Seaweed on the Rocks

by Stanley Evans

  “The one you said you burned.”

  “No, I really did burn it. But listen . . . when I got that first letter, I took it into my office at home and I just got madder and madder. I remember figuring I had to get rid of it before it drove me nuts, and I threw it into the fireplace,” she said, her face alive with eagerness. “But the envelope that it came in, I’d dropped it into the wastebasket when I came into the room. It’s probably still there!”

  “Right,” I said cynically. “It’s still there unless the cleaning lady emptied your wastebasket last week, in which case it’s gone to the recycling depot.”

  I leaned back in my chair and put my hands behind my head. Charlotte came around the desk, cradled my face in her hands, and she was just going to kiss me when somebody gave a low whistle. Bernie Tapp had just come in. Charlotte fled.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Sorry,” Bernie said. “I saw a woman’s handsome backside and I just naturally assumed it belonged to Felicity Exeter.”

  “I ought to hate you,” I told him. “That was a beautiful, unscripted moment.”

  “Unscripted? If you ask me, in another minute you would have been undressed. And you’d have whistled too, buddy, if you’d seen what I saw. She had nothing on underneath that little white skirt and all I could think of was . . . ”

  Bernie was driving, and we were heading north along Douglas Street in his car. An hour earlier we had visited Charlotte Fox at her residence and confiscated the contents of her office wastebasket. Against all my expectations, the discarded white envelope that we were interested in was lying crumpled at the bottom of it. It was an ordinary four-inch by nine-and-a-half-inch envelope, and I for one was very relieved to see it, because I’d been ready to tag Charlotte as a total liar. Typewritten and addressed to Charlotte Fox at her Moss Street house, it had been mailed and postmarked in Victoria. The second blackmail letter and both of the blackmailer’s posted envelopes were now in the police lab. But photocopies of the second letter and of both envelopes were also in Bernie’s briefcase.

  Pulling up outside Titus Silverman’s hockshop, Bernie said, “Charlotte Fox is playing games with us. None of her testimony is reliable.”

  “What can we do about it?”

  “For starters, tap her phones and put her house under surveillance.”

  “Surveillance? Sure, she’s playing games, but you think it’s worth allocating those kinds of resources?”

  Bernie muttered something I didn’t catch.

  “By the way,” I said, “where’s Inspector Manners?”

  “Putting fires out. There was a gaybashing outside the Prism when it closed last night. And another derelict died in an alley.”

  “A natural death?”

  “Foul play not suspected.”

  Bernie tucked his briefcase under his arm, and we went inside the pawnshop. Frankie Nichols was behind the counter haggling over a pile of CDs with a gaunt young guy wearing a padded jacket and greasy jeans. His face was the colour and texture of a squeezed-out orange, and his eyeballs seemed coated with Vaseline. Everything about him said “junkie.” He was one of the end losers in a gravy train that had steamed into Victoria all the way from the golden triangle.

  “About time you assholes came back here,” Frankie said tersely. “I hope you’re returning that property you stole from Titus’ office.”

  “Take it easy, Frankie,” Bernie said sternly. “We’ll talk when you’re done with your customer.”

  The young guy turned at the sound of Bernie’s voice. He gave him a brief glance before his attention slid to me. His gummy eyes were now black between narrowed lids.

  I said, “Hello, Johnson. How you been?”

  He shrugged and turned his head away.

  Frankie slid the CDs across the counter and into a plastic bag just out of Johnson’s reach and in exchange gave him a pathetically small bundle of cash. He scooped the money into his pockets and slouched outside.

  Frankie leaned back, folded her arms and said tonelessly, “My life will become a helluva lot simpler if you’re returning Titus’ address book.”

  Bernie and I assumed expressions of wounded innocence.

  “That book is valuable,” Frankie said with a rising inflection, “and Tubby Gonzales is blaming me for being dumb enough to let cops inside Titus’ office in the first place.”

  “You can stop worrying about Tubby Gonzales,” Bernie said. “As soon as we get done with you, I’ll go right on over there and straighten him out.”

  “Like hell you will! The last thing I want is cops stirring things up between me and Tubby,” Frankie snapped. “Things are bad enough. If you haven’t got the book, just clear off! The air in here’s beginning to stink.”

  That’s when Bernie showed Frankie our search warrant. Without even glancing at it, she reached for an old-fashioned wall-mounted telephone and made a call. When her party answered, she said, “Tell Tubby the pigs are rooting around in here again.” After a listening pause, she went on angrily, “Yeah, didn’t I just tell you? They’re here right now. If Tubby don’t like it, he can come over and handle things personally. I don’t give a rat’s . . . ” After another short pause, she yelled, “You fucking deal with it then because I’m outta here.”

  Frankie slammed the phone down on its base, locked her cash drawer, put its key behind a mantel clock on a shelf behind her, reached inside a closet, grabbed a shoulder bag and headed out through the back door of the premises.

  “Wait a minute!” Bernie said, grasping her arm as she strode angrily past.

  “Get your hands off me, you bastard, or I’ll scream the house down!”

  Bernie let go.

  “Last man out, bolt the doors,” Frankie yelled. “Anybody wants to know, I’m at the welfare office.”

  “Wait a minute,” Bernie said again, but it was too late. Frankie had gone.

  We swung around behind the counter and went into Titus Silverman’s office. The door was open, and the place was filthier than ever. It didn’t need a vacuum cleaner. It needed a ten-horsepower leaf blower. The dust covering the leather recliner suggested that it hadn’t been reclined in recently, the room’s four-bulb pedestal lamp still lacked a shade, and the shag carpeting was perhaps a shade greyer where people had walked in and out, perhaps to borrow one of Titus’ paperbacks. The Underwood manual typewriter that we were interested in, however, wasn’t there anymore.

  Bernie sat behind Titus ‘s desk, took a pair of latex gloves from his briefcase and, after some rummaging, removed a half-dozen business-sized envelopes from a drawer. He was stowing the envelopes into his briefcase when his cellphone rang.

  “Fuck Alexander Graham Bell and all his tribe,” Bernie muttered.

  While he talked on the phone, I went outside and stood on the street with my back to the hockshop door, absorbing the area’s olfactory barrage of burning garbage and hot exhaust pipes. A couple of sparrows were shopping for groceries in the gutters of a house across the street, and a blue Mustang convertible with a jacked-up rear-end went north doing 90.

  I thought about Bernie Tapp’s recent interrogation of Charlotte Fox. He’d been pretty rough with her, even tougher than I had been, but Charlotte wouldn’t tell him why she was being blackmailed. Just then Frankie Nichols emerged from the back of a nearby vacant lot astride a man’s bicycle. She gave me a wave as she rode by. She was wearing a skirt, and I tried not to look at her underwear as I said without raising my voice, “Hey, Frankie. What happened to Titus’ typewriter?”

  Frankie kept going for about half a block, did a U-turn and pedalled back.

  “Maybe I was a bit hasty, pulling the pin like that,” she said, stopping the bike and standing with her legs immodestly straddling the crossbar. “Whaddaya think, Silas?”

  “You know the system, Frankie. Better file today, because you won’t get welfare for over a month.”

  “I know, it’s a bastard. The thing is, I live from paycheque to paycheque.”

  “Go back
to the pawnshop and force ’em to fire you. That way you’ll get EI benefits instead of nothing.”

  She pushed off again. “Oh, I nearly forgot,” she shouted over her shoulder. “That typewriter’s over at the depot. Tubby uses it now.”

  Frankie disappeared from sight around the corner.

  Bernie Tapp came out of the hockshop, and I told him what Frankie had said about the typewriter. He reached into his briefcase, extracted the photocopy of Charlotte’s first blackmail envelope and gave it to me.

  He said, “Something just came up. Wait here until Nice Manners drives over and picks you up. Then I want the two of you to go over to the recycling depot and find that Underwood typewriter. If its typeface matches the lettering on this envelope, seize it. And don’t give Manners any shit.”

  “He won’t like working with me.”

  “You guys should try to get along. In case you’ve forgotten, Nice is a good cop,” Bernie said before climbing aboard his Interceptor and driving away.

  Half an hour passed before Nice showed up in a blue-and-white. Mendelssohn’s second violin concerto was tumbling out of his speakers when I got into the passenger seat.

  He glowered at me and said, “You’re supposed to be a neighbourhood cop. So tell me—why do I have to put up with you?”

  “You don’t. It’s all about choices. For instance, if I were driving this heap, we’d be listening to Gatemouth Brown’s guitar instead of Itzhak Perlman’s fiddle.”

  He grunted, put the car in drive and headed into the traffic. He said, “Okay, Seaweed, gimme an update.”

  “It’s a blackmail case . . . ”

  “For Chrissake, I know that already,” Manners interjected.

  I went on as if I hadn’t heard him. “So far, the blackmailer has sent his victim two letters. The first one arrived in a typewritten envelope. The second envelope was addressed by hand.”

  “Cut to the chase. I haven’t got all day!”

  “This case started when I found Marnie Paul and Hector Latour hiding out at Donnelly’s Marsh. Previous to that, Hector and Marnie had burgled a doctor’s office . . . ”

  “Trew’s not a doctor! He’s a fucking hypnotist.”

  I thought pleasant thoughts and said calmly, “After burgling Dr. Trew’s office, Hector and Marnie took their loot to Titus Silverman and hocked it for drugs. When Bernie and I investigated, we noticed a manual typewriter in Titus Silverman’s office.”

  “This is all crap. Titus Silverman is dead and the second blackmail note was posted after he died. As for Lawrence Trew . . . ” Nice, continuing sarcastically, turned to face me.

  “Keep your eyes on the bloody fucking road,” I snarled.

  His face turned pink. He drove on in careful silence till we reached Titus Silverman’s recycling depot. Instead of getting out of the car, he said petulantly, “You’re supposed to have AIDS. How come I’m always getting stuck with you?”

  I got out of the car, went through the doorway marked Traspassars Killed, said hello to the poker players—who didn’t even look up from their game—and went into Tubby Gonzales’ office. Nice Manners trailed at my heels.

  Gonzales was snoring in a chair behind his French provincial dressing-table-cum-desk. His circa 1954 Austin hubcap was full of cigarette butts as usual, but the aroma of freshly smoked BC Bud alleviated the grimy room’s usual stink. The typewriter we were interested in sat on the floor in one corner. Gonzales was still in dreamland when I went down on my knees, threaded a sheet of paper into the typewriter and typed “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” When we compared typefaces, it was obvious—the first letter mailed to Charlotte Fox had been typed on this Underwood.

  Nice Manners stared at Gonzales. “Think he’s drunk?”

  “What’s wrong with your nose? The fucker’s stoned out of his gourd.”

  Manners put a hand on Gonzales’ shoulder and shook him violently.

  Waking up, Gonzales flopped backwards until his chair was balanced on two legs and he began to windmill with both arms. Just before he crashed to the floor, one of his flailing fists struck Manners’ face, giving him a nosebleed. Manners, enraged at his nice white shirtfront being covered in blood, knelt heavily on Gonzales’ chest and put him in handcuffs. It took both of us to drag him out of his office. The poker players, intent on their game, paid no attention because there was a massive pot on the table. Gonzales’ arrest was nothing to them.

  Interrogated at police headquarters, Gonzales denied everything. He didn’t even know who Charlotte Fox was, he said, and it was outrageous to suggest that he’d stoop to blackmail. The kilogram of BC Bud found in his office must have been planted, he insisted, because he didn’t smoke dope and he didn’t associate with lowlife pot smokers. Unfortunately for Gonzales, Bernie Tapp had an ace in the hole, namely that Gonzales was an illegal alien. But Gonzales stuck to his story even after we threatened to send him back to Mexico. We couldn’t budge him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The city works department van that the Victoria Police Department was using for surveillance purposes was parked on the street across from Charlotte Fox’s house, its audio equipment and a video camera surreptitiously recording everything happening both inside and outside the house. As a result, the detectives inside the van noted the delivery of the morning paper, watched Charlotte step out onto the porch to pick it up and saw George Fox leave the house for his regular morning jog at 6:55. But they hit the jackpot at 7:15 when they intercepted the blackmailer’s next call. The phone message—made from a public box by a male caller using an artificially muffled voice—was short and direct. Charlotte was told to put ten thousand dollars into an envelope, take it by car to the Ada Beaven rose garden at nine that same evening and await further instructions.

  I sat in my office waiting for Charlotte to report the blackmailer’s call. Two hours later I was still waiting. Feeling vaguely let down, I popped next door to Lou’s, got a coffee to go and ordered breakfast sent over. My desk phone was ringing when I returned to the office, but it was Mumbai trying to interest me in a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Eleven o’clock came and went. Noon dragged by. Bernie came in to see me at one o’clock. Charlotte finally showed up at two when, as it happened, Bernie had popped into Lou’s for a cup of coffee. Although subdued and lacking her usual confident manner, Charlotte looked as lovely as ever in a summery print dress cinched at the waist with a silver belt. Her hair was a bit shorter than a few days earlier and seemed to have more blondish streaks.

  “You look nice,” I said, smiling. “Been to the hairdresser?”

  “Yes, I have actually,” she said in a neutral voice. She sat in the visitor’s chair with her knees together and her silver handbag on her lap. “I had an appointment with Henri at ten. That took an hour and a half. Afterwards I had lunch at Ottavio’s. I thought of inviting you to join me because there’s something I wanted to tell you . . . but obviously I didn’t.”

  “Too bad. I was free for lunch today. I would have enjoyed it.”

  “Would you?” she said absently, cocking her head slightly. “The reason I didn’t call, I suppose, is because the last time we met, you and that detective inspector were quite negative towards me and what I really need right now is moral support.”

  “Having a haircut and lunching alone brought you down?”

  “I was down to begin with,” she said, opening her handbag, looking inside, and then closing it again. She went on, “You think I’m a complete fraud, don’t you?”

  “Not completely. You lie to me sometimes, although you don’t do it very professionally.”

  “So if I were to tell you that Trew called me this morning, you wouldn’t believe me?” she said, looking me straight in the eye.

  “I might. What did he say?”

  Charlotte’s pink tongue slid along her painted lips. “He told me to take ten thousand dollars to the Ada Beaven rose garden at nine o’clock tonight.”

  I waited a moment before saying, “Are you
going to do it?”

  “No. I’ve come to my senses at last. To hell with him.”

  “Is that wise? Trew will undoubtedly follow through on his threat to expose you. Your secret, whatever it is, will become common knowledge if you don’t play ball.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she responded, giving way to bitterness. “He’s not getting any more money from me. I remember what you said about George—that people have responsibilities to themselves. I’ve taken those words to heart. I want to be free of the bastard whatever the cost to my reputation.”

  “Very courageous, but there’s a downside. If you don’t show up with the money tonight, we may never know the blackmailer’s real identity. Your secret will be out and he won’t be penalized.”

  “I know who he is. He’s Larry Trew. I’ve already told you so.”

  “Right, but we’ve no concrete way of proving that. It’ll be your word against Trew’s, and we don’t even know where he is. When we do find him and try to haul him in front of a judge, his lawyers will be all over us. Things will become very messy, Charlotte, unless we catch him red-handed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We can nail him when you drop the money off and he tries to pick it up.”

  “No! I can’t! You’re asking me to do the impossible. Don’t you understand? I’m really scared, Silas,” she said. “I can’t carry on with this.”

  “You made the first payment safely,” I said, coming around the desk and reaching for her hand. “He won’t hurt you physically—it’s your money he’s interested in.”

  “Things are different now,” she said in a manner I found unconvincing. “Did you know he killed his wife?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Nobody,” she said, pulling her hand out of mine. “I googled him, something I should have done a long time ago. The whole story about how he killed is wife was all over the Toronto newspapers. And he didn’t decide to stop practising medicine—he lost his licence!”