Murder Among the Pines

by John Lawrence Reynolds

  Cliff and Geegee rarely asked Max about her work. They knew she had to keep details hidden, and they respected that. But now, sitting with them in the warm evening air, Max felt a strong need to talk about Lana Parker’s death. Cliff and Geegee knew Jim had been charged with the murder. Everyone did. All the TV channels had carried the story. It was big news in Toronto. An ex-cop from the big city charged with murder? The papers would be all over it.

  She told Cliff and Geegee some basics, little more than the news channels had reported. “I don’t believe Jim did it,” she said when she finished. Then she shrugged. “There’s nothing I can do to prove it. But I can see why he has been charged. It’s complex. Very complex.”

  “Funny,” Cliff said. “I had a student tell me today that he was going to give up trying to play the guitar. He said it was too complex for him. All them fingers on the strings, he said.” Cliff’s voice rose in pitch. He talked like an annoyed teenager. “I can’t keep track of them. How do you do that?” Cliff smiled and shook his head. “I told him to make it simple. Find a shortcut, I said. He asked how, and I told him to look for a shorter string. What I meant was, he needed to find another way to play the same note on a closer string. I call it a shorter string. You find a shorter string, and you can get to the note easier.”

  Cliff was trying to help by talking about what he knew best, which was guitars. Max knew little more about guitars than that they had strings. Guitars had nothing to do with keeping law and order. Or solving murders.

  Geegee changed the subject to all the garden work she had done that day. Cliff said he planned to paint the garage door brown. Geegee said it should stay white. Cliff said what they really needed was a new door. Max finished her coffee, thanked them both and went home.

  Hours later, lying in bed waiting to fall asleep, Max remembered Cliff’s words. Not the ones about garage doors. The ones about finding a shorter string when playing a guitar. She needed a shorter string to explain the telephone call that Jim said had come to their room in the inn. Was there something to explain Jim’s story about a phone call that the police said never happened?

  She woke sometime after 3:00 AM. She may have seen a shorter string after all. And she knew exactly where.

  SEVEN

  Max called Pam Rosart before leaving home in the morning. It was going to be one of those glorious summer days that seemed made for Muskoka. At the Ainslie Inn she found Pam waiting at the entrance. When she asked, “What’s up?” Max said, “Follow me.” She walked in to the inn, through the main doors, past the reception desk and pointed to the bank of telephones against the wall. “What are those?” she asked.

  Pam folded her arms and rolled her eyes. “A mistake.”

  “House phones?”

  “Yes,” Pam said. “When I saw the plans, I told the company to forget about them. Nobody uses house phones in hotels anymore. But they were in the budget, and some people can’t break old habits, so…”

  “Can somebody call a room here in the inn from one of them?”

  “That’s what they’re for.”

  “If they did, the call would not go through the switchboard, right?”

  “No, they’re just—” Pam began.

  “So it’s a shortcut past the switchboard. To reach somebody registered here in the inn.”

  “That’s one way of putting it. What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking I’d like to watch a video.”

  • • •

  Pam led Max to the security room next to her office. “We made copies of the videos for the OPP,” she said. She sat at a small control panel. “We kept the originals.” She began pressing buttons.

  “How many security cameras do you have?” Maxine asked.

  “It depends.” Pam moved a lever, and the screen lit up.

  “Depends on what?”

  “Some systems are portable. We move them around as we need them.”

  “Why move them around?”

  Pam smiled tightly. “People get to know where they are. And where they are not. They learn how to avoid the cameras. Both our staff and guests. We move the portables now and then so you can never be sure if you’re being watched. They can be anywhere in the resort at any time.” She turned a switch and pushed some buttons. “Here’s what the lobby camera saw.” The screen came alive to show the lobby of the inn. The date and time said it had been recorded at 10:00:00 PM Saturday night. “This is what we gave the OPP. The camera’s fixed and covers the whole area, but I can’t zoom with it.” She entered another date and time. “You’ve seen this, right?”

  “Don’t show me the girl and Jim,” Maxine said. “Show me the lobby starting at midnight.”

  Pam pushed more buttons until the time said 12:00:00 Sunday morning. In an upper corner of the screen was the bank of house phones. No one was using them.

  The women watched people walk across the lobby. An elderly man and woman shuffled past. When the man stopped to speak, the woman nodded and rested her head against him for a moment. Then they set off for the elevator again. Two young women crossed the lobby. One spoke and they both giggled as they walked. Others passed the camera. All looked weary from a day in the sun. There is nothing here to see, Max told herself.

  And there wasn’t. Until the screen read 12:06:17.

  That’s when a man entered the screen from the left. Too far from the camera to be seen in detail, he was wearing a T-shirt and athletic shorts. Max guessed he was in his late twenties, maybe early thirties. He walked straight to the house phones, picked up a receiver and punched in three numbers. Max was sure they were 5-1-1.

  “What time did the OPP ask you to start the video?” she asked.

  “They said from 12:10.” Pam’s eyes had not left the video image.

  “Are calls made from house phones recorded?”

  “No. The phones are on their own system.”

  At 12:06:56 the man hung up the phone. His hands in his pockets, he stood looking around the lobby. Then he turned and walked across the lobby to the lakeside door.

  “That’s the phone call to room 511,” Max said. “That’s why it didn’t show up on the computer.”

  “If they had asked me—the police,” Pam said, “we could have started the video earlier and seen him.”

  “They didn’t ask,” Max said, “because they didn’t want to know. They thought they had their man.”

  Pam nodded at the video screen. “Who was that man on the phone?”

  “I don’t know,” Max said. “But something about him is familiar.”

  When Pam asked if she should tell the OPP what they had found, Maxine said she would handle it. In her own way.

  • • •

  Max could tell nothing about the man who had used the house phone beyond guesses of his height and his age. Had she seen him before? She wasn’t sure. He could be any of thousands of young men who arrived in Muskoka on midsummer weekends.

  On her way back to the station, she thought about telling the OPP what she had found. She would say that someone had used a house phone to call a room in the inn, and there was no record of the call. It had been made around the time Jim Benson claimed Lana had received a call. They would ask her to tell them which room the man had dialed. She would say it looked like 511. Looked like? they would say with a laugh. They would ask if she could prove it was room 511. She would say no. They would ask if she could identify this man who made a phone call. Again she would have to say no. And they would laugh at her again.

  She did not want anyone laughing at her. More than anything, she did not want a macho OPP homicide cop laughing at her. So she wouldn’t call them. Not yet, anyway.

  • • •

  “Where’s Henry?” Maxine asked when she arrived at the police station.

  Margie looked up from her crossword. “Down on Main Street,” she said. “Bop Chadwick’s been trying to sell some junk to tourists.”

  Bruce Olivier Pratt Chadwick, or Bop (no one had called him Bruce since high s
chool), had grown up in Port Ainslie. When Bop’s parents sent him off to college, he came back with no diploma but with a pregnant young wife. He and his family moved to Toronto after the baby arrived. Some years later Bop returned without wife, child, job or future. Even his parents were gone, his mother from cancer and his father from a broken heart. This had happened more than ten years ago. Now all Bop had was an endless taste for alcohol.

  People in town liked Bop. Many gave him food, shelter and sometimes money for a bottle of cheap wine. Whenever Bop became a problem, Max or Henry would bring him in. A pot of hot coffee, a night in cell number two and Margie’s scrambled eggs and onions in the morning made him a new man. Or at least a sober one, and Bop would teeter off to a nearby park bench. On cold nights with nowhere to sleep, Bop would often wander in on his own and claim to have committed some otherwise unknown crime. Margie or Henry would put him in cell number two—it had a window facing the lake—and wake him in the morning.

  Max headed for her office.

  “And those reports came in,” Margie called after her.

  “What reports?”

  “On the names you got from that poor girl’s phone.” Margie followed her and handed Max several sheets of paper.

  “Thanks.” Max carried them to her desk and began turning the pages.

  There were five in all, listed by their last names and in alphabetical order. All were Toronto residents. The first was a woman named Kim Allen, who worked at a hair salon on Jarvis Street. The next two names belonged to men. One worked as a tailor on Queen Street, the other in a high-priced shoe store on Bloor Street. The fourth, another woman, lived in Kingston. None of those four had a police record.

  But the man on the last page did. In fact, he had much more than that.

  His name was Zeyer. The police knew of him. Based on his rap sheet, they knew him very well. Martin Yuri Zeyer was thirty-one years old. At age sixteen he had been charged with car theft. Later he faced three charges of assault on women and was found guilty of dealing drugs. By age twenty-eight he had served two terms in jail, one for six months and the other for two years.

  Subject remains active in narcotics trade, the report said. Lives well, claims to work as mechanic for source of income. Zeyer’s home address was given as Sparky’s Cycle Works, a known hangout for Toronto drug dealers.

  Max turned the page. At the sight of the face staring back at her, she gasped so loudly that Margie called out, “You all right in there?”

  To Max, Martin Yuri Zeyer’s narrow eyes, curly hair and cold smile added up to a man who could attract some women with a wink and a wave of his hand.

  It was also a face Max had seen recently. She had seen it as he stood near the grove of pines, watching Lana Parker’s body floating in the water. And she was sure it was the man on the video, calling room 511 from a house phone in the lobby of the Ainslie Inn.

  EIGHT

  More than anything else, Maxine wanted to be a good cop, which meant doing the right thing. The right thing to do now was to share everything she knew about the murder of Lana Parker with OPP Sergeant Stanton. To not report what she knew would mean concealing evidence.

  She called the OPP office in Cranston, fearing they would mock her.

  She was right.

  “So let me get this straight,” Stanton said. “You’ve got a guy using the house phones at the inn. But you don’t know who he called. Or what he said. You think you saw him at the scene when the body was found, but you can’t swear it in court. Have I got this right so far?”

  “He has a record for assault,” Max said. “On women.”

  “Can you connect him with the victim?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Not yet? When?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know.” Stanton’s sarcasm was thick and heavy. “Are you leaving anything out?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like having a good reason to call me about this?”

  “Look, Sergeant—” Max began.

  Stanton cut her off. “No, you look, Ms. Chief of Police. If you have feelings for your ex-husband, good for you. And good for him. But trying to pull us off his case with dumb hunches like this won’t work. We don’t use hunches. We don’t need them. We have a video of Jim Benson following the victim. We have his DNA under her fingernails. We have matching scratches on the suspect’s neck. Do you have anything like that?”

  Before Max could speak, Stanton went on. “He killed that woman, and we’re going to prove he did. So don’t bother us with hunches, all right? If you get something we can take to trial, call me and I’ll listen. Until then, go back to traffic duty in your little burg and leave serious stuff to us.” And he hung up.

  • • •

  “Henry’s on his way,” Margie said after Max hung up from her call to Stanton. She set a mug of tea on Max’s desk. “Bringing in Bop Chadwick. How’d you do with your call?”

  “I was told to stick to traffic duty. They think I’m trying to weaken their case against Jim.” She picked up the photo of Martin Zeyer. “I know this man was there when we recovered the body. I saw him, just for a second…”

  “For a second? In the dawn light?” Margie shook her head. “A good lawyer would tear that apart.” Margie turned to look out the window. “Here comes Henry with Bop. Poor soul looks a mess.” She meant Bop.

  Max followed Margie out to the office when Henry arrived. He was holding Bop by the elbow.

  “Mornin’, Margie,” Bop said. “Henry tells me you got a batch of butter tarts.” He turned to Max. “Mornin’, Chief.”

  Bop wore loud plaid shorts, plastic sandals and a yellow T-shirt with Westdale Warriors printed in green on the front. It wasn’t his clothes that caught Max’s eye, however. It was the silver chain that dangled from one of his hands. “Where did you get that?” she said and reached for it.

  Bop pulled his hand back. “I didn’t steal it,” he said, looking hurt. “I’m no thief. You know that.”

  “Let me see it,” Max said, and Bop handed it to her.

  “Was trying to sell it downtown,” Henry said. “No takers. It’s broken.”

  Max could see that the clasp was closed. Someone had snapped the chain by pulling it apart. “Where did you get this?” she asked.

  “Found it,” Bop said. “Down by the lake. Across from the inn.”

  “In the pine trees?”

  Bop nodded. “Under a picnic table. See, I was sleepin’ there last night. On the table. Opened my eyes this mornin’, looked down and saw somethin’ shining. Most of it was under some old leaves.” He lowered his voice. “What do you think it’s worth?”

  “It’s a treasure.”

  “Yeah? Really?” Bop held out his hand. “I’ll settle for five bucks.”

  Max was walking back to her office. “Margie, pour Bop some tea and give him a couple of butter tarts. I’ve got some thinking to do.”

  • • •

  “This is the chain I saw around the victim’s neck,” Max said to Henry a few minutes later. The broken chain lay on her desk. “I’m sure of it.” She slid the photo of Martin Zeyer to him. “And this is the man—”

  “Who was there when we arrived.” Henry pulled the photo closer. “He was standing behind Perry Ahenakew and Bucky what’s his name, the tow-truck guy. He wouldn’t look at me.” Henry tapped the photo with his finger. “When I started taking names, he was gone. Didn’t matter. He was just an onlooker.”

  “He was more than that.” Max nodded as she spoke. “He was a murderer. And still is.”

  • • •

  Max told Henry about the video showing the man using a house phone at the resort. Margie stood in the open doorway, listening.

  “Stanton isn’t buying it,” Max said. She held up the broken chain. “He won’t buy this either. I can’t swear this was the chain around the victim’s neck. No court would believe me.”

  “So why is it important?” Henry asked.

  “Becau
se I know Jim Benson did not kill that woman,” Max said. “What would be the motive for someone else to kill her? It wasn’t sex. And she knew nobody else here that we know of. So it had to be robbery.”

  “You said there was a ring on the chain,” Margie said.

  “A big one,” Max said. “Big enough for someone to kill for it.” She looked at Henry. “Get Bop to show you where he found this chain. Line it up with the location of the body. Then follow the line, looking for the ring. Rake the sand. Look under leaves.”

  “That’s all?” Henry said. “We don’t get a team, maybe one of those things that finds stuff under ground?”

  Max shook her head. “Not yet.”

  Henry shrugged. “Come on, Bop,” he said as he left her office. “We’re on a treasure hunt. Bring one of those tarts with you.”

  “Not much chance of finding the ring that way,” Margie said when Henry and Bop were gone.

  “It’s worth a look,” Max said.

  “Someone else may have found it by now.”

  “Maybe. But I don’t think so.” Max picked up the photo of Zeyer. “If this guy is the killer, why did he hang around until morning? She was dead shortly after midnight.” She looked at Margie. “We don’t know why he murdered that poor girl. But he did it in the dark of night. So why was he still there when the sun was coming up?”

  “To look for something.” Margie smiled and nodded. “Probably the ring. Because it was worth a lot of money.”

  “More than that,” Max said. “I think it was because the ring could be traced back to him. The victim told Jim someone had given it to her a couple of weeks ago. I remember that ring. You couldn’t miss it. We would be able to trace a ring like that and maybe put him at the scene of the murder.” She held the chain up for Margie. “This snapped when it was yanked off the victim’s neck. Pulled hard, in anger. The same anger that I think made him kill her. Then he went looking for the ring.”