Salvage (5 page)

“How well did you know him?” asked MacPherson.

Scarnum pondered, then replied. “Not well. Seen him a few times at the Anchor. Young badass lobsterman. Talked loud. Never did business with him.”

“Where'd you get the coke?” said MacPherson.

“What coke?” he said, quickly. “I don't know nothing about no coke. If you found coke on my boat someone else must have put it there, maybe whoever shot Jimmy Zinck. Maybe you'd be better off looking for that guy instead of bothering me.”

“All right,” said MacPherson. “We're bothering you. Innocent Phillip Scarnum. Wouldn't say shit if his mouth was full of it.”

He paused and looked down at the pen top in his hand, which he had chewed to pieces. “Tell me, Phillip, how'd you know Jimmy Zinck had been shot?”

Scarnum answered quickly. “I never said he'd been shot,” he said.

“Yes you did,” said MacPherson. He turned to Léger. “He did say that, didn't he?”

Léger nodded, staring at Scarnum. “He said it twice.”

“We never told you he was shot,” said MacPherson. “All we told you is he was killed. For all you know, he could have been fucking strangled. And you didn't seem too surprised.”

Before Scarnum could answer there was a knock on the door.

A constable nodded at MacPherson, who walked out.

Léger kept staring at him. “Was there anything on the boat?” she asked. She had a thick, musical French accent. Scarnum said nothing.

“What did you buy a new anchor for?” she asked. “What happened to the one on your boat?”

When MacPherson came back he didn't look happy. “Get up, Scarnum, your lawyer's here.”

“Praise the lord,” said Scarnum.

“
It was an illegal search,” said Mayor, as they walked to the lawyer's car. “They didn't have ‘reasonable and probable grounds' to search it without a warrant. So it was an illegal search, unless you gave them permission, and I don't believe you're dumb enough to do that, not when there was a pillbox of cocaine sitting in the front pocket of your pants.”

“Nope,” said Scarnum. “I'm not that dumb.”

“That's the good news,” said Mayor. “They haven't dropped the coke charge but I can't imagine a Crown prosecutor agreeing to go ahead with it, since the only evidence was obtained through an illegal search. The bad news is they've impounded the
Kelly Lynn
, so there's no cheque for you until it's returned to SeaWater, and who knows when that'll be, given that the boat appears to be a murder scene.”

Scarnum nodded. “I was afraid of that.”

The lawyer turned and looked at him. “Look,” he said. “I'm not really a criminal defence lawyer. If you're in real trouble here, you'd be better off getting another lawyer.”

Scarnum looked out the window. “S'far as I know I'm not in real trouble,” he said. “I don't know who killed Jimmy Zinck.”

He looked back at the lawyer. “What did they tell you about that?” he asked Mayor.

“Zinck was found washed up on the beach at Sandy Cove, near where you found the boat. The Mounties think he was shot on the water, then ran the boat up on the reef and swam ashore. They think he died on the beach.”

“I guess he was a tough one,” said Scarnum.

“I guess so,” said the lawyer. “They say he had a couple of bullets in him. It looked like a machine gun, they said. Christ. A machine gun. Here in Chester. You know any people who go around with machine guns?”

Scarnum looked at him and laughed. “Nope,” he said. “Christ.”

But the lawyer didn't laugh, and when he dropped Scarnum off at the boatyard, he took a business card and wrote a name on the back:
JOEL FREEMAN
.

“You get yourself arrested on something like this again, this is the guy you want,” he said. “This cocaine and machine gun stuff is not my, um, speciality. That OK with you?”

Scarnum said it was and shook his hand, and the lawyer drove off.

A
nnabelle hugged him when he stepped up onto the Isenors' porch, and pulled him into the house. Charlie was sitting at the kitchen table, with a disassembled gearbox spread out in front of him on newspapers.

“There's our jailbird!” he shouted. “They let you out of the big house, did they?”

Scarnum smiled. “I told them before we left that it wasn't cocaine,” he said. “I put a bit of baking soda in a pillbox to use cleaning a winch on the
Cerebus
. I told them it weren't cocaine but they didn't believe me until we were down at the detachment.”

“I told them!” said Annabelle, hugging Scarnum's lean body against her generous bosom.

“I told that
maudite
Québécoise constable that you weren't the type to mess around with drugs.”

“She gave her a good going-over,” said Charlie, giggling. “I didn't understand a word, but it didn't sound good.”

“I told her!” said Annabelle. “The idea that Phillip could be mixed up with something like that! I told her she should be out catching real criminals, not locking up an honest boy.”

Scarnum looked out the window at the empty mooring where the
Kelly Lynn
had been.

“They took her away, did they?” he said.

“Yes,” said Charlie. “They brought in Steve Oikle to tow it away. Wouldn't even let him on the deck. Took it down to the town wharf. Gerald told me they got a Mountie sitting watch on it.”

Scarnum nodded. “Terrible thing that happened to Jimmy Zinck,” he said. “Makes my skin crawl to think he might have been killed on the boat not long before I went through the ledges.”

Charlie nodded at that. “Terrible thing,” he said. “Now, we don't know the whole story, what he might have been mixed up in, but whatever it was, it sure didn't end up too good for him. I wouldn't be surprised to find there was drugs behind this.”

Scarnum nodded. “Awful business,” he said. He looked out the window.

“Well,” he said. “I guess I'd better go down there and see what kind of mess they made aboard
Orion
.”

“I'll walk down with you,” said Charlie.

Scarnum gave Annabelle a hug and a kiss and the two men walked down to Scarnum's boat.

It was a mess inside, with all Scarnum's sailing gear and tools pulled out of the drawers and cupboards where he'd stowed them.

“Holy Christ,” said Charlie, surveying the mess. “Hard to believe you have this much shit on the boat. Want a hand cleaning it up?”

“No thanks,” said Scarnum. “You wouldn't know where anything goes.”

Charlie laughed at that and turned to leave.

Scarnum stopped him. “Charlie,” he said. “You remember last night when I said I was going out to have a look at the
Kelly Lynn
?”

Charlie nodded.

“In the end, I decided not to bother and I went to bed,” he said.

Charlie looked him up and down. “I kinda thought that you might of decided not to go out and have a look,” he said.

Scarnum looked away.

“I'll tell you something, Phillip,” said Charlie, suddenly speaking with a serious voice that Scarnum had never heard him use. “I've lived here my whole life, and I've managed to do that without getting mixed up with the kind of fucking people who settle their arguments with machine guns. I'd just as soon it stayed that way. Whoever killed that jackass Zinck wasn't funning. What you're doing is your business, and I don't mean to stick my nose in it, but I can tell you Annabelle would be upset if you were to turn up full of holes.”

He locked eyes with Scarnum for a moment, and Scarnum nodded.

“And I'd lose one of my paying customers here,” Charlie said, and giggled, and left.

T
he digital clock next to Scarnum's V-berth said that it was 2:30 a.m. when he was awoken by the sound of a car grinding to a stop in the gravel by the dock. By 2:32 he was on his feet in his underwear, on deck, holding a long hunting knife, hunched down behind the cabin of his boat, peeking at the car.

When Angela Rodenhiser got out of the driver's side, he slipped back down through the hatch on the deck before she saw him.

He stowed the knife and watched her through a porthole as she marched toward the boat, with her purse over her shoulder and a bottle of vodka in her hand.

She stood on the dock in her miniskirt and banged the bottle against the deck of his boat.

“Phillip, you cocksucker,” she said. “I want some fucking answers. Come out here, you bastard. I want some fucking answers.”

He opened the hatch into the cockpit and called out to her in a whisper. “Angela, shh,” he said. “You'll wake Annabelle.”

It took her a minute to spy him in the darkness under the boom.

She staggered back and fixed him with her bleary eyes and burst into tears. “Oh, Phillip, they killed Jimmy,” she said. “And you're mixed up in it. Tell me you didn't kill him.”

Scarnum stepped onto the dock, took her in his arms, and told her that of course he had nothing to do with it. He brought her into the cabin and sat her down and got her a bottle of water, which she ignored. She took a drink of vodka from the bottle.

Scarnum went into the forward cabin and pulled on a T-shirt and jeans.

When he came back, Angela was leaning forward, shaking her head from side to side vigorously, and crying. “They killed him. They killed him.”

Scarnum sat next to her and put his arm around her. Very slowly, repeating himself often, he told her how he had come across the boat on the rocks. He told her he didn't know that Jimmy was on the boat until the cops told him he'd been killed. He told her the police had arrested him, thinking he had some cocaine, but that it was really baking soda in a pillbox.

She pushed him away when he was finished and held him at arm's length.

“Tell me honestly,” she said, and suddenly she seemed almost sober. “You didn't have anything to do with killing him. You're not mixed up with those Mexicans.”

He looked straight back at her. “Honestly,” he said, letting her look into his eyes, “on the soul of my dead mother, I had nothing to do with killing him. I have nothing to do with any Mexicans.”

She didn't let go. “And you didn't kill him so that you could be with me,” she said. “Tell me that. You didn't kill him so you could have me.”

“Angela,” he said. “No. No. No. You know me. I don't want a woman, not even you. If I'd a wanted to take you away from him, the first thing I'd a done is asked you.”

She hugged him then and held him tight for a long time, crying. He stroked her tangled brown hair and told her she'd be all right.

When she finished crying, she reached for her purse and pulled out a little Baggie full of cocaine.

Scarnum watched her load up a finger full and snort it.

Her eyes suddenly got wide and she looked at him as if for the first time that night. “Phillip,” she said. “I need you to fuck me now.”