The Case Against Owen Williams

by Allan Donaldson

  “You said that you had some information that you wanted to give us,” Drost said.

  “Yes,” Dorkin said. “I don’t think it was just a prank. I’ve found out that Dan Coile was molesting his daughters, and Louie knew it. He caught Coile and the older daughter coming out of the barn a couple of years ago.”

  “So Coile shot his tire out?” Drost asked.

  “I think it’s worth looking into,” Dorkin said. “I think it’s worth finding out where Coile was this morning.”

  “Have you ever heard anything like that about Coile?” Drost asked Carvell.

  “Not about the daughters,” Carvell said. “But he was in trouble over a young girl out there a few years ago. A neighbour’s kid. But it blew over, and he was never brought to court or anything like that.”

  “Who told you about the daughters?” Drost asked. “That’s a pretty serious accusation.”

  “I’d rather not say,” Dorkin said, “but it was from someone reliable.”

  “Louie?” Drost asked.

  “No,” Dorkin said, “not Louie.”

  “But it was Louie who told you about him seeing them coming out of the barn.”

  “No,” Dorkin said. “That wasn’t Louie either. In fact, he deliberately didn’t tell me about it when I was talking to him about Coile. It was Cat Polchis who told me about it this afternoon after Louie was killed.”

  “Bernie,” Carvell said, “let me tell you something.”

  It was the first time Carvell had ever called him by his first name, let alone this nickname, which he had always hated, and the effect was paternal, at once affectionate and superior.

  “I know that Louie was a likeable guy,” Carvell said, “but he was a storyteller. He was full of them. Some of them were true, but a lot of them weren’t. He liked to talk. He liked to weave tales. And most of the time he never expected people to believe half of what he was saying.”

  “But he didn’t talk this one around,” Dorkin said, irritated by Carvell’s manner. “The only person he told was Cat, and so far as I know the only person Cat has told is me. Louie may have told tales around town for the fun of it, but this wasn’t one of them. He didn’t spread it around because he was afraid of Coile.”

  “But even if it’s true,” Drost said, “why should Coile all of a sudden two or three years afterwards decide that he’s going to shoot up Louie’s truck? And how would he even know that Louie was going to be there?”

  “He could have phoned and set it up,” Dorkin said.

  “I’m sorry,” Drost said, “but I can’t see it. He was going away from the Coile place, not towards it. Do you think that Coile got him to come out to his place and then when he’d left got a gun and ran through the woods faster than Louie could drive in his truck and waited for him?”

  “Coile has relatives by the dozens,” Dorkin said. “He could have worked it out with one of them. Or more than one. They could have staked out the road and waited. When they shot his tire out, they may not have intended to kill him, but I think they certainly intended it as a warning.”

  “But why all of a sudden now?” Drost asked. “Even if what Louie said is true, why all of a sudden after two or three years?”

  “Because,” Dorkin said, “whatever reason he may have given to anyone he had help him, he had another reason of his own.”

  “Oh?” Drost said. “What was that?”

  “I think that he was the one who killed Sarah, not Williams,” Dorkin said. “I think that he was the father of the child that she was carrying, and I think that he waylaid her that night and killed her and left her body in the gravel pit.”

  Carvell whistled softly.

  “Do you have any evidence to support this?” Drost asked.

  “Not court evidence,” Dorkin said. “Not yet anyway. But I know that Williams could not possibly have got Sarah pregnant, and I know that he didn’t kill her. I know that whoever got Sarah pregnant was someone she couldn’t marry. I know that Coile had been messing around with her and that he had also been messing around with the older sister before that. I know that Coile knew that Louie had seen him in compromising circumstances with the older girl. I know that Coile knew that I had been talking to Louie. And this was now dangerous stuff for him if he had killed Sarah.”

  There was a long silence. Drost looked down at his desk. Carvell looked thoughtfully at Dorkin.

  “Did you ever check on what Daniel Coile was doing the night of the murder?” Dorkin asked Drost.

  “No,” Drost said. “I had no reason to. But we checked everyone who was in or around the dance hall. Hooper spent almost a week doing nothing else.”

  “But you didn’t check Daniel Coile.”

  “The town is full of people we didn’t check,” Drost said. “We checked everyone who was on the road that night.”

  “But Daniel Coile isn’t just anyone in town,” Dorkin said. “Most people who are murdered are murdered by their own relatives, as you well know.”

  “Or by their boyfriends,” Drost said.

  “Do you think that Williams was the father of Sarah’s child?” Dorkin asked.

  “I don’t know,” Drost said.

  “Did you ever find any evidence that Williams had ever had anything to do with Sarah Coile before that night?” Dorkin asked.

  “I don’t see that we needed to,” Drost said. “We weren’t trying to find out who knocked her up, we were trying to find out who killed her. I don’t think there has to be any connection. She could have been screwing everyone in town. She probably was.”

  “You have no evidence for that,” Dorkin said. “The truth is that once you decided that Williams was guilty, you ignored everything else and simply concentrated on assembling a case against him.”

  Drost flushed.

  “Why are you telling me all this?” he said. “Tell it in court.”

  “I intend to,” Dorkin said. “But I’m telling you now because I want you to do two things. I want you to find out where Daniel Coile was the night of the murder. And I want you to find out where he was when Louie’s tire was shot out.”

  “I can’t just haul people in off the street for questioning,” Drost said.

  “There are ways if you want to use them,” Dorkin said. “What you’re worried about is that you may get heat from Grant if you start interfering with his case against Williams and perhaps spoil his record for having solved a murder in six hours.”

  “I don’t have to listen to this,” Drost said. “You have no authority to order me around. You have no right even to be in this office. If you have a case, go make it in court.”

  “I’ve got a case,” Dorkin said. “Unlike the prosecution, what I don’t have is a police force at my disposal to collect the evidence. I can understand the pressures you may be under, but I think you should also consider what will happen if it turns out that you’ve been a party to hanging the wrong guy in spite of everything I’ve told you.”

  “I don’t hang anyone,” Drost said. “The judge and the jury do.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Dorkin said.

  Drost pushed his chair back angrily and stalked across the room. He stood looking out the window at the rain. There was a long silence.

  “Do you intend to reopen the investigation of the murder or not?” Dorkin said.

  “On the basis of what?” Drost asked without turning around.

  “On the basis of what I’ve just told you,” Dorkin said.

  “I have to have some evidence.”

  “I’ve given you evidence.” Drost looked at him.

  “You’ve picked up some rumours about Dan Coile messing around with his daughters, so you’ve decided that he was the one who knocked Sarah up and then murdered her to keep her quiet. That’s evidence?”

  “Tell me,” Dorkin said, “did you ever make any serious attempt to find out who got Sarah Coile pregnant?”

  “We were investigating a murder, not a paternity suit. Anyway, how do you know it wasn’t Williams?
Because he said it wasn’t?”

  “Not one person ever saw Williams with Sarah Coile outside the dance hall except that night,” Dorkin said.

  “Maybe not, but there are plenty of other people who could have knocked her up. It doesn’t have to be Dan Coile.”

  “You’re not going to check on any of this?”

  “No,” Drost said. “Not unless I hear something more convincing than anything I’ve heard here. I wouldn’t be given the authority from Fredericton anyway.”

  “You’re not going to ask?”

  “No, I’m not going to ask.”

  “And what about Louie? Do you intend to talk to Dan Coile about that?”

  “I don’t know,” Drost said. “I don’t know who we’re going to talk to. I’ll take account of what you’ve told me. What we do with it and how we handle that investigation is none of your business, so far as I can see.”

  “In other words, you’re going to do nothing,” Dorkin said.

  “God damn it!” Drost said. “I’ve had enough of this. You’ve told me what you’ve come to tell me. I’ll make a report of it. Now I’ve got other things to do.”

  Without looking at Dorkin, he went back to his desk and sat down. Dorkin hesitated, then angrily picked his coat off the rack and put it on. Carvell rose and followed him out.

  On the porch, before they went their different ways into the rain, Carvell put his hand on Dorkin’s shoulder.

  “I’m sorry about Louie,” he said. “I don’t think you should conclude that it was necessarily your fault. He was a sharpie, and there were all sorts of people who had grudges against him of one kind or another.”

  “And he was a Jew,” Dorkin said.

  “Yes,” Carvell said. “I suppose there’s that too.”

  “You don’t think that quite apart from anything he may have known about Dan Coile,” Dorkin said, “someone may just have taken a random shot at him because they wanted to take a shot at me and didn’t quite dare?”

  “I don’t know, Bernard,” Carvell said. “It’s possible. Just about anything is. The world’s an evil place.”

  “I don’t want to see whoever it was get away with it,” Dorkin said.

  “I don’t either particularly,” Carvell said, “but he probably will unless he’s foolish enough to brag about it.”

  He hesitated.

  “You may be right about Coile and the girl,” he said. “I just don’t know. I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but I think maybe that under the stress of all this you’re losing control of yourself a little. I’m saying this by way of being a friend. I wouldn’t want you to take it any other way.”

  The next day Dorkin found that there was a further blow in store. A message had come through that he was to phone Meade’s office on a matter of urgency.

  He got the CWAC clerk.

  “Colonel Meade would like you to meet him for lunch at the officers’ mess here at 1200 hours tomorrow,” she said.

  Meade himself would certainly have phrased it so that it did not sound so peremptory, but peremptory it certainly was. Something was in the wind, and Dorkin felt certain that it would not be good.

  Dorkin dined with Meade by a window in the mess. Outside there was a stretch of immaculately tended lawn ending in a thin screen of twelve-foot Lombardy poplars. Beyond them, the river flowed by, unruffled today under a cloudless sky.

  Dorkin could remember this site as it was in the spring of 1940 when it was under construction and he was still at university: banks of raw earth, excavations, mud, water, piles of lumber, mess. Now, over four years later, it had an air of permanency that made it seem as if there had never been a time when there had not been the war.

  They dined on salmon steaks, big and fresh, and Meade was moved to ask Dorkin if he fished (which he did not) and then went on to tell him about the fishing trip that he had made every June for the past twenty-five years, war or no war, to the wilderness of the Big Sevogle River. From there, the talk drifted inevitably to the war. On Sunday, the British had dropped a parachute division on Arnhem, and it was beginning to be obvious that something was going badly wrong. Whenever the press releases started describing Allied troops as “valiant,” one knew that they were being beaten. And the Canadians, grinding and sloshing up the coast, were not doing all that well either. The casualties, Meade said, leaning forward across the table and dropping his voice, were much heavier than was being let on. Any day now the conscription issue was going to blow up again. Did Dorkin know that MacKenzie King had been booed by Canadian troops when he had inspected them overseas?

  When they had finished dessert and coffee, they walked for a quarter of an hour back and forth along the line of poplars by the river, and Meade smoked a cigar. Then, casually, he brought them at last around to his office. He settled himself behind his oak desk, and Dorkin took the chair that he had sat in when Meade had ordered him to attend Williams’s preliminary hearing. Through dinner and their post-prandial perambulations, not a word had been said about Williams.

  “Well,” Meade said, “I hear that you’ve been brewing up quite a storm up there.”

  The tone was affable, indulgent. Caught off guard, Dorkin fished for some appropriate reply, and he was still fishing and beginning to realize that there was no appropriate reply when Meade continued.

  “I’m afraid that I’ve had to call you down,” he said, “because I’ve had complaints from Whidden and the Crown prosecutor’s office. I’ve wanted to leave the case entirely up to you since this was what seemed to me proper, but I’ve come under considerable pressure to speak to you about your handling of some matters.”

  He paused. Dorkin said nothing, and he went on.

  “Whidden is very upset that you’ve been talking to Crown wit-nesses.” He consulted a pad on his desk.

  “To Miss Vinny Page, who I understand was a friend of Sarah Coile. And to a Mr. John Maclean, who testified about seeing Williams the night of the murder. I don’t suppose there’s any law against this so long as you weren’t putting any kind of pressure on them, but it’s generally regarded as unethical. Whidden is making noises about your tampering with witnesses.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dorkin said. “I did talk to them because it seemed to me important. But I wasn’t tampering with the evidence they gave at the preliminary. I never discussed that with them at all. I was talking to them about matters which were different altogether.”

  “Well,” Meade said. “Whidden could not have known that. Could I ask what you did talk about?”

  “I was talking to Miss Page because I thought that she might be able to help me find out who was the father of the child that Sarah Coile was carrying. I talked to Maclean about whether he had seen a truck that I was interested in tracking down on the night of the murder.”

  “Are these not things that you could have asked in cross examination at the trial?”

  “I felt that by then it would be too late for the information to be useful to me.”

  “And did you get any information from them?”

  “Some. What they said helped me to clarify my ideas about what might have happened that night.”

  “I understand,” Meade said, “that there are rumours about that you think that it was the girl’s father who murdered her. Do you really think that?”

  “Yes,” Dorkin said. “I’m sorry that it’s got around. I didn’t intend it to, but I think that people began to realize what the point of my inquiries was.”

  “Do you have any real evidence of this?” Meade said.

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to find over the last couple of weeks.”

  “What you have then is a suspicion?”

  “Yes,” Dorkin said. “A very strong suspicion.”

  “I think you had better tell me about it,” Meade said.

  Dorkin hesitated. He didn’t like this at all, but he decided that he had no choice.

  He talked without interruption for almost three-quarters of an hour, laying out as persuasi
vely as he could what he had found out, what he suspected. When he had finished, Meade sat back.

  “As I understand it then,” he said, “your case against Coile is that he is believed to have molested his daughters and that therefore he might have been the father of Sarah’s child and might have murdered her to keep this quiet.”

  He studied Dorkin from across the desk.

  “That’s very thin stuff,” he said. “You have no actual evidence of his having seen her that night after she left to go to the dance?”

  “No. That’s what I’ve been trying to collect.”

  “I understand that you went to see the Mounties about it.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve had a complaint from them too,” Meade said. “Inspector Gregory phoned me yesterday. He was very angry. He felt that you were using your rank in the army to bully his officers into conducting investigations for you that they did not feel were justified.”

  “I hadn’t intended to bully. But I’m very unhappy about the initial investigation that Grant conducted into the murder. Within an hour or two, he decided that Williams was guilty, and they never pursued any other line of investigation.”

  “But they have been co-operative,” Meade said. “They have made available to you all the evidence they have collected.You don’t feel that they’ve withheld anything?”

  “No. But it’s the evidence they haven’t collected that concerns me.”

  “Bernard, I appreciate your concern for Williams. A lawyer should fight for his client. But you are not a policeman. It’s not your job to chase around the country trying to catch murderers. Your job is to go into court and attempt to convince a jury that the evidence which the prosecution is presenting is not enough to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that your client is guilty. If he is found not guilty, then it is up to the police to chase around the country and try to find out who is guilty. I gather from what you say that you feel that the case which the police have built is a weak one founded on very questionable circumstantial evidence. If that is so, then that is what you tell your judge and jury. You tell them that on the basis of the evidence that has been presented it is easy to construct an explanation of the girl’s death other than the one the prosecution is presenting.”