Inspector Green Mysteries 9-Book Bundle (128 page)

“Who should I report to? I mean...are you running thecase?”

Green hesitated. As he stood at the edge of the crime scene,breathing in the scent of excitement and the urgency of death,watching the ident officer combing the grounds and the pathologist circling the victim, he felt the old passion for the hunt. People suffered, people died, and all he’d ever wanted to do was to track down the tormenters and bring them to account. Nothing thrilled him as much as making the bad guys pay. But now, in the larger, amalgamated police service,he was a middle-management bureaucrat, trapped between the field officers who wrestled with flesh and blood suffering and the senior officers, whose main battlefield was the committee rooms and ledgers of Elgin Street Headquarters.He’d stopped off here because he couldn’t resist the call of the field, but he belonged, even at this moment, in Barbara Devine’s office.

Yet there were elements in the case that could use an inspector’s touch. He dredged up his best bureaucratese. “Not directly. It’s Gibbs's case. He’ll keep me apprised.”

MacPhail straightened as he watched the redhead bound eagerly towards the road. Merriment shone in his eyes. “Not directly? You’ll be getting your nose indirectly in, then?” Green laughed. “Well, inquiries with the military can be delicate. Those army guys love their ranks.”

January 15, 1993. Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Man, it’s cold out here. The wind whips off the prairie like
a nor’easter coming off the sound, so cold we can hardly do
manoeuvres. We’re mostly doing weapons training and PT,
and the sergeant major’s working us so hard my legs feel like
they’re going to fall off. He says we only got two months to get
in shape, and there’s going to be some of us won’t make the cut.
There are guys here from all across the country, a lot of them
weekend warriors like me, really excited to be on their first
tour. My platoon commander’s a captain from the Princess Pat
regulars who they call the Hammer, because he comes down
hard if you mess up. They put Danny and me in the same
platoon, but we’re in different sections so we won’t get to work
together much. Your section’s kind of like your family, you rely
on them.

My section commander’s a sergeant from Winnipeg on back
to back rotations to Yugoslavia. He’s been telling us horror
stories about the shelling and the sniping going on all the time.
But that’s mostly in Sarajevo, and we’re going to be escorting
convoys and protecting civilians in Croatia, which is a little
horseshoe-shaped country that curves through the mountains
and down the Adriatic Sea. Maybe Danny and I can go to a
Greek island on our leave. Far cry from the North Atlantic.
This is our first taste of real action, and I sure hope we both
make the cut.

THREE

 G
reen was already formulating a battle plan for the military as he walked back towards Gibbs’s car, but at the last minute he detoured over to have a quick word with Twiggy. The uniformed officers had obviously decided they had gleaned all the information from her that they could, for they’d left her sitting on the ground by herself. Some thoughtful officer had brought her a cup of hot coffee and a cigarette, which hung from the corner of her mouth. She cradled the coffee and pretended to be engrossed in her paper, but she was rocking slightly as if to soothe herself. At the sight of him, her lips stretched around the cigarette in a jagged but affectionate smile.

He extended his hand. “How are you doing, Twiggy?”

She squinted up at him through the smoke. “Well, well, Mr. G,” she said, her voice rattling through the phlegm in her throat. “Been awhile. What is it now? Superintendent? Chief?”

He feigned horror. “God forbid! Inspector, and that’s as high as I plan to go. I have a fear of heights.”

She chuckled, thrusting her thick tongue through the gap in her teeth. It seemed to Green that she’d lost a few more since he’d last seen her. “I don’t see your buddy around much any more either. Sully. He retired or something?”

“Just off on another assignment. And we got a great big city to take care of now, so we don’t get down onto the street as much as we used to.” He eyed the soggy ground beside her. She had spread out some of her newspapers to sit on. Without hesitation, she laid out the one she was reading, and he eased himself gingerly down beside her. The reek of booze and body odour almost made him gag, but he kept his expression friendly.

“So,” he said gently, “this must have been an unpleasant surprise for you.”

Twiggy shrugged. Green had known her since she’d first hit the streets, and he knew the reason, yet only a slight wobble in her chin betrayed the pain she must have felt. For Twiggy, like himself, dead bodies stirred up one memory too many.

“Not the first time,” she said. “Won’t be the last. Some day it’ll be me.”

He didn’t insult her by arguing. In truth, he was surprised she was still around. She was an alcoholic, a smoker and a diabetic. The only reason her heart and lungs hadn’t collapsed beneath the abuse was that she’d inherited the constitution of an ox. And the bloody-mindedness to match.

He stuck to the facts. “Did you know the woman?”

Twiggy’s eyes peered shrewdly through folds of fat. “Didn’t get a good look first time round, and wasn’t about to take another.”

“Still...did she look familiar?”

“Like you said, it’s a big city.”

“But you’ve seen a lot of it.”

She chuckled. “Not so much recently. My knees don’t like to travel. But she wasn’t from around this part, that much I’ll say.”

“Did you see her arrive?”

“She was already here.”

“Already dead?”

“Maybe. It was dark, and I didn’t notice.”

“Was anyone else around here last night?”

She shifted restlessly, wincing at the stiffness of her joints. “Mr. G, your cops already asked me all this. They took notes up the ying yang. Now I gotta go before I lose the best part of the day.”

Green pulled his wallet from his inside jacket pocket. “It’s just that sometimes, after the shock wears off, witnesses remember more details.”

Twiggy’s eyes flicked to his wallet before travelling up the slope towards the buildings on Bronson Avenue. She poked her tongue through her teeth. “I might have seen her earlier. With someone.”

“Man or woman?”

She stared into the distance, worrying her teeth with her tongue. “It was just a vague impression. I saw more the jacket than the woman.”

“When was this? The same night?”

“Maybe, maybe not. The nights all blur together, you know?”

“What were they doing together? Did it look like drugs? Soliciting?”

“I just remember them on a street over there, outside some fancy place.” When she pointed a stubby, yellowed finger towards downtown, Green noticed an oozing sore on the finger where the skin had cracked. “Talking.”

“Hear anything?”

She cast him a disdainful look before stubbing out her cigarette and beginning her struggle to rise. Green reached to haul her up, then extracted twenty dollars from his wallet. “Treat yourself to a proper breakfast, and check that finger out at the clinic.” He extended his card with the money. “And Twiggy, you be sure to call me if you remember anything more.”

A jagged smile lit her doughy face as she plucked the bill from his hand. “Sure thing, Mr. G. My memory’s a funny thing these days.”

Actually, Twiggy’s memory was still remarkably sharp for details that were important to her survival. Such as the whereabouts and activities of all strangers who came into her personally declared sphere of operation.

She waited till Green had disappeared around the edge of the wall before she made her move. Stuffing her newspapers under her arm and dragging her garbage bag behind her, she struggled up the muddy slope and headed to the seat in the nearby bus shelter. There, shielding her actions from the suspicious eyes of the police officer guarding the scene, she emptied her garbage bag onto the bench beside her. She pawed impatiently through the crumpled bedding and the pile of smelly clothing, picked up a small cardboard box and pried off its lid. Inside were two pairs of homemade bead bracelets and a gold ring now much too small for her swollen fingers. They were remnants of another lifetime, kept only because they were worth more in memories than in cold hard cash.

She frowned at the inside of the box. Too small. She groped through the clothes for a better hiding place, but everything was damp and stained. As a last resort, almost reluctantly, she picked up the two books that had weighted down the bottom of the garbage bag. One was a paperback picked up at a church rummage sale for 25 cents.
If Life’s a Bowl of Cherries,
What am I Doing in the Pits?,
by Erma Bombeck. Bombeck had been dealt one of life’s crappier hands but had risen to fame and happiness, only to be struck down by a fatal disease at the height of her success. Twiggy had been unable to resist the irony, and indeed, Bombeck’s humour had brought her through many a desolate night.

But the paperback wasn’t big enough. Not for what she had in mind.

The second book was a thick hardcover tome with gilt lettering and a splintering spine.
The Collected Works of Charles
Dickens
. Twiggy picked it up and let it fall open naturally to reveal the treasures that lay inside. Two photos, lovingly preserved against the crush of life on the streets. Like the jewellery, they were remnants of another lifetime. Carefully, she tore the newspaper along its crease and folded the page into four. Flipping to a fresh spot, she tucked the small square between the pages of the book.

Another remnant, valuable not to her past, but perhaps to her future.

After Green left Twiggy, he headed up to speak to Detective Bob Gibbs. He opened the passenger door and slipped in just as the young detective was lifting his coffee cup from its holder. Gibbs started, spilling coffee all down the front of his impeccable white shirt. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he searched for his voice.

“Sorry about that, Bob,” Green said, rescuing the cup and setting it down. Bob Gibbs had many talents, but a confident disposition was not one of them. Still, in the current state of
CID
, you had to take the good with the bad. He glanced at the screen on Gibbs’s laptop. “How’s it going?”

Gibbs found his voice. “It’s still early, sir. How...how did you know...?”

“I was just driving by. Any luck with missing persons?”

“It’s no one local, at least recently. But I’ve asked MisPers to check Quebec and Ontario.”

“There may be a military connection.”

Gibbs blinked in surprise, and a faint flush crept up his neck. “Are you...should I...?”

“It’s your case, Bob. I’m heading to the office to meet with Superintendent Devine. But because of the military line of inquiry, I’d like to be kept in the loop.”

A shout from down by the water interrupted any reply Gibbs might have attempted. Green peered out of the car window and saw an officer gesturing towards the water at the base of the pumphouse wall. Green and Gibbs got out of the car for a better look and saw Lou Paquette striding over towards the spot,cameras bouncing, yelling at them not to touch anything.Without a moment’s hesitation, Gibbs and Green hurried backdown the slope, reaching the scene only seconds after the Ident officer. The young uniformed officer who’d made the discoverywas on his knees, leaning out over the water, oblivious to the damp seeping into his pants. A strange pink mottled object layin about four feet of murky water.

“I think it’s a purse, sir,” he said. “Looks like it got stuck on the lip of the culvert.”

Paquette was already chasing everyone away so that he could photograph it. Gibbs and Green waited patiently with the others until he had completed the photos and had fished the purse out into a large plastic pan. Water oozed from it as it gradually deflated. It was large enough to carry a small tank, Green thought, but it was hideous. Something even his wife Sharon, with her practical streak and her sense of humour,would have left on the rack. Shiny black vinyl with big, floppy,pink daisies stuck all over it.

Paquette pried open the clasp, methodically removed the contents and laid them beside it in the pan. A hat and scarf, two lipsticks, a glasses case, a half-eaten pack of Dentine, half a dozen cheap pens, black gloves, an empty Tupperware container, a hair brush, bits of sodden paper, and three large rocks.

Paquette hefted these, looking perplexed.

“Could they have gotten into the purse when it bumped along the bottom?” the young uniform asked.

Another officer elbowed closer. “The clasp was shut.”

Green stepped forward and pulled on a glove before picking up one of the stones. It was heavy. Not something a woman would be eager to lug around in her purse. It was grey and irregularly shaped, certainly not chosen for its beauty. He studied the rocky shoreline thoughtfully. Similar grey stones of all sizes poked through the mud.

“The killer put them in there, hoping to make the purse sink,” he said.

Paquette’s shrug was non-committal. Green knew the Ident officer was not fond of theories, only of evidence he could lay his hands on. Evidence won cases in court.

The second officer peered over Paquette’s shoulder at the pan. “Wallet’s missing. Looks like there’s no
ID
whatsoever. Who’s to say it’s even the Jane Doe’s?”

Paquette had begun poking in side pockets, removing more soggy bits of paper. At this point, he glanced up. “It’s not been in the water very long. The fabric’s not degraded, the vinyl’s still shiny and the print on these papers is still pretty clear.”

Green looked at the sixty odd feet between the purse and the body. “It’s hers. The killer took all the
ID
out, weighted it with rocks, and tossed it into the water, probably hoping the current would carry it farther away. Which was a risk, because he had to know we might find it. He must have thought it was a greater risk to carry it with him.”