by Eric Wright
Copps took a chair and said, “I think it’s blackmail.”
Pickett said, “Everybody tells me Marlow wouldn’t have cared a pinch of coonshit. The women might’ve, but seriously, you think he got four thousand off his sister to pay off Siggy?”
“To pay off somebody, yes, and I’ll tell you why.” Copps gave himself the air of a man with some news to impart. “Maybe not Siggy, but I’ll tell you why it makes sense that Betty Cullen gave Marlow four thousand to shut someone up.”
Copps’s desire to milk his story had given Pickett a glimpse of where he was going. “You making this up?” he asked, in anticipation of what Copps was going to say.
“I’ve wondered from the beginning. Everyone around here tells us she doted on him. After about the tenth dote I started to wonder what the word meant.”
“I wouldn’t let Lyman Caxton in on what you’re thinking. He’s on the edge now. He’d take an ax to you.”
“It makes sense, though, doesn’t it? Suppose Siggy or someone caught Marlow and his sister in the sack, just by chance. Tell you the truth, I wondered at one point if maybe Caxton had.”
“You can stop wondering about that. In fact, you can forget the whole goddamn script.”
“It may not be so bad. It may not even be illegal.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“We only have her word that he was her brother, don’t we?”
“Christ Almighty.” He turned to face Wilkie. “You asked Siggy about this?”
Wilkie, uncomfortable, said, “I don’t want to—what do they call it?—lead the witness. Put words in his mouth. Anyway, if Siggy doesn’t volunteer it, I couldn’t prove it. It’s just something that occurred to Brendan when we were trying to make sense of everything that’s going down. Even if he was her brother, there’s a lot of stuff goes on in these small towns, Mel.”
“If I were you, old son, I’d prove it before I talked about it.”
“I’m just telling you what was in my mind,” Copps said.
“That right? Thing like this would feel at home there, I guess.”
Copps shrugged, looked inquiringly at Wilkie, and left.
“You really believe this?” Pickett asked.
Wilkie looked at his hands. “As soon as someone suggests something, it becomes a possibility, Mel.”
CHAPTER 20
The Larch River Gazette was written and printed in Sweetwater. It was a weekly community paper, thirty pages thick, most of it given over to advertising. The news was all of local events, which took up the front pages and three or four columns dotted through the pages of advertising. The news gatherer was the wife of the town doctor, Helen Kuntz, who wanted to be a writer and used the Gazette for practice. She gathered up the news of what was officially happening and received all the requests for publicity for the town’s social events. Twice a week she drove to Sweetwater, where she and the publisher together wrote the paper. The publisher owned six such newspapers in that part of Ontario, and one press served them all.
Pickett had invented a good reason for reading the old files of the paper, a reason that grew out of his new interest in the survival of the twenty-dollar bill. What he pretended to want was some concrete information about the differences in prices between 1953 and today. He explained his mission to Vernon Calais, the publisher, who became intrigued. “How about doing a little story for me on it?” he asked. Pickett told him not to be silly, but agreed to pass on the information he found. ‘That’ll do,” Calais said, and led him to the archives. “Would be nice if they were on microfiche. But you’ll just have to manhandle the originals.”It wasn’t difficult. In 1953 the Larch River Gazette had begun as a four-page flyer consisting of a page of news and three pages of advertising. It took only minutes to flip through a year. Pickett stayed there all afternoon. First he diligently drew up a comparison list of groceries to give to Calais for his story, then he jumped ahead twenty years. If Siggurdson was to be believed, someone had shot Marlow at point-blank range and left without robbing him, either because he was disturbed, or because he was there to kill Marlow, not to rob him. Assuming the second, then Marlow had enemies that Wilkie had not heard about.
First he established when Marlow had really arrived in town. This turned out to be easy, because from about twelve years before, some attempt had been made to make the Gazette look more like a newspaper by adding, on the back pages, a quarter page of “sports”—baseball in summer and hockey in winter—and on page two a small gossip column listing the social activities of the residents, including their comings and goings. Seven years ago the column had reported that the well-known bakery owner, Betty Cullen, had a guest staying with her, her young brother, Timmy, newly arrived to help out in the thriving business. After that, Pickett skimmed all the way to the current issue, just in case there was anything about Marlow, or his sister, or Siggurdson, but there was nothing.
He handed over the 1953 price list to Calais, who had already written the story. He showed Pickett the headline: SOME THINGS COST MORE FORTY YEARS AGO.
“Find any that did?” he asked, running his eye down the column.
“Television sets. Safety razors. Ballpoint pens.”
“Perfect,” Calais said.
Now Pickett made arangements for a little outing. Mrs. Siggurdson had given him the excuse he had been seeking for some time, a reason for taking one last ride on the Transcontinental train before they junked it. Everyone who knew him understood.
First he made a call to an old buddy in the Bail and Parole unit and asked him to ask his computer if there was any record of Timmy Marlow. The reply came back almost immediately. “He’s dead. Homicide victim in a place called Larch River. Hey, isn’t that where your cabin is? What are you up to, Mel?”
“I’m thinking of opening a detective agency. I’m practicing. I know he’s dead, I’m trying to find out if he had a record.”
“What the hell you talking about, practicing?”
“Put it this way. I’m trying to show the OPP how to do their job.”
“You’ll find your nose out of joint if you’re not careful.”
“They know what I’m doing. They think I’m on a wild goose chase. Look, Joe, it’s a complicated and interesting little story, and when I come back I’ll drop around and fill you in, but right now would you look up ‘T. Marlow’ on the machine and tell me what you find? And keep your voice down.”
A minute passed. “Nothing,” Joe said. “That end it?”
“Yeah. No. Keep it to yourself till I get back.”
“Keep what? Back from where?”
“Christ, Joe, I’m trying to get a little confidential information, that’s all. If anyone asks, tell them. But they won’t. All I’m asking is that you don’t phone the Sweetwater OPP and say, ‘You know what? I got a call from Mel Pickett today about that homicide, Timmy Marlow.’”
“Okay, okay. I can keep a secret. Tell me when it’s unclassified.” He hung up.
The next day, Pickett left Willis with his librarian neighbor in Toronto and took the train to Winnipeg.
It was not easy to get a ticket. This was mid-September, the peak season, and he was told that the train was booked solid until November. If you wanted to travel in September, they said, you should book in April. But what about no-shows? he asked. Yes, that happened, they agreed. So he stayed in his own house in Toronto for the night and the next morning packed a bag and went down to Union Station to make his request in person. Now the lady at the information desk took pity on the poor old man who was afraid of flying and told him to come back in half an hour.
Pickett found a seat on a bench five feet away and sat down and looked sadly at the lady at the information desk until she called him over and told him she had found him a coach seat from Parry Sound to Winnipeg. Parry Sound, he calculated, was three hours by car from Toronto, and even allowing another hour to get back to his house and get on the road, he had plenty of time to intercept the train. He explained his pla
n to the woman, who looked at him admiringly. “Lotsa time,” she agreed. “You’ve got more than six hours.” She grinned. “Wanna gamble? Wait another half hour, see if I can get you a seat to Parry Sound?”
Pickett guessed that with her on his side it was a good bet, so he bought a newspaper and went back to the bench, and half an hour later she asked him to hang on for five more minutes, and then she had it.
“Can I get a berth?”
“Now you’re being greedy,” she said, sadly. “Don’t make me feel bad.”
“No sweat. I’ll take it.”
He could sit up in the coach all night if necessary—you had to when you flew to Europe—but the way his luck was running, it might not be necessary.
And so it proved. He told the conductor about his need, and an hour and a half after the train left Toronto, right after Barrie, Pickett had a lower berth. That taken care of, he found a seat in the club car and ordered the first of two beers he would allow himself before Sudbury Junction, happy again at the prospect of looking at northern Ontario for two days through the windows of an air-conditioned train.
Pickett was a sentimentalist who hated the government for, among other things, what seemed to him the systematic destruction of Canada’s great railway system. The Transcontinental had been cut back from a daily to something that ran three times a week, and Pickett, like a lot of other people, feared that the cutback was simply a prelude to a complete closing down of the system. Every instinct and desire cried out against it. From any point of view, the building of the railway from coast to coast had been a wonderful achievement, helping to create Canada by uniting it, and the great trains had become symbolic of the country. On his war service in England, Pickett had discovered that the words Canadian Pacific had a resonance for the English, a romantic power every bit as strong as phrases like Yankee Clipper, Orient Express, and Flying Scotsman.
He had himself traveled on the train several times on vacation before being lured to Europe like everyone else by cheap air fares. The first time, though, was when as an enlisted man in the RCAF he had been shipped from Toronto to Halifax, across Quebec and the Maritimes. It was the first time he had gained a real feel for the country he was born in. After the war he had traveled with his wife to Vancouver, across northern Ontario (his favorite bit because in places you could still see the world that the first settlers saw, uninhabitable and beautiful), then over the prairies (nice at sunset) to the Rockies (a disappointment), and on through the interior of British Columbia to the Pacific. He had never done the whole seven-day, coast-to-coast journey in one trip and now he probably never would, but when he thought of Canada he thought of the railway, a line stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific with ten different landscapes strung along it.
He wondered what sort of image the next, nontrain-riding generation would have, no doubt already had. A field of ice seen from thirty thousand meters up? Or a gray-green carpet pocked with holes full of water from the same height? He had often thought that no one should be granted citizenship until they had traveled across the country by train, at the taxpayers’ expense. Such a scheme, he thought, would ignite a valuable chauvinism and help to make the railway economically viable. But what about the native-born Canadians who had never taken the train? Soon there would be too many of them, too. Maybe you could demand it of the MP’s, at least? Cabinet ministers, maybe? Any day now, he mused, we would find ourselves in the hands of a prime minister who had never ridden the train, and that would be the end of it.
Another instinct than the romantic told Pickett that dismantling railways of any kind was stupid and shortsighted, and exactly like the way the big automobile interests in the United States, had destroyed the trolleycar systems in the thirties. A new generation of Canadians would one day curse his own for letting the railroads rust. But he never tried to argue the case. He was just glad of an excuse to take a train ride.
CHAPTER 21
They reached Winnipeg late the next afternoon, and Pickett checked in at the Marlborough Hotel. He had never visited Winnipeg before, and he could think of nothing he wanted to see. Winnipeg, he understood from people who had been born there, was a good town to grow up in, but there was not much for the tourist or visitor. The following morning he rented a car and drove the hundred miles back to Kenora.
The office of Bailey’s camp was on a gravel back road, dead-ending in a cleared space where half a dozen cars with American license plates were parked in a square. Pickett strolled over to read the names of the states and a voice spoke behind him. “Need any help?”He turned and saw a tall, weathered man in his forties, dressed as if for hunting, standing outside the door of Bailey’s office. He looked as if he had just showered and shaved, and at the same time had the air of someone who might have been playing poker all night but didn’t show it. Pickett walked over and waited for him to step aside to let him into the office, but the man stood in possession of the door, not blocking it but showing by his stance that he would be happy to answer Pickett’s questions on the step. What did he want?
“Hi, there,’he said.
“I’m looking for the owner or manager.”
“I thought you might be looking for a car. You seemed to be sizing them up.”
“I brought one of my own.” Pickett nodded down the street. “You stand and watch all day? You must have a lot of car thieves in this town.”
“Somebody stole one last week, and now the police are bringing it back and I have to find someone to drive it down to Minneapolis. I saw you through the window, so I thought I’d come out and say hello. I’m the owner. Harry Bailey. What can I do for you?”
Pickett said, “I’m trying to find someone who worked for you seven years ago. Or rather, I’m trying to find out something about him. I know where he is.”
“Who would that be?”
“Timmy Marlow. He’d be about twenty-two then.” Bailey frowned, then, as the name registered, looked uninterested. “I remember Marlow. I fired him. What else do you want to know? How about identifying yourself, by the way. Which outfit you work for?”
Pickett explained himself and his mission. “Point is, I’m retired from the Toronto police. A woman in this little town where I have a summer cabin has come to me for help. Her son’s in jail on suspicion of homicide. These people, both of them, are deadbeats, real unattractive family, but the case against him isn’t blackand-white, and she’s got no one else.”
Bailey walked down the little flight of steps. He said, “I don’t want to go inside because the office staff will listen to us instead of working and we’re real busy. Come on down to the hotel, and we’ll have a cup of coffee,”
In the coffee shop of the Kenricia Hotel, Bailey said, “I assume this guy you’ve got in jail did kill Marlow.”
“Oh, I think so. That’s what it looks like.”
“So what are you searching back seven years for?”
“Because I can’t find any other killers around town and because—although I think the killer probably is in the Sweetwater lock-up—I found a little discrepancy about some dates. Marlow’s dead, but I think someone’s trying to cover up his past. Maybe it caught up with him. And maybe this is all bullshit and all I’m doing is creating an excuse to ride the train, which I haven’t done for years. And visit the Lake of the Woods. It’s nice here.”
“God’s country,” Bailey said automatically. “Come fishing. I’ll give you a deal.” He quoted a price for three days’ fishing.
“Jesus. Do I get to keep the boat?”
Bailey laughed. “No, and you have to buy your minnows.”
“People pay that, do they?”
“I’m booked up.”
“Americans?”
“We had a Canadian here in the spring, I think. Or maybe that was last year. So, what can I do for you?”
“Tell me when Marlow worked for you and what you remember about him.”
“I’ll have to look up the dates. But I remember the guy very well. He worked for me for
part of the summer. I’ll look it up. Then I got rid of him.”
“Why?”
“He beat up one of the Indian boys. A kid, maybe sixteen, who worked around the camp. Marlow was maybe five or six years older, and forty pounds heavier, and tough. He was in good shape.”
“Why did he hit the kid?”
“It was something about a tip. Marlow was learning to be a guide, and he’d just finished a three-day trip with a couple of guys who looked good for a big tip. Before they left they told him they’d given the tip to an Indian boy to give to him. But when they’d gone, the kid said they didn’t leave him any money. Then someone told Marlow he’d seen one of the guests give this Indian kid money on the dock, when they were waiting for the plane. So the next day Marlow took the kid to a quiet spot in the woods and beat the shit out of him. We had to get the doctor to him. Then one of the other guides said that he’d seen the incident, that the guest had given the kid a two-dollar bill for carrying his bags to the plane, and that anyway it wasn’t Marlow’s guest at all; it was some other guy. So I got rid of Marlow. Even if he hadn’t shown himself to be such a vicious son of a bitch, I didn’t want a war on my hands, not even a little one. Everybody liked that kid; I used him for carrying bags, and as a kind of bellboy because he was popular, he looked cheerful. It wasn’t just the guests; all the other workers liked him. Marlow could have wound up with a tomahawk in his back. I’m just kidding. No, I’m not. So I put Marlow on the next plane to town.”
“When was that?”
“We’ll have to look it up in the office.”
“What happened to him?”
“He went to Winnipeg, then disappeared. He was never much in my mind after that, but I got a call last year from a guy who runs a camp up your way, asking for a reference for Marlow. I didn’t give him one, but I asked around to see if anyone had ever seen him again, and someone said he;d just disappeared. I guess he went in search of work.”
