by R. E. Donald
"What happened at Greg Williams' house?"
"I was there just pokin' around, seeing what I could see, and what I saw was that somebody tossed the place."
"You were there? What were you doing there?"
"Like I said, just pokin’ around. There was nobody home, but the door was open..."
"For God's sake, El. Don't go taking risks like that. Besides walking a fine line with the police, you don't know what kind of trouble you could get yourself into. Don't forget, there's already been one murder, and if Ray and Sharon didn't do it, whoever did is still out there. Don't put yourself in danger."
"Aw, come on, Hunter. What danger? Nobody knows who I am and I'm not about to pick a fight with anybody, but did you hear what I said?" She didn't stop for breath, let alone to give Hunter time to respond. “Somebody trashed the place before I got there. Somebody had been looking for something, I guess. What do you think it was? Doesn't that pretty much let Ray and Sharon off the hook?”
Hunter took the receiver from his ear and shook his head before saying, "You shouldn’t have gone there."
“It's significant, isn't it? that the place was tossed?"
Hunter rubbed his jaw. "Could be."
"What do you think it means? What do you think they were looking for?"
"Supposing, first of all, that it wasn't just a break in. A coincidental occurrence."
"Yeah. Supposing."
"Who knows?" Hunter watched a driver hoist a flat of Anderson's pea soup into his truck before following it inside. It was a new Freightliner, probably equipped with a microwave.
"Drugs maybe?"
"That's a possibility." Hunter pictured Teresa Jagpal, her slender body curled in the corner of the couch, shivering like a frightened rabbit, although she hadn't been shivering, or had she? In any case, he could imagine what effect a break-in would have on her, timid as she was. "Another possibility," he announced, "is there could very well be a dispute over the man's estate. There's no love lost between the victim's wife and his brother, and although the relationship was common law, if she and Williams lived together long enough she's still entitled to inherit. If the victim's brother felt strongly enough about it, and from what I've seen of him, he did, then he might have tried to get his hands on anything of value that belonged to the victim before the wife had a chance to dispose of it."
"Ugh! What an ugly thought. The poor guy's not even buried yet and they're squabbling over his pitiful possessions."
Hunter heard another phone ringing in the background and knew what was coming. Before she had a chance to put him on hold, he said, "I'll let you go now, El. Talk to you tomorrow."
"Wait!" she said. "That’s important information, don't you think?"
The last thing Hunter wanted to do was to encourage her, but he didn't have the heart to bring her down. "Sure, El," he said.
"Run with it, Hunter," she said, just before the line went dead. “Run with it, okay?”
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
After supper, Sharon curled up on her bunk, facing the wall, and tried to read. Her cellmate was lying on her back with her legs bent, one knee crossed over the other, bouncing one foot up and down and humming to herself. The witch was looking for any excuse, Sharon knew, to speak. The best thing Sharon could do was pretend to be asleep, so she lay there silently, holding the book low and turning the pages, when necessary, with as little movement as possible. After about an hour, the humming stopped, and was soon replaced by an open-mouthed snore. The witch was asleep. Sharon had read no more than three pages.
Very quietly, and with one eye on her cellmate, Sharon pulled back her mattress and pulled a ragged copy of Time magazine out from beneath it. She opened it to just inside the back cover, and a soft, sad smile crossed her face. Peaches was so sweet and innocent. Her heart melted at the sight of that eager little face. She felt overwhelmed with love and sorrow. Peaches was inseparably mixed up in her heart with everything else: Ray and the truck and their favorite CD's and the meals they shared on the road, the takeout coffees and the rented videos and snuggling into the bunk together at some quiet spot just off the highway. God! The heat of his skin, the smell of him. How she missed it all!
The witch choked on a snore and coughed herself awake, and Sharon let the magazine fall closed. She didn't want the witch to touch Peaches, not even with her eyes. She didn't want Peaches tainted by so much as a thought from that perverted mind.
"You awake, Princess?"
Sharon could hear the soft scrape of dry skin against skin, and tried not to imagine what part of the witch's disgusting body was being rubbed and scratched. She clenched her jaw, willing the witch to leave her alone.
"Yoo hoo! Prin-cess!" the witch called softly in a lascivious singsong voice. "Wake up, honey cup. Have I got a sweet deal for you!"
Sharon gritted her teeth, remained silent and still. She could hear the soft smacking sound of wet lips and tongue, imagined she could smell the fetid breath.
"How about you scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours. How does that sound, pussycat? Huh?" She chortled, then raised her voice. "Let me suck your tits." Smack. Smack. "C'mon. You'll like it. How about it, honey cup?"
The woman from the next stall piped up, "Shut up, you old hag! Ain't nobody wants to touch you wif' a ten foot pole!"
The witch's voice became manic. "Shut your face, cunt! I ain't talkin' to you!" Then soft, sulky. "Come on out, Princess. Play with me."
Sharon hugged the magazine to her chest and began, soundlessly, to weep.
At four o'clock on Friday afternoon, a uniformed RCMP officer walked into the office of Watson Transportation on Annacis Island and stood politely behind the counter.
"Are you Elspeth Watson?" he asked.
"That'd be me," said El. "What can I do for you?"
"Do you own the blue Ford pickup parked outside?"
"Yeah, the old clunker's mine."
"Staff Sergeant Al Kowalski wants me to bring you down to the Burnaby detachment. He has a few questions for you."
"Now?!"
"Yes. Now." The young Mountie was still being polite, but his voice took on an edge.
El tsk'd and threw down her pen, picked up the phone. This Al was a friend of Hunter's after all. She'd just explain how busy she was on Friday afternoons. "What's his number?" she said, then "Never mind. Here's his card. I'll just give him..."
"I'm sorry, you'll have to come with us." The Mountie motioned to someone through the window, then stepped around and took the telephone receiver out of her hand. El punched in the last number anyway. "Now," he said.
El stiffened. "What the hell...?! Let go of my phone! Let go of my arm. Wally!" she bellowed. "Wally, get in here! At least let me talk to my warehouseman, so he can take care of the office for me." A second officer came through the door.
"Wally!"
El was escorted to an interview room, and made to wait. She tried taking deep breaths to calm herself, but her face was burning and she couldn't stop doing things with her hands, flexing them repeatedly, or running them up and down her thighs. The officers who had transported her in the RCMP cruiser - she'd felt like a prisoner locked inside the back seat, and like a fish out of water without a vehicle of her own - had been polite and would only tell her that she was wanted for questioning. In her usual forceful manner, she'd demanded to know why she couldn't drive her own pickup, but they said that they were only doing their job, and added that if she didn't quiet down, she'd make things worse for herself. Worse? Worse how? she'd asked, a little more quietly. They hadn't answered, and she then had to admit that she was not only angry, she was scared. What the hell did all this mean?
When Kowalski arrived, he was accompanied by another uniformed officer. "Ms. Watson," he said to El with a grim nod, then turned and spoke to the other officer as if she weren't there. "Is this the woman?"
The officer nodded. "Yes, that's her." For the first time, El paid attention to his face, her forehead creasing with a bewildered
frown.
"You," she said, then sighed. He was the officer who had caught her sneaking around the back of the building on Still Creek Avenue. She opened her mouth to remind him of her explanation, which had been something vague about scouting out a new site for her business, but realized that with Al here, any kind of a lie would only make her look worse. She shut her mouth and waited to hear what this was all about. The uniformed officer left, and Al sat down across the table from her.
"I'm going to give you a chance to explain this," he said, "but let me tell you that it doesn't look good. You could be facing two counts of breaking and entering, and quite possibly a charge of obstruction of justice. I'd sure like to know what you thought you were going to accomplish."
"Breaking and entering?!" She looked at him in disbelief. "What the hell are you talking about? All I did was try the knob. It was locked, so I left. Ask the officer, there. I wasn't inside the building, and never have been." She thought about the sound equipment she'd picked up from Fraser's Dock, still locked in the back of the Hino in Watson Transportation's yard, and her stomach did a loop-di-loop.
"Which building?" he asked.
"What do you mean, which building? You know very well which building."
"Where were you at one fifteen Wednesday afternoon?"
"One fif..." The penny dropped. Two counts of breaking and entering, he'd said. They knew she'd been at Greg Williams house. That spiky-haired bitch had taken down her license plate number and reported it. "Listen, Al," she said. "You know I'm straight. I'm a friend of Hunter Rayne's, for God's sake. He'll tell you. I'm just trying to help out, but I'd never do anything illegal. Christ! B and E's. Obstruction of justice! What's all this about, for cryin' out loud?"
He sighed like a man losing patience. "Where were you at one fifteen Wednesday afternoon?"
She let out a big breath and rolled her eyes. "Balmoral Street," she said resignedly.
"What were you doing on Balmoral Street?"
"I went to see if there was anybody home at Greg Williams' house." Her mind was going ninety miles a minute, trying to decide what kind of reasons to give. "The door was open and I could see that the place had been trashed, but I didn't do it." Nobody had seen her inside, had they? No. There's no way that spiky haired woman could've seen her before she walked out onto the sidewalk. "There was nobody home, so I never went inside. Like I said, I'm straight. Hey. I'm on your side. Law and order. I just wanted to find out more about the guy, so I could help Hunter figure out why he'd gotten himself killed." She leaned forward and stabbed at the table with her index finger. "Ray and Sharon Nillson didn't do it. The fact that someone tossed his place proves it."
"That may be," he said, motioning her to stand. "We'll need your fingerprints."
After watching the sprawl of the L.A. basin in its nest of yellow haze disappear beneath the burnished aluminum curl of the 757's wing, Russell settled back in his seat and decided it wasn't too early for a drink. He was nervous, but it had nothing to do with flying. When he stepped off this plane, he was going to be out of his jurisdiction, out of his comfort zone. He was going to have to depend on the cooperation of a foreign law enforcement agency, and foreign witnesses. Sure, Canadians looked just like Americans and almost talked just like Americans, but Russell wasn't confident that they thought like Americans. After all, they were so damn polite, they had to be hiding something. It was spooky, discomfiting. And that wasn't all that was eating at him. Now he was also entering Jennifer's world, a world in which she'd been spending most of her time over the past three months, a world she was becoming more and more acclimatized to as she became more and more alienated from him. Their relationship had been changing, and it had something to do with Vancouver, and he was afraid to find out why.
She didn't know he was coming. They hadn't been spending enough time together, nor even talking enough on the telephone, for him to have mentioned the case to her. So today he would be showing up in her new world unannounced, and - what frightened him the most - quite possibly unwelcome.
The passenger beside him was a middle-aged woman wearing jeans and Reeboks and tapping away on a laptop computer. The flight attendants came by with the service cart, and his neighbor leaned way back in her seat so he could see the attendant better, and stayed that way, looking uncomfortable but maintaining a polite smile, until he had received his can of beer.
"Why are Canadians so damn polite?" he muttered out the window.
"Pardon me?" she said.
Russell looked at her sideways. She, too, had ordered a can of beer, and had closed up the laptop but left it sitting on the meal table. She was trying to open a bag of beer nuts.
"You're a Canadian, aren't you?" The way he said it bordered on an accusation..
She smiled. "You can tell?"
"You're polite. Canadians are so damn polite."
"If you say so," she said. "I guess we're trying not to disturb the elephant." She was trying to pull the seam on the package apart.
"Huh?"
"Canada has been compared to a mouse sharing its bed with an elephant."
"You think that's why?"
"No. Probably not. But we were never the rebels that you Americans were. We still have the Queen of England on our money. Look." She dug into her jeans pocket and pulled out a handful of coins. The Queen was on every one of them. "Colonial mentality, I guess," she said, putting them back. "We started off being respectful to Britain, now we're respectful to the United States. We should have a war and conquer somebody. That might help us snap out of it." She held a corner of the package in her teeth and pulled. The bag ripped from top to bottom, spilling nuts on her computer and into her lap. "Shit!" she said. She picked up one of the spilled nuts and threw it in her mouth. "There. I said shit. Is that better?"
"It's a start," said Russell.
They both drank some beer. Russell looked out the window, then turned back to his neighbor. "Tell me something," he said. "Is it contagious?"
"What?"
"The Canadian thing. The politeness."
"No," she said firmly. "My guess is if you hang around Canadians long enough, you'll experience a sort of uncontrollable backlash. You'll get meaner and ruder, just to compensate for all the stifling politeness around you." She emptied her beer glass. "Feel better now?"
"Yes," he said, thinking of Jennifer, wondering why she was becoming more distant, more reserved. For some reason, he also thought of Feldman. Feldman, the picture of an up-and-coming young criminal lawyer, delivering his sound byte for the TV news. Feldman was married, and Russell wondered if there was a baby on the way. Fuck Feldman. "Yes, I do feel better. Thanks." But he didn't.
She nodded, then went back to her computer. Russell didn't speak to her again for the rest of the flight.
Hunter crossed the border at noon. He pulled the Blue Knight into the yard at Watson Transportation well before one o'clock and left it running while he went inside. El's pickup was parked outside, so he knew she'd be there. She was always there on Saturdays, and occasionally even on Sundays. He'd never known her to take a vacation. "When I need a vacation, I'll be the first one to know, okay?" was what she said to anyone who suggested it might be a good idea.
The door was unlocked, but there was no one in the office. Papers were scattered across El's work surface, and a pen lay on top, as if she'd just thrown it down. A half empty coffee cup sat beside one of the telephones. He proceeded into the warehouse and called out to her, but there was no answering holler, no sound at all. He stuck his head into the coffee room. The light on the coffee maker was on and the pot on the burner was half full, but there was no sign of El. Then he heard the back door of the warehouse slam, and the scritching and scrabbling of nails on the concrete floor. Seconds later, those same nails were scratching on his jeans, just above his knees.
"Hey, Hunter! Am I glad to see you!" El bellowed from the back of the warehouse as soon as she came into view from behind a wooden crate. "Peaches! Pete! Behave yourselves! Down! Ge
t down! Don't let them jump on you, Hunter. It's not polite."
Once he'd parked his rig where she indicated, Hunter came back inside and poured himself a cup of coffee. El looked uncomfortable, her jaw set stiffly, as if she were facing an unpleasant task. "What is it?" he asked. "What have you done now?"
"I fucked up," she said, turning her coffee cup around in circles. "I fucked things up for Ray and Sharon."
Hunter took a sip of coffee, leaned back in the chair with his legs stretched long in front of him, trying to work out the kinks after hours on the road. "How?"
"Remember I said I'd been to Greg Williams' house, and his house had been tossed? Well, seems that the woman I saw outside took down my license number or something and gave it to the police."
"And?" Hunter raised his brows.
"And your buddy Al considers me a suspect."
Hunter took a swallow of his coffee. "He knows you went inside?"
El nodded.
"How does he know? You told him?"
El cleared her throat and looked away. "Fingerprints," she muttered.
Hunter sighed.
"I only touched one goddamn thing! It was a cookie jar, and I was afraid it would roll off the counter, so I put it upright, and when I realized I shouldn't touch anything, I put it back the way it was."
"So did you explain that before he found it out for himself?"
"No," she said.
"Damn," he said quietly. "Still, if that's all they've got, they probably won't charge you."
"There's more," she said, with a weak smile. "They think I tossed the studio as well."
Hunter sat bolt upright, almost spilling his coffee. "They found the equipment I asked you to pick up and think you stole it?" He couldn't blame anyone but himself for that.
El shook her head. "It's still in the Hino. I guess we should get rid of it, huh?"