Читать книгу Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle - H. Mel Malton - Страница 16

I drove that ramshackle rattletrap

hellbent for elsewhere

leaving you sleeping.

—Shepherd’s Pie

When I let Lug-nut off his chain, he looked at me like I was crazy. As usual, he had barked his head off when I pulled up in the truck, and he kept on barking until he recognized me, which was when I was roughly three feet away. I wondered if he might be slightly myopic, which would account for some of his aggression.

I had been trying to decide, on my way over to the Travers’ place, whether or not it would be a smart idea to take the dog over to the cabin. After all, he was used to his own territory, and I had no stomach for keeping an animal tied up. There was no guarantee that he would be interested in sticking around my place, except perhaps for the fact that I would be feeding him.

When I pulled into the driveway, I knew immediately that I would be taking him home, no matter what. He looked impossibly lonely. The house was cold and abandoned, just like Lug-nut, and there was a yellow band of POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape over the front door. Any territory would be better than this.

I spoke to him softly, rubbed his tummy for a while and then unclipped his chain. That was when he gave me the “you must be crazy” look. The unexpected freedom confused the hell out of him. He made a sort of “chase me” dash for about a metre, then stopped, whirled around and cringed. I didn’t say anything, just watched him. Then he came back to his feed bowl and sniffed at it in a hopeful way.

“Soon, soon,” I said. I picked up the water bowl and filled it at the outside tap. Lug-nut inhaled it, and I had to refill it twice before he had enough. I had planned to feed him from the food bag under Francy’s kitchen sink, but I didn’t relish the thought of sneaking past the police tape. There might be a hidden camera in there or something, and they might decide I was returning to the scene of the crime. On the other hand, I didn’t have much extra cash, and dog food is expensive.

“What do you think, dog?” I said. “Should we do a spot of B&E?” He wagged his tail, which I took to be permission from the only available resident. He followed me up to the door, which the police had very kindly left unlocked. I ducked under the tape, but Lug-nut refused to come in, although I assured him it was okay. He just sat there on the doorstep, whining and shivering. Maybe he had some sixth sense about what had happened there, or maybe he could smell the blood, I don’t know.

“Hey, it’s okay, Luggy,” I said, patting his ugly head. “You don’t have to come in if you don’t want to. Just don’t go anywhere, okay? Stay!” The word was obviously a recognizable command. He lay down immediately, his head between his paws, looking up at me. “Good dog!” I said. Great White Dog Wrangler. That’s me. I went inside.

The kitchen was just as I had last seen it. The police hadn’t done any friendly housecleaning, and the bloodstains on the floor had darkened to a rust-colour, which was much easier to cope with than the fresh puddles I had slipped in the day before.

There was a stomach-churning, coppery smell in the air, though, and I breathed through my mouth.

The beer bottles were still on the table, although there seemed to be fewer than there were before. Becker and Morrison must have taken some of them away as evidence. I knew that at least a few of the bottles would have Francy’s prints on them, and I felt very afraid for her. The remaining few showed traces of a grey-ish powder, which I assumed was fingerprinting dust, just like in the movies. The whole scene was like a movie set, actually, as if the crew had just stepped away to go on a lunch break. It was spooky.

I glanced at the rack beside the door and John’s shotgun was missing, but that didn’t mean much. The police certainly would have taken the gun with them to do tests on, if it had still been there when we discovered the scene.

The teapot was dry as a bone, of course. I checked.

I tiptoed to the kitchen cupboard, uneasy in this empty, eerie house where John’s violent death was still very much a reality. The house would probably never be the same, to Francy, anyway, if she ever got the chance to come back to it. I had spent a lot of time with her in this kitchen, sitting at the big table, sorting herbs and gabbing, talking about pregnancy and babies, Francy’s commercial art business and my puppets. We never spoke about the past. We rarely talked about John, or about Francy’s life before Cedar Falls. She was one of those people who lived in the moment, completely. I only hoped that the “moment” she was in now, presumably at Aunt Susan’s, wasn’t as awful as this kitchen was.

I opened the cupboard door with the edges of my fingernails and hauled out Lug-nut’s kibble. John had been obsessive about not letting anybody feed the dog but him, so taking the food was almost like stealing from the dead. He had been an uncomfortable man to be around—continually seething with some wrong, imagined or otherwise. I had always felt that he was on the very edge of exploding and had he been there I would not even have gone near the cupboard. I remembered Spit’s ghost story and imagined John’s spectre, enraged at my trespassing, flapping around my head like an angry vulture.

I was just standing up, with the heavy bag cradled in my arms, when I heard something upstairs. Just the creak of a floorboard, maybe, but it was enough for me. I beat it so fast out the front door, I forgot about the police tape and broke through it like Donovan Bailey winning a gold.

Lug-nut was right there where I had left him and wagged his tail as I burst through the tape, but he did not get up.

“Ummm, good boy, Luggy,” I said. He still lay there like a coiled spring. John, for all his neglect of the dog, had certainly trained him well. There must be a magic word.

“Ummm… that’s all right. You can get up now.” Nothing. “It’s okay, Lug-nut!” I said with some exasperation and he leaped about two feet in the air and started running in circles around me. That was it, then. “Okay.” Simple enough. I would have to watch what I said around him, though. There was probably some secret command lodged in his doggy brain that would send him off into attack mode.

Now that I was outside, I laughed at myself for being spooked. If there had been anybody in the house, Lug-nut would have let me know. The overhead creak was probably just the old house settling on its foundations.

I walked sedately to the truck and after I had deposited the dog food in the back with the grain, I returned to the yellow tape to see if I could fix it. Either that, or I would have to call up Becker and tell him that I had broken in. If I didn’t, he’d be off on some wild goose chase, further and further away from finding the real murderer.

The tape had been stapled to both sides of the door, and my dash outside had ripped one end away from the staple, which was still embedded in the door frame. I glanced over my shoulder to make sure that nobody was watching, then used my Swiss Army knife to wriggle the staple out. I lifted the tape back into position, poked the prongs through the plastic just to the right of the original holes and hammered it back with the butt of the knife.

Satisfied, I turned back to the driveway. The cops would have to study it pretty closely to know that it had been tampered with. I was betting that they wouldn’t check to see if the dog food was still there, any more than they’d check to see whether there was still cereal in the cupboard.

Lug-nut had disappeared.

“Shit,” I said aloud. I called his name, and immediately got an answering bark from the quonset hut next to the house. “Come, here, boy!” I said. I know my dog-wrangling techniques from reading Ted Wood’s books. When Wood’s cop-hero tells his wonder-dog Sam to Come, Stay, Keep, or Attack, the dog responds with impeccable, life-saving promptness and barrels full of loyalty.

Lug-nut did not come.

I went into the building to get him.

I’d never been in John’s garage before. Like the dog, it had been his private domain—men only. It was like a mad mechanic’s laboratory. The colours were muddy, all brown and black, and everything was covered in a thin layer of grease and dust. The floor-space was huge. You could have played baseball in there. There were two cars side by side, with open hoods, their guts spilling out and scattered as if some giant predator had been making a meal of them.

Tools were piled on top of one another on every flat surface, and from the ceiling hung chains and pulleys, rope and rubber hoses, like trailing fronds in some mechanical jungle.

I am a complete innocent when it comes to car mechanics, and so I found the atmosphere oppressive. If I’d known what it was all for, I would have felt better.

Lug-nut was waiting for me towards the rear of the building, where it was dark. I called him again, and he barked back, but stayed put. He was sitting in front of a vehicle which had been covered with a dirty tarpaulin and there was something familiar about the shape of it. I looked around for a light switch and found a trouble-light suspended from the ceiling in the corner. I switched it on and the naked bulb cast surreal shadows on the shrouded shape in front of me.

The tarp didn’t quite cover the front bumper, and I’d know that hideous browny-green paint job anywhere. John’s missing truck. Francy was always complaining about it, said it offended her sense of hue. Looking at that colour with an artist’s eye was like listening to a beginner violinist if you had perfect pitch, she said. John had painted the truck himself, shortly after buying it from Otis Dermott. It had been purple, and John had refused to drive it until he got rid of “that faggy colour.”

I lifted a corner of the tarp carefully so I could see into the cab. I don’t know what I was expecting. Another body, maybe.

There wasn’t one, which was a good thing. There was, however, a dark stain on the passenger seat, and the barrel of a shotgun poking up from the floor. I let the tarp fall back, switched off the light and headed for the open air.

As I left the garage, Lug-nut came trotting at my heels—obediently, now that he had shown me what he obviously thought was important. Then I caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye. I turned to look at the house and saw a tall, painfully thin figure loping off into the bush. Lug-nut barked and lunged, but I managed to grab his collar in time to stop him from giving chase. It looked like Eddie Schreier. Nobody else in the world runs quite so much like a frightened spider. The door to the house was still shut and the tape was still up, but I guessed it had been Eddie upstairs, making that noise I heard. What was going on?

I walked Lug-nut to George’s truck, still holding his collar, and put him in the cab. Maybe Eddie had returned to grab Francy’s copy of Lady Chatterley. Maybe, but not bloody likely. I added Eddie to my mental list of people to have a chat with really soon, then fired up the engine and headed home.