“I’m glad you called,” he added. “The new development is something that affects you.”
“Yes, I know,” I began, but he cut me off.
“The officers here have just had a chat with the lawyer who’s handling Ernie Struthers’s estate.”
“Somebody called here at the Lancer . . .”
“And it appears you are a beneficiary.”
“I am? Ernie left me money? How much?”
“Ten thousand dollars.”
“Yikes! Now everyone’s going to think I did it.”
“Now, Carlton, no one is going to believe you would murder a man just for ten thousand dollars.”
“Oh, no? They already think I did it for free.”
Chapter 16
It was a thoughtful C. Withers who found himself that evening, in another teeming rainstorm, soaked to the skin, waiting under the goalposts at the old high school football field. I had much to think on. Ernie Struthers, while of sound mind, or as sound as it ever got, had left me ten thousand dollars in his will. Presumably, this was his peculiar way of saying that he was sorry he had killed my parents, something he never let on in life. That was good, it showed the man had some sense of guilt, after all, and if I ever got the $10,000, it would come in handy. A man can always find a use for $10,000. On the other hand—there is always another hand, isn’t there?—this was bound to make the constabulary even more certain that I was the one who pin-punched Ernie to death. When I was eating dinner in the O.K. Café—burned ham, char-broiled eggs, torched toast à la Belinda—the two local OPP officers were sitting in the corner, drinking coffee. When I got up to leave, Smiley said, “We’ll be seeing you.”
“Soon,” added Thuggy.
This did not sound like the cheerful exchange of courtesies between newfound friends, it sounded more like the rattle of a couple of rozzers who have applied for the warrant and are just polishing up their handcuffs for the arrest. It seemed to confirm my view that there was not a whole lot of point in asking for police protection for this evening’s outing. I was thinking, as I tried, in vain, to shelter beneath the goalposts—very poor umbrellas, goalposts—that it would be nice if whoever made the phone call to the Lancer was not, after all, just another crank caller, but someone with genuine information. Hanson figured that the odds were against this, but he said it was just as well to check it out, anyway. You never know, he said. Which reminded me of a girl in our senior class in high school, the ever-popular Melinda Murchison, who wrote in the yearbook, where you put your favourite motto, “I never No.”
With the exception of a large, black dung beetle, which was, for reasons of its own, methodically crawling up the goalposts, falling off, then crawling up again, I had the place to myself. The loving couples who are usually to be found wriggling about the grounds and scaring the living hell out of the worm-pickers were snuggling indoors or doing without. I began to whistle. Might give new heart to the beetle.
We went on this way, me whistling, the beetle crawling and falling, for about ten minutes. I got through “Coming Through the Rye,” “The Keel Row,” “Here Comes the Forty-Second,” and “Captain John MacPherson’s Lament”—I used to play the bagpipes as a kid—and was just starting in on “The Campbells Are Coming,” when, by golly, they did. Ern and Vern, the Campbell brothers. Woodcutters. Long, lean, and mean, very handy with axe, bucksaw, and chainsaw. Officially, they scratch out a living hacking up the woods for townees. Unofficially, they make a much better return flogging moonshine. I recognized their stake truck sliding down Morrissey Street towards the football field with the lights off and the engine barely ticking over. They stopped just opposite the goalposts, and there was a pause—big argument, I guess, about who was going to get out in the rain. Then a figure detached itself from the truck and came shambling through the downpour at a half run. It was Vern, the younger Campbell. He stopped when he got close enough to recognize me in the dim light from a faraway street lamp.
“Holy shit,” he said. “You!”
“Who were you expecting?” I asked. “Tina Turner?”
“No. Matter of fact, Ern, he said Tommy Macklin was going to meet us here.”
“Tommy Macklin?”
“Yeah. Ern, he talked to him down at the paper today. On the phone.”
“That was me, Vern. I answered the phone.”
“Oh, hell, Ern’s gonna be cheesed. You don’t have no money.”
Too true. “Let me get this straight, Vern. You thought you were going to meet Tommy Macklin here tonight?”
“Yeah.”
“And sell him some information for which he would pay you good money?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me. I’ll tell Tommy, and he can send you the money.”
He nearly went for it. Swift reasoning is not his forte; if it can’t be hacked, or distilled, Vern can’t deal with it. Then, “Naw, Ern said not to say anything till we got the money.”
“See here, Vern, what kind of money are we talking about?”
Vern drew himself up proudly.
“Fifty bucks. Not a dollar less.”
“I can give you fifty bucks, Vern. Well, by Thursday at the latest.”
“Naw, I guess we’ll just drive over and see if Tommy Macklin is still awake.”
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Every seasoned reporter carries a little cache of emergency money, just in case he gets sent out of town and can’t get to the office for an advance. I carry mine in a secret compartment in my wallet—right behind the picture of Gene Autry—and I had two twenties and a ten out under Vern’s nose in a flash. They disappeared into a gnarled fist.
“Well?”
“About three weeks ago, Ern and me, we was delivering a face-cord of wood to Harry Franklin’s place. Ash, it was. Good stuff.”
“And then?”
“Mr. and Mrs. Franklin were having a fight. In the kitchen. We was stacking the wood in the woodshed at the back, and you could hear them arguing in the kitchen.”
“And then?”
“Well, Mrs. Franklin, she was real upset. She kept saying, ‘Harry, you’ve got to do something. Ernie Struthers will be the ruin of us all.’
“And Harry, he says, ‘But what can I do? What can I do?’ He kept saying that, and she kept saying, ‘Something, Harry, you’ve got to do something,’ and he finally says, ‘Know what I’d like to do?’ and she says, ‘No, what?’ and he says, ‘Kill the sonofabitch, is what.’ There, that’s it,” said Vern.
“Have you told the police?”
This drew a grunt. “Ern and me, we’re not too close with the police. We figured to sell it to the paper. Say,” he added, “you suppose Tommy Macklin would give us something if we didn’t tell him we’d already told you?”
“Sure,” I told him, and waved him on his way. Bless his larcenous heart. Tommy Macklin wouldn’t give him money for a story, or anything else. I knew that, but Vern and Ern didn’t, and I thought it might be a good thing for them to go over and bang on Tommy’s door late on a rainy night. It would give them all a pleasant outing and I wished them well.
I shrugged a soggy shrug and wandered back over to where I had parked my car, got in, tried to start it, failed—Marchepas was having a fit of the vapours again—and then sat there, brooding. What the hell was all that about, anyway? Would Harry Franklin, a chubby, retired sales manager and a bit of an oaf, but not exactly the killer type, take a pin punch, supposing he knew what it was and where it was, to Ernie Struthers? And if so, why? Then there was Tommy Macklin. Tilda seemed to think he might have done it. Again, though, why? Finally, there was Dominic Silvio, the demon developer, and my own favourite candidate for murderer, though please, Lord, not to be arrested before my California trip.
It’s a puzzlement, as the bald gent in The King and I used to sing. I tried the car again. It simply groaned, so I got out and
was just starting to walk back downtown for a cab when a car came splashing down the street and pulled up into the spot lately vacated by the Campbell truck. It was a Toyota. Hanna’s.
She rolled down the window on the driver’s side.
“Not murdered yet, I guess,” she said. “Oh, well, maybe next time.”
I jumped in on the passenger side. It had to mean something, didn’t it, when she turned up like this? Better not press my luck, though.
“Evening, Hanna. Say, Hanna, guess what?”
“I don’t have to guess, do I? You’re going to tell me.”
So I told her about the Campbell brothers and Harry Franklin and Tommy Macklin, and about my legacy from the late E. Struthers, and she couldn’t make any more sense out of any of it than I could.
“Well, that maybe puts a crimp in my theory,” said Hanna.
“You’ve got a theory?”
“I have.”
“What is it?”
“You’re not ready for it.”
And, even though she very kindly drove me back to Bosky Dell, I couldn’t get anything more out of her.
Chapter 17
When we pulled up in front of my place, I started to slide across the seat towards Hanna, but she held up her hand, like a traffic cop.
“No, Carlton,” she said, and then added, “not yet, anyway.”
“You ought not to spurn my suit,” I told her. “I’m a wealthy man.”
“You mean the money Ernie Struthers left you? Are you going to keep it?”
“Sure? Why not?”
“It begins to look more and more as if Ernie got his money from a blackmailing racket. Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Yes, it does.” The damned female. “Maybe I should try to find out who the victims were and give it back.”
“It’s an idea. On the other hand, you’ll probably need it for bail money, the way this case is going.”
There was that. I wondered if there was any chance of getting the proceeds of the will before they started fitting me for leg irons.
I sighed, got out of the car, slammed the door, waved a cheery good night to Mrs. Golden, who was no doubt at her station across the way, and headed for the cottage. Hanna drove off, but she was smiling, leaving me with a feeling, long held, that I will never understand the sex of which she is so interesting a member. Just as I went to sleep, about ten seconds after hitting the pillow, I remembered that, for the second time, I’d missed the chance to ask her what she’d been doing in Toronto.
The next morning, before heading for work, I walked around to the Eberleys’, to report to Hanson. He was sitting in the living room, staring into the fire. There was no sign of Nora, thank God, but then, there seldom is before noon. This is a woman who thinks “a.m.” stands for “after Martinis.”
“A bad business,” Hanson said, as I sat down, “a very bad business indeed. I’m afraid those OPP fellows are making something of the ten thousand dollars Ernie left you in his will.”
“But I didn’t even know about it.”
“You know that and I know that, but the OPP think you may have found out somehow. It does seem strange that Ernie would leave you money, after years of showing no sign of remorse.”
I nodded. “Hanna thinks I’ll have to use it for bail money.”
“She may have a point.”
My heart sank. Somehow, I thought Hanson would just clap hands, wave a wand, and, Hey, Presto! conjure up the killer.
“Well, it doesn’t get any less complicated, that’s for sure.” And I told him about the Campbell brothers and their ersatz information-selling scheme. He perked up at once.
“Harry Franklin, eh?” he said. “Well, I suppose it’s possible.”
“No, it isn’t. Harry just isn’t the killer type.”
Hanson gave me a glower. “There is no such thing as the killer type. In the right circumstances, anyone can commit murder. Even you.”
“Yes, but what sort of circumstances would push a pudding like Harry Franklin over the line?”
“Oh, money. Money is a powerful motive. So is pride. So is jealousy.”
“I can’t see Harry Franklin, who didn’t even know my father, as far as I’m aware, coming out here to swipe a pin punch from him and then puncturing Ernie Struthers because Ernie had been making out with tubby old Bernice Franklin. Was Ernie making out with tubby old Bernice Franklin?”
“I don’t know, but”—and I got another glower—“don’t assume that because Harry Franklin looks a little funny and Bernice is no longer a beauty, if she ever was one, that Harry is incapable of feeling love for her. Or injured pride. Despite what you may read in the trashy novels, Carlton, love does not occur exclusively between shapely young women and tanned Greek godlings.”
This I knew to be the case. My father usually looked like something that had been dropped from an airplane in a windstorm, and my mother, although comely, was nonetheless hardly the type to set pulses pounding in the supermarket. But she set Dad’s pulse pounding, anyone could see that. Hanson went on; I’d never heard him talk like this.
“Then, there’s pride. A man may do a lot; give up a lot; dare a lot—even kill, because of injured pride. I once worked on a murder case in which the victim was a young punk who’d broken into a lawyer’s house in Rosedale. He had trashed the place, smashed a lot of fine china, including a superb porcelain collection, slashed the paintings, crapped on the living-room rug—created an ungodly mess. Well, the lawyer went to the legal aid authorities and offered to represent the punk who’d trashed his house, which everybody thought was noble as all get out. Then he drove his client out to Scarborough Bluffs to talk over the case and pushed him off. We got onto him at once, of course. He didn’t care. He just kept saying he had to do it.”
“So, you think Harry Franklin might have . . .”
“I don’t know. Probably not. I merely point out that you mustn’t assume that just because people are old or homely or both, they are immune to strong feelings. Murderous feelings.”
“But I still don’t see how Harry Franklin could have done in Ernie Struthers, or why he would have done so.”
“Nor do I. But he might have been blackmailing Harry.”
“That’s what Hanna thinks.”
“A shrewd young lady.”
“Woman,” I corrected him automatically, on Hanna’s behalf. “So Hanna was right?”
“The police seem to think so. Those two boys from Toronto, Thurston and Smollett, have pretty well taken over the case now. Smart chaps. So far, they’ve discovered that Ernie had about ninety thousand dollars in various bank accounts.”
“And they think it came from blackmail?”
“It seems likely, especially in light of what the Campbell brothers told you.”
“So Ernie set himself up in the stoves, bolts, and blackmailing business, got the goods on Harry—what sort of goods?”
“Oh, the silly old fool was probably fooling around with some young chippy.”
“Got the goods on Harry and the chippy, was bleeding him, and Harry finally had enough and decided to bleed Ernie instead. Is that possible?”
“Barely. It doesn’t explain, though, does it, why your dad’s pin punch was used for the killing, or why Ernie was found on your lawn.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“Nor does it explain the newspaper clipping. That girl of yours . . .”—I liked that—“. . . seems to put a lot of store in that clipping. Well, never mind, Carlton, at least we seem to be getting someplace, and at least we’ve got some evidence that points away from you—that’s the main thing.”
No argument about that.
So it was with light footsteps that I made my way home. Fairly light footsteps. I still had a murder rap, not exactly hanging over me, but hovering in the background. There was still the matter of making t
he Klovack menace succumb to my manly charms, if I could produce any, and I had to discover what, if anything, linked Tommy Macklin and Ernie Struthers—more blackmail? Still, the sun was shining, I could look forward to an all-expenses-paid trip to California, and there was a very good chance that, with any luck, I could be cleared of any connection with the murder, and some other poor sap indicted.
In the grip of this merry mood, I decided to go for a swim after breakfast. I wouldn’t be needed at the office until about noon. I fell asleep on the dock in the sun, and it was after eleven by my watch before I got back to the cottage. That was the end of my merry mood, there was a little light blinking on the answering machine attached to my telephone.
The phone, you see, is safely buried in the debris, but the answering machine is in plain sight on the table in my office-cum-everything else. The newspaper provided the answering machine, which was not a stroke of unusual generosity on its part, but the result of the bankruptcy of Ray Furlinger’s Office Supplies a couple of years back. Ray—“It’s Our Good Deed to Meet Your Every Office Need”—did a lot of advertising in the Lancer, more, as it turned out, than he ever got around to paying for. By the time Ray had worked it out that the locals didn’t need office supplies—doing most of their communication with quill pens on the backs of envelopes—and had gone belly-up, there was nothing left in his till. This meant that the Lancer had to take payment in kind, whatever kind there happened to be around the store. I got a lot of swell telephone memo pads, which I use in place of a regular notebook, a couple of boxes of ballpoint pens, imprinted with the Furlinger motto, “Our Good Deed, etc.,” and one of the three telephone answering machines left in Ray’s inventory. This last item allows Tommy Macklin to phone me up and, when I refuse to answer the phone—my usual policy—leave hectoring messages. One day he phoned up to tell me that the Miss Milkmaid contest, scheduled to kick off at the Silver Falls Fairgrounds at noon, had been moved back to 11 a.m. I missed his message because the phone answering machine was nowhere in sight, having been buried by the usual mound of odds and sods. When high noon discovered me at the fairgrounds, prepared to write an acre of prose about this year’s bovine beauty, the ceremony was already concluded, and the crowd, such as it was, scattered to the four winds. Not one of the great moments in Canadian journalism, especially when you consider that the Lancer was the sponsor of this idiot contest. By the time I had run down the winner—one Prudence Wannamaker, eighteen, of Fairview Farm, R.R. 2, Wendover Cove, not that it matters a damn—I had made a firm resolve never ever to miss a message on the machine again.
Right Church, Wrong Pew Page 13
