The Dells (16 page)

“Easier for who?” Marty shot back. She looked at Shoe. “What should I do?”

Shoe said, “You should co-operate with them, Marty.”

“I don't want to get Joey into trouble.”

“It may be too late to worry about that,” Shoe said.

“Mr. Schumacher is right,” Lewis said. “But if you help us, you'll be helping Joey. You want to help him, don't you, Marty?”

“Don't patronize me,” Marty snapped, temper flaring. “I'm not stupid. I know what cops are like.”

“I apologize if I was condescending, but you should listen to Mr. Schumacher. He's giving you good advice. We can compel you to come to the station to make a statement, but we'd rather you came voluntarily. What will it be?”

Marty stared at Lewis for a moment, then said, “Okay, I'll go with you. But only if Shoe comes with me.”

“Fuck that,” Timmons grumbled.

“Shut up, Paul,” Lewis said.

Timmons scowled. Was Lewis playing good cop, Shoe wondered, to Timmons' bad cop? If so, it was a convincing act.

“I don't have a problem with that,” Lewis said to Marty. “Assuming it's all right with Mr. Schumacher.”

“It's fine with me,” Shoe said, wondering what he was getting himself into.

Lewis looked at her wristwatch. Like Claudia Hahn's, Lewis's wristwatch was also a very mannish timepiece, worn on the inside of her wrist. Masculine watches for
women must be in vogue, Shoe thought.

“Would it be convenient for you to come to the station now?” Lewis said.

“I guess,” Marty said.

Outside the kitchen tent, Lewis asked Shoe, “Do you have a car?”

“I can borrow my father's,” he replied.

“Paul,” she said to her partner. “I'll ride with Mr. Schumacher. Show him the way. Miss Elias, do you mind going with Detective Constable Timmons?”

“I guess not,” Marty replied uncertainly, looking at Shoe.

“It'll be all right,” he said. “I'll see you at the station.”

“I won't talk to anyone till you get there,” Marty said defiantly.

“Paul,” Lewis said. “Make Miss Elias comfortable until we get there. And if you must smoke in the car, leave the goddamned windows down, will you?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Timmons groused. “C'mon,” he said to Marty.

Marty, Timmons, and the two uniformed constables trooped toward the park exit. Marty looked anxiously back over her shoulder at Shoe. He smiled at her, reassuringly, he hoped.

“I'll be just a minute,” he said to Lewis, and went back into the kitchen tent. “Is Dad's car roadworthy?” he asked Rachel.

“Sure. Hal's been after him to sell it, but Dad won't hear of it. He hasn't driven it in months, though, so the battery's probably flat. You can use my car, if you like.”

“Thanks,” Shoe said. “I don't think I'll fit. I'll need to move it, though.” Rachel's New Beetle was parked in the driveway, blocking the garage.

Rachel dug the keys out of her backpack, handed them to him. “Just leave them on the kitchen table,” she
told him.

“Are you all right?” Shoe asked her.

“Yeah, except I feel like I'm trapped in an episode of
The Twilight Zone
.” She looked at Lewis, standing just a few feet away outside the kitchen shelter, and lowered her voice. “Do you think Joey killed Mr. Cartwright?”

“I don't want to,” Shoe said. “But people change, often in ways we don't expect.”

Shoe's father's car was a ten-year-old Ford Taurus station wagon. Bought new, it looked as though it had just been driven off the lot, with less than sixty thousand kilometres on the clock. The battery was indeed flat, but there was a booster pack plugged into an outlet over the work bench at the back of the garage. When Shoe hooked it up, the car started instantly.

“I put gas treatment in the tank every time I fill up,” Howard Schumacher explained to Hannah Lewis. “Keeps the gas from going bad and clogging the jets if she sits for too long. Usually turn her over every couple of weeks to keep the battery from going flat. Guess I been neglecting her lately.”

Lewis smiled tolerantly. Shoe's father was proud of his knowledge of automobiles. He liked them, whereas Shoe considered them a necessary evil. His own car, an aging Mercedes, was nearly twice as old as his father's car, somewhat less well maintained, and showing its years.

Lewis gave him directions to the 31 Division police station. It had moved from its old location next to the fish and chips takeout in the mall at Jane and Wilson, but he wouldn't have had any trouble finding it on his own.

“Not that I mind the company,” he said, “but is there some reason you wanted to ride with me, besides keeping Marty and me apart until you complete your interview?”

“No, that's pretty much it. And it'll give Paul an opportunity to work on her.”

“Good cop, bad cop?”

“More like good cop, better cop. Don't worry. He won't be hard on her. He may look like a dumb, fat slob and smell like an ashtray, but he has a knack for getting people to open up to him. He's just not particularly good at putting it all together.”

Shoe glanced over at her. “You haven't arrested Joey, have you?” he said.

She sighed. “I was hoping you wouldn't twig to that. Do you think Marty has?”

“Don't underestimate her,” Shoe said. “She was a pretty smart kid, as I recall.”

“I'll remember that.”

“Is it because you haven't got enough evidence to arrest him, or because you don't know where he is?”

She looked at him. He concentrated on the Saturday afternoon traffic, imagining he could feel her violet gaze penetrating his hide like X-rays. An image popped into his mind, of an awkward, long-limbed girl with glasses, pigtails, braces on her teeth, and tears on her cheeks, holding a white rose. She stood stiffly beside a cholericfaced man in a wheelchair, a cervical collar on his neck, surrounded by men and women in police dress blues.

“I tried to talk to you after Sara's funeral,” he said. “Ron wouldn't let me near you.”

She looked at him for another moment before
replying. “I know. It probably wouldn't have done any good. I was pretty angry with — well, everyone. You. Ron. Even Sara. I was angry with you and Ron because I blamed you both for her death. And I was angry with her for dying.” She smiled self-deprecatingly. “What did I know? I was just a dumb kid. It took me a long time to realize that it was no one's fault. I missed Sara. I still do. She was the mother I'd lost, the big sister I'd never had, and the best friend I could have asked for, all rolled into one. I missed you, too,” she added. “You were the sort of big brother I wish Ron had been.”

“If you were my sister, you might feel differently,” Shoe said.

“You seem to get along. Are you a close family?”

“We haven't seen much of each other since I went out west,” he said. “My fault. In twenty-seven years I've been back only five times, including this trip, and when I did return, I never stayed more than a few days.”

Lewis was silent for a moment, expression thoughtful. “How well did you know Joey Noseworthy?”

“Probably not as well as I thought.”

“Is he capable of murder?”

“I imagine we all are,” Shoe said. “In the right circumstances.”

“You got that right.”

“Do you have any evidence to connect him to Marvin Cartwright's murder?”

She looked at him, violet eyes darkening. “You really expect me to tell you, don't you?”

“I don't expect you to tell me anything that will compromise your case.”

She sighed. “It may not be my case for very much longer. As soon as my new boss finds out there's a link between my brother and Cartwright, he'll pull me off it faster than you can say ‘circumstantial evidence.' In fact, I should have backed off the moment you told me,
let Paul take over. I just hope Ron's got a good alibi for Thursday night.”

Lewis fell silent and looked out the passenger side window as they drove past the strip malls, parched parks, and apartment complexes that lined that section of Jane Street. When Shoe had been growing up, the Jane and Finch area had been mostly farmland, just beginning to develop. In less than forty years it had devolved, if the media could be believed, into an ugly and gang-ridden concrete sprawl. It wasn't a pretty area, Shoe conceded, but it looked peaceful enough, at least by daylight. Most of the people he saw on the streets were of African or Asian descent, but there were those of European extraction, too, as well as many whose ancestors might have swum in a dozen different gene pools. Multiculturalism and the melting pot were not mutually exclusive.

Lewis cleared her throat. “We found Cartwright's car in the Dells' main parking lot,” she said. “His body was about a kilometre and a half away, on the other side of the creek, in the wooded area behind his former house — and your parents' house. He'd been struck repeatedly with a blunt object, likely a tree bough, which we haven't yet located. FIS — Forensic Identification Services — puts the time of death at between midnight and 1:00 a.m., but he may have been attacked as early as 11:00 p.m. He didn't die immediately. He walked or crawled some distance through the woods, perhaps trying to reach one of the houses for help, before collapsing. FIS says he lay there for at least half an hour before succumbing to his injuries. Official COD is exsanguination. He — ”

“Bled to death,” Shoe said. “I remember the jargon. What makes you suspect Joey?”

“His prints were all over Cartwright's car. He has a record, two misdemeanour convictions for assault, and two for drunk and disorderly. He's done jail time, but no hard time. There were other prints, too.
Cartwright's, naturally, and a couple we can't identify, but Noseworthy's prints in Cartwright's car was enough cause to bring him in for a talk.” She paused.

“But you had to find him first,” Shoe said. “How did you connect him and Marty? Wait. Don't tell me. You got an anonymous tip.”

She shrugged. “You know how it is,” she said.

He did. Luck frequently played a part in homicide investigations. It came in many forms, from an anonymous tip, as often as not from an associate, a rival, or a jealous girlfriend, to the serendipitous arrest of the killer for an unrelated and frequently relatively minor infraction, such as a traffic violation or drug possession. Of course, no amount of luck compensated for sloppy police work; good cops had to know how to make their own luck.

“The caller was a woman. She told us the person who killed the man in the Dells was a biker-type riding a Harley-Davidson Sportster, smallish, with long greyblond hair, and that he was probably shacked up with Marty Elias.”

“Did she give you Joey's name?”

“We already had his name from his prints, but yes. Good call. It indicates she may have been acquainted with Noseworthy, but wasn't necessarily a witness to the crime itself.”

“It could also mean someone is trying to fit him up or misdirect the investigation.”

“All anonymous tips are suspect,” Lewis reminded him. “Anyway, we put eyes on Elias's place last night, but she took Noseworthy's Harley to work this morning and they followed her. It wasn't until she got off the bike at her work that they realized their mistake.”

Not all luck, Shoe also knew, was the good kind.

“Then a truck delivering beer to the restaurant on the ground floor of Elias's apartment building backed
into the new team's vehicle. They got into a bit of a ruckus with the driver and Noseworthy must've made them. When we executed our warrant and got the building manager to let us into Elias's apartment, he was gone.”

Sometimes, Shoe thought, the universe unfolded according to Murphy's Law, rather than Newton's.

“He didn't jump out a window in his underwear, but he left without his saddle packs or camping gear. We didn't find his wallet, or any money, so he's not without resources. We did find a book about birds, written and autographed by Marvin Cartwright, and a small travelling chess set with Cartwright's name engraved on the case.”

“Joey's fingerprints in Cartwright's car and a book and chess set that apparently belonged to Cartwright aren't enough to get a conviction,” Shoe said. “All they prove is that Cartwright and Joey were acquainted.”

“Maybe we'll find traces of blood on his clothing,” Lewis said. “Elias did his laundry, but a normal washing doesn't necessarily remove all traces of blood. Could screw up DNA, but it'll take a few days before the crime lab can get back to us with results. In the meantime, he's in the wind, possibly armed and dangerous.”

The idea that Joey Noseworthy could be considered armed and dangerous seemed ludicrous to Shoe, until he remembered what he'd told his sister about people changing, sometimes in unexpected ways.

Marty's interview was conducted in a small, windowless room that smelled of powerful disinfectant that did not mask the rank, flat stink of the accumulated human misery to which the room had borne witness. Shoe hadn't been in a police interview room in almost thirty years, and then they had been the domain of detectives, not wet-behind-the-ears uniformed constables. With the exception of the no smoking signs and the video camera, which evidently had replaced the traditional mirrored observation window, they hadn't changed appreciably.

Marty and Shoe sat on straight-backed grey steel chairs across a scarred grey steel table from Detective Sergeant Hannah Lewis and Detective Constable Paul Timmons. Timmons chewed vigorously on a stick of nicotine gum that made his breath smell like rotting sawdust. Lewis had removed her contact lenses and donned glasses with rectangular black plastic frames that did little to soften the angularity of her face. She had made it
clear to Shoe that he was there strictly as a courtesy. He was to observe only. Interfere and he was out; Marty would be on her own.