Funny Money, page 19
part #12 of Willows and Parker Mystery Series
She hunted through the cheap white-painted metal medicine cabinet, searching for whatever she could find. Rusty nail clippers, Irish Spring soap, several empty Aspirin bottles, an empty floss container …
She went back into the kitchen. The oven apparently didn’t work, and neither did two of the four burners. She was starving, but there was nothing in the cupboards but a dented tin of tomato soup and an unopened box of Mini Ritz Bits, sandwiches made of Ritz crackers and peanut butter. The fridge was empty except for a litre of mineral water and a block of unsalted butter. The freezer contained a tray of shrunken ice cubes and a bag of Jolly Green Giant peas buried inside a huge lump of ice and frost.
She’d paid for Tim’s lunch but still had almost a hundred dollars in her pocket. She went over to a window, pushed aside the curtain and looked out. The night sky was dark and close, and it was raining hard, beating down on the narrow sidewalk that ran between the houses, making the dark-green leaves of the bushes in the neighbours yard shudder spasmodically. What time was it? The glowing red numbers of an alarm clock on the floor by the narrow bed tinted the white sheets pink. She knelt down and picked the clock up and turned it in her hand. It was just past midnight and the mall would be closed by now. She was too tired to wander around in the rain, looking for a convenience store, so she went back into the kitchen to heat up the soup.
After she ate, she watched an old black-and-white movie on TV for half an hour or so, then dragged herself off the sofa and undressed and crawled into Tim Shepherd’s bed. The sheets were cold and felt slightly damp. She lay there, shivering, as the bed slowly warmed up. The floor above her creaked as someone walked past. A short burst of laughter was followed by a long silence. Shadows crawled swiftly across the ceiling as a car made a U-turn in front of the house. She shut her eyes, and there was Nick.
He’d told her his parents lived in a farming community a couple of hours’ drive east of the city. Had they been contacted by the police? Not that it mattered, because Nick said they hated him, and didn’t care if he lived or died. She imagined a pauper’s funeral, cremation, an unmarked grave. She hadn’t been to church since she was a small child. She hardly ever thought about God, and wasn’t at all sure she believed in him. But there was no harm in a little insurance. She clasped her hands together and shut her eyes and prayed for Nick’s soul. At times he’d been meaner than a snake, but there were other times when he’d been as kind and loving as an angel. Mostly, he’d been thoughtless and carefree. Was that such a terrible crime? She hoped not, for her own sake as much as for his.
Her prayer for Nick dissolved into tears. When she finally stopped crying, she flopped the pillow over, and curled up like a baby. Her face softened. Lines of tension faded. Her fleeting youth was recaptured. Her breathing steadied, and she eased into a deep and dreamless sleep.
Chapter 36
Bradley’s arthritic foot woke him at a few minutes past five. He lay there in the dark for a quarter of an hour, willing himself back to sleep. Not this time. The pain, sharp and persistent, ran in piercing, thread-thin lines through the joints of his toes and into the swollen ball of his foot. Defeated, he rolled out of bed and limped into the bathroom and turned on the shower, adjusting the water until it was as hot as he could stand it. Heat always offered a degree of comfort, but from day to day it was impossible to say how helpful it would be. Sometimes a few minutes’ work with the hair dryer could blast the pain entirely away, but the next day the treatment would be useless. Bradley suspected it all depended on his state of mind. He knew from past experience that today was going to be about as bad as it got, no matter how many Tylenols he sprinkled on his breakfast-table Bran Flakes.
*
As it happened, Bradley’s day started with such a flurry of activity that he forget all about his pain. The Province had somehow obtained a morgue photo of Nicholas Partridge, and a colour shot of his missing girlfriend, Chantal. Wedged into the bottom right corner of Chantal’s picture was an inch-square black-and-white picture of Pinky Koblansky. Bradley’s body temperature and pulse rate skyrocketed as he saw that Koblansky was credited with Chantal’s photo. He scanned the accompanying article, but it was just a rehash of known facts and contained no revelations.
Bradley flipped through the stack of pink message slips on his desk. The Province piece had resulted in a flurry of calls and sightings. So far, none of them had panned out, but that could change at any minute.
He picked up the paper again and turned to page five. A rookie crime reporter had interviewed Pinky Koblansky at length, but it was a puff piece, a waste of time unless you were looking for a little light humour as you rode the bus to work. Or was he wrong about that? He turned back to the page-one photo. The picture of Chantal had been taken from an odd angle, as if the photographer had been standing high up on a stepladder. Chantal’s shoulders and upper arms were bare. The longer Bradley looked at the photo, the more it bothered him. It had been tightly cropped, and the background was a field of impenetrable black. Somebody had manipulated the print to eliminate the background. As well, the softness and intimacy of expression on Chantal’s face made Bradley certain she wasn’t aware that her picture was being taken. He tilted the page to the watery grey light coming from the window behind him.
The photo had a grainy quality, as if it had been taken with very fast film, or enlarged to the point where the quality of the image was compromised.
Bradley was even more certain Chantal hadn’t known she was being photographed, and he was fairly sure the picture had been retouched so it would be impossible to determine where or when it had been taken. He put the paper aside, picked up the phone and dialled Mel Dutton’s extension.
Dutton answered on the fifth ring. Bradley identified himself and told Dutton why he was calling.
Dutton wasn’t surprised. Bradley asked why not, and Dutton said, “That picture bothers me, too, Inspector.”
“Why is that?”
“I think …” Dutton rattled his copy of the paper. “What’s the night clerks name?”
“Pinky Koblansky.”
“Check the angle of the shot. I think he had a camera placed high up on the wall, tight against the ceiling, close to a corner. If he used a wide-angle lens, he could get everything in the room.”
“How would he mount a camera so it couldn’t be seen?”
“I bet if you check the hotel records, you’ll find he never rented one of the adjoining rooms.”
“Why is the picture so grainy, Mel? Because he used fast film under low light levels?”
“The picture’s a still from videotape. It’s grainy because whoever transposed the still from the tape didn’t know what he was doing. My advice? Drop in on Koblansky when he’s home — I’d bet an ice-cream cone against a rat’s ass he’s got his own darkroom.”
Bradley made a few notes. He’d send somebody to the hotel to check the rooms on either side of the room Partridge and Chantal had stayed in. If he found evidence that Pinky had taken surreptitious photographs of the room, he’d get a warrant to search his home. Had Pinky become voyeuristically involved in Chantal’s life and murdered the Partridge kid?
Shadows moved outside his door. He thanked Dutton for his help, hung up, and wriggled his feet into his shoes.
Knuckles tapped the pebbled glass. Nobody he recognized. Funny how all his detectives and even the civilian support staff knocked in a unique and easily distinguishable way. He sat up a little straighten “Come in.”
The door swung open and a patrol sergeant named Peter Broadhead eased into the office, closely followed by a uniformed constable Bradley had never met, but knew must be Broadhead’s son, the rookie who’d given Chantal a ride across the Granville Street bridge. Bradley and the sergeant had wasted more than a few long nights in the city’s downtown bars, bitching about the injustice of it all, but had eventually tired of each other’s whining, and had drifted apart.
Bradley said, “Peter, good to see you.” He shifted his glance to the constable, who was looking sheepish and contrite by turns. There was no need to ask why Broadhead had dropped by. He wanted a favour, and Bradley was happy to oblige. Broadhead’s son had made a crucial mistake, but the damage had been done and there was no point in crucifying him. A word from Bradley would go a long way, and a favour given was a favour owed.
Chapter 37
Hector and Carlos worked the streets until past three in the morning. As the night wore on they gradually wore out, so they were forced to stop more and more often to fuel up on hot coffee, or to empty their overworked bladders.
Hector drifted off at five minutes to three. Ten minutes later, despite all the caffeine he’d poured down his throat, Carlos joined him in dreamland.
The van continued on for the better part of a block without them, and then sideswiped a sparkling white Mercedes-Benz parked under a streetlight directly in front of a high-rise apartment. The impact jolted both men awake. Carlos slammed on the brakes, and the van skidded to a stop. He lit a cigarette and got out to assess the damage. The van and the Mercedes had exchanged a little white paint, and the Mercedes’ side mirror had been amputated from the body of the car. Otherwise, no serious damage had been done. Still, Carlos resented the inconvenience.
He yanked open Hector’s door. “Pass me the bolt-cutters."
“What for?"
Carlos dug deep into his repertoire of hard looks, and gave Hector the hardest he had.
Hector wordlessly unbuckled his seatbelt. He made his way into the back of the van, petulantly kicked aside boxes of bogus foreign currency, and stubbed his toe on the spare tire. What he had to say about that turned the air a rich, smoky blue. Where were the goddam bolt-cutters, for Christ’s sake? He snatched them up, pushed his way back to his seat, and tossed them underhanded to Carlos.
Carlos took out the Mercedes’ side windows first, and then tore into the windshield, roof, side panels and glossy hood. A blizzard of white paint chips flew through the air. His powerhouse swings sent the prestigious Mercedes hood ornament cartwheeling fifty yards down the street. Exhausted by his labours, he drew his pistol and took aim at a tire. But the Mercedes’ strident alarm had roused the neighbourhood. Lights snapped on in apartments on both sides of the street.
Carlos scampered around the van’s blunt nose and climbed behind the wheel. “Let’s get out of here.”
Hector said, “Good thinking, boss.”
Carlos gave him another hard look. Well, no. It was the same look, really. He stomped on the gas. The van’s spinning tires lay clots of scorched rubber on the asphalt, and buried them in a cloud of black smoke.
Carlos drove to Denny’s on Broadway, where they stayed long enough to gobble an early breakfast and undertip the waitress. Revitalized, his mood upgraded to just short of dour, Carlos suggested they head back downtown and pick up a couple of hookers and have a whole lot of fun. Hector exercised his veto. He was tired. No, exhausted. Besides, wouldn’t it be a good idea to park the van until the sun came up and they could more easily catalogue the damage? It was a sensible suggestion, so Carlos was inclined to disagree with it for the sake of form. But Hector was so worn out he was barely semiconscious, and Carlos knew there was less pleasure in flaying a dead dog than a dog who could still feel pain.
Reluctantly, he agreed to call it a night.
*
The following morning passed without incident, primarily because both men slept well past noon.
Carlos was up first. He wriggled into his jeans, used the bathroom, stole Hector’s last clean T-shirt out of his lowboy, and went into the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee. While the coffee brewed he prowled the building’s narrow hallways, hunting in vain for a complimentary newspaper. Amazing, wasn’t it, how goddam thoughtless people could be? He put on his boots, and went outside and cased the row of newspaper boxes on the corner. There were only a few people around, nobody he recognized. He had his choice of the Vancouver Sun, the Globe and Mail the National Post, or the Georgia Strait. The Strait was a giveaway, but he decided to take one anyway, for the telephone-sex ads. It took him only a few seconds to kick in the plastic windows of all four boxes. On the spur of the moment, he took all ten copies of the Globe and Mail
On the way back to his apartment he played paperboy for a day, dropping copies of the newspaper on his neighbours’ hypocritical welcome mats. Hector was in the shower, murdering “My Way.” Carlos stuck his fingers in his ears and hurried past the bathroom to the kitchen, where he poured himself a mug of coffee and dropped a couple of Pop Tarts into the toaster. He peered into the toaster’s fiery depths. The smell of the Pop Tarts made his mouth water. Maybe hell was a bunch of gigantic toasters, but loaded with unrepentant sinners instead of Pop Tarts. He imagined the tortured screams of the doomed as they burned for eternity, the endless bouncy sproings as toasters launched billions of overcooked penitents into the smoky air, then caught them up and toasted them all over again. Not that Carlos necessarily believed in hell. How could he, and enjoy the rewards of his violent lifestyle? By not thinking about it.
The toaster went sproing and the Pop Tarts were flung high into the air, came down hard and hit the toaster and skittered across the yellow Formica in opposite directions. Carlos snatched at the one on the left, but he was too slow. The Pop Tart overshot the counter and splashed into the fetid sink.
Carlos hardly noticed, because his eye had been caught by a lurid headline, POLICE SEEK MURDER WITNESS, and Pinky Koblansky’s unartistic but eminently recognizable, sweetly candid, over-the-shoulder pic of the working girl Carlos had pleasured only a night ago.
As he read the article aloud, Carlos’ meaty lips moved like an inchworm laboriously working its way across a mirror. The article was almost three hundred words long. A magnum opus, by the paper’s taut standards, which were predicated on the average elapsed time between inner-city bus stops.
Carlos learned nothing he didn’t already know about Chantal, other than the fact that the cops seemed to know even less about her than he did. He moved on to the Pinky Koblansky interview. The Lux Hotel was mentioned. Carlos was particularly interested to learn that the night clerk had been alerted to Nicholas Partridge’s death by a shower of coins that had rattled on the lobby’s marble floor scant seconds before Nicholas himself had taken his “fatal plunge.”
Carlos reread the article, top to bottom. A dollar coin falling from a height of fifty feet would hurt like hell, maybe even put a dent in a person’s skull. If it hit him in the eye it could blind him. He remembered reading about a tourist who was killed instantly when he was struck by a handful of pennies tossed off the top of the Empire State Building.
Hector padded barefoot into the kitchen with a green towel around his waist and a red towel wrapped around his head.
Carlos said, “You look like a traffic light.”
Hector pointed. “That’s my last clean T-shirt.”
“Not any more.”
Hector scooped the Pop Tart off the counter. He took a big bite, and chewed thoughtfully. “That’s her!” he said, pointing at the newspaper.
“No kidding, you really think so?” Carlos read the article aloud. It took him only about ten minutes. When he’d finished he said, “I can’t help wondering if this guy Pinky got hit by a shower of twenty-dollar bills instead of coins.”
“Then why mention any money at all?” said Hector. He poured himself a coffee. “I mean, why not just keep his mouth shut?”
Carlos shrugged. “How should I know?” He tossed the paper on the counter. “If a bunch of twenties fell into his greasy little mitts, he sure as hell wouldn’t tell the cops about it. But at the same time, he might think he had to tell them something …” Hector rummaged through the cupboard until he found the Aunt Jemima. He poured syrup onto the remains of the Pop Tart, munched thoughtfully as he read the lead article. He looked up. “It says here that the hooker were lookin’ for, Chantal, robbed a grocer on Granville Island.”
“So what?”
“So the dead kid, Partridge, if he’d had a wad of American twenties on him, it would’ve said so. And we know Chantal’s broke, so she doesn’t have the money either, or why would she commit a robbery?”
“Force of habit?” theorized Carlos.
“Maybe, but I doubt it. She’s on the run from a murder rap. If she’s flush, why would she take that kind of chance?”
“Knock off the riddles, you’re giving me a fuckin’ headache. Jeez, Hector, call a time-out and take a listen to yourself, you sound like a goddam ‘Columbo’ rerun.”
Hector said, “I wasn’t there, so I don’t know what happened, but what if Chantal and her pimp boyfriend fought over her big windfall, he gave her a push, and she pushed back?”
“What pimp boyfriend?”
“The Partridge kid, Nicholas. He’s been hanging around the room all night, she finally comes home, so naturally he wants to party a little, spend some of her hard-earned money. But she’s tired, she ain’t interested. He grabs the money and takes off, but she catches up to him in the hallway.”
Carlos had seen a million violent deaths on television and at the movies. Guys were always taking the big drop, and it was always the same. A hazy image formed in his brain of the two lovers fighting.
Chantal waved the handful of money in her lazy-ass pimp’s face, taunting him with what she’d done to earn it.
The pimp lunges at her, misses, and tumbles over the railing. She’s horrified. Or gives him the finger.
Either way, down he goes, getting smaller and smaller. His body hits the floor; ka-thump. Suddenly he’s dead. A pool of blood forms around his head. His blank eyes stare up at nothing. Maybe his fingers twitch for a second, to emphasize the perfect stillness that follows.
