Читать книгу Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle - H. Mel Malton - Страница 26

I’m so happy, so happy said he,

bought me a coffee at a quarter to three,

meanwhile his happiness waited at home,

in an unhappy bed near a silent phone.

—Shepherd’s Pie

The Tim Horton's in Laingford is no different from any Tim Horton’s you’ve ever been in. First thing that hits you is the smell of hot fat, followed by a big wall of whitenoise—coolers, Coke machines, fluorescent lights—the inexorable buzz of fast food places everywhere. It never used to bother me until I stepped out of the mainstream and crawled off to live in a cabin in the woods. At home, I can hear a mouse chewing its fingernails, and anything electronic is instantly recognizable and horribly annoying.

One thing about Tim’s, though, the coffee is always good, and if you like donuts, they’ve got ’em.

Morrison was sitting at a formica table by the window, a black coffee in front of him, no donuts. He’d probably already had three while he was waiting. He grinned when I came in and threatened to get up, but he was sort of wedged in the plastic modular chair which was part of the table, designed by someone who thought every ass in the world was skinny. He stuck halfway, grinned even wider and settled back, his butt overflowing the seat. I felt sorry for him. Not so much because his size was unappealing—I mean, I didn’t think “poor guy, he’d be very attractive if he’d only lose some weight.” I just thought that his bulk must be a bit of a pain sometimes, that’s all. “Hey, Morrison.”

“Hey, Goat Girl.”

He must have picked it up from Spit, but he said it in a friendly way, so I didn’t mind. Soon I would try out “Earlie” on him and see if he flinched.

“Just let me grab a coffee, and I’ll be right there.” There was a queue, but the Hortonites were efficient, and soon I was at the front of the line. Someone was just bringing out a fresh tray of sour-cream cinnamon donuts, my favourite. I ordered two, one for me, one for Morrison. I guess it was a sort of bribe, but I didn’t think he’d worry about it. I handed it to him when I got back to the table. He looked at it, grinned, and pushed it gently back across the table to me.

“Thanks, but no thanks,” he said.

“It’s only a donut,” I said.

“I can see that,” he said. “Can’t stand ’em. It’s Becker who likes donuts, not me.” I shrugged and another stereotype bit the dust.

I dug in. After a moment, Morrison gazed at my chin and silently handed me a napkin.

“I brought some paperwork,” I said, swallowing and wiping my mouth.

“Oh, yeah? What kind?” I explained that George and I had written down everything we knew about Francy and John and the murders.

“Should be interesting. Is there anything in there you haven’t told us?”

“I’m not sure. There’s stuff I told Becker that I didn’t tell you, but I’m sure he let you know about it. You’re working together, right?”

Morrison didn’t answer. He was reading.

“What’s this about four hundred dollars in the dog food?”

“Well, you know how I took over the care and maintenance of Lug-nut, right? After you suggested it. Why did you make out that it was Becker’s idea, by the way?”

He pursed his lips. “Figured you’d go for it sooner if it came from him, eh? You did, didn’t you?”

“It didn’t matter whose idea it was. Lug-nut’s a great dog. He’s out waiting in the truck.”

“My Uncle Dwight’s dog, Sheila, is his mother,” he said. “I heard Travers treated his dog bad. It’s good to know he’s in good hands now.”

“Jeez, everybody’s related around here, aren’t they? If not by blood, then by dog.”

“Yup. So, the four hundred bucks?”

“Well, I went to get Lug-nut on Tuesday, after you told me he was abandoned, and I kind of, you know, slipped past that tape over the door to get the bag of dog food that John kept under the sink in the kitchen.”

“Yeah? It’s okay. I’m not going to arrest you—yet.”

“I wish you guys would stop threatening to arrest me. It’s wearing me down.”

Morrison frowned. “I was joking,” he said.

“Becker wasn’t.”

“Becker threatened to arrest you? Why?”

“Didn’t he tell you?”

“He never tells me anything.”

I told him. I left out some important details, like what exactly Becker and I were doing at my place, but I think he knew anyway.

“So that’s how he got the bruise over his eye. Yeah, he’s got a thing about dope. Most cops do, but some take it more seriously than others. You be careful, kid. Becker said the ding was from that bar brawl in Cedar Falls last night.”

“Well, it was. I just kind of nudged it later and it started bleeding again.”

He didn’t laugh. “Becker is not the kind of guy you’d want to be pissing off,” he said. “That was real stupid.”

“I know, I know. So. The dog food.”

“Yeah. You found the money in the dog food at the Travers’ place? Before you found the truck? Why didn’t you tell us?”

“No, I found it this morning, when I went to feed Lug-nut. I took the dog food from Francy’s to my place. The money rolled right out of the bag this morning. I was going to give it back to her this afternoon when I found—you know.”

“Yeah, I know. Pretty awful for you.”

I didn’t want to get into it, or I might start to cry. “Anyway, here it is.” I pulled the roll of bills out of my pocket and put it on the table.

“Put that away,” he hissed, startling me. “People will think you’re trying to bribe me.” I whipped the wad back into my pocket and glanced around. There were a lot of people in the place, but nobody near our table. Still, in a town the size of Laingford, people know you. No doubt there were several people there who had heard about Mark Becker and the pickup boys the night before. There would be tales told if I was seen handing Becker’s partner a wad of bills, I guess.

“Sorry,” I said.

“So you found Travers’s cash. And you were going to give it to her and not tell us?”

“Well, Lug-nut got to it before I did and we had a tug-of-war. I figured that the dog slobber probably erased any prints.”

“That’s withholding evidence, Goat Girl.”

“Add it to my sheet, Earlie.”

He grinned. “From you, I’ll take it. The name, I mean,” he added quickly, as I reached into my pocket. “Not the money. The money goes to Becker.”

“Couldn’t it go into trust for Beth, or something?”

“Eventually. But now it’s evidence. It means something. Don’t know what, but it does. What does it say in your Nancy Drew thing here? The four hundred dollars is somehow important? Yeah. I think so too.”

“Have you guys been able to find out who he owed money to?”

“Nope. But Becker’s talking to some of Travers’s poker buddies over at Kelso’s tonight. Maybe you should go find him there and give him the money. Explain how you come to have it.”

“Me? Go into Kelso’s? Becker would kill me.”

“You have a point. Besides, the only women who go in there are usually working.”

“Working? You mean professionals? Dancers?”

He eyed me. “Not that you couldn’t pass. With the right clothes. A bit of makeup.”

“Thanks a bunch, Earlie. Just hang on while I run out to the truck and slip into my bunny suit.”

He laughed. “I took you for one of those feminists with no sense of humour.”

“Oh, I have a sense of humour, don’t you worry. We feminists find it comes in useful when we’re dealing with bottom-feeders.”

“Well, you’ll find plenty of them where you’re going. Bottom-feeders just about sums it up. In both senses of the word.”

“Will you come with me?”

“To protect you from Becker, or the clientele?”

“Both. He’ll go ballistic when he finds out I’ve been holding out on him. On top of everything else.”

“He’ll go ballistic, as you say, when he finds out I met you behind his back, too. Maybe you should be protecting me.”

“I don’t think you need much protection. You’re bigger than he is.” I hadn’t meant it to be mean, but he looked hurt.

“I may outweigh him, but he has seniority.”

“Oh. There’s that.”

He busied himself folding up my sleuth sheet and putting it away carefully in his pocket. He was in plainclothes—wearing the biggest tweed jacket I’d ever seen.

“We’re doing a post-mortem on Mrs. Travers,” he said.

“Good. I bet it shows she was drugged before she was hanged.”

“What would that prove? We found her stash. She was a regular dope-smoker and a pretty heavy drinker. If there’s evidence of drugs in her system, it’ll just indicate that she doped herself up before she did it. Pretty sad.”

“Sure, Francy smoked dope, but then so do I,” I said. “It was no big deal. Neither of us did coke. Neither of us took pills.”

“We only have your word on that. Don’t forget the note.”

“Are you going to look for the notepaper?”

“Already did. Found a big pile of it in the desk in the living room.”

“That’s crazy. It must have been planted by the killer. And besides, any handwriting expert will tell you it’s not her.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I just am, okay? Are you guys checking it?”

“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Becker. You have a sample of her handwriting?”

“Yup. A note she left for me recently.” There was the “we’ll be fine” thing she left in my stash-box. It felt awful to think what optimism in her had written it, now. “But there’s probably stuff she’s written in her house. Thing is, I know for sure that there was no lilac paper there yesterday.”

“What makes you say that?”

I explained how Francy and I had torn the place apart the day before her death, looking for the money.

“I searched that desk myself. There was no lilac notepaper there then.”

“So your theory is that somebody went over there, got her drunk or stoned enough not to put up a struggle, hanged her, left a suicide note, planted the notepaper and left? That it?”

“That’s it.”

“Huh. You’ll have a hard time convincing Becker. He thinks he’s got the case all sewn up. He thinks she was nuts. I finally got him to agree with me that any woman who stays shacked up with a guy who beats her has to have a couple of screws loose.”

“There’s always way more to it than that. It’s not a case of just stay or go. Don’t you ever read about it? Don’t you guys ever do training courses?”

Morrison glared at me. “Of course we do. Sensitivity training and all that. Still doesn’t help when you come up against some poor girl who’s had her arm broken in three places and still won’t make a statement against the guy who did it.”

“Sometimes they stay for the sake of the kids,” I said. If we were going to hash the whole issue out at Tim Horton’s, we’d need another couple of donuts and a whole pot of coffee.

“Listen, Polly Deacon. I got all the training courses I could handle when I was a kid.” Morrison stared at me fiery-eyed for a moment and then looked away, out to where the lumber trucks were whizzing past on the highway. I didn’t say anything, just waited. Then he started talking quietly, as if he and I were the only people in the room. “The Honourable MPP who ran up against your aunt in that election way back then isn’t my real father, eh? He adopted me. My real Dad was a drunk—hit all of us every goddamn night and used my mother for a punching bag. She never left, never made the break, until Dad set fire to the couch one night. We all got out, but he just lay there in front of the goddamned television and burned to death. Mom snapped like a broken twig, and I spent two years bouncing around from one foster family to another. Now, tell me again how staying with a fucked-up wife-beater is good for the kids. Go ahead.” He had said it all very quickly, sending his words like darts straight into my gut. Francy’s story had been like that. Gut wrenching. Leaving me feeling inadequate, like my own deal wasn’t nearly as bad, so who the hell was I to talk? There was so much tension coming at me over the table that the air crackled.

“Oh, man, Earlie. I’m sorry. That’s horrible.”

“Damn right. Francy Travers just made me mad. I talked to her, and she just said the same things my mother used to say. Her, with her face half burned off. Did Travers do that to her? She didn’t tell me—not that I asked, eh.”

“No, that wasn’t John. It was her father a long time ago, back when she was a teenager living in the States. She didn’t talk about it much.”

“Did you ask her right out?”

“Nope. When you carry scars like that, everyone who knows you probably has it at the back of their mind all the time, but there’s just no opening to ask, you know? Like 'So, Francy, how about telling me who burned your face off?’ I don’t think so.”

Morrison nodded.

“Francy told me just after she got pregnant,” I said. “We were up at the cabin, partying a bit, and got to talking about fetal alcohol syndrome and ‘smoking can harm your baby’—that sort of stuff. Francy was having a hard time quitting the old vices, but she said that at least her kid wouldn’t inherit the scars. She just came out with it and then laughed. I waited and she told me what happened. Her father was like your Dad was, except he didn’t torch the couch. He torched his daughter.”

“Why?”

“Why? Does there have to be a reason? Like maybe she did something to deserve it? Like maybe you did something to deserve getting beat up by your dad? I don’t know, Earlie. She didn’t tell me that. All I know is that after the accident, as she called it, he hanged himself. She moved up here to stay with a family as a nanny, and she never went back. She said that after a childhood like hers, she could handle anything. I guess that’s part of why she stayed with John. She compared her early experience to the stuff he doled out and figured she was in heaven.”

“Poor kid.”

“Uh-huh. She had a blind spot where John was concerned. But after he was killed, she certainly wasn’t consumed by guilt, as that stupid note apparently says. She was getting on with it. She was happy.”

“Becker wont buy it.”

“Then how come he’s at Kelso’s trying to talk to John’s friends? He must have some doubts.”

“Loose ends, mostly.”

“And so if he finds out something that points the other way, he’ll ignore it, right?”

“That would be unprofessional.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well. It might just get him thinking. He knows I don’t think Francy Travers killed her husband, but what I think doesn’t count for nothin’ with him.”

“How come you guys don’t get along?”

“He always gets the girl, eh?”

“Quick, Earlie. Very quick. But really. How come you dislike him so much?”

“I was up for promotion, and he swings in from the city and snatches it away from me. How about that? Or, he’s a hundred and fifty pounds of muscle and I’m a slob. How about that? Or, he hates my dog. How about that? I got my reasons.”

Morrison’s face was red, and his tone was vehement enough to turn a head or two.

“Hey, hey. I’m sorry. Rude question. It’s none of my business anyway.”

Morrison took a swig of cold coffee and grimaced.

“Okay, let’s go,” he said. “Next stop Kelso’s.” He looked at what I was wearing. “Couldn’t you have worn a mini-skirt or something?” he said.