Dead in the Water (8 page)

"Kind of a corporate groupie?" I suggested.

Fullwell snorted. "I wouldn't go that far, but it seems she hangs around with whoever the rising star is. The last six or eight months, it's been Pardoe."

"Lucky guy," I said.

Fullwell shook his head. "Seems she busted up his marriage, not that it was any hell before, he'd been separated, but the wife came into the office and made a fuss."

"You think that's why they hired your guy?"

He shook his head again. "This was bigger than that. You don't hire an armed guy unless you've got something that needs special protection."

"And unless other people might know where you're headed with it." I thought out loud. "Tell me, can this contact of yours check there and see if anyone at Straiton has a cottage up here?"

"I can try. But it's Saturday, and this person may not be free to go into the office on a weekend. He likes to keep his snooping down to office hours, he doesn't want anyone to know he's in cahoots with us. Listen, I'll call my people in New York, get them on it for me." He picked up the phone and called his New York head office, using his credit card.

I listened while he caught an earful from the guy on the other end. He stuck it out, then gave his instructions, quickly and clearly. "I know damn well it's Saturday afternoon. I oughta be out in the sunshine too, but those are the breaks, and it's your man who's dead, so get off your butt and find out what I need to know." He hung up with a clatter and sat looking at the phone with hatred in his eyes. "New York. They still think they're the world and the rest of us are outer space."

"Murray is one of theirs," I reminded him. "They're uptight."

"Yeah. Me too." He stood up. "I should go take a look at the body, make sure it's Murray. They sent me a wire picture of him. That's all I've got to go on."

He showed me the picture and I checked. "That's our stiff."

"It figures," he said, "but for the book, I'll go check. What are you gonna do?"

I hadn't told him quite everything. I didn't think he needed know about that cross on the map. That was just a hunch, no sense two grown men following up a will-o'-the-wisp.

"The guy who took my boat headed north. I'm going to take a look up there and see if I can find it. It ain't clever, but could be productive."

"Who's gonna mind the store?"

"Murphy, our mister."

He grinned in amusement. "You mean you're it? The whole department, under that hat?"

"Don't discount Sam," I said, and the big dog looked up and waited for an order. I told him "easy."

"How about this mister?" Fullwell was being professional; he wanted the facts. "Is he dependable?"

"As a rock. He's been in this office since he came back from the war. It he hadn't gotten himself shot up, he'd have been a heel in this town. His father owned most of the shoreline, up until the Depression, when the bank got it. But the locals respect Murphy, he's one of their own."

Fullwell strolled to the exit in the counter, swinging his legs the way patrol car coppers do after hours in the driver's seat. So how do I reach you again?"

"I'll come back here later, say around six. We can compare notes then."

He nodded and flicked the brim of his hat with one finger, the way they used to do in westerns. I could hardly keep from laughing.

I phoned Murphy at home. His wife told me he was spraying his roses and I told her to wish him luck. If I needed him I'd give him a call later. A man deserved a lunch break, and if Murph went to an hour and a half, well, he made up for it with his twenty-four-hour care of the telephone and his long hours at the office when he was needed. At the moment I didn't see what else he could do. I assumed he'd already tried find out if anyone from New York was staying locally. If he had any information for me, he'd have passed it along. I whistled Sam and left, locked the office, then drove down to the marina.

George, the Indian kid, was sitting in the sun in front of the gas pump. He had a book in front of him but wasn't reading. He was watching a blonde in a bikini sunning herself on the deck of one of the tied-up cruisers. I didn't blame him. She had it all over
War and Peace
like a tent. He jumped up when I came down the dock. "Those big feet, Reid, you'll never sneak up on an Indian."

"Okay, Tonto. What can you show me in a power boat?"

He grinned. "I heard some dude made off with yours."

"He will live to regret it," I said.

The blonde heard us talking and raised herself on one elbow. Her top had come undone and we had a micro-flash of wonderland before she subsided again and fiddled with the string, writhing like a landed muskie. George sighed.

"It's about this boat," I reminded him.

"Oh yeah." He walked with me to one of the marina's rental oats. It was the same age as the police boat but with a smaller motor, for trolling. "Help yourself."

I got into it, calling Sam after me. He came and coiled down on the bottom, happy to be in the sunshine. I asked George, "Anything else going on I should know about?"

He thought a moment. "Nope. Except some guy on a cruiser must have had a birthday."

"Yeah, what happened?"

George scrunched his face, remembering. "Well, he tipped Crazy Eddy Crowfoot ten bucks for carrying a few bags of groceries down from the store about an hour ago, more, maybe."

I whistled. "He hasn't seen that much cash since they took the bounty off wolf tails."

"Yeah, well he's up in the beverage room spending it and he went to the liquor store first," George said. "More work for you later." He was right, I thought. Eddie made an ugly drunk.

"Which cruiser was it?"

"The
Mary Sue
, big job, sleeps six. Out of Honey Harbour."

I stored the name in my noggin. "Thanks, keep me posted."

He waved and sloped back to the gas pump to get his old view of the blonde who seemed to be doing isometric exercises designed to pop his eyes out. I backed the boat out from the dock and started away upstream.

I felt frustrated and a little foolish, following up nothing more solid than a hunch, backed up by the direction my boat had taken and a dim pencil cross on an old map. My mind was racing through all the things that might be done. I could be checking cottages to find if anyone knew of a connection between Murphy's Harbour and a chemical company five hundred miles away. Most police work is like that. You ask the same question a hundred times until someone gives you an inch, then you take in a mile of information. As it was, I was following a will-o'-the-wisp. But it was a fine blue-skyed day and the breeze of driving through the still warm air was cool and pleasant. I did what Confucius recommends in such cases, sat back and let it happen to me for a while.

Just through the narrows there was a boat tied to the marker buoy, something you're not supposed to do. Two fishermen were in it, dangling minnows in the hope of pulling in one of our muskellunge. They had beer in the boat and did a quick shuffle with their tackle box when they realized who I was.

I pulled alongside, careful to stay away from their lines. "Hi, been here long?"

"No, we just this minute tied up to the buoy," one of them lied quickly. "You wan' us to move?"

I shook my head. "I wondered if you've seen a cedar strip like this one going through the narrows, about two hours back." They both shook their heads and I pulled away without bothering to listen to their explanations. They were lying about the time they'd been tied to the buoy and would protect it by lying about everything else.

I went on farther to where the channel widened again. It would be best to check the west shore first. There were fewer cottages there, fewer places that a man could get out of a stolen boat, and have a road to walk away on, instead of fly-filled bush. I could check it quickly, touch base with the lock-keeper at the other end, and come back down the east shore, probably no wiser than I was now. I figured this out loud and Sam looked at me, wondering if a command was coming. I told him "easy" and went back to scanning the horizon.

There were five boats in view. Two were sailboats. The others probably belonged to pickerel fishermen; they were drifting aimlessly down the current, their baits bumping along the tops of the reed bed where the lunkers lay, even in warm weather. I wondered if one of the hooks would grab into the flesh of one of the missing men from Winslow's boat. I kept close enough to the shoreline to look at all the cottage docks, but never lost sight of the drifting boats. I was level with the first one when Sam suddenly sat up and started sniffing the air.

I watched him. He doesn't spook easily and he's long since been taught to take no notice of some female in an accommodating state. His nose was high and he suddenly whined. I turned the boat in the direction he was sniffing. It was past the first and second boats, both of them with moms and pops in them, burning quietly in the heat. It seemed he was singling out the third boat.

It was still too far off to be clear to me, but it didn't appear to have anyone sitting in it. That's not remarkable. A lot of fishermen have a beer or two and then lie on the seat waiting for the big strike to happen to them. As I came closer I saw it was a cedar strip. And as I came closer still, Sam stood up and gave a short, urgent bark.

I wound up my motor and closed on the other boat. Even from forty yards it looked empty, but I drew my gun anyway, keeping my gun hand down out of sight in case there were only lovers in the boat, not my missing men.

From twenty yards I could see it was the police boat.

From ten I could see there was nobody lying on the seat. I slowed the motor but drove at the other one, hitting it a glancing blow that would have put anyone inside at a shocked disadvantage.

No head stuck up. No voice protested. And when I stood up, I knew why.

Ross Winslow was in the boat, lying on his back, dead, in a rusty mess of coagulated blood that sang with the wings of a million flies.

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I
put my gun away and silenced Sam with a word. Then, careful not to touch the interior or top of the police boat, I reached in for the bowline coiled on the front seat. I made it fast to my own boat and turned away, heading for the nearest place I could get help, the lock at the north end. As I drove I checked each way for landmarks. It seemed I was downstream about half a mile from the X spot on Winslow's map.

It took me seven minutes to reach the lock. My mind was racing ahead of the boat, working out what I would do when I got there. And I was going over the few facts I had. For one thing, there was no weapon in the police boat. It might be lying underneath Winslow, but it's common for a suicide to hang on to his weapon in his death throes, so it should have been in the boat somewhere if he'd done himself in. And secondly, the outboard motor was shut off and was turned the way it would have been to steer up against a dockside or the hull of another boat. It meant Winslow could have been alongside another boat when he died, maybe his marked rendezvous. It proved nothing, but it suggested that he had been helped to die.

I reached the lock and pulled in against the low concrete wall below it. There were a couple of kids fishing, lithe young ten year olds, brown as butterscotch. I didn't want them looking in the boat. I called Sam out and walked him around a circle about ten yards from the boat. "Keep," I told him and ran up the slope to the lock house.

The lockkeeper was a slow, fat man in his fifties, sucking on a can of beer some boater had given him. He saw me coming and tucked the beer behind him, breaking into the oily greeting of the mildly guilty. "Hi, officer, how's it goin'?"

"Where's the phone?"

"In the shack." He pointed awkwardly with his left hand, still concealing the beer with the other.

"Come with me," I told him and ducked into the shack.

I was already dialing when he came in. I spoke as I dialed. "Listen close. I want the lock closed for the day. Don't let anyone through, and try to remember anyone who's been through in the last two hours."

The phone was burring as he spluttered, "Don't let nobody through. How in hell can I do that? They're on their vacation."

"I've got a dead man in the boat and I need a tarp to cover him."

Murphy lifted the phone at the other end. His voice was calm, and it reminded me that I had to do the human thing first, before I got on with the police procedure. "Murph, this is Reid," I spoke slowly. Outside I could hear Sam giving tongue. Someone was going too close to the boat. Within moments they would be crowding me here. I covered the phone and told the fat man. "For Crissakes, put that beer down and get a tarp. Hurry, will you?" I spoke into the phone again, conscious that the fat man had not moved, would not move until he had heard who was dead. "I've got bad news, I've found Winslow."

"Dead?" His voice was without tone, dead as Winslow.

"I'm sorry."

Murphy cleared his throat. It was as much emotion as he ever showed. "Drowned?" he asked.

"I think he was murdered. His throat is cut and no weapon in sight. I'll know better when I've had a chance to examine the body."

There was a long silence on the line and Sam's barking outside, and then the shouting started.

I did what had to be done. "I'm closing off the lock this end. Nobody gets in or out without a slip we can issue. I want you to bring a pad from the office and a date stamp. Then drive up here with the boat trailer."

"All right. Anything else?" He was calm again. It was wartime once more for an old soldier.

"Yeah, phone Carl Simmons to come down to the station with his camera. And put this on the telex, ready…"

After another pause he said, "Fire away."

I took out my notebook and unflipped it to the entry I had made earlier in the day. Pardoe's name and address, plus the description I had jotted down and the license number of the Volvo. I read them off to Murphy, finishing in the same instant that the first of the boaters crashed in to the lock hut with the news. He was a small man in a summer shirt, shorts, and sandals. His face was white and he was breathless. He started to jabber at the fat man, then saw me and made a grab for my shirt.