The alarm was set for half-past. Chris rolled out of bed. He went over to the bedroom window, cracked the blinds and looked out. It was barely snowing but there was snow everywhere except for twin black ruts down the middle of the street. Despite the window’s double-glazing, he could hear the dull throb of traffic. The sky was an ugly shade of grey, like the skin of a sick old man.
So, in short, everything seemed normal. He rubbed his jaw and his beard made a sandpaper sound that only he could hear. When he released the blind it snapped as if trying to bite him. He turned and walked out of the room.
Robyn said, “Where you going?”
“The bathroom.”
“Stay out of the shower, okay?”
“Got to have that shower, Robyn. A clean mind is a healthy mind.”
Robyn sat up in bed. Chris, standing at the bedroom door, made his eyes open wide and leered at her breasts. She hadn’t even had her first cup of coffee, but just look at her — so perky.
Robyn said, “Wipe your chin. You’re drooling.”
Chris smiled. Robyn was so casually immodest, so effortlessly carnal. It drove him crazy day and night, and he always enjoyed the ride.
She said, “Go on, get out of here. If you’re going to take a shower, get it over with. I don’t want to be late for work. Again.” She smiled sweetly. “Somebody has to pay the rent.”
Chris turned so his back was to her. He reached down and patted himself gently on the rump. Robyn sat there in the middle of the big, unruly bed, watching him. He said, “Next time you want something, kiss me right here before you start begging for it, okay?”
Robyn tossed a pillow at him. It hit the bedroom wall with a dull thud that reminded Chris of the sound the dolly’s wheels had made. His smile faded.
Robyn said, “What?”
Chris shrugged. “Nothing, toots. Just another lewd thought, that’s all.”
He showered, dressed in a pair of faded black jeans and a pale blue denim shirt, battered black Nikes. He snatched his leather jacket from the back of a kitchen chair as he headed for the door. Robyn was still in the shower. Usually she sang a little, but not today.
Chris took the elevator down to ground level, walked to the 24-hour convenience store at the end of the block and bought the city’s two dailies from a fat girl in a red and white checkerboard smock and complexion to match.
Back at the apartment, he helped himself to a fresh cup of coffee, sat down at the table with the papers. The toilet flushed and then Robyn came out of the bathroom and sat down opposite him, smoothing her skirt so it wouldn’t wrinkle. Chris stared at her. He had been gone less than ten minutes but in the interval Robyn had dressed and put on her makeup, turned herself into a stranger — a responsible young woman with a job, a downtowner.
He pushed away from the table and fetched her a cup of coffee. Black, no sugar. Robyn noticed the papers, reached for the Sun. Chris favoured the splashy tabloid style of the Province. He browsed through the sports section, stood up and moseyed over to the kitchen counter, poured himself some more coffee. He peeked over Robyn’s shoulder.
As usual, she was reading the comics.
He said, “I thought you were worried about being late?”
“Shows what you know. Not much. You read ‘Calvin & Hobbes’?”
“Do I look like I’ve got X-ray vision?”
“Yeah. As a matter of fact you do.”
Chris stared hard at the table. He said, “You are wearing black silk panties…”
Robyn giggled. She batted her eyes. The paper made a brittle sound a little bit like ice crunching underfoot as Robyn turned the pages around so Chris could gasp at the crazy shenanigans of her favourite cartoon characters. He began to read. Robyn peered at his watch. “Holy shit, I’m gonna be late!” She dropped the paper and grabbed her coat and mimed blowing him a kiss as she rushed out of the apartment.
Chris sat there, listening hard. After a moment he heard the drone of the elevator. He walked quickly over to the open door, stepped out into the hallway and leaned against the wall. Robyn was waiting at the turn in the hall, about thirty feet away. She turned and looked at him, started a slow smile as he unbuttoned his shirt all the way down to his belt. The elevator arrived and the doors slid open. It was crowded in there. Where was everybody going? Shopping, she supposed.
Not quite shouting, Chris said, “Thanks, honey. I had a wonderful time!”
Robyn stuck her tongue out at him. She vanished into the elevator.
Chris yelled, “I’m gonna recommend you to all my friends!”
Robyn’s arm shot out, her hand balled into a tiny fist, middle finger extended. She was working on a Saturday because Chris wasn’t bringing in any money, and they both knew it. That’s why he was giving her a hard time. Guilt.
Chris went back into the apartment. He shut the door and — atypically — shot the deadbolt.
On working days, all Robyn ever had for breakfast was a cup of black coffee; a jolt of caffeine on an empty stomach to get her cranked. It was a weight thing — she hit the scales every morning and every night, and her weight never varied by more than half a pound.
Chris was only twenty three. He wouldn’t need to worry about his figure until his metabolism slowed down, and that unhappy event was at least ten years down the road. But he’d always made a point of not eating either, until Robyn had left the apartment. Chris kicked in what he had, but she was paying most of the freight and they both knew it. He owed her a lot, and paid his debts any way he could.
He and Robyn had been a love unit for close to a year. They’d met in early December, at an animated film festival. Bumped into each other in the lobby and found out right away they had mutual friends. Chris was well known in local showbiz circles, primarily for his work in a soap commercial that had received saturation coverage nationally. Robyn watched too much television. She’d seen him lovingly sud his butt maybe a thousand times. So she was familiar with his body, knew right away that he had a pretty decent build. Plus he had a great smile and a totally new-age voice, masculine but sensitive.
What she’d told him when she agreed to let him move in with her, about a month later, was that she couldn’t do without the way he looked at her after they made love, with such tenderness and care.
And the amazing thing was that it was the way he genuinely felt about her. He did care about her, deeply. But there was a wildness about him that he believed she was strongly attracted to as well, even if she wouldn’t admit it; a spontaneous craziness that she wasn’t capable of but admired in others.
They were as different, if you stopped to think about it for a minute, as the tiger and the kid in ‘Calvin & Hobbes’. And got along together just as well, too.
Chris poured himself a bowlful of Kellogg’s Cinnamon Mini Buns. He doused the cereal with milk, thumped down at the table, turned the Province towards him and began to eat. The paper was noted for its crime coverage. On the third page, Chris found a piece on a loosely knit gang of homeless people who roamed Stanley Park at night, plundering and cooking the wildlife and generally making merry as best they could. During the previous evening the gang had apparently been attacked by a vicious German shepherd. They’d managed to overpower the beast by force of sheer numbers, debated the merits of eating it versus hanging it by the neck until dead from the welcoming arms of a tarnished bronze statue of Robbie Burns located about a quarter mile from the zoo area.
Chris studied the small photograph of Lassie twisting in the wind. He wondered briefly if there could be a tie-in with the drowning in the whale pool.
His day lay before him. He had an audition at a downtown studio at ten o’clock, for a bit part in a pilot for a TV series about a day care worker. Great concept. He was supposed to play a single parent picking up his kid for a dentist’s appointment. Now there was a role he could sink his teeth into. The audition would take about an hour, somewhere in there. Including about fifty-eight minutes of wait time. Afterwards, he’d take an aerobics class and then find a Starb
ucks, order a latte and slouch on to a stool by the window. Study the way the world moved, as it drifted past.
Chris went into the bathroom. He removed the water tank’s heavy ceramic lid, balanced it on the toilet seat and unscrewed the hollow white plastic ball floating upon the surface of the water tank. The ball was attached by a brass rod to a gizmo that made the water shut off at a prearranged level, instead of overflowing on to the floor. Good idea. Also a great place to stash a half-ounce of finely chopped marijuana — all leaf, no stems or seeds.
He shook enough weed into the palm of his hand to make two fat joints, then put the toilet back together. In the kitchen, he rolled the joints and slipped them into a plastic sandwich bag, which he put in one of the many inside pockets of his black leather jacket.
Dope? Check. Wallet? Check. Keys? Check. Buck knife with fake bone grips and six-inch blade sharp as a razor? Chris yanked open the door where he kept the can-opener and potato-masher and cookie cutters and all that stuff, rooted around until he found the knife and slipped it into one of his pockets.
Dope, wallet, keys and knife? Check. He was armed and dangerous, ready to roll.
Chapter 9
As Robert Kelly escorted Willows and Parker to Tony Sweeting’s office, the bereaved head of the aquarium’s complex and many-layered security system whined and moaned incessantly about the fate of his beloved German shepherd. If Travis, the Province reporter who’d phoned Kelly could be believed, Waldo had been strung up from the arm of the statue of that drunken Scottish poet across from the yacht club. Much worse, Waldo’s body had been spray-painted in alternating bands of red and white.
“What’s the point?” wailed the anguished chief of security. “I mean, I don’t get it. Am I missing a barber’s pole joke? It was a barbarous act, is that it? My God! Why would anyone paint Waldo in red and white stripes?”
“Beats me,” said Willows, feigning interest in a potted plant, turning his head away so Kelly couldn’t see him smiling. There was nothing funny about a hanged dog. Hanged dogs weren’t funny. He’d have to hold on to that thought. Make it the thought of the day.
“Maybe red and white was all they had,” said Parker.
Willows chuckled. Kelly shot him a hard look. They passed a reception area done in beige carpeting and off-white paint and pale oak veneer. Willows noticed that the woman behind the desk only had eyes for Bob.
They walked down a short hallway to another expanse of bleached veneer. Kelly put his knuckles to work, and then pushed open the door and stepped aside.
Anthony Sweeting had removed his suit jacket but hadn’t gone so far as to loosen his fish-shaped tie. He was standing at a large picture window looking philosophically out at an access road blocked with chunks of fragmented concrete and a couple of tons of twisted iron reinforcing rod and rusty sheet steel.
Willows thanked Kelly for his help, told him he’d be talking to him again and firmly shut the door in his inquisitive, grieving face.
The aquarium director’s desk was made of a lustrous black synthetic material in the shape of a large fish, possibly a flounder. Sweeting welcomed them, shook hands with professional enthusiasm. He sighed heavily enough to weigh them all down, and then crossed to the fish desk and dropped into an overstuffed black leather chair.
Sweeting leaned forward. Two huge albino spiders — reflections of the director’s hands — floated up from the bowels of the desk. Sweeting clasped his hands together. The spiders jumped.
Sweeting had not worn the morning well. All the starch had gone out of his suit. His skin was the colour of jaundiced marshmallow. His ears seemed to droop and his whisky-coloured eyes were rimmed with red. He said, “You heard about the damn dog?”
Parker nodded.
“Waldo. What kind of name is that for a guard dog? I’m surprised it didn’t commit suicide.”
The office walls were covered with photographs of large sea creatures devouring smaller sea creatures. The colours were carnival bright. Willows looked into the placid eyes of a moray eel chomping thoughtfully on a small golden fish. He experienced a queasy sensation in the pit of his stomach, and looked away.
Parker said, “There were two parallel ruts in the snow, that ran down the middle of the amphitheatre stairs to the edge of the whale pool. Do you know what might have caused those ruts, Mr Sweeting?”
“I didn’t notice them.”
“They were about an inch wide and twenty inches apart.”
Sweeting massaged his forehead with the tips of his fingers, so vigorously that it almost seemed he might be trying to rub himself out of existence.
Willows said, “Probably Dr Roth simply drowned. We won’t know until we have the autopsy results. But in the meantime, there are a number of questions that have to be answered.”
Sweeting stood up. His suit jacket was draped over the back of the leather chair. He put the jacket on and fastened the middle button, shot his cuffs and sat back down again.
He said, “Gerard wasn’t simply a colleague; he was also a friend.”
Parker said, “We weren’t aware of that. This must be very difficult for you.”
Sweeting nodded.
Parker said, “If it’s any consolation, rest assured that we sympathize with your loss.”
“He wasn’t an easy man to get to know. If you make enquiries, you’ll find he wasn’t terribly popular. This may have been due to his academic accomplishments, which were remarkably impressive and which he liked to discuss at length. He had a rather large ego.” Sweeting rubbed his chin. “When I say he was a friend, what I mean is that I was an admirer of Gerard’s dedication, his drive. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to play eighteen holes with him. Not that he’d waste his time on such a frivolous pursuit. He was an absolute genius, both in the lab and the field, and that’s extremely rare. But Mother Nature has a way of balancing the scales, don’t you agree?”
Willows nodded. His roving eye focused on a picture of a shark tearing a manhole-sized chunk out of another shark.
Sweeting said, “Makos. Bankers evolved one rung up the ladder. Nasty bastards.”
“Would you mind explaining what you mean about nature balancing the scales?” said Parker.
“Professionally, Gerard was brilliant. But his interpersonal skills were virtually non-existent. His personal life was an absolute shambles, a monument to incompetence.”
“He was married, wasn’t he?”
“To Iris. Lovely woman. He simply didn’t know how to behave — what was correct. When he spoke to you he scrutinized you with the intensity and complete lack of inhibition of a small child. It was very unsettling. He’d stand too close to you, that sort of thing. If you had something he wanted, his strategy was invariably to tell you what it was and wait for you to hand it over.”
“Are we speaking of a particular object or event?” Parker asked.
“Not really. I’m attempting to give you a general impression of the man, that’s all.”
Parker said, “We’ve been told Dr Roth was…” She hesitated. “Extremely fond of women.”
“Who told you that?”
Parker smiled. “Was it true?”
“No, certainly not. Well, I’d better qualify that. He may have been emotionally involved with a member of the staff. But I have no reason to think it was anything but a platonic relationship. In fact I was under the impression it was more of a father-daughter situation.”
“What’s the young lady’s name?” asked Parker.
“Just give me a moment to be absolutely clear about this — the rumours I’ve heard are, as far as I am aware, unsubstantiated.”
Willows said, “What was her name again?”
“Susan Carter.”
“Married?”
“I believe she is unattached.”
Parker said, “Dr Roth’s wife’s name is Iris?”
“Yes, that’s correct. I’ve only met her once or twice, and not recently. But my recollection is that she was a very attractive woman. Have you
spoken to her?”
“Not yet, no.”
“Someone should inform her of Gerard’s death. Did you want me to do it?”
“That isn’t necessary,” said Parker. “Does Iris live in the city?”
“West Vancouver. Quite far out. Do you know Eagle Island?”
Parker shook her head, no.
Sweeting said, “Would you like to see Gerard’s office?”
Parker glanced at Willows. He was looking at the picture of the sharks. She said, “Why don’t we have a little chat with Miss Carter?”
Sweetings nodded reluctantly. “I’ll show you the way.”
*
It was immediately obvious that Susan Carter wasn’t in her office. The door was wide open and the cluttered, tiny room offered no place to hide.
Sweeting, looking a little flustered, checked his watch. “It’s a little early for lunch. I could check with Marian, the receptionist…”
Willows said, “We’ll wait for her. She’ll probably be back in a few minutes.”
Sweeting nodded uncertainly, glanced around as if to itemise the office’s valuables and then turned and strode quickly down the corridor.
Parker pointed at the untidy heap of used Kleenex in the wicker wastebasket next to the desk.
Willows said, “It looks as if there might have been some basis for the rumours.”
Parker moved a little closer to the desk and took a long look at the colourful bar graph on the Mac’s screen.
“What is it?”
“An analysis of the sexual performances of fifty of the aquarium’s male staff.” Parker smiled. “Now, what made me say that?”
Two small, framed photographs hung on the wall to the left of the desk. The first was of a young blonde girl of twelve or thirteen. Susan, no doubt. She was lying beneath a tree reading a book. A small black dog lay curled up in her lap. The second photograph had been taken at a beach. Two divers in shiny black wetsuits, flippers, tanks and face masks stood awkwardly at the water’s edge. A tendril of blonde hair trailed from beneath the cap of the smaller diver’s wetsuit.
Susan Carter and Gerard Roth?
Killers Page 9