Seaweed on the Rocks Read online

  “Am I in quarantine? Do people think I’m contagious?”

  “Certainly. People are scared shitless. Mention AIDS and their brains go down the toilet.”

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  Victoria’s “Viagra Triangle” is based at Rock Bay, the area lying between Douglas Street and the Gorge Waterway. Fifty years ago it was largely residential, but now the few remaining houses share Rock Bay with pawnshops, one-hour motels, used-car dealerships, warehouses, hole-in-the-wall consignment shops and British Columbia’s liquor-distribution headquarters, which occupies a whole block. But when I parked my car on the street in front of it, it was after five o’clock and all the liquor employees had gone home. I strolled to the corner of Government and Bay streets and stood with my back to an ivy-covered concrete building that, as soon as it gets dark around there, provides a windbreak for street hookers and the swaggering pimps who own them body and soul.

  Hidden beyond the masonry walls and tall steel silos across Government Street was Rock Bay itself—one of Victoria’s minor navigable backwaters. When the traffic light changed to green, I crossed over, walked past the Ocean Cement concrete plant, turned a couple of corners and ended up looking at the treasures displayed in Titus Silverman’s hockshop window. The only thing I coveted was a shipbuilder’s 1/75 scale model of the SS Princess Marguerite, priced very reasonably at $15,000. I went in and idled my way between display cases containing the abandoned souvenirs of anonymous lives until I came face to face with Frankie Nichols. Fifty years old, a matronly ex-Las Vegas showgirl, she was sitting behind a wire-mesh wicket with her elbows on the counter and her chin in her hands. She gave me a long cool look, sighed and half-lowered her eyelids.

  “Hiya, Frankie,” I said. “I’m making inquiries about an engraved silver cup purchased from here last week.”

  “Sorry I can’t help you, Silas, because nobody here’s sold nothing in silver cups in months.”

  “That’s not what I heard, Frankie.”

  “I can’t help that,” she replied mulishly.

  “In that case, I need to see your pawn book.”

  “No chance. Not without a court order,” she said, her soft lower lip sticking out. “You know Titus hates cops. If he knew that I was even talking to you now, it’d be more than my job is worth.”

  “Is Titus here?”

  “No, he don’t come in here much, thank Christ.”

  “What’s the matter?” I said, puzzled by Frankie’s less-than-welcoming attitude. “Don’t you like me any more?”

  “I don’t even like my kids any more,” she responded listlessly. “Why don’t you scram over to the recycling depot and bother them guys instead?”

  Titus Silverman’s recycling depot was a rectangular, flat-roofed, corrugated-iron building that had been spawned as a machine shop. At the tables on the sidewalk in front of it, a continuous flow of binners traded bottles and cans for cash. Abandoned shopping carts lay everywhere. The whole scene was like a Baghdad street market after a suicide-bomb attack. As I arrived, a helmeted biker drove a Harley chopper out of an alley beside the depot and roared off downtown.

  Walking down the same alley, I glanced through a doorway set in the depot’s otherwise blank wall. A man wearing plastic goggles, a face mask and earmuffs was heaving bottles and cans into crushing machines. The clatter of gritty materials racing down steel chutes was almost loud enough to drown the noise of the German shepherd guard dogs going nuts inside their wire cages. I tapped the man’s shoulder. When he emerged from his trance, I asked him where Titus Silverman’s office was. The mumble emerging from his face mask was probably words. I went out again, walked to the back of the building and entered a door marked NO VISITERS—TRASPASSARS KILLED. Inside, surrounded by mountains of cardboard boxes, six men were sitting around a felt-covered, octagonal poker table playing five-card stud. One of them directed me to a small, square, windowless room with unpainted gyproc walls, a concrete floor with a square of brown furry carpet on it and the kind of furniture appropriate to a recycling facility. It stank of poor digestion and dirty clothes.

  Sitting in the middle of a filthy black velvet couch, poring over a dog-eared Hustler magazine was a Mexican with a long grey ponytail and a tight face. According to the poker player, the guy’s name was Tubby Gonzales. He had the consummate liar’s frank unblinking gaze, and it focused on me as I entered and took his measure. Gonzales was about forty years old, on the short side and a little overweight. His shoulders were probably no wider than an ordinary door. The hubcap he was using as an ashtray overflowed with butts.

  “Mr. Gonzales? Good afternoon,” I said. “I am Sergeant Seaweed of the Victoria Police Department.”

  “You the guy was in the hockshop earlier, pushing Frankie around and asking after Tight-ass?” he asked in a chilly voice. He had a cleft palate and spoke a queer variety of English.

  “That’s correct, and I hope you don’t try to fuck with me as well, because I might lose my patience, and putting uncooperative civilians in handcuffs raises my blood pressure.”

  “Tough guy, eh? So what you want?”

  “I’m trying to trace objects stolen in a recent burglary. You or Mr. Silverman may be able to help with my inquiries.”

  He lit another cigarette. “We don’t handle no stolen property.”

  “Of course not, it’s out of the question,” I retorted sarcastically. “Still, sometimes things go missing, and sometimes those things turn up in pawnshops.”

  “What should I do, lay an egg?”

  After counting silently to five, I said, “One of the stolen items was an engraved silver cup. That cup was found in and purchased from Mr. Silverman’s pawnshop a few days ago.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Silver cup, my ass,” he said in a voice as excited as an iceberg. “I just told you—we don’t handle no stolen property.”

  “The gentlemen playing cards outside tell me that you manage things during Titus Silverman’s absence. Now how do you think Mr. Silverman will feel when he gets back from wherever he is and finds that his business licence has been lifted?”

  Gonzales’ laugh sounded like a backfiring diesel. “It won’t happen. I mean, somebody brings us something, and a shop assistant makes a mistake. Hey, mistakes happen. People don’t lose business licences just like that.”

  “They do if the infraction is integral to a murder investigation.”

  “Murder?” Gonzales returned with less assurance. “Who’s been murdered?”

  “Who do you think I am, a newsboy? You want information, buy a paper,” I said, putting some menace into my voice for the first time. “All that concerns you is that I’m looking for stolen property.”

  Gonzales got up from the couch, carefully folded his magazine, put it down on the French provincial dressing table that served as his desk and sat behind it on a wooden kitchen chair. He leaned back in the chair, blew a smoke ring and asked innocently, “Is Tight-ass dead?”

  I let that ride and allowed the tension to build for a minute before I said, “When’s the last time you saw Titus Silverman?”

  “We ain’t seen Tight-ass since the early part of last week, which is funny,” Gonzales answered, a hint of confusion now wrinkling the flesh between his eyes. “He never said nothing about going nowhere, so we been wondering.”

  “You are sitting in the middle of a nasty piece of business, Mr. Gonzales, so you’d better tell me what you know about those stolen items and the person who brought them in.”

  “I don’ know a goddam thing!” he snapped back. “For Chrissake, you think we can account for every candlestick that comes into the shop?”

  I let the tension grow before I asked, “When’s the last time Titus Silverman took an unexplained absence lasting more than a week?”

  Gonzales sighed. After butting his smoke in the hubcap, he said, “It’s not like Tight-ass to take time off—not ever. I tell you the truth, I been wondering where he’s at.”
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  “Does Titus ride a Harley?”

  “Nah. He rides a BSA.”

  “Have you contacted his family?”

  “Tight-ass ain’t got no family since the bitch moved out.”

  “Which bitch?”

  “His old lady! Jesus!” Gonzales snarled, speaking as if only a hermit after years of solitude in a remote cave could be unaware of such an important fact.

  Gonzales declined to identify the old lady in question, but he did provide me with Titus Silverman’s home address. I said goodbye. He ignored this, but I thought that his exasperation seemed a bit overdone. And I’ll say this for him—he was exactly what Titus Silverman needed in the way of a lieutenant, and if I ever meet him in a back alley, I want to be the one carrying the baseball bat.

  I went out of his office and stopped to watch the poker game. The players took no notice of me until I asked them what the ante was.

  “Fuck off,” somebody said.

  By that time I’d figured out where the sucker was sitting.

  I drove over to Fisherman’s Marina, parked my MG near the houseboats and walked down a wooden ramp to Barb’s floating cafe. While waiting for my order of cod and fries, I phoned Tubby Gonzales. I said, “I’ll bet you five I know the make of car and approximate year of that hubcap on your desk.”

  “You’re on.”

  “It’s an A40 Austin, vintage 1953 to 1956.”

  There was a short pause.

  “You owe me five,” I said.

  With a click Gonzales broke the connection.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Given Titus Silverman’s lurid reputation, I’d expected his house to be a mini-Fort Apache or a concrete bunker with gun ports. It turned out to be an ordinary 1960s split-level in a crescent off Admirals Road. Located behind a lawn flanked with beds of well-tended tulips and heathers, the house stood adjacent to an empty lot covered with Scotch broom and mature cedars where kids had built a tree fort.

  As Acting Chief Detective Inspector Bernie Tapp and I went up the gravel path to the front door, I looked inside the garage and saw a BSA motorbike. Bernie had seen something else—bolted to a metal post set into the ground was a cast-iron plaque bearing the symbol of a pistol and the phrase “We don’t dial 911.” The combined weight of the post and plaque was probably about the same as a sack of cement, but showing no visible exertion whatsoever, Bernie tore the whole assembly out of the ground and tossed it over the fence into the vacant lot. He then dusted off his hands and pushed the doorbell.

  After a longish wait a slender young Asian woman answered the door. She was wearing diaphanous silk lounging pajamas, lip gloss like freshly applied tomato ketchup and enough perfume to deodorize a pulp mill. “No goo. Titus no hoe,” she said, batting her long mascaraed eyelashes seductively.

  Bernie put his foot against the door to prevent her from closing it and pushed his way into the house. I followed, and she didn’t try to stop us. She just folded her arms, leaned against a wall and said, “Ha-hah.”

  “Don’t I know you?” I inquired.

  She shook her head. She wasn’t beautiful, but she looked like she’d be plenty of fun on a stag night after she popped out of the cake.

  “We’d like to talk to Titus,” Bernie said.

  “Titus no hoe.”

  “Where can we reach him?”

  “No hoe. Titus no hoe.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Ming,” she said demurely. “Titus no hoe.”

  “I think we’ve got that,” Bernie said. “Titus is not home. What we’d like to know is what you are doing here?”

  “Titus throw me ow. I come back when I fine ow Titus no hoe.”

  Bernie and I went past her and into a living room heavily scented with the woman’s perfume. The room had too much furniture, all of it new and expensive. Some of the upholstered chairs were still draped in transparent plastic shipping wrap. There was a small modern kitchen with stainless steel appliances and polished granite countertops. A bedroom in the back of the house was full of a king-sized bed. A second bedroom had been fitted out as an office. The bungalow’s single bathroom had pink accoutrements that included a Jacuzzi and a bidet. While Bernie tried to converse with Ming, I poked around. There were no suspicious letters, phone numbers or any of Lawrence Trew’s ballpoint pens in Titus Silverman’s office—or if there were, I didn’t see them.

  “I’ve half a mind to take her back to headquarters,” Bernie said. “Use an interpreter and question her under oath.”

  “I doubt if she’s a Christian.”

  “You’re Chinese, right?” Bernie asked her. “From the Mainland or Hong Kong?”

  “Vietnam,” Ming said.

  “Chinese, Vietnamese, what’s the difference? I’d swear her on the chicken oath,” Bernie told me. “Ever seen it done?”

  Instead of answering Bernie’s question, I bulged my bottom lip with my tongue.

  “The chicken oath is swearing to tell the truth after cutting off the head of a live hen with a sharp knife,” Bernie explained.

  “In court?”

  “Certainly. In an open court with the judge and jury right there watching.”

  “Why not?” I said. “Nixon swore he wasn’t a liar. Clinton swore he never had sex with a White House intern, and they were both Christians. Maybe we should forget bibles, see if swearing on chickens works better.”

  “I go’ chicken,” Ming said, pointing.

  We looked out the window into a backyard consisting mostly of chicken coops and fenced runs where handsome red banties were scratching up dust.

  Bernie’s stern expression faded. “My dad used to raise chickens. And homing pigeons.”

  “I never knew that.”

  “We raced ’em on weekends for years and years.”

  “You raced chickens?”

  “I wish I had chickens in my yard now,” said Bernie, smiling absently, “instead of paving slabs, a gazebo and pre-cast concrete fucking gnomes.”

  “What’s stopping you? It wouldn’t cost much to build a chicken coop and a run. We could do the whole job in a weekend.”

  “Can’t. There’s a bylaw against keeping live poultry in my neighbourhood,” he said. Turning to Ming he said, “I’ll be in touch.”

  On the way out I asked Ming, “Didn’t I see you perform at a fire-hall smoker last Christmas?”

  Giggling, she hung her head.

  We went out.

  Bernie said, “What do you think?”

  I stopped outside the garage. Instead of answering Bernie’s question, I said, “Did I tell you that Titus Silverman rides a Beezer?”

  “No, you didn’t. So what?”

  “That’s one, right there.”

  “Correct. A BSA Lightning Rocket with a custom tank. Six hundred and fifty cubic centimetres of sheer terror. Ever been astride one of those babies in top gear?”

  “Hell, no.”

  We went back to Bernie’s car.

  “Maybe it’s time we said hi to Frankie again,” I suggested.

  Bernie drove us over to Titus Silverman’s hockshop. The Princess Marguerite was no longer on display.

  I said, “Hiya, Frankie. What happened to that ship model?”

  This time Frankie smiled. “Why, did you want it?”

  “Sure, in the same way I want to win the 6/49.”

  “You’ll need lottery money if you start collecting quality ship models. We don’t get many, but those we do get sell for a ton.”

  Bernie, who didn’t like Frankie as much as I did, said, “Have you heard from Titus Silverman lately?”

  Frankie stared at Bernie without expression.

  I said, “Level with us, Frankie. You were on duty the day Hector Latour and Marnie Paul came in here with a silver cup and some other stuff, right?”

  Time passed. Eventually Frankie nodded.

  “Tell us about it, Frankie,” Bernie suggested heavily.

  She folded her arms, thought for another minute and said, “Th
ey came in with a cardboard box full of stuff, just a bunch of crap. I was making them an offer when Titus arrived. He took Hector and Marnie into his back office and made his own deal.”

  “We need to see the record of that transaction.”

  “No way,” Frankie said firmly. “Not a chance.”

  That’s when Bernie decided to get tough. “Wait here,” he said to me. “Make sure Frankie stays put till I get back with a search warrant.”

  He had reached the door before Frankie said, “Okay, you win. Just hold it.”

  Bernie sauntered back to the counter.

  Frankie thought things over for another minute before reaching into a drawer and bringing out an account book. She said, “Remind me what date you’re interested in.”

  After consulting his notebook, Bernie did so.

  “There’s no record of that transaction,” Frankie said, pushing the account book across the counter. “Look for yourself.”

  She was right. Neither Hector Latour’s nor Marnie Paul’s name appeared in the pawnshop’s account book on the date in question.

  Either Frankie’s girdle was too tight or she was nervous, because she was becoming fidgety. Bernie looked at me and winked.

  I said to Frankie, “You were making a deal with Hector Latour and Marnie Paul. Titus Silverman comes in, they talk for a moment then Titus takes them into his back office?”

  “Right. One day is pretty much like another in here. I couldn’t remember the actual day it was, but I remember what happened because Titus doesn’t spend much time here now. Generally he’s over at the recycling depot.”

  “Why?” Bernie said.

  “Ask Titus.”

  Bernie, lying relentlessly, said, “Listen, Frankie, I hope you understand that you are complicit in a violation of the Pawnbroker and Moneylender’s Act.”

  “Technically I am in violation of the Minimum Wage Act, but I need money for food and rent so what the hell . . . ”

  “Well, technically is all that counts,” Bernie said. “I think you’d better let us into Titus’ office.”

  Frankie picked up a phone behind the counter and spoke to the Mexican over at the depot. She put the phone down and said, “Titus is still AWOL. To be honest, I don’t know what to do.”