Seaweed in the Soup Read online

  PRAISE FOR STANLEY EVANS

  “Evans’ combination of [Coast] Salish lore and solid plotting is a winner.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “A fast-paced, entertaining story with enough plot twists to keep the reader guessing.”

  —Times Colonist

  “A mystery novel worth reading and lingering over.”

  —Hamilton Spectator

  “A gritty murder-mystery with some violence and suspense thrown in for good measure.”

  —Oak Bay News

  “Tightly written mystery . . . a pleasure to read.”

  —Comox Valley Record

  “Evans does not disappoint.”

  —WordWorks

  “Well worth reading. Evans knows how to set a scene, creates vivid minor characters, and is capable of spitting out the requisite snappy dialogue.”

  —Monday Magazine

  “An exciting introduction to a Coast Salish cop with a lot more entertaining stories to tell.”

  —Mystery Readers Journal

  “Sharp, calculating and extremely convincing style of writing.”

  —Victoria News

  “Evans is a forceful story teller.”

  —Parksville Qualicum News

  “[An] evocative series.”

  —Montreal Gazette

  “Makes great use of the West Coast aboriginal mythology and religion.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “The writing is wonderful native story telling. Characters are richly drawn . . . I enjoyed this so much that I’m looking for the others in the series.”

  —Hamilton Spectator

  SEAWEED IN THE SOUP

  Stanley Evans

  For my sister Marion, and Douglas Bee

  THE WARRIOR RESERVE DOES NOT EXIST. All of the characters, incidents and dialogue in this novel are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual living persons or to real events is coincidental. Depictions of Native mythology and religion are based on ethnological research and do not necessarily reflect the present-day observances and practices of Canada’s West Coast Native people.

  BEFORE

  Victoria is surrounded by forest, and when I go out of an early morning, checking up on the homeless people sleeping in parks and doorways and alleys, I often see wild animals as well. Raccoons, skunks and squirrels are common. Coyotes, deer and cougars wander our streets occasionally. Moreover, because we’d had a long cold spring that year, huckleberries, salmonberries and blackberries were scarce, and hungry bears had been coming down from the mountains to forage on garbage.

  But ravens seldom nest in the inner city, and when a pair moved into a tree on Pandora Street, I kept a wary eye on them.

  Because of its black plumage, croaking call and carrion diet, the raven has since ancient times been regarded as a bird of ill omen. To Canada’s West Coast Natives, Raven also symbolizes Creation, prestige and knowledge. In Coast Salish mythology, Raven placed the sun in the sky and put fishes in the sea. In the Coast Salish language, Raven’s mystical name may be also be translated as “Trickster,” a powerful god with the power to change itself into anything it chooses—a woman, say, or a tree, or a whale.

  That morning, though, it was easy to overlook the ravens’ Trickster reputations as they soared joyously upwards wing-to-wing, before plummeting recklessly back to earth half out of control, calling raucously. Possessed by love, the ravens spent hours cheek-to-cheek cooing, warbling, and preening each other’s purplish-black feathers. Next, a couple of fluffy brownish chicks appeared. The doting parents spent their days airlifting rotten meat and other delicacies to the nestlings. Well-fed raven babies don’t croak; they coo and they gurgle.

  One warm August morning, the nestlings were flapping their wings on a favourite bough when a couple of young women came by. Both were wearing cut-offs, flip-flops, Jesus loves you, everybody else thinks you’re an asshole T-shirts, and shades.

  The women were on the chunky side and looked like fresh-off-the-reserve folks to me—doe-eyed Indians with long black hair, copper-coloured skin and pretty faces. As they marvelled at the ravens, I took their measure. Statistically, one or both women would be skinny crackheads within two years. Maybe this pair would beat the odds, although, given those four harbingers of mischief watching us from above, I somehow doubted it.

  I went over and said, “Good morning. I’m Sergeant Seaweed. Call me Silas. You’re both new in town, right? Anything I can do for you? No? Well in case you’re wondering, I belong to the Warrior Tribe, that’s my office over there. If you run into a problem drop in and see me . . . ”

  That’s as far as I got, because Nimrod Wright shoved himself into the picture. In a soberer incarnation, Nimrod Wright had been a fisherman. By then, he was an incoherent panhandler who oscillated between the drunk tank, rehab and the funny farm. When Nimrod staggered up to the women with his handout, they turned their backs on us and cleared off around the first corner.

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was about eight o’clock in the morning. A nice sunny August day. I found Chief Detective Inspector Bernie Tapp in Lou’s Cafe. Bernie is a tough-looking guy with hair a quarter of an inch long, an eighteen-inch neck, and eyes the colour of coal. He has the same hard leanness as men who chop down trees for a living. He was wearing a white shirt with the top button undone, a maroon necktie that had been slackened off, and a pair of blue denim pants. His red golf jacket had burn marks on both pockets. He didn’t look like a detective, but that was the whole idea.

  Bernie was sitting alone in a booth by a window, eating steak and eggs. There was a paperback book propped up on the table in front of him. A trace of runny egg, visible on Bernie’s chin, led me to conclude that Bernie was more interested in what he was reading than in what he was eating. Lou was busy serving customers. I helped myself to a cup of coffee and carried it over to Bernie’s table. I didn’t say hello until I was seated opposite him. Taken by surprise, Bernie grabbed the book and put it down on the seat beside him where I couldn’t see it. He was too slow. I grinned, but I didn’t say anything. The book’s title was Mood Disorders—How Sudden Impulses Can Ruin Your Life.

  Bernie drank some coffee and stared at me expectantly. He’s the best friend I’ve got. We go fishing occasionally whenever Bernie takes a day off work, which isn’t often. Not nowadays. Being a CDI is a big deal, but Bernie used to get more fun out of life when he was a sergeant. He was waiting for me to rib him about the book, but he was saved by the ringing of his cellphone.

  One minute later, the pair of us were aboard Bernie’s Interceptor, and he was driving too fast on a winding stretch of blacktop through a stand of half-tamed rainforest. An occasional secluded mansion told us that rich people lived around there. After a couple of screeching turns, we ended up on Collins Lane, a winding gravel road suddenly dead-ended by a giant shingled house. Bernie hit the brakes. With gravel spitting and snarling from beneath our wheels, we skidded to a halt alongside a blue and white patrol car. I noticed a shiny new BMW convertible and an ’88 Toyota Corolla parked in a detached garage.

  There are places in Victoria where you can’t get down to the waterfront unless you own it. This was one of those places. “Must be nice,” Bernie remarked, as we tramped up a flight of granite steps to the front door. The house had about twenty rooms. It was the kind of residence that people like the Astors and the Vanderbilts would call a summer cottage. Instead of knocking, Bernie and I barged straight into a vestibule with a full-size Chinese rickshaw parked in a corner. An Inuit kayak was propped up in another corner. The remaining space was large enough for a ping-pong tournament. The ceilings were twelve feet high. A single yellow driving glove lay on an oak table. The door leading from the vestibule int
o the house was held ajar by a hideous but no doubt expensive elephant’s-foot umbrella stand. The house—full of museum-grade art and furniture—smelled of beeswax, and the parquet floors gleamed. We tramped through a vast echoing hall and on into a formal dining room with a mahogany table, chairs for sixteen people, and enough heavy silver candlesticks, rosebowls and platters to ballast a ship.

  A woman’s laughter drew Bernie and me through an archway and along a passage to a kitchen at the back of the house.

  Lightning Bradley—Victoria’s oldest uniformed constable—was seated at a table drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette, and telling jokes to a woman who was washing dishes at the kitchen sink. The woman wore a lace-trimmed white apron over a black dress. The lines on her face put her at fiftyish; her eyes twinkled with amusement. Bradley was appraising her with a gaze too frank to be innocent.

  Bradley turned his big square face towards us. Instead of showing some ordinary polite respect for Bernie’s rank, Bradley remarked idly, “This pretty lady is Mrs. Milton, the housekeeper. She’s the one who found it.” After a moment, Bradley added as an afterthought, “Ricketts is watching it downstairs.”

  I groaned inwardly, thinking, here we go again. Barely controlled rage was fast becoming Bernie’s default mode, and it looked as if everybody was in for a bad day. “Say, Mrs. Milton,” he snarled. “Why don’t you just leave those dishes for now, and wait for us outside? We’ll have some questions for you later, so don’t wander too far.”

  Mrs. Milton’s smile faded. Startled and upset by Bernie’s unnecessarily harsh tone, she hurried out to a back patio, her black skirts swishing around her legs.

  Bradley stubbed his cigarette in a saucer and stood up quickly. “Oh yeah, right, Bernie,” he said, holding his hands up as if to admit his folly. “You know how it is, we got to talking and I never thought. It’s this way, let me show you.”

  Bernie bottled his anger. We followed Bradley through a doorway off the kitchen, down a flight of wooden stairs to the basement, and along a hallway to an L-shaped bedroom. When we entered, the thick meaty odour of freshly spilled blood enveloped us like a mist. It was a gruesome scene. The rumpled blue duvet covering the room’s double bed looked as if somebody had emptied a can of red paint across it.

  The room’s other occupant was Constable Ricketts, a new recruit. Ricketts was gazing fixedly at a slim Asian male stretched out naked on the floor’s blue carpet. Appearances suggested that during his final agonies, the doomed man had rolled off the bed.

  Ricketts’ face had a sickly pale tone, and he appeared to be deeply shaken. He made a noise in his throat when we joined him, but didn’t say anything comprehensible. Bernie took latex gloves from his pockets, blew on them to inflate and stretch the rubber, and went down on his haunches to examine the corpse.

  The dead man lay on his back. His neck had been slashed. The wound had severed both of his carotid arteries, as well as the jugular veins. The incision was so deep that the dead man was almost decapitated—his head lay at an unnatural angle to his body. Flies buzzed around, feasting on the dreadful wound and on the splashes of blood that Rorschached the surrounding area. “There’s a word for this kind of blood loss,” Bernie said. “I just can’t think of it now.”

  “How about messy?” I suggested.

  Bernie bared his teeth. When we straightened up after looking at the corpse, Bernie said, “You’re Ricketts, right? Do you know who I am?”

  Ricketts emerged from his trance and snapped to attention. “You’re CDI Tapp, sir?” he answered uncertainly.

  The ghost of a smile flitted across Bernie’s face. “Twenty years ago I pounded the pavement with your old man, Ricketts,” Bernie replied in a consciously gentle tone. “Is this your first murder?”

  “Yes, sir,” Ricketts answered. Pointing at the corpse, he said with a bewildered face, “Only, it kept twitching.”

  “What kept twitching?”

  “The body. Its arms . . . It’s stopped now, but for a while earlier its arms and fingers kept twitching like it was alive. Like it was trying to stretch out and reach for something.”

  “That happens sometimes. It’s something to do with changes in the body’s chemistry after death,” Bernie said, his arm going around Ricketts’ shoulder. “The first time I saw it, it scared the hell out of me too. Are you going to be okay?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Have you or Bradley touched the body or anything else in this room?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Fine, I’m glad to hear that,” Bernie said, guiding Ricketts across the room to a window that overlooked the driveway.

  “Easy does it,” said Bernie, unfastening the window catch and pushing the window wide open. “Take a deep breath and get focussed. When you’re ready, tell us what went on. Pretend we don’t know anything, which we don’t. In your own words?”

  Ricketts filled his lungs with clean fresh air. “The housekeeper found the dead man when she came to work this morning. She told us that his name is Ronnie Chew. He’s the gardener-cum-handyman.”

  “That’s it? Mrs. Milton comes to work and finds a dead gardener?”

  Ricketts moved his weight from foot to foot. Straightening his shoulders, he said with growing assurance, “Chief, a neighbour walking his dog this morning saw two young women on Collins Lane. They were walking, which aroused his suspicions. The neighbour thought that the women were Native Indians. After speaking to them, he called 911. Constable Bradley and I were in a radio car nearby and were the first to respond.”

  “What time was that?”

  “It was about a quarter to eight when the dispatcher’s call came through. We were on Haultain Street, near the Jubilee Hospital. I was driving; we headed this way immediately. Going down Echo Bay Road, we saw two women who matched the descriptions we’d been given. When we stopped the car, the women fled into the bush. We gave chase on foot, but they had a head start on us and we lost ’em.”

  “Two women walking along Collins Lane aroused a neighbour’s suspicions?” I said, speaking to Ricketts for the first time. “Why? What were they doing exactly?”

  “The guy who reported them said that they were just walking, but everybody knows there’s a lot of money lives around here, so strangers get noticed,” Ricketts answered. “The women wouldn’t or couldn’t give a reasonable account of themselves.”

  I said, “Let me see if I’ve got this right. You and Bradley followed the two women into the bush?”

  Lightning Bradley—standing just outside the bedroom door—cleared his throat to let Ricketts know that he was listening.

  That reignited Bernie’s fuse. His face went very red. Going instantly into his raging-lunatic mode, Bernie lurched towards Bradley and poked his chest with a stiff finger. With ear-shattering intensity, Bernie roared, “You are suspended from duty as of this minute! If you talk to Mrs. Milton or to Constable Ricketts or to anyone remotely connected to this case without my permission, you’re toast!”

  The corners of Bradley’s mouth sank towards his chin; his glance fell to the floor.

  “You’re a disgrace to the uniform!” Bernie ranted. “Give me your car keys and your notebook!”

  Bradley was trembling when he handed them over.

  “You’re a brainless idiot!” Bernie yelled. “Now clear out of this house and wait for me in the driveway. Get out of my sight this instant!”

  Bradley hurried out of the room. I usually share Bernie’s opinions about sloppy police work, but Bernie was overreacting. I overcame an impulse to intervene. Bernie turned angrily towards Constable Ricketts. “Did you hear what I said? If you or Bradley exchange a single word with each other or with Mrs. Milton, you are toast, finished. I’ll shoot the pair of you down in flames! Do you understand me?”

  Too intimidated to speak, the young officer just nodded.

  “Okay,” Bernie said, lowering his voice with an effort. “You and Bradley followed the women into the woods. Then what?”

  R
icketts moistened his lips with his tongue. “We followed the two women into the bush, but they had a good start on us. To be honest, after they left the road I never saw them again. I saw something, but I don’t think it was the suspects. It was probably a big bird, maybe some kind of an animal. Something. When it became apparent that we’d lost ’em, Constable Bradley thought he’d better go back to the car.”

  After a pause, Ricketts added gamely, “It’s not fair to blame Constable Bradley entirely, sir. It’s as much my fault that the women got away.”

  “Stop apologizing. You’re supposed to be a cop, not a goddamn Boy Scout,” Bernie snapped. “Just tell me what happened.”

  “After you leave the road, the brush is very heavy in places along there. A jungle of firs and cedars and salal bushes. Blackberry clumps everywhere. I poked around for a while after Bradley went back to the car and I ended up going down some steep ground to the beach. I guessed that the women would probably go north, so I headed that way myself. I was just level with this house when I heard a woman screaming. It was Mrs. Milton. She had just found the dead man and had fled from the house in a panic. She was in a terrible state. It took me a while to calm her down. By then I figured the suspects were long gone, so I used my cellphone to call Constable Bradley and tell him what was going on here. After Bradley showed up at the house and had had a good look at the dead man, he told me to stay with the body. ‘We’ve got to secure the crime scene,’ is what Bradley told me.”

  I said, “This thing that you saw in the woods. You thought it was a big bird or an animal. Can you describe it more precisely?”

  “I only glimpsed it from the corner of my eye,” Ricketts said after some hesitation. “Something moved very suddenly, although I didn’t hear any noise. When I turned my head, all I saw was a large isolated boulder. The thing that I saw wasn’t human. I don’t think it was human. Seeing it kind of sudden like that, it gave me a bit of a shock. Anyway, I didn’t see anything more until I reached the beach.”