Death On a No 8 Hook (A Willows and Parker Mystery)

by Gough, Laurence

  Half a mile upstream, they came upon an overgrown logging road and a crumbling corduroy bridge made of cedar logs. The disused road was little more than two faint parallel depressions in the grass. What made it easy to see was the absence of large trees. There were tread marks and torn soil where a four-wheel drive vehicle with a short wheelspan had braked hard. Willows found traces of oil, a few small globules of heavy grease.

  The girl’s neatly folded clothes were in the fork of a wild cherry near the bridge on the far side of the stream. Willows saw the bright orange tanktop first, and then the white shorts and white tube socks, neatly folded over the running shoes.

  Rossiter took the clothing down out of the tree. A pair of white cotton panties with a pattern of little red strawberries fell lightly to the grass. Rossiter picked them up. He went through the pockets of the white shorts, and found three twenty-dollar bills wrapped tightly round a driver’s licence and a small black and white photograph. The picture was a head and shoulders shot of a boy in his early teens. His eyes were a very pale grey. The teeth were large, so white that they looked over-exposed.

  Rossiter flicked the plastic laminate of the driver’s licence with his index finger. “Dickie was right,” he said. “Naomi Lister it is.”

  Rossiter handed the licence to Willows. It was the girl in the river, all right. The licence had been issued two months earlier, on her sixteenth birthday. She had been restricted to driving vehicles with an automatic transmission, and was required to wear corrective lenses.

  “You notice she was wearing an engagement ring?” Rossiter said.

  “Yeah, I saw it.”

  “What do you think happened up here, have we got a crime of passion, or what?”

  “If I had to guess, I’d say she and whoever drove her up here went for a swim. And she banged her head on a rock, and he panicked. Or maybe he was off in the woods somewhere, wandering around. Maybe he never knew she was in trouble and still has no idea what happened to her.”

  “If she was with her fiancé, and the death was an accident, wouldn’t he have reported the fact that she was missing?”

  Willows indicated the small black and white picture. “Be nice to know who he is, wouldn’t it?”

  “Looks to me like it came from one of those automatic machines.”

  “Maybe her parents can help you.”

  “You like to be in on that?”

  “Not particularly,” said Willows. He handed the driver’s licence back to Rossiter. It was a gesture of rejection.

  Rossiter tucked the licence and the money and the picture away in his shirt pocket. “We better get back down to the meadow,” he said. “That pilot gets paid by the hour.”

  Chapter 9

  Junior caught a CP Air redeye out of Vancouver International. The plane was almost empty. Junior sat down in an aisle seat over the wing, where he couldn’t see the ground even if he forgot and looked out the window.

  The plane touched down at LAX at one o’clock in the morning. It took Junior a couple more hours to make the drive down the coast to Felix’s beachfront mansion. By the time he hit the sack it was almost four o’clock. At five, Felix and Misha dragged him out of bed to watch the latest shuttle launch. At ten minutes past five, with the three of them sitting in front of the Sony and the first pale light of day seeping hesitantly in through the windows, the flight was cancelled.

  Junior mumbled something about going back to bed, but Felix would have none of it. He and Misha had been up all night, smoking a little and drinking a lot. He had his second wind, and he was feeling full of beans. The idea of a picnic breakfast on the beach suited him just fine.

  Misha went into the kitchen to prepare the food.

  Felix punched through the channel selector to see what was on, and then used the remote control to turn off the TV. Junior was sprawled out on the chesterfield, his eyes half-closed. Felix went over and sat down beside him and patted him on the knee. “It’s good to have you back, kiddo.”

  Junior yawned.

  “Been a long night, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Later on, when you’re feeling a little more energetic, you’ll have to tell me how it went. Okay?”

  “Sure,” said Junior.

  Junior closed his eyes. Felix sat there on the edge of the chesterfield, looking fondly down at him, until Misha came back into the room. She was carrying a wicker basket, holding it awkwardly with both hands. She staggered across the room and dropped the basket on Junior’s lap. Junior grunted. The basket looked heavy, and it was a lot heavier than it looked.

  They went out of the house, past the patio and the sixty-foot pool, down the long sloping lawn towards the ocean. There were thick wooden planks on weathered poles and a series of narrow wooden steps to get them past the fragile, crumbling dunes. Felix had made a side trip to the kitchen to grab a couple of bottles of Kirin beer from the fridge. He and Misha drank steadily as they stumbled along through the debris at the high-tide line, heading south towards San Diego, giggling like a couple of kids as they clumsily tried to avoid the hiss and rumble and froth of the incoming surf. Junior kept himself occupied by watching Misha’s small pointed breasts bouncing around under her halter top. With maddening frequency, Felix tripped himself up and fell full-length and without apparent resistance, his ancient wrinkled face turning into a mask of fine white sand. Resentfully, Junior rinsed him off with hatfuls of ocean while Misha poured Kirin beer over both of them.

  As soon as he could see again, Felix got right back at it. Grinning and laughing and reaching out to slap ass, he chased Misha up and down the beach.

  Splat! Another face full of sand.

  Junior plodded along behind them, his shoulders hunched. He made a point of keeping his distance. It felt as if Misha had filled the wicker basket with anvils. His Colt .357 Magnum with the ribbed and ventilated nine-inch barrel kept rubbing against his hipbone, chafing his skin and forcing him to walk with a crablike sideways shuffle he knew must make him look like a fool. He squinted at the orange ball of the sun, balanced unnaturally on the convex rim of the horizon. Although he had grown up in southern California, he somehow had never managed to adjust to the weather. He wiped sweat from his eyes, and found himself wondering what the weather was like back in Vancouver. Raining, probably.

  Up ahead, Felix didn’t so much stop walking as simply decide to sit down in mid-stride. When Junior caught up with him, he said, “This looks as good a spot as any. Let’s eat.”

  Misha had folded a fringed tartan blanket over the food. Junior helped her spread it out on the sand. Inside the basket there were a dozen tall brown bottles of Kirin beer, a whole roast chicken, a loaf of brown bread shaped like an iron from the European bakery at Laguna Beach, a thick crystal bowl full of cherry tomatoes, a foot-long English cucumber, and a sterling silver setting for six in a mahogany box. No wonder Junior’s back ached. He sat down with his back to the ocean and the rising sun, and took off his shoes. He yawned hugely, making a lot of noise.

  Misha quartered the chicken. She sliced up the loaf as neatly as a machine. Felix cracked open three bottles of Kirin beer. He and Misha began to eat, Felix whuffling and snorting like a pig, making a lot of noise.

  Junior had eaten three cold roast beef dinners on the plane. He wasn’t hungry. He passed the time seeing how thin he could slice the cucumber. The knife was sharp, and he had a steady hand. Wheels as limp as tissue-paper and almost as transparent as glass fell one after another into his lap. Misha and Felix watched him raptly as they ate. After a little while Junior became aware of all the attention he was getting. He lost his concentration, cut deeply into the ball of his thumb. Blood welled up, spilled across his cupped palm. Nobody said anything. Junior sucked at his wound. When the bleeding had finally stopped he looked up and saw that Misha had fallen asleep with her mouth open and that Felix was staring sightlessly out at the ocean, as if mesmerized by the steady pounding of the waves.

  Junior drank some beer. He watched Misha’
s breasts rise and fall as she breathed.

  “Ain’t she cute?” said Felix.

  Junior nodded.

  “How’s the cut?”

  “Just a scratch.”

  “Let’s have a look at it.”

  Obediently, Junior held out his hand. Felix grabbed the thumb and squeezed hard. A single fat globule of bright red blood appeared. Felix nodded thoughtfully, and let go.

  “I’ve always been quick to congeal,” said Junior proudly.

  Felix used a wing from the chicken to point at Misha. “We nuked her grandparents,” he said.

  “What’s that again?”

  “Her grandparents. World War Two. We nuked ’em.”

  “And now you’re fucking the survivors,” said Junior with a grin.

  Felix ignored him. “Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Bang! Powie! We vaporized ’em, Junior. Nothing left but shadows on a wall.”

  “Don’t blame me. I wasn’t even born.”

  “I know how old you are,” said Felix. “I know how old I am, too.” He wriggled his toes in the sand. The sand was cool and it felt good. Firm. Resisting, but yielding. He wriggled deeper. “Tell me what happened last night,” he said.

  Junior shrugged. “Nothing much. He used the van I told him about. Picked up the kid and took him to a parking lot under an apartment building. Chopped him up and left him and the van in the park.”

  “What park?”

  “Stanley Park. You know Second Beach?”

  Felix nodded. “After that, then what?”

  “Beats me.”

  “You see him actually do the killing?”

  “No, I didn’t. You told me not to get too close.”

  “Did I?”

  “Before he picked up the kid, he stopped off at a grocery store and bought something.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Toilet paper, maybe.”

  “You don’t think too much of Mannie, do you?”

  “No, I wouldn’t say that at all. You need somebody to fetch your newspaper in off the porch, he’d be just about perfect.”

  Felix finished his beer. He threw the empty bottle towards the water. It skittered across the sand and spun to a stop fifty feet away, end on. “Can you hit that from here?”

  “Easy,” said Junior, not even bothering to look.

  Felix took off his wide-brimmed straw hat and scratched vigorously at the liver spots high up on his forehead, where his hairline used to be. “We got one down and two to go. What I’d like is to let Mannie do the work, and then kill him.”

  “Fine with me.”

  “In the meantime, you keep an eye on him. If he starts to get in over his head, then you go right ahead and pull the plug.”

  “My pleasure,” said Junior.

  “That is,” said Felix with a mocking smile, “if you think you can handle the guy all by yourself.”

  Junior ripped his shirt in his hurry to get out the Colt. The long barrel slowed him down, but not enough to notice. He thumbed back the hammer. The blade front sight bisected the dark brown disc. He squeezed the trigger. The Magnum went off like a cannon, and a fountain of sand erupted a foot to the right of the bottle.

  “Fuck!” shouted Junior. He thumbed back the hammer for a quick second shot.

  Misha screamed and jumped up, found herself right in the line of fire.

  “Rise and shine!” said Felix cheerfully.

  Chapter 10

  The pilot kept the engine running and the power on. Willows pushed the sliding door open and dropped blindly into a maelstrom of dust and small pebbles. Above him the whirling blades spun and clattered, dicing and chopping the air. There was plenty of headroom, but Willows found himself crouching as he trotted down the road towards his Oldsmobile. He was halfway to the car when the helicopter lifted off, the rising scream of the engines and the thud of bruised air pounding down at him in waves.

  It was nice to be back on the ground. The short trip down the mountain had been claustrophobic. A puddle of river water had collected under the stretcher, and vibrations transmitted through the metal floor had made the corpse quiver endlessly, as if it was alive and shivering with fear. Willows reflected, not for the first time, how odd it was that the dead always used up so much more space than the living.

  Willows unlocked the boot. His service revolver was as he had left it, hidden under the spare tyre and wrapped in a clean white cloth. He put away his gear, shut the boot, got into the car and started the engine. The windscreen, like the rest of the car, was coated in a layer of thick white dust. He turned on the wipers. The blades swept away enough of the dust to make driving possible. The road was deserted. He made a U-turn and accelerated, changed up into second gear. Dust was blown swirling across the painted metal of the bonnet. He hit thirty-five miles an hour and shifted into third.

  When the wind of his passage had washed most of the dust from the car, Willows rolled down his side window and then leaned across the seat to roll down the window on the passenger side. Ahead of him, the white road glittered in the sunlight, making him squint.

  The same guard was on duty at the gatehouse. He glanced up as Willows drove by, his wounded face registering surprise. Willows gave him a beep of his horn and kept going. After he’d borrowed the guard’s phone to call the RCMP, the man had been all questions. Willows hadn’t answered them then, and had no intention of answering them now.

  It took him half an hour to drive back to Squamish. He turned off the highway and drove past the Chevron station Dickie had said was owned and operated by Naomi Lister’s father. The lights were on inside the office and service bays, but the pumps were dark and the station was closed.

  There was a fitful wind blowing up from the Sound, but it wasn’t strong enough to drive away the sour smell of the mills. Willows supposed people eventually got used to it, stopped noticing it just as they stopped noticing everything else that was unpleasant. He turned left, following the directions Rossiter had given him. Squamish was a small town. It looked as if it had been that way for a long time and had no future ambitions. He made another left and drove half a block and parked in front of the RCMP detachment, a tidy one-storey lemon brick building crouched behind clusters of white, blue and pink hydrangeas.

  Rossiter and Dickie were waiting for him out on the street, lounging purposefully against a blue and white highway cruiser with reinforced bumpers and a light bar crammed with red and blue flashers and white spots. The car was a perfect match for the garden. Somehow Willows doubted if it was deliberate. He rolled up the windows and locked his car. As he got out of the Olds, Rossiter gave him a big smile.

  “Welcome to our fair city,” Rossiter said.

  Willows nodded.

  Dickie opened the rear door of the cruiser. Willows got into the car. Dickie slammed the door shut a little harder than should have been necessary. The car smelled faintly of vomit and urine and stale beer and industrial strength cleansers. It was neither better nor worse than being outside.

  Dickie slid behind the wheel. Rossiter sat in the passenger seat. Both men were in uniform. Dickie had crossed pistols on his shirtsleeve. From where he was sitting, Willows had a wonderful view of the angry red rash beneath the close-cropped hair at the base of Dickie’s stump of a neck. He glanced up, and saw Dickie watching him in the wide rearview mirror.

  “Would you mind telling me something,” Dickie said. “Would you mind telling me what the hell you’re doing here?”

  “He’s a special guest detective,” said Rossiter. “How many times do I have to tell you, for Christ’s sake?”

  Willows watched the flesh at the back of Dickie’s neck rearrange itself in overlapping folds as Dickie twisted in his seat to glare at his partner.

  “He found the girl’s body,” said Rossiter. “If you were her father, wouldn’t you want to talk to him?”

  “Just don’t get in the way,” Dickie said into the mirror.

  “In the way of what?” said Rossiter. “This isn’t a criminal inves
tigation, it’s a sympathy call.”

  “We won’t know what happened to her until after the autopsy,” said Dickie. “Let’s just try to keep that in mind, okay?”

  Rossiter half-turned in his seat to face Willows. His left arm lay along the top of the seat. He raised his hand, turned it palm upwards, and let it drop. “You have to understand,” he said, “that the most excitement we get around here is when some drunken logger tries to drive his pickup through a fir tree. My friend’s been feeling for some time now that his talents are being wasted. He’s looking for headlines, and he’s hungry.”

  “Bullshit,” said Dickie.

  Rossiter grinned. “I admire a man who can get to the crux of his argument with an absolute minimum of words, don’t you?”

  “Fuck off,” said Dickie.

  It was a short drive to the Lister house, but to Willows it seemed to take a very long time. He was tired. It had been more than twenty-four hours since he’d last had a hot meal. He needed a shower. And it was exhausting work, listening to the two Mounties chew away at each other. He hoped he wouldn’t have to spend too much time at the Lister house. He was looking forward to getting back to the city, back to his own set of problems.

  The Lister house was weathered grey clapboard, one and a half storeys high. It was partially screened from the street by a trio of gnarled apple trees, the branches crouching under the weight of clusters of neglected, overripe fruit. Dickie parked the cruiser at the mouth of a dirt driveway. His phone call had caught Naomi Lister’s father in the middle of dinner. Lister knew the policemen were coming to see him about his daughter, but he didn’t know why.

  Rossiter unlocked the rear door for Willows. Dickie had already started to walk away from the car. They skirted a Datsun station wagon with the Chevron logo painted on the side, went down a concrete sidewalk that meandered purposelessly through the trees. Willows noticed that the house needed a new roof, and that the windows were dirty. He followed Dickie and Rossiter up the front steps.

  The three men were almost at the top of the steps when the screen door swung open and Lister stepped out on to the porch. Willows guessed his age at about fifty. He was thin, with a full head of unruly white hair and a snub nose that supported the kind of old-fashioned wire-frame glasses favoured by Norman Rockwell. He was wearing clean white coveralls and a checked shirt in three shades of brown, scuffed leather slippers. His eyes were another shade of brown, and the skin around the eyes was slack and lifeless. He looked at Dickie and then at Rossiter and then at Willows and then back to Rossiter. “What’s wrong,” he said. “What’s Naomi done this time?”