Seaweed in the Soup (10 page)

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.”

Candace looked disappointed. I was too, in a bizarre way, because until things had cooled off between us recently, I'd been enjoying a very satisfactory love life with a woman called Felicity Exeter. But Felicity had ignored my last few calls, and I didn't know why. Weeks had passed since we'd seen each other. But I don't pay for sex. So I left Pinky's, walked half a block and stood outside Peacock Billiards for a minute, trying to remember if I'd ever told Felicity that I loved her. Maybe when I was drunk, which wouldn't count. Felicity had told me that she loved
me
, more than once. Perhaps she'd gotten over it, and I was no longer the person who used to matter to her.

Looking north along Douglas Street, I pondered my next move, wondering whether it would be a good time for me to brace Twinner Scudd. I decided it wasn't.

The sky was clear. The city was hot, noisy, bright. Victoria is a port city and a favourite tourist destination, especially for Americans who love the usually cheap Canadian dollar. The downtown sidewalks were a blur of colour because a French aircraft carrier had just dropped its anchors in Royal Roads. Sailors on shore leave and local girls with sun-bleached hair strolled back and forth, flirting and enjoying themselves. Skateboard kids were doing crazy matador acts between moving cars and taxis. Street buskers and jugglers and ice-cream sellers were all cashing in.

I spent the rest of the day snooping around, trying unsuccessfully to get a line on who Maria Alfred's companion might have been. About nine
PM
I picked up my car from the lot and detoured through Chinatown, noticing its garish coloured lights, chop-suey cafes, and the gaudy imported wares displayed in shop windows. When a red light stopped me at Fisgard and Government I had time to notice a bicycle-rickshaw parked on the street outside Wong's Cafe.

I derailed thoughts of the rickshaw I'd seen in the Wasserstein house and began to wonder what secrets lay hidden behind the red-painted doors and silken curtains that abound in this ethnic neighbourhood. The rickshaw kid had legs like Arnold Schwarzenegger. He got on his bike and started pedalling before the light changed, slowing motor traffic down to Store Street. Where he turned right, I turned left. I winkled my way onto the Johnson Street Bridge, and went home.

Instead of brushing my teeth and going to bed, I poured myself a drink, found a dead fly on my windowsill, took it outside and said hello to pine siskin. He seemed happy to see me, and hopped out of the escallonia bush onto my hand when I offered him the fly. Afterwards I sat in my garden, thinking about the secret life of birds, and Maggie Bradley, with the siskin's background chatter a pleasing accompaniment to my ruminations.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A coroner's inquest into Raymond Cho's death opened at the Blanshard Street courthouse at 11:00
AM
. After hearing about a hundred words from Detective Inspector Manners, the coroner adjourned the inquest pending further evidence, much to the dismay of the ink-stained wretches, the idlers, the pensioners and all of the other irregular sad sacks that fatten their shrunken lives on courthouse misery.

Manners stood down from the witness box and exchanged a few private words with Bernie Tapp. Bernie and I then left the courthouse together and stood on the sidewalk. Dark thunderheads were massing over the Sooke Hills. A majestic bald eagle was devouring something small and feathery on the courthouse roof. In the sky above the eagle, a pair of bereft thrushes screeched piteously.

Nice Manners came out of the courthouse, got into a waiting patrol car, and was driven off.

Bernie is one of those fidgety pipe smokers constantly patting his pockets for matches or tobacco pouch or reaming dottle from the pipe's bowl with a pocket knife. He was going through another pipe-filling, tobacco-fiddling routine when a taxi drew up nearby. Bernie and I watched as Terri Murnau got stiffly out of the taxi, paid the driver, and then limped slowly up the courthouse steps. Terri hadn't been limping when she'd served Fred Halloran and me at Pinky's Bar.

Bernie said. “I'm going to grab a cup of coffee. You coming?”

“Can't, I've a couple of things to do.”

“You do that, but don't bully your expense account too much,” Bernie said amiably. Puffing smoke like a steam train, he began a slow locomotion towards the Fort Street Starbucks.

I re-entered the courthouse. The corridors were jammed with conmen and crooks, and with their natural prey: the frightened, the cheated, the confused, the old. Barristers wearing black jackets and pants, white shirts with wingback collars and flapping white neckties, strode purposefully around at $500 an hour.

Terri Murnau was leaning against the wall outside courtroom five with most of her weight supported on one leg. She was heavily made up, but not heavily enough to conceal the puffiness surrounding both of her eyes. She looked exactly what she was. An attractive middle-aged battered woman wearing a charcoal-grey pantsuit and black flat-heeled shoes. We exchanged smiles. Terri's shoulders covered up the court calendar posted on a board behind her, preventing me from seeing what kind of legal or domestic trouble she might be embroiled in.

I said, “Everything under control, Terri?”

She regarded me contemplatively for an instant. “I'm getting a grip on it,” she said noncommittally.

British Columbia courts go easy on wife beaters, unfortunately, and Terri probably knew it. I told her to give me a call if she needed anything, and continued along the marble corridors to the bc land registry office.

Generally, the land registry office is busy; there's usually a lineup. That morning, for a brief period, I was the only customer. I showed a woman behind the counter my police badge and asked to see the conveyance on Ernest Wasserstein's Echo Bay property. A copy of that document arrived promptly. The deed was simple enough. Ten years earlier Ernest Wasserstein had purchased his house, fully furnished, for nine and a half million dollars. I also discovered that Collins Lane had been gazetted in 1873.

Well, that was interesting.

By the time I returned to courtroom five, Terri Murnau had gone. I examined the court calendar posted beside the courtroom door. Regina vs. Murnau was being heard before Judge Hilda at that very moment. By then, it was a little before noon.

Something was nagging me. I went back to my office and ran a computer check on Ernest Wasserstein. He was a Swiss national with two convictions for fraud in Canada. Thoughtful, I locked up my office, strolled across to the Broughton Street parkade where I'd left the MG, fired it up and drove out to revisit the Echo Bay scene of incomprehensibly violent murder. Traffic alternately raced and crawled.

Echo Bay's village clock was striking two when I stopped at a corner grocery to buy myself a cold drink. Getting out of the car, I noticed the Mai Thai Restaurant. Forgetting my thirst, I went into the restaurant instead. Heavy cooking odours. A Help Wanted sign in the front window. The curtains were closed and the lights were off. After going in out of the day's bright sunlight, it took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the gloom.

An agitated elderly Asian woman came fluttering out of the kitchen, waving her arms and trying to shoo me back outside. “Close till six please,” she said, speaking English in a heavily accented voice. “Restaurant close please, come back later please.”

When I showed the woman my police badge, she gave a stifled cry and fled from sight through a bead-curtained doorway.

I sat on a stool and gazed at the display of domestic wines and Thai beer stacked behind the counter. Silence reigned until another Asian woman appeared. She was about twenty, exuded tranquillity and looked like the first woman's granddaughter. Her black hair had yellow streaks, and she was wearing a blue silk shirt and slim-fit jeans. She regarded me seriously, although her narrow gaze seemed slightly unfocussed. I thought,
she's worried
.

Smiling, she asked tentatively, “Is there something I can do for you, sir?”

I asked her name.

“Tania Sundaravej,” she answered. “That was Granny you were talking to just now. She said you're a policeman. There's nothing wrong, I hope?”

Her voice was well modulated, Canadian.

“I'm looking for someone who lives nearby and might possibly be one of your customers.”

“This business has been a going concern since I was five years old. We have thousands of customers.”

I paused. The inquiry was in its early stages, and we were still playing things close to the chest. I wondered whether it was safe to use the dead man's name. What was I going to say otherwise? That the man I was interested in was Chinese, about thirty? A man who dressed well, drove an expensive late-model German car? That description fitted thousands of people. I grinned at her. “This is confidential. His name is Ronnie Chew. A Chinese man, about thirty. He's apparently well-to-do. Drives a nice Beemer, wears very good expensive clothes.”

Her smile became radiant. “Oh Ronnie, sure. Ronnie was in here on Saturday night, late.”

“Alone?”

“He was with a couple of friends, I served them myself. Wait a minute.”

Tania put on glasses with bottle-glass lenses, reached beneath the counter and brought out a register, but couldn't find what she wanted. She said, “It's crazy in here on Saturdays. Generally, Ronnie books a table when he's coming.” She took her glasses off and turned the book 180 degrees so that I could read the page. Ronnie Chew's name wasn't there.

“Ronnie must have just walked in at the last minute. It's lucky we had a free table.” Tania pointed vaguely to a table in a far corner of the room. “Minnie was hostessing, she put him over there.”

“What time would that be?”

“It must have been close to eleven. We stop cooking at midnight, and the bar closes at one. Ronnie and his friends were among the last people to leave here.”