Authors: Ted Wood
I fought down the ugly swimming feeling that the realization brought me and cleared my mind of emotion, turning instead to checking the rest of the boat. I did the routine things. I scraped under his nails, finding flesh fragments that seemed to me to have come from his own face. I assumed that until he suckered me out of my boat he had been stuck on the same mosquito-infested shore where I had gotten covered with bites. But it's policy. There was a chance that the skin had come from the hands of his attacker, and if it had, and if the guy had a different blood group from Winslow's, it might narrow down our search by a few million suspects. I scraped up some blood samples as well and put them in the little bottles in my kit. There was no doubt it was his own blood, but it had to be done, for the same, long-odds reason. Finally I checked his boots. They were heavy work boots, clogged with black swamp mud, the same as my own boots had been. This was the man who had stolen my boat. And a hell of a lot of good it had done him, I thought grimly. The only thing about the boots that held me was some blood splashes on the worn leather. They were neat drip spots, not the spurting splashes that lay farther away from the body. They confirmed my earlier thought that someone had held him erect while his life drained away.
I noted everything in my book and stood thinking for a while. It was likely that his murderer had been standing higher than he was. That would account for the ease with which the throat had been attacked. He had been looking up, throat taut, the murderer had grabbed his hair, spun him around, done his knife trick, held him, and dropped him. I was looking for a cruiser. It was supposition, but it fit the findings and I had damn little else to go on.
I went into the station and called McKenney, listening to the piped organ music at the other end of the line. McKenney said he would send the hearse. That simplified things for me. He was there within minutes, coming himself instead of sending the syrupy young kid he usually sent to the farmhouses of the elderly. The guy was a ghoul, but what could you expect in his line of work. He had brought his joe boy with him. I wondered who was minding the store, changing the tapes of dreary organ music while the elderly relatives of an elderly farmer he had laid out in the chapel were doing their weeping and handshaking and eventually their talking about one another's families and crops. The young guy was cool, but McKenney was like a bird dog, his horrible false teeth almost chattering with excitement. "A murder, would you say, Chief?"
"Could be."
The kid spat on the grass beside the boat. I watched his throat work as he swallowed his bile. "Looks like murder to me," he said thickly.
"You can't tell, you can never tell," McKenney said, almost happily.
We lifted the body out. I was surprised at the strength in McKenney's arms and his carelessness of bloodstains. It occurred to me that his black suit must be wash-and-wear. They dropped the body on a stretcher and covered it with a sheet. The crowd had pushed as close as it could, almost past Curtis, who was still standing there, faithfully keeping them back. One of the teenagers giggled, but most of the others stood very still. One even took his hat off, but he made as if to wipe his forehead. Respect was not cool and these kids would be anything rather than involved.
When McKenney and his boy had everything strapped down, I told them, "Can you keep it like this until I get in there to check the body?"
The kid looked surprised but McKenney had learned enough to go along with me. "Trust me, Chief."
"I do," I told him.
The crowd moved back from the stretcher as McKenney and the kid wheeled it out. It was all right to laugh and scratch around death, but none of them wanted to get any of it on them. It was almost superstitious the way they hustled back. About a third of them took off in their cars to hang around McKenney's. They weren't bothered about the investigation; the body was what attracted them.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw the others start passing what looked a hell of a lot like a joint. But I had enough to do fingerprinting the boat, so I ignored them. I only wondered if they were Winslow's customers, and where their next supply would come from.
It took a while to get everything done. First I checked to be sure there was no knife lying under the place the body had been. Then I made sure I had enough blood samples. And after that I started fingerprinting the whole lousy boat. It was a long dull job and I knew that I'd pick up my own prints, Murphy's, possibly some from George, the kid at the marina, then Winslow's. And if there were any others after that, and if the person who had left them had a police record, and if I could pick up a clear print with enough points of similarity, all I would know is that this other person had touched the boat. It wouldn't convince a judge or a jury that he had killed Winslow.
But I did my job. And I found that somebody had carefully wiped the controls of the boat plus a lot of the other flat surfaces where there could have been prints. I wondered if it had been Winslow, when he finally got alongside the boat he was looking for. Had he wiped everything down so that he would be able to dump the police boat safely and hitch a ride back to the dock at his own place?
And how surprised had he been by what happened?
I went into the back of the station and washed my hands carefully, getting the blood out from under my fingernails. Then I sat down and thought for a few minutes. I needed intelligent, willing help to run an errand. The only person I could count on late on a Saturday evening was George at the marina. Murphy I needed for the phone. Fullwell was likely to be busy alongside me. George was a good choice, if he was still at the marina.
I phoned and Walter Puckrin called him in. The boy was excited, glad to do some driving for me. I told him to come by the station around six o'clock.
While I was still on the phone there was a great roar from the crowd outside and then the deep beating of the chopper blades overhead. For a second I almost panicked, remembering all the times the chopper had dropped in to take out shattered friends of mine from Nam. Then I remembered my pact with the media. It was the radio station chopper, here no doubt to tell me they'd had enough and were heading back to Toronto in time for an evening at some disco or other. I went out, in time to find a trendy looking guy of about my age, but with that smooth, monkey-faced youthfulness that lasts into the fifties and then shatters like a dropped mirror. He had a mike and a tape recorder and was chuntering away into it. I went over to him.
He said, "And now here's Chief Bennett, the police chief of Murphy's Harbour, a man who's no stranger to the tough side of police work. Formerly with the Metro police department, Chief Bennett has come up to the peace and quiet of this beautiful resort town where nothing ever happens, until today… tell us, Chief, what's happening."
He stuck his big ugly microphone at me and I obliged him. It was payment for the scouting they were supposed to have been doing for me all afternoon while I checked out the boat and the body. "I want to thank station CHRP for coming to our help in this way. We're not staffed for emergencies of this nature and the use of a helicopter made things much easier for us."
He wanted more. He wanted blood for his listeners, but I kept it cool, making the obvious official comments about sudden deaths, not homicides. It wasn't what he wanted, but if it got the crowd to go home, it would be fine by me.
He made a production out of telling me that only three boats had been lifted out of the lake that afternoon. He had the numbers of each, and the locations. None was a cruiser, and I had a feeling it was a cruiser we were looking for, but I thanked him and finally he went away, stepping low back to his chopper and up and away to the cheers of the crowd. I felt the way we used to back there in the saw grass. They were leaving, drawing the same pay, earning the same goddamn medals, but home free while we pushed on with the dirty business of war.
When he was gone, I called Curtis off his job of guarding the boat. He was standing where I'd asked him to. By now his suit was black under the arms with sweat, but he was hanging in. I took him back in the station and cracked out the other evidence bottle I had in the safe. It was cheap rye and he choked on it but drank it down like a survivor. Then I thanked him and he left, with real news to talk about around the supper table that night.
After he left, I called Toronto, the police office I worked out of when I was a detective downtown. They put me through and I was lucky enough to find my old partner in, questioning a witness in a lousy domestic stabbing, as he explained with some disgust.
I made the usual noises and he laughed and asked, "So what's happening up there? You just heading out fishing? Or are you doing a bed check on the local ladies tonight?"
"Both…" I let him laugh, then went on, "once I get this damn murder investigation sorted out."
There was a clatter at the other end and a minor uproar, then my old partner came back on the line. "Bastard's drunker'n a fiddler's bitch, now he wants to go get some more booze." He stopped and spoke words of caution to his witness, then asked, "What can I do for you, Reid?"
I told him. I needed someone to push my fingerprints through the computer team down at headquarters. It would be quicker than my doing it by going through the usual channels. And on top of that I wanted a check made by the attorney general's office.
He agreed at once. "I can't touch the blood and the scrapings, you'd be better sending them to the A.G.'s office yourself, but get your messenger to bring me in the fingerprints and I'll shove them through for you."
"Great. Thanks, Mike. Soon's this thing is over, maybe you can bring your young lad up for some fishing."
"That'd be great." His voice was almost wistful, then it tailed off in disgust. "Goddamnit. Now he's thrown up." He hung up the phone, and I did too. The squalor at the other end reminded me of what I'd left behind when I quit the Metro force. It wasn't all bad, changing jobs.
I left, locked the station, and drove out through the crowds to Main Street. The shadows were starting to pull away from the buildings and there was purple in them, like the bloom on a ripe grape. It was a beautiful time of day, but somehow it didn't register that way after what had happened.
I went to the back door of McKenney's and let myself in. The young assistant was sitting in the preparation room, among the marble surfaces with a bottle of vodka open in front of him and a glass of pop in his hand. As I came in he was slopping more vodka into the glass. From the casual way he was doing it, I guessed he was on his third or fourth. I hoped no more bodies turned up that night. I'd have to bring them in myself at this rate.
He waved the bottle at me. "Hi, Chief. Can I show you something in a vodka and Seven-Up?"
That line amused him and he snorted about it as I replied, "No thank you, I'll kill a whole bottle later on. Right now I want to search Winslow's body."
He waved again, a big, drunken movement. "Help yourself." I unwrapped the straps from the stretcher and peeled back the cloth. The kid was behind me, his breath rattling in my ear. "Jesus God," he said softly. "What a way to die."
"There's worse ways. He was lucky."
The kid couldn't handle that. He went back to his chair and collapsed into it. "You reckon?" he asked.
I didn't tell him about some of the ways that buddies of mine had caught it. He couldn't have handled any more. As I stripped the sheet off completely, I told him, "Ross was unconscious in seconds, most likely, hardly felt a thing." The kid sipped his drink, and grew up, right there in the funeral parlor. He would be all right. I was glad of the change. Winslow's body was starting to stiffen, I might need help with him before my investigation was over. The kid would be okay now.
I opened the mackinaw jacket and looked at the gun. It was sitting in a loosely put-together holster that looked as if Winslow might have jury-rigged it himself some time. I had the boy bring me rubber gloves and I pulled them on, hating the obscene way they plucked at the hairs on my wrist. I pulled the Luger out of the holster and checked it. It didn't smell as if it had been fired. There was a clean, old-soldier's smell of gun oil in the barrel. And on the tip, against the sight, there was a tiny scraping of skin.
McKenney's boy was hanging behind me like a shadow. I got him to find a little jar for me to scrape the fragment of skin into. He asked, "You think Ross hit some guy with his gun?"
"It's the only reason there'd be skin on it, right?"
I was wondering if it was Murray's skin. Was this the weapon that had made that gash on his temple? I said to the kid, "Can you ask the boss to get me a tissue and blood sample from that body we brought in this morning, Charles Murray?"
He nodded, "I'll ask him, soon's as he's through supper." I had a sudden vision of McKenney, with his semicircular dentures, sitting in a house filled with day-old flowers, talking in a hushed voice over the pot roast.
I went back to checking the gun. I was right, it had not been fired. The barrel was clean and unpitted. The magazine was full but there was nothing up the spout. Winslow would have needed time to cock it before he went about killing anybody. Maybe that was why he had used his gun to pistol-whip somebody, perhaps Murray.
I fingerprinted the gun, the magazine, and each of the shells. Then I took Winslow's prints and made my own rough comparison with the prints from the gun. It looked to me as if he had done all the handling on his own, but it was something else to follow up.
I went through his pockets. There were only the things you'd expect to find. In the pants pockets there was a clasp knife that had cost three bucks at the bait store, a spare shear pin for an old outboard motor, a key ring with a 303 service bullet case on it along with four keys, some change, and a dirty handkerchief. And there was a wallet containing a driver's license and ownership papers, a membership card for the Canadian Legion, an Esso credit card, a few receipts from a hardware store in Sundridge, twenty-seven dollars cash. That was it.