Authors: Ted Wood
I got angry. "Listen, you ugly bastard, you do that again and you're going in alongside him, understand?"
Eddy was ruefully rubbing his knee as if he were a total stranger to the affair. "Shit, that hurt," he told nobody in particular.
The Newfie was getting bolder by the moment. "You think that hurt, do you," he raged. Once again I was grateful for Sam. Without him it would be a tussle that I could not win without hurting the man, putting him in hospital. His normal reflexes were all jammed with anger. Pain would not deter him; I would have to incapacitate him. Instead I said to Sam "speak" and Sam snarled and raged in front of him until he shriveled in fear. He pulled back, falling over a beer case and backing away on his buttocks, his injured hand held aloft like a trophy.
"You want your other hand in pieces?" I asked him.
"Call 'im off." He was almost screaming with fear.
I told Sam "easy" and he relaxed, a show dog again with a handsome, silent head. I patted him and spoke to the uninjured cottager.
"Now I'm going to make a couple of assumptions, okay?" he stared at me. "I'm gonna assume that you're sober enough take your buddy to the hospital at Sundridge. Does that sound reasonable?"
"Yeah." He nodded greedily. "Yeah, thanks."
"You're welcome. Get him out of here, and keep his mouth shut."
I stood back, stooping to pat Sam's head gratefully, as the two of them made their way through the side door and out to the parking lot.
I followed them thirty seconds later, in time to see their taillights pulling sedately out of the lot. It was barely dark.
I went back inside. I had to take Eddy to jail, for one thing, and for another it's always good policy to stamp out the ashes of barroom fight. They tend to go underground and smoulder once the first big blaze has gone out.
The barman was at his beer tap, working a shade faster than his opposite number down at the hotel. Murphy's Harbour was a beer town in summertime. He paused to slide a couple of cool bulbous glasses in front of me. Now I was ready for beer. I thanked him and took that first wonderful bite out one of them.
The barman kept pouring. He knew and I knew that I was breaking the law. Policeman do not drink on duty. But this was my patch and I had a couple of bodies to account for and I'd just saved him from an expensive bar fight. We would waive the rules. Only I had to remind him. "How long did Eddy have that bottle with him?"
He shrugged, moving from the elbows up, not disturbing the rhythm of the glasses under the spout of the beer tap. "Hard to say."
"You have to watch out for that. It's illegal," I said, and we looked at one another and grinned.
"I didn't know he had a mickey," he said.
"Of course not," I soothed. "Otherwise you wouldn't have been selling him beer, would you?" We laughed and I finished my beer and set down the empty.
I felt like a phony, a show policeman. Arresting a drunk on a night when I should have been looking for Winslow's murderer was frivolous. It showed me only how small my worth had become since that night in Toronto. I was a doorman for this bar, not an investigator, a lackey, keeping the peace while Fullwell went off to the city to try and do my job for me.
I went and collected Eddy. He was sleeping the sleep of the justly hammered, sprawled across the cases of empties as if someone had caught him a solid right cross. I woke him with a nip between finger and thumb under his armpit and led him out and back down the street to my scout car, parked outside the tavern. I took the handcuffs off him and shoved him in the back, where he fell asleep again, snoring happily to himself. Sam came in the front, sitting tall on the passenger side, my assistant. As I drove I reached over and did the little thanking things, bumping his big back and rubbing him behind the ears. He rolled his head in puppyish delight. I had a sudden image of myself, old and lonely, sitting on a park bench somewhere with my dog, the only creature in the world that gave a damn if I opened my eyes in the morning. The thought made me laugh at myself. What I was suffering from wasn't loneliness, it was responsibility overload. I'd feel better when Winslow's killer was behind the doors of my neat little slammer.
I got to the station and drove around to the back door. I got out of the car and Sam came after me, flitting out like a dark ghost. He hit the floor and began to growl, uneasily, roaming up and down by the door as I stood there trying to get Eddy out of the back seat. I told Sam "easy," but he didn't obey completely. Instead of falling silent he whined with anxiety. I assumed it was the smell of Winslow's blood in the boat still parked behind the station, so I repeated myself, "Easy, Sam."
I got Eddy mobile, using another horse bite to open his eyes for him, and steered him up the step to the back door. He fell asleep again as I propped him there, and then he woke with a start as he began to slip when his knees buckled. I managed to lean against him while I opened the door and let him half fall inside.
The first cell was open and I swung him inside it, flopping him out on the bare cement. Sam was whining again in a fury and I looked around to check that nobody was inside. I could see nothing, but Sam's actions worried me. I quickly slipped Eddy's belt off and then his bootlaces and dropped them on the floor in front of his cell. I slammed the door on him and locked it, then gave Sam my full attention.
He was crouching against the doorway that led to the interior of the station. His hackles were up and the whine was turning itself into a growl, his attack growl. I studied him for a moment, then unflipped my holster and took out my gun. I went to the door, braced myself for whatever might be waiting, then threw it open and jumped inside and low, crouching to one side down clear of the light.
Sam came past me, barking savagely. I waited for thirty seconds but no human voice was added to the noise. I knew the crisis was past. I stood up and flicked the light switch, flooding the room with greenish fluorescent light, and I realized why Sam had been alert.
The place had been torn apart.
Drawers were lying on the floor upside down, files were flopped about with their contents spilled out. The stationery cupboard had been rifled.
I looked up at the wall where our little safe stood. It was gone. Too tough to be opened in a hurry, it had been pried right out of the wall and removed.
I told Sam "easy" and he came to me. "Old buddy, they're still in town," I told him.
I
did the obvious things first. I opened the counter flap and went through to check the space in front of the desk. There was nobody there. They had come in and presumably left again, through one of the screen windows. It had been cut very neatly. I wondered whether it had been done by the same knife that had let the life out of Ross Winslow.
Once I checked inside, I threw the front door open and told Sam "seek." He ran his hunting circles around the place until I was sure there was nobody out there within a hundred yards of me. I walked out to the edge of the road and checked both ways. There was no car in sight and none could have hidden in the bush; it's too low all along there. I whistled Sam back and went back inside the station. It was depressing to stand there amid the clutter. This couldn't happen in a bigger department where there was at least one spare man to look after the station. I felt for a moment that I ought to strip the police patch off my shirtsleeves and sew on a Mickey Mouse.
But that phase passed. For one thing, the mosquitoes were pouring in through the open window where the screen had been cut. I closed the glass on them. It didn't help the temperature any—it was close to a hundred inside—but the mosquitoes can drive you right off your head after a while.
I checked around the room. Everything had been turned over, except for one or two items that were still intact. The gun rack had been left untouched, the shotgun and rifle still locked in place. The contents of the cupboard beneath it had been strewn around everywhere. So it had not been thieves. Thieves would have picked up the station hardware, the guns and the typewriters. No, these people had been looking for something else. And it figured to be the envelope that Angela Masters had given me. I picked up the telephone to call Murphy's house. Somebody was talking on the line, some semidrunk telling Bertha about a blue boat with a red sail that he had seen that day. I cut in over him and he said "Whooozis?" a couple of times. I told him, "Police chief, clear the line, please." He swore and hung up.
Bertha said, "Hi, Reid, up the station, are you?"
"Yeah, I just got in. Tell me, please, is Murph there?"
"No. He's gone out. I told him to go up the Legion and get himself a glass of beer. He's that upset, he don't know what to do with himself."
"Good idea." I didn't mean it. I needed all the help I could get. Murphy drunk was no help at all. "How long's he been gone?" I tried.
"About an hour." She broke off, searching for the proper words. "I figure you better call him soon if you want a sensible answer."
"Good thinking. They're likely having a remembrance for Ross Winslow."
"That's what Murph said," she confirmed.
I thanked her and asked her to leave me a line clear for a while. "In fact, the hell with it, I'm going to be here most of the time. Unplug the phone down there and get some sleep. I'll mind the store."
She sounded tired as she answered and I remembered she was close to Murphy's age, damn near old enough to be my mother. "I b'lieve I will," she said.
We exchanged very civilized good nights. I depressed the phone button, then let go and phoned the Legion Hall. There was a lot of noise at the other end. It sounded like a hundred drinking parties I'd been on in the service. Men fulfilling their god-given duty of making themselves goddamn stupid with booze. I asked for Murphy. There was a delay and then he was there, sounding angry. "What's up now?"
"We had visitors at the station. Guys with pinch bars, took the place to pieces."
His voice rose excitedly. "Did they get it?"
I told him, "No. But it's gonna take a month to put things back together again."
Murphy swore. It was soft but definite. "What in hell is things coming to, Reid? First the goddamn boat gets took off you. Then Ross gets killed in it. Now the station's tore all up. Where in hell is it gonna end?"
A mosquito had realized that lunch was on and settled lovingly on my cheek to dig in. I slapped it. Murphy heard the poise.
"Now what?" he almost snarled it.
I kept my temper. It was a hot night, even if you weren't almost sixty and crippled up and bereaved and confronted with a piece of malice that would rob you of your Sunday off. "Just a bug. The shopbreakers came in through the front screen." On impulse I added, "But they're wasting their time. I'm gonna mail that envelope to the attorney general's office, care of myself. Then on Monday I'll drive down there and pick it up and take it down to Straiton Chemicals."
"Are you out of your mind?" Murphy's voice was a hiss of horror. "What did the goddamn M'rines teach you about security? You're not dealing with dummies, you know, you're dealing with the big time; these guys may have the station bugged."
I slapped another mosquito. "I'm certain they do, the kind that bite," I said.
"You're crazy," he said.
"Take it easy. This isn't the Russian embassy," I told him.
Murphy made no attempt to hide his anger. "I'm not wasting time arguing with you. I'm not coming in tonight, no matter what. I'm gonna have a few beers.
Quite
a few beers, in fact. I'll be in tomorrow, not too early. I'll tidy up then."
I said, "Thanks, Murph. Enjoy," and hung up.
I stood looking at the phone for a long moment, then I realized what I had to do. I weighed the meaning of every word we had exchanged and finally I went over to the gun rack, unlocked the guns, and did what had to be done. After that, I prepared my bait. I picked up a few sheets of paper at random from the mess on the floor, folded them in half, and put them in a manila envelope a size larger than the one Angela Masters had given me. I wrote "Chief Bennett, Murphy's Harbour Police Department, C/O Attorney General's Department" and put the Toronto address down. I sealed it and stamped it and slipped the whole thing back into the front of my shirt.
I whistled Sam to heel and went out the back way, checking on Eddy, who was snoring harmoniously. It was the third time he'd been inside for drunkenness since I'd been chief. This time he'd probably get thirty days to complete his snoring.
I put Sam in the car and drove down to the post office on the main drag. For a moment I considered putting the flasher on, but that would have been too corny. I figured my actions would be obvious enough.
It was close to ten at night. The street was quiet. A young couple was walking arm in arm down by the waterside, looking at the ripples of sunfish coming up to feed on the bugs that fell in the water under the lights. I glanced up and down, let Sam out of the car, in case I should be lucky enough to have someone try to grab the letter off me as I mailed it, and stepped out in front of the mail box.
The phony letter went through the slot with a faint whoosh. And then I heard the sound I'd been half expecting. From a dark space between two houses a woman's voice said, "Officer!"
I turned toward the sound. "Hello, Miss Masters, I've been looking for you," I said. I was so delighted I felt like hugging the bitch. Here we had come full circle. It had all started out with her knowing nothing and needing help from me. Now it had switched. As sure as God made the Province of Ontario she had all the answers I needed. And now she had come back, trying to undo the one slip she had made, handing me that envelope. Without that, she and Pardoe and whoever did the throat cutting in their organization would have been on their way.
Before she could answer I bored in. "Where's Pardoe?"
She lied, of course, but at such a rate that I could tell she was under pressure. "I don't know. But it doesn't matter. I'm going home. I want my envelope back."