Shutterbug

by Laurence Gough

  Parker said, ‘Excuse me? You’re moving down the hall?’

  ‘Well, wouldn’t you? It’s a corner unit. Windows on two sides. It’ll be so much brighter, even in the winter. Oh, I know, it’s a terrible mess. But I’ve never been afraid to roll up my sleeves and go to work. A bit of scrubbing, a new carpet from that roll-end place, spackle, a few cans of paint.’

  Marjorie drifted towards the door, and Willows realized she wanted them out of there, so she could go back to her packing.

  She said, ‘Come back in a couple of weeks. I guarantee that you won’t even recognize the place!’

  Parker said, ‘Marjorie, we’d like to ask you a few questions.’

  ‘About what?’

  Marjorie had changed course. Now she was drifting towards the teapot, which was standing on the kitchen counter next to a large bottle of brandy.

  ‘About what you saw the night Lester Rules was murdered,’ said Parker.

  ‘I didn’t see anything, dear.’ Marjorie poured herself a halfcup of orange pekoe. She reached for the bottle. ‘Didn’t I already tell you that?’

  Parker said, ‘No drinking, please.’

  Marjorie stared at her, aghast.

  ‘What a thing to say! In my own apartment! It’s not as if I’m trying to drown my sorrows, or anything like that. This is strictly for medicinal purposes, young lady.’

  ‘I appreciate that. But we don’t want you to become inebriated, no matter what the circumstances.’

  ‘Inebriated? You mean, drunk?’

  ‘Tiddly,’ said Willows, smiling genially.

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Marjorie made a snap decision not to turn nasty. She said, ‘That’s different.’

  ‘The night we first talked to you,’ said Willows, ‘you told us his apartment was infested with cockroaches.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘You said you’d had problems, but that you took great care to keep your apartment spotlessly clean. You said that, from time to time, you used insecticides.’

  ‘Well, yes. I don’t remember saying any of that, but it’s certainly possible.’

  Parker said, ‘You told us you saw a really huge bug outside Lester’s doorway, the afternoon he was murdered.’

  ‘I did?’

  ‘Yes, you did,’ said Parker firmly.

  ‘Did I say what kind of bug it was?’

  ‘Shiny. Huge, and shiny.’

  ‘Shiny?’

  Parker said, ‘I’d like you to take a look at something.’

  She took the evidence bag from her purse and held it up to the light so Marjorie had a good view of the fragment of brightly gleaming material.

  Marjorie’s hand flew to her mouth. ‘Dear me! Now I remember! I thought I was imagining things. Sometimes I do that, if I haven’t been feeling well, and I’ve had a lot of tea.’

  ‘You weren’t imagining things,’ said Parker. ‘Tell us what you saw.’

  ‘You have to understand that I was looking through the peephole in the door, so everything was distorted. Like looking at the world through a goldfish bowl.’

  Parker nodded encouragingly.

  ‘A man, it had to be a man, he was so huge, was standing by the door. Leaning against it, as if listening, to find out if there was anyone inside. He was wearing a silver suit. It was very shiny, like an enormous fish. A trout, or a salmon. But he was too fat.’

  Willows was making notes. Marjorie paused, to allow him time to catch up.

  ‘Then he turned and looked right at my door, and I saw, I didn’t really believe it at the time, but I saw that his face was covered with silver, and he was wearing a pair of goggles. Like swim goggles, but larger.’

  ‘Do you remember the colour of the goggles?’ said Parker.

  ‘Green. They were dark green. I don’t know why, but he turned and looked right at me, as if he knew I was looking at him. I was so frightened! It sounds silly, I know, but there was something about him that was pure evil.’

  Marjorie sipped from her cup of unlaced tea. ‘Now that I’ve had time to think about it, I’m sure that’s what made me think he was a bug.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Parker.

  ‘He was missing something,’ said Marjorie. ‘I don’t know how I knew, but I did. I sensed it, I suppose. Sensed that something was lacking in him.’

  She glanced anxiously at Willows.

  ‘I thought he was a bug because I knew, somehow, that he wasn’t quite human.’

  Relenting, they both had a nice hot cup of tea, before they left. Willows took his with a pinch of brandy.

  Marjorie, on her second cup, said, ‘I’m safe, aren’t I?’

  ‘Safe as houses,’ said Willows.

  The rescheduled meeting with the Bank of Montreal loans officer, Mary Sanderson, suddenly nagged at Parker. She glanced at Willows, and saw he hadn’t made the connection, and found herself resenting his irresponsible lack of concern.

  Chapter 23

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Pasta. With little tiny wee itty-bitty shrimp’

  ‘Shrimp?’

  ‘Little ones. They’re out of a tin. From China, probably. What isn’t. But don’t tell Wayne, because he thinks they were fresh. Open wide.’

  Lewis’s mouth sagged open. April filled it with cut-up pasta, shrimp, a pale, creamy sauce.

  ‘Chew.’

  Lewis chewed.

  ‘Good. Now swallow.’

  Lewis swallowed.

  ‘Capistrano!’

  Lewis tilted his head so he could look at her.

  ‘It’s what my mom used to say, when I was a little kid, and she was trying to get me to eat. Capistrano! Every time I swallowed a mouthful. It always made me laugh, because of the way she said it. Making a big deal, y’know. Capistrano! Try it.’

  ‘Capistrano!’ said Lewis.

  ‘Good, now let’s do it together. Capistrano!’ April dissolved into a fit of childish giggles. When she’d got herself under control, two or three seconds later, she said, ‘I don’t know what it means. It’s Spanish or Mexican, I guess.’

  She emptied the bowl of shrimp pasta into Lewis forkful by forkful, with infinite patience and goodwill. Lewis lay on the bed, in a voluminous pair of Harley-Davidson pyjamas cast off by Wayne when he’d realized he had been bilked - the jammies weren’t the genuine article, licensed by Harley-Davidson, but a cheap Asian knockoff.

  Wayne loved to talk bikes. He disdainfully referred to Japanese motorcycles as ‘Riceburners.’ He’d boasted that he’d never in all his motoring life raised his left hand in greeting when encountering a Japanese bike on life’s highways. Honda, Suzuki, Yamaha and Kawasaki, they were all one and the same to Wayne. Inferior products, because they weren’t fashioned of American iron.

  The fact that many of these motorcycles were built in the United States meant nothing to him. Wayne had developed an attitude. Since it was such a comfortable fit, why would he ever change?

  ‘April?’

  ‘Yeah, what?’ But she knew what was coming. Lewis’s tone of voice had been weedy and wheedling. The boy was turning into a high-maintenance item. Left-over pasta-and-shrimp was the last thing he was interested in; but he’d cleaned his plate like a good boy, and now he wanted dessert.

  Lewis wanted to eat the needle.

  He was pale and shivering, his face glistening with sweat. He had that special junkie-knot in his belly, that junkie-knot in his heart.

  Lewis was a junkie.

  He needed to fix.

  April was amazed. Lewis was an ideal patient, in the sense that he had made such rapid progress. Junk had robbed him of all desire, except the desire for more dope, another fix.

  From personal experience, April had come to believe that people turned into junkies for as many reasons as there were needles in a needle exchange, but that the primary reason was because they’d been cursed with an addictive personality.

  Lewis smoked like a chimney, drank like a fish. If he hadn’t found junk, he’d probably have died of l
ung cancer, or liver failure. Horrible deaths, unlike a simple overdose.

  She was doing him a favour, really.

  But still…

  He lay there on the bed, looking adorable. She told herself he wasn’t actually all that cute, that she’d been seduced by the combination of his angelic face and the hard-ass biker jammies. But she didn’t believe it, not even for a minute.

  She was falling for Lewis.

  Had already fallen for him, to tell the pathetic truth.

  She leaned over the bed and kissed him lightly on the mouth, and whispered into his ear that she’d be back in a minute.

  ‘I’m sick, April. I need to fix.’

  ‘I know you do, baby. Try to be patient, okay? I’m going to take care of you, don’t worry.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To the kitchen, to do some cooking. Close your eyes. Try to relax. I’ll be right back.’

  Due to their casual attitude towards bladder control, the dalmatians had been restricted to the kitchen. The lights were agonizingly bright; April noticed right away that the dogs were missing. But in any case she had no time for the dogs.

  She had to cook up.

  She was busy, busy, busy.

  *

  As it happened, the dalmatians were in the backyard. Wayne had taken them outside because he was in need of congenial company, and April, as usual, was otherwise engaged.

  Conchita and Esmeralda, spying the neighbour’s horses, had become extremely agitated. Wayne was in no mood for frolic. Using short lengths of rawhide, he’d tied the dogs together, rear legs to rear legs. If the beasts wanted to go anywhere, they had to move in perfect synchronicity, in what were essentially identical but opposite directions.

  Wayne stood in close proximity to the barbecue, which was venting roiling black clouds of acrid smoke shot through with spiralling tongues of bright orange flame. The wind was in a shifty mood; he had to stay alert, if he hoped to avoid serving his lungs a lethally toxic dose of sooty chemicals.

  Wayne was destroying evidence, torching the expensive silver coveralls that Sammy Wu had chosen to make his last meal. Wayne had hoped the coveralls could be repaired. He’d showed them to April, who, during her career as a lap-dancer, had often created her own ornate, wildly inventive costumes.

  April had taken a quick look at the damage and said, ‘Yeah, I can fix that. Easy. All I need is a needle and some white or silver thread.’

  But then she’d smoothed out the material and laid down the piece Wayne had yanked out of Sammy’s mouth, and changed her tune. There was no need to explain why. A small piece of material, a square about one-eighth the size of a fingernail, was missing.

  Wayne had stomped all over the house, looking for it. He tore his van apart, hunting for that little square of shiny cloth.

  Wherever it was, it was gone.

  Frustrated, he had fired up his FXSTC Softail Custom and blasted around the city, running familiar twisties at such high speeds that the Harley’s lowside footpeg often trailed a twenty-foot streamer of sparks.

  High-speed antics on a powerful motorcycle is the very definition of risky business, especially in the city of Vancouver, where most drivers are apparently unaware that modern automobiles are equipped with turn signals and a functioning brake pedal.

  Wayne’s unavowed intention was to have a whole lot of fun, enjoy himself until he ran out of adrenalin or got caught up in the middle of a tangle of exquisitely chromed motorcycle parts lit up by a huge, high-octane fireball.

  He was saved by an empty gas tank. The Harley, like most motorcycles, had a reserve tank. But insufficient fuel translated into a depressively unimpressive fireball.

  The prospect of crashing spectacularly, only to suffer multiple fractures, extensive third-degree burns, and years of agony in an intensive-care facility, was not the least bit enticing.

  On the other hand, no fuel at all meant he’d have to get out and push. The Harley weighed six hundred and thirteen pounds. Hey, so what! Wayne had dropped down into fourth gear and cranked it, slipped over to the wrong side of the double yellows and avoided a head-on collision with a cube van by a unit of time too small to measure. His handlebar had ticked the other vehicle’s side mirror, blowing it to pieces.

  Wayne had no idea what he’d hit. Something a lot bigger than a motorcycle. The impact had sent him off-line, and created a near-lethal front-end wobble. He churned up a couple of hundred feet of boulevard, and missed a concrete telephone pole by a whisker, before he was finally able to bring his machine under control.

  He had motored home at not much over the speed limit. In the pit of his red-lined heart, he knew full well that, if the Harley hadn’t been so strongly built, he’d have traded his life for a harp.

  Or, more likely, a pitchfork.

  Wayne poked at the barbecue’s smouldering flames with a short length of branch stripped from the weeping willow. He kept hoping that April would come wandering out of the house with a six-pack, casually join him, maybe ask him how he was doing. Chit-chat with him, be his woman.

  He turned and looked behind him. No April. There was no movement in the house.

  Where was she? What was she up to? On the other side of the electrified fence, the horses shifted nervously.

  By the time he’d barbecued the Mylar suit to death, Wayne smelled so bad the dogs had moved as far upwind as they could get. Cowering shamelessly behind the weeping willow, they studiously avoided eye contact when Wayne called to them, and patted his smoke-blackened thigh.

  To hell with them. He stripped down to his underpants as he beelined towards the house, and a hot shower, letting his filthy clothes fall where they may.

  April found him in the tub. All of Wayne’s anatomy that she could see was his head, bulging stomach, and knees. She didn’t mean to be critical, but he’d sure gained a lot of weight, during the past few weeks. He’d turned out to be one of those men who tried to eat away his tension. The things you never thought to ask! To April, gaining weight didn’t seem like a sensible way of dealing with stress.

  But then, she knew absolutely zero about physics. Maybe Wayne had figured out that the burden of his tension would somehow be diluted if he increased his body mass.

  He said, ‘Somethin’ I can do for you?’

  ‘Not really.’

  Wayne shifted position, getting the crimp out of his neck. A froth of soap bubbles clung to his beard. He was semi-glaring at her, the way he did when something was bothering him, but he wasn’t sure what it was.

  She said, ‘Want a beer?’

  ‘You see any beer?’

  Where was this going? April had no idea.

  She said, ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘You sure? Take a good look around, sweetie.’

  April peered in as many directions as she could think of. She said, ‘Okay, I admit it - I don’t see any beer.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know. I guess because there isn’t any.’

  ‘Think about it. If I wanted a beer, wouldn’t I be drinking one?’ April shrugged.

  Wayne said, ‘You can shampoo my hair, if you want to.’

  Oh frabjus fucking day. April got down on her knees, squeezed the bottle of herbal shampoo as if it were Wayne’s throat. She told him to duck his head, and he did. She massaged the shampoo into his scalp, worked up a good lather. He had an incredibly gnarly head; his massive skull was as lumpy as a cobblestone road.

  ‘Rinse.’

  Wayne leaned over. His protruding belly was an obstacle, but he managed to submerge his head as far as his ears. April sluiced the water around. She pulled him back, squeezed a fat yellow worm of shampoo onto his head, and went back to work.

  ‘I’m clean,’ Wayne protested.

  ‘No you aren’t.’

  She twirled his soapy hair into elaborate twists, so his head looked a little like a lemon-meringue pie. ‘There we go, rinse, and you’re all done.’

  Wayne said, ‘Now you can bring me a beer.�
�

  Chapter 24

  Antique crime-kingpin Jake Cappalletti lived just outside the UEL, the University Endowment Lands. His small mansion had been built in 1912, renovated by Jake when he’d bought it, way back in’67. The hardwood floors, oak with gum trim, had been covered with expensive pure-wool wall-to-wall carpets. The drafty leaded-glass windows had been replaced by aesthetically pleasing and much warmer double-glazed, aluminum-framed plate glass. Jake was so old he often couldn’t remember how old he was. But he liked to think of himself as a modern, happenin’-type dude.

  The grounds, just over an acre of prime-view real estate, were surrounded by a towering evergreen hedge. Cleverly hidden in the dense shrubbery was Jake’s second line of defence - a twelve-foot-high chainlink fence, topped with ‘Screamin’ Eagle’ motion detectors, and coils of lethal razorwire. Security cameras surveyed the grounds. Jake’s hulking minions patrolled the perimeter at frequent-but-entirely-random intervals. The thugs were under strict orders to take no wounded.

  At the front of the house, there was an electronically controlled gate, and a manned gatehouse with a steel-clad door and bulletproof glass windows.

  Willows rode the unmarked Ford right up to the gate, so the heavy front bumper pushed the gate slightly off line. He rested his elbows on the horn, and peered impatiently through the windshield.

  A slick-haired punk named Rico Cordoba sauntered casually out of the gatehouse. Rico wore a sharkskin suit the colour of polished aluminum, a black silk shirt, and a skinny white leather tie. The sky was heavily overcast, but Rico was never without his Serengetti sunglasses. His nails were professionally manicured, his shoes polished so ruthlessly that the leather had the reflective qualities of a cheap mirror. Rico was a detail man. His toenails were as well-tended as his fingernails. Twice a week, he drove downtown and paid twenty dollars to have his nose hair clipped. His eyebrows were gelled.

  He cursed Willows with a death-stare, winked saucily at Parker, and went back into the gatehouse and pressed a green button. The gate swung open. Rico tried to wave the cops through, but too late; Willows had already gunned it up the crushed limestone driveway.