When she finally answered, she sounded hurried and out of breath. He imagined her hearing the telephone, saw her drop the big scissors and a gathered handful of white carnations, run across the lawn and up the back porch steps, into the shade and coolness of the house.
He said hello.
There was a pause, a fraction of a moment’s silence. Then, “Jack, is that you? I didn’t think you were coming back until tomorrow.” A gratifying note of concern. “Are you all right?”
“I decided to come back early, that’s all.” Another pause. “How are you, Sheila?”
“I’m fine, just fine.”
“Annie and Sean?”
“Perfect. Listen, are you sure you’re okay?”
“Positive. Never better. Tell me, Sheila, were you out in the garden just now?”
“No, why?”
“You’re huffing and puffing, that’s why.”
Sheila laughed. A bit self-consciously, Willows thought.
“I was in the den. Flat on my back in front of the television. Doing sit-ups. I rented a Jane Fonda tape, can you believe it?”
“Everybody’s doing it,” said Willows. He almost added, it’s a fad, but stopped himself in time.
“How was the fishing?”
“Not as good as the beans.”
“Work?”
“It’s always the same. It never changes.” What had made him say that? It was like a declaration of war, a statement of intent, inflexible and unyielding.
They talked about the garden for a little while, the annual proliferation of weeds. Willows was about to say his goodbyes when Sheila reminded him that the children were scheduled to spend the next weekend with him. Was that still on? He assured her that it was. She told him to take care of himself, her words widely spaced, as if deliberately letting him know that she had all the time in the world to ramble on. Willows said goodbye and hung up, gently cradling the receiver.
The room was very quiet. He realized that during his absence the alarm had run down. Setting it by his watch, he wound the mainspring tight.
The telephone rang, the sound unnaturally loud and shrill. Willows picked it up, assuming that Sheila had wanted to add a postscript.
“I thought you weren’t getting back until tomorrow,” said Claire Parker.
‘Then why did you bother to phone?”
“I had a hunch. What you’d think of as intuition. It happens all the time, as a matter of fact.”
“Like acid indigestion.”
“You interested in a murder case that’s a little out of the ordinary?”
“Where are you?”
“Main Street. I’ve got an appointment with Bradley in half an hour.”
“See you there,” said Willows.
Parker hung up. Willows sat on the edge of his rented bed with the dead telephone in his hands. He never missed his weekends with Annie and Sean. Why had Sheila found it necessary to check on his plans? Was it because she had plans of her own? And not that it was any of his business, but why had she suddenly felt compelled to start working out with Jane Fonda? Just exactly what was she getting in shape for?
Willows felt a stab of jealousy, a small, sharp spasm of fear.
Chapter 13
Junior wandered aimlessly through the big house, his hands in his pockets and his mind a blank. He hit a cross-current and realized he was hungry, followed his nose into the kitchen. A skinny kid in a Kung-Fu outfit was hunched over the stove. One of Misha’s relatives. Impossible to say how old he was — not that it mattered. He was using a big wooden spoon to push a colourless mix of noodles and small bits of stringy meat around a stainless steel wok. Junior, peering over the kid’s shoulder, decided the food smelled a whole lot better than it looked.
Turning away from the stove, Junior yanked open the refrigerator door. He was in luck. There was a big plate of crab sandwiches left over from lunch, and an open bottle of Robert Mondavi Fumé Blanc. Junior pulled the cork with his teeth. The sandwiches were tiny, without crusts, and had been cut in weird shapes. He ate six of them, washing each one down with a good healthy slug of wine.
There was nobody in the oak-panelled den or in the living or dining-rooms. Nobody in the can. Nobody out by the tennis court or sixty-foot pool. Junior made his way back through the house to the front porch. He scratched his sunburned nose and peered out at the ocean. After a while he went upstairs, to the top floor of the house. He was wearing a pair of white leather Hi-Toppers, baggy white shorts and a surfer shirt covered with palm trees and hand grenades that at first glance looked like pineapples. The Hi-Toppers made no sound on the thick wall-to-wall, but Felix was alerted by the click of the latch and his rheumy grey eyes were focusing on the door as Junior opened it.
Junior grinned. “Hey there, Felix. Hope I didn’t wake anybody up.”
Felix wiped a smear of saliva from his chin. He yawned and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. Junior watched him struggle to sit up, made no attempt to help as Felix’s bony arms and sagging flesh sank into the downy berm of the pillows. Felix’s dentures were in a Duralex glass on the night-table beside the bed. He spilled a little water getting them out of the glass and into his mouth. When his teeth were firmly in place he gave Junior a big, dripping smile.
“Nice to see you, big fella!”
“I don’t think I much care for that thirty-weight tone of voice of yours,” said Junior. But he stepped inside the room and shut the door.
“Quiet!” hissed Misha.
Junior gave her a look like she was something he’d found wedged between his two front teeth. She was lying on the far side of Felix’s monstro canopied four-poster, watching a Japanese movie on a big screen suspended from the ceiling at the other end of the room. She had a bulky pair of Sony headphones clamped on her head and there was a young girl sleeping in the crook of her arm. The girl was lying on her side and from where Junior was standing he couldn’t see her face. He wondered if he knew her. The way Felix and Misha ran through them, it was pretty unlikely.
“Live from Osaka,” said Felix, waving a mottled hand at the screen. “Up on the roof I got one of those big white fibreglass things with a wire sticking out of the middle.” He paused for a minute, thinking hard, and then pounded a pillow in apparent frustration. “There’s a name for the fuckin’ thing, but I can’t remember what it is.”
“A fuckin’ dish,” said Junior.
“I got stuff coming in from all over the globe, they bounce it down at me from satellites. American ones, French and Russian and German. Even the Italians got one up there.” He chuckled. “I can watch Clint Eastwood westerns all day long if I feel like it.”
“Terrific.”
“And all the sports you can imagine. Not just baseball and football and hockey and shit like that. You ever heard of jai alai?”
“You forgot to mention lawn bowling,” said Junior. He drank some Robert Mondavi and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Who’s the girl?”
Felix shrugged. The tangled sheets were down around the girl’s waist, bunched at the curving swell of her hips. Her skin was very dark, and Junior had assumed she was yet another of Misha’s numerous relatives, or maybe the friend of a friend. But now Felix gave the sheet a yank, pulling it down to her knees, and Junior found himself staring at a tiny white triangle of untanned flesh. He wondered what beach the girl hung out at, where it was in California you could get away with wearing a bikini that small. He swallowed.
“You like?” said Felix. He tugged at the girl’s smooth brown shoulder, rolling her over on her back. She had small breasts, large nipples. Her eyes were closed and her lips were slightly parted. Junior could just make out the tip of her tongue, pink and wet. He watched Felix slide his old man’s hand down and across her smooth flat stomach, explore her belly button with the tip of his little finger.
Push hard.
The girl’s eyelashes fluttered. She muttered something thick and incomprehensible, and tried to roll back over on her side.
&n
bsp; “She thinks you’re real cute,” Felix translated. “In fact, she can hardly keep her eyes off you.”
The girl started snoring. Felix pinched her nostrils shut. Without waking, she slapped weakly at his hand. Junior watched her breasts jiggle.
“You know what happened this afternoon?” said Felix. “I tuned my satellite dish in on the fair city of Vancouver, Canada. And you know what? It seems a girl called Naomi Lister drowned herself to death in some creek about sixty miles out of the city.”
“No shit,” said Junior, sounding bored.
“So now what’s your opinion of Mannie Katz, huh?”
“My opinion is I got a whole box of wadcutters with his name on ’em. Big soft-nosed bullets that mushroom on impact, knock chunks off him big enough for hamburger patties.”
Felix grinned. “What a thing to say!”
“I’d like to stick my Colt in his eye and pull the trigger.”
“You’re a tough cookie, Junior. I’ll say that much for you.”
“Blow his fucking head right off.”
Felix patted the bed. “You need an outlet for all that repressed anger,” he said. “Why don’t you come on over and join us?”
Junior finished the last of the wine. It tasted warm and fruity. “How old is she?”
“Sweet sixteen.”
“Bullshit.”
“No, really. She showed Misha her driver’s licence. She’s from Ignacio.”
“What, the Air Force base?”
“Her daddy’s in Germany. He’s a button pusher. Got himself one of those big Pershing missiles.”
“Let’s hope he doesn’t get mad and point the fucking thing at us.”
Felix smiled condescendingly. The only time Junior made jokes was when he was nervous, and they both knew it. He patted the bed again. “Why don’t you get naked and shake hands with our new friend.” He smiled. “I think you’ll find she’s got a very good grip.”
“When she’s conscious, anyway.”
“Hey, why be so picky?”
“I’m in a picky mood.”
“Pick on me,” said Misha.
Junior realized that the movie had ended and that another one was about to begin. He looked at Felix. Felix stared unblinkingly at him, his dark and glittery lizard’s eyes giving away nothing. Junior let the empty wine bottle drop to the rug. He unbuttoned his shirt and took it off, tugged at his belt, unzipped his fly. The moppet from Ignacio was awake and all three of them were watching him, now. He kicked out of his Hi-Toppers. There was a network of blue veins in Felix’s drooping eyelids. Junior paused.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Felix. “All I’m gonna do is watch.”
“Where have I heard that before?”
Felix rolled his eyes.
Junior let the shorts drop. His penis was limp and accordioned, his testicles drawn up snug. He moved towards the bed, threw himself full length on the girl from Ignacio, kissed her mouth.
Misha’s tongue fluttered in his ear. She whispered something to him in Japanese.
“Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” Junior said to the girl.
Misha giggled, hiding her mouth behind her hands.
“We found her in L.A.,” said Felix. “Slinging quiche in one of those tacky vegetarian joints over on La Cienga.”
“No shit,” said Junior. “That’s just amazing.” He kissed the girl again, bit gently on her lower lip. She moaned softly, but he couldn’t have said why.
The metallic cricket sound of a power winder intruded. Junior glanced up to find Felix peering at him through a stubby 28mm wide-angle lens. He remembered his anger the first time this had happened, and Felix’s solemn advice: If you wanna look good in the sack, kiddo, never stop smiling.
Chapter 14
Inspector Bradley’s office was on the third floor of police headquarters at 312 Main. The room was not large and it contained too much furniture. There was a battered cherry-wood desk, a black leather recliner chair, three varnished wooden chairs, and several gunmetal grey filing cabinets. The desk and leather chair were Bradley’s personal possessions; signs of his seniority and rank.
There was only one window in the room. It was a small window and it had been painted shut, but it faced north, towards the inner harbour and bluish bulk of the mountains. Reluctantly, Bradley turned away from the picture postcard view. Lowering himself gently into his leather chair, he leaned back and rested his clasped hands on his slightly protruding stomach.
Above him hung a quartet of bare neon tubes suspended from the ceiling by thin chains. There was something wrong with the circuitry, a bad connection somewhere. The lights made a constant buzzing noise that Bradley found impossible to block out when he was feeling overworked, tired. The noise was bothering him now, had been pressing in on his nerves all day long. He flipped up the lid of an ornately-carved cedar humidor and selected a cigar. Parker and Willows were sitting in front of him, perched on two of the varnished chairs. He pointed the cigar at Willows and said, “You read the coroner’s report, Jack?”
“Yeah, I read it.”
“Then I don’t have to explain why I look so unhappy, do I?”
Willows didn’t bother to answer. Although Bradley looked exactly as glum as always, neither more nor less, Willows wasn’t about to say so.
Bradley fished a big wooden kitchen match out of his jacket pocket. He flicked at it with his thumbnail. “Look what we’ve got,” he said. “A whorehouse on wheels, hot-wired with prefabricated alligator clips. Strapped to the steering-wheel, a Timex watch with the crystal smashed and the hands stopped at the probable time of the murder. In the back seat we have a bed and on top of the bed a much-punctured juvenile dressed like a hooker, no I.D.”
Bradley chewed on his cigar. “Under the corpse, we find some skin mags and a cash register receipt. And except for the knife sticking out of the victim, that’s it. No other physical evidence whatsoever.”
He pointed his cigar at Parker. “Claire and Farley Spears were trying to find out where the dirty magazines had come from when Spears came down with the mumps, or whatever the hell it is he’s got.”
“Chickenpox,” said Parker.
Bradley ignored her. He flashed a dazzling smile at Willows. “How was the vacation?”
“Great,” said Willows without enthusiasm.
“Well, it’s over now, Jack. So let’s get out on the street and hit that grindstone, okay?”
When Parker and Willows had gone and his office door had swung shut behind them, Bradley struck at the match again, and this time it flared into life. He touched the outer edge of the flame to his cigar, concentrating hard. When he had the cigar burning evenly, he blew out the match and tossed it into the metal wastebasket beside his desk. The lid of the humidor was still up. He flipped it shut and pushed the little box away from him. Smoke drifted upwards towards the harshly buzzing lights. He rubbed the back of his neck and then yanked open the top drawer of his desk, looking for his bottle of aspirins.
Bradley lost aspirins the way other people lost ballpoint pens. They were never where he left them. Never! Frustrated, he slammed the drawer shut. He couldn’t understand it.
It was as if the goddamn things had legs.
Chapter 15
There is a phenomenon known to the medical profession in general and forensic pathologists in particular as “gravitational sinking”. The phrase refers to the areas of discoloration, huge dark bruises, that gradually appear on an unattended corpse and are a consequence of blood slowly settling to the lower areas of a body.
When the morgue attendant rolled open the stainless steel drawer containing the mortal remains of the unidentified white male, preliminary case and tag number 19H88, whom Parker had discovered in the back of the stolen Econoline van, Willows saw immediately that there was very little evidence of gravitational sinking. This came as no surprise, since he’d already examined Mel Dutton’s Polaroid shots of the body and the inside of the van. There had been blood everywhere, hard
and shiny as a carapace in the glare of the camera’s flash. Of the seventy-two stab wounds that had been inflicted on the victim, three had severed major arteries. The dying boy had pumped himself dry with the final beats of his heart; there was not enough blood left in his body for gravitational sinking to occur.
Willows leaned forward and pulled down the pale blue rubberized sheet that covered the body, exposing the coroner’s sternum-to-pubis Y-shaped incision and the hurried, looping, Raggedy-Ann stitches left by a busy intern.
During the first few hours following the death of a human being, the temperature of the body drops by about three degrees per hour. Then, gradually, the rate of heat loss slows until it is one degree or less per hour. The boy had now been dead more than thirty-six hours. His corpse was as cold as it would get during his stay in the morgue: 38 degrees Fahrenheit and holding steady. Willows picked up a hand. Death reached up at him through the network of nerve endings in his fingertips. He twisted the wrist, slowly turning the arm back and forth under the shadowless white glare of the lights.
There was a deep, wedge-shaped chunk of flesh cut out of the boy’s forearm, and on the bottom edge of the cut, a tiny half-circle of blue. Willows examined the arm carefully, and then let it drop. It hit the stainless steel drawer with a dull, meaty thud.
“Looking for anything in particular?” said Parker.
“Yeah, you know what a Smurf is?”
Parker nodded, smiling. “A little cartoon eunuch that looks like a Pillsbury Dough Boy, except it’s bright blue.”
“A fan, are you?”
“Sometimes on Saturday I go over to my sister’s for breakfast. She cooks the pancakes while I watch Smurfs on television with her little girl.”
Willows leaned forward so he could look directly down at the boy’s face. The eyes were pale green. He pulled back the upper lip, exposing the same large white teeth he’d seen in the black and white picture he and Rossiter had found in Naomi Lister’s shorts.
Death On a No 8 Hook (A Willows and Parker Mystery) Page 8