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

Grant me a taste of your experience, stranger,

Give me a sip of your blood.

—Shepherd’s Pie

Police officers make me nervous. I could be driving perfectly legally, all the insurance and my license up to date, keeping to the speed limit—a responsible citizen in every respect, but the minute I see a police cruiser, my face flames red and my throat gets tight. I start to drive erratically, out of sheer nervousness.

It’s all that dumb power that gets me; men and women in uniforms with bored, bovine faces, carrying guns. I don’t see brave “Servers and Protectors”, I just see people in stiff blue hats who have every right to interrogate you if they feel like it. I’m the same with customs officers, and I am invariably searched at airports.

By the time the police finally arrived to deal with Spit Morton and the body in the “wood only” pit, I had worked myself up into a lather of fear. I was all for dragging Dweezil off into the bush somewhere and leaving him, but George would have none of it.

“They will be searching the area,” he said. “I’m the only goat breeder around here. They would know.”

“Get real, George,” I said. “As if the police, in the middle of a murder investigation, would give a damn about a dead goat.” Still, George wasn’t taking any chances.

I believed that George and I, as the first to find the body, would immediately become prime suspects. I’m no fool. I’ve read my Eric Wright and Sue Grafton. The police would ask us all sorts of awkward questions, they would go to my cabin and search it and they would find my modest stash of homegrown weed (kept for medicinal purposes only, you understand) and I would go to jail.

The police officers who arrived first were from Laingford, and they were both men. The thinner of the two, who introduced himself as Detective Becker, looked to be in his mid-thirties and obviously worked out with weights. He was wearing a short-sleeved uniform shirt, and the muscles on his arms were ropy and interesting. The other, from what I could see of him, weighed about three hundred pounds. He stayed in the car, talking on the radio.

I wondered if Detective Becker was any relation to the mogul Becker who owned the famous chain of convenience stores, and I asked him—you know, to break the tension, but he gave me a cold smile and said he wasn’t.

I gave him my name. Pauline Deacon. Polly, to my friends.

“Can I have your address, please, ma’am?”

“My, uh, mailing address?”

“No, your place of residence.”

This was a problem. My beloved cabin—George’s homestead—was not strictly legal. What I mean is, although I had been living there for a number of years, it wasn’t zoned as residential. There was no record, anywhere, that someone was living in George’s cabin. His tax returns certainly didn’t include that information, and although most of the locals with whom I was acquainted were aware of where I lived, they were very good about keeping it to themselves. I hadn’t filled out a tax return in years. I didn’t have a credit card or a phone. Actually, I didn’t exist. I liked it that way.

So, the question made me uncomfortable. I glanced at George, who came to my rescue, smelling trouble.

“She lives with me,” he said, his voice full of hidden meaning. Interesting, I thought. Why not? I took his arm possessively.

Becker’s upper lip twisted for a moment, and then he switched his attention to George.

“You live together, then, on the Dunbar sideroad.” He checked his notes. “Lot forty-two, concession six?”

“Correct,” George said.

“You married?”

“I don’t think that’s any of your business, detective,” I said. I could feel a hideous blush creeping up my body.

Not that the concept was wholly far-fetched. I mean, George was well into his seventies, but hard-bodied and more flexible than I was at six. He was probably quite capable of getting it up if called upon to do so. Our relationship was entirely platonic and the thought of being intimate with him had never crossed my mind, but Becker didn’t know that. We were, after all, covering our butts.

“We are not married,” I said, after a nasty little pause which Becker filled by scribbling in his little black book. I can just imagine what he wrote: “May/December relationship between suspects. Check this.”

“Domestic partnership,” George said, which was true in a way. Becker wrote that down as well.

“Now, Mr. Hoito and Ms. Deacon, can you tell me in your own words just how you came to find the deceased?”

“Well, we were getting rid of, er…”

“… some scrap lumber and Polly thought that she—”

“I thought I saw a piece that we could have kept. You know? Re-use? Recycle? So I jumped down to haul it back.”

“And she moved that old door.”

“It looked like maybe we could save it too, eh? And the decea—I mean the body—was there underneath it.”

“Slow down, please,” Becker said. “I don’t do shorthand.” He smiled, and I started to like him. Nice eyes. Crinkles at the corners.

The fat guy still hadn’t moved from the driver’s seat of the cruiser, but I could see an ambulance arriving to deal with Spit Morton. Fatty noticed it too and gunned the cruiser over to meet it.

We had met the cops at the dump hut, after we had replaced Dweezil in the back of the truck and covered him up. The truck was still parked by the pit where the body was.

The cops had checked out Spit, and, like me, they had decided that he was in no danger and left him there to wait for the first-aid people. I’ll bet Spit would have received more attention if he had been dressed in a three-piece suit and found unconscious in a BMW.

Anyway, that left us alone with Becker. He had caught up with his notes and was looking at me expectantly.

“Uh, sorry. Did you ask me something?” I said.

“Did you touch the body in any way?”

“Are you kidding? The guy was not in any immediate need of CPR, you know. Just look at him.” Becker peered obediently over the edge of the pit. I looked over too, to keep him company, which was a mistake. The corpse’s appearance had not improved. The most horrible part was that his eyes were open. Once you see dead eyes, you never forget them.

“Right. So you didn’t move him.”

“He might have shifted a bit when I moved the door that was covering him,” I said. “I took one look and scrammed.”

“Don’t blame you. You recognize him?”

Now this is the weird thing. Up until then, I hadn’t. It had just been a body. A horror-filmy, yucky, dead human body, and that was all my outraged mind would accept, but when Becker asked me that question, I did recognize him. I knew who it was.

“John Travers,” I said.

George gasped.“Really?” he said and went back to take another look over the edge.

“Travers. Local?”

“He’s—was—an auto mechanic living about two kilometres down the dump road. He has a wife and baby daughter—Oh, God, Francy!”

“Francy. His wife?”

“Somebody’s got to let her know,” I said.

“We’ll do that, Ms. Deacon.”

“How? Knock on her door stone-faced, hat in hand? There’s no telling how she’ll react. She’ll probably flip out all over you. You don’t know Francy.”

“Do you know her?”

“Yes. She’s a friend.”

“Perhaps you’d be willing to come with us then, to talk to her, when we get through here. She’ll likely be needing someone she knows to be with her for support.”

“Not likely,” George muttered. I tried to elbow him to shut up, but it was too late. Becker turned quickly to look at him.

“What does that mean?” he said, sharply.

George had the grace to look sheepish, or goatish, which he does from time to time. His ears elongate, somehow, and his neck gets brownish-red when he says something tactless.

“Well. John Travers was a bit of a… not a good husband to Francine.”

Becker looked at me. I hated to say it. Francy had just lost her husband, though she didn’t know it yet, and even if he was a no-good son of a bitch who got drunk and hit her, she had told me that she loved him, most of the time.

“He was violent,” I said. “Look him up, Detective Becker. There’s probably some record of—what do you call ’em—domestics? John was a shit.”

Becker’s nice crinkly eyes narrowed and I swear his ears moved. “So, she might have some motive for shooting him?”

“Motive she may have had,” I said, “but Francy wouldn’t shoot anybody. She hated guns. Anyway, she just had a baby. Kind of hard to lug a body to the dump without bursting your C-section stitches and spewing your intestines.” It was graphic, I know, and both George and Becker winced. What is it with men, that they can eat pepperoni pizza while watching a slice-and-dice Rambo film, but the merest mention of menstruation or childbirth and they go a sickly green colour?

The ambulance had pulled away from the dump hut, presumably with Spit Morton safely tucked away inside. I hoped he was okay. The fat cop drove back to the pit, pulling up just inches from Becker’s left thigh. Becker jumped out of the way and swore, and the fat guy laughed.

A second vehicle arrived, painted a dark colour, very discreet. It had more class than Spit’s hearse could ever hope for, and I knew that it was the dead-mobile. Suddenly, I really wanted to go home.

“Are we done?” I said.

“What? The little lady doesn’t want to help us drag up the nice, juicy body she found?” the fat guy said, poking his head out of the cruiser window, a greasy smile on his face.

“The little lady,” I said, “is in shock.” And I was, because suddenly everything went black.