Death of a Hired Man

by Eric Wright

  “Witty fellow, isn’t he?” he said.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Oh, sorry. You mean, what do I think of our Eliza having an Indian boyfriend?”

  “You can’t call him ‘Indian,’ can you? Confuses people who grew up near a reservation.”

  “What’ll I call him?”

  After some thought, she said, “Nothing.”

  “You brought it up.”

  “I know. I’m glad I did, too. Now I know how to deal with the talk in the coffee shop.”

  “They talking about Eliza and him already?”

  “They will be. They’ll soon know not to talk in front of me.” She looked reflectively out the window. “There’s a family in turbans runs a service station about ten miles down the highway, but there aren’t any others in Larch River.”

  “This is a little bit of Old Ontario, Charlotte. No West Indians, no East Indians, no Vietnamese, no blacks; just nice folks like us. No wonder people retire here; they feel like they’ve come home. It’s Ontario fifty years ago. All it needs to be completely authentic is a Chinese restaurant run by the descendants of the coolies who built the railway. But in answer to your first question, I don’t think anything, honey. I doubt if they plan to get married yet, but if they do, we’ve got the name of a counselor, haven’t we?”

  “What’s all this about traffic?” Charlotte asked. “Eliza doesn’t seem very safe up there.”

  “Her thug will look after her.”

  “Her what!” Charlotte glanced at the door in case someone was lurking. “You can’t use words like that!”

  “Thug? That’s what he said he was. An assassin. Thuggee.”

  “Keep it to yourself, Mel. He was joking, surely. You use that word, everyone in Larch River will know what you think of him.”

  Pickett sighed theatrically. “I’m too well-read, that’s my trouble.”

  Charlotte said, “Lovely teeth they’ve got, haven’t they?”

  “Who?”

  “Editors,” she said, furious. “Book editors.”

  8

  In Sweetwater on Monday morning, Sergeant Wilkie said, “Three break-ins, one a week for three weeks, always on Friday night. Why Friday?”

  Constable Brendan Copps said, “The TV’s bad; there’s no hockey. Some people still get paid on Friday. People go shopping in Sweetwater, then stop off for supper. Or they go to the Legion. Friday’s a big night at the Legion.” He looked at the thing he was eating. “They shouldn’t put jam in doughnuts, not first thing in the morning.”

  “Probably they didn’t see a car outside the cabin—Thompson didn’t own one—so they went in to help themselves. Then Thompson walked in on them—he had likely been in the village doing his shopping at the IGA—and they panicked. Hit him and killed him, probably by accident.”

  “Probably. Trouble is, if it was punks, they’ll be scared shitless now they’ve killed someone, so they’ll stay home Friday nights for a long time.”

  “Do you think maybe we’re in Newcastle territory? We wondered if they did the Lyles’ cabin.”

  Copps repeated the phrase. “Newcastle territory? What’s that? Some ‘no-go’ area? The body snatchers’ domain?”

  “It means the area that the Newcastle gang operates in, the break-in boys from Newcastle. You know?”

  “Tell me again.”

  “There’ve been a lot of break-ins of summer places in a wide area around Newcastle, but not near Newcastle itself, which is why they think the gang operates from Newcastle.”

  “Never shit on your own doorstep?”

  “No, nothing delicate like that, but a kind of stupid cunning. See, if Newcastle isn’t touched, it’s because this gang is trying to lay suspicion somewhere else. If they went to only one or two other places, that might work, but now they’ve been everywhere but Newcastle, so they are doing the opposite of what they wanted. Stupid cunning.”

  “Could be cunning cunning. Close to home, someone might recognize them. But I agree, it’s the same, whatever. It puts the finger on Newcastle. So?”

  “They started with summer places around Lake Skugog, then began to hit permanent residences. They seemed to have good information about who goes to Florida and when, because all of the owners have been away when they called. They probably scour an area, find a place or two, then come back and hit it. I think they did the Lyles’ place.”

  “Why?”

  “When I reported it to headquarters, they said it fits: nice summer cottage; this time the owner lives in Newcastle, and everybody knows it. They went in, took all his power tools, including his bench saw and generator, all from the tool crib. They didn’t touch the cottage proper.”

  “Nothing worth taking?”

  “Being a summer place, there’s no money or jewelry or fur coats. No microwave oven, no TV, no radios, nothing except the furniture, which isn’t worth the trouble. And clothes to keep you warm and dry but not worth stealing. The owner spent his money on picture windows and a big stone fireplace, which are hard to steal; he’s smart, see, but so are these guys.”

  “Is this the same guy who supplied us with photographs of everything, showing where it was supposed to be on the walls so he’d know if anything was missing?”

  “Serial numbers, the lot. All listed, not that it helped much.”

  Copps asked, “When was this?”

  “A month ago.”

  “And nothing since?”

  “There’s been a break-and-enter each Friday since, but they don’t look like the work of professionals.”

  Copps nodded. “It won’t be locals at all, unless they’re very young kids. The older teenagers will know enough not to operate where they’ll be recognized, like the Newcastle gang. Chances are, if they’re not total outsiders, they’re from Sweetwater.” Copps nodded to himself. “Yeah, far enough so they’re not known, but they’ll know their way around Larch River.”

  “That the way it goes in the country, Brendan?” Wilkie sat back waiting to get information about small-town ways from his constable, who had grown up, to Wilkie’s delight, in a town called South Porcupine. “Tell me about it.”

  Wilkie was better trained and much more experienced in every area of police work than Copps, but the constable had the advantage of him in two other areas; women, and the street smarts he had picked up in the gutter. Compared to Copps, Wilkie’s upbringing had been genteel; he was very much aware that he lacked the sexual ease Copps had probably acquired in a rural grade school, and he kept the subject out of their conversation. But he had learned to be comfortable when Copps talked about petty crime.

  Copps said, “You want my life story? Okay. By the time I was fourteen, I’d lifted every store in Timmins, just down the road from South Porcupine. Two of us took the bus in every Saturday morning and loaded up. It was easy.”

  Wilkie dropped his amused attitude. “You never got caught?”

  “Once, nearly. We were in Bogden’s Department Store and this guy came up behind me close. I was just going to tell him where to go, and he said, very quiet, “They’re on to you,” and walked away down the aisle. When he got to the end, he winked and sort of wigwagged his head. I said the word to Piggy Potter—”

  “Piggy? Why ‘Piggy’?”

  Copps grinned. “He looked like a little pig, had a face like one.”

  “I thought that maybe in South Porcupine he was into pigs. A country boy.”

  “No, no. That was his friend, Hammy. No. Piggy followed me into the racks of men’s raincoats, where we dumped the stuff we had, except for a couple of things we’d bought. Piggy didn’t want to, but I pointed out that someone had noticed us, the guy who warned us, so we played it safe. We hung around for a couple of minutes like regular customers, then walked out the door. They picked us up on the sidewalk, but we didn’t have a thing on us we didn’t have a receipt for. They were very pissed off.”

  “Who was the guy who warned you?”

  “I think he was trying to pick up boys
, but when he saw there were two of us, he didn’t bother. Just warned us to show he was on our side. Piggy was kind of ugly, anyway. I was the one who caught the guy’s eye.”

  “So you gave up crime?”

  “We had to stop shoplifting Timmins. They knew our faces now. So then four of us took up stealing from cars, from the parking lots. Radios mostly, but anything else we could find. You’d be amazed at how many women leave their purses in their cars. We had a receiver now, a fence, a guy who ran a used-parts shop, mostly second hand tires, in Iroquois Falls. He gave us a quarter of what the radios were worth.”

  “And how long did this gang last?”

  “A year. Then one night we got chased by a guy who was waiting for us, crouched down in the back seat with a tire iron.”

  “So then you gave up crime.”

  “Then we started to burgle, back in Timmins.”

  “You and Piggy?”

  “And a couple of others. One of them had a car.”

  “How long did this go on?”

  “Just for the school year. Then, with daylight saving, it was too light to do much.”

  “Did you do well?”

  “It was easy. Yeah.”

  “So why did you stop?”

  “We grew up. Piggy first, I think. He was the most mature. He announced one day that he was quitting. We were just going into grade twelve.”

  “You never got caught?”

  “Like I said, nearly. But not actually, no.”

  “You’d never be here now if you had.”

  “That’s why we quit. We realized that what they’d been saying all along was true, that we had too much to lose.”

  “So you all quit?”

  “Smokey Stover carried on and got caught six months later.”

  “What happened to the others?”

  “Piggy’s a lawyer, works for the provincial government. He’ll run in the next election. Herby Benson’s a paving contractor—he steals from the government now, building roads.”

  “And Smokey Stover?”

  “On parole, I think. He’s habitual. Been in and out ever since.”

  “Jesus Christ. I had no idea of all the experience we had under our roof.”

  “Nothing like that ever happened to you? In Toronto, where you grew up?”

  “Not that I was involved in. I used to lift apples from the Chinese grocery on my way home from school. Not after ninth grade, though.”

  “All Boy Scouts, were you?”

  “My dad was a policeman. He’d have killed me.”

  “There it is, then. I didn’t have your advantages. I had to find out about right and wrong all by myself. I just made it in time.”

  “So how about putting your experience to work? How do we find these guys?”

  “We’ll have to ask around. Leaving out the Newcastle mob, we’re probably looking for punks—a couple at least, maybe three or four. We don’t know what kind of wheels they have. If it’s two of them, it could be anything, but four would be a car. I mean, not a pickup truck. They might have bought gas. One of them might have had a broken muffler. If they borrowed one of their family vehicles, they might’ve put in gas so that Dad didn’t notice how much had been used. They might’ve stopped to eat something—before, not after. After, they would’ve wanted to get the hell back to where they came from. Here, probably.”

  Wilkie thought about what he was hearing, about the crime and about Copps and his Artful Dodger background, and conceded the constable his authority on teenage rural crime. “So you think it’s local punks?”

  “I didn’t say that. I just was telling you how it would be if it was punks. That’s what you asked. As a matter of fact, if this was a quiz, I would say I don’t think so. The kind of punks I ran with wouldn’t have hit anybody. We’d’ve just took off. But who knows? I never got that far. Smokey Stover might’ve, after a spell in the reformatory. Not when I knew him. But someone hit Thompson from behind, and that says to me that they were not frightened, but maybe real hard cases.”

  “I think you’re right, but they didn’t have their own weapon.” Wilkie told him about Pickett’s discovery of the missing piece of dowel. “I think we’d better cover the local scene, don’t you?”

  “Oh, sure. Do what they taught us. Try every store that was open then—the coffee shop, the burger shacks, all of them, and the Finger-Lickin’ Chicken. We’re looking for two or more guys who might have been around for a couple of Fridays. Right?”

  “Couldn’t be just one guy?”

  “Sure. But we always went in company when I was a thief, and that’s what we’re talking about, isn’t it? Thieving? One guy on his own means we ought to be looking for some other reason. If you want to include all the possibilities, we’re looking for one or more strangers of unknown height, weight, color, and age, seen on this Friday or any other. Not a lot to go on. Any other leads?”

  Copps had given Wilkie time to think. “Ask the gas stations for a list of the numbers of cars that bought gas on credit that night. There won’t be too many to check.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Find out which of these kids needs a new muffler.”

  “That it?”

  “Find out if there’s a welder in town, one with a pickup truck. I guess a welder would have to have a pickup truck to carry the generator around, wouldn’t he?”

  “Sometimes they use a trailer for the generator so they can use the truck for other stuff if they need to. Anything else?”

  “Find out more about what Thompson did with his Saturday afternoons.”

  “He sat in the beer parlor and drank two beers, watching sports on the big screen.”

  “How do you know?”

  “That’s what farmers do. They come to town to look at the big screen. What else?”

  “I have to talk to Aaron Sproat.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The guy who was courting Mrs. Maguire while her husband was sick.”

  When Wilkie called him, Sproat asked if they could meet in Sweetwater. “Mrs. Sproat has had enough,” he said. He suggested a coffee shop on the main street. “They have those high booths,” he said. “It’s a little bit private. I could be there in half an hour.”

  He was a tall, bony man in his early fifties, dressed in clean work clothes. His hair was clipped short well above his ears, and old-fashioned, steel-rimmed glasses completed the look of a farmhand from a previous age, which Wilkie realized he was.

  He had been standing by the door of the cafe, waiting for Wilkie—the two men had no difficulty in identifying each other—and when Wilkie walked in, Sproat pointed silently to a booth. Wilkie led the way down the aisle. When they were both seated, Wilkie offered his hand and Sproat looked first at the hand, then at Wilkie’s face, then back at the hand before he produced his own to shake. His handshake was literally that, a shaking in which the fingers moved separately from the rest of the hand, as if it was a gesture that Sproat had read about and was now practicing for the first time.

  Wilkie ordered coffee for them both, and Sproat raised a finger before the waitress left. “Hold the phone,” he said. “I’ll have a piece of coconut pie with mine.” He added, to Wilkie, “I always eat coconut cream pie when I come here. It’s good.”

  Wilkie nodded, trying to remember the last time he had had a piece of factory pie in a diner like this, waited until the waitress brought the coffee and Sproat’s pie, sipped his own coffee and pushed away the cup, pleased to find that it tasted as if it had been stewing since breakfast, if not the day before, as he had anticipated. He waited for Sproat to finish his pie, wondering if the man had the acting skill to conceal any apprehension of the policeman behind the chat about the eating of coconut pie. Probably not, but he might have something to contribute about the victim.

  “I’d like to ask you about Norbert Thompson, save bothering your wife too much,” he said.

  “You already bothered her once. What do you want to know? I know all about him, sure.”


  “Did you know him long?”

  “I didn’t know him well personally, except just to speak to. I know all about him from Ruth. My Ruth.” He spoke with a declarative belligerence as he looked all around Wilkie, avoiding eye contact.

  “How long have you known him to speak to?”

  “I met him just after Ruth’s first husband died.”

  “That was the first time? Wasn’t he ever around when you called at the farm?”

  “I was never a caller, mister, until after Mr. Maguire died. Ruth’s first husband, that is.” Now Sproat looked at him directly to see if Wilkie understood.

  “Not once?”

  “No, never. Because I had feelings for Ruth, I kept my distance from her home while her husband was alive.”

  “But you used to meet her outside the home.”

  “If you mean somewhere private, the answer to that is no, too.”

  “But you did use to see her.”

  “I saw her in church, and afterward in here.”

  To eat the coconut cream pie. “Alone?” he asked. “Just the two of you?”

  “Mostly. Anyone was welcome to join us, and sometimes someone did, but most of the time it was just the two of us.” The man’s voice had a curious mechanically produced quality, as though the words he needed had been separately recorded and were only now being selected and organized into sentences. “I spoke to our minister about my feelings for Ruth to ask him if it was proper we should meet after the service, and he said there was no harm in it as long as I behaved myself. He’s a very liberal minister, too much so to my way of thinking.”