Corkscrew

by Ted Wood

  McKenney cleared his throat and paused for a moment longer while the doctor kept on smiling. Then he gave in and turned to his assistant. "You may as well go for supper, Irwin. I'll see you back at seven."

  The assistant straightened himself up, just as reluctant to move, but said, "Yeah, okay, Mr. McKenney," and ambled out, with his boss a slow pace behind him.

  When the big metal-covered door had swung shut, the doctor said, "I don't want this getting around town, you understand."

  "Of course," I said. "What do you see?"

  He turned back and picked up the dead hand. "There's marked lividity in his face—you can see that—but it's also in his fingernails." I waited, still not certain what he meant. He rolled the boy's shirt back and tapped the abdomen with his fingertips as if it were a bongo. "See that?" He glanced up at me. "There's a lot of spring in the abdomen, as though his lungs were still filled with air."

  "He didn't drown, then?"

  "No. If you want my first opinion, I'd say he was smothered. That would be after he was struck in the head." He pulled down the boy's right eyelid, pointing at the white of the eye. "See those rusty-looking marks there? They're petechial hemorrhages."

  "And that wouldn't have happened in a drowning?"

  Like all medical men, McQuaig was cagey. "It could have, but it's not likely. If you ask me, and you did, I'd say somebody put a cloth or something over his face and held it there."

  "Wouldn't his bowels have emptied?" I'd investigated the usual number of homicides while I was in the Toronto police. In most of the cases you had to hold your breath when you found the body.

  McQuaig nodded. "Normally, yes, the sphincter relaxes. I imagine that he was too far gone after the blow to the head."

  He was looking at me without focusing, his mind working on the evidence he had found. Then, still moving gently, he unzipped the blue jeans and slipped them half down. I watched as he rolled the body over and checked the buttocks. "He's clean," he said. He bent over and examined more closely. "And it wasn't a sexual killing."

  "No marks on him?"

  He looked up at me sharply. "Here, look for yourself."

  "I'll take your word for it."

  We stood and looked at one another for a long moment. I was going over all the things I had to do, trying to set some priorities. He spoke first. "You ought to have a proper autopsy done. The best place is Toronto, the attorney general's department. I could do it but—" He waved one hand awkwardly. "It's a special skill, forensics. They'll find things I could miss."

  I came out of my trance. "Right. I'll have McKenney ship the body down there right away. But before it goes, could you take a look at the foot, the bare one?"

  He turned back to the body and pulled the cuff of the blue jeans up on the bare leg. The graze I had seen earlier made him stoop again and stare long and hard.

  "It looks like a rope burn," he said softly. "If you look closely, there's a loop effect, as if whatever was holding him down was right around the leg. No rock would have done that."

  "That's what I thought. Can you see any fibers?"

  He dropped the foot and went to his bag, rummaging in it for a magnifying glass. I held the dead foot for him while he looked it all over. Then he said, "Ah."

  "Find something?" I couldn't see anything myself, but he was pointing to the deepest part of the scrape.

  "There. Almost buried. I can't see a lot, but it looks to me like a piece of yellow fiber. You know the kind. Half the boats in town use that kind of rope for tying up."

  He lent me the glass, and I stooped and stared until I could make out what he was pointing to. It was tiny, barely a sixteenth of an inch long.

  "Leave it where it is," he instructed me. "The boys at the lab will know what to do with it better than we do. All you have to go on for now is the fact that he was tied down with a yellow rope."

  "Then it's up there still, in the water below Indian Island." I straightened up. "Thank you, Doctor. Now I'd like to search the body. Then, if you could take care of the transportation arrangements with McKenney, I have to make some phone calls in a big hurry."

  "Of course." He nodded and quietly pulled the boy's jeans straight again and zipped the fly. "Would you like me to stay while you go through his pockets?"

  "Yeah, I'd like you here as a witness. Would you pull everything out, please?"

  He nodded again and dug deep into the pockets. "Pocket knife, Swiss army pattern. Three dollars and fourteen cents. Kleenex," he said as I wrote the items in my book. "That's all in the left. In the right, one small pebble, pink color. One red-and-white Daredevl spoon."

  I looked up sharply. "Is the hook still on?"

  "No. No hook, just a ring on the broad end to attach a hook. There seems to be a portion of a broken hook shaft attached. Maybe he found it somewhere." He dug deeper. "There's a foreign coin of some kind." He looked at it and handed it over. "A ten-peso piece, Mexican. Could have been his lucky coin. Although it didna do him any good."

  He dug on silently. "Short piece of casting line, black. Looks like heavy test. That's it. Now the back."

  He rolled the body and went into the hip pocket. "Ah," he said, and pulled out a soggy bundle of paper. "Maybe this is something."

  There may be nothing sadder than the things a dead child leaves behind. I didn't like going through his papers, but I had to. It helped to have the doctor there so I could stay objective and call out what I'd found. "A sales slip for almost five dollars from the grocery. That's probably for the film he bought. Two photographs. One of some boy about seventeen. The other—yes, it's his stepfather getting out of his car outside their apartment."

  I stopped and looked at the photographs more closely. First the boy, blond and handsome in an English public-school kind of way. He looked as proud as a young soldier, standing in tennis clothes, holding a cup. There was an inscription on the front, "To the brat from David." The photo was well composed, a close-up, just wide enough to include the boy's face and body and the cup. Most amateurs stand off to make sure they get your feet in. If young Spenser had taken this, Carl was right. He'd had an eye for composition.

  The second photograph was less impressive. It looked as if it had been taken from across a city street. A car was just driving by on the far side, but beyond it was the Spensers' car, with the stepfather rising from the seat. There was another person in the lobby of the apartment, partly obscured by the brightness on the lobby glass. I checked it through the doctor's magnifying glass. As far as I could tell, the person was a woman, blond, with short hair.

  I put the glass and the photographs aside and looked at the last item. It was a letter, with the address of the Spensers' summer cottage at the top and yesterday's date. There was no name at the top; it burst out at once into angry words. I read them aloud, ignoring the childish misspellings. "'You said we were friends and I thought we were but we're not. Don't say I'm making this up like you always do. I was there and I saw and you promised you weren't going to see him anymore and you did. I saw you. That's not what being friends means, I don't think so anyways and when I get back from this rotten place I'm never going to speak to you again. Kennie.'"

  Dr. McQuaig gave a little humph of embarrassment more than amusement. "Passionate little beggar, wasn't he."

  I looked at him, then at the body on the table. The Vanderheyden girl had said he was always hanging around her and her friends, shy and awkward, trying to break in but not sure how to do it. And yet this letter wasn't shy. It was the kind of letter a man might send to an unfaithful lover. It was angry, filled with hurt of the kind that a timid boy would never put into words, not even in the privacy of a letter he hadn't addressed or mailed.

  "It's a precocious letter," I said. "It doesn't fit with the kind of picture I had of him."

  "Aye, it's precocious," McQuaig said. "When you say it. Not many boys his age would be that vehement. It was as if he was writing to some girl he was intimate with. Somebody older, maybe, who was amusing herself with him
but still had other guys she was serious about."

  "But that seems a bit unlikely. I mean, a girl even of his own age would likely be taller than him. Somebody who'd matured enough to fool around, even without going the distance. She'd be too big to want a little freckle-faced kid tagging after her."

  We stood staring at one another, frowning, until the same thought came to both of us at once. McQuaig put it into words.

  "There's always the possibility that the letter isn't addressed to a girl at all. Maybe it's to a boy."

  "Like a schoolboy crush kind of thing?" I wondered.

  McQuaig nodded and rubbed his chin, making a brisk little sound. "Call it a crush, but it's love."

  "Do you think it was physical?" The answer was important; it would change the way I investigated the case. I might start by finding out more about the David who inscribed the photograph to him.

  "It could be." McQuaig was being clinical again. "It could be, maybe, just the kind of clumsy fumbling you see in puppy dogs, or maybe, if the other boy is older, it was the real full-dress thing."

  I straightened up. "Okay, thank you, Doctor. That's all I need to know for now. Could you ask the forensics people to give you an opinion about it. I'm not sure if they can, but knowing it might help."

  He nodded. "Aye, I will. I'll do them a wee letter explaining what we think. And ask them to check for hairs and fibers and all the other things they can do. I'll get on with it now."

  "Good. In the meantime, I've got some calls to make, and I think I should do it from the station."

  He raised one hand mutely, and I went out the back door and around to my car. The crowd outside was starting to thin. It was hot, a perfect blue August day, and the dust on the unmade roadway scuffed under my feet, dry as flour.

  In three minutes I was at my office, with Sam flopped on the floor beside me as I took out the office phone directory. The first person I rang was a former partner of mine in Metro Toronto, a detective by the name of Irv Goldman. I was lucky. He was just in, and he hadn't picked up the evening's headaches yet.

  "Hi, Reid. How's everything going in God's country?"

  "Busy for once, Irv. I've got a homicide on my hands, a boy hit on the head and smothered."

  He made sympathetic noises and asked, "So what can we do in Hogtown?"

  "I'd like to see if a few guys have got sheets. It'll be faster if you do it for me. D'you mind?"

  "Shoot," he said, and I stared at the top of my list.

  "First off, a Fred Dobos, one-fifteen Davisville. Next is Jack Innes." I gave him the address and waited while he wrote everything down. "Also, the dead boy's stepfather. He's an odd fish, name of Ken Spenser."

  Irv grunted. "Odd, what way?"

  "Well, nothing certifiable, but he's a two-fisted drinker, miserable with it."

  "Hmm. Worth a check," Irv said. "What's the address?"

  I gave it to him and then added the last name, the one that had me feeling a little guilty for encroaching on the man's privacy. "And the fourth name is Carl Simmonds, around thirty-eight, address West Shore Road, Murphy's Harbour."

  "Be back with you in an hour," Irv said.

  I thanked him and hung up, then called the local office of the OPP. The guy on phone duty was Jack Rinhardt, a friend of mine. I told him to take the boy off the missing list and then explained about the bikers and asked if he could contact the OPP special unit that'd been set up to deal with them. They might be able to give me a lead on where this gang came from. It was more direct than working from their descriptions, finding their names from mug shots, and then going through the criminal-records process I'd set in motion with Irv Goldman.

  Jack said he'd do it for me, taking the notes himself and calling me back. He knows I'm alone here and need all the help I can get. Then I rang the third number, the insurance office in town. The secretary answered and put me through right away to her boss, Wolfgang Schneider.

  He was with a client but took the call, anyway. "Yes, Chief, what can we do for you? Maybe increase the contents coverage on your house?"

  "Next time, thanks, Wolf. No, it's not insurance this time. I've got a drowned kid, and the guy who pulled him in thinks he may have been tied to something up south of Indian Island, maybe thirty yards toward mid-channel, just off the southern tip. I was wondering if you could call out your scuba club for me and go looking for whatever it was." I added the same statement I always made when I used his services. "We can't pay for your time, I'm afraid, but we'll cover any out-of-pocket expenses. Could you do it for me?"

  "Sure, I was just closing up. Do you know what we're looking for?"

  "Whatever it is, there's likely a loop of yellow boat cord attached to it. I'd like your guys to bring it in if they can without touching it. I want to try for fingerprints."

  "I'll get them some gloves," he said, his German accent hissing gently on the "s." "That's deep there, over thirty feet, I think."

  "Yeah, and the bottom's weedy, so it may be hard pinpointing the place. I've got a few things to do now; then I'll come up to the point in the police boat, bringing the guys who found the kid. They'll know where you should look first."

  "That would be good. When will you be there?" He hesitated and added a respectful "Chief." All the Germans I've ever met love rank.

  "Two hours," I told him. I checked my watch. "Let's say seven-thirty."

  His voice became dubious. "We would have light only for an hour. I'll get Roger to bring his underwater light."

  "Thanks, Wolf. At least we know we're looking for a fixed object. It won't be drifting away from us."

  "That's one good thing," he said. "See you there at seven-thirty."

  The phone rang at once, and I answered, "Police chief."

  A teenaged boy spoke at once. "Yes, Chief. I'm Cy Levine. My mother said you wanted to speak to me."

  "Thanks for being so prompt, Cy. I hear you were going slalom up near Indian Island this afternoon."

  The voice was cautious. I remembered that Levine Senior was a lawyer. "I was skiing safely, Chief," he said. "We stayed away from other boats, had an observer and a driver."

  "I know, Cy, and I hear you're pretty good. The reason I'm calling is to ask if you saw any boats up near the narrows while you were out."

  "Oh." He was relieved and eager to please. "Lemme see. There were a couple of guys fishing. They caught something, then left."

  "I know about them. Anybody else?"

  Another pause and he said, "There were boats, you know, but if they're not in your way, you don't notice. Like I was working pretty hard at the time." I could feel his ego swelling up, blocking out his memory of anything other then himself flashing over the waves. I burst his bubble to get at the truth. "The reason I'm asking is that those fishermen found a boy drowned and, I believe, he came from a boat. What you remember may be important to me."

  He gasped, and his voice went up a fifth. He was a kid again, not a star. "Wow. Drowned. Yeah, well, that's different. Let me see." He thought about it and said, "There was a sailboat up above the narrows. It had a red sail. Not a big boat—holds two, you know."

  I scribbled this down and waited. He went on. "Oh, and there was a green aluminum johnboat, the kind they use at the lodge near us to take the garbage over to the dump."

  I wrote that down as well and asked, "Where was it?"

  "Coming north through the narrows. As if it was coming from the lodge. Heading over toward the dump."

  I probed to see if he remembered any garbage bags in it or who was driving, but he didn't. He had seen a biggish inboard/outboard with a canvas cover. He didn't recognize it but remembered it was green. And a canoe. The canoe had only one man in it. It was gray aluminum, and he didn't remember what the man looked like.

  "Okay. Now I've got some other things to do. Could you please round up your friends and see what else they can remember? I'll drop by your cottage at dusk, in the boat, to check. If you could have them both there, I'd appreciate it. It's important."

&nb
sp; "Yeah. Sure will." His voice sank again to its teenage masculinity. "Is this, like a homicide, Chief?"

  "We treat them all that way, Cy," I said ambiguously. "So it's important. Thanks for calling. See you at dusk."

  The next call I made was to Freda. It rang five times before she picked it up and answered, "Hello there."

  "Hi, it's your landlord," I said, and she laughed.

  "I've been meaning to talk to you about the deerfly situation. Here I am, a defenseless woman in a bikini, trying to get some sun, and they're gnawing on me."

  "Understandable. You looked very bitable the last time I saw you," I kidded, then came to the point. "Listen, can you throw some clothes on and come down to the station? You know where it is."

  "I ought to. You locked me up in it once." She laughed. "You want me to pay for my keep now?"

  "Yes, this drowning is getting complicated. I need somebody to answer the phone while I play cops and bad guys. Can you help me?"

  "Sure will. Be there in ten," she said, and added the typical actor's afterthought. "It'll give me a chance to practice my accents."

  I hung up, grinning. What Murphy's Harbour would think when the phone was answered by an East Indian, a Mexican, an Irishwoman, or a Cockney, I didn't know. But Fred has a good mind, and she wouldn't play games with the facts.

  It took only a few minutes for her to arrive, and I used the time well. I rang the lodge and asked who had been using their johnboat around four o'clock. They told me it was the owner, a guy in his fifties, straight as an arrow, to my knowledge. He had gone to the dump on his own. Right now he was in town at the hardware store, but he would call when he came back.

  The other two boats were harder to trace. I called both locks and gave a description of the pair of them to the keepers, asking them to detain any boat of that description and call me, then rang Walter Puckrin at the marina and picked his brains. He knew the sailboat. It belonged to a Toronto schoolteacher and his wife. They stayed at the cottage up above the narrows. They had no phone, and I decided to call on them later. The cruiser might be any of a dozen he could think of or a stranger passing through our stretch of the waterway. He would make a list of the locals and leave it for me.