Hook, Line, and Homicide

by Mark Richard Zubro

  11

  Paul Turner and Buck Fenwick were hunched over the Formica kitchen table on Turner’s houseboat. Between them were several boxes of Timbits from the local Tim Hortons. In the Chicago area these would be doughnut holes from a Dunkin’ Donuts type of place. Turner had once suggested that Fenwick call ahead to the nearest franchise in Cathura so they would be certain to have a supply on hand large enough to keep Fenwick satisfied. Fenwick had thought this was a logical precaution. They were sipping tepid coffee.

  Fenwick was saying, “Why don’t you gain weight from eating these? You eat as many as I do.”

  “No one could eat as many as you do.”

  “Nearly as many.”

  “Maybe so,” Turner replied, “but perhaps my consumption of everything else is less than yours. I like these so I eat less of other stuff. I’m told that is the new diet craze, eating less.”

  Paul had checked with the boys after everyone was awake. Jeff was determined to stick to the fishing trip. Paul could already imagine the eleven-year-old’s voice, six months from now, bragging to his buddies about finding a body on their trip. For the moment it was still too raw an experience for all of them. Brian said he’d prefer to stay. Ian was temporarily absent, and he didn’t know how to get in touch with Mrs. Talucci. Paul and the Fenwicks had consulted. The girls hadn’t seen any grisly body remains, and at the moment there seemed to be more excitement than fear. For now they would all stay. And Turner was determined not to run in the face of homophobia. But if his children really needed to leave, he would consider it. Their safety and their fears trumped a fight for gay dignity.

  The kids had all gone into Kenora with Madge and Ben to purchase supplies. Normally they’d have been up at five to go fishing. Today they had barely gotten to bed by then. Turner had slept until eleven. He didn’t feel quite awake. Before the crowd left for town, he’d again checked with his sons. Both seemed to be fine. Jeff, the finder of the body, seemed reasonably calm although quieter than usual. During their late breakfast, his tendency to burble incessantly had mercifully been absent. Paul wasn’t sure finding a corpse a day was quite the regimen he wanted his kid to start even if it would cause a halt to his seemingly endless chatter. Paul was proud his kid was bright, but there were times when he wished the kid would ask fewer questions.

  At breakfast Paul had caught Brian staring into the distance. Being the first on the scene to help his brother had shaken him considerably. He hadn’t been his usual self, eager to go rushing to meet his peers and make noise as only teenagers know how to do. His appetite had been blunted. Normally you couldn’t fill Brian up or shut Jeff up.

  Rain had started in midmorning and it had continued to sprinkle intermittently. Madge and Ben had been willing to take all the kids into town. In a situation rare for him, Brian had not objected to tagging along with the younger kids.

  Paul Turner heard the thud of feet on the deck of the houseboat. Ian’s face appeared at the window screen. “You won’t believe this,” he announced. “I’ve been awake all night.”

  “Well, throw you a fish,” Fenwick said.

  Turner said, “I was running around until early this morning. Could you make this short?”

  Ian banged open the screen door and flourished the local paper under Turner’s nose. It was the Cathura Post with the headline splashed across the front page LOCAL HERO DIES with a subheading about a Chicago cop’s kid finding the corpse.

  Turner put a hand on Ian’s arm to stop the flourishing. “Yes, I know,” Turner said. “Remember? My kid fished up the dead body.”

  “But there’s been lots of them.”

  “My kid’s been fishing up lots of dead bodies? He’s been keeping them from me?”

  “You hate that in an eleven-year-old,” Fenwick said. “For a teenager it’s still a headache, but you know how teenagers are, secretive.”

  Ian attempted to ignore them. “Six bodies in the past four years, seven now. All college guys.”

  “It’s a crime wave,” Fenwick said. “My life is packed with dead bodies in Chicago. I knew I felt something was missing up here.”

  “Well, they’ve got a passel of them,” Ian said. “From all the communities around here.”

  “Maybe it’s like an interlake competition, a contest,” Fenwick said. “Maybe each of these little towns is keeping score. Where were they from?”

  “Two each from Kenora, Sioux Narrows, and Cathura.”

  “Tied,” Fenwick said. “The cable networks should be able to beat that to death. They’ve beaten to death less.” Turner knew that Fenwick agreed with someone’s analysis when cable news started—that there wasn’t enough news to fill twenty-four hours. Fenwick’s frequently expressed opinion was that this continued to be true. Turner agreed with him.

  Ian said, “This one breaks the tie.”

  Fenwick said, “Cathura wins.”

  “How did our guy die?” Turner asked.

  “He drowned,” Fenwick said. “Lots of water around here. That can’t be unusual. Doesn’t sound like murder.”

  “The provincial coroner is going to do an autopsy.”

  “Did they autopsy the others?” Turner asked.

  “No. Everybody assumed they all drowned.”

  Fenwick said, “Big damn lake. People drown. Sun rises in east. Stop the presses.”

  “But there are some locals who think it’s been murder all along. They’re worried they’ve got a serial killer on the loose.”

  “And they think so why?” Fenwick asked.

  Turner said, “Something fishy is going on.”

  Ian and Fenwick glared at him. Fenwick said, “I do the ghastly puns in this relationship.”

  Ian said, “Listening to the two of you spouting any kind of ghastly crap is painful.”

  Fenwick said, “I’m also in charge of ghastly crap in this relationship.”

  Ian said, “Will you guys be serious?”

  “I was being serious,” Fenwick said.

  “Is there a connection between these seven?” Turner asked. “Did they know each other? Were they friends? Drug runners?”

  “Not that I know of, so far,” Ian said.

  Turner said, “Okay, why would it be murder? Is there a problem locally? They don’t like the chief of police? The wind shifted? They had a dream? They did a tarot reading? They got a special message from their local goddess? They have forensic evidence bubbling up from the bottom of the lake?”

  Fenwick said, “I prefer neon arrows above the killer’s head that say ‘he did it.’ They have any of those?”

  Ian poured himself some coffee and joined them at the table. “The people with suspicions called the Ontario Provincial Police. Those cops wouldn’t intervene. They said it was up to the chief of police. Then I ran into some local guy, Howard Coates. He says it’s too many coincidences. It’s in the article. He thinks it’s murder. Normally there’s about eight or nine drownings in the lakes around here per year. In the past couple years they’ve had all these extras.”

  “Six,” Fenwick said. “Stop the presses. Rewrite the statistics books.”

  “Seven now,” Ian said.

  Turner said, “Run into? You don’t just ‘run into’ a guy making accusations of murder.”

  Ian said, “Fine. I talked to the reporter who wrote the articles on the other six. He told me to talk to Coates.”

  “They’re friends? Enemies?” Fenwick asked.

  “The owner of the paper edits out a lot of the speculation in the articles.”

  “Speculation is news?” Turner asked.

  Fenwick said, “It is on the FOXNews network.” Fenwick was referring to the channel that spent most of its time shilling for various right-wing causes.

  Ian said, “This Howard guy doesn’t sound like a raving idiot to me. He seems sensible.”

  “Good for Ed,” Fenwick said. “Why are you telling us this?”

  “I figured you’d be interested professionally.”

  Fenwick said, �
��I’m not planning to get drunk and drown. In fact I haven’t been drunk since my brother’s wedding when I was eighteen. He’s been divorced four times. Leaving my loony brother aside, I have no jurisdiction here. We have no standing.”

  Ian looked at Turner. “Your kid found the body. Doesn’t that make you interested?”

  “Technically it found us,” Turner said.

  “Yeah, it thumped into your boat. You get a lot of bodies thumping into your boat?”

  “Not on this lake,” Turner said, “but there was that time—”

  Fenwick interrupted, “There I was, motoring through the Amazon. Three of our guides and two of the other people in the party, including an Albanian dwarf, had mysteriously disappeared. They all did a thumping-on-the-boat dance both before and after they’d been sacrificed to a variety of mysterious causes. I’d just—”

  Turner said, “No, no, no. It wasn’t the Amazon. We’ve never been to the Amazon.”

  “We haven’t? It worked for the story.”

  Ian said, “I’ve been trying to ignore your pathetic humor. You guys are not funny.”

  Fenwick said, “That’s been long since established in all the finer marinas on every lake within a hundred miles.”

  “A thousand miles,” added Turner.

  Ian said, “There are no fine marinas. The ones I’ve seen are managed by people who look more run-down than their shoddy, crumbling cabins, camps, and piers.”

  Fenwick said, “What were you expecting? The Wilderness Ritz? Didn’t you or your family ever go camping or fishing?”

  “Fishing, like golf, is not in the gay gene.”

  “I go fishing,” Paul said.

  “We’ve been worried about you,” Ian replied.

  “I’m not,” Paul said.

  Ian said, “You’re not interested in investigating? How can you not be? One of your kids was fishing and snagged the body. What if one of you had been swimming, or”—he pointed at Fenwick—“one of your girls had pulled it out of the water?”

  Fenwick said, “Maybe they’d have been tied to a buzz saw and needed to be rescued just in time.”

  “Or the railroad tracks,” Turner added.

  “That makes no sense,” Ian said.

  Turner said, “We try not to use the s word around Fenwick. Him and sense don’t often get along.”

  “‘We’ who?” Fenwick demanded.

  “Anyone who’s ever met you,” Ian said.

  Fenwick said, “Ian, you’ve obviously bought the whole conspiracy theory—”

  “Don’t,” Ian said.

  Fenwick continued unabashed, “—hook, line, and—”

  Ian groaned.

  Fenwick finished, “—homicide.”

  Ian said, “If I have any luck on this fishing trip, I’ll be the next victim.”

  Turner said, “Of course I’m concerned for my kids. They may be used to my job. They might have seen a lot of death and destruction on television and video games, but the real thing is different. I don’t know the young man who drowned. I’m not sure I care or why I should. He was a homophobic asshole the other night. I don’t know the local law enforcement people. I don’t want to be involved with them if I don’t have to. The police last night seemed methodical and efficient if a little brusque and off-putting. The chief of police seemed a little too eager to believe the wrong side in a dispute. That’s stupid, but not provably criminal. It’s his jurisdiction, not mine.”

  Ian said, “We’re against murdering homophobic assholes?”

  “Now who’s not being serious?” Turner asked. “Sure, one less homophobic asshole is in theory a good thing.” Turner remembered one of his favorite sayings from The Lord of the Rings, when the wizard Gandalf is speaking to Frodo, who has just wished death upon the villain Gollum. Gandalf says to him, as Turner now quoted to Ian, “‘I daresay many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice.’ Maybe I’ve seen too many dead bodies in my career. This one has nothing to do with us. Take our Chicago police detective stars and add two bucks and you can get a cup of coffee at Starbucks.”

  “But this Coates guy can’t get a hearing from the local cops. They ignore him.”

  “Then he’s lucky,” Fenwick said. “If he’s that interested or that much of a pain in the neck, he should be their number one suspect.”

  “Just because somebody’s interested doesn’t make him a suspect.”

  “Too interested, makes a suspect, does,” Fenwick said.

  “You swallow a Yoda pill recently?” Ian asked.

  Turner said, “So Howard thinks what?”

  “That somebody pushed them. They were all drunk. They had all been drinking at the same local establishment on the waterfront.”

  Fenwick said, “You said they were found at various points around the lake.”

  Ian said, “But all were seen drinking in Cathura the night they died.”

  Turner pointed out, “There aren’t that many local establishments that stay open on the waterfront after ten at night. It’s a small town.”

  “Guys get drunk, fall in the water, die,” Fenwick said.

  “These were all young, athletic college kids,” Ian said.

  Fenwick said, “College kids drink a lot.”

  “So do cops.”

  “You got a set of them turning up dead in the lake?” Fenwick asked.

  “Not yet,” Ian said. He swirled his coffee around in his cup. “Several people from the earlier drownings have filed lawsuits against the bar for serving them drinks.”

  “Dead people have been filing lawsuits?” Turner asked.

  “Their relatives,” Ian said. “And they’re suing the town for not putting up barriers along the waterfront.”

  “But it’s a parkway along the shore,” Fenwick said. “Hundreds of people stroll along there every night. We’ve strolled along the shore. Big deal.”

  Ian gulped more coffee. He said, “No, you guys have got to listen. There is intrigue in this town. It is a veritable hotbed of dastardly doings.”

  Fenwick yawned. “I hope you don’t use that many clichés when you write.”

  “Everybody’s a critic. Come on, you guys. You’re cops. You’ve got to at least be a little bit interested in this, maybe at least as an intellectual exercise.”

  “Let me give it due thought,” Fenwick said. He paused for three seconds. “I have given the subject all the consideration it deserves, and the answer is, I don’t care. I’m on vacation. I’m fishing. We have nothing to do with this. They have police here. Let them earn their doughnuts.”

  “But there’s all kinds of cloak-and-dagger crap. What about the big lodges who are fighting the conservationists?”

  Turner said, “What does that have to do with dead college-age kids?”

  “Scarth Krohn worked for some of the lodges. As far as I can find out, he took a few college classes. Supposedly still did. Maybe he met some of the dead kids.”

  Turner said, “Half the kids up here work for one, some, or all of the lodges. They do freelance guide duty. They tote barges and lift bales. They do a million things for the tourist trade.”

  Fenwick stood up and said, “It is nap time on the Fenwick vacation time schedule.”

  “Nap,” Ian said. “You can nap when there’s murder afoot?”

  “I can nap when there’s murder underfoot, above foot, horizontal and vertical foot. Naps are the staff of life. I’m good at them. Like I always say, when you’re good at something, stick with it. Always go with your strength, and one of my great strengths is napping.” He washed his coffee cup out, stuck it in the dish drainer, strolled onto the deck, and lumbered over to his family’s boat.

  Turner knew Fenwick would be asleep in seconds. Fenwick always declared that naps were second only to chocolate as the loves of his life. Turner had noted that he never uttered this sentiment within hearing distance of his wife or kids. Turner knew that Fenwick
was totally devoted to them although Fenwick would rather rip out his tongue than admit that to very many people.

  Ian said, “Come on, Paul, even if you’re not interested, let me tell you, there is some nasty stuff in this town. Look what’s happened to us since we’ve been here.”

  Ian was a friend. They’d been lovers many years ago. Paul kept his sigh to himself. He said, “Don’t go getting involved in this. There is no benign amateur sleuth immunity. Not in the real world. If they are halfway competent cops, and you seem like you’re too interested, they will go after you.”

  “When have you not known me to be discreet?”

  “I have a list that has grown extensively over the years. Big charts, dates, times, who was present.”

  “Fenwick has had an evil effect on you. How about this: Did you know the owner of the houseboat company that rents you these things is a homophobic pig?”

  “And how did you find that out?”

  “I have four sources.”

  “How did you get them to talk?”

  “Everybody wants to talk about the murders. You get them talking, they tell everything. It is the topic of discussion up and down Main Street. People are talking—tourists, year-rounders, everybody.”

  “And murder and homophobia came up in the same conversation how?”

  “Well, funny you should ask. There I was.”

  “Yeah, right, once upon a time. Get on with it.”

  “The guy who rents you these houseboats owns the dock, the marina, that little restaurant, and the bar. The bar where supposedly all these people had been drinking before they bought it in the briny deep.”

  “This is freshwater. I don’t think it’s briny.”

  “He owns the damn bar. It’s a popular spot in town. There’s only three really big establishments. During fishing season it’s packed. Well, Howard Coates, the guy the reporter told me about, also owns a restaurant/bar.”