The Goldfish Bowl

by Laurence Gough

  Flora McCormick stood in the middle of a sea of tables, sweeping the last fragments of a wine glass into a metal dustpan. Behind her, at the far end of the room, there was a parquet dance floor and a small raised stage.

  Flora McCormick was in her early fifties, about five foot four and one hundred pounds. No heavyweight. Her hair was cut short and combed straight back over a narrow skull. She was wearing cream Hush Puppies and a baggy dark green pant suit that seemed to drain all the colour out of her pale green eyes. Parker was close enough to count the trio of engagement rings crowded together on the third finger of her left hand before Flora heard them coming, and looked up. Parker introduced herself, and then Willows. Flora nodded, and kept working.

  “I’ll be with you in a few minutes,” she said. “Just let me get the rest of these glasses laid out.”

  There were about fifty tables in the room, four place settings to each table. Only half a dozen of the tables had glasses on them. Parker glanced at Willows. He shrugged, leaving it up to her to decide how to handle the situation. She moved over to one of the cardboard boxes, opened it, and went to work. Willows hesitated, and then followed her lead.

  A quarter of an hour later, Flora McCormick led them back down the linoleum hallway and into an office so small that the furniture seemed out of scale. To the left of the door there were two folding metal chairs and a grey metal desk. To the right a row of five steel filing cabinets were lined up against the wall. There were two more cabinets on either side of a tiny window set high in the wall opposite the door. Parker walked over to the window. An aspidistra languished on the sill. She had to stand on her toes to see outside. The view was of a parking lot. At the far end of the lot a man in an idling tow truck was reading a newspaper. It was still raining.

  Willows stood on a scrap of carpet in front of the desk while Flora searched through the drawers looking for her keys. Above the filing cabinets, hundreds of black and white photographs covered every available inch of the wall, all the way up to the ceiling. Most of the pictures were framed, but many were not and these had simply been push-pinned to the plaster. All were of past dinners and dances. They had been arranged in chronological order. The oldest picture Willows could find was dated New Year’s Eve, 1947. A dark, hairy man wearing oversized diapers and a pointed party hat cavorted on top of one of the round tables in the dining room. A woman had taken the man’s cardboard scythe away from him, and was using the sharp point of it to try to pull down his diapers, much to the amusement of the surrounding crowd. 1947. Willows found himself wondering where they all were now.

  Flora McCormick eased past him, key ring in hand. She moved to the filing cabinet to the left of the window, unlocked it and slid open the top drawer.

  “You always keep the filing cabinets locked?” said Willows.

  “I sure do.”

  “What about the keys, you always keep them in your desk?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You ever lock the desk?”

  “Not that I can remember.” Flora McCormick thumbed through a thick sheaf of straw-coloured folders. “Doesn’t make much sense, does it?”

  “Not to me,” said Willows.

  Parker sat down on the edge of the metal desk, glanced idly at the three framed photographs clustered around the telephone.

  Flora looked up, smiled fondly. “That’s Harry with the cigar. He was the first, and the best. The guy in the glasses, that’s Ralph. A bum. Died of cancer of the pancreas eleven years ago. No, make it twelve. Two weeks before his forty-fifth birthday, can you imagine? Cut off in his prime.” Flora peered up at Willows, clearly estimating his age, and frowned at what she saw. “The movie star in the turtleneck sweater, that’s Bill. My third and last mistake. Look at those teeth. Have you ever seen a nicer smile?” Flora pushed the drawer shut and opened the one beneath it. “The trouble was, Bill never seemed to be smiling at me.”

  She selected a folder, pulled it out, and handed it to Willows. Alice Palm’s name was written on the side in a stylish, spidery hand. Willows flipped open the file. Parker abandoned her perch on the desk to look over his shoulder.

  There was very little in the file that was new to Willows, and it contained no information that seemed even potentially useful to him. Alice Palm’s date of birth, height, weight, and hair and eye colour were all listed in the same spidery hand that was on the cover of the folder. Her hobbies included the usual eclectic and unlikely mix of sedentary pursuits and violent contact sports. It was obvious that the sole purpose of the list was to give her the widest possible appeal to anyone looking for a woman with similar interests.

  The space reserved for religion had been left blank, although Willows knew she’d been an Anglican.

  The date on the file indicated that it had been opened five years earlier. Willows doubted that the photograph stapled to the top left-hand corner of the page was less than ten years old.

  Flora handed him a second folder. Andy Patterson’s name had been pencilled rather than inked on the side flap. His photograph was a Polaroid, and had been taken inside the office, with the door shut so he could stand in front of it. His face and hair had a faint greenish tinge. Willows had seen the effect before: it came of using outdated film.

  He read quickly through the short list of Patterson’s personal statistics, the notes on his hobbies, his likes and dislikes. Patterson and Alice Palm seemed to have almost nothing in common. While she was a fan of classical music and rock, his preferences were Willie Nelson and jazz.

  “What sort of crowd do you get here?” Willows asked Flora McCormick.

  “What d’you mean?”

  “The people who come here to have a good time, what are they like? I mean age, education, stuff like that.”

  Flora shrugged. “Most of the people we get here are older than either Alice Palm or Andy Patterson were. But on the other hand, some of them are quite a bit younger.” She eased the file drawer shut. “All sorts of people walk in here. You’d be surprised.”

  “You get many homosexuals?”

  Flora nodded. “I thought that’s what you were getting at.”

  “Did Andy Patterson know Alice Palm?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Did Alice know Phasia Palinkas?”

  “I already told your Inspector Bradley that Phasia Palinkas wasn’t a member of this club. And the place isn’t a gay hangout, either. Patterson was the only homosexual member we’ve ever had.”

  “That you know of.”

  “Right,” said Flora McCormick emphatically.

  “What was Patterson doing here?”

  “He only came two or maybe three times. I think he was trying to figure out which way the wind was blowing.”

  “How’s that again?”

  “I don’t think he was comfortable with his sexuality. I think he started coming here because it was an easy way to rub shoulders with a lot of women. He wanted to see if he could make it as a heterosexual.”

  “Interesting theory.”

  “Can you come up with a better one?”

  “What about Alice Palm?” said Parker. “What was she doing here?”

  Flora smiled wistfully. “Like most of my regulars, she was very nice and very shy. Except for the club, I don’t think she had much of a social life.”

  “How often did she drop by?”

  “We have a dinner and dance on Friday and Saturday nights. She almost always came on Fridays.”

  “But not Saturdays?”

  “Never.”

  “Did she always come alone?”

  “Always,” said Flora McCormick.

  “What about the return trip?” said Willows. “Did she ever take anybody home with her?”

  “Every once in a while.”

  “How often, exactly?”

  “I don’t know. Two, maybe three times a month.”

  “What you’re saying is that this shy lady took someone home with her two and sometimes three Fridays out of four.”

 
“I don’t know where they went.”

  “She’s been a member of your club almost five years,” said Willows. “That’s a lot of men. How many names can you give me?”

  “None, not a single one.”

  Willows stared coldly at her. “Don’t give me that shit,” he said softly. “I’ll run you in for obstruction, and I’ll have the vice squad shut you down.”

  “It’s the truth! During all the time I knew her, she never left with a regular member.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Parker. “What other kind of member is there?”

  “Temporary, a one-time admission.” Flora McCormick smiled up at Willows. “Let’s say you were thinking about joining the club, but you wanted to find out what it was like before you spent your money. All you’d have to do is walk up to the door, fill out a registration card and pay me fifteen dollars. That’d cover dinner, and all the dancing you wanted. But no drinks.”

  “How many people do that?” asked Parker.

  “Quite a few. Over the course of a year, hundreds and hundreds.”

  “How is it,” said Willows, “that out of all those faces, you managed to remember Andy Patterson’s even though he’d only come to a couple of dances?”

  “I already told you, it was because he was homosexual.”

  “Otherwise you’d have forgotten all about him, is that right?”

  “Probably.”

  “Maybe you don’t remember Phasia Palinkas because she only dropped by once or twice.”

  “Her name isn’t in the files.”

  “All that means is she wasn’t a regular member. Maybe she was just a casual, somebody who dropped in from time to time. Do you keep the registration cards your customers fill out when they pay fifteen bucks for a one-nighter?”

  “I have to, because of the income tax. I’ve got them all the way back to 1961, when Harry and I bought the business.”

  “Where are they?”

  “In half a dozen big cardboard boxes in a storage room at the back of the building. You want to see them?”

  “Not if I can help it,” said Willows. He turned to Parker. “Show her the picture, will you?”

  “What picture?” said Flora. She sounded surprised, as if in covering the walls of her office she thought that she had cornered the market.

  Parker opened her purse and took out a morgue snap of Phasia Palinkas. The dead woman’s eyes were closed, and her face had a peculiarly slack and boneless look. But the colour image was much truer than the grainy, blurred, outdated print that had appeared in the newspapers.

  Flora sighed, and took a pair of bifocals out of her jacket pocket. She stared down at the still, quiet face for a long time. Then she took off her glasses and put them away and handed the picture back to Parker.

  “I’ve never seen her before,” she said firmly.

  “Christ,” said Willows, despairing. He gestured at the seven steel cabinets ranged along the walls. “How many files have you got in there?”

  “Six thousand, give or take a few.”

  “Christ,” said Willows again. He took the snap of Phasia Palinkas from Parker, and propped it up on the windowsill next to the weeping fig. “Unlock the rest of the cabinets,” he said to Flora McCormick.

  “You still think she’s in there somewhere?”

  “She better be.”

  “You’ll be here all night,” said Flora. There was more than a hint of satisfaction in her voice, more than a trace of a smile in her eyes.

  “You stick around until we’re finished,” said Willows.

  *

  They’d started at eleven o’clock in the morning. At three in the afternoon Willows sent out for chicken sandwiches and coffee. He cleared a small space on Flora McCormick’s desk and he and Parker sat down next to each other on the two folding metal chairs. The food was limp and tasteless, and Parker had no appetite. She drank a mouthful of the lukewarm coffee, stretched, and went back to work.

  The air in the cramped little office was stale, and smelled of sweat and frustration. Parker’s wrists ached. Her fingers felt stiff and clumsy, and stung from paper cuts. She opened another file. A man old enough to be her grandfather smiled confidently up at her through the gap in his teeth. He had outsized ears and a shadowy, uneven moustache. Rimless glasses, hardly any hair. Parker shut his file and put it to one side, opened the next.

  Her hair had been much longer when the picture was taken, failing to her shoulders and out of frame. She was smiling. The camera’s flash had left pinpoints of light in her dark and solemn eyes. A gold cross hung from a thin chain around her neck. Parker stepped away from the filing cabinet, savouring the moment. She waved the file at Willows. He looked up, and then came over to her.

  “She registered under the name of Sharon Hopkins,” said Parker. She frowned. “Wasn’t that the name of one of the other tenants in her apartment block?”

  Willows nodded. “The next-door neighbour.”

  “I wonder why she didn’t use her own name.”

  “That makes two of us,” said Willows. He went back to the desk, tossed the remains of their lunch into Flora McCormick’s wicker wastebasket, and laid the three files down on the desk in a neat row.

  Alice Palm.

  Phasia Palinkas.

  Andy Patterson.

  “All three victims were Caucasian,” he said. “They were under fifty years of age and their last names all started with the sixteenth letter of the alphabet. Now let’s find out what else they had in common.”

  Parker picked up Andy Patterson’s file and began to read, taking it one word at a time.

  Two hours later, she had memorized all three files and all she had to show for her labour was a five-star headache. Her purse was on top of the filing cabinet to the left of the window. She opened it and discovered that Bradley had helped himself to every last one of her aspirins.

  Seething with anger, she stared at the picture on the wall directly in front of her.

  This picture, unlike all the others, was mounted in an ornate oval frame. It had been taken in the dining room down the hall. Parker could see tiny sections of the parquet dance floor through a forest of ankles. The photographer, she thought as her rage gradually subsided, must have crouched and taken the picture from a height of no more than two or three feet. It was a very odd picture indeed, and as Parker studied it she became aware that it was much too small for the space allotted to it on the otherwise crowded wall. She examined it more carefully, and saw that it was the only picture in the room that didn’t have a fine coating of dust on top of the frame.

  She willed herself to relax, to let her eyes wander over the print, to stop looking and start seeing. The photograph was dated 25th December 1966. The writing was scrawled right across a pair of white high-heeled shoes with decorative hearts stitched above the arches. They were, Parker immediately realized, a perfect mate for the shoe the killer had abandoned on Jervis Street less than twenty-four hours earlier. She’d check with Flora McCormick, but there was no doubt in her mind that the killer had planted the picture in the office, hung it there for her and Willows to find.

  It was impossible, but undeniable. The .460 Magnum killer was playing with them, leading them on.

  XIV

  THE ROOM WAS small, filled with cigar smoke and a dozen dilapidated chairs, a portable projector and a screen that had been mended with wide strips of white adhesive tape filched from a first-aid kit. Mel Dutton finished threading film into the machine as Willows came in through the door.

  “Douse the lights, will you, Jack.”

  “Sure,” said Willows. He nodded a greeting to the trio of vice cops lounging in the front-row seats, and flicked the switch. A shaft of light cut through the smoke. Numbers flashed wildly across the screen, followed by the film’s credits. Willows didn’t recognize any of the names. Dutton adjusted the focus. They were in a house, in a large and modern kitchen. There was no sound track.

  “This is genuine Art,” said Dutton to Willows. “Film as L
iterature. I know you’re going to be impressed.”

  There were two girls in the kitchen, sitting opposite each other at a butcher’s block table, profiles to the camera. The table had been set for breakfast. There was a four-slice toaster, a loaf of sliced wholewheat bread, a large box of Nabisco Shreddies, glasses, plates and bowls, a salt and pepper set in the shape of windmills.

  Willows guessed the girls’ ages at fifteen or maybe sixteen, although they had been made up to look even younger. Both girls were blonde, their hair styled in a severe military cut, and lightly streaked in red and green. They were identically dressed in skin-tight pastel sleeveless T-shirts, black satin bikini panties and translucent plastic sandals. Both were smoking.

  Behind the table there was a door leading to the back porch, and every few seconds one of the girls would turn and look expectantly at it. Willows had the impression they’d been coached to try to look nervous and excited.

  “Guess who’s coming to breakfast!” said Mel Dutton in a Bill Cosby voice. One of the vice cops chuckled briefly. Another yawned. The third seemed to have fallen asleep.

  The camera dollied in, and Willows saw that the girls had their names glitter-printed on the T-shirts across their breasts.

  Annie mashed her cigarette out in her cereal and was silently but vigorously chastised by Dewey.

  The camera cut erratically to an electric clock on the wall above the sink. A dozen seconds ticked slowly by. Annie lit another cigarette and tossed her match into Dewey’s bowl. The cereal caught immediately, burning with a bright orange flame.

  “A quality production,” said Dutton. “Absolutely first-class values. You notice the lighting?”

  “I noticed it right away,” said Willows.

  Dutton grinned, teeth flashing in the light from the projector.

  Dewey used her spoon to extinguish the burning Shreddies. Suddenly she and Annie jumped up and ran to the back door.

  “Knock, knock,” said Dutton.

  Annie got to the door first, yanked it open. A huge black in a milkman’s uniform smiled down at her. He was carrying a dozen quarts of milk in a metal rack. Grinning, he allowed himself to be pulled into the kitchen.