Willows and Parker Box Set

by Laurence Gough

  Parker’s apartment was in the middle of the block. The lawn needed mowing. The gold letters on the door were beginning to flake away. Willows pulled up to the curb and turned off his lights, but left the engine running.

  Parker screwed the metal cap back on the bottle and put the bottle in her coat pocket. She gave Willows a sad, brittle smile, and opened her door. “Thanks for the ride.”

  “Anytime,” said Willows.

  She patted her pocket. The bottle gurgled. “I guess I owe you a drink.”

  “Forget it.” Willows hesitated, and then said, “Are you going to be okay?”

  Parker shook her head. “No, as a matter of fact, I don’t think I am.”

  “Want some company?”

  “I don’t know. Probably not.”

  Parker got out of the car and slammed the door shut. Willows sat there for a moment, both hands on the wheel, watching her walk slowly towards her apartment. Then, with a quick, decisive movement, he reached out and turned the key in the ignition, killing the engine.

  In the mirrored lobby, they had to wait a long time for the elevator. Parker rested her head on Willows’ shoulder, but kept her hands in her pockets. He watched his reflected image put his arms around her. Neither of them seemed to have much to say. The elevator arrived. They stepped inside. Parker pushed the button for the third floor.

  Up they went.

  XVII

  THEY’D KEPT THE corpse on ice, in cold storage and out of the public eye, for almost two full weeks. Now, with six civilians dead and the city’s population frightened and outraged, a top-level political decision was made to ease the pressure by putting the body on display, parading it about for everyone to see.

  A Staff Sergeant, six foot two and resplendent in his dress uniform, brought a silver bugle to his lips and began to play. On cue, the eight pall-bearers slowly lowered the mortal remains of Detective David Ulysses Atkinson into his grave.

  Mrs Atkinson, a thin, bony woman with a wide mouth and her son’s dark and passionate eyes, began to cry quietly. Inspector Bradley quickly offered her his handkerchief. It was Irish linen, brand new, precisely folded and rigid with starch. Mrs Atkinson dabbed at her brimming eyes and then enveloped her button nose in the handkerchief and blew long and loud.

  Behind them, at the base of the grassy, gently sloping hill that led to the graveyard’s parking lot, stood a sparse and restless crowd — the usual mix of good friends and bad of the bereaved family, passers-by, the idly curious, death junkies.

  On the flat ground surrounding the gravesite more than seven hundred uniformed city police had gathered, and there were also contingents of scarlet-clad Mounties from the neighbouring communities of Burnaby, North Vancouver, Richmond and Surrey, as well as municipal cops from West Vancouver, Squamish, and New Westminster.

  The brass and the politicians, thought Bradley, were getting exactly what they wanted: a public relations gesture in the form of a visible and highly photogenic testimonial to a good cop who had been shot down in the line of duty, while in hot pursuit of the .460 Magnum killer. It was bad luck that just as the last mournful notes spilled from the bugle, the thin drizzle that had been leaking out of the sky all day long abruptly turned into a heavy downpour, a drenching onslaught that caused the sombre and orderly ranks of policemen to break up, fall apart like wet cardboard as the coppers hustled to keep themselves and their powder dry.

  Bradley watched with a mixture of amusement and dismay as hundreds of gaudy and entirely inappropriate umbrellas blossomed, lending the funeral a bright and festive air. The probability and consequences of inclement weather had been discussed at length at one of the tactics meetings held earlier in the week. It had been suggested that the department purchase a thousand identical black umbrellas, but because of the prohibitive expense the idea had been reluctantly discarded. A complete ban on umbrellas had also been kicked around, until someone had pointed out that among the rank-and-file, the common cold was already quite common enough.

  Over by the grave, a gust of wind rattled the protective plastic wrapping on a hand-held television camera, distracting Bradley’s attention. He watched as the cameraman moved in for a closeup of the Mayor, who was standing perilously near the edge of the grave, struggling to dump a shovelful of wet, gluey earth on to the coffin.

  Behind the Mayor, Superintendent Ford stood solemnly, his expression resourceful and determined, his hands at his sides. Only the nervous twitching of his thumbs betrayed the tension he felt as he waited for his stint under the television lights, the sharp and penetrating questions of the network reporters.

  Bradley’s attention was deflected again as the Honour Guard stepped forward to raise their rifles and fire the first of three crisp volleys. He moved aside as the priest shuffled over and laid a soft white hand on Mrs Atkinson’s shoulder. The second and then the third volleys were fired into the leaden clouds. The sound of the shots echoed off the slope behind them, drowning the priest’s words of comfort. Bradley found himself squinting into the lens of a camera, but it was the bereaved mother they were interested in, not him. A moment later the crowd began to break up. The priest seemed to have taken Mrs Atkinson in hand. Bradley took advantage of the situation to slip away, abandoning his ruined handkerchief.

  Willows and Parker had kept busy discreetly taking photographs of the civilians at the funeral. Now, as the last of the shots were fired, Willows tucked the camera under his arm and they began the uphill climb towards the parking lot.

  Partway up the slope, George Franklin and Farley Spears stood waiting for them. There was a brief jostling of umbrellas as Franklin fell in next to Parker. There was no room for him to walk abreast of her on the narrow path, and his shoes darkened as he strode through the lush, rain-soaked grass. “We finally ran down the last of the suspects on the short list you gave Bradley,” he said to Parker. “The guy’s name was Collins, remember?”

  “Jerry Collins,” said Parker.

  “Yeah, well, he’s been dead for the past six months. Rolled his car on a patch of black ice on the highway outside of Prince George last November, on his way home from a bar.”

  “There’s no question that he was positively identified?”

  “No question,” said Franklin.

  “Some people will do damn near anything to duck a murder rap,” said Spears. He grinned at Parker and she looked at him as if he was a bug. The grin faded.

  “George?” said Willows.

  “Yeah, what?”

  “I noticed you spent some time with Atkinson’s mother. How’s she taking it?”

  Franklin shrugged. “Not too bad, I guess. I said hello because I figured I owed her one last chance to cuff me around a little, let off some steam. But she’s stopped blaming me. All she wanted to talk about was how much she liked my tie.”

  “I noticed it myself,” said Parker. “It looks good on you. What is it, silk?”

  “Rayon, probably,” said Franklin. “My wife buys my ties. I never owned a silk one in my life.”

  “Well whatever it is, it looks terrific,” said Parker firmly.

  But the truth was, Franklin looked awful. His scuffed brown shoes and Argyle socks and the cuffs of his pants were soaked through, but he felt so bad he hardly noticed. He’d lost a lot of his excess weight since the murder of Atkinson: almost twenty pounds in less than two weeks. The weight loss had been far too rapid, leaving him feeling listless and weak. And he was smoking more now than ever before, in a futile attempt to ease his nervous tension, the ever-growing burden of his guilt. The short walk up the hill had exhausted him, and the funeral had left him emotionally drained, empty. He was breathing through his mouth but he couldn’t seem to get enough air, his heart was pounding furiously in his chest. When he coughed it sounded as if his lungs were full of rust.

  The path levelled out as they reached the top of the hill. Twenty yards away a high wrought-iron gate set in a trim boxwood hedge provided access to the parking lot. By the time they reached the gate, Frank
lin seemed to have recovered both his spirits and his wind. His position as assistant liaison officer put him right in the middle of the information web, and he had a tidbit of news for Willows that was hot off the presses. As they passed under the dripping iron gate and into the parking lot, he said, “Did you know that the crime lab finally tracked down the missing container of coleslaw, Jack?”

  “Where was it?”

  “Tucked away in the back of that old fridge they’ve got in the lounge. A clerk named Jane Patrick thought it was part of somebody’s lunch. We know it was her because Goldstein found her prints all over the lid. She’d pried it off to take a look inside, see what was in there.”

  “Were her prints the only ones on the container?” said Parker.

  “No, but they were the only clean ones. Goldstein did lift a few partials, though, and most of a thumb. Enough for a positive identification, but not to run through the computer or take into court.” Franklin paused, and then added, “Goldstein figures the prints belong to a woman.”

  “Why is that?” said Willows.

  “Because they were so small,” said Franklin. He looked down at his own large, ungainly hands, the spatulate, nicotine-stained fingers. The hands were ugly. He stuffed them away in the pockets of his raincoat.

  They had come to Parker’s Volkswagen. Franklin said goodbye and he and Spears walked away, their feet crunching on the gravel. Parker fumbled in her purse for her keys. She unlocked the car and got inside, rolled her window down a couple of inches and slammed the door, rolled the window back up. Willows waited for her to reach across to unlock his door, then climbed in beside her. He leaned back in the bucket-seat and closed his eyes. Parker put the key in the ignition and started the engine. It chugged and hummed noisily. She switched on the windshield wipers, clearing the glass. Through a ragged gap in the hedge she watched a bright orange machine creep up to the loose mound of earth beside the open grave.

  “You know something?” said Willows, opening his eyes.

  “What?”

  “Every time somebody gets shot, we find something at the crime scene that the killer has left behind. Spent brass, an ashtray full of cigarette butts, a pair of earmuffs, coleslaw.”

  “Nothing was left behind when Atkinson was shot,” Parker pointed out.

  “That was a different situation. For some reason the killer was prowling around in Phasia Palinkas’ apartment when Franklin and Atkinson showed up. Atkinson surprised him and got shot. But the killing wasn’t planned, it wasn’t worked out in advance. And Atkinson wasn’t a member of the singles club.”

  “Okay,” said Parker. “What’s your point?”

  “The point is that we’ve been wasting a hell of a lot of time chasing all this stuff down. Trying to make the pieces of physical evidence fit into a puzzle that doesn’t even exist. Take the shoe that was left in the road after the cabbie was shot, the shoe with the heart stitched over the arch.”

  “The same shoe we found in the picture in Flora McCormick’s office,” said Parker.

  “Wrong,” said Willows. “It looks like the same shoe, but it isn’t. I had Mel Dutton enlarge the picture. The shoe in the road was brand new, the one in the photograph shows plenty of wear. Also, Dutton figures the one in the picture was several sizes smaller.”

  “What are you saying, that the picture was a plant, that the two shoes don’t have anything to do with each other?”

  “Something along those lines.”

  Parker thought about it for a moment and then said, “You think the killer’s been toying with us, playing a game.”

  “That’s what it looks like to me.”

  “I don’t know,” said Parker. “There has to be more to it than that.”

  Parker leaned forward and used the back of her hand to wipe condensation from the windshield. Down on the flat, the operator of the orange machine was manipulating an articulated metal arm with a metal bucket on the end. The arm suddenly jerked sideways. A fountain of earth sprayed up into the air and tumbled into the grave. In the same moment, a puff of oily blue smoke spouted from the machine’s exhaust pipe. The arm swung back for another strike at the mound of earth. The blue smoke was pounded to shreds by the rain.

  Parker released the emergency brake, put the car in reverse and backed up in a sweeping arc, turning to face the exit of the parking lot. She changed into first and let out the clutch. Gravel crunched under the wheels with the fragile sound of breaking shells.

  The wiper blade on Willows’ side was frayed and needed replacing. The worn rubber flopped wearily back and forth, smearing the rain across the glass, blurring his field of vision and leaving him feeling mildly claustrophobic. Willows turned away from the windshield and looked at Parker, studying her profile, admiring the firm, graceful lines of neck and jaw, the tilt of her nose, the sloping planes of her cheek and the soft curve of her lips, the light in her eyes. It had been a mistake, spending the night with her. The time she’d spent in the morgue had frightened and depressed her, and he’d taken full advantage of her despair. Not to mention that he was still a married man, even if he no longer had a wife.

  *

  At the far end of the Property Room at 312 Main there is a large steel vault that is used for the short-term emergency storage of small, high-value items such as jewellery, cash and hard drugs. To the right of the safe there is a bicycle rack that is occupied at any given time by half a dozen or more expensive English and Italian bicycles. But almost all of the floor space in the property room is filled with row after row of unpainted plywood shelves. The shelves sag with the weight of stolen television sets, stereo components, sporting goods, typewriters and computers, automobile parts, musical instruments — almost anything of value that a determined thief or thieves could carry through an open door or window to a waiting car or truck.

  The only access to the room is through a steel mesh door. For longer than anyone can remember, the door has been guarded by a horse. The horse is a chestnut, a stallion. The stallion stands seventeen hands high, but his lustrous brown eyes are made of German glass, and his Hared nostrils are layered with a fine grey dust. In the crowded, low-ceilinged room, the horse seems larger than life. But moths have been at him, and pranksters, too. In order to read the number on his identification tag, it is necessary to crouch at the rear of the animal, lift its tail, and look up.

  Years ago, someone had stuck a stolen bowler hat on the beast’s head, wedged a cheap cigar in its mouth, and called it Whinnie. The hat had disappeared on a rainy day and an unidentified thief had eventually smoked the cigar, but the name had stuck like glue.

  Whinnie’s head cast a wedge-shaped shadow across a double pedestal oak desk (also tagged) that stood in the corner on the far side of the doorway. Jack Willows sat wearily at the desk, shoulders hunched, staring sightlessly down at the mass of physical evidence collected from the four murder sites. It was two o’clock in the morning. Willows’ skin was pale and crumpled. There were dark circles under his eyes. He needed a bath, and a change of clothes, and a shave.

  When Corporal Bernie Watts pushed his way through the door carrying two thick white mugs of steaming coffee, Willows didn’t bother to look up. Watts was the duty officer. He came into the room like a man on a tightrope, moving slowly and cautiously, holding the mugs of hot coffee well away from his body. Despite his caution there was a certain amount of spillage as he pivoted towards the desk, and he was forced to perform an impromptu little jig to save the mirror polish on his shoes.

  “Damn it,” Watts said, “those last couple of steps are always the hardest, aren’t they?”

  Willows considered the question for a moment, and then said, “What?”

  Watts shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Have some coffee, Jack.”

  Willows accepted the proffered mug, sipped gingerly, winced.

  “Too strong, is it?” said Watts.

  “If you have to ask, Bernie, your taste buds are in real serious trouble.”

  Chuckling, Watts k
nelt and unlocked the bottom right-hand drawer of the desk, pulled the drawer all the way out. He had a bottle of Lambs Navy Rum tucked away at the back of the drawer, hidden behind a stack of old Playboy and Penthouse magazines. There was about an inch and a half of liquor in the bottle. Watts poured it equally into the two mugs, stirred it in with his Bic pen.

  Willows held up his mug. “Thanks, Bernie. Mud.”

  The rum had given the coffee an extra dimension of warmth. Willows felt a slow trickle of energy seeping back into his body. He sat back in his chair, put his feet up on the desk.

  Watts pulled cigarettes and matches from the breast pocket of his starched blue shirt. He lit up and tossed the spent and smoking match halfway across the desk, into an ashtray made out of an automobile piston. Waving the cigarette at the evidence bags scattered across the surface of the desk, he said, “Real weird case, eh Jack?”

  “Looks that way,” said Willows tersely.

  It was clear from Willows’ tone of voice that the subject wasn’t open to discussion. Watts frowned. Nobody but nobody ever told him what was going on upstairs. All he ever heard was faint whisperings, uncertain rumours. Frustrated, he flicked half an inch of ash into the piston, and decided to attack Willows from another angle. What he’d do was ramble on about nothing in particular until Willows had to say something back, speak up in self-defence, even if it was only to shut him up. Once he got Willows talking, he’d gradually work the conversation around to the string of unsolved shootings, find out if the papers were right about the homicide cops not knowing what the hell was going on, or if homicide was all over the case and getting set to make a bust.

  “Speaking of coffee,” Watts said to Willows, “do you by any chance remember a guy named Phil Taylor?”

  “Skinny face, jug ears?”

  “Yeah, that’s him. Well, whenever Phil wanted a coffee, he’d take a hike all the way up to the third floor and steal a cup from that machine they got in vice. Said vice had a special blend you couldn’t find anywhere else in the building.”