by Eric Wright
“If I am finished early, I’ll stop in on Wilkie in Sweetwater. See if there’s any news.”
“I thought you might.”
He could see she thought that was the real reason for him driving to town—so he could pass through Sweetwater and talk to Wilkie. His story was thin; the fact was that he could have bought everything he needed two hundred yards away from the house, in the hardware store in Larch River, which did a good business selling alarm systems to summer cottagers, and he prepared a refined version of his story just in case Charlotte told someone in the coffee shop about his errand and they put her straight. But he was glad she didn’t believe him anyway; it was as if he wasn’t lying after all.
He did call on Wilkie in Sweetwater first, hoping that the sergeant might already have arrested a local man, but there was no news. His instinct was not to tell Wilkie what errand he was on, without giving that instinct much thought; thus when Wilkie inquired, he told him the same story about buying floodlights as he had told Charlotte.
In Toronto, none of his old colleagues was working the day shift in the Bail-and-Parole Unit except for Sergeant Marinelli, but Pickett found that he was known to everyone, having become a legend: “Pickett the Pioneer.” His log cabin intrigued them and had come to form an important part of his image for them. The pattern was familiar: first the jokes, then the questions about did he really build it himself. When they were all satisfied, he got to cross the street for a quiet cup of coffee with his old crony, Marinelli, to whom he explained the problem.
Ever since he had seen the picture of the body on the floor of the cabin, he had been troubled by the notion that at first glance, it looked like himself on the floor, simply because that was who you expected to find on the floor of his cabin. And that had got him wondering if the killer had not simply expected to find him at home, and from that, Pickett had gone on to the possibility that he was the intended victim. He kept in front of his mind the near certainty that Thompson had been killed by an intruder who had been disturbed in the act of burgling the cabin, but he nevertheless could not blot out the recurring image, like a still photograph flashing in his head, of himself dead on the floor of the cabin; it was an image that seemed to be warning him, because if by the remotest chance, it was him who was supposed to have been killed, then perhaps the killer would return as soon as the news of Thompson’s death was published, or at some time thereafter come again to look for Pickett.
The possibility was slight, but he did not think that considering it indicated paranoia. He might have shrugged off the risk to himself, but he felt that the safety of Charlotte, and even of Eliza, was at risk, so he had driven in to Toronto. He’d bought the floodlights and some alarm equipment and then driven over to the Bail-and-Parole Unit, for it was his idea that if he was the intended victim, then the largest pool of possible assailants was made up of all the criminals he had helped put away over the years he had been in Homicide, all of whom would have to report to the Bail-and-Parole Unit when they got out. He could think of half a dozen who had cursed him at some point, usually right after sentencing, and promised revenge. His reaction, the reaction of all policemen, was to tell them to join the queue. Their desire for revenge never survived the jail term. But this might be the exception.
Marinelli asked, “You have any ideas?”
“Not yet. I helped put away my share of them when I was in Homicide, and before that, there were a few assault cases, drug dealers—you know. Any one of them could be bearing a grudge.”
“You feeling spooked?”
“A little bit. It’s a possibility is all, and it always is. But this is not just for me. I’ve got a house trailer up there I used when I was building the cabin. There’s a girl, a woman, uses it weekends. And I got married again, did you know?”
Marinelli grinned. “We heard.”
Pickett could guess at the jokes that had been trotted out at his expense. He waited for Marinelli to decide not to try one now. Then he said, “So I want to know if anyone is still looking for me.”
“We can check the circulars in the office.”
Pickett nodded. A circular was distributed whenever the system released a criminal with a history of violence, especially if he had been heard swearing revenge while in prison. “That would be a start,” he agreed.
“Apart from that, if there is someone, we wouldn’t necessarily know, would we? We handle the records for most of them, but if the parole officer is federal, they wouldn’t come into us.”
“Let me see what you’ve got.”
They went back to the unit, passing the lineup of people on bail or parole who were required to report once a week. As many as six hundred a day went through the office.
Pickett thumbed through the circulars first, but he remembered none of the names. Then he glanced at the records that Marinelli produced, but once more there were no familiar names.
“Sorry, Mel, or, I guess, no, that’s good, isn’t it?”
“I guess so.” Pickett stood up. “It’s a start. Thanks.”
They shook hands and Pickett left, watched on his way out by the lineup of criminals.
The expedition was completed well before noon, and Pickett had the time he wanted to drive across town to his house on Alcorn Avenue. He’d planned to drive down about once a week while it was empty during the summer, to cut the grass and generally make sure the place was intact. His neighbor, a librarian, would keep his porch free of flyers, and she had Charlotte’s phone number in Larch River if the place caught fire, but she would not know if the plumbing had sprung a leak, or if someone had quietly broken in through the back door. And he had had no tenant on the second floor since his granddaughter Imogen had gone home to England.
Before he had conceived the plan to build a cabin, before he had met Charlotte, he had satisfied his need to make and build things by remodeling the house, duplexing it into upper and lower units. Downstairs, he turned the former dining room into a shower and a den; he kept a couch in the den for overnight visitors, and a television set because he was old-fashioned enough not to want a blank eye staring at him in the living room when he was trying to read. He had moved his own bed into the basement.
On the second floor, he had carved a self-contained, one-bedroom apartment out of the former three bedrooms and bathroom, completing the conversion by boxing in the stairs and putting a door at the foot of the stairs. At first he had rented the second floor to married students, keeping the rent low in exchange for mild dog-sitting duties—his librarian neighbor did the serious dog-sitting when he went to England—and some caretaking when Pickett was away, chiefly in the long, bleak period from Christmas to Easter.
Then, when his long-forgotten “granddaughter” appeared on his doorstep, he had made it easy for her to stay by offering her the second-floor flat, and so, finally, he had had all the pleasures of having a granddaughter to love without any of the anxieties of raising children along the way. The fact that she was not his granddaughter, not related to him in any way, and the further fact that she looked like her grandmother at her age—the girl Pickett had fallen in love with in 1944—made the nature of his fondness for the girl complicated, even suspect, as he knew perfectly well without letting it worry him. Most people see likenesses to the family in their grandchildren; Pickett saw the likeness to his first love, and enjoyed it.
But Imogen had returned to England, and now Pickett found a letter from his “son,” Imogen’s father, in the mailbox, an answer to his query about how he felt about Pickett’s desire to adopt him legally so that Pickett’s estate would go to him, to be held in trust for Imogen and her sister. For nothing was simple: If the world was to believe that Pickett was Imogen’s natural grandfather, then the same would have to be true of her sister. Slowly, Pickett read the letter.
Dear Mr. Pickett,
Already / am having trouble writing this. / realize / ought to call you “Father,” but / can’t do that, not at the moment, so “Mr. Pickett” it will have to be.
You can hardly expect me to welcome the idea of being adopted by a stranger, a foreigner, and at my age, can you? / grew up believing you seduced my mother, abandoned her to have me in secret, and although / know you saw her once or twice more, and / admit she always spoke well of you, nevertheless you washed your hands of her and of me. of course, after / was old enough to realize what you had done, / was happy never to see you or to hear of you again.
However, lmogen’s initiative has complicated matters, and now this proposal of yours looks to benefit her and her sister substantially, and I don’t have the right to dismiss it out of hand. But I’m not jumping with joy over it. Everyone knows the facts of my bastardy, and these days it is no great thing. l have lived perfecty comfortably with the known situation, I don’t share Imogen’s romantic obsession with discovering our origins. I am a happy bastard, and I don’t know that I want to change. But let me come to my real objection.
What I have written so far omits one thing, somethinq that changes everything. I have lately learned something about you that Imogen does not know, and I am not sure I should tell her, but it bears on our relationship so directly as to render nugatory everything I have said so far. So I am coming over, and so is Imogen. We shall arrive separately—I have business in New York with our head office, and I will be staying at the Plaza Hotel, in case you want to get in touch before I come. But I plan to arrive in Toronto early in the week of the 18th of April. Imogen will fly from here and we will meet in Toronto. I will be in touch later.
Pompous bastard, Pickett thought. He looked up “nugatory” and felt a chill of apprehension, then confirmed from the calendar that his “son” would be arriving next week. Christ! And Imogen. He would have to bring Charlotte down to Toronto to meet her bastard of a stepson. He dialed the number of the Plaza Hotel in New York and learned there was no one staying there called Colwood. The letter had been written on the English company’s letterhead, and after a bit of calling around, Pickett got the number of the New York head office and found the man his son had come to New York to see. Apparently they had concluded their business very quickly, and as far as the New York executive could remember, the son was now touring New England before going up to Canada to join some distant relative.
There was nothing for Pickett to do, therefore, except to leave a message with his neighbor that if she saw someone standing on his doorstep with a suitcase, she should direct him to Larch River. At least give him Charlotte’s number. He would know about the cabin; Imogen had visited the site in earlier days.
11
After Pickett left, Wilkie gave him a few minutes to get clear of the town and then drove into Larch River. He had no secrets from Pickett as far as the Norbert Thompson case was concerned, but he was glad to know Pickett was out of the way, because he wanted to chat to the bank manager about Thompson without anyone else listening; most of all, he wanted to give the bank manager the sense that their chat was completely off the record. He didn’t want the manager looking up and seeing Pickett waving outside the window.
Ernie Villiers, the manager of the only branch of a bank in Larch River, regarded the confidentiality of his customers’ financial affairs as sacred, at a certain level. That is, he would not have dreamed of being indiscreet about one of the townspeople’s banking interests to another. But Wilkie knew he had been a very useful source of information in the last case, when he had allowed Pickett to know about what seemed like the odd banking behavior of one of his customers who was connected to the case. By tracing a sum of money that ought to have been deposited in the customer’s account, Pickett had helped Wilkie unravel a thread that started off the solution to the crime. It now occurred to Wilkie that Villiers might know something interesting about Norbert Thompson, but first Wilkie had to show himself a man to be trusted.
He introduced himself and made his first mistake. “You were very helpful to us in nailing Timmy Cullen,” he said.
Villiers looked blank. “I don’t remember speaking to you at all, Sergeant. And I don’t remember this bank being asked to testify at the trial. You caught the man with a gun hiding in Betty Cullen’s basement, I heard. And then Mel Pickett figured it all out, I understand, though maybe Lyman Caxton, our own cop, got there at the same time. You guys thought it was Siggy Siggurdson, I heard.”
“That the way the story goes? We all knew it was Timmy Cullen. But Mel knew where to find him.”
“And Lyman.”
“Lyman Caxton knew he was in the basement, too, yes.”
“The newspaper report didn’t read that way.”
“We simplified it so the lawyers wouldn’t screw it up in the courtroom. And so we wouldn’t have to charge Lyman with failure to cooperate.”
“Made you look good, though, simplifying it. I’m surprised you haven’t made inspector out of it.”
The malice behind Villiers’ comments nearly made Wilkie give up. But before he could speak, Villiers continued. “Personally, I’m glad you simplified it, even though Mel didn’t get the credit he was due.”
“He’s retired, he doesn’t need it.”
“I don’t either, and I’m not retired. I was happy to hear there was no mention of how you caught up with Siggy.”
“We wouldn’t have brought that in anyway. All we would have had to say was how we were suspicious of Siggy’s spending spree. It’s normal police procedure after a robbery in a small community to wonder why someone has suddenly got rich.”
“Timmy didn’t appeal, did he? I mean, he won’t now, will he?”
“He’d be too late.”
Villiers nodded. “Sleeping dogs, then. So what are we talking about now? Norbert Thompson? Yes, he banked here. You might have found that out from anyone. The account is frozen now, of course, until someone tells me what to do.”
“I understand.”
Villiers said nothing for a while, then, “Did Mel tell you what I told him about that bakery account?”
“I don’t remember. If he did, it’s gone now. It never became material after we found Timmy.”
“Ah.” He nodded. “Water under the bridge then, is it? So. What do you want to know?” Villiers eased himself in his chair and leaned back.
“Nothing about Thompson’s account. More about your impression of his situation on that chicken farm, and after he left it.”
Villiers took a few moments to think about the question. “I wondered about that myself. As I understood it, he couldn’t collect unemployment insurance because he’d never paid in, nor did his brother for him. Apparently he worked on some kind of contract. Day laboring, only by the month.”
“How much does a hired man make around here?”
Villiers grinned. “Hired what?” He spluttered and giggled and hissed with glee in anticipation of what he was going to say. “About as much as a swineherd, I would think. Bit less than a dairymaid.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What are you talking about? I’ll ask around for you, but I’ve not heard the term ‘hired man’ in years. As I say, like ‘dairymaid,’and ‘swineherd’ and ‘plowboy.’ I’ll see if anyone else has. Hold on.”
Villiers looked up a number in his book and called it; then, obviously speaking to a friend, he went into a conversation to establish the going rates for a hired man. He put the phone down. “That was a pal of mine who runs a hobby farm near Peterborough. He says there aren’t any hired men these days. They call them ‘farm managers’, pay them a thousand a month and give them a house rent-free.”
Wilkie saw a way to dismantle the last of Villiers’ caution and unleash the banker’s natural desire to share his understanding of the nat
ives with another administrator. “Are we talking confidentially, Mr. Villiers?”
“Of course.” Villiers glowed. He got up and made sure the door was shut. “Mel will vouch for me on that score,” he said.
“He did already. You don’t know what they paid Thompson?”
Villiers, slightly irritated at being asked something when he had thought he would be hearing a bit of gossip, said, “No, I don’t. Probably ten dollars a week and all the bullcock sandwiches he could eat.”
“All the what?”
“Bullcock. What they make baloney sausage out of. Bulls’ cocks. And they got rid of him as soon as he wasn’t wanted. Fucking Bible-thumpers. You religious, Sergeant?”
“I don’t go to church.”
“Nor do I. Nor do I. I was a Catholic once, but I couldn’t keep up with all the sins I was committing. After my wife left me, I let them get on with it, and I’ve enjoyed whatever’s come my way since. Enjoyed it all,” he repeated, making sure Wilkie understood. “I’ll pay for it one day, but all the same, better a lapsed Catholic than one of these teetotalitarian sourbellies.”
“You know about them, Mr. Villiers?”
“Ernie. Don’t we all? Isn’t this a case? I often wondered about Norbert Thompson, how much they paid him, because he didn’t deposit much with us. Most weeks, all he had was dribs and drabs; some weeks, nothing at all. Jesus Christ. He probably didn’t earn enough to change his oil.”
“He didn’t have a car or truck of his own.”
“His oil, Sergeant, not the truck’s.” Villiers winked to drive the point home.
“Yeah, right,” Wilkie said eventually, wondering if Copps had heard that one. “Help me do the sums, Ernie. He drank two beers every Saturday afternoon, ate a steak dinner for about fifteen dollars, got his hair cut, bought the odd bit of clothing. He didn’t own a car, and he had no hobbies that we can find evidence of in the cabin. Now, you know what he deposited here—no, no—don’t tell me, just figure it in. Would you say there’s a sum of money unaccounted for?”
