The Goldfish Bowl

by Laurence Gough

  “I don’t know. I’ve tried to tie them in, and I can’t. Maybe they were tossed in just to confuse us.”

  Willows smiled. “A pink herring.”

  “Something like that. There was also the ashtray full of cigarettes in the stolen Mercedes.”

  “The cigarettes nobody smoked,” Willows pointed out.

  “Andy Patterson was the next victim. There’s a tobacconists right around the corner from the stand where he usually cooped. Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “I always wondered how you spent your time when you weren’t working,” said Willows. “Now I know.”

  “Patterson used to drop in almost every night, buy a pack of cigarettes or a soft drink. There’s a sign in the window advertising the same brand of cigarettes we found in the Mercedes. It could be another coincidence, but somehow I doubt it.”

  “How do you explain the high-heeled shoe we found on Jervis Street the night Andy Patterson was killed?”

  “Just before they were shot, Fraser, Moore and Tate had been drinking at the Rose and Thistle, right?”

  Willows didn’t respond. He just sat there, waiting for Parker to continue.

  “The thing is,” said Parker, “that until about a year ago, the Rose and Thistle was called the White Slipper.”

  “The White Slipper?” If Willows was surprised, he managed not to show it.

  “The bartender’s only worked there six months, but he told me he understood the business had changed hands a year ago. I talked to the new owner. He said that when he bought the place, it needed a new image. One of the first things he did was change the name.”

  “And you asked him what the bar was called when he bought it?”

  “I asked him a lot of things. He happened to mention that the bar used to be called the White Slipper. It just flowed out of the conversation. I got lucky.”

  “You figure out the Beefeater and the Schweppes bottles, the empty glass and the slice of lime?”

  “It’s the gin,” said Parker.

  Outside, Willows stood patiently in the rain while Parker fumbled with her keys. Finally she opened her door and reached across to let him in. The engine started on the first try. She turned on the heater. It growled asthmatically, and a cold damp wind blew across Willows’ knees. He wiped condensation from the windshield with the palm of his hand. Parker turned on the lights and released the emergency brake. She put the car in gear and they accelerated away from the curb.

  They were on Broadway, heading east through the rain. Because of the lateness of the hour, traffic was fairly light. Parker moved into the centre lane and slowed to turn left on Burrard. They drove down the undulating slope and made a right on Fourth, just catching the yellow. The heater was working now, and the interior of the little car was snug and warm.

  At Fir, the light was green. They took the intersection at speed, bumping over a set of railway tracks, passing swiftly through the dense black shadows cast by the massive bulk of the Granville Street bridge. They hit another green at Hemlock, and Willows braced himself as the Volkswagen powered through the corner. Then they were on the glistening black straightway of Sixth Avenue, accelerating past the mass of condominiums huddled along the south shore of False Creek. It was raining harder now, the rain blistering the pavement and frothing in the gutters.

  The light at Sixth and Cambie was red. A plugged drain had flooded the intersection. Visibility was less than a block. The windshield wipers struggled with little effect as the hammering on the car’s convex roof gradually rose to a thunderous roar. It was deafening, like being inside a tin drum. Willows looked out of the side window and saw that the car was immersed in water right up to the running board. Finally the light changed. They pushed cautiously through the intersection and made the left turn up on to the high ground of the Cambie Street bridge, past the Expo 86 site and the sixty-thousand-seat domed stadium that someone had once described as looking like a huge marshmallow in bondage.

  At the north end of the bridge, Parker swung right on to Beatty. Willows rolled down his window a couple of inches and filled his lungs with the cold night air. “Tell me,” he said, “why you decided to focus on the gin, instead of the tonic water or the empty glass, the slice of lime.”

  “Process of elimination,” said Parker. “All the other stuff is local, available all over the city. But the Beefeater is one of only two imported brands of gin. All the others are either distilled here or back east, under licence to the parent company.”

  Willows nodded, not taking his eyes from the road. They were travelling at a steady thirty-five miles an hour and had sailed through three yellow lights in a row.

  “Discounting the bootleggers,” Parker continued, “every drop of hard liquor in the city is sold through the Liquor Control Board. There are twenty-one retail outlets, including one next to the central warehouse at 238 East Hastings. All imported liquor passes through the warehouse before it’s trucked out to the various stores.”

  There was a large brown envelope lying on the back seat. Parker reached behind her and picked it up, handed it to Willows. The envelope contained seventeen glossy black and white photographs, each measuring eight by ten inches. The top photograph was a closeup of a man Willows judged to be in his early forties. Willows switched on the inside light, and studied the picture carefully. The man’s face was heavily lined. He was balding, and his eyes were such a pale grey that Willows was sure they must be blue.

  “That’s Morris Cunningham,” said Parker. “He’s a clerk at the warehouse. He’s forty-six years old, twice married and twice divorced. He has three children, two by the first marriage and one by the second. His wives have custody. He lives alone in an apartment in the Mount Pleasant district. For the past three weeks he’s been on holiday, visiting a brother in Calgary. He goes back to work at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. And there’s something about him I think you might find sort of interesting.”

  “What’s that?” said Willows.

  “He’s a member of the West Coast Singles Club.”

  Willows turned to the next picture. “Who’s this?”

  “Clark Wallace, the warehouse manager. All the other pictures are of LCB employees who are scheduled to work at the warehouse or store during the next two weeks.”

  Willows sifted quickly through the photographs. “Where’d you get these?” he asked.

  “LCB security.”

  “You tell them why you wanted them?”

  “No,” said Parker.

  They were on Powell now, driving east through the unrelenting rain, the clatter of the exhaust beating back at them from the million and one bricks in the gently curving, block-long wall of the BC Sugar refinery. Willows looked at his watch. Midnight had long since come and gone.

  Parker slowed, and turned left on Heatley. The car bumped over three parallel sets of railway tracks, feeder lines for the area’s many warehouses. The road was narrow, steeply-cambered, ill-lit. Parker switched on the Volkswagen’s high beams. They started up a gentle incline. The tracks were on their right, running alongside the road. On their left was a ten-foot-high steel mesh fence topped with barbed wire. Beyond the fence, only blackness. They drove in silence for several minutes. The road levelled out. Parker braked, went into lower gear, and then turned sharply to the left, easing the car through a ragged gap in the fence.

  They moved slowly across a span of uneven ground that was strewn with jagged chunks of concrete, abstract tangles of rusty iron pipe. Parker abruptly spun the Volkswagen in a tight half-circle and stopped in the lee of a huge stack of creosote-blacked wooden beams.

  Less than twenty feet away, the rust-red prow of a deep-sea freighter loomed high above them. Visibility was so poor that Willows couldn’t make out the stern of the vessel, or see the flag she was flying.

  “That’s the Seaspray,” said Parker. “She’s British registered and she’s full of British booze.”

  “Including a consignment of Beefeaters?”

  Parker nodded
. “According to the manifest, she’s scheduled to start off-loading tomorrow morning at six o’clock sharp. The first truckload is due at the warehouse at eight.”

  “Who else have you told about this?”

  “Nobody. There’s two of us and only one of him, right?” Parker leaned across Willows and flipped open the glove compartment, took out two plastic glasses and a mickey of Cutty Sark identical to the one he’d given her on the night that Fraser, Tate and Moore were murdered. Willows held the glasses while she unscrewed the metal cap.

  “I want to bring Franklin in on it,” said Willows as Parker poured the Scotch.

  “Is that smart, considering the shape he’s in?”

  “He deserves to be there.”

  “Then here’s to the three of us,” said Parker. They touched glasses, drank.

  Willows felt the whisky percolating warmly down. The rain looked as if it would never stop, but tomorrow was a brand-new day.

  He was looking forward to it.

  XX

  THE SNIPER LEANED against the curved aluminium railing that enclosed his diminutive balcony. A fitful and capricious wind tugged at his shirt, and at the purple leaves of a Japanese plum tree down on the street. Rain plastered his hair to his scalp and ran into his eyes. He wiped his face with the back of his hand and then peered at the luminous dial of his watch. It was late, almost one o’clock in the morning. He took a last, lingering look down at the drenched and empty streets and then went back inside his apartment and slid the plate-glass door shut behind him.

  The apartment had lost much of its charm since he had moved in, only twenty-six days ago. The polished hardwood floors now had a dull, glazed look. Dustballs prospered in the corners. A thin film of oily black dust had settled on the window-ledge and on top of the refrigerator. On the kitchen sink a fat wedge of Cheddar cheese lay mouldering, slowly changing from orange to green. The sniper’s sleeping bag, fetid and crumpled, lay on the floor surrounded by a wreath of used Kleenex. The once immaculate white walls were covered with the maudlin, disjointed messages he had written to the world during his bouts of drunkenness: the words small and cramped, stumbling over each other, scrawled in Chinese Red lipstick.

  A chrome-plated gooseneck lamp cast a small pool of light on the pine work table, but otherwise the apartment was deep in shadow. The sniper stood with his back to the plate-glass door, watching indifferently as a puddle of rainwater collected at his feet. After a few minutes he kicked off his shoes and began to undress, letting his clothes fall where they may. When he was naked, he sat down at the pine table and lit a cigarette, dropping the match negligently on the floor. To his right the rifle lay diagonally across the table, the dark blue metal of the barrel and action gleaming coldly.

  The sniper smoked most of his cigarette and then picked up a packet of Kodak cleaning tissue and a small plastic bottle of cleaning fluid. He shook a few drops of the fluid on one of the flimsy tissues, then went to work on the rear lens of the rifle’s telescopic sight. As he polished the glass, his thoughts turned once again to Morris Cunningham. The LCB worker had been given a number, and his number was the number nine. The sniper’s intention had been to kill four of them at the most, five if it seemed necessary to bump off Foster. But he hadn’t planned to kill Tate and Moore, too. Especially not Moore, who hadn’t even been a member of the club. Funny how it all slipped away, got out of control. Soon he’d be into uncharted territory, the land of double digits.

  What had happened, exactly? How did the situation get so completely out of control? The sniper smiled a wan smile. The answer to his question was right there in front of him, he was holding it in the palms of his hands.

  It was power. The incredible sense of limitless power that flowed through him when he cradled the Winchester in his arms and squinted through the Lyman’s crosshairs right into the heart of a life.

  He tossed the dirty Kodak tissue to the floor, and idly scratched his stomach. It was ten minutes past one. He calculated that it would take him two or three more minutes at most to finish cleaning the scope, only a few more minutes to load the rifle’s spare magazines. Add five minutes to strip, clean, reassemble and load the .45 automatic. Half an hour to iron the dress and lay out the rest of his clothes.

  When his preparations were complete, he’d take a shower. As always, he would stand rigid and unmoving beneath the coarse jets of scalding water until his neck and chest and shoulders turned red as blood, and he could no longer bear the pain.

  Then he’d towel himself off, crawl into the sleeping bag and cry himself to sleep.

  Dream of death, and resurrection.

  XXI

  IN ALL DIRECTIONS, as far as the eye could see, the lowering sky was a heavy, leaden grey. It had rained all night, it was raining now, and it was beginning to seem to Willows as if it would rain for ever.

  Willows, protected from view if not the weather, was crouched behind the waist-high parapet on the gently sloping roof of the building directly across Hastings Street from the LCB warehouse and liquor store complex. Parker was perched on the roof of the adjoining building, armed with her service revolver and a pair of Zeiss 7X50 binoculars. She’d spotted Morris Cunningham the moment he’d pulled his rusty Chevrolet into the employees’ parking lot. Willows had covered Cunningham with his Remington Model 870 Police slug Gun until the unwitting clerk had sauntered into the building, then cradled the heavy gun in his lap and picked up his walkie-talkie.

  “Claire?”

  “What is it?” Transmitted through the tiny speaker, Parker’s voice sounded thin and fragile, crackling not so much with static as with tension.

  “Just running an equipment check,” said Willows casually. “You remember to put on that high-fashion vest I gave you?”

  “And my gumboots. But they leak.”

  A trickle of cold water ran down Willows’ spine, washing away his grin. He adjusted a fold in his poncho and wondered, not for the first time, what the hell had happened to Detective George Franklin.

  *

  Franklin was late. And he was so upset with himself that he failed to notice the plump middle-aged native Indian woman sitting in the shadows of the disused loading dock on the far side of the lane.

  Jenny was a Haida, from the Queen Charlottes. She’d spent the night on the loading dock, nestled snugly in the arms of an unemployed logger named Walt, in a wooden packing crate full of fat white styrofoam worms. They had slept late, waking at nine-thirty, and had killed the next half-hour smoking Walt’s hand-rolled cigarettes. At a few minutes to ten, Walt had scuttled across the lane and into a narrow gap between two of the buildings that faced on Hastings. The liquor store opened at ten sharp, and Walt was on his way over to buy a bottle of breakfast.

  At two minutes after ten, Franklin appeared in the lane. He was obviously distraught. Jenny watched, fascinated, as he jumped three times in quick succession and then caught the bottom rung of the ladder that Willows had climbed at dawn that morning.

  Franklin was winded and gasping for breath when he reached the top of the ladder. He had one leg over the parapet when his sleeve caught on an iron retaining bolt. Cursing softly, he tried to jerk free.

  Parker was watching the entrance to the liquor store through her Zeiss binoculars. Willows was busy scanning the roofs of the surrounding buildings. The thin sound of cloth tearing came faintly to him through the rain. He turned around, and then stood up. His walkie-talkie fell unnoticed from his lap into a shallow puddle that had formed in a slight depression in the tar-and-gravel roof. The walkie bounced once and screamed dementedly, making a noise like a dentist’s drill.

  Franklin scrutinized Willows’ face. He watched the flesh rearrange itself to accommodate a tightening of the mouth, noted the distinct loss of warmth around the eyes. Franklin lifted his leg, flashing his new panties, and started back down the ladder. He saw Willows’ thumb jab at the safety-catch of the Remington as the barrel of the gun came up and began to swing towards him in a short, smooth arc. The Winches
ter was slung uselessly over his shoulder. He reached under the white dress and yanked his automatic from the holster strapped to his thigh. Rain fell into his eyes. The heels of his shoes kept catching on the iron rungs. His heart thudded in his chest. Somewhere off to his left he heard the sharp crack of a pistol shot.

  Parker, firing steadily, saw puffs of pink dust blossom all around Franklin as her bullets ricocheted off the brick wall of the building. She emptied her revolver and began to reload.

  Willows risked a quick look over the parapet. A bullet howled past his face. He ducked back, then pointed the Remington blindly down the side of the building and fired as fast as he could work the slide action.

  Iron hummed, sparks flew. Franklin screamed. He let go of the ladder, dropped ten feet and rolled. Slugs cratered the pavement inches away from him as he climbed to his feet. There was a movement off to his right, and he pointed the automatic and fired twice. Jenny fell back into the packing crate, vanishing in a welter of blood.

  Franklin began to hobble down the alley. The fall had broken the stiletto heels on both shoes. A slug from the riot gun smacked into a garbage bin and thrummed into the distance, sounding like a single note plucked from a giant harp. Another shot grazed his skull, knocking his wig askew and filling his right ear with blood. He heard the high, urgent wail of a dozen converging sirens. He turned and fired repeatedly at Willows, now halfway down the ladder. Willows braced himself and aimed the riot gun at Franklin.

  Franklin hitched up his dress and ran. He hit Walt hard, knocking the wind from his lungs and the brown paper bag out of his hands. A five-dollar bill splintered on the asphalt. Franklin grabbed Walt by his throat and spun him around, using him as a shield. There was a padlocked door only a few feet behind them. Franklin managed to hit the lock with his second shot. He kicked the door open and dragged Walt backwards. Walt scratched at his arm, whimpered like a puppy. Franklin slapped him lightly on the side of the head with the .45. Walt stopped struggling.