Corkscrew (6 page)

She lay still, and then, as consciousness brought memory back, she began to weep silently. After a moment or two I helped her to sit up, and McKenney brought a chair. Her husband lifted her to her feet and sat her down. McKenney's assistant appeared with a glass of water. "Sip this," I told her, and she drank while the tears ran down her face.

I turned to her husband. "I think you should take her back to the cottage, Mr. Spenser. I'll be over to see you both later, in about an hour."

He nodded, and then he spoke quickly, so softly that I had to lean close to hear him. "Listen, Chief, I'm sorry I was difficult earlier on when you came around. I'd been drinking."

I was surprised but gave him a formal little smile and said, "Don't worry about it; you're on vacation."

He nodded, grateful for the out. "I know. But I drink too goddamn much."

He stooped and put his arm around his wife's shoulders and eased her to her feet. I watched them leave and wondered why he was apologizing, and to whom.

Chapter Five

Dr. McQuaig must have passed them as they left. He came in thirty seconds later, carrying his scuffed leather bag, head down and hurrying as he always is. He's a lean old Scot who settled in the Harbour because he likes to fish and can be on the water in two minutes from his big old house on the shore.

He smiled when he saw me, a businesslike flicker of the mouth. "Hi, Reid. Is that the kiddie under there?"

"I'm afraid so, Doctor. Shall we take him out back again?"

"That would be best," he said, slipping out of his jacket as he walked. McKenney's assistant pushed the gurney back into the preparation room, and we all followed. The doctor flung his coat carelessly over an empty coffin and flicked the sheet back from the dead face. He grunted. "How long since he was in the water?"

"About forty minutes."

McKenney's soft voice said, "There was no frothing at the mouth or the nostrils that I could see."

The doctor glanced at him, then back at the boy. "That bump could have killed the wee lad." He opened his bag and took out his stethoscope. He put it into his ears, rolled back the Camp Sunrise T-shirt on the dead boy, and put the little cup on the chest, low down. I wondered if he was checking for signs of life, but he tapped the chest with his hand, keeping the cup pressed down while he did it.

We watched him as he rolled the body over and did the same thing low on the back, at the bottom of the ribs. Then he took the stethoscope out of his ears and stood looking at the body for a few seconds. Nobody spoke. He rolled the body right side up, moving as gently as if the boy were asleep, and stooped to check the face, tilting his bifocals up with his left hand so he could come in close. Then he picked up the boy's limp hand and studied the fingernails.

At last he lay the hand down and straightened up. McKenney and his assistant were watching him, poised like birds of prey, waiting for him to speak, but McQuaig's lived in Murphy's Harbour long enough to know that McKenney's one vice is gossip. McQuaig smiled the same tight smile and said, "I'd like a word with the chief in confidence, if you'll excuse us, Les."

McKenney cleared his throat and paused for a moment longer while the doctor kept on smiling. Then he gave in and turned to his assistant. "You may as well go for supper, Irwin. I'll see you back at seven."

The assistant straightened himself up, just as reluctant to move, but said, "Yeah, okay, Mr. McKenney," and ambled out, with his boss a slow pace behind him.

When the big metal-covered door had swung shut, the doctor said, "I don't want this getting around town, you understand."

"Of course," I said. "What do you see?"

He turned back and picked up the dead hand. "There's marked lividity in his face—you can see that—but it's also in his fingernails." I waited, still not certain what he meant. He rolled the boy's shirt back and tapped the abdomen with his fingertips as if it were a bongo. "See that?" He glanced up at me. "There's a lot of spring in the abdomen, as though his lungs were still filled with air."

"He didn't drown, then?"

"No. If you want my first opinion, I'd say he was smothered. That would be after he was struck in the head." He pulled down the boy's right eyelid, pointing at the white of the eye. "See those rusty-looking marks there? They're petechial hemorrhages."

"And that wouldn't have happened in a drowning?"

Like all medical men, McQuaig was cagey. "It could have, but it's not likely. If you ask me, and you did, I'd say somebody put a cloth or something over his face and held it there."

"Wouldn't his bowels have emptied?" I'd investigated the usual number of homicides while I was in the Toronto police. In most of the cases you had to hold your breath when you found the body.

McQuaig nodded. "Normally, yes, the sphincter relaxes. I imagine that he was too far gone after the blow to the head."

He was looking at me without focusing, his mind working on the evidence he had found. Then, still moving gently, he unzipped the blue jeans and slipped them half down. I watched as he rolled the body over and checked the buttocks. "He's clean," he said. He bent over and examined more closely. "And it wasn't a sexual killing."

"No marks on him?"

He looked up at me sharply. "Here, look for yourself."

"I'll take your word for it."

We stood and looked at one another for a long moment. I was going over all the things I had to do, trying to set some priorities. He spoke first. "You ought to have a proper autopsy done. The best place is Toronto, the attorney general's department. I could do it but—" He waved one hand awkwardly. "It's a special skill, forensics. They'll find things I could miss."

I came out of my trance. "Right. I'll have McKenney ship the body down there right away. But before it goes, could you take a look at the foot, the bare one?"

He turned back to the body and pulled the cuff of the blue jeans up on the bare leg. The graze I had seen earlier made him stoop again and stare long and hard.

"It looks like a rope burn," he said softly. "If you look closely, there's a loop effect, as if whatever was holding him down was right around the leg. No rock would have done that."

"That's what I thought. Can you see any fibers?"

He dropped the foot and went to his bag, rummaging in it for a magnifying glass. I held the dead foot for him while he looked it all over. Then he said, "Ah."

"Find something?" I couldn't see anything myself, but he was pointing to the deepest part of the scrape.

"There. Almost buried. I can't see a lot, but it looks to me like a piece of yellow fiber. You know the kind. Half the boats in town use that kind of rope for tying up."

He lent me the glass, and I stooped and stared until I could make out what he was pointing to. It was tiny, barely a sixteenth of an inch long.

"Leave it where it is," he instructed me. "The boys at the lab will know what to do with it better than we do. All you have to go on for now is the fact that he was tied down with a yellow rope."

"Then it's up there still, in the water below Indian Island." I straightened up. "Thank you, Doctor. Now I'd like to search the body. Then, if you could take care of the transportation arrangements with McKenney, I have to make some phone calls in a big hurry."

"Of course." He nodded and quietly pulled the boy's jeans straight again and zipped the fly. "Would you like me to stay while you go through his pockets?"

"Yeah, I'd like you here as a witness. Would you pull everything out, please?"

He nodded again and dug deep into the pockets. "Pocket knife, Swiss army pattern. Three dollars and fourteen cents. Kleenex," he said as I wrote the items in my book. "That's all in the left. In the right, one small pebble, pink color. One red-and-white Daredevl spoon."

I looked up sharply. "Is the hook still on?"

"No. No hook, just a ring on the broad end to attach a hook. There seems to be a portion of a broken hook shaft attached. Maybe he found it somewhere." He dug deeper. "There's a foreign coin of some kind." He looked at it and handed it over. "A ten-peso piece, Mexican. Could have been his lucky coin. Although it didna do him any good."

He dug on silently. "Short piece of casting line, black. Looks like heavy test. That's it. Now the back."

He rolled the body and went into the hip pocket. "Ah," he said, and pulled out a soggy bundle of paper. "Maybe this is something."

There may be nothing sadder than the things a dead child leaves behind. I didn't like going through his papers, but I had to. It helped to have the doctor there so I could stay objective and call out what I'd found. "A sales slip for almost five dollars from the grocery. That's probably for the film he bought. Two photographs. One of some boy about seventeen. The other—yes, it's his stepfather getting out of his car outside their apartment."

I stopped and looked at the photographs more closely. First the boy, blond and handsome in an English public-school kind of way. He looked as proud as a young soldier, standing in tennis clothes, holding a cup. There was an inscription on the front, "To the brat from David." The photo was well composed, a close-up, just wide enough to include the boy's face and body and the cup. Most amateurs stand off to make sure they get your feet in. If young Spenser had taken this, Carl was right. He'd had an eye for composition.

The second photograph was less impressive. It looked as if it had been taken from across a city street. A car was just driving by on the far side, but beyond it was the Spensers' car, with the stepfather rising from the seat. There was another person in the lobby of the apartment, partly obscured by the brightness on the lobby glass. I checked it through the doctor's magnifying glass. As far as I could tell, the person was a woman, blond, with short hair.

I put the glass and the photographs aside and looked at the last item. It was a letter, with the address of the Spensers' summer cottage at the top and yesterday's date. There was no name at the top; it burst out at once into angry words. I read them aloud, ignoring the childish misspellings. "'You said we were friends and I thought we were but we're not. Don't say I'm making this up like you always do. I was there and I saw and you promised you weren't going to see him anymore and you did. I saw you. That's not what being friends means, I don't think so anyways and when I get back from this rotten place I'm never going to speak to you again. Kennie.'"

Dr. McQuaig gave a little humph of embarrassment more than amusement. "Passionate little beggar, wasn't he."

I looked at him, then at the body on the table. The Vanderheyden girl had said he was always hanging around her and her friends, shy and awkward, trying to break in but not sure how to do it. And yet this letter wasn't shy. It was the kind of letter a man might send to an unfaithful lover. It was angry, filled with hurt of the kind that a timid boy would never put into words, not even in the privacy of a letter he hadn't addressed or mailed.

"It's a precocious letter," I said. "It doesn't fit with the kind of picture I had of him."

"Aye, it's precocious," McQuaig said. "When you say it. Not many boys his age would be that vehement. It was as if he was writing to some girl he was intimate with. Somebody older, maybe, who was amusing herself with him but still had other guys she was serious about."

"But that seems a bit unlikely. I mean, a girl even of his own age would likely be taller than him. Somebody who'd matured enough to fool around, even without going the distance. She'd be too big to want a little freckle-faced kid tagging after her."

We stood staring at one another, frowning, until the same thought came to both of us at once. McQuaig put it into words.

"There's always the possibility that the letter isn't addressed to a girl at all. Maybe it's to a boy."

"Like a schoolboy crush kind of thing?" I wondered.

McQuaig nodded and rubbed his chin, making a brisk little sound. "Call it a crush, but it's love."

"Do you think it was physical?" The answer was important; it would change the way I investigated the case. I might start by finding out more about the David who inscribed the photograph to him.

"It could be." McQuaig was being clinical again. "It could be, maybe, just the kind of clumsy fumbling you see in puppy dogs, or maybe, if the other boy is older, it was the real full-dress thing."

I straightened up. "Okay, thank you, Doctor. That's all I need to know for now. Could you ask the forensics people to give you an opinion about it. I'm not sure if they can, but knowing it might help."

He nodded. "Aye, I will. I'll do them a wee letter explaining what we think. And ask them to check for hairs and fibers and all the other things they can do. I'll get on with it now."

"Good. In the meantime, I've got some calls to make, and I think I should do it from the station."

He raised one hand mutely, and I went out the back door and around to my car. The crowd outside was starting to thin. It was hot, a perfect blue August day, and the dust on the unmade roadway scuffed under my feet, dry as flour.

In three minutes I was at my office, with Sam flopped on the floor beside me as I took out the office phone directory. The first person I rang was a former partner of mine in Metro Toronto, a detective by the name of Irv Goldman. I was lucky. He was just in, and he hadn't picked up the evening's headaches yet.

"Hi, Reid. How's everything going in God's country?"

"Busy for once, Irv. I've got a homicide on my hands, a boy hit on the head and smothered."

He made sympathetic noises and asked, "So what can we do in Hogtown?"

"I'd like to see if a few guys have got sheets. It'll be faster if you do it for me. D'you mind?"

"Shoot," he said, and I stared at the top of my list.

"First off, a Fred Dobos, one-fifteen Davisville. Next is Jack Innes." I gave him the address and waited while he wrote everything down. "Also, the dead boy's stepfather. He's an odd fish, name of Ken Spenser."

Irv grunted. "Odd, what way?"

"Well, nothing certifiable, but he's a two-fisted drinker, miserable with it."