Authors: Scott Thornley
Strangling a woman in an aluminum boat wouldn’t be too difficult. But stripping her, wrapping her in a nylon line tied to a heavy anchor, lifting it and the body over the side, sliding it silently into the water without a loud
kersploosh
—well, that would take considerable strength. Not to mention a cool head free of panic.
If she screamed as someone was passing by? Too risky. She had to have been dead before the boat ride, her neck snapped somewhere else. Night comes early in December. If he’d attacked her in the parking lot, he would appear like any other man stealing kisses in a parked car.
MacNeice climbed into his car and started the heater. His hands were finally thawing when a black Saab with a kayak on the roof pulled in to park. He watched the driver take the kayak from the rack and put it on the frozen grass, then retrieve a life jacket and paddle from the trunk. Not far from him was a concrete dock, but it appeared that he was going to launch from the land. MacNeice turned off the car, put his keys back in his pocket, took the envelope and walked over to him.
Short and fit, the man was wearing a black neoprene body suit with a hood topped off by a Montreal Canadiens toque. As MacNeice approached, he was pulling on a fluorescent green life jacket.
“You appear to know what you’re doing, so I won’t ask, why go out on such a cold day?”
“It’s not so bad today, and I’m used to heavy water. So’s the boat.”
“What is it exactly?”
“It’s a Beaufort sea kayak.”
MacNeice explained who he was, then asked, “Can I show you a photo of a woman I’m trying to identify?”
The kayaker was willing but didn’t recognize her. When he asked what happened to her, MacNeice told him she died in Cootes Bay the previous November or December. The man shrugged and said—as he slipped on his neoprene gloves—that wasn’t water he’d want to die in. MacNeice nodded, returning the photo to the envelope.
MacNeice braced himself against a sudden gust of wind. “Just out of interest, why don’t they make those suits in fluorescent yellow?”
“I have no idea. I wouldn’t wear one if they did.” He lifted the kayak into the water, held it still with his foot and, laying his paddle across the cockpit to stabilize it, he slipped inside, adjusted the vinyl apron’s elastic around his waist, making himself one with his boat.
He was about to paddle off when MacNeice called to him, “Do you know where the nearest marine supply store is?”
“Right over there”—he pointed with the paddle—“three blocks east on Burlington, the Dockyards.” With a half-dozen strokes, he was out on the bay and turning into the wind, the waves breaking over the bow and sheering off either side before they reached the cockpit.
As MacNeice was getting back into the Chevy, his cellphone rang. He fumbled with near-frozen fingers to retrieve it from his pocket and answered on the fourth ring. It was Ryan. He’d had a call from the overnight surveillance of Byrne’s house. He’d left the bar just after midnight, walked home, stayed inside until morning and received no visitors.
“Nothing else?”
“Byrne made one call at 12:18 a.m. A male answered, ‘Hello.’ Byrne replied, ‘Don’ call me, I’ll find you.’ The man responded, ‘Yeah,’ and hung up. It was over in four seconds, not long enough to trace.”
MacNeice had just put the phone down when it rang again. Looking across the bay to the spit of land getting blasted by wind and rain, he picked up.
It was an angry William Byrne. “I was expecting you here at eight.”
“I’m on my way,” MacNeice said. He punched in Mary Richardson’s number, turned away from the view and eased the Chevy slowly toward the entrance.
“I was going to call you, detective.”
“News, I hope.”
“There was one small thing.” Richardson’s voice echoed; she was likely standing next to the morgue table. “I cannot speculate as to the reasons why it was done, but under ultraviolet there appeared to be evidence of tape over her eyes and a wide patch across her mouth halfway to her ears.
“Tape, like duct tape?”
“That would leave a different adhesive residue. This was more likely common packing tape, the kind couriers use. With magnification, we’ve detected rectangles that suggested the killer used two-inch tape. Where there had been tape, there was no peach fuzz.”
MacNeice looked back across the water to Cootes. There were things to reconsider; among them, his initial theory that the killer had arrived by freighter. That one was fading faster than a radio signal on a lonely highway. To begin with, it was impossible to see the steel plants from here, and it was unlikely that anyone disembarking from a ship would know anything about the tiny bay at the other end of Dundurn Bay. To make it more difficult, Cootes was invisible
from the southeast. Heavy anchors, exotic knots, tape on the mouth and eyes—somehow it was all too ornate for a merchant seaman.
William Byrne was standing on the porch of the old port hotel, smoking a cigarette, when MacNeice came to a stop in front of the bar. As he climbed the stairs, Byrne rubbed the butt out on the railing and flicked it onto the road.
“There’s actually a law that deals with littering, Mr. Byrne.”
“Then I’m guilty as charged.”
MacNeice presented the warrants, one for the November and December registries, another for a search of the premises.
Byrne led him to his office, where he sat down and read both documents carefully. Then he tossed them on the desk and asked MacNeice which he’d like to do first: search the place or look through the registry books. MacNeice took the two black imitation leather books.
“You got September through December there, but I’ve also added January and February. I hope that’s enough. I’d give you March, but I’m using it.”
“I’ll return them as quickly as possible,” MacNeice said, tucking them into the briefcase. “Take me on a tour. If I feel a more thorough search of the premises is necessary, we’ll be back.”
Byrne retrieved a two-inch ring with a set of keys from the drawer and together they left the office, squeezing past the remaining cases of Guinness. On the left was the kitchen. Its door swung both ways, a circular greasy window keeping the waitresses from pushing through with
their orders and whacking someone, mostly Byrne, heading to the office. On the right was a door with a small Private sign. It was the storeroom for the bar and the hotel rooms.
The kitchen was clean and staffed by two men, one in his twenties and the other middle-aged. “Hard workers, from the Philippines,” Byrne said. The younger one was dipping healthy portions of haddock in batter while the older one emptied a massive tin of mushy peas into a pot. “Do one thing well, Pa told me, and you’ll be a happy man. Fish ’n’ chips is what I do well. We don’t do burgers or fried chicken—there’s plenty a places to find that.”
The storeroom contained an industrial washer and dryer for the bed linens and towels, kitchen and bar supplies, a stack of toilet paper, tiny bars of Ivory soap, and extra towels, sheets, blankets, pillows and pillowcases. Like the office, there was no room to spare.
The bar was empty, inhabited only by the sour smell of spilt beer from all the nights before this morning. MacNeice moved into the middle of the space. The washrooms were on either side of the stairs leading to the rooms above. The entry wall featured—what else?—grimy block and tackle, fishnets, framed black and white photos of large trawlers. Several featured docks—somewhere other than Dundurn—where large fish were hung for weight and length with men smiling and smoking pipes, wearing heavy sweaters or rain gear and waving to the camera. The windows that faced the street looked untouched from when they’d been installed in the 1880s.
Byrne watched MacNeice as his eyes took in every detail. He drew the detective’ attention back to the end of the bar and the cash register. “I usually keep the registries here the till. It doubles as the check-in counter.”
Byrne led the way up the stairs. On the landing there was a heavy door that he said was deadlocked between one and six a.m. The only way out was the fire escape on the south side of
the building, and if someone returned after the bar was closed, they’d be locked out of the building until six a.m. “Saves me having an all-night clerk in slow seasons like this and keeps the sleepwalkers from coming down for a drink after I’ve gone home.”
“Not exactly code, Mr. Byrne. I would recommend you have a night clerk if you’re going to rent these rooms.”
MacNeice turned and opened the washroom door next to the stairs. Shiny painted white walls, a toilet stall, shower and two sinks set into a laminate counter. On the wall was a mirror and, next to it, soap and paper towel dispensers. Both appeared to be empty.
The corner room Byrne wryly referred to as the “Presidential Suite” had a shower stall that was so stained with use and age that it looked like nicotine plastic. Its faucet dripped, hitting the contained aluminum base with a
plit, plit, plit
.
The enamel was all but worn off the sink, and the mirror was so dull you wouldn’t bother looking for yourself in it. While cheap to begin with, the double bed was worn out, sagging from its hard life. There was a single night table of worn pine, with burns on the edges and circles from endless bottles. A nice touch for the port flophouse theme was an imitation hurricane lamp on the table, its metal base rusting. The bedcover emphasized a cigarette burn near the thin pillows, and underfoot, the carpeting was prickly and stiff. It reminded MacNeice of walking on the frozen grass at the bay. A pale yellowy green curtain covered the window, casting an uneasy tint across the room.
The room across the hall—with no such lofty designate—had only a sink, a 1950s armoire and an identical bed and night table. The lighting was provided by two four-foot fluorescent tubes behind a dirty acrylic lens. The colour scheme was hospital blue. It was a toss-up as to which room was the more depressing.
“No televisions?”
“There’s TV downstairs, and beer, if you catch my drift. We don’t have room service.”
MacNeice nodded
. Abandon all hope ye who enter here
. He told the barman to carry on, and Byrne swung the key ring theatrically around his index finger to isolate a key. He appeared to be enjoying the tour.
Byrne opened the next door. MacNeice stepped past him into a wall of musty air. The room was fitted out with a double bed and two straight-backed wooden chairs, a metal nightstand and, overhead, a bare fluorescent tube. A brown curtain was drawn over a small closet. When he pulled it back, he found three shelves with curling paper. Two dead flies lay together on the middle shelf. Byrne brushed them off and they fell to the cracked red and black checkerboard linoleum floor.
“Comfy, eh? I mean, yer here to sleep. It’s not a drawing room for receptions.”
“Next.”
The rest of the rooms were rented. Given how quiet it was, the three tenants were presumably still asleep. Byrne smiled, knocked sharply at the first door and announced, “Police,” before turning the key. Startled, an old man in pyjamas sat up and put his glasses on. “Mornin’,” he said, as if Byrne and MacNeice standing before him was the most natural thing in the world.
MacNeice asked him how long he’d been rooming at the bar. The old man reached over to a cup on the bedside table, put his hand in and retrieved his dentures. He positioned them and worked his jaw once or twice. “Well, I dunno … What do you think, Billy, three, four months now?”
Byrne shrugged his shoulders. MacNeice turned to the old man again. “So, what’s your name?”
“Freddy Dewar.”
“When was the last time you had a decent breakfast, Mr. Dewar?”
Freddy looked over his glasses at the detective. “What, you mean like bacon and eggs and hash browns?”
That was exactly what MacNeice meant. “How about you come along with me and you can eat while we chat?”
The old man’s face brightened. “Sure. Gimme a few minutes and I’ll be right with you.”
The other two roomers had awoken when they heard Byrne call, “Police.” They were both new to the bar. The first had arrived two days ago. An Italian immigrant in his thirties, he was looking for work as a carpenter. He retrieved his passport and landed immigrant status papers from a heavy corduroy jacket and handed them to MacNeice. The detective made a mental note of the name and handed both back to him.
The last of the roomers stood up shakily as they came through the door. He was a heavy man in his late fifties. His wife had thrown him out of the house the week before because of his drinking.
If there was anything left in the rooms from late November or December, it might be very tired evidence, worn down by disinterest, disinfectants and stale air.
Byrne walked MacNeice to the front door and out on the porch, where he lit up another cigarette. MacNeice was going to ask the question anyway, but this seemed to be the best time to do it.
“Do you own a boat, Mr. Byrne?”
“What for?”
“You mean, why am I asking, or why would you want a boat?”
“The former.”
MacNeice watched Byrne, patiently wondering if the barman would answer, curious to know what he might be thinking.
“I’ve an old eighteen-foot aluminum boat. In season, it’s tied up at the far end of Macassa, far enough away from the yacht club that people won’t be embarrassed.”
“And where is it now?”
“In the garage beside me house and it stays there till the beginning a May, when I put it in the water to go fishing again.” Byrne looked at his watch, snuffed the cigarette against a column and turned to go inside.
“There’ll be a unit down here for the boat and a forensics team to do a thorough search of the premises—they’ll be as efficient as possible so as not to interrupt your business.”
Byrne exhaled dramatically but said nothing.
When he’d gone, MacNeice called Aziz to get the additional warrant to have the boat picked up.
The Committed Chick was dedicated to all-day breakfasts and never-ending coffee. Freddy Dewar read the menu, taking his time over the cartoons of cavorting yellow chicks and photos of the specials. He settled on Chickin-lickin-blues, pancakes with two strips of bacon, maple syrup and blueberries—whipped cream on the side—and said yes to the bottomless cup of coffee.