Murder on Ice (6 page)

Now she looked up, keeping her hands busy, pitty-patting the folded handkerchief. "Is that what you'd do, really?"

"Straight up." In the mood of this interrogation I sketched a cross over my heart with my right hand. It worked. Over the next five minutes she gave me all the information she had.

She had been the victim of an attempted rape. She had accepted a ride home from some guy she met at a party. He had been acquitted because the judge thought she should have shown better judgment than to go off with a stranger. As she was leaving the court, humiliated, while the accused was shaking hands with his friends, she had been approached by a woman in her fifties. They had gone for coffee together. My prisoner had been ashamed and depressed and the woman had been sympathetic. The other woman had told her that there was a new group being formed to heighten the awareness of men to the humiliation of women.

I asked her to repeat that part and she gave it back to me word for word. Obviously I had some pop psychology coming at me from this mysterious, murderous grandmother.

The woman had not given a full name. "You call me Margaret," was all she gave away. She had invited the girl to a meeting, which was held a week later in a motel room on the edge of Toronto. The girl had gone and met three other women of about her own age, all of them angry over some feminist cause. One had been a battered wife. One had been harassed by an employer with more hands than sense. The other one had no specific beef but it seemed to my prisoner that she was angry at all men.

"She struck you as lesbian?"

"I'm not saying that. She seemed angry, as I said—more than the rest of us, and we all had some good cause for anger." Between them they had hatched up the plot to abduct Nancy and gain publicity for their cause. She insisted that Nancy had been a party to the idea. They would not have forced her, they were all too anxious to protect one another's rights as women, she told me.

It rang true. If the kidnapping had been carried out by force, it would have taken at least two people to drag Nancy to the waiting car. As it was she had gone cleanly—her footprints had told me that. This girl confirmed it.

When it came to her own part in the affair, she was more reticent. I found out at last that she had been told to strip while the crowd was watching the beauty parade and to jump out as soon as the lights came on again after Nancy's disappearance. But she had been too timid and had spent ten minutes psyching herself up for the exposure.

I nodded and made tut-tut noises, and then threw her the hard question. "One girl is dead and Nancy is gone. Do you still think it's a joke?"

It scared her, but she had no information. She had carried out her orders and was waiting for her group leader to pat her on the head and tell her she had done well. Only there was a corpse in the picture now and it wasn't a prank any more. All she could do was to weep and insist that she had no idea where Nancy had gone. The plan had been for her to stay at the motel until morning, when she would emerge and make her speech about male chauvinism while the whole of the beauty contest judging panel hung its head in shame.

It was all very bloody smug. And it was also a crock. There was more to this operation than the phony kidnapping. It looked to me as if somebody wanted to get their hands on the girl, perhaps for ransom, and had set up this spurious group to do the dirty work and act as a smoke screen. I was growing certain that professionals had removed the girl from the removers while the removers all struck their little poses.

Val found coffee and made a full pot. We all had a cup while I talked the girl through her story again. She came up with the dots for a couple of "i"s and the crosses for the "t"s, but nothing new. I decided to ring the motel where the meeting had taken place, on the outside chance that Fred might remember this Margaret and that she had used her real name to register for the room. After that, I was stumped. Nancy Carmichael could be fifty miles south of here by now, still not realizing that she was in danger. I had no way of letting her know.

The phone ring was a relief. I picked it up at once. That's my arrangement with the woman who answers the extension for me while I'm away. I take it when I'm at home or after ten o'clock at night.

"Police Department."

"Reid. Come right away. They've been here. They took all my film. All my goddamn film. Everything." Carl Simmonds was almost soprano in his anger. I told him to wait there and hung up.

Val looked up, waiting instructions. I said, "I want you to stay and make sure our visitor doesn't come to any harm. I have to go to see the photographer."

"Does he have something for you—a clue?"

"Yes," I lied. "Meantime, make yourself comfortable. There's blankets under the counter if you need them. Bunk down in the spare cell and snooze. I'll leave Sam minding the store."

Two minutes later they were both in cells, one locked, one unlocked, and I was on the station skidoo heading for Carl's cottage. It had taken me most of the two minutes to get out of the garage past the snowdrift. I'd ended up trampling it solid at one end so it would bear the weight of the machine. As a result, I was soaked with perspiration but cooling in the relentless wind, still flushing snow at me as if it would never end.

I have never worked out why city people buy snowmobiles and ride them for fun. Up here they're a tool, a vehicle that does the work of a dog team, without the fighting. But they're no fun to ride, especially on a night like this one.

By the time I got to Carl's place I could feel the beginnings of frostbite. There was almost no sensation in my cheeks and nose. I stood and pounded on his front door and pounded my frozen face with alternate hands until he opened up for me. I wished he would hurry. There were skidoo tracks on the road but I had no idea which way to follow them, and no idea who to look for if the tracks led to a crowd like there was at the Lakeside or the Legion. I needed some quick details from Carl and I could go after whoever had taken his film.

I had never been in Carl's house before but had expected taste and elegance. Yesterday, things probably were that way. Tomorrow for sure, but tonight there was a welter of furniture, magazines, books, pictures, all tossed anyhow into the center of the living room. Carl was still wearing the clothes he'd had on at the Legion Hall, but the pockets in the jacket had been cut away raggedly.

He said nothing to me as I entered, but stood there for me to check the damage and whistle.

"Were they looking for the photographs you took at the Ball?"

"That's what they said." He tossed his head to throw back his long blonde hair and waved his hands despairingly. "For a couple of lousy negatives they did this."

I moved further into the room, stepping over the rubble, stooping to pick up a book. I closed it, noting automatically the title
Out of Africa
. "How many were there?"

"Three of them, all wearing blue skidoo suits, one-piece jobs like the kind they sell in Canadian Tire. They all had red ski masks over their faces."

"All dressed identically?"

He nodded. "And very bloody tacky they looked, too."

"Were they men, women, how tall, how heavy? I need anything you noticed, I want a handle on this thing."

He was bending down to pick up an ebony carving that must have been some kind of fertility symbol. He noticed me watching him and went a little red, dropping the statue and straightening up, wiping his palms on his thighs. "Okay. I'm wasting time. Let me get a drink and I'll sit and concentrate."

I didn't need a drink, but I wanted his concentration so I said nothing. He set a small sideboard back on its legs. It looked as if it cost as much as my house. He opened the front and swore once as liquor from a smashed bottle ran out onto his rug, a sand-colored Moslem carpet of some kind. He pulled out a bottle of Hennessy and two glasses, one of them snapped off at the stem. He poured about four ounces into each and handed the complete one to me. I nodded thanks and took it. I needed his memory. He was a photographer, he used his eyes better than most people.

"What happened was I was working in the darkroom when they came in. The door at the side was locked, they smashed a pane of glass and let themselves in that way." He took a sip of his cognac and sat down, cross-legged among the ruined books and paintings. "I came out of the darkroom when I heard the noise."

Now he straightened up suddenly, importantly, and walked to the back entrance to the room. "I was standing here and I said, 'What the hell is going on?' Something like that. Then the leader said. 'Give us the negatives, faggot.'"

"The leader?" I prodded quickly.

He shrugged. "Seemed to be. He was the only one to speak the whole time they were here. The others did as he told them. He had the authority, I suppose you'd say."

"You're sure it was a man?"

He cocked his head toward me, surprised. "Of course, why?"

I gave him a little of the detail about C.L.A.W. that the prisoner had told me. "It's some kind of feminist movement. There may be men in it but they don't figure prominently so far."

He sipped his cognac, then stood swirling it in the broken-stemmed glass. From his gesture this might have been an ordinary night and he would have been listening to Mozart on his stereo and having a nightcap in comfort. I felt sorry for him, but I was even more sorry for the girl at the motel and beginning to feel sorry for the Carmichael kid.

"Let me replay this, if you don't mind," he said at last. I waved one hand in silence and he went out, scrunching over the debris, to the back door of his summer kitchen. He paused as he came back, balancing his glass on top of a plant pot that was still standing in the window.

Now he advanced to the center of the room, stood still for a moment, backed off, advanced again, knelt down to his right side, covering his head with his left hand, then stood up.

"The man was in front. He was close to your height, maybe five-eleven, well built. He was right-handed." He paused and thought for a moment. "He was the one who hit me and then showed the others how to shake the place down like this. He's the sonofabitch I hope you catch."

"What color were his eyes?" I asked quietly.

"Brown," Carl said without hesitation. "So were the eyes of the second person—slim hips, might have been a woman or a small man. I couldn't tell, he or she didn't move around much." He hissed, suddenly angry. "If he-she had moved much I would have known. You can always tell if it's a man by the articulation of the legs. Queens don't fool anybody."

"What about the third one? What color eyes, any hair showing, what?"

Carl put his hand to his chin, then clasped the other hand across his chest to lock the elbow. It was the move Jack Benny used to make on TV when the world was younger and warmer and things other than pain and humiliation were worth a laugh.

"Undoubtedly a woman," he decided. "Not much in the boobies department, rather heavier in the hips, about five-four, perhaps one-thirty." He stopped for so long I was about to ask him another question before he said, "And she had brown eyes with seven gold flecks in the left pupil."

"You're kidding!" I almost laughed. To stand in the wreckage of your home and take notice of that kind of detail called for a toughness of spirit most people don't have.

"Absolutely true," he said, throwing up his hands. "I know you're going to catch her and when you do, I'll identify her for you."

"So. Okay. What exactly happened after he hit you?" I was scribbling the descriptions in my book as I talked and he paused a moment to let me catch up.

"They looked for the negatives of the film I had shot at the Ball. They got them right away, I hadn't even had time to print them up. Then, just to be sure, I guess, they did all this."

"Was that the only reason, do you think?" It was a guess, but this was turning into an unusual case. I wondered if one of the C.L.A.W. people had been a closet gay, resentful about his leanings, carrying on the ancient sport of fag-bashing.

Carl went back to his cognac and took a solid bite out of it. "I think the man was enjoying himself," he said simply.

"I'll try to get them all," I promised. "I saw skidoo tracks outside, just point which way they went and I'll follow."

He came to the door with me as I zipped up my parka and pulled down the flaps on my fur hat. It was savagely cold at his door but he stood there in his light jacket without shivering as he pointed out the direction they had taken. I admire that little guy. As I got on the machine he called out, "They went thataway!" and laughed.

I laughed and started my skidoo. I didn't need to be an Australian bushman to follow the trail. Once he had told me which way was coming and which one going, I followed the overlapping belt tracks at close to thirty miles an hour. It seemed to me there were only two tracks. One person must have been riding pillion. On the machine it was almost calm as I ran with the wind at my back. The tracks were still crisp and fresh, only beginning now to drift in.

Within two hundred yards they left the roadway and turned up over the rocks that loomed bare red in the headlights, swept clear of snow by the relentless wind. I followed up through the trees and onto an old logging trail that had been recleared that fall for snowmobiling. It was all part of the Reeve's plan for winter fun and games. He hadn't counted on its being used as a getaway road. But maybe the escapers hadn't reckoned on my following them, so I wound up the throttle and pushed on as fast as I could in the flat footprint of the machine ahead. The track led to a small open shelter in a clearing. It's not fancy—three walls and a roof with a stone fireplace. It's not worth vandalizing, and it's stood up for a few years now of snowmobiler rendezvous. The tracks turned into the front of it and I pulled in just behind, where they had obviously stopped. There was a welter of footprints and unmistakable evidence that a man had relieved himself, outside the shelter, out of sight. That meant Carl was right. At least one of the party was a man.

I checked the ground and decided that the two machines had met up with a third. It was hard to examine the footprints in the snow with a flashlight, but it seemed that two other people had been waiting here. That meant I had five of them to worry about. I flashed the light around the shelter, but whoever it was had not whiled away the time carving their initials or leaving their wallets, so I was no further ahead. There was nothing to do but get back on my machine and follow the triple track further on down another branch of the trail.