Murder on Ice aka The Killing Cold Read online

  Murder on Ice aka The Killing Cold

  Ted Wood

  Book DescriptionReid Bennett, the newest addition to Murphy’s Harbor, Ontario, has embarked on his second case. During the Ice Festival, there is a sudden blackout and the Queen of the Ice Festival disappears; in fact she’s been kidnapped! Members of a feminist anti-pageant group are suspected, but Reid suspects something fishy. He must expose the organizer of the kidnapping – and try not to get himself killed.

  Ted Wood

  Murder on Ice aka The Killing Cold

  The second book in the Reid Bennett series, 1984

  For my mother,

  who taught me the value of words

  1

  A kid in a mackinaw jacket stumbled out of the fire door of the Lakeside Tavern and collapsed against the six-foot snowdrift under the emergency light. I watched from the police car as he rolled onto one elbow and pried himself erect, one hand cupped over his mouth. Blood oozed between his fingers, black in the yellow light.

  I opened the car door and stepped out, calling Sam to heel. He jumped out and followed me along the shoveled walkway between the man-high walls of snow, through the thin new snow that was driving almost flat against my face on the bitter northeast wind. The kid was reeling but I judged he was more drunk than hurt.

  I grabbed him by the elbow and he took down his hand and gaped at me, trying to focus his eyes. He was short a couple of front teeth but this is hockey country, he could have lost them years earlier. I told him, "Come inside, you'll freeze out here." I let go of his elbow and he followed, docile as Sam, around to the main door and through the lobby to the low-ceilinged cocktail lounge, following the sounds of the fight. It was still going on at the far end of the room, on the other side of a wall of locals who were whooping and cheering, standing on tiptoe or on chairs to get a look. Most of them were nickel miners and bush-workers, tougher than any city crowd. But I had Sam.

  I told him "Speak!"

  He fell into his snarling, barking crouch, stiff-legged and savage. He's a big black and tan German Shepherd with one ear torn away in an old battle. It gives him a lopsided ugliness that makes people step aside. The crowd parted and we went through. Somebody shouted, "It's the cops!" and I felt the old wry amusement. Sure! The whole Murphy's Harbour contingent-Reid Bennett and Sam.

  The standard bar fight has two men in work shirts swinging big sucker punches at one another or sometimes working on one another with steel-toed safety boots. This was different. Neither man was swinging. One was a local, a truck driver for the nickel mine. He runs into the States and figures he's a hard case. But tonight he was scared. He was in a crouch holding a chair in front of him, light in his big hands. His opponent was the wild card in the game. He was tall and elegant, dressed in a velour shirt and expensive corduroy pants. He was circling silently on the balls of his feet, his hands up in the classic karate pose.

  The trucker shot me an appealing glance but I didn't respond. Most Friday nights when I come here, he's standing over some drunk, usually smaller or older than he is. Tonight he had picked wrong and I wanted him to sweat a little.

  Finally I told Sam "Easy" and he switched off like a radio, standing, watching the two men, ready to leap as soon as I asked.

  The trucker's wife was drunker than usual. She hadn't grasped what was happening. In the sudden silence her shout was shrill. "Garrrn! Kick his goddamn teeth in!"

  The karate man lowered his hands. He had nothing to fear from the trucker, chair or no chair. Slowly, keeping safely behind his chair, the trucker lowered it and backed off. His wife had noticed me now and she shouted, "Them sonsabitches picked on Harry."

  I said nothing, studying the karate man. He was narrow and dried out, with a dancer's build and the studio-tanned, young-old face you see on a lot of gay men. I judged him to be around my age, thirty-five. I had never seen him before. There were two others like him in the crowd, one his age, one younger. They were behind him, on the edge of the crowd.

  The trucker began to bluster. "He kicked my bro'r in the mouth. Waddya gonna do about that?"

  He knew the answer. He'd heard me give the instructions to his own victims. I ignored him. Instead I turned to the karate man.

  "I know these other people, they live here. Could I have your name, please?"

  He took out his billfold and flipped it open at the driver's license. I read his name, George Nighswander, and an address in Toronto. I could tell from the coded number on his chauffeur's license that he was thirty-six.

  "I didn't start this," he said, speaking softly.

  The trucker, whose name I remembered to be Cassidy, shouted immediately but kept his distance. I let him shout, speaking to Nighswander. "I'm not concerned with causes. All I need is your name and address in case one of them wants to lay an assault charge. Aside from that, you're free to go."

  He ducked his head and said, "Thank you, officer."

  Cassidy was still fuming but feeling safe now, with Sam and me there to protect him. He ducked his own head, mimicking Nighswander. "Thank you, officer!" he lisped, then spat and said, "Goddamn fruit!"

  Nighswander closed his billfold and pushed it back into his hip pocket. I asked him, "What brings you this far north, Mr. Nighswander?" I kept my voice polite. After all, he had the right to be anywhere he wanted, even two hundred miles north of Toronto with its gay bars and steam baths.

  "I'm here with friends for the Winter Carnival," he said primly. "We were having a quiet drink and this man began making personal comments. I didn't like it and said so, and his associate tried to punch me."

  "And you retaliated?"

  He nodded. Good! I thought. It might discourage Cassidy from picking fights, even with strangers in soft clothes who look as out of place in Murphy's Harbour in January as a bird of paradise in a chicken run.

  I turned to the kid with the broken mouth. He was standing where I had left him, blood still dripping through his fingers.

  "You've heard this man's name. If you want to lay a charge, go to the Justice of the Peace on Monday and swear out a warrant." He blinked a couple of times, painfully, and gave a slow nod. He would lay no charges. He was beaten and he knew it. So did Cassidy, but he was anxious to save face in front of the crowd. They would never again fear him, not now.

  "There's other ways to settle this," he said suddenly.

  "Maybe Mr. Nighswander will oblige you," I told him. "If you're bound and determined to fight, go outside and finish it now." It's not the speech a policeman is supposed to make, but I'm alone in this town and I sometimes cut corners.

  Cassidy swore and turned away from me to his wife. "Screw this place. Let's get the hell home."

  She was a big tough bottle blonde who had once worked as a cook in bush camps. She liked fights. "Are you gonna let that pansy get away with it?" she shouted. The crowd laughed and cheered and Cassidy's face grew redder than usual. "Shut your yap," he hissed. "You started this mess." He picked up his parka, said "Let's go," and left, brushing insolently close to Nighswander, who stepped aside gracefully and made a mocking little maitre d' gesture.

  That was the end of it. All three Cassidys went, and the visitors gathered at one table while the rest of the crowd settled back to its beer. I waited another minute, then nodded a signal to Sam and went to the bar. The barman flipped up the flap on the counter, winking at me. I winked back and went down the corridor to Irv Whiteside's office. Irv's the manager but he's never in his office on Friday. That's the night he brings in a girl from Toronto. They have the surf 'n' turf dinner while the crowd gets a good look at her, then he takes her upstairs. It's one of his vanities, making the isolated bush-workers drool with envy. That's why he always brings gi
rls in for the weekends in winter. Summertimes he finds companionship from the tourists and cabin renters.

  The waitress came in after me, flashing buck teeth as she snapped her gum. "Hey, thanks, Chief. You wanna talk to the boss?"

  "When he comes down. No panic."

  "Okay." She stopped the sentence with a snap of her gum. "You like your usual?" My reward for acting as tavern bouncer. I thanked her and she went for the Black Velvet. Policemen aren't supposed to drink on duty, but I'm the only member of the force so I'm never off duty and I never have more than a single shot.

  I stood at the door of the office and watched the crowd again. Everyone was settled down except for one overfriendly near-drunk who was talking to Nighswander. The two men with Nighswander were grinning at one another, probably at the ignorance of the local. I decided I didn't like any one of them.

  I wondered again why they were here. Our little Winter Carnival isn't important enough to draw strangers from Toronto, and I didn't recognize any of the men as cottagers. They were not the cottage type, anyway. They didn't look like family men. If they wanted sunshine they would go to the Club Med somewhere or buy themselves sun lamps. Automatically, I filed their descriptions in my memory.

  Irv came in as I was sipping my whisky. He's my height, six feet one, but a lot thicker, and his face has the smudginess of a failed fighter. He was a contender once, light-heavyweight, but took enough beatings to quit and find an easier line of work. He broke legs for a loan shark in Montreal, was arrested once but never convicted. I may be the only person in the Harbour to know that about him. Local gossip pegs him as a former mob hit man and he basks in it. He's in his early forties and he was wearing a dove-gray suit with a light pink shirt and a black tie.

  He said, "Hi, Reid, Isabelle take care of you?" I raised my shot glass in salute. "Yeah, thanks, Irv." He nodded toward his office and we went in and sat down, him behind the desk with the signed picture of the last fighter to beat him, me on the chesterfield that took up the length of the wall.

  "Ever seen those three city guys before?"

  "Which three?"

  I explained and he shook his head, doing a little negative thing with the corners of his mouth. "Don't ring a bell with me. I guess they're here for the Carnival." I finished the last warm drop of rye. "Wonder where they heard about it. They don't look like cottagers."

  Nobody else would have known. Our Carnival was too small to have been written up in the Toronto papers. We had no sponsors, we weren't raising money for charity. We would not have reached the attention of a gang of trendies.

  Irv wasn't bothering about the three men. He was thinking about women, his constant preoccupation as far as I could tell. He grinned at me. "You gonna be a judge at the beauty contest?"

  I shook my head. "No. But don't think I'm crying. I can make enough enemies just doing my job, without playing favorites with local girls."

  I don't think he heard me. He was so full of his own information. "I know who's gonna win. I just wish I could get a bet down, that's all."

  "Yeah, who's that?" I knew the names of the few local girls who had entered. Each was pretty but sturdy-there wasn't a clear winner among them.

  Irv leaned across his desk confidentially. "Nancy Carmichael. You know, the big yellow cottage up near the north lock, that's her folks' place."

  "I didn't realize any summer people were entering."

  Irv nodded, still grinning. "Neither did I, but she is. And she's got it all over them other broads like a rash. Like, she's rich, eh? She took one o' them modeling courses in T'rannah an' on top of that, she's…" He gave up trying to find words and sketched curves in the air.

  "You sound like she's waiting upstairs for you right now."

  "I wish," he sighed. "She's up there, her an' her folks, but they're only stayin' here because it's closer to the Legion. Her old man's gotta heart problem. He didn't want the hassle of opening their place up in the cold."

  I stood up and set down my glass on his desk top. "I'm glad you told me. I promised the Reeve I'd drop by the Carnival and see everything's in order. Now I can get to see Miss Rich Kid. It makes the whole thing worthwhile."

  He stood up with me, grinning his meaty, pool-hall hustler grin. "Do yourself a favor, Reid. I mean, this kid's got everything."

  2

  It was snowing hard when I left the Lakeside. There was already a crust over the cars, and small sharp flakes stung my face.

  I scraped the windows of the scout car, wondering how many people would turn out for the Carnival dance. This is inhospitable country in January. In the old days before electric light, men lost their way between their back doors and their woodsheds on nights like this and died of exposure. Sensible people stay indoors.

  But this was no normal night. Murphy's Harbour makes its living from the Toronto people and the Americans who swarm north to our lake in July and August. The rest of the year, the locals take day jobs or draw unemployment. The Reeve wants to change that. He wants people up here in winter as well, snowmobiling and buying their food and propane and gas and firewood from the locals. That's why he started this Winter Carnival. He's smart enough to realize that bad weather can be an attraction. I saw the invitation he'd sent to our cottage owners. He told them that the Legion Hall would be equipped to keep everyone safe and sound overnight if a blizzard blew up. By that he probably meant they would keep extra liquor on hand so everyone could feel good about losing a night's sleep. It would probably mean a full house.

  Maybe most of them would have stayed in the city if they had expected really bad weather, but this snow had been forecast only this morning. Most people who had planned to come for the weekend would still turn up. I guessed that quite a few of them would be stuck in the Legion Hall overnight.

  My own plan was to make a formal appearance, shake a few hands, and pick up my date, a woman called Val Summers from Toronto. She's the widow of a policeman I'd worked with there. I met her once when he was alive, but I'd slowly worked up to a real friendship over the last few months on my trips to the city. Now she had left her two boys with their grandmother and was coming up to stay with me for the weekend. She was meeting me at the dance and then we would head back to my place with its warm wood stove.

  The Legion parking lot was almost full. Many of the cars were snowed in, a sign that they had been there for an hour or so. Here and there among the parked cars were snowmobiles. Most people up here call them skidoos, which was the name of the original Canadian invention, but nowadays there are a dozen models, many of them made in Japan. If the snow kept on all evening, they might be the only way to come and go from the Legion by midnight.

  The only other noticeable vehicles in the lot were a van with a psychedelic paint job and a Toyota four-wheel drive. The van was parked in front of the hall, illegally. I guessed it belonged to the disc jockey, a guy from Parry Sound, our nearest city. The Toyota was standing at the end of a row of parked cars. I imagined the occupants were playing kissy-face and debating whether to go to the dance or head home for something more strenuous.

  I parked the scout car behind the DJ's van and went into the hall. It's the standard small-town Legion. There's a lobby with a soaking coconut mat where people kick off their snow boots. It's hung with pictures-the Queen, of course, and photographs of parades with old or middle-aged men wearing ribbons they had won in Europe or Korea. They had asked me to be part of the show because I served in Nam with the U.S. Marines, but I'm not anxious to commemorate any killing I did then, or since.

  I went up the single step to the double doors. An old Legionnaire was sitting inside at a card table that held dance tickets, liquor tickets, and the inevitable bottle of Molson Export Ale. He grinned, "Hi, Chief. Just in time for the beauty contest."

  "Naturally," I said, and we both grinned again. I glanced around and got my first surprise of the occasion. Everyone in the hall was wearing a mask.

  "Whose idea was the masks?"

  He shrugged. "Some broad, kind of s
kinny. She was wearing one when she came in, gave me the box, and asked to give one to everybody, so I did."

  I nodded acknowledgment and walked around the edge of the floor to the office, Sam a neat six inches from my left heel. Walter Puckrin was sitting at a table counting money. He's the man who runs the marina, the biggest industry in town. He's a big, heavy guy in his sixties. He won a gallantry medal on his destroyer on the Murmansk run during the war. A useful guy to know. There was a bottle of cheap rye on the table. The top was off and lying beside it, a sign that he intended to finish the jug before he'd finished celebrating this evening.

  He waved me to sit down. "Hi, Reid. Tonight's the night."

  "For what?"

  He gestured at the money in front of him. "For payin' off the mortgage on this place. Lookit. Three hundred and eighty-four dollars a'ready and we'll take another three hundred easy from the bar."

  "Mazel tov," I said, and he chuckled.

  "If that means good luck, thanks. Like a snort?"

  "No thanks, I'm up to capacity. Mind if I leave Sam in here? It'll save him from being fussed by the crowd, and he'll look after your cash."

  "Help yourself," he said amiably, and poured another slug of Special Old. I told Sam "Stay" and he settled down on the floor.

  I stood in the doorway a minute or two, watching people who were old enough to know better doing the twist to Bill Haley's "Rock around the Clock." With the masks pulled down over their eyes they all looked like Lone Rangers, but I soon picked out the figure I was watching for. There's no mistaking Val Summers-she's tall, dark haired, and graceful. It would take more than a mask to disguise her from me.

  She finished twisting when the record ended, and came over to me. "Hi, Reid. I made it."

  "Nice going. Want to hang around for a while longer?" She was dressed for dancing, a mid-length number that must have cost her a week's pay. But she laughed. "I didn't get off work at four and drive two hundred miles in this weather to boogaloo."