Burn, p.12
Burn, page 12
part #1 of Vancouver Series
“Fuck me, Dan, fuck me.”
Dan pulled back as Marsha reached out, grabbed a complimentary BlueBoy from her bag, and stared up at him.
Dan hadn’t a clue, but whatever he’d been doing must have been working because this was it. He was in. He was there, and he was going to get it at last—and with the girl who’d just been voted the most beautiful woman on this planet.
Marsha leaned back and opened her legs. Dan climbed on top of her, trying his hardest to stop his body from shaking and having what had happened to him on stage happen again. He began to panic, but then he remembered the calm words of counsel Chendrill had passed on as he’d sat there in his blue Hawaiian shirt at the wheel of Mazzi Hegan’s Ferrari, and in his mind, he began the only chant that could save him. Margaret Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher.
Dan let her image take over his subconscious and his mind. He repeated it over and over—Margaret Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher. Seeing her there before him with her bouffant hair and pokey face. Then out of the blue, just as he felt himself growing large enough to rupture the BlueBoy and felt Marsha guiding him into her, he said Chendrill’s mantra out loud.
“Margaret Thatcher, you’re so beautiful.”
Marsha froze and stopped what she was doing. “I’m sorry?”
Dan looked down at her as he hovered there above her, propped up on his elbows, his whole body shaking, Mazzi Hegan’s underpants halfway down his legs.
“Did you just call me Margaret Thatcher?”
Dan shook his head. “No.”
Moving away, Marsha began to push Dan off. “Yes, you did.” She moved, kicking Dan right off and spat out, “My name’s Marsha, okay? Marsh-aaaa. Not fucking Margaret, okay? No one calls me Margaret. I’m Marsha, Marrrrshaaa!”
And that was that.
Chapter Fifteen
It was about two minutes after Chendrill had left the hotel when news of Daltrey filtered its way far enough through the grapevine to reach him, and the news of her passing hit him hard.
Burned to death in an alley in the posh part of town. Fuck, what a way to go, but why? What was going on? The word was an accelerant had been used, and they’d found traces of oil on her body and in the alley, along with her gun and ID where her body was found. Why? he thought as he turned the corner and headed down toward the bridge across the creek coming back from Kitsilano.
Daltrey was dead. What harm had she ever done to anyone? She was a cop, yes, and she sometimes caused trouble, upset people, sent them to a holiday camp called prison for a bit, but to be burned to death? That was just wrong. He pulled Mazzi Hegan’s car up to the side of the road and just stared as people passed by, looking at him and the car. It felt good to be driving the Ferrari—real good—but he’d have been happier to ride a bicycle for the rest of his days if it meant Daltrey could have still been around.
He pushed down the clutch with his left foot and slapped the car into first, then spun the wheels and hit it. Dan was right—the tires smoked if you wanted them to, no problem, but from the looks he got from everyone around, he knew it would be the last time he did that.
The alley was short and tight with barely enough space for two cars. Chendrill got out of the Ferrari and walked to the end. The electric gate was now open for the day, but he was sure it would have been closed when Daltrey had burned to death here. He looked to the floor, the concrete still charred where they must have found her body.
It was the third murder by burning he could remember in the last year—the first a drug dealer in the alley and the other the guy on the creek a few days back. Daltrey had been looking into that one and must have gotten close to the suspect to have been torched herself.
Who had she been after? He thought back to all the conversations they’d had the last time they’d met, but came up with nothing. She played her cards close to her chest. But she had dated Dan—how crazy was that? Dan the man, up there now in a swanky hotel getting it on with Miss Long Legs of the Year, Marsha.
Chendrill looked to the ground and then around to the sea of condos behind him. Maybe two hundred of them looked down over the alley. Daltrey had died at around eleven. Someone somewhere up there must have been looking out their window and seen something. He’d been told the call to 911 had come from a motorist coming in from a night on the town. Despite the smoldering, the driver had still nearly run over her lifeless body.
When he was a cop, he’d have knocked on every one of those apartment and condo doors. He walked back out of the alley and looked up to the main street at the top of the road. Up there somewhere, there’d be a camera, he thought. He walked up to the road and looked at the shops that spread out in both directions—a dentist showing off a set of huge, perfect white teeth in its window, a nail salon, another dentist with more teeth than his neighbor and showing before and after photos, then a financial advisory service bordering on a Ponzi scheme. He stopped to check his own teeth in the reflection of the plate-glass window, then moved on and found another nail salon and a convenience store.
Chendrill entered the store and smiled at the elderly Japanese guy behind the counter. He picked up some gum and floss, glanced at the cheap CCTV camera aimed at the doorway, and asked, “What’s the chance of me having a look at your footage from that camera for yesterday evening?”
“You police?” asked the store owner.
Chendrill shook his head. “Once upon a time, I was. Now I’m a private investigator.”
“This not cinema,” said the store owner. “Very busy.”
Chendrill looked around the shop. It was empty and had little chance of being any different any time in the near future. Looking back to the owner, he held up some mints, adding them to the gum and floss, and said, “Okay, how much do all these cost? Fifty bucks?”
Sitting on a swivel chair with a broken backrest, Chendrill watched the footage from the night before on the black and white six-inch screen of a monitor that should have been thrown away in the eighties. Over a hundred people had come into the store. Barely visible through the door, five had passed the shop in the period from nine onward, and around eleven, four had passed by—that was about five minutes before the fire trucks and cops had started to move past.
There was a woman, a couple, and a guy in track pants just back from holiday who was having trouble with his suitcase. Chendrill stared at the pictures and snapped a still shot with his phone of each person who headed away from the alley. He thanked the owner who’d just hit him for fifty and quickly headed back along the road toward the alley, only to discover Mazzi Hegan's Ferrari was gone.
******
Patrick sat on a chair and lifted his head from the eyepiece of his telescope. He could not remember ever being this upset, having puked continually throughout the night as he’d sat and watched the events unfold as the fire brigade and ambulance service and finally the police had sealed off the alley as a crime scene. Now this guy who drove a red Ferrari and looked like Thomas Magnum was sniffing around and staring up at him in his window.
Fuck, Patrick thought, he should just go to the police and tell them everything that had happened. But then what? All the questions would start. Why do you have a telescope in your room? Why was Daltrey in your room? Why was she talking to you? Where were the photos the prostitute had taken that Daltrey had found? Why hadn’t he called it in when he saw Daltrey burning to death?
Why hadn’t he? It was a good question.
Patrick looked at his hands, and he could see they were shaking. It must have been instinct, intelligence overriding natural human response. A car had come, and he could see the driver calling it in, and minutes later he’d heard the sirens screaming out in the distance, growing closer by the second. He didn’t need to get involved. The guy would be caught—there was a system in place for that. But deep down, he knew he was dirty. And the more he looked at it, the worse it became.
After all, he knew the answer this guy down below was searching for, along with the name of the people who’d towed his car. He knew who had killed this girl who had only minutes before whispered in his ear. He’d watched her stalking the man and then watched him stalk her and stand above her, pouring flames down upon her long, brown hair and her beautiful, smooth skin. Then he’d watched him calmly walk away, trundling his suitcase behind him.
Patrick put his hands on his face. He stood then sat and then stood again, watching Chendrill standing in the alley, staring at the floor where Daltrey had died. Patrick knew he was in deep, so deep, and every minute he waited before calling the police got him in deeper. He and his celebrity status as a realtor was sinking. Slowly, he moved to the window and stood there with the curtains pulled back, looking out, before turning and heading to the door.
Chendrill stood and waited in the alley. He’d seen the man standing there in the window watching. Going with his gut, he knew he would be coming down, and as soon as he saw Patrick appear from around the corner, he knew who he was.
“They towed your Ferrari” were Patrick’s first words as he drew closer.
Chendrill smiled and said, “You’ve come all the way from up there to tell me that?”
Patrick nodded, his face smiling.
“That’s nice of you. You saw them pull it?”
Patrick nodded again. Chendrill dug deeper. “Tell me, what else have you seen from up there?”
Patrick hesitated for a moment and then asked, “Are you a cop?”
Chendrill shook his head. “How many cops drive a Ferrari? I’m a private investigator.”
Patrick stared at him for a moment, working him out, this guy with long hair and a moustache dressed in a Hawaiian shirt. “Well, then it must pay well,” he said.
“Not as much as selling houses. A client of mine lets me use the car.”
Patrick stared at him, liking him instantly. Obviously, the three hundred thousand he was spending on advertising every year was paying off.
“Same as the guy in the ’70s TV series. You kind of look like him.”
Chendrill liked that one and wished he had the car here now so he could get in and come back with a quick one-liner like, “Yeah, but he was an actor!” But he didn’t. The car was gone, so instead he said, “Why don’t you hire me? Then I can help you sort out this problem that’s troubling you.”
They sat in the corner of a small bar, thanked the waitress, and both stared discreetly at her backside as she walked away. Then Chendrill came straight out with it.
“So you saw something going on that night, and you think you may know the person who did it, but if you let it out that you know him, it could have bad repercussions for you?”
Patrick couldn’t believe it. How the fuck could this guy know that just like that?
And the strange thing was that Chendrill didn’t. It was a wild guess based on the guy’s nervousness yet his willingness to come down and speak to a stranger.
“If I did, could I be in trouble?” Patrick asked.
Chendrill shrugged. “If you had a reason for wanting the girl dead, you could be. Have you spoken to the police?”
Patrick shook his head. This guy, this PI had a way about him. He asked the right questions, but didn’t give a shit about the answers. “They rang my door buzzer,” he said.
“But you didn’t answer.”
Patrick shook his head.
“No? Why?”
Patrick paused, his mind whirring, then took a deep breath. “The girl who died, I’m sure you know, was a cop. Her name is Daltrey. She was in my bedroom just before she was murdered.”
Fuck me, Chendrill thought, not another one. First Dan, and now this guy. Daltrey did get around. He took a deep breath and asked, “You were lovers?”
Patrick shook his head again, then said, “I wish! She was using my place to watch an apartment opposite. I was in a café, and she approached me. Next thing I knew, she was in my bedroom, but not for sex. She just wanted to keep an eye on some apartment.”
Chendrill smiled. That was Daltrey, moving outside the system, thinking outside the box. “Do you know the apartment she was watching?” he asked.
Patrick nodded again then paused for a moment before saying, “And I think I saw the guy who set her on fire. It was the same guy she was watching.”
Chendrill sat there for a moment, taking it all in, remembering Daltrey and the way she could smile and get you to do things you wouldn’t usually do for other people. Then he asked, “What was the last thing she said to you before she left?”
And with those words, Patrick’s walls came tumbling down.
******
Chendrill took a cab down to the towing company and walked through the security gate and past the cabin with its line of people waiting to pay money to the pricks who’d managed to ruin their evening. He spotted Mazzi Hegan's red Ferrari at the back of the lot and moved toward it. Opening the door with his key, he sat inside and waited, watching the wannabe Hells Angel with an attitude at the gate showing off his fat gut and tattoos to the drivers as he checked their release papers before setting them free.
He shouldn’t have gotten himself into this situation with a client’s car, but had he not, he would never have met Patrick, Vancouver’s Premier Realtor, as he liked to call himself. This man had his own kinky secret, a secret which had come spilling out along with everything else that had gone down that evening Daltrey died and in the months before. Patrick was now a terrified man who told lies for a living, spitting out half-truths as he tried to maneuver his way around questions delivered to him by a man trained to spot just that.
There was more to it, though—a lot more. More than blackmail in the making from the beautiful whore who was now lying in a hospital. Daltrey had been, after all, using the same tactic to get use of Patrick’s apartment so she could watch the same place he’d been visiting and getting off to every evening through his telescope. She hadn’t given Patrick back the photos but had instead left it open, making it a game. It was the way she operated.
Chendrill waited, watching as the tow truck driver with the fat gut lifted the gate for the second time and left it open while he checked the next car’s papers. Chendrill quickly started the engine and crept Mazzi Hegan’s Ferrari forward. As soon as the time was right, he hit the gas and gunned it at an angle, straight under the open gate, out of the yard, and across the sidewalk, sending the Ferrari sideways as he hit the road out front.
Fuck ’em, he thought as he reached the end of the road and saw the tow truck driver standing in the middle of the road in his rearview mirror. Pulling out onto the main causeway, Chendrill laughed and said out loud, “You steal my car, I steal it back.”
Chapter Sixteen
Ralph “The Thief” Ditcon knew he had a nickname, but had no idea why. In his eyes, his exemplary career as a detective was what any police officer in the world would be proud of. Truth was, on paper it was nothing less than an incredible record of thirty murder convictions. He had what was seen as an uncanny ability to step in and solve the crime of any investigation that other not-so-special policemen were stalled on.
As the news of Daltrey's terrible death rippled through the ranks of the Vancouver police force, Ralph Ditcon—now in his fifty-second year—had a crime to solve, and his incredible record and the powers that be deemed him the one man capable of getting to the bottom of it all and bringing the persons involved to justice.
Daltrey's apartment was clean and tidy, Ditcon thought as he wandered about the place, lifting her clothes. The curtains in the rooms were all pulled back to precisely the same width at either end of every window. All of her towels hung equally spaced, centered on each rail. There was not a speck of dirt anywhere in the place. He remembered her and the fantastic work she’d done putting together her first murder case against a suspect whose wife had disappeared while swimming off the beach at the Spanish Banks. After five weeks of sniffing and digging, Daltrey had found the woman in a shallow grave in the woods close to a cottage the couple had rented the year before, a hundred miles away. That’s when Ralph Ditcon had stepped in. Using his criminal judicial expertise and Daltrey's notes, he’d brought the case to a successful conclusion.
The next time Ralph “The Thief” Ditcon had stepped in to help wrap up a case involving the suspicious suicide of a young man in his early twenties, Daltrey had no notes.
“They’re up here,” she’d said, tapping the side of her head, and as she walked away, she’d smiled and called out, “Go ahead, finish. Once you’ve worked it all out, give me a call, and I’ll come in and help you with the arrest.”
Six months later, when Ralph “The Thief” Ditcon had gotten nowhere and taken some time off to sit with his toes in the sand on the beach of Salt Spring Island, Daltrey had stepped in and arrested the young man’s best friend. And from then on, that had been exactly how she’d rolled—on her own and with the jigsaw left undone till the last second.
It was late in the evening when Ditcon got his first lead. A call had come in from a local tow truck company that a car towed from the alley where Daltrey had been murdered had been stolen from their compound under suspicious circumstances. Obviously, something in the car had been important. Whoever it was had something to hide, and within two hours after a very upset and irate Mazzi Hegan had been pulled from his silk sheets, Ditcon had Chendrill sitting behind a desk, answering questions in an interrogation room and Chendrill wasn’t holding back.
“You are so far off base you may as well be in China.”
Ditcon stared at him, trying his hardest to look as though he was in control of the situation. “So why were you there?” he asked.
Chendrill smiled. God, this guy was stupid, he thought. If he didn’t have a case handed to him on a plate, he didn’t have a clue. “Why do you think I was there?”
