Seaweed in the Soup (20 page)

PC emerged noiselessly from behind the filing cabinet. After stretching and yawning, she assumed a sphinx-like pose, looked towards me and meowed. PC has me properly trained. As she required, I quickly finished my drink, took my glass and PC's stainless steel water bowl out to my private washroom, rinsed them both, filled the bowl with fresh clean water, put it back where it was supposed to be, and then I opened a can of Thrifty's white tuna and dumped the contents into PC's stainless steel food bowl.

PC was having dinner, and I was building an origami beetle out of multicoloured junk mail when the phone rang again. I picked it up. A familiar voice said, “Silas? Silas Seaweed?”

It was one of the neighbourhood crazies. “Yes, Fran,” I said politely. “This is Silas.”

“Do you know where Bowker Creek goes under the road at St. Ann's?”

“Ye-es.”

“Oh, I am pleased,” Fran said. “We're having a get-together under the big willow tree. There'll be hot dogs and coffee. June 14th, two o'clock. Mark it on your calendar.”

“Sorry, Fran. Today's the 15th of August.”

“Oh dear, are you quite sure?” Fran said, putting down the phone.

PC had gone out. I poured myself another drink, put on a pair of rubber gloves, and then briefly inspected the contents of the garbage bags. It was mostly clothing. I didn't see any documents or personal information. So much for that.

I stood by the window and looked down Pandora Street towards the abandoned Janion Building, seeing its boarded-up windows and bird-shit-spattered facade. It was raining harder than ever by then and a bit early for the evening stroll, but a wizened forty-year-old floozy wearing a blonde wig was already tottering back and forth in a tatty white blouse, fishnet stockings and leather skirt. Then the door opened. Cynthia Leach strolled in. I admired her porcelain skin and lovely blue eyes as she took her cap off and put it on my hat tree. Posed entrancingly, she tossed her head back and ran her fingers through her short blonde curls.

“Nice Manners wants you,” Cynthia said, hitching a fully loaded equipment belt up her shapely waist.

“I know, I've got call display.”

“You don't like him very much, do you Silas?”

“Do you?”

“I like him more than you do, obviously. He's not bad-looking, either.”

Feeling a slight pang of some emotion that, if I'd been fifteen years old, I might have diagnosed as jealousy, I said, “It's not Manners that I hate, exactly, it's his type. He's the kind of guy who wakes up every morning and pastes this certain expression on his face. The one that says ‘I'm big and great and I'm important. You are a piece of shit'.”

Cynthia gave an indifferent shrug. “Have you heard the latest?” she asked, carelessly resting one shapely buttock on the corner of my desk. “City council is thinking of stopping drivers from renewing driving licences until their parking tickets are paid.”

“I know that too. The army of Right is on the march, the forces of Evil are in full retreat.”

“There are a couple of garbage bags in the corner.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Do you know everything?”

“I know that a ghost moved into this building recently.”

“My God,” she said, staring at me. “I've just noticed. What's happened to you?”

“Haven't you been paying attention?”

“You look different.”

“Every day and in every way I'm getting worse and worse. Somebody tried to roast me alive the other night.”

Realization dawned in her eyes. “You were in Nanaimo's when it was firebombed?”

“Right.”

“But you look . . . your face seems thinner for one thing. Are you losing weight?”

I shook my head.

Cynthia gave me a long, penetrating look.

Flushing noises emanated from my private washroom. With Cynthia at my heels, I ran from the office, tore down the hall and unlocked the washroom door. It was unoccupied, although water from the last flush was still swirling in the toilet bowl.

“Will you please explain what's going on?” Cynthia asked.

“Search me. All I know is, there's no possible way that a human being could have flushed that toilet and escaped down this corridor without being seen. This isn't the first time it's happened.”

Cynthia sniffed. “Lucky you didn't find a woman in there, or you'd be in big trouble.”

Footsteps sounded as Nobby Sumner, the building superintendent, came downstairs from his roof garden, lugging a desiccated potted ficus. I asked him if he'd noticed anybody near my washroom. Nobby shook his head.

Cynthia followed me back to the office. Cynthia was going on and on about male insecurity and rights-invasion when she reached into the junk mail still remaining on my desk.

“What's this?” she said, bringing out a large, cream-coloured envelope. She held it to her nose, sniffed and said, “Hmmmmm. Expensive. It's patchouli, I think.”

“Let me guess. It's a property developer looking for investors.”

“Let's find out,” Cynthia said bossily, ripping open the envelope and drawing out a deckle-edged card.

Her jaw dropped open. “It's from P.G. Mainwaring,” she murmured in reverential tones.

“P.G. Mainwaring?” I said, grabbing the card.

Printed on it were the words in copperplate: P.G. Mainwaring invites your attendance at the Mainwaring Memorial Lecture, 7:30
PM
, August 14, Empress Hotel. RSVP.

“August 14th. Pity, that was yesterday. I didn't know you moved in such exalted circles,” Cynthia opined enviously. “How does a deadbeat like you happen to know the likes of P.G. Mainwaring?”

“P.G. Mainwaring?” I said guardedly. “I've never even heard of him.”

“Idiot! Men don't drench letters in patchouli. P.G. isn't a guy. They say she owns a thousand apartment buildings.”

“Who says?”

“Everybody. You'd know that yourself if you read the business section occasionally, instead of the funny pages.”

Cynthia and I were cheek to cheek, looking at the card together, when the door banged open and Lightning Bradley marched in. “You two look very cosy,” he said with a knowing smirk.

Lightning looked thinner than before, haggard. He threw the burning stub of the cigarette he was smoking into the cold fireplace and added with a suggestive leer, “Am I interrupting something?”

Cynthia groaned, stood up and put her cap on at a jaunty angle.

I said, “Are you driving, Cynthia?”

“Yes, why?”

“Would you mind dropping those two garbage bags off at Serious Crimes?”

“About your washroom,” she said quite seriously. “Technically, you may be dealing with a poltergeist. Ordinary ghosts don't possess physical attributes. That's why they walk through doors instead of opening them. Ghosts certainly can't flush toilets.”

Well, she was wrong there. When they want to, Coast Salish ghosts can do many strange things.

Cynthia said, “After you get rid of Ugly, Silas, just lock yourself in, close the blinds, take a couple of Aspirins, and have a long nap.”

“You don't get it,” I said.

“Damn right I don't,” Cynthia said. Her expression changed. She said animatedly, “My God! I just noticed. You've had a haircut!”

“Twenty bucks at Alfredo's.”

“You wuz robbed.” Cynthia blew me a kiss, picked the orange sacks up and carted them off without saying a word to Lightning. Looking through my window, I watched her lug the sacks across the street and into the back of a blue and white Ford. A puff of black smoke escaped its exhaust pipe as she revved the car's big V8. Cynthia glanced over, saw me looking, and made a funny face. I watched her drive past Swans Hotel, turn right onto Store Street, and go from sight.

Lightning threw himself into a chair and was reaching inside his tunic for another cigarette when he noticed my frown.

I said unsympathetically, “You are under arrest.”

“What for?”

“Conduct unbefitting. Suspicion of murder. There's a BOLO out on you, for God's sake.”

“Serious Crimes sends Be On the Look Out notices for jaywalkers, so who gives a damn?” Putting both hands into his pockets, Lightning added, “What am I, a goddamn pharaoh?”

“I think the word you want is pariah,” I said. “There's nothing going on between Cynthia and me, and you must know it. Why do you talk like that?”

“Talk like what?”

“Try to stir things up. All you do is make a fool of yourself. You're about as funny as a burning orphanage.”

“Oh Christ, don't you start. I thought you liked me.” After checking his Timex, Lightning added, “What's the holdup? Are you still on duty?”

I locked the door, closed the blinds, brought out the office bottle and two Tim Hortons mugs, poured an inch of Teachers into each and shoved one across the desk. Lightning drank his in one gulp. I poured him another and said, “Okay, start talking. You have a lot of explaining to do.”

“I thought you were finished for the day.”

“I won't squeal if you don't.”

“I guess you've learned to roll with the punches, Silas,” he snapped. “I never have.”

He'd lost me. “What are you talking about?”

Lightning had become defiantly angry—maybe it was the Teachers. “I'm talking about guys jerking your chains just because you're an Indian or making fun of me just because I'm a fifty-year-old constable,” he snarled. “Seems like I joined just yesterday, but it's nearly thirty years since I started pounding the pavement. Bootlickers with twenty years' less seniority than me are wearing sergeant's stripes. Oatmeal Savage kissed ass and polished brass right up the food chain to chief inspector. Where the hell did I go wrong?”

I could have told him.

We sat in the room's semi-darkness, occupied with our different thoughts. I was wondering how to broach the topic of Maggie's grisly death when Lightning said, “When I get this mess sorted out' I'm retiring. Take my pension. Move to Arizona and live in one of them trailer parks.”

“You can't. You're talking about a career, not a merry-go-round. People don't just . . . ”

Lightning interrupted. “Why not? Think anybody'll miss me? I've been planning this on the quiet. When I go, there won't be no tears shed for Lightning Bradley. The whole department will be glad to see the back of me. I used to go fishing with Bernie Tapp. Now, he won't even give me the time of day. As for Oatmeal Savage and Superintendent Mallory, they hate me too.”

He was suffering, but what he said was true. Lightning had few if any friends, and no close ones that I was aware of. “Oatmeal” Savage, who ran the uniform branch, hated Lightning with a burning passion. I wondered why Lightning had chosen to let his hair down with me.

“Don't be a jackass,” I said.

“I mean well, but sometimes I rub people the wrong way. Like just now with Cynthia. It was just a lousy joke, Silas. I screw up all the time, and not only on the job.”

His smile was a stiff grimace, because a genuine smile is hard to fake.

This time when Bradley reached absently for a cigarette, I didn't stop him. He lit the cigarette, blew smoke out the side of his mouth, and said quietly, “Something happened. I should have told you and Bernie Tapp about it when you and him showed up at Collins Lane. But Bernie treated me like I was dirt underneath his boots. Made me look stupid in front of Mrs. Milton. I was so pissed off I kept my trap shut. That's days ago, and if I tell Bernie what I know now, after all this time, he'll go ballistic. I just don't need it, Silas. I've got all the problems that I can handle right now.”

“Talking to me is the same as talking to Bernie. If you tell me something that I think he should know . . . ”

“Screw that! This is off the record, strictly between you and me. Maybe it'll help to break the Cho case. I know you're working on it. But it's strictly private, and maybe I'm making a mountain out of a molehill. Maybe what I saw isn't important after all.”

“Let me be the judge of that.”

“I want your word, Silas. If I tell you, I want your word that you'll keep it under wraps while you do some snooping on your own. If what I tell you helps to crack the Cho murder case, all well and good. Nobody needs to know you got the tip from me. If it doesn't help the case, no harm has been done.”

“Are you serious about quitting your job?”

“Dead serious,” he said, tapping a bulge on his inside breast pocket. “The papers are all filled out, and when I leave here I'm gonna stuff 'em in the mail. This time next month, I'll be on a plane heading south with the snowbirds.”

I thought,
No you won't
, but what I said was, “What about Maggie?”

“She's dead and gone, there's nothing I can do about it. It's a relief in a way.”

“Do you know how she died?”

“I only know what I read in the paper,” he said incuriously. “I haven't been home for days.”

Lightning exhibited an eerie calm. He seemed totally uninterested in the reality of Maggie's death. It was as if some important aspect of his normal psychological makeup was missing, or had been amputated. God only knows what strange beasts roamed his psyche.

I was silently brooding when Lightning said, “Look at it this way. This visit to your office is the same as an anonymous call.”

“You're not anonymous, I know who you are. You want me to lie for you? I'd be in the soup too.”

“It wouldn't be the first time, would it Silas?”

I shrugged. Telling convincing lies, dealing with liars and interpreting the truth behind other peoples' lies is a big part of my job, that's just the way it is. Some of my scruples go missing occasionally too along the policeman's highway.

“Here goes. I'm relying on you to do the right thing, Silas,” Lightning said in a rush of words. “Last Sunday I'm in a patrol car with that punk, Ricketts. We've been told to keep a lookout for a couple of Native girls. I spotted 'em on Echo Bay Road, and Ricketts stopped the car. The girls start running. Ricketts is younger'n me, so he took off after 'em. I followed, but I'm too out of shape for chasing people through the boonies, so I went back to the car. Then I get a call from Ricketts. He says there's been a murder at the waterfront house. I'm heading over there. With the trees and all, there's dark shade along Collins Lane. I came around a bend and collided with another car. The other guy was speeding, and he went off the road into the trees. It's a miracle he didn't get killed. I stopped my car, and then I backed up to make sure he was okay. He was alive, but he was out cold. I didn't see no blood, I just figured he was shook up. I figured he'd come to, snap out of it. Instead of staying with him and reporting the incident, I panicked. I drove away, I left him to it. I guess it worked out okay, because I know that the guy did come to, and he managed to drive himself off.”