When the Killing Starts (24 page)

"Only for the time I was up at Prince Arthur Place. I went back to Fred's apartment after that and watched TV, went to bed."

"What time did you get there?" The partner was quick with the question. I looked up at him, seeing the glint in his eyes that meant he had me handcuffed and locked up already, the hell with me, the hell with Elmer.

"Around eleven. I phoned Fred, then watched TV. I caught the late news, including the local news around eleven-thirty."

The partner almost purred. "Then you had all night to slip back to the Michaels house, do what was done, and go home."

Elmer exploded. "Shut the fuck up. I'm telling you, I've known this guy longer than you've been out of Pampers."

"And you're bangin' his sister."

The line hung in the air like the silence between a lightning flash and the rumble of thunder, and in the silence I leaped to my feet and stuck a stiff finger on the end of his nose as if it were a bell push.

"Listen, snotrag. Any cracks out of you and I'll tear your head off and stuff it where the sun doesn't shine."

Elmer grabbed my arm. "Easy, Reid. He's just an asshole kid. My partner's on vacation. I'm stuck with this punk; ignore him."

The other detective was looking at me. The sneer had gone from his face, but it was superior as he spoke softly. "Pretty violent, aren't we, Mr. Bennett."

I sat down again. I didn't apologize. It would have done no good. Anyway, it wasn't his opinion that mattered. The way things looked, I was going to have to convince twelve of my peers that I had not strangled Norma Michaels.

Elmer drained his juice and turned to the sink to rinse the glass and gulp down a swallow of cold water. Then he set the glass down and turned back to me. "The thing is, Reid, there's more."

"More? Like what?"

"Well, when the death was reported to the husband, he told us he'd found some receipt you'd signed, a receipt for twenty-five grand, paid by the husband's girlfriend."

"I signed that in Michaels's office yesterday morning." I slapped my forehead with my palm. "I've been set up. He asked me to predate it to when his girlfriend was alive, said he wanted her name cleared, no mention made of the rubber check she gave me."

"But she was dead," the young cop said. I looked at him, seeing his future. He would have a long, safe career as a copper. He never deviated from the rules. He'd never get his ass in a sling over jumping to conclusions. Guilty people would get away, innocent people would be sent down, but he would be able to look himself in the eye every morning and know he had done his stinking job. In that flash of a glance I gave him, my own future swam before my eyes. Even if I didn't end up in jail, could I ever go back to police work?

"Yes, she was dead. I spent a lot of yesterday evening trying to kick start her heart."

"Damn, Reid. It was dumb to date that note that way," Elmer said. "The thing of it is, Michaels is saying that his girlfriend wanted his wife killed and that she paid you to do it."

"That money was to get his kid back from the Freedom for Hire people. Young George Horn helped me, and I gave him half this morning." Why does the truth sound like a tin trumpet?

"The thing is, he's made a case against you, and we have to investigate. I'm sorry." Elmer looked utterly miserable. He was going to have to explain all of this to Louise when he got off duty.

"You want me to go down to the station with you?"

"It'd save worrying Lou," he said.

"Okay, Elmer, I'll go tell her."

"You want me to come?" I could see the idea worried him. He was crazy about Louise. He'd have done anything to spare her any concern.

"Naah, relax a minute, I'll sort it out." I walked out into the garden. The barbecue was flaring, and Louise was shaking water out of a pop bottle to douse the flames. The burgers smelled good.

She looked up at me. She reminds me of my mother, and the concern in her face kicked me back through the years to some time I had come in late from fishing and Mom had worn the same expression. "What's going on?"

"This case I went up north on, it's taken another twist, and Elmer has asked me to help out for a while. I have to go with him."

She's nobody's fool. "If that was all of it, he wouldn't have looked like he does."

"You know how it is; he doesn't like involving family in his job. No policeman ever does."

"Are you going to arrest somebody?" Jack asked.

"Very soon," I told him. "Right now it's a game of cops and robbers, and I have to play."

He stretched up to his full four feet eight. "I'm going to be a detective when I grow up, like you and Elmer."

"Good idea," I said. "Listen, can you guys take care of Sam for me?"

"Sure." He dropped to his knees and fussed Sam, who was sitting as close to the barbecue as he could, looking hopeful. "Good boy, good old Sam."

Sam blinked and looked at me. I raised one finger to him, and he stiffened. "Stand up, Jack," I said, and he did, straight-backed as a soldier, alongside Sam. I pointed my finger at Sam. "Okay, Sam, go with Jack." It was my formula for handing over. From now until the process was reversed, he was Jack's dog and I was the stranger, pined for, maybe, like a lost friend, but not to be obeyed.

Jack turned immediately and ran to the corner of the yard, under the big oak tree that splits the fence. "Come on, Sam," he called, and Sam bounded away to him.

"I don't know how long this is going to take," I told Louise, "but make sure Sam gets walked and don't let the kids stuff him with burgers."

"You're making this sound serious," she said. "If it was just an investigation, you'd take Sam. What's going on, Reid?"

"I'll be in the office, and Sam's better off here. I'll see you tonight, but I'll ring before I come back. I'll probably be back when Elmer gets off work. See you then." I winked at her and tapped her on the arm lightly, then went back into the kitchen. Louise was going to follow me and speak to Elmer, but the barbecue flared again, and she stayed where she was, lifting off the burgers.

Elmer and his partner drove an unmarked police car so I didn't have to sit in the cage. In any case, Elmer insisted I sit in the front with him, sticking his partner in the back, where he sulked silently, arms folded, waiting for me to get mine.

The police station was busy. It was lunch hour for half the evening shift, and policemen in uniform were coming and going with lunch pails and boxes from the chicken place up the block. A few citizens were sitting around the front of the office, smoking and muttering and wishing they were somewhere else. Elmer led me past them, up to the detective inspector's office. "You remember Andy Burke? Used to be sergeant of detectives in Fifty-four Division," he told me. He was nervous, like a kid bringing his girlfriend home for the first time, wondering what the family would think. I guess I wasn't helping. I said nothing.

Burke was a big man in a light summer suit with a beer belly that hung way out over the big belt he was wearing. I guessed he had his .38 at the exact center of the back of it. He was sitting forward in his chair, so I was probably right. And he was giving somebody hell on the phone.

"You know better than that," he growled. "If we don't get a warrant, we're dead. We must've arrested that sleaze a dozen times; he knows the law better than you do. You gotta go by the book or he walks. Do it by the goddamn book or don't do it."

He hung up and looked up at me. "Hey, Bennett, right? Used to be in Fifty-two?"

I knew him only slightly, and it was odds on that he didn't remember me, but he was abreast of Elmer's investigation and knew I would be coming in. He stood up and shook hands, but perfunctorily, not wanting me to assume any familiarity. "Siddown. Want some coffee?"

"No, thanks, Inspector. Just want to get this mess cleared up and go home."

"Yeah." He swung his feet up on the desk. There was a smear of dead chewing gum on his left sole, and I couldn't see his face until he parted his feet, like curtains, and peered out. "Fill me in," he said.

"It's complicated, and it's messy, but I'll tell you right off the top that I didn't touch that woman."

"Of course," he said heartily. It would have cheered me more if I hadn't heard a lot of policemen say the same kind of thing to a lot of rounders.

"So are you planning to arrest me or what?"

He pulled a package of Old Port cigars out of his jacket pocket and lit up before answering. "You reckon we should?"

"I heard about the dog tag," I said.

He lit his cigar and waved the match out, making it a gesture of dismissal. "Yeah, how'd that thing get there?"

"It was stolen from my house sometime overnight, sometime after three o'clock yesterday, which is when I was last at my place."

Smoke poured up around his feet, which he had closed together again. "You report the theft?"

"Yes, to the cop who's filling in for me at Murphy's Harbour. We got a good latent off the box I kept it in. I turned that over to Irv Goldman in Fifty-two Division."

He glanced up at Elmer, who hadn't been invited to sit down. "Have you talked to Irv?"

"Will do," Elmer said, and left.

Burke parted his feet again and squinted at me through his cigar smoke. "Sounds phony as hell," he said. "I'm not saying you're lying, but you have to admit it sounds like bullshit. Somebody steals something from your house, kills this broad, and plants the evidence."

"I'm being set up." So far I was still on top of my anger, but I could feel it boiling up inside me. Pretty soon I would have the urge to shout, and then they would be confident I'd done what they thought. I decided to get all the skeletons out of the closet. "Pretty soon you're going to hear another thing that sounds like evidence."

He swung his feet down and reached out to tap his cigar into the ashtray. I noticed it was filled with ash but had no butts. Did he eat them along with the little plastic holder? "What more'm I gonna hear?"

"You'll hear that I was paid twenty-five grand by a woman who hated Norma Michaels's guts and stood to gain from her death."

His expression didn't change, so I knew I wasn't telling him anything fresh, but he took his cigar out of his mouth and waved it vaguely. "Fill me in," he said, "all the way in. Fact, tell you what, why don't I get a tape recorder in here and we get it all down."

"Feel free," I said, and sat back while he bellowed for a junior detective, who got the machine and set it up. Then Burke waved the man away and spoke, enunciating carefully for the sake of the machine.

"This tape is being made at the request of Detective Inspector Burke. Mr. Reid Bennett, chief of police, Murphy's Harbour, has volunteered to help us in our investigation of the Norma Michaels homicide. He is not under arrest, he has not been cautioned. This is for the record only." Then he nodded to me, and I told him and the machine the whole story, starting with my first meeting with the woman in the bar.

I'm a professional, and the statement didn't need any questions from him to keep it on track. When I'd brought it up-to-date, he asked a couple of details. Where was the son, Jason Michaels? I didn't know. Who did I think had broken into my house and stolen the dog tags?

That question made me frown and think for a moment. "I'm not sure. But it looks to me as if Michaels Senior set it up. He pulled that stunt on me with the receipt. It looks as if he has the most to gain from making me look guilty. I'm not sure what he's up to, but all the fingers point at him."

"You think he sent somebody up there to go through your house and come up with something to plant in his house, then went home and offed his old lady?"

"Makes more sense than anything else I can think of," I said.

Burke ground out his cigar butt on the edge of the ashtray, then dropped it into the wastebasket. "More sense than any alternative except one," he said.

He reached out and turned off the tape recorder and looked at me out of big brown eyes with deep blue bags under them that sagged down into the pouches of his face. "You've been a copper long enough to know that the guy we suspect the most is you."

 

 

 

SEVENTEEN

 

 

I kept my temper. He was doing his job, nothing more. "Look, what you've got is circumstantial evidence. Two items. First, the receipt, which I wrote yesterday. Second, the dog tag. That's it. Period."

"I know," he said comfortably. "But that's more'n I get on ninety-nine percent of homicides. Why should I take your word for it?"

"Because we both know I didn't do this. That's why. That dog tag lives up in Murphy's Harbour, in a tin box in my house. Why would I have taken it out of there and come down to Toronto to strangle some woman with the cord?"

"Why not? Lots of guys are proud of their service, wear their tags all the time. The way it looks, you and her were down to your underwear, wrestling on the couch. She pisses you off. You strangle her and take off. You got problems with that?"

"I took those things off the day I got out of the service, and I've never had them on since. They're in a tin box with my goddamn medals, my father's medals from the big war, and some souvenirs of my mother. Ask anybody if they've ever seen me wear them."

"Like who would you suggest?" I got the feeling he didn't think I'd murdered Norma Michaels but wished I had. It would have made his work load a lot lighter. He might have been able to get home in time to watch the late movie with his wife. It would probably be the first time he'd made it in a couple of years.

"Like " I paused. "Not that many people ever see me with my clothes off. But I guess George Horn has seen me swimming at my house up north. He's the deputy copper there, a law student from the U. of T. And then there's my girlfriend."

"You've got a girlfriend?" He cooed it disbelievingly. Just a ploy, trying to get me mad to see if I would give anything away.

"Did you think I kicked with the other foot, Inspector?"

He shrugged. "You've got the reputation of being kind of a loner," he said.

"What's this, psychographic-profile time? You've got me pegged as some kind of guy who keeps to himself until the full moon, then heads down to Rosedale and strangles some drunk housewife with my dog-tag cord?"