by Eric Wright
Wilkie said, “I put that truck on the computer, across the province, got everybody looking for it.”
“I’ll ask Metro again,” Copps said. “These guys sound like they belong in Toronto.”
17
They had not had to look long or hard for Gruber. He was found in the emergency ward of the Toronto General Hospital. His head had been kicked several times, and his internal organs were at least heavily bruised by the same boots driven into his stomach. His assailant had been interrupted before he could finish the job.
Wilkie called Pickett with the news. “The way they talked, he’s going to be there for a few days, so I can talk to him at any time. The Metro police have put him under guard, just in case someone tries to garrote him a second time.”
“When will you go in?”
“I think I’ll leave it until he’s fit to be moved. Then I’ll have him brought up here.”
Pickett put down the phone. This time he told Charlotte they wanted him in Toronto for an identification parade.
Charlotte asked, “Is this really the way it was when you were working?”
Pickett said, “This is more interesting. I never actually got to solve any cases during the time I was on the force. Mostly, someone would get killed and the neighbors would sit on the killer until we arrived. Even if he got away, the neighbors would tell us who he was. Either that or we never found the guy. That happened about twice a year. But here I am retired and looking at two genuine mysteries in two years. Amazing, isn’t it?”
“You’re just chasing fire engines, then?”
“That’s it. I’ll call you if there’s any chance I won’t be in for supper. What are we having?”
“Steak-and-kidney pie.”
“I’ll be here.”
The nurse said, “The patrol from the Indian mission found him unconscious in an alley behind Gerrard, east of Church. They called for an ambulance, and the ambulance brought in the police.”
“Has he said anything?”
“Not to us. I don’t know if he responded to the police officer. The policeman came back this morning for a while and sat by his bed. I think he’s coming again after lunch.”
A doctor appeared, wooden clogs clacking down the hall. “No flowers?” he asked. “What kind of friends had he got?”
“Can I talk to him?” Pickett jerked a thumb at the bed.
“Certainly. Ask him whodunit. But he’s probably bound by the code of silence.” He snickered to show he was joking.
“Will he live?”
“I haven’t determined the size or extent of the internal injuries yet, but judging by the fact that he’s stopped pissing blood, I think they won’t be fatal. According to the X rays, his head is in one piece, and his neck is bruised by an incompetent attempt to garrote him. Incompetent, but serious. I understand that the would-be executioner was interrupted. So talk to him, tell him all you want is a name, just one name.”
The doctor acted out the last phrases melodramatically, like a character in a gangster movie. Pickett wondered if the doctor had been taking his own medicine.
The doctor continued. “I’ll stay with you for a few minutes, make sure you don’t beat him up again. Then I’m going home. I’m too young for this. Hang on, I’ll be right back.” He disappeared from the room in answer to his name being paged along the corridor.
The nurse said, “He gets a bit silly near the end of his shift, but he doesn’t shout at us however tired he is.”
When the intern returned, he leaned over the bed and said, “Connie, baby. The fuzz is here. He wants to know who fucked you over. Who was it, baby?”
Gruber opened a tiny bright-red eye set in a bed of ripped flesh. The other eye was covered with a dressing. Then he saw Pickett and closed his eye again.
“See?” the intern said. “Omerta. They never talk.”
“Ask him again.”
The intern hung over the bed. “Connie. Name the sonofabitch so we can string him up by his balls.”
Gruber lay unmoving, and now the intern spun around, opened his arms and swept the visitor from the room. “That’s it. Come back in four hours. Let him sleep.”
“I’m going to tell the guard to come in the room and stay with him.”
“Fair enough. But your man is not to sit by the bed, his ears pressed to the patient’s lips, okay? You can probably wait a few years for this guy’s last words. Right now, leave him alone until the doctor on the next shift shows up. He’s in no danger. He needs rest, like me. Y’all hear that, Nurse?” he added in a fake Southern accent.
She nodded and closed the door of the room, and the intern clacked along to the elevator, where he did a little dance and sang a bit of the Largo El Factotum, apparently to celebrate the end of his shift.
Pickett walked over to the Pickle Barrel for a corned-beef sandwich, killed an hour in the World’s Biggest Bookstore, then made his way back to the hospital.
When he appeared at the nurses’ station, the nurse on duty paged the resident, who arrived in a few minutes. “What do you want to know?” he asked. “The intern got it right. Someone beat this guy up and tried to strangle him, kill him. Seriously. His stomach is bruised, but the internal organs seem okay. You want to talk to him? Go ahead.”
The resident led the way into the room and leaned over the bed. “Mr. Gruber,” he said. “A visitor.”
Gruber did not open his eye. “Where from?” he asked.
Pickett said, “Remember me, Connie?”
Gruber turned away. Pickett walked to the door with the doctor. “How long can I have?” he asked.
“What are you going to do?”
“Ask him some questions. Usually you guys say ‘ten minutes, no more,’ something like that. Don’t you?”
“That’s television. I sure as hell don’t know how long is right. I guess if he was nearly dying, I would give you five minutes. But he’s all right. Half an hour? He’s full of painkiller. He will fall asleep on you before then.”
Pickett returned to the bedside, watched by Gruber. One of Gruber’s ears had been bandaged, and there was a line of dried blood under Gruber’s lower lip, suggesting he had now lost what few teeth had survived his hockey career.
Pickett said, “Tell me what happened, Connie.”
Gruber was silent, his red-veined eye swiveling back and forth.
Pickett said, “We want to know who clobbered you.”
Gruber shook his head fractionally.
“They found you in an alley with some guy trying to strangle you. Another minute, you’d have been gone. Somebody tried to kill you, Connie. We’ll look after him. Who was it?”
Again Gruber shook his head.
Pickett said, “What kind of asshole are you? Guy kicks you in the guts, ruptures your spleen, puts the boots to your face, then tries to garrote you. Would’ve, if that Indian patrol hadn’t come along. And you don’t want to tell us who it was?”
“I’ll look after him, when I get out.”
He had to lean over the bed to hear the whisper, and not all the syllables came through, but the message was clear enough.
Pickett said, “Great. So now we have to trail you around until you find him? That’s bullshit. But then, I’m Metro. This isn’t my problem. The OPP is investigating a death in Larch River, remember? I’m here to tell you that as soon as you’re okay—okay enough, that is—they’re taking you up to Sweetwater and charging you with some kind of homicide. You’ve been identified as the guy asking after the dead man; you were there when he was killed; and now I think what’s happened is that whoever went for you was after your money, the money he thinks you took off the guy in the cabin in Larch River.”
It was impossible to read any reaction on the bruised and scratched face staring up at him, but again Gruber shook his head and said nothing.
“Who was it, Connie?” Pickett asked. “We can put him away for seven years just by showing the judge a picture of your face the way it looks right now. You know who it was
, don’t you?”
Gruber said nothing.
“Maybe you’ll talk just before they send you down. Be too late then.”
Gruber said nothing.
Pickett went out to the hall and asked the nurse to call the resident. When he appeared, Pickett asked him when Gruber could travel, in a car.
“Couple of days.”
Pickett said, “What I want here is total security. No visitors, no calls, no answers to questions. Don’t even tell anyone whether he’s still here or not.”
“You expecting trouble? This is a hospital.”
“They’ll leave the guard on.” He nodded at the constable. “No one allowed in except hospital staff you recognize, or someone the nurse at the desk can vouch for. Okay?”
“Those are my orders. I’m supposed to be protecting him. By the way, who are you?” the constable asked.
“Special Services,” Pickett said. “Liaison.”
He left the hospital and walked down University Avenue to College Street, to police headquarters. Inside the building, he found the office of the sergeant heading the investigation into Gruber’s assault, introduced himself as a “messenger from the OPP” and told him what he knew. He concluded, “You are going to have to be lucky to find the guy. It could have been any of Gruber’s close friends.”
Pickett felt himself in a bind. Any moment now, if it hadn’t happened already, a phone would ring on a desk in Toronto or Sweetwater and Wilkie would learn that Pickett was impersonating an officer, taking the Gruber case much further than he should have. What he should have done was to refer all his doubts to Wilkie in the beginning, and stayed home to look after Charlotte.
But Pickett was having a nightmare. When he was rational, he did not think there were any more than a couple of coincidences: the first, the possibility that Thompson had been mistaken for him, and the second, that a broken-down hockey player turned hooligan was asking for him around Larch River, which was connected with the first. And he also knew that Wilkie was carefully putting together a case involving the Sproats. But Pickett was newly married and he was afraid. He felt strongly the possible threat to which he might have exposed Charlotte, and even Eliza, because they were associated with him. He wanted to eliminate Gruber, whereas Wilkie, so far, had given no sign of regarding Gruber as a serious suspect.
So instead of going home, Pickett called Charlotte to tell her he might be late.
Charlotte said, “You are retired, aren’t you?”
“They want me to look at some more pictures.”
She sighed. “You know what’s for supper?”
“Offal,” he said. “I’ll be there by eight.”
He hung up. He would give Gruber another hour. He sat there musing on “offal,” trying to give his anxiety a rest.
He had acquired a taste for kidneys in England, where he had been stationed with the Royal Canadian Air Force at the end of the war. Charlotte was the second Canadian woman he had met in forty years who liked to eat kidneys, as the variety of meats that appeared on the tables of his acquaintances shrank every year. Veal had disappeared; lamb had never been popular among the policing classes; and it was harder and harder to buy many of the old cuts of beef—pot roast, oxtails, tongue—in the supermarkets. Even brisket was going.
“No Offal” the signs in the Bournemouth butcher shops in 1944 proclaimed. And of what the English called offal-liver, heart, kidneys, tripe, and sweetbreads—only liver was easy to find, and no one among his acquaintances ate that anymore. Pickett was the only Canadian he knew who had ever eaten heart; presumably, hearts were ground up for dog food. Soon there would be a choice among steak, hamburgers, or pork chops, with sirloin-tip roast for Sundays. To have gotten two wives who liked kidneys was really something.
On the way out to the chicken farm, Copps asked, “What are we hoping for, Abe? I mean, what do you think we’ll find?”
“I think they’ll say, ‘It’s a fair cop,’ something like that.”
“You think they did it? Or one of them?”
In fact, Wilkie was beginning to have no opinion at all. He had not entirely set aside his original preference for an assault during a robbery, but the connection between Gruber and Pickett was beginning to look as if it would turn into something. Now the news that Sproat had a defective muffler on Friday night offered another line entirely.
“I was taught never to theorize,” he said. “Get the facts.”
“You can’t help guessing, though, can you?”
“So what do you guess? Did one of the Sproats clobber him?”
“No.”
“What about the muffler?”
“It’s not much, is it?”
“Let’s hear their story first.”
“Okay. When we get there, I’ll take a look around the farm.”
“Why?”
“Just in case I guessed wrong. I’ve been thinking.”
“About what?”
“I’ll tell you after, okay? Just a dumb idea that might fit a very dumb suspect.”
Once Sproat had called off his dogs, Copps stayed outside “to get some air,” as he put it.
Wilkie sat down with the husband and wife. “Mrs. Sproat,” he began, “I found out something I didn’t know when I was here last. I just learned that Norbert Thompson was entitled to half of this farm.”
“Who told you that?”
“Point is, is it true?”
“I seem to remember telling you when you first came here that this farm belongs to me, always has. It came down through my great-grandfather, who cleared the land. So there’s no way Mr. Maguire could have left Norbert half of it.”
“But Thompson believed your husband. He came out here to tell you that, didn’t he?”
After a long silence, Mrs. Sproat seemed to take in air, inflating slightly. “He came out here once, yes, and said such things.”
“Why?”
“Because he’d been told to, I reckon, by that lawyer. But I spoke to our church lawyer, and he said Norbert had no rights at all.”
“Thompson said your husband made promises, is that right?”
“So Norbert said.”
“You think he was lying?”
“I don’t know what to think. I never thought of Norbert as a deceitful man, but if he wasn’t lying, what am I to think about Mr. Maguire?”
Sproat leaned forward. “Mr. Maguire was in great pain, and he wanted to make sure that Norbert Thompson would stay on the farm and look after his wife. So he could’ve made promises he wouldn’t have made otherwise. That’s what I think.”
Mrs. Sproat waited for Wilkie to respond to this version.
Wilkie asked, “You don’t think Thompson had a case? Never mind the lawyer.”
She looked troubled, hoping Sproat would speak.
“Tell you the truth, I thought he did,” Sproat said. “But not the same one he thought he had.”
“We didn’t know,” Mrs. Sproat said, after several attempts to clear her throat. “I’m sure Mr. Maguire acted for the best.”
Sproat put his hand on his wife’s arm. “When Thompson came out to make his claim, that was the first I heard about his wages, what they were.” He looked at Mrs. Sproat. “It wasn’t enough. I told her that.”
“It was what was agreed,” his wife said. “I’m sure at the time it seemed fair. We didn’t know.”
“But he was underpaid,” Sproat said.
“And?” Wilkie prompted, into the silence.
“When he left, I told Mrs. Sproat what I thought, and I said she ought to think about paying him some kind of compensation. Not for not getting half her farm, but for all the back wages he should have had. So I said. I said it was right, and anyway, if it got into court, a hundred a week would sound bad.”
Mrs. Sproat nodded.
“So did you?” Wilkie asked.
Mrs. Sproat said, “I wanted to do what was right. I asked the church lawyer, and he said we mustn’t offer anything, that it would weaken our position.
So we didn’t. I wish we had. There was other things, too. I don’t want to go into them.”
“Was that the last time you saw Thompson, either of you?”
Now she looked at her husband in misery. Sproat took in a deep breath, but before he could speak, Copps, who had been standing in the doorway for several minutes, brought out from behind his back a piece of two-inch dowelling and held it up.
“I found this in the truck,” he said. “Under some sacking.”
Mrs. Sproat looked puzzled, then alarmed. “What—” she began.
Sproat put a hand up to stop her. “That’s it, I guess,” he said. Then, with a formal attitude, he said, “That piece of wood is one I removed from the home of Norbert Thompson, after I struck him with it.”
Mrs. Sproat said, “Aaron? You?”
For a moment, Sproat seemed less sure of himself. “Yes. I did it to stop their dirty mouths, and that’s all I’ll say.”
18
They led him out past a paralyzed Mrs. Sproat and took him to Sweetwater to be booked. When he was safely tucked away, Wilkie said to Copps, “You guessed wrong, then.”
“Yeah? I still don’t think we’ve got a neat answer.”
“Why, for Chrissake?”
“See, that piece of wood was in the wrong truck. It should have been in the one with the new muffler. But it was in the other one. Don’t ask me why. We’ll find out soon enough.”
Wilkie picked up a message from his desk. “When did this come in?”
“Half hour ago,” the duty constable said. “There’s another one from the Metro force.”
