Authors: Alison Gordon
After an hour, I took a break, put on the kettle, and got into the shower, letting water as hot as I could stand it pound down over my neck and shoulders. I swear computers were designed by quack chiropractors out for business.
While the tea steeped, I did some stretches and warm-ups to work the rest of the kinks out. Then I took a mug of sweet and milky tea to the desk.
I scrolled through the information in my computer, taking notes in longhand. I don’t travel with a printer, and sometimes things make more sense on paper than they do on the screen.
By 11:00, I had a bunch of paper to shuffle around, but inspiration was still refusing to strike. I was considering packing it in for the night when the phone rang. I almost ignored it. I didn’t really feel like talking to Andy, because I hadn’t yet decided if I was going to tell him what I was doing. I finally picked it up, trying to sound sleepy so he’d feel badly for disturbing me.
“Oh, gosh, I’m sorry,” he said, but it wasn’t Andy. “It sounds like I woke you up. This is Cal Jagger.”
“No problem.” I said. “I am just sitting and mulling.”
“Mulling what?”
“Not wine. Suspects,” I said.
“How many have you got?”
“At least three, so far,” I said. “Troy Barwell, the rapist cop with a sexual inferiority complex; Axel Bonder, the KKK janitor with the loony son and both motive and opportunity; and Step-daddy-o just on general principles.
“Plus, I have a whole bunch of question marks about other people.”
“Like?”
“Oh, Stinger Swain, Hank Cartwright, Constable Sweeney, you, an unrelated madman acting alone, none of the above, and Uncle Tom Cobbley and All.”
Cal laughed.
“I think maybe you had better sleep on it,” he said. “I just called to say I’ll be at Esther’s tomorrow. If you need me, I won’t be in the office until the afternoon. I’m doing some stuff for my day job.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m seeing June. I’ll bring my notes to the meeting. See you at seven.”
I decided to give Andy one more try. I was in luck.
“Been out carousing all night?” I asked. “Some behaviour, I say. Ignoring your hearth and home, Elwy pining for your company. But do you care? Ha!”
“Elwy’s not pining,” Andy laughed. “He is being cuddled as we speak. I didn’t call, because I only got in a few minutes ago, and I thought it was too late. But you’re right, I was out having a good time. It’s always tons o’ fun at a crime scene.”
“Oh. Anything interesting?”
“Not particularly. A bad one. Hooker murder in an alley behind a crack house. An empty crack house, now. Since last night, when it happened.”
“How old?”
“Maybe seventeen. She was a runaway from Regina. A Native girl. Known to the guys at Vice.”
“I hate that.”
“They had tried to get her to go home,” he said. “They got her in at Covenant House, but she didn’t stick.”
“So she ends up dead.”
“She ends up dead. And we’ll solve it the way we usually do. It’s just a matter of time before one of the dealers gets picked up for something else and cuts a deal by caving in on one of his buddies.”
“Her poor parents.”
“Poor all of us.”
“Lousy for you, too,” I said.
“I’m just tired of seeing all these lives wasted.”
“I wish I was there to cheer you up.”
“Me, too,” he said. “But hearing your voice helps. Thanks for calling.”
“I wish you were here, too,” I said.
We listened to the silence for a while.
“So, what are you up to?” he asked.
“Promise not to get mad?”
“You’re messed up in that murder, aren’t you?”
I took a deep breath.
“A bit,” I said.
“Yeah, I saw in the paper that they had arrested that kid,” he said. “I figured you’d get your nose in it somehow. Then T.C., asked me why you hadn’t been writing, and, with the keen detective’s mind for which I am so famous, I put two and two together.”
“You’re not mad?”
“With you, there’s no use,” he laughed. “If I reacted every time you did something stupid like this, I’d be in a fury half my life. Tell me what you’ve got.”
“No, you’re too tired.”
“I’m wide awake. Just give me a minute to get a pen and paper. I’ll take some notes.”
“Thanks.”
I listened to the sounds down the line; Elwy meowing indignantly at being moved, Andy answering him, then the echo of Andy crashing around in the next room.
“Be right with you,” he shouted hollowly. “Don’t hang up.”
Then I heard the tinkle of ice cubes and he was back on the line.
“Got myself a Scotch while I was at it,” he said. “Now I’m all set. I’m on the couch, Elwy’s back on my lap, and you have my almost undivided attention.”
I fought back a wave of longing to be with him, picked up my notes, and moved the phone to the bed.
“Well, I’m swimming in motives, here,” I began. “There are a whole lot of people who had a reason to hate her. Tell me something. After all the years you’ve investigated murders, can you get inside the heads of the suspects?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I can understand why some of these guys could hate Lucy, and wish she wasn’t around to bug them, but I am not capable of imagining how they take the next step. Deciding to kill her, taking the gun, going out to the beach and shooting her, then calmly going on his way.”
“That’s because you are a basically non-violent person,” Andy said. “Partly because you are a woman, partly because you are a genuinely nice human being.”
“Well, thanks very much,” I said.
“No, really. You don’t hate. You don’t bear grudges. You don’t see the world as a frightening place where people are out to get you. You just sail along, bless your heart, believing that everyone is basically good and wishing that life was fairer than it is.”
“You make me sound like Pollyanna,” I grumbled. “Like a simp. I think there are bad people. I think some of the people I’ve encountered in this case are scum-sucking creeps who ought to be put away.”
“Aha,” he said. “There you have it. Put away, not blown away. Right? See what I mean?”
“I guess you’re right.”
“That’s why you are having trouble.”
“But you don’t think that way either,” I said.
“Not personally, no. But I do professionally. I have talked to enough of the other kind of people to understand how they think. To them, the world is full of scores to settle or scores to make. If someone is in their way, they simply remove them and don’t think anything of it. I’m talking about the real psychopaths here. Not the domestic killings, say, where the killer calls 911 in tears or turns himself in the next day.”
“So I should look at the case and imagine that I was someone who put no value on human life. Then I could take the next step.”
“Something like that.”
“Because if I don’t, all of this stuff just seems far-fetched.”
“There are lots of reasons people kill. For money and sex are two biggies. Another is in response to some sort of threat, to eliminate a perceived enemy and save one’s own life.”
“Self-defence, you mean.”
“Not literally. I’m not talking about cases in which someone is holding a knife to another one’s throat.”
“You mean if I think someone is threatening my job or good name or prosperity,” I said.
“Or freedom. A drug dealer suspects his buddy of being a snitch, and it’s goodbye buddy. In that kind of situation, some guys run to escape the threat. Other ones stay and eliminate it.”
“Gotcha. What else?”
“Revenge is another obvious one. The murderer who blows away someone who has done him wrong in some way. This ties in with the third, most psychopathic one, in which the murderer becomes the executioner. This is where we get into the real creeps. They decide that the person deserves punishment, and just do it. The guy who kills prostitutes, for example, because they are immoral. Or blacks because he doesn’t like blacks.”
“Well, I have to tell you, we have both types of possibilities here,” I said. “Let me call you back in five minutes.”
“How come?”
“I don’t want to run up long-distance charges while I pee,” I said.
“I’ll be here,” he chuckled.
Five minutes later, exactly, I was back on the phone, at my desk with a fresh cup of tea, a clean ashtray, and a blank page turned in my notebook. I’d turned my computer back on.
“Okay,” I said, when he answered. “I’m ready to go.”
“Hit me,” he said. I could hear the yawn in his voice.
“Darling, you don’t have to do this if you’re tired,” I said.
“No, no. I like hearing you play detective,” he said, sounding amused. “Besides, if I have some input, you are less likely to do something really stupid and get into trouble you can’t handle.”
“Well, while I was in the john I thought about what you told me, and it seems that I’ve got some suspects here that fit into your categories, some of them into both.”
“All right.”
“First, and most popular in my books, is your friend Detective Sergeant Troy Barwell.”
“Handy for you,” Andy said.
“No, really, listen to this.”
I told him about Barwell’s history of violence against women, about his dishonesty as a cop, and about Lucy’s rape and his subsequent humiliation.
“Dick Teensy,” he said. “I like that. I may use it.”
“On who? Whom?”
“You remember Bob Flanagan?”
“That jerk? You mean he’s . . . ?”
“Like a thimble.”
I snickered.
“Go for it,” I said. “But let’s get back to my problem. Did you happen to notice what kind of gun Barwell wore?”
“Sure, the same one we use.”
“I thought so. And that gun is?”
“Smith and Wesson .38.”
“Yes!” I said. “That’s the murder weapon.”
“I hate to throw a wet blanket here, but was he at this party?”
“Well, no.”
“Then your theory supposes what, a chance encounter on the beach?”
“That’s where it’s a bit weak,” I admitted.
“And how did he get the murder weapon? Do a B and E at the condo?”
“No, I’ve worked that out. He planted the gun during his search after the murder was reported, took Dommy’s identical gun, and threw it in the ocean.”
“He could have, but I think you’re a bit weak on the opportunity angle on this one. And the motive isn’t so hot.”
“What if she was threatening to expose the rape? It would kill any chance he had for advancement. What if he has secret ambitions to be the chief someday?”
“That wasn’t Lucy’s style, from what you tell me,” he said. “Next.”
“All right,” I said. “Here’s a threat motive. Dirk Hoving, Lucy’s stepfather.”
“How was she threatening him?”
“I’m not sure she was, but she could have. He was a prominent born-again businessman who evidently indulged in some hanky-panky with Lucy a few years ago. If it got out, it could ruin him. Maybe she was blackmailing him or something.”
“Any evidence of that?”
“No. I just heard about it from her father, who isn’t exactly a reliable witness.”
I told him all about my conversation with Hank.
“Well, I still don’t like your theory yet,” he said. “It’s worth following it up to see if there is any evidence of blackmail, but opportunity is weak. Have you considered the father, by the way? He sounds pretty scuzzy.”
“There was something a bit unhealthy about their relationship,” I admitted. “The two of them smoking dope and talking sex isn’t exactly standard father-daughter stuff. But I can’t see him being capable of thinking this whole thing out. His grief was real, Andy. He was suffering.”
“Grief or remorse? Think about it. Anyone else?”
“Before I get to him, let me talk about opportunity again. You keep saying there was no opportunity with these guys, but we don’t know, do we? I mean, no one admits they saw her after midnight. Anything could have happened. It could have been a chance meeting. It could have been set up. We don’t know.”
“No, but it’s more likely that it comes back to that group at the condo,” Andy said.
“All right,” I said. “You’re a hard sell. My next suspect has both motive and opportunity. Axel Bonder, the super at the condo. He knew about the gun, he had access to the apartments, and he had a dandy motive.”
I ran down the history between Lucy and Bonder’s son, as well as his racism.
“Besides, he’s a really creepy guy,” I said.
“Okay, but why now? This all happened, what, six or seven years ago?”
“Maybe his son has taken a turn for the worse, maybe watching her with Dommy drove him crazy. Maybe she said something to him that made him snap.”
“That’s all worth exploring,” Andy said. “Is that all the suspects?”
“Well, no. There’s Stinger Swain.”
“Ah yes, your favourite ballplayer. I thought we’d be getting around to him sooner or later.”
I told Andy about the scene between Stinger and Lucy, and about the rumours that he had slept with her last year.
“He had the opportunity. Maybe she was making trouble with his wife. When she mentioned the kid’s birthday, he went nuts. She was giving him a little reminder that a year ago they had been together. Maybe she threatened to tell Tracy?”
“Maybe. But I can’t imagine that would be news to her.”
“You’re probably right,” I said. “Karin told me they went through a bad patch last year. Maybe Tracy told Stinger that he had one more chance, and that if he stepped out of line, she’d leave.”
“I can’t see how that would matter to a stickman like him.”
“I hate that term. Stickman. It’s so, I don’t know, guy, you know? Like it’s some big admirable deal to screw around with lots of women.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said, yawning. “I’m just being grumpy. I’m tired. I’ll sleep on all of this. Thanks for your help.”
“I’m not sure what help I’ve been. But keep digging. You’re going at it the right way, given the resources you’ve got at hand. But I’ve got some advice for you, if you’ll take it.”
“Of course,” I said.
“First, put personal feelings aside. Don’t let the fact that Barwell is a creep, and I agree that he is, by the way, make you see things that aren’t there.
“I think, too, that you should add Avila to your list of suspects. He could have done it. He’s the most obvious, remember, which is why he was arrested.”
“I guess you’re right,” I admitted.
“What do you really know about him? Just the word of people you like. You must have learned by now that likable people can still do horrible things. That’s what I mean about Barwell. You’re ready to think the worst of him because he’s not your type of person. Or of Stinger Swain and the janitor. Make sure the facts fit.”
“Okay. Is that it?”
“No. One more thing. Promise me that you won’t be alone with any of these guys. No one-on-one confrontations or meetings in dark alleys. I’m not around to ride to the rescue this time. And I’d rather you were alive than right, if you know what I mean.”
“Yes, sir. I’m playing it super-cautious.”
“End of lecture. I don’t like it, but I know why you want to do it. So just be careful.”
“I promise.”
“And now it’s time for Elwy and me to go to bed. We both miss you.”
“At least you’ve got each other,” I said.
“That’s your opinion. I tolerate this beast sleeping with me, Kate. I don’t consider him fit company.”
“Don’t let him hear you saying that.”
“He’s dead to the world. So will I be thirty seconds after I hang up this phone. I love you and miss you.”
“Me too.”
“One more thing. Can you get to the medical examiner?”
“If I can’t, maybe Esther can. Why?”
“It would be interesting to know if she had sex before she died, for one thing.”
“I’ll get on it first thing,” I said.
We talked for a few more minutes, just inconsequential stuff to put off having to say goodbye.
When I hung up, I cursed my job, put out the light, and went into a deep, exhausted, lonely sleep.