Dead in the Water (3 page)

"Relax. If they stake out the OK Corral, call me." I winked at him. He didn't return it, and I walked out with Sam a tight six inches from my left heel.

It was busy at the marina. George Horn, the Indian kid who works the pumps, was filling two cruisers simultaneously and carrying on a conversation with a third guy who was waiting with an empty outboard motor tank.

He saw me and waved, then loped down the dock to meet me. "Hey, Reid, you bring in Winslow's boat last night?"

I guess I ought to be fussy about being called chief, but a copper never has many friends and George was useful.

"You know it's Winslow's boat?"

He nodded, slim and young and right. "No doubt about it. That's his Evinrude."

"That's what Murph says. I found it in mid-channel up by Indian Island, after young Sullivan creamed it."

George grinned. "Yeah, I heard. He was laying that Bryant girl."

I was glad I hadn't accepted daddy's sawbuck.

"Not right then he wasn't. He hit the boat and flew out." George paused to work out the sexual possibilities of falling out of the boat while otherwise occupied than in watching where you were going. He frowned.

I started my interrogation. "So how come you know his motor?" George held up one finger then darted off and took money from his customers. I waited, looking at the boat. What I saw made me whistle with surprise. Sam sat up straight, puzzled. I told him "Easy!" and waited for George to come back. He was talking as he ran.

"He was here last night when I closed down. Working on the motor. Said the plug was fouled."

"Was it running bad when he got here?"

George shook his head. "No. Running good. I wondered why he was fooling with it."

"Anybody with him? A broad maybe?"

He grinned again with the confidence of a boy whose whole life revolves around his sexuality. "Hell, Reid, it wouldn't have been his plug he was taking out, would it?"

"Kids. No respect for their elders." I let him have his smile, then dropped the bomb on him. "Did anybody cut the lines on the motor since this morning?"

He glanced at me, then into the boat, his chin dropping in surprise. "Hey no. I never seen that happen."

I got down into the boat and checked it thoroughly, as I should have done the night before. The feed line from the tank to the motor had been slashed. There was no trace of the spilled gasoline that must have been in the rubber bulb when it was cut. It had happened hours ago, perhaps back before the boat drifted out and got in Sullivan's way. There were three life jackets tucked under the bow in case the boat was stopped by a law officer, namely me. Two fishing rods, not set up. A big tackle box and a box of worms. They had been there long enough to go dry. They stank. I tipped them over the side and flutter of little sunfish rose and dimpled the water as they caught the free feed. I was more puzzled now. The boat could never have been driven without the line to the motor. And people did not leave their tackle boxes in their boats. Tackle vanished, even in a law-abiding place like Murphy's Harbour.

George was watching me, waiting for me to come up with an answer like the high-priced executive I was supposed to be.

I said, "I guess I'll go see if he's at home."

He looked disappointed. Like maybe he had expected me to come on like Sherlock Holmes. I don't do much of that. No policeman does. Certainly not many small-town coppers with nobody to back their hunches.

I gathered the bow line of the Winslow boat and got into the police boat. Sam came behind me and lay down on the floorboards, out of the way. That dog was so well trained he even knew how far forward to sit.

The motor started at once. George cast me off and waved. I waved back, once, and set off across the bay toward the abandoned ferry boat that gave Winslow's place its name. There were children swimming off the dock beside the boat. As I came in they jumped off and swam out to the raft that Winslow had moored for them. I cut the motor and slid in, Winslow's boat coming up fast to bump me as I stopped. The kids watched, brown and silent.

I tied up both boats and walked down the dock toward the lodge building. It was a single-story building with a kitchen, a small cafe area, and a rec room. At one end was Winslow's private quarters. Around it, in a semicircle, up on the rocks, were the cottages he rented for a living, a thin living.

There were a couple of families out on the wiry grass in front of their cottages. And drawn up on the sand in front of the cafe were two elderly sedans with the kind of paintwork that shouts "a teenager owns me."

As I came up to the coffee shop the door burst open and four youths came out, fast enough that they didn't want to meet me, slow enough that I had no real reason to stop their going. I watched them climb into the sedans and spurt back over the sand, off up the road that led to the highway. I made mental note of their numbers. I'd only been in this job for three months, but there was something a little alien about the way those kids had left. When I knew the area better, I'd maybe know what they were doing here. I filed their presence in my head beside the numbers and the fact that Winslow probably didn't get very fat running this place.

As I was about to go into the coffee shop, a girl came running down from the rocks. She was dressed in city clothes, tan skirt with a slit in it, and a blouse that was too floppy to go well with suntan lotion. And she was running hard, not doing the elbows-and-knees-out swing that most women use when they want you to see how they run. I waited and she panted up to me. She was blond, maybe thirty, one twenty, something of a looker if you like them tall and slender.

She said, "I was just going to call you."

"Something the matter?"

She began to speak, then drew a great gulp of air to steady herself. "I don't know," she said. I must have looked skeptical because she reached out impulsively and covered my hand with both of hers. "I don't know for sure, officer. But I'm worried."

Behind her the families at the cottages had gathered in a single circle, like Indians in a B movie.

"Is someone missing?"

She nodded, tight mouthed, not speaking. I took pity on her, with the gallery staring into her soul, and led her out on the dock where it was quieter. I indicated the bow of the police boat. "Sit down and tell me what's on your mind." She turned and sat, the boat dipping discreetly under her. Sam looked at her curiously. I nodded to him and he came out of the boat. She looked at Sam, then at me. Her face was pale. If she was on vacation, this was her first day. And there were dark circles under her eyes.

"I'm not sure if they are missing," she said awkwardly.

"Who are
they
?" Police questions always sound dumb to the person who's answering them, but you have to remember that we don't have anything until we've asked a few obvious things.

She thought about her answer for so long that I began to think she hadn't been listening. As I was about to try again she said, "Two people. Derek Pardoe and Mr. Murray."

"What makes you think they're missing?" This was going to a Dick and Jane investigation, I could tell. See Dick, see Jane. Does Jane know where Dick has gone?

"They've been gone all night."

"So when did you see them last?"

"Around ten, maybe a little earlier, it was just dark." Her voice was starting to choke and it looked as if I'd be handing her the Kleenex before we were much further along.

"Where was that, here?"

She shook her head, almost angrily, whipping her hair like tiny gold lashes. "No, in the little town, across the way there." She waved at Murphy's Harbour, struggling to be seen, three-quarters of a mile away over the channel. My hair started to tingle. I felt the beginning of a case. It was good, like that first jolt that lets you know a pickerel has grabbed your jig and is mouthing it for a moment to see if he wants to end up over your mantelpiece.

"And they took off in a boat."

She frowned at me. "How did you know that?"

"People take boats a lot from the marina."

"I didn't say it was at the marina." She seemed wary.

I stood up straight and did my yokel number, humble but sincere. "We aren't going to find out anything if you don't give me the facts now, are we?"

She thought about that and said, "I see," in a grudging tone that could have meant anything.

"Now. Were they alone?"

"No. The boat man was with them."

"Was it Mr. Winslow?" A newcomer like her wouldn't know his first name.

"That's right."

"And they were heading over here?"

She shook her head again, just as violently, then stopped suddenly as if she was giving too much away. "I don't know where they were going."

"Then why are you here?"

She pursed her mouth and looked down at her fingers. "I knew his name so I found out where he lived and came over this morning."

"And did you come to Murphy's Harbour to meet Mr. Winslow?"

"No." The shake again. She must be as rigid as hell, probably some kind of cashier or teller, I thought, someone who dealt with certainties all the time.

She became aware of her attitude and toned it down. "No, we just met up with him at the marina and he offered to take Derek and Mr. Murray where they had to go."

"After dark, leaving you on the dock? That's kind of late to go calling, isn't it?"

She fenced, giving me a half answer. "I could have gone with them but I was tired from the drive, and Derek wanted me to go to the motel at the highway.…" She waved back vaguely over her shoulder.

"How far had you driven?"

"From New York."

The way she clipped it I knew she meant Manhattan, but I stayed in character. "The city or the state?"

"The city."

"Okay. Now who had you driven all the way from New York to visit?"

She stood up, leaving the boat curtseying idly. "I don't have tell you that. I want you to report that Mr. Pardoe is missing."

A lot of things were coming together. Pardoe was her lover. She wouldn't have switched from familiar to formal and back that way if he wasn't. And she was infinitely more concerned about him than she was about the other guy, Murray.

I kept right on being reasonable. "If you tell me where they might have gone, I'll have a place to start looking for them, right?"

She shook her head, slowly this time, fighting with herself about what she was to do. "No," she said at last. "Derek told me not to tell anyone."

I didn't say anything. It was a waste of time pushing her at this stage. It might be unnecessary anyway. If they'd fallen out of the boat when Sullivan clipped it, they were going to wash down to the lock later on this weekend. The lockkeeper would drag them out and call me. I said, "Okay, then, let's start with the unclassified stuff. Like what your name is."

"Angela Masters."

I took out my notebook and wrote it down. "All right, Miss Masters, what are the full names of the other people?"

She said, "Derek Pardoe."

"How old?"

She had no hesitation. "Thirty-two."

"How big a man is he?"

She shrugged, an upturn of her shoulders and hands that looked studied, but wasn't. I added the fact to the file I was building on her. Probably European stock, despite the Brit-sounding name. Limeys don't turn their shoulders inside out.

"Is he your size, my size, what?"

For a moment she forgot herself, became a measuring tape, standing tall, jutting her breasts as she measured herself against me. "I'd say he was right in between." I'm six one, she was six inches shorter. I wrote "five ten."

"How about build?"

We got through it all eventually. I got a picture of a slim, pale guy of medium height, wearing a tan business suit with a striped shirt and red spotted tie. All it told me was that he must have stood out like a banner in church among the blue jeans and the open-necked shirts of Murphy's Harbour. She hadn't told me what his job was. And she didn't.

Murray was easier. I got the kind of description you pick up after a robbery. He was heavy-set, red-faced, forty to forty-five. Check suit, green shirt, green tie. But she had to work to get any of the facts out of her memory. She wasn't interested, that much was obvious. Pardoe was her man.

I closed the book and pointed to Winslow's boat. "Does that look like the boat they got into?" She went up and stared into as if it were a book of mug shots. She was in profile and I had to admit she was a looker. She had the tip-tilted nose of Eastern Europe, good forehead, firm breasts. Pardoe was a lucky man. Or had been, twenty-four hours ago.

She turned back to me, shaking her head in concern. "I don't know. I don't know anything about boats. It could have been."

I changed the tack. "Had they been drinking?"

She looked shocked. "No, of course not."

"It's not a frivolous question. This is vacation country, people drink."

"Not Derek." She shook her head again. "He was here on serious business."

I said, "Oh?"

She looked at me quickly, then looked away, angry with herself. "I already told you, he was here to see someone."

"Yes, you did," I agreed. "But you didn't say who, or why."

She gave a little gasping sob and then checked herself. "I can't. I promised I wouldn't. He told me people would ask."

"Is he in some kind of trouble?"

"Trouble?" She almost laughed. "Derek never did anything wrong in his whole life."

Great, I thought, just what we need. A missing saint. I said, "Listen, this is unpleasant for you, what say we go in and get a cup of coffee." She sniffed a couple of times and dashed her cuff across her eyes. Then she blinked and nodded.

I led her back, past the silent group of watchers. Perhaps they were waiting for me to put the handcuffs on her, something, anything to avoid the boredom of another sunny day of kids and swimming and drinks with the people next door. Even on holiday, people don't relax that much.

We reached the wooden screen door and I yanked on it, lifting the ancient flatiron that hung on a cord over the jamb, automatic door closer, early Ontario style. Inside was the standard greasy-spoon lodge kitchen. The Ministry of Tourism at Queen's Park in Ontario would like it if every resort had haute cuisine. Most of them are like this, plastic-topped counter with chrome stools and plastic seats, leaking wood wool. Two tables that needed wiping and kitchen chairs that looked as if too many kids had leaned back on them too many times. On the walls were pictures of fish taken years ago in this reach of the water. And on the wall behind the counter, where the coffee machine and the four-slot toaster were drawing flies, there were pictures of the native dishes: blueberry pie with ice cream, Coca-Cola, hamburgers with the works. Sissie Lowrie was standing behind the counter, cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. She managed to make a clean white apron look slovenly. I said, "Hi, Sis, got a couple of coffees?"