Dead in the Water (17 page)

"I know what you mean." He almost crowed. I could imagine his scrawny little neck stretched up as he shouted. He went into the second verse. "Just you hold the phone …"

I headed him off. "Can't do that I need it. You call me back when you find something, okay?"

"Oh Kay…" he made two words out of it and clattered the phone down with the first real excitement he had shown in life since he realized his secretary's husband was not living up to his contract. I grinned and hung up the phone and then George's voice was rising with excitement.

"Hey. Reid, I found it!" He picked up the ledger bodily and carried it to the counter in front of me.

I read the words under his forefinger and gave a rebel yell. "You're right, goddamn it! Why didn't I think of it?"

He was laughing like a jackpot winner. "It figures. It figures, Reid. The place had to be on an island or they wouldn't have needed to hire a boat to take them there."

We pounded one another on the arm a couple of times, blindly, while I read the whole of the story. "Henry J. Clemence, Residence, White Plains, New York. Business Address, Straiton Chemicals, Madison Avenue."

George was still chortling. "How about that luck, eh? The business address right there. I can't believe it. Why'd he do that?"

I shrugged. "It's about time something good happened to us guys, and I guess he was thinking his family might be up here and him at work. If anything went wrong, that's where we'd have to reach him."

I had stopped laughing. Playtime was ended. I was orchestrating the best way to handle the call. A man rich enough to own a property six hundred miles from where he lived was not very likely to want to hold long midnight conversations with coppers. I would have to be careful.

"Don't count on him telling me why Pardoe was up here," I warned.

"Why not?" George still believed in happy endings, in right guys winning and other TV kinds of sentimentality.

"He doesn't have to tell me a thing." I stood for a moment, rubbing my eyes, and as I did so, I realized that they had stopped burning. I was over the worst of the Mace.

George brought me back to this time and place. "He doesn't have a phone on his island."

I opened my eyes and thought about it for a while that way. "I'll check he's not home in New York, then take a turn up there." Cool. Definitely cool for a guy who has just realized that about half the pieces of his puzzle are snapping together like magic. I picked up the phone and called White Plains. It rang seventeen times before I hung up. He couldn't answer. He was too far away, up here in Ontario, waiting for Pardoe to come boating up to his dock with a piece of plastic that answered all his problems. Or set him a whole bunch of new ones. I set the phone down with relief. There was something real to do. "Listen, George. I'm going to get this guy up and talk to him. Can you carry on here?"

He was dejected. "I'd rather come with you."

He was ready to swim lakes, trek through swamps, leap tall buildings at a single bound. And I was a louse. But I was doing the right thing. I needed him here in case this hot lead cooled right out when we rode three miles up the waterway and found the Clemence family had gone back to White Plains, leaving us with nothing. Someone had to stay and play office, and someone had to risk his neck. And I was the only one getting compensated for risking his neck, however unlikely that seemed. "Better you should stay here. Lloyd will be calling in with some information, and there's the whole book to go through for more guys from Straiton when we find this is the wrong one."

"What if it's the right one? What if you need help right there?" He stood, bouncing on the balls of his feet with excitement he couldn't keep down.

"It won't be." I threw some cold water. "This time tomorrow, when you can't keep your eyes open and we know that it's not any of half a dozen guys like this one but we have to keep looking, you'll be glad you kept on while I was off screwing around."

"Like hell," he said, but he was coming around.

"It's more important to be here, please."

"Okay. What needs doing, besides answering the phone and more reading?" He wasn't happy, but he was settling.

"Call Fullwell and tell him that Angela Masters was here, Maced me and Sam, and that I would like him to come back and join us, as soon as he can."

He took down the phone number, still disgusted, writing in a sloping left-handed scrawl. "That's not much police work, one phone call and a bunch of reading."

"Believe me…" I started, but he waved me away.

"Okay, I'll do it."

I picked up my notes and went to the back door. "Back soon."

"Yeah," he said.

I went into the corridor and found my hat lying on the floor where it had rolled when I was Maced. My head was hurting, but clear. Sam was following me, weak himself, but still anxious to see what was going to happen. I felt better just watching him, until he fell over as his front legs gave out.

That decided me. I would take him home first. I had not even thought about the card hidden in his pen. That would come when we got there. He could do the guard job he was trained for. I would give him some milk in that important dish of his, wash the last of the chemical out of his system.

I whistled him and he came to heel, like a drunken soldier falling in on parade, hoping to get by from memory rather than acuteness. I got to the door and paused. I was no longer sure what was outside, what was waiting for me. I only knew that I was through playing by the rules. From the moment I was blitzed with my own Mace, I was ready to play their way. It meant I had to sit Sam down and switch off the lights. First the inside, then the outside lights. Then I inched the door open. There was no light showing. Unless the other side was using an infra-red sniper's sight, I was okay. But I had been shot at before by guys with sniper sights. So I didn't take any chances. I flung the door open and rolled out, whistling Sam after me. Nothing happened. That still left me the problem of getting into the patrol car. It could have been covered the same way, but I was beginning to doubt it.

Sam landed on collapsible legs and rolled away from me. When he stood up I gave him the command to search and he left me, beating away with all his might, up and down, all around the station. He was slow but I trusted him.

I called him back and got into the patrol car, with him on the passenger seat. He flopped there and I drove off, spurting ravel in a way that must have made George look up from his book-searching in wonderment.

I drove back through town, slowing down opposite the mailbox. It was as I expected. Someone had pried it out of the wall and it lay surrounded by a clutter of postcards and mail. Without stopping, I knew my envelope would be gone.

"Murphy was on the ball," I told Sam as we drove. They've got a line right into the station." Sam only looked up, then slept again like a drunk taking the cure. I was angry about the mailbox. It had been my trap. I had planted that letter and had planned to stake it out and catch the man who came to rip it off. And then that damn woman with her angelic face and diabolical manners had made a monkey out of me.

I contemplated their next move. Obviously, they would arch the house. And they wouldn't find the envelope, so they would stake it out for me. The thought cheered me in a negative kind of way. At least I knew where the trap was set, even I was the bait instead of the trip spring.

I thought it through as I drove. They wouldn't shoot me down. They wanted that envelope of Angela Masters's. I had a fighting chance. And I was ready to fight.

I parked the car in front of the house, gunning the motor before it died. Might as well act stupid. On my record, they would be expecting it.

I got out and called Sam after me. He came along, listlessly but gaining strength. The car ride had shaken him and he stopped to throw up once before climbing the steps.

I tried the front door. It was unlocked, the way I had left it. I made a show of fumbling with the door and acting noisy. And at the same time I unflipped my holster and took out my .38.

Then I threw the door open and stepped in and down, out the light from the doorway. My hand thrust Sam forward with the little twist I gave him to signify "search." At the same time I told him "speak!"

Even sick, Sam was magnificent. His snarls and barks filled he house like gunfire. On his unsteady feet he moved from room to room with a stiff-legged ferocity that made his long claws clash on the old pine plank flooring.

Within seconds I knew what was happening.

I heard a yell. It wasn't as dignified as a shout or as horrifying as a scream. It was a yell of alarm, from the dark by the back door.

I charged in, shouting to Sam "fight!"

I waited ten seconds while the room was filled with the rash of falling furniture and the angry shouting of a frightened man.

Then I snapped on the light.

The intruder was big. He had a pallid moon face and dark air. Sam was hanging on to his gun hand. But he was drowning in his own saliva and as I watched he lost his grip and fell way, shaking his great head angrily.

I shouted, "Hold it," but the man was wrapped up with pain. He fired wildly, missing him by a foot, then turned and slammed one my way. I snap fired, aiming for the stopping portion of the target, the section of the torso that is painted solid black on the police revolver target.

He flew backward and his gun crashed back against the wall, then down to the floor.

I advanced on him, still wary, gun at the ready to hit him again, hard.

Sam was recovering. He moved in with me. His eyes were fixed on the man's face. His dead face. I reached the corpse and knelt beside him, feeling for the pulse in the throat. It was out of business.

I told Sam "seek" and he went off to check the rest of the house while I checked the body.

My bullet had entered the chest at the top inside corner of his breast pocket. The entrance wound was a dull hole, one inch away from the breastbone, a hand's breadth below the side of his collar bone. It had gone through his heart. I felt my neck prickle with an inhuman pride in what I had done. One shot! My Marine Corps instructor would have been proud of me.

Then I swore. The bullet had wiped away my advantage. I had no prisoner to question.

I stood up tall and waited for Sam to finish searching the house. There was no one there but me, Sam, and our dead man. I came away from the body and went to the fridge, reaching in for the milk. I poured some for Sam in a saucepan, the only utensil handy. The rest of the carton I drank.

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I
should not have searched the body. Normal, step-at-a-time police procedure dictated that I call another policeman, some independent party, and let him proceed with the homicide investigation. Then, after the photographs and the statements were taken and the body was moved away, I could have gone on with my investigation.

I knew the drill but I ignored it. I judged, from the speed with which things were happening, that something big was going to break soon. I wanted to be in on it. I had scores to repay. Not professional, but more effective than the long gray columns of rules set out in all the law books.

I rolled the body over, onto its bloody front, frowning at the width of the exit wound. That .38 of mine did ugly work. I wasn't sorry for the hood. His gun would have made a bigger hole in me. I eased his billfold out of his hip pocket, trying to avoid the blood that soaked the whole of his back. Inside I found three hundred and fifty-eight dollars in American money. There was a New York State driver's license in the name of Frederick Morse. There were a couple of photographs of the dead man, taken a year of two before when he was thinner. There was a matchbook from a New YorK City restaurant with a phone number scrawled on it and the name "Gina."

I made a note of the man's name and address and of the phone number. Then I tore the corner of a page out of my notebook and wrote "Searched, R. Bennett" and thrust it inside the wallet. Then I stuffed it back in the hip pocket, having to dig it down deep past the puffiness of the dead, collapsed buttocks.

I checked the man's pants pockets, but they were empty. Not a key, not a Kleenex. And what was more, there was no holster for the heavy automatic he had fired at me. That meant he had carried it in his hands, maybe wrapped up inside the light windbreaker that was hanging over the back of the chair beside him. It meant he had not walked far. Which meant his friends might be close at hand. Which meant fear for me.

I rolled him back the way he had been and looked at the wound. It was a pity I wasn't Matt Dillon, that my bullet had not clipped his hand neatly, leaving him alive and well and talkative, anxious to help. Instead, that neat black full stop in the corner of his breast pocket had ended him, forever.

I reached down and brushed the wound with a fingertip. And as I did so, I heard and felt a paper crinkle. I reached into the bloody pocket and pulled out the first real clue of the entire case.

It was a folded slip of paper. I opened it and read "
Mary Sue.
Admitted 4:35
P.M.
North Lock" in Murphy's spidery writing. Below it was the stamp of the police office property receipt.

I gripped the paper, waving it in front of the dead man's face in a gesture of triumph. Even dead, he had given me the news I wanted.

And it all figured. The
Mary Sue.
That was the boat that had given Crazy Eddy the money to buy his mickey and his draft beers. No doubt they hadn't planned it that way, but their money had created the diversion that took me away from the station while the crew took their time cleaning the place out. That piece of paper would have been the perfect alibi except for the sharp eyes of young George, who had seen them in our section earlier in the day.

I slipped the piece of paper between the pages of my notebook, then went to the light switch and clicked it off. Outside the trees were lit faintly with moonlight reflected from the empty lake.