A Door in the River (12 page)

“Don’t talk like that, Lane. She’s an officer of the law. OPS.”

“It’s okay, boys,” she said, backing off comically. “I’m just here on a next-of-kin job. Travers knows I’m here.”

“What does Travers know you’re here for … DI Micallef?” he said, reading her nametag.

“I’m looking for this guy.” She handed the picture to the man on the stool. The boss. “Name of Henry Wiest. I understand he plays here sometimes and I’m trying to track him down.”

“What’d he do?”

“It’s nothing he did,” she said. “There’s been a death in the family and no one can find him.”

“Maybe he’s the death in the family,” said the rake.

“Lane? Jesus. Ma’am, Detective Inspector, you’re free to look around, but this is, you know, this is a service industry and how’d it look if you were some kind of process server looking to serve this guy, your Henry, with a letter from a judge?”

“I never thought of that,” said the rake.

“You see?” said the stool. The third man was just watching.

“Yeah, I see,” said Hazel, and she took the picture back, thanking them with some kind of a bow and feeling a little stupid. She walked past the roulette table, and she was darned if the croupier didn’t give her the hairy eyeball. She was beginning to feel unwelcome.

This feeling only intensified when Commander LeJeune
met her at the edge of the room. She was smiling. “I
heard
you were lurking. What else did we miss?”

“Well, I’m a member now,” she said, and she flashed her casino ID at the commander. “I can come and go as I please.”

“To the casino.”

“So, what are you all, like, hiding in a zebra costume and following me around?”

“Percy, from the poker room, gave me a call. He thinks on his feet, that Percival.”

“Do you take me out in chains now and parade me before your people?”

LeJeune frowned at that. “That would be slightly less-than-playful banter there, Detective Inspector. What’s got you so mad?”

“Just all the paleface stuff, the fact that an officer of the law, in the same province, incidentally, that you’re living in, gets a cross-eyed look from every Indian in the place.”

“Oh come on, Detective. You’re free to do as you please.
Mi casa
, and so on. And who called you paleface? Did someone actually call you
paleface
?” She laughed heartily.

“I never said anyone called me anything. Don’t try to paint me into that corner, LeJeune.”

“Oh, calm down. What are you looking for anyway?”

“I didn’t find it.” She wanted to get out of here, now. There was a small knot of people in attendance around them, not sure if they were listening in on something interesting or not. “If I
had
found something, you’d know.”

“Well, good.”

LeJeune’s even-tempered approach was grating on her nerves. She weighed the value of being conciliatory against trying to piss her off. She decided to compromise. “I presume you accept now that Henry Wiest was murdered.”

“I don’t accept anything.”

“What would you say if I told you we’d had more … 
activity
since Henry’s death?”

“Well, I would need to know what you meant by that.”

“Cathy Wiest was attacked. In her own home. Shot with a Taser-like weapon, just like Henry was.”

For the first time, LeJeune’s expression changed. “By whom?”

“I’m going to take the Fifth on that, Commander. Until we know more. All I can tell you is that our investigation points to
here
.”

“It does, does it?”

“What would you have us do? Your own autopsy was wrong and you all seemed satisfied with your own conclusions. But the Wiests are
my
responsibility and after you gave signs of moving on, I thought it wise to run our investigation in the background. I think you would have done the same thing.”

“I shudder to think of the consequences of that,” said LeJeune. “But fine. You made your choices.”

“We did. And when we learn something, we’ll let you know.”

“Why do I feel I’m being invited to my own party, now?”

“I haven’t invited you to anything,” Hazel said, and that did it. LeJeune’s facade of total Zen collapsed and she narrowed her eyes at the detective inspector. “We did the footwork, Commander. If you want in on this investigation, it’s under my authority.”

“Cowboys and Indians?”

“Whatever you want to call it.”

Now the smile was back. “I’m not sure what I would call this. How about you do your thing, but you check in with me any time you step on reserve land?”

Hazel had no intention of letting LeJeune know anything about her movements. “Absolutely,” she said.

Outside, continuing the conversation with LeJeune in her mind, she forgot she’d brought the unmarked and it took her five minutes to find it in the parking lot. She was giving LeJeune a piece of her mind, and the commander was really feeling the heat, holding her hands up, apologizing.
You may be under the illusion that everything is always as it seems, but out here in the
REAL
world, we know it rarely is
. LeJeune looked horrified, and then the phone on Hazel’s hip rang. “
WHAT
!” she shouted into it.

“Skip?”

“Who is this?”

“It’s Roland … I’m sitting in your car on Queesik Bay Road? Drinking cold coffee out of a cracked Thermos.”

“Sorry, Roland.”

“Where are you?”

“Walking to my car about six kilometres away from you.” “You’re on the reserve?”

“I am. But I can’t talk. Has anything come up?”

“Not really.”

“Keep up the good work,” she said. She hung up on him and called Constable Costamides. Hazel had sent her down to the Wiest store that afternoon. “What’s the news?”

“I don’t think I found anything. His manager, Janis Hoogstraat, was in the store and she said Henry had taken the account books home.”

“Was that normal?”

“Actually, she sounded surprised when she couldn’t find them. Then she remembered he’d taken them home.”

Hazel thought about the ransacked office. “I’ll see you back at HQ,” she said.

] 14 [

Evening

She had an idea where those ledgers were. They were, or had been, somewhere in the mess of Henry Wiest’s destroyed office. But could the girl with the stun gun have been looking for
ledgers
? Who would Taser a stranger in her own home and then tear the place apart looking for paperwork? No, the girl’s presence in the house had nothing to do with ledgers or cheques. Maybe Henry had brought his accounts home in order to hide an unusual transaction, like those hundreds in that envelope.

Was
the girl a dealer? Maybe she’d dismissed the weed in the medicine cabinet too quickly. Was it possible what she saw there was for personal use, but the rest of it was going out the door? And he’d hooked up with a charming urchin at the casino. God, that felt like a long shot. But
you could always filter the proceeds of a minor operation like that through a small business.

She still had Cathy’s keys and she let herself into the house, hoping that if she heard the bird, it wouldn’t terrify her this time, or vice versa. “Helll-ooo, birdie … it’s Hazel. Don’t be scared, birdie …”

There were no sounds from the office, and she pushed the door open to find the birdcage was gone. For the second time in this house, she removed her sidearm. So someone had been here between the attack and now and taken the bird. Or it was on the lam.

She was beginning to feel exhausted.

She set aside the mystery of the cockatoo and stepped into the destroyed room. A ledger. That’s what she was looking for now, one of those big, hard-covered books with black tape down the spine. Something like that, or else one of those cerlox thingies. She found a yellow file folder that said
Cafe
on its label. She righted the desk chair and sat in it. These were bank statements from the café. Hazel settled in and began to read. She’d never had any idea how much it cost to run a restaurant, or if it was hard to make a living from one. Judging from the statements, it was possible to make money, but there was a lot of overhead, too. It looked like Cathy took in about six thousand dollars a month over her costs. Not a fortune but enough to live on. Some months, it appeared as if she was doing better, but the bottom line didn’t change much: on months where she
made more money, she also had more expenses. This was to be expected: if you sold more coconut cream pie, you had to buy more coconuts.

She stopped and listened for a moment. Every creak in this house was making her heart race. None of the other papers pertaining to the café seemed to point anywhere. She kept flipping through stapled, paper-clipped, perforated, and folded paper that had been strewn everywhere. A folder full of stale-dated income tax forms. These she flipped through as well, to get an idea of the household’s income. For the last five years, it seemed that Cathy was bringing down just about what Hazel thought she would be: ninety thousand, some years closer to a hundred. Running a restaurant was a tough business, but Cathy’s had been around for ten years now and she knew how to do it. Henry’s returns were here as well, and the store contributed the lion’s share of the household income and there was a lot of it. The Wiest name had been good for eighty years. Generations of families had shopped there. It looked like Henry was bringing in over a quarter of a million every year. That was his profit, after supplies, personnel, and other costs. He owned the building. That was an excellent living; it would have kept them both in style and she didn’t have to work. But she did, and they lived modestly, and as far as she could tell, they respected, but did not admire, money. Henry had already endowed a countywide hockey trophy. It was top prize in each
division of girls’ hockey in the region. It was called The Wiest Westmuir Trophy.

There was nothing in this room and there was no way of knowing if there had been anything of interest when the girl went through it.

Hazel went down the hallway to the bedroom and flipped the lights. No other forms of life. The two open dresser drawers were the ones she’d spied last time, both pulled all the way out, the top one concealing the lower. A bloom of clothing burst from the top drawer. She went through the top two drawers, found nothing, and closed them. The bottom one was closed. Hazel opened it and lying almost centred on top of a folded Hudson’s Bay blanket was a ledger book. She grabbed it greedily.

She opened the ledger. It was hard to make out what all the cheques might be for; there were so many company names that could have been his suppliers. She ran her finger up the columns, scanning the recent entries. She flipped pages back and forth, comparing dates, checking monthlies, looking for easy patterns. There were many. But just two weeks ago, there had been a cheque made out to cash for ten thousand dollars. July 31, five days before his body had shown up in the Eagle’s rear parking lot. Cashable by anyone, but it looked as if he’d cashed the cheque himself. He hadn’t wanted to categorize the expense; probably thought he would be able to cancel the debit out and explain it away if his accountant – or
the government – ever asked. So what was the ten thousand for? He seemed to have spent forty-five hundred. And then the girl had helped herself to twenty-five hundred. Was this about money or not? What was this bloody girl looking for?

Roland Forbes was starving. It was five o’clock in the afternoon. But he’d be home in time for supper: he’d seen something a few hours back, and then he’d seen it again. Now he was sure. He pushed himself up to his knees and stretched his stiffened back. Sometimes police work was almost comical: you committed to actions that made you look and feel ridiculous. But then, sometimes you got to have this feeling of a job well done. Milled out of the dailiness and normality of the world sometimes you could make out patterns and resonances. He sat behind the wheel moving his head around on his neck in little circles and looked at his tick marks again.

The people who arrived at the Eagle alone, on foot, or in vehicles of their own, were both men and women.

The people who arrived alone on foot or in vehicles of their own and who left with bags were both men and women. Of the men and women who had arrived on foot, and who clearly made purchases, some left in taxis. Some did not.

The people who arrived alone on foot and who left
without
bags were men and women.

Of these men and women, some took taxis. Some of those taxis turned left onto Queesik Bay Road and some turned right, in the direction of Dublin, the edge of the reserve’s territory, and Westmuir County as well.

And two men and one woman had arrived in their own cars, gone into the smoke shop, left without bags, and then got into taxis, leaving their cars behind. And all of those taxis had turned right.

2

Saturday, August 13, and Sunday, August 14

] 15 [

She rode the bike under the moon, north out of town, and kept to the smaller roads, just in case. She no longer had the electric gun on her. She’d used the last cartridge on the woman, and there was no hope of getting any more. They had been effective.

It would be easier now with the cash. She’d grabbed some clothing out of the drawers in the bedroom – a blue hoodie, a couple of pairs of socks, and a pair of pants – and when she stopped at a gas station, past midnight, she imagined she looked like any other person out at night. Still, she kept her face hidden within the hoodie, as she bought another map, a bar of soap, and a chocolate bar. She ate the chocolate ravenously as she continued on the bike and felt the sugar swelling in her veins, driving her on. She hadn’t felt this alive in a long time.

All along the roads here were quaint signs pointing down lanes to cottages. Little wooden fish or buoys with names painted on them. She went down one, the road turning to gravel, and rode the bicycle all the way to the bottom, where a line of cottages was spread out along the reedy shoreline of a lake. Some of the cottages were lit – these she avoided and carefully walked the bike between two that were quiet and dark. She leaned the bike against one of them and shucked her clothes in the dark before walking down to the water’s edge, naked, with the bar of soap in her hand.