Snowjob Read online

  It was a little girl’s room. There were posters of the New Kids on the Block; Save the Rain Forests; Reduce, Reuse, Recycle; and a little statue of the Virgin. That stopped me as I looked around. I was brought up Catholic although I haven’t done much about it since Nam, but there was an inherent goodness in this house that reminded me of my mother and I went to bed oddly happy. If there was anything in the power of his family’s prayer Doug was safe.

  Next morning after I’d had breakfast with Melody and the kids, I went down to the courthouse and asked to see Doug. The guy in charge was the typical small-town tyrant. “You an attorney?”

  “No, just a friend.”

  He snorted. It was an appropriate sound. He was short and stubby, wearing a ten-year-old suit with a lodge pin in the lapel. “Ford don’t have a whole lot of them right now.”

  I didn’t answer and after a pause he asked, “You got any ID?”

  I pulled out the little plastic card with my picture and police chief accreditation. That impressed him. “Chief of Police,” he said thoughtfully. “Don’t believe I’ve ever heard of Murphy’s Harbour, Chief. Is it big?”

  “Not as big as this place,” I told him which was less than I might have said. The Harbour isn’t one tenth as big, and I didn’t bother to add that I was the only copper in the place. Myself and Sam. In any case it put his suspicions on hold and he unlocked a door into the secure area and led me to the meeting room.

  It was painted institutional green, bare except for a table with a chair each side of it. I sat down on one side and waited for them to bring Doug out. He came in with a big uniformed guard behind him. I stood up and the guard said, “Stay on your own side of the table, sir. Do not pass anything to the prisoner. If you have papers or anything he must see, give them to me, I’ll give them to him.”

  He said it all by rote. It was nothing personal and I waved a hand at him to confirm I understood.

  Doug spoke first. “Thanks for coming, Reid. I didn’t know who else to call.”

  “De nada,” I said. “How’re they treating you?”

  “Can’t complain.” He tried to grin. “It’s a whole lot softer’n boot camp.”

  I studied him. He looked stressed, his eyes hollow, the green work clothes he was wearing ill-fitting and rough. “I’m not in the general population. Thank God,” he said softly. “My own guys managed to do that much for me. But the other prisoners keep shouting what they’re going to do when I get put with them.”

  “Just jailhouse machismo. Any chance of bail?”

  “They want half a million dollars,” he said bitterly.

  I guess the District Attorney was looking to prove to the town that he didn’t play favorites with policemen, so I changed the subject. “Your family’s fine,” I told him. “The kids are taking it well and Melody’s hanging in okay.”

  “She’s a saint, that woman,” he said and I watched his face. If he had been having an affair with Cindy Laver he would have wept now. But he didn’t.

  “Were you balling this Cindy Laver?” I kept it rough to check his reactions.

  “With what I’ve got at home? Come on, Reid.” He sounded disgusted. “I haven’t cheated on Melody. Not once in eighteen years.”

  “The waitress at Brewskis says you used to hold hands with this Cindy Laver.”

  Now he glanced over at the guard who was standing with his hands at his side, listening to every word. Doug leaned forward and lowered his voice. I had to lean in to hear him. “That was an act,” he whispered. “We figured it was safer that way.”

  “She was acting too?”

  He nodded. The guard was straining to hear us. From his frown I guessed he was having trouble. “She wouldn’t have minded if it had been for real but we decided it was the best way to cover up what was really going on.”

  “What the hell was going on?”

  He gave a breathless little sigh. “If I tell you, Reid, you’re a part of all this. That could be trouble.”

  “You’ve got more trouble than you can handle. It wouldn’t hurt to off-load a little.”

  He smiled shortly and lifted his hand as if to give me a high five. “No touching,” the guard said and Doug waved the hand and laid it flat on the table again.

  “Ever hear of Angelo Manatelli?”

  I shook my head. “A rounder?”

  “Mob,” Doug said briefly. “He’s with the Mucci family of New Jersey. Big into gambling, prostitution, loan-sharking. But he’s not a hard man himself. He’s the bookkeeper.”

  “New to me.” I took out a notepad and pen and wrote the names down. “Where’s this guy fit in?”

  “He was here, in town. I saw him at Rosario’s, that’s the best Italian place in town. He was having dinner with a couple locals.”

  “Who?”

  “One of them was Eric Lawson. He owns the bank. The other owns the Cat’s Cradle ski resort.”

  “Name?” I was taking notes.

  “Peter Huckmeyer.”

  “And what happened then? Where does Cindy Laver come in?”

  “I knew she worked as a bookkeeper for the Huckmeyers at the Cat’s Cradle. If they were talking to criminals, I wondered if she knew why.” Doug looked at me very straight. “You know how it is. You try to know everything about everybody.”

  I nodded. “I’m the same.”

  “So,” he said slowly. “I was waiting outside the resort when she came out at six, like always, and made her right turn without stopping at the sign, like always. And I started writing her a citation.”

  “Were you in uniform?”

  Doug touched his cheek. “With this skin I don’t need a uniform. Everybody in town knows who the hell I am.”

  “So, was she surprised that a detective would pick her up on a traffic violation?”

  “That was the idea,” Doug said. “She asked me what this was all about and I started talking to her about the guy her boss, Peter Huckmeyer, had been eating dinner with.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Three weeks before she was killed.”

  I sat back and looked at him. I believed him, but it seemed a little pat, that a professional accountant would play along with a cop on suspicions as slim as his. “And she bought it?”

  Doug nodded and beckoned me forward with one finger so he could whisper again. “She had an ax to grind. She wasn’t local. She came from Chicago. I didn’t find out until later, but her ex-husband had gotten into trouble with loan sharks over his gambling. It cost her the house they owned, cost him the marriage. But even then he didn’t stop. He borrowed more and when the horse was slow the enforcers came after him with tire irons. One of them got too enthusiastic and caved his head in. She was apart from him by then but still cared about him.”

  “So then what happened? Did you go to the chief with your case or what?”

  Doug pursed his lips bitterly. “If I hadn’t been trying to be a goddamn hotshot I would’ve. But I wanted to go to him with a complete case, not a pack of worries. So I asked her to help me, to let me know what was going down at work. That way I could’ve laid the whole thing on his desk like a Christmas present.”

  The guard scuffed his feet and I glanced over. “One more minute,” he said tonelessly.

  “Who else knows?” I asked Doug quickly.

  “Nobody,” he said as the guard advanced toward him. “Nobody but me and you and the guy who killed her.”

  “Did you tell the arresting officer any of this?”

  “No.” He shook his head fiercely. “I was scared they’d come after my family while I was inside.”

  The guard was moving toward us so I spoke quickly. “What can you tell me about the case against you?”

  “Check with Pat Hinton. He was my partner. He’s a good head. A tightass but fair as they come.”

  The guard touched Doug on the shoulder and he stood up. “Watch yourself, Reid. This is heavy.”

  “Hang loose.” I winked at him and stood while the guard walked hi
m back to his cell. Doug turned at the door to wave. “Semper fi,” he said and I echoed it. The Marine motto, as abbreviated by ex-grunts.

  There was a diner across the square from the courthouse and I went over there and had a coffee and phoned the police department. Detective Hinton was off duty, they told me. He would be in at four. There was no Hinton listed in the phone book, which didn’t surprise me. Most small-town cops have unlisted numbers. It cuts down on the midnight cursers. I guessed that Melody knew his number so after I finished my coffee I walked Sam down to the library and left him beside the steps while I went in.

  It was one of the libraries donated by Andrew Carnegie in the early part of the century, a square stone building with three steps up to the front door. The woman at the front desk told me that the chief librarian was busy but Melody must have seen me from her office. She came out and thanked the girl and led me in.

  She had a clutter of folders on her desk and there were piles of new books everywhere but she cleared a chair for me and I sat.

  “How is he?” she asked first.

  “Fine. He sends his love.”

  “He asked me not to come in every day,” she said, almost bitterly.

  “Because he loves you,” I said. “He knows what it’s like, having to run the gauntlet of those people.”

  “You think that’s it?”

  “He’s a good man,” I told her, “and there was nothing between him and that girl. It was an investigation, concerning somebody that girl knew.”

  “He told me that,” she said. “Remember? I mentioned it last night.”

  “It’s the truth. I believe him.” I sat there, looking at her beautiful, troubled face, and eventually she got control of herself.

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “He wants me to talk to his partner, Pat Hinton. He’s not at work, not in the book. I wondered if you had his phone number.”

  She reached under her desk and pulled out her purse, opening it and taking out a little book. “Yes. Got a pencil?”

  I wrote down the number, then said, “I guess you know him pretty well.” She nodded and I said, “It might be good if you were to call him, introduce me by phone.”

  “Sure.” She picked up the receiver and dialed quickly. The person at the other end answered almost immediately and she said, “Hello, Alison. It’s Melody Ford.”

  She stared at the wall blankly, then said, “He’s fine, thank you. A friend of ours has just been in to see him. Says he’s okay. That’s why I called. This friend, Reid Bennett, he was in the service with Doug. He’s a police chief now in Canada. He wanted to talk to Pat if that were possible.”

  She covered the mouthpiece and said, “She’s calling him.” I nodded and then she said, “Hello, Pat. I’ve got a friend of Doug’s here, Reid Bennett. Doug asked him to speak to you. Will that be all right?”

  He must have agreed because she passed the phone to me without another word. I took it. “Hello, Pat. This is Reid Bennett.”

  “Hi, Reid.” It was a veteran policeman’s voice, not giving anything away. “How can I help?”

  “I was in to see Doug this morning and he asked me to talk to you. I’m a copper myself so you wouldn’t be telling tales out of school.”

  “Whyn’t you come on over,” he said. “I don’t go in until three. Melody knows where we are.”

  “Great, thank you. I’ll be right there. Bye.”

  Melody directed me to Hinton’s house and I left. Sam was outside with a little old lady staring at him, her string bag of library books dangling at her side. “He’s never moved, not once,” she said wonderingly. “Even when I patted him. However did you train him so well?”

  “He was smart to start with,” I told her. Then I told Sam “Easy” and this time he responded, wagging his tail when she gave his head a pat.

  I went back to my car and put him in the front seat, then I found Grissom Street and left him where he was with the window down. It was beautiful skiing weather, a bright, cold morning, about five above zero on the Fahrenheit scale. Inside the car Sam would have been comfortable at 30° lower than that.

  Hinton came to the door and we both did a double take. He was the cop I’d identified the evening before at Brewskis. “Well, small world,” he said and shook my hand. “Come on in.”

  I went in, kicking off my shoes at the door, something most Canadians do automatically. The place was similar to Doug’s house but furnished in a more modern way and it had an electric keyboard organ in one corner of the living room.

  Hinton introduced his wife. “Ali, this is Doug’s friend, Reid Bennett. He’s a police chief, no less, from Canada.”

  Alison was a tiny woman with a head of frizzy curls. “My goodness,” she said. “I don’t believe we’ve ever had a chief in here before.”

  “I’m the only guy in the department,” I explained. “It’s a phony title but I didn’t pick it. It came with the job.”

  She laughed. “Is that so. Then I won’t bother to curtsy. Would you like some coffee?”

  “Please. Black,” I said and she went out as Hinton waved me to a chair.

  “Take a load off,” he said. I sat opposite him and he asked, “So, you’ve known Doug awhile?”

  “We were in the Marines together. Went from boot camp to Nam. We both did two tours, although I was out a few months earlier than Doug because of a wound.”

  “And you stayed in touch?” He was being careful, but I wasn’t offended. I needed his help. This was his price.

  “Yeah. I was best man when he and Melody got married. And he’s been up to visit my patch to do some fishing. Brought young Ben with him last time. The boy caught a good-sized walleye. He was proud as punch.”

  That was enough, it seemed. He crossed his knees and asked, “What can I tell you?”

  “I didn’t get time to talk to Doug about the case against him. He said you’d fill me in. Would that be okay?”

  “Sure. For my partner,” he said. “But right off the top lemme say that it doesn’t look good for Doug.”

  “What’s the case, the evidence?”

  His wife came back with the coffee and we thanked her and she looked at our faces and said, “I guess I’ll get lunch started. Holler if you need a refill.”

  “Thanks, Ali,” Hinton said. She went out, closing the door. “We’ve been married fourteen years. She understands police work,” he said fondly.

  “She’s very tactful,” I said politely and waited.

  Hinton sipped his coffee. “Facts,” he said. “The deceased woman, Lucinda Lee Laver, age thirty-six. Born Chicago. Found dead in her apartment at ten A.M., thereabouts, by her landlady. That was Wednesday.”

  Two days ago, the day I’d received Melody’s call for help.

  “She was nude. She’d been strangled with a pair of her own panty hose. Whoever did it was a pro. He’d knotted a quarter inside, pressed it on her Adam’s apple.”

  “Why did the landlady go into the apartment? Was that normal?”

  Hinton shook his head. “No. But her boss called the house and couldn’t raise her. So he sent a coworker, woman called Ella Frazer, over to see if she was okay.”

  “At ten in the morning? Sounds like he was really anxious to see her.”

  “Yeah.” Hinton looked at me bleakly. “And this is where it gets bad for Doug. She was supposed to have made a deposit at the bank the evening before. She left work at four with fifty grand in a canvas sack. And at nine that morning, when she didn’t show, her boss phoned the bank and found they hadn’t received the deposit. So he got worried and called her house.”

  “Was the money found?” After the hint he had dropped I dreaded the answer. He gave it to me straight. “It was in Doug’s car. He’d taken it out of the sack but it matched the amount she had taken with her, forty-nine grand and change. It was there to the penny.”

  We both sat and sipped our coffee without speaking. Neither of us spoke but in my eyes this looked like a frame-up and I was t
rying to find a tactful way to say so. Hinton did it for me.

  “Go ahead and say it. Doug wouldn’t have been that dumb. If he’d killed her he’d have put the money somewhere else.”

  “That’s the way I see it. So I’m guessing that there was more evidence than the money against him. I’m guessing they made a case against him first, then checked his car and found the cash.”

  “That’s how it happened.” Hinton nodded. “We were off duty, Doug and me, the morning it happened. The other team investigated, Lieutenant Cassidy and Sergeant Morgan.”

  “What happened?”

  “It broke right away,” Hinton said. “The first thing the landlady said was the aid of it as far as Doug was concerned.”

  “She said that Doug and the deceased had been an item?”

  He nodded. “More than that. She’d seen him going in and out of the place for a couple weeks already. And on the night before she’d seen them going in together, having a big fight. Ms. Laver didn’t want Doug to come in but he’d more or less forced his way in and they’d gone on fighting over the landlady’s head while she was watching TV. She said they were still at it when she went to bed, around ten-thirty. Her bedroom’s in the back of the house and she couldn’t hear from there.”

  “What time did death occur?”

  “Around two in the morning, give or take. You know how it is with coroners.”

  “Did you find any forensic evidence in the apartment? Anything to tie Doug to the place?”

  “Fingerprints on a beer can. That was it,” Hinton said. “I’d figured there’d be more than that. Like if they’d been having a thing, there’d have been fingerprints in the bedroom, the toilet seat, wherever. But the only prints they found were on one lousy beer can,”

  “Let’s get this straight. You mean they didn’t find any fingerprints at all?”

  “Virtually none. The place was clean and neat and they figured she must have cleaned up recently and not touched a whole lot of stuff since.”

  I frowned. “Surely they found prints on the fridge door and the kitchen cupboards, places she would have touched since cleaning.”