Shutterbug

by Laurence Gough

  April pointed towards the refrigerator. ‘Look what you did.’ ‘What?’

  ‘You dented the door, you big ape.’

  Wayne smiled. ‘Yeah?’ He sounded pleased.

  ‘You’re so proud of yourself, aren’t you?’

  ‘I guess so. Come to think of it. Wouldn’t you be?’

  April snorted in disgust. ‘You kick the door all to hell, bull your way in here like a goddamn storm trooper… ‘

  ‘I broke the door down because you wouldn’t open it and my key didn’t fit the goddamn lock.’ Wayne’s fist came down on the two empty cans, flattening them thin as coins. ‘You changed the lock, didn’t you?’

  April nodded. She poured herself another martini.

  Wayne was perplexed. ‘Now why in hell’d you go and do a crazy thing like that, for God’s sake?’

  ‘Duh… ‘ said April, rolling her pretty eyes.

  ‘Back off, honey. All’s I’m doin’ is asking.’

  April thought it over, decided to bear the conversational burden just a little bit longer. She said, ‘You were gone a long time. Where were you?’

  Wayne glanced across the table at Lewis, who had stopped crying but continued to shudder spasmodically.

  ‘Forget him,’ said April. ‘He’s harmless.’

  ‘You know where I was,’ whined Wayne. ‘Like they say, takin’ care of business. Bumping people off, to be exact.’

  April had finished her martini. She put her pretty feet up on the table, and wriggled her toes. Too sweetly, she said, ‘Do you happen to remember how long you were gone, before you finally came home tonight?’

  Wayne mulled it over. His fingers picked at his beard.

  April said, ‘Three days, Wayne. Then you come waltzing in, shovel some stew into your gut, burp twice, and walk out. You enjoy your meal? You never even bothered to say boo.’

  Wayne made his face go all contrite.

  ‘I thought you were dead,’ explained April. ‘Murdered, or fallen off your motorcycle, smeared all over the goddamn asphalt, your keys stolen by some drug-addled psycho biker friend of yours, on his way over with a bunch of his slack-ass buddies, thinking to take an unfriendly poke at lonely, helpless little April.’ ‘I got no friends, biker or otherwise,’ protested Wayne.

  ‘Okay, point taken. But there’s people you ride with who think they’re your friends, aren’t there? You dumped your bike, these same people’d dip their greasy thieving hands into your pocket before you’d stopped breathing, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘Maybe,’ admitted Wayne.

  ‘Be over here in a shot, wouldn’t they?’

  Wayne’s teeth chewed worriedly at the fringes of his beard. He showed the whites of his eyes. Finally he reluctantly said, ‘Yup.’ ‘So tell me, you still mad I changed the locks?’

  ‘I dunno… ‘

  ‘Wayne!’

  ‘Okay, okay… I’m sorry.’ Wayne reached over, effortlessly picked up the chair April was sitting on, and lowered it onto his lap. He put his arms around her. ‘Miss me, babe?’

  ‘Of course I did,’ said April. She trailed a proprietary hand over Wayne’s grossly bulging gut, and then stretched a shapely leg across the table and rumpled Lewis’s hair with her foot. ‘I missed you like crazy,’ she said, ‘right up to the minute I grabbed my brand-new loverboy!’

  Chapter 12

  Addicts were dying like flies, all over the city. Siren after siren wailed the same hopeless tune. The morgue was jumping, the only sour note being that gurneys and clean sheets were in short supply. Teams of exhausted homicide detectives worked far into the night, knowing full well that all they were getting was the cream. In the morning, and in the gruesome days to follow, plenty more corpses were bound to rise to the surface.

  In their race to the ultimate finish line, Melvin Ladner had finished six to eight hours behind Lester Rules.

  ‘He’s still warm,’ said Popeye Rowland. The M.E. swept his hand over Melvin Ladner’s eyes, expertly shutting them. He rested his pudgy palm on Melvin’s forehead, as if in belated benediction. ‘Warm as toast.’ He smiled. ‘Which figures, if you think about it, because he is toast.’

  Mel Dutton took a moment to switch lenses - from the 28-mil wide-angle to an 85-mil more suitable for portraits. He straddled the corpse, took several carefully composed shots, and then let the camera hang from the.strap around his neck as he got out his pen and notebook, and wrote down the date and case number, Melvin Ladner’s name and occupation, the model Nikon he’d used, as well as the lenses and /-stops, brand and speed of his colour film.

  Mel Dutton and Popeye Rowland were so physically alike - both of them short and bulky and balding - that they might have

  been brothers. But Popeye was a cynical, squinty-eyed pragmatist, whereas Dutton had worked hard to cultivate the image of a sensitive artiste.

  Dutton glanced around. Popeye was industriously cleaning trace elements of blood from his thermometer - and who could blame him? Parker and Willows were in the kitchen, probably checking out Melvin’s cupboards with an eye to a tasty bacon-and-egg breakfast. Or, in the case of Parker, bacon and bean sprouts.

  The uniform by the door was lip-reading the sports section of yesterday’s paper.

  What mattered was that no one was paying any attention to Mel Dutton.

  A couple of hotshot drug-squad cops, Ken DelMonte and Tony LoBrio, would be arriving at any moment, if the crackle of the radio could be believed. But all that mattered was that DelMonte and LoBrio weren’t here now, they weren’t here yet.

  Dutton seized the moment. He saw his window of opportunity, and jumped through it. Bending, he lifted Melvin Ladner’s left eyelid, and then straightened and peered anxiously through the Nikon’s viewfinder.

  Ladner lay on his back, legs crossed at the ankle and his arms spread wide. His face was split by an ear-to-ear smile. The bloody hypo was still inserted in his swollen arm. It looked as if Ladner had died laughing. What a shot! Dutton decided to call the picture Winker.

  He delicately fine-tuned the focus, and was no more than a split-second away from taking the shot when he noticed that Ladner’s eyelid had slid shut.

  ‘Son of a bitch!’

  Willows appeared in the kitchen doorway. Popeye glared over his burly shoulder. The uniformed cop rattled his paper.

  Dutton adjusted his beret. ‘As you were, folks. Minor technical problem, a mere glitch. Nothing to concern yourselves about. Holster your weapons, resume duties… ‘ Dutton fiddled with the Nikon until interest had faded, then swiftly bent and pried the eyelid open.

  ‘Now stay put, damn you!’ he hissed.

  The Nikon had an autowinder. Dutton fired off three shots in half as many seconds. Then, always the pro, he lowered Ladner’s left eyelid and raised the right, and finished off his roll of film.

  If you were going to do something wrong, do it absolutely right.

  In the kitchen, Parker found a.38 Colt snubnose revolver wrapped in a plastic bag that had been hidden in a box of Raisin Bran.

  Willows said, ‘Two scoops of raisins and one scoop of thirty-eight Specials. No wonder it’s such a popular cereal.’

  Parker flipped open the cylinder. Six rounds. The revolver was fully loaded.

  Willows said, ‘That’s a good sign. It means nobody’s been shot.’

  ‘Lately.’

  ‘That’s good enough for me,’ said Willows. The cookie jar was full of stale cookies. He emptied the sugar bowl into the sink. Sugar. The bread box held an unopened loaf of sliced rye and a little less than half a loaf of cracked whole wheat. Willows squeezed the bread to death. His interest had been piqued by Parker’s discovery of the illegal firearm. But now, already, he was fading. He yawned. He’d been up all day and now most of the night, and tomorrow didn’t look any slower than yesterday.

  Poking around in a dead man’s apartment was tedious and emotionally draining work, especially when the corpse was a junkie. Injection addicts hid their ‘works’ everywhere you could think of, plu
s a whole lot of places you’d never think of. Needle-stick was always on a cop’s mind when he was dealing with addicts. Kevlar gloves were available, but they were so bulky and thick that if you wore them during a frisk, the perp could hide a cannon between his legs, and never get caught.

  He swung open a cupboard door on a dozen or more stacked tins of Campbell’s tomato soup.

  Campbell’s was his own preferred brand. But a dozen tins seemed a bit excessive. Maybe Ladner had taken advantage of a case-lot sale. Maybe, but probably not. Willows carefully examined the tins one by one. Detecting nothing unusual, he peeled away several labels. As far as he could see, the tins of soup were merely tins of soup. He pulled open drawers until he found Ladner’s can opener, and opened up a tin. The contents looked and smelled and had the consistency of tomato soup. He probed with a spoon. Nothing. He opened a second can, and then another, and another.

  Soup, soup, soup.

  Parker drifted past. She said, ‘What’ve you got there?’

  Willows dipped his index finger into a tin. He sucked the finger clean, smiled, and said, ‘Soup.’

  Parker nodded. She said, ‘Do I hear something?’

  Willows tilted his head. Somewhere not far off, a telephone was faintly ringing.

  Parker said, ‘It’s in the bedroom.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ But Willows followed her out of the kitchen and down a short hallway and into the bedroom. The ringing was definitely louder. There was a phone on the bedside table. He picked it up, and got a dial tone.

  Parker said, ‘It’s coming from the closet.’

  The closet door was open; Willows had taken a quick look in there, patted down Ladner’s off-the-rack sharkskin suit, shirts, a tartan sports jacket in all the colours of the rainbow, a soiled and permanently wrinkled double-breasted raincoat. He’d found nothing of value.

  But when he pushed all the clothes down to the far end of the rack, there was a woman huddled in the corner, her hands and feet bound by miles and miles of bright orange outdoor extension cord. The cellphone had been forcefully stuffed into her mouth. She appeared to have asphyxiated. Or simply died of fright.

  Willows couldn’t believe he’d overlooked her. A full-grown corpse. In a closet. A very small closet. The light dimmed. He glanced behind him. Parker said, ‘DelMonte and LoBrio are in the kitchen.’

  Willows nodded wearily. The damn cellphone was still ringing. Or rather, warbling. The bright green readout on the phone’s tiny screen lent the woman the complexion of a Granny Smith apple. Ken DelMonte crowded the closet doorway. His Mag-Lite zeroed in on Willows, and then the corpse. The sickly-sweet smell of breath mints wafted across to Willows.

  DelMonte said, ‘That’s the weirdest-looking phone booth I’ve ever seen. Hey, Tony!’

  ‘What’s up, Ken?’ LoBrio brusquely shouldered his way past Parker, followed the Mag-Lite’s path to the woman’s gaping mouth. ‘Who’s the babe?’

  ‘Ask me anything but that,’ said DelMonte. He nudged the woman with the steel-capped toe of his boot. ‘Jack, whyn’t you do the right thing, and introduce us to your new friend?’

  Willows was wearing latex. He got a thumb-and-finger grip on the phone and pulled. He’d expected resistance, but the phone, trailing several gossamer threads of saliva, slipped easily out of the woman’s mouth.

  Her mouth eased shut.

  Willows flipped open the phone, lifted it to his ear. A man’s voice said, ‘Madeleine, you there?’

  ‘Who is this?’ said Willows.

  The caller disconnected.

  ‘Wrong number?’ guessed LoBrio. ‘Listen, I’m into drugs, not murder, so maybe you can explain something to me. Why in hell would anyone try to swallow a telephone?’

  Willows backed LoBrio up as he exited the closet, phone in hand.

  ‘Maybe she’s got call forwarding,’ said DelMonte.

  The telephone was a Motorola StarTac 6000. It weighed three-point-one ounces, and featured a built-in rapid charger and three ringer-tone choices. It was registered to Madeleine Kara, whose home address was identical to that of Melvin Ladner.

  ‘Think they knew each other?’ wondered DelMonte.

  ‘We were hoping you could tell us,’ said Parker.

  ‘Oh yeah, right.’ DelMonte and LoBrio exchanged a few nudges and winks.

  ‘Should I tell them?’ said LoBrio.

  DelMonte shook his head. ‘No, you do it.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Not in the least.’

  ‘Okay, fine. Go ahead.’

  DelMonte lit a cigarette. ‘Melvin and Madeleine. They were kind of like M&MS, know what I mean?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Parker.

  ‘You hardly ever saw just the one of them,’ explained DelMonte. ‘It was like they were joined at the hip.’

  ‘Good choice, you want my opinion.’ LoBrio winked at Parker, caught her reaction, and pretended he had something in his eye that was irritating him.

  ‘Madeleine did a little hooking,’ said DelMonte. ‘But only when times got tough. Otherwise, her one true love was Melvin.’ ‘Melvin deals,’ explained LoBrio.

  His partner punched him on the forearm. ‘Who said you could give away the juicy parts?’

  ‘Your wife.’

  ‘True,’ said DelMonte. ‘So, Mel’s a mid-level dealer. Sells to the sidewalk salesman. He’s a couple rungs up the ladder from Lester Rules, guys like that.’

  Willows said, ‘You know people who knew Melvin?’

  ‘Bet your ass,’ said LoBrio. ‘You looking for us to play the part of middlemen, you got no problem, probably. Me’n’ Ken, we been around so long, we almost made it back to where we started.’ DelMonte glanced at his partner, shook his head, and sighed with infinite weariness. He said, ‘The important thing, what you should know about Melvin, he was a dealer, but he wasn’t a junkie.’

  ‘Maybe a little coke, now and then,’ said LoBrio.

  ‘I give you that, but he never injected.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Never?’ said Parker.

  ‘He had a fear of needles. Melvin mainline? No way.’ ‘Somebody murdered him,’ said DelMonte.

  ‘What I just said, Ken.’

  ‘Tell it like it was, partner. If you can’t keep up with the rest of us, the least you can do is keep up with yourself.’

  Willows said, ‘Who wanted Melvin dead?’

  ‘Nobody we know,’ said LoBrio a little too quickly.

  ‘Except us,’ amended DelMonte.

  Inspired by a sudden insightful inspiration, LoBrio snapped his fingers. ‘And God, probably.’

  ‘Amen to that, brother.’

  *

  Vancouver’s a great city, but it’s short on all-nite diners. By three in the morning, the opportunities for a hot meal are severely limited. Willows suggested the Denny’s on Broadway. Parker exercised her veto.

  ‘How about you drive us home, and I’ll cook.’

  ‘Is there anything in the fridge?’

  ‘If you’re in the mood for an omelette.’

  No sale. Willows hungered for a half-pound of well-done sirloin, a monstrous baked potato smothered in sour cream, a token vegetable, and a stiff drink. But he knew from too-reccnt past experience that his appetite and his stomach were often at odds.

  He said, ‘An omelette would be fine with me, Claire.’

  Willows enjoyed the ride home. The city was renowned worldwide for its spectacular ocean setting and mountain views. But his favourite time was in the small hours of the morning, when the office towers were ablaze with light, but eerily quiet.

  The signal at Burrard and Broadway turned red when they were half a block away. He braked, checked for traffic and found none, lit up the dashboard fireball and cruised through the intersection.

  They slowed twice for four-legged pedestrians; a family of five raccoons the first time, and then a solitary skunk. Half a block off Dunbar, Parker spotted a pack of coyotes streaking across the road. The city zoo had been shut
down, except for the aquarium, but there was no need to go any further than your front porch to observe wildlife.

  The raccoons, who had a special knack for overturning garbage cans, were a nuisance. Skunks smelled, but nobody expected anything more of them. It was the coyotes that caused the most resentment. They hunted in packs, were threateningly large, and seemed to dine exclusively on house cats. People loved their pets. Willows had bought thirty linear feet of one-by-eight-inch cedar board, and constructed a pair of plain-but-sturdy open-ended ‘boxes,’ escape hatches for Barney or Tripod to slip into, in a tight situation. Even so, whenever the cats decided to spend the night outdoors, he worried about them.

  It was twenty past three when he pulled up in front of the house. Parker had dozed off, and he had to wake her. By now his appetite had faded and all he wanted to do was fall into bed.

  Fall into bed and forget forever that he’d overlooked one hundred and twenty pounds of corpse tucked into a very small closet.

  Was he losing his touch? No, he’d lost it. The only question now was whether he could get it back.

  Neither of the cats greeted Willows and Parker as they made their way up the front walk and onto the low front porch. Willows unlocked the front door. Still no cats. He found them in the den, curled up on the sofa next to his son, Sean.

  Sean was watching television. He told Willows he couldn’t sleep, that his arm was bothering him. Parker looked in for a moment, saw that the situation was under control, and went upstairs to check on Annie and then go to bed. Willows asked Sean if he’d like a cup of cocoa.

  In the kitchen, he made cocoa for Sean, and fried-egg sandwiches for both of them.

  Between bites, Sean confessed that there was something else nagging at him. Annie was going out with a kid from another high school. Sean knew the boy by reputation, and didn’t think much of him. There was a rumour that the guy had fathered a child and abandoned the girl he’d made pregnant. Willows knew nothing of this. He promised he’d have a talk with Annie.

  The movie ended at 4:00 a.m. Sean had to turn up the volume a few notches to catch the last few minutes of dialogue over the gentle drone of Willows’ snoring.