“Josh,” Lefner said, “I don’t care when the trail to the body was made. I still can’t see that Tip’s guilty of murder. I mean, what motive did he have?”
“Karl Spearing owns this house and a good deal uv the land around here. A man uv considerable means. An’ yet Tip, his own son, wasn’t allowed to have enough pocket money even to play a few hands uv penny-ante poker. He had to use IOU’s an’ then account to his father for every cent he lost. A most degradin’ situation fer Tip. Might it be that he went searchin’ fer his father to ask fer money to pay his debts? Tempers flared, an’ there wuz a fight, with Karl comin’ out the loser. Oi tried to point out this possible motive by presentin’ yez with them IOU’s uv mine, but I suspect ye wuz hard put to divine their true meanin’.”
“So you think Tip killed his father, eh?” asked Lefner. “Well what about the foot in the trap? And that footprint by the body?”
“All right, let’s sum up the whole operation. At some time yesterday-or p’rhaps the day before, I dunno, what with the body bein’ froze the way it wuz-Tip is out in the woods, carryin’ an ax. He sees his father on the game trail an’ decides to ask fer money. There’s an argument, ez I said, an’ a brief struggle. Tip loses his temper an’ swings the ax, takin’ off Karl’s leg. Karl falls to the ground, fast bleedin’ to death, right at the spot where we seen his body. Out there in the woods, who wuz to hear his cries of pain?
“But Tip’s mind is on other things. He knows if the body is found in its present condition, he’ll be the number-one suspect.
“Then, an inspiration. Tip’s heard stories, ez oi hev, about men bein’ caught in a trap an’ what they had to do to save themselves. He knows the bear trap’s nearby. So he picks up the bloody leg, and off he goes down the trail. Once in the willow thicket, he jabs around with that grisly member ‘til he hits the pan uv the bear trap under the snow. The jaws crunch together on the leg. Then Tip drops Karl’s sheath knife by the trap to complete his alibi and muckles up the trail between the trap an’ the body so it’ll look like a man’s dragged himself along it. All the footprints are destroyed, or so Tip thinks. But there’s still one uv Karl’s near the body that he overlooked an’ oi found.”
Joshua leaned back in his chair and spread his hands expansively. “An’ that’s the way it wuz, ez they say on the tellyvision. This mornin’ Tip went lookin’ fer someone to be witness to Karl bein’ dead with one leg cut off an’ caught in the trap. He found Mr Kehoe an’ me. If we didn’t immediately assume what Tip wanted us to, oi’m sure he stood ready to point out what he wished us to believe. Ye must, uv course, give Tip credit fer his actin’ ability. He’d uv succeeded, too, if me sharp Injun eyes hadn’t spotted that footprint in the snow by the body.”
“He could beat the rap yet,” Kehoe said. “You’ve got an interesting theory there, Josh, but no real proof.”
“Would the murder weapon do?” Joshua asked. “Oi found an ax out in the shed. Somebody did a hurry-up job uv tryin’ to wipe it clean, but there’s still some reddish stains on the handle an’ blade. Oi dropped it off on the steps on me way in from outside. Could yer police chemists make somethin’ uv them stains, Vern?”
“Yeah.” Lefner got up and peered into the livingroom to check on Tip Spearing. “If the stains are human blood, we’ll have a pretty tight case.”
“Well,” Joshua said, “at least ye’ll hev it easy apprehendin’ yer suspect. Oh my, the hangover he’ll have when he wakes. Oi hope, Vern, that ye won’t be too severe with him.”
“Hell, Josh, he killed a man – his own father.”
“True. But what kind uv a man wuz the father? Seems to me the milk uv human kindness might uv turned to gall in the man’s veins.”
“Look, just because he didn’t give Tip any money—”
“No, oi wuz thinkin’ about how that bear trap wuz placed. It’s winter. No need fer a trap with the bears all hibernatin’. Besides, no bear’s about to hide in a thicket. That’d be the place where the hunters would lurk, waitin’ fer game to pass by on the trail. Like we wuz doin’ this mornin’, Mr Kehoe.”
Kehoe stared wide-eyed at Joshua. “You mean . . .”
Joshua nodded. “Karl Spearing couldn’t stand to hev people huntin’ his land. He’d do anythin’ to keep ’em away, even shoot at ’em. So I don’t believe he wuz after bear when he set that trap.
“It wuz put there to catch a man.”
Three Blind Rats
Laird Long
Laird Long (b. 1964) is a prolific Canadian writer whose stories have appeared in a wide range of print or on-line magazines, including Blue Murder, Handheldcrime, Futures Mysterious, Hardboiled, and Albedo One. His story “Sioux City Express” from Handheldcrime was included amongst the top 50 mystery stories of 2002 by Otto Penzler in the anthology The Best American Mystery Stories-2003. In this brand new story, he demonstrates how criminals can use the latest technology to commit the perfect crime – if only an impossible crime hadn’t got in the way!
Pinero said, “Marciano or Lewis – who’d you take in that one?” He lowered his Ring Magazine and looked at McGrath, watched the little man down his fourth cup of coffee of the morning, rub his grey face.
McGrath played around some more with his Blackberry, his right eyelid twitching as he stared at the glowing screen. “I told you, I don’t follow boxing. It’s too violent.” Thumbs flying like a twelve-year-old video-gamer chalking up kills on God of War, he added, “You should see all the great features on this thing.”
Pinero raised his magazine again, recrossed his feet on top of his desk. “You’re gonna get radiation poisoning from all those gadgets of yours,” he warned, taking some satisfaction in his partner’s stricken expression.
Pinero was young, liked to wear his clothes flashy, gel his jet-black hair into a subtle Mohawk. But despite all that, he considered himself old-school, less concerned with the geeky forensic fantasies of criminal investigation, than the pavement-pounding, door-dusting street solving of it. And he was good at it, like his father had taught him.
“Pretty soon we’ll be able to break cases without ever even leaving the office,” McGrath stated. “Like fighting a war by remote control.” He tilted his empty mug against his lips, almost choked on the plastic stir straw.
McGrath was well past the age when most cops were puttering around their Victoria condos, bald as a bagel and just as rubbery. But he’d carved out a niche for himself in the Department by becoming a tech-savvy guru, an indispensable computerized tool in the 21st-century assault on crime.
The men’s mutual loathing went back to the first day they’d been paired together in Homicide. Pinero despised McGrath’s foul coffee breath and chronic health whining, his holier-than-Intel attitude. While McGrath didn’t envy Pinero his smooth good looks and muscular physique; he detested him for them, in fact. And the young detective’s apparent indifference to all things chip-driven earned him a special place of contempt in McGrath’s ebook.
Pinero was two weeks away from transfer-bait for trolling John’s with the Vice Unit – and both men were counting the days, one on his Dukes of Hazzard wall calendar, the other on his Outlook software.
Sergeant Bugler walked into the Squad Room, barked, “McGrath, Pinero!” They looked up. “Got a job for you two.” They waited. “Lenny ‘The Rat’ Laymon’s been found dead.”
It was a skid row bungalow bordered by a boozecan on one side and a crack house on the other; smack-dab in the middle of the sour armpit of Vancouver – the downtown eastside. Inside: the nude body of Lenny Laymon, curled up in a fetal ball on the bottom of his bathtub, like a rat in its hole.
Pinero stared at the hunk of limburger on the toilet lid, gestured. “That a joke?”
McGrath slurped java out of a paper cup. “Air freshener, more likely.”
Constable Mullings laughed. “The Rat did like his cheese.”
The two detectives and the uniformed cop looked down at Lenny’s sunken body. The water had still been running f
rom the showerhead when the girl had discovered him, both he and the water ice-cold by then. Even with the long soak, Lenny still looked dirty, the yellow skin on his hairless body going blue, backbone spined like a Stegosaurus. His eyes and mouth were wide-open, back of his blonde-fringed head a bloody mess.
“When’d the girl find him?” Pinero asked Mullings.
“’Bout an hour ago,” the Constable replied, wiping a big, red nose with a big, red hand. “She couldn’t reach him on the phone all of yesterday, so she decided to pay him a visit this morning.”
“How old is she, anyway?”
“Fourteen.”
“How’d she get in?”
“Had her own key.”
Pinero mauled a hunk of bubblegum. They could hear the girl, Kristal, crying away in the next room, lamenting a life gone down the drain: a con artist, fraud artist, sneak thief, pickpocket and stool pigeon.
“Look what I found when I made her empty her pockets,” Mullings added, pulling something out of his jacket. He held it up. It sparkled in the light of the bare bathroom bulb.
“A diamond ring,” McGrath said, taking it from the Constable and examining it.
“Rock’s gotta be at least one-carat,” Mullings guessed. “She claimed Lenny gave it to her – like anyone’d believe The Rat was gonna pop the question, eh – then finally admitted she’d found it on Lenny’s dresser and palmed it, after she found the guy soaking in the tub.”
“It’s got ZJ stamped on the inside of the band,” McGrath stated.
“Zammy Jewelers,” Pinero responded. “They’ve got a store in the Centre Mall-make their own rings. And right now I’m betting they’re at least one bauble short of a glitter palace.”
He pulled a couple of Kleenex’s, a pair of latex gloves out of his pocket. He set the Kleenex carefully down on the grimy tile floor and knelt beside the tub, dressed his hands in the throwaway gloves. He ran a finger along the bottom of the tub, up to and around Lenny’s body. He poked the corpse.
McGrath turned his head and spoke to the two guys from the Fire and Rescue Service who were lounging in the doorway, “Looks like an accident, huh?”
They nodded.
“If it was anyone but The Rat, we wouldn’t even be here,” he grumbled, fingering what he suspected was a cellphone tumor growing behind his right ear. “Hey, I heard you guys get Workers’ Comp now, if you develop lung cancer, or have a heart attack twenty-four hours after a fire. That right?”
The guy with the Stalinesque mustache nodded, smiled a self-satisfied smile. “You’re darn right it is. The Union got the legislation passed a couple of months ago, eh.”
“I just started smoking again myself,” the other firefighter joked.
“Cops should have something like that,” McGrath groused. “I’m sure I’m getting cancer from using my computer and cellphone all day, in the line of duty. My doctor even said—” He halted his grievance when he saw his partner tilt Lenny’s stiffened body face-up, so he could check out The Rat’s other profile.
Pinero dug around in Lenny’s right ear. “Gimme a pair of tweezers, someone.”
He was handed a pair, and everyone watched as he pulled something out of Lenny’s oversized ear. He held the small, brown object up for inspection. “How many guys take a shower with their hearing aid still in?” he asked.
McGrath was working his wireless keyboard like the Chicago Stadium organist when Pinero reemerged from Robbery. “There was a heist at the Zammy Jewelers store in the Centre Mall last night alright,” he informed his partner. “Estimated loss: four hundred grand.”
McGrath whistled. “Lenny pulled a couple of jewel snatches back in the day, didn’t he?”
“Yeah, with a little help from some friends-turned enemies.” Pinero glanced at the piece of paper in his hand. “The last one that we know of was the Big Rock Diamond Mountain store on Granville-five years ago. The Rat weaseled out of heavy jail time by squealing on all his partners, including the inside guy, the fence, a couple of US Customs slobs, and half the local Hell’s Angels starting line-up.”
The phone on Pinero’s desk rang. He scooped it up, growled, “Yeah?”
“Detective Pinero, Dr Rampersand, Coroners Office.”
“Yeah, Doc?”
“Yes, you wanted us to phone as soon as we had some preliminary results from our examination of Leonard Laymon.”
“The Rat. Yeah, go, Doc.” Pinero snagged a pad and pencil.
“Yes, well, cause of death appears to be a single blow to the back of the head-blunt force trauma-as you no doubt observed for yourself. Time of death was approximately two to four a.m., the morning of 16 November.”
Pinero glanced at his watch, the comely picture of Daisy Duke: 2:10 p.m., Wednesday the 17th. “What else?”
The doctor cleared his throat. “Well, not much, I’m afraid. There appear to be no other untoward signs of trauma on the body, other than the usual assortment of bruises, burns, cuts, scabs, pimples, and warts that come from a bad diet and a life lived close to the streets. We found soap scum, lime scale, and tile grains in the wound, consistent with someone knocking their head on the edge of a bathtub after losing their footing.”
“Thanks, Doc.” Pinero hung up, thought for a moment, then reconnected. “Hey, Doc, forgot to ask – what about the hearing aid?”
“It’s a completely-in-the-canal type of hearing aid, very small. It’s not waterproof, of course, but someone could well forget about it when taking a shower.”
“Thanks, Doc.” Maybe The Rat had actually gone out the same way he’d come in-accidentally, Pinero thought. He relayed the information to his partner.
McGrath’s cellphone chimed the alien greeting from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He plucked it off his belt. “Okay, we’ll be right down.” He stood up and reholstered his cell, swallowed dregs and said to Pinero, “The Lab’s got something for us to see.”
The two men trotted on down to the basement.
“The Zammy Jewelers’ cameras, all the mall cameras, went blank as a blacked-out Canucks game at midnight – for ten minutes,” Cordweider explained.
“Covered up?” Pinero asked the lab technician.
“Naw. Off-line,” Cordweider snorted, “along with the alarm system. Everything came back up like the new programming day at 12:10 a.m. But by the time the security company got there, the jewelry store was a whole lot less sparkly.”
“Did the cameras see anything interesting before they blinked off?” McGrath asked, fondling the bag under his left eye and staring at the bank of monitors.
“Indeed,” Cordweider teased. “We’ve been running the mug-shot file against the surveillance camera facial shots, looking for matches, and you wouldn’t believe who turned up.”
“Who?” Pinero gritted impatiently. He and Cordweider had gone a few rounds during a late-night stakeout once, when bad food and conversation had turned decidedly personal.
Cordweider grinned. “Take a look at this, hot-shot.” He pointed to a blank monitor, pressed a button. People started walking in and out of quadruple doors. “That’s the entrance to the mall on West Georgia. Note the date and time.”
Pinero and McGrath noted: 16 Nov 2005, 2103:44 and counting.
Cordweider pressed another button and the picture froze. A guy in a bulky jacket was coming through the door. Cordweider fingered a roller ball, locked on the guy’s face, clicked. The face jumped up and filled the screen, unmistakable.
“Lenny ‘The Rat’ Laymon,” McGrath exhaled.
Back in the Squad Room, the detectives went to work. What had been a simple slip-up in the tub-one more bad guy washed away – was now something strangely different. If the Coroner was right – and he had a lucrative book deal and speaking calendar to attest to his brilliance – then the unanswered question was: how could a Rat lying dead in a bathtub early Tuesday morning slink into a shopping mall late Tuesday night, with the intent, it seemed, of knocking over a jewelry store?
It didn’t make sens
e. And when something doesn’t make sense, you work some sense into it. Pinero hooked up with Forensics, while McGrath mined Lenny’s computer for pertinent information.
“Tolmeyer speaking?”
“Pinero. What’d the boys in Forensics get off the crime scene?”
Tolmeyer laughed. She had a soft spot for Pinero-right between the legs whenever he wanted it. “We ‘boys’ are still on scene. But so far, everything looks pretty clean – from a crime perspective, that is, not a housekeeping one. No signs of forced entry, lots of fingerprints-Lenny’s and the girl’s – nothing else unusual, so far.”
“No Athabaska Terrier hairs? Albino herb roots native only to Cape Breton Island? Poisoned tea bags? Furry creature suits with DNA-identifiable sweat?”
Tolmeyer laughed again. “You’ve been watching too many TV shows, Detective.”
“What about the tub? Any evidence someone dusted it with a Zamboni-made it extra slippery for the bathing beauty?”
“In my professional opinion, that bathtub hasn’t been cleaned since it was installed. And nobody greased the soles of Laymon’s feet, either, before you ask.”
Pinero grunted, shelved the phone as Tolmeyer was enquiring about his dinner plans for the evening.
He was chewing things and a wad of gum over when McGrath pointed at his computer screen. “Take a look at this,” he said.
Pinero strolled over, looked at the listing up on the LCD flat screen.
“This is Lenny’s email history,” McGrath explained, his hand stroking his optical mouse with caffeine jitters. He highlighted the first message listed after a backlog of porn and penis enlargement spam. It was dated Monday, 15 November, from [email protected], subject: “Ready to go to work?”
The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes & Impossible Mysteries Page 20
