The Woman in the Wooden Box
– Fiction by Robert Friedland –
Featured in issue 18 of Dreamers Magazine
My woman friend was an amateur at a special place in Vancouver’s toney Point Grey that the neighbours call, The Castle, and where most of the women there were working for a living. Amateurs were not encouraged; they were often noisy and made trouble, believing, mistakenly, that The Castle experience was about them. But my friend had been after me to take her and I finally gave in. I had, myself, not been before, either.
My friend liked excitement, sleeping with different men she did not know, hitchhiking alone, visiting sex clubs, and sun bathing nude at Wreck Beach. She was wearing a sheer black dress that resembled a nightgown, and might have been a nightgown, that left nothing to anyone’s imagination. For instance, she was unshaven, and her black Asian pubic hair was obviously visible to any and all who cared to see it.
An old woman eyed my friend and approached, evaluating her tall, slender, small-breasted body from several angles. My friend’s small breasts had been tastefully augmented in China with a pair of only modest implants that did not arouse skepticism. The old woman asked if my friend wanted to go to an even more special place, naked, chained and crated in a wooden box. The old woman said there might be a former American President and a Prince of the Realm there.
My friend laughed and agreed. The old woman made a phone call, and in a surprisingly few minutes, two strong men arrived with the six separate parts of a wooden box, and a heavy gauge, large-linked, shining, chromed chain.
The old woman told my friend to remove her clothes and shoes, which Yanzi did.
The men chained her to the bottom piece of the box and spread some straw. The old woman told my friend that it was so she could pee if she had to. The men knocked the sides and top of the box together with hammers that hung from their leather tool belts. The box was small and my friend could not stand. She had to squat or kneel, postures that some men liked to see women in. The delivery men carried the box and my friend away to their panel van.
My friend was a Chinese woman from Shanghai. Her given name was Doctor Doctor. Her mother and father were both physicians, and they hoped her double birth name would light the way along a career path in medicine for my friend, but she had rebelled in university and changed her name to Yanzi, Little Bird.
There was a helicopter that crashed into the sea beside the Hamptons. One of the pilots got out. The other was found, still strapped in his harness. There was a naked young woman chained inside a wooden box.
Like breadcrumbs, the trail of now ubiquitous security camera footage, led the authorities back to The Castle, and, in relatively short order, to me. I lawyered up, which the police did not like, at all.
Foul play was not suspected, helicopters can be skittish, but the titillating circumstance, the naked woman, chained in the wooden box, was the stuff of tabloid fever. I was surprised to see a twenty year old photo of me on the front page of the Vancouver Herald. The headline read, “Prominent BC Lawyer Dated the Girl in the Wooden Box Last”. It was a long headline and a blurred photo of me in my thirties. I was amused to see that I had, at last, been promoted to the status of “prominent” lawyer. I’m sure many of my colleagues chuckled about that, too.
For, in truth, I was a salaryman lawyer for a provincial government administrative body. I had no complaints. The work was not difficult. The pay and benefits were good. I would never get rich, but I had all the money I needed. Enough, it seems to have gotten myself into a problematic situation.
I met Yanzi at the Crystal Mall, a Chinese shopping mall and food court in Burnaby, near Metrotown, whose authenticity was attested to by the mingled scents of cooking oil, Chinese food, Asian herbal medicine, and garbage. Through the open windows and doors at the western end of the second level east-west food court arcade, the one that looked out over Willingdon, little birds had entered and were flitting about. I pointed out the little birds and Yanzi laughed. She said that, “Little Bird”, was her name.
She was dressed in a modest dark red sweater with a very small Doric patterned navy blue trim at the cuffs and collar and plastic buttons that shined like silver. She was wearing loose, off-white, textured cloth slacks. The slightly raised pattern of the cloth, a seemingly endless series of overlapping rectangles of irregular lengths and widths, appeared to give the supple fabric a structural integrity, but like so many things about Yanzi, it was only an illusion.
Like the time she said that she was not sleeping with the young man who accompanied her and two women friends on a road-trip to Kelowna. When she returned, there was a small hickey on the center of her neck, and I said, “You slept with the boy”. Yanzi laughed.
I was losing patience with the Vancouver police detective. “What are you chasing me for? Yanzi drowned.”
“No,” he said, “She didn’t drown.”
I staggered slightly, reaching for the edge of the kitchen table to steady myself, and missing it. “Didn’t drown?”
“No”, he eyeballed me for my reaction. She was dead when the chopper hit the water.”
I took a seat at one of the chairs. Who would kill a beautiful Little Bird? Then, I got it. The detective thought I killed her.
That’s when I lawyered up. I hired Danny Brownbridge from Brownbridge and Finklestein, with offices on the seventeenth floor of the old Sun Tower Building. I was in the same class as his partner, Morty Finklestein, at law school, and Brownbridge had a reputation for defending accused murderers, successfully.
“The first thing,” he said, chewing on a corned beef sandwich they had delivered from Omnitsky’s, and talking with his mouth full, “is don’t tell me whether you killed her, or didn’t.”
“But, I didn’t kill her.”
“I told you not to tell me.” Brownbridge laughed, with his mouth full, spraying little pieces of corned beef and rye bread.
The second thing, he cautioned me, emphasizing his point with a long spear of sour pickle, less the bite he had taken, is, “You don’t say anything about this case to anyone but me.”
“Danny,” I never gave Yanzi any drugs. I never had any oxycodone.” He obviously did not believe me.
“The police have a prescription in your name, for fifty tablets of it. They say you saw Doctor Beulah, a physician known for writing scrips for the stuff. It was filled at an East Hastings Street drug store, ‘New World Pharmacy’.”
“I was never in New World Pharmacy. I never saw Doctor Beulah. Where are they getting this stuff?”
“Where they’re getting it, doesn’t matter.” Brownbridge said, pushing the last bite of the sandwich into his mouth, and speaking with his mouth still partly full, “what matters is, they believe it.”
I bargained, “Maybe they won’t charge me.”
“They’ll charge you. They know the two of you weren’t getting along. That she was sleeping around. Nice looking girl, too. Was she fun? They’ll charge you. They like you for it. They’re not looking at anyone else. You need to bring in my retainer.”
I had warned Yanzi about her dangerous lifestyle, and she had laughed. In my imagination, I thought the worst that could happen to me was that she would give me an STD. That was one of the reasons I stopped sleeping with her. But we did still get together, mostly to talk.
Yes, I loved the Little Bird. But, once I realized how she was, I was able to control my feelings for her, to a certain degree. My feelings for her were tempered by my understanding that she would always lie, and always sleep with other men, and always disappear for days and weeks, at a time. On the other hand, Yanzi had made me feel alive again, after a long time of not feeling alive. You can’t put a price on that, can you?
I had let Yanzi stay on in the spare bedroom. The deal was that it was only a place for her to stay, not to bring any men back to. I thought I smelled cigarette smoke, one time, but I wasn’t sure. It was exciting to watch Yanzi walk around naked. She liked to be naked. She liked to be watched. Yanzi had nice features, and a long slender body. She was almost as tall as me.
I hoped that the fact that I had never seen Doctor Beulah, or filled a prescription at the New World pharmacy would be enough to take the police off my scent. But it didn’t work that way. I had read that when the police settle on a suspect, they spend all their time and energy proving that he is the killer.
Doctor Beulah’s clinical records were a mess, and it was not clear whether I had ever been seen by her. However, there was a billing she made to my Medical Services Plan account for a date and time on which I had no alibi. The New World Pharmacy only kept their security camera recordings for a month. The pharmacist on duty had told the police that it might have been a man that resembled me that filled the prescription for oxycodone.
Brownbridge told me that it was possible to relate my prescription to Yanzi’s tox screen.
“Danny,” I said, “It wasn’t my prescription.”
“Right,” he said, “that’s what you say.”
The media were clamoring for the police to charge a perpetrator. They always showed my old photo and mentioned that I was a person of interest. Because Yanzi had died in New York, the New York media also sensationalized the, Naked Woman in the Wooden Box Killing. There was a buzz about convening a Grand Jury.
The police obtained a search warrant and tore my home apart. They interviewed my neighbours about my relationship with Yanzi. I wondered if I would be able to adapt to life in prison.
The surviving helicopter pilot recovered and told police that Yanzi had seemed fine when men put the box on the chopper. He had given Yanzi some granola bars and a juice box. She asked him if there were peanuts in the snacks. The helicopter pilot noted that Yanzi had both wet and soiled the straw, but he said there was nothing unusual in that, as she had been chained in the box for a long flight across the continent, and the shorter trip from the local airport to the Hamptons mansion.
When asked about the crash, the pilot had little to say. The instruments were normal. The weather was good. The engine just stopped, and the chopper went down into the water. When he knew they were going down, the pilot had released his harness and unlatched the cockpit door. He made no apology. In those situations, it was every man for himself, and he had lived to tell the tale.
The pilot of the private jet, an Iranian, filed a flight plan from YVR, Vancouver International Airport, to East Hampton Airport, in Wainscott, New York. The pilot and the co-pilot, a blue-eyed former commercial airline pilot, reported nothing unusual.
Danny Brownbridge was positively cheerful. “I got you a deal.” Brownbridge said, pointing with an unsharpened lead pencil. “They’ll let you plead to Manslaughter. You’ll be sentenced to nine years, but you’ll only have to serve three.”
This was the deal? I wondered if I needed a new lawyer. “Danny” I tried, “I didn’t kill Yanzi.”
“I told you not to tell me that. You should take the deal. You’re going to be arraigned on Monday. Don’t try to run away. They’re watching you.”
I was staggered. I reached for a wooden chair to steady myself. “Danny, what if I don’t take the deal? What happens?”
Danny was annoyed. I could see it in his eyes and hear it in his voice. “What happens is, they will charge you with murder. If you’re lucky they will charge you with Second Degree Murder. They may think they have enough to make First Degree Murder stick. I’ll apply for bail, but it will be denied, given the heinous nature of the crime, society would be offended, and you’re a flight risk. You’ll spend months in pretrial detention. You won’t like it.”
Danny made an effort to console me. “Three years will go by like no time. When you get out, you can make an application to the Law Society, for reinstatement. They may turn you down the first time you apply, but I’m sure they will eventually come around.”
The Sun Tower was a seventeen storey building, built in 1912. It was older than air-conditioning, and the wood framed windows actually opened. I was looking out one of the fully opened windows. I lived in a two-storey townhouse, in Richmond, and if I jumped from the second storey, I would probably only break a few bones. But if I jumped from the window in Danny Browbridge’s seventeenth storey office, I wouldn’t have to worry about being convicted for murdering the Little Bird.
“Don’t even think about it.” Danny said, “You’re no jumper.”
But I was. I looked out the large opened window. The sun was shining. The sky was blue, I could see the North Shore Mountains. I jumped. For an instant, I felt the exhilaration of relief, and then, quite suddenly, there was an impact. I had landed on the metal scaffolding used by two white uniformed window-washers who were as surprised to see me as I was to see them. Danny Brownbridge was looking down from the open window, and laughing.
I took the deal. I pleaded to manslaughter and served my three years at a minimum security facility. As Danny had predicted, the Law Society turned down my initial application for reinstatement and accepted the second.
About the Author – Robert Friedland
Born in New York City, Robert N. Friedland has been the Sheriff of a Judicial District; an investigator for the United States Treasury Department; a Regional Director of the Alberta Human Rights Commission; Human Rights Advisor for Malaspina University‑College; a two-term City Councillor in Victoria, British Columbia; and, Chief Lawyer for a group of seven First Nations in the Interior of British Columbia. He currently practices human rights and administrative law in Vancouver, British Columbia.
He is a widely published commentator on the international, Canadian, and British Columbian political scene.
His fiction has been published in Canada, the United States, England, and Japan. Faded Love, a collection of short stories, was selected by Canada’s ReLit Awards for its long list of Best Books. New World Press, Beijing, China, obtained the rights for a translation of Faded Love. Friedland’s first novel, The Second Wedding of Doctor Geneva Song, was published by Libros Libertad. The Tragic Marriages of Doctor Geneva Song, was also published by Libros Libertad.
PUBLICATIONS:
Fiction: Petroleum Independent; Canadian Broadcasting Commission‑Radio,(Alberta Anthology, Edmonton On‑Stage, Vinyl Cafe); CITR‑FM Radio; NeWest Review; The Fiddlehead; Entre Nous; Raw Fiction; Abiko Literary Quarterly; Stand; Broadkill Review; Spadina Literary Journal; Jewish Literary Journal; Transitions; and, Libros Libertad.
Non‑fiction: Japan Today; Toronto Star; Vancouver Sun; Vancouver Province; Globe & Mail; Ottawa Citizen; Calgary Herald; Canadian Broadcasting Commission – TV; Edmonton Journal; Alberta Report; Victoria Times‑Colonist; Lawyers’ Weekly; Business Examiner; Victoria News; James Bay Beacon; Red Zone; Lower Island News; Wetaskiwin Times; Cycle Therapy; and, Canadian Public Administration.
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