by Eric Wright
Pickett corrected his terminology, although he wasn’t sure, now, if the right term was bush plane or float plane. Inevitably they moved on to talk of the voyageurs, those Quebec traders, singing and paddling their way for two thousand miles across the land, long before the advent of bush pilots, and Pickett tried to remember one of their songs. By the time dinner was announced, the journalist was in tears at the beauty and wonder of it all.
As the train reached Sioux Lookout, around eight in the evening, he realized that Marlow’s death should have been a relief to his sister, however much she doted on him. Her duty done, surely she could marry Caxton now. Did Lyman Caxton know? Probably not. He didn’t have the guile or the will to handle a major deception. Caxton was a good man: not so much naturally virtuous as law-abiding; a policeman who would follow the rules with a punctiliousness that would be a pain in the ass to a colleague who saw a chance for a shortcut. He liked being the embodiment of law and order, and he might even have given up Betty rather than get involved with her problem with Marlow. If he had seen it coming.
Pickett climbed into his bunk and helped himself to a large scotch from his flask, but when he woke up, during a half-hour stop in Hornepayne, his mind was still on Caxton. What about now? After his first shock, any sorrow Caxton felt would have been tempered with a big helping of relief. But Betty would see the new danger; her brother was dead but his killer wasn’t, and when they caught him the whole story would come out, and her shame would be complete, or whatever other nonsense she lived by. Because it was nonsense, Pickett thought. Times had changed; the world had other things on its collective mind than Timmy Marlow, and the scandal would soon fade. But for her, even with Timmy dead, the issue of respectability was still so strong that she must be hoping that Devereaux would escape.
CHAPTER 23
And then, crossing the French River on the way to Parry Sound in the middle of the afternoon, looking down at the water route the voyageurs had taken three centuries before, Pickett saw that Betty Cullen must have known from the time Devereaux first appeared who he was, had known and helped her brother to respond. The money, for instance; two deposits, four thousand dollars, held back with the story that she had loaned it to Timmy to buy a car. Now it seemed likely that she had put together the money herself for Timmy to take to the meeting with Devereaux.
And the story that he had gone to Toronto? Probably that had been agreed between them, although Marlow was already committed to spend the weekend with Pat Dakin, a circumstance he never bothered to tell his sister about. There was much else she didn’t know, most of all, Timmy’s real intention to kill Devereaux, probably with the same gun he had used seven years before. So Marlow had left his car in Dumpy Lake, rented another, and changed his appearance enough so he wouldn’t be recognized at dusk when he came back to Larch River to wait for Devereaux. Caxton had been right about that, and Pickett would enjoy pointing it out to Wilkie at the appropriate moment. Marlow had four thousand in a paper sack, and a mistress waiting for him in a lodge by a lake. His only problem was Devereaux. He probably planned to kill Devereaux and dump the body in a gully in the bush, in a much deeper hole than the one Marlow’s body was found in, and Pickett remembered that he had got this thought also from Caxton. He would let Wilkie know about that, too. Marlow knew the area; with luck he could dispose of a body for good. No one would be looking for Devereaux in Larch River. He was just someone who had skipped parole a thousand miles away. Until Pickett had come along, even the car he had stolen was not connected to him. And nothing linked Devereaux with Marlow. The only connection would disappear with Devereaux’s death. It was a perfect crime.
But Devereaux, presumably, after seven years in a penitentiary, was nobody’s fall guy. Bailey had said he wasn’t very bright, but he would have learned a few tricks in the penitentiary. He had a debt to collect; he had been loyal once and done Marlow a very big service, but he could not be sure how Marlow would respond to his request for gratitude. One of the possibilities, especially after the holdup, was that Marlow would try to pull something, and when he did, Devereaux would have seen it coming and probably killed Marlow while he was still taking the gun out of his pocket.
And then, as the train brought Pickett into Toronto, it was dusk, as it had been when Devereaux and Marlow met on the trail. Now it was Devereaux who had four thousand dollars. All he had to do was get to Sweetwater somehow and catch the bus to Toronto. What would have worked for Marlow would work for Devereaux, surely. No one would connect him with the dead Marlow. No one knew anything about him. He lived in Winnipeg, reporting regularly to his parole officer. All he had to do was get down to Toronto and catch a plane west with some of his money.
So why hadn’t Devereaux done that? Had his nerve cracked? He was not a very experienced criminal, just someone who had been unlucky enough to try and rob a grocery store in company with a punk who had a gun.
Pickett took a cab from Union Station to his house, where he picked up his car and collected Willis from his next-door neighbor. The next morning he drove north, trying to concentrate on one problem at a time. He had some news for Wilkie that he ought to have phoned to him, bit by bit, as he uncovered it. His excuse was that until he learned that Devereaux had broken parole, he was just speculating, all begun with the curiosity about why Betty Cullen had falsified the date of her brother’s arrival in town, seven years before. Pickett began to justify himself. He had told Wilkie he intended to respond to Mrs. Siggurdson. Wilkie had said, “Lotsa luck.” Sort of mockingly. After that, one thing had led to another. At what point ought he to have called in? Surely not until now?
But he was still uneasy. What he had to tell Wilkie was that Marlow’s killer was not in his cells, but somewhere on the loose, and with enough money to go to Tokyo if he wanted. Go get him, Wilkie. Lotsa luck. Jesus Christ. If only Devereaux had kept his head they could have picked him up at his next meeting with his parole officer. Why did he run? If it hadn’t been for Mrs. Siggurdson, he would be sitting pretty.
Pickett stopped in Peterborough and spent a few hours eating lunch, buying some building supplies not available in Sweetwater, and generally postponing the meeting with Wilkie, because the more he thought about it, the more dissatisfied he became with his idea of what Devereaux had done after the shootout.
Coming into Larch River at sunset, Pickett drove down to the landing, parked, and walked up the trail to give Willis an airing before they went to the cabin. There was still just enough light to see the gully, and he tried to re-create the scene. With Marlow dead, surely Devereaux’s first reaction would have been to hide, in case someone had heard the gunshot and come looking. Soon it would be dark, and Devereaux was in strange country. There was no point in crashing about the bush; he would not know about the concession road a quarter of a mile away, or how to get to it through the bush. He would have seen the cottages, though, on his way up the trail. So did he stay the night? Did he walk out on Saturday, risking being grabbed by the police, probably looking for the lost Marlow, or, at least, risking being noticed and identified later? Could he risk hitchhiking the five miles into Sweetwater? Devereaux must have wondered if he had created a trap for himself. Somebody could have heard the gun; for all he knew the search for the shooter would begin just as he emerged from the bush.
Pickett remembered that until Siggy had presented himself, Wilkie had done a pretty good job of questioning everybody in the area about any strangers they had seen, and all he had come up with was one man who had given a stranger a ride from Sweetwater to Larch River on the Friday, but no one who had seen or given a ride to anyone going the other way, on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. And on Sunday, they had searched around the cottages, and Wilkie had posted cars to seal off the area. That was the point at which Pickett wondered if Devereaux was still nearby, and realized that he could be, bottled up by Wilkie.
In the very early morning, Pickett sat, with Willis on his lap, watching the light leach back into the sky like a stain spreading, and st
arted at the other end. This time he thought about Betty Cullen, and her passion for respectability, how it had ended her future with Caxton, and probably condemned her to a lonely life as a shop assistant in Peterborough or somewhere. It was, he concluded again, nonsense, and he thought about the woman who doted on her brother so much that she had sacrificed her way of life for him, and her behavior since the death of her brother, and he wondered why she hadn’t simply gone away for a while.
And then, thinking about Caxton, the image of the police chief sitting in his front window came to mind and he realized what Caxton had been doing, realized that he, Pickett, had been seeing the whole thing wrong, that it was like one of those optical puzzles where the foreground becomes the background as soon as you focus your eyes correctly.
As half a dozen details that he had brushed aside fell into place, Pickett became certain of his conclusion. The only problem left was Siggy, and Pickett got around Siggy by reminding himself that the man was a congenital liar with a dump truck for a lawyer.
What a lot he had to tell Wilkie.
For reasons that had to do with his upbringing about how to comport yourself on a formal occasion, he put on a clean pair of trousers and found a tie to wear over his workshirt, but he had no jacket except his windbreaker so he had to call on Wilkie looking like a Larch River native on his way to meet the bank manager. Like Wilkie, in fact.
CHAPTER 24
Wilkie greeted him cheerily, but Pickett tried to keep some formal distance between them to make it easier for Wilkie to get angry when Pickett had spoken his piece.
“I hear you were in Winnipeg,” Wilkie said. “Did you find the guy you were looking for? Brendan! Come in here. I want you to hear this.”This should have warned him, but as well as being nervous about Wilkie’s reaction, Pickett was still pleased with himself, and excited at what he was going to say. “Yes, Abe, I did.”
“The bad guy, eh? Where’s my pencil. I’ll get his name down.”
Copps entered and sat down, nodding to Pickett.
What the hell was going on? Wilkie’s reaction was all wrong. These guys were practically winking at each other. But this was about finding a killer, not someone stealing newspapers. Wilkie was treating it as a routine event in a Sweetwater OPP morning.
Wilkie continued. “No. Don’t tell me his name. Tell me the story first. How’d you get on to him?” To Copps he said, “Mel’s found the killer. He’s going to tell us how. That right, Mel? What got you started?”
“The dates,” Pickett said finally. Was Wilkie sending him up? He looked quickly at Copps, who looked away Something was going on, certainly “The dates,” he repeated. “I should tell you I think Betty Cullen knows a lot more than you thought.”
“That right? What dates are these?”
Pickett explained, and Wilkie lost some of his air of mock wonder. Both policemen became more attentive. He had told them something they didn’t know.
Starting from the discovery of the discrepancy over the dates of Marlow’s arrival in Larch River, Pickett told his story, how he had tracked Marlow back to Winnipeg to the day he had left Winnipeg, and how he had discovered why, and uncovered Devereaux. Wilkie made no move now to write the name down. Pickett had all his attention as he described how Devereaux had probably stolen the car (here Wilkie looked at Copps, who started to make notes) and the circumstances of the meeting, backtracking now to Marlow’s progress to the meeting that Friday, carrying the money his sister had given him.
“And Caxton?”
Pickett drew a breath. “I don’t think he knows a thing.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I think he smells something, that’s all.”
“Go on.” Now Wilkie was fascinated. “Tell us the rest. So what did you work on next?”
Again it was an odd response. Wilkie seemed to be more interested in the how than the what, in the teller than the tale. But Pickett’s last two items should shift his interest. “So I asked myself how Devereaux could have disappeared so neatly, and why he hadn’t turned up in Winnipeg.”
Copps snorted and seemed to want to suppress a grin. Wilkie turned on him, furious. “Shut up. Shut the fuck up.” He turned back to Pickett. “So what did you conclude, Sherlock?” But he was not being sarcastic. This time the wonder was real, admiring.
It was obvious that other dramas were being played out in the room, but Pickett’s absorbed him totally. “That’s when I realized, Abe,” using the name to soften the bad news and associate himself with the sergeant, “that you’ve been looking for the wrong man. Devereaux’s dead. It’s Marlow you should be looking for.”
Wilkie let out a sigh. Copps started to splutter, “You think we’re totally …”
He got no further. Wilkie said sharply, “Leave us alone, Brendan.” When Copps looked at him, amazed, he repeated, “Go on. Take a break. Before you go, though, you might congratulate this guy. You think you would have got there starting from where he did, without the help we had?”
Copps made a face, shrugged his shoulders, started to speak, then left the office, leaving the door open. Wilkie got up and closed it.
When Wilkie had sat down, Pickett said, “What’s going on, Abe?”
Wilkie said, “You mind if we finish going over it first?”
“You don’t seem very surprised.”
“I’m not. I’ll tell you why in a minute. Let’s finish the story. What happened? Marlow shot the Devereaux guy, then what?”
“Then he got disturbed by Siggy, maybe.” Now Pickett stepped back from his second revelation. Whatever was going on with Wilkie and Copps, he could not believe they would be sitting here if they already knew what he was going to say next. So he waited. “I think he must have taken off, don’t you?” he said. Actually he thought nothing of the kind. He watched for Wilkie’s reaction. “So when did you know, and how did you get there?”
“Let’s keep going,” Wilkie said. “So Devereaux’s dead, and Marlow is away, could be anywhere right now, right? Then along comes Siggy, finds a body, empties his wallet, and rolls him into the gully.”
“Did he admit that? Disturbing the body?”
“He says it must have been bears. I say it was Siggy Goldilocks. I don’t think it matters. He found Marlow’s body on the trail. Then, on Sunday, the two lovers go for a walk and stumble over it, so to speak. Who was the next person to see the body, after them?”
“What is this? Caxton, when him and I went up the trail.”
“He didn’t get in there with Marlow’s body, did he?”
“No.”
“He recognized the jacket, right? Next we brought the ID out of that ditch, and took the body to the morgue here, and Betty Cullen identified it. Now what’s going on? You say it was Devereaux. Would she have made a mistake like that?”
“No, she was lying. She knew all about Devereaux.”
“From when?”
“From who, you mean.”
“No, from when?”
“I don’t know. Maybe from seven years ago. Maybe she knew all along, from the time that Marlow came to town and asked her for a place to hide. So when Devereaux came, she gave Marlow the money to make him go away. She didn’t expect Marlow to kill him, but when he did she still tried to look after him. The trouble is, it makes more sense if she only just found out, like, last week. She was making plans with Lyman. She wouldn’t have done that if she had been expecting someone like Devereaux to show up for the last seven years, would she?”
“Okay. Then?”
“Marlow came back to the bakery in a panic, and she agreed to help. Even now, Caxton still didn’t have to be involved. You remember she got flu and wouldn’t let him in.”
“So did he know or not?”
“I don’t know. No, he didn’t.”
“But Betty knew.”
“Oh, sure. She knew.”
“Okay, Mel. Now let’s see if you can answer your own question. Who else saw Marlow’s body?”
“Siggy.
He’s my problem. He knew Marlow, all right, so he’d know this guy wasn’t him. Marlow hadn’t been mauled at that point, though I understand his face was smashed in. But it wouldn’t have been enough. From the pictures I’ve seen, Devereaux and Marlow were of an age, and about the same size, but they weren’t all that much alike. Siggy must have known, but he figured he was better off lying. Maybe he saw a chance of blackmailing Marlow down the road, if he could ever find him when he came out of jail.”
Wilkie nodded and breathed out loudly. “Simpler than that. He knew, all right. For him it was just a legitimate body to rob, somebody he had never seen in his life before, so he proceeded to rob it. Then, when he heard they’d found Marlow dead, he couldn’t exactly rush in here and tell us who it really was, could he? We had to wait until we charged him with homicide. Then he told us.”
Then Pickett saw the whole game. “So he told you, but you didn’t tell the world, right?”
Wilkie nodded, savoring the moment.
“When? When did he tell you? Before I left town?”
“That’s right.”
“So when you told me he was pleading guilty, that was all bullshit, right?”
“That was for the benefit of Marlow, make him think we’d wrapped up the case. I couldn’t risk telling anyone a different story. Not even you, Mel.”
“So you knew for a week what I was going to find, if I found it.”
“Four days. I did try to warn you, you were wasting your time.”
“What a laugh you’ve had. So why aren’t you looking for Marlow?”
“I am. But I’ve got the okay to leave it off the computer for a few days.”
“Why?”
“Caxton has a computer.”
“So what the hell are you doing? Seems to me you’re just sitting here feeling smug about the fact that Siggy told you how wrong you were. You haven’t done fuck-all, have you?”
But Wilkie was a hard man to rile. “I’m waiting, that’s what I’m doing. Look at it like this. We know that Marlow killed this guy, and that his sister knows, but nobody else does. Everybody else thinks we’re looking for Marlow’s killer.”
