The Dells

by Michael Blair

  More memories of the night, of Dougie and his two whores, circled through his mind, spinning, then slowing, then dimming as he slipped into unconsciousness …

  Some unknown time later, he awakened on the bathroom floor, head throbbing, mouth foul, body aching. Dragging himself to his feet, he slurped water from cupped hands, then staggered into the other room. He let himself out of the motel room and walked unsteadily along the connecting balcony to the stairs down to the parking lot. Maureen’s car was on the other side of the lot, baking under the hot August sun, parked between a rusty pickup and a mud-encrusted four-by-four with oversized tires. He unlocked the car and squeezed in, collapsing onto the driver’s seat with a sigh of relief.

  He sat for a moment, catching his breath, before shakily inserting the key and trying to start the engine. Nothing happened when he turned the key. He remembered that Maureen’s car was equipped with a safety interlock that prevented the engine from starting unless the brake pedal was depressed. When he put his foot on the brake pedal, he found that the seat was too far back. He located the control, and moved the seat forward. Had someone else been driving the car because he’d been too drunk?

  He started the car and reached for the air conditioner controls, but Maureen’s car did not have air conditioning. He rolled down both the driver and passenger side windows. He wondered if he should check out. He didn’t have a key to the room, though. To hell with it. It was the kind of place where one paid in advance.

  Next to the motel there was a small strip mall with a pharmacy. He turned off the engine and, without locking the car or winding up the windows, walked to the pharmacy, where he used his bank card to buy Extra Strength Tylenol and a litre bottle of water. He also got $20 in cash, the most the cashier would allow. Returning to the car, he took four Tylenol and drank half the water. He then started the engine, put the car in gear, and wondered where to go.

  chapter thirty-two

  Shoe cruised slowly south along Weston Road, looking for place to park. He was in what should have been familiar territory — when he and Joey Noseworthy had been in their early teens, they’d gone to the Biltmore movie theatre almost every Saturday for the afternoon matinee — but he didn’t recognize a thing. The Biltmore was long gone, of course, had been for some time even when Shoe had walked a beat in this area for the final months of his short career as a police officer. Everything else about the area was different too: more plastic and steel and glass, less brick and stone and wood; bars and licensed restaurants in a district that had once been one of the last so-called “dry” areas of the city. Shoe parked on a side street, in the shade of a row of mature trees overlooking the deep green gash of the Humber River ravine, into which Black Creek merged a few kilometres farther south. He locked the car, and walked back two blocks to his destination. The lettering on the storefront window read “RM Printing & Reproduction, Ronald S. Mackie, Prop.,” and promised business cards in an hour, passport photos while you waited, and instant digital photo printing. “We’re Open Sundays” proclaimed a sign hanging above the push-bar of the door. A buzzer rasped as Shoe pulled open the door and went inside.

  A counter divided the shop into a small waiting area at the front and a larger production area in the back. The waiting area contained a row of half a dozen contoured fibreglass chairs under the window facing the street, a magazine-strewn coffee table, a water cooler, and a small work table. Above the work table hung a cork board crowded with business cards, event flyers, and notices advertising items for sale — from cars to computers to office furniture — garage sales, and babysitting and house-painting services. Shoe went to the counter. There was no one in the production area. A Ricoh copy machine, about the size of a small chest freezer, worked unattended, chugging away, cat-a-chunk, cat-a-chunk, cat-a-chunk, spitting page after page after page into the sorter. Three other machines, ranging widely in size and age, from a small, state-of-the-art Canon desktop machine to a huge Xerox 9500 that hadn’t been state of the art for twenty years or more, sat idle. The red eye of a security camera glared from high in the far corner of the room.

  A push button on the wall at the end of the counter was labelled “Press for Service.” Shoe was about to press the button when a door at the rear of the production area opened and a man stood in the doorway. He hesitated when he saw Shoe at the counter. Beyond him Shoe could see a ten-inch web printing press and other machinery. The man stepped into the room and the door hissed closed behind him. He was in his early sixties, six inches shorter than Shoe and soft around the middle. He had a round, open face and an unruly fringe of greying brown hair surrounding a shiny pink dome. He wadded up the paper towelling with which he’d been wiping his hands and dropped it into a waste basket beside a cluttered desk. He stepped up to the counter.

  “My sister told me you were in town,” he said, putting his strong, pale hands flat on the counter top. He was wearing an ink-stained grey work coat. A slight chemical odour emanated from him.

  “How are you, Mack?” Shoe said.

  “Not bad, all things considered.” He raised his hands from the counter top, then, as if unsure what to do with them, put them down again. “No one’s called me Mack since I left the job. What’s in a name, eh?”

  “Have you got a few minutes?”

  The copy machine stopped with a final cat-a-chunk, followed by a grating whine as the sorter retracted. Ron Mackie lifted his hands from the counter and dropped them to his sides. “Gimme a couple of minutes to finish up this job, then we can go get a coffee.”

  Ten minutes later, Shoe and Mackie were sitting under an umbrella on the sidewalk terrace of a coffee and sandwich place across Weston Road from Mackie’s print shop. Mackie was drinking a frothy iced coffee concoction from a tall glass. Shoe had regular coffee.

  “I was surprised when Hannah told me you weren’t still a cop,” Mackie said. “Not sure why I was surprised, now that I think about it. You miss it at all?”

  “No,” Shoe said. He didn’t want to ask Mackie if he missed being a cop, since he was responsible for ending Mackie’s career.

  “I did,” Mackie said. “For a while. I got over it. I still keep in touch with some of my old pals, though. Like street gangs, the cops isn’t a club that’s easy to quit.” He sipped his iced coffee, wiped his mouth with a waddedup serviette. He seemed nervous, Shoe thought. What did he have to be nervous about?

  “Things turned out okay for me, though,” Mackie went on. “Between the disability and some good investments, I’m doing okay. More’n okay, actually. I don’t really need to keep working, but the shop pays for itself and the wife says it keeps me out from underfoot. Some days, though, I think seriously about packing it in. Hannah tell you about this crazy woman who’s been giving me grief?”

  “No,” Shoe said. He didn’t remember Mackie being so talkative. They’d been well-paired; on patrol, hours had gone by without the exchange of but a few words. Except toward the end, when Mackie had learned that Sara was seeing someone else, probably some “suit,” he’d said, and had started talking obsessively about finding out who.

  “The wife of a city councillor who’s also on the police services board,” Mackie continued. “The councillor, not the wife. Claims I hit on her, then said I purposely put the wrong date on invitations for a charity thing she was organizing when she blew me off. Maybe I should retire, take up fishing or curling or whatever. Wanna buy a print shop? Nice little business, except for the occasional wacko customer.” His hand shook slightly as he raised the glass of coffee to his mouth and drank.

  Why is he so nervous? Shoe wondered. With a start, he realized that Mackie was afraid that Shoe had come to settle old scores.

  “Ron,” he said. “Relax.”

  “Yeah,” Mackie said. Exhaling, he bent his spine and eased against the chair-back. “I am kind of running off at the mouth, aren’t I?” He leaned forward again, but his hands and his voice were steady. “Look, let’s get this out of the way. I know I was an asshole, all right.�
��

  “No, you weren’t,” Shoe said.

  “Yeah, I was. I knew Sara and me were never gonna get back together, but I was too much of an asshole to let it go. What happened between me and her was my fault, not hers. Or yours. I don’t blame you for what happened between you and me either. I’m sorry, okay. For, well, for a lot of things.”

  “Likewise,” Shoe said. “I’m glad things turned out for you.”

  “Thanks. How about you? Things turn out okay for you?”

  “Yes, I’d say they did.”

  “Hannah told me you’re some kind of corporate investigator. Like I said, was a little surprised you didn’t stay a real cop. I always thought you could’ve been a good one, if you’d tried. Ever thought about hanging up a shingle as a PI or security consultant?”

  “Not seriously.” After a moment of silence, Shoe said, “I’d like to talk to you about an old case you worked, the Black Creek Rapist.”

  “Yeah, Hannah asked me about it. Wasn’t much I could tell her. It was a long time ago.”

  “Did Hannah tell you about Marvin Cartwright’s murder?”

  “Yeah, she did. Son of a bitch finally got what he deserved, didn’t he? Couldn’t’ve happened in a better place, too.”

  “Did you know there was another murder in the Dells last night?”

  “No. Christ, this city’s turning to shit. Besides being in the Dells, is it connected with Cartwright’s murder in any other way?”

  “The victim was a woman named Marty Elias.”

  “Elias? She was one of Cartwright’s victims, wasn’t she? The kid, right?”

  “Yes. Claudia Hahn and I found her body this morning.”

  “Claudia Hahn?” Mackie’s brow lowered in thought for a moment, then he said, “She was Cartwright’s second victim. The schoolteacher. Like my old rabbi used to tell me, everything’s connected some way or another. You just gotta find how.”

  “You still think Marvin Cartwright was the Black Creek Rapist then?”

  “When I think about it at all. Any reason I shouldn’t?”

  “Claudia Hahn is certain it wasn’t Cartwright who raped her.”

  “She was what, twenty-two, twenty-three back then? Pretty shook up, as I recall. And she knew him from the school where she taught, didn’t she? I remember thinking, people don’t like the idea that people they know would do that kind of thing.” Mackie lifted his glass of coffee and drank.

  “Most rapists have a victim preference, don’t they?” Shoe said.

  “So the experts claim. Your point being?”

  “The age of the victims in this case ranged from eleven — Marty Elias — to mid-twenties — Claudia Hahn. Daphne McKinnon was fourteen and Elizabeth Kinney was nineteen or twenty. How alike were they physically? Marty Elias was prepubescent and Claudia Hahn was a grown woman, tall and slim. What about the other victims? I remember Daphne McKinnon as being plump and blond. What about Elizabeth Kinney?”

  “The parks department worker?” Mackie said. “She was black as the ace of spades. Look, I know where you’re going, and if this was a television cop show, I might agree with you. But you know as well as I do — or maybe you don’t; you weren’t a cop as long as I was — that you gotta be careful about making too many assumptions about things. Yeah, some of the investigators thought that the lack of physical similarity between victims meant there was more than one perp. Me, I figured Cartwright was either just getting started and hadn’t established his preferences yet, or he was an opportunist, jumped anything that happened by.”

  “None of the other investigators seemed to think Cartwright was guilty.”

  “Yeah, well … ”

  “According to Hank Trumbull, you almost lost your job over it.”

  “So I was a little overzealous in my pursuit of justice. I was young and green and stupid, and it was my first big case. But I wasn’t wrong. I just went about it the wrong way.” His tipped up his glass to drink, but it was empty. He put it down. “What do you want me to tell you? That it wasn’t Cartwright? He was innocent as fresh fallen snow? Fine. Someone else attacked the teacher and those girls. Someone else raped and murdered the black girl. Happy?”

  “Hank Trumbull is worried that your connection to Cartwright might compromise Hannah’s investigation.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Or that you may have even had something to do with his murder.”

  “Trumbull’s an old pal of yours, isn’t he? Hope you won’t be too upset then when I tell you he’s an asshole.”

  “It would help Hannah’s investigation if you had an alibi for the night of Cartwright’s murder,” Shoe said.

  “You’re starting to make me regret talking to you,” Mackie growled. Then he shrugged. “Hannah’s already asked me if I had an alibi for that night. Not that it’s any of your business, but as a matter of fact, I don’t. Not much of one, anyway. I was working in the shop till around midnight or a little after, then got home about one, maybe a little before. My wife’s visiting her sister — I think she half believes I got it on with the councillor’s crazy wife — so there’s no one to vouch for the time I got home. But in the real world alibis aren’t worth shit unless they’re absolutely airtight. Nothing lawyers like better than creating reasonable doubt around someone’s alibi.”

  “Cartwright wasn’t the only suspect in the case. Why were you so certain he was the Black Creek Rapist?”

  “Jesus, it was thirty-five years ago. Let’s see. He spent a lot of time in those woods. He didn’t have a credible alibi for the time of the attacks.” He smiled thinly. “And, yeah, I remember, now — there was a complaint.”

  “A complaint? From whom?”

  “The father of some girl in the neighbourhood. I forget the name, but they lived in an older house at the end of a little dead-end road that stuck into the woods behind your parents’ place.”

  “Braithwaite.”

  “If you say so. I don’t remember. All I remember is that the girl’s father didn’t want Cartwright hanging around his daughter, but there wasn’t anything we could do about it because he wouldn’t let us interview her. In any case, she was over twenty-one. He was some kind of preacher.”

  “Pretty circumstantial,” Shoe said.

  “When circumstantial is all you’ve got, circumstantial is all you’ve got.”

  “Hank said there may have been a witness to one of the rapes or the homicide, and that you were accused of suborning a false statement. Was there a witness?”

  “There were three,” Mackie said.

  “The surviving victims, you mean? None of them was able to identify her attacker.”

  “That doesn’t mean they didn’t know him. It only means they wouldn’t identify him.”

  “Or couldn’t.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe, but I was sure the kid knew who’d attacked her. She was a lousy liar. I tried to get her to open up, but her parents complained to the lead investigator that I was trying to get her to say it was Cartwright who’d attacked her even though she kept saying it wasn’t.”

  “Do you remember an assault that occurred in the Dells a month or so before the first rape?” Shoe asked. “The victim was a fifteen-year-old boy.”

  Mackie’s eyes narrowed. “Not sure. Sounds sort of familiar.”

  “His name was Joey Noseworthy.”

  “Noseworthy. Noseworthy. He was interviewed for the rape case, too, wasn’t he? Small for his age, with a big mouth? Queer, though, right?”

  “Smallish and sharp-tongued,” Shoe agreed. “But he wasn’t homosexual.”

  “If you say so. What about him?” “Hannah has him down as prime suspect for Cartwright’s murder.”

  “Is that right?” Mackie said. “Maybe it’s a case of what goes around comes around then. Maybe it was Cartwright that attacked him. Was he raped? Always figured Cartwright for a shirt-lifter.”

  “It wasn’t Cartwright who attacked Noseworthy,” Shoe said.

  “No? Who was it then?”
/>
  “My brother and a couple of his friends: Dougie Hallam and a boy named Ricky Marshall. They were the neighbourhood bullies. Hallam was, anyway. My brother and Ricky Marshall just went along for the ride.”

  “How do you know it was them? Seems to me I remember the Noseworthy kid couldn’t or wouldn’t say who beat him up.”

  “My brother admitted it. So did Ricky Marshall. I didn’t give Dougie Hallam a chance. Joey Noseworthy was my best friend.”

  “Your brother,” Mackie said slowly. “Hal, right?” He was lost in thought for a moment, then said, “I remember him. He had a smart mouth too, but he was kind of fat and whiney. I could see him beating up a smaller kid, but I never figured him for having the balls to rape a grown woman, if you’ll pardon the expression. Christ, you don’t think your brother was the Black Creek Rapist, do you?”

  “No,” Shoe said.

  “I don’t remember the Marshall kid, but I remember Hallam. He was a punk. Thought he was tough, but I remember something about him getting the crap beat out of him around the time the rapes started. That was you? Payback for Noseworthy?”

  “Yes,” Shoe said.

  “Hallam or his old man would’ve been my second choice for the rapes, except they were both out of town when the first two attacks occurred. The old man — Eddy? Freddy? — he was a real piece of work. He had a couple of convictions for assault and battery, and both him and his old lady had a dozen arrests between them for robbery and receiving stolen goods, but skated on them all, as I recall. Insufficient evidence, witnesses losing their memories, changing their stories, that sort of thing. The son wasn’t much better. There was a daughter, too, wasn’t there? I don’t remember much about her, but if she was anything like her old lady … ” He left the thought unfinished. “Hallam and his old lady, weren’t they killed around the time you joined up?”

  “A little before. Their bodies were found in the trunk of their burnt-out car, wrists wired together and .22 bullets in their heads.”

  “Shows what can happen when you keep bad company. No great loss to the gene pool.”