Sleep of the Innocent (5 page)

“Yeah. A black leather coat, size eight, woman's, made by—”

“She was there. And so scared, she forgot her coat.”

“It was in the living room closet. She couldn't have got the door open without moving the body. So, don't lose track of her, eh? Where did you put her?”

“The Blue Star Motel. No one's likely to find her there. Good night, Inspector. I've had it.” And he dropped down the phone and climbed under the bedclothes in the same motion, sinking almost instantly into oblivion.

Lucas walked into the noise and activity around his desk with his eyes clamped half-shut and his mouth dry and foul-tasting. He wasn't sure how much sleep he had finally managed the night before, but it hadn't been enough. Not nearly enough. He put down his coffee, carefully removed the lid, and with equal care set his almost-cold Danish beside it. So far this morning he had successfully avoided speech. Even the woman at the bakery where he picked up his breakfast had said, as she always did, “Black? And you want your Danish warmed up?” and he had nodded. Gratefully. And so, when Kelleher said, “Morning, Robert,” all he got in return was a croak.

He took a mouthful of coffee. That was better. “Anything new?” he said in a voice passably like his own.

“Not so's you'd notice.”

“Nothing?” he asked incredulously. “What's everyone been doing?”

“Tripping over each other's feet. Whatever you do, duck when the phone rings. Ten to one it'll be Baldwin screaming at you to do the exact opposite of what you were supposed to do five minutes ago. If you follow me. I've only been here an hour, and he's phoned at least four times, screwing everything up. Eric's not here—he'll be in later. He went off to get some sleep. Been chasing around most of the night, I think, trying to avoid Baldy. He has this big list of people he's not supposed to question, and he's looking pretty grim.”

“That's going to look great when it hits the papers, isn't it?”

“Yeah,” said Kelleher, with a certain amount of relish. “Won't it? Tempting thought. I want to be here when Sanders hears about it, too. Not that Baldwin's his favourite person anyway.”

“Where in hell is Inspector Sanders?” asked Lucas forlornly. “If he doesn't come back, I'll never get away from Baldy.”

“Somewhere in the States with his girlfriend,” said Kelleher. “Having a hell of a lot more fun than we are and screwing up everyone's schedule. I wish to hell people didn't just take off on holidays anytime they felt like it,” he added, in a low-voiced mutter. “Leaving other people stuck with assholes like Baldwin to deal with. Anyway, relax. It's safe around here for a while. Baldy's coming in late, thank God. Did you know him when he spent all his time bending paper clips and worrying about politics? I never realized what a pain in the ass he could be when he started taking his job seriously.” He paused to pick up his coffee. “So help me God, I'll never complain about someone not working again. I swear. By the bones of my sainted Aunt Mary.”

Lucas grunted and pulled the telephone closer to him.

“Room one-sixteen,” he said, when he reached the desk at the Blue Star Motel. During the ensuing pause, he started in on the Danish. It was cheese. He varied the kind from day to day, depending on his mood. Cheese meant exhausted. And grim.

“Who do you want to talk to?” The voice on the other end was a suspicious voice. A cautious voice.

“Jennifer Wilson.”

You could almost hear the head shake. “Miss Wilson left last night.”

“Last night? She only checked in last night.” There was an icy pause. “Damn,” muttered Lucas. And then something else occurred to him. That little bitch had gone sneaking off with—“You didn't find a blue sweater in the room, did you?” he asked. “Men's, large, hand-knit?”

“Who is this?” Now the voice was heavy with suspicion.

“I'm a police officer,” he started in his usual bored sing-song, “and I've been—”

“We made a damage report on the room to the officer who came by this morning,” he said coldly. “There wasn't any sweater.”

“Damage? What damage?” The world had gone mad on him this morning.

“The damage caused by the people who broke into the room,” he said carefully, as if he suspected that Lucas was not very bright.

“What in hell are you talking about? Someone broke into her room? Why didn't you tell me that in the first place? Was she hurt?”

“I don't believe so. I think Miss, uh, Wilson—if that's her name—had already left by the time they entered.”

“Let me speak to the clerk on duty last night.”

“He's asleep,” said the voice. It sounded shocked.

“Then wake him up. No—I'll be out there as soon as I can. I'll see him then. Just leave everything as it was.”

There was a significant pause. “I'm sorry, sir. But the constable said we could repair the damage. The workmen are already in the room.”

“Damn, damn, damn,” muttered Lucas. “Never mind. I'll be out sometime this morning.”

He dropped the phone back down and cursed the girl, the motel, the phone, everything. “Something wrong?” asked Kelleher, amused.

“I've lost the witness,” said Lucas. “I stashed her in a motel last night, showing touching faith in her word that she was going to stay there for a few days, and she took off in the middle of the night.” He omitted the complication, the strange people who came to visit her and apparently destroyed her room, because explaining them was going to be beyond him at the moment.

“Baldy's going to be pleased, isn't he?”

Inspector Baldwin was not pleased. His face became unnaturally still, then reddened slightly, and then paled to white again. There was silence—ominous silence—for at least a minute.

“Let me see if I understand this,” said Baldwin at last. “First of all, you find someone outside the murdered man's apartment who has come out of it very recently, but you decide, even though this is a very sensitive investigation, that she is not important enough to hold. You drop her off in an out-of-the-way motel of her choice—”

“Not exactly, sir,” said Lucas. “She chose the direction; I found the motel.”

“Some motel in her part of town, then. You still think she's relatively unimportant. And then you decide when you're talking to me that she must be an eyewitness to Carl Neilson's murder, and on that comforting thought you go to bed. Leaving her to skip out in the middle of the night with a couple of accomplices. What made you think she hadn't killed the man? Do we have a better suspect?”

“Her hands were clean. She hadn't fired a gun. And we got her right after the phone call went in. For God's sake, the guy was still bleeding when the constable got there,” said Lucas defensively.

“Gloves? Rubber gloves?” snapped Baldwin.

“There weren't any,” said Eric Patterson, who had walked into the office without knocking—or any other ceremony—as was his habit. “We've combed through the entire apartment. And there's no place to stash them between the apartment and where the cadet grabbed her. And before you ask—no one's opened the windows since they were last painted, a year ago, but just in case, we searched every inch of land under them anyway.”

“Did you search her?”

Patterson looked at Lucas, who shook his head uneasily. “I didn't. But she wasn't wearing very much, and it was pretty tight.”

“So,” said Baldwin. “She could have slipped a pair of surgeon's gloves in her underwear.”

“There's something else,” said Patterson, yawning. “She might have hidden the gloves, but we didn't find a weapon, either. Harder to miss. Did she look strange to you, Robert? Like she had a Beretta in her bra?”

“Listen, she couldn't have hidden a hairpin in the outfit she was wearing.”

“Or a Colt in—”

“Watch it, Eric,” said Baldwin. “Well, if you're right, and she didn't shoot him, then she must know something about the person who did. I want her found. Soon. Today. How far can she have gotten since the middle of last night?” Lucas looked at Patterson and shrugged his shoulders. The answer, of course, was that she could be landing in Paris right now. “And as soon as you get any sort of lead on her, I want to know. I'm under great pressure to find out who killed Neilson. Fielding has already called a couple of times this morning. We need results, and fast.”

“I sure as hell screwed that up,” said Lucas gloomily as they walked back down the corridor.

“Don't worry about it. She's probably not that hard to find. You want me to get onto it?”

“Don't bother. How many people can it take to find one girl? What I can't figure out is what's gotten into Baldwin. You'd think Marty Fielding was the goddamn mayor. Or the prime minister.”

“Jesus—where have you been for the last year?” said Patterson.

“Out of it, obviously. Who's Fielding? Besides being a rich lawyer. I know that.”

“Fielding is the membership secretary of the Yacht Club. No, it's not even
The
Yacht Club. Baldwin doesn't aspire—yet—to
The
Yacht Club. It's the Sandy Cove Yacht Club. You know. Number two. We try harder.”

“I see. And Baldwin wants to join—”

“Right. And so he doesn't want Fielding annoyed at him.”

“He's crazy. He should keep his boat at a marina. It's cheaper and less aggravating.”

“Oh, he doesn't have a boat. If he gets in the Yacht Club, he's going to buy a boat and learn how to sail.” Eric chuckled. “I wonder if Marianne gets seasick,” he added softly.

“Marianne?”

“His wife. Last year it was horses, remember? He took riding lessons, the whole thing.”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“Only Marianne kept breaking out in some sort of rash, and they discovered she was allergic to horses. So he had to find something else.”

Patterson's gossipy, malicious voice went on and on while Lucas tried to imagine Baldwin on a boat. He was a big man, used to getting his own way through sheer size and forcefulness. Lucas imagined him standing by the mast, roaring at the wind to blow from the right quarter and stop all this messing about. And then—wonderful thought—being swept overboard. Boats. His thoughts drifted away from Baldwin. Lucas's father belonged to
The
Yacht Club, all ties, blazers, white flannels, and quarts of gin. Those sails, at least twice a summer, in his father's
Nonesuch,
with his stepmother lying about chattering and oozing sex all over the place. His father, to give him credit, still regarded sailing from the point of view of the serious racer he once had been and preferred to stay quiet and sober on the water; if Tricia hadn't been along, Lucas might have enjoyed himself. But there was no point in going sailing with someone who talked incessantly. On a boat, in the middle of the lake, was the only place around where you could get away from the interminable sound of voices and phones ringing and bloody internal combustion engines. He shrugged. Patterson's monologue seemed to have exhausted itself. He went back to finish his cold coffee and Danish before setting off for the motel.

The March sun poured down on the ferry dock as the
M/V Uncatena
edged gently away from Vineyard Haven. Inspector John Sanders, Metropolitan Toronto Police Department, Homicide, and Harriet Jeffries, freelance architectural photographer, were up on deck, leaning companionably against the rail, staring down into the water. They were almost alone. Most of the people crossing were islanders, year-round residents of Martha's Vineyard, and for them the off-island trip was routine enough to make them consider hot coffee and a warm, comfortable seat inside more important than looking at late-winter scenery.

“It's beautiful, isn't it?” said Harriet, yawning and pulling her coat more tightly around her.

“The parking lot?” asked John, pointing to the broad expanse of asphalt where cars lined up to get on the ferry.

“No, you benighted idiot—the island. Now. In March. With lots of cold wind and no tourists. Except for us, of course.” She turned to look at him. “Do you suppose that the locals saw us and groaned—here comes the tourist season all over again?”

“Maybe they took us for a sign of spring—like robins.” He wrapped his arm tightly around her shoulders. “After all, the sun started to shine just as we pulled into the harbour on Wednesday. We've given them three whole days of good weather.”

“I still can't believe that we actually got here,” said Harriet. “That you were willing to walk out and leave them all behind. How much vacation time did you say you had accumulated?”

John ignored the question. “Me? When did you last take a holiday?”

“I never take holidays,” said Harriet smugly. “I merely change my working locale temporarily when I get sick of Toronto architecture.” She giggled huskily. “And alter my working hours somewhat.”

“To between eleven and eleven-thirty on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.”

“Something like that.” Harriet leaned forward over the rail and looked past her companion in the direction of the open water. “You know, you could be right. About our bringing good weather. Look at that.”

The ferry was gliding tranquilly into a wall of fog. Somewhere close to their ears, a crew member loosed a melancholy, ear-splitting blast of the horn as the world disappeared behind a blanket of gray. Harriet jumped and then shivered in the cold dampness. “What a magnificent atmosphere,” she said. “All we need is a ghost ship to come drifting past.”

“If we're really lucky,” said Sanders with a grin, “we'll have to put back into harbour and won't be able to get off the island for another week. Maybe I should have a word with the captain—”

“No chance of that,” said a pleasant-looking man who had suddenly appeared next to them, also leaning on the rail. “No need to be nervous. That's my cousin in there,” he added, nodding in the direction of the bridge. “And a little fog never bothered him.”

“I wasn't nervous,” said Sanders irritably. He felt that a significant moment had fled, and he resented this man for chasing it away.

“We just don't want to go home, that's all,” added Harriet. “Are you from the Vineyard?”

“Yes, just back for a few days. Visiting.” Reluctantly, Sanders relinquished his hold on Harriet, and the three of them fell into the kind of inconsequential chatter that serves to pass the time on brief voyages such as this.