The next morning at seven thirty the bathroom was empty and the whole place quiet. Everyone else had eaten and vanished. I must have been sleeping like the dead to have lasted through the boots, mostly those of construction workers, going up and down the halls. I shaved, brushed my teeth, and conducted my daily debate with myself as to whether to attack my gums with a little rubber pointed thing that made them bleed, as the dentist in Ottawa had told me I must do.
“You don’t want to get gum disease, do you?” he said accusingly.
I said, “When you ask that, does anybody ever say yes?”
He didn’t laugh, too bad, but I really did not want to get gum disease, so I obeyed him every morning until the gums bled. I spat and cursed and hoped no native would come in and ask me why I was making myself bleed, and should they call the shaman?
Margaret was not around the kitchen when I came down. The Inuit girl served me oatmeal porridge, fried fish, toast, and honey. She asked how my mother was and looked solemn when I told her I was about to call and find out the latest. I finished my tea and went outside into the frosty morning. The spring sun was already two or three hours into the sky, visible through a cold mist that softened the outlines of houses and what lay around them. A few kids were heading by circuitous routes to be early for school, some dressed Arctic-style in caribou-skin pants and mukluks with sealskin soles, others getting the jump on spring, as kids tend to do, with lighter clothes, store-bought anoraks, even a couple in Nikes. Most were getting in some sliding and wrestling on the way.
When I walked in, Bouvier was putting down the phone. “The forensics guy just phoned from the airport. Got in by chartered Beaver from Cambridge Bay. Wants to get at it.”
After a moment’s thought I said, “Pick him up and bring him to Annie’s.” In that I had a slightly ulterior motive. Bouvier and I both were very short on local knowledge, people, personalities. Annie already had been helpful. I thought the more she was personally involved, the better off we’d be. Her insights might point us in one direction or head us off from another.
When he was gone I called the hospital and got Dr. Butterfield.
“No change,” he said. I walked up the hill to where the police van was parking outside Annie’s place.
In the kitchen, Annie poured coffee for Bouvier and Constable Joe Pelly, tea for me. Pelly was tall, thin, fair-haired, with an Adam’s apple that bobbed up and down when he spoke or swallowed. As a graduate of the RCMP’s tough forensics course, he would be well educated about fingerprints, footprints, material from under fingernails, minuscule shreds of clothing, weaponry, rigor mortis time spans, everything that might have a bearing on a case.
When we shook hands I noticed that his were chapped across the knuckles, as happens when someone works outside a lot in cold weather. I mentioned that.
“My girlfriend and I are building a ski cabin.”
“Where?”
“In the Gatineau.” It was a region in northwestern Quebec, not far from Ottawa. “Our cabin is one of those jobs where logs are cut to a pattern and numbered, with lots of directions, arrows, and so on, so that any fool is supposed to be able to put one up.” He laughed. “But it ain’t easy. For me anyway. I feel more at home doing what I’ve been doing so far on this case.”
“About the bodies,” I began, and stopped, because at the mention of bodies Annie got up and said she had to get to the office. Hastily pulling on her parka and boots, she declined Bouvier’s offer to drive her to work. “With all due respect,” she said drily, “I don’t want everybody to think I’m part of the police force.”
The door closed behind her. Pelly looked at me with a mild flick of the eyes. He’d noticed the abruptness of Annie’s departure. “You were saying?” Pelly asked me.
“Did you find anything new, looking at the bodies?”
“Well, two things I could mention. Even before I got them out of the body bags they were starting to thaw a little.” Bouvier, leaning against the sink, suddenly looked sick, but if Pelly noticed he showed no sign, went on matter-of-factly. “Because of the weather delay night before last at Cambridge the dry ice the bodies had been packed in hadn’t lasted all the way to Yellowknife. But basically what I could see was pretty close to what anyone would see right after they died. We’ll need an autopsy to determine exact cause of death on both of them. The old lady, she was stabbed so many times it’ll be a tossup which one did her in.”
Bouvier looked sicker. I didn’t feel so good myself. I hated to think of an honest old lady carved up like that just for being alive and in the way.
“Any idea what the knife was like?”
“I’d think about average size for a hunting knife. There was one wound in her right thigh where the handle bruised the flesh, meaning the knife had gone in full length. But it didn’t come out the other side of the thigh. Of course, there was pretty thick flesh there. Say a blade five, five and a half, six inches.”
Jonassie had said the blade was five and a half inches on his knife with the gyrfalcon handle.
“You said there were two things you could mention.”
“Yeah.” He looked thoughtful. “The money in Dennis’s pocket had been put in there, like, laying flat. I mean, you take a stack of bills and pile them neatly and slide them into a pocket loose without folding, get what I mean? With all that blood, some of it was in that pocket. The bills that I saw had a lot of blood spread around, but mostly on what would be the bottom end, the end deepest in the pocket. There must have been half a cup of blood there. However, the top bill of what was left had a smear on one side consistent with somebody sliding some of the blood-soaked bottom stuff out and across it.”
He looked pleased with that deduction and had a right to be.
“Meaning if we do find money with a smear of blood on it, you’ll be able to match it with what was left?”
“Well, the person who took it might have had time to wash the blood off when it was fresh, but there would be traces.” He stopped briefly, finished the last of his coffee, and looked baffled. “Thing I can’t figure out is why only some of the money was taken.”
I’d been thinking about that and had one possible answer. “Maybe whoever it was thought that leaving some of the money would make it look as if there’d been no robbery at all.”
Whatever the case, our wondering about why Dennis had more than his pay now had another dimension. He’d had even more, and some of it would be bloodstained.
I looked at Bouvier. “I’ll get on it,” he said.
I said, “First make a list of people in town who handle a lot of money and can keep their mouths shut.”
I meant, people who would not go blabbing around that the cops are looking for bloodstained money. We didn’t want some kind of a general alarm to spook somebody into getting rid of the evidence.
Bouvier pushed his lips together into a tight straight line, reading my mind.
All this hadn’t taken long, about long enough for Pelly to drink his coffee. He got up, put his cup in Annie’s sink, and looked at me. Time for action. I couldn’t put off any longer going to look at what I didn’t really want to see. Each new scene-of-the-crime I had faced over the years had had its own horrors. I knew this one wasn’t going to do much to help me fall asleep at night, either. I tidied the table, moved dishes to the sink and margarine and milk to the fridge, thought of Lois’s compulsive neatness, of Maxine’s more relaxed attitude. In microcosm, the story of my life.
“Well,” I said finally, “let’s go.”
“I think I’ll pass,” Bouvier said, not unexpectedly. “I’ll go back and start on the money-with-blood-on-it angle.”
“One other thing,” I said, passing him the names that Annie had given me last night. “See if there’s anything on those and tell them we want to talk to them.”
He glanced at the list thoughtfully. “Dennis’s night visitors,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Maisie is a surprise. We did talk to them all briefly.”
I thought of Margaret’s remark about Maisie being “strong as a horse” but clueless about men.
I had an afterthought. “If Corporal Barker phones to give us a pep talk from Waikiki, read the list to him and see what he says, especially about Maisie.”
When Pelly and I stepped outside, Bouvier was gone; nobody was in sight. I didn’t know how curious the neighbors might be, this long after the event, but all adjoining windows faced out, not sideways, and there were no other homes close enough for me to see if anyone was watching. I shoved the key into the lock and opened the door, Pelly right behind me.
The house’s heat had been at minimum since the night of the murders, so although there was an odor it was more musty, cold, and clammy than repugnant. Dried blood looked black against the cheap gray carpeting, especially black in what appeared to be footprints. If somebody spilled a pail or two of blood on a floor and it splashed and then you struggled in it, fought through it, and killed some poor woman who might have struggled a bit until she fell back, it would look like this.
Pelly’s instant cursing seemed private, almost inaudible. “I didn’t get the idea that she had had this much chance to fight back,” he said finally. His professional reaction quickly followed the human one as he put down his bag of tools. “There’s a real goddamn mother lode of tracks here, though,” he said. “We should try to step where the, urn, others didn’t.”
We took off our shoes. He padded over toward the kitchen, turning on an overhead light on the chaos there, and then dropped to his knees in the doorway and unlimbered his camera, taking endless close-up photos as he slowly traversed the downstairs rooms and entrance hall.
I don’t really have a system in a killing where there isn’t much to go on. I rarely take notes. I listen and smell and see. Leaving Pelly working in the kitchen, I turned on more lights and climbed the steps to the second floor.
By staying close to the left wall I avoided the crazy pattern of splotches and stains on the stair carpet and wall on the right side. When I reached the second-floor landing and faced its three doorways, left (Dennis’s room), center (bathroom), and right (Thelma’s room), it was easy enough to figure the pattern of the bloodstains there: anyone hurtling out of the lefthand bedroom, Dennis’s, would naturally wind up on the other side.
The bathroom, directly ahead, looked undisturbed. Whoever had made that mad dash away from Dennis’s body had certainly not stopped to clean up. Clean towels, folded neatly, hung from a metal rack screwed into the wall beside the washbasin.
The bedroom door to my right was open. From where I stood, the hall light showed Thelma’s neatly made single bed. It had no headboard, simply a mattress on a boxspring that had short screw-on legs, the bed covered by a multicolored and cheerful-looking patchwork quilt. I pushed the door wider open and stuck my head in. There was no sign that anyone had been in the room since the last time Thelma made it up. A nice Inuit doll of a sort made in the north and sold in souvenir shops had been placed on the pillow so that it leaned against the painted drywall.
Dennis’s bedroom door was closed. I couldn’t remember anyone saying whether it had been open when Barker and Bouvier first walked in last Friday night. If so, it had been closed after they removed the body. Tracks leading from that room to the landing were not complete footprints, as was the case on the ground floor, but looked more the way mud or dung, or blood, for that matter, anything that tracks, might look if someone had been slipping and sliding, in a hurry.
I opened Dennis’s door and closed it again quickly. The smell in there was not like it had been below; this was human excrement, and urine, and general foulness, along with a lingering aroma of stale beer and wine or whisky. I opened the door again, turned on the light, and walked in, stepping carefully. I had seen animals killed, caribou torn to pieces by wolves, once a dog being torn apart by a wolverine, polar bears harassed by dogs and finished off by Inuit hunters, but never anything like this; tangled sheets and blankets on the double bed dried into weird shapes by the blood and excrement that stuck this part to that part and then dried, clothes and bedding torn and flung around, foulness everywhere. Hanging over a full-length mirror on the wall beside the dresser was a shirt that seemed to have been hung there clean and ironed and then splashed and fouled from below but not all the way up. One sleeve and the collar were as pristine white as when Thelma, presumably Thelma, had ironed the shirt.
From downstairs, Pelly: “How you doing up there, sir?”
“Coming down.”
Pelly was kneeling in the blood-splashed hall, flashlight in hand, now engrossed more or less impersonally. “I’ve never even heard of a case with stuff like this,” he said, waving at the mess around him in a kind of awe. “If the people who did it are still here and still wearing boots, maybe we’ve got them.”
“Them?” I said.
“Some of the boots were big but there are smaller prints, too, maybe a woman or a boy. Here, look.” He knelt carefully on a bit of carpet and pointed to an unmistakably small but smeared shoe print. “I’d say there are three or four distinctly different prints, including a faint one not associated with blood, one of the smaller ones—could have been just wet, as if someone came in out of the snow.”
Even not-so-good prints in the right hands could yield details of size, make, extent of wear, and the way a person walks as indicated by where the wear occurs. Finding out where a specific piece of footwear was sold might take some doing in a city, but it would be easier to trace if it had been bought here or here-abouts.
I asked, “Any of the prints look like sealskin?” Our women still make boots in the age-old style, with warm caribou uppers and maybe insoles, but outer sales of sealskin, which doesn’t react to damp the way caribou skin does. It also would not have a manufacturer’s brand name helpfully stamped into the sole.
“It’s hard to be sure with all the sliding around but I’m not thinking sealskin, yet, except maybe the one that didn’t get into the blood. When these prints get the full treatment they’ll tell us some things I can’t get at just yet.”
He glanced at his watch. “I’ll photograph the upstairs and take up a lot of the carpet samples before I get out of here, but if I could make it to Yellowknife tonight I could have at least some preliminary stuff back to you tomorrow.”
I said, “How long do you need here?”
He looked around thoughtfully as if working out aspects I couldn’t even imagine. “Gimme a few hours. Let’s say three o’clock. The goddamn cement they use to stick this carpet down is hard to handle.”
He went upstairs. I could hear him gasp and swear in a low voice. Then he came back down. When I left for Annie’s kitchen phone he was on his knees prying up a section of the kitchen linoleum with an instrument resembling a short square-ended spade, and using heavy curved-blade clippers to cut the tile into a manageable chunk.
I called the Yellowknife hospital again, got the same answer, no change. “I’ll call you as soon as I have something,” the doctor said. “Depend on that.”
The other calls took a while. Pelly’s Beaver pilot had gone to the hotel for a sleep. Margaret told me she’d have him out front at two forty-five, or sooner if we called again. I asked Bouvier to check the airport to make sure the Beaver was gassed up and ready to go, and told him to be ready at two forty-five to pick up the pilot and then us. The Cambridge Bay airport line was busy, but the RCMP line there wasn’t. There were two more flights to Yellowknife that day, the sergeant told me, one scheduled and one charter. If Pelly’s Beaver could get there by late afternoon, getting to Yellowknife that night should be a cinch.
When I walked back through the door, Pelly was putting chunks of stained and smeared carpet and linoleum into plastic bags and was getting ready to collect more. He glanced up and I told him the travel details.
On the way to the airport a little after three, with the sun high in the sky, I sat in the back of the van with Pelly. I liked both his youth and his professionalism. They went well together, as usual. Allied with open ambition.
“It’s a break for me, getting a job like this,” he called over the roar of the heater. “Funny, we spend most of the forensics course on fingerprints. Miss a fingerprint match on a comparison exam and you’re out, man, off the course! And then I wind up with this! Beats hell out of fingerprints!”
After a minute or two I said, “You mentioned a girlfriend, back in Ottawa.”
He nodded.
“See her often?”
Hint of a smile. “She says not often enough.”
“You know,” I said, “in the old days and not so old a man had to get RCMP permission to marry. They liked to keep a man single. Single guy could be moved around on short notice and cheap, without having to move a wife and kids, too.”
He glanced at me, grinning. “Well, my girlfriend and I haven’t talked about marriage, so far, just about building us a ski cabin.”
I realized I’d said enough about the old days.
At the landing strip we drove the van out to park beside the Beaver. I could see some people in the terminal watching curiously. Pelly climbed in. Bouvier and I carried and lifted in to him the bags of what we hoped would be useful evidence.
“See you,” Pelly said. “I’ll call.”
When Bouvier and I drove back into town the day was warming. There were quite a few people around, mostly kids playing. Bouvier said, “Corporal Barker called from Vancouver. I read him the list you gave me, the four girls. He didn’t seem all that impressed. Said we’d already talked to them. Also mentioned what I already knew, of course, that two of them, Sarah and Agnes, were in his wife’s grade-ten class at the school.”
Their being schoolgirls didn’t rule out the main aspect that I was concerned about—sex as a motivating factor in murder. These girls plus Leah and Maisie were the only people we knew about who could tell us whether what happened in Dennis’s room might somehow produce revenge motives which might in the end have led to dead bodies.
“In the first interrogation with these girls did you or Barker get to the point of asking, frankly, what their relationship with Dennis involved? I mean, about sex. If they’d had sex, for instance, were they willing? If unwilling, scared, or whatever, did they try to fight? Did they complain later to one another or to anyone at home?”
Bouvier was smoking one of his cigars but through the cloud of smoke I could see his amusement. “We just didn’t get that deep into it. Sadie was upset about Sarah and Agnes even being questioned. Maybe some of that rubbed off on Steve. Anyway, he wants you to call him. He’s a little pissed off, leaves here on Tuesday, gets weathered in at Cambridge so they miss one flight and he’s still only in Vancouver . . . although he did say they’re getting out later today.”
I called. I wasn’t going to, but then decided it was a courtesy I could afford. Theoretically he would rather be here than there. In years to come when people talked about the case he would not relish having to um and ah and admit that he’d been in Honolulu at the time.
Barker picked up the phone on the first ring. I could imagine his big and burly figure, pug-nosed face, the paunch, and had the idea that his wife was sitting there all set to listen to him running his empire from afar, but he started off just like any tourist, “Great weather here, Inspector! Seventy-five today, sunny, shirtsleeves, now if we hadn’t missed our goddamn airplane, sorry honey . . . not you, Inspector! . . . Anyway, Bouvier told me what you’ve got in mind about these girls and sex and so on and I just thought I should put in my two cents worth . . . that isn’t the kind of thing we’re looking for.”
He rushed on. “So what if Dennis had been banging, sorry honey, some of them or at least trying? If you’re thinking of some girl’s boyfriend going over there and bumping off Dennis because he’d made a pass at their girls, there’s not a chance! The picture we’ve got of the guy that did the murders is that he’s gotta be big enough to beat the shit, sorry honey, out of Dennis, who was big enough to fight back and obviously did, and then out of old Thelma. She might have slept a lot but was strong as an ox, and certainly wouldn’t have taken the kind of beating she did from some highschool kid mad about Dennis cutting in on his girl.”
He did have a point. Even several points. But they weren’t necessarily at odds with what I thought was important.
“How about some father or big brother?”
“Well, you gotta find a girl first who’d been getting laid,” he began, forgetting to say “sorry, honey.” “Then even if she got pregnant, that kinda thing happens and if every time it happened we had a murder or two out of it, there’d hardly be anybody left in town. That just isn’t the kinda thing that leads to murder . . .”—he finished with a flourish—“around my town, anyway!”
Polite is polite, but I was becoming tired of polite. I didn’t raise my voice. Didn’t have to. But I laid it on the line.
“Considering that it is now nearly six days since the murders happened and we haven’t got a goddamn thing”—I thought of saying sorry honey, but didn’t—“I want to know who Dennis made it with and whether it had ever caused any arguments or fights and whether anybody knows anything, from earlier, about going into that house after Thelma had gone to sleep. When we find out a few of those things we’ll know more than we do right now.”
“Okay,” Barker said grudgingly. “But when we do get a break I’m goddamn sure it’s not going to be through those kids we’ve been talking about. More likely to be somebody we haven’t even hit on yet.”
“All right,” I said, belatedly soothing. “You know the town. As you sometimes say, it’s your town. So what’s your opinion on this: Could anybody from the rec hall with a cooked-up alibi leave there, commit the murders, get cleaned up, and then get back to the rec hall without anybody knowing he’d been gone?”
Barker, flatly: “How can anybody know for sure? To make it stick someone would have to have seen the guy somewhere that contradicted the alibi.”
“In lieu of a better idea, I still wouldn’t rule that out,” I said. “Well, that’s up to you.”
“I didn’t get a chance to talk to you before you and your wife had to leave”—a little dig—“about that list of the guys Dennis was loan-sharking with, guys that must have been paying up, maybe more substantially than we know yet, maybe one with a money-based grudge against Dennis.”
“So what about those guys?”
“I don’t find any record that they were interviewed.”
“It’s there somewhere, all small-time stuff, tens, twenties, one fifty. No reason for some big grudge.”
“All right,” I said. “We’ll check harder, and maybe get more.” The mildest rebuke of my life, but he’d get it. “That brings us to something else. I don’t get the idea from anything anybody has said that Dennis was the kind of guy who could strong-arm somebody who didn’t pay up.”
“That’s right!” Barker said. “I mean, whenever there’ve been fracases around the rec hall or anywhere else, Dennis might be on the fringes but in all the assaults and that kind of thing due to boozing or whatever, we never had to lay a glove on him.”
I guessed that years ago, before Davidee did his time, he might have been both the loan shark and the enforcer. If so, when he left he might have turned the business over to Dennis. Or maybe it was just a matter of Dennis filling the void and arranging with someone (Hard Hat?) to be the enforcer. But Davidee, being Davidee, here secretly off and on for the last few weeks, might have felt the business was just on loan, there for him to pick up again now that he was back.
“If Dennis was that clean, it might mean that he had somebody else doing his enforcing for him,” I said. “Who do you think? Name or names. Somebody to put the heat on.”
Bouvier had been mainly studying his half-finished cigar, glancing at me from time to time with an encouraging smile. Now he came over and stood writing a note that read, “Hard Hat. Maybe in recent weeks Davidee taking over?”
Barker, slowly: “I’ve thought about Hard Hat. I mean, he’s a real asshole, sorry honey, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find out what connection he had, if any. And to get back to the murder night, we did check him out first. He’d been at Davidee’s parents’ house watching the hockey game most of the evening and then went to the rec hall. Davidee’s parents backed him up, and never mind the kind of son they had, they are decent people.”
Davidee’s parents backed up Hard Hat? I had assumed that Hard Hat’s own family had backed his alibi. I came close to blowing up.
“For Christ’s sake, Barker! Don’t you think that in this place everybody, including Davidee’s parents, maybe even especially Davidee’s parents, are so scared shitless that they’d say anything either Hard Hat or Davidee told them to say?”
Bouvier voted by nodding vigorously. Motion carried.
But one more question suddenly, to me, seemed vital. “So when Davidee’s parents gave Hard Hat the alibi, how about Debbie? Did she back them up?”
“She wasn’t there when I talked to them,” Barker said. “She was out somewhere and didn’t come back until later.”
“Oh, shit,” I said, and hung up.
I put down the phone thinking that for a lot of that conversation I hadn’t been getting anywhere, like at one of those police seminars where nothing new comes up but everybody does a lot of showoff talking and then a lot of eating and drinking, after which I’d go to bed thinking, what a bloody waste of time. But in this case, Davidee’s parents turning out to be Hard Hat’s alibi was like a pinpoint of light in a dark tunnel.
I tried the hospital one more time. No change. “I’ll call you as soon as there is,” Dr. Butterfield said.
Bouvier said, “What now?”
“I’m going looking for Hard Hat.”
“He might not be too easy to find. Want some help?”
We checked the rec hall first, on foot. Not there. Then we drove the van to his house, a good-size A-frame, one of the newer ones, down the shore from the hotel. A three-wheeler Honda was parked outside. The usual trash barrel languidly trailed some acrid smoke into the otherwise clear air. The door was answered by a lively looking young woman with a woolen toque perched on top of her head.
“Hi, Sarah,” Bouvier said. “We’re looking for Hard Hat. He here?”
Sarah shook her head.
“Do you live here, too?” I asked.
She smiled. “Just when my parents are away—they’re out on a hunt. But cousin Donald isn’t with them. He went sealing with Davidee.”
She was the first one I’d met in all of Sanirarsipaaq who didn’t call him Hard Hat. Also, I noted, she had spoken his name fondly.
“They good friends?” I asked.
The slightest of shadows showed in her eyes. “Sometimes, but when I came here about noon Davidee said something and Donald yelled something back at him.” There was no use asking her where they’d gone or when they’d be back. Hunters came back when they finished hunting, not by any schedule.
She didn’t look especially apprehensive; in fact, it was more as if she wished to please. “Don’t know where they went,” she offered, “but it was on Davidee’s Skidoo. Maybe if they kept on arguing they won’t be gone long. Want me to tell him you’re looking for him?”
“Will you do that?”
“Sure.”
When we were driving away, Bouvier asked, “You looking for him for what I think you’re looking for him for?”
“Wouldn’t be surprised. I want to know who was into Dennis for more money than he could pay.”
An hour later at the detachment, I was surprised. The door opened and Hard Hat came in. I thought, it’s strange the way that hat suits the rest of him, sort of a feisty-looking welterweight. The first time I saw him at the airport I’d thought that he had a particularly cheerful expression. He didn’t look all that cheerful now. I wondered what he and Davidee had been arguing about.
“You get anything?” I asked. I meant, on the hunt.
He shook his head. “Nothing but a lot of shit from Davidee.”
“I thought you were friends from away back.”
“We used to be. Then I smartened up.”
I took a shot in the dark. “What were you two arguing about today?”
“Who told you we were arguing? Oh, Sarah, I guess. Anyway . . .” He paused. “I was going to come and see you even before I got the message.”
“What about?”
“Well, it seems to me . . .” he said, then stopped. “You would hear that him and me were good friends . . .”
I waited for the rest.
“We’re not, anymore. I don’t want you thinking that anything he’s mixed up in, I’m automatically in it too.”
“What’s he mixed up in?”
He paused as if wrestling with himself about what to reply. “Just that we’re not friends anymore,” he said stubbornly.
“Okay, I’ll tell you what I wanted to see you about. I understand you used to help Dennis collect what people owed him.”
“That’s true. But I never done anything wrong. I’d just tell ’em, pay up or I’ll beat the shit out of you.” He smiled very faintly. “That was always enough.”
“Always?” I asked.
“Always.”
“Was there anybody who owed Dennis a lot of money who might have got into an argument about it with him, enough to beat him up? Enough to get into the fight he had before he got killed?”
He was shaking his head even before I finished the question.
I tried another tack.
“Your alibi on the night of the murders . . . ” I began.
“Was that I was watching hockey at Davidee’s parents’ place and then went to the rec hall.”
“You went straight to the rec hall and stayed there until after Bouvier took the pictures, and then you went home?”
“That’s it. The other guys there would back me up, I was playing snooker with some of them. When you guys, I mean the corporal here, and Barker, came in and did the searches, I didn’t know what it was all about. None of us did. I didn’t even know about the murders until the next morning.”
“Was Davidee in the rec hall any of that time? We know he wasn’t when the pictures were taken.”
“All I know is, he wasn’t there when I was there.”
I couldn’t think of anywhere to go from there. “Okay,” I said, “and thanks for coming in.”
He nodded. “I just don’t want you to think of me and Davidee any more as being friends. In fact, I beat the shit out of him this morning.”
I couldn’t believe it—for about three seconds. Then I looked into Hard Hat’s hard eyes and did believe it. “Why?”
“Something he said about my cousin Sarah. That she’d fuck anybody.”
Abruptly, he walked out of the door and slammed it behind him, leaving two very surprised cops staring at each other.
“You believe him?” Bouvier asked.
“Most of it,” I said.