The Dells

by Michael Blair

  “She’s good,” Hank Trumbull had said during Shoe’s brief conversation with him earlier in the day. “She was on the fast track for a while, but, well, she can be something of a loose cannon. Comes by it honestly, I suppose; her brother wasn’t exactly the poster boy for esprit de corps, was he?” A sigh. “I tried to be a good influence on her,” he said, words heavy with irony. He paused for a moment, then said, “This Cartwright case could come back and bite her.”

  “How so?”

  “Do you remember a rape/homicide case in that area about thirty, thirty-five years ago? Three sexual assaults and the rape and murder of a female park worker.”

  “The Black Creek Rapist,” Shoe said. “Yes, I remember.”

  “Cartwright was a suspect,” Trumbull said.

  “Not a very good one.”

  “The best of a bad lot, maybe, but a suspect nonetheless.”

  “All right,” Shoe conceded. “But how could that hurt Hannah?”

  “Her brother was part of the investigation.”

  “He was?” Shoe said, surprised. “I didn’t know that.”

  “No reason you should. It’s not something he’d be inclined to brag about. According to a retired sergeant I play golf with, who knew him back then, Mackie had a major hard-on for Cartwright. He was convinced Cartwright was the Black Creek Rapist. He went way overboard, though, and got himself an official reprimand for harassment and insubordination. There was also something about him trying to pressure a witness into making a false statement. He’s lucky they didn’t kick him off the force. Might’ve saved himself and others a lot of trouble if they had.”

  “Are you suggesting that Ron Mackie may have killed Cartwright?” Shoe said.

  “Hell, no, but — ” A woman called Trumbull’s name. “Be with you in a sec, love,” Trumbull called in return. “I gotta go,” he said to Shoe. “Listen, if there’s the slightest hint Mackie is connected to this Cartwright murder, there’s going to be some serious hell to pay, and Hannah is going to get stuck with the check. The smart thing would be for her to recuse herself, but — ”

  “Hank!” the woman called again.

  “Tell her to keep her head down and play this one by the book.”

  “Hank! We’re going to miss our goddamned plane!”

  “Okay, okay,” Trumbull had shouted as he’d hung up the phone.

  Lewis became aware of Shoe’s sidelong scrutiny. “What?”

  “Did you know your brother was part of the investigation into the old rape/homicide case I told you about?”

  She stopped in her tracks. “What? No. Where’d you hear that?” When Shoe hesitated, she sighed and said, “Right. Hank. Shit.”

  “According to Hank, your brother was convinced Cartwright was the Black Creek Rapist and came close to being dishonourably discharged for harassment, insubordination, and possibly attempting to suborn a witness. He was concerned that Ron’s connection to the case could compromise your investigation. He asked me to tell you to keep your head down and play it by the book.”

  “He’s hardly the one to give that kind of advice.” She was deep in thought for a moment, then said, “Was there a witness? Besides the victims?”

  “I don’t know,” Shoe said.

  “But you don’t think Cartwright was the Black Creek Rapist, do you?”

  “No.”

  “How can you be so sure? Maybe Ron wasn’t wrong.”

  “Not according to Claudia Hahn.” Or Marty Elias, according to Tim Dutton.

  “Hahn was the second victim?”

  “Yes. I spoke with her this morning. She knew Cartwright and is certain he wasn’t the man who raped her.”

  “She wouldn’t be the first woman to be raped by someone she knew but couldn’t — or wouldn’t — identify him.”

  “No, but she’s extremely compelling. Talk to her yourself.”

  “Count on it.” She sighed. “All right, so Ron screwed up. It wouldn’t be the last time, would it? On the other hand, maybe you’re wrong about Hahn.”

  “I’m frequently wrong about many things,” Shoe said agreeably. Lewis smiled thinly. He knew what she was thinking: Claudia had denied that Cartwright was her rapist in order to remove a possible motive she might have for killing him. “But I’m inclined to believe her,” he added.

  “Mm,” Lewis said. After a moment of contemplative silence, she resumed walking.

  Rachel and Marty Elias were in the kitchen tent, sitting at the folding table, heads close together, looking at the laptop screen. Both stood when Shoe, Lewis, and Timmons entered. The uniformed constables waited outside, already attracting curious glances.

  Rachel glared at Timmons. “Would you put that out, please?”

  Timmons dropped his cigarette to the grass and ground it out beneath the toe of his shoe.

  Lewis took a notebook out of her jacket pocket. She looked at Marty. “Are you Martine Elias?”

  “Yes,” Marty replied, looking at Shoe, then at Lewis again.

  Lewis introduced herself and Detective Constable Timmons, then said, “Do you have a few minutes to answer some questions?”

  “What about?” Marty asked, a little warily, Shoe thought.

  “Are you acquainted with a Joseph Charles Noseworthy?”

  Marty’s eyes widened. “Sure, I know Joey. We all do. Why?”

  Lewis looked at Shoe. “You know Joey Noseworthy?”

  “He was my closest friend until our first year of high school. I haven’t seen or spoken to him since.”

  “Why are you asking about Joey?” Rachel asked.

  Lewis didn’t reply. Shoe knew the answer. In the jargon of police speak, Joey had become a “person of interest” in the investigation into Marvin Cartwright’s murder, possibly even a suspect.

  “Miss Elias,” Lewis said. “We understand he’s been staying at your apartment. Is that right?”

  “So?” Marty said belligerently.

  “How long has he been staying with you?” Lewis asked.

  “Since Thursday night,” Marty replied. “How — ”

  “What time did he get there?”

  “I dunno, um, around midnight, I guess.” She avoided eye contact with Shoe; earlier in the day she’d told him that Joey had shown up at her door at two-thirty in the morning.

  “Are you certain of the time?” Lewis said.

  “Look, I … ” Marty was flustered. Like lawyers, Shoe knew, cops also asked questions to which they already had the answer.

  “Because when we canvassed your neighbours, they told us that a man who appeared to be quite drunk was banging on your door and shouting your name at twothirty Friday morning.”

  Marty flushed. “Okay, so it was two-thirty.”

  “Thank you. What was his demeanour?”

  “Like you said, he was drunk.”

  “Was there any blood on his clothing or on his person?”

  “Not that I saw. He smelled like a dumpster, so I made him take a shower and threw his clothes in the washer. I didn’t see any blood on them. Look, I know what this is about now, but there’s no way Joey killed Mr. Cartwright.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Lewis said.

  “Sure you do,” Marty replied sarcastically.

  The two uniformed officers standing patiently in the hot sun outside the welcome tent were attracting attention from passersby. Nor did the kitchen shelter, with its bug-screen walls rolled up, afford any privacy. Shoe wasn’t surprised when Lewis suggested a change of venue.

  “Perhaps we should continue this at the division,” she said.

  “I’m not going anywhere with you,” Marty said.

  “Miss Elias,” Lewis said patiently. “This will go a lot easier if you co-operate.”

  “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 th
at,” 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.”

  chapter twenty-one

  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 St
reet. 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.