Shutterbug

by Laurence Gough

  The conversation, such as it was, lagged.

  Wayne said, ‘Could I have a cigarette?’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’ Wayne stuck a Marlboro in the corner of Lewis’s mouth, fired up his Harley-Davidson lighter. Lewis pulled smoke into his lungs. He coughed, got himself under control.

  Wayne said, ‘April mention what she’s got in store for you?’

  ‘You’re turning me into a drug addict, aren’t you?’

  ‘Not me, pal.’

  ‘What are you going to do to me?’ It was a question Lewis hadn’t meant to ask. He tried to stay calm, but it wasn’t working. The Marlboro fell out of his mouth, and rolled away into the fetid sheets. He hardly noticed. He’d begun crying again. He was crying uncontrollably, sobbing like an orphaned child. He couldn’t stop. He didn’t want to stop. He felt no sense of shame, only a terribly deep and endless unnamed fear.

  Wayne said, ‘Hey, take it easy.’ He pawed Lewis’s shoulder. ‘There, there.’

  Lewis felt it overtaking him again, his need, his craving, his insatiable desire.

  Where was April? Where was his sweet baby nurse, his beloved April, with her lovely needle?

  Lewis’s stomach was in knots. His body twisted and turned, straining against the handcuffs.

  It was time! It was time!

  Where in hell was his goddamn heroin!

  Chapter 16

  Bradley had all four teams of homicide detectives working on the Lester Rules murder, and related cases. The drug squad was also heavily involved, LoBrio and DelMonte at point. Willows couldn’t recall a case that involved so many murders. The fact that the vast majority of the victims were not solid citizens added to the complexity of the situation.

  The suspect list was going to be impossibly long.

  The financial cost to the city, in overtime alone, was going to be horrendous.

  Willows and Parker had found hand-delivered Polaroids at the homes of Melvin Ladner, Warren Fishburg, Sandy Newton, and Ralph Lightman. In every case, several pictures recorded the victim’s last moments on this mortal coil. Pressed, Ken DelMonte had admitted that Fishburg and Lightman were street-level dealers, and had worked for crime kingpin Jake Cappalletti. Sandy Newton was a possible. DelMonte, and LoBrio, had heard rumours but had no hard evidence. All DelMonte could tell Willows was what he already knew. Female drug dealers were a rarity at any level.

  Sandy Newton, benefitting from brand-new friends in very high places, had leap-frogged to the front of the line.

  The ex-hooker/suspect drug dealer’s autopsy was scheduled for twelve o’clock. Noon sharp. Willows and Parker arrived at the morgue a few minutes late, and were mildly relieved to discover that the festivities had not yet begun.

  The pathologist, Christy Kirkpatrick, had been cutting bodies for as long as Willows had been a cop. Kirkpatrick, like Bradley, was closing in on mandatory retirement. It was a thorn in his side. ‘What am I expected to do for the rest of my life,’ he complained to Parker, ‘buy a penknife and a truckload of lumber, and whittle?’

  Kirkpatrick was a tall man, well over six feet, though time and his occupation had given him a permanent stoop. His red hair had long ago faded to silver, but his hand was as steady as it had ever been. He was out in the hallway, smoking, and drinking tea from a paper cup, when Willows and Parker arrived.

  Kirkpatrick lifted a heavily freckled arm in greeting, exhaled a cloud of smoke, and sipped at his tea.

  Willows said, ‘Waiting for us?’

  ‘Pathologists wait for no man. Our schedule’s too crowded. Lucky for us, our patients rarely complain.’ Kirkpatrick indicated the double swinging doors leading to the morgue. ‘Go ahead, I’ll be with you in a minute. But you better steel yourselves, detectives. There’s a damn repulsive morality play going on in there.’

  Mystified, Parker and Willows pushed open the double swinging doors.

  Sandy Newton lay supine and naked on a stainless-steel table. A pale blue sheet lay in a crumpled heap on the white tile floor at the foot of the table.

  A pale green homicide detective leaned over the body, hat in hand.

  Willows said, ‘Bobby?’

  Bobby Dundas spun around, startled and confused. Like a traffic light, his face turned from green to red. His puffy red eyes skittered from Willows to Parker. Bobby had obviously been crying. Bawling his eyes out, from the look of him. His camel-hair coat was streaked with tears.

  Parker said, ‘What’re you doing here?’

  Bobby shrugged. He started to put on his hat and saw that it was brimful of used Kleenex.

  ‘Friend of yours?’ said Willows.

  Bobby mulled it over, his damp eyes full of rapidly whirling cogs. It took him a while, but in the end he decided against.

  ‘Not really,’ he said, too casually. ‘I met her a couple times, here and there, when I was in vice. Dropped by hoping a visual might trigger some memories, lead to something… ‘

  Willows and Parker exchanged a quick glance. Bobby had been caught off balance. An accomplished liar, he was clearly lying. What was going on?

  Willows said, ‘It work?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘She trigger any memories?’

  ‘Nah!’ Bobby coughed, and wiped his nose on his sleeve. ‘Waste of time!’

  Another lie, but who was counting.

  No way Bobby would ever admit that he and Sandy Newton had been lovers. The first time Bobby met Sandy, he busted her for soliciting. He’d been new to the force, on the job less than six months, a rookie, working undercover. He was standing behind Sandy, cuffing her, when she’d suddenly groped him. He’d staggered backwards, shocked, and tripped and fallen flat on his ass on the rain-drenched asphalt. Sandy could’ve kicked him in the head, driven her five-inch stiletto heel right through his addled brain. Instead, she offered him a hand up, and a freebie. Any way he wanted it, now or at his convenience.

  Bobby scrambled to his feet, brushed off the seat of his pants. ‘Are you trying to bribe me?’

  ‘No, I’m offering you a deal. It’s up to you to decide how you want to handle it.’ She smiled, and provocatively cocked a hip. ‘You aren’t interested, take me to jail.’

  Bobby was no fool. He smelled complications. A few hours later, after he’d got off shift, he met Sandy at a downtown bar.

  Surprised to find her where she said she’d be, and on time. ‘Time is money,’ she told him. ‘There’s nothing more punctual than a whore, except maybe a brain surgeon or an orthodontist.’

  She asked Bobby what he wanted to drink, told the waiter to put his Heineken on her tab.

  Bobby felt himself sliding into her life. Somehow, for reasons he couldn’t even begin to pin down, he didn’t care. Maybe it was that his fiancée had just dumped him. Maybe it was something else.

  Sandy Newton was six-one, an inch taller than Bobby. She was twenty-three years old, for now. She charged two hundred and fifty dollars an hour, two-hour minimum. Her all-night fee depended on the variety and frequency of services required, but her base rate was two thousand dollars. A green-eyed natural blonde, she was two-thirds leg, and dressed accordingly.

  Bobby lacked many qualities, but made up for it with a surplus of vanity. But despite his exalted opinion of himself, he knew that Sandy was a thousand miles out of his league.

  She wanted something from him. Something large.

  As he worked his way through his third Heineken, she got down to it.

  There was this guy, called himself LaMer Ocean…

  ‘LaMer Ocean?’

  ‘It’s, like, a joke.’

  ‘What’s his actual legal name?’

  ‘I don’t know. Benny something or other, maybe.’

  ‘He’s black?’

  ‘Not that I noticed.’

  ‘A local guy?’

  ‘He is now. Skipped out on his probation, via the I-5.’

  ‘He tell you what he did?’

  ‘Cut a woman.’

  Bobby nodded. LaMer had rolled hi
s Lexus down the interstate from Seattle, and put together a string. He wasn’t the first Yankee pimp to move across the border, and he wouldn’t be the last. Sandy wanted out, and no wonder.

  She said, ‘What’re you thinking?’ Toying with the long red straw that had come with her drink. Flirting with him, batting him around with her eyes.

  He wasn’t going to pretend he was immune to her immeasurable charms. No way a healthy male could inoculate himself against a woman like that, so why pretend. But he had his career to think about. His precious cop life. She could do him some serious damage, if she ever turned against him.

  He said, ‘Where does LaMer hang his hat?’

  ‘Actually, at the moment, he’s staying at my condo.’

  False Creek, the south side. LaMer, busy with his remada, rarely made it home before dawn. Or so Sandy said. During the ride over, Bobby worked out how he’d handle the situation. There would be a handful of warrants out on LaMer. Bobby could arrest him, fingerprint him, identify him and send him back to whatever jail term awaited him. But that would leave a mile-wide paper trail. Better to work out a deal with LaMer. Cuff him and drive him over the border, let him go. What option did the pimp have, but to cooperate? None. He was bound to see the light.

  He and Sandy waited in the dark, in the living room with its big picture window overlooking the water and the deceptively bright lights of the city. The stereo played softly, as they made small talk. From time to time, Sandy fetched him a beer. It must have been three or four hours after they arrived that she turned on the gas fireplace, and made a decisive move on him. He fended her off for at least a couple of seconds. They made love on the carpet and then in the bedroom, Bobby hobbling after her in hot pursuit, his pants around his ankles.

  They were in the shower, getting started all over again, when LaMer breezed in the door.

  Bobby heard the jangle of his keys, and then LaMer was in the bathroom with them, standing at the toilet, in a good mood, taking a noisy whiz, asking after Sandy, wondering how her night had gone, where she’d left her fuckin’ purse.

  ‘It’s in the bedroom, LaMer.’

  Along with Bobby’s suit, underpants, badge and pistol. The toilet flushed.

  LaMer said, ‘You wan’ me wash your back?’

  ‘No thanks, LaMer.’

  ‘You sure, baby?’

  ‘I just need a few minutes to myself right now, okay?’

  ‘Okay, baby!’

  Bobby eased open the shower door. No LaMer. Stark naked and dripping wet, Bobby padded after him. Detouring through the kitchen, he snatched a breadknife off a blood-stained wooden cutting board. He caught up to LaMer in the bedroom. Intent on dumping the meagre contents of Sandy’s purse onto the rumpled kingsize bed, LaMer apparently hadn’t noticed Bobby’s clothes. He noticed Bobby, though, and the knife.

  ‘What’re you doing in here? Sandy bringin’ tricks home? That stupid bitch! You a thief?’

  LaMer stepped forward. He kicked Bobby so hard he lifted him up off his feet. The pain was unbearable. Bobby fell onto the carpet, moaning piteously. LaMer pried the breadknife out of his hand, rested a knee on his throat. ‘You gonna cut me up, is that what you were gonna do, you putz?’

  LaMer drew back his arm. Would he, had he lived a few seconds longer, have sliced Bobby’s throat from ear to ear?

  Bobby never found out, because Sandy had slipped into the room, helped herself to his snubnose.38, put the barrel up against the back of LaMer’s head, and pulled the trigger. Twice.

  Bobby relieved her of his weapon. He double-bagged LaMer’s ruined head in Safeway plastic, and then he and Sandy headed back to the shower to wash away the blood and gore.

  Bobby, as he soaped her down, kept expecting somebody in a uniform to kick in the door, or at least knock.

  It didn’t happen. Sandy promised that, if he didn’t arrest her, she’d be grateful forever. Bobby had no idea how long ‘forever’ might turn out to be. He knew one thing, though. He’d rather be a cop than a convict.

  He and Sandy zipped LaMer into a cheap sleeping bag, dumped him in the trunk of Sandy’s Dodge Intrepid, drove him across the border and dumped him in a drainage ditch on the outskirts of Blaine.

  Ever since, Bobby had wondered if he’d done the right thing, or if Sandy would eventually roll over on him. Like many hookers, she aged precipitously. The faster her career nosedived, the more Bobby worried about his own fate. When he learned that Sandy was a heroin addict, he looked her up, offered to get her into a clinic, and emptied his savings account to prove he was serious. He’d thought, more than a few times, about bumping her off.

  And now here she was in the morgue, all her passion stopped, and he was out of harm’s way at last.

  Bobby had expected to feel overwhelming relief, tinged with maybe a soupçon of guilt. To his relief, he felt nothing, not even a lingering regret for the better life they might have shared. Then, to his intense surprise, he suddenly found himself bitterly regretting his utter lack of common human emotion.

  For a brief unguarded moment, Bobby knew himself for the empty husk he was, and hated himself, and everything he could never hope to become.

  He’d wept, and wept.

  Willows said, ‘You knew her pretty well, did you?’

  ‘Not really.’

  Willows asked a few penetrating supplemental questions. Bobby blew a fuse, cursed and screamed until he ran out of wind, then bent to kiss Sandy Newton chastely on the forehead, and stormed out of the morgue.

  Willows said, ‘Is it possible he loved her?’

  ‘No chance,’ said Parker, and she was absolutely right.

  Bobby loved Bobby. What tormented him was the certain knowledge that it was the only meaningful relationship he’d ever have.

  Chapter 17

  Wayne scrutinized Lewis a little too closely as Lewis stepped into the shower.

  Lewis pretended not to notice. He turned on the water, adjusted the taps, bent his head and let the spray wash pieces of bottle out of his hair.

  From the other side of the frosted-glass shower door, Wayne said, ‘Are you normal?’

  Lewis had been reaching for the shampoo. The question froze him.

  ‘Hey, you still in there?’

  Lewis nodded. How clearly could Wayne see him through the frosted glass? He said, ‘What d’you mean, normal?’

  ‘Normal. Are you normal. Are you normal. Is it something you have to think about? Answer the question, Lewis.’

  Lewis said, ‘Yeah, I’m normal. I mean, as far as I know. Nobody’s ever said otherwise.’

  ‘When April picked you up, were you seeing anybody?’

  Seeing anybody. What cloud had Wayne stepped off, before he drifted down to earth? Lewis squeezed a pale yellow worm of herbal shampoo into the palm of his hand. He thought about Elizabeth. Liz. His partner in crime. Did she miss him? Had she called the cops, hooked up with somebody else, moved back to Saskatchewan…

  Lewis worked the shampoo into his hair. He tried to picture her, conjure up an image. She was slim, pale. Her hair was… short, out-of-control? Her eyes were…

  Wayne pounded on the glass. ‘You still in there, dreamboat, or did you escape down the drain?’

  Lewis said, ‘I had a girlfriend. Her name was Elizabeth.’ He’d almost said Liz, but Elizabeth sounded more stable, somehow. ‘Living with her, were you?’

  Lewis nodded. He said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Shared an apartment, a bed… Must’ve been nice. What part of town d’you live in, you don’t mind me asking.’

  An alarm situated midway between Lewis’s ears rang shrilly. What wretched egg was Wayne bent on hatching? Lewis rinsed his hair. No way he was giving up Liz, even if he couldn’t remember what she looked like.

  Wayne was standing there, towel in hand, when Lewis finally came out of the shower. He noted the blood trickling from a cut between Lewis’s thumb and index finger, and asked him what had happened.

  Lewis said, ‘I cut myself.’

 
‘On what?’

  ‘A sliver of glass from a Wild Turkey bottle.’

  ‘Oh, man! I’m so sorry!’ Wayne scuttled out of the bathroom, returned in jig time with a first-aid kit. He fussed over the selection of bandages, gauze, pressure tape, little tubes of antiseptic jelly. But at least he didn’t offer to kiss it better. Dressed in his bathrobe, Lewis ministered to himself.

  Wayne was in a talkative mood. He grabbed a fresh six-pack of Budweiser from the fridge and shooed Lewis into the backyard. It was a sunny, reasonably warm day. They sat at the picnic table, Lewis in his robe, Wayne in heavy black motorcycle boots, oil-stained jeans, a black T-shirt and his sleeveless black-leather Harley-Davidson vest. He shook a Marlboro from a pack, offered the cigarettes to Lewis, fired up his Harley-Davidson lighter and held the flame steady for his guest. He popped the tab on a couple of cans of beer, and pushed one across the table for Lewis. They sat there in the sunshine, quietly sipping and smoking.

  Lewis anxiously said, ‘So tell me, is April still outside?’

  ‘Miss her, don’t you? Or maybe it’s Nurse April’s needle that you miss.’ Wayne’s sneer trailed away into a bitter, weirdly twisted approximation of a smile. ‘She’s gone shopping. For groceries. We’re outta orange juice and coffee, Raisin Bran, and Christ knows what else. Just about every goddamn thing you can think of. Hey, don’t get me wrong. I’m not bitchin’. April does her itty-bitty best, and that’s all a reasonable man can ask of any woman. But I’m telling you, sometimes I get so goddamn frustrated …’

  Wayne guzzled his Budweiser, sighed contentedly. Grasping the empty can top and bottom, he rotated his hands in opposite directions. The can magically shrank in size, seemingly screwing itself into itself, until finally it wasn’t much larger than a satellite photo of Danny DeVito.

  Wayne tossed the can aside and got started on his second beer of the morning.

  ‘See, April’s well-intentioned. She does her best. But she has a limited attention span, her mind tends to wander, she’s forgetful.’ Wayne frowned at a perky robin that had gracefully alighted on a fence post, and was preening itself with studied indifference. ‘What I’m trying to say, April has a history of being prone to sudden attacks of loneliness that do not last. From time to time she goes on the prowl for that thing called love. I blame myself. In certain areas, I find myself wanting. Not that it’s any of your business. What concerns you is that April’s well-intentioned, but has a notoriously unsteady heart.’