Seaweed in the Soup Read online

  Bernie was speaking into a cellphone when he showed up and parked at the curb. He put the phone away, and then got slowly out of his car. He was yawning when we walked up to the house together. Bernie rang the doorbell; nobody answered. I shaded the sides of my face with my hands and looked through a front window. It was dark inside, I couldn’t see anything. The back door facing the school was locked.

  Bernie had stopped yawning. “We’re going in,” he muttered.

  Using my Glock like a club, I broke a side window, climbed inside, and let Bernie into the kitchen. In the day’s scorching heat, Bradley’s house smelled foul, and when we turned lights on, we saw a scene of utter destruction. As we slowly advanced through the house towards the living room, the extraordinarily powerful smells of spilt blood, urine and feces became unbearable. We retreated to the kitchen, opened doors and windows, wetted handkerchiefs, held them to our faces and made a second attempt to reach the living room.

  The house had been thoroughly trashed. Papers, feathers and furniture stuffing was strewn everywhere. Fine suspended particles filled the air. Drawers had been pulled out of cabinets, and their contents dumped onto the floor. Cushions, pillows and mattresses had been slashed. Carpets had been drawn back to reveal bare boards. Cabinets had been dragged away from walls; hollow metal curtain rods had been taken down and searched. The toilet’s tank lid lay in small pieces on the bathroom floor. Photographs had been removed from their frames. But that was all incidental. We only half-noticed such things at the time, because the woman we found in the lounge took our minds off everything else.

  It was another grisly bloodbath.

  The woman was fastened to a fake-leather recliner by yards of duct tape. Her blue woollen dress and the recliner she sat in were drenched in blood, as was the carpet beneath her. Flies buzzed around the corpse. More duct tape had been wrapped around her head, covering her mouth and anchoring her arms to the chair. She had been badly beaten. Her face and body were swollen and bloated beyond recognition, but a folded wheelchair leaning against a wall and the corpse’s muscular arms and useless, atrophied legs told us that this was Bradley’s wife, Maggie.

  Maggie’s fingernails had been ripped out. Her dress had been slit open down the front, exposing her sagging breasts and her groin area. And Maggie’s glistening entrails. Gripped by primeval dread and disgust, I touched Maggie’s skin. It was still warm, and rigor had not yet commenced; she had been dead less than three hours. The scene was so ghastly that for a few seconds I experienced involuntary skin-crawling sensations.

  “The guy who did this is a maniac,” I said unnecessarily. “A stark raving lunatic.”

  We went out to the backyard together; children’s laughter echoed distantly in the school playground.

  When Bernie finished phoning Serious Crimes, I said, “I’d like to know where Lightning is.”

  Bernie took a deep breath. “Think he did it?”

  “Not a chance.”

  “He might have done it,” Bernie insisted, his face flushed. “Lightning’s job was on the line and it must have preyed on his mind. He might have gone over the edge. If he did, I’m responsible.”

  “That’s crap, Bernie. You’re talking nonsense.”

  Bernie’s head snapped back as if I’d slapped him. After that we barely spoke to each other until Serious Crimes showed up minutes later.

  Bernie laid down the law. “We’ve got to keep the lid on this business,” he told everyone sternly. “A complete silence, I want the press kept out of it as long as possible.”

  I didn’t see any particular need for it, but I didn’t argue. Bernie turned his attention to the foot soldiers, some of whom were already stringing yellow Crime Scene Police tape around the house.

  When I got home, I removed every stitch of my clothing, put it in a garbage bag, and secured the bag with a twist-tie. Then I went out to the backyard shower and scrubbed myself with deodorant soap until my skin felt raw. The smell of death was in my mouth and in my nostrils; I couldn’t wash it away.

  CHAPTER SIX

  First Woman—who brings rain to Vancouver Island—had been smiling instead of weeping for weeks, and Victoria was hot. It was two in the afternoon, and I was hot. My office was hot. The city was hot like August in Tucson is hot. Last week, CFAX’s weatherman told us that Victoria’s present climate is the way it was in northern California 50 years ago. I’m beginning to believe it. Local farmers are ploughing up their potato fields now. Planting grapevines and calling themselves vintners. People grow peaches instead of apples in their backyards.

  I looked at Pandora Street through a slat in my closed office window blinds. A narrow bar of bright afternoon light spilled inside. A fat bald taxi driver, hunched over his steering wheel like a Buddha as he waited for the traffic lights to change, was casting lascivious eyes at a young prostitute, skinny as a desert rat, who was lurking outside Swans pub. A street-person of indeterminate sex was collecting discarded bottles and cans from a garbage gobbler. I brought out the office bottle, braced myself with a stiff one, and started looking through the Raymond Cho murder book.

  According to the ME, Raymond Cho had been murdered approximately two or three hours before Mrs. Milton discovered his body. When screened, the bloodstains on the slavekiller club did not match Cho’s DNA. The blood in the medicine bag—as I could have told them—was that of wild animals and birds, not humans. Forensics had found traces of cocaine in Cho’s room and in his BMW, along with numerous fibre samples and many disparate samples of human hair. Ultraviolet light had revealed bloody size ten shoe prints leading from Cho’s bedroom and down the corridor to the staircase. Lightning Bradley wore size tens. Nice Manners had seized several pairs of shoes from Lightning’s house, one pair of which, when examined under ultraviolet light, showed traces of blood. Bradley’s uniform had been found in the house and, when examined, it too had tested positive for cocaine.

  The crime-scene bunnysuiters who had unearthed Cho’s smut-filled digital camera had also lifted a complete set of Lightning Bradley’s fingerprints from the inside of Cho’s BMW. In addition, traces of cocaine had been found in Bradley’s Crown Royal.

  Bradley’s future—and Ricketts’—was looking increasingly bleak.

  After another drink, I used my desk phone and called Fred Halloran at the Times Colonist. Fred was out, but I tracked him down at Pinky’s. I told Fred that if he’d wait for me, I’d go over and buy him a drink. Fred was a newspaperman who had me to thank for a couple of scoops; it was time for him to return the favour.

  The sun had moved even closer to Victoria by then. I was wet under my clothes by the time I had walked the several blocks to View Street. The sun blazed above the rooftops. Wisps of steam rose from manhole covers; the sky pressed down like molten lead. Half a dozen Harleys were parked outside Pinky’s—a hole-in-the-wall bar. Rotating gaily up on Pinky’s flat roof was something new: a red neon pig driving a purple neon motorcycle.

  Pinky’s has low ceilings, bad-smelling air, and is furnished with the kind of seedy mismatched oddments that marginal restaurateurs pick up at fire sales. Rock music poured out of giant speakers. Bearded bikers with jail-tatted arms were drinking beer at tables set around a small dance floor. Female patrons dressed in clothing suitable for hanging around on street corners after dark lounged here and there. Fred Halloran sagged against Pinky’s bar clutching an empty glass. Thin and sixtyish, with a gloomy expression, horn-rimmed glasses and ill-fitting dentures, Fred wore a brown fedora and a scruffy beige raincoat that had been out of fashion since the Beatles left Liverpool. I sat on a stool and asked Fred if he expected rain.

  “Jeez, this weather,” Fred mumbled.

  Pinky’s Irish beer slinger—a red-haired, red-nosed, beer-bellied functioning alcoholic named Doyle—was behind the bar picking his teeth with a plastic cocktail fork. Doyle wore a Guinness apron, a starched white collarless shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and black pants supported by wide green suspenders.

  “Glory be to Go
d, it’s the filth, so it is,” said Doyle to me. “And here a fellow was telling me only half an hour ago that you’d been swept to your death down a drain, so he did.”

  “And the best of Hibernian luck to you too, Doyle. I’ll have a cheeseburger and fries, a pint of Fosters, and give that ink-stained wretch over there whatever he’s drinking.”

  “Oh, you’re a great man for the drink, Silas. A double Scotch will set me up nicely, so it will,” Fred Halloran responded in a fair imitation of Doyle’s rough Belfast patter.

  Doyle shouted “Cheese and fries!” through a hatch behind the bar, poured the drinks, set my Fosters in front of me and slid the Scotch to Fred along a bar scarred and burnt by yesteryear’s untended cigarettes. Doyle then leaned against the bar’s back counter and resumed work on his upper molars.

  Fred stopped ogling a long-legged woman across the room. With his glass tilted slightly in his hand, he eyed me over the rim and said, “Here’s looking up your old address.”

  “I seem to recall that you covered the crime beat in Vancouver before you moved to Victoria.”

  “I was a reporter on the Vancouver Province in the sixties. Those were investigative journalism’s glory days,” Fred said wistfully. “Jack Webster and Jack Wasserman were the writing stars back then. Ben Metcalfe and Doug Collins were doing great columns as well. They’re all gone now.”

  A mirror behind the bar gave me a good view of the whole room. I watched a dishwater blonde come in. She had freckles across the bridge of her nose and had once been very pretty. Now she was emaciated and twitchy; the lids covering her blue eyes were at half-mast.

  Doyle edged closer. He removed the cocktail fork from his mouth, eyed the blonde speculatively, and said, “There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight, begorra.”

  I was already sick of Doyle. An empty table had come up beside the dance floor. I picked up my drink and said, “Okay Fred. Let’s you and me go and sit over there.”

  The bikers who had used the table before us had left empty glasses and crumpled Dorito packages in their wake. Terri Murnau came over to clear up and swish a damp rag.

  Terri is my age, about 40. A good-looking waitress, Terri was wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt that she must have purchased in a weak moment. She had either switched to wearing loose-fit jeans, or was losing weight. The skin raccooning one of her eyes showed purple beneath its makeup. I asked Terri to bring us another round of drinks.

  After Terri went away, I said, “I expect you still know your way around Vancouver, Fred. You’d know all about the Big Circle Gang, I suppose.”

  Fred had been slumped in his chair. He straightened up and returned my gaze warily. “I know a bit. Why do you ask?”

  “Casual interest,” I said—sharing secrets with newspapermen unnecessarily is a mug’s game.

  “Baloney, your nose is growing.” Fred dropped his voice to a confidential whisper. “Come on, strictly off the record?”

  “There’s nothing,” I lied. “If anything comes up you’ll be the first to know.”

  “A few years back, I did some investigative journalism on gang activity for the Vancouver Province which the wire services picked up,” Fred said, awakening fascination showing on his face. “After my stories went to press I received a few threatening phone calls. Such calls are part of the territory and reporters get used to them. Still, those particular calls made me nervous. I’m glad to be in Victoria now instead of on the mainland. To be honest, just talking about those mobsters makes me nervous. What do you want to know, exactly?”

  “What you can tell me about the Big Circle Gang?”

  Fred looked at me directly; his dark glasses emphasized his facial pallor. “I thought you were going to ask me about Twinner Scudd. You’re involved with the Raymond Cho murder investigation, right?”

  The speed with which secret information is transferred from police headquarters to the Fourth Estate never ceases to amaze me. “I’m just a neighbourhood cop.”

  “A neighbourhood cop who bailed from the detective squad. You never got around to telling me why.”

  I hunched my shoulders. “I enjoy what I’m doing now. Working with street people. Setting my own hours and my own agenda.”

  Fred sipped a little whisky. “The Big Circle Boys, or Dai Huen Jai, are brutes first and last. It’s not strictly accurate to call them a gang. The Big Circle Boys are a loose network of interlinked cells usually consisting of ten members, led by a so-called Big Brother. The head of the organization, if there is in fact a head, is rumoured to live in Hong Kong. The Big Circle Boys originated on the Chinese mainland. They first showed up in Vancouver in the 1980s although it was several years before they made a blip on police radar. The Big Circle Boys arrived via Hong Kong, travelling on false passports. Raymond Cho may have been a Big Brother.”

  Fred stopped talking when Terri delivered our drinks, along with my burger and fries.

  “What are these things?” I asked, pointing at the interlocked strawlike objects covering my plate.

  “They’re waffle fries,” Terri replied. “What do they look like?”

  “They look like deep-fried hairpieces,” I said. “I hope the chef didn’t fry ’em in Brylcreem instead of cooking oil.”

  Terri sauntered away.

  I said, “Okay, Fred. You talked about a leader who may or not exist. But the Big Circle Boys didn’t appear out of thin air.”

  “The Big Circle Boys arose out of China’s Red Guards—a paramilitary arm of the Cultural Revolution who murdered intellectuals and the upper classes during the Mao Tse Tung era. The very mention of their name put the fear of God into people. After Mao died, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army stamped the Red Guards out. Viciously. Many Red Guards were killed by firing squads. Some were tortured and then buried alive. The rest were locked up in prison camps outside Canton City. On maps, Canton’s prison camps were shown inside a big circle—hence the name. A few prisoners managed to escape. Some escapees ended up in Hong Kong. Afterwards a few came to Canada posing as refugees. They are all very hard men.”

  I tasted my burger. After two bites I pushed the plate away.

  Fred popped one of the waffle fries into his mouth, grimaced, washed it down with Scotch, and said, “Ten years ago there were about fifty Big Circle Boys in Vancouver, there are probably a lot more now. However many there are, the Big Circle Boys are alive and well and operating in Vancouver. They’re into every kind of mischief. Drug trafficking—primarily heroin brought in from the Golden Triangle. The Big Circle Boys have also branched out into cocaine and bc weed. Prostitution, gambling and massage parlours. Loansharking. Extortion. Human smuggling. Vancouver is a big city; there’s plenty of muck to wallow in.”

  He sipped a little more Scotch. After a pause he said, “All due respect, Silas, but if you check any of this with Canadian Security and Intelligence Services, or the Mounties, I’d advise you to take anything they tell you with a dose of salt. Their take on Asian gangs isn’t reliable.”

  I asked him why.

  “Several reasons. By and large it has to do with language. Most CSIS cops and Mounties are Canadian-born high school graduates. Their first and usually their only language is either English or French. Many big-time Canadian gangsters were born overseas. They conduct their business in Mandarin or Vietnamese or Russian. What do you think happens when English-speaking cops try to infiltrate Urdu-speaking gangs?”

  “I think they could end up with their feet in buckets of concrete.”

  “Or worse. CSIS and the RCMP are actively recruiting foreign-language speakers, but at present they mainly rely on paid informants.”

  Fred finished his drink and licked his lips. I offered him a refill. To my surprise, he declined. We shook hands. Fred buttoned his raincoat up to the neck.

  Nature abhors a vacuum. As Fred went out, an alley cat slinked into view from behind a small stage at the back of the room. She’s known on the streets as Candace, but the name on her birth certificate is Hilda Mullins
. If Candace weighed ten pounds instead of a hundred, I’d put a rhinestone collar around her slender white neck and keep her in my office as company for PC. After scanning the room, Candace made a beeline to my table. Her face has coarsened slightly since I first knew her, although she still has very good bones. She was wearing her business suit—a slinky black cocktail dress with a low-cut top and six-inch stilettos.

  Putting both hands on my table and leaning towards me, smiling as if she meant it, Candace gave me a chance to admire her new implants before saying huskily, “Remember what I told you the last time I saw you in here?”

  “No, but I remember what I thought. I thought that you were bad news, but that you had a beautiful ass and nice legs and that your figure was lovely. In fact, it’s lovelier than ever. When you pull your shoulders back like that, your nipples point straight up.”

  “What I said, Copper, is there was a time when they didn’t let Siwashes inside places like this.”

  “They’ve amended the Indian Act since then. Besides, I’m not Siwash, I’m Coast Salish. Would you like a drink?”

  “A drink will do for a start, but what I really want is to get laid. It’ll set you back two hundred. Cash or VISA. Special deal because I like you.”

  “You’ve got VISA now?”

  “Certainly. In my business you’ve got to keep up to date. My ass isn’t the only thing that moves with the times.”

  I don’t want to know what had been in the mouthful of cheeseburger I’d just eaten, but whatever it was had taken my appetite away. I raised a hand for Terri.

  “Christ, I love big cops. I’m so horny my pants are wet, I can hardly wait,” said Candace with a theatrical moan. “Let’s go over to my place and get it on.”

  Candace was an unapologetic hooker, but at that moment, strangely enough, I was half-deluded into thinking she meant it. Even hookers, I suppose, tell the truth about sex sometimes. I sat there, mute and slightly aroused although, I’ve never had commercial sex and I wasn’t about to start. When Terri arrived, I gave her a twenty and said, “I’m leaving now. Candace can have whatever she wants, as long as it comes out of a government-approved bottle. I’ll settle with Doyle the next time I come in here.”