Memory Lane

by Laurence Gough

  Ross was distracted by a trio of young women who happened to jog past. Above the slap of their sneakers on the sidewalk, and the hiss of their skimpy garments and the sibilance of their chatter, he heard a sudden, heart-rending squawk. Where the small brown bird had been, a halo of startled feathers hung for a moment, and then slowly and silently drifted down. In the undergrowth, something scuttled furtively.

  Was that a speck of blood that glistened upon that spinning twig? Despite the lack of sirens or flashing lights, Ross was inexplicably drawn to the disaster. He was crossing the street when some small, abruptly detached thing tumbled to the sidewalk. A clue? He bent and picked up a petite leg that held no residual warmth. The black and curling claws were sharp as tacks. The knee joint moved smooth as silk in its minuscule socket as he repeatedly bent and straightened the leg. It was no puzzle as to why the limb had been discarded. Not a scrap of flesh clung to those diminutive and feeble bones.

  He stood there, the weightless fragment of corpse cupped in the palm of his hand. After a few moments he put the leg in his jacket pocket. By now the three joggers were mere specks of fluorescence in the distance. Ross’s mind was a blank. What should he do now?

  He lit a cigarette and smoked it halfway down, then turned his back on the hotel and began walking along the street. There was a weird-looking, kind of Jetsons-style futuristic apartment block on his left. The building stood on a pair of sturdy concrete legs, for a better view of the water. The façade was mostly glass. The balconies flared in and out; there were no straight lines, other than the verticals. Further on, there was a take-out Greek restaurant. Ross turned left, putting his back to the ocean. He walked past a dry cleaner’s, a grocery store, a small branch of a large bank and then the hard white lights of a chain fast-food restaurant. Across the street there was a Starbucks coffee shop, a barber’s. The barber’s red-and-white pole tried unsuccessfully to screw itself into the sidewalk.

  A rusty orange Datsun pulled into the Starbucks parking lot across the street. The Datsun was burning oil, and then it wasn’t. Kelly had killed the engine. The driver side door swung open. Kelly got out of the car, tossed his keyring high in the air and caught it neatly behind his back. He turned and looked directly at Ross and then strolled across the parking lot and disappeared inside the coffee shop.

  Ross waited for a break in the traffic. He trotted across the street and into the Starbucks. Kelly was sitting at a table near the back, facing the door. Two large paper cups stood on the table. As Ross drew near he said, “I bought you a latte, is that okay?”

  Ross sat down, angled his chair so he had his back to the wall and was facing both Kelly and the door. He pried the lid off his coffee cup, sniffed.

  “I sprinkled some cinnamon on top,” said Kelly. “Most people I know like chocolate, but I figured you for a cinnamon kind of guy.”

  Ross sipped at his coffee. Good. He stirred in the cinnamon with a slim wooden stick.

  Kelly said, “Shannon likes chocolate. Can’t get enough of the stuff, piles it on, she might as well drink a melted candy bar…”

  Ross told himself to do what he’d done in the joint, when he had no idea what to do. Which was, keep his face blank and his mouth shut tight, his ears wide open.

  “She’s a lady who likes her sweets,” said Kelly. He smiled, and lifted his paper cup in a casual toast, pointed at Ross with the pinkie finger of his free hand. “She likes her sweeties, too.”

  Ross didn’t know quite how to respond to the remark, or if he should try. Out on the sidewalk, an old man shuffled past. He stopped by a table, picked up a cardboard cup and looked deep inside, carried the cup over to the gutter and spilled out a mouthful of coffee, gave the cup a shake and resumed his journey. Ross said, “What’d he do that for?”

  “What?”

  “An old guy just walked past, he grabbed a paper cup off a table, poured out the last of the coffee and stuck the cup in his pocket. What’s he want with an empty cup?”

  “He’s a beggar.” Kelly sized Ross up. “You been away for a few years. People don’t like to touch hands anymore. It’s AIDS, maybe. You wanna make a few bucks, you gotta have a paper cup, something people can stick the money in without risking contact.”

  “Makes sense,” said Ross, with more conviction than he felt.

  “Disease,” said Kelly. “That’s what people are afraid of, disease. Lethal diseases. Who can blame them? Not me, I’ll tell you that much.”

  The jaunty topping of foam on Ross’s latte had collapsed in upon itself and assumed a somewhat bedraggled look. Ross sipped delicately. His upper lip was freckled with cinnamon.

  “Nice haircut.”

  “Yeah — you like it?”

  “Spooky, how much you look like Garret. Even the way you walk, that roll of the shoulders, kind of a bold swagger.”

  Ross said, “You notice things like that, do you?”

  “Shannon mentioned it, pointed it out to me.” Kelly showed his teeth, but the display of enamel had nothing to do with a smile. “You calling me a queer?”

  “Hell no,” said Ross.

  “’Cause gay is one thing I’m definitely not.” Kelly thumped Ross on the shoulder with a lightning punch that would have hurt even more, had it not been so friendly. “I’m cheerful,” he said, “but you better not call me gay.”

  “Got it,” said Ross.

  “Think we could get along, you and me?”

  Ross shrugged, buying time. He contemplated his choice of lies. “I don’t mean you have to fall in love with me,” said Kelly. “I’m asking, could you stand me long enough so we could do a job together?”

  “Bust the Crown house?”

  “You’re way ahead of me, aren’t you?” Kelly shook his head in admiration. “Man, you’re so far up the road all I can see is dust.” He drained his latte and crumpled the cardboard container in his fist. “Yeah, I’m talking about the Crown house. Home invasion, they call it. A standard break-and-enter, but you stick around for a few hours, get to know the victims.” His smile was grim. “It’s a friendlier kind of crime, in a way…”

  “The two hundred grand, whatever’s left of it by now, what makes you think it’d be in the house?”

  “That’s where I’d keep that kind of money, cash that didn’t belong to me, big bucks that some innocent person had died for. But what difference does it make where they’ve got it? See, that’s why there has to be two of us, in case the cash is in a safety-deposit box or somewhere else off the premises. So if hubby has to go somewhere to get it, one of us can stay with him while the other holds hands with Nancy, the intention being to give him a reason to hurry back home.”

  “How do we divvy up the cash?” said Ross.

  “Three-way split. Shannon gets the same as us because without her we’d have nothing.”

  Kelly kept working on the paper cup, his big hands compressing it into a smaller and smaller ball. “I figure, if the money ain’t in the house, that you should stay with Nancy. Shannon wouldn’t trust me to be nice, but she’d figure you’d be a dependable babysitter because you’re already getting as much hot sex as you can handle…”

  “Makes sense to me,” said Ross.

  Kelly studied him closely, seemed satisfied with what he saw. “I got a plan, a real good plan.” Kelly’s pale eyes glittered. “See, I rented a bunch of movies with the same kind of plot, about people who want valuable things other people have got but maybe don’t deserve to keep. In these movies, the people who do the stealing are the good guys, so their plans always work out pretty much as expected. I watched some of those movies five or six times, Ross. I took notes, written notes about the things these people had to do to get what they were after. And also, how things sometimes went wrong. In other words, I’m working both sides of the street, the sunny side and the dark side. You ever notice how, in movies, things always go wrong for the bad guys?”

  Ross said, “It’s been a long time since I’ve watched a movie about bad guys.”

 
“What I did, I went to a drugstore and I bought a special notebook and three different colour ballpoint pens, red, green, and black. Whenever the movie bad guys, the criminals, whenever they did something that was smart, I wrote it down on the page in green ink. They made a mistake, or did something stupid that came back to haunt them, I used the red pen. C’mon back to Shannon’s, I’ll show what I figured out, see what you think.”

  Ross said, “Wait a minute. What about the black pen, when did you use the black pen?”

  “Well, what I meant to do, I was going to use it to write down stuff that happened differently than was expected, because of unforeseeable events.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, for example, a sudden change in the weather. Like a thunderstorm, where a bolt of lightning knocks down a tree that falls across the road. Or an unexpected downpour causes a flood that takes out a bridge. Stuff like that.”

  “Acts of God,” said Ross.

  “Or a little girl walks into the path of an onrushing getaway car, or some guy’s coming to the house to repair the furnace, but nobody knows about it, and it turns out the guy is a martial-arts expert…” By now the paper cup had been crushed into a ball about the size of a marble. Kelly began to pluck at it, as if he hoped to reconstruct it, bring it back to life.

  Watching him, Ross was reminded of the Budweiser label.

  Kelly said, “Almost all the movies had stuff that happened that you could never in a million years guess would happen. Weird coincidences. Or like you said, acts of God. So I never did use the black pen. I figured, what was the point? There’s always the element of chance and you can’t do nothing about it.” He put the coffee cup down on the table. He’d done the best he could to repair the damage he’d caused, but the cup was so battered and wrinkled that it looked as if it had aged a thousand years. Ross sympathized.

  Summing up, Kelly said, “Nobody can predict the future.”

  “Or if somebody could, he’d be down at the track, making bets.” Kelly stood up, stuck his hands in his jacket pockets. Ross hoped like hell that nothing showed in his face as he considered the absolute predictability of Kelly’s future. Maximum security, or a bullet.

  Kelly pushed his chair away from the table, legs squeaking across the floor like a quartet of tortured mice. Ross gritted his teeth. Kelly said, “I’m going back to Shannon’s. Want a ride?”

  “Why not?” said Ross, acting casual, though he felt as tangled up inside as the ivy clinging to the Sylvia Hotel. He’d been on standby, a bystander alertly waiting for something to happen, an opportunity to react. Now, finally, the pace had begun to accelerate, they were closing in on the narrow end of the funnel.

  As Ross trailed along in the wake of Kelly’s broad shoulders, he thought again that it might be wise to formulate a plan all of his own. But what was the point? Hadn’t Kelly said that things always went wrong for the bad guys? But that was in movies. Ross crouched and looked at himself in the Datsun’s side mirror. That was him, all right. But who was he?

  Depending on your perspective, you could muster a pretty solid argument that he, too, was one of the bad guys.

  Maybe, just maybe, he’d turn out to be the baddest of them all.

  Chapter 24

  Jerry Goldstein’s list of forty-one restaurants had been split, according to the city’s geography, among the three teams of detectives. Orwell had whined so loudly about the workload that he and Bobby had been made responsible for only thirteen restaurants, all of them concentrated in the downtown core, whereas the other two teams each had to check out fourteen restaurants spread over a wider area.

  Willows and Parker were working the southeast side of the city. They’d decided to start with the most distant restaurant in their sector, an Italian ristorante called Romeo’s, that was so far out on Kingsway it was within an accurate pistol shot of the city boundary. Parker’s thinking was that the least convenient locations were most likely to yield positive results. Willows found her logic well-nigh infallible.

  Kingsway is a six-lane strip of asphalt flanked by car lots and motels, malls ranging in size from modest to gargantuan. Willows kept pace with the traffic. He slowed and signalled a left turn as he spotted the restaurant’s neon sign, the off-street parking lot. He waited for a break in the oncoming traffic, then lost patience and hit the lights. He burned a little of the taxpayer’s rubber as he aggressively made his turn. Parker was already unbuckling her seatbelt as he pulled into the lot and killed the engine.

  The restaurant had looked small from the front, but Willows saw that the building, though narrow, was deep. They walked around to the front entrance. Music stolen from an elevator leaked fuzzily from a pair of exterior speakers. The plate-glass door was smeared with fingerprints. They pushed on through.

  A small-scale Luciano Pavarotti bore cheerfully down on them, his ruddy, bearded face barely able to contain his smile. He took Parker gently by the arm, then seized her again and more forcibly with his dark and glittery eyes, and told her in a voice soft as a brand-new feather pillow that she was an extremely lovely woman, as desirable a dish as he had ever seen. His name was Leone, the lion. His great desire was to put her in a window table, that she might draw a crowd, and make him rich beyond his wildest dreams. Parker showed the lion her tin.

  Leone stepped back. His lustrous eyes lost their court and spark. It was as if a glass of champagne had suddenly gone flat. He clapped his beefy hands together with great energy, as if meeting himself for the first time.

  “This can’t be about the kitchen! Not again! Dio mios! Is it my fault that these tiny scuttling creatures love me so much? I beg of you, what more can a man do, for God’s sake!”

  Willows tweaked a colour photograph, a no-nonsense head-and-shoulders shot of Donald E. Mooney, out of a buff envelope. “Do you know this man?”

  “He’s with the health department?”

  “You tell me.”

  The restaurateur tilted his glossy head towards the photograph, studied it as carefully as any reasonable person might expect him to. Regretfully, he said, “No, I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t know him?”

  Leone shook his head. “No, I don’t believe I do.” He moved his bulky upper body in such a way as to shake off any hint of culpability. “Should I know him, do you think?”

  Willows slid the photograph back into the envelope. He withdrew a copy of Ray Waddington’s sketch.

  “How about him?”

  “Do I know him?”

  “That’s what we want to know,” said Parker.

  “No, never. Did he make a complaint? Was there something he found in his food?”

  Willows, offended by the proprietary way that Leone had taken Parker by the arm, said, “Yes, it was something truly horrible that he found in his food.”

  *

  Trident Steak & Seafood was on Forty-ninth Avenue, just east of Knight. From the street, the restaurant looked closed. If there were lights on inside, they were dim bulbs indeed. Willows tried the door. It was unlocked. He stepped inside, glanced around.

  Parker said, “Hello? Anybody home?”

  The door creaked shut behind them, the click of the latch small as an afterthought. The cash register was dead ahead; to the left there were a dozen tables and a small bar. The tables had been set. Glass and cutlery gleamed in the dim light from the windows. Dozens of glasses hanging from wooden racks above the bar reflected spots of green and red from the ship’s lights on either side of the bar. Dehydrated starfish, clamshells, glass floats, sand dollars and bits of driftwood had been caught in coarse green netting. Fleets of ships that had unwisely sailed into glass bottles hung from near-invisible lengths of fishing line. Willows reached up and touched a bottle with the tips of his fingers, made it sway gently, so the vessel within seemed to rise and fall upon a shifting sea.

  A door behind the bar swung open, admitting a stub of a man spotlighted by a beam of watery grey light. The man wore a bright yellow rain-slicker and matching so
u’wester. He kicked the door shut behind him, grunted as he lifted a heavy cardboard box up on the bar. He was in his mid-sixties. His full beard was silver shot through with parallel streaks of black. His ruby lips clutched a smoking corncob pipe. His eyes were bright blue. From the knee down, his left leg was a sturdy wooden peg with a shiny brass-bound tip. He sliced open the top of the box with a clasp knife, tossed the knife on the bar and reached inside. He grunted again as he pulled out a six-pack of Heineken beer. He began to stow the bottles in the bar cooler.

  Parker said, “Excuse me…”

  “Christ! Repel all boarders!” A trio of bottles rattled on the bar. The clasp knife’s blade flashed green and red.

  Willows said, “Police!” He flipped open his badge-case, identified himself and then Parker.

  The blue eyes sized them up. Willows first, then Parker.

  Parker said, “Are you the owner?”

  “Moniker’s Ahab O’Brien. And yes, I am the owner. Lock, stock and octopus, she all belongs to me.” Sparks bubbled in the bowl of his pipe. He exhaled a fogbank. “What can I do for ye, mateys?”

  “Ahab?” said Parker with a trace of disbelief.

  “I had it legally changed, after I lost my pin. Leg, to the likes of you. I was a landlubber back at the time. A longshoreman, and a good one, until a damn cable slipped and a pallet-load of cinderblock fell on my leg and sheared it off clean as a cleaver, just below the knee. I’d always talked about owning a restaurant. I was halfway through my rehab when I saw that the chance to live my dream had fallen right out of the sky. By the time I got out of the hospital, rehab had evolved into Ahab. My lawyer, God bless his soul if he’s got one, negotiated a fat lump-sum payment from Workers’ Comp. I’ve been in business coming up eight years. I used to open at eleven for lunch, but now it’s just dinner, five to midnight, no reservations. In a few more hours, they’ll be lined up at the door, just you wait and see.”

  Willows sat down on a padded barstool. He reflected that he had never met a barstool he didn’t like. Feeling quite at home, he showed Ahab the photo of Donald E. Mooney.