Bed of Nails (5 page)

“Coke?”

“You got it. Chopped with this.”

The man held up a tarot card in a plastic evidence bag.

“The Hanged Man,” Zinc said. “A calling card?”

“It was used to chop six lines on this table. You can see traces of powder.”

Zinc continued laying out the scenario in his mind. The high roller makes a connection in the bar downstairs. Romeo rents this room for a snort and a fuck. The three do two lines each at the window table, then strip off their clothes and climb into bed. Things turn kinky when Romeo’s sex partners cuff his hands together at the small of his back and stuff the gag wad into his mouth. With one working him in front and the other behind, the two get their sexual kicks by adding spurts of blood from Romeo’s brain. Nail by nail, they hammer a halo around his skull. The shallow depth keeps him from dying too soon. The one in front gets death-throe pumps from his groin. The one behind enjoys the clenches of his anal sphincter.

Bang …

Bang …

Bang …

Like Maxwell’s silver hammer in the Beatles’ song.

Until …

Clang …

Clang …

Clang …

They’re sure he’s dead.

After that, they drag his body over to the beam and string him up like the Hanged Man on the coke-cutting card.

“Who found him?” Zinc asked.

“A chambermaid. She came in this morning to make up the room and here he was,” said Rachel.

“Anything stolen?”

“The coke and the cash in his wallet. Unless he traveled on plastic without a bill to his name.”

“May I see that card?” Chandler asked the tech.

The Ident cop handed him the coke cutter sealed in the plastic bag. Zinc noted the nimbus around the Hanged Man’s head. Did that explain the halo of nails hammered into Romeo’s brain?

“If you ladies will excuse me, I’m going down to the bar.”

“Drinking on duty?” Gill teased.

“Looking for Romeo’s Juliet.”

The world’s oldest profession was almost as old as Vancouver itself. Whisky—the basic necessity of any frontier town—arrived on the south shore of Burrard Inlet in 1869, when Gassy Jack Deighton built a saloon to found what is now this city. Sex—an even more basic necessity if there is to be urban growth—arrived with Birdie Stewart in 1873, when she opened the first cathouse in what had become known as Gastown, kitty-corner from the booze and two doors away from the Methodist parsonage. The demographics of the day were bullish for business. Horny men outnumbered loose women twenty to one.

By the turn of the century, Dupont Street was Vancouver’s colony of vice. A card game, an opium pipe, pleasures of the flesh—whatever your desire, come down to Chinatown. The red-light district got a boost in 1906, when the San Francisco earthquake shook the booties of a lot of brothel madams north. The Americans—as they are wont—brought their advertising and marketing skills to this den of iniquity, and before long there were scantily clad temptresses on wanton display in bordello windows and harlots in gaudy garments flouncing about on the streets.

Vancouver, back then, had a puritanical streak. Loosely defined, a puritan is a prig who loses sleep knowing that someone, somewhere, may be having fun. The shocking revelation that churchgoers saw “boys in that vicinity who could not be older than fifteen or twenty” was too much, and it forced the police to crack down with a “no flouncing” order.

The breakup of Chinatown’s vice colony spread 112 whorehouses to other parts of the city. The hooker history of Vancouver from then on became one of cops chasing Pearls, Violets, and Carmens all over town. Each time the vice squad closed a house of ill repute, the pros found new lodgings at accommodating hotels. B.C.’s Liquor Control Act was such that you couldn’t license a bar or pub unless you offered rooms, so the city was inundated with drinking establishments that kept empty cribs on the upper floors. That law was tailor-made to turn every booze can into a knocking shop. A working girl could troll for dates downstairs at the bar, then rent a private room upstairs by the hour.

Ergo, the Lions Gate. In its present form.

Those who make their living on their backs and their knees won a decisive victory in the Penthouse case. For three decades, the Penthouse was the hottest club in town. That’s where visiting celebrities like Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack hung out. With no rooms to let, it was a “bottle joint,” unlicensed premises where BYOB was the rule. The club charged dearly for glasses, ice, and mix. On any given night, a patron also had his choice of somewhere between 30 and 150 hookers to take elsewhere on his arm. Those were the days before ATMs, so the Penthouse made a killing off credit card advances. For instant cash to pay for prospective athletics, the patron paid the club a 20-percent surcharge. For that, he also got his picture taken by the cops, who surreptitiously photographed each couple leaving the premises.

The Penthouse trial was a
cause célèbre.
The owners were charged with living off the avails of prostitution. “Sure, we took the 20 percent,” was their defense, “but it was none of our business what the patrons did with the money.” Of the seven hundred photos snapped by the cops, only two hundred were offered by the Crown as evidence. The rest, according to one detective, were a blackmailer’s wet dream, for the men caught in the photos were prominent lawyers, doctors, celebrities, and politicians from across the colorful spectrum of Vancouver’s establishment.

With the Penthouse shut for the two-year duration of the case, the working girls went back to flouncing on the streets, only this time they let it all hang out in the ritzy West End. The public hue and cry deafened city hall, so when that two-million-dollar fiasco at taxpayers’ expense resulted in acquittal of the club on all counts, Vancouver was relieved to see the girls retreat into bars.

Today, Sin City is a wide-open town. There’s a hooker bar to cater to every demographic. For Hollywood high rollers, the Lounge Lizard at the Lions Gate is the
in
place. Feel free to transact business in the bar. Just don’t flounce on the streets.

The Lounge Lizard was slithering with the lunchtime crowd when Zinc entered through the lobby door and made his way to the bar. Because the hotel dated from pioneer days, the decor was British Empire gentlemen’s club in style and atmosphere. Dark wood walls with plenty of brass and overstuffed wing chairs around cocktail tables. Folks transacting business tended to congregate at the mirror-backed bar, which spanned the entire length of the off-street wall.

Bar stools were at a premium just after high noon. Luckily for the Mountie, a movie mogul had just negotiated a nooner, so Zinc procured one of the seats vacated by the happy hooker and her john. The other stool fell to an asexual academic whom the cop pegged as a radical feminist here to research her master’s thesis in women’s studies.

“I don’t muff dive,” said the blonde hooker on her other side.

“You’re a pawn, don’t you see?” countered the feminist.

“Oh? How so?” replied the blonde.

“In a patriarchal world, men are ultimately responsible for forcing women into prostitution.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Have you any idea how much money I make? Enough to put both of us through graduate school. If a john wants to flip me a C-note or two to give him a hummer, what fucking business is that of yours, Ms. Holier Than Thou?”

Good question, Chandler thought.

“And come to think of it, honey,” said the blonde, “you wouldn’t
be
here if some john hadn’t blown a load.”

The academic huffed.

“In the real world, baby, they’re all johns,” said the hooker.

On that
coup de grâce,
the inspector cocked an ear to eavesdrop on the conversation on his starboard side.

“What’s your name?”

“Stanley.”

“Hi, Stan. I’m Mona. Moaning Mona, to my friends. What do you do?”

“I’m a studio accountant.”

“Mmm,” purred Mona. “Would you like to count my beans?”

“I know a joke,” said Stanley, “about a woman like you and a man like me.”

“I like jokes.” She placed her hand on his thigh.

Stanley looked like … well, like an accountant. His bald pate had a comb-over of seven strands plastered in place. Thick Coke-bottle glasses magnified his beady eyes, strained no doubt by too many years of adding up false figures. It was hard to know which was more endearing: the cute little dimple on his chin or his roly-poly belly.

“A woman walks into her accountant’s office,” he said, “and tells him that she needs to file her taxes.”

“Fat chance,” Mona said, squeezing his pudge.

“The accountant informs her, ‘Before we start, I need to ask some questions.’ He gets her name, address, and social security number, then he asks her, ‘What’s your occupation?’

“The woman replies, ‘I’m a hooker.’”

A sharp intake of breath from mock shock almost popped Mona’s bountiful breasts out of her bodice. Her free hand rose like Betty Boop’s to her luscious mouth. “No!” she gasped, wide-eyed.

Stanley’s Adam’s apple caught in his dry throat as he struggled to complete the joke.

“The accountant balks and says, ‘No, no, no. That won’t work. It’s much too crass. Let’s rephrase it.’

“‘Okay,’ the woman says. ‘I’m a prostitute.’

“‘No,’ replies the accountant. ‘That’s still too crude. Try again.’

“The woman thinks for a moment, scratching her head. Then she tells him, ‘I’m a chicken farmer.’

“Puzzled, the accountant asks, ‘What does chicken farming have to do with being a whore’”—Stanley’s voice broke on uttering that word—“‘or a prostitute?’

“‘Well,’ the client replies, ‘I raised five thousand cocks last year.’”

Mona laughed the sort of deep throaty laugh that would terrify a mama’s boy’s mom, and her hand slid toward the beckoning bulge in the fidgeting bean-counter’s pants. “Shall we make that five thousand and one?” the hooker asked.

“How much?” Stan croaked.

“An even grand. For the best afternoon of your life.”

“Phew. That’s expensive.”

“You don’t think I’m worth it?”

Mona crossed her long legs on the bar stool to expose creamy thighs complemented by garters and nylons, seen through the slit of her tight green dress. Elbow on her knee, chin in her free palm, she leaned toward Stan so he (and Zinc) could gaze down the valley of her awesome cleavage to the mystery beyond. Her quizzical eyes were emeralds the same shade as her clinging sheath and her red hair as wild as licking flames. As a faithful male in a strong relationship with Alexis Hunt, the inspector would keep his wanton lust in check. But he had to acknowledge that Moaning Mona would be cheap at twice the price.

“I don’t know,” said Stan. “Can’t you go lower?”

“An accountant goes into a bar,” Mona said, “and sits down beside the sexiest hooker in the place.

“‘How much?’ he asks.

“‘A grand,’ she says.

“‘Gee, I don’t know,’ he hems and haws. ‘Can’t you go lower?’

“‘Sure,’ says the hooker. ‘For less, you get a penguin.’

“‘What’s a penguin?’ the accountant asks.

“‘You’ll see,’ she replies.

“So off they go to one of the upstairs rooms, where the horny guy drops his pants and waits for his ‘penguin.’ The hooker kneels and gives him the ultimate blow job. Then, just as the accountant’s about to come, she stops, gets up and walks away. With his pants around his ankles, the cheapskate waddles after her. ‘Hey, wait a minute,’ he shouts. ‘What’s a penguin?’”

Stan was still waiting for the punchline when the eavesdropping Zinc burst out laughing.

Mona winked at him over Stan’s sparse pate.

“Hello, handsome. What sharp ears you have. Shall we make that five thousand and two?”

And that’s when the barkeep approached Zinc.

“What’ll it be, sir?”

“Information.”

The Mountie flashed his bison-crested regimental badge.

“Tsk-tsk,” Mona clucked. “What a waste.”

“Oh no,” Stan gulped, and bolted from the bar.

“Our graft’s paid up to date, Officer,” the barkeep said.

“Where can we talk?”

The young man flicked his wary eyes toward the end of the bar.

As Zinc swung off the bar stool, Mona said, “Did you hear the one about the hooker and the horny cop?”

“I gotta warn you. I’m an actor,” the barkeep said. He looked like a snow stud in ads for boarding on Whistler Mountain’s usuriously ticketed slopes.

“This your day job?”

“Night job, actually. I’m working double shift to cover a bad case of the flu.”

“What’s your name?”

“Denny.”

“Denny what?”

“Am I in some kind of trouble?”

“Not yet,” said the Mountie.

“Denny … Dennis Tobin.”

“You work last night?”

“Yes,” said Denny. “What’s this about? The guy upstairs? There’s nothing I can tell you.”

“Why the warning that you’re an actor?”

Denny cracked a cautious smirk. “I’ve seen this scene enacted in a thousand noir films. A cop goes into a bar and leans on the bartender for information. He strong-arms him with”—the young thespian dropped his voice to a growl—“‘Is that a hooker I see? Are those two high on drugs? Either you talk, buddy, or we’ll be all over this place like a dose of salts. You won’t know what hit—’”

“What’s a dose of salts?” Zinc asked.

Denny blinked. “Beats me.”

“Are you going to blame me for that?”

“For what?”

“Beating you.”

Denny’s smirk switched to a genuine grin.

“The guy upstairs,” Zinc said. “What’ve you heard?”

“Nothing.”

“No? Then how do you know about him?”

“Hey, I work here. I heard the basics. Thelma found him when she did the room this morning. He’s naked. He’s dead. He’s hanging upside down. He’s got a halo of nails in his skull. And shit’s gonna hit the fan in here when the news breaks.”

“Too bad for you.”

“Why?”

“You’ll be out of work. And all because you kept mum instead of helping me.”

“No way.”