Dead in the Water (7 page)
Authors: Ted Wood
He reached behind him and took the keys of the cruiser off the hook on the wall. He held them out, then held on to them as I reached. "Maybe you should put that envelope in the safe it's that important."
"I'd feel safer hanging on to it," I said, taking the keys. "Whatever's inside has cost one guy his life and her a punch in the mouth. I'd like to keep it with me."
"You're the chief," he said reluctantly.
"Yeah. And I'm about to act like one." I took out the envelope and tore it open.
Inside there was a thin folder and inside that a flat black disk of plastic.
"What in hell is that?" Murphy wondered.
"Looks like a computer diskette," I told him. "It's got some computer data on it, I guess." I looked at its smooth blankness. "It's important enough to bring from New York under guard. And it doesn't mean a damn thing to anyone who hasn't got the right computer program to play it back."
Murphy said, "I figure it belongs in the safe, Reid."
"Later," I told him and whistled Sam. "I'm going up to the motel. If she comes back, ask her to wait."
I guessed she had checked out as soon as I pulled in and saw that her Volvo was gone. Oh sure, she might have been out somewhere, but the way things were moving she was covering her back and she'd be gone from here.
I opened the door and sent Sam in ahead of me to search. There was no way of knowing whether the mad doctor had a gun of his own and had staked the place out. He hadn't. Sam made a quick spin around and came back to me. I went in and checked. The birds had flown, sure enough. The suitcases and few hanging clothes were gone. The bed was still unmade, but one thing had changed. The Cinzano ashtray was full of butts.
I'm no Sherlock Holmes, but that was evidence. Angela Masters didn't smoke. Somebody had been here, spent a little time. I checked the butts. Two brands, both American.
I pulled the door shut and went over to the office. There was nobody at the desk and I leaned on the bell. Still nothing. I figured that the boss was taking a tumble with the hired help. Jenny Saunders isn't much to look at, but neither is Mike and she didn't do much work in making up the cabins. I figured they were mom and popping out back.
As I waited I heard a wailing of horns out on the highway. I looked out and saw a snake of motorcycles threading down the white lines on the highway, passing everything. My gut tightened. It was the motorcycle gang from Toronto. If they knew I was here they'd feel obliged to hoorah the place, just to show how ballsy they were. And if I came outside they would fight. I found myself breathing shallow, tense as a bow string. I had a murder to look after, plus an abduction and a disappearing boat. This was not the day to get into a bloody hassle with some spaced-out speed freaks who would have a holiday in the newspapers if I took the gun to them, and would leave me for dead if I didn't.
My luck was running good that minute. They sailed on by, not looking sideways to see the cruiser in front of the bin. If they remembered, they would be back, and the fight would be on.
I was turning to go when Mike Higgins came out, yawning to let me know he had been sleeping, not making out. He didn't have anything much to tell me. The room had been paid for with an envelope stuffed under the door of the office. It was an envelope from the drawer of the cabin and it had a U.S. twenty stuffed inside. Someone had written "Cabin Four" sprawling letters on the envelope.
I left him, still yawning and scratching, willing me to leave so he could get back to his woman. I made my way back to the cruiser and drove down to Ferry Beach Lodge. It was time to take a real look around.
Sissie Lowrie was still working, and working on a bottle of rye that she covered with a towel when I came into the cafeteria. There were three or four teenagers in the place. They had cokes but weren't drinking them. When they saw me they left, pronto. I wondered just what Winslow's place was famous for. It sure wasn't the haute cuisine. I walked through the little lift-up flap to the back of the counter and took the towel off Sissie's rye. "Is this what Ross is selling the kids?"
She looked at me for perhaps half a minute, wondering if I'd go away. When she decided I wouldn't, she said, "I just work here, eh?"
"And you shouldn't be drinking."
She narrowed her eyes and worked her mouth a little. I guessed she was worried that I'd tell her husband and he'd give her hell for not bringing the bonanza home with her. "You ain't gonna make trouble, eh, Chief?"
I picked up the rye bottle. "You didn't answer my question. Is this what makes Ross so popular with the kids?"
She shook her head and sat down helplessly. "He never tells me nothing. I guess he lets the lodge guests have the odd bottle on the weekend."
"So what's with the punks hanging around here?"
Her eyes were on the bottle, like Moses staring at the Promised Land. "Why'nt you ask them?"
I set the bottle down again. Her sigh filled the muggy kitchen like steam. "I'm going to take a look around inside," I told her. Maybe she knew it was outside my rights. She didn't care. As long as the bottle stayed in the kitchen, so would she. She just nodded and I nodded back, polite as a couple of Mandarin dolls, then I went on through the back exit of the kitchen, into Ross Winslow's living quarters.
There were two rooms and a John.
The first room had a table and one chair, a couch, a TV set, and a dry sink with a couple of bottles on the top of it. They were rye, all the same brand, sealed from the liquor store. This was where he obliged his guests with a little weekend blind-piggery.
I checked the bottom half of the dry sink and found it locked. It was an unslippable lock, the dead-fall variety that needs to be forced, unless you had been in the Marines with a good ol' boy from Kentucky who shared his simple skills with you. It took me thirty seconds to open it and solve the riddle the groupies in the coffee shop.
The sink had two old-fashioned cracker tins in it. One was filled with little plastic bags of marijuana, the other with pills. I took a few of them out and broke one open, tasting the bitterness on the tip of my tongue. Speed.
I dug farther down and came up with some sealed packs of white powder. I left them sealed but put them into my shirt pocket. I didn't think they would be heroin. The security was too casual. I assumed they were speed for the occasional freak who shot the stuff rather than dropping it. Of course, if I'd been doing things by the book I'd have picked up a search warrant, then I could have scooped the lot and seen Winslow slapped inside. This way the law was going to be rougher on me than it was on him. So I closed the cracker tins and the dry sink, relocked the dinky little lock, and went through to the bedroom.
Searching a room is a skill, like packing a suitcase. The pro makes it look easy. He checks all the places that people think he's never going to find, without disturbing the look of the place. I found that Winslow had more than seven hundred dollars in small bills, a collection of expensive pornography, most of it homosexual, and no gun or spare ammunition to indicate that he owned one.
The last thing I went through was his wardrobe. It consisted a couple of pairs of check pants and a good windbreaker. There was one suit that looked as if it had last been worn when he came marching home from WW2. And there was a heavy jacket.
In the jacket I found the first thing that tied him into my mystery. It was a map of the area, an ordinance survey large-scale job. It was nothing special in itself. He had another one, identical to it, pinned on the wall of the coffee shop for the formation of his guests. But what made this one special was pencil mark, a small neat cross in mid-channel, upstream from the narrows.
I unfolded the map flat and checked references, not the figures but the lines of sight that crossed at that point on the waterway. It seemed that the point lay on a line between one small island and a prominent rock on the shoreline. That was the east-west axis. North-south it lay on a line between the mouth of the narrows and the mid-channel marker a mile upstream. I thought about it all for a minute. Then I folded the map and put it back in the jacket. It seemed to me that Winslow had picked out a rendezvous point in a remote part of the waterway. I wondered why. I wondered who he was planning to meet there and why he should choose a place that looked casual but was far away from any cottage or place here people might be watching. Perhaps it was the spot he had been heading for when his boat had been stopped by someone's cutting the fuel lines. It made the hairs on my neck tingle. It fitted. Winslow was tied in with drugs. That meant he could be involved with some heavyweight rounders. Perhaps they knew that Pardoe was coming to Murphy's Harbour. Perhaps they arranged to wait for him there, making sure that Winslow would bring him to them. Maybe they were the people that Pardoe was coming to visit.
I nodded to Mrs. Sissie and left. Sam was outside, ignoring the vacationers who were making cootchy-coo noises at him. I whistled and he followed me back to the cruiser. I hit out for the office, excitedly forming my next plan. It was close to two o'clock and my gut started to remind me that I was there to keep it quiet. Murphy had gone home for lunch and the office was empty, so I phoned the restaurant to send me up a sandwich.
I'd just hung up when the screen door clattered. I looked up and saw a stranger, a big man with an old-fashioned fedora flat on his head. He was about forty, good build, sallow complexion, pale blue eyes, hair sandy, dusting to gray at the temples. I thought: copper!
He came up to the counter and took out a leather billfold at he swung open for me. It had a shield inside, Bonded Securities.
"Reid Bennett, Chief of Police," I said. "You here about Murray?"
"Yeah. The name's Fullwell, Simon Fullwell." He stood there as if he expected me to genuflect. I said nothing. He realized I wasn't impressed and tried a little bark. "You find the body?"
"No." He was annoying me. Security companies are a dime a dozen. Most of the guys in uniform are no-hopers, working for minimum wage at a job that requires nothing more complicated than staying awake all night. If he wanted to play detective, he would have to go by my rules.
He stood and looked at me again, stiff as a bird dog on point. Then he slowly unbent and leaned both hands on the counter. "Look, Chief. I've got a job to do. Okay? I also have organization behind me. One of the things we do is keep records of every law enforcement agency in the area we cover."
"Very professional," I said.
He nodded, acknowledging the politeness. "Yeah, so on my way here I rang the office and checked on Murphy's Harbour. I found out that you're an ex-Toronto detective. You used to be in the U.S. Marines when you were in your hell-raising stage. You learned how to kill people." He paused and took off his hat, looking down into it briefly as if it contained the notes he needed. It didn't; there was nothing there but the smell of hair oil. He looked up again, laying the weight of his tired flat eyes on me. "So a year ago you had a little trouble with three bikies. You took two of them out for keeps, put the other one in hospital for months."
"You keep good records," I said.
He nodded again. "Yeah. And you're not a dumb hick of a country copper. So I'd appreciate any help you can give me. A guy of mine got himself dead on your turf and I have to find out why. You understand."
"I've got one corpse, two missing men, a 'now you see her now you don't' blonde, and I'm not any further ahead than you," I told him. I was starting to relax about him; he was off his own patch and needed help. As long as he didn't intend to be on his high horse, I'd do what I could to help him. He took his hat off again and tossed it on the counter. It was a peace offering, the kind of submission one dog makes to another when he knows he can't win.
He stood staring at his hat while he patted his pockets until came up with a little tin of Dutch cigarillos. He offered one me but I shook my head. He lit one and relaxed some more. "Can't you afford an air conditioner? It's gotta be ninety in here."
"Low budget," I said and we both grinned. "Look," I said, "here's what I've got. Murray was retained by a guy called Pardoe. The pair of them, along with Pardoe's girl friend, blonde called Angela Masters, came up here last night. The guys got in a boat with a local lodgekeeper and took off up-channel. The girl took a motel room. The boat was found after midnight, floating with its fuel lines cut. This morning, the body of Murray, still carrying his .38, was washed up at the lock. The other two guys are still missing."
He spat a shred of tobacco off his tongue. "Great," he snorted. "You figure they drowned?"
I told him the rest of what I knew, including the stolen boat. He didn't grin, so I knew it was as heavy as I was starting believe. "Okay, your turn. What do you know about Pardoe?"
He reached in his pocket and took out a notebook similar to my own. "We don't have anything on the computer about him, but we do have a good contact in the personnel office of Straiton…" He paused and read from his notes. "Pardoe. He's British, a scientist employed in research at Straiton. Salary eighty-five thousand, so I guess he's a heavy. He got his first two degrees in England, took his doctorate in California, working on the effects of…" He looked up, frowning in disgust. "My writing's godawful. What the hell is it?" I waited. He snapped his fingers as if that might decode the hen tracks. "You know…"
"Not if it's chemical. The only scientific words I know are coitus interruptus and aspirin."
He skated by that one. "No, not that. I remember, steroids."
"Drugs!" I said. "Here. Take a look at what I turned up in lodge where the missing boat owner lives." I showed him packages I'd removed from Winslow's dry sink. Fullwell bent his head over them for a moment. "This thing is starting hang together," he said quietly.
M
y sandwich arrived and we split it while we tried to kick some more sense out of the few facts we had. Fullwell had a description of Angela Masters, from his source at Straiton. "Seems she's a chemist, twenty-eight, kind of a looker. She's been at Straiton since college and has a reputation for keeping company with the top-echelon people."