Shutterbug

by Laurence Gough

  Shutterbug

  Laurence Gough

  © Laurence Gough 1999

  Laurence Gough has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1998 byMcClelland & Stewart Inc.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Sad but true, the delicious On-On restaurant no longer exists. I should mention that the On-On was never owned by a drug dealer named Sammy Wu. Mr. Wu is a figment of my imagination.

  Shutterbug is a more or less light-hearted work of fiction, neatly categorized by Graham Greene as an ‘entertainment.’

  Light demands shadow.

  On July 15, 1997, more than one thousand simple, white-painted wooden crosses were sunk into the hard-packed turf of Oppenheimer Park. The park is located in Vancouver’s downtown eastside, only a few blocks from the Public Safety Building at 312 Main. Each cross symbolized the death of a Vancouver heroin addict who had accidentally overdosed during the past four years.

  Four years. One thousand dead.

  At the moment, there are about one thousand addicts packed into the city’s downtown eastside. Amazingly, this number remains constant despite the high fatality rate. One in four is HIV positive. During the past six months, more than two hundred have died.

  But the drug problem isn’t restricted to the downtown east-side. There are addicts all across the city, in every neighbourhood.

  Is it time to legalize heroin? In 1994, B.C.’s Chief Coroner recommended that the Province provide a heroin maintenance program as part of a harm-reduction policy.

  So far, nothing has been done.

  Chapter 1

  By the time he graduated from diapers, Wayne was known all over the block for his exceptionally high standards.

  Of cleanliness, friendship, and beauty.

  Especially beauty.

  Understand, we’re talking about Wayne Sharpe.

  Aka ‘Wayne the Brain’ aka ‘The Main Wayne’ aka ‘Main-Frame Wayne’ aka ‘Plain Wayne’ aka ‘The Same Wayne’ aka ‘Larry Loam’ aka ‘Larry The Loam Shark,’ etcetera.

  A long time ago, and this is the stuff of legends, Wayne fell hard for a woman named Laura Lederer. Laura was an expatriate Swiss. Like most women who are unfortunate enough to spend their formative years in the cold and barren mountains of rural Switzerland, Laura was sexually naive, and sexually repressed. She might have stayed that way forever, if she hadn’t emigrated to hot-blooded Canada.

  She’d just started making up for lost ground when she happened to meet Wayne.

  Laura was a beaut. More often than not, strangers mistook her for a gorgeous film star named Nicole Kidman. Laura was blessed with Nicole’s wonderfully long legs, her taut, perfectly proportioned body, lovely face, glossy mane of chestnut hair, mischievous, sexy, sparkling green eyes, perfect nose, teeth, mouth and ears. Laura and Nicole were virtually clones; Laura was able to match the film star perfect for perfect, from her shapely head all the way down to her irresistibly cute ‘n’ cuddly little toes!

  In fact, Laura so closely resembled Nicole Kidman that people who’d met Laura, and subsequently got to know Nicole, often asked the film star if she was really Laura Lederer, from Switzerland.

  Wayne met Laura at a Vancouver cocktail lounge that is not much short of internationally famous for its tasty martinis and stunningly tall waitresses. Laura happened to be exalting one end of the bar, while Wayne was holding down the other. This was during the brief period in his life when Wayne was always accompanied by hired muscle.

  This ones name was Arturo.

  Wayne was telling muscular Arturo a hilarious joke about a near-sighted ostrich, but Arturo, unwisely, wasn’t paying strict attention. Worse, he kept climbing up on his pointy black toes so he could see over Wayne’s brawny shoulder. Arturo was gaping. But what was he looking at? Wayne got out his dentist’s mirror and took a quick peek.

  His dark, smouldering eyes touched down on Laura with all the subtlety of a doomed, completely out-of-control Boeing 747 plummeting vertically into the Pacific Ocean.

  What a babe. Wayne fell in lust. Love at first sight. Passionately swelling violins, and body parts, galore. Hell, he’d kill for her, even if it wasn’t necessary.

  Putting it crudely, he had to have her.

  Which he did, about an hour later, and again not long after that, and first thing the next morning, right after breakfast.

  What a lovely couple they made! Pretty soon, the whole darn town was talking about them. It was considered a treat and a privilege just to catch a glimpse of that star-crossed couple dancing by, as they waltzed from posh nightclub to seedy lounge to five-star luxury hotel to rundown Kingsway hot-sheet motel to… well, wherever they happened to be going next.

  The romance might have lasted forever, but about a month after it got rolling, Laura made a terrible mistake.

  She smiled.

  Due to circumstances entirely beyond her control, when Laura smiled, she flashed her upper gums in their entirety. Not that her gums weren’t just as pink and healthy as the rest of her. They were, they were! But when she smiled she looked…

  Kind of like a hysterical burro.

  Just like that, Wayne dumped her.

  Laura wasn’t thrilled. She had never been dumped before. Like most novel experiences, it was unwelcome. Because she had no life skills in the area of being dumped, Laura committed a grievous tactical error.

  She made a fuss.

  Standing there in the Meridien hotel’s posh lobby, she cranked it up to full volume, took full advantage of the acoustics afforded by all that marble and brass.

  Laura loudly told Wayne he was a cold-hearted sonofabitch, a miserable little prick. If he thought he could drop her like a hot potato, he had another think coming. Heads turned all the way to the far distant, most intimate, recesses of the hotel bar. Staff began to gather. Passers-by loitered on the busy sidewalks.

  A quick-thinking receptionist made an emergency phone call to a bulky, steroid-enhanced member of the staff, whose services were rarely required, except in the wee small hours of dawn.

  Laura told Wayne that he better reconsider the situation, unless he had a secret desire to spend the rest of his miserable life in a maximum-security institution full of miserable pricks just like him!

  That was more than enough for Arturo. He stepped between Laura and his boss, positioning himself so neither of the two combatants could see the other. Arturo cut quite an imposing figure. His unnaturally widely-spaced eyes, which were the colour of virgin olive oil, were so lifeless they might have been transplanted from a corpse. His russet polyester suit shone like a puddle of oil lit up by a spectacular su
nset. His teeth gleamed like antique ivory. His slick-backed smile matched his slicked-back hair, and he had so liberally slapped on his cologne that he smelled like ten thousand acres of roses in full bloom.

  Flopping a manicured hand on Laura’s shoulder, Arturo lubricated his sausage lips with his furry, lolling tongue. By now Laura knew the signs. The Spanish Slug was about to lecture her.

  She power-lifted her knee into his groin. It was as if he’d been assaulted by a forklift. Squeaking shrilly, he hit the marble floor, bounced once, and was still, except for his madly fluttering eyelashes.

  Wayne realized he’d made a mistake. He hauled Arturo to his feet, brushed him off, and instructed him to empty his fat wallet into the eager hands of the assembled staff. Dozens of crisp new hundred-dollar bills vanished like grains of sand into the Mohave Desert. Wayne contritely apologized for any inconvenience his lover’s spat may have caused. He voluntarily promised to never again darken the Meridien’s shiny glass doors. Then he enfolded Laura in his enormous hairy arms, and got her the hell out of there.

  Wayne had a weakness for feisty women.

  But not that feisty.

  About a week later, the first sunny day in August, he and Arturo and Laura drove out of town, for a picnic.

  The unhappy trio ate on a sun-drenched, grassy slope just a hill and a dale from the site of a new mall.

  They drank ice-cold champagne imported all the way from France, and dined like royalty on delicious take-out grub from Meinhardt Fine Foods Inc., on Granville. As they ate, Arturo squatted evilly in the unbalanced shade of a lightning-crippled beech tree, playing solitaire and drinking lukewarm Perrier. Wayne had borrowed Arturo’s portable Sony CD player, so he could spin a little mood music, play a few tunes from a romantic disc called Lovely Lovin that he’d bought by mail from a late-night TV 1-800 number. The music came faintly to Arturo and made him want to bend over and puke.

  Wayne, too, believed the music was truly awful. The only reason he put up with all that racket was because, talk about sheer coincidence, the first pouring of the mall’s concrete foundation was scheduled for that very day. Large-scale construction was a noisy business. Some of those union guys had mouths as foul as the back end of a diarrhetic elephant. No point in upsetting Laura. Much better to provide a little something in the way of background harmonics, to drown out all the noise. Those big tandem-barrel cement trucks, for example, made a hell of an unpleasant racket.

  So, as it turned out, did Arturo’s pistol, when the food and drink and poor Laura’s time had finally run out. Not that there was anything wrong with the Glock. The problem was with the knuckleheaded hitman; he’d forgotten to pack his silencer.

  What the Spanish Slug liked to call his silencio de pistola, when he was trying to impress the ladies.

  Chapter 2

  VPD Homicide Detective Jack Matisse Willows stood close by the luminous green glass wall of the courthouse, in the scant shelter of the overhanging glass roof. His lawyer, Peter Singer, morose, bald and bearded, suffering from a recurring pelvic infection, offered a hand that was no less cold and limp than the rest of him.

  ‘Congratulations, Jack.’

  Willows nodded. He could find no words that were even remotely appropriate. A courtroom appearance had been forced on him because he’d let his ex-wife, Sheila, off the child-maintenance hook. The judge had, naturally enough, wanted to be sure that the two children were going to be well taken care of. The handshake dispensed with, Singer quickly put his glove back on. He shifted his grip on a stack of file folders, thick as a telephone book, that he seemed to carry everywhere and perhaps accounted for the slight hunch in his narrow back. Retreating down the broad concrete steps, the lawyer wished his client the very best of luck, and warned him to expect a final accounting in the next few days.

  Willows and Sheila had been legally separated for the better part of two years, and now, suddenly, they were divorced. Split asunder by the mighty sword of law. His chains had been snapped. He was a free man. Free as a bird. Free at last to marry his boon

  live-in companion, gorgeous homicide detective Claire Parker. Free to marry, or suffer her wrath.

  He was gleeful as a broken-stringed kite. But at the same time, he was as desperately sour and glum as man could be. He’d loved Sheila for a great many years. It wasn’t so long ago that he had believed they would be together for all the rest of his days. Then Sheila had told him, in great detail, how discontent she was, and why. She’d threatened to leave him, and kept her word.

  Poor Jack. But he had recovered, in time. Parker had been his partner, his cop partner, for eleven years. A damn long time. She’d been thrust upon him when his previous partner, Norm Burroughs, had died of cancer. God, but he’d resented Parker. Resented her youth and beauty, her boundless good health.

  He wondered when he’d fallen in love with her. Was it before Sheila had left him, or a long time afterwards? He wished he knew, but suspected he never would. He had no memory of realizing how beautiful she was, though he certainly thought her beautiful now, and couldn’t remember when he hadn’t.

  In Jack Matisse Willows’ humble opinion, love was endlessly perplexing. It could hit you like a ten-pound sledgehammer to the heart, or bind you up in a million gossamer threads of silk. Either way, you were stricken to the point of being immobilized. And you were grateful as hell, to be so lucky.

  But in the end, he supposed, love was that wonderful, wonderful thing that just might happen to you if you were willing to let it happen. You had to be ready, willing, and able.

  Not everybody met those criteria.

  In the line of duty, he had bumped up against plenty of guys, and women too, who were ready, willing, and completely unable to fall in love. Something was missing. He wasn’t sure what it was. An important cog, something crucial to their basic humanity, that prevented them from developing lasting relationships, caring deeply for someone, falling in love. Willows didn’t understand them; he only knew they existed.

  He stood there on the courthouse steps, in the shelter of the glass roof, inches away from the steadily falling rain. He wore a charcoal suit, a white shirt with button-down collar, a dark blue tie, black brogues and a black trenchcoat. He wore no hat. He carried no umbrella. A gust of wind flapped the trenchcoat’s lapels, and worried his tie, and lifted up a lock of his hair and laid it neatly down again. Rain ricochetting off the concrete beaded his shoes, and dampened the cuffs of his pants.

  Jack Matisse Willows was cold, and tired. His face was pale, his eyes dark and shadowed. He’d cut himself shaving that morning. Well, he’d been nervous. A crooked line of dried blood lay along the underside of his jaw, and lent him a faintly disreputable look.

  When he’d strode into the courthouse, not half an hour ago, he had been full of manly resolve. Now he was exhausted. All he wanted to do was go home and crawl into bed and pull the covers over his head and shut his eyes and sleep right through the weekend.

  He wanted a drink. A double Cutty, on the rocks. He desperately wanted, though he hadn’t smoked since his undercover years, more than twenty years ago, an unfiltered Export ‘A’ cigarette.

  He hadn’t heard the first few bars of the national anthem blaring from the speakers atop the old B.C. Hydro building, but the high-noon notes must have sounded nevertheless, because suddenly the streets were crammed with a flood of humanity. A quartet of lawyers in black robes flew in tight formation down the courthouse steps. The lawyers might have been ravens; they were too large to be crows. Willows watched the self-serve restaurant across the street fill up with hungry people. The place was empty one moment, full to capacity the next. Two middle-aged women sitting at a window table stripped away the stretch’n’ cling wrap from their salads, and tucked in busily, with white plastic forks.

  A man who closely resembled a two-thirds-scale Woody Allen saw Willows, waved, and called out to him in a friendly manner.

  ‘Hey, Jack!’

  The man trotted up the steps, smiling broadly. Wi
llows turned to face him more squarely. His hands hung loosely at his sides.

  The man slowed as he drew near. His smile faltered. ‘Jack, you don’t remember me?’

  Willows stood quietly.

  ‘Christ, I don’t believe it. Bryan Galt. Aggravated manslaughter, five years ago the middle of next month.’

  Willows said, ‘Got something for me, Bryan?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘You and Teddy Hayes used to pal around, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right.’

  ‘I hear Teddy was the genius behind that Chinatown jewellery-store robbery last week.’

  The last faint vestiges of great good humour fled Bryan Galt’s sallow face. ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Three wounded, one fatally.’

  ‘Doesn’t ring a bell, Jack.’

  ‘You’re sure about that?’

  Bryan Galt bent his head to light a cigarette. A filtertip Marlboro. He inhaled deeply, exhaled with a rush. Willows caught a whiff. There was something wrong about a miniature Woody Allen snorkelling away on a cigarette. In high school, there was a kid who used to sell cigarettes for a dime each, and make a good profit. George. The entrepreneur’s name was George. Willow frowned, squeezing his brain. George Hetger. No, Hertger. George Hertger.

  Bryan Galt flipped his yellow disposable lighter into the air and caught it, but just barely. He put the lighter away in the pocket of his suede windbreaker. Willows wondered if Galt deliberately dressed like Woody Allen. No, that was crazy. He wondered what he’d find if he reached out and frisked Galt. What was under that puffy jacket? A 9mm semiauto? A roll of fat?

  Bryan Galt said, ‘I haven’t seen Teddy in years.’

  ‘Too bad. Got the time, Bryan?’

  Galt unthinkingly shot the cuff of his jacket. The gold Rolex on his wrist seemed to surprise him. Recovering, he said,’It’s ten past twelve.’

  Willows smiled down at him.

  The watch vanished. Galt turned and ran, with Willows in hot pursuit.