Читать книгу Winston Patrick Mystery 2-Book Bundle - David Russell W. - Страница 17

Detective Andrea Pearson was a detective with the Vancouver Police department. And a good friend of mine. In fact, Andy and I had been been friends since before high school. For as long as I could remember, Andy had wanted to be a cop. As kids, playing cops and robbers was always predictable when she was around; I would be the bad guy because there was simply no way she could portray that part when in her heart she knew her reason for being on this earth was to stop crime. Not an episode of Baretta, Hawaii Five-O, Police Story or a host of other seventies and eighties cop shows was not committed to her memory. She even watched Charlie’s Angels religiously, not the least because it showed women in the lead crime busting roles. This, of course, was a plus for me, since it justified my having the famous Farrah Fawcett in the red bathing suit poster in my room: swimsuit model for me, semi-role model for Andrea.

From the moment we left high school, Andrea Pearson had gone straight to the University of British Columbia to study a double major in criminology and psychology, her two passions. Four years and an Honours Bachelor of Arts degree later, she had gone straight to the Vancouver Police Academy, where she’d finished at the top of her class. That’s right, the top of her class. Above the other women candidates. Above the men. Above everyone. That fact never went unnoticed, not only among her fellow police officers, but also her superiors. At thirty-five years old, she had been a detective for nearly six years, making her one of the more senior members of her squad.

Much to my mother’s chagrin, Andy had never married. More to the point, she had never married me. Andy had everything going for her. Her family was Irish—good Irish, my mother would make the distinction—in heritage, though they had been in Canada even longer than my family had. Her family were practicing Catholic, another of the many failed prerequisites of my Jewish ex-wife that my mother could never overlook. Of course, now that I was divorced, I was an “improper Catholic.” All of which only goes to show I should have married Andy in the first place, and everyone would have been happy. Everyone, that is, except Andy and me.

Andrea and I had never dated. Never. Ever. When you grow up with a girl who for all intents and purposes was essentially a boy to you, it’s difficult to think of that person as anyone you plan to hop into a matrimonial bed with. Or even just into bed with.

It certainly wasn’t that Andy wasn’t attractive. From a strictly objective point of view, I could see why any man would make efforts to win her favour. The reason she had never truly hooked up, it seemed to me, was probably because she intimidated the hell out of just about every man she met. A lifelong fitness fanatic—it was Andrea who convinced me to take up late night running as a potential cure for insomnia—she was buff enough to lead new recruits at the academy in hand to hand combat drilling. No one, not even the gym monkeys with bodies that looked like someone stuck an air compressor hose up their bums, could outdo Andy in physical health. It’s entirely possible that most men were afraid to date her because they worried if they ever broke up, she’d kick the shit out of them.

Andrea wasn’t officially working Tricia’s murder. But I knew she would be in the loop, given her seniority and highly respected status among her colleagues. Despite the fact that many of her cop friends knew me, no one would keep Andy in the dark. No one would dare. She met me at the Thai Palace restaurant on Burrard Street, which served Vancouver’s best heart attack inducing, spicy Thai food. It was also a good place to talk without fear of being overheard by the patrons, most of whom patiently waited their turn at the karaoke machine. Andy was already in “our” booth when I arrived.

“How well do you know this guy?” she started as I slunk onto the faux velvet bench.

“Fine thanks, how are you?” I replied. We had the kind of relationship where opening pleasantries were optional and most often ignored.

“Don’t get pissy on me, Win. I thought we could cut to the chase.” Andy was the only person I allowed to call me “Winnie.” What could I do? She could kick my ass too.

“How do you know I invited you out to talk about legal matters? Why do you think I might not have something else to talk about?”

“Because nothing exciting happens in your life,” she reminded me. “You have no other news.”

“Sandi’s pregnant,” I blurted out. I have so few opportunities to scoop Andy on anything. Somehow, she would have found out within a few days, and I wasn’t about to let this rare moment pass.

“The she-beast is preggo?” she exclaimed. “Holy shit. I would have thought her yoghurt expired a long time ago.”

“She’s only two years older than us.”

“Still.” She paused and took a sip of her Corona beer straight from the bottle. She looked across the table as she gulped half the lemon-yellow liquid. “Have you two been at it again?”

“No! Shame on you for even thinking that. You have a dirty mind.”

“And a healthy soul. They go together,” she told me. “She come and tell you?”

“Yeah,” I told her. “Last night. She dropped by to share her happy news.”

“Why’d she tell you? She want something from ya?”

That gave me pause. My mind had been so focused on Carl and Tricia that I really hadn’t given enough thought to just why Sandi had made the trek to my place to inform me. Why the hell did I need that info?

“I don’t know,” I confessed. “I pissed her off, and she left before she could tell me.”

“Typical. You always piss her off good.”

“Well. I piss her off well.”

“Don’t start.” The waitress arrived with appetizers. Despite my inherited propensity for bland British food, I could also get hot and messy with spicy food. The difference between Andy and me was that I would pay dearly for it later with heartburn and indigestion. She always tried to convince me to order separately so I could get food with less spice, but it seemed like a test of my manhood so I always refused. I hated it when her manhood was stronger than mine. Andy dove into the finger foods.

“So are you in a funk about this?” she continued, hot sauce poking out from the corner of her delicate mouth.

“About Sandi?” I asked. “Hardly. I really hadn’t given it much thought.”

“Then why bring it up?”

“I thought you might want to know,” I told her.

“In case my biological clock went into jealousy overdrive?”

“It’s not beyond the scope of possibility. You’re not getting any younger.”

Andrea considered that for a moment. That was not a good sign, because it usually meant she was preparing a verbal assault. She cocked her head slightly to the left, peering with curiosity at the top of my head. Finally, she said, “Your hair’s thinning.”

“Okay. You win,” I conceded. “You’re starting to hit below the belt.”

She smiled coquettishly. “I wasn’t talking about hair below the belt.”

“And I wish you wouldn’t. This is a family restaurant.”

The waitress arrived again to take our orders as we were winding down on the fiery hot appetizers Andy had ordered prior to my arrival. Over her shoulder, a young couple cheerfully sang a duet of Britney Spears’ bubblegum hit “Oops I Did it Again” in Cantonese. It didn’t sound any better in Chinese. It also didn’t sound any worse. Andy ordered a Thai chicken dish that showed three red hot peppers beside it on the menu. Not to be outdone, I said I would have the same.

“Are you insane?” she said. “You can’t handle those types of spices.”

“Thanks, Mom,” I countered.

“Someone has to mother you. You don’t listen to the natural one, and you divorced the second one to come along.”

“Please. You’re killing my appetite.”

“You’re too skinny. We should have gone out for cheeseburgers. You’re starting to look like a camp survivor.”

“My mother’s Catholic guilt, not Jewish guilt.”

“Seriously, I think you need to eat more. This teaching thing is making you waste away.”

“No,” I told her. “The food level is probably fine. I need to sleep more and run less.”

Andy tilted her head again, this time just slightly to the right. This was her signal to me that she was no longer bullshitting and was genuinely concerned for my well being. It made her angry when I brushed off these attempts at trying to improve my state of being.

“Seriously, have you seen anyone?” she asked.

“I see you,” I said. “And not nearly often enough.”

“Shut up,” she replied. Andy had a way of saying “shut up” that was not mean spirited. She was probably the only person I knew who could say “shut up” in a caring, compassionate manner. “Don’t get cute on me,” she warned.

“I’m not already cute?” I tried to continue a line of conversation away from my physical and emotional health.

“I’m talking about going to your doctor.”

“Here we go,” I began to protest.

“Win,” she insisted, “you haven’t slept properly in, like, three years. Sooner or later you’re going to have to acknowledge that it’s not normal to live on less than three hours of sleep each day and find out what the hell’s wrong with you.”

“Thank you for putting it so gently. What if I find out I’m nuts or something?”

“At least we’d know medically what we’ve believed all along.” She paused long enough to cause me to to wonder what had happened and look back up from my food. When my eyes came level, I found her staring at me.

“What?” I demanded. She didn’t respond, only continued to give me a commanding stare. In many ways, Andy and I communicated non-verbally like an old married couple. She didn’t really need to say anything else, because I knew she has reached her end of the conversation. I now had two choices: accept what she was trying to tell me to do, or start a lengthy argument.

“Okay,” I eventually acquiesced. “You win. I will go to the doctor as soon as I have time.”

“Thank you,” she said with just a hint of smugness in her voice.

“Of course, he’ll tell me to avoid stressful situations like dinner with you.”

“I’ll survive eating dinner alone.” She paused. “Are we done with avoiding the real reason you wanted to have dinner with me?”

“Yes,” I confessed, “I have exhausted all other avenues of conversation for the time being.”

“In that case, I return to my original question: how well do you know this guy?”

I could tell by the tone of her voice she had found out something she knew she was not supposed to tell me because it wasn’t yet public information.

“Not all that well,” I admitted. “He’s basically just a guy I work with, but we’ve been friendly. He definitely helped me to get acquainted with the oh-so-subtle nuances of surviving in a public high school.” I paused and thought about one of my earlier encounters with Carl. “When I was bumbling through my first conflict with a student, he stepped in and helped. It kind of forged a friendship.”

“It doesn’t look good, Win,” she told me, then paused as the waitress returned with our dinners.

She thanked the waitress and, unbelievably, actually added hot sauce to what I’m sure was already a flaming hot, spicy meal. I had to draw the line somewhere; I opted to eat my dinner as was. I watched her in awe as she picked up a steaming bunch of noodles and sucked them indelicately into her mouth without even flinching. Gingerly, I pulled apart one tawny noodle and placed it daintily on my tongue. Immediately, I began to choke as my soft palate was suddenly aflame. At that moment I reached the panicked conclusion that I could actually die in a small Thai restaurant. How humiliating.

Andy was nearly beside herself with laughter. “Here,” she said, pushing my glass of water towards me, “take a drink, you dumbass!” I gulped water like a camel on its ninth day as perspiration broke out and began flowing down my forehead. “I told you not to order that,” she told me. “You don’t have to show off for me, remember?”

After a full minute of chugging water, dabbing my head with a napkin and loosening most of my clothing, I managed to recover sufficiently to sputter out a few syllables. “Tasty,” I gurgled out at her.

Andrea, meanwhile, had taken advantage of this medically necessary lapse in conversation to wolf down more than half of her dinner. I knew before the evening was done she would consume a fair portion of mine as well. The way Andy eats, the woman should be huge, but constant body-abusing exercise has fat cells scared to go near her.

“Are you all right?” she asked, giggling like the teenaged girl I remembered.

“I’m fine,” I gasped, my pulse slowly returning to normal. I signalled to the waitress, who found her way over to our table. “I’d like to just have some kind of house salad please. No dressing.” The waitress took my order and turned towards the kitchen. I turned back to Andrea. “You were saying it doesn’t look good?”

“No,” she replied, turning serious.

“Why?”

She gave me a look that reminded me I was receiving extremely privileged information. “There’s some pretty strong evidence.”

“The fingerprints? I thought we had pretty much debunked any significance those prints had. Those illegally obtained prints, I might add.”

“There’s more, Win. DNA. They got some preliminary results back today.”

“DNA? Where the hell did Furlo and Smythe get a DNA sample from?”

“The coffee cup in the interview room. A pencil in his biology lab with his teeth marks on it, and apparently a few other assorted odds and ends they found in the classroom.”

“Jesus Christ,” I complained, “what kind of detectives have you got working down there? I’ll move to strike all of that as illegal searches. You can’t go taking samples from coffee cops in the police station.”

“But you can from a public school classroom. He doesn’t have any guarantees of DNA privacy there,” she countered.

“We’ll see,” I threatened. “I don’t think the Charter of Rights and Freedoms will permit DNA sampling simply because my client is a public employee.” By then I was fuming as much from the tactics of Furlo and Smythe as I was from the Thai noodles. I thought we had established some parameters of how my client would be treated during the remainder of the investigation.

“Hey, Win!” Andy ordered. “I’m not opposing counsel here, remember? Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m only telling you what I’ve found out about your case.”

“You’re right,” I told her, exhaling heavily. “I’m sorry. It just pisses me off. Not so much that I’m going to have to file suppression motions, more that they’re wasting time with Carl that they could be using following other leads.”

“There are no other leads, Win,” she told me gently. “This is the direction they’re focusing on.”

“That’s bullshit. There are any number of ways that strands of hair, or fingerprints or whatever they’ve found on Tricia could have innocently come from my client. And I’ll fight them over using that as evidence anyway.”

“I don’t think you want to do that, Win. They’ll just get a court-ordered DNA sample from Turbot anyway. We’re not talking about a stray hair on the body.”

I looked at her quizzically. I could sense she was worried about telling me the next part, not only because a murder case is generally out of my purview of experience, but also because it involved a friend and colleague.

“What are you talking about?” I asked as the waitress returned with my very plain looking salad.

Andrea waited until the waitress had left the table, then looked at me and said bluntly, “Seminal fluid.”

I felt as though someone had punched me in the stomach. For a moment I found it difficult to breathe as I digested this new information. If the forensic scientists had found semen from Carl on Tricia, it pretty much blew away the notion that she had been concocting a scheme to hold over Carl’s head for whatever twisted reason we believed she had invented.

After a small eternity, I recovered enough to continue. “I thought there was no evidence of sexual assault?”

“There wasn’t,” Andy told me. She had finished her dinner. “There was no indication the body had been assaulted. They went to her house. They found trace semen evidence on a pair of underwear in her laundry hamper. They figure it was relatively, umm, fresh.” She said the last word uncomfortably.

“Holy shit,” I proclaimed, lacking any more suitable legal term for the turn my case had suddenly taken. “And it matches the samples they took?”

“Apparently enough that they’re not worried about you fighting the collection of those samples. They figure Tricia’s story is enough to get them a court order for a sample, and then they’ll have him.”

“That’s impossible. It can’t be right,” I protested feebly.

“Only if you refuse to believe it. Win,” she said, reaching across the table and taking my hand, “it looks pretty clear your guy was at least having sex with the girl. That’s going to give him proximity, motive. You sure you’re gonna be up for this?”

“I pretty much have to be. I wouldn’t be much of a lawyer if I suddenly bailed because I didn’t like the look of the evidence.”

“You don’t have to be much of a lawyer,” Andrea reminded me. “You’re a teacher now, remember? You could probably get a judge to excuse you from defending him.”

My cell phone rang from inside my jacket pocket. Extricating my hand from Andy’s, I reached into my pocket.

“Hello?” I asked. I listened quietly to the voice on the other end of the line give me information I knew was destined to come, having heard Andrea’s information and interpretation of the case. I just hadn’t thought it would come so quickly. After a moment or two, I thanked the caller and hung up the phone, simultaneously signalling the waitress to bring the bill.

Detective Andrea Pearson looked at me expectantly. “Well?” she asked. “You don’t look good.”

“That was Jasmine Smythe,” I tell her. “They would like me to meet them at Carl’s house. They’ve got a warrant, and they’re going to arrest him.”