When the Killing Starts

by Ted Wood

  "Yes, to the cop who's filling in for me at Murphy's Harbour. We got a good latent off the box I kept it in. I turned that over to Irv Goldman in Fifty-two Division."

  He glanced up at Elmer, who hadn't been invited to sit down. "Have you talked to Irv?"

  "Will do," Elmer said, and left.

  Burke parted his feet again and squinted at me through his cigar smoke. "Sounds phony as hell," he said. "I'm not saying you're lying, but you have to admit it sounds like bullshit. Somebody steals something from your house, kills this broad, and plants the evidence."

  "I'm being set up." So far I was still on top of my anger, but I could feel it boiling up inside me. Pretty soon I would have the urge to shout, and then they would be confident I'd done what they thought. I decided to get all the skeletons out of the closet. "Pretty soon you're going to hear another thing that sounds like evidence."

  He swung his feet down and reached out to tap his cigar into the ashtray. I noticed it was filled with ash but had no butts. Did he eat them along with the little plastic holder? "What more'm I gonna hear?"

  "You'll hear that I was paid twenty-five grand by a woman who hated Norma Michaels's guts and stood to gain from her death."

  His expression didn't change, so I knew I wasn't telling him anything fresh, but he took his cigar out of his mouth and waved it vaguely. "Fill me in," he said, "all the way in. Fact, tell you what, why don't I get a tape recorder in here and we get it all down."

  "Feel free," I said, and sat back while he bellowed for a junior detective, who got the machine and set it up. Then Burke waved the man away and spoke, enunciating carefully for the sake of the machine.

  "This tape is being made at the request of Detective Inspector Burke. Mr. Reid Bennett, chief of police, Murphy's Harbour, has volunteered to help us in our investigation of the Norma Michaels homicide. He is not under arrest, he has not been cautioned. This is for the record only." Then he nodded to me, and I told him and the machine the whole story, starting with my first meeting with the woman in the bar.

  I'm a professional, and the statement didn't need any questions from him to keep it on track. When I'd brought it up-to-date, he asked a couple of details. Where was the son, Jason Michaels? I didn't know. Who did I think had broken into my house and stolen the dog tags?

  That question made me frown and think for a moment. "I'm not sure. But it looks to me as if Michaels Senior set it up. He pulled that stunt on me with the receipt. It looks as if he has the most to gain from making me look guilty. I'm not sure what he's up to, but all the fingers point at him."

  "You think he sent somebody up there to go through your house and come up with something to plant in his house, then went home and offed his old lady?"

  "Makes more sense than anything else I can think of," I said.

  Burke ground out his cigar butt on the edge of the ashtray, then dropped it into the wastebasket. "More sense than any alternative except one," he said.

  He reached out and turned off the tape recorder and looked at me out of big brown eyes with deep blue bags under them that sagged down into the pouches of his face. "You've been a copper long enough to know that the guy we suspect the most is you."

  SEVENTEEN

  I kept my temper. He was doing his job, nothing more. "Look, what you've got is circumstantial evidence. Two items. First, the receipt, which I wrote yesterday. Second, the dog tag. That's it. Period."

  "I know," he said comfortably. "But that's more'n I get on ninety-nine percent of homicides. Why should I take your word for it?"

  "Because we both know I didn't do this. That's why. That dog tag lives up in Murphy's Harbour, in a tin box in my house. Why would I have taken it out of there and come down to Toronto to strangle some woman with the cord?"

  "Why not? Lots of guys are proud of their service, wear their tags all the time. The way it looks, you and her were down to your underwear, wrestling on the couch. She pisses you off. You strangle her and take off. You got problems with that?"

  "I took those things off the day I got out of the service, and I've never had them on since. They're in a tin box with my goddamn medals, my father's medals from the big war, and some souvenirs of my mother. Ask anybody if they've ever seen me wear them."

  "Like who would you suggest?" I got the feeling he didn't think I'd murdered Norma Michaels but wished I had. It would have made his work load a lot lighter. He might have been able to get home in time to watch the late movie with his wife. It would probably be the first time he'd made it in a couple of years.

  "Like " I paused. "Not that many people ever see me with my clothes off. But I guess George Horn has seen me swimming at my house up north. He's the deputy copper there, a law student from the U. of T. And then there's my girlfriend."

  "You've got a girlfriend?" He cooed it disbelievingly. Just a ploy, trying to get me mad to see if I would give anything away.

  "Did you think I kicked with the other foot, Inspector?"

  He shrugged. "You've got the reputation of being kind of a loner," he said.

  "What's this, psychographic-profile time? You've got me pegged as some kind of guy who keeps to himself until the full moon, then heads down to Rosedale and strangles some drunk housewife with my dog-tag cord?"

  "How did you know she was drunk?" He stood up suddenly, looming over his desk.

  "Because I called on her last night around seven. She hauled out the rye and tried to get me paralytic. I took half of the first one she poured and left. Ask the maid. She let me in, and she heard the noise when her boss threw the glass at the wall. But you know that already, don't you?"

  "You telling me how to conduct an investigation, Bennett?" He shouted it, but I didn't flinch. Maybe it was an interrogation ploy of his; maybe he was teed off. I didn't know, or care much. "We've got hard evidence on you, Bennett. You can try to dismiss it, but you're tied to this family pretty close. Then we get two items of evidence that make it look as if you're the killer. How much more do I need?"

  "Motive might be a start," I said, and he threw his hands up in the air explosively.

  "Motive? Motive? I've got twenty-five thousand dollars' worth of motive." He shouted it, but he didn't look at me. He stood there sweating in his cheap suit and hated me and the dead woman and everything else that stood between him and his pension. But he didn't look me in the eye.

  "Why don't you take a close look at my face?" I asked him, and he glanced at me in surprise. "Not because I'm Robert Redford. Take a look at the fact that I've got no goddamn eyebrows left on my head and these red patches aren't sunburn. They're the price I paid on this job for that twenty-five grand. I earned it by getting the Michaels kid away from a mob of killers. I got shot at and burned, but I made it without killing anybody. That's where your mysterious twenty-five grand comes into it." He sat down, still not looking at me, and got out his cigar package. It was empty, and he crushed it and threw it into the waste can disgustedly. "All right. You're a goddamn hero. So what?"

  "So why haven't you got the Michaels family in here? Why aren't you asking the father how come he set his own son, well, stepson, up with Freedom for Hire, hoping the kid would get killed? And ask him why his girlfriend then came around to me and asked me to get the kid back? And ask him how come Dunphy and Wallace knew where she lived? And why they went up there and drowned her in her own tub?"

  "That's what you'd do, is it?" He sat down, sighing as if it had taken a major effort, opened the top right drawer of his desk, and took out a fresh pack of Old Ports.

  "Yeah, that's what I'd do. And I'd also get hold of Jason Michaels and ask him where he got to after he waved bye-bye from the airport at North Bay."

  He ripped the cellophane wrapper off his package, doing it slowly as if the action gave him real pleasure. "Good thinking, sir. Have you ever considered police work as a career?"

  "Have you done it yet?"

  "Yes, I've done it. And I've done every other goddamn thing you learned about in the Boy's Own Big Book of Detectin
g."

  "And what did the guy say?"

  Burke dug out his lighter first, then a cigar, and lit up before answering. "He told me to rub salt in my ass."

  "Just like that?"

  "No, it was much more polite. But he told me he had no information for me and sent me on my way."

  "And you went? Just like that? Turned around and left? Or did you back away, bowing?"

  Burke blew out a long, tired plume of smoke. "You're a pain. You know that?"

  "Seems to be the popular opinion. Did you find the kid as well?"

  "No." He looked at me out of his tired eyes, wondering, I guess, if I might be able to lighten his work load. He drew on his cigar and gave me the rest of the story. It wasn't very much.

  "The pilot of the company jet says he landed at Buttonville, north of Toronto. His own car, that's the pilot's, was there but the kid skipped, didn't wait to ride into town with the pilot. He phoned for a cab and left."

  "The cab must have come from Markham. Did your guys check?"

  "Of course they did. Didn't help. The cab dropped the kid at the nearest subway stop, top end of Yonge Street in Toronto. He could have gone anywhere from there."

  "Where does he live, anyway? I don't figure him for a homebody. Probably got a pad somewhere fancy."

  "Not that fancy. He lives in the City Center, up behind Maple Leaf Gardens. Apartment eleven sixteen, west block. I've got a uniformed man over there waiting to see if he shows up."

  "You know, he might have done this," I said carefully. "When I mentioned his mother, he sneered. He despised her for putting up with the husband."

  "Sure. So he got up to your place, stole your dog tags, and left one at the scene. Right?"

  I shrugged. "Yeah, I know, it's more organized than that. If he'd come in and found her drunk and got mad at her, he might have hit her on the head with a Ming vase or something, but he wouldn't have strangled her. That's not typical."

  "How not typical?" Burke put his feet back on his desk, but he edged his chair away so he could look at me while he talked. He wasn't just listening now, he was working, watching every move I made.

  "You've investigated more homicides than me, but the only stranglings I've ever seen have been sexual. One of them was a straight murder, the other was kinky. The strangler was just trying to crank up the other party's orgasm, only he got carried away."

  Burke nodded. "Yeah, I had one like that once," he said, and I wondered why he was taking such a soft line. Was I off his suspect list, or was he trying to lull me? Then he dropped the other shoe.

  "You were right about one thing."

  "What was that?"

  "Sex," he said, and sighed out a long blue column of smoke. "Yeah, this one was a sex killing. The broad was in a housecoat, nothing on under it."

  "And she'd had recent sexual activity?"

  He nodded. "Very recent. The forensic guys got a good semen sample?"

  "What blood type?"

  He grinned at me like a big Cheshire cat. "You figure I'm gonna say AB negative and you'll throw your hands up and say, 'See, I told you it wasn't me.' Right?"

  "You're telling me it's O positive, the same as mine."

  He nodded. "O positive. Same as yours."

  "The same as half the goddamn population," I said angrily.

  He waved me down. "Yeah, I know. But it's another piece of evidence."

  "That plus two bucks'll buy you another five Old Ports."

  He looked at me dreamily through the smoke and said, "You know, my kid, nineteen, he's in college. Ryerson, taking journalism. I found him smokin' up. He said, 'It's the pressure, Dad.'" He snorted. "Pressure. An' now you're on my case for smokin' cigars." He reached out and tapped the ash on top of the pile in the ashtray. "Advice I don't need, Bennett. I need a goddamn break."

  It was my cue, and I took it. "You mean you'd like me to look around for you, see if I can come up with anything else?"

  He swung his feet down and stood up, glowering at me around his cigar. "You know damn well I can't say that to you. You're not on the department, you're a suspect, for Crissakes. How can I ask you to go out and do my job for me just because I've got fourteen unsolved homicides, three accidental deaths, and a slew of missing persons to worry about an' only five guys assigned to me? I can't ask you to help."

  I stood up. "Let me rephrase that. I have some uncompleted business to discuss with Jason Michaels. I was thinking of looking for him. If I should encounter him someplace, could I bring your dilemma to his attention?"

  He grinned and took the cigar out of his mouth with his left hand, sticking out his right to me. "Very Christian," he said, and we shook. "Now piss off, will ya."

  I ran into Elmer Svensen in the hall. He was hurrying back the way I'd just come. He checked his stride and held out one hand to me. "What happened?"

  "Cross me off your worry list; the big man set me free. I'm looking for Jason Michaels. If I find him, I'll call you in."

  He grinned, a quick, nervous flicker that died instantly. "Good. Louise would've had my guts for garters."

  "Worry not. I'm out of here. See you at Louise's."

  "If I ever get off work," he said gloomily, and turned away again.

  I needed my car, so I took a cab back to Louise's house, catching her putting the kids to bed. Sam was in Jack's room, lying beside the bed. He stood up and wagged his tail when I tapped and came in. Louise was listening to Jack saying his prayers. He was at an age when he figured religion was redundant, but Louise still takes it seriously. For a while, as a little girl, she had almost decided to become a nun. I stood and waited until they were finished, Jack peering around at me as he gabbled through it. Then I said, "Hi, folks, I'm home."

  "For keeps?" Louise asked. "I can make you some supper."

  "A burger would be good, if you did one too many on the grill. Could you stick it in the microwave for me, please?"

  "Tell me a story, Uncle Reid," Jack begged. "I was gonna watch the movie, but Mom won't let me."

  "Good." I sided with authority. "TV is for losers. You should read more."

  He pouted but didn't argue. He got the same line from his mother. "Listen. I'll start on one of your books, just one chapter, if you'll hand Sam back to me. You know how, right?"

  "Okay." He sat up in bed. Louise winked at me and left. Jack called, "Here Sam," and Sam stood up, looking at me and wagging his tail. I could have taken him away, but I never do. It's part of his training to do as he's told without question. I don't want to break the pattern. Jack rubbed Sam's head and said, "Good boy. Go with Reid," and Sam broke away from his hand and fawned around me like a puppy.

  I bent down and fussed him. For four years he's been about the only permanence I've had in my life, and we're bonded pretty tight. Jack looked on enviously. "He didn't play like that with me," he said. "He chased a ball and played, but not like that."

  "He thinks he's my brother," I minimized. "Now, what's it going to be, the Hardy Boys or The Wind in the Willows?"

  "Mom's always saying I oughta read that," he said, settling down under the covers, "but it's got a lot of big words in it."

  "It's a hell of a story, though. You listen." I got the book, a worn old copy that my father had bought me when I was close to Jack's age. Like a lot of working-class Brits, he was a big reader, and he steered us onto good books at a time when most kids were depending on Bugs Bunny for intellectual stimulation.

  A quarter of an hour later I left Jack reading chapter two on his own and came down for my burger. Louise had fixed a salad to go with it and served it on a crusty Italian roll. I dug in happily. "You want a beer with it?" she asked, reaching for the fridge door.

  "No, thanks. I have to go out again. I'll take a glass of milk, please."

  She poured it and sat down opposite me, waiting patiently until I'd finished eating before she asked, "What's going on, Reid? Elmer came here as grim as death. Now you're going out again. What's happening?"

  "It's the murder of these two wo
men, the one drowned in her tub and the other one last night. It's all to do with the Michaels family, the people who had me get their boy back from playing soldiers. I'm involved, so the police have asked me to help sort things out."

  "And that's it? All of it?" She stood up and put my dishes in the sink. "You know, you make me mad, you guys. You and Elmer both. You're policemen, and you edit the facts down so far that there's nothing left over for your family."

  I pushed my chair back and picked up the milk. "Think yourself lucky, Lou. We do a job that's dirty a lot of the time, misery and pain and ugliness, and we don't want you to get any of it on you. That's what makes it tough on police marriages. You're out all day dealing with filth, and when you come home, you want to escape from it. If you bring it home with you, it makes your family as miserable as you are, doing the job."

  "And if you don't bring it home?" she asked softly. She's too intelligent for games. She wants facts, and she's strong enough to face them.

  "Sometimes, if you feel you can't bring it home, it turns you to drinking too much or to other women, cheap women that you feel won't be hurt by contact with the seamy crap you have to put up with. What you want, need, I should say, is a woman who can welcome you home whatever mood you're in and not figure that you're mad at her when you don't want to talk."

  She ran water into the sink and washed off the dishes. "Man must work, and woman must wait," she said.

  I stood up and put my hand on her shoulder. "Come on, Lou. Don't tell me you and Elmer are having problems?"

  "Not until tonight," she said. "He hasn't had a drink since we met. We've been out to cop parties where well-meaning friends shove doubles into his hand, and he never touches them. And he's loving and funny, and he adores the kids. No. No problems, until he walks in on duty and I realize that I only know half of him, the off-duty half."

  "That's the real half," I said. "The tough part is something he puts on with his uniform or with the clothes he wears to the detective office. It's a hard shell you grow so the crud doesn't touch you. Don't worry. He isn't going to bring any of it home."