Buried in Stone

by Eric Wright

  “Tell the police.”

  Villiers looked unhappy. “That’s like asking Betty. Isn’t it?”

  “So why are you asking me?”

  “I don’t know. You used to be a cop, didn’t you? What would you do?”

  “I’d tell the OPP. After I’d made sure they understood why I thought it was a bit delicate.”

  “Would you, Mel?”

  “Oh shit, all right, I’ll tell Sergeant Wilkie, but he might have to go round asking hard questions. You can’t be sure he’ll be able to keep you out of it.”

  “Maybe we should forget it.”

  “You can’t do that. Fact is, let’s say it, the bill could’ve come out of Timmy Marlow’s wallet, and whoever brought it in could tell the OPP where they got it. It won’t have a long trail.”

  “It’ll lead straight here, though, and if it’s just Betty paying the plumber cash to get round income tax, GST, stuff like that, she’s going to be pissed off with me.”

  “I’ll try and get Wilkie to involve you last.” Pickett stood up. “You get a lot of cash trading around here?”

  “I’ll tell you, Mel. There’s always been the usual moonlighting. It’s cheaper on one side, and you save the income tax on the other. But people have always felt a little guilty about it. This Goods and Services Tax, though, people hate it. They dodge it as if it’s their patriotic duty. There’s an electrician near here who reports just enough income to keep his kids in porridge. But his boat and cottage, and his month in Florida—all that is paid for in cash. And the GST isn’t a bad tax, the idea of it, anyway. It’s just that I think I’m the only person in town who understands it.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Pickett accepted the commission, but instead of having to drive out to Sweetwater he ran into Wilkie leaning into a car window, talking to one of his men outside Caxton’s house. “I’ve got something you might want to know about,” Pickett said.

  Wilkie straightened up, glanced back at Caxton’s house and up and down the street for a place to sit down. “Come for a ride,” he said. “I’m parked just down the street.”Pickett joined him in the cruiser and Wilkie pointed the car out of town.

  Pickett said, “Why are you watching Caxton?”

  “We aren’t watching him, Mel.”

  “Bullshit. There’s someone sitting near his house day and night. What are you hoping to see? I’ll bet I’m the only one who’s visited the guy.”

  “That’s right. You are. Fact is, he spends all his time alone or with you. Mostly he just sits looking at the street.”

  “He’s mourning.”

  “For Marlow?”

  “Don’t be an asshole. For himself and Betty Cullen.”

  “Yeah? Well, he’s not doing anything, for which I’m grateful.”

  At the junction of the highway he turned away from the direction of Sweetwater. “I’ve had no lunch,” he said. “There’s a place up here with the best homemade soup in the county.”

  “How come you haven’t had time to eat? You doing one of these round-the-clock investigations you’re always telling the public about? You coulda fooled me.”

  “Oh, I had time, Mel. I had time. But I made the mistake of going into this ptomaine clinic by the gas station, a real greasy spoon, and you could tell by the broad behind the counter there was no way to trust the food. We just had a coffee …”

  Pickett was bright red and looking murderous before he realized what Wilkie was up to. “You bastard,” he said. “Who told you?”

  “Everybody, Mel. It’s that size of town.” Wilkie was beside himself with glee. “Shouldn’t you be careful, at your age? Rich, randy widower like you. How well do you know her?”

  “Knock it off. I remember you now. You always went too goddamn far. Now knock it off.”

  “Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Seriously, she looks like a very nice lady. When’s the big day?”

  “You want to hear what I have to say?”

  “Go ahead. I’m just jealous. But I didn’t have any lunch because Copps was sure she tells you everything she hears.”

  “He’s right. She does. Now listen to me for a minute.” Finally he told the tale. He ended, “Villiers, the bank manager, is hoping you might be able to use the information without involving him. He wouldn’t want everyone to think their secrets aren’t safe with him.”

  Wilkie said, “All right. So far, one fifty-dollar bill. Could have come from anywhere, and I’ll think about it before I have a talk with Marlow’s sister. He may have had two or three of them on him. This bank teller—Jenny?—I’ll tell the manager to get her to watch out for any more, let us know where they came from. Then I’ll ask some more questions.” He looked at his watch. “Time for a bowl of soup. This place has got new people running it. The boys say the fish chowder is worth the drive.”

  Pickett watched the traffic slow down respectfully as the black-and-white cruiser rolled along the highway, 0 down to a responsible hundred kilometers an hour, only ten reasonable kilometers over the limit. Wilkie leaned forward a little, frowned, then shifted into the center passing lane, put on his flasher, and started to overtake the stream of cars. He drove in this way for no more than three minutes, then switched off his flasher and settled in with the stream of traffic, alarming only the drivers in the immediate vicinity. A minute later he pulled off the highway to a small, independent service station with a dining room attached, much like the café Charlotte ran.

  The fish chowder was good; so, too, from the comments of the room, were the minestrone, the pea soup, and the chicken-vegetable. When the waitress, a tall, thin woman who was also the cook, had taken their order, Wilkie said, “She’s from Toronto, trying to live naturally. All the stuff here is organic or free range. Can you have organic fish?”

  “It’s not cheap, not like regular soup,” Pickett said, reading the small menu.

  “That’s why it won’t last. A few summer cottagers will find it, and they’ll use it on their way by, but what about the winter? She won’t have too many customers then. People around here aren’t used to paying four dollars for a bowl of soup. Have you ever noticed, by the way, the more rural you get, the harder it is to find Ma’s old-fashioned cooking? The local people here live on frozen food and pies baked in a factory in Barrie.”

  “What were you chasing just now?” Pickett asked, more to change the subject than because he cared. He knew Wilkie just enough to know that he was down on all country ways, taking pleasure in pointing out how bad life was in Sweetwater compared with downtown Toronto. He was becoming a little boring on the topic.

  “The blue Volvo. Did you see him?”

  Pickett searched his memory. “I didn’t see anyone do anything wrong.”

  “I thought it might be a wanted car. I saw it on the bend, just before the road curves round those big rocks, and it had an out-of-province license plate. We had a message yesterday that there was a stolen one believed to be traveling across country, heading east. But that one was from New Brunswick. The stolen one was from Minnesota or Missouri, one of those states in the middle. It’s probably in fifty pieces by now in a garage in Montreal.”

  “You like doing highway patrol?”

  “I’m not crazy about parking behind a tree for four hours, but I go for a ride now and then, if that’s what you mean. Did you ever do patrol work?”

  Pickett shook his head. “I went off the beat straight into Homicide and stayed there until I moved over to Bail and Parole. I did help out with a last little homicide just before I left.”

  “You live alone now?”

  “You saw my cabin. I just have a single bed.”

  “No, only I was talking to my dad last night on the phone …”

  “And he told you that I have a granddaughter living with me in Toronto, right?* Tell him she’s gone back to England, so I’m living alone again. Did he also tell you that she was illegitimate? Or rather, her father was. A wild oat I sowed when I was with the air force in England at the end of the war. She came looki
ng for me a while ago, and I gave her a place to stay. She’s gone now, though, back to university. She might come back one day. I hope so. He tell you all that, your dad, did he?”

  Wilkie looked for another topic. “Would you think of marrying again?” he asked eventually.

  “What is it you really want to know? Ask me. I’ll tell you.”

  Wilkie colored but said nothing.

  “You’re being goddamn personal, you know that?” Pickett continued. “Like one of those morning TV hosts thinks he can ask any question he likes, because they’re careful to get only the kind of people on the show who wouldn’t tell him to fuck off. I don’t know you that well to talk about my private life.”

  “I just wondered.”

  “I know.”

  Later, after he had taken Pickett home, Wilkie examined his question from all angles and decided that it was a perfectly ordinary, reasonable query, and that Pickett had not been entitled to give him a bad time over it. Wilkie had meant it in a general, theoretical sort of way, but Pickett had taken it as a particular inquiry. Which meant, Wilkie concluded, that Pickett was thinking of marrying again, and he was embarrassed about it.

  Wilkie had the happy idea of approaching Caxton privately about the fifty-dollar bill, on the assumption that he might know something about the way Marlow’s sister conducted her business and her relationship with her brother that would make the information trivial, so he wouldn’t have to approach Betty Cullen.

  “It was handed over the counter at the bank,” Wilkie said. “You see the problem? It could mean something. If Betty initialed it, that would usually mean that she planned to deposit it, wouldn’t it? So what could have happened? The only possibility that interests me is that she gave it to Timmy herself, and it was in his wallet when he was killed.”

  “Tax dodge,” Caxton said, promptly. “She could’ve given that to almost anyone. Always cheaper to pay in cash.” He turned away to keep his distance from Wilkie, then said, almost over his shoulder, “That isn’t like her, though. It might’ve come out of Timmy’s wallet, but Betty wouldn’t necessarily know about it. I caught him once with his hand in the till.” He added, “No good asking Betty. When I told her what I’d seen, she even told me that she had told Timmy to take the money. Defending him, she was. And she will still. She won’t want anyone to think her little brother was a thief. No, you won’t get anything out of her. I see where you’re heading: you think that if you could find out where the bill came from you’d have a line on the killer. I doubt it. I’ll give you odds that if you do trace it you’ll find it was used to buy gas, up on the highway, something like that.”

  “I think I’m going to have to talk to her myself,” Wilkie said. “How is she?”

  “I haven’t seen her. Haven’t you heard? She’s leaving. She still hasn’t reopened the shop. She’s leaving. Me and her have broken up.”

  “Why is that?”

  “It has to do with the fact that someone shot her brother. Any more stupid fucking questions?”

  Wilkie waited for a minute until Caxton stopped glaring at him. “She still there now?”

  “Didn’t you hear? I don’t know. I don’t fucking know. I haven’t seen her. We ain’t speaking.”

  Wilkie let him walk away, then turned to cross the street to the bakery.

  It took a long time for Betty Cullen to open the door. Wilkie had to knock hard twice, and then step back so that he could be seen from behind the curtain of an upstairs window.

  At last her voice came through the door. “Yes?”

  “OPP. Can I come in?”

  She let him in and rehooked the chain, then led him into the sitting room. He showed her the bill without saying anything, and she turned it over and over. “That’s my initial,” she said at last. She handed it back to him. “You found that in Timmy’s wallet, I suppose. I gave it to him for spending money. I forget how much I gave him. Two hundred.”

  “How many fifties?”

  “I can’t remember. How many did you find?”

  “Could you have given one to someone for a job they’d done for you? Someone who wanted cash.”

  She thought about that for a while, then shook her head. “I’d never do that. Everyone around here knows that I would never do that. The government could check up on you. But I could give money to Timmy if I liked, couldn’t I?”

  But as Wilkie understood it, Betty initialed money that was already made up for deposit, not the bills she slipped to her brother.

  CHAPTER 14

  Then, three days later, another fifty-dollar bill with Betty Cullen’s initials appeared, this time in Sweetwater. The banks there had been alerted by the OPP to watch for marked bills, and one of the clothing stores had included the bill in its regular deposit. The store could not identify the customer who had passed it, but the owner had the bright idea of checking the cash register, which was modern enough to indicate on the sales receipt how much money had been tendered for each transaction, in order to calculate and announce the proper change. There had been fifty dollars offered for an item of thirty-two dollars, which meant it must have been a single bill. The item was a pair of work boots, being offered on sale.

  “Those are the bright yellow kind,” Wilkie said. “Should be easy to spot.”But the assumption that anyone seen in Larch River wearing new yellow work boots might be a killer was very shaky. The bill that had turned up in the Sweetwater clothing store probably had come from a local carpenter, who had got it from someone else. Or a hundred other possibilities. Nevertheless Wilkie brought in half a dozen extra men to help take a casual look at as many of the boots in Larch River as they could manage. They had to be careful; cross-questioning the local citizenry about their boots would surely send a warning signal through the town very quickly; it would be a slightly absurd and therefore memorable inquiry, to be passed on, grinning, to everyone before the police got all the way round. So they split up and went from workplace to workplace, pretending to be looking for strangers.

  The excuse that Wilkie invented came to him when he learned that the stolen Volvo had been found abandoned near Huntsville, where the thief had apparently run out of gas, and all units of the OPP had been asked to keep an eye out for hitchhikers. Someone claimed to have seen the driver leave the car, so Wilkie had a rough description, so vague that he simply lifted an old sketch from another file, one that corresponded to the description, and made a dozen copies. The police now began a methodical check of every house and workplace in Larch River, looking for someone wearing a new pair of yellow boots.

  They found three. Two of them, a worker in the lumber mill and a man who sold wood-burning stoves, were known to Caxton and very unlikely suspects. A third, though, was suggested by Caxton himself. “Try Siggy Siggurdson,” he said. “He had new boots on last week, but I didn’t think nothing about it. Not then.”

  “Is he likely? What do you know about him?”

  “He calls himself a guide, but most of the time he’s on welfare. There’s a guy named Ramsey who owns a little tourist lodge upriver. If any of his guests wants to go fishing, he or his son takes them out, but if he has several people who want to fish at the same time, he gets Siggy to help out. He uses Siggy just enough so that with a few weeks’ work when the lumberyard is busy, Siggy qualifies for unemployment insurance all winter. Mainly he sponges off his mother. From time to time she gets sick of him hanging around and kicks him out, but he’s generally back a day or so later. She takes the attitude that everyone’s got it in for her boy, until he steals something off her to buy himself a bottle, then she lays a complaint, which I tear up a couple of days later when she feels sorry for him again.”

  “Let’s go see him.”

  “You mind if I stay here?”

  Wilkie waited for an explanation.

  Caxton said, “Siggy isn’t very popular around here, but I’d as soon not be there when you arrest him for murder. I have to live here afterward. And if you’re wrong he’s gonna think that I put you up t
o it.” He stood up abruptly. “Oh, shit, he’s gonna know that, anyway. Let’s go.”

  “Found your chain saw,” Caxton said later, over a beer on Pickett’s porch. “Under Siggy’s bed, where I figured in the first place.”

  “You got it with you?”

  “Wilkie took it. Needs it for evidence.”

  “You sure it’s mine?”

  “Brand-new Husqvarna with a little nick in the handle.”

  “Won’t be brand-new now, not after two years.”

  “Siggy never used it. Too scared to use it or sell it. I made a point two years ago of scaring the shit out of him, so he never brought it out, and he never stole from you again.” He paused. “I knew he was a thief, but this latest … I wouldn’t have guessed it in a million years.”

  “No?”

  “No. He’s a tub of lard. If he’d done anything like that, I would’ve guessed he’d’ve been in my office every day with suggestions, showing what a good citizen he is.”

  “He’s got a new pair of yellow boots, paid for with a marked fifty,” Pickett said, grinning. “It’s a start, Lyman.”

  “Looks pretty good, doesn’t it?”

  Pickett thought Caxton seemed a little excited by the news, an excitement he was trying not to show. It was probably relief, Pickett thought. If Timmy’s killer had been found, then Caxton might still be able to persuade Betty to stay, especially if it was Siggy. From Caxton’s point of view, Siggy was the ideal killer.

  “He started with the usual bluster,” Caxton continued. “Said the money was a tip from some American he’d guided earlier in the summer. Wilkie offered to contact all the Americans he had guided this summer to confirm it—Ramsey, the camp owner, would have a list—then Siggy backed off, said that he really meant that he’d made change for someone else who’d been given the fifty while he was working as a guide. When we threatened to check this out, Siggy said he was just someone he met in a beer parlor, didn’t know his name. There he stuck. He liked that story. So we accepted that and just moved on to ask him what he was doing on the trail on Friday, implying someone like me had seen him. Siggy had already told so many lies he was in a hell of a tangle, so he said he’d gone up there to check on some smoke. He was just passing, he said, and saw some smoke, and then he gave us a big bunch of bullshit about city people not realizing how dangerous campfires were at this time of year with the fire hazard so high. But we had him now: he’d admitted being in the area when Marlow was killed and he had passed a fifty that must have come from Marlow.”