Very Bad Deaths Page 10

  Once I solved the maze, parked in front of the giant block-sized building, and got out of the car, I began to understand why the place was as difficult as possible to reach: it wasn’t police headquarters at all. Oh, one end of it was a police property of some kind—but as I fed coins into the meter I could clearly see that ninety percent of the structure, a vast office building, in fact constituted the headquarters of ICBC. The Insurance Corporation of British Columbia is a semiprivate company with an absolute monopoly on auto and collision insurance in the province of B.C. It is internationally renowned for its compassion, generosity, efficiency and competence, and I am Marie of Rumania. This was where you came to file your appeal, begging for at least some token fraction of what you deserved and desperately needed, and they were in no hurry at all for you to find the place.

  Apparently the police felt the same way. And once you had made your way to “headquarters,” down at the ass end of the building, and pushed through the glass door with the police logo on it, where were you?

  In a cheesy and entirely empty lobby, strikingly like that of the Olympian, the crummy hotel in downtown Olympia, New York, one step above a flophouse, in which Susan and I had surrendered our virginities to one another. No milling cops. No suspects cuffed to D-rings. No crying babies or people screaming in foreign languages or hookers in abbreviated costumes. Off to the left was a wide counter, again much like the front desk of the old Olympian, save that back in those days front desks were not yet enclosed with bulletproof glass. The only people visible behind it were two middleaged women in civilian clothing, both of whom ignored me. On the right was an office that appeared to be unused.

  At the far end of the lobby I could see elevators. Curious to see how far I would get before I was stopped and asked for my ID and an account of myself, I wandered down there. Nobody tried to stop me. The elevator alcove finally made a stab at pretending to be part of police headquarters: All the elevator doors bore the VPD crest, with the word SERVAMUS above it in some large bold chancery font, and above them hung sixteen large portrait photos memorializing officers who had been killed in the line of duty. The most recent was from a good five years ago or so. I could still remember the details of the story. Probably most Vancouverites could. As I looked over the photos, two uniformed cops came out of one of the elevators, walked past me and left the building. Neither looked at me.

  Once I established that if I felt like getting on one of those elevators and wandering around headquarters, knocking on doors at random, I could, I retraced my steps to the glassed-in front desk. My story was more than flakey enough; I didn’t need to start out by pissing them off.

  For which reason I let the women behind the counter keep their backs to me for as long as they felt necessary to establish their authority and importance. By the time the alpha female was ready to acknowledge my existence, a courier with a parcel under his arm had arrived and lined up behind me. He gave off an air of being in a hurry, and I did not feel like trying to sell a complicated, tricky story while an impatient man waited at my shoulder. I waved him ahead of me. Both he and the woman behind the counter stared at me. After a short hesitation, he stepped around me, slid over his parcel under the bulletproof glass, and left, looking over his shoulder at me to make sure I was not going to turn violent before he cleared the door.

  The woman behind the glass was now the picture of skepticism. In size, shape, and general facial appearance she bore a strong resemblance to Lou Costello, but the hair was more evocative of Larry Fine of the Three Stooges. I introduced myself, and produced a business card, a press card, and a few print copies of recent columns I had published in The Globe and Mail, as evidence that I was gainfully employed in a respectable profession not noted for raving lunatics. And also to clearly make the point that I did not work for the local Vancouver Sun or Province, which routinely raked VPD over the coals, but for the Globe, which being published out of Toronto rarely felt any pressing need to do so.

  She declined to so much as glance at my exhibits, and the moment our eyes met I knew I was dead in the water here. No matter what, I was not going to get anything I wanted from this woman if it lay within her power to withhold it from me. I have no idea why, but the gaze she fastened upon me was unmistakably the Evil Eye. Instantly I was catapulted back through time thirty years: she was the Assistant Dean of Women, and I was a raggedy-ass hippy, and no explanation I could possibly concoct for my presence on the third floor of the girls’ dorm at 3 A.M. was going to be adequate.

  I did ask her some of the questions I had prepared on the ferry ride—I had come this far—but at the last moment I decided to phrase them as I had on the phone, as hypothetical inquiries for a work of prose, to avoid committing myself as long as possible. It was immediately clear to both of us that I was wasting my time. When it finally began to dawn on her that I was wasting her time too, I did manage to elicit a single fact: that if the allegedly hypothetical questions I was annoying her with happened to actually be actual questions, what I would need to do was be interviewed by “an officer from Major Crimes.”

  A detective?

  “An officer from Major Crimes, sir.”

  “So I’d just go upstairs—”

  “You cannot go upstairs, sir.”

  “Ah. I see.” That’s what you think, lady. “So this officer would come down here, and—”

  “Major Crimes is not located in this building, sir.”

  “It’s not?” You obviously have never been in an auto accident in this province. “Where is it?”

  “I won’t tell you that, sir.”

  I stared at her long enough to blink several times. “The Major Crimes division is not located at headquarters. And citizens are not permitted to know where it is located.”

  “That’s correct, sir.”

  I nodded. If you react, you only confirm that they’ve insulted you. “Mind if I ask why not?”

  “Not at all, sir.”

  Blink, Blink. Blink. Ah, of course. “Good one. Why not?”

  “Was there anything else I could help you with today, sir?”

  “If I did want to see a Major Crimes officer, how would you suggest I locate one? Random questioning of the populace?”

  I was surprised when a slight edge came on her voice; I hadn’t expected her to recognize sarcasm without tone-of-voice cues. “If you convinced me a Major Crimes officer needed to speak with you, you would sit down on that bench right over there and wait, for as long as necessary, and eventually an officer would speak with you.”

  I glanced behind me. Sure enough, there was a bench there which I had overlooked. “Group W, I presume,” I muttered. But of course the reference went over her head. She was too young to know about mother-stabbers and father-rapers and an envelope under a half a ton of garbage. I wished she were with it.

  “Was your question hypothetical then, sir?” How do public officials manage to make such a deadly insult out of the word sir? “Or did you wish to report knowledge of a homicide?”

  I looked into her piggy little eyes and knew that I did not wish to report to this woman knowledge of an attempted jaywalking. “You’ve been most helpful,” I lied. “And I for one have enjoyed this brief interlude.”

  She looked down too late, and found that I had just retrieved my ID and my old columns. “What was your name again, sir?”

  “English, on my mother’s side,” I said. “Hard to know about Dad until he’s identified.”

  “Can I have your name, sir?” she persisted.

  “Why, I’d have to think about it. Can you cook? Are you fertile?”

  She reddened, and glanced around for a cop, but I was already backing away from the glass, and anyway what would a cop be doing in the lobby of police headquarters? “Sir—”

  “I could talk to you all day,” I said, “but I’d prefer to set myself on fire. Besides, today happens to be the Feast of Ali Ben Dova Redrova, and I have sworn to carry the Sacred Domestic Utensil beyond the Lion’s Gate Bridge befor
e darkness stumbles and falls, so—”

  “Sir—”

  “Fuck you very much—have an ice day, now.”

  I fled.

  5.

  Driving away from there, I suddenly remembered the building that I’d thought 2120 Cambie was going to turn out to be—a structure much more like my mental picture of what police headquarters ought to look like. Now where the hell had that been? Oh, yes. Catty-corner from the Firehall Theatre, on the corner of Main and…what, East Cordova?

  The Firehall is one of the better dance venues in Vancouver. I hadn’t been there in over a year, since before Susan’s death. Some of the fun of attending a modern dance performance had faded once she was no longer around to be dragged along kicking and screaming. (Perversely, I’d been to several of the poetry readings she used to drag me to in revenge.)

  But I was able to find the place without difficulty. It was largely a matter of following the junkies. By the time I reached it I thought I understood why it was not police headquarters, even though it should have been.

  The Main Street police station does indeed look exactly like a police headquarters ought to look—massive, monolithic, medieval, proof against anything short of nuclear attack, surrounded by copmobiles. And it lies exactly one block from the single worst open-air drug supermarket in North America: the gaping, glistening open sore that begins at the corner of Main and Hastings.

  I’ve always thought of it as the Corner of Pain and Wastings. It is a 24/7 rolling-boil riot of junkies, crackheads, crystal queens, dragon-chasers, pill freaks, drunks, winos, whackos, and the dealers who love them all. Elsewhere, they are whores, pimps, muggers, pickpockets, panhandlers, squeegee guys, dumpster divers—everybody has an occupation—but when they get near Main and Hastings, they’re all just customers, anxious to score whatever it is they need to get over. The whole area throbs with a desperation that transcends even despair, an ugliness that has no choice but to flaunt itself. It didn’t matter how suitable the physical structure might be: to have had police headquarters one block from that international disgrace would have been unthinkable.

  I thought it was amazing luck that I found a parking space right next to the front door. Then I got out and discovered that the parking meter was “broken”—it ate my money, but continued to show time remaining as “00:00.” It was obviously the cops’ way of assuring themselves a space at need, when they were too rushed to go around back and use the underground garage. Cursing under my breath, I got back in the car and found another space a block and a half away. I checked the interior of the car very carefully before getting out, to be absolutely sure that nothing pawnable was visible from any window, and that tape cassettes were visible to make it clear this car held no CD player. Even so, I more than half expected to find the car gone when I returned. I guess that’s a clue as to just how foul the area around Main and Hastings is: there are people there who would steal an ’89 Accord.

  This lobby looked like the lobby of police headquarters. For a start, it was full of cops, on their way in or out. To my left as I walked in were windows with signs saying things like RECORD CLEARANCES, DOCUMENT SERVICES, and TAXI DETAIL. (This being normal business hours, all of them were closed.) On the right were doors labeled FINGERPRINT ROOM and POLICE-NATIVE LIAISON. (I couldn’t help wondering if any Indians had liaised with the police lately—voluntarily.) And directly ahead of me as I entered was a glassed-in cage much like the one back at Cambie Street, similarly inhabited by female civilians—but these looked much more like the kind of women a sane person would hire to run a real cop shop than the trolls back at the Potemkin police station.

  The alpha female here clocked me as I came in the door, and by the time I reached the counter she was waiting for me, with a pleasant smile. She was a tall slender brunette in her sixties, and exuded competence and calm. I introduced myself, and presented my cards and columns as before. This woman looked at them all politely, and nodded. “How can I help you, sir?” were her opening words.

  “I’m working on a novel, and I have a hypothetical question,” I said. Neither of those statements was a lie; it was only together that they became misdirection. “It’s about jurisdiction. Suppose a Heron Island resident, like myself, came in the door and told you he had certain knowledge that next week, say, a person of unknown address is going to kidnap a Vancouver resident, take him an unknown distance up the Sea to Sky Highway, and…” I hesitated. “…and shoot him. For a start, who would have jurisdiction in a case like that—VPD, or the horsemen?”

  She nodded. “If you actually came in and told me that, I’d refer you to a Major Crimes officer and let him make the call—but I can tell you what he’d say. Barring other complications, the operative factor is the address of the victim. So yes, it would be our case. Of course, we might very well interact with the RCMP, or with other police agencies along the Sea to Sky, depending on the circumstances.”

  “I see.”

  “And if your hypothetical murderer were from another country, say, we could also end up interfacing with Interpol, the FBI, or the like.”

  I was mildly stunned. She had given me the information I’d asked for, just as if I had a right to it. “So basically if my hero came in with that story, you’d tell him to have a seat and then you’d send for a—”

  “I’d just send him upstairs to Major Crimes and have him speak with a detective.”

  I blinked. “Major Crimes is—”

  “Third floor.”

  “You’re allowed to tell me that?”

  She frowned. “Why not?”

  “Never mind. And what the detective would probably say is, the address of the victim controls, so it’d be his case.”

  She nodded judiciously. “If, as you say, the victim resided in Vancouver itself, and not one of the suburbs with their own force, like Surrey or Burnaby.”

  I suddenly realized, to my horror, that I was fresh out of questions, and could not think of any new ones. The rotten bitch had been unforgivably helpful, and now the moment of decision was upon me, way before I had been expecting it. Here, now, was the point at which, if I was ever going to, I should clear my throat and say, well actually, it isn’t hypothetical and I really do need to speak with a detective.

  I wanted to. Why else had I come into town, for Christ’s sake? I’d promised Zudie. And some fucking lunatic wanted to butcher a whole family, for the sheer artistic symmetry of it. No matter what, I couldn’t let that happen, and continue to live with myself.

  But I pictured the conversation ahead, with the detective.

  Let me see if I’ve got this, sir: you’re sure Mr. Zudidoodi can read minds, because a long time ago he used to smell really bad? And last night, armed only with the knowledge that you’re a widower, he divined that you’re depressed? That seems conclusive, all right. And you say all we have to do is find a rich fella that lives somewhere within flying distance of the Lower Mainland—or a family of four somewhere in Point Grey—or a quiet spot somewhere along a three-hundred-kilometer highway? No problem: we have a special department for that. You want to go down and talk to a woman behind the desk at 2120 Cambie Street…

  “Uh…well, I guess that’s all I needed to know, for the moment. Thank you, you’ve been extremely helpful.”

  “You’re quite welcome,” she said.

  I started to leave—then stopped. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

  She looked me over. “How personal?”

  “How have you lasted this long as a civil servant, being so helpful?”

  Her smile had been pleasant, but her grin was glorious. “People are generally too grateful to rat me out.”

  I grinned back. “I’ll bet they are.”

  “Have a good day,” we chorused at each other, and grinned some more, and I left.

  I don’t know about her; my grin didn’t last as far as the sidewalk. The whole trip had been a waste of time. I had to tell the cops. But I had not been able to. And it was not ever going to get any easie
r. I felt like a fool.

  I was in such a sour mood I was perversely almost disappointed to find my car still where I had left it. I told myself I deserved to have it robbed, for being such a coward. I got in, and put the key in the ignition, but didn’t turn it. The car behind me started up and drove away; now would be a convenient time to back up two feet and then pull out myself. I just sat there.

  I thought about getting out, going back to 312 Main and completing my report. That lady behind the counter had been so polite, she might actually pretend to be surprised when I told her my question hadn’t really been hypothetical after all. A car took the space behind me, and a blonde woman got out and walked away. Pedestrians passed. Every so often, one would stop and bend down slightly to check me out. I was sitting in a car on Main Street with the engine off; was I selling, or buying?

  I ignored them all and tried to persuade myself I was glib enough to sell my wacky story to an experienced detective. I wasn’t glib enough to sell that to myself. In my rear view mirror I saw a gaunt bald man get in the car behind me and bend down out of sight. It seemed to me that what I needed to do was find some way to demonstrate telepathy to the police. That meant I would have to somehow bring Zudie close to one of them—but I believed him completely when he said he couldn’t survive coming to town. And I had no plausible excuse to haul a Vancouver cop all the way out to Heron. For some reason I don’t understand, it’s harder to get people to take a half-hour ferry than to drive an hour out of their way in traffic.

  Behind me the engine started, and the bald man reappeared behind the wheel. A glimmering of a possible solution occurred to me then, but it would be a good five minutes or so before I had time to examine it closely, because an instant later the penny dropped, and I was way too busy finding my key in the ignition and starting the car and putting it in reverse and stepping slowly but firmly on the accelerator while leaning on the horn.