Seaweed in the Soup

by Stanley Evans

  “Not like Gonzales. I agree that in a fit of rage a woman might knock somebody out with a bottle. But she doesn’t then drag him into a chair, tie him down with duct tape and then torture him for hours.”

  “Silas,” Bernie said impatiently. “You’re talking about a normal woman. I’m talking about a nutcase. The Beast of Belsen was a woman.”

  “What? You’re pissed at the killer and now you’re pissed at me too?”

  Bernie summoned a weary grin. He rubbed a hand across his forehead and was about to say something when a voice said, “Excuse me, Chief. No offence, but shouldn’t you be wearing booties?”

  It was a crime-scene tech, one of the bunnysuiters. He was standing in the doorway, and he was right. Bernie and I ought to have been wearing booties instead of contaminating the scene of the crime with our dirty size twelves. Bernie and I left the apartment and waited in the corridor until Nice Manners arrived.

  Visibly annoyed, giving me the icy stare, Manners asked, “What are you doing here?”

  “He found the body, Nice,” Bernie growled. “Keep your shirt on, for chrissake.”

  After that, I kept quiet and tried to stay under Manners’ radar while Bernie brought him up to speed. A constable handing out blue booties, white paper suits and rubber gloves to whoever needed them offered them to us. Bernie and I declined. We had seen all we wanted of Tomas Gonzales and his apartment for the time being.

  Manners, pulling a bulky white paper suit over his day clothes, said, “Raymond Cho: dead. Maggie Bradley: dead. Larry Cooley: ditto. In addition, three people are dead due to that arson at Twinner Scudd’s club. And now Tomas Gonzales is dead.”

  “If it is Tomas Gonzales,” Bernie demurred. “It probably is, but you can’t be certain by looking at what’s left of his face. I’ve never seen the likes of it.”

  Manners zipped his white suit up. Stooped down to put his blue booties, on he grunted breathlessly, “Seven murders in less than a week. Are these cases all connected in some way?”

  Bernie shrugged. I didn’t say anything.

  But Manners’ question had been rhetorical. He straightened up and went on, “I’m wondering if these murders are all tied to that first killing, the one on Collins Lane? Raymond Cho was involved with drugs, and he was murdered with brutal violence. Ditto Larry Cooley. Ditto Tomas Gonzales. Ditto Maggie Bradley.”

  Bernie shrugged. “Maggie wasn’t a drug trafficker.”

  “Not directly, perhaps,” Manners said. “But who’s to say that her husband wasn’t? After all, we found traces of cocaine in Bradley’s house, and in his Crown Royal.”

  “Lightning Bradley is a dumb asshole. He’s a drunk, which means he’s an addictive personality, so he probably fooled around with cocaine once or twice,” Bernie responded. “I don’t think he was a trafficker. Besides, cocaine is ubiquitous. Nowadays there’s traces of it in a majority of used 20 dollar bills.”

  “Ah yes, well, it’s not quite that simple,” Manners said. “Forensics now tells us that the cocaine traces we found in Cho’s BMW had been cut by the same ingredients and in the identical proportions to the traces found in Bradley’s Crown Royal. They were all from the same batch.”

  Bernie nodded.

  Looking at me, but without meeting my gaze, Manners added, “Chief Tapp tells me that you interviewed Twinner Scudd, Larry Cooley and Gonzales recently. So who do you like for this, Sergeant?”

  I said without hesitation, “I didn’t interview Cooley, but my guess is Twinner Scudd, although I think that the Big Circle Boys and the Red Scorpions should be added to your list of suspects.”

  Manners responded by pulling the paper suit’s hoodie over his head, and going into Gonzales’ apartment.

  “Twinner Scudd?” Bernie said doubtfully. “Don’t tell me you’re coming around to my way of thinking?”

  “It makes no difference what I think, Bernie. Manners doesn’t put any weight in my opinions.”

  Bernie let that one go. He said “So long,” and went home. It had been a very long day; I probably should have done the same.

  The sky was full of thin whirling clouds when I drove back to my office, thinking and trying not to think about Tomas Gonzales’ unlovely corpse, and his grisly encounter with the finality of death. The smell of death was in my nostrils; the taste of death was in my mouth. Rather than gargling with mouthwash, I brought out the office bottle and poured myself a stiff one.

  Then I logged on and spent a few minutes investigating Larry Cooley. That was something I ought to have done much earlier. Cooley’s real name was Millray.

  Larry Millray was a self-made character who had made several unsuccessful attempts to reconstruct himself with the faulty psychological building materials that nature had given him to work with. He was booted out of Queen’s, then Dalhousie, when they found out he’d registered with forged transcripts. After that he lowered his sights, and took a welding course at a community college in Red Deer, Alberta. Millray passed bottom of his class and then worked on a northern pipeline project until inspectors took a closer look at his work and he was let go. He had two convictions for assault, the second of which had earned him six months in minimum security. When he came out, he got into the condo time-share racket. A few scandals later, and another minimum-security jolt, he changed his name to Cooley (his mother’s maiden name) and then somehow slithered his way into P.G. Mainwaring’s enchanted circle.

  There were no voice mail messages; no snail mail lay on the floor underneath my letter slot. There was just me, and that miserable night. I keep a portable radio in my desk, and I switched it on to lighten my mood. It was tuned to KPLU, a National Public Radio jazz and blues station broadcasting out of Tacoma. B.B. King was singing about the bro in Korea—the war that nobody remembers any more. The Obama/McCain election was in its death throes, and a newsbreak came on. Palin and her cohorts were accusing Obama of being a closet terrorist, an actual socialist and a secret Muslim. I was already sick of America’s election slanders and phantom campaign issues, so I turned it off in disgust. I had the whole silent building to myself, or thought that I had, until I heard water running along pipes. I padded soft-footed along the corridor to my private washroom and used a key to let myself in. The room was empty, although water swirled in the bowl of my toilet. Evidently, I wasn’t the building’s only occupant. That ghost was back. I stayed in the corridor, thinking and waiting. After a while, footsteps clattered down the wooden stairs from the second floor. A pair of gorgeous female legs came into view, then the rest of her.

  It was P.G. Mainwaring. She looked tired, not as vivacious as I remembered. Dark circles ringed her eyes, but she was still exceptionally lovely.

  “Miss Mainwaring,” I said. “What are you doing here at this hour?”

  “I’ve been working,” she said obscurely, coming to a stop at the foot of the stairs. “I should ask you the same question?”

  “I’ve finished work for the day. Now I’m drinking whisky. Would you like a cup?”

  “It may be time to enlarge your social repertoire. All you do is offer me alcohol.”

  “If I could get you to drink some alcohol, I’d extend my range.”

  She was holding herself stiffly. “A drink might be fun, although I don’t normally drink distilled beverages from cups. There’s always a first time, I suppose,” she said, relaxing her rigid stance. “Let me have a look at your office, first.”

  She moved towards me with easy graceful strides, wearing an unbuttoned green raincoat that showed off a curvaceous figure beneath a black blazer, a cream turtleneck sweater and a tartan skirt with a lot of the same green in it. I couldn’t read her eyes. The hem of her coat brushed against me as she went past into my office. She had on a perfume, something unusual, but I’d smelled it before, and I wasn’t sure that I liked it.

  “By the way,” I said. “Thanks for inviting me to your memorial dinner. I’m sorry I didn’t make it, but I was tied up.”

  “You can’t be too sorry because y
ou didn’t RSVP me either.”

  “As I say, I was tied up, but I’d have enjoyed the dinner.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  Perhaps unconsciously, she leaned against my desk with one hip out, like a hooker. I studied her and noticed for the first time that age was bringing faint wrinkles to her cheeks and tugging down the flesh under her chin.

  PC was out on the prowl. The only things for P.G. Mainwaring to admire were my crummy desk, crummier visitors’ chairs, pathetic metal filing cabinets, a drab fireplace, those pictures of British queens and some missing-kid notices.

  “How long since this room has been painted?” she said, as regal in her disdain as their Britannic majesties glaring down at us from their frames. “And you should start using room freshener, because I smell cat.”

  “It smells of cat because a cat is the principal resident, I’m just her designated victualler. As for the paint, the landlord’s a cheapskate. This office hasn’t been painted in years.”

  I pointed at the swiveller behind my desk. “Somebody shot me in 2005. I was sitting in that very chair. The gunman was across the street, hiding on the roof of Swans pub. Most of the bullets went into the walls instead of me. Even then, the landlord wouldn’t spring for a complete paint job. All he did was spackle the holes and do a bit of touch-up.”

  “How dreadful for you,” she said. “Were you badly injured?”

  “Not terribly. The doctors had me on morphine for a while, which was actually quite pleasant.”

  “And I suppose pretty girls thronged to your bedside, signing their names on your plaster casts, bearing grapes, flowers?”

  “Well, yes, a few of them did. One of the pretty girls was called Sarah Williams. She’s a friend of mine. I think you must know her, because she’s mentioned your name to me at least once, although not recently.”

  P.G.’s eyes widened.

  I went on, “When I got out of hospital after being shot, I was on paid disability for a few months, which was another plus. I went down to Nevada to recuperate and play a little poker. I even won a few bucks. All in all, being shot turned out to be a positive experience.”

  “Did you find the man who shot you, and send him to prison?”

  “Yes and no. I broke his nose, put him on a boat and sent him to South America.”

  “How extraordinary,” she said, adding in an offhand manner, “You mentioned Sarah Williams. Is she a friend of yours?”

  “I run into her occasionally.”

  “Accidentally, or on purpose?”

  “Never you mind,” I said jokily. “And by the way; that perfume you’re using. Is it patchouli?”

  “How clever of you to notice. It’s an old-fashioned perfume, but then, I’m an old-fashioned girl.”

  I showed her my pearly whites. “Why don’t you sit down? Make yourself comfortable, and I’ll pour you that drink.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t think so, because I have a better idea. Follow me.”

  This is getting better and better, I thought, trotting dutifully behind her, admiring those lovely legs and swaying hips as P.G. Mainwaring preceded me up the stairs to the second floor.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I seldom visit the second floor. Occasionally, when I tramp up the stairs to visit Nobby Sumner’s roof garden, for example, I glance in passing along narrow corridors and see frosted glass doors leading to anonymous offices. For the most part, the building’s tenants are obscure underachievers like me. Dicey manufacturers’ agents, bitter ambulance chasers, a woman who deals in paper ephemera, a podiatrist, jaded astrologers and the like, along with dot.com startups that hang on for a year or two and either go broke or make good and then move on to more ostentatious addresses.

  P.G. Mainwaring led me to an inconspicuous door under the stairs. The world is full of surprises. Instead of an office, we went into a large windowless private library with fat leather armchairs, cherry furnishings and sumptuous rugs. When she flicked a switch, sconced wall fixtures lit a banker’s desk with a soft golden glow. Ship paintings and oil portraits shared the walls with shelved books. The dark red carpet was luxuriously deep. A door led off to a washroom. Hidden behind a folding screen was a tiny kitchen with a minute sink, a kettle and a two-burner hotplate of ancient design. The ceiling was decorated with elaborate plasterwork urns and swags. After I had helped her off with her raincoat and hung it on an antique brass whatnot, P.G. Mainwaring went to a corner and swung a hinged panel aside to reveal a small wet bar.

  “I’ve no refrigerator, so there’s no ice, sorry,” she said. “And no rye either. If you like whisky, there’s plenty of scotch.”

  “Scotch is fine.”

  “How do you like it?”

  “Neat, if that bottle I’m looking at is actually the Grand Macnish.”

  She poured the whisky into two-cut glass beakers and added a little water to her own drink. She delivered mine along with an Irish linen napkin.

  “Here’s looking up your old address,” I said. “It’s quite a hidey-hole you’ve got here, I never knew this room existed.”

  “That is the general idea.” Smiling faintly, she sat down in one of the armchairs, with her knees together. I sat down, crossed my legs, and wondered, not for the first, time how nice it was to inhabit—even if temporarily—worlds where people drank $70 whiskies and used Irish linen napkins instead of paper towels.

  “Sorry about the dust. I ran a vacuum cleaner around the room for a few minutes last week, but it really needs wiping down with a damp cloth, except I can’t be bothered,” she said in an unapologetic tone. “In case you don’t already know, and I suspect that you do, I’m the landlord that you were slandering downstairs. This room is exactly the way it was when my grandfather had it fixed up as a hidey-hole eighty years ago. It hardly ever gets used now.”

  I licked my lips. “You’ve been using the room a lot, lately.”

  She seemed mildly alarmed. “How on earth did you know that?”

  “Because your washroom is directly above my washroom, and something’s wrong with your plumbing. Every time your toilet flushes, it disturbs the water in my toilet downstairs. Until I figured it out, I was beginning to think that my bathroom was haunted.”

  “My goodness, your glass is empty already. Would you like another?”

  “I certainly would, thanks.”

  “Are you afraid of ghosts?” she asked, crossing to the bar with my empty glass.

  “Not particularly. In the popular imagination, ghosts are the disembodied spirits of the dead,” I added pedantically. “People who think they’re seeing ghosts are probably seeing bog apparitions or wakeful-sleep hallucinations.”

  “Wakeful-sleep hallucinations? My, you must be cleverer than I gave you credit for,” she said facetiously. “Do you Salish people go to heaven when you die?”

  “Coast Salish,” I chided her. “When we die, we go to another world. We call it the Unknown World, which is a misnomer, because we actually know quite a lot about it. The Unknown World is a bit worse than the world we’re living in now. In the Unknown World, for instance, we live the traditional life of our ancestors . . . ”

  She handed me my refill. “No soap, no metal pots and no plastic raincoats?”

  “Nope. We eat most food raw. Everything else is cooked on open fires. We live in unhygienic pit houses or in longhouses, as we did in olden times. Screwing like crazy, shitting in the woods, itching and scratching. We have slaves to do our bidding, which is a plus, but otherwise the afterlife is very like this one, except everything is backwards. The sun rises in the west and sets in the east. When it’s summer here, it is winter there, and so on, until we’re reborn into the Vancouver Island that we’re living in today. Some of us get reborn as killer whales and thunderbirds. I keep coming back as a male human being.”

  “Let’s hope you keep coming back till you get it right,” she drawled. “Now. Tell me more about Sarah Williams.”

  “I met her five y
ears ago. Sarah’s cousin had gone missing, and I helped to find her. Sarah called at my office with a man called Charles Service once. She happened to mention that this was one of your buildings.” I grinned. “What Sarah actually said was, as I recall: ‘This is one of Piggy’s buildings.’”

  P.G. Mainwaring smiled—the ice queen was thawing. “You’re right about Sarah and me. We were at boarding school together. She used to call me Piggywig.”

  “That would be the Crofton House School in Vancouver. And don’t tell me. Let me guess. You and Sarah were best friends and you hated each other?”

  “We might have been best friends once, but there’s no love lost between us now, I can assure you. If you’d had the disadvantage of a private school education, as I have, you’d know exactly what I mean.”

  “I went to St. Michael’s. It’s a private school, but your comment is still too obscure for my tiny brain. By the way, ‘Piggy’ is rather casual. Your full name is Penelope Grace Mainwaring, so what would you like me to call you?”

  She had been softening, but my question made her eyes widen and that snooty look reappeared. “Have you been checking up on me?”

  “I’m a policeman; you are a person of interest.”

  The thin cleft between her eyebrows deepened. “A person of interest to the police? I’m not sure that I like that very much. In answer to your question, my close friends call me Nibsy. You may call me Miss Mainwaring.”

  I let that one slide right by.

  She looked at her hands and said coquettishly, “Tell me, Silas. Sarah Williams is very pretty, of course. Are you sure she isn’t something more than just a casual friend?”

  “Tell me, Miss Mainwaring. Is it true that you own a thousand apartment buildings?”

  “Don’t be silly,” she laughed, another thaw setting in. “Of course not.”