Snowjob (3 page)

The guard scuffed his feet and I glanced over. “One more minute,” he said tonelessly.

“Who else knows?” I asked Doug quickly.

“Nobody,” he said as the guard advanced toward him. “Nobody but me and you and the guy who killed her.”

“Did you tell the arresting officer any of this?”

“No.” He shook his head fiercely. “I was scared they’d come after my family while I was inside.”

The guard was moving toward us so I spoke quickly. “What can you tell me about the case against you?”

“Check with Pat Hinton. He was my partner. He’s a good head. A tightass but fair as they come.”

The guard touched Doug on the shoulder and he stood up. “Watch yourself, Reid. This is heavy.”

“Hang loose.” I winked at him and stood while the guard walked him back to his cell. Doug turned at the door to wave. “Semper fi,” he said and I echoed it. The Marine motto, as abbreviated by ex-grunts.

There was a diner across the square from the courthouse and I went over there and had a coffee and phoned the police department. Detective Hinton was off duty, they told me. He would be in at four. There was no Hinton listed in the phone book, which didn’t surprise me. Most small-town cops have unlisted numbers. It cuts down on the midnight cursers. I guessed that Melody knew his number so after I finished my coffee I walked Sam down to the library and left him beside the steps while I went in.

It was one of the libraries donated by Andrew Carnegie in the early part of the century, a square stone building with three steps up to the front door. The woman at the front desk told me that the chief librarian was busy but Melody must have seen me from her office. She came out and thanked the girl and led me in.

She had a clutter of folders on her desk and there were piles of new books everywhere but she cleared a chair for me and I sat.

“How is he?” she asked first.

“Fine. He sends his love.”

“He asked me not to come in every day,” she said, almost bitterly.

“Because he loves you,” I said. “He knows what it’s like, having to run the gauntlet of those people.”

“You think that’s it?”

“He’s a good man,” I told her, “and there was nothing between him and that girl. It was an investigation, concerning somebody that girl knew.”

“He told me that,” she said. “Remember? I mentioned it last night.”

“It’s the truth. I believe him.” I sat there, looking at her beautiful, troubled face, and eventually she got control of herself.

“What are you going to do now?”

“He wants me to talk to his partner, Pat Hinton. He’s not at work, not in the book. I wondered if you had his phone number.”

She reached under her desk and pulled out her purse, opening it and taking out a little book. “Yes. Got a pencil?”

I wrote down the number, then said, “I guess you know him pretty well.” She nodded and I said, “It might be good if you were to call him, introduce me by phone.”

“Sure.” She picked up the receiver and dialed quickly. The person at the other end answered almost immediately and she said, “Hello, Alison. It’s Melody Ford.”

She stared at the wall blankly, then said, “He’s fine, thank you. A friend of ours has just been in to see him. Says he’s okay. That’s why I called. This friend, Reid Bennett, he was in the service with Doug. He’s a police chief now in Canada. He wanted to talk to Pat if that were possible.”

She covered the mouthpiece and said, “She’s calling him.” I nodded and then she said, “Hello, Pat. I’ve got a friend of Doug’s here, Reid Bennett. Doug asked him to speak to you. Will that be all right?”

He must have agreed because she passed the phone to me without another word. I took it. “Hello, Pat. This is Reid Bennett.”

“Hi, Reid.” It was a veteran policeman’s voice, not giving anything away. “How can I help?”

“I was in to see Doug this morning and he asked me to talk to you. I’m a copper myself so you wouldn’t be telling tales out of school.”

“Whyn’t you come on over,” he said. “I don’t go in until three. Melody knows where we are.”

“Great, thank you. I’ll be right there. Bye.”

Melody directed me to Hinton’s house and I left. Sam was outside with a little old lady staring at him, her string bag of library books dangling at her side. “He’s never moved, not once,” she said wonderingly. “Even when I patted him. However did you train him so well?”

“He was smart to start with,” I told her. Then I told Sam “Easy” and this time he responded, wagging his tail when she gave his head a pat.

I went back to my car and put him in the front seat, then I found Grissom Street and left him where he was with the window down. It was beautiful skiing weather, a bright, cold morning, about five above zero on the Fahrenheit scale. Inside the car Sam would have been comfortable at 30° lower than that.

Hinton came to the door and we both did a double take. He was the cop I’d identified the evening before at Brewskis. “Well, small world,” he said and shook my hand. “Come on in.”

I went in, kicking off my shoes at the door, something most Canadians do automatically. The place was similar to Doug’s house but furnished in a more modern way and it had an electric keyboard organ in one corner of the living room.

Hinton introduced his wife. “Ali, this is Doug’s friend, Reid Bennett. He’s a police chief, no less, from Canada.”

Alison was a tiny woman with a head of frizzy curls. “My goodness,” she said. “I don’t believe we’ve ever had a chief in here before.”

“I’m the only guy in the department,” I explained. “It’s a phony title but I didn’t pick it. It came with the job.”

She laughed. “Is that so. Then I won’t bother to curtsy. Would you like some coffee?”

“Please. Black,” I said and she went out as Hinton waved me to a chair.

“Take a load off,” he said. I sat opposite him and he asked, “So, you’ve known Doug awhile?”

“We were in the Marines together. Went from boot camp to Nam. We both did two tours, although I was out a few months earlier than Doug because of a wound.”

“And you stayed in touch?” He was being careful, but I wasn’t offended. I needed his help. This was his price.

“Yeah. I was best man when he and Melody got married. And he’s been up to visit my patch to do some fishing. Brought young Ben with him last time. The boy caught a good-sized walleye. He was proud as punch.”

That was enough, it seemed. He crossed his knees and asked, “What can I tell you?”

“I didn’t get time to talk to Doug about the case against him. He said you’d fill me in. Would that be okay?”

“Sure. For my partner,” he said. “But right off the top lemme say that it doesn’t look good for Doug.”

“What’s the case, the evidence?”

His wife came back with the coffee and we thanked her and she looked at our faces and said, “I guess I’ll get lunch started. Holler if you need a refill.”

“Thanks, Ali,” Hinton said. She went out, closing the door. “We’ve been married fourteen years. She understands police work,” he said fondly.

“She’s very tactful,” I said politely and waited.

Hinton sipped his coffee. “Facts,” he said. “The deceased woman, Lucinda Lee Laver, age thirty-six. Born Chicago. Found dead in her apartment at ten
A.M., thereabouts, by her landlady. That was Wednesday.”

Two days ago, the day I’d received Melody’s call for help.

“She was nude. She’d been strangled with a pair of her own panty hose. Whoever did it was a pro. He’d knotted a quarter inside, pressed it on her Adam’s apple.”

“Why did the landlady go into the apartment? Was that normal?”

Hinton shook his head. “No. But her boss called the house and couldn’t raise her. So he sent a coworker, woman called Ella Frazer, over to see if she was okay.”

“At ten in the morning? Sounds like he was really anxious to see her.”

“Yeah.” Hinton looked at me bleakly. “And this is where it gets bad for Doug. She was supposed to have made a deposit at the bank the evening before. She left work at four with fifty grand in a canvas sack. And at nine that morning, when she didn’t show, her boss phoned the bank and found they hadn’t received the deposit. So he got worried and called her house.”

“Was the money found?” After the hint he had dropped I dreaded the answer. He gave it to me straight. “It was in Doug’s car. He’d taken it out of the sack but it matched the amount she had taken with her, forty-nine grand and change. It was there to the penny.”

We both sat and sipped our coffee without speaking. Neither of us spoke but in my eyes this looked like a frame-up and I was trying to find a tactful way to say so. Hinton did it for me.

“Go ahead and say it. Doug wouldn’t have been that dumb. If he’d killed her he’d have put the money somewhere else.”

“That’s the way I see it. So I’m guessing that there was more evidence than the money against him. I’m guessing they made a case against him first, then checked his car and found the cash.”

“That’s how it happened.” Hinton nodded. “We were off duty, Doug and me, the morning it happened. The other team investigated, Lieutenant Cassidy and Sergeant Morgan.”

“What happened?”

“It broke right away,” Hinton said. “The first thing the landlady said was the aid of it as far as Doug was concerned.”

“She said that Doug and the deceased had been an item?”

He nodded. “More than that. She’d seen him going in and out of the place for a couple weeks already. And on the night before she’d seen them going in together, having a big fight. Ms. Laver didn’t want Doug to come in but he’d more or less forced his way in and they’d gone on fighting over the landlady’s head while she was watching TV. She said they were still at it when she went to bed, around ten-thirty. Her bedroom’s in the back of the house and she couldn’t hear from there.”

“What time did death occur?”

“Around two in the morning, give or take. You know how it is with coroners.”

“Did you find any forensic evidence in the apartment? Anything to tie Doug to the place?”

“Fingerprints on a beer can. That was it,” Hinton said. “I’d figured there’d be more than that. Like if they’d been having a thing, there’d have been fingerprints in the bedroom, the toilet seat, wherever. But the only prints they found were on one lousy beer can,”

“Let’s get this straight. You mean they didn’t find any fingerprints at all?”

“Virtually none. The place was clean and neat and they figured she must have cleaned up recently and not touched a whole lot of stuff since.”

I frowned. “Surely they found prints on the fridge door and the kitchen cupboards, places she would have touched since cleaning.”

“Nothing.” He shook his head. “The chief said it looked like she’d gotten compulsive while they were arguing, the way some women do, gone around with a dust cloth and wiped stuff down. Hell, some women ace like that, guys too.” Hinton waved his hand. “You know, they can’t sit still and talk.”

“Sounds to me like someone may have sanitized the crime scene and it wasn’t Doug or he would have gotten rid of the beer can.”

“I thought the same,” Hinton said. “But I was overruled and I wasn’t the investigating officer so I won’t get a chance to say anything in court, but Doug’s defense lawyer ought to make something of it if he’s smart.”

“It’s starting to sound phony. The beer can could have been planted,” I said. “And the woman downstairs doesn’t know what time he left. Could have been right after ten-thirty.”

Hinton shrugged. “I agree, and the money could have been planted in his car but you know how it goes. When you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras.”

“Had there been any sexual assault on the victim?”

“No.” Hinton shook his head firmly. “The coroner said not. He also said that she had just gotten out of the shower when she was attacked.”

“And where was Doug at the time it’s supposed to have happened?”

“He wouldn’t say,” Hinton said. “He was on duty alone. It was Ali’s birthday and I took the night off so we could go out to dinner.”

That surprised me. Detectives work in pairs for a good reason. It gives two points of view to everything they investigate. If one man was taking the night off, the other would generally do the same. If the caseload didn’t allow it, he would take some other guy with him, maybe a uniform man working a rare plainclothes shift. I asked, “Did you have many cases on your sheet?”

“Nothing important.” Hinton set down his coffee cup. “We don’t have much heavy stuff going down in this town. We only work nights two weeks a month. This was our second week. The only things we had were a guy who’d beat up his girlfriend and a missing person.” He paused and added, “There was nothing to stop Doug taking the same night off if he’d wanted. That weighed against him as well.”

“Did he follow up on those cases? Did anyone check?”

Hinton nodded. “I did that right off. He’d interviewed a couple of people through the evening but from nine o’clock on, he had nothing to prove that he hadn’t been with Cindy Laver.”

Hinton was uncomfortable. I could tell that much. He fiddled with his coffee cup, setting it just so in its saucer before he spoke again. “Like you’re a friend of Doug’s, and Melody’s, right?”