Salinger almost showed an emotion of some kind. “Swanson, I control every newspaper in this city and most of them in the rest of the country. No one will print your story.”
I laughed. “You’re showing your age, Salinger. Even if you did control all the newspapers, there’s a new communications medium out there. It’s called the Internet, and nobody controls it. With one click of a mouse, I can expose this story to more readers than the largest ten papers in Canada put together.”
Now he was definitely showing an emotion: irritation, maybe even anger. “All right, Swanson, you can embarrass me and put some of my colleagues in jail. But I’m past retirement age. I’ve got a beautiful house in the south of France. I’ll just move there and enjoy my remaining years free from pests like you.”
“Uh, no.” I gave him my brightest smile. “Dickens sold you out. I’ve got all the evidence a court will need of your little stock-kiting scheme. If you fuck around with me, Salinger, you won’t be going to the south of France. You’ll be going to jail and fucking with different people in a different sense.” He bowed his head, and I knew I had him. “Look at me, asshole. You need to ensure that no West-Coast pipeline deal goes ahead, either Dickens’s or that of any other greedy pig who prances down the pike. The minute I hear that approval has been given for a new pipeline to carry Alberta oil to the BC coast, you’ll be in shit so deep your ears will implode. Agreed?”
He knew he was dead, but his deal-making nerves continued to twitch. “But I will be free to pursue other interests?”
“Salinger, you’ve got about as much negotiating room as a dead slug. Last chance. Yes or no?”
He hesitated just a second, so I stood up and had started to turn away when he quickly said, “Yes. Yes. All right. Yes.”
I looked at him. “I won’t need that in writing.” Then I walked out the door.
On the way to the airport, I thought, Well, Dougie would be happy with that. He would have been totally against Alberta oil polluting our coast. So that’s a victory. That’s one for the good guys. But I didn’t feel like celebrating.
Eighteen
BACK IN STEVESTON, DANNY HAD paid off and disbanded the troops, all except for Johnny Hanuse and his nephew Simon. They had waited around because Johnny wanted to have a wake for Dougie. We went to the Steveston Hotel and drank a few beers while I explained most of what I knew about Dougie’s death. Johnny regretted the lack of anyone to avenge himself on, so he decided to take it out on his own brain cells. My heart wasn’t really in it, but I more or less kept up and took advantage of the opportunity to get to know Simon.
He was an interesting kid, smart, but like many rural kids, absolutely determined not to show it. He read a lot and couldn’t completely disguise his academic leanings. He was, in fact, not unlike Dougie. But living in a small First Nations community, he didn’t have a road map to where he wanted to be.
So I encouraged him to enrol in university, even offering him a place to stay. He said that one of the things holding him back was that he had no idea what he wanted to do for a career. “Listen,” I said, “university is not primarily about job training. It’s about learning stuff and having fun. Sometimes what you learn is useful and sometimes it’s not. But it’s all valuable, because it connects you to the collective human brain, everyone who’s ever lived and had a thought that became part of our collective knowledge. You know what I mean?”
He became animated. “I’d like that. I want to explore. There’s so much out there—just a treasure chest of ideas and knowledge that could link our cultures together.”
Yeah, I could see Dougie in him, all right. Excitement about ideas. That was Dougie all over. I repeated my offer of a place to stay and told him to phone me if he needed advice on enrollment or anything, and then I regretfully took my leave and went home.
The house felt empty until Oshie and the kids flew home from Sointula, where they’d had many excellent adventures with their many excellent cousins. They were a little disappointed to have to leave life in the fun lane, but were soon comfortably back in their routine of school and playmates.
I got an update from Louise. The DNA from Novi Beravitch matched that of the blood left at the Trimmer murder scene. When they explained to Novi that he was going down for that murder, he decided to cooperate and implicated Sonny Feng. The powder they had found in Feng’s car had proved to be aconite. That and the fact that Novi Beravitch had fingered him as the actual killer of Phil Trimmer had persuaded Sonny to plead to second-degree murder in exchange for fingering Chen as the one who had ordered the killing. Chen was declining to cooperate, but all three of them had been transferred to Ottawa for trial.
I phoned Stala for his update. He said the Crown was pretty sure they would convict all three villains. “I’m glad we nailed those bastards anyway,” I said. “Even if we’re not making any progress on Dougie’s murder.”
“I can understand your being disappointed with lack of progress on your friend’s murder,” Stala replied. “But why do you even care that Trimmer got whacked? He was a low-life crook.”
“Yeah, Phil was a small-time wannabe wise guy. But he only lied to me when he needed to. And he had a wonderful mother.”
“You knew his mother?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
And then nothing much happened for a couple of weeks. I spent as much time as I could with Oshie and the kids, enjoying the relaxing experience of not having hired gunmen stalking me and my family. But I brooded. Only a little and only once in a while, but occasionally the feeling would strike me that I had failed Dougie. I resolved not to give up the hunt for his killer, but I could see no way forward. I’d shaken all the trees and rattled all the cages and rocked all the boats that I could think of. But I’d accomplished almost nothing except nailing the killers of a peripheral figure who was killed not because he was connected with Dougie’s death, but because it was feared he would queer an oil-pipeline project. And, partly because of the material Dougie had gathered, I’d been able to stop the pipeline. And I’d beat a few people up. It wasn’t enough.
One afternoon Ren and Daiki came to me and said, “Look, Dad. We found a gun.” And they showed me a weapon that, although I’d never seen one before, I quickly identified as a paintball gun.
“Where did you find this?” They told me they’d been playing in Dougie’s old Jeep, which was parked in our backyard. Wanting a tire to make a swing like their buddy’s, they’d removed the spare tire from the rear of the Jeep. Under the tire, in the tire well, they’d found the gun. “You guys were right to bring me the gun, although I think it’s sort of a toy. But it’s better to be safe than sorry.”
I puzzled over the gun for a while as I tried to picture Dougie running around in the bushes with a bunch of macho males, “killing” each other with paintballs. I just could not summon up that image.
I sat in my kitchen and turned the gun over in my hands, wondering what the hell Dougie had been doing with the thing. There was a small paint stain on the grip, presumably from one of the paintballs. It was an unusually fluorescent red, and with a shock of recognition, I realized it was exactly the same color as the paint that had stained Dougie’s T-shirts, the ones that Dougie’s landlord had showed to Alex and me. Dougie had been in a paintball war with someone and lost badly, because he had five or six T-shirts that looked like they had received a multitude of hits, right in the heart area.
I phoned Stala. “I may have stumbled on something related to Dougie’s murder. Can you send me photos of the body, photos of the crime scene, maybe even the autopsy report?”
“Why not? You’ve already made me shred the rule book. What’s your e-mail?”
While I was waiting for Stala to gather all that material, I found it necessary to go for a walk. I was excited. I could feel that I was on the edge of a breakthrough. I didn’t know exactly what it was, but I knew I was getting closer to the killer. When I got back to the house, I turned on my computer and checked my e-mail. So
mething was taking a long time to download, and I hoped it was the material Stala had sent. It was.
There were fourteen JPEGs and a PDF of the autopsy report. Taking a deep breath, I clicked on the first JPEG, then immediately closed it without looking at it. I got up and walked around the room, mentally flagellating myself for being such a wilting flower. I was looking out the front window when Oshie drove up with the kids. As soon as she walked into the house and saw me, she knew something was wrong. The kids ran upstairs to their rooms and Oshie put her hands on my shoulders and gave me a searching look. I said, “Stala sent me pictures of the crime scene. I can’t look at them.”
“Tonight, Ollie. After the kids are in bed, we’ll look at them together.”
So we did. We sat on two chairs in front of my computer and Oshie held my hand while I clicked on the first picture. When it opened up, she squeezed my hand almost as hard as I squeezed hers. It was a full-frame shot of Dougie, on his back, arms outspread, legs slightly apart, bloody, bloody shirt, and more blood in a pool on the left side of the body. His eyes were open and he was staring intently at the ceiling. I looked at the picture for a long time, and after a while it wasn’t Dougie anymore. It was just an image.
I clicked on the next picture. It was the same shot from a different angle, as were the next three. The fifth shot was interesting. It must have been taken from close to the back of the room, facing the door. The body was more or less in the middle of the room, twelve or fifteen feet from the door. Just in front of the door lay the gun. To the right of the door there was some kind of workout apparatus mounted against the wall: racks with free weights, some resistance levers for pulling and pushing, an incline bench, and some rubber tubing with D-shaped handles. “I didn’t know Dougie worked out,” Oshie said.
“He didn’t,” I replied. “That stuff probably came with the room.” We went through the rest of the pictures but saw nothing else of interest.
I opened up the autopsy report. It was seventeen pages long and written in dense medicalese. But you didn’t need to know Latin to understand the cause of death: “Gunshot wound to heart. Massive damage to left atrium and pulmonary aorta.”
Going back to the beginning of the report, we read through a description of the overall condition of the body: scar on left thigh (I knew where that had come from), healed fracture of left fibula (I knew about that one too), and a lack of tonsils. There had been a bandage on the right forefinger, but, oddly, no wound of any kind under the bandage.
Oshie put her hand on my shoulder. “Ollie, that’s very strange.”
“Yeah, it’s a little strange.” I thought about it. “But sometimes I get a bit of an infected hangnail, which really, really hurts, so I put a bandage on to protect it. But anyone looking at it wouldn’t see anything wrong. Maybe that’s the explanation.”
“Maybe.” She sounded unconvinced.
I shut off the computer and went to the fridge for a bottle of Chardonnay. I took it and two glasses back to the living room, where Oshie and I sat and talked of things that had nothing to do with dead bodies until it was time for bed.
I fell asleep quickly, and suddenly I was in Dougie’s brain. I was looking out through Dougie’s eyes as he chased someone. Dougie was holding a gun, and I knew he wanted to kill the person. The chase went on and on, across water and in the air and through different seasons. I was aware of Dougie’s despair, and my mounting despair, and finally despair was the atmosphere through which we moved. Then Dougie cornered the guy in the wheelhouse of a fishboat. Dougie raised the gun to shoot just as the guy turned around, and I recognized him. It was Dougie.
When I woke in the morning, I knew who had killed Dougie and why. I just needed to work out a few details. There was about an hour of frenetic activity while the kids got up, breakfasted and left for school. Then Oshie left to visit her parents.
I lingered over my coffee and thought through the events of the past three months. Then I went to the computer and opened up the material that Stala had sent. I spent a long time looking at a particular picture. It was the one shot from the back of the room, showing Dougie’s body in the middle of the room, the front wall of the room with the door, and, next to it, the exercise apparatus. I zoomed in on the exercise apparatus. The racks for the weights extended about three quarters of the way up the wall. Lower down was the inclined bench. And at the very top of the weight racks were the two lengths of surgical tubing with D-shaped handles on their ends. I studied them, estimating the length of each to be almost ten feet. The one on the left was about three feet from the door.
I shut off the computer and mentally ran through various scenarios until I was sure I had it right. I heard the front door open and close, and Oshie came in and put her arms around me from behind. “What are you thinking, sweetie?”
I sighed. “I’m thinking I let Dougie down.”
“How, sweetie? You had no way of knowing he was going to be killed.”
“He wasn’t killed, Oshie. He committed suicide.”
“What!” She was incredulous. “Dougie wouldn’t do that. Why would he? Are you sure, sweetie?”
I was weighed down by guilt and grief, and I felt almost as if I was slandering my dead friend, but I had to get it all out. “He was seriously depressed, Oshie. He was a small-town kid brought up to work hard and tell the truth. He was transplanted into a town where lies and manipulation and greed are the order of the day, where crooks are honored, given the Order of Canada just like decent people. It eventually wore him down. He just got tired. But he’d written this story, the best story of his life. He wanted it to be noticed. He wanted to give it legs. He wanted to introduce it in a blaze of publicity.”
“How would committing suicide accomplish that?”
“Because it wouldn’t be seen as suicide. It would be seen as the murder of Gerry Steadman. And Dougie had left evidence that would make the cops suspect Cliff Ernhardt as well as tip them off to some of the bribery that was going on. And then Dougie’s editor would run his story, and the rest of the bribery and the influence peddling and the political manipulation and the intimidation of the bureaucracy would be exposed. The Committee, the modern-day Family Compact that runs Ottawa, would be destroyed.”
Oshie sighed into the side of my neck. “So what went wrong?”
“Two things. Dougie’s editor was Ernhardt’s stooge, and he killed the story. And the detective in charge of the case ran a leakproof operation, so none of the evidence that Dougie had manufactured ever became public. Any other jurisdiction in the world and that information would have been all over the front page.”
Oshie sighed again, and I felt tears on my neck. “Such a waste. Such a waste.”
We were quiet for a while and then I said I had to phone Stala. When I told him what I’d figured out, he said, “It wasn’t suicide. There was no muzzle burn or contact powder on your friend’s shirt.”
I was patient. “Here’s how Dougie did it. He spent months practicing with a paintball gun, shooting himself in the heart. I assume he wore padding under his shirt, or it would have been painful. He got so he could hold a gun away from his body in his left hand—it was his left-hand prints on the gun barrel, right?” Stala grunted. “Then Dougie pushed the trigger with the index finger of his right hand. You may remember there was a bandage on that finger but no wound. Dougie didn’t want to leave his fingerprint on the trigger.”
Stala interrupted, “But the gun was found twelve feet away from the body. How did your friend manage that?”
“You remember that exercise equipment on the wall to the right of the door? Dougie used that rubber tubing. He stretched it out to where he stood in the middle of the room, placed the D-shaped handle over the butt of the gun and shot himself. The tubing recoiled and pulled the gun away from him before the handle slipped off the gunstock.”
“But it would have pulled the gun toward the exercise apparatus—to the right of the door. The gun was found directly in front of the door.”
&nbs
p; “That took me awhile to figure out, but it’s simple. Dougie took about two feet of the tubing, measuring from where it was attached to the weight rack, made a little bight and held it on the top of the door with the door open, then closed the door so that the bight of tubing was pinched and held. Then he could stretch the rest of the tubing straight out from the door, and the tubing would pull the gun straight back toward the door. When the waiter opened the door in the morning, it released the tubing and it snapped back to its normal position.”
“The waiter heard two voices arguing.”
“That was just Dougie, doing an act.”
Stala thought that over for a minute. “Well, that’s complicated, but I can see how it would work. And your friend went to all that trouble, including faking his own death earlier, just so he could frame a bunch of sleazebags.”
“He hated them, Stala. But he was tired and he thought he was losing the battle. Maybe he was right. Maybe we’re all losing the battle.”
Ever the detective, Stala had to clear up the last detail. “So when your friend faked his death at Canoe Lake, he left his vehicle there. How did he get back to town?”
“His dirt bike. It was in the back of the Jeep when he drove out there.”
Stala said, “Well, at least I get to slam the door on someone. Three lowlifes who killed another lowlife. That’s something, at least. We’ll get the big boys next time. Thanks for your help, Swanson. You West-Coast boys have your own style, but it gets results.”
When he hung up I looked at Oshie and said, “When the boys come home from school, let’s take some food and go for a boat ride.”
Which we did. The boys were thrilled to be cruising down the Fraser River on the Ryu II, passing seals and sea lions basking on the log booms, gulls and herons swooping in the afternoon breeze, and ospreys dive-bombing for fish.
The Fourth Betrayal Page 21
