Corkscrew
Page 23
"If that's what it takes, I'll try to be," she said softly, then bobbed her head at me. "How about taking your dog back? I'm not up to any more responsibility tonight."
"Sure. Tell him, 'Easy,' then, 'Go with Reid.'" I said. She did, and I spent thirty seconds fussing him and telling him he was a good boy. Then we all three got into her car and headed home.
As we got out of the car, Fred said, "I hope you're not feeling overly romantic. This isn't the time."
"Time? We've got years. Let's just snore side by side like an old married couple," I said, and she kissed me, not saying anything.
In the morning we lingered over breakfast, bacon, eggs, coffee, and a lot of laughs. Then we headed back to the station. We got there around nine-thirty to find the OPP still in residence, a fresh uniformed man on the desk, and Positano and Andy working out the final details of the case.
"How did you get on with Corbett and his lawyer?"
"Oh, the usual objections and legal crap," Andy said. Like most policemen, he wondered why the law is written to protect the guilty rather than the innocent. "But we'd already seized the garment bag with the shirt and pants in it."
"You know, it still doesn't prove he murdered the boy, only that he had contact with the body," I said.
"Yeah, I think that's the last straw the lawyer will hold on to. We've charged Corbett with obstructing justice and offering indignity to human remains, on top of the first-degree murder. He can't wriggle off all three charges. I think we'll get him on the lesser two, and if his wife works on him, he may cop a plea on the homicide."
"The only thing I can't work out is that heelprint," I said. "If Corbett scattered that flour, then somebody must have come in after him and seen the mess and left that print."
"No problem there," Andy said. "Did you check the boots on young Reg?"
"No. He wasn't at the camp yesterday when I had that fight with Jas."
"He's as far as you have to look," Andy said. "He stopped in there yesterday afternoon early, took one look, and got the hell out."
"He told you this?"
Andy nodded. "He's gotten very talkative since his granddad made the big speech last night. Seems he really wants to be an actor, poor dear. And he's afraid the tape will put an end to that. He'll just get a part on some soap opera and this tape'll come out and he's gone."
"It's kind of hard to feel sorry for him. Nobody twisted his arm to take part in that tape," Positano said. "Incidentally, where is it? I haven't seen it yet. Do you have it here?"
"No, I took it back to them last night in that exchange. That much was legitimate, although I cheated on the file cabinet."
Andy started to laugh. It began as a chuckle but grew until he was helpless with laughter, bending from the waist, roaring. He had become a biker again, as he had been when I first met him, devoid of subtlety or kindness, the same as all the others he had ridden with. Then he wiped his eyes. "You know what happened to that videotape? When that homemade bomb of yours went up, Reid, Jack, that's one of the Brigade guys, he had the camera and tape in his hands, in that garbage can. The bang blew him back, or he jumped back or whatever, right over the edge of the bridge and down into thirty feet of water. He got out, but hell, that tape isn't ever going to come up. It has to be in the lake by now, lost for keeps."
"There's still that file cabinet from Spenser's house. I'll bet that had copies in, the originals, maybe," I said, and now Positano laughed. As long and hard as Andy, who was infected by it and started to laugh with him.
"I thought you guys had been working. Now it looks like you've been smoking up. What gives?"
"You wanna hear something really funny? You wanna real laugh?" Positano choked out at last.
"Funnier than bikers going off bridges?"
"Much funnier." Positano wiped his streaming eyes, gave a couple of last chuckles, then held up his hands, the way he might have done for an address at the Rotary Club. "See, we found all those tapes from the cabinet in the Spenser house. They were all of them in the saddlebags of the Diamonds we brought in last night." He chuckled and then went on. "So they all had real pornie titles on them, just handwritten, mind, on tapes but really sensational, right. So we sat some shiny-faced young officer down with a VCR and all of these tapes and asked him to catalog them."
"And it turned him into a raving sexual maniac," I tried. So far the story wasn't funny.
"No." Positano waved me down. "No, see, he starts screening them and something's wrong. The first one is called Hotlips Nurse. Only there's no nurse in it and no hot lips. It's all game shows—The Dating Game, The Price Is Right—soap operas, all daytime TV. So he goes to the next one and the next and they're all the same, all innocent garbage right offa the TV."
"Wait a minute, I don't get this. I thought these were sleaze tapes that the bikers were selling."
"They were. Until Mrs. Spenser found one of them and realized what it was. She was disgusted and she wiped them all, the only way she knew, by playing other stuff over them all day while her husband was off talking bullshit about Greta Garbo," Andy said, and then we laughed again, all three of us this time.
"So the kid's safe from harassment. His granddad's down the tubes for the Spenser murder, and you're talking to the Diamonds to find out which one of them needled Spenser senior and shoved him over the rock," I said.
Positano nodded. "Got it all wrapped up, or damn near. All's we need is a statement from your lady about what happened to her; then you're free and clear. Come back in later on and Anderson will be here full of apologies to reinstate you."
I stood there for a long moment, looking around at the interior of the office I knew so well. And I thought about Anderson and the rules of conduct he represented and about the long spells of boredom I had known since coming to Murphy's Harbour, between the very few exciting times that had occurred. And I thought about another police chief I had met in a town like this, an older man who had warned me to leave before the job took me over. Somehow, from this side of the counter, I could see all this in a light that was obscured once I got into harness. It was a little job, for a little man, someone much closer to retirement than I was.
"I had an offer once from a guy called Fullwell, at Bonded Security," I said. They were all listening, but only Freda started to smile as I spoke. "He promised me some interesting work. More money, more to do. And I'd be based in Toronto, working all over the province."
"I'm based in Toronto," Freda said, and I put my arm around her waist. "Yes," I said, "that's just what I was thinking." I pushed her gently forward to the counter. "Why don't you make a statement for the officers. I want to walk around outside for a while and think about it."
Andy said, "Are you serious, Reid? What I've heard since I came here, you've got a hell of a good reputation for being a fair, honest, tough copper. Why quit now?"
"What was it the song said, back a few years? From the Book of Revelations. 'To everything there is a season, turn, turn, turn'?"
"It's from the Book of Ecclesiastes," Fred said quietly. "Not the 'turn, turn, turn' part, but the rest."
I patted her shoulder gently. "I'm going out to take a walk around for a few minutes while you talk to the guys about what happened. Then I think we should head back home. We've got some planning to do."
"I'll come and look for you as soon as I'm through here," she said. Then she tugged my arm until I stooped, and we kissed, ignoring the other people there. Then I winked at her and called Sam, and he fell in behind me as I went out through that familiar front door, not sure where I was heading or what I was really thinking.
Table of Contents
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
<
br /> Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two