Death of a Hired Man

by Eric Wright

  “Maybe Mrs. Sproat was lying. Maybe she only paid him fifty a week,” Pickett said.

  Copps said, “Maybe the money never left the chicken farm. Maybe he kept it all in a hiding place there, but when he went to find it, it was gone. She’d found it first. Maybe she figured she was entitled to it, that the Lord had led her to it, because she’d been overpaying him all these years.”

  Wilkie said, “I don’t think Mrs. Sproat is a liar or a thief, just pious. But I’ll keep it in mind.”

  The assistant in the hardware store identified Gruber’s picture immediately. “That’s Connie Gruber!” he shouted. “Used to play for the Longborough Huskies, before he went out to the maritimes. He got called up to the National League once for about two weeks when a lot of guys were injured in the play-offs.” Then the revelation came. “Hey! That’s the guy who was asking after you, or asking about your cabin, the day Norbert was killed. I never recognized him then, but I knew him about ten years ago. Well, not knew him, but, you know, knew who he was. The dirtiest player in the league. That’s him, sure.”

  “Why didn’t you say so before now?”

  “I had to see the picture. You know, it’s his picture I recognize. I never saw the guy in person before, except on the ice with a helmet on. But I remember the story.”

  Pickett said, “You mind keeping this to yourself? Just between you and me? See, this guy probably has nothing to do with the one the police are looking for, but you know how mud sticks. I’ll let you know what I find out, but just now, not a word, eh? Not even to your helper.”

  “I don’t have a helper. I’ll keep my mouth shut, don’t worry.”

  14

  Back home in Larch River, Pickett said, “I have to go into Toronto again for a couple of days. It shouldn’t take more than that.”

  “What shouldn’t?” She started to fill the sink with water for the dishes.

  “There’s a guy I want to look up, but I’m not sure where to find him. I’ll have to ask around.”

  Charlotte burst out laughing. “This the way you talked to your first wife? She must have thought she was living in a movie. ‘There’s a guy I want to look up … I’ll have to ask around’ What guy? Around where?”

  “When Mary asked me, I used to say I was working, and I’d call her. She never inquired further.”

  “Not working now, though, are you? What are you doing?”

  “Probably making a horse’s ass of myself, but I have to follow something up.”

  “There you go again. What? Follow what up?”

  “Okay. I’ll tell you what I’m up to. But just between us, please. I could look very foolish. In the last couple of weeks there’s been a guy driving round in a pickup truck asking about the cabin. Says he wants to build one like mine. I’ve been wondering from the time we came up here if whoever killed Thompson wasn’t maybe looking for me.”

  “God Almighty. Why? Why would he be looking for you? What movie are we in now?”

  “I thought at first it might be someone I had put away. A lot of them go down cursing and threatening the guy who collared them. Most of the time, you just tell them they’ll have to wait their turn, but there’s always the chance that one of them will take himself seriously and try to carry it through. It never bothered me before, but …”

  “Go on. I’m listening.” She turned her back to him and started in on the dishes.

  He put his arms around her from behind, partly out of affection, but also to show her what he was really concerned about. “If someone came looking for me and found you instead, I might have to start all over again, looking through the husband-wanted ads in the Saturday paper.”

  “Dear God, you’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “You’re a nice target for a punk trying to square his account with me.”

  “Take your hands off. What does your pal in the OPP think?”

  Pickett gave up trying to treat the matter lightly. “Look out the window.”

  Charlotte pulled the curtain back, then let it fall into place. “That car is guarding us? You asked for a guard? Oh, my.”

  “I didn’t ask; I saw him this morning when I went to the store for a paper. You asked me what Wilkie thinks. He says he thinks I’m nuts, but I didn’t ask him to post that bodyguard out there. That’s his idea. Come the weekend, he’ll probably have someone parked on the river road, keeping an eye on Eliza.”

  “Eliza will have the Gupta fellow.”

  “I’d forgotten about him. I’d better tell Wilkie that Gunga Din is on our side.” He picked up his keys. “How are you going to manage without a car?”

  “I wondered if you would ever ask. I don’t know. I didn’t realize I would have to manage without a car. I’ve always had my own up here.”

  “We should have brought both cars.” He sat down to think.

  “Next time, I’ll ask about your plans for the day.”

  An awkward moment, one of several dozen so far; he had not had to consider anyone else for the last five years and was out of the habit. And before that, his first wife didn’t drive, so the car had been his, not theirs. Still … .

  “I forgot all about you,” he said. That is what the marriage counselor had said to do. Be honest. Say it right away, rather than have her say it three weeks later, harboring a grudge, bringing it out when she was angry. “You never crossed my mind.”

  “Just the car. You didn’t forget I was here, did you?” she said. “You’d’ve said good-bye?”

  He laughed. “I guess. But I have to be careful, don’t I?”

  “Didn’t Mary ask for her own car?”

  “She couldn’t drive.”

  “Why didn’t you teach her?”

  “That would’ve meant I could never be sure where she was. As long as she couldn’t drive, she was tied to me, right? That’s the way I like wives—dependent.”

  “But couldn’t she learn?”

  “She tried a couple of times, probably too late in life for her. Hell, if she could’ve driven, I could’ve stayed home Sundays instead of trundling down to Hamilton every Christly week to visit her sister. But maybe I had subconscious motives there, too. I don’t know what they would have been, though. Nothing to do with Verna, that’s for sure.”

  “Was this Verna really that bad?”

  “Was and is. Ever since we had the fight over Imogen, when she arrived from England and Verna thought her son’s inheritance was threatened, I haven’t had to deal with her. But before that, Christ! I never knew when she’d be making a social call. Her and that kid of hers. And she never ever failed to warn me that the librarian next door probably had her eye on my money, too. For Verna, that would be only natural. I can’t wait to tell her about you.”

  “I’ll make sure I’m out that day.”

  “So will I. Now, do you really need the car?”

  “Of course I need the car. You noticed any buses around? But go, go. I planned to do a little visiting, but I’ll call around and have them visit me. In the meantime, I’ll start in on seeing what we’ll put out in the lawn sale.” She turned and put her arms around his neck. “If I have to, I can borrow a car from Harlan, my old boss. He likes to have me in his debt. And just think, if you were thirty years younger and we’d been married for ten years, with all this running back and forth to Toronto, I might get worried about another woman, but I don’t have to worry about that do I? Just your—what do you call it?—chauvinism.” And then, as he was leaving, she said, “Mel, this running back and forth—I know what you just told me, but it hasn’t got anything to do with your son, has it?”

  He paused with his hand on the door. “In what way?”

  “In any way. I was just thinking, nearly fifty years and you never even asked what he looked like?”

  “I told you. I went over there sometimes and met with her.”

  “But not with him. Didn’t she ever bring him along, in the early days?”

  “What are you getting at, Charlotte?”

  “I’m
not getting at anything. I’m telling you, I think it’s weird. You don’t even have a picture of him?”

  “I had no interest in him.”

  “That’s what’s weird. Still, maybe I’ll understand one of these days.”

  As he left, she asked, “What am I supposed to say if anyone asks where you are? That Sergeant Wilkie, for instance.”

  Pickett went back to the sink. “Don’t tell him, okay?” He thought about it. “Tell him I’ve gone to meet my son.”

  He wondered how long it would be before he had a choice of telling Charlotte the truth about his son or letting her decide on a sinister explanation for all this nonsense she was hearing.

  In Toronto, Pickett threw away the accumulation of junk mail and called on the neighbor who kept an eye on his house to tell her he would be staying the night, and to ask her if she had seen any pickup trucks parked in the street near the house. She had seen nothing. Then he drove down to see Marinelli. He wanted to find out if Gruber was “known,” not just to the Bail-and-Parole Unit, and he needed a friend to do the asking. He could think of several people in the College Street headquarters who might help, including Staff Inspector Charlie Salter, whose wife used to invite Pickett to dinner a couple of times a year out of pity for his single status, but all of them would wonder what he was up to and probably suggest he stop it.

  Marinelli, oddly, seemed to have no criticism at all. “If we know him, you want to know what he’s doing? If he’s been seen around? Who he hangs out with?”

  “Maybe he’s turned respectable. Then I’ll relax.”

  Marinelli put Pickett’s request into the pipeline and promised to call him when a response came in.

  Pickett said, “I have to get my hair cut and grab a sandwich. Can I call you in a couple of hours?”

  “You could try.”

  When Pickett called back in the middle of the afternoon, a response had already come in. One of the undercover people on the drug squad knew Gruber, had “bought” small quantities of drugs from him, a tiny amount that would be hard to use as evidence that Gruber was a dealer. He was almost certainly not an important figure in the drug scene, if he was a part of it at all, but he was a hangeron of a group that drank at the Stairway Tavern on Queen Street, a group that included a leading wholesaler who liked to relax at the tavern when he was clean. The squad had been watching the dealer for months, trying to locate his source of supply. They were fairly sure where and how he distributed the stuff to the retailers, and soon, if they could not get to his source, they would drop on him when they knew he was loaded. Gruber had never been seen in the company of the dealer outside the tavern.

  Pickett said, “Drug squad? That’s fast. Used to take a couple of days to even make contact with one of those guys. I always used to suspect that when they said they went underground, they meant the subway out to the racetrack. You had to wait until they came home and picked up their messages. No, I’m impressed. Who’s your source?”

  Marinelli said, “Sergeant O’Dowd.”

  “I don’t know him. But I can’t see much connection between building a cabin and pushing drugs, can you?”

  “None at all.”

  “Which probably means that I can forget about him, leave him to the drug squad.”

  “I would say so.”

  “Which is what I’ll do.”

  That was for Marinelli’s benefit, really more to allow Marinelli not to worry about him.

  Pickett drove across town to meet Sergeant O‘Dowd, who apparently remembered him from the old days. O’Dowd repeated what Marinelli had said.

  Pickett thanked him, then asked, “Have you let the OPP in Sweetwater know?”

  O’Dowd said, “I was just about to. Marinelli asked me to. Guy named Wilkie. You know him?”

  “You got a minute?”

  O’Dowd sat back from his desk. “You going to tell me a story?”

  “Sort of.”

  Then Pickett told O‘Dowd in elaborate detail the whole story of the murder, and of the sighting of someone who was probably Gruber, and of the slight possibility that Gruber and Pickett had been connected in the past. His purpose was to place himself in O’Dowd’s mind as Wilkie’s unofficial right-hand man, his chief assistant in the case. He used “we” a lot, even in those parts of the narrative where he had not been present, like the chicken-farm scenes, as he implied that he was inquiring of the Bail-and-Parole Unit on behalf of Wilkie.

  “So now we may have him,” he continued, “but we need to be sure. We don’t want to pick him up if he’s the wrong guy, so I’m going to take a look at him myself first. If I recognize him I’ll call Wilkie, who’ll have him pulled in.”

  “And if you don’t?”

  “We’ll have to find out who his friends are. But that’s Wilkie’s problem. Thanks for the help. I’ll take it now.”

  “Yeah?” O‘Dowd shrugged. He rolled the information slip between his fingers and flipped it near the wastebasket. “Lotsa luck,” he said, leaving Pickett fairly sure there would be no immediate call from O’Dowd to Wilkie.

  Pickett explained to Charlotte that he would be staying one more night in Toronto, because the old colleague in the police department had the day off and Pickett wanted a favor he could get only from him. He spent the rest of the day buying things he and Charlotte liked that were unavailable in Larch River, like pistachio nuts and Algerian olives. By seven, he had done every errand he could think of and drove over to the tavern far too early, to wait for two hours at a quiet table by the door.

  One of the patrons, a derelict, nearly ragged enough for the waiters to throw him out, came by his table holding an unlighted cigarette and motioned, requesting a match. Pickett shook his head, but the man persisted, and as Pickett turned around in his chair, looking for a smoker he could direct him to, the man said, “Gruber just came in. He’s sitting by the stage with his back to you,” and moved off in a search of a light.

  Gruber was obviously waiting for someone, sipping his beer and glancing from time to time around the room, checking the other tables. Pickett rose, circled the room and came up behind him.

  “Connie Gruber?” he asked, appearing and sitting opposite Gruber at the same time. “Mel Pickett. I hear you were looking for me.”

  It was obvious as soon as you thought of it, but it took Copps a surprisingly long time to get there. As a policeman, and as the recipient of a lot of lovers’ confidences, he knew that most people had secrets they wanted to tell you, most of which mattered only to the person involved. Sometimes these secrets became public, even though they were nobody else’s business, as when the public learned that the senator had died of a heart attack while making love to his cleaning lady and the truth got out before the version from the Prime Minister’s office.

  Copps himself was an exception; his girlfriends could never complain that they had been deceived, because he told them all about the others—that is, that the others existed. His secret was that he had no secrets, but his women never stopped trying to find out what they were.

  When he started looking for a woman Thompson might have known, he had very few places to search. He touched base with Harlan, who confirmed that as far as Larch River was concerned, Thompson was a solitary celibate and nearly a teetotal bachelor. The assistant in the hardware store described him as a decent-seeming, quiet fellow he had never seen in anybody else’s company, nor even stopping to chat on a street corner.

  So Thompson’s social life, as far as it existed at all, was centered in Sweetwater, and Copps returned to the waiter in the beer parlor Thompson had favored.

  “Girlfriend?” the waiter wondered. “I saw no sign of one. He just sat and watched a few innings or whatever was on—” he jerked a thumb at the screen “—and made two bottles of Molson’s Blue last all afternoon.”

  “Hookers?”

  “No way.” The waiter was noisy and decisive. “The owner would have my job if I served one knowingly.”

  “But if someone was to ask you?�
��

  “I wouldn’t know where to tell him to go. Not in Sweetwater. Closest would be Whitby. Besides, Thompson didn’t look like a man looking for a piece.”

  “What does a man looking for a piece look like?”

  “More like you.” The waiter roared with laughter, then wiped the mirth off his face and resumed his customary air of belligerent self-righteousness.

  One last possibility had to be looked at because the manner of Thompson’s death was entirely consistent with his being a victim of an assault by someone he had taken home. “You think he could have been gay?” he asked.

  The waiter grinned without humor. “A fruit? Nah. More into sheep, I would think. Nah.”

  Copps left the beer parlor and crossed the street to the restaurant. Except for the Laundromat, it was his only hope. But once more the slate was clean: Thompson ate alone, sometimes looking at the weekly newspaper, sometimes not, and he never bothered the waitress. Copps bought himself a take-out coffee and walked down to the Laundromat wondering what else to do, and why Thompson brought his laundry to Sweetwater in the first place instead of using the Laundromat operated by Harlan in Larch River, and then, when he opened the door and saw the woman look up, he realized that he had found the answer to all his questions. How had he missed it before?

  He leaned against the wall at right angles to the counter and pulled back the lid of the coffee. “Hi,” he said, nodding. “How are you today?”

  Not too strong, nearly harmless, but sending a little message. Well, well, well, the message said. This is a nice surprise in a Laundromat. Hello again.

  She leaned forward over the counter, “Fine,” she said. “Can I help you?”