Murder on Ice (15 page)

"I'll talk," he said shakily. And then he added the most surprising comment I had heard all night. "You don't have to torture me. This isn't Viet Nam."

I looked into his eyes but there was no sarcasm there, just fear. "How did you know I was in Viet Nam?"

He waved his working hand, dismissing the question. "We checked this town out from top to bottom before we decided to join in."

"Who's we?"

He straightened up, imperious, except for the purple and white clown stripes on his left cheek. "The People's Revolutionary Guard."

"Is C.L.A.W. some part of the same outfit?" Know your enemy, even if he uses dumb names to throw you off.

He laughed, a condescending, bitter sound. "C.L.A.W. is just a bunch of brainless broads playing games."

The younger woman shouted something. I told her, "Shut up. You can have your turn in a minute." She subsided and I bored in on the kid.

"How many of your Guard are up here tonight?" It was the least he could tell me. I wanted more, names, locations—especially locations—but numbers would be a start.

"Four."

"Names?" I took out my notebook, then realized I had gutted it to start a fire in the fishing hut a thousand years earlier. I looked around for paper and found a writing pad tucked into the top drawer of a sideboard against the wall. "Names?" I asked again, and he began to back off.

"I took an oath."

"Yeah, so did I, but mine is for the greatest happiness of the greatest number, so forget yours."

"I can't break it," he said unsteadily.

"If you don't, somebody else is liable to get hurt and the first candidate would be you," I said softly.

He backed away, a pace closer to the stove and the reminder of my threat.

"You heard him." He appealed to the women. "This policeman threatened to torture me. He said he would sit me on the stove. I have to talk."

The older woman surprised me. "Why talk? Say nothing, you scum. I'd like to see you burn."

That ended any play-acting on his part. He gave me the names. His own was Elliot. Really it was Peter Hawthorne, but he had always admired T.S. Eliot so he had taken the name as his code name. Eliot was an English poet, he explained helpfully. I didn't bother explaining that I had read the occasional book. The others were Michael and Sam and Tom. Tom was the leader, the heavy-set mystery man who had trashed Carl Simmonds's house.

"Is that his last name, or what?"

"First name, of course." He was surprised. He had never visited an Indian reserve where half the men had surnames that had once been somebody's Christian name.

"Where was he when he asked you to wait for me on the ice and shoot down my headlights?"

"At our field headquarters." He was enjoying talking now. He had slowed his delivery, like the drunk who gets you in a corner and holds you by the lapel.

"Don't play games. Where were you geographically, not philosophically?"

"It was the cottage on the island." Now he hesitated, looking up at me as if measuring the odds of my hitting him again. He needn't have worried. Hitting isn't a hobby with me. It's an occasional function I have to attend to, but I don't enjoy it. He looked down at the floor and mumbled, "We were at the cottage where you killed Michael."

More gasping from the women. I ignored them. "Did you arrive at the same time as Tom? And if so, was the man dead when you got there?"

"Tom was there before me. He was examining Michael. Michael's head was a
mess!"
From the way his voice ran up at the end of the sentence he might have been describing a bad haircut rather than a fatal beating.

"Was the Carmichael girl with Tom?"

"No." He shook his head. His hair had dried completely now and I could see that it was dark at the roots.

"And where had you come from?"

He had come from another motel, just south of the park. He had driven his vehicle there after dropping the women off, and had picked up a skidoo from there. He had gone to the cottage on the island, found Tom, listened to the tale of my villainy, and had waited close to the cut to ambush me and revenge his group. He had waited for the first skidoo. Tom had told him it would be me, that I was too dangerous to tackle in a fair fight, I would have to be taken by surprise.

"Where are the others—Tom and what's his name, Sam?" I asked the one question but I needed answers to twenty. The second one would have been, Why had the three men shown themselves at the Lakeshore Tavern? Why give anybody a clear look at you when you plan to be involved in a crime? The only answer that made sense was vanity. They had enjoyed the limelight of fighting in the bar, never guessing that they would be seen again later. They hadn't expected any real resistance. I wondered if one of them was staked out for me close to the station, waiting for me to come back, waiting with another gun—perhaps a shotgun this time—something that would put me away for keeps.

"I don't know." He shrugged his shoulders, though one of them didn't work. His towel slipped and he gripped it with his good hand.

I pushed him some more, went over the questions again, but nothing new came out. He was scared enough to be telling the truth. Which meant the girl was still missing and that there were two people somewhere outside this cabin who could justify themselves if they killed me.

Neither of the women added anything to what he had told me. Under steady questioning, the younger one said that it must have been Nancy's blabbing that let the People's Revolutionary Guard know what was going to happen. But she herself knew nothing about the Guard. If it was a terrorist group, it was new.

So far in Canada we've been lucky. The only terrorists we've had have been the Quebec F.L.Q., a bunch of Moscow-sponsored hooligans who stirred up the country for a few months during 1970. Our federal government gets all its strength in Quebec and most of the bad boys had been allowed to get away with their murder. They had been given free passage to Cuba, whence they went on to France and came home after ten years to the kind of jail terms you expect for stealing candies. In the meantime, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who had been told to prosecute them, had themselves been arrested and hassled. I guess we don't have terrorists because the other side doesn't have much more to win here.

I gave up and concentrated on the older woman. "You must be 'Margaret.' What's your last name?"

"Sumner." That meant she would be Mrs. I've never met a Sumner on any of the Indian reserves. We have lots of Sinclairs, no Sumners.

"Mrs. Sumner. You understand that this Tom character has killed two men—one with a booby trap, the other one beaten to death. He may also be the person responsible for killing your own group member under the name of Katie at the motel."

"All this is assumption," she said quietly.

"I also know that you and he wrecked Carl Simmonds's house."

She looked away from me, gazing at the stove as if it were a Rodin sculpture. Her profile was toward me and I could see how she had impressed these younger women. There was strength and dignity to her that looked classical.

"I'm not proud of what we did. I just wanted those negatives."

"That's a great comfort to him as he cleans up the damage."

"I'll pay." She glared at me, nostrils pinched. "I'll compensate the little faggot, don't worry."

That surprised me. It was the first heat she had shown. Was she herself a fag-basher? Most women aren't, only insecure men need to thump homosexuals, but there was real hatred in her voice. No, the wild card in the deck was Tom. I turned the topic back to him.

"I need to know where Tom has taken the girl. She's in real danger."

She said nothing and I tried a new tack. "He has already killed, and he nearly killed another one of your group, that girl he stripped on the ice and left to die." That was when Mrs. Sumner laughed at me, a big, genuine laugh right down to her gut, shaking her whole body, making her let go of her head and dangle her arms helplessly.

"You predictable, chauvinist bastard. Don't you understand? He didn't strip her. She volunteered."

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M
y astonishment opened her up like a book. She couldn't tell me fast enough what a fool I'd been. They had seen me overtaking them across the ice, my headlight bobbing along behind. Margaret had been in front and she had stopped close to the fishing huts and made her suggestion to the girl. The plan was for them to leave her where they were sure I would find her, then press on with the lights out, Margaret in the lead. I guess she had the knack of finding her way in the dark better than most people can follow street signs. They would have their lights out, although she had bet that I wouldn't come after them even if I saw their lights, not with a damsel in distress to rescue.

So I had done my Sir Galahad impersonation and they had gotten away and Irv Whiteside was dead. The girl had done her own part by unloading my gun when I left it with her so I would be at a disadvantage next time I needed it.

The two women and the kid in his towel all had a good smirk at my predictability, but I ignored them. If people can still get my attention by expecting me to act humanely, I have nothing to be ashamed of.

When they had made their point, I acted a little humble. It worked. Margaret gave me her version of the story. She was serious about feminist action. They had planned this kidnapping as a rehearsal. They knew about my service in Viet Nam, but with the feminine equivalent of arrogance they had ignored it as a threat. To them it made me some kind of knee-jerk trigger-puller with no brains. I was obviously no match for a subtle group of women. The only fly in their ointment was Nancy's failure to understand she was just the cheese in a mousetrap, not the star of the show. She had bragged about the plan to some boy and he had let it slip to somebody else, and finally a member of this crazy Guard group had heard and wanted in. It would give them some cheap and easy publicity. And even more important, it would give them leverage in their struggle against the arms race. As I already knew, Nancy's father was the president of Astro-Control Systems, the Toronto outfit that made guidance systems for American missiles. Some wild-eyed group had already bombed the plant. Now this new outfit was planning to do by stealth what the others had failed to do with dynamite.

At least that was my guess, and it made me sure that the Carmichael kid was dead if I didn't get her back tonight.

I asked how C.L.A.W. had reacted to the news that Nancy had done everything to blow security short of writing an editorial for the college paper. Apparently like all democratically run lunatic fringes they had taken a vote and decided to proceed. They had counted on the Guard group to give them what Margaret described cryptically as "firepower."

The dead girl at the highway had struck up a romance with one of the Guard people, I couldn't find out which one, and that had intensified the complications.

"Doesn't it bother you that this Katie is dead? And the same guys who killed her now have another member, young Nancy? Don't you care?"

Margaret Sumner looked at me with something like amusement. "No," she said.

The other girl protested. "We don't want anybody harmed, we're a peaceful group." But Margaret Sumner had the last word.

"We don't care," she said.

I gave up and asked the last, hopeless question. "Why did you set this particular heist up? What have you got against Carmichael that you'd put his daughter in this kind of danger?"

She looked at me impassively, the true believer talking to the heretic. "You don't need to know. It's personal."

I gave up. None of them knew enough about this Tom character to suit me. He was the wild card in the deck, unknown even to the kid who had fired at me. I wondered what kind of zealot he was. These Guard groups spring up from time to time, mostly made up of spoiled rich kids doing something about their Oedipus complexes by opposing the church or corporate profits, anything, right or wrong, with more seniority than they've got. Mostly they just march and sing. They're harmless and their members grow up to be teachers and newspaper columnists who vote Socialist.

But this man sounded different. Elliot's description of him was the key. He had described him as "around thirty-five." By that age he should have shucked his activism along with his acne. I was worried, but too tired and stretched to know what to do about it.

In the end I left them all there. There was no way to take them back in. If I put them on another skidoo in front of mine they could break for it. I didn't want to waste time chasing them down. It was even too much of a problem to bring in Elliot, so I handcuffed him and left him nude except for his towel. It would prevent his getting dressed, which meant he wouldn't be bothering me before the weather warmed up. I'd be back by then. In the meantime I would be free to chase down the skidoo tracks that led away from here.

I considered tying up the women, but instead immobilized them by taking all their outdoor clothing and the plug lead from the snowmobile outside. I also tore the phone out of the wall. It was primitive and illegal but I had no choice. Two men who had killed before were outside somewhere, waiting for me. I didn't want them to be reinforced or even warned from here.

I took the outdoor clothes with me out to my snow machine, which was covered with snow by now. Fortunately it started easily, and I headed out behind the cabin onto the roadway. It was drifted in and I had to curtsey around the edges of the worst drifts, but I could see the track of another machine ahead of me. I followed it, pulling my face down into my collar, longing for a chance to curl up in a corner out of the snow and sleep like a dog.

The bite of the snowflakes that fluttered around the windshield kept me from dozing. I drove along the stale track up to the edge of Murphy's Harbour proper, around the curve that matches the curve of the bay, past the bait store and past the point where the track turned off, toward the side door of the Lakeside Tavern.

I was wide awake now, but I didn't pull in. Instead I did the clever thing, winding up the throttle and passing the place at a roar, heading up and over the hump beside the bridge above the lock and around the first corner toward the police station.