Snowjob (2 page)

“Nonsense,” she said. “Ben, you get Raid’s bag and let’s get inside. It’s cold out here.”

I let Ben take the bag which was light, and we went in. The place was furnished inexpensively but with a lot of care. It reminded me of my own house since I’d remarried, lots of antique country pine picked up at auctions and stripped down to the original blues and grays. Not
Better Homes and Gardens
but classy without breaking the bank.

Melody’s daughter was standing in the archway that led to the living room and she looked at me shyly. She was pretty, dark-skinned like her dad but with the aquiline features of a young Lena Home. She would break a lot of hearts, I thought.

Melody said, “Say hello, Angie. This is Mr. Bennett. He was in Vietnam with Daddy.”

“Hello,” she said and smiled shyly.

“Hello, Angie. Call me Reid. And this is Sam.”

She was more at ease with him. “Hi, Sammy,” she said and patted him lightly. “You’re big.”

“I hope you don’t mind,” Melody said. “You’re in Angle’s room. She’s doubling up with me.”

“If that’s okay with Angie that would be very nice,” I said and the girl nodded.

“Will you get Daddy out of prison?” she asked, wide-eyed.

“I hope so. I’ll do whatever I can.” I didn’t want to make promises I couldn’t keep. Doug was a good man when I knew him, in a bad place, but that had been a lot of years ago. And it figured that there was a solid case against him.

“I brought you something,” I said, to break the tension, and opened my bag. “Hope you like it.” My wife had shopped for me, when she knew I had to come down here. I had a loose sweatshirt with a picture of a loon on it for Angie and a Toronto Blue Jays warm-up jacket for Ben. They were delighted and Angie went to put hers on.

Melody led me into the kitchen. “Have you eaten yet?”

“Yes, thanks. I had dinner on the road.” I sat down at the table and Melody said, “Would you like a beer then, cup of coffee?”

“Coffee would be good, please, black, no sugar.”

Melody gave a nervous laugh. “Didn’t they serve cream and sugar in the Marines? Doug takes his the same way.”

She poured us coffee, which was strong and good, and the kids came back to show us how they looked in their new gear. Then Melody sent them into the living room to watch TV and sat down at the table with me. “I hope your wife doesn’t mind my asking you to come down? Freda, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but she prefers Fred. Funny name for a good-looking lady, but that’s her, independent as all get-out.”

“You said on the phone that her mom was there.” Melody looked on the point of tears, battling bravely to make small talk when all she wanted was her husband home with her and the cloud lifted from her life.

“Yeah. Her father lost a long fight with cancer last month. We went out west for the funeral and her mom came home with us. She was at loose ends and she’s delighted to be around the baby.”

Melody asked about the baby and we got all the politenesses out of the way before we settled down to discuss the reason I was there. It was a long story and it came out awkwardly with her having to backtrack a few times to cover points she had left out.

It boiled down to the fact that she had suspected Doug was having an affair. There was no way of checking. He was a detective, working all the crazy hours his job demanded. She didn’t know whether he’d been seeing another woman, but their own lovemaking had changed. From being the centerpiece of their marriage it had dwindled to almost nothing and that mechanical, as if his mind was somewhere else. She had challenged him about it and he told her that the pressure of work made it difficult for him to relax.

“It wasn’t easy for him,” Melody admitted, refilling my coffee cup. “He’s the only black officer in the department. This is a snow-white town, white as the slopes out there.” She shook her head. “Oh, there’s no racism, not out loud. Nobody calls you nigger, but you’re an oddity, know what I mean?”

I nodded. “Most of these folks have been here since the year dot. They’re used to pink faces around them. Then when a smart black cop from New York comes here, for the quiet life, they’re surprised. But they’re not rednecks. It’s going to be fine.”

“It’s been eight years and no problems,” Melody said softly. “I have my job in the library. The kids have lots of friends, we’re accepted just fine but Doug figures he has to work twice as hard, be twice as smart as every white officer on the force, especially now he’s made detective.”

“He was always that way in the service,” I said. “More guts than brains I used to tell him. Hell, he’d’ve volunteered to walk point every time if the lieutenant would have let him.”

Melody nodded. “Well, anyway, I was on my way home from work one evening, around nine, and I saw him and this Cindy Laver in her car, outside her apartment. He was laughing with her, the same way he used to laugh with me. And I went around the corner and stopped and got out and when I went back I saw him going up to the apartment with her.”

“Did you talk to him about it?”

“I sure as hell did,” she said angrily. “He didn’t come in until three in the morning but I was sitting here waiting and I told him what I’d seen.”

“And he said he was on an investigation,” I said.

She gasped, then half smiled. “You cops are all the same. Yeah. That’s exactly what he said. And I asked him ‘investigating what, her birthmarks?’ and he said he couldn’t tell me. It was big and it was confidential.”

“How long was this before the girl was murdered?”

“Three nights,” she said softly, and then her shell cracked and she began to weep.

TWO

That ended our discussion for the night. She dried her eyes right away but I called off the questioning. I wanted to hear the details of the murder and Doug’s arrest but I knew I could get it more clearly from the police department next day and I didn’t want to cause Melody any more heartache. So I knocked off the questions and phoned home and talked to Fred. She was in raptures. Louise had started rolling over from her back onto her stomach and was moving her arms and legs as if she wanted to crawl. Fred wished I could have been there to share her pleasure but she understood. Doug and I had been close in the service and he didn’t have many friends at the moment. We said our goodbyes and I let Sam out for a last run and went up to bed.

It was a little girl’s room. There were posters of the New Kids on the Block; Save the Rain Forests; Reduce, Reuse, Recycle; and a little statue of the Virgin. That stopped me as I looked around. I was brought up Catholic although I haven’t done much about it since Nam, but there was an inherent goodness in this house that reminded me of my mother and I went to bed oddly happy. If there was anything in the power of his family’s prayer Doug was safe.

Next morning after I’d had breakfast with Melody and the kids, I went down to the courthouse and asked to see Doug. The guy in charge was the typical small-town tyrant. “You an attorney?”

“No, just a friend.”

He snorted. It was an appropriate sound. He was short and stubby, wearing a ten-year-old suit with a lodge pin in the lapel. “Ford don’t have a whole lot of them right now.”

I didn’t answer and after a pause he asked, “You got any ID?”

I pulled out the little plastic card with my picture and police chief accreditation. That impressed him. “Chief of Police,” he said thoughtfully. “Don’t believe I’ve ever heard of Murphy’s Harbour, Chief. Is it big?”

“Not as big as this place,” I told him which was less than I might have said. The Harbour isn’t one tenth as big, and I didn’t bother to add that I was the only copper in the place. Myself and Sam. In any case it put his suspicions on hold and he unlocked a door into the secure area and led me to the meeting room.

It was painted institutional green, bare except for a table with a chair each side of it. I sat down on one side and waited for them to bring Doug out. He came in with a big uniformed guard behind him. I stood up and the guard said, “Stay on your own side of the table, sir. Do not pass anything to the prisoner. If you have papers or anything he must see, give them to me, I’ll give them to him.”

He said it all by rote. It was nothing personal and I waved a hand at him to confirm I understood.

Doug spoke first. “Thanks for coming, Reid. I didn’t know who else to call.”

“De nada,”
I said. “How’re they treating you?”

“Can’t complain.” He tried to grin. “It’s a whole lot softer’n boot camp.”

I studied him. He looked stressed, his eyes hollow, the green work clothes he was wearing ill-fitting and rough. “I’m not in the general population. Thank God,” he said softly. “My own guys managed to do that much for me. But the other prisoners keep shouting what they’re going to do when I get put with them.”

“Just jailhouse machismo. Any chance of bail?”

“They want half a million dollars,” he said bitterly.

I guess the District Attorney was looking to prove to the town that he didn’t play favorites with policemen, so I changed the subject. “Your family’s fine,” I told him. “The kids are taking it well and Melody’s hanging in okay.”

“She’s a saint, that woman,” he said and I watched his face. If he had been having an affair with Cindy Laver he would have wept now. But he didn’t.

“Were you balling this Cindy Laver?” I kept it rough to check his reactions.

“With what I’ve got at home? Come on, Reid.” He sounded disgusted. “I haven’t cheated on Melody. Not once in eighteen years.”

“The waitress at Brewskis says you used to hold hands with this Cindy Laver.”

Now he glanced over at the guard who was standing with his hands at his side, listening to every word. Doug leaned forward and lowered his voice. I had to lean in to hear him. “That was an act,” he whispered. “We figured it was safer that way.”

“She was acting too?”

He nodded. The guard was straining to hear us. From his frown I guessed he was having trouble. “She wouldn’t have minded if it had been for real but we decided it was the best way to cover up what was really going on.”

“What the hell was going on?”

He gave a breathless little sigh. “If I tell you, Reid, you’re a part of all this. That could be trouble.”

“You’ve got more trouble than you can handle. It wouldn’t hurt to off-load a little.”

He smiled shortly and lifted his hand as if to give me a high five. “No touching,” the guard said and Doug waved the hand and laid it flat on the table again.

“Ever hear of Angelo Manatelli?”

I shook my head. “A rounder?”

“Mob,” Doug said briefly. “He’s with the Mucci family of New Jersey. Big into gambling, prostitution, loan-sharking. But he’s not a hard man himself. He’s the bookkeeper.”

“New to me.” I took out a notepad and pen and wrote the names down. “Where’s this guy fit in?”

“He was here, in town. I saw him at Rosario’s, that’s the best Italian place in town. He was having dinner with a couple locals.”

“Who?”

“One of them was Eric Lawson. He owns the bank. The other owns the Cat’s Cradle ski resort.”

“Name?” I was taking notes.

“Peter Huckmeyer.”

“And what happened then? Where does Cindy Laver come in?”

“I knew she worked as a bookkeeper for the Huckmeyers at the Cat’s Cradle. If they were talking to criminals, I wondered if she knew why.” Doug looked at me very straight. “You know how it is. You try to know everything about everybody.”

I nodded. “I’m the same.”

“So,” he said slowly. “I was waiting outside the resort when she came out at six, like always, and made her right turn without stopping at the sign, like always. And I started writing her a citation.”

“Were you in uniform?”

Doug touched his cheek. “With this skin I don’t need a uniform. Everybody in town knows who the hell I am.”

“So, was she surprised that a detective would pick her up on a traffic violation?”

“That was the idea,” Doug said. “She asked me what this was all about and I started talking to her about the guy her boss, Peter Huckmeyer, had been eating dinner with.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Three weeks before she was killed.”

I sat back and looked at him. I believed him, but it seemed a little pat, that a professional accountant would play along with a cop on suspicions as slim as his. “And she bought it?”

Doug nodded and beckoned me forward with one finger so he could whisper again. “She had an ax to grind. She wasn’t local. She came from Chicago. I didn’t find out until later, but her ex-husband had gotten into trouble with loan sharks over his gambling. It cost her the house they owned, cost him the marriage. But even then he didn’t stop. He borrowed more and when the horse was slow the enforcers came after him with tire irons. One of them got too enthusiastic and caved his head in. She was apart from him by then but still cared about him.”

“So then what happened? Did you go to the chief with your case or what?”

Doug pursed his lips bitterly. “If I hadn’t been trying to be a goddamn hotshot I would’ve. But I wanted to go to him with a complete case, not a pack of worries. So I asked her to help me, to let me know what was going down at work. That way I could’ve laid the whole thing on his desk like a Christmas present.”