Hanson took up the thread again. “Miss Klovack has already referred to the fact that a book containing code numbers, dates—presumably of payments—and amounts, in Ernie’s handwriting, was discovered.” He did not say where. “This apparently detailed the payoffs from a number of blackmail schemes. There were no names, merely initials and numbers which presumably represented regular payments.”
“How many sets of initials?” Harry Franklin wanted to know.
“There were three.”
“Jesus,” said Harry, “up until today, I thought I was the only one.”
“You were indeed one of the victims,” Hanson said. “Because of an incident”—flicker of eyebrows—“that does not concern us here, you were paying Ernie $200 a month. However, the police have checked the statement of your, uh, whereabouts on the night of the murder, and it is obvious that you could not have committed the crime.”
Harry relaxed, just a trifle. He was still in trouble, but not headed for durance vile.
“Two down,” I said.
“We now come to Tommy Macklin,” continued Hanson, and Tommy was on his feet at once, protesting, “Hanson, that’s got nothing to do with this case.”
“Mr. Macklin,” Hanson rolled on over his protest, “was another victim of Ernie’s blackmail schemes, for reasons which, again, do not concern us here.”
“Oh, my,” sang out Lillian Wentworth, “now everybody’s going to know that Tommy was a draft dodger.”
Stop the presses. Tommy Macklin, one of the brayingest, breast-beatingest patriots in the land, a draft dodger? Yessir, Lillian explained in a swift whisper, despite Tommy’s repeated remonstrations, he had sat out World War II on a farm-help exemption. This is the man who writes the only white-hot editorial that ever appears in the Lancer—once a year on Remembrance Day, saluting the bold heroes who fought for our freedom in two world wars and Korea, let us not forget Korea, and lambasting the sunshine patriots, Commie pinkos, and other ne’er-do-wells who stand around refusing to shed their blood for the causes of righteousness. Something like that, anyway. Turns out that Tommy got himself an exemption back in 1942, when Canada was going in for conscription, on the grounds that he was needed on the family farm. While he never exactly said it in so many words, he always managed to leave the impression, whenever the talk around the office turned to matters military, that he had been the first man ashore on the beaches of Normandy, and had ravaged the Nazi hordes with an occasional assist from his pals Bernie Montgomery and George Patton.
Tommy didn’t come from our area; he was an outsider, from Stirling, forty miles away, so he could get away with this line, but Ernie must have picked it up somewhere, and pried hush-money out of Tommy. Nobody else really cared any more about who was or was not up in arms four decades ago, but there was the matter of face, and Tommy, like the previously mentioned Ubangi tribesmen, was strong on face. He was no longer pale and wan, in fact, back to his normal enraged purple, and would no doubt make life difficult for Lillian in the future. But, for the moment, she was merely smiling demurely. The damage was done.
Hanson called the meeting back to order. This damn gaggle was not following form. “Yes, well, for whatever reasons, Tommy Macklin was paying Ernie Struthers blackmail money. Again, however, the potential suspect was able to give the police an account of his whereabouts on the night of the murder, and, again, it held up.”
“I was at a golf tournament in Toronto,” said Tommy. Golf tournaments, like Chugalug and Chowder nights, run to the liquid. Tommy, too, was paralyzed at the relevant time.
“Three down,” I said. This was getting good. This was where, when all the obvious suspects had been eliminated, Hanson would suddenly confront the killer. And so he did.
“But what if,” he said, “the blackmail clue was, like the church clue, merely misdirection?
“Most murders, in my experience, are simple. They arise from simple causes, and, outside the pages of Agatha Christie, are simply solved. A moment of passion, an outburst of greed, or the long culmination of a series of small brutalities, will produce an explosion. Most murders, in my experience, can be solved if we concentrate on the essentials. Which are, as every reader of crime fiction knows, motive, method, and opportunity. We can assume, because the same weapon was used, that the two murders were connected, that, in all likelihood, Ephraim Wylie was slain because he had information about the first killing. So we must apply our three tests of motive, method, and opportunity to the slaying of Ernie Struthers, and when we do this, when we clear away the misdirection, we find that the answers are glaringly obvious. They point in one, and only one, direction.”
He paused dramatically, and looked around the room, checking, no doubt, on the presence of the cops before he unloaded his bombshell.
“Carlton Withers.”
Chapter 24
Yes, well, I said to myself, that makes sense. I was even, for God’s sake, writing down my own name on my memo pad and nodding as I wrote when it suddenly occurred to me that, hey, this was not the way it was supposed to go. There was a great deal in this case that confused me, but I knew one thing for sure, and that was that I had not stuck a pin punch into Ernie Struthers, much as he deserved it. Nor would I ever have murdered Ephraim Wylie, as harmless a bird as ever broke bread, and a minister to boot. Wore his collar backwards, and everything. So I was a bit taken aback when Hanson Eberley suddenly shoved the whole thing off onto me. I wondered if I could get out the door before the cops reacted, but realized I couldn’t. And then, just when I was reeling—if you can reel when you are still seated—and trying to get my tongue untangled from the roof of my mouth to murmur a protest, a single word ripped out into the stunned silence that hung within the church.
“Bullshit!” shouted Hanna Klovack, bless her irreverent soul. “Bull-bloody-shit!”
And she ran up onto the dais, over to the table where Hanson was sitting, dug into the back pocket of her blue jeans, and pulled out a piece of paper. This was it, I guessed, the big surprise she had been hugging to herself all this while. I hoped it was good.
“I’ve listened to this farce because I wanted to see where it was going,” she said. “Hanson Eberley sits up here, looking cool and composed in his goddam cravat, as calm as a codfish on ice, but let me tell you, everybody, the performance you just witnessed was an act of desperation.”
“Desperation?” Hanson smiled, a tolerant smile. “My dear young lady . . .”
“I am not your dear young lady, jerkface. You may have Carlton dazzled, because of the poor sort of trusting simp he is, but I’m onto you.”
I wasn’t crazy about “poor sort of trusting simp,” and I wondered if I shouldn’t interfere and, in a manly way, take over things at this point from Hanna, except that, when you come right down to it, it seemed to be more dignified, somehow, to preserve a restrained silence. I could assert myself later. Or not.
“Did you notice?” Hanna turned away from Hanson now, faced the gang in the front row, and began waving her arms about as she talked, “did you notice how he strung all that stuff together as if it made sense? Hell, he even had us nodding at it. But what was it? Pure fabrication.
“The church is important only in pinpointing the probable time of the meeting between Ernie Struthers and his killer.’” She had dropped her voice to imitate Hanson, and it went up an octave when she returned to her own voice. “Bunny baubles. The only reason we’re told that Ernie must have been in the church about 9 p.m. is that Mr. Sherlock Holmes Eberley is covered for that time, because his old police buddy was at his place. The whole argument was worked backwards. Hanson wanted us to think about the church and about 9 p.m. or thereabouts. That’s why he planted the Rotary pin in the Flannery pew when he went up to the church just ahead of Carlton and myself the other day.”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
Hanna gave an exasperated sigh. “Think about what happened that day
. We had just worked it out that probably the killing didn’t have anything to do with the church at all, and the offertory envelope was a false lead. Remember? Then suddenly there were you and I doing the dishes, and a few minutes later we go up to the church and there is Hanson, fooling around outside, and we go inside, and voila! we find the Rotary pin in the Flannery pew. It doesn’t really mean anything, as we have just learned, but it gets us all thinking that Ernie must have been there at about nine o’clock or so. Not a perfect alibi for Hanson, by any means, but good enough, as long as nobody really thought about it.
“But what if the killing took place much later? What if, as seems most likely, Ernie just wandered off when the meeting moved outside, and went to drink Catawba, or whatever he does for recreation, and then, much later that evening, he went over to your place, Carlton? And what if he was seen going there, and knocked on the head and stabbed with that horrible thing there, and just left? Leaves our hero without an alibi, doesn’t it?”
Hanson smiled indulgently. “An impressive line of reasoning. Unfortunately, it raises more questions than it answers, and it is not supported by the slightest shred of evidence. Moreover, I can give you my solemn word, not that I expect it to weigh much with you in your present, ah, excited state of mind, that I did not have anything to do with putting a Rotary pin in the pew at the church. It was bound to be discovered to be a false lead, surely you accept that a man with my experience would see that?”
“Well, I may have the pin wrong, but I’m right about the desperation, by God.” Hanna was spitting out the words, now, you could practically see the blood of her Cossack ancestors surging through her veins. “There was one bit of evidence you have been blipping over since this whole thing started. The newspaper clipping that was found with Ernie Struthers. Here it is.”
So that was what she had in her hip pocket. Scarcely seemed room for it. She waved the bit of newspaper about in the air.
“Take a good look at it, Hanson,” she went on, “because it’s what sank you.”
Hanson seemed more amused than anything. “You mean there is something in that clipping that somehow proves I killed Ernie Struthers? I should be delighted to hear what it is.”
“I didn’t say that. What I said was that it was the clipping that sank you, not that it said anything about you. Your name isn’t even in it.”
Tommy Macklin was getting impatient. “What in hell are you talking about?” he demanded.
“Hello, Tommy,” Hanna gave him a broad grin. “Fought any good wars lately?”
Tommy subsided.
“What I was about to explain,” Hanna went on, “is that the newspaper clipping had to have some relevance, didn’t it? The most likely thing is that Ernie was taking it around to Carlton’s place, to slip it under his door, when he ran into the killer, just as he got to the porch. They quarrelled, struggled, he was hit on the head, and knocked unconscious. The envelope fell out of his hand, and the killer didn’t see it in the dark. That part’s easy enough. But why was he bringing Carlton a newspaper clipping about an event that must already have been engraved on the poor darling’s mind?”
You got that “poor darling”? It took the sting off “poor sort of trusting simp.”
“Well, okay, I’ll bite,” said Dominic Silvio, “why?”
“It was to answer that question,” said Hanna, beginning to stride up and down the platform—my, she was enjoying this—“that I went to Toronto.”
“Huh?” said Harry Franklin.
“You see, I figured that if I had a look at the newspaper, the whole newspaper, from that day, I might find out something else about the accident, or, at the very least, some reason why Ernie would have been bringing the clipping around to Carlton, a man he obviously didn’t like. So I went down to the Toronto Star—I used to work there, you know—and got a friend of mine who works in the library to get out the microfilm of that day’s paper.”
I asked, “And what did you learn?”
“Absolutely nothing. I was sitting there, going over and over the paper and getting nowhere, and chatting, off and on, with my librarian friend, and she wanted to know what I was doing since I’d left the Star, so I told her I was up here, working on a jerky little paper . . .”
“Hey, hey . . .” Tommy had come back to life.
“. . . a jerky little paper called the Silver Falls Lancer, and she said that was funny, she had just filed some stuff about a murder that the Lancer was trying to help solve. A famous detective, she said, was working on it. A man named Eberley, who used to be on the Toronto force.
“I said, sure, sure, yeah, yeah, not really paying any attention, and she said, ‘Why don’t we pull his file?’ Librarians,” she explained, “are always pulling files; it’s their recreation. So we did. And guess what? Bingo!”
“How do you mean, Bingo?” I asked.
Hanna then hauled out another piece of paper, not a clipping, this time, but a computer printout, just a short one, which she proceeded to read.
“This is a readout from a story that appeared eight and a half years ago,” she told us just before she launched herself, “and was back on about page 88, among the truss ads. The heading is very small, and all it says is ‘Police Officer Suspended.’ Obviously, the fix was in on the coverage of this one:
Staff Inspector Hanson Eberley has been temporarily suspended by the Metropolitan Toronto Police while a disciplinary panel checks into a citizen’s complaint that the chief of the city’s homicide squad was caught driving while under the influence of alcohol.
The citizen, a lawyer, Russell S. Miller, of Chaplin Cres., charged in a letter to the police complaints bureau that he saw Eberley, whom he recognized from court, stopped in the same safety check that he had been stopped in last January.
Eberley, according to Miller’s letter, was obviously drunk at the time, but no action was taken against him. In fact, a police officer got in his car and drove him away, presumably to his home.
The next day, Miller checked the arrest dockets, and, discovering that no charge had been laid against the homicide detective, filed his complaint, which resulted in the suspension announced today.
Staff Inspector Eberley was not available for comment.
Hanna lowered the piece of paper and looked up, for applause, I guess.
“Pardon me, dear,” piped up the Widow Golden, “but I’m not sure this gets us anywhere. I mean, it probably explains why Hanson retired so suddenly—presumably he was allowed to get out of the force in return for dropping the charges and then the whole thing was hushed up. But that doesn’t explain why Hanson should have killed Ernie. And it especially doesn’t explain why Ernie, if he thought his life was in danger, would go around to Carlton’s place with a newspaper clipping about the crash. If he wanted to leave a note, why not just something that said, ‘If I’m killed, Hanson did it’?”
“Because,” said Hanna triumphantly, “Ernie didn’t know his life was in danger. That’s not what the clipping was about at all.”
I was totally fogged. “Then what in blazes was it about?”
“I believe I can answer that.” Suddenly, we heard from Smiley again. He had moved directly behind Hanson Eberley now, and the other cops were edging down, and, all in all, things seemed to be coming under control at last. “Ernie wasn’t indicating his killer. Miss Klovack is quite right in stating that he didn’t even know he was in danger. What he was hinting at was that he knew who had killed Mr. and Mrs. Withers, Carlton’s parents.”
“Hanson killed my parents?”
“No, we don’t think so,” Smiley responded. “We think Mrs. Eberley did.”
There was a stunned silence in the room, as everybody turned to stare at Nora Eberley. She didn’t move a muscle, didn’t say a word, just stared straight ahead.
“It’s our belief,” Smiley went on, “that Nora Eberley was driving the truck that ki
lled Carlton’s parents. From what we’ve been able to put together since we began to reinvestigate after Ernie Struthers’s death, the Eberleys persuaded Ernie to take the rap for Mrs. Eberley. We have located a witness who says that the Eberleys drove home from town that day with Struthers in his truck, and that all of them had been drinking. As most of you know, Hanson Eberley does not often drive a car, much less a truck. Since the, uh, incident in Toronto, he usually finds someone else to drive him. It seems likely, given the blackmail which we knew was taking place, that Nora Eberley took over the wheel from Ernie somewhere on the trip home, and that she was driving when the accident occurred.”
Nora twitched, and looked as if she were about to say something, but Hanson said, firmly, “Not a word, my dear. This is all nonsense.”
Smiley went on, “We believe that, after the crash, the Eberleys persuaded Ernie to get into the driver’s seat again, and they just got out and walked home through the woods. There was no one on the road, and by the time the police arrived, all they found was Ernie behind the wheel, drunk, and Mr. and Mrs. Withers, dying.”
“But why?” I wondered. “Why would Ernie agree to take the blame?”
“Money. Quite a lot of money. Staff Inspector Eberley had retired from the Toronto police, with quite a comfortable pension fund. Ernie got most of it.”
“So that’s where the money came from for the hardware store?”
“It appears that way. We haven’t finished checking out the bank transfers yet, but from what we have already discovered, in Eberley’s bank”—the title had suddenly disappeared, I noticed—“a good deal of money changed hands within a year of your parents’ death. For Ernie, because he only got three months in jail, it was pretty good pay.”
I turned to Nora. “Mrs. Eberley, is this true?”
Hanson spoke a single warning word, “Nora”—and again, she stared straight ahead. The police were moving down the aisles now, cutting off escape, but I still couldn’t take in what Smiley was saying.
Right Church, Wrong Pew Page 19
