“Domestic partnership,” George said, which was true in a way. Becker wrote that down as well.
“Now, Mr. Hoito and Ms. Deacon, can you tell me in your own words just how you came to find the deceased?”
“Well, we were getting rid of, er…”
“… some scrap lumber and Polly thought that she—”
“I thought I saw a piece that we could have kept. You know? Re-use? Recycle? So I jumped down to haul it back.”
“And she moved that old door.”
“It looked like maybe we could save it too, eh? And the decea—I mean the body—was there underneath it.”
“Slow down, please,” Becker said. “I don’t do shorthand.” He smiled, and I started to like him. Nice eyes. Crinkles at the corners.
The fat guy still hadn’t moved from the driver’s seat of the cruiser, but I could see an ambulance arriving to deal with Spit Morton. Fatty noticed it too and gunned the cruiser over to meet it.
We had met the cops at the dump hut, after we had replaced Dweezil in the back of the truck and covered him up. The truck was still parked by the pit where the body was.
The cops had checked out Spit, and, like me, they had decided that he was in no danger and left him there to wait for the first-aid people. I’ll bet Spit would have received more attention if he had been dressed in a three-piece suit and found unconscious in a BMW.
Anyway, that left us alone with Becker. He had caught up with his notes and was looking at me expectantly.
“Uh, sorry. Did you ask me something?” I said.
“Did you touch the body in any way?”
“Are you kidding? The guy was not in any immediate need of CPR, you know. Just look at him.” Becker peered obediently over the edge of the pit. I looked over too, to keep him company, which was a mistake. The corpse’s appearance had not improved. The most horrible part was that his eyes were open. Once you see dead eyes, you never forget them.
“Right. So you didn’t move him.”
“He might have shifted a bit when I moved the door that was covering him,” I said. “I took one look and scrammed.”
“Don’t blame you. You recognize him?”
Now this is the weird thing. Up until then, I hadn’t. It had just been a body. A horror-filmy, yucky, dead human body, and that was all my outraged mind would accept, but when Becker asked me that question, I did recognize him. I knew who it was.
“John Travers,” I said.
George gasped.“Really?” he said and went back to take another look over the edge.
“Travers. Local?”
“He’s—was—an auto mechanic living about two kilometres down the dump road. He has a wife and baby daughter—Oh, God, Francy!”
“Francy. His wife?”
“Somebody’s got to let her know,” I said.
“We’ll do that, Ms. Deacon.”
“How? Knock on her door stone-faced, hat in hand? There’s no telling how she’ll react. She’ll probably flip out all over you. You don’t know Francy.”
“Do you know her?”
“Yes. She’s a friend.”
“Perhaps you’d be willing to come with us then, to talk to her, when we get through here. She’ll likely be needing someone she knows to be with her for support.”
“Not likely,” George muttered. I tried to elbow him to shut up, but it was too late. Becker turned quickly to look at him.
“What does that mean?” he said, sharply.
George had the grace to look sheepish, or goatish, which he does from time to time. His ears elongate, somehow, and his neck gets brownish-red when he says something tactless.
“Well. John Travers was a bit of a… not a good husband to Francine.”
Becker looked at me. I hated to say it. Francy had just lost her husband, though she didn’t know it yet, and even if he was a no-good son of a bitch who got drunk and hit her, she had told me that she loved him, most of the time.
“He was violent,” I said. “Look him up, Detective Becker. There’s probably some record of—what do you call ’em—domestics? John was a shit.”
Becker’s nice crinkly eyes narrowed and I swear his ears moved. “So, she might have some motive for shooting him?”
“Motive she may have had,” I said, “but Francy wouldn’t shoot anybody. She hated guns. Anyway, she just had a baby. Kind of hard to lug a body to the dump without bursting your C-section stitches and spewing your intestines.” It was graphic, I know, and both George and Becker winced. What is it with men, that they can eat pepperoni pizza while watching a slice-and-dice Rambo film, but the merest mention of menstruation or childbirth and they go a sickly green colour?
The ambulance had pulled away from the dump hut, presumably with Spit Morton safely tucked away inside. I hoped he was okay. The fat cop drove back to the pit, pulling up just inches from Becker’s left thigh. Becker jumped out of the way and swore, and the fat guy laughed.
A second vehicle arrived, painted a dark colour, very discreet. It had more class than Spit’s hearse could ever hope for, and I knew that it was the dead-mobile. Suddenly, I really wanted to go home.
“Are we done?” I said.
“What? The little lady doesn’t want to help us drag up the nice, juicy body she found?” the fat guy said, poking his head out of the cruiser window, a greasy smile on his face.
“The little lady,” I said, “is in shock.” And I was, because suddenly everything went black.
Three
She’s got her good dress on
and she’s waiting like a bracelet
for his arm.
—Shepherd’s Pie
George drove me home after I woke up. I had never fainted before and I was mortified.
“Must have been because I didn’t have any breakfast,” I said, more to myself than to George, as the old truck bounced along the Dunbar sideroad. He was driving more slowly than usual, which I appreciated, but it didn’t make much difference. The Dunbar road hasn’t seen a municipal grader since the Great Depression.
“It is a good thing you didn’t eat, actually,” George said. “Bodies are best discovered on an empty stomach, I think.”
“You have a point. Oh, shit.”
George stepped on the brakes. “Are you going to throw up?”
“No, no. I just remembered that I was supposed to go with Becker to tell Francy about John. I don’t want her to be alone when they tell her.”
“The policeman Becker already thought of that. He said you should take it easy. He’ll finish up at the dump and then come to pick you up. You should have seen him when you fainted. He caught you before you hit the ground, like one of those figure-skater fellows. I thought he would twirl you around a couple of times before he put you down.”
“I really don’t know why I chose that moment to black out,” I said, disturbed by the thought of Becker’s arms around me. Wish I’d been awake.
“It was good timing,” George said. “It got us away from there. No more questions.”
“True.