Needles Page 3

  For the first few days she had allowed herself to daydream about him, about what it might be like to be with him. She told her girl friend that he was kind of cute — sort of early 1940s Gary Cooperish but with blond straight hair, cut sharply at the collar. Tall, kind of loose-boned and thin-assed. Super little pot belly which he kept trying to hide under his belt. Sad eyes, but crinkly at the corners. Somewhere late thirtyish? Cute, really. But did she want to get it on with an alcoholic — a married alcoholic? Mooning about his wife. . . .

  Mind you, he hadn’t made a pass at her yet. That would come in time.

  This morning she had taken only one call. From Cobb’s wife (stuck-up, she thought, with her flashy looks and flashy clothes). “Hello, dear,” Mrs. Cobb had said. “This is Deborah. You had better be warned: he is just very damn forgetful. Put this in his diary for two weeks from tonight — dinner at Ed and Martha Santorini’s at seven. And let me speak to him.” The balance of the call, casually listened to, was about bread, milk, and coffee, to be picked up by Cobb on the way home. Mrs. Cobb’s voice sounded imperious, and her husband’s strained. Obviously a b-a-d marriage.

  After Cobb hung up, she heard another bout of dry choking, and suddenly his door opened. She quickly put down the receiver as he hove into sight in his doorway, materializing from a cloud of smoke. The boss did not even look at her, but walked funereally past the waiting room to the hallway, leaving a trail of heavy smoke from his blazing brier pipe.

  After several seconds he re-appeared, carrying a paper cup with water. Through teeth clenched hard on the mouthpiece of his pipe, he mumbled something like, “Don’t put anything through to me for fifteen minutes.” He looked like a man biting a bullet.

  “Your business cards have arrived,” she said.

  He paused, picked one up, and grunted. “More crap to carry around.” And he disappeared inside his office, wreathed in smoke. She heard him lock the door.

  The phone rang.

  “This is Ed Santorini. Put me through to the useless tit.” She remembered Santorini from a visit when he had copped a feel of her rear, saying: “Can’t help it. Hot Italian blood.” He was chief prosecutor for Vancouver, and her boss’s friend.

  She went to Cobb’s door and rapped on it. “Will you speak to Mr. Santorini?” she asked.

  “No calls!” came his hoarse reply, followed by some mumbling.

  She turned to the phone. “He’s in conference now. Can I get him to call you back?”

  “You mean he’s finally got a client? Don’t let it go to his head. I’ll get back to him. Hey, how you doing, sweetheart? I hope you’re not scared up there all alone with him. Guess you heard: he’s a homicidal rapist.”

  “I haven’t seen that side of him yet, Mr. Santorini.”

  “Don’t take dictation on his knee. He goes a little strange.” I’ll bet, she thought.

  Again came the rasping sound from the inner office. Trying to ignore it, she busied herself with typing particulars in an impaired-driving case for one of only three clients who had been in this week. One had made frequent visits: a sallow-faced man, thin and nervous. All she knew was that his name was Benjamin Bowness and that Cobb called him Bennie Bones.

  Fishing inside his desk, Cobb found his silver coffee spoon, and he studied it gloomily. He put it back, then pulled it out again. In his other hand he held the business card. He put it to the window, holding it up to the gray light of a murky, sunless day.

  FOSTER L. COBB, M.A., LL.B.

  BARRISTER AND SOLICITOR

  The words shimmered in lightly raised gold lettering on cream, discreetly, elegantly, and, he thought, pompously offering his professional services to those luckless enough to have been caught at crimes, preferably crimes of murder, robbery, or corporate fraud. The trick was somehow for the cards to find their way into the pockets of prospective murderers, robbers, and swindlers. He was having difficulty seeing the card through the veil of wet film on his eyes, a veil which made the pupils look like glass beads. The air of his office was musty, stale with pipe smoke, and he breathed heavily in it. His pipe was burning out now in the ashtray beside the cup of water. It had finally become too bitter in his mouth.

  There was a knock on his door. He heard the sweet, gooey voice of his secretary, a mousy woman enveloped in her daydreams, who seemed to stalk him like some merciless animal of prey. “Will you speak to Mr. Santorini?” she said.

  God damn her. “No calls!” he shouted. He cursed quietly. He resented her prying and obtrusiveness.

  For the first two hours of his working day he had hidden out in his office, gagging and spitting, desperately smoking a strong mix, at intervals swivelling his chair about to stare out his ninth-storey window at the forest of buildings that loomed through the grey unyielding mist. Vancouver was submerged in its winter torpor and Cobb in his own self-pity.

  The call from Deborah had been blunt and businesslike, and it had done him in. She always had that knack. If she had not called, he just might have made it. . . .

  Cobb was desperately trying to quit, or at least cut down. He paid for such efforts with pain.

  His cramps tore through him again, and he held his head over the waste basket while his abdominal muscles contracted and pulsed, delivering nothing. If he kept up, he would be spitting blood.

  Cobb put the spoon down on his desk, the bowl suspended over its edge. He placed a copy of Martin’s Annual Criminal Code on the handle. Then he unlocked the second drawer of his desk and removed a metal box from it, and unlocked it. There were seven number-five gelatin capsules in the metal box. Cobb opened one, tapping the fine white powder into the bowl of the spoon, into which he also poured a little water from the paper cup.

  It was the last work day of his meagre week. The call from Deborah meant that she would be home tonight, not at Whistler. God knows if that meant there would be dinner. Probably she would be going up the mountain early in the morning. If he wanted to spend the weekend with her, he could go too. If he could get himself together. If he could handle it. If he could take the bitching and the pain.

  On his third try, Cobb got a flame from the lighter and heated the bottom of the spoon for a few seconds. Still standing, he undid his belt and took down his fly, letting his trousers fall to his feet. Then he drew his shorts down and he stood, hating himself, hating the absurd trial lawyer, in suit jacket, dress shirt, and tie, naked from hip to socks. He sat down and took from the metal box a syringe. He drew the warm, pale fluid into it, through a wad of cotton batten which strained impurities. Then, with his fingers, he massaged a scarred vein in his crotch, where his inner left thigh met his groin. There were more prominent veins — in the inner elbow or on the feet — but tracks in the groin would not be seen except by the most astute and indiscreet observer. (It was not a territory frequented even by his wife. At least of late. Deborah did not know he was back on the wire.) Finally the vein came up, and he inserted the needle. It missed, and he cursed softly. He tried again, and this time blood backed into the syringe. He squeezed the plunger and sent the pink solution flowing into his bloodstream, pouring its sweetness into his flesh and muscles and organs as it found pathways up his spine and into the cortex of his brain.

  It was an instalment his rapacious body demanded at least twice a day.

  Just before noon, Santorini called again, his voice full and booming and ineffectively disguised.

  “Is this Mr. Cobb, the lawyer?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve just been busted for cheating at cards.”

  Cobb beat him to it. “Sounds like a trumped-up charge,” he said.

  “Hey, you goddamn deserter, how’s it hanging?”

  “Ninety degrees to the horizon.”

  “Got the invite for March third? Cocktails at seven. Nothing fancy. Just a bunch of lawyers with good political connections” — Santorini was actively seeking a federal judge
ship — “and their spouses. Might have Judge Foot-in-Mouth over so we can all truckle up around him and pick up a few gold stamps. Hey, tell Deb not too much cleavage — I don’t want people drooling in their glasses. Pomerol ’66. Drool makes it go flat.”

  “Your Lordship will be stocking a Pomerol ’66. Isn’t that a little ambitious — even for someone who’s judge-bound?”

  “I dream of the day I can cite your ass for contempt, Cobb. So. Anyway. What are you up to now that you’re out of my hair? You got anything to do down there beside goose your girl and smell your finger?” Santorini would make a different kind of judge. “How busy are you? — that’s what I want to know.”

  “I’ve got people lined up all the way down to Granville Street,” Cobb said. “I’m giving away a free Big Mac for every new client.” Cobb paused and drew a breath. “Aw, Jesus, Eddie, actually it’s lonely up here, and it’s nice to hear a human voice. Even yours.”

  “Don’t be too sure. I could be a recording. Speaking of which, I’ve got a new Don Giovanni, featuring that great Italian soprano Joan Sutherland.” Santorini was an opera nut. “Maybe we can get into it after the deadwood has left the party. Okay. Enough chatter. Got a big case. Just for you. The big case. Special assize and all. I mean, look, who’s playing games? I figure you need the money, and we’ve got an okay from Victoria to use a private prosecutor. Regular ad hoc crown rates plus sixty bucks an hour preparation.”

  “The Surgeon.”

  “Yeah, right, brilliant.”

  “Eddie, I hate losers.”

  “Who knows? Maybe it’s his turn to lose. He’s batting something like six out of six. The odds gotta catch up to him.”

  “Eddie, I’m trying to put together a private practice. I’m trying to live down my reputation as a crown counsel. I can’t do that by putting people in jail. Send over some criminals, for God’s sake. I’m doing a special on shoplifters next week. I’ll take anything. Pedophiliacs, corn-holers, flashers. Red Army kidnappers. Crooked politicians. Loudmouthed prosecutors of Italian descent. Commit a crime, for Christ’s sake, then phone me.”

  “Yeah, well, Jesus, Fos, you know you don’t have a beggar’s tin teacup worth of business. Start making a living, then you can afford to be proud. You’ll make it, given time. ‘Good counsellors lack no clients’: Measure for Measure, Act One, Scene Two. I hate to feed your ego, but you’re the best goddamn starving lawyer in town. A courtroom brain, you got. Like they say, you talk good.”

  “Suck a little harder, Eddie.”

  “Aw, Fos, this isn’t my idea of a personal bequest to the Foster Cobb Starvation Foundation. Homicide wants a special prosecutor for Dr. Au this time. Honcho Harrison doesn’t trust the department regulars to put enough jam into it. He wants this one so bad his bicuspids ache.” Harrison was a senior city homicide detective who specialized in hard cases. The end of Au P’ang Wei’s career was his dream, and although he was past voluntary retirement age, he stayed on, waiting for one final crack at him.

  “I won’t take it,” Cobb said. What he meant, and could not say, was that he didn’t know whether he could take it unless he kicked junk.

  “Aw, shit, you’d just love to fire a few harpoons up his clammy ass. You itch after Dr. Au just about as much as Honcho does.”

  Cobb recalled the scene in the prosecutor’s office two months earlier when Detective Harrison, told that Au had been released on $150,000 bail, erupted and spewed lava all over the green young man who had appeared for the crown at the bail hearing.

  “It’s only three weeks away,” Cobb said.

  “Aw, Jeez, Fos, don’t play coy. You’ll earn ten thousand for two weeks in court. Maybe more — I’m not going to study your bill too hard. Not that you wouldn’t earn it. I know the kind of hours you put in with a jury. Or maybe you’d rather spend them standing in front of some grinning hyena at the provincial court zoo copping out hustlers and junkies.” Cobb flinched inwardly. “You told me you wanted another crack at the Surgeon. You got it. Go for it.” Santorini sounded petulant, as if Cobb were refusing a generous gift. Cobb knew the senior prosecutor was beleaguered — his inexperienced and underpaid staff of salaried lawyers had been scored on recently by quicker-thinking defence counsel, many of them graduates from his own office.

  “Maybe I should hold out for Dr. Au’s phone call,” Cobb said. “He doesn’t pay by the hour.”

  “The position, as you know, is filled. The Surgeon uses the high-priced spread. Smythe-Baldwin can buy a small country with his retainer.” Cobb could hear him sigh. Santorini liked money very much. “Okay, Fos, don’t say yes, don’t say no, don’t say anything. Sleep on it. Honcho wants to know today, but sleep on it. He says you’re his man. Look, we’ll provide junior counsel. We can dredge up some bright light around here.”

  “Fat chance. Nobody down there knows his asshole from an indictment. Even if I have to say no, thanks for the offer. I don’t know if I have my shit together right now. Give my love to the slaves.”

  “Mine to Deborah.”

  Cobb had followed the latest Au case: murder in the barbecued meat plant. Au P’ang Wei had cut an old friend up and left his usual calling card — surgical removal of the testes. Over the years, Au had slipped a half-dozen convictions and was suspect in five unsolved homicides — all by knife, all involving castration. There had not been enough evidence to get information sworn in these cases. Narcotics police had given Au the code name of White Lady — not in deference to his precise, charming, almost effeminate side, but in recognition of his excellent merchandise. The heroin that Au’s syndicate handled — delivered at the docks of the port of Vancouver by Chinese merchant seamen — was known in Hong Kong and Taipei as White Lady, and was ninety-seven per cent pure before delivery to the back end. Au had built, with singular devotion, a profit-able trade route: Burma, Bangkok, Hong Kong, with links to North America through Vancouver; he had mercilessly expanded captive markets in the New World. He killed off his competition. Literally.

  Cobb, cooled out now after his fix, feeling easy and just drifting a bit, sat back in his chair, which he had again swivelled to allow him to stare out the window at the dark clouds of winter. The dope that Bennie Bones dealt to Cobb was rich and potent. Bones was an old friend of Cobb’s and warranted his goods as pure as possible. And it kept his head in one piece, kept him together while his marriage was falling apart. The thought that the stuff was probably White Lady from the factories of Dr. Au made him feel dirty, because the thought of the man was a stink in his nostrils.

  He remembered the hard lump that had sat in his gut for months following the acquittal of Au in their one previous encounter, ten years earlier. Cobb had then been the junior prosecutor assigned to assist a senior counsel poorly equipped for his task in a case against Au involving the wounding and mutilation of an attractive call girl. Her clitoris had been removed neatly and antiseptically. The woman had been a poor witness, poorly prepared, terrified under the calm gaze of Au’s brittle grey eyes. She had been caught — stumbling, correcting herself — in several small lies during Smythe-Baldwin’s cross-examination. During the clitoridectomy she had been blindfolded, but she testified she knew the touch of Au’s hands. Au did not take the stand, was found not guilty, and walked from the courtroom after a polite bow to the judge and a quiet smile in the direction of the prosecution table. His eyes met Cobb’s briefly, and Cobb felt with discomfort that he had been sized up quickly as an ineffective opponent.

  Another call. Detective Harrison was on the line.

  The Honch was not wasting time.

  “I’m working for the bad guys now,” Cobb said. “Fighting crime does not pay.”

  Harrison’s voice growled through the phone, as if filtered through a bed of gravel. “Fos, I don’t want a screwed-up job. Santorini, now I know he’s a friend of yours and all, but he just don’t have any smart people down there, he was gonna pawn the case off to s
ome jerk who’d forget to prove what year it was, or some fucking thing. The last time, we had Dr. Au on an attempt on some guy who was trying to muscle into the territory — you remember the case? — and our brilliant witness, some RCM-piss-up, picks out the wrong Chinese guy in court. That’s just a lousy job of coaching by some prosecutor who can’t clean the snot from his nose and who thinks the most important part of his job is going to the bank twice a month to cash his cheque.”

  “Prosecutors don’t coach,” said Cobb, getting a word in.

  “Don’t lay any of your holier-than-thou lawyer bullcrap on me, Fos. Any good prosecutor will do what he has to do. Anyway, the Surgeon probably paid off the narc. He wasn’t a real policeman, he was a Moun-tie.” Harrison said the word with a little-girl accent. It was his bleak view that officers of the law, Harrison alone being the exception, were ultimately corruptible. Cobb said nothing, waiting for the sales pitch.

  “We got the goods this time,” Harrison said. “It’s tight. I can get a bank loan on what we got. We got honest witnesses, a juvenile chess champion, smart little son of a gun, and an old seaman. We got an eye-fucking-witness, one of the Surgeon’s goons by name of Charlie Ming, bit of a loser, and he’s backing off, but we got him signed and sealed. We got weapons all over the fucking place, it’s a Chinese butcher shop. We got wiretaps. We got a bite mark on the killer’s fucking hand.”

  “He’s got Rear Admiral M. Cyrus Smythe-Baldwin, Q.C., V.C., and OBE,” Cobb said.

  “Yeah, well, he’s a sly shyster, but he’s over the hill,” said Harrison.

  Cobb knew Harrison would not admit to being scared of Smythe-Baldwin, but he had been mauled by the lawyer more than a few times.

  “Smythe-Baldwin is a hell of a lawyer,” Cobb said.