and held the tape up against the door next to the heel marks while Dutton shot half a roll of film. When Dutton was finished, Willows measured the distance from the ground to a cluster of overlapping heel marks on the door.

  Thirty-nine inches. What did that tell him? The group of heel marks was located about three inches below the lock. He balanced on his left leg and brought his own leg up. The heel of his shoe made contact with the door two inches above the dents in the wood. He was a six-footer. That would make the killer about five foot ten. One thing for sure, he wasn’t a midget.

  “That it?” said Dutton.

  “For now. I want the boulevard searched. You might find some footprints in the grass.”

  The fire truck had arrived. Willows and Parker went back to the pond. There were four firemen. They had a wooden ladder about thirty feet long. Two of them slid the ladder across the ice, past the body. The smallest of them started to climb over the rock ledge surrounding the pond.

  “Hold it!” yelled Willows.

&
nbsp; “You don’t want us to go get him?”

  “I’ll do it.”

  The fireman pulled off a bulky yellow rubber glove and stroked his walrus moustache. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t try to hide his disappointment, either. Willows swung over the ledge and stepped gingerly on the first rung of the ladder. The ice groaned and crackled. To avoid crashing through the ice, he was going to have to distribute his weight as widely as possible. On his hands and knees, he began to crawl along the ladder.

  “Smile, Jack!” yelled Dutton. Willows heard the firemen laughing. Orwell, too. His knees ached from contact with the rungs. The ice moaned again, as if it was in pain.

  Willows got close enough to reach out and touch the hunched figure of Kenny Lee, and stopped.

  Lee was naked. His entire body was covered in an encrustation of ice. In his lap, the ice was perhaps three or four inches thick. Icicles hung from his nose, the lobes of his ears. Dribbles of ice ran like veins across the smooth ice that coated his arms. His feet were sheathed in ice. Fat drops of ice lay like huge warts across his ice-encased shoulders. Stalactites of ice fell from his bent legs to the surface of the pond. He was burdened with a back-pack of ice. His mouth was wide open, as if he’d died screaming. A frozen waterfall poured out from between his lips and down his chest. He wore a tight skull-cap of ice. Everywhere Willows looked, there was ice.

  Lee’s face was thin and bony. His features were softened by the layer of ice that covered him, and in the pale, bleached light of early winter, his eyes looked like two frosty balls of frozen slush.

  Willows crept along the ladder, so he could take a look at Lee from a different angle. He could see the outline of Lee’s spine through the ice. The man was extremely thin, almost emaciated. There were no visible wounds, but under the circumstances, that didn’t mean a thing.

  Willows called out to the firemen for an axe.

  It took him almost half an hour to chop the corpse free of the ice, hack a circle all the way around the body. By the time he’d finished he was soaking wet and trembling from the cold, his knuckles were scraped raw and his face stung from splinters of ice.

  He managed to get his arms around Lee’s body, tried to pull the corpse up on to solid ice.

  “You want a hand?” yelled Orwell.

  Willows ignored him. He used the axe to smash a larger hole in the ice, took a deep breath and jumped into the water. Christ! Naked, Lee weighed maybe a hundred and thirty pounds. Dressed in his suit of ice, he was twice as heavy. Willows tipped the corpse at an angle, managed to get the flat base of ice over the lip of the hole. He pushed hard, and Lee slid several feet across the surface. There was a ragged cheer from the crowd of cops and firemen. Willows dragged the ladder over the hole. He climbed up on it and moved closer to the corpse, reached out with both hands and shoved hard. Kenny Lee, still sitting bolt upright with his legs crossed and his hands in his lap, rocketed across the ice and bumped up against the stone wall surrounding the pond.

  Willows crawled slowly back down the ladder, climbed stiffly over the stone retaining wall. His hands were numb. His body was so cold he couldn’t shop shaking, he was out of control.

  “Nice work,” said Orwell. “Dutton must’ve taken about a thousand pictures. Here, have a souvenir.” Grinning, he handed Willows a Polaroid.

  Parker drove Willows back to 312 Main, dropped him off at the back entrance and wheeled the unmarked patrol car into the underground garage. Willows took the elevator down to the basement. There was a spare change of clothes in his locker, but his hands were trembling so badly he couldn’t work the combination lock, and had to ask a passing cop to do it for him. He stripped off his clothes, grabbed a towel and headed for the showers.

  When he walked into the squad room, half an hour later, there was a six-inch-tall stuffed penguin standing in the middle of his desk, in a small puddle of water. He glanced around, but only Parker would meet his eye. The half-dozen other detectives in the room didn’t seem to have noticed his arrival. He slid open his desk drawer and pulled out a letter-opener, used the blade to viciously disembowel the penguin and then tore its head off and tossed the gutted and decapitated bird into Eddy Orwell’s wastebasket.

  “Nice throw,” said Parker. “How you feeling, a bit hungry?”

  “Yeah, maybe a little.”

  “Nothing like a good swim to sharpen the appetite.”

  Willows said, “How would you know?”

  Parker smiled. “Let’s go grab something to eat.”

  She took him to the Ovaltine Cafe, on Hastings, just around the corner from 312 Main. They found a booth near the back. The waitress was about sixty years old and balding. She looked at Parker and said, “Pot of tea, and a blueberry muffin.” Parker smiled and nodded. Willows ordered a full breakfast — eggs over easy, sausages and hash browns, toast.

  “Coffee?”

  Willows nodded.

  “Be right back.” As a rule, cops were a tight-fisted bunch. But the waitress knew that this one, when he was with his partner, sometimes left a generous tip.

  Parker said, “Yang didn’t seem too pleased when you told him we’d have to drain the pond.”

  “He didn’t seem too pleased about anything.”

  “The Chinese Times guy. Kenny Lee. How long had he been missing?”

  Willows shrugged. “A couple of weeks. Nobody was all that worried about it. I forget who told me, but apparently Lee disappeared once before, about a year ago. He was gone about a week and then his wife got a phone call from Reno. Lee’d gambled away all his cash, run his plastic to the limit, sold his return ticket and couldn’t even cover his hotel bill. I called Tommy Wilcox but he was out.”

  Parker nodded. Wilcox was Missing Persons. The food arrived. The blueberry muffin had come with two pats of butter. She sighed, and put the butter off to one side, where it couldn’t do any harm.

  Willows said, “You worried about your weight again?”

  “None of your business.”

  Willows wiped his fork on a paper napkin, sprinkled pepper on his eggs. A quartet of uniforms strolled past, all four men covertly eyeing Parker.

  Willows shovelled a forkful of egg into his mouth, chewed and swallowed.

  Parker said, “Did Lee have any children?”

  Willows shrugged. Plucked a fresh napkin from the dispenser, wiped his mouth.

  Parker said, “There were no threats, demands for money? Somebody snatched him, held him a couple of weeks and then killed him. That’s it, end of story?”

  “We don’t know how he died. Maybe it was suicide.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “We don’t know how long he’s been dead, either. Yang said the gardens had been closed all weekend. And for all we know, Lee’s been in cold storage since the day he disappeared.”

  “That’s not the point, Jack.” Parker checked the pot, fished out the teabag.

  Willows said, “Pass the ketchup.”

  “The guy gets kidnapped. He’s a businessman, owns a newspaper. Anything there that might have landed him in trouble?”

  “I don’t read Cantonese. Or Mandarin.”

  Parker watched him douse the sausages with ketchup.

  Willows glanced up, caught her eye. He said, “I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. But it tastes good.”

  Parker ate some muffin. It was stale. She stared at the pats of butter. “We need some help on this. Maybe Fred Lam.”

  Willows nodded. Lam was one of four Chinese-Canadian constables on the force. He wiped his plate with his last slice of toast.

  Parker said, “We can get Tommy to pull the file. See what’s there. Know what I think?”

  “I think you’re going to short tip the waitress because you just realized she forgot to bring the lemon for your tea.”

  Parker smiled. “That, too.”

  “What else?”

  “I’ll bet you the price of breakfast whoever killed Lee was in contact with the family. I’ve got a gut feeling we’re
looking at a failed extortion attempt.”

  Willows shrugged. “Maybe. And then again, maybe not. Lee ran a newspaper. He was owner and editor, and he was bound to make enemies. Plus, he was a part-time, out-of-control gambler. Could’ve been a hundred people wanted him dead.”

  “They dumped the body where it would be found right away, be sure to cause a stir in the community. Soften things up for their next shot at it.”

  Willows’ beeper shrieked.

  “Got a quarter?” Parker gave him a look, fished around in her purse and gave him two dimes and a nickel. There was a payphone at the front of the restaurant, near the cash register. Willows dialled, spoke briefly, hung up and made his way back to the table.

  “That was Tommy.” Standing, Willows finished his coffee.

  Parker said, “You want the rest of this muffin?”

  “Next time, ask before you pick all the blueberries out.”

  *

  Tommy Wilcox offered Willows a chair, went over to the big gray legal-size filing cabinet next to his desk and pulled the Missing Person Report, numbered 90-027, on Kenny Lee. Wilcox wore a white shirt, plain blue tie, brown tweed jacket and dark brown pants. He had sad, pouchy brown eyes and looked as if he’d seen it all before and expected to see it all again. Wilcox worked alone, and he was a very busy man. In the City of Vancouver, three to three and a half thousand missing person reports are filed every year, and Wilcox handled every single one of them. He sat down, adjusted his jacket, flipped open the file.

  “Okay, the initial call was fielded on the first of January, twenty-two hundred hours, by the Communications Centre. The non-emergency nine-eleven number. Mrs Lee was worried because her husband was late getting home from work. Communications suggested it was too early to be concerned, told her to call back in the morning.”

  Willows nodded. Standard procedure.

  “Okay, she called back at seven hundred hours. An early bird. Distraught. We took Lee’s description and broadcast it to all units. A copy of my report went to Communications.” Wilcox’s shirt collar was too tight. He scratched his neck, adjusted the knot of his tie. “Mid-afternoon, she called us again. None of his friends or business acquaintances had seen him. He’d missed an important meeting. I put the info on CPIC.”