The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes & Impossible Mysteries (27 page)

“Oi’ll disregard yer remark ez unworthy uv ye,” Joshua said, grinning expansively. “Fer while yez two were sittin’ here stuffin’ yerselves, oi’ve been solvin’ the murder of Karl Spearing.”

“Murder!” Lefner’s face turned a beet-red. “Josh, I’ve heard enough already. Nothing’s been said at all about Karl Spearing’s being murdered.”

“Yes there has. Oi just said it meself. Now if ye’ll calm down a bit, oi’ll elucidate fer ye.”

Lefner turned to Kehoe, shaking his head.

“Ye see, Vernon,” Joshua began, “there wuz somethin’ about Karl Spearing lyin’ there in the snow that disturbed me from the first. In addition to the footprint, oi mean. A couple of things, in fact. In the first place, while the snow around the body itself wuz drenched with blood, there wuz none to speak uv back at the trap. What oi mean to say is, the leg wuz covered with it, but none at all on the snow. Even if Karl had wrapped his tourniquet to the tightest, seems ez if there’d be a drop or two, don’t it?”

Kehoe was seeing the Indian through new eyes. “You know, you’re right,” he said. “But that’s still not conclusive, Josh.”

“P’rhaps not. But try this. Karl Spearing had a sheath knife to do his cuttin’ with. The blade wuz mebbe six inches long. Oh, t’was sharp enough, and he could hev performed the amputation with it. But only if he’d cut off his leg at the knee where the joints come together. But no. The bones wuz sheared through cleanly, a few inches below the joint. An’ ye just can’t cut a bone like that with a knife without doin’ a good bit o’ hagglin’ at it. Ye kin experiment on the lamb roast right now, if ye’d like.”

Both Kehoe and Lefner let their confusion show in their faces. Their preconceived notions were trickling out of their minds like sand through an hourglass.

“Karl Spearing’s leg,” Joshua went on, “wuz cut off with the one weapon an outdoorsman might carry that could slice through bone with a single cut – a finely-honed ax.”

“Wait a minute,” protested Lefner. “Karl Spearing didn’t have an ax with him.”

“Ah.” Joshua held up a finger triumphantly. “So finally yer comin’ around to me way o’ thinkin’, eh? Ye’ll admit, then, the presence uv a second party?”

“Well . . . yeah, I suppose so,” Lefner said. “But I still don’t see how the other person got there. I mean, there were no tracks around except Karl’s.”

“But there wuz other tracks, don’t ye see? Don’t forget the trail Tip Spearing, Mr Kehoe an’ me made when we went to view the body.”

“Why, sure we did,” Kehoe said. “But neither of us killed—” He stopped abruptly.

“Yer beginnin’ to see what oi’m drivin’ at, ain’t ye?” Joshua said, smiling.

Kehoe jerked a thumb in the direction of the livingroom. “Are you saying you think Tip killed his own father and then retraced his trail back to where we were?”

“Somethin’ like that. O’ course the killin’ wuz probably done a day or so ago. But ez long ez Tip walked in the tracks he’d first made, there’d be just the single trail. When Tip located us in the woods an’ took us to the body, we figured the tracks had been made when he discovered his father. But they could just ez easy uv been put there a day or two before, when the killin’ wuz done.”

“Josh,” Lefner said, “I don’t care when the trail to the body was made. I still can’t see that Tip’s guilty of murder. I mean, what motive did he have?”

“Karl Spearing owns this house and a good deal uv the land around here. A man uv considerable means. An’ yet Tip, his own son, wasn’t allowed to have enough pocket money even to play a few hands uv penny-ante poker. He had to use IOU’s an’ then account to his father for every cent he lost. A most degradin’ situation fer Tip. Might it be that he went searchin’ fer his father to ask fer money to pay his debts? Tempers flared, an’ there wuz a fight, with Karl comin’ out the loser. Oi tried to point out this possible motive by presentin’ yez with them IOU’s uv mine, but I suspect ye wuz hard put to divine their true meanin’.”

“So you think Tip killed his father, eh?” asked Lefner. “Well what about the foot in the trap? And that footprint by the body?”

“All right, let’s sum up the whole operation. At some time yesterday-or p’rhaps the day before, I dunno, what with the body bein’ froze the way it wuz-Tip is out in the woods, carryin’ an ax. He sees his father on the game trail an’ decides to ask fer money. There’s an argument, ez I said, an’ a brief struggle. Tip loses his temper an’ swings the ax, takin’ off Karl’s leg. Karl falls to the ground, fast bleedin’ to death, right at the spot where we seen his body. Out there in the woods, who wuz to hear his cries of pain?

“But Tip’s mind is on other things. He knows if the body is found in its present condition, he’ll be the number-one suspect.

“Then, an inspiration. Tip’s heard stories, ez oi hev, about men bein’ caught in a trap an’ what they had to do to save themselves. He knows the bear trap’s nearby. So he picks up the bloody leg, and off he goes down the trail. Once in the willow thicket, he jabs around with that grisly member ‘til he hits the pan uv the bear trap under the snow. The jaws crunch together on the leg. Then Tip drops Karl’s sheath knife by the trap to complete his alibi and muckles up the trail between the trap an’ the body so it’ll look like a man’s dragged himself along it. All the footprints are destroyed, or so Tip thinks. But there’s still one uv Karl’s near the body that he overlooked an’ oi found.”

Joshua leaned back in his chair and spread his hands expansively. “An’ that’s the way it wuz, ez they say on the tellyvision. This mornin’ Tip went lookin’ fer someone to be witness to Karl bein’ dead with one leg cut off an’ caught in the trap. He found Mr Kehoe an’ me. If we didn’t immediately assume what Tip wanted us to, oi’m sure he stood ready to point out what he wished us to believe. Ye must, uv course, give Tip credit fer his actin’ ability. He’d uv succeeded, too, if me sharp Injun eyes hadn’t spotted that footprint in the snow by the body.”

“He could beat the rap yet,” Kehoe said. “You’ve got an interesting theory there, Josh, but no real proof.”

“Would the murder weapon do?” Joshua asked. “Oi found an ax out in the shed. Somebody did a hurry-up job uv tryin’ to wipe it clean, but there’s still some reddish stains on the handle an’ blade. Oi dropped it off on the steps on me way in from outside. Could yer police chemists make somethin’ uv them stains, Vern?”

“Yeah.” Lefner got up and peered into the livingroom to check on Tip Spearing. “If the stains are human blood, we’ll have a pretty tight case.”

“Well,” Joshua said, “at least ye’ll hev it easy apprehendin’ yer suspect. Oh my, the hangover he’ll have when he wakes. Oi hope, Vern, that ye won’t be too severe with him.”

“Hell, Josh, he killed a man – his own father.”

“True. But what kind uv a man wuz the father? Seems to me the milk uv human kindness might uv turned to gall in the man’s veins.”

“Look, just because he didn’t give Tip any money—”

“No, oi wuz thinkin’ about how that bear trap wuz placed. It’s winter. No need fer a trap with the bears all hibernatin’. Besides, no bear’s about to hide in a thicket. That’d be the place where the hunters would lurk, waitin’ fer game to pass by on the trail. Like we wuz doin’ this mornin’, Mr Kehoe.”

Kehoe stared wide-eyed at Joshua. “You mean . . .”

Joshua nodded. “Karl Spearing couldn’t stand to hev people huntin’ his land. He’d do anythin’ to keep ’em away, even shoot at ’em. So I don’t believe he wuz after bear when he set that trap.

“It wuz put there to catch a man.”

P
inero said, “Marciano or Lewis – who’d you take in that one?” He lowered his
Ring Magazine
and looked at McGrath, watched the little man down his fourth cup of coffee of the morning, rub his grey face.

McGrath played around some more with his Blackberry, his right eyelid twitching as he stared at the glowing screen. “I told you, I don’t follow boxing. It’s too violent.” Thumbs flying like a twelve-year-old video-gamer chalking up kills on
God of War
, he added, “You should see all the great features on this thing.”

Pinero raised his magazine again, recrossed his feet on top of his desk. “You’re gonna get radiation poisoning from all those gadgets of yours,” he warned, taking some satisfaction in his partner’s stricken expression.

Pinero was young, liked to wear his clothes flashy, gel his jet-black hair into a subtle Mohawk. But despite all that, he considered himself old-school, less concerned with the geeky forensic fantasies of criminal investigation, than the pavement-pounding, door-dusting street solving of it. And he was good at it, like his father had taught him.

“Pretty soon we’ll be able to break cases without ever even leaving the office,” McGrath stated. “Like fighting a war by remote control.” He tilted his empty mug against his lips, almost choked on the plastic stir straw.

McGrath was well past the age when most cops were puttering around their Victoria condos, bald as a bagel and just as rubbery. But he’d carved out a niche for himself in the Department by becoming a tech-savvy guru, an indispensable computerized tool in the 21st-century assault on crime.

The men’s mutual loathing went back to the first day they’d been paired together in Homicide. Pinero despised McGrath’s foul coffee breath and chronic health whining, his holier-than-Intel attitude. While McGrath didn’t envy Pinero his smooth good looks and muscular physique; he detested him for them, in fact. And the young detective’s apparent indifference to all things chip-driven earned him a special place of contempt in McGrath’s ebook.

Pinero was two weeks away from transfer-bait for trolling John’s with the Vice Unit – and both men were counting the days, one on his Dukes of Hazzard wall calendar, the other on his Outlook software.

Sergeant Bugler walked into the Squad Room, barked, “McGrath, Pinero!” They looked up. “Got a job for you two.” They waited. “Lenny ‘The Rat’ Laymon’s been found dead.”

It was a skid row bungalow bordered by a boozecan on one side and a crack house on the other; smack-dab in the middle of the sour armpit of Vancouver – the downtown eastside. Inside: the nude body of Lenny Laymon, curled up in a fetal ball on the bottom of his bathtub, like a rat in its hole.

Pinero stared at the hunk of limburger on the toilet lid, gestured. “That a joke?”

McGrath slurped java out of a paper cup. “Air freshener, more likely.”

Constable Mullings laughed. “The Rat did like his cheese.”

The two detectives and the uniformed cop looked down at Lenny’s sunken body. The water had still been running from the showerhead when the girl had discovered him, both he and the water ice-cold by then. Even with the long soak, Lenny still looked dirty, the yellow skin on his hairless body going blue, backbone spined like a Stegosaurus. His eyes and mouth were wide-open, back of his blonde-fringed head a bloody mess.

“When’d the girl find him?” Pinero asked Mullings.

“’Bout an hour ago,” the Constable replied, wiping a big, red nose with a big, red hand. “She couldn’t reach him on the phone all of yesterday, so she decided to pay him a visit this morning.”

“How old is she, anyway?”

“Fourteen.”

“How’d she get in?”

“Had her own key.”

Pinero mauled a hunk of bubblegum. They could hear the girl, Kristal, crying away in the next room, lamenting a life gone down the drain: a con artist, fraud artist, sneak thief, pickpocket and stool pigeon.

“Look what I found when I made her empty her pockets,” Mullings added, pulling something out of his jacket. He held it up. It sparkled in the light of the bare bathroom bulb.

“A diamond ring,” McGrath said, taking it from the Constable and examining it.

“Rock’s gotta be at least one-carat,” Mullings guessed. “She claimed Lenny gave it to her – like anyone’d believe The Rat was gonna pop the question, eh – then finally admitted she’d found it on Lenny’s dresser and palmed it, after she found the guy soaking in the tub.”

“It’s got ZJ stamped on the inside of the band,” McGrath stated.

“Zammy Jewelers,” Pinero responded. “They’ve got a store in the Centre Mall-make their own rings. And right now I’m betting they’re at least one bauble short of a glitter palace.”

He pulled a couple of Kleenex’s, a pair of latex gloves out of his pocket. He set the Kleenex carefully down on the grimy tile floor and knelt beside the tub, dressed his hands in the throwaway gloves. He ran a finger along the bottom of the tub, up to and around Lenny’s body. He poked the corpse.

McGrath turned his head and spoke to the two guys from the Fire and Rescue Service who were lounging in the doorway, “Looks like an accident, huh?”