Seaweed in the Soup (12 page)

The figure reappeared almost instantly and a pistol roared. In a rain of bullets, I flung myself back into the room I'd just vacated and mentally recounted the shots I'd heard. Six, I thought. Guessing that if he'd used a revolver it might now be empty, I grabbed a bottle of liquid soap from a shelf and threw it into the hallway. That brought the gunman from his lair, but a click from his revolver told me his gun was empty. The dark figure of a man with a scarf covering the lower half of his face was trying to reload the revolver when I hurled myself at him. We grappled and fell down together, me underneath. Him with his knee in my groin. When we hit the deck, the pain in my balls was almost paralyzing. He swung the empty revolver at my head. I twisted aside and swept a kick at his knees. My kick missed. A blow intended for my head struck my left arm above the elbow. I rolled away across the carpet as the man came towards me. I was trying to climb up his legs when he hit me with the revolver again. This time the blow fell on my upper back. I managed to get my arms around his waist and throw him off balance. He chopped the back of my neck with his gun. I kneed him somewhere. Gasping, he tried to throw me off, but I held on until we crashed to the floor. His breath smelled revoltingly of garlic and rotten teeth. The revolver had fallen and was a few feet from my left hand. When I reached for it, pain radiated down my arm all the way to my fingertips. The intruder lurched away, grabbed his revolver and ran upstairs. After a while I crawled into Cho's room and looked around. I was reaching for my cellphone when the intruder's car engine coughed into life.

My cellphone wasn't in my pocket. It had fallen out while we'd been wrestling. By the time I found it and called headquarters, the car had gone from hearing.

≈  ≈  ≈

Nice Manners was the first officer to appear in my painful field of vision. He found me sitting in a soft leather lounge chair with my feet raised up on a padded ottoman. Openly scornful, he wasn't very sympathetic when I told him I'd been kneed in the balls.

“Why the hell were you here in this house?”

“Bernie has already told you that I've been seconded to this case.”

“Yes, he did, and I tried to talk him out of it. We can manage quite well without you.”

I didn't say anything.

Manners said, “What the hell were you looking for, anyway?”

“More importantly, who was the intruder, and what the hell was
he
looking for?”

“Go on. Make a guess.”

“Maybe it was a killer, revisiting the scene of his crime.”

“That's quite possible,” Manners said reluctantly. “But if so, why?”

Exasperated, I shook my head. I didn't know. Worse, I couldn't even describe my attacker except to say that he had bad breath.

“The trouble with you, Seaweed, you're not much of a sleuth,” Manners said, narrowing his eyes to make himself look scary, “Why don't you go home and stop making a nuisance of yourself?”

That was the smartest thing Manners had said to me all year.

I staggered upstairs with my legs wide. My balls were killing me. I got as far as the front hall before the need to sit down became imperative. But there were no chairs there. I was about to plant myself down on the oak table when I noticed that the yellow glove had been removed.

A uniformed constable was manning the front door. I called him over and said, “Go downstairs and tell Inspector Manners I need to talk to him. Tell him it's urgent.”

The constable hurried away. Manners showed up ten minutes later. By then, I was feeling a little better. I told Manners about the missing yellow glove.

Instead of speaking, Manners cupped his right elbow in his left hand and flicked his mustache with his fingers. He was thinking. His thoughts however, were too important to be shared with me. After a long minute, he turned on his heels without a word and went back downstairs.

I drove home, swallowed a couple of Tylenols and had a lie-down Later, I phoned Bernie Tapp. When he answered, I brought him up to date regarding the yellow glove, the Ballard Diner, Tudor Collins and the Mai Thai restaurant.

“Why are you talking funny? You sound winded.”

“Because of my balls.”

“Quit bellyaching. If it was really bad you'd be lisping,” Bernie said unsympathetically. “Serious Crimes is stretched to the limit. Can you take care of the Ballard Diner angle for me?”

“Okay,” I said, hanging up.

Outside, waves broke whitely on the beach, trees whispered. I went out into my backyard, and swung myself into a string hammock. I was trying to forget my aching nuts when pine siskin leapt from the cherry bush onto my chest and began his sweet serenade. I was telling myself that things could be worse when my eyes closed.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The sun had blazed around behind my cabin, and I woke up in the shade. The crown of the split-leaf maple that I'd planted in the garden two years earlier was a lacy mass against a blue sky strewn with small white clouds. My balls had calmed a trifle, but I had a backache from lying in the hammock too long. I was wondering whether to risk swinging down off the hammock to the ground and finding out whether I could walk or not when I became aware that I had company. Old Mary Cooke was sitting on a patio chair with a table at her right hand, looking as usual like a mound of Goodwill clothes in a floppy black hat and layers of skirts and coats. She smelled like clothes-dryer lint. She was over a hundred years old. Her face was as wrinkled as a dried apple, although her hedge of silver hair was still threaded with black.

“Feeling better?” she asked me in her very gentle voice.

“A little.”

“You've got a bit of bird crap on your shirt, but it'll brush off after it dries.”

“So it will.”

“Somebody kicked you in the balls, right?”

“How did you know?”

“Because you've been moaning and cradling your nuts in your sleep,” she said without smiling. “Does it hurt like hell?”

“It's more of an ache than a hurt.”

“I keep being reborn a woman. I don't think I've ever been born as a man, so I don't know what having balls feels like. When balls get hurt, do they ache like toothache?”

“Nothing aches like a toothache, unless it's a bad earache.”

“Earache is bad,” Old Mary said, nodding her agreement. “I used to get a lot of earaches, back in my abalone-diving days. My mother used to pour warm codfish oil in my ears to make it better.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Can I get you something from the house? A drink? Maybe a sandwich? I've got some venison left.”

“I don't need nothing right now. Thank you, Silas.”

After couple of very careful stretching exercises to loosen the kinks in my spine, I rolled off the hammock, staggered inside my cabin, took out a bottle of Schweppes ginger ale, a tray of ice and a pint of Seagrams from the refrigerator, and mixed myself a stiff drink. Five minutes later, feeling better, I went back outside.

Old Mary appeared to be asleep, but her dark hooded eyes opened when I sat opposite her at the table.

I said, “Do you know Echo Bay?”

Old Mary Cooke chuckled. “I've known Echo Bay since it was called Su'qu'imish. The name got changed after White people settled on land up above where we used to pick summer clams. Everybody calls it Echo Bay now, except for a few old rememberers like me.”

“There's two rock carvings on a boulder at the brow of a ravine overlooking Echo Bay. The first carving shows a life-sized human skeleton. The second carving, below and to the left of the main carving, shows a wolf with its jaws held open by sticks.”

A shadow passed over the old woman's face. Maybe a minute went by before she said, “A long time ago there was a village at Su'qu'imish. Long before my old folks' time, there was a year-round village at Su'qu'imish. Now in them olden days there was a young Su'qu'imish boy went out on spirit quest looking for seawolf power. His father had sent him out. His father said to his son, ‘If you don't eat too much and you keep yourself clean by swimming, seawolfs will come to you, salmon will come to you, whales will come to you, because you don't smell. Take sharp sticks in case seawolfs come.'

“When that young boy came back after swimming, his father said, ‘Did you get seawolf power?' The young boy said ‘No.' The boy's father sent him back out to look for seawolf tamanhous again. This time, when the boy washed himself clean and dived in with his pointed sticks, a big seawolf swam by. When the seawolf opened its mouth to bite him, that boy put his pointed sticks in the wolf's mouth so it couldn't bite him.

“Right afterwards, the boy noticed an old white-haired man sitting on the beach with a bunch of dentalia beads. Lots of dentalia. And this old man said to the young boy, ‘This is all the seawolf power you'll get, it's just this dentalia. Help yourself. When you get married you'll have a son, that son will look like a White man. He'll have white hair and white skin and pink eyes.'

“Well, when that boy got home his father said, ‘Did you get it?' I got it, the boy said, and showed his father them dentalias. The father said, ‘Okay my son, you done okay. You can have yourself some wives.' So the boy uses some of them dentalias to give a potlatch and get married and buy slaves and food. He was a man now. He kept on that way till there was no dentalias left. Then there was this child born to one of the man's slaves. It must have been bad seawolf tamanhous the man had, because the child born to him was a White child, with white hair and pink eyes. None of that man's wives or slaves gave him any more children.”

When Old Mary left, I hooked the garden water hose up to my homemade outdoor shower gizmo and treated myself to a long icy soak. Feeling slightly more human, I put on a pair of stonewashed loose-fit jeans, a pale green shirt with a white stripe in it, and a pair of blue and white Nike sneakers. Drove back to my office.

PC treated me with her customary indifference, but she warmed slightly when I refilled her water bowl and gave her half a can of Thrifty's premium flaked tuna. I took out the office bottle, poured myself another drink and turned my swiveller towards the window. Outside, a bedraggled woman in a rain-shrunken wool coat was approaching people with her hand out.

The phone rang. It was Lightning Bradley. He said breathlessly, “I'm in a mess. I don't know which way to turn. Maggie's dead.”

“We know she's dead. But the question is where the hell have you been hiding? We've been looking all over for you.”

“I need help, Silas.”

“I know you do. It's time to come in out of the cold, help us get this mess sorted out.”

“It's not that easy. I'm scared.”

“No wonder. But instead of talking to me on the phone you should come in. Talk to me and talk to Bernie.”

“Screw that, I don't care about goddamn Bernie. I've got my time in already. I've spent years watching assholes like Tapp and Manners climb the goddamn ladder, stepping on my goddamn shoulders and lifting themselves up. Well, them cocky bastards can go screw themselves,” Bradley said, his voice rising and falling with emotion as he spoke. “It's not what you think. The reason I'm in trouble has nothing to do with that screw-up on Collins Lane. Well, maybe a little bit. The thing is, Silas, I'm at my wits' end. I'm in a mess that I don't see no way of getting out of. So how about it?”

“You know the drill, Bradley. If Bernie Tapp finds out you called me, you'll be in a worse situation than you are already. You'll probably drag me down with you.”

“What happened to your guts? I thought we were pals, Silas,” he said. “Haven't we always got along?”

Instead of replying, I had a little drink.

Lightning said, “I've got to talk to somebody, I've just got to. There's more to this than . . . I'm talking about maiming and killing people. More lives are at stake if I don't get some help.”

“Okay,” I said wearily. “Spell it out for me, what's the problem?”

“It's not that easy. I can't talk on the phone, we've got to meet face to face,” Bradley was saying when the phone went dead. I thought I'd lost him until moments later, when he said urgently, “My life is in your hands, pal. You've got to come over here. Please come over here.”

“Where are you?”

Instead of replying, he groaned.

“If I don't know where you are, how am I supposed to find you?”

“I'll find you,” Bradley said, hanging up.

Call display told me that Bradley was in town. I phoned Telus. After the usual runaround, I was put through to a competent supervisor who told me that the number in question corresponded to a public phone located at the Ross Bay Cemetery end of Dallas Road. I called headquarters and left a message for Bernie Tapp, who was at a meeting.

The bedraggled woman was still on the street when I closed my window blinds and left my office. She stumbled towards me, high and disoriented, dirty and bare legged, her face contorted with misery. She was about 40 years old and wouldn't live to see 45. I gave her a dollar and tried to put her, and Bradley, out of my mind as I strolled towards the Inner Harbour.

Deep-fry odours lured me down to a waterfront pier at the foot of Broughton Street, where young entrepreneurs had converted a couple of steel shipping containers into a fish and chip shop. I paid eight bucks for a sackful of halibut and fries. Munching steadily, contented as a cow in clover, I ambled south along wooden docks crowded with summer tourists. To my right, beyond a small boat marina, the harbour lay smooth and green. Highrise apartment buildings and hotels loomed upright, casting shadows in the breathless air. Leaving the boardwalk, I passed through a small green park and an area of busy restaurants and shops on my way back to Pandora Street, got back to the office, and had a nap.

About six o'clock, I took out the office bottle, had a little drink, and allowed myself to worry about Lightning Bradley. I was still agonizing when Bernie Tapp showed up.