Lucy's Launderette. Betsy Burke
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You would have thought they were buying a Van Gogh, they were so pleased with themselves. They picked out a monster member in lurid pinks and purples, then with much bowing and smiling, they put it on their VISA and took it away. One less willy in my life.
I surfed the net for a while then e-mailed Sky, “Help, I’m a prisoner in a Gastown weenie factory.”
She e-mailed back, “Aye, there’s the rub.”
We agreed to meet for lunch at our usual place.
It was ten minutes to one when Nadine finally arrived. She wore dark glasses and when I said “Good morning” too brightly, she let out a grunt of disgust and retreated into her office. I was surprised that she didn’t send me out to get her something to eat.
“I’m going for lunch,” I yelled in the direction of the door. When there was no answer, I put on my coat and headed off to meet Sky.
Evvie’s Midnight Diner was one of those Naugahydebooth, dusty plastic aspidistra, twirly-stool-at-the-long-steel-counter kind of places near East Hastings. A hungry part of town. Evvie was actually a huge ugly-beautiful Lebanese man. His name was unpronounceable so everyone just called him Evvie. He had bought the place from the real Evvie back in Jeremy’s day, sold it in the eighties, gone home to Lebanon, seen what a Swiss cheese had been made of his home country, hightailed it back to Canada, bought his old diner back, and restored it to exactly what it had been in the seventies, right down to the liverish color of the booths.
Evvie’s Midnight Diner had been a well-kept secret for decades, a haunt for vanilla drunks, Korea crazies, fresh air inspectors and actors waiting up to read their reviews in the morning papers. Now it was becoming fashionable again simply because it was so unfashionable. The real thing. Sky and I had given up being virtuous and eating at those health food places with the nut rissole burgers and grass cutting teas. Evvie’s served cheap old-fashioned unhealthy food and piles of it.
Sure, there were salads on the menu at Evvie’s, too, but it would have been frivolous for a person in my financial position to bypass the mountainous, double-cheese, bacon and mushroom burgers with the side of fries for a sagging lettuce leaf and an anemic tomato slice. Or the platter of battered and deep-fried halibut and prawn with loads of tartar sauce. It was good dollar value.
Let’s be frank here. Only the rich can afford to starve.
And there was another problem. The food I left in the fridge at home disappeared mysteriously before I could get to it. I thought I was being clever, eating out, keeping my food out of the Viking’s mouth. She’d denied touching any of it, just as I’d denied touching her Glug. I asked her if maybe her conquests didn’t get hungry and thirsty in the night, and perhaps didn’t make a raid on the provisions, but her eyes and mouth narrowed into a sneering expression and she said, “You jealous.”
Sky was sitting in our booth at the end of the diner. She was not alone. With her, was a man whose hair was just a little too blond. His trimmed mustache lurked on his upper lip like a small yellow rodent. His face was buffed to an unnatural shine. He wore a lavender-colored Lacoste T-shirt, a preppy gray knit sweater knotted around his shoulders, and a pair of jeans that were so tight I wouldn’t have been surprised if he squeaked when he talked. He was fit though, and very neat. Nice and tidy right down to his fingernails. He must have been edging on forty—perhaps he was older—but he gave the impression of eternal forced youth.
He was running his hand up and down Sky’s arm and if he kept at it much longer, he was going to leave her with no skin. There was no doubt about it. He had taken possession of her. And Sky seemed pretty happy to be possessed. She had a slightly goofy expression on her face and a bruised, trampled look about her. When I sat down at the table, she held out her hand, palm up, in a Ta-da gesture and said, “Lucy Madison, Max Kinghorn.”
So this was the guy who had hired Sky to manage the store, the famous boss from Seattle. I peered rudely.
Max didn’t bother to stand up on my arrival as I might have expected from such a tidy polite-looking person. He must have sensed my hostility. He laughed a nervous, whiny, slightly nasal laugh and went back to the arm stroking as if his life depended on it.
I stretched out my hand to shake his, and to stop him from doing all that damned stroking.
“Sky’s told me all about you,” I said, forcing myself to smile.
He whinnied again.
She had told me all about him. She’d gone into quite a lot of gory detail.
Max Kinghorn was the owner of the Retro Metro Boutique, but he lived in Seattle where he had other vintage boutiques. He was a strange bird. A vulture, to be precise. He stocked his stores by reading obituaries published up and down the West Coast, from California to B.C. He was always ready to swoop down on the defunct’s family and offer to take the horrid burden of dusty antiquated clothing, furniture and knickknacks off their hands. As vintage vultures go, I gathered he was the best in his trade. But Sky, I wanted to scream, Oh Sky, what about that little thing you told me about Max, that one, really important detail?
Max shifted, gave a few last frenzied strokes, then pecked Sky demurely on the cheek. “Well, I’m sure you ladies have a lot to talk about. I’ll get going. I have business in Port Townsend.” Then he whispered to Sky, “Ciao, liebchen, I’ll call you.”
I could picture it already, Max hovering and slavering as he waited to pick over the corpse down in Port Townsend, offering condolences to the bereaved family along with his certified cheque.
I watched him leave then glared at Sky across the table. “That’s Max, Sky? The infamous Max?”
She glared back at me. “Don’t get worked up about it. I told you I thought he was interesting.”
“I didn’t realize you thought he was that interesting.”
“Just what do you mean by that?”
I held the menu high in front of my face. “I really shouldn’t be having all this fried stuff but I just can’t help myself. It’s all so yummy and tempting.”
“Don’t try to change the subject, Madison. Just spit it out.”
Sky looked fierce. She was already a dark, scrawny, pointy little person with spiky techno-punk black hair, and when she became fierce, she was like a Jack Russell terrier, hanging on to the object of her passion until she had ragged it to death.
“I love you, Sky. You’re my best friend in the world, but if Max handcuffed you to the bed, beat you with rubber hoses, then drove over you with his car and left tire tracks, you’d still look better than you do now. He’s been staying at your place these last few days, hasn’t he?”
Sky blushed, and she’s not a blusher.
“He’s so…so…”
“Gay?”
“That’s one facet of Max’s personality. Besides, he’s celibately gay. For the last few years anyway.”
“That’s a good one. Celibately gay. Except for the fact that he had sex with you. Or am I presuming too much? Did you have sex with him, too? It was sex he had with you last night, wasn’t it?” I stared at a bruised area on her neck and raised my eyebrows.
Sky looked even fiercer. “Don’t get worked up about it, Madison. In case you haven’t noticed, men aren’t exactly leaping out of the woodwork these days. Men I have something in common with, I mean. I’m as surprised as you are that he’s good in the sack. But it’s not just the sex either. It’s a business relationship, too. He’s looking at other boutiques around Vancouver. We might be…you know…expanding and consolidating.”
“I think I need to start worrying about you.”
“You don’t get it. I don’t really count. I’m unofficial,” said Sky.
“Ooo, ouch. Let me think on that one for a minute. YOU DON’T REALLY COUNT. It’s time you started listening to your mother, Sky.