by Eric Wright
“In the meantime, Marlow could be in New Zealand by now.”
“I doubt it.” Wilkie smiled. “Marlow doesn’t have any money.”
“Four thousand dollars?”
“He doesn’t have it.”
“How do you know that? Of course. Siggy.”
“Siggy remembered where the money was after we’d made him into some kind of informer and he’d seen what a difference it made to how we looked for Marlow. Siggy had stashed it under one of the cottages, after lifting out a handful of fifties, I would suspect. But knowing Marlow doesn’t have it is more important than proving Siggy stole it, so we are going to tell everybody that we found it.”
“Don’t let him off too lightly, will you? I don’t like being told to fuck off by a scumbag like that.”
“He’s an informer. They’re all scumbags.”
“Let’s get back to the story. You’ve got Marlow without any money and therefore not too far away. Now, what did you decide Marlow did next?”
“What do you think?”
“This is your story now. I want to hear how you made an asshole of yourself.”
Wilkie smiled. “I think we’ll look okay. Marlow’s hiding somewhere, but his only source of money is Betty. I’ve got a bug on that bakery phone, so all I have to do is wait. When he calls, and Betty goes to meet him, or conceivably when he’s feeling real cocky and comes in himself when he thinks it’s safe, we’ll pick him up.”
My turn, Pickett thought. My turn, Wilkie, old son. “He hasn’t called yet?”
“No.”
“Ten days. And no money. A little strange?”
“He’s got whatever money Devereaux had on him.”
“Devereaux was on welfare, and he had to steal a car to get out here. Devereaux didn’t have any money on him.”
“Look, Mel, I don’t have an answer for everything. I admit he’s been out there a long time, but he thinks we think he’s dead. So he thinks he can walk around free as long as he stays away from this area. But he’s going to have to call for help soon.”
“How long are you going to wait?”
“My boss likes the scheme.”
“And Siggy?”
“He’s tickled to be a part of it. He has to stay in jail, but he gets extra privileges. Half a Coke bottle of rye before supper.”
“Nice.” Pickett leaned forward. “It won’t work, though.”
“Why?”
“Because Marlow isn’t out there.”
And Pickett told him where he was.
Wilkie absorbed the information very quickly. “Has to be,” he agreed. He laughed. “Let me get Brendan in. You can tell him yourself.” He laughed again. “Brendan!” he called. “Come in here. Mel’s got something he wants to share with you.”
As they reached the bakery, Pickett pointed down the street to Caxton’s house. “You going to leave Lyman out of this?”
Wilkie considered. “He knows the layout of the house, doesn’t he?”
“Yes, and I think he’s been watching it for a week. He got there first. He’s been waiting for him.”
Wilkie thought about this, nodded, and continued on to Caxton’s house. When he told Caxton the mission, all Caxton said was “Let’s go, then. I was just waiting for him to poke his head out, so I could break it off.”
CHAPTER 25
After they had gone through the ground floor and the bedrooms, Caxton opened the trapdoor to the cellar to find Marlow waiting on the top stair, waving his gun. There was ten days’ growth of beard on his face, which might have allowed him to be spirited away at night, now that Siggy was in jail and no one was looking hard for strangers anymore. Caxton ignored the gun and kicked Marlow in the face and jumped through the hole after him, using him to cushion his landing.
“Here,” Wilkie called, and threw down a pair of handcuffs. Caxton put the cuffs in his pocket and kicked Marlow ahead of him, up the stairs. Marlow came through the trapdoor and sprawled onto the floor. As he was getting to his knees, Caxton kicked him in the ribs. “Up, buddy,” he said, and as Marlow tried to stagger upright, kicked him again to point him toward the door. Wilkie, who had been watching with some detachment, said, “Put him in the car. And don’t kick him again.”
“Just one more,” Caxton said. “I don’t like people pointing guns at me. Especially him. Let’s go, hero.”
Wilkie sprang suddenly to his feet to get between Caxton and Marlow. “That’s enough,” he said. “You hear?” He pushed Caxton away. “Get over there,” he ordered him. “I’ll take care of this man.” He put an arm around Marlow’s shoulders. “You okay? Let’s get out to the car.”
When the door closed, Caxton looked at Pickett in surprise. “Did I do something wrong? The guy had a gun.”
Pickett laughed. “You played your part perfectly. Now it’s Wilkie’s turn. He’s cute. Quick, too.”
An hour later, Copps had taken Betty Cullen to Sweetwater to be charged. Wilkie returned to the bakery, assigning two constables to escort Marlow away. Wilkie stayed to talk to Pickett, telling Copps to send a car back in an hour to pick him up at the coffee shop.
Charlotte, smelling the excitement, sparkling a little with it, put coffee in front of them and moved almost out of earshot.
“You first,” Wilkie said. “Start at the end. How did you know he was in the cellar?”
“I knew he was in the house and there was no sign of him aboveground. She never closed the curtains in the bedrooms or downstairs, and there was never a face at the window.”
“You watched from the street.”
“No, Lyman did that. I remembered noticing. Afterward. When I was in Sweetwater, visiting you so that Betty could identify the body, she asked me to stop for groceries, so that she wouldn’t have to talk to anyone while she was shopping in Larch River, she said. She came out of the IGA with three sacks of groceries. For one person. This was the first week after the body turned up. And I noticed her going into the hardware store here in Larch River, and the drugstore, and keeping up a pretty good chat with everyone she bumped into. Then there was the fact that she didn’t reopen the bakery. I thought she’d close it for a day and then again the day of the funeral. Isn’t that normal? But the sign’s still up; she never did reopen. You know the reason? She had no one to bring up the sacks of flour from the cellar. Caxton did it for a while, after her husband died and before Timmy showed up. It’s how they got to know each other, so he’d know they’re too heavy for her. If Caxton was in on it, he could’ve brought up the flour. No one would’ve thought anything of that.”
“She didn’t want us to touch Caxton. Said he didn’t know anything about it. I see what you mean by saying he smelled something. He knew it subconsciously, I think.”
“This is fancy stuff, Abe. This is psychology, is it? Police college stuff? How does it go over in Sweetwater?”
“Go fuck yourself. Where were you at?”
“Yeah, so she bought her groceries in Sweetwater, and everything else in Larch River. She kept the bakery closed. So I figured, or rather, it came to me this morning, that she didn’t want anyone to see that she was still buying groceries for two people. And she couldn’t open the bakery because Timmy was there somewhere and she couldn’t risk someone wandering around the house and shop. The idea that she couldn’t bring the flour up just came to me. See, if Timmy had brought up the flour at night, she would have to tell Lyman Caxton that it was the fairies or something.”
“Don’t go overboard. Remind me now when and how you knew it was Devereaux who was dead, not Marlow.”
“Did you know it was Devereaux? The actual Paul Devereaux?”
“We’d have got there. I didn’t care who it was. What I knew was that it wasn’t Marlow, so Marlow was the guy I was looking for.”
“Siggy told you.”
“Right, right. I didn’t cleverly figure it out, and relying on Siggy, I could’ve screwed up. Okay? Write it out and I’ll sign it. Okay? Now. Your turn.”
“When
I found Devereaux had disappeared for no good reason it seemed a natural fit. The logical thing for Devereaux to have done was shoot back to Winnipeg, although rounders aren’t always logical.”
“What started you off on the trail again?”
“Betty Cullen lying about the date Timmy came to town. She had to be covering, even now, something that happened just before he arrived. Something that happened in Winnipeg, most likely. When the store owner was shot.”
“And the rest was simple. Even I could have done it.”
“You didn’t have to. You cheated. You had Siggy.”
“I should have told you. Could have saved you a lot of trouble.”
“I enjoyed it. I got to ride the train again. So what did Marlow have to say? More coffee, Charlotte, please?” Pickett wanted to savor this story.
“The whole thing?”
“From Winnipeg seven years ago. By the way, I’ve never seen the friendly cop trick done better. Did you sit him on your lap? Did he cry?”
“Just about.”
“Caxton couldn’t figure out what you were doing.”
“It’s not in the manual. So, back in Winnipeg, seven years ago, two pals robbed a convenience store. These two knew each other from before, as you found out, met up again in a beer parlor, both broke, and Marlow had the idea of a quick smash-and-grab. You found out the rest. So Marlow spent a few days waiting for the cops to come, then realized that Devereaux hadn’t fingered him. When he realized he’d got away with it, he came east to settle down with his sister. He figured that as long as he stayed around Winnipeg, there was always a chance that some cop would ask him where he was when the store owner got shot.”
“Did she know?”
“He had to tell her because she didn’t want to take him in. When she heard what he’d done, she decided to cover him.”
“It wasn’t just that she doted on him.”
“Okay, okay, there was nothing going on there, sure. But then Devereaux got released and called Marlow for money. Personally I think he might have had something going for Marlow, keeping quiet like that, serving extra time and all.”
Pickett sighed. “Jesus Christ. You’re as bad as your buddy.”
Wilkie grinned. “I mean it was Marlow bringing along a gun in the first place that landed Devereaux in it. He had no idea of shooting anyone in that convenience store. But when Marlow didn’t send him any money, Devereaux came looking for him.”
“How did he know where to look?”
“I asked him about that. Marlow told him, at that fishing camp. They were sort of buddies, and Marlow told him all about his sister. Even Devereaux could guess that Marlow had probably run here. So he called the bakery from Winnipeg, and sure enough Marlow answered the phone. So Devereaux came east. He called again from Sweetwater, and Marlow told him to meet him on the trail. Marlow told his sister he was being blackmailed and she put together the money. This is where her brother got cute. As you guessed, he planned to kill Devereaux, drop him in one of the holes in the bush like the one we found him in, and keep the money. No one knew he was there, and even if they found him, no one would connect him with Marlow.”
“So what happened?”
“Siggy. Siggy was wandering around the woods, and he heard a shot. So, after a while he went to take a look at who was target-shooting when it was nearly dark. Marlow was just getting organized to haul Devereaux away when he heard Siggy coming through the bush, so he dropped Devereaux and lay back to watch. Siggy found the bag of money, saw the body, shouted out “Timmy” to see if it would move, went to take a look, rolled it over, then ran.
“Now Marlow had to figure out what Siggy would do next. Probably nothing. Siggy had four thousand in a paper sack, and the longer it took them to find the body the farther away Siggy could arrange to be. Siggy headed home, of course, trying to look as if he’d never left. But Marlow has no real way of knowing what Siggy would do. He’s panicking. He waited a couple of hours and nothing happened, then he starts to think. When he puts it all together he realizes that Siggy never got a good look at the body, he just assumed it was Marlow because the money was in a bag with the bakery’s name on it. So Marlow thinks that Siggy thinks that the body is his, and if that’s the case, he’s going to be surprised if Marlow appears in town. At any rate, the money will keep Siggy quiet, so Marlow changes his plan. He stuffs his wallet in Devereaux’s pocket, puts his wristwatch on him, and his jacket, shoots him in the face again, probably, and rolls him into the crevasse, and kicks a lot of leaves over him.
“Now he’s committed. It isn’t safe for him to take the rented car back to Dumpy Lake. There’s only one safe thing to do, disappear. With any luck, and if he judged Siggy right, they might not find the body for a long time; a week would be enough with the plan he had in mind now. Point is, no one would miss him for a couple of days. He thought they’d never trace the car in the shed back to him, except that the asshole left the stolen ID in his wallet, which he left on Devereaux’s body. So once more Betty Cullen took him in. In a week or so, she was going to drive him to Peterborough, with enough money so he could disappear.
“It was full of holes, of course, but it might have worked. Don’t forget the essentials: officially we have a dead Marlow in the morgue, identified by his sister. We’re supposed to be looking for his killer still.” Wilkie laughed. “When he heard they’d charged Siggy, he thought he was home free. But Siggy was mine.”
“You didn’t need Siggy. I’d’ve helped you out, eventually. What about Betty Cullen?”
“She was going to sell the bakery and move. He told her when Devereaux showed up. She gave him the money, but when he came back, telling her he’d killed Devereaux, she took him in and hid him in the basement. Gave up her whole life on the spot.”
Pickett nodded. He was thinking about Caxton. It had come to him that dawn, when he realized what Caxton reminded him of. Once in Toronto he had suffered from mice, so he had bought a cat, and he’d had the familiar experience of seeing the cat wait forever by a hole for a mouse to appear. That morning, as he was trying to think about the last steps in the story, he had realized that Caxton had been sitting in his own window, with a view of the bakery, all night and every night as far as Pickett could tell, ever since that Sunday. What Pickett had worked out eventually, putting all the little clues like the grocery shopping together, Caxton must have felt instinctively, smelled it out by the way the house looked and by the way his girlfriend acted. But he had been planning to handle Marlow personally.
“What about Lyman Caxton? What’s going to happen to him?” he wondered.
“He followed them into Sweetwater. He said he had to look after her.”
“I guess this’ll be your bailiwick now.”
“How’s that?”
“They won’t replace Lyman. They’ll contract Larch River out to you guys.”
“When’s my turn?” Charlotte poured more coffee into his cup. “When am I going to hear what happened at the bakery so I won’t have to wait for all the customers to tell me?”
“Tonight?”
“Come up to the house.”
“Tonight?”
“Eat your supper here, and we’ll go up when I close. Your girl friend was in looking for you. Eliza.”
“What did she want?”
“Something about the play must go on and she’s staying here to finish it. They are thinking of having it ready by Christmas. But she hasn’t been able to find another place to live. She could stay where she is in the trailer until Christmas, couldn’t she?”
“There’s no heat. It’ll get pretty cold in a month. But sure. I’ll tell her.”
By eleven o’clock he had told her the story. He got up to go home. She stayed seated on the couch. As he reached the door, she said, “Why can’t you stay here?” The tone of her voice was that of a child asking why she can’t be allowed to do the pleasant thing for a change, instead of the unpleasant other.
“I could stay here. Nothing to stop m
e.”
“Then stay here. Sleep here.”
“You don’t mind?”
“What am I saying?”
He sat down. “Let’s have a drink. You, too.”
She shook her head, but he went into the kitchen and found her half bottle of scotch under the skirt of the doll and poured himself a large one. He returned to the living room and sat down beside her and put his arm around her. She stiffened, shivered, and collapsed lightly against him, head resting against the side of his chest. He leaned over awkwardly and kissed her near the top of her ear.
“Marry me,” he said.
“Sure. But you don’t have to.”
“Yes, I do. I didn’t think we’d get to the point. But we’re there now.”
“You are.”
“Aren’t you?”
“I’ve been there awhile.”
All of the questions were set aside now in a spontaneous request. The whole debate he had been solemnly putting himself through, preparing for this day, or not, depending how the debate went; weighing the advantages of the renewed pleasure of bed, board, and most of all, companionship, against the disadvantages; all the decisions that would have to be made (he had recently sworn he would never move house again); the rules that would have to be laid down, for example, to point out in words that he had reached sixty-five without a beer belly or heart disease so he would eat and drink what he liked because he was naturally abstemious, apparently, and having come this far he might as well finish off his life with butter, too, because he didn’t like margarine. All this was set aside now in the discovery on his tongue of the words “Marry me.” And her response had reminded him that maybe there was more motive in his asking the question now; he had probably sensed that it was in her head, and for once he wanted to have the initiative, to exercise the male prerogative while it still existed. She could have all the others.
“We have to decide where we’ll live,” he said.
