Death of a Hired Man

by Eric Wright

  Marinelli responded now like Wilkie. “I think what you’ve got is a hockey player looking for a place to build a cabin and trying to get some ideas on how to proceed,” he said.

  “I’d still like to know who he is.”

  Two hours later, Marinelli looked up in surprise. “Back again? Still looking for the avenger?”

  Instead of driving back to Larch River, satisfied, Pickett had stayed in town long enough to begin to have doubts again.

  To Marinelli, he said, “How about doing me a favor? Ask everyone who has worked here for the last few weeks, every shift, if they can remember anyone passing through who looked like an old hockey player. Or if they know of any old hockey players who’ve done time.”

  “Jesus, Mel, that’s a hell of a long shot. Just because a guy with a scar instead of an eyebrow has passed through Shit Creek, or whatever that town of yours is called, about the time your tenant was killed, you can’t put out a dragnet for all old hockey players.”

  “Why not? Old hockey players known to us, I mean. This guy looked suspicious.”

  “They all do if they’ve been in enough fights. On the ice.”

  “It’s suspicious that he was a stranger hanging around the town.”

  “It’s suspicious that he was a stranger. How come the sheriff didn’t shoot him on sight? That’s the usual way, isn’t it, up there on the frontier?”

  “Would you do me the favor?”

  “Ask all of my guys here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Christ, Mel—”

  “Christ, nothing. Just ask them.”

  Several people looked up, shocked by the raw edge in Pickett’s voice as he tried not to shout.

  “I’ll ask them—” Marinelli became still, quiet, careful, but acknowledging Pickett’s concern “—if you’d mind telling me why we should know the guy.” He looked around the room to send the eyes away.

  Pickett, awkward now, said, “I can’t get it out of my skull that it wasn’t an accident and that it might have been meant for me. So someone might be bearing a grudge. And then there’s Charlotte, my wife—”

  “Right, right, right. But why us?”

  “I’ve been thinking. Guys who come here to register have to wait in line for a while. This guy could have overheard you people talking about me, couldn’t he?”

  “Ah, come on, Mel. No, right, right, right. I’ll ask. Okay?”

  “Could you start now, with these guys?”

  There was no response from the present shift, so Pickett went home and waited, calling Charlotte to tell her that he was staying over because he wanted his regular service station to give the car a tune-up after their Florida run.

  That evening he got a call from Duguid, the sergeant in charge of the evening shift, who had picked up the assignment from Marinelli and received an immediate response from one of the constables manning the desk.

  “He said maybe you mean Gruber,” he told Pickett.

  “Who’s Gruber?”

  “A guy who fits your description. He was convicted of assault—he beat up a hooker—and had a couple of minor drug charges, and he was a found-in at a booze can we raided. He worked as a bartender for the bikers.”

  “What address have you got?”

  “No address, and I’m kind of busy. Can it keep until tomorrow?”

  Pickett swallowed the reply. “Sure. When does Marinelli come back on?”

  “Two o’clock tomorrow.”

  “Leave him a note, would you? Tell him I’ll be down to see him about finding Gruber.”

  “Connie Gruber,” Marinelli confirmed. “I don’t know where you’ll find him, but here’s what he looked like the last time we booked him.” He handed Pickett two ID shots, side and front.

  Pickett started to put them in his wallet.

  “What do you plan to do with them?” Marinelli asked.

  Pickett had not decided that himself yet. “Take them up to Larch River,” he said after a moment. “Try to get an ID.”

  Marinelli shook his head. “I don’t think so. The chance of it being him is kind of remote, and yet you’re going to flash his picture all over central Ontario. You should think about that. So should I.”

  “Why did you guys think of Gruber at all?”

  “Because you asked us to. He was in here a few weeks ago.”

  “Parole?”

  “Out on bail, charged with possession. Which he beat with a lawyer the bikers paid for. Now let me ask you a question. Have you ever heard of this guy before, let alone been responsible for putting him away? Rack your brains.”

  “I don’t have to. No. But he’s been asking around, looking for me. Why?”

  “Someone his age with scars on his face, a totally respectable minor-league goalie, was around looking for someone to show him how to build a summer cabin and someone told him about your cabin. He wasn’t looking for you. Coincidence.”

  “Let me crop the picture, make it like a real passport photo. No one will know where I got it.”

  Marinelli laughed. “There’s a switch. A prison ID that looks like a passport photo. But I’m still unhappy about it. Suppose you’re right? Someone could, just could, report back to Gruber that they are showing his picture around Armpit Landing in connection with a murder, and then this biker/lawyer of his will be down on us like a … biker/lawyer.”

  “I won’t show it around. I’ll show it to only one guy, the kid in the hardware store. If he recognizes Gruber, then I can make up a little story about the license plates on his truck, if Gruber ever gets around to asking.”

  “Ask the OPP guy first. Wilkie? That his name? Ask him. Tell him what you’re thinking.”

  “Sure, I will. No problem. Why?”

  “For your own sake. Tell him what you’re up to, or you’ll be in shit. You know, Mel, you sound obsessed. Just a little.”

  “That’s what Wilkie thinks, too. I merely want to know if someone’s after my hide.”

  “Okay.” Marinelli took the pictures back and cropped them, leaving a tiny head and shoulders on a nearly clueless picture.

  “Here.”

  “I could have done that.”

  “I did it for you.”

  “How did you know Wilkie?”

  “I don’t. You must have told me. Anyway, you tell him.”

  “Sure.”

  Pickett drove back to Larch River, dropping in on Wilkie on his way through Sweetwater. Once more he just wanted to see if Wilkie had made any progress he could use in his story to Charlotte. He had no intention of bothering the sergeant with his own concerns.

  “Just the man,” Wilkie said, apparently not surprised to see him. “Come up to your cabin, will you? One last look.”

  “I’ll follow you there.”

  “Make it in an hour. I have to pick up Brendan.”

  13

  “She says she paid him a hundred a week. Ten dollars would cover his beer on Saturday, another fifteen at the Chew‘n’ Chat, say twenty-five altogether. Then his laundry. Five? Another twenty for all the other stuff, the once-a-month haircut, once a year for a new pair of boots, things like that. So he had fifty a week left over. What did he do with it?” Wilkie was talking to his constable, Brendan Copps.

  “A woman?” Copps speculated.

  “A hooker? Here? What does it cost in Sweetwater? Two hundred would be about right on Jarvis Street, in Toronto.”

  “We don’t have any hookers here. We wouldn’t allow it. They would corrupt our youth. No, I meant a girlfriend.”

  “Did he have one? I haven’t heard of one.”

  “I’ll find out.”

  I wonder how, Wilkie thought. “I still have to think he was targeted for the money someone thought he had. This guy was one of these real rural tight-asses—you know—kept his money in an old milk churn.”

  “Sounds like my dad,” Copps said.

  “Yeah? Oh. Well. Sorry. I didn’t mean, you know, just—”

  “The word you want is ‘farmer.’”
/>
  “Norbert Thompson wasn’t a farmer. Just a hired man.”

  “He was what we used to call a ‘farmer,’ when I first came to town. You don’t hear it much anymore. Nowadays ‘farmer’ means the guy who owns a farm. On English television, it means Sir Rupert Doiley, the guy up at the manor house. But here when I was a kid, it meant the guy who kept his hat on in the movies. ‘Take your hat off, farmer,’ we used to shout from the back row, trying to be the first to shout it. Most of them were called ‘Elmer.’ You know, ‘Don’t eat that, Elmer.’”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Acting dumb. Like a farmer. The whole sentence is said by the farmer to his kid. ‘Don’t eat that, Elmer. That’s horseshit.’ Means don’t swallow everything you hear. I’m surprised you haven’t come across the expression before.”

  “I was carefully raised. But you guys, the ones who lived in downtown South Porcupine, you knew better, right?”

  “We were cool.”

  “You were. Smokey Stover wound up in jail.”

  “Yeah. That was the chance you took. But farmers didn’t take chances. They didn’t have to. Like you said, tight-assed.”

  “So what happened to you? Your dad was a farmer, I mean a real farmer. Why aren’t you?”

  “I lived in a boarding house in town through high school. It was the only way. I couldn’t commute seventy-five miles over dirt roads twice a day. So I fell in with the townies, and when I finished high school, there was no way I was going back to that quarter-section of dirt we lived on. So I went down to Toronto, worked for a year, then enrolled in the university.”

  “What did you take?”

  “Engineering. That’s what everybody like me took. Or agriculture. But I only lasted one semester. In engineering, I was back with the farmers I’d been trying to get away from. So I tried to transfer. I fancied law, but I didn’t have the prerequisites, so I thought maybe if not ‘law,’ then maybe ‘order.’ So I became the man you see in front of you.”

  “You going to stay with it?”

  “Oh, yeah. This is it. I’ve finally found a role model. You. I wanna be like you.” Copps burst out laughing. “Seriously, I like it. It suits me. I can understand you being disappointed after the big city—where did you live? Scarborough?—but I’m at home anywhere. Except Toronto. Anybody I marry will know what to expect. I’ll tell her.”

  “That’s smart. Mine didn’t. Know what to expect, I mean.” Helen had called, making the preliminary noises to prepare the ground to let him know she would not be coming home next weekend. It was the first time she had been away for two weekends in a row.

  “I don’t think you did, either, Chief, when you transferred from the Metro force.”

  There was nothing to be said to this. It was a truth he ought not to have allowed Copps the intimacy to express. “Can we get back to Thompson?” he asked.

  “Right. You were figuring Thompson was what we used to call a farmer.”

  “I just wondered if he understood how the system works. Mrs. Sproat says they paid him a hundred a week and his board. They were screwing him, but I don’t know if they knew it or if he did, so were they screwing him in fact? Any way I figure, there’s fifty a week not quite accounted for—over the years, maybe five thousand? I thought he might have put it in a deposit box, but there’s no record, here or in Lindsay, and he wouldn’t have gone any farther. Remember, he didn’t have any transportation except on Saturdays, and the word is that he spent Saturday afternoons in the beer parlor.”

  “What about the widow?” Copps grinned.

  “Who?”

  “The widow. You know.”

  “No. Tell me about the widow.”

  “I heard about her from my bachelor great-uncles. Three of them there were, all came over from Ireland together. My grandad was the fourth, and he was the only one got married. When my dad got into the sauce with his cronies, when the wives weren’t around, he used to joke about the widow. Once you were sixteen, you were allowed to hear the stories. These three great-uncles, my dad’s uncles, farmed the same acreage a little south of Peterborough, and they had sent back to Ireland for their sister to keep house for them. Every Saturday afternoon they would go into Peterborough to see the widow. Separately. I think each one had his own hour to visit.”

  “She was the town whore?”

  Copps screwed up his face in an expression that suggested he was suddenly up to his waist in sewage. “You city people don’t understand the subtle nuances of rural culture. There weren’t any whores in Peterborough then, still aren’t officially as far as that goes, not real Jarvis streetwalkers. No, she wasn’t the town whore, or even the town bicycle. She was just a poor widow woman who accommodated my great-uncles. Once a week. They didn’t believe she accommodated anyone else, or they might not have carried on. Seriously.”

  “But they did pay her. For a tumble. Right? Don’t let me misunderstand these nuances.”

  “You have, in a way. No. The way the story came down to me from overhearing my dad and his neighbors after a barn raising or some such when they’d had a few, was that they didn’t pay her in money. They helped her out, a poor widow lady. One uncle would take her a box of apples, another a sack of onions and a bag of potatoes, the third one half a pig and a couple of roasting chickens. They made sure she didn’t go short. Later on, when they got older, they used to go together sometimes, still taking her stuff, all three of them together on a Saturday afternoon to play euchre, and she would cook up the bacon and eggs they brought, and bake a pie, so their sister, my great-aunt, could have the night off.”

  “Where did the sister go? You making this up?”

  “I’m telling you it exactly as it came down to me. There used to be a social at the Catholic hall on Saturday nights. The sister helped out with the refreshments. Her brothers would turn up later.”

  “Didn’t she know where they’d been?”

  “She didn’t make a fuss. See, the widow was Anglican, so that didn’t count.”

  “You mean on these Saturday afternoons when they went together, they took turns? Sounds like a whorehouse to me.”

  “What dirty minds you Protestants have. No, that wouldn’t have been nice. No, what I’m saying is, later on, the three of them turned up together to show the neighbors that they had always been just good friends to the widow, and show her, too, that they appreciated her not just for the nookie. By then, they’d given up the other altogether and just wanted bacon and eggs and a game of cards.”

  “So you figure Thompson might have had a widow in Sweetwater?” Wilkie tried for a tone of skeptical amusement just in case Copps was bullshitting him, but it was very interesting.

  “It’s possible, but not likely, not these days. It would be hard to find a widow in that sense, these days. The conditions have all changed. It’s a lot easier to get your ashes hauled now than it was for my great-uncles, even in Sweetwater. There isn’t the same demand for widows,” Copps replied with a look of candor that was impenetrable.

  “Still, if Norbert Thompson had led a sheltered life, he might have been out of date as far as knowledge of the availability of widows is concerned, don’t you think?”

  Now Copps grinned. “Could be. And he was from the maritimes, too, wasn’t he? Maybe they still keep up the old ways. I’ll see what I can find out. See if I can find an out-of-date widow.”

  “Let’s go back up to Larch River first. I’ve got Mel Pickett waiting for us.”

  With Pickett as guide, they tried for the last time to look at the cabin with the eyes of someone seeking to hide something. The floor offered a decent hiding place, but there were no marks anywhere to show where a board had been pried up. The woodpile had been thoroughly taken apart by Wilkie’s crew, and in a very short time, there was nowhere else to look.

  “What’s your idea, then?” Pickett asked.

  Once more Wilkie laid out the simple arithmetic. “He took one week’s holiday a year, staying at a boarding house in Toronto,
which cost him maybe five hundred, so that leaves as much as a couple of thousand a year for four years. Where is it? He had a few dollars in the bank here, nothing significant.”

  “You had a chat with Ernie at the bank?”

  “I had a chat with Ernie. And Thompson had no safe-deposit box or any other account here or in Sweetwater or Lindsay. He had no living relatives except the brother here. So where is it?”

  “How old was he?”

  “Fifty maybe.”

  Pickett nodded. “In his prime. A girlfriend?”

  “We wondered. Brendan’s going to try to find out. There’s no obvious sign of one.”

  Copps started to speak, but Wilkie cut him off. “So we came to have one last look to see where a slightly eccentric, maybe one-brick-missing, fifty-year-old hired man might have hidden eight thousand in twenties.”

  “Your boys went over the lot pretty carefully,” Pickett said.

  “They were looking for other things: the weapon, a place where someone might have hid, something he dropped on his way out, like his wallet.” Wilkie smiled. “Today we’re looking for a little tin box with a slit in the lid. You know?”

  “Good luck.”

  Copps looked out the window. “What about that trailer over there?”

  “I’ll do that,” Pickett said quickly. “Eliza uses that weekends. I’ve got a key.”

  Two hours later, the group re-formed in the cabin and Pickett made coffee.

  “Without using a mine detector, I think Brendan and I have been over the ground pretty well,” Wilkie said.

  “Fucking right,” Copps agreed. The two OPP men were wet from the knees down from kicking their way through drifts of sodden leaves and pine needles. “We even took the goddam woodpile apart again.”

  “There’s nothing in the trailer,” Pickett said. “There’s no room to hide anything there, and anyway, I gave Thompson plenty of warning when Eliza wanted to start using it, so he would have taken everything of his out.”

  “I’ve never seen a guy with so little identity,” Wilkie said. “We’ve got his birth certificate, his hospital card, his Social Security number, and about thirty dollars in cash. That’s it. And he didn’t have enough spare clothes to tie up in a red handkerchief to go traveling with. There has to be something more.”