Seaweed on the Rocks

by Stanley Evans

  “Just coffee, thanks,” Fred said automatically without looking at her.

  Her face slightly averted, she said in a low voice, “Hello, Frederick. Black, no sugar, right?”

  Fred had been leaning across the table. His smile faded as he turned his head and recognized her. “Yeah, I still take it black,” he said without inflection.

  “Long time,” she said, smiling for the first time. “You haven’t changed much, Frederick.”

  “So,” Fred replied warily, “how long have you been working here, Connie?”

  “Couple of months,” she said. “Do you live in Victoria now?”

  “Lived here for years.”

  “I didn’t know that,” she said.

  Fred’s eyes followed her as she went around the room, filling coffee cups, then out of sight into the kitchen. For a minute he wasn’t in that cafe with me anymore. He was with Connie somewhere else. At last he said, “I was kidding you earlier . . . about the flat tires, I mean. I was going to ask you about some character called Filligan . . . but I’d better leave that for now.”

  Before I could respond, he stood up.

  “Hold it a minute,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing’s going on. Why should there be?”

  “I’m not talking about Connie.”

  “Forget it,” Fred said angrily. “I wish to God I’d never come in here in the first place.”

  He went out, but I was right on his heels and caught up with him as he was getting into his car. “What’s up, Fred?”

  “My dubious past is catching up with me,” he said, without looking at me. “I don’t know why I’m explaining any of this to you, Silas. It really isn’t any of your business.”

  “Maybe Connie isn’t any of my business, but what’s this about Filligan? Better tell me about it now, then I’ll go away and quit bothering you.”

  “Sorry. I’ll give you a call.” And he drove away.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  Victoria’s Central Library is on Blanshard Street opposite the BC Courthouse. Those high-calorie fries needed burning off, so I walked there instead of driving. A reference librarian showed me how to log onto their e-resources website, and after scrolling back and forth among the news items that had appeared in the Toronto Sun in 1999, I zeroed in on May 15, the day after Lawrence Trew’s wife plunged to her death. A short news story under Charles Fortunato’s byline was accompanied by a photograph of the widower emerging from Toronto’s police headquarters following his interrogation. Trew, pictured wearing dark glasses and a heavy overcoat with a turned-up collar, had refused to answer the reporters’ questions, and he left the scene in a Cadillac driven by an unidentified female companion. A second Fortunato story appeared two weeks later at the conclusion of a coroner’s inquiry into Mrs. Trew’s untimely and suspicious death.

  Lawrence Trew had testified that on the evening in question he and his wife had been barbecuing steaks on their outdoor balcony. Each had consumed two glasses of white wine. During the course of the evening, somebody knocked on the Trew’s front door. When he answered, he found a neighbour who was returning a borrowed punchbowl. The neighbour was invited to come in for a drink, but declined. Trew put the punchbowl away in his kitchen and returned to the balcony to find his wife absent. He said that he assumed she was probably in the bathroom and thought nothing of it until several minutes had gone by and she still hadn’t returned. That’s when he searched the condo and realized something was amiss. When he finally looked down from the balcony, he saw a crowd gathered around an object lying on the concrete below. It was his wife. She had plunged to her death. Asked by the coroner to account for her apparent fall, Trew testified that his wife occasionally suffered from slight dizziness. He speculated that during such an attack she might have accidentally tumbled over the balcony railing.

  Ralen Genova, MD, a general practitioner, was then called to the witness stand. He testified that Mrs. Trew had been his patient for the three years preceding her death and that she was in generally good health, except for moderate benign hypertension for which he had prescribed medication. In response to a question, he said that a small fraction of anti-hypertension drug users experience occasional mild vertigo. When asked if such an attack would cause an otherwise healthy woman to fall over a railing to her death, the doctor said that in his opinion it was possible although unlikely. However, he observed that alcohol potentiates certain medications and Mrs. Trew had consumed two glasses of wine, thereby rendering an episode of dizziness more probable.

  After hearing further testimony from Detective Sergeant Gerald Hayes of the Toronto Metropolitan Police, who had attended the accident scene, and from Edwin Randall, a mechanical engineer who discussed the integrity of the balcony’s railings, the coroner’s jury retired to consider the evidence. Thirty minutes later they returned a verdict of accidental death. I checked the following weeks’ newspapers and saw that by degrees, the stories concerning Mrs. Trew and her unfortunate death followed the usual downward direction from city desk to features desk and thence to oblivion.

  I decided that I’d like to talk to Charles Fortunato one of these days.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  Restless, unable to concentrate, I walked back to the Fisherman’s Marina, where I’d left my car, and drove across town to the Demi-Tasse on McNeill. I found an empty table on the outside patio and enjoyed a cinnamon bun and an espresso while browsing through Titus Silverman’s address book. Charlotte Fox’s name was in it. Her brother George’s name was not. I bought another coffee to go, and took it to the Chinese cemetery at Harling Point. There wasn’t a breath of wind. The sun was lost behind the low frothy fog that had obscured the sea all morning but was beginning to lift.

  As is generally known, Canada’s early Chinese immigrants spent their harsh and—for the most part—underpaid lives building railroads, sluicing gravel in icy northern gold creeks or working in cafés and laundries until they died. Traditionally, their corpses were buried until worms devoured their flesh, after which their bones were exhumed and cleaned by undertakers who specialized in the practice. The bones were then placed in wooden boxes and stored in the Harling Point mausoleum until they were to be shipped back to the old country. In 1933, however, the Chinese government banned the importation of human bones, so instead of spending eternity with their ancestors, Chinese-Canadian bones now spend eternity at Harling Point. But there are worse places than Harling Point.

  Surrounded by grave markers, I stood looking out to sea. The snow-covered Olympics made a majestic backdrop for a pair of twitchy-nosed, grass-nibbling rabbits. A flock of pigeons flew in from Gonzales Bay and strutted around, bobbing their heads. I thought how nice it might be to sit here with somebody—somebody nice, that is—like Felicity Exeter or even Charlotte Fox—except Felicity seemed to have a private love life I knew nothing about, and Charlotte was undoubtedly very complicated and might even be a murderer. Besides, I still didn’t know whether I had HIV or Hep C—or possibly both—so I resisted the temptation to call either of them.

  Instead I would continue to keep track of Charlotte’s Lexus. She’d stopped going to the Stick In The Mud for breakfast and had been patronizing the Ocean Pointe Hotel, but mostly she drove around within Victoria’s city limits. Once she had driven out to Saanich and spent the night in a waterfront house near Brentwood Bay. Being nosy, I checked to see who owned the house. She did.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  After the filing of numerous lawsuits and countersuits, stern Times Colonist editorials and intemperate city council meetings, Victoria’s police chief was at last directed to eject the squatters from Beacon Hill Park. I watched as Police Superintendent Mallory, using a bullhorn, read the Riot Act to the noisy mob of campers, sympathizers, wackos, and protesters of both sexes who had congregated in the park. As soon as he finished speaking, a hundred uniformed cops in full riot gear drew up in close order and raised their Plexiglas shields. Mallory blew his whistle and the phalanx moved slowly forward
, night-sticks clattering against their shields with a sound like kettledrums. The more militant among the mob began to throw things, but the rest broke ranks and scattered. In a bid to infuse some backbone into these cowards, the protesters began singing a bitter song, the words of which were unintelligible above the racket.

  By the time the Taser guns were triggered, three officers had been injured badly enough to require hospital treatment. Thirty or so civilians were arrested and removed from the scene in various conditions of disrepair, but the park remained hazardous in those places where the hardcore rump continued to assert themselves. Sunlight filtering through the trees created a kaleidoscope of darkness and light filled with hurrying figures. CHEK TV and A-Channel news were covering this well-publicized event, and the liberals who love the homeless as long as they stay downwind strutted before the cameras, deploring the criminal actions of Victoria’s police.

  It was in the aftermath of the melee that Hector Latour appeared—shivering, ill-nourished and filthy—when a front-end loader began to demolish the squat where he’d been hiding out. He was just escaping onto Cook Street when I grabbed him and frog-marched him to my car in handcuffs. Hector—high on west-coast bud—was inclined to be saucy as I shoved him into the MG’s passenger seat. “Why are you treating me this way?” he whined.

  “I’ll ask the questions. First, I want a complete inventory of the items you burgled from Lawrence Trew’s office.”

  “Who?”

  “The hypnotherapist on Fort Street. You smashed his door and burgled his office.”

  Hector giggled.

  I said, “One of the items was an engraved silver cup . . . ”

  “You’re a goddamn . . . ”

  “Look, Hector, don’t try my patience. I know you stole the cup. I even know where you fenced it.”

  “You got a nice line of BS. Gimme a sleeping pill and I’ll listen to it for hours,” Hector retorted. “Used to be you had to be a crook to land in jail. Now you only need to be homeless.”

  “Right. A homeless pimp who broke into Lawrence Trew’s office. You and Marnie Paul.”

  “That’s a load of crap. I’m no pimp an’ we never broke into nobody’s office.”

  “You’re a liar.”

  “Maybe I’m just practising. Some day I might want to lie myself into the police force,” Hector mocked, “but I never broke in nowhere. Ain’t nothing you can say will make me change my tune neither.”

  I gave him a frosty stare. “You put the burgled items in a cardboard box, went over to Titus Silverman’s pawnshop and popped them for cash.”

  Hector grunted.

  I went on, “And we can prove that while you were engaged in burglary, Trew walked in and disturbed you. After inflicting a grievous wound to his head, you . . . ”

  “Yeah-yeah-yeah,” Hector interrupted. “You’re fishing. I ain’t robbed nobody, I ain’t killed nobody, and I ain’t broke into nobody’s office.”

  I thought of Marnie, lying brain-dead at the Good Samaritan, and I repeated with barely controlled fury, “You broke into Trew’s office and burgled a number of items. Then you beaned him with a candlestick and fled. You and Marnie Paul. You might have got away with it except for a witness who saw you leaving the scene. It’s a positive ID and you are facing the whole jolt.”

  “For what?”

  “Manslaughter, criminal negligence leading to Marnie Paul’s death plus whatever else the Crown dreams up to ensure you get a life sentence.”

  “Baloney,” Hector said, although by this time his shoulders were beginning to sag and he looked a little anxious.

  I bared my teeth. “Hector, you’ve never had any imagination, and that’s why until now you’ve just been a small-time nuisance. But this time you figured that what worked for you once ought to work for you twice. So what you did was, you found out where Trew lived and then you burgled his home, too.”

  “More baloney,” Hector said in a voice now reedy and fearful. “I don’t even know where the guy lives!”

  “You know all right. He lived on Terrace Lane. You probably got his address from the phone book. So how did you get over there? Steal a car and drive, or catch the number two bus?”

  His face now waxen, Hector worked his jaws from side to side.

  “You and Trew had another mix-up in Trew’s kitchen. How do I know that? I’ve seen the bloodstains,” I said, lying wildly but perhaps persuasively. “You assaulted and robbed Trew not once but twice. And you killed him. Then you administered a lethal cocktail of drugs to Marnie Paul, and she’s dying, too. And when she dies, you will be going down for two slices of Murder One.”

  “You bastards are stitching me up!” Hector said, his voice wobbling on the edge of hysteria. “I want a lawyer right now!”

  “You shut the fuck up and listen,” I said. “You are going to spend every minute of the rest of your life in the house of locks. Every minute. We’ve got you nailed. You have a criminal record stretching back over fifteen years . . . ”

  “Shit, man, honest to God, I never been near that guy’s house! I don’t even know where the fuck Terrace Lane is,” Hector wailed. “It was this way—Marnie and me was strung out, see? We didn’t even have a dry place to crash except for a fucking dumpster, for Chrissake. So we was on Fort Street and it was late at night, cold and raining, and we stopped in this doorway. We figured our luck was changing because the door wasn’t locked, and we went inside and spent the night flaked in the corridor. Next morning we wake up and see this office door is open. We’re not looking for no trouble. We just need a fix and someplace to stay warm. I never killed the guy. I never laid hands on nobody, never. I’m a thief and a fuck-up but a strong-arm guy? That’s not my style and you know it!”

  That was true—strong-arming men wasn’t Hector’s style. He preyed upon helpless women instead, in fact, had served two separate jolts for assaults against street women. I snarled, “It’s pathetic how life’s treated you, Hector, when all you’ve ever wanted to be is an honest upright pimp and thief. Well, you don’t have to worry because you’re never going to touch another woman’s leg. It’s payback time.”

  “I’m no killer and I’m no pimp neither. I love Marnie. Every-thing’s gone to hell. Shit, I never had a decent break in my life.”

  I’d scared Hector enough by this time so it was time, for Mr. Nice Guy. I showed him my teeth again and said slowly, “You know, Hector, maybe if I put my mind to it, I could give you a break. The question is—what will you do for me?”

  Hector didn’t hesitate for a moment. “I’ll level with you. Marnie and me robbed that office, but it’s not the way you think. We didn’t do no break-in. The door wasn’t locked. And I don’t know nothing about no murders.” In his agitation, his right knee was flexing and his foot was tapping the floor like a trip-hammer. He tried to say something more, but his mouth had gone dry. My threat to ship him down the river had really frightened him. Finally he added, “We grabbed a couple of candlesticks and a silver cup and some other stuff . . . ”

  “You were seen leaving the building carrying a cardboard box. I want you to imagine yourself picking things up, dropping them into that box.”

  He shook his head. “There was some pens . . . Hell, I don’t remember . . . ”

  I reverted to bad-cop mode. “Fix your memory or take the high jump,” I said nastily. “Your choice.”

  He licked his lips. “Listen, I’m an asshole all right, but for Chrissake, you know I never murdered nobody. I never carried a weapon in my life. Sure, me and Marnie took a few shortcuts, but murder? No way, man.”

  “Candlesticks, a silver cup, pens. What else?”

  Another groan escaped Hector’s lips. He made a useless gesture. “I can’t remember. It’s like I said already—I was strung out.”

  “You couldn’t have been too high when you unloaded the stuff at Titus Silverman’s hockshop. How much did he give you?”

  “Not enough, the cheap bastard. I was making a deal with Frankie when Tight-a
ss comes into the shop. She’s talking fifty, sixty bucks, but Tight-ass wouldn’t give us no money. Paid us in drugs,” Hector said defeatedly. “That silver cup alone was worth hundreds, and the tape recorder was worth plenty, too.”

  “What tape recorder?”

  “Oh, yeah, it’s coming back. There was this tape recorder on the guy’s desk. A Sony no bigger’n a pack of cigarettes.”

  “A tape recorder, a handful of ballpoint pens, the silver cup, candlesticks. That’s it?”

  “That’s it. I don’t remember nothing else.” In response to the skepticism on my face, he added, “I’m giving you the straight goods.”

  “Okay, Hector, I want you to cast your mind back to going into Lawrence Trew’s house on Terrace Lane.”

  Looking like a playground kid whose ball had just been stolen, he said, “I been levelling with you, and this is the way I get treated. I don’t know nothing about no house on Terrace Lane. For all I know the guy lives in a fucking cave.”

  “You don’t seriously expect me to believe that you don’t know anything more.”

  The colour had drained from Hector’s face. He shook his head.

  I said, “So this is what we’ve got so far. You steal Trew’s gear and take it to Titus Silverman’s hockshop, where you negotiate with Titus Silverman personally.”

  Hector nodded. “Yeah. I’m talking to Frankie, then Tight-ass comes in and I end up making a deal with him personally. He won’t give us any money. Instead he gives us some heroin and cocaine.”

  “Crack cocaine?”

  “Yeah, heroin and a few small rocks. Tight-ass could see me and Marnie was strung, so he knew he could stiff us.”