Corkscrew (21 page)

"I don't know," she said, enunciating every word angrily. "Whyn't you do your own goddamn dirty work."

Werner paused to light his cigar, then waved the match out, like a rich man at dinner in his club. Then he flicked the match away, put his hand under her chin, and jerked her face up toward him.

She shrieked with alarm. "Brutality," she shouted. She rounded on the other women, holding her right hand to her face. "See what he done? See what this bastard done?"

"Nobody saw anything, sweetheart," Werner said. "Because nothing happened. But it's going to if we don't get some answers out of you right away, the reason being, there's a couple of women in trouble unless we can get to them fast. And you can help us do that." He let the statement sit for a moment, then lashed her with a shout. "You understand?"

"Sure," she said sullenly. Neither of the others was looking at her. They had developed a sudden interest in the office linoleum.

"Right," Werner said. "Now, as I was asking you. What racket are these guys into? We know they run hookers and drugs."

"We're not hookers," she flared.

"I know you're not. You're exotic dancers and hostesses," Werner said. "But I wasn't talking about you, was I?" He puffed pleasurably on his cigar. The door opened, and the OPP constable came in. He looked at Werner in surprise but did not say anything, just moved through the counter gap and out the back door into the room by the cells.

Werner spoke to the girls again. "What is it they're into? Drugs, porno movies, what?"

"Yes," she said softly.

"Yes what? Yes drugs, yes pornos, what?"

"Drugs an' movies," she said. "But if you say I said it, I'll tell about you hittin' on me."

"Nobody's going to tell them anything except to say they're getting fifteen years out of your sight in Millhaven," Werner said. "How long have you known them? Let me rephrase that. How long have they been running the club where you work?"

"They don't run it," she said. "It's legit."

"Sure." Werner's voice was soothing. He breathed out a long plume of sweet-smelling smoke. "Sure. So who owns this legitimate club of yours?"

"A guy name of Roger Walmsley," she said. "I ain't never seen no bikers in there." She looked up at him, trying to look innocent, but the lie was written across her face.

"Not as customers, that is," Werner said. "But sometimes they might drop by to talk to Mr. Walmsley."

She shrugged, dropping her eyes to the floor. "Lots of people talk to him."

"Yeah, I'm sure. So how did you happen to be on partying terms with this social club we found you with tonight?"

"Jack's a friend of mine, from when I was workin' in Vancouver."

"Working at a biker place," Werner said, and she shrugged.

Werner looked up and caught Kennedy's eye, nodding toward the phone. Kennedy looked at me, and I pointed out to the back. No sense letting the women hear his conversation.

The phone rang, and the OPP man answered it. He looked up at me. "Yes, he's here. Who's calling, please?" I saw him wince and knew who was on the other end. I held out my hand for the phone, and he passed it over.

"Bennett here."

"Good. That's what I like to see. You're not doin' nothin' dumb. That's good."

"I've called Toronto. That file cabinet is being picked up right now. It'll be up here by three."

"Good. You jus' do what you're tol'." There was a long pause while I waited for him to add something else, but in the end he just let the receiver clatter down.

Werner left the girl and came up to the counter, close to me. "What gives?"

"Not a hell of a lot. He said he was going to be checking up on me and he is. The only thing that bothers me, it sounds like he's blowing weed. His voice is getting a bit vague."

"It figures he would be," Werner said. "You know what it's like with those kind of guys. Grass is breakfast. They do drugs regular as breathing."

"I know." I kept tight hold of my emotions. "I don't care what they do to themselves, but I'm worried about the women."

Werner nodded. "That's why I'm working on this woman. Maybe she knows where they're hanging out."

"There's got to be a faster way than this." I punched my fist into my palm. "The Toronto connection is interesting, but they've got to be within a ten-minute ride of this station. The trick is to find out where."

"Easier said than done," Werner said. He waved his cigar at me placatingly. "I know, we'll try it. But how would you suggest we do it?"

"The quickest way is to head for the highway." I walked over to the map of my district that hangs on the wall behind the teletype machine. "Look. The Spenser house is on the west side of the lake. Now that means they must have gone from there either north, up into the bush, or south, out to the highway."

"Right." Werner laid his cigar down and studied the map. "We'll head over to the Spenser place again and ask around the neighbors. The woman next door didn't know which way they'd gone. She just knew that they came and drove away with the two women in the car and one guy with them. That was only a couple of minutes before we got there."

"And she didn't see whether they went north or south?"
 

Werner shook his head. "She says her husband threw a tantrum, started calling her down for getting involved, pulled the blinds shut, and kept shouting so she didn't know what was happening."

"That bastard needs a swift kick," I said.

"Agreed," Werner said. "Lissen, I'll get Bert and we'll go look for them. If we start getting close, I'll call."

I nodded and sat down and took out my .38, flipping the chamber open to check that all six shells were in place. My mind was racing, but it wasn't productive thought. I was working out ways of approaching the gang if I could locate them, wondering if I could round up any explosives to use to create a diversion. But I hadn't come to grips with the hardest question of all. Where were they?

I closed my pistol and holstered it, then stood up and studied the map again, trying to remember all the landmarks that corresponded to the symbols on the map. If I was right and the bikers were within ten minutes of the police station, there weren't too many places they could be. Unless they had gone to someone's cottage up along the west side of the lake, they would not have been close to a telephone. There aren't any public phones once you leave the area of the marina. That meant they had most probably gone south, out to the highway, where they could have cranked up their bikes and covered fifteen miles in ten minutes.

I stood looking at the map as Kennedy and Werner came out from the back of the station.

Kennedy stopped to speak to me. "I spoke to Walmsley. He denies all knowledge of the bikers; says I have no right to speak to him and he is going to have my job or my balls or both."

"Guilty as hell," Werner said, and I nodded.

"It looks as if we're going to have to sort this thing out ourselves. Now they've phoned me, so we know they're close to a phone, so that means they're either at a cottage up the west side of the lake, north of the Spenser cottage, or else they're out on the highway, anywhere within a fifteen-mile radius, give or take."

"Pity you didn't get a chance to speak to the women," Kennedy said. "They might've told you something."

"I spoke to them, to Freda, anyway," I said. "That's what makes me so certain they're close to town."

Werner was salvaging his cigar stub from the ashtray. He raised it carefully to light it, and as he puffed, he asked, "What did she say? Anything useful?"

I shook my head. "Not really. All she said was, 'Be brave.'"

"'Be brave'?" Kennedy almost snorted. "What kind of a line is that?"

I shrugged. "It was meant as encouragement, I guess. Freda's an actress, but she's not hammy."

I wasn't looking at the others, I was still staring at the map, mentally filling in all the features as they existed along the highway close to the east and west exits from the Harbour. And suddenly I understood what Fred had meant.

The detectives were turning away, heading for the door, but I grabbed both their arms and swung them around to face the map.

"I'll tell you what she meant," I said triumphantly. "Look." I put my finger on the map, about a mile west of the exit from the Harbour. "'Be brave,' she said. Brave, Indian, right."

The other two looked at one another, then at me, carefully, assessing how crazy I really was. "It fits. That place there is a camping ground. It has everything, including public telephones. And it's got the most Indian name you can think of, The Happy Hunting Grounds Campsite."

Kennedy whistled, low and tonelessly. "You could be right," he said. "Sonofabitch. You could just be right."

"I am right. And I'm going up there."

Werner shook his head. "You can't do that, Reid. Not on your own. And we can't go with you. The gang's been put off limits. God knows what's going down, but we can't screw it up."

I nodded impatiently. "I understand. But for now I'm just a suspended ex-chief of police. I'm going in there, and I'm going in to win."

Kennedy tried again. "It's dumb, Reid. If you get in trouble, they'll grease you and the girl, both."

I paused at the counter. "And if it was your wife in that camp, you'd be doing the same thing as me, wouldn't you?"

"Of course," he said. "What can we do to help?"

"For one thing, keep the phone off the hook. We've got two lines—keep them both tied up. Otherwise, they'll know I've gone. So lift the receiver off right now on both lines."

The constable looked at Kennedy and waited for his nod; then he went to the desk and reached for the phone. He was just lifting it as it rang. He took the call. "Murphy's Harbour P'lice."

I waited while the constable covered the phone. "It's for you, Chief."

I came back through to my desk and took the call, expecting the smoked-up hoarseness of the biker. Instead, it was Irv Goldman's voice. "Hi, Reid, got some news for you. That address you gave me—I'm there now. The place has been raided, trashed, and the file cabinet is missing."

"You say it's missing. Can you see where it was?"

"Yes, there's a different-colored patch of paint in one place, just the size you described, and there's a squashed-down place in the rug where the base of the thing must have been. But it's gone."

I swore. "What now?" I wondered out loud.

"What the hell was in the thing, anyway?" Irv grumbled. "We might have a better chance of finding it if we knew why it was gone."

"Something these bikers wanted, and from the look of it, something another gang wanted, as well," I said.

The line sighed between us for a long moment. Then Irv asked, "What now, Reid? You want me up there?"

"I've got the OPP swarming all over me at the moment. Why don't you go back to bed. Thanks for turning out for me in a panic."

"Yeah, well, no big deal. But it leaves you up the creek. What are you gonna do now?" I could imagine him as he spoke, probably leaning against the wall on his left shoulder, his trademark stance, tired from his own long day and broken sleep but still looking to help.

"No, thank you for trying, Irv," I said. "I've just had my first real idea of this case."

Chapter Seventeen

I hung up and stood leaning on the counter, thinking. They wanted a file cabinet, I'd give them a file cabinet. It was my guess that the bikers wouldn't be able to recognize the one they wanted on sight. Perhaps Spenser had described it to them before they killed him, perhaps they had seen it in his house, but unless it had a decal on it or cards with names on them in the slots on the front, it was no different from a thousand other cabinets. If I delivered one, they would believe that we had gone and picked it up, as promised. Of course, once they opened it, I would be in trouble. That part of the idea was going to need work.

I looked around the office. It's not fancy. Most of the furnishings look as if they were picked up in a distress sale. I have made a promise to myself to spray all the cabinets the same color sometime, but for now I was in luck. One of them matched the biker's description. Gray, two drawers, legal size. Perfect!

It was an evidence file, filled with items of importance to cases that were pending. Each item was in a brown envelope along with the necessary arrest reports and statements. There were a couple of open bottles of liquor taken from drunk drivers, a jimmy bar I'd taken off our local housebreaker while he was home on parole from jail, a small tear-gas pistol with a box of red-nosed tear-gas shells, and a cache of firecrackers I'd taken off some kid who was throwing them at passing cars during our Victoria Day holiday weekend.

Kennedy was watching me. "What's on your mind?"

"I'll tell you. But first, let's put these women in the back of the station."

He nodded and turned to them. "Okay, ladies, let's go, please."

They were too tired or hung over to take any notice of him. Only one of them moved, rolling her head up to look at him. The others took no notice until he clapped his hands together like a man shooing birds away; then all of them started at him, painfully, puzzled. "That's better," he said. "We need you out the back for a minute or two. On your feet, please."

They got up and walked through, following the uniformed man's pointing finger. One of them was still alert enough to look suspicious; the other two moved like zombies, coming down from whatever drugs they had taken at the bikers' camp, all of their anger fizzled out.

When the women were gone, Werner turned to me. "What's up?"

"I just heard from Toronto. Somebody's already broken into the house and stolen the file cabinet the bikers asked me to get for them."

"And you're going to give them this one?" He laughed. "Why not? It'll bring them out in the open."

"Yes. But I think I can do better than that." I opened the box of firecrackers—bangers, all of them—remembering how loud they had sounded in the warm night. There were seventeen left. I got out my pocketknife and notched one of them, then broke it in half and set both pieces upright on the desk. I took an envelope and elastic bands from the stationery drawer in the front counter and bound the unbroken crackers together, twisting their fuses as close to one another as I could get them. The fuses were too short to join properly, but they were close.