The Goldfish Bowl (12 page)

Lambert shot out the Ford’s windshield. There was scattered applause from the crowd.

Furth got the boot open and hauled out the shotgun, a pump-action Browning. As he loaded the gun, he heard the infant scream of a dozen approaching sirens, and knew that he and Lambert were running out of time. He worked the slide action of the Browning, swung the barrel around to bear on the Ford, and fired from the hip. The steel mesh security door rattled under the impact of the shot. Furth heard glass breaking somewhere deep inside the garage. He adjusted his elevation considerably and let off another round. The load of buckshot struck festive sparks and streamers of light off the ramp and the concrete floor of the garage. At a range of approximately fifteen yards, Furth had managed to miss twice in a row.

Someone on one of the balconies, a bearded man in underpants standing out there in the rain, shouted words that were unintelligible but clearly not flattering.

Furth pressed the butt-plate of the Browning firmly against his shoulder. Nestling his cheek against the stock, he aimed carefully and then fired four times in quick succession, as fast as he could work the slide.

There was a deafening explosion, and the Ford was suddenly enveloped in a huge, rising ball of flame.

Furth staggered backwards, raising his hands to protect his face from the scorching heat. The cedar wall of the condo above the garage began to smoke. A secondary explosion blew the hood off the Ford. The ornamental shrubbery on either side of the driveway shrivelled and died.

The sirens were very loud, now. Furth felt the adrenalin begin to drain out of his system. He was beginning to realize that they’d had the .460 Magnum killer cornered and then let him get away. It was Lambert who’d failed to radio for backup, but Furth knew how the system worked. They’d both get tarred with the same brush. Both he and Lambert would spend the next twenty years out on the treadmill of the street, wearing out shoe leather and going nowhere. Disgusted with himself, he tossed the loaded shotgun into the boot. The weapon discharged on impact, blowing a fist-sized hole through the Aspen’s rear fender.

The man standing in the rain in his underpants screamed with delight.

XII

THE SNIPER WAS all alone, and he was lonely. He needed human companionship, and he had satisfied his needs by taking an all-night disc jockey to bed with him. The DJ had no talent for conversation, but his voice was rich and soothing and he was very good at monologue.

The sniper lay on his back, the radio nestled in the crook of his arm, a sharp corner digging into his ribs. He was very tired, but couldn’t fall asleep. Although he’d adjusted the thermostat as high as it would go before he’d crawled into his sleeping bag, he could still feel the ice in his bones, and every few minutes, without warning, his body would shake with cold, violent, uncontrollable spasms that went on and on, draining him of strength and leaving him feeling weak, exhausted.

He rolled over on his side, hugging himself tight, trying to conserve the heat seeping out of him into the chill air of the apartment. As he moved, his arm brushed against the dial of the radio. The DJ’s voice filled with static, became scratchy and indistinct, faded. The sniper didn’t notice. He was thinking about the shooting of Andy Patterson, the chase that had followed. He saw himself crouched like an animal at the rear of the underground garage, the garage suddenly filling with a lurid orange light as the stolen Ford exploded in a ball of flame.

It was a lucky thing, the quick police response to the shooting on Jervis Street. If they’d shown up a few minutes later, he had a terrible feeling it would have been too late to save the bald man and his blonde girlfriend.

It had taken an effort of will to ignore the two targets standing frozen in the glass-encased lobby of the apartment. The man and the woman had spoiled his concentration. He’d resented it and even though it would have been an irrational act, had been toying with the idea of killing them both. But he wanted to be sure of Andy Patterson first. Patterson was the primary target.

And then he’d heard it, the faint wail of an approaching siren. A nasty, insistent whine.

There always came a time when everything fell to pieces. Most people knew it but hardly anybody believed it, because if you really believed it, then you had to face the consequences. Luck was all.

The sniper was a pro, but he’d let his rage get the better of him, had loitered far too long at the scene of his crime. He’d wanted to be sure of Patterson. The plan had been to kill him, and the sniper wanted to get it right the first time around.

But he shouldn’t have been able to get away. They should have had him cold. He’d been so lucky that he could not stop himself from worrying that he had used up a lifetime of luck all in one moment. He couldn’t understand why more police cars hadn’t joined the pursuit. There were always seven or eight units in the West End. One call on the radio, and they’d have boxed him in within a few minutes.

As the sniper stared blindly up at the ceiling, a part of his mind began to wonder if he was wrong in assuming that he had managed to get away. What if they knew exactly who he was? What if they were at that very moment deflecting neighbourhood traffic, surrounding the building, slipping quietly into the lobby and elevators, hiding in the stairwells, furtively creeping down the hallways? Dark, featureless men, guns in hand.

The thought grew. Suspicion evolved into certainty. The sniper grabbed the electrical cord and yanked the plug out of the wall, silencing the radio.

At first the only sound he could hear was the sound of his own breathing, shallow and ragged. Then, gradually, he became aware of the distant hum of traffic and then of the almost imperceptible sounds of the building itself, the minute expansions and contractions of concrete and steel, the dull throbbing of unseen engines, whirring of air conditioners, faint hiss of fluorescent tubes.

The rising drone of an elevator.

The sniper reached for the .45 automatic on the floor beside him. His fingers groped through dust and used Kleenex. He found the gun and thumbed back the hammer. Rain slapped against the glass doors leading to the balcony. A gust of wind made the curtains dance. The sniper kicked free of the sleeping bag. He crawled naked across the floor, his eyes on the thin slit of light beneath the door. He heard the elevator doors slide open, muttered conversation. He held his left arm up in front of his face. According to the luminous dials of his watch it was 3:15 a.m. The dead of night — a good time for a surprise assault.

The sniper moved slowly and silently to the door. He eased back the deadbolt, careful not to make the slightest sound, and then used his left hand to turn the knob as far as it would go. Then he raised the .45 to chest level and yanked the door open and rushed outside.

The hallway was empty, deserted. The elevator doors were open but there was no one inside. The sniper stood in a half-crouch, the big automatic clutched in a two-handed grip, his finger on the trigger. Around a turn in the hallway he heard the scratch of a key in a lock and then a burst of laughter, the voice of a woman, loud and shrill. He took three rapid strides down the corridor and then stopped. After a moment he turned and went back into his apartment, slamming the door shut behind him but not bothering to lock it.

The needle of the thermostat was steady at eighty-six degrees. He dropped the pistol on the floor and climbed back into the sleeping bag. His heart thumped against his ribs. His body shook uncontrollably. He shifted into a prenatal position. He had never been colder. His bones were made of ice.

XIII

INSPECTOR BRADLEY, HIS hands clasped behind him, stood at his window and stared out at the harbour. The water was a flat and listless strip of grey. Beyond, the North Shore mountains were obscured by rain and by the same thick, sluggish grey clouds that blanketed the city.

Bradley dropped his gaze to the construction site, almost directly below him. During the week several huge digging machines working sixteen-hour days had chewed a deep hole in the wet clay. On Friday, workmen had sprayed the steeply-pitched sides of the excavation with quick-drying cement. Now, as he watched, a dozen or more labourers lay a complex network of iron reinforcing rods across the bottom of the hole, in preparation for the first pour of concrete. Bradley was no architect, but based on the depth of the foundation, he suspected the finished building was going to be at least twenty storeys high. Soon he would lose his recently acquired ocean view, and his tiny office would sink once more into a state of perpetual twilight.

Massaging his aching temples, he went over to his desk and collapsed into his leather chair. Aside from the usual clutter, the desk was crowded with several plastic or glassine evidence bags containing:

Thirteen spent .460 Magnum cartridges.

Two empty magazines from a Winchester .460 Magnum rifle.

Twenty-three cigarette butts stained with Chinese Red lipstick.

A slightly-worn high-heeled shoe made of white leather, with a heart stitched in red directly above the instep.

One pair of fluffy pink earmuffs.

There was also a glass of lukewarm tap water on the desk, and an empty aspirin bottle. Bradley picked up the aspirin bottle and shook it, then dropped it in his wastepaper basket. He looked at Franklin, who was sitting hunched on one of the wooden chairs lined up against the wall opposite the desk. “You don’t happen to have an aspirin on you, by any chance, do you, George?”

“What?” said Franklin. His voice was hoarse. He sounded as if he’d been taking a little nap. He didn’t raise his eyes from the floor.

“I said, you got any aspirin on you?”

Franklin shook his head. He scratched absently at a thin line of dried blood above his upper lip, where he’d cut himself shaving.

An errant gust of wind threw a handful of rain across the window. The fat drops trickled slowly down the glass, cutting erratic paths through the accumulated dust.

“You okay, George?”

“Never better,” said Franklin dully.

“You don’t have to stay, you know. There’s no real reason for you to be here.”

Franklin didn’t say anything. Bradley decided to let it go. Jerry Goldstein had found Dave Atkinson’s prints all over the inside of the walk-in closet in Phasia Palinkas’ bedroom, verifying Franklin’s version of the events leading up to the shooting. Technically, Franklin was off the hook even though the internal investigation was continuing. But the unofficial thinking was that Franklin had screwed up badly, and that his partner had died as a result. Bradley had dealt with the situation by sticking Franklin behind a desk, making him assistant to Staff Sergeant Peter Yip, who was the case liaison officer. Franklin hadn’t been too keen on the job, but Bradley had made it brutally clear it was the only one available to him. Both Atkinson and Franklin had been good cops. Now neither of them were of any use at all. As far as Bradley was concerned, George Franklin had nobody to blame but himself.

A distorted fist hit the pane of frosted glass in Bradley’s door, interrupting his chain of thought. The door swung open. Claire Parker walked into the office, and then Jack Willows.

“Have either of you two got an aspirin?” said Bradley.

“I do,” said Parker.

“God bless.”

Parker rummaged through her purse, handed Bradley a small metal tin.

Bradley popped the tin open and found five dusty white pills inside. He popped two of the pills into his mouth and swallowed half an inch of lukewarm water. When he picked up the water glass it left a pale green ring on the darker green of his desk blotter. He rubbed at the ring with the ball of his thumb. “I guess you two have heard by now that the cabbie died this morning?”

Willows nodded.

Bradley helped himself to another aspirin. “But what I bet you didn’t know is that he was a fella of the limp-wristed persuasion.”

“He was gay?” said Parker.

“I didn’t say he was happy, I said he was a queer.” Bradley chased the last two aspirins around the inside of the tin, cornered and ate them, drank some more water. He snapped the lid shut and tossed the tin back to Parker, who caught it one-handed and dropped it into her purse. Bradley pushed the water glass around on his desk. He took the pink earmuffs out of the evidence bag, flexed the steel headband and struck a muscleman’s pose. “The point is, we now have a killer who dresses like the Queen of the May, and a victim who’s a certified fairy. I don’t know about everybody else, but I smell a homosexual angle.”

“What about Alice Palm and Phasia Palinkas?” said Parker. “How do they fit in?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” said Bradley. He turned to Willows. “There’s a woman named Flora McCormick, runs an outfit called the West Coast Singles Club. Alice Palm was a member. So was Andy Patterson.”

“What about Phasia Palinkas?” said Parker.

“Let me know what you find out,” said Bradley.

Willows started towards the door, but Parker wasn’t finished yet. She took a small spiral-bound notebook and a bright yellow ballpoint pen out of her purse, and said, “Where’s Flora McCormick’s club located, Inspector?”

“In the yellow pages,” Bradley replied. “You manage to track down a phone book, you’ve got it made.”

Parker glared at him, then spun on her heel and stormed out of the office, slamming the door behind her. Bradley winced. His headache, despite all the aspirin he’d taken, was absolutely killing him. He tossed the earmuffs down on the desk and said to Franklin, “The girl’s got quite a temper, hasn’t she, George?”

Franklin didn’t give the slightest indication that he was aware that Bradley had spoken to him. He just sat there in his chair, gazing off into space, idly picking at his wound.

*

Flora McCormick’s singles club was located on the main floor of a squat two-storey stucco building in the 500 block West Broadway. Above the entrance a bright red man danced frenetically with a bright blue woman, neon limbs crackling in the rain as they jumped endlessly back and forth.

Parker and Willows walked under the sign and pushed through double glass doors and then made their way down a long, dimly-lit corridor with a highly-polished black linoleum floor. Somewhere ahead of them and off to the left there was the sound of shattering glass, a muffled curse.

Willows broke into a run. Parker hurried after him, her shoes clattering on the linoleum. They passed beneath a curtained archway and into a long, rectangular dining room.

Flora McCormick stood in the middle of a sea of tables, sweeping the last fragments of a wine glass into a metal dustpan. Behind her, at the far end of the room, there was a parquet dance floor and a small raised stage.

Flora McCormick was in her early fifties, about five foot four and one hundred pounds. No heavyweight. Her hair was cut short and combed straight back over a narrow skull. She was wearing cream Hush Puppies and a baggy dark green pant suit that seemed to drain all the colour out of her pale green eyes. Parker was close enough to count the trio of engagement rings crowded together on the third finger of her left hand before Flora heard them coming, and looked up. Parker introduced herself, and then Willows. Flora nodded, and kept working.

“I’ll be with you in a few minutes,” she said. “Just let me get the rest of these glasses laid out.”

There were about fifty tables in the room, four place settings to each table. Only half a dozen of the tables had glasses on them. Parker glanced at Willows. He shrugged, leaving it up to her to decide how to handle the situation. She moved over to one of the cardboard boxes, opened it, and went to work. Willows hesitated, and then followed her lead.

A quarter of an hour later, Flora McCormick led them back down the linoleum hallway and into an office so small that the furniture seemed out of scale. To the left of the door there were two folding metal chairs and a grey metal desk. To the right a row of five steel filing cabinets were lined up against the wall. There were two more cabinets on either side of a tiny window set high in the wall opposite the door. Parker walked over to the window. An aspidistra languished on the sill. She had to stand on her toes to see outside. The view was of a parking lot. At the far end of the lot a man in an idling tow truck was reading a newspaper. It was still raining.

Willows stood on a scrap of carpet in front of the desk while Flora searched through the drawers looking for her keys. Above the filing cabinets, hundreds of black and white photographs covered every available inch of the wall, all the way up to the ceiling. Most of the pictures were framed, but many were not and these had simply been push-pinned to the plaster. All were of past dinners and dances. They had been arranged in chronological order. The oldest picture Willows could find was dated New Year’s Eve, 1947. A dark, hairy man wearing oversized diapers and a pointed party hat cavorted on top of one of the round tables in the dining room. A woman had taken the man’s cardboard scythe away from him, and was using the sharp point of it to try to pull down his diapers, much to the amusement of the surrounding crowd. 1947. Willows found himself wondering where they all were now.

Flora McCormick eased past him, key ring in hand. She moved to the filing cabinet to the left of the window, unlocked it and slid open the top drawer.

“You always keep the filing cabinets locked?” said Willows.

“I sure do.”

“What about the keys, you always keep them in your desk?”

“That’s right.”

“You ever lock the desk?”

“Not that I can remember.” Flora McCormick thumbed through a thick sheaf of straw-coloured folders. “Doesn’t make much sense, does it?”

“Not to me,” said Willows.

Parker sat down on the edge of the metal desk, glanced idly at the three framed photographs clustered around the telephone.

Flora looked up, smiled fondly. “That’s Harry with the cigar. He was the first, and the best. The guy in the glasses, that’s Ralph. A bum. Died of cancer of the pancreas eleven years ago. No, make it twelve. Two weeks before his forty-fifth birthday, can you imagine? Cut off in his prime.” Flora peered up at Willows, clearly estimating his age, and frowned at what she saw. “The movie star in the turtleneck sweater, that’s Bill. My third and last mistake. Look at those teeth. Have you ever seen a nicer smile?” Flora pushed the drawer shut and opened the one beneath it. “The trouble was, Bill never seemed to be smiling at me.”

She selected a folder, pulled it out, and handed it to Willows. Alice Palm’s name was written on the side in a stylish, spidery hand. Willows flipped open the file. Parker abandoned her perch on the desk to look over his shoulder.

There was very little in the file that was new to Willows, and it contained no information that seemed even potentially useful to him. Alice Palm’s date of birth, height, weight, and hair and eye colour were all listed in the same spidery hand that was on the cover of the folder. Her hobbies included the usual eclectic and unlikely mix of sedentary pursuits and violent contact sports. It was obvious that the sole purpose of the list was to give her the widest possible appeal to anyone looking for a woman with similar interests.

The space reserved for religion had been left blank, although Willows knew she’d been an Anglican.

The date on the file indicated that it had been opened five years earlier. Willows doubted that the photograph stapled to the top left-hand corner of the page was less than ten years old.

Flora handed him a second folder. Andy Patterson’s name had been pencilled rather than inked on the side flap. His photograph was a Polaroid, and had been taken inside the office, with the door shut so he could stand in front of it. His face and hair had a faint greenish tinge. Willows had seen the effect before: it came of using outdated film.

He read quickly through the short list of Patterson’s personal statistics, the notes on his hobbies, his likes and dislikes. Patterson and Alice Palm seemed to have almost nothing in common. While she was a fan of classical music and rock, his preferences were Willie Nelson and jazz.

“What sort of crowd do you get here?” Willows asked Flora McCormick.

“What d’you mean?”

“The people who come here to have a good time, what are they like? I mean age, education, stuff like that.”

Flora shrugged. “Most of the people we get here are older than either Alice Palm or Andy Patterson were. But on the other hand, some of them are quite a bit younger.” She eased the file drawer shut. “All sorts of people walk in here. You’d be surprised.”

“You get many homosexuals?”

Flora nodded. “I thought that’s what you were getting at.”

“Did Andy Patterson know Alice Palm?”

“I doubt it.”

“Did Alice know Phasia Palinkas?”

“I already told your Inspector Bradley that Phasia Palinkas wasn’t a member of this club. And the place isn’t a gay hangout, either. Patterson was the only homosexual member we’ve ever had.”