Wife, begad, here was something. Our Nell, it turned out, was nothing short of a home-wrecker. Or, as it turned out, a would-be home-wrecker.
“I see. Well, you’ll find, my dear, that Carlton doesn’t approve of carryings-on ,” Whatever that meant. The Widow nodded in a self-satisfied way.
“I’ll bet,” said Hanna. I was beginning to wish the Widow weren’t quite so solicitous, she made me sound like the old boy on the Quaker Oats package.
The essay on morals was interrupted by a tapping, rather timid, this time, on the side door. The intruder had abandoned the front entrance, and was now peering in the kitchen window.
“My goodness, how rude!” exclaimed Emma. She jumped up, whisked open the door, and glowered at the thug.
“Well,” she said, “what do you want?”
The galoot attempted a simper. “Say, I’ll bet that’s terrific pizza.”
“It is,” replied the Widow, grimly, “but not a sniff of it do you get until you explain what you’re doing here. And why you tore Carlton’s screen door off its hinges.”
“I knocked. Didn’t I knock?” He addressed me in an aggrieved tone and I had to admit it to be the case.
“I see,” said Emma. “Carlton, if he knocked, why didn’t you let the man in?”
“I can answer that one,” replied Hanna, “because the last time he did any knocking, it was on Carlton’s face. With his fist. Isn’t that right?”
The lout nodded. “That’s why I’m here. To explain.” He turned to me. “You see, we mistook our instructions.”
“Who is ‘we’?” I asked.
“Clarence and me.”
“Ah, Clarence. He was the other thug. The smaller one who was driving the car.”
“Clarence was driving the car. Thug, I don’t accept. Clarence and me, we’re businessmen.”
“And,” asked Hanna, “your business is?”
“This and that. Assignments for Mr. Silvio.”
“Assignments such as beating people up?”
“Well, no, lady. I was just coming to that. But perhaps I’d better introduce myself.”
“Well, then, come in.” Mrs. Golden opened the door, and he slid past her into the kitchen. He had the nerve to raise his eyebrows at my housekeeping, and bobbed his head at Hanna. Then he fished in his jacket pocket, extracted a wallet the size of a suitcase, dug around in it, and came up with a handful of business cards. Solemnly, he handed one of them to each of us. The cards, heavily embossed, read “Silvio Developments” and, underneath, “Melville R. Firkin, Consultant.”
He smiled. “Nice cards, aren’t they?”
“Melville?” I asked, “you’re a Melville?”
“Most of my friends call me Moose. Can I have some of that pizza now?”
This brought out the hostess in the Widow Golden. She drew up a chair for him, excavated another plate, scoured it, carved out about two-thirds of the remaining pizza, and deposited it on the plate in front of Moose. There was silence for a time, broken only by the champing of his jaws. The pizza lasted about ninety seconds, then Moose burped politely, rubbed his stomach, and smiled. “Great pizza.”
Emma smirked. “You really liked it?”
“Terrific.”
“You didn’t think there was too much oregano? Sometimes I put in too much oregano.”
“Just right,” said the Moose.
I decided to intervene before they got down to swapping recipes. “Yes, well, I’m glad you approve, but why did you slosh me?”
Moose sighed. “It’s like I was saying. Clarence and me, we made a little mistake. Just a slip-up. It could happen to anyone.”
“Well, it happened to me. What was the nature of this mistake?”
“You see, Mr. Silvio, he’s a developer. Man who develops.”
“What does that have to do with you baffing me?”
“It’s like this. Mr. Silvio, he has this plan to develop here and . . .”
“Here? In Bosky Dell?”
Moose nodded. “Right. Here in Bosky Dell.” He paused. “Silly name for a place, isn’t it?”
“Exactly where in Bosky Dell is this development to go?”
“Well, just about everywhere, I guess. Mr. Silvio’s developments are kind of big. The last one, we built twenty-seven apartment buildings and condominiums over at Eel River. Took out the whole town. Fixed it up beautiful.”
I remembered that the collection of concrete slabs, glass towers, and brick bunkers along Highway 501, where there used to be a quiet little village like our own, was one of Silvio’s creations. So this was what he had in mind for Bosky Dell.
The Widow was agitated, too.
“Oh, Carlton,” she asked, “can this be?”
“No.” I was clear on that. “The village can’t be touched. That’s in the bylaws. In fact, you can’t build a garden shed around here without going through about ten miles of red tape, and a hearing in front of the Ontario Municipal Board.”
Bosky Dell is one of those leftovers from an earlier era, when the province was run by, for, and through the nobs, many of whom lived in the area in the summertime, and set up their own lines of defence. The village is directly incorporated to the province; it doesn’t belong to any county or township. No outside planning board can give a permit to develop, only the local council. And the local council, elected in the reign of George III, haven’t approved of anything since his demise.
“My good man,” I told Moose, after explaining all this, “you’re talking through your size seventeen hat. Bosky Dell cannot be developed. In fact, there is only one piece of property in the whole place that isn’t tied up in about ten different directions, because it doesn’t have to be, and that is. . . . oh, my God, the church!”
“Carlton, what is the matter?” The Widow put a plump hand to her cheek. “You look as if you’d seen a ghost.”
“Not a ghost. A loophole. What could be a loophole. You see, the church was a gift to the village, decades ago, when there was almost nothing here. Old Sir John Flannery, the lumber baron, he donated the land and the money for the church, in hopes it would encourage settlement here. Very generous, everybody said. My dad said the fact was that he’d made so much money robbing widows and orphans over the years that he needed to pile up points in heaven. Anyway, for whatever reasons, he gave the village the church.”
“I knew that,” said Emma.
“I’m sure you did, everybody does. But what everybody does not know is that the church was never properly surveyed. You know how these things were in the old days. Even the official survey is pretty vague about where the church property begins and ends.”
“Carlton.” Hanna was getting impatient. “I’m sure we’re all impressed with your grasp of local lore, but does it matter a hoot in hell?”
“Yes. It does. I was coming to that.”
“Slowly.”
I ignored this. “I once researched a piece on this whole business for the Lancer. We didn’t run it, of course, because it might have upset people, but I still remember it. Anyway, it turned out that the church land deeded to the village was deeded from the village to the congregation, once it had been running for a while; apparently, that’s normal in these arrangements. Quite recently, one of the lawyers on the church committee looked into this, and he wrote a letter saying that they’d better get a new survey done, because—mark this well—he said that, the way he read it, the church could own quite a lot of land to which the restrictions wouldn’t apply.”
“Why not?”
“Because the official survey wasn’t conducted until 1920, and the land transfer took place in 1910. So you could argue—no one was very clear on this, but lawyers never are—that the rules don’t apply to the church land. Which could be quite a large parcel of land.”
Hanna said, “I don’t understand that part. Didn’t t
he deed say, from a point fifty feet southwest of the hitching post to old Bill’s fence, or something like that?”
“That was the problem, the wording was just like that. It said ‘all that land situate in the Village of Bosky Dell from a point ten feet south of the village pump to the top of Sixth Street.’ Something like that, anyway. And the trick is that nobody knows exactly where the old village pump was. It’s been gone for years.”
“Which means?” asked Hanna.
“Well, this gent said it meant that if the church wanted to develop, it could claim quite a chunk of land, and might be able to claim exemption from the building bylaws. He wanted the village to spend a lot of money to get it straightened out, but it was never done. Cost too much.”
“So the minister could make a deal with this Silvio? Would it stand up?”
“I don’t know. Who does? It would take about ten lawyers and a couple of judges to straighten out. But you know the way things work, these days; you just charge ahead and do it, and by the time somebody proves you can’t, you already have.”
“But it still doesn’t explain,” I added, “why I got plugged by Moose here.”
Moose was looking sheepish. “Well, it turns out that Mr. Silvio knew about this piece that you’d written for the paper. The one that didn’t run.”
“How did he find out about that?”
“This we do not know. Mr. Silvio, he has connections. Anyway, he figured that, when the story came out that he was planning to uplift and upgrade the village of Bosky Dell, which is his sincere intention, the local people might have something to say.”
“They would scream like stuck pigs.”
“Then you would write another story for the paper, and this one would get in.”
“A shrewd guess. So?”
“Well, he asked Clarence and me—this is going to hand you a laugh—he asked Clarence and me to be sure to treat you special. Those were his words, ‘Treat Carlton Withers special.’”
“And by special, he meant . . .”
“It turns out—this is where the funny part comes—he meant, be nice to you.”
“Whereas, you thought . . .”
“We thought, well, you know, special. Like a polite way of saying, push him around a little. Funny, isn’t it?”
I wasn’t laughing. Hanna was; she made a noise like a paper bag exploding, and even the Widow smiled, but I didn’t find the situation amusing.
“So,” said Hanna when she stopped snorting, “where does all this leave us?”
I replied, “It leaves us with the reason why there was a clandestine meeting at the church the other night. The Rev. was holding a little conference with Silvio, I’ll bet, and for some reason, Ernie Struthers was on hand. Maybe as a witness.”
I added, “I think it’s time we got this information to a higher authority.”
“You mean the cops?”
“I mean Hanson.”
Chapter 10
We said goodbye to Moose and the Widow, who appeared to be settling down for a cozy chat, and walked back over to Hanson’s. On the way, I asked Hanna if my surmise had been correct, and whether the aforementioned louse had, in fact, thrown her over. After inviting me to mind my own bloody business—a point she had refrained from making with the Golden Intelligence Service—she answered the question anyway.
“No, as a matter of fact, I threw him over. It came as quite a surprise.”
“He wasn’t expecting it?”
“It was quite a surprise when I found out he was married. It was the old story. His wife—are you ready for this?—didn’t understand him. He worked it out that that was the same as not being married and so . . .”
“Why bring it up?”
“You got it.”
“And how did it come up?”
“That’s the rich part. I asked him, one day, quite casually, ‘Hey, why don’t we get married?’ I mean we were, after all, you know . . .”
“Shacked up?”
This drew a glare.
“. . . not exactly strangers. It seemed logical that we might get married.”
“But wasn’t.”
“Not with another wife in the picture.”
Anything I said after this was bound to get me into trouble, so I shut up until we arrived back at Hanson’s. He was still there, the Rev. Mr. Wylie having apparently told his tale and fled. Mrs. Eberley was also on hand, curled up on a wicker sofa with a drink clutched in one ring-laden fist. When we came onto the porch, she hoisted her glass and told us, “Don’t get up.”
Hanna looked blank.
“I mean, pardon me if I don’t get up.”
This was easy, since there was a good chance that if she did get up, the alcohol sloshing around inside would list to one side and overbalance her. She leered at Hanna.
“I know you,” she said accusingly. “You’re a friend of Carlton’s.”
“When he isn’t calling me names,” said Hanna, “Carlton and I work together.”
“He works at the Silver Falls Lancer,” noted Mrs. Eberley.
“Right.”
“You work there, too?”
“That’s it, Mrs. Eberley.”
“Making two of you in all.”
“Plus a supporting cast of thousands.”
“Huh? Say,” still clutching her drink, Mrs. Eberley leaned forward and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial croak, “Carlton’s all right.”
“Is that so?”
“Strange. Weird, even, but all right.” She laid one finger alongside her nose, a trick I thought had been copyrighted by Jolly Old Saint Nick. “Carlton make a pass at you?”
The ghost of a smile flickered on Hanna’s face. “No.”
Mrs. Eberley shook her head in a wobbly way. “Here’s a news bulletin for you, sweetie,” she said, “he won’t.”
“Okay by me,” said Hanna.
Hanson and I exchanged glances of mutual agony. It seemed wise to change the subject before Nora broke any more news bulletins, so I told Hanson about our run-in with Moose and what that large consultant had had to say about a Silvio development scheme for Bosky Dell. Hanson already knew most of this, as it turned out. In fact, that was what his earlier, mysterious hints about Ernie meant. The Rev. Wylie had dropped by a week earlier to see Hanson. He had had a phone call from Dominic Silvio and then a letter from a lawyer, setting out the ambiguous position of the church property, and suggesting a meeting between himself and Mr. Silvio, “at your earliest possible convenience,” to discuss potential development on the site.
He hadn’t known what to do, so he turned to Hanson for free legal advice. As a former policeman, he reckoned, Hanson must know something about the law. The lawyer on the church committee was totally incomprehensible to him and besides, he would probably charge for advice, once it became official. Hanson, he knew, would not. What Hanson knew about this kind of law would not fill an offertory envelope, but he glows with self-assurance, so he became the sturdy oak, as the Rev. put it, upon whom he would lean.
Hanson was intrigued—who wouldn’t be?—by the ambiguities in the church’s property deed, and he had advised the Rev. that he ought to go at least as far as having a meeting with Silvio, since he was going to have to lay the matter formally before the church committee. But it would be as well, Hanson suggested, to have a witness on hand at any meeting with a developer, perhaps an unseen witness. “Just in case,” was the way Hanson put it.
So it was arranged. Hanson would go up to the church, conceal himself, and listen to whatever it was Dominic Silvio had to say. The meeting had been fixed for Monday evening, about 9 p.m. However, about an hour before kickoff, Hanson discovered that he was not going to be able to make the meeting after all. Nora, he found, had “taken a turn for the worse.” This, translated, means that Nora’s system was lodging a protest and she was in
the grip of what is technically known as the “heebie-jeebies.”
The Rev., while full of Christian spirit, was not similarly strong on brains, and when Hanson phoned to say that he wasn’t going to be able to make it, that trusting soul asked the first man he spotted to fill in for him. This turned out to be Ernie Struthers. Not an ideal selection, not even a church-goer, but when you’re dealing with a village whose welcome sign reads, “Pop. 109,” you don’t get many choices when it comes to ringing in substitutes. The Rev. briefed Ernie, who was glad to sit in, figuring, no doubt, that he might hear something useful, even profitable. That’s how he got to the church, and that’s why, we now learned, the Rev. held himself at least partly to blame for what had happened to Ernie.
“He felt,” Hanson explained, “that if there was a killer on the loose around the church, he unwittingly put Ernie in danger, but I think that Ernie’s murder was probably deliberate and would have happened no matter where he went.”
Hanna interrupted, “Did he talk to Ernie after the meeting?”
“No, he never saw Ernie, although he assumed he was in the church somewhere, because he’d said he would be. Apparently, Dominic Silvio insisted on taking Ephraim outside and walking him around, while they discussed what would go where in the development. He promised they’d leave the church itself alone, so he wanted to show Ephraim how they had it laid out, and . . .”
“In the dark?” Hanna butted in again.
“No, it wasn’t really very dark yet; this was about nine o’clock, and at this time of year, it doesn’t get really dark until nine-thirty or so.”
“So they walked around, and talked outside?”
“Yes.”
“Kind of blew the whole purpose of Ernie’s being there, didn’t it?”
“You’re quite right, except that I gather the talk didn’t come to anything. Rev. Wylie said that he had been thinking about it, and under no conditions could the church consider selling any property. Dominic Silvio asked him to think some more, or at least to take it to the church committee. But Ephraim said that although he would certainly tell the church committee, his mind was made up. So, he says, Silvio went over to his car and drove off, and he went back into the church.”
Right Church, Wrong Pew Page 7
