“I told you -”
“Whatever you call him. Where is he?”
“He’s at his house… why?”
“Describe him for me.”
Paritas’s brow creased. “What’s going on here?”
“I’m asking the questions.”
“He’s big. People call him bearlike. But not fat, just a big man. He has a beard and -”
“Fine.”
“Fine?”
“Yeah, that’s all I need to know.”
Paritas kept her gaze on Hazel, and then decided she wasn’t going to press her luck. She crossed one leg over the other. “Are we allowed to smoke in here?”
“Not since 1998. Let’s talk about your fishing expedition. You say you didn’t see a body coming out of Gannon Lake, but it was on the end of your line. So what did you see?”
“I really have no idea,” said Paritas. “By the time it was coming out of the water, Pat had taken over. It was too heavy for me to reel in. I just caught a flash of it. It was round and sort of orange and green. It had lines on it, I think.”
“You know, you don’t strike me as the kind of person who goes out for bass.”
“I’m not. It’s Dean’s thing. He has about twenty stuffed fish on the wall of his house. He doesn’t even eat them. I go out with him once a year and he goes to the craft show with me. It’s a trade. It would be different if he ate them, but he says he’s into the ‘sport’ of it.”
“Did Dean see what was on your line?”
“Yeah. He said it was a buoy or something.”
“Don’t buoys float?”
Paritas sighed. “I’m honestly not an expect, Detective. Inspector, I mean. If you want to talk to Dean, I can give you his number.” Hazel turned her notebook to Paritas and laid her finger on the number they had for Bellocque. “That’s it,” said Paritas.
“It’s out of order.”
“Oh. I’ll mention it to him.”
Hazel smiled at Paritas with a tilted head. “Handy, huh, the two of you go out fishing, find something that might have been a body on the lakebed, and then you’re unreachable for the rest of the weekend.”
“I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”
“Does Dean have internet access at his house?”
Gil Paritas laughed. “That’s funny.”
“Why?”
“You don’t know Dean, obviously.”
“No… no, I don’t,” said Hazel. “Tell me about him.”
“He can fix anything with his hands, any mechanical little thing. He’s got projects all over the house. It’s how he makes a living. Fixes people’s washing machines, wires houses, digs septic tanks. It’s how we met.”
“He dug your septic tank?”
“It was more romantic than it sounds.”
“It would have to be.” She poised her pen over the PNB. “What’s the address?”
“Of what?”
“The house where Mr. Bellocque dug your septic tank?”
“Oh,” said Paritas, waving her hands in front of her. “That place is long gone. It was just outside of Gilmore. But I sold it after my divorce.”
“You’re divorced, are you? When was that?”
“What’s my divorce got to do with anything?”
Hazel thought about that. “Nothing, I guess. So you stay with Dean now if you come up to Gilmore.”
“That’s right.”
“Fine, then. You were saying he’s good with tools.”
“Well, he’s good with real things. But computers? The internet? Forget it. He thinks it’s modern witchcraft.”
“So your boyfriend wouldn’t have a webcam or anything like -”
“Honestly, I told you, he’s not my boyfriend. I’m fifty-four, for god’s sake. I don’t have a boyfriend. He’s just a… a friend. He lends me a hand once in a while.”
“I’m sure he does. So what is he then? What is the nature of your relationship?”
Paritas looked down at the tabletop, wiped away some invisible smudge with her finger. “Can I ask what my relationship with Dean has to do with anything?”
“Nothing,” said Hazel, brightly. “Let’s move on. Why were you fishing where you were fishing?”
“There was nothing biting. Pat said she knew a better spot.”
“So it was Pat’s idea to fish there.”
“She’s the one who knows the lake.”
“Did she seem… eager for either of you to fish that spot? Did she tell you exactly where to fish?”
“No,” said Paritas, “she just said there was fish there. She had a radar-type thing on the boat that could read the water. There were supposed to be fish.”
“And were there?”
“Just that thing we caught. That I caught. Then we went back, as you know.” “To Dean’s?” “That’s right.”
Hazel turned back a couple of pages in her PNB and read her notes from the interview with Barlow. “You came in separate cars. You and Bellocque.”
Paritas narrowed her eyes at Hazel. “So?”
“Just seems odd, if you’re living together, that you came in separate cars.”
“We’re not living together, Detective Inspector. I live in Toronto. Remember? You interrupted my drive home. I have my own car.”
“Okay, okay,” Hazel said, trying to mollify the other woman. She decided to try a curveball. “So it was Barlow who drove the two of you out to that shelf. But do you think you could find it again?”
“Me?” said Paritas. “You mean on my own?”
“Yeah. Could you direct us to that spot?”
“Why?”
“Well, we never found the thing you say isn’t a body, and Barlow is too scared, so she says, to go out there again. So I thought -”
Paritas shifted in her chair, looking alarmed. “You’re kidding me, right?”
“Could you find it?”
The woman, her mouth slightly open, stared at Hazel. “I probably could, but I don’t think I want to.”
“And why would that be?”
Paritas leaned forward over the table. “I didn’t see it, okay? I told you. It was Pat who insisted it was a body. And if there’s any chance it actually was, I don’t want to have to look at it, do you understand? I was a guest on that boat, there against my will to appease my… my friend. I’m not going back out on that lake to help you find some half-decomposed body. You can’t force me.”
She was scared. But Hazel could see, not in a way that was useful to her. “And you’re sure Dean didn’t somehow direct Pat Barlow to that part of the lake?”
“And then somehow ensure I fished a body off the bottom of the lake? So… what? Dean’s a killer and I’m his accomplice and he thought it’d be fun if we went out, with a witness, and just made sure one of his victims was right where we thought it was?”
“Well?”
“Am I charged with something, Detective Inspector? I’ve watched enough television to know that I’m here by choice, and that I can leave at any time, unless I’m to be charged with something.”
Hazel looked at her watch. She’d got fifteen minutes of questioning in – pretty good. “If you don’t mind, I’d like you to look at something before you leave.”
“Do I have to?”
“No.”
Paritas stood and seemed to be lost in thought. “What is it?”
She followed Hazel out of the room, and they crossed behind the pen. The evidence room, such as it was, was a small chamber with a single file of metal shelves fitted against a wall. There was so little call to store anything meaningful in this room that over the years it had become a catch-all for sundry crap belonging to both the station and its personnel. There was a stack of notebooks and other paper goods on one shelf, a miscellany of police caps in different sizes still wrapped in plastic, and on a lower shelf, a roll of green felt that unfurled over a desk and became a poker table. It had been confiscated six years ago when Sergeant MacDonald broke up an illegal rake-game in a private home. Now, sometimes, it was pressed into duty at fundraisers. Or the occasional backroom game that broke out in the station house.