by Eric Wright
“I’m not a cop anymore and I told you, I don’t live here. Besides, this isn’t too rugged. I did a lot of looking before I picked this place. I decided that three hours was the maximum I wanted to drive. More than that, you have to stop for coffee.”
“Who else lives here in the winter?”
“The core population, which is bigger than you’d think. This place doesn’t rely as much on the tourists as some of the others around here. Those boarded-up food places on the highway make it look as if the whole town’s closed up, but it isn’t.”
“What the hell do people here do in the winter?” The question was rhetorical. Wilkie sighed and went back to work. “You know this guy Caxton?”
“He came out to check on me a couple of times when I was first building the place. He found out I was on the force—I hadn’t retired yet—so that made us buddies as far as he was concerned. He’s never been a regular cop, though. He was in the Lands and Forests Department once, some kind of fire ranger or warden, then he owned a marina near Peterborough, which went belly-up, and then he came here. He likes the fishing and the hunting, and I think he had some idea of opening another business, a bait shop or some such. He worked for one or two of the people here for a while, then the town gave him a job. He suits this place. He likes being the police chief, and he puts in a lot of extra time he doesn’t get paid for.”
“Seems like a bit of a Boy Scout,” Wilkie said.
“Conscientious, you mean?” He knew exactly what Wilkie meant, but he was slightly offended by Wilkie’s assumption that Pickett was as much of an outsider as he was. For all Wilkie knew, Pickett and Caxton were buddies.
Wilkie said, “I figured he sees himself kind of like—who was that guy who played small-town cops?—Andy Griffith.”
“He does his job, and they like him well enough, so it’s his for life. I told you, he’s conscientious, and he makes sure he knows what’s happening around town. I like the guy. I know what you mean, sure. He enjoys having his picture taken with his hat on, but he doesn’t think he’s John Wayne and there’s a whole other side to him. He makes me feel like a city boy sometimes. A dumb one.”
Wilkie waited for more.
“He knows about animals, stuff like that. Just a small for instance, he’s the only one who can get Willis to sit still. I don’t know what he does, maybe he’s got some secret signal, but he just says ‘sit’ and Willis sits. Willis won’t do it for me. I’m impressed. Tell you the truth, I sometimes think he’s kind of like a big animal himself, like a bear or something. Other times, okay, I agree, he looks like he’s trying to imitate Andy Hardy. Was that his name?”
“Griffith. Caxton would know the area, then.”
“Oh, sure. And I would think he knows just about everyone around here.”
Wilkie looked at his watch again. “This guy Marlow. Did you know him? He was Caxton’s girlfriend’s brother, right?”
“I knew him to see. Bit of a dude. Sideburns. Little curly beard.”
“He’s clean-shaven now. Caxton and this woman live together? Or just go around for company?”
“You see them around at barbecues, picnics, stuff like that. If you’re asking me if they sleep together, I don’t know, but my assumption would be yes. But they don’t live together.”
“I just want to know if we should keep an eye on him. He could be a lot of help. Being a local, he might have some idea of who would kill Marlow. But if he’s real close to Marlow’s sister, then he might get some idea of avenging his woman, something like that. He could be very useful, but I don’t want him conducting his own investigation on the side, know what I mean?”
“Tell him. Tell him the procedure when one of us has a personal stake in a case. I think he’ll keep his distance. But, like you said, he could be a lot of help to you, too.”
“Did he get along with Marlow okay?”
Pickett had known this was coming, known that Wilkie was making his list already. “You’ll have to ask someone else that. Someone who knows them better. He a suspect?”
Wilkie laughed. “You know how it is, Mel. You’re a suspect. So as far as you know, Caxton and this guy were pals?”
The truth was so far from this that Pickett would have to have been blind and deaf not to get some inkling of it; he saw no point in continuing to dodge. “I don’t know Caxton well, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t like Marlow at all. That’s what I’ve heard. But when he saw whose body it was, I think he might have recognized him and foreseen a lot of misery for himself. He looked to me like he wished he was in Florida right then.”
“That’s helpful. What about Marlow?”
“If I racked my brains I could probably come up with something I’d heard that accounts for the fact that my impression is that he wasn’t very popular. Maybe threw his weight around. Which would mean that Caxton had some problems, but I’m not aware of any confrontations between them. Now you have everything I know.”
“Now we have to ‘search the area,’” Wilkie said. “Christ. You know anything about that part of the bush?”
“I told you, take Caxton with you. What would you hope to find?”
“Nothing. If someone local killed him, the guy’s been sitting at home all weekend, scared to poke his nose out. But just in case he’s holed up in one of the cottages still, we have to look the area over.” Wilkie stood up and put his cup on the table. “Good to talk to you, Mel. I’ll let you know how it goes.”
“You’ll come by and pick my brains, you mean?”
Wilkie laughed. “Yeah, pick your brains about the locals, if this doesn’t get cleaned up quick. Maybe just come by for a chat. I’ll tell Dad I ran into you. Bird-watching.”
In Caxton’s office, Brendan Copps said, “I guess we should let his sister know.”
“I’ll do that,” Caxton said. He could not put it off any longer. The news would reach the bakery soon enough, and he should be the one who brought it.
“You know her pretty well?”
“I’ve lived here for ten goddamn years. There’s only one baker in the town.”
Copps looked up, surprised at the violence of Caxton’s tone. “Did I say something wrong?”
Caxton waved the question away and got to his feet.
Copps continued. “Town this size, you must have known her brother pretty good.”
“All I wanted to. I’ll go over there now,” he said. “Your boss will know where to find you. The people you sent for are coming to the office here, right?”
“I imagine.” The policeman slumped back in his chair.
“You want a beer?” Caxton asked.
The OPP man shook his head. “My boss might disapprove.” He pulled himself out of his chair. “I’d better go get him.”
CHAPTER 5
Half an hour later Wilkie appeared on Caxton’s porch and asked him to take them to interview Betty.
“I’ve already let her know,” Caxton said. “She should be all right by now.”“Why didn’t you wait for me?”
“Because she’s a friend of mine. And because I didn’t want someone phoning her. The whole town knows by now.”
Wilkie blinked and frowned. “I guess the possibility that she shot her brother is remote, all right. But don’t help us out too much, okay? It’s our investigation now.”
“That it is. And she’s my girlfriend. Let’s go over there.”
“Can we walk?”
“It’s three blocks.” He nodded at the window. “You can see the sign on the other side, past the cold storage warehouse.”
“Let’s walk, then. You can fill me in on the way over.”
Caxton had anticipated all of Wilkie’s questions. “I couldn’t stand the guy,” he said finally, telling Wilkie what he was bound to find out, anyway. “For one thing, he’s the reason me and Betty aren’t married. Here we are now.” They paused outside the bakery, Wilkie waiting for more. Caxton continued, “Marlow had a couple of arrests in Sweetwater for drunk driving and one for assault. Around he
re, he liked to hang out with the dregs, like Siggy Siggurdson and Joe McBain. There’s a table of them in the beer parlor by the motel most nights. A day was coming when I would have had to arrest him for something, sure as eggs, or resign. Even now, some people around here figure I’ve been protecting him because of Betty. For me he was awkward as hell and I wished he’d go away. The reason Betty wouldn’t marry me was because she figured Timmy was liable to become too big an embarrassment for me. We’d just sorted that out, and then he gets himself killed and I’m out again. This time the reason he was killed, she thinks, might be embarrassing for the chief of police. Now you know it all. Can we get this over with?”
Wilkie knocked at the door.
Betty Cullen was a small, pretty woman in her mid-forties, plump with a full bosom and thick brown curly hair cut close to her head. She led them through the shop and the bakery behind, into the back room. Although it was Sunday she closed off the doors as they passed through them, as if to keep the customers from hearing anything.
She had had only half an hour to digest the news, and she was obviously under considerable strain, but she answered all Wilkie’s questions without hesitation.
“When did you see your brother last?” he began.
“On Friday. Friday afternoon.”
“Did you know of his plans for the weekend?”
“He told me he was going to Toronto. I assumed to see some woman he had there.”
“Why? Why did you assume that?”
“He was a womanizer.” There was no stress on the word. She might have been calling him a music-lover. Only the choice of word showed her attitude.
“Where did he stay?”
“Like, live? Here. He lived here.” She pointed upstairs.
“Could you show me his room?” He turned to Caxton. “Tell Copps to come over, would you?”
She led the way upstairs and to the front of the house, and opened a door onto a small room with a single bed, a pine bureau, and an old wardrobe. The wide floorboards had been sanded recently and varnished, and were partially covered with braided cotton rugs. The room was clean, the bed was made, and there were no clothes in sight.
“Won’t be hard to check this out,” Wilkie said. “He was a tidy guy.”
“I’m tidy. He was my brother. I looked after him.”
“You’ve been in here since he left on Friday?”
“I cleaned it.”
“Did you take anything away?”
“His dirty laundry.”
“Where is that now?”
“In the dryer.”
They were interrupted by the arrival of Copps. Wilkie said, “We won’t need you for a while, Mrs. Cullen. Or you, Lyman.”
When the others had retreated downstairs, Wilkie told Copps what to look for. “It’s routine,” he said. “Covering our ass, if you like. Look around, go through any papers, letters, stuff like that. Find anything that’ll tell us who he meets in Toronto, or who he was meeting here. Find anything he might have been hiding from his sister.”
Back in the sitting room, Wilkie said, “Who were your brother’s friends, Mrs. Cullen? Could you give me a list?”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t. Try the beer parlor, eh, Lyman? I never wanted to know who the women were.”
“I’ll give you a list of his cronies afterward,” Caxton volunteered.
Wilkie nodded and stood up.
Caxton said, “You want me to stay, Betty? I could come right back …”
“Not now, Lyman,” she said. “No. I need to be by myself. Leave me alone.” She looked around abruptly. “All of you. Leave me alone.” She opened the door, urging them out.
Wilkie said, “Officer Copps will be through upstairs shortly.”
She absorbed this silently, holding the door open, her head down, waiting for them to go.
Out on the street, Wilkie said to Caxton, “She doesn’t know anything about how he spent his time, does she? She isn’t going to be much help.”
Caxton said nothing.
“I suppose if she could help us find who killed little Timmy, she would. Wouldn’t you think? Could you bring her in tomorrow to identify him?”
“Jesus Christ, couldn’t I do that? The guy’s been dead a couple of days. He’s not pretty.”
“I know, but I need a next-of-kin ID. Now let’s take a look at those cottages. What’s the best way to do that?”
“We’ll do it from the river. I’ll get my boat from Chester’s marina.”
Wilkie looked at his watch. “I’d better go talk to the pair who found the body, first. You have an address?”
Caxton led them into his office and wrote out Dennis Corning’s address, adding directions.
Wilkie said, “I’ll call you when I’m done.”
When Wilkie had gone, Pickett lay down for a twenty-minute nap, put a collar on Willis, then changed his mind and left the dog to guard the house while he went to town. He had long ago given up trying to get Willis to behave in public without a leash, and even on a leash Willis spent most of his time trying to trip Pickett.
He tried to get the heavy work done in the mornings now, and putter for the rest of the day: a drive to town to pick up the newspaper and whatever groceries and building supplies he needed, a chat with whoever looked glad to see him, and then home for his chief pleasure, an hour’s read. He read a lot and tried everything. He had recently come across Winston Graham and become engrossed, and then happy that the Poldarks would last him for years. That hour was his only reading time. When he retired, he had thought he would read in the evenings, but he simply wasn’t alert enough, so he tinkered with little jobs, like sharpening his chain saw, or listened to the radio if he could find a baseball game or someone talking. So far he had resisted bringing a television set up to the cabin, but in the battle to avoid going to bed earlier and earlier, and therefore being awake in the too small hours, he had wondered lately if a television might be the answer.
When Pickett first began to try to get to know the members of the community who might be useful to him, he soon learned that many of the jobs he would need help with would require the services of people who did not necessarily advertise their skills. The well digger had a sign outside his house, as did the electrician and the ladies’ hairdresser, but for most other jobs you had to know where to find the man. In Sweetwater, for example, five miles away, there was a licensed plumber who would send a man to a house in Larch River for forty-five dollars an hour (ninety on Sundays), but the man he would send actually lived in Larch River and he moonlighted for twenty-five an hour if he knew you. You could find someone locally to do almost anything, from building a fireplace to felling a tree, but you had to know where to look. (The postmistress was his best source of information. In exchange he satisfied her curiosity about himself.) For hauling and laboring jobs, there were plenty of people who owned pickup trucks and who were happy to earn a few dollars on a Saturday afternoon. But you had to know and be known, and Pickett had made a point of buying everything in town as far as possible, including gas, and he ate, by design at first and then by inclination, in the coffee shop by the service station.
He pulled into one of the spaces beside the motel, knowing that he ought to be talking to Lyman Caxton, keeping him company, but putting it off for a while. He walked into the little café, a separate building beside the gas pumps, and Charlotte Mercer waited for him to choose a stool, then put his coffee in front of him. There was only one other customer, a traveler stopped for gas, and Pickett sipped his coffee and rearranged the contents of his wallet until the man left and Charlotte had poured herself a glass of water and sat down next to him, holding the cloth she had been using to wipe the counter. She had a round face with small gray eyes that disappeared when she smiled. Her nose was turned up and too small for her face, and it seemed alive, constantly twitching, or dilating, or wrinkling, or all at once. Pickett thought at first that she was responding to a temporary irritant but now he was used to the idea that Charlotte
just liked to exercise her nose. The rest of her was solid without being fat, not very much waist and slightly chunky legs. She wore a white nylon uniform in the café, slightly too tight around the bottom, and running shoes.
“You heard?” Pickett asked.
“Four people in already to tell me. Maybe there’s someone in town who hasn’t heard, but I doubt it.”
“You knew him well?”
“He brought the bread around. I liked him better when he first came here, six, seven years ago. He kept pretty much to himself then. Last couple of years he’s been a bit more—active. He seemed to think he was too good for Larch River, went around like the city boy among a bunch of farmers. And there are other stories.” She made a face and sipped some water, waiting.
“Like what?”
“Two or three people stopped buying their bread because of him. He kept a Mickey of rye in the glove compartment of the truck. People smelled it on him in the morning. It didn’t bother me. Betty needs the business, and my customers like her bread.”
“That all? Just a few swigs on the job?”
“He was late sometimes. Usually on the days I was running low. Who do they think did it?”
Pickett instinctively tried to dampen speculation. “They haven’t started to find out yet. Could have been an accident.”
She considered her next comment. “He was a skirt-chaser, I heard.”
“Any particular skirt?”
“I heard he wasn’t particular.” She raised her head and smiled at the row of boxes of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes behind the counter. “I think that’s what made him late sometimes.”
Pickett grinned. “Did he ever make a pass at you?”
She laughed. “You think I’m too old? For him?”
“No way.”
“He gave me a big smacker one day when there was no one around, and said Merry Christmas. That count?”
“That all?”
“It was October.”
“What did you do?”
“I burned his toast. Nothing. That was the best offer I’d had in years.” She laughed. “I didn’t mind, except he’d had a snort.” She looked at the clock and slid off the stool. “You coming for supper?”
