Burn, p.18
Burn, page 18
part #1 of Vancouver Series
But when?
She looked back to the bathroom door and heard the toilet flush. Illya was standing outside the bedroom door now, the flick of his lighter lighting another cigarette giving him away. She thought what she’d do was not wash anymore or anything like that. Eventually, she’d stink worse than a fish shop or this prick’s mother or any other whore he’d beaten into submission and pimped out. Then that guy, that Russian fucking psycho could go muster up some other girl he could talk into coming over with the promise of big bucks and his bullshit about being an actor in a miniseries. He’d kick her out, and she’d make a call and then clean herself up and come straight back within the hour, looking like a million dollars, and sit and let her looking good be the last thing he saw as her ex-boyfriend and his friends dug his eyes out with a teaspoon.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Dan stood in the shower and looked down at his pubes as the water ran through them. He had the cream the doctor had given him, but couldn’t remember if he’d said to put it on before or after having washed. After seemed logical, but none of what had been happening to him lately was logical. Fuck, it was sore down there, and it stung when he rubbed the soap in. So the answer was obvious, it was as he thought—tomorrow if he showered, he’d put the cream on before he got in.
As soon as Dan turned off the shower, he heard shouting outside. Getting out, he toweled off quickly and looked out the bathroom window to see a man in an apron looking up at him. Still with the towel wrapped around him, Dan came out of the bathroom to find his mother standing in the living room with tears in her eyes, holding her long blond hair in a bunch.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
Tricia shook her head. Looking to the floor, she said, “It doesn’t matter…it’s that guy, you know, the baker. I told him to stop coming around now as I didn’t feel good about it anymore.”
Dan looked at his mother. She had to be kidding. “So what about all the pastries and shit?” he asked.
“I know you think free food means as much to me as it does you, Dan, but you’ll be surprised to know that I didn’t spend the last couple of months dating this guy just because he brought cakes around three times a week.”
Dan could already feel his stomach beginning to rumble. The thought of getting up and not being able to stuff his face with freshly baked goods was too much to bear. “Maybe you should think about this for a while,” he said, “before you make any rash decisions. You know, think it through first.”
Dan walked to the window and stared at the man and then his bread van, which was parked behind him.
“I thought he was taller,” he said.
Tricia stared at her son for a moment and wiped her eyes. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve only ever seen his legs.”
“You’ve met him with me at the patisserie loads of times, and you spoke to him.”
Dan looked back at the window and said, “I’ve never seen him before in my life.”
“I’ve been dating him for months, Dan!”
Dan turned away and looked back through the window, the short Italian baker still out there looking pissed, the guy’s fat little legs kicking out at nothing as he paced up and down the curbside along the length of his van.
“Is that what you call it?”
Tricia took a deep breath and felt the frustration and embarrassment run through her. Her son was right. They’d been out a couple of times when he’d first chatted her up at the patisserie his family owned. She’d liked his smile and the way his dark hair was always neat and combed tightly to his head and the way he always made her feel special. But when had they been out since? The truth was they hadn’t, even when she’d laid with him in bed after they’d made love and told him, “We need to go out more.”
And as he’d rested there, doing his best to look sexy, and smelling of the cologne his wife had bought him for Christmas, he’d answered, “Baby, of course I’ll take you. There’s a nice restaurant we can go to and then to a concert.”
But as the time went on, and the kitchen filled with delicacies, she realized it was only Dan’s stomach enjoying the relationship.
Tricia looked up and in a stern voice said, “Yeah, and that’s why it’s over.”
Then, hitting the nail on the head, Dan simply said, “Yeah, well, I suppose it’s hard to compete against a Ferrari when all you’ve got is a bread van.”
******
By the time afternoon had come, the baker had left, and Dan had resorted back to masturbating after reading through a website showing bar code circuitry which enabled ticket guns at concerts to be circumnavigated by using binary code. Then he’d seen a picture of a pretty girl in the bikini at the bottom of the page, reached for his sock drawer, and was just about there when Mazzi Hegan’s Ferrari pulled up outside.
They were chatting in the kitchen when Dan came upstairs, his mother glowing, wearing her tight jeans and a new top, and Chendrill still sporting his seventies’ haircut and Hawaiian shirt.
“You ever going to go on holiday, or are you just wearing those shirts for a bet?” Dan asked.
“At least I’ve got a shirt,” Chendrill replied.
Dan opened the fridge as his mother asked, “What are you doing down there?”
“Looking at stuff. Trying to find a way of getting into Dead Mau5.”
“Who?” his mother asked.
“He’s a DJ—Canadian,” Chendrill said, trying to sound cool. “You like him, do you?” he asked Dan.
Dan pulled a block of cheese from the fridge and broke off a chunk. “If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be looking. Why are you here anyway? Am I supposed to be somewhere again?”
Chendrill shook his head. “No, just doing what I’m being paid for and looking out for your safety.”
“Really?”
Chendrill smiled. The kid was on to him. He wasn’t as stupid as he made himself out to be. He nodded and said, “And that includes seeing if your mother wants to go to dinner again.”
Tricia beamed. “That depends where,” she said.
“I was thinking Italian.”
“Yeah, she’d like that,” Dan said. “She can’t get enough of them.”
******
They sat down at a corner table, each picking up a piece of bread and placing it on their side plate as the waiter poured some red wine.
“So you’re the real deal, then? A real live private eye?” Tricia asked.
Chendrill smiled. “Yep—that’s me.” He was, but it was not the life he’d thought it would turn out to be.
“And you work for these guys who are paying Dan all this money?”
Chendrill nodded. “Yep, they think I’m incredible.”
“Why?”
“Because a year ago, I found the CEO’s little dog after he lost it in the park, and now he won’t stop hiring me.”
“Where was it?” Tricia asked, as she picked up her glass of wine and took a sip.
“At the dog pound.”
Tricia gave him a look, unsure as to whether he was joking. “You’re kidding?”
Chendrill shook his head. “I’m not. The owner of the company, Sebastian, called me. He was hysterical. I told him, I’m sorry, but I don’t do dogs. I only deal in serious matters. Then he started screaming into the phone, saying, ‘I’ll give you ten thousand dollars.’ So I went to the office of Slave, the company Dan is contracted to, and I’ve never seen such a fuss made. Sebastian was, like I said, hysterical. The other guy who hates me, Hegan, especially now since Sebastian’s given me his car, was being all huffy, and on top of it all, the girl at the reception desk was in tears.”
Tricia sat back in her chair, smiling. “So what did you do?” she asked.
“I called the dog pound, and they said he was there, so I went over and picked him up.”
“That was it?”
Chendrill nodded. “Yep.”
“And you charged them ten thousand dollars for that?”
“No, they paid me ten thousand dollars for doing that. There’s a difference. Like I said, I don’t usually do dogs.”
Tricia smiled again. “What about cats?”
“I’m too old to climb trees.”
“And now they pay you to babysit my son and give you the company car to boot about in?”
“They like him. They say he has an air of rawness about him.”
Tricia stared down at the table for a moment and fiddled with her fork. “There’s definitely something about him,” she said.
“Yeah, like we mentioned before, he’s a genius and is going to be a famous name in the electronics industry.”
Tricia looked up from her bread roll. “Well, he did fix the doorbell, so he must know a bit about how it all works. But when he was a young boy, I always thought he’d end up as a professional dancer.”
Chendrell was enjoying himself—this was getting better. Dan, the electronic genius, slash ballroom dancer, slash catwalk model. It wasn’t the first time she’d bought up Dan’s dancing, so there had to be some truth to it and even if it was simply mother’s pride, it was all good listening as he liked this woman. She had a naiveté about her and was as sweet as a freshly bloomed flower you’d find in a meadow on an early spring morning, not that he’d been to any meadows lately.
He said to her, “Anyway, I’m glad I’m looking out for him as it gives me the excuse to keep an eye on you and make sure you’re okay instead.”
She was, Tricia thought. She was more than okay. Sure, the man was stuck in the seventies, but there was really something sexy about him.
“So how did you get brought into looking after Dan?” she asked.
Chendrill picked up his glass and smiled. “I was not brought into looking after him. I was brought in to find him.”
“And I’m guessing he wasn’t at the pound.”
Chendrill laughed. “No, not this time, but I did check. Dan, I must say—and please excuse me—had found himself in a peculiar situation.”
“Like what?”
“Let’s say he has a rare talent and was discovered.”
“By who? Was he found in a shopping mall like that Marsha woman?”
Chendrill laughed to himself. Out loud, he said, “Similar. The head photographer of Slave snapped a candid photo of him, and they brought me in to track him down.”
“What was he doing? Was he on the street?”
“No, in an elevator.”
“And you found him? From a photo? How did you do that when there are a million kids living around here?”
Chendrill smiled and watched the waiter as he brought two salads to the table.
“I nearly steered clear of these guys altogether this time ’round. You see, I’d been working solid, and I was on my way back home, having just become free.”
Tricia smiled politely and toyed with the top leaves of the romaine lettuce covered in dressing as Chendrill continued, “I’d been working for this English guy out at a farm in Aldergrove. He’d married a Canadian girl he met at the Ascot races—the place in the UK where they wear those fancy hats—and they settled out here. You see, he inherited a racehorse over there, and lucky for him, it was a big winner. Earned him a fair whack of money by the look of the place. Anyway, he met this girl half his age and followed her back here, and for the last five years, he’s been putting the horse out to stud.”
Tricia took a mouthful of salad, swallowed, and asked, “And you were there to check up on the young wife?”
Chendrill shook his head and frowned, “No.”
“I thought that’s what private eyes did?”
“Sometimes—but no, I’d been there for a while watching one of the stable guys. The owner was convinced he was stealing the horse’s sperm.”
Taking the fork from her mouth, Tricia looked at Chendrill in astonishment, then said, “Sorry?”
The case had been different for Chendrill, and it had all started when a friend put him forward as a recommendation to an Englishman he’d met on a golf course.
The Englishman explaining his problem about his suspected goings on as he cheated in the rough, and the friend having heard enough had simply told him, “Chendrill will sort it out. He’s the best detective you’ll ever find.”
And the Englishman had said straight back, “Tell him he’s hired.”
Chendrill had entered the Englishman’s property along a small road lined with old cedars dividing a series of paddocks with fences painted red, white, and blue, each with its own stallion or mare named after members of the British Royal Family who were still alive or long gone. Their brass nameplates, brightly polished, shone in the sun, sporting the names Queeny, Lady Di, Prince Philip, Charlie Boy, and George IV, all of them alongside another sign that read, Horses bite and so do I—so do not touch.
And reading it, Chendrill knew it was going to get interesting.
The mansion was new, but the wife was newer, a right little hot potato, who it turned out was local, from Kitsilano in Vancouver. While traveling around the UK looking for a rich husband, she had found one at the races.
The man from Ascot sat Chendrill down at a table on the veranda that looked out across a garden and further on toward more paddocks at the back of the property, and the first words he said as he handed Chendrill a thirty-year-old Macallan were, “Would you like a scotch?”
And the second thing he said after he’d stood silent, staring at his horses out in the paddocks, was, “Would you like another?”
His main concern was that the stable further along the road and nearer to the U.S. border had just had a foal, and in the opinion of the guy from Ascot, the foal came from his champion thoroughbred by the name of Prince Charles, but no one had given him the one hundred thousand he charged for putting his stallion out to stud.
“How can you tell?” Chendrill had asked.
“You’ve just got to look at it,” the man from Ascot replied, his English accent tight with frustration. “Go see it. Thoroughbreds are the result of centuries of breeding. They’re mixes of Arab and North African Barbary. Good God, man, they don’t just appear on the farm next door where all they normally churn out are ponies!”
Chendrill finished his second scotch and then had a large Bushmills. He thought it rude not to have a taste of a 1964 Macallan and then a quick taste of a fifty-year-old pure malt Dalmore, followed by a Chivas Regal. By the time he’d gotten away, his head was spinning, and he had enough knowledge of horses to last a lifetime. He found his way to the paddock and the most comfortable-looking bale of hay he’d ever seen in his life, and slept.
******
Tricia sat there and smiled as she listened. Many years ago, she knew an English family, and the father had had a penchant for scotch, so she understood the feeling. After a while, she’d found it best to just say no or have only one at the start of the evening.
She took a sip of wine and asked, “So he knocked you out before you even started?”
Chendrill nodded and smiled. “Yeah, kind of, I suppose. Anyway, about two hours later, I surfaced, and there was this Englishman out there riding around his paddock drunk on the back of this million-dollar thoroughbred that was strutting and twitching all over the place. And the guy calls me over and tries to get me to get up on the horse to take it for a ride.”
“And did you?”
Chendrill shook his head. “Not a chance. Can you imagine if it took off at racing speed and cleared the fence and kept going with me on its back? If I even got that far! No, I went off and found the farm and the stall where the foal was kept, and I have to be honest, after seeing the little thing running about in the paddock, I couldn’t see what this crazy Englishman had seen. But I crept into the stable in the dead of night and managed to grab a hair sample off the little thing.”
Tricia laughed, watching Chendrill twirling a loop of spaghetti around his fork. “Do you have like a special nighttime Hawaiian shirt that you wear for such clandestine investigations?”
The sad thing was that Chendrill did—a black Hawaiian shirt with dark palm leaves. He’d picked it up while trying to look like he could surf on Waikiki Beach, and it served as a cool camo. He’d worn it that night as he’d snuck through the farm grounds and into the stable in the darkness, awkwardly reaching in and cutting some hair from the young foal’s mane. Then he’d let science do the rest.
“And he was right?” Tricia asked as she watched Chendrill’s moustache bobbling up and down as he delicately worked his way through a mixed mouthful of Italian sausage and tomato.
He shrugged, swallowed, and began to laugh. “How the hell he could tell, God only knows. You know, the funny thing is that as I drove up the driveway to this guy’s mansion with the results, he jumped out with binoculars from behind a tree and said to me, ‘He’s in there now, in there stealing my sperm!’ So both me and this crazy Brit stinking of scotch sneaked up and into the thoroughbred’s stall and caught one of the stable boys relieving the beast into a giant condom and pouring it into a coffee flask.”
Tricia put her hand to her mouth and started to laugh. “No! Please, no!”
Chendrill began to laugh along with her.
“So what did you do?” she asked.
“Well, I confronted the kid. He denied it, of course. Said it was yogurt his mum had given him. And the drunk Brit screams out, ‘Go on, then. Eat it. Drink the fucking stuff!’ Then he grabs the huge condom the kid had hidden and slaps him around the head with it. Then he attacks him with his arms flailing out all over the place, and they start fighting. I tried to break it up—you know get in there between them—but then, the contents of the flask ended up all over me.”
Tricia could not help herself and burst out laughing.
Chendrill continued, “And so, I ended up dragging the kid, who was no bigger than you, over to the mansion with this English guy from Ascot, all red in the face with his comb-over hair all over the place, in tow and carrying what’s left of the flask as evidence. I thought the man was going to drop dead of a heart attack. When we got there, this stable boy slash, wannabe jockey confessed to stealing and selling the magic potion for five hundred dollars a pop, and it turned out loads of foals over the last couple of years in British Columbia had been seeded by this horse that won the Grand National. Anyway, I left stinking of horses and goodness knows what, and I got another call from Sebastian at Slave about another ‘absolute emergency’ that I had to attend to right there and then. I thought to myself, could what they have to offer be any worse than what’s just happened to me? So I went straight over.”
