“But you didn’t.”
“No. What was the point? The lawyers would get the money, Ernie would lose his store, and where would that leave us? It sure as hell wouldn’t do anything for my parents.”
Hanson leaned over and patted my arm. “Well, I’ll tell you, Carlton, there is a certain amount of incriminating evidence strewn about the place, and those two OPP louts obviously think you killed Ernie, but I don’t, and I’ll see you out of this if it’s the last thing I do.”
A lump, an honest-to-God lump came to my throat, and we sat there for a minute in a solemn silence.
Hanson broke it by saying, “Oh, I nearly forgot. You may as well have this.” He handed me a copy of the newspaper clipping that was now part of the case of the late E. Struthers and explained that he had asked his old pal Fred Burgess to run off a copy for him before it was bagged and sealed. Two copies, in fact, one for him, one for me.
The one for me was pure swank; I wasn’t going to be able to make anything of this.
“What am I supposed to do with it?” I asked.
“Read, heed, and inwardly digest, as we used to say on the police training courses. There may be something in this clipping that will tell us what Ernie was up to.”
“Nothing good, I’ll bet,” I said and I leaned down to see if Marchepas would startle the world by starting twice in succession. She did, and I was just about to pull away from the cop-shop when I got an idea. A lulu, if I do say so myself.
“Hey, Hanson, what if you were to come out of retirement?”
“Pardon?”
“Well, think about it. Now, don’t laugh. I remember a few years ago one of the Toronto newspapers brought a famous Scotland Yard detective over from the U.K. to help solve the mystery of a girl’s disappearance . . .”
“You mean Fabian of the Yard?”
“That was the name. He was going to find . . .”
“Marion McDowell. I remember the case.”
There was a thoughtful pause, and then Hanson said, “He never did find her, you know.”
“No, but he had a good run at it.”
“And you think I should try my hand at solving this case?”
“Why not?”
“Well, I admit the idea has a certain appeal. Certainly, I was the one who put the notion into those fellows’ heads that you did Ernie in. Perhaps it is up to me to help get it out.”
“I could get a terrific story out of it,” I pointed out, “and that would cover any expenses.”
There was another pause, rather longer, while I looked out the window—at a fascinating view of the back of the OPP shed—and then Hanson asked, “Who would you write the story for, the Lancer?”
“Why not?”
“I thought the Lancer didn’t go in for stories of this sort.”
“Well, it doesn’t, not normally, but in this case we’d have nothing to lose, would we? If you broke the case, we’d have an exclusive—even the Lancer would carry a crime story if it had a world exclusive—and if . . .”
“I fell on my face, nobody would be the wiser, is that it?”
“Something like that, yes.”
“Well, perhaps it’s worth thinking about. Is this the sort of idea that would appeal to your managing editor?”
“Tommy Macklin? To tell you the truth, the last idea that appealed to Tommy, really appealed to him, had to do with Dolly Parton and a whole lot of whipped cream, but I’m willing to give it a try.”
Hanson nodded decisively. “Then perhaps you’d better get down to the paper,” he said, “and give it a try.”
Chapter 5
The newsroom of the Silver Falls Lancer occupies the second floor of a building on Clarence Street, just off Main. The advertising and circulation offices are downstairs, for easier customer access. The building has seen better days, at a guess, May I, 1901 is one of the better days the building has seen and, as a result, the newspaper office, until quite recently, was an appalling place to work. Too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter, and filled with dirt in all seasons. The only inhabitants who truly enjoyed the ambiance were of the four- and six-footed variety. In the days of hot metal type, when the words were actually set in lead on a linotype machine, we got into the habit of keeping a chunk of the stuff on our desks for heaving at the rodents and squashing the cockroaches. We used to hold a pool on the number of vermin exterminated on press day.
Then we got computers to replace the old typewriters—and, not coincidentally, to allow management to dispense with the services of typesetters—and they fixed the joint up for the sake of the computers. Computers don’t like heat, or cold, or dirt, so all the improvements the peons had been howling for in vain, and which had been rejected on the grounds of needless expense, became affordable. The vermin, except for those actually on the payroll, disappeared. The newsroom is now quite comfortable, a long rectangle punctuated by the desks and terminals of the working stiffs and, across one end, the offices of the lordly—viz., Tommy Macklin, the managing editor, Harry Hibbs, the business manager, and Mrs. Sylvia Post, the publisher.
Tommy was sitting at his desk when I strolled in about ten minutes after two—the trip back to Bosky Dell to return Hanson to his home, added to the interlude with the OPP, plus ten minutes for an incinerated hamburger at the O.K. Café down Main Street, Silver Falls’s answer to Maxim’s, had made me a trifle late for work. I usually clock in at 9 a.m., give or take half an hour, depending on the mood of Marchepas. Tommy looked up.
“Well, if it isn’t the jailbird,” he quipped. “I had a phone call from the inspector,” he went on. “He said something about you stabbing Ernie Struthers. You know what this means?”
“It means I’m fired?”
Tommy nodded, pleased with my ready intelligence.
“Wait a minute, Tommy.” And I went into my spiel. I won’t bore you with it here, because, frankly, it was a little sick-making. I appealed to Tommy’s sense of justice—non-existent—his spirit of fair play—ditto—the journalist’s code that every accused person is innocent until proven guilty—actually, every journalist believes the opposite, but I gave it a try anyway—and the fact that, if he fired me right now, he would have to write the Ramblin’ John column himself this week. At this point he appeared to reconsider.
“Maybe we should wait until you’re actually arrested,” he mused, “and then fire you.”
I told him he was doing the fine, manly thing. Then, pressing home my advantage, I sprang the scheme about having Hanson work with the police on Ernie’s murder, unofficially, of course, with self taking notes for a world exclusive if he cracked the case.
“We don’t run that crime crap,” said Tommy.
“But a world exclusive,” I murmured. “We could sell it to the Toronto papers, maybe even syndicate a series.”
Tommy looked thoughtful, which is to say, his eyes, already far too close together, seemed to compress even further, and he twirled the end of his quite disgusting moustache with his right hand.
“There’s money in that,” he acknowledged. “Of course, the paper gets the syndication fees.”
“Certainly, Tommy.” I wasn’t giving up much. The series wouldn’t appear unless the murder got solved, and I had no faith whatever in those two bozos from the OPP solving it. The way I saw it, Hanson was my best chance of coming out of this without gyves on my wrists. Give me liberty or give me syndication rights, about summed up my view, and of the two I preferred the former.
“I’ll think about it,” Tommy said, and he pointed me out of his office.
I waved cheerily at him from the hallway. All the offices at the Silver Falls Lancer—like most newspaper offices—have glass walls. This is so the higher-ups can see what is going on at all times. Since there is generally nothing worth observing, the system may be wasted. Or maybe not. God knows what journalists would get up to if they w
eren’t under constant observation.
I wandered over to my workstation. We used to have desks; since computers, we have workstations. When I got there, I felt the way the smallest bear must have felt on that famous morning so long ago when Goldilocks dropped by. Someone had been sitting in my chair, and she was still there.
The intruder was a young woman and quite good-looking, if you liked the type. I didn’t. She was long-limbed and slender, with brown hair, slightly curled and fastened at the back with a bandana. She cradled a Nikon 35-millimetre camera in one hand, and had a light-metre on a cord around her neck. She wore the uniform—scuzzy blue jeans, sloppy t-shirt, scuffed boots—of a news photographer. Nothing alarming, so far; but what alarmed me were her eyes. Black, they were, and lustrous, with a snap to them, the kind of eyes that keep sending out messages. Messages like, Watch it, Buster, or I’m onto you, Mac, or Just try something and see what happens. She reminded me of Mary Ambree. Remember Mary? She appears in the work of that outstanding poet, Anon, in a verse that goes:
They mustered their soldiers by two and by three,
And the foremost in battle was Mary Ambree.
Mary was a troublemaker, and so was this one. I could see it at a glance and so, refraining from the natural inquiry—who the hell are you and what are you doing here?—I merely came to a halt in front of her and assumed a neutral expression.
To my astonishment, she thrust out her hand and said something that sounded like “Klovack.” I shook the hand—it seemed the thing to do—and said, “Huh?”
“Klovack,” said the girl again, and tapped herself on a highly interesting chest. Ah, I thought, her name is Klovack. Clearly, this was a foreign traveller visiting in town, without much English.
“Withers,” I bellowed—it is always best, with foreigners, to turn up the volume—and tapped myself on the chest.
“Writer,” I added, giving myself another tap. I pointed to her camera. “You photographer?”
“Christ on a crutch,” said Klovack, “Tommy Macklin told me you were weird, but don’t you even speak English?”
I saw that there had been one of those misunderstandings. The girl was not foreign, she was merely rude, one of the modern bunch who think that thrusting out a hand and rapping out a name constitutes an introduction.
“Um,” I said, and “ah. Perhaps I should introduce myself. I am Carlton Withers, senior reporter here at the Lancer. You again are . . .”
“Klovack. Hanna Klovack, from Toronto.”
“Nice to meet you, Hanna Klovack from Toronto,” I said, which was a lie; this girl was going to be a pain. “What brings you to the boondocks?”
“I’m working here. For a while, at least.” She raised the camera briefly, lowered it again. “I understand you’ve been taking most of the pictures up until now.”
This was true, although I have never claimed to be a great photographer. When you work for the Johnson chain—the Silver Falls Lancer is one of the fifty-seven Canadian links in that glittering chain—you take pictures whether you can or not. That is, you point one of these automatic cameras at something and press the button. What comes out usually looks like a scene about halfway down the shaft of a coal mine, but we print it anyway. It may be lousy, but it is cheap, and cheap is the second-favourite word in the Johnson vocabulary. “Free” tops the list.
“You mean, we’ve hired you as a full-time photographer?”
“Yep. I start today.”
“Boy, you must be rotten.” As the eyes snapped, the brows grew together and the mouth tightened, I realized that I might have put that better. “What I mean to say is, I’m sure you’re a terrific photographer, but we don’t pay . . .”
“No, you certainly don’t pay much. But that’s all right; I wanted to get out of Toronto and work in a small town for a while. I’ve been working for the Star.”
The Star. The Toronto Star. That brought back memories. I had worked at the Star, soon after I graduated from journalism school, until management decided to relocate me elsewhere. Anywhere but here, is the way management put it, but the point is that I knew the Star, and if this girl had worked there, she knew her stuff. Trouble. I knew she was trouble.
“Well, we must get together and talk about the Star, sometime. I was something of a rising, ah, star there myself back in the dawn of time. But in the meantime, I wonder if I could have my workstation back.”
“Sure. I was only sitting here because Tommy said you were going to be fired. Or jailed. Or both.”
“Just one of those laughable misunderstandings,” I said.
So Hanna got up, a swift, easy mover, arrogant as a cockatoo, and wandered off to read back issues of the paper while I fired up the old computer and rewrote a column of Neighbourly Notes from our contributor in Dunsford, one of the outlying hamlets. A tea and bake sale was recently held in the church hall to raise funds for Our Feathered Friends. Life in Dunsford is one damn orgy after another, all of them recorded faithfully in the Lancer.
I had tapped out about five hundred words when I looked up to see that Hanna had returned. No doubt a few back issues were all the excitement she could stand at one time.
“Say,” she said, “maybe you can explain something to me. I’ve been looking through your stuff and,” she reached over to my desk and plucked a copy of the current Lancer from it, turned to the inside and held up a piece carrying my byline. “You write this?”
I murmured a modest assent.
“It’s all about the swell gang down at Barry’s garage waiting to give you something called ‘suave service.’”
“I made that part up,” I explained. “In fact, the service at Barry’s is more surly than suave. But everybody liked the piece.”
Actually, Barry had come in the day after publication and bought an ad; for a brief moment there I could see that Tommy Macklin was contemplating giving me a bonus; but cooler heads prevailed, and I got a friendly nod, instead.
“This whole paper,” Hanna went on, waving it in the air, “seems to be devoted to sucking up to advertisers and local bigwigs.”
I nodded brightly. “That’s it, exactly.”
“And you approve of this?”
Approve? The girl must be mad. “What I approve of, young prune,” I told her austerely, “is eating. We have worked out an arrangement whereby I do what I’m told, and the Lancer fixes it so I go on eating.”
She rolled those luminous eyes. “Great. I’m here to get back to the real stuff of newspapering and I draw a spineless twit for a partner.”
The “spineless twit” crack didn’t bother me nearly as much as the “partner” bit.
“What do you mean, partner?”
“Tommy told me that if you weren’t in jail, or didn’t get fired, or whatever your little misunderstanding was, you and I would be covering some political dinner tonight.”
“Ah, yes. That will be Orville Sacks, Silver Falls’s gift to the world of politics. Our local member of the provincial Parliament,” I explained. “He’s making a speech to the Rotarians. With an election in the offing, I guess the brass-hats have decided to get behind Orville and push. No mean feat, the man must weigh three hundred pounds.”
“So, what will they want from me? Groups? Heads and shoulders?”
“Why don’t I ask them, and see?”
But when I went back to Tommy Macklin’s office, he was already closeted with Mrs. Post, the publisher, who was shaking her head in a dubious way as Tommy explained, I guessed, the advantages of the scheme I had sprung on him. Tommy saw me hovering and waved me in. Mrs. Post looked up and gave me a cool look. She is a handsome woman, if somewhat imperious, who inherited the paper from her late husband, Donald, and turned out to be so good at buttering up advertisers and putting the screws to the workforce, that when the Johnson chain bought the Lancer a few years ago, she stayed on as publisher, while salting the purchase
price into the old sock. Nice work if you can get it. I met her mainly during Christmas visitations when, with Tommy Macklin at her side, both of them reeking of whisky and bonhomie, she circled the room, shook hands with all fourteen of the hired hands, and doled out the Christmas bonus, usually a munificent twenty dollars. She was looking speculative, and as I came into the room, she started in on Tommy.
“I don’t know about this, Tommy,” she said, “Oh, hello, Withers”—so much for me—“it sounds pretty dubious to me.”
“Now, now, Mrs. Post, nothing to worry about, nothing at all. If it works, we have a great series, an exclusive; we can syndicate it through the chain across the country. And, if it doesn’t work, we can just fire Carlton, and no harm done.”
Mrs. Post still looked dubious. She gave me an up and down glance, and plainly didn’t much like what she saw.
“Tommy tells me that you are in some difficulty right now,” she said.
That was rich. I was staring at thirty years to life.
“But he says that Staff Inspector Hanson Eberley—of course, we’ve all heard about him, and the chain did that series on his famous murders when he retired—wants to help prove your innocence.”
“If any,” chipped in Tommy. “I don’t suppose you actually did it, did you, Carlton? No, I thought not, too much of a wimp. Here, pick up your pen.”
This last was because on the words, “I don’t suppose, etc.,” I gave a kind of convulsive twitch, propelling the ballpoint I had been fiddling with across the room; it narrowly missed Mrs. Post’s elaborately coiffed hair. I rose, gibbered an apology, picked up my pen. Tommy went on.
“I gave Eberley a call,” he said. “He says the local OPP aren’t really equipped to handle a murder and will have to bring in somebody from Toronto. May take days. In the meantime, he has spoken to his old buddy the inspector, who says he has no objection if Hanson wants to do a little poking around on his own. In fact, reading between the lines, I gather the idea of having someone with Hanson’s experience on the job right away, unofficially of course, strikes the inspector as pretty shrewd. And Hanson says it would be okay for you to hang around with him for a few interviews.”
Right Church, Wrong Pew Page 3
