The Goldfish Bowl

by Laurence Gough

  “Then what, you went over to the window?”

  “No, I couldn’t.”

  “Why not, George?”

  “Because it wasn’t the duck I heard making that wet noise. And it wasn’t the duck that was screaming, either. It was my partner, it was Dave.”

  Bradley took the cigar out of his mouth and massaged his face. “Just one more question, George.”

  “Shoot,” said Franklin.

  “When Dave was inside the walk-in closet, did he turn on the light?”

  “What light?” said Franklin.

  “Never mind,” said Bradley. “Forget it.” He’d taken a quick look in the closet while Milne was working on Atkinson’s corpse. There was a ceiling fixture, but when he’d flicked the switch the light had not come on. Tapping the bulb gently with the tip of his ballpoint pen, he’d discovered it was loose, that it was only screwed partway into the socket. The closet had been deep, the racks jammed with clothes. It would have been easy for the killer to hide there, easy for Atkinson to miss him.

  The Closet Killer. Wonderful. He could already see the headlines. Sighing inwardly, Bradley stood up. He rubbed the small of his back, massaging away the stiffness. “Tell Goldstein to check the closet for prints,” he said to Willows. “Make sure he dusts down the light bulb and the wall in the area of the electric switchplate.”

  “Okay,” said Willows.

  Bradley looked down at Franklin. Franklin was sitting on the lid of the toilet with the posture of a man who was prepared to sit for ever. Bradley indicated Franklin and said, “You better take him downtown. Get a statement from him and then take him home.”

  Willows tapped Franklin on the shoulder. “Let’s go, George.” Franklin nodded wearily. Willows helped him to his feet, and at the same time reached deftly under his raincoat and took away his gun.

  Franklin gave him a surprised and wounded look. “Regulations,” said Willows. “Nothing personal.”

  “I want it back as soon as possible,” said Franklin. “I’m gonna need it to get the guy who shot Dave.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” said Willows. “We’ll get him.”

  “Blow his head off,” said Franklin. He thumped a fist into his open hand, and then sat wearily back down on the toilet.

  Atkinson’s body lay on the stretcher in a dark green plastic bodybag. One of the ambulance guys smiled at Parker as he yanked on the bag’s zipper. “Teeth must be out of alignment,” he said, and gave her a wink.

  Appreciative chuckles from his partner. A wide grin from Farley Spears. A snigger from the cop lounging in the doorway. Even a little twitch of the lip from Jerry Goldstein. Parker didn’t get the joke until they wheeled the stretcher around and she saw Atkinson’s upper plate leering at her.

  In the bathroom, Mel Dutton was using the Nikon with the 28mm lens to take a series of photographs of the dead goldfish floating in the toilet bowl. He was conducting a little experiment, bouncing his flash off the bathroom wall in order to cast the far side of the bowl in deep shadow. Each time he took a picture, the top of his bald skull glowed with an incandescent brilliance, as if lit from within by a sturdy filament of bones.

  IX

  WOHLFORD SWUNG FLUIDLY, from the hips. The ball seemed to jump off the end of his bat. Freddy could tell by the sound of the blow that it was on its way to the upper decks. Outta there. They all sounded the same, homers. You heard one, you’d heard ’em all.

  Freddy turned his back on the television as Wohlford rounded third base. Wohlford was smiling, and Freddy was smiling too. He had twenty bucks on the game and it was six-zip Toronto, bottom of the eighth.

  Freddy reached out and hooked a bottle of Cutty Sark towards him with his left hand, a hand that was slick with scar tissue. A lot of people stared at the hand, and Freddy didn’t blame them. The hand was mangled real bad, the three middle fingers chewed off right down to the knuckles — the stumps so short he had to wear his wedding ring on his thumb. Freddy took two glasses from the mirrored shelf behind him and poured an ounce of Cutty freehand into each glass, then deliberately splashed in another half-measure. Freddy picked up the two glasses, balancing them in the palm of his good hand, and started towards Jack Willows, who was sitting as always in the end booth with his back to the wall.

  Freddy was still twenty feet away when Willows saw him moving in, and whatever it was that Willows was saying to the woman sitting opposite him, he let it drop. Freddy was curious, and he guessed it showed. Willows drank a fair amount but since Norm Burroughs had dropped out of the picture, Willows had been drinking alone. Until now, that is. Freddy checked out the woman as he placed the drinks on the table.

  “Thanks, Freddy,” said Willows, dismissing him.

  “You folks ready for something to eat?” said Freddy. He smiled at the woman. She’d noticed his hand but she wasn’t staring at it or away from it, and he liked that. “Maybe something to nibble on, a bowl of peanuts?”

  “Nothing,” said Willows.

  “Call me if you change your mind,” said Freddy, still looking at the woman. He gave the table a quick wipe with the damp cloth he carried slung over his arm, and then turned away, heading back to the bar. He’d catch the last of the baseball and then maybe go back with a plate of chicken wings hot out of the microwave. See if Willows would swap a free meal for an introduction to his new friend. Freddy had heard a rumour that Willows was having serious problems with his marriage. Maybe she was the reason why.

  Parker waited until Freddy had moved out of earshot and then nudged the twenty-dollar bill that Willows had dropped on the table when they’d first sat down, and that had remained untouched through three rounds. “I’m kind of surprised they let you run up a tab in a place like this,” she said.

  Willows tilted his glass. He watched the glass fall away from the Scotch, the ice settle. After a moment he let the glass swing back to a vertical position. He put the glass down on the table. “Freddy and I go back a long way,” he said at last.

  Parker waited. Now that she’d got him talking, she wasn’t going to rush him.

  Willows sipped at his drink and then said, “Freddy used to make a pretty heavy dollar working the piano bars around town. But he was one of those guys, when he wasn’t working, he liked to play. And he didn’t much care who he was playing with, if you know what I mean.”

  “He got mixed up with the wrong crowd?”

  “The wrong woman,” said Willows. “You know the Redstone Hotel, over on Cordova?”

  Parker nodded. The Redstone rented rooms by the day or by the hour. It was a dump.

  “About two years ago, the night clerk dialled a 911, told the dispatcher he had a customer sounded like he was in more than the usual amount of pain. Norm and I caught the squeal, drove down there.” Willows shook his head, remembering. “That was the only night clerk I ever met who had a talent for understatement.”

  Parker smiled. “How d’you mean?”

  “Freddy had checked into a room on the third floor, right at the back of the building. But we could hear him down in the lobby just as clearly as if he was standing next to us. He was screaming his head off. He sounded as if he was dying. You ever been in the Redstone?”

  “Not yet,” said Parker.

  “It’s the kind of place, even if there was an elevator, it wouldn’t work. Norm and I pulled our guns and ran up three flights of stairs, down the hall. The door was locked. Norm kicked it in, and in we went.” Willows drained his glass. “Freddy was sitting on the floor by the window, chained to the radiator. There were three other guys in the room, and a woman. The woman and one of the men were lying on the bed, drinking from a bottle of Red Devil wine. The other two guys were kneeling on either side of Freddy. One of them was holding him down while his buddy was feeding what was left of Freddy’s hand into an electric blender.”

  Parker glanced behind her, at Freddy working the bar, happily mixing drinks. “Why were they hurting him, what had he done?”

  “Screwed around with
the wrong guy’s wife.” Willows smiled. “He said at the trial he’d never understand why they stuck his fingers into that machine, instead of a more relevant appendage.”

  Parker laughed, perhaps a shade too loudly. She became alarmed. Was it possible she’d already had one too many? She looked down at her glass and saw that it was almost empty. So far, she’d had no more than two or possibly three drinks. Four at the most. She wondered if Willows might be trying to get her drunk. Somehow it didn’t seem his style. She finished her drink and put the empty glass down on the table, pushing it away from her, watching it glide smoothly across the varnished wood on interlocking rings of condensation. Looking up, she found Willows staring at her.

  “Something on your mind?” she said.

  Willows nodded. He looked serious.

  “What is it?”

  “Yesterday morning,” said Willows, “I ran into Shelley Rice in the service elevator at 312 Main. Or maybe I should say that Rice ran into me. He was on his way to a holding cell. He’d been busted. Possession with intent. You happen to know a couple of narcotics cops named Orwell and Kearns?”

  “I know them.”

  “You turn them on to Rice?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not?” said Parker.

  Willows stared hard at her for a moment and then slid out of the booth. He walked a few steps away from her and then changed his mind and came back and sat down beside her. His hip pressed up against hers, but there was no warmth in his eyes. She moved a little closer to the wall, putting a bit of space between them, and at the same time turned to face him more squarely. He picked up her empty glass and made the ice rattle, then put the glass back down. “Look, when we were at Rice’s house, I told him that if he cooperated with us we wouldn’t give him any trouble. I gave him my word that we weren’t interested in drugs, and you heard me do it.”

  “You gave him your word,” said Parker. “I didn’t give him mine.”

  “That’s bullshit. We’re supposed to be partners. I was speaking for both of us.”

  “No you weren’t. You might’ve thought you were, but you were wrong. For Christ’s sake, Rice was a dealer!”

  “That isn’t the point.”

  “It damn well is,” said Parker angrily. “It’s exactly the point.”

  They were sitting so close together that Willows could see tiny flecks of gold in Parker’s eyes. He thought for a moment and then said, “What if Rice hadn’t been a dealer, what if he’d been a pimp. Would you have handed him over to vice?”

  “No,” said Parker firmly.

  “So you weren’t just out to score some points. There’s more to it than that. You’ve got something against dealers. Something personal?”

  “A brother who’s a junkie,” said Parker. She gave that a moment to sink in and then said, “Now you tell me something. Does the fact that Norm Burroughs was buried this afternoon have anything at all to do with the hard time you’ve been giving me?”

  Willows stared at her, stunned into silence. Finally he said, “How did you know about Norm?”

  “I was there,” said Parker.

  “Why?”

  “He was your old partner. I’m your new partner. It seemed like the right thing to do, that’s all.”

  “He told me you visited him in the ward.”

  “Just once. We didn’t get along too well.”

  “Norm was like that,” said Willows. “He was a spiky bastard, didn’t have a lot of friends.”

  Willows smiled, and Parker said, “What are you grinning about, what’s so funny?”

  Willows hesitated, and then started to tell her about the night he and Burroughs had deliberately rammed a moving freight train, destroying a brand-new squad car with less than fifty miles on the odometer.

  Behind the bar, Freddy was using his remote to flip through the channels when a flurry of motion caught his eye. It was Willows’ date, waving a couple of empty glasses in the air, signalling for fresh drinks. Freddy put the remote down on the counter. He waved back, scar tissue shiny under the lights, then popped the chicken in the micro and reached for the bottle of Cutty Sark.

  X

  ANDY PATTERSON’S FRIDAY shift started at four in the afternoon and ended at two in the morning. By ten o’clock that night he’d run less than a hundred dollars through the meter. Worse, he’d spent most of his free time cruising restlessly around the city. Boredom had kept his foot on the gas pedal. It had also pushed his mileage total far beyond the acceptable limit. If he hoped to avoid catching an earful from the cab’s owner, he was going to have to spend the rest of the night roosting, not move an inch.

  Turning left off Hemlock, Patterson drove west down Broadway to Granville and parked in the two-cab stand in front of the Royal Bank. The rain continued to belt ferociously down. Traffic was light, the sidewalks deserted. He radioed the dispatcher and told him he’d be out of service for a few minutes, and then turned off the engine. Using the business section of the evening newspaper to keep his head dry, he got out of the cab and ran around the corner to the VIP newstand.

  When he came in through the door, the elderly Hungarian woman at the cash register smiled at him and reached behind her for the two packs of menthol cigarettes he bought every night he worked. Patterson paid her out of his tip money, exchanged a few words about the weather, and hurried back to his cab. Smoking, he waited for a break in the radio traffic and then cleared himself with the dispatcher.

  Across the street, an old lady carrying an armful of bright yellow daffodils came out of the Aristocratic restaurant. She didn’t have an umbrella and she wasn’t wearing a hat, but she paid no attention to the rain. A native, thought Patterson. He watched her walk slowly down Broadway and then disappear into the lane behind the restaurant. Settling back into his seat, he opened the paper to the sports section. James Lawton’s column was on golf, a game Patterson had never played and had no interest in playing. He flicked cigarette ash to the floor of the car and began to read.

  Twenty minutes later, his call number came over the radio. Dropping the paper on the seat, Patterson picked up the mike and acknowledged the call. The dispatcher directed him to the Penthouse, a downtown cabaret. The club was a little more than a mile away, but it was a straight run over the Granville Street bridge and down the Seymour off-ramp. He’d be there in two minutes, three at the most.

  Judith and Sidney were standing in the scant shelter of the big, old-fashioned Penthouse sign when Patterson swung his cab sharply into the curb lane in front of the club. The sign had flashing red arrows above the name of the club, which was written in green neon. More red neon advertised the continuing presence of GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS. The main attraction of the evening was,

  NANCY BON BON

  RARE & BARE

  Sid hurriedly stepped forward as the cab pulled up to the curb. The gaudy neon of the club’s Eagletime clock stained his face blue and yellow, his teeth pink. Turning up the collar of his trenchcoat, he pulled Judith across the sidewalk, through the rain. Behind them, an emaciated pimp in a popsicle-coloured suit burst through the club’s double doors on the dead run. There was a wide gap between his front teeth. He used it to whistle shrilly. His bug eyes were fixed on the taxi. Sid was in a race, and he knew it. Yanking the back door of the cab open, he pushed Judith inside and fell in after her, slammed the door shut and locked it. Out on the sidewalk, the pimp screamed abuse and jumped up and down in his alligator shoes. Sid smiled, and blew him a kiss. The pimp reached under his coat. Patterson dropped the meter and put his foot down on the gas. The cab shot away from the curb. Patterson glanced in his rearview mirror. “Where to, folks?”

  Sid looked at Judith. “Your place or mine?” he said.

  “Whatever’s closest.”

  Sid grinned. “You think you can find eleven-twenty Jervis, cabbie?”

  Patterson nodded. The light at Smithe was red. He braked, noted the time and address of the fare on his call sheet, spoke softly into his
mike. The dispatcher responded immediately. The light changed to green and Patterson turned left on to Smithe. In the back seat, Sid laughed and Judith giggled. Patterson heard the faint rustle of clothing, and took another quick look in the mirror. He guessed Sid’s age at about thirty-five. Sid’s hair was beginning to thin, and he was a few pounds overweight. But he wasn’t a bad-looking guy, in a meaty kind of way. Patterson noticed that Sid had removed his trenchcoat and that it now lay across his lap. Sid’s right arm was across Judith’s shoulder, his hand rested on the back of her neck. Patterson saw the soft, lightly tanned skin above her collarbone dimple briefly as Sid’s fingers played a nervous tune on her flesh.

  Patterson slowed to let a black El Camino ease into his lane. He shifted slightly in his seat, and his Van Halen T-shirt made a faint rippling noise as it came unglued from the vinyl. The interior of the cab was like a sauna. He turned off the heater and rolled the window down a few inches, took another quick peek in the mirror. Judith had a mop of thick blonde hair that was cut short in a way that emphasized the narrowness of her face, giving her a waifish look. Her eyes were cornflower blue. She had a wide, pouty mouth. She might be nineteen, but Patterson doubted if she was twenty.

  Ahead of him, the Camino signalled a left turn and slowed for the oncoming traffic. The light turned yellow. The Camino accelerated down Comox past the hospital, leaving them at the intersection, caught by the red.

  Patterson slowly became aware that Judith was watching him. Their eyes met in the mirror. Before he could look away, she wet her lips with the tip of her tongue and gave him a small, secret smile.

  Behind them, a car honked angrily. Patterson looked up, and saw that the light had turned to green. He hit the gas, accelerated through the intersection In the back seat, Judith laughed softly.

  Five minutes later, the taxi pulled into the wide, semi-circular driveway in front of Sid’s apartment block The huge lobby, encased in towering sheets of plate glass which rose from ground level all the way to the thirty-foot high ceiling, was brightly illuminated by a massive chandelier. Light splashed through the immense windows, across the sidewalk and into the cab. Andy Patterson stopped half a car-length behind a bone-white Corvette convertible. The car was empty and its hazard lights were flashing.