Snowjob by Ted Wood Read Free Book Online Page A

everyone standing in line to apologize. He’s a good buddy of mine too.”
    It was five o’clock and fully dark, the streetlights glinting yellow on the piled snow around the parking lot. I sat in my car, patting Sam’s head absently, wondering what to do next. There wasn’t much really, not before I’d spoken to Doug again and tried to get him to open up some more. I had to find out what he had been working on. If mob money was involved it was motive enough for someone to have killed the woman and framed him to get him off their backs. But unless Doug opened up to me, I couldn’t do much more for him.
    The only other thing I could follow up was the beer can. It seemed the weak link in the case. From the placement of the prints it looked as if it had been served to Doug, on a tray. If he’d helped himself to a beer, the prints would have been random. And I wondered why it, alone of the six-pack, had other fingerprints on it. Anyone could have bought the six-pack, wiped it clear of prints and stuck it in the cooler at the Laver house, taking one out to account for the empty in the garbage can. No, I decided, the beer can was a good place to start investigating.
    On my own patch, under Ontario law, the only place to buy beer is the government store. I could have chased the staff up to see if they remembered Cindy Laver buying beer. But here, in Vermont, booze was sold in grocery stores. I could never canvass them myself. No, I decided, I would concentrate on the can with the prints and there was one logical place to start, at Brewskis, where Doug and Cindy Laver had taken their last public drink together.
    Carol Henning was behind the bar again. She pulled me a Budweiser and waved my money away. “Draft beer we can cover. It’s on the house. How’s your work going?”
    “Pretty good, thanks.” Nobody wants to hear bad news. “Thought I’d drop in and ask about the last night Doug Ford was here. Can you remember what he drank that night?”
    She shrugged. “I serve around three grand’s worth of drinks in a shift.”
    “I hope everybody tips big,” I said and she snorted.
    “Not bad. I make about twice my pay in tips, but don’t go telling that to the boss.”
    “I promise.” I sipped my beer. “Do you think you could ask, Joyce is it? Next time she comes to the bar.”
    “Will do.” She tilted her head on one side, flirtingly. “Is this gonna help?”
    “Lord knows. I’m just a nosy SOB, that’s all.”
    Now she looked at me levelly. “You’re married, right?”
    “Yeah. How can you tell? Do I look round-shouldered, what?”
    She laughed, a nice friendly sound. “I can always tell, even when the guy’s coming on to me. But you don’t. I figure you play it straight.”
    “I’m terminally married. But they didn’t poke my eyes out on my wedding day.”
    She laughed and said, “I’ll see what Joyce remembers.”
    Someone came to the other end of the bar and she bobbed away while I sat sipping my Bud. A minute or so later, the waitress I’d helped the night before came up to me. “Hi. Carol said you wanted to talk to me.”
    “Just a dumb question. I was wondering if you can remember what Doug Ford ordered the night he was in with Ms. Layer. The night she was killed.”
    “Yeah. I remember because she was kind of mad. She said to me, ‘I suppose we’ll have what we always have. That hasn’t changed.’ And then he said, ‘No, make it a beer for me, please, a Coors.’ And I found we were all out of bottles but there were cans. I served him a can of Coors.”
    “Thank you.” I didn’t let any satisfaction show but my spirits lifted. “Can you remember who else was working that night?”
    She pushed out her lower lip. “The same bunch. Carol was at the bar and Ellen was working the dining room, from the bar that is, taking drinks through.”
    “Any management people around?”
    She thought about that before answering. “Not working. But Walt was here, Walt Huckmeyer. He hurt his