Hollow Dolls, The (13 page)

 “People trust Walter down here, he’s a hero practically,” said
Lynx.

“Listen. We’ve got blood evidence that places him at the scene. We
need to talk to him.”

Normally the detectives wouldn’t offer information like that to
just anyone, only they wanted this particular dealer to know it so he could
spread the news. Dealer’s street name: Lynx. In their little black book, he was
a CI, confidential informant.

 “You can’t come up to me here like this, dammit!” grumbled Lynx.
Then he walked off without a second look. Lynx’s street cred was massive. Not.
He was just a low-level powder and pill guy. The two detectives didn’t seem to
care he’d walked off. They were playing him. Lynx was tied to their suspect Vic
Denton and they knew Lynx would spill eventually.

Lynx had a retro blue rabbit’s foot on a chain dangling from his
belt loop. He’d get nervous and play with it when the detectives paid him a bit
of cash in the alley. They didn’t usually approach him at his corner, but they
needed to put extra pressure on him.

They were Vancouver Police Detectives, Martin Reuben and Frank
Barnes; partners in the Downtown Eastside for nearly a decade. Today they were
working the Lydia Westerley case: a street worker murdered in her
room May 12, 2012. It was Marty and Frank’s third open case now. It made them
uneasy, the same close-up photos of blood spatter and victim’s faces each
morning on the whiteboard back in homicide division. It wasn’t the bloodied
body parts under the fluorescent lights, it was that they were the same ones.
The victim’s faces would get more and more familiar with each passing day, like
a dead acquaintance. Occasionally a victim would resemble someone they’d known,
a relative or a co-worker’s kid from the Christmas party. That made it worse.

Marty and Frank had picked up word that the murdered girl might
have been seeing a drug dealer named Vic Denton.  Lynx had already let it slip
after they pushed him hard in the alley one day.

“Ok, maybe I saw him with her a few times at The No.5.
She was just another dancer... Yeah, I could tell he liked her. Maybe they had
a thing.”

Marty and Frank knew then that Lynx was holding back. They let it
go. Let him stew for a while...

The DTES had its share of unsolved murders, dozens of open cases,
all workers in the sex trade. If you counted the unsolved ones... People who
work in law enforcement let things go. They have to. Not so easy for the
relatives of the dead girls. The way things were going, the Westerley case
would be another tick in the unsolved column.

“Thinning the herd.”

That’s what Marty and Frank called it. They weren’t as callous as
all that—it was just the lay of the land. You couldn’t work homicide cases in
Vancouver’s East-end and survive without being a little cold. You had to take
charge of your own mind and play the game, otherwise you’d be the one getting
thinned via booze, pills and whatever else would get you through the night.
Frank and Marty were veterans, crunchy on the outside, chewy caramel feelings
on the inside.

Today was check day, the last Wednesday of the month; a special
day for the local residents. It was like Christmas on check day. Everyone had a
bit of cash, the slumlords got their end from the government in the mail, and
the rest went to the dealers and the bar owners.

The local grocers got the leftovers when people decided to eat.
Then there was the flood of bottle returns when some poor souls had to scrape
together enough for a hit. Desperation, like pennies, were everywhere and not
worth much. Once every option dried up for ready cash, petty crime blipped on
the charts like it always did, and a week later the bodies would start piling
up—withdrawal causing a heart attack, robberies gone bad, junkies overdosing,
you name it.

Lynx was hopping. To the drop box, back to the street, cash in the
can, eyes peeled, the check day drill. Today people got on top of their real
loved one, the powders and rocks that they were married to. This wasn’t a
culture, it was a religion.

After giving him another hour, they were back. Lynx felt Marty’s
grip on his shoulder, and then a ruddy old face come into view.

“How much do you stand to lose today Lynx?” asked Marty.

Marty Reuben was half a foot taller and built solid. Frank was another
half a foot past Marty. This was stage one: nice cop.  The years of alcohol
abuse gave Marty’s face that ‘I’ll will stomp on you’ kind of glow.

“What the—not again! You guys, I told you what I know!” Lynx
squealed in a tiny voice. Marty gouged into his trapezius, it was handy. Lynx
buckled a little as Marty tore a strip off of him.

“Listen shithead. We know you hang out with Denton. How about a
night downtown? We can have a nice long chat and these folks can get their
goodies somewhere else.”

Marty wasn’t bluffing. Lynx would lose three quarters of this
month’s income in one afternoon if they shut him down.

“Come on guys, it’s me, Lynxie.” He wriggled out from under
Marty’s grip.

“Hey guys, how many stoners does it take to change a light bulb?”

“Not now Lynx,” said Marty.

Lynx looked over at Frank pleading with his color contact china
blue eyes and a big smile spread across his brown face.

“Ok, what?” said Frank.

“Four. One to hold the light bulb and three to smoke until the
room starts spinning.”

Lynx spread his homey sound on thick when he tried to shine them
on like that. Frank gave an actual smile and shook his head. Why? Because at
the end of the day, he liked Lynx. He was an ok kid, staying alive down in the
killing fields.

“Look, I told you I only buy from the guy. We’re not pals, ok?”
said Lynx.

The detectives wanted Denton for killing the girl, and maybe
others. Lynx had informed on lots of other cases, only not where he was
directly involved with the suspect. This could lead to accessory charges
depending on how he was involved, or obstruction.

Marty lost his ‘this is me being nice’ smile. He grabbed on and
squeezed harder this time.

“Do you know the stretch for accessory to murder?”

Lynx’s legs buckled and he almost went down. Frank pulled Marty’s
arm to ease off.

“Ok-ok, but we can’t do this right now,” said Lynx.

Marty patted Lynx on the shoulder. “That’s the Lynx we know and
love.” He pulled him up and straightened Lynx’s jacket.

“Seven tonight, you know where. Don’t be late,” said Frank.

Frank and Marty worked the Major Crimes Division, specifically the
Homicide Unit and street people knew them. The cop species was like any other
taxonomic rank in the wild: animals had overlapping territories that only
mattered to their particular species. One set of toothy jaws or sharp beak
might venture into the territory of another and not necessarily cause a panic.

The drug crowd didn’t care much about Marty and Frank hanging
around their dealer, it wasn’t like they were murderers, they were users. Downtown
in the Eastside, a user was like an upstanding citizen, a contributor to the
economy.

Every shiny facet of culture has a status hierarchy, even the
Downtown Eastside in Vancouver, known as ‘the poorest postal code in Canada.’ In
detox, the plain old alcoholics were a low brow genus. If you didn’t have the
lady for your girlfriend, you were a boring old fart. You want status, you
gotta climb onto her and give it your all. For most, rehab was a place court
sent them to, or they ended up there out of sheer excess. After the first week
of the twenty-eight days, they wanted back at her. On her. Insider her.

The line-up for Lynx’s products had nearly doubled. His customers
had seen him yakking with the po-po’s lots, so it meant nothing. What mattered
was what Lynx had in his jacket pockets. Lynx smiled and his lip twitched. He
stroked his rabbit’s foot.

I’m fucked
, he thought.
If I give up Denton,
he’ll know.

Lynx sold off the last packets he was holding and pulled out his
cell. He found Denton’s avatar and tapped it, fingers shaking.

“What?” The tiny speaker in his phone was reading him already.

“It’s me. Listen Vic, we gotta talk.”

“What’s goin’ on L-Word?”

“I can’t talk now, not on the phone,” Lynx whispered.

“Okay, come by already,” groaned Vic.

Lynx stared into the phone—the Land of Oz was in there, maybe a
yellow brick road, a wizard. He meant to stay on his corner and sell for
another hour but serious time in Kent Penitentiary loomed, scrambling his brain
to a paranoid encryption. Panic rose up his throat until his face was
burning with the electric reality of what was happening to him.

He jammed the phone into his jeans pocket. Freaked, he didn’t
notice he’d snapped the flimsy tin chain and as Lynx broke into a run, the
blue-dyed bit of rabbit fur fell to the sidewalk, landing a full second after
Lynx had vacated that particular piece of real estate.

Shimmery pink neon spilled along the wet sidewalk where the rabbit’s
foot came to a stop. Maybe it would bring somebody else some luck...

Lynx was wheezing hard. He knocked on the door three times.

 
This is the big one
, he thought rapping gently, twice—their
signal.

“Come in.”

It was a woman’s voice. Lynx knew it was Kim Li, or Tifa, her
stage name. Vic’s new girl. Lynx opened the door a crack and slowly inched his
head in. His hoodie slid back. The first thing they saw was his shiny brown
forehead in the dim light. A few black dreads spilled into the doorway below
his weary attempt at a smile. He wheezed and felt like he was about to drop
dead. Or be killed.

“You better just breathe for a while hun,” said Kim Li.

She was wrapped up in Vic’s arms and legs; the sleek body of a
dancer. Their tattoos blended together and in the room’s low light Lynx
couldn’t tell where one body part began or ended.

“What’s the big fucking deal Lynx?” said Vic. He had a
British Properties rich kid couldn’t care less drawl.

Lynx closed the door behind him and opened his eyes wide trying to
invite light in that wasn’t there. “We gotta talk.”

His voice cracked like a puberty case. Vic always intimidated him.

“About?”

He looked at Kim Li and back at Vic.

 “Hey, listen to this,” said Lynx. “There were nine fleas on a
fanny. Four of them were smoking dope, what were the other five doing?”

Kim Li sat up, her full uncovered C pups joining the conversation.
“What were they doing?” she said.

“Sniffing crack. Haaaah!! Haaa!”

Kim Li giggled and Vic said, “Ok, just spill it.”

“Those two dicks, the ones from homicide—they were around asking
questions.”

His breathing was still strained; a goldfish out of his bowl doing
what he could to hide his familiarity with Marty and Frank. 

Vic sat up. “What did they say—exactly.”

“They asked me if I knew you. That’s it.  I didn’t tell them
anything, I swear.”

Lynx never knew he tried too hard.

Vic looked at his face.

The light from the tiny window at the top of the wall shone some
city light onto Lynx’s handsome, brown, lying little motherfucker face.

“Anyway, they think Walter the wagon guy did it,” said Lynx. “They
said they found his blood at the scene.  I don’t know why they’re riding me
about it.”

Silence.

Busted...maybe.

Vic reached over Kim Li to the side table for a smoke, grinding
his horny package across her trunk while he eyed Lynx.

“Lynxie Loo, do-dee-doo. What am I gonna do with you?”

Vic lit a smoke and held it to Kim Li’s lips. She took a drag
while Vic held it with his fingers, then angled her chin up, exhaling a cloud
of smoke. Vic’s fingers held the cigarette still while the oval perfection
perched on her slender neck charmed him like a cobra.

Vic jumped the arched brass foot rail at the end of the bed to the
table where all the gear was. He cooked for himself and Lynx. The atmosphere
waned, complicit in its silence, a confessional, a box with a priestess and a
devil. Lynx stood nervously by the door, like the accused, waiting to hear the
charges while Kim Li lit a smoke and blew nicely-made smoke rings up into the
shaft of filtered light above her. Lynx watched like it was therapy. The smoke
rings rolled upward and expanded into grotesque circles. They were haloes,
angelic, then distorted broken fucks within seconds. He still had his hands
behind him, wrapped around the door knob. His mind flashed,
run for it
.

“Get over here you rat bastid,” said Vic.

Lynx smiled.

It melted his fears for a moment; Vic’s friendly, familiar tone.

Maybe he could just stonewall the Big D’s and stumble his way
through this after all. He was just being paranoid—it happened.