“You were involved.”

  Chendrill shook his head, laughed, and said, “I’m more involved than you are right now.”

  “You’re telling me you’re investigating Daltrey’s death?”

  “No, I’m telling you I’m not investigating her death, but from spending just ten minutes at the crime scene, I already know because you’ve got me here that I’m further down the road than the detective in charge of the case.”

  Ralph stared at him, this smug prick who had left the force because he couldn’t handle it. “What makes you think that?” he asked.

  “Because you’ve got me sitting here in this chair.”

  “So why did you steal the car?”

  “You can’t steal your own vehicle. They stole the car from me. I went and reclaimed it.”

  Ralph “The Thief” Ditcon waited, wanting to pull a cigarette from his pocket and light one up, but remembering he’d quit smoking, then he said, “You need to start thinking about what trouble you could be in here,”

  Chendrill sat back in the chair and stared back at this detective who did not have a clue. “The only person around here who’s in trouble is you, and that’s because you and I both know you don’t have a clue as to what you’re doing.”

  ******

  It was five in the morning when Chendrill stepped out of the police station on Main Street on Vancouver’s east side and heard the man’s voice as he passed by, asking him in a whisper if he wanted hash. The man’s face was tight and as wrinkled from the crack and crystal meth he’d forced through his system. God damn it, Chendrill thought. It was shameless, selling drugs right outside the police station. He looked along the street toward the homeless, lost souls on Hastings and began to walk. The man’s voice whispered still, trying to earn what he needed to get his next hit.

  Only in Vancouver would you get that, Chendrill thought. He hated it. In fact, he hated the whole situation so much it had caused him to resign. How could you be a policeman and drive right past pimps, underage whores, and drug dealers spewing heroin and shit onto the streets from their alleys not more than a block from the police station where you worked? It was a hypocrisy he could no longer live with, but the moment he had walked, a sinking feeling had set in, a feeling he’d turned his back on the people who paid his wage to make what little difference he could with the means given.

  He reached the end of the road and hailed a cab that smelled sweet from the sweat of the driver. Tired, he closed his eyes in the backseat. Another night wasted, just because he’d parked on a corner. Fuck me, what would they do in Italy? It would be big business for those guys. He looked over at a tow truck driver sitting opposite him at the light, his arm hanging from the window, huge rings pushing the fat away from his porky fingers. He laughed as he remembered the guy’s face as he’d whipped past him and spun the Ferrari out onto the road, just like Thomas Magnum would have done.

  Fuck him. Fuck that guy who made a living stealing cars from hardworking people with real jobs—if you could call babysitting up-and-coming fashion models for a hundred an hour a real job.

  Chendrill laughed quietly to himself as he sat in the back of the taxi and headed home. He wondered how Dan had got on with the supermodel and if he’d taken one for all the boys in the world who lived in their mum’s basement.

  But all that was just nonsense, because his old friend and ex-lover whom he’d admired from afar was lying in the morgue, burned like a cure for a Sunday morning hangover, and the man assigned the task of finding out why couldn’t find a lost sock in the dryer, let alone a girl who was hiding a secret bigger than the private room Patrick was paying for at the Vancouver General Hospital. And with that thought, Chendrill, the ex-police detective who hated the police system and did his best to look like Magnum PI, knew that if he did not get to the bottom of it, no one would, and if that happened, it would follow him to the grave.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Illya stood next the girl and tried to wake her up. It had been almost forty-eight hours since he’d slipped the date rape drug into her drink in the busy bar and walked her back to his new place through the early evening crowds.

  She wasn’t doing well. By now she should have been a little more responsive. He had been hoping to start selling her off within the week, but it wasn’t looking good. How could he sell her? Who would pay for a girl who just lay there with her eyes rolled back in her head and drooled? Some would, he knew, but those kind of perverted people weren’t welcome, and chances are he’d end up killing one of them anyway.

  Gently, Illya picked the girl up by her arms and tried to walk her around the room. What the fuck was with the heroin he’d given her? he wondered. She should never have been this out of it. Illya reclined her in a chair, walked out to the kitchen, filled a glass of water, came back in, lifted her to a sitting position, and put the glass to her mouth.

  “Come on, beautiful, have a drink.”

  Working on instinct, the girl half-drank the water, her body taking what it could, the rest running down her cheeks and her front. Gently, Illya lay her back in the chair. He looked at her long legs and her destroyed party dress and knew he had work to do. Maybe it was a lost cause. Maybe her body was too innocent and fragile to take what he had coming for her. Maybe she would not make it at all and end up dying after being fucked too many times by one too many of the town’s businessmen sent his way by a concierge he kept happy in one of the hotels in town.

  He walked out to the living room and through it to the balcony. Leaning on it, he looked at the park across the road—all sectioned out, its grass neatly cut, rubber on the ground beneath the swings to save the kids’ lives when they fell two feet, the dog park positioned to one side, fenced in and full of gravel to save the city workers from getting dog shit in the mower. You didn’t get that in Russia, Illya thought. All you had there was concrete, and you had to be quick and climb fast when a pack of stray dogs came running through.

  It was good here. They had a good system, Illya thought as he finished his cigarette, flicked it out onto the pathway below, and made a decision. The girl thing was not working. It wasn’t worth the effort, and he should have learned that from the past. He needed a real whore, one he didn’t have to teach how to fuck. After all, he wasn’t offering a training program. He’d get a whore who was already set up, like he used to do back home, and he’d hit her until she submitted to his demands. Terrorize her until she gave him what he needed and make her work for a living like his father had at the docks—all day and night instead of just getting fucked once or twice a day in the afternoon or late in the evening after the bars closed.

  He went back into the bedroom and picked up the girl from the chair. He walked her around the room three times, picked up her handbag, then walked her out the door into the elevator and down to the foyer. Holding her as he had the night he kidnapped her, he crossed the road to the park and placed her down on the newly cut grass, fifty feet from the playground. It was a good place for her to wake up, he thought. She’d come around, open her eyes, and the first thing she’d see was all the kids playing on the swings.

  ******

  Dan woke up in the morning in his own bed in the basement to the sound of the East Indian taxi driver pacing up and down outside his window and the faint muffled noise of his mother having sex with the guy with the bread van who smelled of too much aftershave.

  Fuck, Dan thought, how had the taxi driver found him? He thought he’d given up. Now he was outside pacing around like a Tamil tiger, carrying a pair of garden shears and waiting to strike.

  Dan let out a deep breath and reached around along the side of his bed for some food, pushing aside the broomstick he’d been using to bang on the ceiling earlier when his mother’s lovemaking got too loud. He found an empty packet of chips, peeled the bag open, and began to drag out with his tongue what crumbs he could find at the bottom.

  Above him, his mother was about to orgasm, and she was definitely acting. He’d been living below her for nearly two years and was beginning to be able to tell the difference. Soon there would be silence, then mumbling, and then movement. After a quick visit to the shitter, the guy would be out the front door, down the path, and straight into his van.

  Dan threw the cleaned chip packet onto the floor and stared at the ceiling above him. How the hell had he blown it the night before with the girl who’d just been voted the sexiest woman in the world? How was he now laying here instead, listening to his mother being fucked by a baker who wore his trousers too tight? It was disgusting, his mother going at it and the strange way she always groaned. Reaching to the side of the bed, he grabbed the broomstick and, in frustration and protest, thumped its end over and over into the ceiling above.

  What a waste of time yesterday had been, all that nonsense with Marsha and the gay guy. Then having his feet screwed to the floor—what the hell was that all about? Throwing the broomstick down, he stared at the ceiling and let out a long breath. So that was that. His modeling career had come and gone in one day. He’d arrived in a limo and gone home on the bus.

  Dan listened to the noise of the footsteps upstairs passing over him. The toilet flushed, and on cue, the front door opened. Mr. Tight Pants appeared outside the basement window and passed by the taxi driver, who was now cutting the lawn.

  Everything was getting so confusing. He had chicks throwing themselves at him, but his mum was getting more action than he was. Now the guy who had been trying to kill him only a couple of nights ago had found him and was cutting his lawn. He could have sworn he’d only told his mum about the taxi driver doing that in case she saw him and wondered why he was hanging around.

  Turning back toward the ceiling, he called out to his mother above. “Did you arrange with that taxi driver to do the lawn?” He waited in silence for the reply, and when it didn’t come, he picked up the broom again and whaled on the ceiling. “Why do you keep seeing that baker guy?” he shouted. “If you need free bread and cakes, I’ll buy ’em for you. After all, I’m working now. Anyway, what’s the point in being with him if the first thing he does after he’s shot his bolt is look for his car keys?”

  For a moment, there was silence upstairs, then movement, heavy and frenzied. Dan sat up and swung his legs off the bed, staring out the window at the morning sun hitting the long grass as Belinda cut away at it the way Dan was supposed to have done.

  For the life of him, Dan just didn’t get it. Maybe his mum had seen him and had struck up a deal? Nonetheless, he certainly wasn’t going to complain. He stared out at Belinda, who was bent down and giving Dan the thumbs up through the sunken basement window.

  It was confusing. Perhaps Chendrill had seen the taxi driver wandering about outside the house with his hockey stick. Maybe he’d spoken to him, and it was all good now? After all, that was Chendrill’s job.

  He turned to stare at himself in the mirror leaning against the wall, its top cracked from a year before when he’d tried to walk to the bathroom with a garbage bin on his head. He looked at himself from the side, tensing his stomach. He looked good—had muscle in all the right places just like the guys he’d seen posing in ads.

  Suddenly, his mother came rushing down the stairs and was in the hall on the other side of his basement bedroom door. “What are you doing home?” she shouted.

  Releasing his pose, Dan stared at the door and watched his mother’s shadow moving as she paced back and forth. “I live here?” he answered.

  “Not anymore you don’t. Didn’t I ask you to leave over a year ago?”

  It was true. Dan remembered her telling him to get out the day she’d discovered him cleaning his toenails with her toothbrush.

  He shrugged and thought about opening the door, but she had been known to attack. Instead, he said, “If you’re embarrassed about me hearing you with that loser, then don’t be with the man. You can do better.”

  “I don’t see you dating any princesses,” his mother snapped back.

  Dan laughed to himself, thinking about Marsha, and said, “If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me anyway.”

  “You’re right there,” she said from behind the door, and then he heard her begin to walk away.

  It was the way she had always been—the flare of a temper that was red hot, but cooled as quickly as Dan as a child could make it to his room and throw himself under the bed or into the wardrobe to hide.

  Then, as she reached the top of the stairs, she said, “The only thing you’ve ever had a relationship with is your sock.”

  Dan looked down at his feet as a surge of embarrassment swept over his body. She was right—using a sock had become a habit for him since he’d discovered that it felt good when the white stuff came out the end of his dick, thinking as kids often do, the secret was just his.

  He took in a deep breath and then blew it out, looking up at the bang marks, old and new, on the ceiling as he heard his mother enter her room above. Fucking cow, he thought, being a bitch just because she couldn’t keep a man longer than it took him to blow his wad and run. Then looking down again, he said to himself quietly, “At least my socks stay with me.”

  He looked back to the mirror again and felt his stomach begin to rumble. Daltrey was about the longest girlfriend he’d managed to keep so far, and that was only because she wanted the infrared door entry system he’d bragged about being able to make.

  Had he fucked her? No. Had he even done anything sexual with her? No. Was she even a real girlfriend? Probably not, he thought. She had a nice ass, though. Yeah, she had a real nice ass, real nice. Soon the infrared system would falter, and she’d be back, saying, “Hey, Dan, how’s it going? What’re you up to?” the way she did. Then she’d meet him, and they’d have coffee or something, and she’d be all chummy, and then somewhere in among it all, she’d say, “Hey, you know that thing you made? Well, it doesn’t work anymore!”

  And he’d say, “Well, go find some geek who’s just out of tech college and see if he has the chops to figure it out. Because I’m a male model now with Slave—you ever heard of them? They’ve got a contract with BlueBoy.”

  She did have a nice ass, though, real nice. Oh yeah, it was nice. Real peachy, the way it stayed tight as she walked and stood out just the right amount. She looked so sexy in those jeans she wore that bunched up at the top of her boots and her nice pert little titties under her T-shirt.

  ******

  An hour later, the garden was all done, and Belinda, turning down all offers of money from Tricia, had smiled, holding his hands together in a praying motion. With a shake of his head that could only mean he had done the chore out of the kindness of his heart, he smiled at her. Through teeth so brilliantly white from years of scrubbing them with fish oil and baking soda back in New Delhi, he said, “No, Miss Dan’s mother, it is an honor for me to take such a small part of my day to come here to be helping of you.”

  Dan was standing in front of the mirror, looking at himself and tensing his stomach muscles when Charles Chuck Chendrill pulled up outside in Mazzi Hegan’s Ferrari. They sat in the kitchen as Chendrill sipped a cup of tea that had been made for him by Dan’s mum. He looked down the hall over the cup’s rim, hoping she’d come back.

  “You liked that, did you?”

  Chendrill looked across to Dan, who sat there with a smirk, and said, “Liked what?”

  “My mum.”

  Chendrill smiled. Shit, was he that obvious? “Maybe,” he answered.

  “I don’t see what guys see in her. There was an East Indian around here earlier cutting the lawn for free trying to get in her pants.”

  Chendrill put his cup down on the table, careful not to leave a rim mark, and said, “That’s because she’s your mother.”

  Dan stared at him for a moment, then laughed. “Wow, thanks. They teach you that at cop school?”

  Chendrill nodded. The funny thing was that they did. It was all part of the human psychology course.

  “I thought this East Indian was the same one who’d been looking for me since I did a runner from his cab the night I got into trouble with the gay guy at the camera place,” Dan said. “But then I realized it was the guy who picked me up yesterday at the crack of dawn and dragged me to that green warehouse.”

  The whole revelation had come to him as he was pulling his sock off in the bedroom and he’d looked out the window again to see Belinda—and recognized him.

  Chendrill stared at him, grinning. “And you couldn’t tell the difference between the two?”

  Dan shook his head. “Didn’t help that I was wearing sunglasses. Besides, I only saw the backs of their heads.”

  “How do you know they’re not the same then?”

  Dan stood and walked to the window. “Because I’m intelligent.” He looked outside at Mazzi Hegan’s car then turned back to Chendrill and asked him again, “How’d you scam that?”

  “All part of the incentive package offered by your two new friends.”

  Dan nodded. “My mum’s looking at it now,” he said.

  Chendrill frowned. “She likes cars, does she?”

  Dan nodded and walked back over to sit down opposite Chendrill. “She likes Ferraris.”

  Chendrill smiled. “Has she got a boyfriend?”

  “There’s a guy comes sniffing around, and there’s the Indian guy who did the lawn who’s also sniffing, but he’ll not get anywhere.”

  “I take it she doesn’t like Indian food then?” asked Chendrill as he took another sip of his drink.

  Dan shook his head. “No. He’s fighting a lost cause. Hot and spicy is not her thing—it gives her the runs.”

  Chendrill looked at the table a moment before saying, “You knew Daltrey?”

  “Yeah, but you knew that.” Dan watched as Chendrill took a deep breath.

  “I’m sorry to tell you,” Chendrill continued, “but she’s dead, Dan. She was murdered yesterday.”

  Fuck me, Dan thought as a strange feeling of emptiness hit his body. He’d been thinking of her only an hour ago and had put one of the new fluffy socks he’d received for Christmas to use in the process. He looked up from the floor and over to Chendrill. “Murdered?”

 

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