Dead in the Water (12 page)

I took off his shoes and socks and checked for money or papers. There was nothing there. I also flipped up the collar on his mackinaw to see if he had slit it and used it as a hiding place for some of the merchandise from under the dry sink at his lodge. Nothing. I guessed all his customers were cash and carry. I didn't strip the body. The doctor could do that. He might find something a policeman would miss.

The kid said, "The doctor phoned about an hour back, said that delivery is dragging on, he expects to be here around nine." I made grateful grunts. The kid couldn't resist adding, "He said what in hell's happening? Two murders in one day."

"He watches too much TV," I said. "This one could be a murder. Murray looked like an accidental death."

The boy looked at me, his eyes narrow. "How about the skin on Winslow's gun?"

"You don't mention that to anybody, okay? It could screw up the case if it got out too soon."

His eyes widened and he nodded. He was sober now. The bottle was out of sight, out of mind probably. All he had needed was someone to stiffen his spine for him. He would have made a good soldier.

McKenney came back, picking his horrible teeth with his tongue. The kid told him what we needed and went off to get it, happy to be doing something productive. By the time he came back with the samples, I was ready to go. I took his little jars and left.

Back at the station the telephone was ringing off the wall. Every time it started, Murphy's wife answered it at their house up the water and I was able to work without interruption. I labeled all the samples and the fingerprints and divided my exhibits into two bundles: one for Mike Delaney at 52 Division in Toronto, the other, containing all the blood and skin samples, for the attorney general's forensic laboratory.

I was just finishing up when the door opened and George came in. He had gone home across the lake and changed into good clothes—blue jeans of course, but a clean shirt and his fancy shoes, cowboy boots with the Cuban heel that made him six feet tall.

I grinned. "Pretty slick. Going to cut yourself a swath through the big city women, are you?"

He looked a little sheepish. But he fielded it. "Hell, I don't get too many business trips, Reid. Figured I might as well look like an executive."

"From the knees up, you're uptown. But the boots are a giveaway."

Now he laughed. "Hell, I'm trying to pass as a cowboy, you oughta know that." For some reason he trusted me. Ribbing from a stranger would have made him fighting mad. From me, it was a laugh.

I got serious, gave him the samples, and told him where he had to go and who he had to see. I gave him forty bucks, which was all the spare money I had. His eyes lit up. "Buy heap much firewater," he said cheerfully.

"For the car only," I wagged a finger at him. "For tonight you're an acting police officer. No drinking. You wanna hustle some lady, you do it on cokes."

He winked at me and left.

I stood up and uncrinked my back, then went out and got in the scout car. The locks closed at dusk, but nobody was going to get uptight if I closed them an hour early, not tonight. When I got to the north lock, Murphy was sitting in the shack, smoking one of his hand-rolled smokes. He looked beat. Sam was flat out on the floor, his chin on the ground, but his eyes moved every time anybody came in. When he caught a hint of me he straightened up and whined.

Murphy grinned. "Must be nice being wanted."

"You can't beat it." I waited politely while he told Sam to come with me. I could have hooked Sam away from anybody, he was my dog through and through, but it was good for his training to go through all the motions. When he came over I wrestled him a little, then cleared things up with the lockkeeper. "Either Murph or myself will be up in the morning. Until we get here, don't let anybody out without one of those entry slips signed by Murph, or by a Mr. Fullwell, the guy who's been working the south lock for us today."

The fat man grunted. "Don't make no sense to me, little bits of paper…"

I could have argued with him, but it would have done no good. He was lazy. He thought with his guts, and any more rules than he generally had to carry out meant less chance of the occasional free beer. "Trust me," I said. "Anybody going into the basin, you give them a slip and sign it. Anybody coming out has to show you one or wait for us."

Murphy broke in, his voice tired. "Don't forget, it could find the sonofabitch't killed Ross Winslow."

We said good night and Murphy and I walked out to the car. He got in and leaned back. "What did you find out?"

"For one thing, Ross was carrying a Luger and it had some skin and blood on the barrel, as if he'd clobbered somebody over the head."

Murphy turned and stared at me, very cold. "Are you saying he pistol-whipped that Murray who drowned?"

I concentrated on driving back out to the roadway behind the little park where the lock sat. "You know this job as well as me, Murph. I'm not paid to think, I'm paid to find out. I've sent the tissue sample off, with a matching chunk from Murray for them to check. We'll see what the forensic guys say."

Murphy spat out of the car window as if he wanted me to know that the story was too hard to swallow. "I've known Ross Winslow forty years and except for the war, I've never known him to get rough with anybody." His voice rose angrily as he remembered more. "I've never known him to get rough with any
thing
, for that matter. All the years I've known him, he's never even taken out a deer license."

I said nothing, just drove, letting the air wash through the car windows and cool him down. He snorted a time or two and settled down quietly. Then I asked him, "What did you see?" His anger boiled up again. "I saw how people pass the day when they're rich, that's what. I saw them lying around on expensive cruisers with expensive women, thin women in little bitty swimsuits and glasses of good booze in their hands. That's what I saw. And I saw them laughing at us donkeys trying to do our job of police work with a couple of guys and a dog and a cripple."

I let it all go. I could remember days when buddies of mine had been wasted. Everything else in the day made you angry. Especially officers and dumb orders. After a pause to let him know I had listened to everything, I said, "I guess Fullwell didn't find anything either. That means that whoever did it is still in the basin." Murphy thought about it. I could see him working to push the anger out of his mind to make room for the professionalism, the patterns that could put his buddy's killers behind bars.

"What makes you so sure it was people in a cruiser?"

I told him about the way the blood had spilled, the way the body had fallen. He listened and nodded. "I saw a guy get a piece of shrapnel in the throat one time, in Italy." There was a long pause as his memory creaked back and remembered all the details that had been unforgettably vivid that day, and been overlaid with a thousand others, just as unforgettable, between then and the time he arrived back in Murphy's Harbour with a tin leg and a pension that maybe kept him in tobacco if he rolled his own cigarettes.

I said, "I was thinking of picking up some burgers and taking them down to the station, along with you and Fullwell, check where we stand."

He shook his head. "Bert'll never hear of that. Come on to my place."

"You sure she won't mind? Two extra guys turning up at suppertime."

Murphy snorted a pleased little sound. One of the good things in his life was big, capable Bertha. "She wouldn't say a word if I brought the whole goddamn Indian Reserve home for supper."

"Well, it's sure better than the Chinaman's. If you're certain."

"Positive."

We drove through town, along the side of the water and out to the lock. Fullwell was sitting on a bollard, smoking one of his little brown cigarillos. He got up and came to the car. "Hi, what's next?" His face was flushed with sunlight, and he looked tired but healthier than he had when he arrived in the harbor six hours earlier.

"Supper at Murph's place—hop in," I told him.

He squeezed in. Murphy made room, lifting his tin leg up on to the transmission hump, out of the way.

I became aware of the smell of Fullwell's cologne. I grinned in the gathering dusk. The biggest use for cologne in these part was as a replacement for booze on slow Sundays. Fullwell dangled his right forearm out in the wind. He was uncomfortable at going to Murphy's house, and he sounded us out before accepting it.

"You sure this won't be any trouble… ?" he tried. Murphy said, "positive" again as if he had it rehearsed.

We all sat quiet like good boys until I reached Murphy's place. It was as neat as a pin with those goddamn corny roses spilling all over the trellis around the door. It looked like one of those jigsaw puzzles you used to get of English country gardens. Fullwell got out and spent a tactful moment or two sniffing the flowers while Murphy negotiated his stiff leg out of the car. Bertha Murphy came to the door as we all approached. She was big and cheerful, one of the people in the world who have certainties in her life. She was certain of Murphy, certain of the essential goodness of the people of Murphy's Harbour, certain that Christ was a member of the United Church. I liked her. If my own wife had been the same way she could have weathered the bad times we had when I hit those three slobs.

I put it all out of my mind and lived for the warm, blowsily comfortable minute.

Bertha said, "Hello, Reid. You've had a busy day." She bent and patted Sam who was happily cocking his leg on the rose bush. "You too," she said.

Murphy said, "This here is Mr. Fullwell, Bertha. He's an investigator from T'ronnah."

"We spoke on the phone," Bertha said, wiping her hands on her apron and then shaking Fullwell's. "Did you get your sandwich like you wanted?"

"Thanks, yeah."

We washed up in the tiny bathroom and came back into the kitchen where Bertha was setting out cold cuts and boiling water for tea.

Fullwell had the awkward politeness of a visitor from another culture. He wanted to talk about the case but carefully waited for me to start it, and I knew it was hopeless until supper was over.

Bertha chattered. All the callers had been neighbors. No one had called with any useful information. People who knew about Winslow's death had called, knowing that Bertha would be answering the police phone and would tell them whatever she knew. We listened politely and helped ourselves to sliced meat and salad. The kitchen chairs were sticky plastic and the sweat was running down the inside of my shirt by the time I'd finished eating. Fullwell was about two bites behind me. Murphy was down the track, but he could see what was needed.

"Listen, Bert. We've gotta get our heads together; d'ya think you could take over the phone again for a while?" He left it a moment or two before adding "please" in a pleading tone of voice.

Bertha was quite cheerful about it. "You men get on with it. There's plenty more tea in the pot." She beamed at us all and left.

Fullwell relaxed at once. "I didn't see a damn thing at my lock," he said. "Not a boat came through that could have been involved."

Murphy cleared his throat. "Me neither. I don't think it was any damn use at all, Reid, you ask me."

Fullwell glanced at him in surprise but said nothing.

"It's the closest we could come to sealing off the scene of the murder. I'm sorry we didn't catch anybody with blood on the boat, but at least we know that the boat that was involved is still in our reach of the waterway."

Murphy said, "Great." Fullwell sniffed.

The heat was getting to me. It had already been a long hot day and we were no closer to any answers. I was beginning to lose patience with Murphy, but I kept it in.

"Let me just lay out everything I know, in one straight line, okay?" The other two sat silent. Fullwell brought out his tin of little Dutch cigarillos, offered them to each of us, then lit up. I said, "Ross Winslow was pushing grass and he was pushing pills."

Murphy shot me a look. "How'd you get to say a thing like that?"

"I went through his room. He had enough speed to get the whole goddamn district flying, plus some grass." I waited a moment to see if either one of them would ask where I got the search warrant. They didn't. "What that means to me is that Winslow had some pretty sleazy dealings. Somewhere down the line he had to be tied in with some rounders."

Still no argument. I ploughed on. "I also found a map with a cross marked at the approximate place where I found the boat floating today. Now, if you add in the fact that he was wearing a gun when we found him and that his boots were covered with muck from the island up by the narrows, I start to put a picture together."

Fullwell took over, so excited he forgot to take the cigarillo out of his mouth. It wagged as he spoke. "It could be that he was going to meet some guys up where he ended up. So he puts on his gun and goes over to the marina and there he is, waiting, when Pardoe and Murray arrive."

"He was at the marina every Friday night, regular as clockwork—he always came into town to go to the beer parlor," Murphy objected. "He's never missed. He wouldn't even go to the Legion on a Friday."

"Exactly." That was the cue I had been looking for. "And he was there at eight o'clock, regular as clockwork. Only this time he was fiddling with a motor that was already running good."

Fullwell took his cigarillo out of his mouth. His eyes were bright and his voice had picked up speed. He was thinking as he spoke. "So it looks like he'd been set up to meet those two. It's easy for me to believe that he was trying to take them up to the point marked on the map."

"That's what I make of it," I said. "Only somebody cut the lines on his boat, most likely up near the narrows, so he couldn't make his rendezvous."

Murphy was silent. It was his own personal statement on the case, anger and frustration tied together, a defense of Winslow's memory in the face of all the evidence we were fitting into place.

"It all makes sense," Fullwell said.

"Yeah, plus the fact that Murray had been hit in the head, and when I checked Winslow's gun he'd slugged somebody with it; there was skin and blood on the barrel."