Seaweed in the Soup (22 page)

I emptied my boots, took my pants and socks off, wrung them dry,and then put them back on again. We waited under the tent, drinking coffee, till Dr. Tarleton arrived. Instead of driving in, the medical examiner had been delivered to the mouth of the creek in a police boat, after which he had been obliged to wade and scramble more than a mile upstream—a journey that had taken overall two hours longer than our trip in the Land Cruiser. Doc Tarleton was soaked, bedraggled and exhausted, but in his usual jovial mood when he examined the corpse.

“I think he drowned,” Dr. Tarleton said. “Some of those facial cuts and contusions appear to have been inflicted before death.”

I asked Dr. Tarleton how long Cooley had been dead.

“Heavens, I don't know,” he answered good-humouredly, “It's all highly hypothetical till I open him up. At a guess, I'd say the poor man has been feeding the fishes for twenty-four hours, maybe more.”

Mollard had an irreverent sense of humour. He chimed in with, “One thing's for sure. It's the last time anybody gets a free meal outta the guy.”

Bernie turned to me. “Come on,” he said, shrugging his shoulders and bending his arms at the elbow in a supplicative gesture. “If it is murder, who do you suspect?”

“I dunno.”

“I know you don't know. But you're a detective, and I want you to use your imagination here.”

Reluctant to venture an opinion, I said grudgingly, “Maybe it's a natural death. It's too early to start making guesses.”

“For crying out loud!” Bernie chided me. “Until proven otherwise, I'm assuming this is murder. You heard what the doc said. This guy was beaten up before he drowned.”

“Hang on,” Dr. Tarleton said. “That's not what I said. What I said was—”

Bernie interrupted him. “Maybe it's not what you said, Doc, but that's what it boils down to. For the time being I'm working on the assumption that this guy was brought to the bridge back there, beaten up, and then thrown into the creek, where he drowned. If I'm right, that means there's too many coincidences going on. We've had several violent deaths in the last few days. That being so, nobody can tell me they're not related.”

Bernie looked at me expectantly.

I shrugged my shoulders. “If this is murder, the field is wide open. Maybe the Big Circle Boys are involved. Tubby Gonzales, Twinner Scudd, the Red Scorpions. Take your pick.”

Bernie was exhausted and ready to leave. I said to Sergeant Mollard, “How did you guys get in here without four-wheel drive?”

Mollard shook his head. “It wasn't too bad earlier this morning. We'll have a helluva time getting out.”

By the time Bernie and I departed, Nice Manners, Nicky Nattrass and the crime squad had arrived and were combing the scene for clues. If such a thing is possible, it was by then raining harder than ever. Bernie looked like death warmed over, and I wanted to do the driving, but Bernie wouldn't hear of it. Shortly before the Land Cruiser's tires touched blacktop again, we passed an A Channel satellite van uselessly spinning its wheels in a ditch. I suggested we stop and give them a hand.

Bernie floored it and said, “Screw 'em, let 'em rot. Let the Judas who keeps feeding 'em news tow 'em out.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

We got back to Victoria after a 70-mile round trip that had lasted five hours. Bernie's cough sounded worse to me but he said that a good meal was all he needed. Instead of dropping me, at my office, he drove us to the Victoria seaplane terminal down at the Inner Harbour. The terminal's coffee shop heaved with showbiz characters dressed in expensive west-coast casual. Gucci, Dolce and Gabbana, Armani, designer jeans. Everybody was either darling or dahling. The terminal's self-service counter was jammed. We found an empty wall to lean against and eavesdropped. Another TV movie of the month had just wrapped on northern Vancouver Island. The principal character was either a baby orca, a baby grizzly or an orphaned forest wolf. I could find out by keeping tabs on Hallmark's Fantasy of the Month, except I don't have TV.

Some of Victoria's low-rent paparazzi were besieging an unflappable Canadian actress—the one with famous breasts. Her tiny, haggard face was in real life far more interesting and revealing than the airbrushed facsimile usually pictured on a screen. Most of the travellers were en route to Los Angeles via Seattle. When the next flight was announced, a few people trooped outside. Bernie and I picked up coffees and sandwiches, and grabbed an empty table. Out in the downpour, people were boarding a DHC-3 Otter. Visibility was terrible. We watched the plane take off and disappear into the murk like a ghostly giant bird.

Bernie drank a little coffee, his eyes closed. He was out on his feet. Shaking himself awake he said thoughtfully, “Larry Cooley was a police informant. He gave the squad a few useful phone calls, but the slippery bastard thought he had us in his pockets.”

I nodded. “Yeah, I know.”

Bernie seemed surprised; he gave me a long look. “You knew that Cooley was a squealer.”

“Everybody knew. The question is whether Cooley was an arsonist as well.”

Pent-up air escaped from Bernie's lips in a long sigh. “Cooley was stupid. Instead of keeping his head down, he acted like he had immunity.”

“It sounds as if he did have immunity, for a while at least.”

“Yeah, well, we used to cut him a little slack. If you ask me, Twinner Scudd's boys got him.”

I said, “Remember when we went to see Tubby Gonzales at the recycling depot? A car was parked underneath tarps in the back lot. It was about the size of an import convertible.”

Bernie smiled. “That's worth looking into,” he said.

When we left the terminal, passengers were being turned away. All further flights had been cancelled due to bad weather. Lit by the terminal's halogen lights, Bernie's wet face was all sharp angles—a study of exhaustion in black and white.

“We'd better check that car out now,” Bernie said reluctantly.

“Forget it, Bernie. You ought to be in bed. Go home, for Christ's sake.”

He offered to drive me home, but I needed a walk while I thought a few things over. Bernie drove off into the night. I pulled up my coat collar and headed uptown on foot.

CHAPTER TWENTY

It was still monsoon weather that night. Along Government Street, sheets of rain streamed from rooftops, creating mini-lakes along the roads where floating garbage had plugged the gutters. Apart from a few passing cars and buses, the street was deserted, except for a pierced hooker twirling an umbrella, wearing a blonde wig and spikes, her shorts hanging off her skinny ass. She stepped out of a doorway and gave me the business as I slowed the MG to make a left turn at Bay Street. After a few more twists and turns, I ended up at the Titus Silverman Memorial Recycling Depot.

It was quite dark by then. The low rectangular building was a pale blur lit by my headlights as I drove into the muddy junkyard around the back. I pulled to a stop next to the tarpaulin-draped car. I left the MG with its engine running and its headlights on. Dragging the tarpaulins off, I got my feet wet and my hands dirty for the dozenth time that day.

The car illuminated by the MG's headlights was a white 350Z Nissan Infiniti convertible that had sustained major front-end damage. Documents in the glove compartment showed that the vehicle was registered to Tomas Gonzales. Lightning Bradley had told me that the car he'd run into was probably a
black
Mercedes.

Things are starting to add up
, I said to myself.

Wet as a water rat's nose, I tramped through the junk-clotted mudfield to the depot's back door. In the murky darkness, I kicked the door till it rattled the TRASPASSARS KILLED sign that hung above the doorframe. Nobody answered; the building was unoccupied. Everybody, even the poker players, had given up for the night.

≈  ≈  ≈

I don't like Humboldt Street, and I especially dislike Humboldt Street after dark. Humboldt lies at the heart of Victoria's most ghost-haunted region, and it gives me bad vibes. I sometimes get the same feeling when I visit parts of James Bay. The stretch of Humboldt that runs alongside St. Ann's Academy is supposed to be haunted by one of Victoria's gold-rush era hanging judges. Many people have reported strange goings-on over the years. I was feeling those bad vibes quite strongly when I parked the MG in a five-minute zone outside the Clarion Tower's front entrance. I didn't know it then, but within five minutes, my bad vibes were destined to become much worse.

Built by someone with more money than taste, its exterior facade had Tudor, Grecian, Gothic, Italianate, Moorish and New Brutalist touches, and for good measure it was plastered with precast concrete gargoyles. It has been widely mocked and how it ever snuck past Victoria's municipal planning committee is anybody's guess.

A tall muscular man appeared from inside the Clarion Towers' ornate lobby. Waving his arms, defying the weather in a T-shirt, shorts and leather sandals, he tapped a knuckle against the MG's side window and suggested I find a proper parking space. I dismounted from the car and showed him my police badge. His name was Josefsen, and he was the Clarion Towers' building manager.

I asked Josefsen if he knew Tomas Gonzales.

“Sorry, officer, I'm not at liberty to say,” he said respectfully. “We have two hundred people living here. I can't give out personal information about our tenants to anybody who just asks.”

“I'm not anybody, I'm a police sergeant. Just answer my question.”

Josefsen swallowed. “Well, yes, I do know Mr. Gonzales, as it happens. I had to fix a faulty radiator for him once. His suite in on the twenty-third floor.”

Quiet as an undertaker's mute, Josefsen followed as I walked under the cantilevered concrete slab that protects the building's front entrance and pressed the buzzer to Gonzales' apartment. Nobody answered.

Josefsen didn't demur when I told him to take me up there. He used a master key to access the lobby. The two of us got into the elevator and rose in silence to the top floor. The building was soundproofed. Instead of yesterday's dinner, the carpeted corridors smelled of lilacs. When I remarked upon this, Josefsen said, “The air in the public areas is slightly pressurized. When somebody opens an apartment door, scented air flows in from the corridor instead of out of the apartment.”

Gonzales' apartment was at the end of the corridor. I pressed a buzzer set in the doorframe. The sound it made inside was inaudible to me. I kept pressing for a full minute, after which I gave Josefsen the go-ahead. He inserted a plastic card into a slot in the door and pushed. Josefsen stuck his head into the opening and murmured politely, “Excuse me! A visitor for you, Mr. Gonzales.”

Nobody replied. I put a hand on Josefsen's arm to prevent him going any farther inside. “Wait a minute,” I said. “You'll wait out here for me here, please.”

I went in and closed the door in Josefsen's handsome face.

Thirty seconds later, I was in the corridor again. Leaving Gonzales' door slightly ajar, I asked Josefsen for his pager number and told him that he could resume his normal duties: I would call him if necessary. I watched Josefsen retreat down the corridor and get into the elevator. After bracing myself, I re-entered Gonzales' apartment.

It was a large seven-room corner suite. In daylight, there must have been marvellous views of the Olympic Mountains, and the Salish Sea. As it was, vast tentacles of electric light stretched away into the surrounding blackness. Gonzales' suite smelled of death. Even after I had opened every window, the stink of death was almost overwhelming.

A man was collapsed in a large wooden chair to which he was secured by yards of silver-coloured duct tape. His face was an unrecognizable gory mess of misshapen, featureless bone. His clothes, the chair he sat in, and the carpet surrounding his chair were drenched in blood. In death, his sphincters had let go. The contents of his bladder and bowels had discharged. Flies buzzed around the mutilated corpse. God only knows how those flies knew that there was a tasty new cadaver waiting for them to lay their eggs in a Humboldt Street apartment.

As in the case of Maggie Bradley, this man had been flogged repeatedly with a heavy blunt instrument. The visible parts of his sallow corpse had bloated in the apartment's stultifying heat. Every one of his fingernails had been ripped out.

Clearly, this was a premeditated crime. Somebody who had planned to pull those fingernails out must have brought a pair of pliers with him for that express purpose.

In death, the only visible sign of Tomas Gonzales physical vanity was the comb-over, which was now pathetic as well as ridiculous. His shirt had been slit open down the front with a very sharp knife. The same knife had then slashed his belly open like a gutted fish. Entrails had spilled from their cavity and they glistened obscenely, like slimy rubber tubes. As in Maggie's case, the scene was so ghastly that for a few seconds I believe that my heart stopped beating.

For a brief period, Gonzales had had it all. Flashy young women to adorn his arm, the big Rolex, the gold necklaces. Now he was a brutalized corpse. Gonzales' skin was cool to the touch. Rigor had set in, fluid had pooled in his ankles. Based on that, I guessed that Gonzales had been dead for more than twelve hours. As Maggie's had been, Gonzales' rooms had been thoroughly trashed. Papers, feathers and furniture stuffing was strewn everywhere, and fine suspended particles filled the air. Drawers had been pulled out and their contents dumped on the floor. Cushions, pillows and mattresses had been slashed. Carpets had been drawn back to reveal bare floors. Cabinets had been dragged away from walls. Hollow metal curtain rods had been taken down and searched. The toilet's tank lid had been removed, photographs had been torn from their frames—all of this by someone looking for something small and very, very valuable.

A minute after entering the apartment, I was once more outside in the corridor, calling headquarters.