by Ted Wood
I had to give Ms. Frazer marks for fairness. If she was angry that I was a friend of Doug’s she never showed it. She protested politely when I paid for lunch, then thanked me and drove me back to my car. Sam was none the worse for his long wait but I let him out for a stretch, and stood to watch the skiers having their fun in the bright sunshine, then went back to town. It was just after one o’clock and there was nothing I could do until I saw Hinton at his office so I took time out to go for a run with Sam. The streets were clear of snow but tike sidewalks were icy in places so we took it easy and covered only three miles. I showered and was waiting at the town’s neat new police station when Pat Hinton arrived at four.
He was different at work than he had been at home, more serious and careful. “The chief’s not here or I’d take you in to see him first,” he said. “He’ll know soon enough that you’re in town. I don’t want him thinking I’m getting outa line. If he says no dice, that’s the end of it.”
“I understand. Thanks for taking the gamble.” I followed him into the detective office. It was typical of a hundred I’ve seen, brightly tit, the walls covered with a clutter of photographs and notices. There were four desks in the room, pushed into two back-to-back groupings. A couple of other detectives were putting their coats on, getting ready to leave. Pat introduced me. “Guys, this is Reid Bennett. He’s a chief from Canada. Reid, this is Lieutenant Cassidy and Fred Morgan.”
Morgan stuck his hand out first. “Glad to know ya, Reid. Is that police chief or Indian chief?” He was laughing, the clown of the twosome. There always is one.
I shook hands. “Police, but it’s a phony title. I’m the whole department.” Now Cassidy shook hands. “Hi. You’re a friend of Doug Ford’s, am I right?”
“Yeah. We were in the service together, Lieutenant. His wife called me to come on down when this happened.” I was careful with him, giving him his rank. No cop likes to think someone has come to question his findings. From the look of Cassidy he was ultra-touchy. He was lean and intense, the kind of guy who has his sights set on promotion.
He looked at me, out of narrowed eyes. “Well, I wish I could say this is a crock, but it looks bad. We had no choice but to charge him.”
“I understand. I’d have done the same myself, based on what I’ve heard. But you know how it is. We go back a long way.”
Morgan asked, “Were you in Nam with him?”
“Yes. Marine Corps.”
I could tell they had worked together for a long time. Cassidy asked the next question, not even pausing. “But you’re Canadian, right? How come you were in the service?”
“Our country made a kind of trade-off with yours. We took in a whole bunch of draft dodgers but a lot of guys came down here for a chance to fight. It worked out even.”
That completed the formalities. Morgan said, “Well, I guess Pat’ll walk you through it all. I’ve got to take my son to his hockey practice.”
Cassidy looked at his watch. “I’ve got a little while. What can I tell you?”
“I’d like to hear your end of the case. Pat told me you were the arresting officer.”
“Right.” Cassidy lifted one hand as Fred Morgan left, then sat down at his desk. “We got a call about the woman being found dead. Fred and I went over there and checked things out. The landlady, a Mrs. Vaughan, said that Doug had been calling there for a few weeks. She wasn’t too happy about that, she told us. She knew that Doug was married and it didn’t make it any easier that he’s black. But she’s kind of a live and let live old broad. Anyways, she said that Doug had been there the night before and him and the deceased had been arguing. She didn’t hear the words and there was no violence, but she could tell from the tone of their voices that they weren’t making nice like they usually did.”
“He’d been there a lot, had he?”
“Every night he was working. Pat here was his partner, says that Doug used to take his lunch hour and disappear for a while, with the girl.”
“It was more than an hour usually,” Hinton said. He sounded unhappy. “I didn’t like it but he said he was working on something big.”
“Yeah,” Cassidy said and laughed for the first time. “A big hard-on, y’ask me.” Neither Hinton nor I laughed and Cassidy went on. “Sorry, Reid, is it? But that’s how I see it. So, this night the landlady went to bed around ten and she couldn’t hear anything from the back of the house. Then next morning a Ms. Frazer, head bookkeeper at Cat’s Cradle, she came by to see why Ms. Laver hadn’t shown up for work and the landlady let her in.” He opened his desk drawer and pulled out an envelope which he opened, taking out a stack of eight-by-ten photographs. “This is what they found.”
He handed me the photographs, one by one. The woman was ugly in death, tongue lolling, face swollen, but I could see that she would have been attractive. The body was slim and fit with good breasts.
“She was quite a looker,” Cassidy said, “before this happened.”
“She was strangled with what?”
“Pair of panty hose.” Cassidy pointed to the victim’s throat. “It was a pro. Whoever did it had slipped a quarter into one leg, then twirled them until the whole thing was thin as a string. She was attacked from behind, the quarter resting almost exactly on her Adam’s apple.”
I nodded. “That makes it premeditated murder.”
“Yeah. The charge is Murder One,” Cassidy said. He fed me each of the pictures in turn. A wide shot of the bed, revealing that she had been laid out, hands at her sides, in the middle of it, as if the person who did it was showing respect for the corpse. Then there was a cover shot of the room, neat and tidy, a small shelf of books to one side with a photograph and potted plants on it, a couple of what looked like art posters on the walls. Everything seemed well cared for.
I examined each shot carefully. They showed the bathroom, with a man’s hand pointing at a place on the tiles. “That’s where the crime scene guy found traces of feces,” Cassidy said. He seemed to enjoy using the fancy word for waste, as if he was practicing for his court appearance. “There was hair against the edge of the shower stall as well, where her head had rested, we figured, although, who knows. It could have happened anytime, I guess. Women shed hair in the bathroom. But the placing, plus the traces you can see being pointed out here, suggested that she’d been lying here.”
“Did they find the cloth that had been used to clean up?”
He shook his head. “No. We figure it was done with toilet paper and flushed down the john.”
“Were there fingerprints on the handle?”
“Just a smear, as if somebody had given it a wipe.”
I nodded and he showed me the next photographs. First the living room, then the kitchen. They were both equally neat. Obviously Ms. Laver had been house-proud. Then there was a shot of the garbage can. At the top of the contents was a Coors beer can. “That’s the can we found Doug’s prints on,” Cassidy said. He was grim now. “I mean, until we found this, he could have made a case that he didn’t do it. But on top of the landlady’s evidence, this proved he was there and that was the last but one straw.”
He wanted to tell me about the last straw, the money found in Doug’s car, but I interrupted. “Do you have a shot of the can, showing the placement of the prints?”
“Yeah.” He riffled through the photos and pulled out the one I’d asked for. The can was almost life-sized on the big photograph and I could see the impressions of four prints of the fingers down one side, placed one above the other where Doug’s hand had gone around it. There was enough of the top showing that I could see the pouring aperture. It was facing the same way as the fingertips.
Cassidy was saying, “The way we figure it, he’d had a beer while they were fighting, then something blew up and he strangled her.”
“Were there any other prints on the can?”
“Yeah. We made out two sets, all over the place. They’re not on record but we’ve got them out to the FBI lab for comparison with their files.”
“From the placement, it looks like Doug poured the beer into a glass,” I said slowly. “Like if he’d drunk from the can, the spout would’ve been across the prints, the thumb in front.”
“We thought about that,” Cassidy said immediately. “But there was no glass in the place with prints on it. They’d been wiped and put away. She didn’t have a dishwasher so whoever washed up would’ve handled the glass with a tea towel.”
“Doesn’t make sense that Doug would have washed up and not taken the empty can away with him,” I said.
“Dumb, y’ask me,” Cassidy said. “But the prints indicate that he was there. And being on top of the garbage, it indicates that it was used that night. We found the grapefruit she must’ve eaten for breakfast and an empty cereal box underneath it.”
“Were there any other beers in the house?”
“Yeah. There was a six-pack with one gone,” Cassidy said. “They didn’t have prints on them. Like whoever sold them must’ve handled ’em by the plastic strap.”
That didn’t sit right, not when there was someone else’s prints on the beer can in the garbage. It sounded like a plant to me. But Hinton spoke now, carefully. “We wouldn’t have busted him on the evidence of a beer can, Reid. But the lieutenant searched his car and found the missing fifty grand.”
“Where was it? In the trunk?”
“No, in front, between the seats. Just layin’ there,” Cassidy said. “Ms. Frazer had told us about the night deposit. We were going to search his house for it, but there it was.”
“Doesn’t make sense that he’d leave that kind of bread lying in plain view in his car. Maybe somebody came by and dropped it in there. The same guy who strangled Ms. Laver and put the beer can in the garbage.”
“Where did this guy get it from? Either the money or the keys to Doug’s car, or the beer can?” Cassidy asked. “Come on, Reid. You’re talking like a defense lawyer. We had no choice but arrest the guy. You’d have done the same thing if you’d been in charge.”
I knew he would never give me any other help unless I agreed with him, so I gave in. “Of course. But coming in now, as a friend of his, I’m looking at things differently.”
“I can appreciate that,” Cassidy said. “But I was doing my job the way I always do my job. Looked open and shut to me. Guy has a fight with his girl, strangles her. She has some dough, he takes it, maybe to throw suspicion on somebody else. That’s the way I saw it.”
There were other questions to ask, like had they checked the body for fibers. Whoever laid her out must have picked her up and there would have been clothing fibers along one side of her body. If they didn’t match Doug’s clothes, then he was probably innocent. But I didn’t push it. Instead I asked, “What did he say when you arrested him?”
“Not a whole lot.” Cassidy was thoughtful. “I read him his rights but he waved me down, said he knew what they were. All he said aside from that was that he didn’t do it, didn’t know anything about her death or about the money in his car.”
I nodded and stayed silent. On the face of it Doug had a chance at least of getting off. But at what price? He would lose everything he owned in paying for a lawyer and at the end of the case he would be out of a job. The people in town would never believe he hadn’t killed the woman. He could never work again in this town, or anywhere else as a cop. It was less terrible than a lifetime sentence but a blow his family would never recover from. And at worst, if the jury turned hostile, with maybe a few racists on it, he would be in a maximum security prison with a bunch of guys who had nothing to lose by killing him. It would be a death sentence.
At last I said, “Thank you for the information, lieutenant. It’s not what I wanted to hear but you had no choice. It’s up to the courts now.”
That pleased him. He stood up and stuck out his hand, creasing his face into a minimal smile. “Sorry to give you bad news but you’re right.”
I shook his hand and he nodded to Hinton and left.
Hinton said, “G’night, Lieutenant,” and sat where he was until Cassidy had gone. Then he asked, “Seen enough?”
I nodded. “Enough to see that a good defense lawyer will be able to make a case for him, but I can also see that you had to arrest him. Thanks for the help, Pat.”
“You’re welcome. But now I’ve gotta be starting work.” Hinton stood up. “Anything else I can show you?”
I took the hint and stood up. “No. Thanks. Be all right if I get back to you over the next day or two?”
“Anything I can do, I will.” He stood there with his hands on the desk. “Keep on digging. I want to see Doug walk out of jail with everyone standing in line to apologize. He’s a good buddy of mine too.”
It was five o’clock and fully dark, the streetlights glinting yellow on the piled snow around the parking lot. I sat in my car, patting Sam’s head absently, wondering what to do next. There wasn’t much really, not before I’d spoken to Doug again and tried to get him to open up some more. I had to find out what he had been working on. If mob money was involved it was motive enough for someone to have killed the woman and framed him to get him off their backs. But unless Doug opened up to me, I couldn’t do much more for him.
The only other thing I could follow up was the beer can. It seemed the weak link in the case. From the placement of the prints it looked as if it had been served to Doug, on a tray. If he’d helped himself to a beer, the prints would have been random. And I wondered why it, alone of the six-pack, had other fingerprints on it. Anyone could have bought the six-pack, wiped it clear of prints and stuck it in the cooler at the Laver house, taking one out to account for the empty in the garbage can. No, I decided, the beer can was a good place to start investigating.
On my own patch, under Ontario law, the only place to buy beer is the government store. I could have chased the staff up to see if they remembered Cindy Laver buying beer. But here, in Vermont, booze was sold in grocery stores. I could never canvass them myself. No, I decided, I would concentrate on the can with the prints and there was one logical place to start, at Brewskis, where Doug and Cindy Laver had taken their last public drink together.
Carol Henning was behind the bar again. She pulled me a Budweiser and waved my money away. “Draft beer we can cover. It’s on the house. How’s your work going?”
“Pretty good, thanks.” Nobody wants to hear bad news. “Thought I’d drop in and ask about the last night Doug Ford was here. Can you remember what he drank that night?”
She shrugged. “I serve around three grand’s worth of drinks in a shift.”
“I hope everybody tips big,” I said and she snorted.
“Not bad. I make about twice my pay in tips, but don’t go telling that to the boss.”
“I promise.” I sipped my beer. “Do you think you could ask, Joyce is it? Next time she comes to the bar.”
“Will do.” She tilted her head on one side, flirtingly. “Is this gonna help?”
“Lord knows. I’m just a nosy SOB, that’s all.”
Now she looked at me levelly. “You’re married, right?”
“Yeah. How can you tell? Do I look round-shouldered, what?”
She laughed, a nice friendly sound. “I can always tell, even when the guy’s coming on to me. But you don’t. I figure you play it straight.”
“I’m terminally married. But they didn’t poke my eyes out on my wedding day.”
She laughed and said, “I’ll see what Joyce remembers.”
Someone came to the other end of the bar and she bobbed away while I sat sipping my Bud. A minute or so later, the waitress I’d helped the night before came up to me. “Hi. Carol said you wanted to talk to me.”
“Just a dumb question. I was wondering if you can remember what Doug Ford ordered the night he was in with Ms. Layer. The night she was killed.”
“Yeah. I remember because she was kind of mad. She said to me, ‘I suppose we’ll have what we always have. That hasn’t changed.’ And then he said, ‘No, make it a
beer for me, please, a Coors.’ And I found we were all out of bottles but there were cans. I served him a can of Coors.”
“Thank you.” I didn’t let any satisfaction show but my spirits lifted. “Can you remember who else was working that night?”
She pushed out her lower lip. “The same bunch. Carol was at the bar and Ellen was working the dining room, from the bar that is, taking drinks through.”
“Any management people around?”
She thought about that before answering. “Not working. But Walt was here, Walt Huckmeyer. He hurt his leg that day, skiing on his lunch break at Cat’s Cradle. He was sitting over there.” She pointed to a table near the big log fine. “Like that’s his favorite table.”
She was excited at the chance of helping me but I didn’t want to give anything away so I changed my tack. “I’ve not met him. Is he a good skier?”
“He used to be on the national team,” she said. “You should see him carve those moguls.”
I wanted to get her mind off Doug so I said, “You wouldn’t get me down there, not on a bet,” and laughed. “Anyway, thanks for the help. You’ve got one heck of a memory.” Always get people talking about themselves, my father told me once. That way you’re sure they stay interested.
“I took one of those courses,” she said, delighted. “It’s good for the tips. You take someone’s credit card and see their name and next time they come in, you call them by name. Makes them feel welcome.”
“And does it work, with the tips?”
She tapped me on the arm with her forefinger. “I’m a bookkeeper when there’s any work going and I know figures. It’s increased my take by twenty-seven percent.”
I pushed the conversation into asking if she would really prefer working with money rather than doing what she was doing here and she spent a minute or two talking about herself. Then Carol waved at her, pointing to one of her tables, and she excused herself and bustled off. Mission accomplished, I thought, and I finished my beer, raised my hand to Carol and left.