Memory Lane

by Laurence Gough

  “What was that all about?”

  “Remember the guy at L’affair? The tall guy with the bandit moustache, shaved head, black leather vest?”

  “C’mon, Claire, you’re going to have to do better than that. There must’ve been a hundred bald guys with moustaches.”

  “No shirt, lots of chest hair, black leather shorts. I’m surprised you don’t remember him, because he liked you a lot, Jack.”

  “Oh, him.”

  “That’s right. Him.”

  “What’d he want?”

  Parker said, “He just identified Mooney from our photo. Remembered his first name, that he was in law enforcement…”

  “Yeah?”

  Parker glanced around. The squad room was empty except for the civilian staff, who were down at the far end of the squad room, out of earshot. Even so, she lowered her voice to a whisper. “He identified Rimmer, too.”

  “By name?”

  “He knew his first name, but that’s all. I got the impression he doesn’t know Rimmer’s a cop.”

  Willows said, “That’s okay with me.”

  *

  Parker signed a sludge-coloured Ford out of the police garage, rattled the keys as she walked across the oil-stained concrete towards the vehicle. She waited until Willows had fastened his seatbelt and then pulled out of the slot and drove slowly towards the exit. The first drops of rain pebbled the windshield as they left the building. She switched on the wipers, braked for a jaywalking cop who was bowed under the weight of a cardboard box overflowing with file folders.

  Parker made a right and then another right, came to a full stop and then gunned it, taking advantage of a break in the traffic. She made a left on Main and drove south across the breadth of the city, all the way to South East Marine Drive. She made another left, drove a little less than a mile and made a right. They drove past several blocks of light industry and warehouses. Parker slowed as the asphalt ran out and the road narrowed to a single lane of loose gravel generously studded with potholes.

  Willows braced himself against the dashboard. The Ford bottomed out as they hit a particularly deep hole. Muddy water obliterated the view. Parker adjusted the wiper speed. They drove past a fire-blackened mattress, a broken jigsaw puzzle of jagged concrete chunks. A length of seine net hung between two small trees. Caught in the net were the black feathers and white bones and dull yellow beak of a small bird. Parker hit the brakes. The Ford shuddered to a stop with the front bumper overhanging a greasy clay slope that led down to the slow-moving river.

  The Fraser was much narrower here, split in two arms by Mitchell Island, named after Alex Mitchell, the first man to farm the island’s lush soil. Times had changed. A hundred years ago the island had been covered with small cedar and spruce trees. Now the chief geographical feature was a mountain of junked automobiles.

  The airport was on the far side of the river, miles away.

  Parker turned off the engine. They got out of the car. A narrow path wound down to the river. More slabs of concrete had been dumped along the bank to slow erosion caused by marine traffic.

  The tide was on the ebb. The silt-brown waters moved swiftly towards the sea. Twenty feet offshore, a fourteen-foot aluminium boat powered by an outboard motor idled against the current. The leather-boy from L’affair was at the tiller. He’d changed into his day clothes — cuffed jeans and a red-and-black lumberman’s jacket, a well-used Mr. Lube baseball cap. But that was him, all right. Thick neck, chipmunk cheeks, pug nose. He was in his late twenties, too far away to see the colour of his eyes. Parker made her way gingerly down the path towards the water’s edge. Willows followed close behind.

  The prop kicked up a little water as their informant cut in towards the shore. Despite the vagaries of the current, he managed to manoeuvre the little boat until it was almost, but not quite, close enough to touch. Smiling, his teeth white against the black moustache, he said, “This is as close as we’re going to get, my friends.”

  The chunks of concrete were damp, slippery with a layer of green mould. Willows crouched low. The boat’s motor burbled throatily. A flagpole-sized log drifted by. The river was swollen with rain and snowmelt; the water was moving along at a pretty good clip.

  “What’s your name?” Parker had to raise her voice almost to a shout in order to be heard above the sound of the river and the motor.

  “Milt. They call me Milt.” He grinned mischievously. “Please don’t call me Milton. No last names, okay? Not that I’m wanted for anything serious…”

  Parker smiled, “Okay, Milt. What d’you know that you want to tell us?”

  “Donald was a friend of mine.” A minor change in the speed or direction of the current caused the nose of the boat to veer suddenly closer. Milt shifted into reverse gear and twisted the throttle. The prop churned up a froth of dirty water, and the boat’s stern dipped dangerously low. Milt throttled down, shifted gears. The boat eased back into position. He said, “Was Don a friend of yours?”

  Willows shook his head. “I didn’t know him.”

  “I thought all you cops knew each other.”

  “All eleven hundred of us? I couldn’t stand having that many friends, Milt.”

  “Yeah, well. Don kept pretty much to himself, I guess. Who can blame him?” Milt’s face was tight. He said, “The department isn’t exactly at the cutting edge of political correctness, is it?”

  Parker said, “Milt? We’re all here for the same reason. Because a man’s life was taken and we want to bring his killer to justice.”

  “Yeah, right.” The boat moved away and then back. A deep-sea tugboat pushed upstream against the current and tide. A hundred yards behind the tug, an empty barge kept pace. Willows hunted for the towrope but couldn’t find it. But he knew it was there.

  “The other picture you showed me back at the bar,” said Milt to Parker, “the picture of the old guy, the guy wearing the glasses. Mark.” He paused. “I kept thinking about trying to remember where I’d seen him.”

  Parker waited.

  “There’s a place out in the Fraser Valley that hosts parties. Usually there’s only four a year, one every three months. It’s a couple of hundred bucks to get in, there’s a cash bar…”

  Willows said, “What’s the attraction, Milt?”

  “Well, it’s kind of exclusive. You’ve got to be a member or the guest of a member. No pun intended. Once you’re in, anything goes. There’s films, live entertainment. You can do whatever you want, wherever you want to do it, with whoever you want to do it to. Or you can just watch, if that’s what makes your heart turn over… The guy in the picture, Mark, is a watcher.”

  “Is he a regular, at these parties?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I only went just that one time, about six weeks ago. I was a guest, a friend of mine invited me.”

  “So the next party’s in about another six weeks?”

  “Somewhere in there.”

  “Out in the valley?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. And that’s all I’m gonna tell you.”

  “Tell us who hosted the party,” said Willows. “Nobody’ll ever know you spoke to us.”

  “Tell you what — I’ll think about it.” Milt threw them a mock-salute, pushed the tiller towards Willows. The prow swung around, towards deeper water.

  Willows reasoned that if Milt was so eager to end the conversation, he must know something worth talking about. Impetuously, he lunged forward. His hands clasped the gunwale as the length of his body hit the water. The boat heeled over, and then surged forward. Parker shouted words only she understood. Willows’ hip thumped against the side of the boat. He felt himself being pulled forward through the water. He caught a quick glimpse of the metal-studded leather sole of Milt’s heavy boot. A jolt of pain ran up his arm. He fell into the churning water, heard the thrashing of the propeller and felt the swirling water slap his cheek as the boat accelerated past him. He spat a mouthful of river, lifted his head to get his bearings. The boat was already a silv
ery-white dot in the distance. He was facing downstream, drifting along at a good pace. He flexed his fingers. All present and accounted for. He kicked out, and realized that he had lost a brogue.

  Chapter 17

  Ross knew the drill. Back there in the slammer, Garret had told him how it went over and over again, so many times that Ross had inadvertently memorized just about every last word. But sometimes Garret had given him a slightly different version of the same story, changed some small, insignificant detail. For example, he often exaggerated his sexual skills and appetites and then felt bad a day or two later, for talking that way, and contritely insisted that none of it was true.

  Ross would look up from his hardcover Roget’s. “So, what’re you sayin’, that she’s a virgin?”

  “Yeah. I guess so.”

  “A twenty-three-year-old virgin.”

  “Right.”

  Ross elbowed Garret in the ribs. “As far as you know, she’s a virgin. Which, if it’s the truth, would be entirely your fault.”

  Then Garret’s fists would come up, and Ross would back off, keep himself looking serious as he apologized, admitted he’d stepped over the line…

  The way it was supposed to go today, on their first date, Shannon would splash back most of the second bottle of wine, pay the bill with her Visa card and then grab his hand and tell him she wanted to take him downtown, show him something, if that was okay with him. Getting him to cooperate, involving him, turning him from a slack-assed bystander into an active participant. It was the same technique they’d used in prison, during group counselling sessions.

  So, Ross sat there in his chair, relaxed, his legs splayed out in front of him under the table, enjoying himself quite a bit as he watched her down glass after glass until finally both the bottle and glass were empty. She waved the waitress over, requested the bill.

  Ross asked — a hypothetical question — if he could help out with that, maybe take care of the tip.

  Shannon waved him away, hauled out her well-used Visa card. As they were going out the door, she touched his arm and told him there was something downtown that she wanted to show him.

  Teasing her a little, Ross said, “Oh yeah? Like what?”

  “You’ll see!” Shannon was not one of those rare, unfortunate women who are impervious to the effects of alcohol. She was clearly feeling a little loose at the knee. Her tongue was not quite in sync with her brain. She mumbled a few words Ross wasn’t able to stitch into a comprehensible sentence, as she charted an unlikely course across the parking lot. Ross still had the keys. He unlocked the passenger side door and helped her into the car. A guy in a blood-smeared apron leaned against the restaurant’s open kitchen door, smoking a cigarette. He smiled indolently at Ross. Was this the fellow who’d cooked his chicken? He hoped not. Shannon leaned across the seat to unlock the door for him. Her skirt rode high.

  Ross was fast becoming a fan of time travel. He believed himself more than ready for their next destination.

  Following Shannon’s slurred and frequently contradictory instructions, Ross drove deep into the heart of the downtown core and right out the other side. Cruising north on Burrard, he couldn’t help noticing that the street had lost an awful lot of its down-home charm. Still following Shannon’s directions, he hung a left. Immediately he was caught up in an artful web of one-way streets, roundabouts and cul-de-sacs. Against all odds, he eventually found himself on the right street. He pulled up in front of a tall, bulky building that was thickly covered in ivy. Big ivy. Some of the vines were thicker than his wrist. Could this be the love-nest Garret spoke of in such glowing terms?

  He killed the Saab’s engine and followed Shannon inside the building. Three or four steps had to be climbed to reach the lobby. The lobby was small, plenty of dark wood and subdued lighting. This was definitely the hotel Garret had told him about. But to his surprise Shannon veered away from the front desk.

  He followed her down a long corridor, into the bar. She made a beeline for a window table, and he couldn’t really blame her — despite the inclement weather, the view of the harbour was not much short of spectacular. But the table, like all the other window tables, was occupied. By Kelly. Shannon sat down, shrugged out of her coat. They smiled at each other. She said a few words, he turned and squinted across the smoky room, peered through a pair of binoculars fashioned from his hands. He waved casually at Ross. Meanwhile a waiter in black pants and a white shirt moved in on Shannon. The guy was already in third gear, accelerating fast. Ross loitered. But when Shannon waved him over, he was there in a jiffy, quick as a well-trained yo-yo on a very tight string.

  Shannon ordered coffee, cream and sugar. Ross said he’d have a glass of beer, something domestic, whatever was on tap. She cancelled the coffee, ordered a dry white wine.

  “Ross, I think you’ve already met my brother, Kelly.”

  Ross nodded. Kelly slouched low in his chair, arms bulging dramatically, his purple golf shirt rippled by washboard stomach muscles. A tick too much time went by before he offered his hand. All that beef. Ross expected the handshake to shatter a random selection of his smaller bones, and it was true that Kelly’s hand had all the flex of a chunk of kiln-dried maple. But the man had a grip like a Prozac jellyfish that belied his carved-from-granite appearance. And he had a nice warm smile, too. Ross had met the guy’s identical twin brother in the joint, plenty of times. The whisper-quiet, kill-you-in-a-minute crowd. But why should Kelly find him objectionable? Merely because his sister was drunk, in broad daylight, in a hotel, with a parolee she hardly knew? Ross had first-hand knowledge of where that kind of thinking could lead a careless person. Straight to emergency, so the trauma unit could get busy extracting pieces of chair from his brain.

  It was a small table, but Ross did what he could to distance himself from Kelly. He shifted his chair so he could more easily soak up the view, and not quite so easily be kicked between the legs.

  Shannon said, “You guys do recognize each other, I hope?”

  Chuckling inanely, blue eyes sparkling with amusement, Kelly reluctantly shook his unnaturally blond, buzz-cut head. A mostly full longneck bottle of Budweiser stood on the table by his right elbow. He’d been picking at the label, but not getting anywhere, possibly because his fingernails were chewed to the quick. “Yeah, I remember him. Your new house guest, right? Garret’s buddy. The ex-con.” Ross lit a cigarette.

  “You two’ve got an awful lot in common,” said Shannon.

  “We do?” Kelly sounded a tad doubtful. He held the longneck between his thumb and index finger. He lifted the bottle to his mouth. The waiter was back. Shannon picked up her wine glass and dunked her nose into it, like one of those goofy mechanical birds that don’t know when to stop. Ross sipped at his beer. He smoked his cigarette. Down by the beach, a loving couple strolled hand in hand, oblivious to the rain. So sweet. He drank a little more beer, just a sip. He counted nine freighters in the harbour, great big go-anywhere deep-sea monsters.

  Kelly had resumed destroying his Budweiser label. The man was on a mission. Tiny pieces of silvery paper littered the table.

  Shannon said, “What you’ve got in common is, you’re both my tenants.”

  Kelly rotated his bottle a quarter-inch.

  Ross said, “How d’you mean?”

  “I’m living in the basement suite,” said Kelly. He gave Ross a look that measured him to the tenth of an inch.

  Ross went back to admiring the view. On the far side of the street there was a strip of anaemic-looking grass, a few spindly trees, an unoccupied park bench. A blue-and-white cruised slowly past, the cop’s face a pale blur behind the rain-swept glass. The cop was sitting bolt upright, as if he’d just come on shift.

  Ross thought about the Saab. The gas tank was three-quarters full. The keys were in his jacket pocket. What if he drained his beer, asked Shannon to order another for him, mentioned that he had to take a leak and would be back in a minute, jumped in the Saab and blew town?

  He drained his
beer. Said, “I gotta take a leak.” The waiter was right behind him, within easy reach. Ross touched his arm. “Bring me another beer. Make it a pint this time.”

  The waiter nodded, scooped up Ross’s empty glass. Ross said, “Where’s the john?” The waiter directed him towards the lobby. Ultra perfecto. Except, he really did have to go to the washroom. But that was okay. He could make a side trip on his way out.

  But as he stood at the urinal, he realized he’d left his jacket on the chair back there in the bar. Lordy. He zipped up, washed and dried his hands and ran his fingers through his hair.

  As he left the washroom, he saw that Kelly was leaning far out over the table so he could keep an eye on the washroom door. Kelly waved coquettishly, gave Ross an ironic smile. Even at that distance, his teeth looked big as sugar cubes.

  Ross walked back to his chair, sat down. Kelly was still smiling, but there was something weird about his smile. As Ross stared at him, his front teeth fell apart, dissolved into a gooey white mess. Kelly reached out, grabbed a few more sugar cubes from the bowl and popped them into his mouth.

  Now what? Ross sipped at his new beer.

  Kelly used the edge of his hand to bulldoze the pieces of label off the table. Ross expected him to scoop them up in his other hand, but Kelly was content to let his litter drift to the carpet. He said, “You and Garret were pals. Did he ever talk about the armoured-car robbery he and that other kid, Billy, tried to pull off?”

  “From time to time.”

  “He tell you about the two hundred grand that went missing?”

  Ross nodded. “Yeah, he might’ve mentioned it, once or twice.” Once or twice every hour or so, that is.

  “He tell you what happened to it?”

  “Yeah, he did. He even told me where it is. But I spent it already, on lottery tickets. So don’t get your hopes up.”

  Kelly gave him an iceberg look. Shannon playfully slapped her brother’s arm. “Leave him alone, quit bothering him.”

  “Am I bothering you, Ross?”