Raw Bone (8 page)

Though it was a lie, MacNeice said he’d already eaten and ordered tea with milk—referencing the chick in a bowler hat with an umbrella tucked under its wing. He pulled a notepad from his briefcase and set a pen down on top of it. “Tell me about your life, Freddy.”

“I don’t recall ever being asked that question.” Dewar smiled. He absent-mindedly ran his fingers over the crease in the paper napkin, and then he started at the beginning. Born in Halifax, Freddy was eighty-four. He joined the merchant marine at fifteen, surviving the war ferrying supplies, equipment and men across the Atlantic. Afterwards, he tried settling down in Halifax, but it didn’t take. There was no steady work on land for a stoker. He eventually came west to Dundurn and worked with the city’s road crews patching cracks in the summer and spreading sand, and later, salt in the winter. For a few years, he signed on to the lake freighters, but he found working the lakes deadly boring.

Freddy paused as the waitress put the stainless steel teapot and china mug in front of MacNeice. He said he went back to spreading gravel in Dundurn and a year later married Florence—Flo—a girl he’d met at the Woolworth’s lunch counter. She worked next door in the lingerie department of The Right House. They had a daughter together—Edith.

The waitress slid the plate of pancakes in front of Dewar and filled his cup with coffee.

“Three years ago, almost to the day, Flo died of a heart attack. She was seventy-six. I sold the house on Province Street, including its contents, and moved to Edith’s dairy farm near London.”

He had his own room at the farm and the food was fine—there was always plenty of it—but there was nothing for him to do. His daughter was a teacher and her husband farmed from sunrise to sunset. They didn’t have kids, so he couldn’t even babysit. Before the first snow came, he moved back to Dundurn with nothing but a duffle bag and the nest egg of his savings account.

“Why would you live at the Block and Tackle rather than take a small place of your own?”

“I considered it. But I’d have to get furniture—everything from a bed to a lawnmower—and it didn’t make sense since I could be dead in a year or two.” The napkin’s crease was now crisp; he patted it gently, a job well done. “I stayed at the bar a couple a times when I was working freighters, eh. I like the old guys there, always somethin’ to talk about, something to watch on TV, and I’m crazy about Fish ’n’ chips. Reminds me of a place in Southampton during the war. That was the best you could hope for: getting there in one piece, then Fish ’n’ chips and a pint. Funny eh? Unlucky, and you were fish food; lucky, and you ate good fish … Anyways, it’s pretty clean, and I’ve only ever had one thing swiped—my duffle bag. And I don’t know why anyone would want that old thing. My name was on it—F. A. Dewar—and stencilled below was “Stoker.” The thing has to be sixty years old or more.”

“When was the bag stolen?”

“Pearl Harbor Day—last December 7th.”

MacNeice watched the old man mop up the remaining syrup and cream with the last section of the pancakes, creating an elegant series of looping blue and gold and white swirls on the plate. Freddy had a steady hand, absent of any tremors of age. When he was done, the waitress came by and scooped up the plate in one hand, pouring Freddy a top-up with the other.

At last, MacNeice produced the photograph of the young woman. Before showing it to Dewar, he told him that she had died violently out on the bay. He said there was a chance, a remote possibility, that she may have had a beer, or fish and chips, or even stayed a night or two at the bar. He laid the photo on the table and waited.

Freddy wiped his mouth with the napkin, adjusted his glasses and looked down at the face.

“She’s a goner in this picture?”

MacNeice nodded.

“You been to the bar, detective? I mean when they’re serving?”

“I have.”

“Well there aren’t many women who come in for a beer, let alone dinner. The ones who do are geezers like me and some don’t bother putting their teeth in.”

“Her face isn’t familiar to you then?”

“Oh, I didn’t say that. No, I’ve seen her all right.” He tapped the photocopy with a crooked right index finger. “I can’t say where … but not at the bar. I can tell you the hair’s wrong. You’ve made it straight, eh, and this gal’s hair was wavy.” He handed the photocopy back to MacNeice.

“Try and recall where you saw her, Freddy, and why you’d remember her at all—especially her hair.”

“Oh, that’s easy. An early life at sea, eh. The only thing we ever talked about was girls. We had pin-ups taped everywhere.” Freddy sat up and said, “Betty Grable, that’s it. Her hair was blond and wavy like Grable’s.”

MacNeice was struck by how animated the old man had become. “Anyways, ever since then, I’ve liked looking at girls—though not without clothes Our pin-ups always had something on, a bathing costume, a fancy dress …”

MacNeice asked again, “Can you recall where you saw this particular young woman?”

Freddy sipped his coffee, taking warmth from the mug, thinking hard, but finally gave up. “I can’t.”

“Give me an idea of your typical day. Do you go for walks?”

“Oh yeah, I walk everywhere. Over to the main library … I can spend a day there. Or down to the water, sometimes the botanical gardens or just along Burlington to see the ships coming and going. Mostly, folks pass you by like you was invisible, eh, and I don’t blame them.”

After breakfast, MacNeice dropped Dewar back at the BTB. He wrote his cell number on the back of a card. “You’ve seen her face, Freddy. When you remember where you saw her, call me right away.”

On his way back to the division, MacNeice drove slowly past Byrne’s house. A patrol car was already parked in the driveway, facing the street with its engine running. The uniform inside spotted the unmarked Chevy passing slowly and nodded.

The name appeared for the first time on November 14, not as a roomer, but scrawled across the spot for Day/Night Clerk, the final box in the column: Duguald—no last name. The entries prior to that had been Byrne, and on December 28, Byrne was back. MacNeice put the name on the whiteboard under the Block and Tackle Bar.

“Ryan, what’s the etymology of
Duguald
? Please tell me it’s Irish.”

“I’ll check.”
Click click click
pause … 
click
pause. “Irish, sir … means ‘dark stranger.’ ”

“You’re serious?” MacNeice looked up from his desk as the young man spun around in his chair.

“Completely. There are different ways to spell it, but that’s what it means. It’s Gaelic.” Ryan spun back to the computer, where he was searching the missing persons files of several forces, looking for a lead to either the body in the bay or the one blown up in the wagon.

Standing back from the board, MacNeice let his mind wander, flipping the red marker over and around the fingers of his right hand, the way Clint Eastwood would a silver dollar.

Did the name trace back to the Black Irish and the myth surrounding the fate of the Spanish Armada after its catastrophic defeat at Gravesend? Many of the men who survived that battle and its desperate retreat—the long way around the British Isles through gut-wrenching storms—were shipwrecked off Ireland’s northwest coast. Most were slaughtered on the beaches, stripped of anything useful and rolled back over the cold stones into the sea. Those not put to death were taken into service as soldiers by the Irish warlords. As the story goes, these men
married or otherwise impregnated the fair and freckled girls of Kerry and Antrim. The product of their coupling was born: fair and freckled, dark and fair, or simply dark. Born with them was the story that Black Irish were the descendants of Spaniards that had washed ashore. The myth refuses to die, but then great myths never do.

“Black Irish” may also have been an ancient English slur suggesting the treachery of the Irish. If so, it was a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black. Putting the marker back in the tray, MacNeice cautioned himself not to read too much into the name.

Aziz appeared, espresso in hand, hanging her wet coat over the leading edge of the cubicle.

MacNeice sat down at his desk again. “Tell me, how are the casualties doing?”

“Michael says the paramedic will live, but it could be weeks before the doctors will know if he’ll be able to return to work. The damage to his upper arm and shoulder will heal, but a portion of the lung on that side is gone. As for Szabo, the neurosurgeon was able to stop the bleeding and reduce the pressure in his brain. But he’s in an induced coma and no one is giving a prognosis. Both these men have young wives. The cop has two small children, a two-year-old girl and a baby boy. The paramedic has only been married a year.”

The phone rang. Ryan had taken to wearing a headset and answering the team’s phone without having to leave his keyboard. “Boss, it’s Forensics calling about a boat.”

MacNeice picked up.

“It’s Nathan Ho, sir, senior scientist up at the Mount Hope Forensics. Can you tell me what I’m looking for?” Byrne’s aluminum boat had been taken to one of the decommissioned RCAF hangars at Dundurn’s regional airport.

“DNA—anything female. Hair, pubic hair, clothing, a lost lipstick tube, an eyelash, a fingernail.”

“What I can already tell you is that this really is a fishing boat. I’ve found dozens of small silvery scales and a fair amount of dried slime.”

“Is there an anchor?”

“A twenty-pounder. It appears to be old, what fishermen call a bass river anchor. It’s attached to a coiled half-inch white rope … about thirty feet long.” MacNeice could hear him walking around the boat, his voice booming in the hangar. “There’s another anchor too,” Ho said, “but it’s not so fancy. It’s a makeshift job—an industrial-sized juice can with a heavy-duty galvanized eyelet set in concrete and a similar length of the same rope.”

MacNeice asked Ho how long it would take to do a thorough sweep, but Ho was reluctant to promise anything specific. He was about to hang up when he volunteered something else. “The guy that towed it in said it’s not local. The numbers on the side are American and the draft is so shallow, it really is meant for bass fishing on a river, not Lake Ontario or even Dundurn Bay. We’re checking the registration now.”

It wasn’t just that a shallow draft boat couldn’t make it across the bay in November or December. To dump a body wrapped in a rope with a heavy anchor overboard would take a man much more robust than Byrne. But, when the winds of winter were howling over the water, crossing with three people might have drowned them all. No, MacNeice didn’t think Byrne was the prime suspect, but he wasn’t ruling out that Byrne knew who was.

When MacNeice turned, Aziz gave him the update on her interview with Salty Conner. She had taken a Google Earth aerial view of the park beyond the promenade and asked the old man to point to where the wagon-puller entered the park and where he went after leaving the
wagon. Salty drew the line with his finger from east to west, saying, “Came in this way, left that way.” He tapped the paper, indicating south.

“I asked him, ‘What makes you think he went south and not north?’ ” She glanced at her report. “He looked at me like I was a bit batty and said, ‘I’m not Buck Rogers, lady, I’m just saying I think he went that way.’ ” Not knowing who Buck Rogers was, Aziz asked again if he was just guessing. “Salty tapped the south end again and said, ‘Because I’d turn that way, ’cause the cops would come up from Main.’ ”

“Smart man.”

Salty had also told Aziz he thought the wagon-puller knew the park, because he didn’t hesitate. “He just dropped the handle and kept on going. He knew where he was headed.”

MacNeice leaned against his desk, studying the board. He asked Aziz if she had a sense of the wagon-puller yet. Without hesitation, she replied, “A cool-headed man, and calculating. What do you think?”

“I agree with you. Do you think he’s done yet?”

Aziz shrugged. “I’m not sure. The killing was so artful that repeating it might prove irresistible—just to show how truly clever he is. Alternatively, if it was about exacting punishment on one individual, there’s no reason to worry that it will happen again.”

The phone rang. Ryan answered and turned quickly to MacNeice. “It’s Vertesi, sir, calling from the door-to-doors.”

MacNeice picked up the phone. On the other end, Vertesi raised his voice to be heard over the rain. “Boss, I think we may have something—the apartments at Cumerland and Gage.”

Martha and Bob Goode lived in the fourth-floor corner apartment, fronting on Gage Avenue. Retired from a maintenance job at the university, Bob was happy to have the attention of both MacNeice and Vertesi, who stood beside him on the narrow balcony overlooking the park. Though sheltered from the rain, they were getting hit by a bracing spray, like standing too close to Niagara Falls on a windy day.

Goode said, “I was out here, having a smoke—Martha don’t allow me to smoke inside. That’s when I sees it, like a flash and then a loud bang—jeez, it was loud. All of a sudden this black cloud floats up over the trees. Then I could hear some screaming from somewhere—I don’t know where exactly, maybe one of the other apartments. But, like you can see, we’re right above that park entrance over there.”

He called his wife to come out and see what was happening, but she was in the bathtub and hollered that unless the building was on fire, he should leave her alone.

“I was just about to go inside and give her what for, when I see this guy wearing a long, dark coat and a hat—the kind with the flaps on the ears—pushing an old shopping cart.” Goode said he was certain it was old because one of the front wheels was spinning this way and that and it all seemed a bit rusty. MacNeice nodded, and the man carried on. “It was loaded with bags full of stuff—junk, most likely. The guy’s waving a hand like he’s swatting flies, like he’s mad at someone, but there was no one with him. I thought he was one of the mentals—you know, the ones they let out of the hospital in the ’90s, so I didn’t pay too much attention to him. The park has a lot of nuts—nuts ‘n’ punks. You don’t go in there at night unless you’re one a them.”