Cold Water Burning

by John Straley

  “Harrison Teller called me this spring,” Doggy said. “He said he wanted a meeting between me and Ewers. He said Ewers had sold his story to the press and he wanted to give me what I wanted to clear up the Mygirl murders.”

  “Are those the words he used, he wanted to ‘give you’ something?”

  “That’s what he said. He said he was going to give me something.” Doggy paused a moment as if checking his own memory. “I went to Ketchikan, and when I got to the airport my gun didn’t show up. I was in a hurry. Ewers had said if I wasn’t in the hotel by a cer­tain time he would leave. You know the airport in Ketchikan, the ferry runs on the half hour. I tried to fill out a report, but there was a long line. Several people had lost their luggage and it was the tail end of tourist season so it was busy. I missed one ferry and I was just about to miss another, so I bolted from line and just made the second ferry and caught a cab to town.”

  “Did you communicate with the troopers or anyone else from the DA’s office? Did you tell anyone at all about this meeting?”

  Doggy shook his head. “No . . . I didn’t tell a soul. And frankly I didn’t know what I was going to do with Mr. Ewers. I knew he was going to lie to me. I considered busting him again. I don’t know for what. I just wanted to see him in cuffs.”

  “You thought about killing him?”

  “Goddamn right I thought of killing him!” Doggy said without apology. “This was a world-class killer who had not only gotten away with four murders but was about to be paid off by the press for his troubles. Yes, I thought of killing him.”

  The new logs on the fire had caught, and Doggy adjusted the flue on the stack and then the vents on the bottom of the old cast-iron stove.

  “But I didn’t kill him,” he said, watching the light flickering through the vents. “When I got to the hotel he was already dead. Someone shot that bastard through the head with my own gun and left the gun there on the carpet.”

  The stove rumbled now, and George Doggy flicked the vents all the way closed. “This is my biggest mistake and the thing I am most guilty of: I didn’t call it in right away. I turned around and walked out. I didn’t touch a thing. I never even picked up the gun, which I should have done if I was going to cover the whole thing up. I walked around town for an hour or so. I have to say, Cecil, I wasn’t upset much by Ewers’s death. Seeing him there, laid out, gave my soul some peace. I thought of those two kids he shot and burned. The mom and those sweet children on the Mygirl. I was glad that bastard was dead. And I wanted to enjoy the feeling be­fore I phoned it in and they took me in for questioning.”

  “Did you ever phone it in?” I asked.

  “I went back to the hotel. I went up to his room. The door was still unlocked, and when I went in, Ewers was gone, the gun was gone. There were fresh sheets on the bed and only a faint hint of blood on the mattress. The maids said they knew nothing. The desk clerk had Richard Ewers checking in that day and swore he’d checked out an hour ago. He was gone, and there didn’t appear to be a trace of him. No—I never called it in. I know I should have.”

  “George, not only didn’t you call it in, when the police started looking for Richard you dummied up. You offered nothing be­cause you didn’t want them looking for Richard, did you? You were obstructing justice,” I said, trying hard to keep a scolding tone out of my voice.

  “Don’t talk to me about justice and Richard Ewers, all right? I know it was stupid,” Doggy said in disgust. A flare of sunlight moved through the room as a cloud pushed past. Everything—the gun case, the photo album, the black stove, and George Doggy’s tired face—glimmered in the light.

  “So, who do you think shot him?” I asked, as the cloud shaded the world once again. For the first time in my life, I was feeling a slight sense of superiority over the great George Doggy, not for what he had done in Ketchikan, but for what he had failed to see before he got there.

  George looked at me with mock surprise. “I knew the Sands brothers and Chevalier had the motive to kill him because of what Ewers had done to their families. That’s why I was following the money. That’s why I wanted to know what those boys knew.”

  “But you couldn’t work closely with the police because you thought Chevalier and the Sands brothers were poised to frame you. They were also afraid of you, knowing that you were the only one who might tie them to Ewers’s murder. But I’m wondering, George, if it’s harder for you now that the Sands brothers are dead? Or is it easier?”

  “I don’t know, Cecil. All I can go back to is this: the truth is the truth is the truth. And the truth is, I didn’t kill Ewers, and those Sands boys knew it. The Sands boys could have cleared me, but now . . . it looks like I’ve been killing witnesses.”

  “The truth is the truth is the truth,” I repeated softly, consid­ering the plausibility of the statement.

  Doggy opened the door to the stove, and the firelight played on his face. “It’s a hell of a way to go out after all these years, isn’t it, Cecil? I wanted Ewers myself. I wanted him in jail. I wanted that smile off his face.”

  “I should be enjoying this, George. I never get to hear you whine. But the truth is I’d like to help you out.”

  “There is nothing you know that will help me now,” Doggy said without looking at me.

  “George,” I said, “it’s not something I know. It’s what you don’t know. You were wrong about Richard and the Mygirl. You were al­ways wrong. I feel warmly toward you because, for the first time, I’m right about something and you are wrong, and I’m going to get you out of a jam instead of the other way around.” I reached over on the desk and took a piece of notebook paper from Sean’s photo album, stuffed it in my pocket.

  “I think we should take a ride and go see someone.”

  George looked up at me with an expression I had never seen on his face before. I appeared to be in charge and this was a new cir­cumstance for both of us. His face was a blank mask, like an old man afraid he is losing his memory.

  We walked up to his pickup truck and Doggy slid behind the wheel. I told him we needed to head to town. We could park near my house and walk. The fall afternoon was a battle between the sun and clouds, moments of sparkling clarity browned out by clouds across the sun. We turned onto the main road, and George accelerated the powerful truck. We passed a crew of kids picking up trash on the roadside; they wore orange vests and carried bright yellow bags. A murder of crows hopped the ditches in front of them, nibbling up any scrap of food they could rescue.

  “So, professor, what are you so right about?” Doggy said without taking his eyes off the road. Doggy sighed.

  “Shoot, Cecil, you and I have both heard hundreds of theories about the Mygirl, everything from drug enforcers to alien abduc­tions. They all start with one slightly fuzzy fact and end up in the imagination.”

  “Okay, George. You never got a conviction on the Mygirl, so you are hardly the expert.”

  Doggy bristled and his eyes narrowed as he kept looking down the road.

  “Let me just ask you this: did Richard ever mention seeing anyone else the night of the fire? Did he mention a second skiff? Did he mention seeing anyone else on the water that night?”

  Doggy shook his head and spoke as if he were humoring me. “You know all this, Cecil. First Ewers said he hadn’t been on the Mygirl that night. Then he claimed he had just come into town to drink. Finally he admitted he had taken some of the money but knew nothing about the fire. He claimed he never saw the fire. That’s where he stuck. But he was lying all along.”

  We passed Sandy Beach. I looked out to see if anyone was surfing and sure enough Bob and Nels were getting into their wet suits. The storm had stirred up surfable waves that would last for at least a couple more days. I imagined those guys wading into the water and shuddered, thinking about the Amelia, our lost skiff.

  “So even at trial, even when it would have saved his ass, Richard n
ever mentioned seeing someone coming over to the Mygirl. He never even floats the possibility of another shooter. He never men­tions seeing Chevalier coming over on the skiff. But Richard, the arsonist, would have seen Chevalier perfectly because Chevalier’s face would have been lit up by the fire he was moving toward. Richard never even tells his lawyers about this other witness until after that witness gets a little pissy and testifies on direct that ‘maybe’ Richard Ewers was the arsonist skiff operator. Richard never mentions to anyone that he saw Chevalier on the water that night because it never happened.”

  “Ewers was lying through his teeth, Cecil. He had stolen the money and was headed into town. Maybe he planned to kill everybody, but more than likely he was caught in the act. He shot the first person who came on him and then had to kill everyone else to make his escape.”

  “How much money was on Ewers when he was interviewed in Sitka just after the fire?”

  “He had spent a couple hundred at the bar, and he had a hun­dred dollars on him.”

  “He killed four people he worked with, a woman and children, for three hundred bucks? Where was the rest of the money? There had been thousands on board the Mygirl, most of the money was found in the safe. He could have forced someone to open it. Why didn’t he take all the money?”

  “I don’t know, Cecil . . . and neither do you. Ewers was a liar.” George Doggy’s voice was bitter.

  We passed the grocery store, which sat on one of the most beautiful pieces of waterfront property in town. Gulls circled the Dumpsters.

  “I agree, George. He’s a liar. That’s the truth. But there are some other liars to consider here too. Look at the whole thing, George. Try to not think of Richard as the killer for a second. Who would have more reason to kill Ewers in Ketchikan than you?”

  George was staring intently at the road as if we were driving through a snowstorm and his gaze could part the curtain of white he was riding through. He was thinking hard, I could tell, sorting and re-sorting his facts, but more importantly, I could tell by the tension in his body, the firmness of his grip on the wheel, that he was challenging some very old and entrenched assumptions. Fi­nally he spoke. “Shit” was all he said.

  We parked on the waterfront near my house. George knew where we were going. I fell in step beside him. He patted the outside of my coat pocket. “Don’t you think you’d better load that gun, son?”

  “Here, you take it.” I fished the empty revolver and the shells out of my suit coat and held them out to George.

  “Ah, criminy,” he muttered, flipped the cylinder out, loaded it, snapped the wheel shut, spun it and checked the hammer. Then he handed the gun back to me. “I’ve already got one. He won’t expect you to be carrying.”

  I took the revolver, although I didn’t like the heft of the thing. George pointed to my pocket again. “Hammer’s down on a hole, you know, so you have five. Use two hands. Pull back the hammer and squeeze. It’s loud as hell, so it scares most people to death, even if you don’t hit anything.”

  We turned the corner to the harbor and walked down the ramp and out to the last float. The Naked Horse was tied up in its own slip. She was ragged and weary-looking, with her rigging hanging off and shards of broken mast on the deck.

  George jumped into the cockpit and the old boat rocked easily. I followed. George rapped on the hatch, and we heard a clatter of tools falling into the sink.

  Jonathan Chevalier looked up at us and his expression was nei­ther surprised nor concerned.

  “You feeling all right, Jonathan?” I asked.

  Jonathan took a long breath and looked back at us. He had shaved, and his long hair was combed back neatly over his head. He still had bruises, and his eyes were rimmed with dark circles. When he started speaking, his voice was sleepy and a little cracked.

  “I’m feeling more . . . normal, you know what I mean?”

  “You know, Jonathan, I got to thinking about how you said you saw Richard coming from the boat that night yet there was firelight on his face.”

  Jonathan didn’t say anything, but took a step up on the ladder and craned his neck around on the deck as if he were out at sea checking on the wind. He was staring toward the bow as he spoke kind of absently. “When I saw Harrison Teller in town I figured something was up. What are you guys—playing detective?”

  “I’m just curious,” I said, and sat down in the cockpit eye to eye with Jonathan as he stood on the cabin ladder.

  Doggy tugged on my sleeve. “Cecil, come on. What is this guy going to tell us now? Everyone else is dead. He knows he doesn’t have to talk to us. Come on, let’s leave him alone.”

  George Doggy, the master of confessions, was paying me the single greatest compliment of both his and my career: he was sig­naling me to take the lead on the questioning. He would be the skeptical good cop; that left only me, the bad cop.

  “This guy doesn’t have to talk to us,” Doggy repeated. “I’m sorry we bothered you, Jonathan.” And Doggy made a show of tugging on my sleeve.

  Jonathan looked at us as if we were Laurel and Hardy.

  “I think Jonathan wants to talk to us,” I told Doggy. “I think he’s wanted to talk to someone for a long time, and now would be a good time.”

  Jonathan snorted; he shifted his weight nervously from one foot to the other. “Why is that?”

  “Because it’s really over now. The others are dead. Before, one of you couldn’t break away or the other two would point the finger. When Richard wanted to talk to George and when he gave the money to the Sands boys, you thought it was over. You thought he was going to tell the truth about what happened on the Mygirl. But that’s not going to happen now, is it, Jonathan?”

  I was fidgeting in my suit coat pocket. I didn’t like the heft of the gun there.

  “So . . .” Jonathan said, “is any of this supposed to make a dif­ference to me?” His voice quavered enough to let me know he wasn’t as calm as he pretended to be.

  “I don’t know, I just think someone should tell you it’s all right. That we know it wasn’t your fault.”

  His eyes narrowed. “What wasn’t my fault?”

  “It wasn’t your fault that you had to kill your brother.”

  “My brother was a good boy.”

  “It must have been hard all these years. Living with it. Never being able to tell anybody. You saved the lives of all the others on the Mygirl. You saved Richard, and you saved Sean and Kevin. They knew you saved them and that’s why they went along with you for all these years.”

  Jonathan Chevalier’s eyes narrowed to slender crescents. He was crying.

  “Albert was a good boy,” he said softly.

  “Albert was a deeply troubled boy. He had an AK-47 he used to blast anything that moved. He would tear squirrels’ bodies apart with his bullets. He tortured small animals.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything. You never knew him. You don’t know.” Jonathan wiped at his nose.

  “I was always curious why he had been shot in the arms and legs,” I said. “The parents were shot through the chest. Straight kill shots. The little girl was clubbed maybe to keep her quiet. Maybe to play with her, like he played with the animals he tor­tured.”

  “He wasn’t a monster,” Jonathan snarled.

  George was staring at me, his brow furrowed. He was working through the problem. He was not interrupting me.

  I went on, letting it spill out as if my dreams were bursting through to my waking life, sick of being cooped up in the dark. “But Albert’s first wounds were to his legs and arms. Shots meant to stop him. Then there was one close shot to the head, and that was the last shot, wasn’t it?”

  Jonathan stared up at me as if he were a wolverine caught in a leghold trap.

  “What was it, Jonathan? Did the little girl find him torturing the animals? Did he hit her on the head by mistake? Did he hit her in fun an
d maybe misjudge his strength? And then her parents found them and they started screaming, so Albert started shooting?”

  Jonathan’s hand was shaking as he ran it through his hair.

  “You don’t have anything, Cecil.”

  “That’s not quite true,” I said softly.

  “We never meant to hurt a soul.”

  “I believe that. I really do, Jonathan,” I said. “You heard the shots and you came over in the skiff and you found your brother Albert in a rage. He had clubbed Tina Sands and shot her parents. He was headed back toward where Richard Ewers and the Sands brothers were sleeping. He was going to kill them too. He had to, by that point. You got the gun from him and tried to stop him hut he was wild. You shot him in the arms and legs and the wounds were bad. Worse than you expected. He was bleeding to death, he was suffering, so you put him out of his pain. Then you looked around and you saw all the dead bodies and the gun was in your hands.”

  George Doggy looked at me closely. “Jonathan had to split up the suspicion, so he gave Ewers some money and told him to leave as fast as he could. Ewers, being a dumb scared kid, split. Then Jonathan swore he was going to kill the Sands boys if they told the truth. Albert had killed their family and Jonathan had killed Albert. There was no more justice that was needed and Jonathan swore if they said anything to the cops about Albert, he would finger Kevin and Sean for the killings. Kevin was just criminal enough to know he could be made-to-order for the killings.”

  “Kevin took the rifle back to his uncle’s boat and later gave it to Sean as a keepsake,” I added sarcastically.

  “Like I said,” Jonathan muttered, “you don’t have anything.”

  “Well now, son, we have the AK-47,” George offered.

  “And there’s a picture in Sean’s album of Albert with the gun,” I said, “and if we need it, we can find some old slugs in that stump where they did target practice in Kalinin Bay. That puts the gun on the Mygirl. We’ve got you lying about the gun to the police. We’ve got you lying about how you saw Ewers coming from the burning boat with the light shining on his face, which would be impossible from the angle you claimed to be coming from.”