A Door in the River Read online

  The main road on the reserve ran within a kilometre of the shoreline of Queesik Bay. The closer the road came to the lake, the more likely someone would be parked there in order to access the water to fish or swim. This was what he’d have to do – locate a lookout on the Eagle in a bend in the road close enough to the water to disguise why he was there. He’d brought a pair of high-powered binoculars, and when he was installed on the shoulder beside a marshy tract of land, he lowered the two rear passenger seats and lay between them on his stomach. With the glasses steadied against the rear window, he was able to see the comings and goings through the front door of the Eagle, although the activity inside was hidden.

  Janice had made him a special lunch for his “first stakeout,” a cloth lunchbox that zipped shut and contained a rare roast beef sandwich on a baguette, two large red apples, a Thermos of coffee, a big bottle of water, and some whole grain crackers with a hunk of cheddar in cling wrap. He was to text her every hour, or whenever something exciting happened. He stared hard through the binoculars and watched a number of people enter and exit Eagle Smoke and Souvenir. He texted Janice: Stakeout under way. An hour later, he texted, Numerous cigarette and souvenir purchases have been duly noted. At one o’clock in the afternoon, he forgot to text, and she wrote to him asking what was happening. He wrote back, Bored silly.

  He’d worked out categories and taxonomies by the middle of the afternoon. General categories were On foot and By vehicle, and By vehicle was subdivided into Car and Taxi. There were categories for Alone and Not alone. Some people came out with bags, some not. There was no way of knowing if the bagless people had made purchases or not, but a person buying only a pack of cigarettes wouldn’t have a bag.

  No one who went in alone came out with anyone. No one who went in with someone left without that person. People who came in taxis left in taxis. Sometimes a person who came on foot left in a taxi. That was the only variation. By three in the afternoon, he was out of food and water and more or less out of patience. He called Hazel. She answered curtly and wouldn’t talk to him for more than a few seconds. He hung up and stared out the rear window. Real romantic, a stakeout. He made a checkmark under On foot as a man entered the shop from the road.

  Hazel dropped her mother off at home. Emily said, “Off to visit the undertaker now?” as she closed the door to the house, but she’d ignored the sniping. The whole time she’d been in Pass’s office, the facts of the case were piling up in the hopper of her mind. There was a point when likenesses and dissonances began to coalesce in a case. She didn’t have all the hints, all the resonations in place, but there was too much lining up. Not enough for an image to form, but enough to sense one.

  Now she was thinking again that it had to do with money. A precise amount. The girl had taken precisely what she’d been owed. But then she’d also torn the office apart looking for something else. The money had been right there in the front hall, in a drawer. Unless that was where she’d looked last. She didn’t seem to lack confidence, this girl. Stunning the wife, conking her in the head and ransacking the place wasn’t exactly subtle. And why had she left Cathy alive? Had this girl intended to kill Henry?

  Finally, could there be a connection to the casino? What if Henry had gone back to a forgotten vice and somehow gotten entangled with this girl? When she got back to the station house, she had Cartwright track down a wallet-sized picture of Henry Wiest. She tucked it into her breast pocket, along with a photocopy of the police sketch of the thoughtful-looking young woman.

  ] 13 [

  Afternoon

  Hazel Micallef parked her unmarked as close as she could get to the casino’s doors so the walk from the car to the entrance would be as short as possible. She went in unmolested and her luck held out. One of the three guards was the man who’d admitted her with Constable Bellecourt two nights ago. “Back for more?” he asked.

  “Got a quick meeting with Lee.”

  “Awesome. I’ll let him know you’re coming.”

  “Oh, don’t bother. I have to use the, uh, first and I’ll just go to the office. I know where it is.”

  “Is this police business?” he asked.

  She wasn’t sure how to answer that. Maybe it was better that she was just here as a civilian, albeit a civilian in uniform. “No,” she said.

  “Well then, without Constable Bellecourt accompanying you, you’ll need a member’s card. It’s a technicality, sorry. You can get one over there at Member Services. Line up on the right.”

  “Member card, huh?”

  “Sorry,” he repeated. “Policy.”

  She stared at him, to no effect, and she went and stood in the line between two other prospective new “members,” fuming, and then slid her driver’s licence across the desk to a woman with a blank look on her face. She gazed at the card and typed Hazel’s particulars in. She pointed over her own shoulder mysteriously, and when Hazel looked at where she was pointing, a flash went off. “Come back in ten minutes,” she said.

  “Ten minutes? What about my licence?”

  “We just do a quick check. Then you get it back. A lot of fake IDs come through here, unfortunately.”

  To her left, at a porthole in a wall covered in Plexiglas, a man came up and gave his name, and another woman gave him his new membership card and his licence back through a little opening. At least they were thorough, Hazel thought.

  For ten minutes, she stood in the vestibule and watched people come and go from the interior of the casino. On one of the walls there were pictures of people holding big cardboard cheques. These people were jackpot winners. She understood that some people had a system for winning jackpots, but they required patience and a big bankroll. Not all of the winners looked happy. Imagine the problem you had if forty thousand dollars wasn’t enough to solve it.

  After ten minutes, she got in line on the left to pick up her card. A woman in front of her in line collected her driver’s licence and her new membership to the casino, an exciting-looking black card with a display of fireworks on the front. Hazel gave her name and got the two cards in return. She pocketed her licence.

  The guard showed her how to run the card through the reader. “What, really, is the point of this?” Hazel asked.

  “Self-exclusion.”

  “Self-exclusion?”

  “Problem-gamblers exclude themselves from the casino. If they try to run their card through, they get caught and we toss ’em.”

  “Really.”

  “Good luck, ma’am,” the guard said.

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  He opened the door for her and she plunged into the air-conditioned scintillance and stood before a bank of slot machines. She headed into them, like a deer into cover, and walked with her head down as she tried to figure out the best path to get to the poker room. She’d decided to head there first, as it was out of the way of the main floor, and from what little she knew about poker, people who played it liked to talk. Maybe she’d hear something. Show around a picture or two and listen. Poker was popular. It was on every other channel, guys with stubble squinting. Maybe someone had seen Henry Wiest in here. Tying him to the casino – without a member’s card – would be a very useful bit of information.

  The laneway between the machines led directly to the back of the casino. The word POKER was painted over an archway. She walked casually to a cut-out in the wall beside the entry. There was a man in a good suit typing on a keyboard. He saw her approach.

  “Officer?”

  It wouldn’t do to correct him, so she let it stand. “Sorry to bother you … Calvin … I’m just down from Fort Leonard and I’m looking for this man.” She slid the picture across the top of the cut-out. “Unfortunately, this is in regard of a next of kin. I was told I could find him here most afternoons.”

  “Oh gosh, of course,” said the man, and he studied the picture for a moment. Then he passed it among some of the other bosses in the room behind him. Hazel looked around herself subtly, making like she was sopping up t
he atmosphere as she waited for the photo to make the rounds. There was no one looking at her. Calvin returned with another man, a man in a better suit. No nametag. Absolutely a native. Paydirt?

  “I’m head of the poker room, ma’am. I’m here eight hours a day, six days a week. If the man in this picture was a regular, he came in in a dress. But I think I would have noticed that, too.”

  “Maybe he’s a recent regular?”

  He beckoned her around to the entrance and then impatiently waved her over the threshold. He pointed at a player. “Today’s his third time here. This guy” – he pointed at another table – “was a regular for three years, quit for a year, and this is his first month back. Three guys at the back there, on table six, are playing in this poker room for the first time. I clock everyone in, Officer, and I never forget a face.”

  “Okay. Point taken. What about other parts of the casino? Maybe you’ve seen him elsewhere in here.”

  The man’s expression changed slightly. She would have called this new expression shut down. “Did he play poker or not?” he said, not entirely unfriendly.

  “I thought he did.”

  “Perhaps your information is incorrect?”

  “I suppose it could be.”

  “Then I’ve answered your questions.”

  “Yes, you have.”

  She turned smartly and left. A little checkmark got inscribed in her mind. But what was it marking? She believed that that man had never seen Henry Wiest in his life. She decided to try the table games. In the open. But what then? Flash images at patrons? That didn’t seem like a good strategy if she wanted to get the most bang for her buck.

  She followed the wall along the side of the bar and went back into the forest of slot machines, moving casually. At the other end of the casino was the high-stakes room, tucked into a corner. Looked good. She crossed quickly into the elegant-looking room. The carpeting was thicker here, and woven with a rich Indian-culture motif of leaping salmon and bears standing proudly on their back legs. There were only a couple of tables each of blackjack, roulette, baccarat, craps. The cognoscenti didn’t sniff at Four-Card Poker or Crazy Twenty-One. They preferred, it seemed, to blow their cash on the classic gambling games.

  There weren’t too many people here. The roulette was popular, and so was blackjack, but it seemed that throwing the dice was too much work for the rich. Three employees were standing around it, yakking. Baccarat was another universe, with people shouting and making checkmarks on cards. The blackjack tables were like covens of witches: crony old women, mostly Asian, hunched over their holdings. It didn’t seem like a place to ask too many questions.

  The croupiers at the craps table, however, were bored out of their skulls, and they brightened perceptibly when she approached. “Hello, gentlemen.”

  A man holding a long rake-type stick said, “Don’t arrest us, Ossifer! It’s the roulette game gots all the illegal booze!” There were three of them there, and one of the men laughed, but the one on the stool behind the table was having none of it.

  “Don’t talk like that, Lane. She’s an officer of the law. OPS.”

  “It’s okay, boys,” she said, backing off comically. “I’m just here on a next-of-kin job. Travers knows I’m here.”

  “What does Travers know you’re here for … DI Micallef?” he said, reading her nametag.

  “I’m looking for this guy.” She handed the picture to the man on the stool. The boss. “Name of Henry Wiest. I understand he plays here sometimes and I’m trying to track him down.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “It’s nothing he did,” she said. “There’s been a death in the family and no one can find him.”

  “Maybe he’s the death in the family,” said the rake.

  “Lane? Jesus. Ma’am, Detective Inspector, you’re free to look around, but this is, you know, this is a service industry and how’d it look if you were some kind of process server looking to serve this guy, your Henry, with a letter from a judge?”

  “I never thought of that,” said the rake.

  “You see?” said the stool. The third man was just watching.

  “Yeah, I see,” said Hazel, and she took the picture back, thanking them with some kind of a bow and feeling a little stupid. She walked past the roulette table, and she was darned if the croupier didn’t give her the hairy eyeball. She was beginning to feel unwelcome.

  This feeling only intensified when Commander LeJeune met her at the edge of the room. She was smiling. “I heard you were lurking. What else did we miss?”

  “Well, I’m a member now,” she said, and she flashed her casino ID at the commander. “I can come and go as I please.”

  “To the casino.”

  “So, what are you all, like, hiding in a zebra costume and following me around?”

  “Percy, from the poker room, gave me a call. He thinks on his feet, that Percival.”

  “Do you take me out in chains now and parade me before your people?”

  LeJeune frowned at that. “That would be slightly less-than-playful banter there, Detective Inspector. What’s got you so mad?”

  “Just all the paleface stuff, the fact that an officer of the law, in the same province, incidentally, that you’re living in, gets a cross-eyed look from every Indian in the place.”

  “Oh come on, Detective. You’re free to do as you please. Mi casa, and so on. And who called you paleface? Did someone actually call you paleface?” She laughed heartily.

  “I never said anyone called me anything. Don’t try to paint me into that corner, LeJeune.”

  “Oh, calm down. What are you looking for anyway?”

  “I didn’t find it.” She wanted to get out of here, now. There was a small knot of people in attendance around them, not sure if they were listening in on something interesting or not. “If I had found something, you’d know.”

  “Well, good.”

  LeJeune’s even-tempered approach was grating on her nerves. She weighed the value of being conciliatory against trying to piss her off. She decided to compromise. “I presume you accept now that Henry Wiest was murdered.”

  “I don’t accept anything.”

  “What would you say if I told you we’d had more … activity since Henry’s death?”

  “Well, I would need to know what you meant by that.”

  “Cathy Wiest was attacked. In her own home. Shot with a Taser-like weapon, just like Henry was.”

  For the first time, LeJeune’s expression changed. “By whom?”

  “I’m going to take the Fifth on that, Commander. Until we know more. All I can tell you is that our investigation points to here.”

  “It does, does it?”

  “What would you have us do? Your own autopsy was wrong and you all seemed satisfied with your own conclusions. But the Wiests are my responsibility and after you gave signs of moving on, I thought it wise to run our investigation in the background. I think you would have done the same thing.”

  “I shudder to think of the consequences of that,” said LeJeune. “But fine. You made your choices.”

  “We did. And when we learn something, we’ll let you know.”

  “Why do I feel I’m being invited to my own party, now?”

  “I haven’t invited you to anything,” Hazel said, and that did it. LeJeune’s facade of total Zen collapsed and she narrowed her eyes at the detective inspector. “We did the footwork, Commander. If you want in on this investigation, it’s under my authority.”

  “Cowboys and Indians?”

  “Whatever you want to call it.”

  Now the smile was back. “I’m not sure what I would call this. How about you do your thing, but you check in with me any time you step on reserve land?”

  Hazel had no intention of letting LeJeune know anything about her movements. “Absolutely,” she said.

  Outside, continuing the conversation with LeJeune in her mind, she forgot she’d brought the unmarked and it took her five minutes to find it in the parki
ng lot. She was giving LeJeune a piece of her mind, and the commander was really feeling the heat, holding her hands up, apologizing. You may be under the illusion that everything is always as it seems, but out here in the REAL world, we know it rarely is. LeJeune looked horrified, and then the phone on Hazel’s hip rang. “WHAT!” she shouted into it.

  “Skip?”

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s Roland … I’m sitting in your car on Queesik Bay Road? Drinking cold coffee out of a cracked Thermos.”

  “Sorry, Roland.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Walking to my car about six kilometres away from you.” “You’re on the reserve?”

  “I am. But I can’t talk. Has anything come up?”

  “Not really.”

  “Keep up the good work,” she said. She hung up on him and called Constable Costamides. Hazel had sent her down to the Wiest store that afternoon. “What’s the news?”

  “I don’t think I found anything. His manager, Janis Hoogstraat, was in the store and she said Henry had taken the account books home.”

  “Was that normal?”

  “Actually, she sounded surprised when she couldn’t find them. Then she remembered he’d taken them home.”

  Hazel thought about the ransacked office. “I’ll see you back at HQ,” she said.

  ] 14 [

  Evening

  She had an idea where those ledgers were. They were, or had been, somewhere in the mess of Henry Wiest’s destroyed office. But could the girl with the stun gun have been looking for ledgers? Who would Taser a stranger in her own home and then tear the place apart looking for paperwork? No, the girl’s presence in the house had nothing to do with ledgers or cheques. Maybe Henry had brought his accounts home in order to hide an unusual transaction, like those hundreds in that envelope.