Robyn glanced down at the mess on her plate. She looked shocked. Or maybe just bemused. “I did that?”
“You and your butcher knife.”
“Well…”
“So… what’d she say?”
“She said, ‘Hello’.”
Chris shook his head, miming amazement. “You phoned her and she said hello? Wow! No wonder you’re feeling a little shaky.”
“Don’t be a smartass.” Robyn picked up the smallest piece of her sandwich, ate it and moved on to the next.
Chris thought about it for a while, finally said, “It was a shock, wasn’t it? You heard her voice. She spoke to you. All of a sudden she turned into a real person.”
Robyn nodded, kept eating.
“And now you want to back off. Leave her alone. Forget the whole thing.”
Like a very attractive toreador lining up a doomed bull, Robyn pointed with her index fingers at the remains of her sandwich. Then she pointed at her mouth. Sign lingo.
While he waited for her to finish chewing, Chris noticed he’d left a burner on. He went over to the stove and turned it off, then made his way down to the other end of the counter and stood a bottle of red wine on end. Robyn watched him but kept silent. He rummaged around in a kitchen drawer until he found the corkscrew.
“Are you planning to open that?”
“It’s the weekend. The sun’s past the yard-arm. I’m thirsty.”
“Answer the question, please.”
Chris popped the cork. “Care to join me?”
“Not particularly.”
“Maybe I should rephrase the question. Would you like a glass of wine?”
Grilled cheese was good, but greasy. Robyn licked her fingers clean. She said, “Yes, please.”
Chris poured two glasses of wine. He put a glass down in front of Robyn and set the bottle down between them, raised his glass in a toast.
“To us.”
Robyn smiled. “To you, and to me.” They touched glasses and drank. She smiled.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.”
“I could tickle it out of you!”
“Better not try.”
Chris made as if to crawl across the table towards her.
Robyn said, “Remember Linda?”
“Should I? Is it safe?”
“She and that guy she was going out with, the bicycle courier…”
“Donny.”
“They rented that place up on Tenth Avenue…”
“The duplex.”
“Right, and they had a housewarming party, forty or fifty people, and somebody proposed a toast and then we all threw our glasses in the barbecue…”
“That was the outside crowd,” said Chris. “The inside mob demolished the microwave.”
“You’re kidding — really?”
“Yeah, really.’
Robyn said, “What happened to them? Are they still together?”
Chris’s face suddenly sobered up. He said, “Donny jumped a red and got wiped by a punk in a pickup truck. I thought you knew.”
“Run over by a truck — was he badly hurt?”
Chris poured them both a little more wine. “Yeah, he was almost killed. See, he got tangled up in his bike chain and dragged across the intersection by his…”
“His what?”
Chris glanced circumspectly down at his lap.
Robyn said, “Oh my God.”
“The surgeons did what they could, but there were parts of Donny that were never found.” Chris emptied and refilled his glass. Important parts.”
Robyn said, “Poor Linda. How awful for her.”
Chris nodded in agreement. He said, “That’s life, I guess.” He leaned over the table and turned Robyn’s hand palm up and softly kissed her. He kissed her again and seductively whispered, “No one knows what the future holds. Life’s best lived to the fullest, my love.”
Robyn nodded sorrowfully and then glanced up and caught the glint of lust in Chris’s eye. She slammed her glass down on the table. “You really are a grade-A asshole, aren’t you!”
Chris admitted it, happily confessed he’d say or do whatever it took to get her into the sack.
“Even the dishes?”
“But not the pots.”
In bed, Robyn suddenly turned serious. She told him about the eighteen possibles, how she’d narrowed it down to six and struck pay-dirt on the first number she tried.
“What’d she sound like?”
“Stuffed up. Congested. Like she had a cold or had been crying.”
“Remorse,” said Chris.
Robyn said, “That’s right, that’s what it must have been. Remorse. She sounded guilty as hell, now that I think about it.”
Chris raised himself up on an elbow so he could see her face more clearly. She didn’t seem to be kidding. He said, “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
She nodded. He stroked her golden skin, ran his thumb along the smoothly curving white line that marked the southernmost boundary of her bathing suit. Summer was long gone. Her tan was fading fast. He kissed her throat. Summer was a memory but Robyn still tasted of the ocean: salty and warm.
She turned into him. “What’re you thinking about?”
“August — the sexiest month of them all.”
“And what page of the calendar are we on now?”
“November.”
Robyn laughed. “I should have known.”
Chris turned his back on her. He said, “Now I know how Donny felt when he came out of the anaesthetic and the surgeons told him he was going to have to learn how to ride side-saddle.”
Robyn giggled and said, “She probably doesn’t have much money anyway.”
“Susan Carter? Probably not.”
“We should forget about blackmailing her. Just drop it. Tell the police what we know and let them take over. It was a pretty stupid idea, if you stop to think about it.”
“My sentiments exactly,” said Chris.
“But at the same time, I don’t want to quit. The truth is, I don’t care if she has any money or not. I just want to… keep on going.”
Chris said, “I’ve been thinking. Now we know where she lives, maybe I should break into her apartment. That seems like the best way to find out what kind of person she is.”
“Please don’t tell me that all your life, if you wanted to get to know some woman a little better, the first thing you did was ransack her apartment.”
Chris moved cautiously across to Robyn’s side of the bed. “That’s exactly right. Want to know what I did next?”
“Actually, I don’t think I do.”
“Kissed her breasts.”
“What a cheap obvious trick.”
“But it worked.”
Robyn pushed his head away. “Those must’ve been the good old days, eh sport?”
Chris moved effortlessly into the feeble, antiquated voice he’d used in a lucrative voice-over for a product that cleaned and disinfected your teeth when you weren’t using them. He said, “I suspect they were the good old days. Hard to recall ’em, lately. Everything’s kind of all mixed up and hazy-like. Know what I mean?”
Robyn laughed and reached out to him, took him in her golden arms and pulled him close.
Squinting down at her, Chris said, “You sure are a pretty young thing, ain’tcha?”
They made love again, slowly and carefully, getting it just right, and then Robyn snuggled into his arms and drifted off. Chris stared up at the ceiling for a while, then doubled up his pillow and read a couple of chapters of a paperback. Then he must’ve dozed off for an hour or two, because somehow the book ended up on the floor and dusk was settling over the city. He happened to glance out the window. Four of the five rock pigeons had gone. The remaining bird, tiny feet still clamped to the power line, hung head down with its wings spread wide.
A gust of wind raced down the alley, blew swirling clouds of snow off the roofs. The frozen corpse swayed slightly, and was still.
<
br /> Chapter 19
Parking was always tough in the city’s overpopulated West End district, but Willows managed to find a spot in a loading zone in an alley. He let Parker out of the unmarked Ford and then pulled up against the graffiti covered flank of a building, turned off the engine and got out of the car and locked up.
An orange tabby with a pronounced limp and most of its left ear missing slunk out from behind a dumpster. The animal eyed the two detectives with the air of a jaded beggar sizing up a prospective customer. Meowing plaintively, it picked its way across the landscape of ice and snow, rubbed against Willows’ leg. Willows knelt to stroke the cat’s wide, blunt head. It pressed against him, purring furiously. He scratched vigorously behind a bristly nub of scar tissue — all that remained of its ear. The cat’s ringed tail whipped at the snow. It jumped suddenly into Willows’ lap.
The creature had bright green eyes, good teeth, a great personality. But it wasn’t wearing a flea collar and the fleas knew it. Willows ran his hand along the length of the cat’s body, felt the bones lurking beneath the fur. The tabby was big, but it wasn’t fat.
He slipped his hand under its belly and put it down on the snow. The cat gave him a shocked look.
Parker said, “Look at him. He’s been jilted, and knows it.”
Willows stood up.
The tabby followed them as far as the mouth of the alley and then, still mewing, fell back.
Susan Carter lived on the fourteenth floor of a drab concrete high-rise on the corner of Davie and Bidwell. The wide brass-trimmed glass doors leading to the block’s cramped lobby were kept locked to deter lazy door-to-door salesmen, thieves and vagrants, maybe even cops. Willows ran his finger down the list of tenants until he found Susan’s name and dialled her apartment number on the intercom. The machine emitted a raucous buzzing sound, like a crow with laryngitis.
Willows dialled her apartment again. Nothing.
Parker said, “Maybe she’s sleeping.”
“Or watching TV or filing her nails.” Willows tried a third time, then buzzed the manager.
Following another pause a disembodied androgynous voice said, “Yeah, who is it?”
Willows identified himself, explained the situation.
“She don’t answer her buzzer?”
“Don’t answer it one little bit,” said Willows, affecting the patois.
Parker gave him a look.
The voice said, “Probably she ain’t home.”
“Yeah, probably. But we’d like to check it out.”
“Got a warrant?”
Willows said he hoped it wasn’t necessary.
There was a pause and then the unseen woman told him she couldn’t open up the apartment unless he had a search warrant. The law was the law. If he really was a cop, he ought to know better.
Parker said, “A colleague of Miss Carter’s recently died. She called in sick at work. We’re concerned about the general state of her health. We just want to make sure she’s okay.”
“What’s that?”
“This is Detective Claire Parker speaking.”
“No, what the hell’s a colleague?”
Willows said, “Tell you what, let us into the lobby and we’ll take it from there.”
Raucous laughter, fading into silence.
Parker said, “She hung up on you, Jack.”
Willows had to agree. He wondered what was wrong with him, that he didn’t recognize the symptoms after all this time. The nearest payphone was a block away. He asked Parker if she wanted to wait in the car.
“I better not. I might be tempted to shoot that poor starving cat, put it out of its misery.”
They trudged down Davie, wary of the patches of ice and trampled snow that made the sidewalk treacherous.
Parker said, “Isn’t there a city bylaw requiring landlords and shop owners to clear the sidewalk in front of their premises?”
“I think that might be the exact wording,” Willows said, grinning. “It sure has the right tone.”
He unbuttoned his overcoat so he could get at his sports jacket, found a quarter. He wiped the pay phone’s mouthpiece on his sleeve, dropped the coin and dialled.
An operator new to the job picked up on the first ring. Willows gave him Susan Carter’s address, was told to wait. The computer kicked in. An eerily human voice gave him Susan’s number. By then Parker had notebook and pen in hand. Willows repeated the number aloud and she wrote it down. He hung up. The quarter rattled in the coin return. He dug it out and used it to dial Susan’s number.
The phone rang twice and then Susan Carter picked up and said hello.
Willows identified himself. He told her he and Parker were only a block away, and would like to talk to her about Gerard Roth’s death.
Susan said, “You’re a block away?” She sounded a little confused, as if she had trouble believing him.
Willows said, “I buzzed, but you didn’t answer. The super wouldn’t let me in. I’m calling from a payphone at Denman and Davie.”
There was a pause. He thought he could hear her breathing, but wasn’t sure because the light had changed and there was a noisy rush of traffic.
“Miss Carter?”
“I’m not at my apartment. I have call forwarding. I’m…”
Willows felt himself losing control, the situation slipping away from him. Cutting in, he said, “Where are you now?”
“Gerard’s. I’m at Gerard’s.”
“The house on Eagle Island?”
“No, of course not. His apartment — the condo.”
Willows said, “You’d better give me the address.” He gestured to Parker, and she passed him her notebook and pen. He wrote down Roth’s address, thanked Susan Carter, told her they’d be arriving in twenty minutes or less and hung up.
They walked in silence back to the Ford. Willows unlocked his door, got behind the wheel and started the car. He pulled into the middle of the alley and reached across to open Parker’s door. As she got in he said, “Straight up Davie and then left on Homer and right on Nelson and over the bridge. What’d you think?”
Parker fastened her seatbelt. She said, “Sounds good to me, Jack,” and slammed shut her door.
The Ford fishtailed as Willows gunned it towards the mouth of the alley.
Gerard Roth’s condominium was located in the eight-hundred block West 7th, on the trendy north-facing slope above False Creek. Fifteen years ago the area had been a mix of light industry, warehouses and falling-down drunk clapboard houses. Now it was a mass of three-storey apartments; wall-to-wall stucco in a thousand shades of pink and green. Prices started at about a hundred and ten thousand and went up to twice that amount. The area was convenient to the downtown core. If you had a view, the scenery was terrific. But Willows had always thought the area somehow looked like a gestating slum.
As they turned up Davie, he said as much to Parker.
“The whole world’s a gestating slum. Or you could say it’s nothing but an over-tended graveyard. Depends on your attitude, doesn’t it?”
Ice crunched under the tires as Willows pulled over to the curb, braked. Parker had a bit of an attitude herself, and he thought he knew why. He said, “Look, there’s something I think I better explain. On the way in from the airport, Sheila and I hardly said a word to each other. She spent the night in the guest bedroom. She was still sleeping when I left the house this morning. Claire, I don’t have any idea what’s going on. I don’t know any more than you do what’s on her mind.”
“She’s your wife.”
“No she isn’t.”
“Yes she bloody well is.”
“Legally,” said Willows. He thumped the wheel as if he’d made a crucially important point.
“Did you sleep with her?”
“Hell no.”
“Did she ask you to sleep with her?”
“No, Claire, she didn’t. In fact she hardly said a word to me.”
“She will, if she wants to stay.”
Wi
llows nodded sagely. He was confused. Was Parker predicting an onslaught of meaningless sex, or meaningful dialogue?
She said, “Does she want to stay?”
“I have no idea.”
Parker said, “I want you to invite me to dinner this evening. After the kids go to bed maybe we can work out what everybody else is up to.”
Willows said, “The three of us?”
“You think I’m going to put up with a situation like this — not knowing what the hell’s going on?”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
Parker leaned across the seat and kissed him on the mouth. In his peripheral vision Willows saw one of the new patrol cars cruise past, the uniformed constable behind the wheel eyeing him with a mix of suspicion and envy. The department was saving three hundred dollars a unit by sticking with an essentially off-the-rack factory paint job. White, with a blue racing stripe. What was the world coming to? Willows remembered a time, not so long ago, when police cars were black.
He hadn’t recognized the cop and was pretty sure the cop hadn’t recognized him. The Ford’s tires spun on ice and hard-packed snow as he pulled away from the curb.
As advertised, he drove down Davie to Homer, made a left and continued down Homer to Nelson, hung a right and merged with the southbound flow across the Cambie Street Bridge.
He turned off Cambie at Seventh Avenue, drove three blocks west and parked in a ‘Residents Only’ zone. He dropped the visor.
Roth’s building was virtually identical to all the buildings that surrounded it — three storeys of miniature balconies and blank aluminium-framed windows, the whole package wrapped in pastel stucco. The California look.
This time, Parker hit the intercom button.
Susan Carter answered immediately, as if she’d been waiting for them and didn’t care if they knew it. She gave Parker directions and buzzed the door, unlocking it.
The lobby was small. Smoked mirrors lined the walls from waist level to the white-painted ceiling. There was only one elevator. Willows punched the UP button. The elevator — as Eddy Orwell liked to put it — immediately ‘spread ’em’.
Parker stepped inside and held the door for Willows. There was just room enough for the two of them and a chaperon.
Parker hit the third floor button. They ascended so lethargically that Willows wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that down in the basement somebody was sweating over a cheap bicycle. He said, “If this thing went any slower, somebody’d have to offer us a cold meal.”
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