Murder on Ice (11 page)

That still left two questions unanswered. "If she was among friends, why did she need a bodyguard, and why the hell were you shooting at me?"

It seemed that Nancy was not just a pretty face. She had brains enough to realize that as a rich man's daughter she might be a valuable commodity once she stepped outside the law and disappeared. She knew Irv from years of coming up to Murphy's Harbour, mostly without her father, who was too busy to spend more than occasional weekends at the family place on the lake. She had heard the local rumors about Irv Whiteside's past and had bought the glamor of it.

"Hell, you know, Chief," he apologized, "folks think it was like
The Godfather
, fer crissakes. I didn't tell her no different. She's a nice kid."

"You still didn't tell me why you were trying to kill me."

"Well, it's like this. I told the help I'd be upstairs, to close up and go home without disturbing me. They figured I had a broad up there. So I went down the firesteps and out to the marina. Like, I keep a skidoo there. That was it. I was out here by eleven, poured myself a snort, and waited. Around eleven-thirty they turn up. I can see right away they're excited. There's five o' them, not six, like I expected. So I open the door and they come stormin' in outa the cold but they're not laughing, like I figured. Nancy's cryin'. So I ask her what's up and she points to the big one who's wearing the ski mask and she says, 'He stripped one of the girls and left her on the ice to die.' So I say to him, because this is a him, this is no broad. I say, 'What's going on?' and he says, 'Keep outa this.' And I say I'm goin' to keep the kid with me and the rest of them can go. But he just sighs, real weary. He says, 'I thought some dumb bastard would try that,' and he pulls a gun on me. He says to me, he says, 'One move outa you and you're through worryin' about anythin'.' Then he grabs Nancy and they all go back out to their machines and away. I go through this place and find the rifle but when I go down to the dock they've screwed up my skidoo. So I lie low to wait for morning, but I'm scared and I'm goddamn mad. So I keep the lights off and my eyes open. And when I see somebody coming over the rocks, sneaking up, instead of up from the dock like a normal person would've, I figure it's the guy with the gun back again and I let fly."

I thought about what he'd told me. On the face of it they had been dumb, leaving Irv here with a rifle, but as I thought it through I could see sense in their plan. For one thing they weren't sure how many more people Nancy had told, including possibly me. Leaving him here, angry and armed, had given him a chance to shoot me if I turned up and left them with the choice of taking Nancy to some place nobody knew about. It seemed to me they were adjusting their plan as they went along, and that made it harder to second-guess them.

My face was burning. I realized it had been frostbitten when I was up on the roof. Tomorrow it would be swollen and blotchy. Tonight it was pins and needles but I didn't care. It was the only thing about me that was really alert. I felt dull and outwitted, trying to keep up with the chain of events Whiteside had described. I rubbed my face with two fingers until I got used to the pain, then I asked him, "Did Nancy give you any idea where they were going, except for here?"

"No. Honest, Chief. This place belongs to the woman who set up the kidnapping. Calls herself Margaret Sumner."

The name meant nothing to me. I pushed him. "What do you know about her? Is she a dumpy broad, in her fifties?"

He nodded, eager as a puppy to please. "That's her. There's no Sumner on the Reserve, that's for sure, but she's an Indian, around fifty-five."

I remembered the September morning. Three bangs of the pump gun, three ducks. Maybe she was Indian, but if so she had made money along the way. Her clothes were expensive.

"Anything else? Is she married, widowed, what?"

He held up his hands. "That's all I know. She bought this place last summer. I've seen her come into the marina a time or two, keeps an old plywood runabout there, got a Mercury motor."

I sensed a pattern to this. She had bought the cottage here and then set about building her little organization. Had it been because she wanted to get her hands on the Carmichael kid for something? Or had the Carmichael kid seemed like a usable totem for her cause? Whichever it was, Irv Whiteside wouldn't be able to help me. I tackled his knowledge from the other end.

"How come you and Nancy Carmichael are so close? Are you getting next to her?"

He folded at the shoulders and crossed his legs guiltily. "Hey, come on, Chief, get real. Me an' a kid like that?"

"Well, how much was she going to pay you for looking after her?"

"Nothing." He muttered it, not looking at me.

"Nothing? You don't work for nothing, Irv. I've seen your sheet, don't try to snow me."

"This was a favor." The rawness of his longing for the girl was painful to watch. "I mean, she's a pretty kid. I'm a man of the world. You know. I'd be shut up here with her a couple days. You never know what'll happen."

I slumped down in an armchair, weary beyond belief. "You mentioned pouring a snort. Is there any more around?"

"Yeah! Sure. You want some?" He was on his feet at once, desperate to please. He found the bottle. It was J & B.

"Sorry it's not Black Velvet, Chief. I'm a scotch man."

"Sounds good," I said. He found a couple of coffee mugs and poured a solid belt into both.

He gave me mine, then raised his and said, "Chimo!"

"Chimo yourself." I toasted him and sipped. It went down smooth and spread out into my tired body like fresh blood.

Now he was setting his drink down and feeling in his pocket for cigarettes. He found them in his side pocket, crushed flat from his exit through the window. He extracted one, rolled it gently, and lit it with a stick of kindling he then threw into the stove.

"Now." I sipped again and set down my drink. "You probably don't need me to say it, but I have to. You're in trouble up to your ass. For openers, you're a part of a conspiracy to commit a felony." I looked at him to see how he was taking it. The kidnapping was nothing more than a case of public mischief and that's just a misdemeanor, but I wanted him scared. And besides, the caper involved a murder now.

"What's more, you attempted to murder a peace officer." He put his drink down on the floor and spread his hands like a crucifixion victim. "Come on, Chief. I told you what was goin' down."

"You know as well as me that story wouldn't last a minute in court."

He said nothing, just sat staring at the floor. Slowly he lowered his hands and brought the right to his mouth for a drag on his smoke. He cupped the cigarette in his hand. He had never been in the pen but he had worked for men who had. He knew the drill. No J & B, no Friday night women, just noise and fear and the chance of ending up as somebody's punk if you didn't hit any guy who looked at you sideways.

I took pity and got to the point. "So we'll scratch the shooting. I've been shot at before, by experts."

He looked up now, his eyes narrow as he considered the thin slice of hope I'd handed him. "And you're no part of the conspiracy, so we can scratch that as well … for a price."

"You mean you'd forget about everything." His voice was quiet. He spoke almost without moving his lips, a criminal again.

"I'm ready to."

"I'll pay whatever wants payin'." He made a half swoop toward his wallet but backed off when I looked at him.

"You know me better than that. What I need is some help. Hang in with me until this is over and I'll forget the rest of this nonsense."

He reached out his hand automatically, forgetting the cigarette butt. As his fingers extended, the butt fell to the floor and he stepped on it firmly. I shook his hand. "This is going to be hard," I promised him. "These are tough bastards. They've already killed one woman and tried to kill another."

"Killed a woman?" His horror was genuine.

I filled him in briefly, including the bit about the girl on the ice, then asked, "Waddya say?"

"Let's get 'em," he said.

"Okay. First thing, I want to know all you can tell me about the plan. Start talking, give all the names and facts you've heard, all the details. So far, none of it is making much sense. Maybe you can put the pieces together."

There wasn't much. He had known about the plot for three weeks. Nancy had come up alone and stayed over at the Tavern, ostensibly to go cross-country skiing. She had confided in Irv. She thought the thing was a big joke and hoped there would be plenty of headlines because it might help her when she reached the Miss Toronto contest. She would go into that contest, as she had ours, because her father owned houses in both places.

I stopped him here. "She has to be nuts. Doesn't she know the Miss Toronto is always chosen at the Police Games? No copper would vote for a dingbat like her."

"She's no dingbat." Irv was just the safe side of angry. "She's real smart. She's already in college, at seventeen. She speaks French better'n Jean Arcand at the bait store."

"She's got a thirty-eight bust, Irv, and you never looked any further. She's also got a big mouth. If she was letting you in on this dumb plan of theirs, she must have told half the world. She's likely got a whole lot of other people involved, people with no connection with this C.L.A.W. outfit."

He said nothing. I guess he knew I was right, that he wasn't the only one with the kid's secret. But that's not what he wanted to hear. I believe he was in love with her. I softened my approach. I wanted him to help me from choice, not anger.

"Did she tell you anything about this group of hers?"

"She said they were a great group of women."

I set down my empty coffee mug and sighed. "That shows it's wide open. There's at least one guy with the group, maybe more. And the one you saw is a tough, mean sonofabitch."

Irv stood up, convulsively clenching his fists. They were big, a fighter's fists. I was glad he was on my side. "I'd like a couple o' rounds with that bastard."

"You'll get them," I promised. "And we've got to find him. Unless I'm badly off base, he's the guy who murdered the girl at the motel and left the other one to die on the ice. He pulled a gun on you. We've got to stop him."

Irv was pacing, making small chopping punches with both hands, working out his anger as if this were a gym and he were honing himself for a bout.

"Did Nancy say anything about her group, what it was for?"

"Not much." He was still chopping punches that could have cracked ribs. "Only thing she said was, it was a feminist outfit."

"Feminist, not just a women's group. You're sure?"

He frowned. Subtleties of politics weren't his line. "Sure I'm sure. Feminist is what she said."

That made a difference. Feminist groups drew support from left, right, and center, all the shades of political color there are to the left of the Ku Klux Klan. The thought made me angry. I'm supposed to keep the peace here. It's not in my charter to hammer people into the ground or shoot them or open their mail or any of the other things that activists worry about. But on the other hand, I am a one-man band, and if she was calling on some heavy-duty troublemakers I would have to break some more rules and earn some more bad black ink. It would be the only way I could prevent somebody from doing worse to some helpless member of the public. They would justify their actions in the name of "The People," whoever the hell
they
were, but mine would be the actions of a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary.

I stood up and pulled on my scorched and smoky-smelling hat. It didn't improve my mood. "All right, so security is shot full of holes. She's been talking and there's a good chance she's got some wild-eyed radicals on her side. We've got to get hold of her before they do anything crazy."

"Tonight?" Irv was startled. His plans had been for a couple more scotches and a few hours sleep, helping me with the rough stuff by daylight if he had to.

"Tonight." I confirmed his fears for him. "The weather's too bad for them to make a run for it down the highway. She will still be here in some cottage until the snow stops. After that, they could take her cross country on a skidoo and meet the road someplace."

Irv reached for his outdoor clothes, a one-piece skidoo suit, extra large, to cover his out-of-place gray suit. I waited while he dressed and pulled on big rubber boots over his shoes. "Have you got any more shells for that rifle?"

He patted the pocket of his skidoo suit. "I already put them in here."

"Load up. You may need that thing."

I left him doing that while I went out back to the tree where I had dumped my showshoes and slipped them on. Irv came out of the back door as I finished. "Wait here," I told him, and stumped out to my snow machine. It was standing in the center of its very own snowdrift, but it started first try. I brushed the snow off the seat and drove up to the front of the cottage. Irv came down the steps to meet me, plunging waist deep in one drift. He climbed on behind me and I asked him, "Which way did they take off?"

He pointed vaguely west and I started off that way, making a big loop first to my left, then right again until I picked up the trail. They had done their best to run Indian file so the track would be less obvious, but it was the only track on the lake not yet covered with new snow. I followed it toward the far shore through the hypnotic dazzle of the snow that was still falling as fast as ever.

The track led straight to the shore line, then turned north until it reached a big older place, one of the summer houses that had once belonged to some lumber baron or other. Right now I wasn't interested in history. I just knew it would be a pig to search, especially if the guy with the gun was alive and well and hiding somewhere inside. I would have given anything to have had Sam with me instead of Irv Whiteside.

I drove right past the place without stopping. Irv was bumping me on the back trying to get my attention, but I just held up my free hand to let him know I'd heard. This was no time for a frontal attack.

We stopped a hundred yards past the place and I switched off the lights and the motor and strapped on my snowshoes. It was hard to talk over the rushing of the wind, but when I was set to go I beckoned to Irv and he leaned close.