Free Corkscrew by Ted Wood

boat and killed him to ensure his silence.
    Carl had taken out the roll of negatives and was holding them up to the light. I looked over his shoulder, unable to make out much in the reversed colors. He held them against a light and skimmed them. "Nothing very exciting so far," he said as he reached the halfway point. "Six—no, seven—shots of the gigglers who hang around downtown. A couple of boats."
    "Is one of them a cruiser with a canvas cover?" I was looking at them with him but could see only red. The angle was wrong for me.
    "One is," he said. "It would be green in the positive." I said nothing, and he turned to me. "Does that mean anything?"
    "It could," I said. "What else is there?"
    "Let me see . . . more boats, a chipmunk eating peanuts. He must have used a long lens for this one; the little rascal is full frame. Then there's that miserable dog of Walter Puckrin's. See, a good composition, head hanging out of his doghouse. He looks like an old French trollop in her bedroom window."
    "Could you pull me a quick print of these, please? I can't read negatives the way you can."
    "Right away." He fiddled with his other machine. "I'll do straight contacts. They're small, but it's faster."
    "Good." I nodded. "I appreciate it."
    He went to work with his other machine and was absorbed for a moment or two, then asked over his shoulder, "What happened? Was he drowned?"
    "No," I said, and he looked up in genuine surprise.
    "I assumed . . ." he said, and trailed off.
    "So will most people. His body was recovered off Indian Island, but the doctor thinks he was smothered, and he'd been hit in the head first."
    "Good God," he said angrily. "That's sick."
    "It's murder. And whoever did it wanted the evidence hidden. The body was dropped into the deep hole off Indian Island."
    He straightened up from his machine and looked at me. "Doesn't that tell you that whoever did it knows the lake very well?" he asked.
    "Yes. That's what I think. That's why I want this film. I think he may have known the man who killed him. Maybe there's a photo on the film."
    "I hope so," Carl said savagely. "I hope to God there is."
    He worked silently for another five minutes before pulling out the contact sheets from the drier and handing them to me. I looked at each in turn. Nothing jumped out and spoke to me. The girls at the tavern were laughing and pointing at the camera as if it were a joke. Beckie Vanderheyden was one of them, and her pretty young face was no kinder than any of the others. Then there were animal pictures, a couple of the chipmunk, one of Walter's old shepherd dog, another of a tortoiseshell cat. And then there were boats.
    I studied these more slowly. Carl had a magnifying glass on a little stand, and he handed it to me, pulling down a high-intensity lamp for me to use. The pictures were arty, made up of the curves and shapes of boats, several boats in each picture. Some were from low level, taken as he lay full-length on a dock somewhere, I guessed, looking for the effect he wanted. Others were high shots, from where? Up a tree possibly. Or! The thought came to me like a bolt of lightning. From the second-story balcony of some cottage set above the water. Which meant they had been taken from one of only about a dozen places around the lake.
    I pointed out one of the pictures for Carl. "When would you say this was taken, morning or evening?"
    He moved the glass away from me and examined the shot carefully. "The light is yellowish. The shadows are getting long. I'd say this was taken around seven in the evening."
    I took the glass and contact sheets back from him and studied the shadows. "In that case, looking at the run of that dock against the sun, it was taken on this side of the waterway, from a balcony. And that means it could be the Corbetts' place."
    He looked at me and nodded. "Right. I covered a party there once, a twenty-fifth anniversary. The balcony is about, oh, say, fifteen feet above the dock. The angle's right."
    I