Karaoke Rap

by Laurence Gough

  Bob Barker wanted to give away a speedboat, a trip to Mexico, a bright red car so shiny it looked as if it was melting.

  Willows wondered what he’d look like when he was Bob’s age, should he live that long. Not that he had any idea how old Bob was, though it seemed he’d been around since the birth of the picture tube. Bob had probably given away tens of millions of dollars’ worth of cars and boats and trips to the Grand Canyon during his career as a genial game-show host. Maybe the secret to eternal youth was an abiding generosity of spirit.

  Or genetics. Or a careful diet, moderate consumption of alcoholic beverages ...

  The contestants had to guess the value of a five-piece solid-oak bedroom suite.

  The first contestant dithered, peered anxiously towards her friends in the crowd. “Five thousand!” she cried.

  “Six thousand, six hundred and eighty dollars!” cried Annie.

  “Seven thousand, five hundred,” said Parker.

  “Six thousand, six hundred and seventy-nine dollars and ninety-five cents!” said Willows.

  Annie threw a cushion at him. “That’s not fair!”

  *

  The bedside lamp on Parker’s side had a fringed, saffron-coloured shade and a ten-watt bulb shaped like a candle-flame. She and Willows had bought the lamp at an “antique moderne” store in Seaside, Oregon, when they’d found that their hotel-room lights were more suited to reading small-print paperbacks than to making love.

  Willows had knocked the lamp over a few minutes earlier. He reached across Parker and set it upright. Parker smiled up at him. He made as if to shift his weight and she put her arms around him, holding him captive. He settled a little lower, so they were touching all along the lengths of their bodies, but she was spared his weight.

  Parker said, “Relax, Jack.”

  Willows felt the heat rising up off her. He tilted his head back so he could look into her eyes. Whenever they made love, Parker seemed to lose a good ten years. Her face softened, the lines around her eyes and the corners of her mouth faded and slipped away. It was like knowing her before he had ever had a chance to know her, when she was younger, blessed with a sweet and tender innocence unknown to cops.

  He held her for a few more minutes, stroked her hair, ran his hand over her body and kissed her everywhere his mouth could reach. Finally he moved off her.

  Parker snuggled into the crook of his arm. The swell of her breast pressed against his ribcage. She told him why Annie had been so upset at dinner.

  Lewis had told Annie during lunch that he couldn’t come over that night because he had to study for a chemistry exam. After school, Annie happened to see him with a blonde girl named Bev, who was in Annie’s math class. She had followed them to a nearby coffee shop. Lewis had bought two large lattes. He’d sat down next to Bev and put his arm around her.

  “Damn conniving Bev,” said Willows.

  Parker giggled. She said, “Annie marched up to the table and tipped Lewis’ large latte into Lewis’ cheatin’ lap.”

  “Ouch,” said Willows, who was in a post-coital, acutely sensitive mood.

  “Lucky for Lewis, he was wearing one of those thick flannel lumberjack shirts outside his jeans, so he wasn’t burned.”

  “Merely terrified.”

  “A woman scorned ...” said Parker.

  Willows reached out with his left arm, and turned out the light. Parker snuggled a little closer. She said, “Tired?”

  “Yeah, a little.”

  “Me too,” said Parker contentedly.

  *

  When Willows arrived at 312 Main the next morning, he found a single pink message slip on his desk. The note was terse and to the point. He was to report to Homer Bradley’s office the moment he arrived. There was an identical note on Parker’s desk.

  Willows knuckled the pebbled-glass door. Bradley crisply shouted at them to come in. Willows pushed open the door and stepped inside. Parker took a moment to adjust the collar of her blouse, and then followed after him.

  Bradley sat at his desk. He didn’t look up from his paperwork. He said, “Shut the damn door.”

  Parker shut the door, leaned against the frame.

  Bradley finished writing, capped his pen and slipped it into the breast pocket of his uniform jacket. His thinning hair gleamed frostily in the overhead lights. He glared at Parker and Willows in turn.

  “I fell asleep at my desk yesterday afternoon. When I awoke, at approximately twenty minutes past seven, I discovered that my telephone had been disconnected, that the switchboard had been ordered to reroute my calls to your desk, Jack, and that my office door was locked and that you had taped a handwritten note to my door informing all and sundry that I was out of the building, and unavailable.” Bradley took a deep breath, held it for a moment, slowly exhaled. “What in hell possessed you do to such a thing?”

  Willows said, “We were talking to you about the LeGrand case ...” Bradley was staring at him, openly hostile. He said, “You don’t remember?”

  “Remember what, for Christ’s sake?”

  “You fell asleep in the middle of a sentence,” said Parker. “We thought you’d had a stroke ...”

  Bradley stared at her in shocked disbelief.

  Parker said, “Jack took your pulse. We smelled liquor on your breath. We thought ...”

  “That I’d been drinking?” Bradley was shouting. He lowered his voice to a harsh whisper. “You thought I was drunk?”

  Willows said, “Not at first. We ...”

  “Hold it right there!” Bradley held up his right hand, palm out, as if claiming the right of way at a conversational intersection. He said, “I’m having a little problem with my arthritis. I’m taking painkillers, prescription drugs. I had one little drink with lunch. Obviously that was a mistake, a minor error in judgement. But I was not drinking on duty and I sure as hell do not have a drinking problem. Is that clear?”

  “Absolutely,” said Parker.

  “In future, should you find me comatose at my desk, kindly assume that I am ill, not pissed. Act accordingly. Call the paramedics. Do not call a goddamn bartender!” Bradley was shouting again. He struggled to get himself under control. “Do I make myself understood?”

  “Every word,” said Willows.

  “In that case, kindly get the hell out of my office!”

  Willows held the door open for Parker, followed her out. He eased the door shut. The latch clicked. He said, “What time is it?”

  Parker checked her watch. “Quarter to nine.”

  “Want to go somewhere quiet and have a drink?”

  Parker gave him a rueful grin. “I hope you’re kidding.”

  “Me too,” said Willows.

  23

  Ozzie had forgotten to lower the blinds. The sun woke him early, but he managed to roll out of the sack and stagger over to the window and drop the blinds and fall back into bed without actually waking up. He slept until the ringing telephone woke him at just a few minutes past noon.

  “Ozzie?” It was Dean. The shooter. He sounded excited, pumped. He reminded Ozzie this was the day they’d been waiting for. He pointed out that this special day was already almost half over. Was Ozzie sick or something?

  Ozzie said, “I was up late, okay?”

  “Wanna go somewhere, Denny’s, get some breakfast?”

  Ozzie said, “Forget it. Dinner, maybe.”

  He hung up and went back to bed, but the damage had been done. He was wide awake; there was no way he was getting back to sleep. He kicked free of the blankets, went into the bathroom, showered and shaved, washed his hair. He liked his hair cut short, but had let it grow the past few months, so it came down almost to his shoulders. As soon as he finished with Harold and Dean, he was going to get himself a military-style crewcut. Get his ear pierced, buy a gold hoop. Wear his Detroit Tigers baseball cap backwards. Create a whole new personality to go with his new look. Be a nice guy, someone gentle and kind, considerate.

  In the kitchen, he made coffee, slice
d a poppyseed bagel in half and shoved it into the toaster. Fucking Dean. The kid lacked patience, had to be kept on a real short leash, couldn’t be depended on for more than a minute or two at a time. He became aware of a stream of dark-blue smoke rising from the toaster. The smoke alarm stuttered uncertainly and then broke into a full-bore scream. What a racket! As if the goddamn Three Tenors had kicked in the door for an impromptu sing-along. He burned his fingers trying to fish the bagel out of the toaster, desperately yanked the plug out of the socket.

  He waved yesterday’s paper at the smoke detector, trying to clear the air.

  Nope, that wasn’t going to work. He couldn’t shoot the thing, either — too damn noisy.

  He opened the living-room window and then went over to the door and yanked it open, and there was Thomas, the building’s chubby gnome of a maintenance man, crouched low in the hallway.

  Thomas stood there, master key in one hand and fire extinguisher in the other, a startled look in both his close-set eyes, vodka fumes leaking from his open mouth. Ozzie glowered down at him, thrust a j’accuse finger at him and shouted, “What’re you, the bagel police?” Thomas flinched, and backed away. An ex-Hungarian, he’d fled his mother country back in the late fifties, when the Russkies invaded and the tanks started burning. The fifties were a long time ago, but he still suffered pangs of guilt. Ozzie had told him to let it go, that he was a man ahead of his time. It was the nineties. When the going gets tough, emigrate.

  He went back to the TV, drank his coffee and munched on a charcoal-black bagel as he watched the last of the noon news.

  The salmon were in trouble, again.

  He watched a string of commercials, and then it was time for the sports update. He sat up a little straighter on the sofa. Who was this weird kid with no shoulders and a size-twelve neck, a two-dollar haircut and chirpy, overly cheerful voice? Nobody Ozzie wanted to know. He hit the remote’s off button. The kid vanished in a burp of light. Zapped.

  He was close to the bottom of his second cup of coffee when the phone started ringing.

  Dean, again.

  “Can I come over?”

  Ozzie hung up. He put on a pair of latex gloves and went to work on the apartment with a roll of paper towels and a bottle of Windex. Starting in the bathroom, he wiped down any surface that might hold a fingerprint. By the time Dean arrived, he’d done the bathroom and the kitchen and was hard at work on the bedroom. He told Dean to sit on the sofa and watch TV, not to touch anything but the remote control. He finished the bedroom and started in on the living room. Dean was watching an old western, Dean Martin and a bunch of actors Ozzie vaguely recognized but couldn’t name.

  Ozzie wiped down the TV, playfully waggled his hands in front of the screen. He pulled both his sports bags out of the bedroom closet and filled them with his clothes and the few other belongings he felt it worthwhile to take with him: his shaving gear, clock radio, the Ruger and boxes of Black Talons.

  Packed and ready to go, he pulled a couple of bottles of Kokanee from the otherwise empty fridge. He tossed a bottle to Dean and popped open the other.

  The two partners in crime sat there at opposite ends of the sofa, Dean in his tight black jeans and tight black T-shirt, black leather belt and his new Doc Martens, Ozzie in battered Adidas sneakers, jeans, a baggy short-sleeved shirt in pale-blue cotton, his fogged-up latex gloves. They drank beer, watched the movie, passing the time. Dean smoked heavily. His posture was relaxed, but there was a tightness around his eyes.

  The movie ended at three. Ozzie turned the sound up a notch before they left. He locked the apartment door and dropped the key and the latex gloves and empty beer bottles down the garbage chute.

  Dean followed in the rental as Ozzie drove the Chevy out to the airport, and parked it in the long-term lot. They drove downtown in the rental, and then Dean wriggled his hands into a fresh pair of latex gloves and Ozzie drove around more or less aimlessly. Whenever they happened on a mailbox Dean mailed a photocopy of the patched-together ransom letter to Joan Wismer. In half an hour, they’d sent her a dozen copies. If Canada Post held to its part of the bargain, the notes would be delivered to the Wismer household about eleven-thirty the next morning.

  But that would be then, and this was barely now.

  Ozzie parked the van in a pay lot on Seymour, and they strolled over to Granville and paid eight-fifty each to watch the last hour of a gangster movie starring Bruce Willis.

  As they left the theatre Ozzie said, “Can you imagine what it’d be like, being married to Demi?”

  Dean, his face solemn and immobile, thought about it for the better part of a block. Finally he said, “No, I don’t think so. But why would I want to? A woman like that, a movie star. She ain’t real.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “She ain’t real. She’s a star.”

  “A star,” said Ozzie. Not getting it.

  “Besides, she’s married to Bruce, and I like Bruce. He’s a nice guy. You think I’d want to fool around with his wife, screw up his marriage? Forget that, man. Anyway, they got kids, and I hate kids. I already did the father thing, in case you forgot. It wasn’t me.”

  “Good point,” said Ozzie. Thinking, moron. They walked back to the van, and he tossed Dean the keys and told him about the Italian restaurant he wanted to try ...

  The restaurant was located on a corner, across the street from a place that sold discount Persian-style carpets, but was going out of business. Ozzie studied the menu taped to the inside of the window by the door, while Dean scrutinized passing women. Soups and salads were in the eight-dollar range, main-course pasta meat dishes twenty and up. Ozzie lifted a hand and peered through the plate glass. The joint was almost full, the men in expensive suits, the women wearing lots of jewellery, bright lipstick. A suit glanced up, happened to catch Ozzie’s eye. They stared at each other until the guy remembered his soup was getting cold.

  Ozzie grabbed Dean’s arm and pulled him inside. There was a table for two by the far window. They brushed past a small sign on a tripod that said, “Please wait to be seated.” Dean, a little intimidated by the restaurant’s atmosphere, the ritzy classical music, all those obviously well-off people who were paying absolutely no attention to him, followed close behind as Ozzie made his way across the narrow room, pulled out a chair and sat. Dean stood there, not too sure about the situation. Ozzie stretched out his leg and kicked the other chair away from the table. “Sit down, make yourself comfortable.”

  Dean sat down.

  A man in his fifties, balding, with a week-old beard, wearing pointy black shoes, tight black pants and an unbuttoned black vest over a crisp white shirt, strode briskly towards the table. His name was Rudolpho, if the shiny brass plate pinned to his vest could be believed. Ozzie pulled his roll, peeled off a hundred. He tried to cram the hundred into Rudolpho’s pasty-white hand. The man flinched away as if the bill were a long-dead fish.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” he whispered, “but I’m afraid this table is reserved ...”

  “For us,” said Ozzie. He peeled another hundred from the roll.

  “Unfortunately, I’m afraid we have a dress code.” The sweep of a limp hand encompassed the restaurant and all it contained. “As you see, gentlemen are required to wear a jacket and tie ...”

  “We ain’t gentlemen,” said Ozzie, peeling another hundred from his roll. “We’re just guys. A couple of harmless, very hungry guys.” He winked at Dean, licked his fingers and stripped another hundred from his wad.

  Rudolpho was deeply offended. Pushing at the air with his hands, he propelled himself away from them, shuffled backwards across the dark carpet and vanished through the batwing doors that led to the kitchen. Three swarthy men dressed all in white pushed through the doors and into the dining area. The men had thick, hairy arms. Grim, European faces. The smallest discreetly wielded a meat cleaver.

  *

  Ozzie drove the van north on Granville to Broadway, made a right, drove past the blocky, bright-red ne
on letters of a Future Shop. He made another right and pulled into Denny’s, parked in the handicapped slot and killed the engine. He hung his blue-and-white plastic handicapped tag from the rearview mirror. He reminded Dean that he limped.

  Inside, the restaurant was crowded but not full, the air thick with the clatter of cutlery and conversation. Ozzie glanced around, categorizing the customers. Shoppers, lonely salesmen, the terminally unemployed. As far as he could see, he and Dean were the only professional criminals in the joint.

  A woman whose style of walking hinted at a gene pool that was heavily dependent on waterfowl led them to a booth with a nice view of several other booths. Ozzie said, “We’re okay like this?”

  “Like what?” said the waitress.

  “No tie, no jacket ...”

  “You got a shirt, shoes and socks? That’s all we require here at Denny’s, sir.”

  “And it’s okay to sit here ...” — Ozzie’s gesture encompassed the booth’s gleaming table, cushy seats, the quality stainless-steel cutlery, chrome-topped glass salt-and-pepper shakers, napkin dispenser — “... even though we got no reservation?”

  “We don’t accept reservations at Denny’s, sir. Will you be having something to drink?”

  “Got a light beer?”

  “Coors?”

  “Fine,” said Ozzie.

  The waitress turned to Dean.

  Dean said, “You got a light beer?”

  “Coors.”

  “Fine,” said Dean. He lit a cigarette. The city had recently passed a by-law against smoking in restaurants and just about everywhere else, with the possible exception of school washrooms. He sucked smoke so deeply into his respiratory system that it would never find its way out again, then lifted his upside-down coffee cup from the saucer, squashed the butt in the saucer and carefully replaced the cup.

  The waitress arrived with their bottled beer, glasses. She sniffed the air, glanced suspiciously around.