Dead in the Water (10 page)

"Yeah. It's Ross Winslow, and his throat's been cut. I need your help."

"Name it." He sounded like a TV copper.

"First off, I want that tarp off there. Then I want those kids kept back out of my way so nobody touches the boat."

"My time is yours," he said solemnly.

I clapped him on the back and went to the boat. The tarp was loosely covering the body. I rolled my end back, keeping an eye on Curtis. His face whitened, but he was steady. He rolled the other end away and I took my first real look at the body. From the amount of blood in the boat I guessed he'd died almost instantly. The front of his clothing was crusted with it, the whole bilge area of the boat was flooded with it. It had dried in the shallow places, but the deep portions in the bottom of the boat still held fluid blood, and flies.

I heard Curtis gulp a couple of times and told him, "Look away, Bill. You'll be fine." He nodded and turned away, dumbly, but he turned toward the kids in the roadway and held his ground. He was going to help me, and I was saved from the ceaseless arguing that I would have been into otherwise.

Curtis impressed the kids with his color. For the first time they realized that this wasn't a game, that death was unpleasant. They called out at him for a moment or two, then fell silent, standing around like visitors in church.

I went to my work. With my notebook in one hand I went all around the boat, looking at everything that was in it. I could see no knife, but that didn't mean anything. Even if he had cut his own throat, which I didn't believe for a moment, he could have dropped the knife overboard in his last kicking. I made a note of everything: the position of the throttle, the tanks, the presence of blood splashes rather than smears, the way blood must have spurted, judging by the clear patches in the partial shelter of seats. Then I shushed the flies off and started a closer investigation of the body. At least, I was going to start when I heard the cackling start at the back of the crowd behind me. I guessed that Carl Simmons was here.

Carl was the only identifiable gay in Murphy's Harbour. He was an elegant, tiny man in his middle thirties. The year-round regulars regarded him as kind of a pet. Most of them had only a vague idea about homosexuality and they couldn't really believe that this man with his pastel outfits and a lisp was anything more than a confirmed bachelor, perhaps a bit sissy. Over the five years he had lived at the Harbour, in his white cottage at the edge of town, he had become an institution.

I looked up and saw I was right. Carl was doing his strut for the young bloods in the crowd. He was dressed in pale pink slacks with a white safari shirt open halfway, revealing a heavy gold chain and his zodiac sign. I noticed automatically that he was a Pisces. He had his cameras dangling about him and was camping it up for the crowd, confident of his worth here and now defying any of them to insult him. They parted, jeering, and he came through, nodding graciously to Curtis, who turned to me for approval.

I called out, "Okay, Bill, I sent for Carl."

Curtis made a little ushering motion and Carl came by and up to the boat. He stood there for a moment, looking back at one kid who had been doing most of the catcalling. "Not now sweetie, I'm busy," he said and the kid went scarlet.

I stuck out my hand to him and he gripped it firmly. His voice became businesslike. "I heard it was a killing. I came as quickly as I could."

"It's a killing. Take a look."

He did, not flinching at the sight. "Poor old Ross, he doesn't look a bit well." He was working as he spoke, unslinging his cameras and setting one of them down. "What do you need?" he asked.

"In a word, everything," I told him. "I'd like you to shoot from every side so that I can get a clear indication of everything in the boat and its relationship to the body. Then I want some close-ups of the wound."

"Done," he said. He snapped a lens into his camera and went to one side of the boat. "How would it be if I went all around the boat, taking pictures every three or four feet?"

"I want overlap, so there won't be any blank spots if I have to check the shots over."

"Okay." He held up his camera and looked through it. "I'm going to need something to stand on."

"Stay there, I'll get a stepladder." There was one in the back of the station, in the little utility room where the furnace stood gathering dust until fall. I brought it out and he accepted it without comment. He set it up and started shooting, wrapped up completely in what he was doing. I stood back, grateful for his professionalism, and waited for him to complete the job.

His camerawork gave my own eye a new objectivity. I studied the remains dispassionately. Winslow had died trying to stem the flow of blood. His right hand was clenched close to his throat, his left thrown back. That didn't necessarily mean he had been murdered. A lot of suicides change their mind when the blood starts, but he was lying half across the boat. I tried to construct the circumstances that might have made the body fall that way. One thought came to mind. It would have happened if he had been standing at the time and if whoever cut his throat had grabbed him, probably by the hair, holding the back of Winslow's head against his own chest, cut, and pushed Winslow away as the blood spurted. That would mark the killer as a professional. There would be no blood on the killer, or his boat if he was in one. It had all gone away from him, toward Winslow's front. If it had happened from another boat, the driver could have been away from the scene before Winslow knew what had happened to him.

I was glad that Murphy had Sam by his side. Sam could handle a knife or gun faster than any human could change his position. Murph was safe, even if there was a professional killer about.

I was just congratulating myself on being so bright when Schulz the Reeve arrived. He was the head man of the village, I guess, the real estate broker who was the elected head of the town council and was the closest thing I had to a boss. Schulz was a self-important little guy, a snappy dresser in a ten-years-outdated way, the kind of guy who makes out with waitresses when he goes to conventions. He would have liked it if I kissed his rear in public, but I found it tough to be more than ordinarily polite. He came up to the boat and looked in. "Haven't seen anything like that since Korea," he said.

"It must have killed him very quickly," I said. I wasn't there to listen to his war stories. He wouldn't have listened to mine.

"Murder?" He did a quick little thing with his eyes, the "Dragnet" investigator to the life.

"I can't tell, but it looks like it."

He spat thinly onto the withered grass. I could see it was getting to him. "Don't you know?"

"There's no weapon in sight, but he could have dropped it overboard after cutting his own throat. When Carl's finished I'll move the body out and check if it's underneath." He turned back and moved to lean on the side of the boat. I brushed his hands aside and he almost went on his nose. "Sorry, I don't want any more prints on the boat; it's gonna take me a couple of hours to print it now."

He looked annoyed for a moment, then realized that Carl was watching, through the viewfinder. He immediately became stern and officious for the newspaper picture. Carl obliged him. "Watch the birdie," he chirupped and clicked while the Reeve turned back to me, showing his good profile, the side opposite his thinning part.

Like most amateurs he had no idea how the investigation should go. But he had the moxie to cover his ignorance. "What have you done?" I told him about the bulletin on Pardoe, the man who had last been seen in Winslow's boat with him.

"This boat?"

I shook my head. "No, this is the police boat. Ross Winslow stole it this morning while I was ashore searching for him and Pardoe."

That really gave him his opening. He swung a great verbal roundhouse, like a bar bully picking on a little guy. "You mean a respected citizen of this municipality stole the police boat and took it away somewhere and got his throat cut."

"Right on."

He snorted and stamped his foot a couple of times like a horse learning to count. "You mean that we have to believe that you are not responsible, that despite the fact that you were looking for him in this boat and that his body ends up in this boat, you had nothing to do with it."

"You think I did this?" I indicated Winslow's gaping throat, the open staring eyes.

"You have a certain reputation," he said, not looking at me. I didn't want to argue. The familiar sickness was rising in my throat. I didn't want blame, I wanted peace and quiet far from this kind of savagery, and here was this little Caesar taking cheap shots.

"If you were in Korea you've done your own share," I tried.

He drew himself all the way up to five seven and shook his head. "Not me. I was in administration."

I grinned. "Bully for you. Now get off my back. I've got an investigation to run."

He stopped tramping his foot and looked up, embarrassed at giving away the secret of his war experience. I kept a straight face while he shifted his anger onto me. "I just have to tell you that nothing like this ever happened before you came to Murphy's Harbour."

"Then aren't you lucky to have a professional on hand when it did," I said.

He played his trump. "I think it would be better for all concerned if we had the OPP come in and take care of it."

"Once you do that, you're stuck with OPP protection fulltime. You told me you couldn't afford it; that's why you hired me. So let me get on with my job, okay?"

He thought about it, looking for ways to salvage some glory from what was after all a grubby little murder. "I'll give you until tomorrow."

I said thanks to his retreating back and went on with my viewing of the body. Carl caught my eye and winked like a conspirator. And as I recognized the action I realized how thin I was spread. There was not enough manpower for the investigation. I should have swallowed my pride and asked the Reeve to let me call in a few volunteers, but I knew it wasn't possible. If I was going to keep on working here, I had to be the boss. Otherwise I was done. It was worrying. I was counting on the help of a cripple and a couple of well-meaning volunteers. On top of which I was beginning to feel that old disgust with death. This was not the reason I had come to Murphy's Harbour. If I was honest with myself, I had come here to turn into an old man, or at least to get my head back to normal life again. I was through with death, if only death would let me go my way.

I watched as Carl changed cameras and rattled off some insurance shots. Beyond him the crowd was getting restless; this was boring. They wanted excitement. Nobody had ever told them that death is ultimately boring.

Carl finished shooting and came across to me, shaking out a menthol cigarette from a soft pack. As I lit it for him he accepted gratefully, ducking his head and brushing my hand like a woman. Someone in the crowd laughed. Carl said, "I got all the shots you asked for and a few more. El Reevie-poo looking important, of course, plus a few of the exterior of the boat, the number, and a few marks that looked as if they might mean something."

"Great. Now when can I have the prints?"

He frowned. "Suppertime, I guess. I'll have to keep the King family waiting for the last shots of their darling daughter as a putative virgin." He did a little thing with his tongue in his cheek. It was odd; his campiness was like rising dough. It expanded to fill every opportunity it could find. I guess it was his form of toughness. I thanked him and he left, strutting through the crowd like a duchess on her way to the headman.

I turned back to the body. All the preliminaries were over. It was time to start searching. With the tip of my pencil I reached over and lifted the flap of Winslow's mackinaw jacket. And what I saw made me give a quick little whistle, a cheep of satisfaction with my own reasoning. The dead man was wearing a gun.

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I
t was a Luger. Thirty-five years before, Ross Winslow's young fingers had pried it out of the hands of some dead Nazi in Italy. And now it had failed him as it had failed the original owner. There was some kind of poetic justice in that, but my mind skipped by it as I went on with the puzzle that had been shaping since morning. Winslow had been wearing a gun. Therefore he had been primed for trouble before coming to the marina dock and sitting there waiting for Derek Pardoe and his bodyguard to come cruising up looking for a boat to rent. Somebody had known that Pardoe was heading for Murphy's Harbour. Somebody, the same somebody, had notified Winslow to be ready for him. And now the same somebody had drawn a knife across Winslow's life.

I stood and looked at the gun, acknowledging finally that Winslow had been murdered. No doubt about it. A man with the world's neatest killing device strapped to his chest does not cut his own throat. If he wants things to go away, he sucks on the barrel of his Luger.

Without examining the gun any closer I checked the slash on Winslow's throat. Now that the wound had dried and the lips of it had started to gape, it was easy to see that there had been two distinct cuts. The first might have been made by Winslow; it reached from under the left ear down almost to the Adam's apple. But the second, which started almost exactly at the end of the other, would have been impossible for a right-handed man. To cut that high would have called for an insupportable raise to the right elbow. Besides, most suicides leave a first faint nick, a trial cut to see if they have the nerve to make the big one. Winslow had no such mark. No, he had been killed. And what's more, he had been killed by someone he trusted. Otherwise this old soldier would have been holding that Luger and the results would have been different.

To complete my diagnosis I lifted the front of his shirt away from his chest. The blood had matted it to the flesh for a few inches below the cut but then there was a clear spot where no blood had fallen. That looked to me as if someone had sliced Winslow and then held him erect for a few seconds until the blood had started spurting, then dropped him back into his boat, still clean because Winslow's blood was pumping away from him. I pushed my hat back and scratched my sweating head. I was surely dealing with people who knew how to kill.