The Case Against Owen Williams

by Allan Donaldson

  “Yes,” Hooper said. “But nothing solid.”

  Carvell and Dorkin waited and watched as the two sides of his Mountie soul fought it out.

  “Well,” he said finally. “I’ve always wondered how much Clemens could really have seen that night coming around the corner. I thought we might have some trouble in court about it, so one night about eleven o’clock me and MacDougal went out there. It was a clear night the way it was the night of the dance, but there was probably more moon. We took a white towel along to act like Sarah Coile’s dress. MacDougal stood where she and the soldier were supposed to have been standing, and I came down the road and made the turn. I could see the towel but not much detail. Then MacDougal stood there without the towel the way the soldier would have been, and I couldn’t see much of anything. Just the shape of someone there. It’s hard to see how Clemens could have seen as much as he said he did in that light. The only thing is that if there’d been another car coming up the road or even one behind him, there probably would have been enough light—more than enough.”

  “He didn’t say anything about another car?” Carvell asked.

  “No,” Hooper said.

  “And nobody asked?” Dorkin said.

  “No,” Hooper said uneasily. “Not that I know of.”

  Dorkin bit his tongue. It was no time to moralize.

  “There isn’t much I can do,” Hooper said. “I can’t haul him in just on this kind of stuff.”

  “Well,” Carvell said, “I could poke around and see what I can turn up. Maclean and his pals may know more than they told.”

  “I haven’t got a lot of time,” Dorkin said. “On Monday I’m supposed to be out of here.”

  “We can still work on it,” Carvell said.

  “I know that,” Dorkin said. “But I want to be here.”

  The phone on Carvell’s desk rang. He picked it up, took the receiver off the hook, listened briefly, then pushed the whole apparatus across the desk to Hooper.

  “It’s MacDougal,” Hooper said when he’d finished. “There’s been a call. He has to go out, and I’ll have to take over the office.”

  He stood in the middle of the room, vacillating, his cap in his hand.

  “I’ll do what I can,” he said finally.

  “He’s in a tough spot,” Carvell said when he was gone. “If he sets about to undermine their case and they find out about it, he’s going to be in the shit with Grant. And if he really does help to prove that Williams didn’t do it, everyone will run around saying nice things about him, but they’ll never forgive him. The army and the lords of the law may not be all that pleased with you either.”

  “Probably not,” Dorkin said.

  “Well,” Carvell said, “if Clemens did do it or was an accessory to it somehow, he’s going to be thinking he’s home dry, and it may rattle him into doing something foolish if he finds out that he isn’t. Why don’t we go shake the bushes a little and see what flies out?”

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTEEN

  They found Thomas Salcher out back of his house by the pigpen. Over the fence in front of him, two enormous pigs were standing with their snouts lifted in expectation of food.

  “That’s a couple of good-looking hogs,” Carvell said.

  “Yes,” Salcher said. “Pretty good. Just about good enough to have their throats cut.”

  He giggled. But behind the chat he was studying them warily.

  “We’re thinking,” Carvell said, “that you may be able to help us with a little problem we have. Why don’t we go inside out of the wind?”

  They sat around one end of the kitchen table. Ada Salcher sat in a rocking chair, her dropsied legs above her sneakers like a pair of corpse-white balloons filled with water, the rest of her a shape-less pile of breasts and belly. She eyed them as she might have eyed someone passing on the road. In spite of the cooler weather, the stink in the house seemed to Dorkin even worse than when he had been there before.

  “The problem,” Carvell said, “has to do with Reverend Clemens.”

  “Oh?” Salcher said. “What kind of a problem would that be now?”

  “We’ve heard some strange things,” Carvell said.

  “Oh?”

  “We’ve heard that sometimes on Saturday nights, he dresses up in a pair of old overalls and goes roaming around in the woods behind the dance hall. Have you ever heard anything about that?”

  “Well, now,” Salcher said, glancing back and forth between Carvell and Dorkin, “I don’t know.”

  “You either know or you don’t know,” Carvell said. “Have you?”

  “Well,” Salcher said, “I guess I have. Yes.”

  “Seen it even, perhaps?”

  “Well, yes. It’s just that he told me I wasn’t supposed to tell nobody about it. He said it wouldn’t do to have it git around.”

  “What exactly was it that you weren’t supposed to tell? What was he doing out there?”

  “He didn’t like that dance hall. He said it was a palace of sin. He was gonna git it shut down, and he wanted to be able to say what was goin’ on there. So sometimes he went to spy on it.”

  “In an old pair of overalls and a railroad cap.”

  “Well, yes. That’s right,” Salcher said. “He said if he got recognized, and they knew what he was doin’, he might git beaten up. Even killed. He said people were threatenin’ him because he preached against the dance hall.”

  “I see,” Carvell said. “He drove here to your place and parked his car, did he?”

  “Yes. Out back there.”

  “What about the overalls?”

  “Well, now, he used to leave them here. Outside the back door there with my coats and jackets and stuff. They just looked as if they was mine. He’d put them on and then go off down the path back there into the woods.”

  “How long was he gone?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe an hour. Maybe longer.”

  “You never thought that maybe the reason he was going down there was to have a peep at the boys and girls in the woods?”

  “Well, I did once or twice,” Salcher said. “But that ain’t no crime.”

  He giggled.

  “I guess not,” Carvell said, “if that’s all he did. Did he come here on the night of July 1?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t know about that,” Salcher said. “That was a long time ago.”

  “In court, he said he was here that night. He said he had a religious visit with you and Ada. That’s how he happened to be driving the Hannigan Road.”

  “Yes, that’s right. I just didn’t remember the date.”

  “It was the night Sarah Coile was murdered. Did he go out spying in the woods that night?”

  “Now, I don’t remember that,” Salcher said. “I didn’t think nothin’ about all them things at the time.”

  Before Salcher had even finished, Carvell’s fist came down on the table so hard that everything on it jumped. Salcher jumped too.

  “Stop horsing around,” Carvell said. “I think you know god-damned well what all this is about. You tell me lies, and you’re going to find yourself in more trouble than you’ve ever seen in your life before.”

  Salcher couldn’t have looked more cowed if Carvell had picked him up and slammed him against the wall.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, he was here that night.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Just like usual. He parked out back and came in and talked for a while and said a prayer for Ada and then put on the overalls and cap and went out. Off down the path behind the house.”

  “When did he come back?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t watch the time. An hour maybe. Maybe more. I don’t know.”

  “But he did come back?”

  “Yes. But he didn’t come in. He didn’t bring the overalls back neither. I just heard the car start up and drive off.”

  “Did you look out?”

  “No. I just saw it go by under the windows.”

 
“You didn’t see if there was anyone in it besides Clemens?”

  “No. I didn’t look.”

  “And you don’t know what time it was?”

  “No. I never paid no heed.”

  “Did he bring the overalls back here later?”

  “No. I never seen them again. And I don’t know as he ever went into the woods again neither. Leastways, he never came here before he did. But he came a couple of times just to visit.”

  “Did you ever think there might be a connection between Sarah Coile being murdered that night and Clemens never going out spying again?”

  Salcher hesitated. He was thoroughly scared now, sitting with his hands clasped tight in his lap.

  “I wondered,” he said finally. “But I thought maybe he was afraid to go there anymore with all the police around that might see him.”

  “Did he ever talk about Sarah Coile being murdered?”

  “Once. I remember once he said it was a judgement.”

  “Oh? A judgement for what?”

  “I don’t know,” Salcher said. “For goin’ to the dance hall maybe. Or goin’ out back with boys.”

  “Did he say anything else?”

  “I remember he said somethin’ about how now all her sins would be forgiven.”

  “Sort of a tough way to get into heaven,” Carvell said.

  Dorkin and Carvell mounted the steps of the small front porch of the Reverend Clemens’s house on Broad Street, and Carvell turned the key of the doorbell in the centre of the door.

  There was a long wait, and then the door was opened by a tall young woman dressed in a loose blouse, buttoned up to the neck, and an unpatriotically long skirt that reached almost to her ankles. She had a delicately boned, oval face completely without makeup, dark brown hair pulled back in a severe bun, very large, dark eyes, a long neck. This, Dorkin assumed, was the daughter whom Alden Bartlett had told him about, but Bartlett had not led him to envision such a strikingly good-looking woman. However, she was not working at impressing them with her looks. Her eyes were hard as she looked first at Carvell, then at Dorkin, studying his uniform with systematic disdain.

  When she showed no sign of speaking, Carvell introduced him-self and Dorkin.

  “We would like to have a few words with your father,” he said.

  “Could I tell him,” she asked, “what it is you want to have a few words with him about?”

  The accent was unmistakably southern.

  “I’m afraid that it’s confidential,” Carvell said. “I’m sure he’ll understand.”

  She hesitated, glancing beyond them at Carvell’s car parked in the yard behind her father’s, then stepped back.

  “Come in, then,” she said, “and I’ll see.”

  They stepped into a narrow hall fronting a flight of stairs and were ushered into a small parlour furnished with a horsehair sofa, several tightly packed, uncomfortable-looking chairs, and a lectern. There was a faint smell of damp as in a house where windows are seldom opened, and Dorkin had an unsettling sense of having passed into an alien world.

  The girl vanished into the back of the house, closing a door behind her, and Dorkin and Carvell stood in the middle of the room, unspeaking and uncomfortable, studying the prints on the wall. There was one of Jesus with children, one of Jesus with the disciples, all of them suitably Aryanized, one of a sun-drenched landscape with a distant rainbow towards which some common folk in work clothes were making their way with rapturous, upturned faces.

  From somewhere at the back of the house, Dorkin could just hear a murmur of voices. There was an interval of silence, then a man’s heavy tread. Reverend Clemens was in shirt sleeves and braces, massive and softly shapeless, though not so massive as he had appeared from the eminence of the witness stand, nor, no doubt, from his pulpit.

  He looked at Carvell, then more closely at Dorkin. If he had cause for alarm, he didn’t show it.

  “Sheriff Carvell,” he said. “Lieutenant.”

  He made no move to shake hands.

  “We’d like to talk to you for a few minutes about Sarah Coile,” Carvell said. “We understand that you were her minister.”

  “I was,” Clemens said, emphasizing the pastness of it in an odd way. “I’m sorry that I could not have swayed her more than I did. Then all of this might not have happened.”

  The tone of voice was distant, as if suggesting that he regarded Carvell and Dorkin as themselves part of the great worldly conspiracy against holiness that had destroyed Sarah. As in court, Dorkin caught the whiff of a southern accent, not as strong as the daughter’s, but unmistakable all the same.

  “Yes,” Carvell said. “I’m sorry too. Everyone is.”

  “That dance hall is a curse,” Clemens said. “I’m sure it has ruined more lives than hers.”

  “Probably it has,” Carvell said.

  “I’m not sure what it is you wanted to talk to me about,” Clemens said.

  “Perhaps we could sit down,” Carvell said.

  “Certainly.”

  Clemens carefully closed the door, crossed the room with his slow, heavy stride, and sat down in the middle of the horsehair sofa, leaning back, his hands on his thighs, elbows out, his chin lifted. Dorkin and Carvell took chairs across from him.

  “We have come into possession of some information,” Carvell said, “which tends to cast some doubt on the guilt of Private Williams.”

  Watching closely, Dorkin saw, or thought he saw, a shadow as brief as that of a passing bird cross Clemens’s face.

  “We thought you might be of some help to us,” Carvell said.

  “If I can,” Clemens said.

  His manner seemed guarded, perhaps wary, perhaps merely puzzled.

  “I didn’t like to question you in court about Sarah Coile,” Dorkin took it up, “but we were hoping that just between ourselves here, you might feel free to tell us something about her.”

  “Perhaps. What was it you wanted to know?”

  “We were wondering if perhaps you might have some idea who the father of her child might have been.”

  “I had assumed that it was Private Williams. But I gather from the trial that this seems doubtful.”

  “You didn’t know that she was pregnant before you heard about it at the hearing?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “You’ve no idea of any special boyfriends?”

  “No.”

  “Was she someone whom you knew well? Someone you saw often?”

  “Ours is a small church. Everybody knows everybody else.”

  “She still came to church?”

  “Yes. Not as often as she used to.”

  “When was the last time you saw Sarah?” Dorkin asked.

  He tried to pose his question in a way that suggested without making it too obvious that he might already know the answer. Clemens hesitated briefly—for a heartbeat or two, no more—and the look that he gave Dorkin was ambiguous. Was it wariness as he saw what he took to be a trap and realized that he dare not lie? Or was it merely an annoyed awareness that Dorkin regarded the question as a trap and was expecting him to lie?

  “I saw her on the afternoon of July 1,” he said.

  Dorkin carefully restrained himself from looking at Carvell. Then as they both waited, Clemens went on.

  “She came to the church. My wife and daughter were both there helping me prepare things for Sunday. I talked with Sarah in my office at the back.”

  “Would it be possible for you to tell us what she came to see you about?” Dorkin asked.

  “No,” Clemens said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t do that. People come to me in trust for my advice. I am not going to betray that trust.”

  “Not even when they’re dead?”

  “No. I’m sorry. It would still be a betrayal, and it would destroy the faith that others have in me if it were known that I had broken a confidence. You are a lawyer, Lieutenant Dorkin. I believe you are under an obligation not to divulge what your clients tell you. Why should you
think that my obligation as a man of God should be less?”

  “I’m sorry,” Dorkin said. “Of course, we respect your principles. It just seemed to us that there might be some special significance in her coming to you for advice on that particular day.”

  “Is it possible for you to tell us if what she came about could be connected in any way to her death that night?” Carvell asked.

  “No,” Clemens said, “it was not. Not in any way.”

  “I see,” Carvell said. “Well, we don’t want to press you about it. We were also wondering if you saw anyone suspicious in the general vicinity of the dance hall that night?”

  “No,” Clemens said. “I don’t recall seeing anyone at all.”

  “There’s been some talk,” Carvell said, “about a strange man who was in the area that night and has never been identified. He was said to have been dressed in overalls and some kind of cap.”

  This time the shadow that crossed Clemens’s face was not swift but slow spreading.

  “No,” he said. “I didn’t see anyone.”

  “That’s too bad,” Carvell said, drifting blandly on as if he had seen nothing unusual in Clemens’s reaction. “What time did you go to the Salcher place?”

  “I’m not sure,” Clemens said. “As I said in court. I wasn’t watching the time. Sometime around ten o’clock.”

  “You weren’t outside at the Salchers’?” Carvell asked. “Out back or anything like that? Nowhere you might have been able to see into the woods?”

  “No,” Clemens said. “I just parked and went into the house. It was dark. And when I was leaving, I came out and got into the car.”

  This time Dorkin did glance, as if casually, at Carvell. Carvell’s face retained its look of deferential inquiry.

  “That’s too bad,” he said. “Maybe there wasn’t any man. When things like this happen, people sometimes let their imaginations run away with them.”

  “Yes,” Clemens said. “That’s true.”

  “When you were driving back,” Carvell said, “you didn’t hap-pen to see any other cars on the road?”

  “No,” Clemens said.

  “When you were going around the corner where you saw Sarah and the man, there weren’t any other cars going up or down the road? No one else who might have seen something in their headlights?”