Corkscrew (Reid Bennett) Page 11

"How the hell you gonna do that, you part Indian?" he asked.

  I pointed at Sam. "He's got a better nose than Baker, the dog the OPP use for bomb sniffing," I said. "Trust me."

  "See you here when the divers arrive," he said, and turned back to the thickening crowd at the edge of the property. A few cars had stopped there now, and people were beginning to act excited.

  I went into the cottage. Fred was at the stove, making tea. She looked over at me and put her finger to her lips. "I've got her resting," she whispered.

  "Good work." I nodded at her and looked around. A windbreaker that could only have fit Spenser was hanging over the back of a chair. I took it and went back out to Sam. I shoved it under his nose and patted his big head. "Remember this one," I told him. It's not a command, but sometimes I find myself talking to him as if he were a person. He's trained to sniff anything I put in front of him like this, and he did. Now I told him, "Seek," and he put his head down and ran at once to a point about forty feet from the cabin. As I watched, trying to place the Spenser car there from my last visit to this place, he stopped and whined for a moment, puzzled, then ran back to me and out again, toward the rock, the path Spenser and I had taken when I talked to him earlier.

  "Good boy," I told him. "Come." He came to me, and I patted him again and told him, "Easy," then took the windbreaker back inside and dropped it over the chair back. No doubt about it, Spenser had walked out to the car. And the car had been pointing toward the rock, not ominously, just sitting at the angle they had left it when they drove back from the funeral parlor. That meant that the last walk he had taken had been out to the car, one way. Maybe he had jumped at the last minute, but if he had, his wife would have seen him, and Sam would have picked up his trail. No, he hadn't done that. But maybe he had been sober enough and cool enough to let the car flood, then push the door open under twenty feet of water, and swim ashore. Maybe. But Sam's nose had told me he had been in that car when it pulled away from its parking spot.

  I saw headlights approaching and then heard the polite beep of a big car horn. The crowd at the roadway parted, and Wolf's big station wagon drove down in front of the cabin. Wolfgang got out with two other men. I went over, and Wolf said hello brusquely and set to work getting the equipment out of the back. In the gloom I recognized one of the other men, the face I'd seen in the water up at Indian Island. The other guy was a stranger, young and lean. Wolfgang introduced him as he pulled tanks out of the back of the wagon. "Dave Henderson, Chief Bennett. And you've already met Tim."

  "Hi, guys. Thanks for turning out. We've got a car gone over the rock. I need to know if there's anyone in it, and if there is, exactly how he's positioned. Like, does he look as if he was driving, and are his injuries compatible with an accident. Know what I mean?"

  "I drive ambulance up in Parry Sound," Henderson said. "I've seen plenny accidents."

  "Great. You know what people look like after a smash."

  "Do I?" he snorted. "Don't worry, I'll report."

  I wasn't sure what I was looking for. I wanted to know if Spenser had been hurt, but if he hadn't, it wouldn't make any difference to the facts. If he'd decided to kill himself, he might just have braced for the impact, perhaps even fastened his seat belt, determined to take the water like a permanent anesthetic.

  Henderson already had a wetsuit on. Wolfgang slipped casually out of his blue jeans and pulled his own on over patterned bikini shorts. "What's the drop-off here?"

  "Looks like it goes right down deep, but I've never been in, just glanced down off the top of the rock once in daylight," I told him.

  "Fine. We go in carefully," he said. He switched on one of the two big lamps he'd brought and shone it down into the black water. A school of minnows stopped, paralyzed by the light, but below them the water was a cold black cave. "Take the rope, Tim. I'll go in easy," he said. He turned, big and awkward with his tanks on his back, flippers grotesque on his feet. He wrapped the rope around his hands, not wanting to snag his air lines, I guessed, and as Tim and I braced, he rappeled down the rock face and slid into the water with hardly a splash. He let go of the rope and trod water, calling up. "Now you, Dave."

  Henderson did the same, keeping hold of the rope in the water.

  "When we find the car, I'll give three tugs," he said. "Then, if the guy's there, two more, got that?"

  "Three for the car, two for the guy. Gotcha," Tim said.

  The two divers adjusted their masks, gave one another a thumbs-up, and sank into the water, the big submersible lamps growing dimmer as the water closed over them. I stood on the top of the rock, watching, seeing the pair of bodies lying horizontal in the water, stark against the lights they were holding in front of them. Then the darkness won, and all I could see was two diminishing glows.

  I turned to look at Tim, who was holding the line very carefully in both hands, paying it out a foot at a time. Then the line went slack. "They're on the bottom," he said, talking out of the side of his mouth as if he were afraid any noise would disturb the divers. The line went tight again, and he paid out another six feet, then stopped. I saw his hands move three times. "They've found it," he said.

  Chapter Eleven

  We waited without speaking. The rope in his hand moved, then stopped. They had come to the side of the car, I guessed. I wondered how much damage had been done. Would the door be impacted by the shock of the six-foot fall? Would the pressure make it stick? Probably not. If Mrs. Spenser had seen it going off the rock, it must have been crawling. It probably hadn't suffered damage as bad as it would have taken in a ten-mile-an-hour collision. Spenser hadn't been racing to his doom. He had just driven over, as quietly as a man gliding into a parking space outside a church.

  I ran through the physics I could remember from school. Gravity works at thirty-two feet per second. He'd fallen six feet, so it would have taken him less than a third of a second. That kind of impact wouldn't have smashed the car up. But why were they taking so long?

  I took a long breath to calm myself. Tim was checking his watch, a big depth-proof diver's model. "How long have they been down?" I asked him.

  "About a minute," he said. I straightened up and went closer to the edge of the rock. The bubbles were almost invisible, but I could make them out, a single cluster of silvered globes, lit from the dim light below, breaking at irregular intervals, showing that the two men were working side by side, probably opening the door. The two streams diverged for a moment, and then Tim shouted, "Two tugs—they've found him."

  "Great." I ran back over the rock to where Kowalchuk was doggedly doing his job, talking to another person in the crowd.

  "Can you come down the rock, please?"

  He nodded and spoke to the woman. "Thank you, Mrs. Serrel. Now if you'll excuse me . . ."

  He turned away, ignoring the calls from the people far enough back in the crowd to be faceless, the usual curious questions: "What gives?" "Don't you want to talk to me?"

  "What's going on?"

  "They've found the body," I told him.

  "Good. Are they going to bring it out?"

  "They will if they can. The one guy is an ambulance driver. He said he'd look for any injuries and compare them with the inside of the car."

  "What other kind of injuries would you expect?" he asked carefully.

  "I'm not sure. But I would like to know that he did this himself before we cross it off as a suicide," I said.

  "You're still thinking about the Wilsons and what they heard. Hearing doesn't amount to a hill of beans," he told me. I already knew that, but there was more to the Wilsons' exchange of glances than had been expressed so far. I was wondering whether they'd heard a fight between Spenser and his wife, whether she had hit him in the head with a skillet and stuffed him into the car and driven it off. She had no cause to like the guy. I'd seen that much in the time I'd known the pair of them.

  We reached Tim, and he turned to give us the news. "The line just went slack. That likely means they're on the way back up."
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br />   "Good," Kowalchuk said. He crouched with me on the edge of the rock, and as we watched, the dim glow of the underwater lights grew brighter. Then the bodies of the two divers became visible, arms and legs moving gently, and then at last, the loglike object they were carrying.

  Kowalchuk turned to me, his voice hoarse with excitement. "They've got the sonofabitch, first dive."

  "They're good; they found that engine block within minutes," I told him. Part of me was relieved at their find, but another part was angry that I was sharing it with another policeman, my replacement. I was a disowned, discredited copper, nothing more than a glorified spectator.

  One of the lights broke the surface first, momentarily blinding the pair of us. Then Henderson's head appeared. He flashed the light around until he was sure he had found us. Shielding my eyes, I stared down the beam and saw that he had shoved his mask back. "Found him, got him out easy," he shouted.

  "Good work," I called. "Is he cut up at all?"

  Now the second light broke the surface, and it was Wolfgang's voice that came up to us. "Come to your right, about thirty feet. There's a ledge. We can give him up to you."

  Kowalchuk and I scrambled over the rock and down to the ledge, about eighteen inches above the water. Neither of the divers spoke. They swam to us, the lights attached to their wrists waving in the darkness.

  Wolfgang reached the rock and held it with one hand as Kowalchuk and I scrambled down to it. "Be careful," Wolfgang said, and handed me Spenser's limp arm. It was still warm through the water that it wore like a sleeve. I tugged gently until I had him with his back to the rock. Then Kowalchuk got under one arm and I got under the other, and we pulled him up on the rock, his heels dragging over the surface.

  Kowalchuk had his flashlight stuck in the strap of his Sam Browne belt. He took it out and shone it down onto Spenser's face.

  "No marks on him," he said.

  "No, but there's no froth at the mouth, either," I said. "According to our local doctor, that makes it doubtful that he drowned."

  "What do we do with him next? Is there an ambulance in town?"

  "No, I'll have to call the funeral parlor, see if they've got any empty boxes." I was growing angrier by the minute as I realized fully what my suspension had done to me. I was not in charge of the investigation. Instead, I was the local volunteer, like Wolfgang and Henderson. When the real detectives turned up, they would pat me on the head and send me home.

  Tim had come up behind us. "Wolfgang's got a phone in his car," he said. "You wanna use that to call McKenney?"

  "Sure, great." I stood up, leaving Kowalchuk kneeling beside the body. Tim handed me the phone, and I called McKenney, giving him the details he needed and holding back those he didn't. Then I went back to Kowalchuk.

  "I took a look at the back of his head. There's no marks there, either." He was excited, the way I should have been.

  "I wonder what happened to him. He couldn't have just gone in there and held his breath until he died. He wasn't breathing; at least that's what no frothing at the mouth's supposed to mean."

  I looked at Kowalchuk over the cone of his flashlight, aimed down, whitening Spenser's pale face to the color of paper.

  "Don't ask me," he said. "I'm not the doctor."

  "There is one other possibility," the thought came to me. "Maybe he was just plain drunk." I knew Spenser was a drinker. Maybe he had been drunk enough to go out and step into his car, and then he had started up and died, choked on his own vomit, maybe, before it rolled him down the slope and into the lake. It was thin, but I didn't have anything better to go on. Or maybe he was a drug user, as well. It was possible; anything was possible right now. I lifted his arm and glanced at the crook of the elbow. He didn't have needle tracks there, but maybe he was injecting between his toes, or even into his neck. Drug addicts are sneaky, especially if they've got a good job to maintain. It's only skid-row addicts who don't care who sees their needle scars.

  There was nothing obvious, not in the light from Kowalchuk's flashlight, so I stood up and wiped my damp hands on my pants legs. Maybe the case was closed now. It had gone full circle. Murder, remorse, suicide. The hell with it. Let the OPP worry. I'd arrange for Mrs. Spenser to be attended by their people, and Fred and I would go home and play house, if I could get myself interested in it while the red-and-white flashers on the OPP cruisers were lighting up my territory.

  The radio on Kowalchuk's car crackled again. He'd left it on, and there had been a number of calls that he had ignored. This time he responded, trotting over to the car door.

  I heard the message clearly. It was a dispatcher from the OPP detachment down the highway from Murphy's Harbour. "Yeah, Sarge, got a message for you from Murphy's Harbour. A family called Corbett has just arrived at the police station. They wanted to talk to Chief Bennett. Is he there with you?"

  Kowalchuk told him I was, and the dispatcher said, "Can you ask him to drop by the station right away? They want to go home, and he's closed their place up apparently."

  "Will do. Out."

  Kowalchuk turned to me as I approached him. "Did you get that?"

  "Yeah, I'll take my car. Would you tell Freda I'll be away a while and then try to get a matron up here to take care of Mrs. Spenser?"

  "Fine," was all he said. I knew what was happening to him. Kowalchuk was high on the investigation, full of the hunting lust that takes over once you start working on a good case. He'd started out apologetic for taking my job. Now he would have fought me to keep it. It was natural as breathing, but it made me sour inside.

  I called Sam and went back to my car. People had started to drive up now. There is a real jungle telegraph in places as small as the Harbour. Within an hour you wouldn't be able to get up the road for the parked cars.

  The crowd parted, letting me back out through the pack and down the road apiece, where I turned and drove back to the bridge and over to the side where the beverage room is located. And I noticed that there were half a dozen motorcycles outside. From the look of them they belonged to my bikers. I imagined the bar owner had already called the station, asking for some policeman to come and protect him, and I wondered if any had. I should have been there, with Sam by my side. It was what this town expected of me and I felt guilty as I drove by. I'd been suspended from my job, but not from my conscience.

  There was a Mercedes coupe outside the station. I recognized it as the Corbetts' car. Stan Corbett's, anyway. His wife has a beat-up old station wagon.

  Corbett was sitting on the pew out in front of the counter. He was wearing a neat gray pin-striped suit. I guessed he had come right from one of the hotels or bars he owns. He was smoking a cigar that smelled expensive and he looked angry.

  "What's happening, Chief? What's this OPP officer doing here?" he asked me. He's tall and tough-looking, as if he had personally built all those hotels himself.

  "They've taken over, Mr. Corbett. I'm under suspension."

  "What the hell for?" He glared at the OPP man. "Whose idea was this?"

  "It's not important, just a formality. But before I was taken off the case, I was investigating the death of a boy and I had occasion to visit your cottage."

  Corbett frowned. "My cottage? A dead boy? Just a minute, Chief, can you take this a little slower? What's happening here?"

  "The victim, a boy, had a picture of your dock. He was a camera buff and he had a lot of pictures of boats, but I recognized your dock and from the angle of the shot it looked as if it had been taken from your balcony. So I went there."

  Now Corbett interrupted me. His eyes had narrowed and he asked his question carefully as if he figured the answer might get him into trouble.

  "You say it was a boy, a photographer?"

  "Yes, Kennie Spenser. Do you know him?"

  He nodded. "Twelve, something like that, sandy-haired?"

  "That's him. Have you met him?"

  "Yes, lots of times, he's a friend of my grandson."

  My mind took a leap forward. "Is your g
randson Reggie Waters?"

  He looked at me, the same kind of look he might have given some extra-sharp salesman who knew too much about his business. "How did you know that?" he asked.

  "Kennie had a photograph of a young fellow and his mother told me the name."

  Corbett put his cigar back in his mouth. It had gone out and he relit it carefully. "This is terrible news. What happened to him?"

  "He was found in the water, out by Indian Island. A fisherman snagged him."

  He shook his head sadly. "Poor little guy. A nice boy, quiet, well-behaved. This is terrible. Angela will be heartbroken."

  Angela was his wife, she was softer than him, always ready to volunteer for fund-raising for the community or to pitch in with work on projects over at the Indian reserve. She would probably cry, then set to and find some way of helping Mrs. Spenser.

  In the meantime, I had to add to their problems. "I'm sorry to tell you that's just part of the bad news."

  "Oh?" he growled, frowning and puffing out cigar smoke.

  "Yes, I have reason to believe that it was your cruiser that was used to dump the boy's body. The wires have been torn out of it and my dog tracked the boy to the deck."

  "Goddamn." He took his cigar out of his mouth and looked around for an ashtray, then let it fall to the old linoleum. "I should have immobilized that boat, taken the rotor arm out of the ignition."

  "I wish you had." I waited while he ground the cigar out under his foot. "And one last thing, Major, I'm afraid. Your house has been vandalized."

  "Vandalized?" He pivoted on the foot he was using to crush his cigar butt, turning away from me angrily, then back. "Vandalized? What the Sam Hill is going on?"

  "Vandalized!" He said it again, disbelievingly, rigid with rage, ducking from the waist and jerking his arms in tight little convulsions, a disgusted, helpless man. "That makes me vomit." He turned away from me, raising his voice as if he were addressing a meeting. "Do you know what I'm going through, right now, for the people of this town?"

  The OPP man stood listening, trying to look respectful, although I could see he was amused at the show. He hadn't seen Corbett's house.