Memory Lane

by Laurence Gough

  The younger woman said, “May I help you?”

  Improvising, Ross said, “I’m interested in buying a watch.”

  She smiled. “For yourself?”

  “No, my girlfriend.” Ross leaned against the counter. The glass was flawlessly clean, except for his fingerprints. He said, “Something in the range of about fifty dollars.” Surreptitiously, he wiped his prints away with his elbows.

  The girl offered up a sweet, apologetic smile. “Tm afraid we don’t have anything in that price range. You might try Eaton’s, in the Oakridge mall.”

  “Yeah, okay. I’ll do that. Thanks.” Ross turned and walked away, pushed open the big glass door. Now, what was that all about? If he hadn’t spotted the cameras, would he have done something really bad?

  He told himself the answer was no.

  A woman with a body shaped like an inflatable hand grenade approached him from dead ahead. He veered towards the curb, but she had him in his sights and wasn’t about to let him go. The hem of her coat dragged on the sidewalk. The lenses of her glasses were as thick as the glass in the jewellery store’s plate-glass door. He experienced a moment of bewildered panic as she thrust something at him. A religious tract. He bolted down the street, turned into a coffee shop, bought a cup of coffee and sat down at a lonely table. The window was misted. The outside world might have been a gigantic aquarium. He added milk to his coffee. Small plastic bins by the cash register held plastic knives and forks, plastic spoons. He pulled the tract from his pocket and began to read.

  The end was nigh. Surprise, surprise. Was this supposed to be a news item? The end had always been nigh. Nigh was just around the corner from the day you were born. It was nigh-well inescapable, was nigh.

  He drank some more coffee. It was okay, but not quite as good as the coffee they served in the slammer. Hotter, though. His hand shook a little, as he thought about how close he’d come to walking straight over to the antique clock, picking it up and hurling it at a display case. Smash and grab. By now, they’d have had his stupid face on every television in town. Or, more likely, have him in cuffs. Or he’d have moved to the post-nigh phase of his life. He pictured, from the height of a stepladder, his bullet-riddled body lying on the sidewalk in a pool of his stupid blood. To die a natural death, shouldn’t that be every man’s holy grail?

  No matter how long it lasted, nothing was shorter than a life.

  Ross took his time with his coffee. He lit a cigarette and smoked it down. Shannon’s twenty lay at the bottom of his pocket. He was a man of property. He had no need to rob and steal.

  A thin black man wearing baggy red corduroy pants and a sleeveless T-shirt and an improbably thick gold chain had been sitting at the window table. When Ross had lit his cigarette, the man had glared at him. Now he got up, gave Ross another hard look, and swaggered out of the restaurant. Ross wiped away an arc of condensation from the window. The skinny black guy was standing by the curb, waiting for a break in the traffic.

  Ross went over to the cash register and inquired as to the restaurant’s refill policy. No refills. Outside, brakes screeched but no metal crumpled. The guy at the cash register didn’t even bother to look up. What was another near-miss? Ross paid for his fresh cup of coffee and went back to his seat. The black man lay on his belly in the middle of the street, about fifty feet from a black Honda with a frosted windshield that had stopped at an angle to the natural flow of traffic. The black wasn’t much thicker than a shadow. His arms and legs pointed in four different directions. Ross sat there, watching the drama unfold. A police car, an ambulance and a fire-engine-red hook-and-ladder chased their sirens down the street. The black was eased onto a gurney and driven away to be repaired or autopsied. A tow truck scooped up the battered Honda. Another ambulance carried away the Honda’s driver, who had not been wearing his seatbelt and as a consequence had suffered a grievous head wound. A fireman with a push broom made small talk with a traffic cop as he swept up bits of debris. A second fireman washed down the asphalt with a hose. A small, glittery object tumbled into the gutter. A shard of glass, probably.

  The fire truck left. The cop sorted out the backed-up traffic, climbed into his vehicle and drove away. Ross bought another cup of coffee, his third. He wasn’t sure why, but he was enjoying himself. He had no ambition but to sit there, drinking coffee and watching the world stumble by, until it was time for him to meet Shannon.

  Half an hour or so later he used the washroom, and when he came out two women were sitting at his table. His mug had been cleared away, his religious tract expropriated.

  He went back outside and walked slowly through the rain until he came to a small bookstore. He went inside. A man with pale blue eyes looked him over, nodded in a way that was neither here nor there. The man was tall, well over six feet. He wore a cream-coloured cardigan. Now he was looking at Ross as if he thought he’d met him somewhere before, but couldn’t recall the circumstances. Ross looked at magazines for a while and then moved down the ranks of shelves towards the back of the store. Finally he came to the section where the Westerns were shelved. Dusters, Garret used to call them. Or Oaters. They were the only books Garret ever read. He liked them because those were the days when men were men.

  Ross picked up a slim paperback called Tumbleweed. The art on the cover depicted a cowboy half-falling off a horse as he scooped up a redheaded beauty. There were Indians in the background. They were tiny and featureless but there were plenty of them, and in their own way they were so real he could almost hear them whooping. Ross had never read a Western, despite all the pressure Garret had put on him. He was more into trade paperbacks, what they called contemporary American fiction. Not that he read a lot of books. It was individual words that interested him, more than the art of stringing words together. He carried Tumbleweed back up the narrow aisle to the front of the store, and handed the blue-eyed man a ten-dollar bill. The man rang up the sale, slipped the receipt and a bookmark between the pages, and put the book in a brown paper bag with the store’s name and logo printed on it. He sealed the bag with half an inch of Scotch tape and handed the bag to Ross.

  The blue-eyed man said, “Enjoy.”

  Ross nodded. He walked out of the store carrying the book in his right hand. It had cost almost seven dollars, considerably more than he’d expected. But he knew almost nothing about the price of books. Although he had used the prison library from time to time, he was fairly certain this was the first book he’d ever actually bought, unless you counted comics and the odd magazine. As he walked down the street, he slipped the book out of the bag. It was two hundred and twenty-three pages long, but didn’t start until page nine. He worked out how much the book had cost, per page, and then stopped in the shelter of an awning and counted the words on a page and, after a few false starts, calculated to his satisfaction the fraction of a penny each word had cost him.

  He stuck the book in his jacket’s inside pocket, crumpled the bag into a ball and tossed it away.

  When he came even with the spot where the black pedestrian had come to grief, he crossed the sidewalk to the gutter and looked down. The glittery thing was the black’s gold chain. Ross knelt and scooped it up, gave it a shake. The boxy links were an eighth of an inch thick and half an inch wide. The metal, cold and heavy, weighed three or maybe four ounces.

  Ross stood up, glanced around. Nobody paid any attention to him. He found shelter in a doorway. The chain’s clasp had bent but was not broken. He fiddled with it for a few moments and then gave up and dropped the chain into his pocket. Man, but it was heavy.

  He walked a little further down the street, until he came to a hotel with a bar. Inside, a couple of guys, an older man and someone who could’ve been his son, but wasn’t, sat on stools at the bar. Ross sat down in a padded chair, at a small table made out of a thick sheet of glass perched on a round wooden stem. He lit a cigarette, blew smoke at the ceiling. He had put his hand in his pants pocket and was fondling his gold chain when a heavy-set woman wearing a short re
d skirt and black jacket came at him from the area of the bar. She stopped at his table, smiled tiredly down at him and then noticed his hand moving in his pocket, and looked away. Ross yanked the gold chain out of his pocket, laid it noisily on the table but kept playing with it, turning the links over and over in his hand. The chain was as supple as a snake. The woman eyed the fat gold links as she asked him what he wanted to drink.

  He put the chain back in his pocket. Flicked his cigarette at the ashtray, ordered a pint of draft beer.

  Pretty soon he felt as comfortable in the bar as he had at the coffee shop. He finished his pint, started another. The bar slowly filled up. Four elderly women sat down a few tables away, ordered glasses of white wine and chatted animatedly in a foreign language.

  An attractive woman wearing a dark blue suit and fluffy pink blouse thumped her fat leather briefcase down on a table, ordered a double vodka martini. She opened her briefcase, scrutinized the contents of a file folder. Her cell phone rang as her drink arrived. Her face suddenly had a pinched and angry look. She plucked the olive from the glass and tossed it in the ashtray, snatched up the phone. She listened for a moment and then spat out a few words and slammed the phone down on the table.

  Ross fumbled in his jacket pocket, cracked open Tumbleweed. The light was kind of dim, but manageable. He began to read.

  *

  The sky was a vast bowl of burnished gold. Nothing moved. As far as the eye could see, in any direction it fancied him to look, the land was featureless and still. But he knew he must not rely upon his senses, for this was Indian country, and he had heard much talk of…

  *

  Sixty-odd pages later, Ross finished his third pint of beer, and thumped the empty glass down on the table. He was out of cigarettes. The pints had left him feeling bloated and gassy.

  Outside, it was dark, and raining, and the sidewalks were crowded. A taxi crawled past. Ross raised his arm, shouted. A woman hurrying past nicked him with her umbrella. He peered up at the orange clock on top of City Hall. He was ten minutes late for his appointment with Shannon. Ten minutes and counting. The hotel was at Twelfth and Cambie. Zellers was twenty-nine blocks away.

  He folded his umbrella and began to run.

  Chapter 10

  The bedroom walk-in closet was crammed with Mooney’s uniforms, civilian clothing, a neoprene wetsuit. Parker searched methodically through the pockets. She turned up a dry-cleaning receipt, several dollars in loose change, a folder of paper matches from a downtown nightclub, contraceptives, a variety of types of lint.

  “Jack?”

  Willows sat on the bed, Mooney’s Sharp electronic data directory in hand. Mooney had a lot of friends, for a cop. Willows had been pushing buttons for several minutes and was only a third of the way through the alphabet.

  Parker said, “You know a place called L’affair?”

  Willows studied the logo. “Yeah, it’s a gay club on Past Broadway. Why?”

  She tossed him the packet of matches.

  Willows smiled. A classic clue. But what did it mean — other than that Mooney was gay?

  There are eleven hundred police officers in the VPD. Cops are always quitting or retiring, being replaced. It isn’t possible to know everyone on a force that size. Not that Willows wanted to know everyone. All police departments are essentially paramilitary organisations, extremely conservative in nature. Willows liked to think of himself as a liberal and a bit of a free-thinker. There were plenty of guys in the department that he didn’t get along with. He said, “Mooney was active in the union. I’ve seen him around. But I didn’t know him.”

  He was learning, though, thanks to the notebook. Mooney had known an awful lot of men, but hardly any women. If he had been gay, he wouldn’t have flaunted his sexuality. Willows worked his way through the ‘J’ and ‘K’ listings. Not many surnames started with ‘K’. There was no listing for Killer. He slipped the notebook into an evidence envelope and tossed the envelope in a cardboard box containing several other envelopes.

  Coat hangers rattled. Parker was having a good time in there. Willows unscrewed the cap from a plastic bottle of water. He sipped, screwed the cap back on, put the bottle in his jacket pocket. The uniforms had gone back to patrol, the CSU techs had left with their fingerprints and other booty. Bradley had returned to his office, and Eddy Orwell and Bobby Dundas were conducting a door-to-door of the nearby apartments.

  Parker backed out of the closet carrying a red-painted metal box about the size of a large lunch-bucket. A combination lock rattled. Willows retrieved the electronic notebook. He hit the recall button, tried ‘lock’ and then the letters ‘comb’.

  The word combination came up on the screen, above three sequences of two-digit numbers.

  11-14-36.

  Parker sat down on the bed. Willows read out the numbers and she dialled them and pulled on the lock’s hasp. The lock popped open. She lifted the hinged lid.

  The box contained a small-frame five-shot revolver and a cheap red plastic photo album with the words My Holidays stamped on the cover in gold. It was clear neither the gun nor the album had anything to do with the crime scene, but Willows put on a pair of latex gloves just to be on the safe side. The revolver had been made in Italy. He didn’t recognize the brand. There was rust on the barrel and one of the plastic grips was cracked. He flipped open the cylinder. The gun was loaded with 158-grain round-nose bullets.

  Parker said, “I’d guess he found that somewhere, decided to keep it in case he needed a throwaway…”

  She flipped open the album, and then slammed it shut. Her skin glowed.

  Willows said, “Now we know how Donald spent his holidays. And that he was definitely gay. We’re going to have to go through the whole thing, from cover to cover.”

  Parker gave him a look. He was right, and she knew it. Lust, and love, were wonderfully dependable motives. What she’d have to do, the investigative trick she’d have to perform, was concentrate on the faces. But the faces weren’t always where you wanted them to be…

  They went through the rest of the apartment, room by room. Mooney’s sole indulgence in life seemed to have been his sex life. He had a large-screen television, two expensive video recorders and a cabinet with smoked-glass doors that contained a substantial library of pornography in both VHS and Beta format.

  “The classics,” said Willows, as he ran a thumb over a dust-free plastic box.

  “We’d better go through his receipts,” said Parker. “He’s even got a foreign-language section. Some of this stuff probably came through the mails but I bet most of it is local. The dealer might be able to give us something.”

  “As long as it isn’t contagious.”

  Parker smiled. The photo album had been a real gut-wrencher, but her sense of humour was slowly coming back. She heard the apartment door swing open, and then Eddy Orwell’s booming voice.

  “Anybody home?”

  Orwell had his meaty arm casually draped across the shoulder of a skinny kid in his early twenties. The boy wore baggy orange shorts and a teal-blue Grizzlies T-shirt. He needed a shave. His shoulder-length hair was dirty and matted. He was barefoot. His toenails needed trimming.

  Willows said, “Who’s your new friend, Eddy?”

  “This’s Graham Aubert. He lives in the apartment right across the hall.” Orwell introduced Parker and Willows. He said, “Tell them what you told me, Graham.”

  “I was up late.” Graham offered a lopsided, slightly apologetic grin. “I’m unemployed, so I stay up late lots of times. More often than not, probably.”

  Willows nodded, but the boy had focused on Parker.

  Parker said, “Okay, you were up late…”

  “Yeah. Watching a tape of Reservoir Dogs. Have you seen it?” Parker shook her head.

  “I bought a copy as soon as it hit the shelves. I must’ve seen it twenty times. More than Pulp Fiction.” He scratched his belly. “You saw that one, I bet.”

  “Once,” said Parker.

&nbs
p; Graham nodded. “There’s probably only about fifty people in all of North America who didn’t see it. What a great movie.” He smiled, showing yellow teeth. “Did you like it? Did you think it was true to life?”

  “Uh…” Parker glanced at Willows. “It seemed very convincing.” Orwell said, “Anyway, Graham was watching the movie, and it was right at the part where there’s a big shootout…”

  “Everybody’s blasting away, but I got the sound turned down pretty low because it’s late, and the Leggatts have already made a lot of complaints, so I’m kind of on probation with the apartment manager, I gotta watch it or I’m gonna get evicted.”

  “The Leggatts’ apartment is directly above Graham’s,” explained Orwell.

  “They’re retired,” said Graham. “From life. You can’t come right out and ask people about stuff like that, so it took me about a year to figure out their routine, but they go to bed at ten o’clock on weeknights, sometimes stay up as late as eleven during the weekend.”

  Parker said, “Okay, we’ve established that you were watching a video and that you had the sound turned down. Then what?”

  “There was a bunch of shooting. In the movie. And then I heard a shot that was louder than the other shots. I mean, it wasn’t really loud. But it was a little louder than the others. And another thing, I got that movie memorized, not just the dialogue, but the music and sound effects, everything right down to the smallest detail. So not only was this particular shot louder than all the others, but it was out of place. I mean, it wasn’t supposed to be there.”

  “When you heard the shot, what time was it?”

  “In the movie?”

  “No, Graham. In the real world.”

  “I don’t know.” The boy sat down gingerly on the arm of a black leather chair from Ikea. “But I can figure it out.”

  “How can you do that?” said Parker sceptically.

  Graham smiled. “Well, see, I watched David Letterman, and Letterman’s show ends at twelve-thirty-five. I’d already put the tape — I’m talking about the Reservoir Dogs movie — in my VCR during a commercial break. I hit the play button as the Letterman credits rolled, just as his Worldwide Pants logo came on the screen. While the tape was running and the movie was cuing up, I went into the kitchen, tossed my sandwich in the microwave and got a beer out of the fridge.”