Murder Sees the Light

by Howard Engel

  “I’m wondering what plans you have for my unfortunate Bishop.”

  “I have no plans, fella, only designs.” He didn’t rub his hands together, but he might as well have. I hadn’t meant to pass the game to him in a brown paper bag.

  “Did the Provincial Police come up here?” I asked touching the wrong piece and then pushing it into the glare of Patten’s Queen.

  “Oh, they arrived. But we’re just poor American tourists who see, hear, and speak no evil. That corporal bought that. We’re just minding our business. Too bad about that guide. The Lord giveth and the Lord … Checkbloody-mate, fella!” He had me all right; a little sooner than I expected. I examined the positions while Patten did everything but an imitation of a victorious fighting cock. At last I shook my head slowly so that the inevitability of it all showed. Clean living and the good life won again.

  “One more?” he asked, already rearranging the men.

  “Nothing doing. When I’m licked, I stay licked.”

  We’d been playing inside the house this time. It was still early. I’d done an hour’s pretend fishing near the island. I hadn’t tied a hook on my factory-tested line. I was busy thinking about a couple of incidents that happened before I went to bed the night before. And while Patten was busy in the narrow kitchen of the cabin making a fruit drink for both of us, I had a chance to think about them again.

  After the Annex lights went off, the night before, the party dispersed. Everybody went back to their cabins, or at least to the cabins of their choice.

  I took a walk down to the water and watched the lights blinking through the trees at the Rimmers’ across the lake, and listened to the conversation of the idle rowboats tied up to the cleats. I sat down in one of the deck chairs, lit a cigarette, and tried to make my mind a blank.

  I was nearly dozing off, when I heard the sound of paddle strokes coming quietly over the water. Under the stars, the lake was dead, a dance floor lit by a mirrored globe. The canoe came closer, out of the shadows near the shore. It was Aline Barbour. She beached the canoe, stowed her paddle, dragged the boat a short distance up the beach so that the bow was on grass, and turned the craft bottom up. There was a tidiness about her movements that was almost like dancing. Or maybe I just like to watch other people do the manual labour. Anyway, she wasn’t hard to watch.

  “Nice evening for a paddle,” I said, not raising my voice more than was necessary to cover the distance. She turned around quickly like I’d caught her signing my name to a cheque. She located me after a second on the dock.

  “Oh, it’s you. You startled me.” She was wearing slim jeans and a dark denim jacket over a tight turtleneck pullover. Her running shoes made squishing noises as she joined me. “You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that.” I mimed innocence and pulled up another chair. She settled into it and accepted my pack of Player’s with a smile. “All by yourself?” I nodded the story of my life, and she changed the subject. “It’s a little cool out there tonight.”

  She lit the cigarette with her own butane lighter. Her face looked bright surrounded by her dark hair, but her cheekbones were flattened until the flame disappeared. For a moment, as she crossed her legs, I thought of her rubbing suntan cream on her shoulders that morning. Funny how clothes change things. She was still a very sexy lady, but somehow different.

  While I was taking her apart and putting her back together, she was giving me the same business. “You’ve got a burn on your nose,” she said. I ran my finger over the roughness and peeling.

  “Is this your first time up here?”

  “Yes. Wonderful, isn’t it?” I agreed, and we sat and smoked and listened to the whippoorwill auditioning from a distance. “Those stars,” she said, and I looked up towards the Milky Way. “Each one of them is a sun with whirling planets. Do you think they know as little about us as we know about them? Are there networks of information that we know nothing about? What do you think, Mr. Cooperman?”

  “I’m no expert on space travel or flying saucers. Do you put stock in them?”

  “Oh, there are presences. I call them presences. I think I’m Manichean. I believe in the presence of evil. Good is only a temporary absence of evil. There’s no end to it, really. It just goes on and on like those suns up there.” Again we both sat rubbernecking the universe. At last she stubbed out her cigarette on the dock and said good night. I liked the sound of her voice, even if I didn’t follow everything she said. Then I remembered that Aeneas had started to say something about knowing her. What was it he said? I looked off into the trees after she’d gone and tried again to make my mind a blank

  Patten was making a noise in the kitchen. When I collected myself back to where I was, I could hear him, but only gradually did I recognize that he was singing. It was an old hymn that I remembered from high school:

  Our Shield and Defender,

  The Ancient of days,

  Pavilioned in splendour,

  And girded with praise

  Patten couldn’t carry a tune in a wheelbarrow, but he seemed to be enjoying himself in there. He was making a Hollywood production number of his juice-making.

  I drifted back to the night before on the dock at the lodge. It was some time after Aline had left. Had I drifted off? I remember hearing voices. They were familiar because I’d been hearing them in my head before I opened my eyes. There was a nagging insistence to them, like the banging of a window blind when the wind comes up in the night. At first I couldn’t make out what was being said. What sense can you make from the Morse code of a badly anchored blind?

  “You’re just being silly, David. Someone will hear us.”

  “I don’t care who hears. I’ve got to talk to you.”

  “I’m sure it’s nothing that won’t wait until morning. Look, you’re very sweet, and I don’t want to hear you say anything you’ll regret.”

  “Joan, please listen to me.”

  “Not if it’s the same tune you were humming before. I don’t think you’re thinking straight.”

  “I’m not thinking at all, Joan. Listen to me!”

  “No! Let go of me. David! Christ, David, someone will hear!” I couldn’t see anything from where I was sitting except the odd falling star slipping out of place and dropping towards the rim of the lake. I knew that if I turned, cleared my throat, and got up, I’d be making a mistake, so I kept my eyes on the Big Dipper. Gradually the human noises were replaced by those of bull frogs and crickets which didn’t seem to give a damn if anybody heard or not. I gave them another fifteen minutes and then went in to bed. I had another cigarette lying on the bed. I didn’t bother to light a candle.

  * * *

  “Ouch! Damn it!” It was Patten and I again returned to the present. The exclamation was followed by the sound of a bag of groceries dropping to the floor. Then something broke, a glass, probably. I rushed into the kitchen to see Patten sucking his fingers. There was blood on his cheek. “What happened?” I took the hand and ran it under the cold tap. Thank goodness for the senator’s modern conveniences. It didn’t look serious; a few jagged cuts on his fingertips. I repeated the question; he nodded towards the split paper bag with oranges rolling all over the floor.

  “I don’t see anything. Was it something in the bag?” As I said it, I could see blood on the brown paper. Patten held his hand under the tap and I bent to see what was inside the broken bag. I’d like to say I did this fearlessly, but the truth is I probed inside with a long-handled wooden spoon with fragments of dried spaghetti clinging to it. Oranges, lemons, a couple of limes, and the screwtop from a large bottle of ginger ale or soda water. There was no bottle. Then I saw that the bottle cap was the problem. The metal flanges that held the screw-top secure on the bottle had been bent out, away from the round top, turning the innocent cap into a mean-looking jagged cutting wheel. Anybody probing the bottom of the bag would end up with his fingers gashed. I spooned the bottle cap closer and sniffed it. I couldn’t detect anything sinister like burnt almonds. But to be on th
e safe side: “Come on,” I said. “Wash out your mouth and try to vomit.”

  “What? I cut myself. It was a shock, that’s all.”

  “Do what I say or you could be dead in ten minutes.” It’s surprising what saying a thing like that does. I heard retching within seconds. “Drink some water. Do the same thing again and wash your cheek carefully.” I began to recall the clever murderous implements in Rex Stout and Ellery Queen. I guess I panicked. “Come on!” I pulled him by the wrist into the parking lot in front of the cabin, first making sure to wrap the strange weapon in a dishtowel. Spence was sitting talking to Wilf, both stretched out on lawnchairs with a cribbage board between them.

  “What’s up?”

  “Mr. Patten’s had an accident. Get him to the nearest hospital on the double. Bancroft’s closest. There’s not a second to lose. I think he’s been poisoned.”

  The cards and board went to the ground and Spence had the Mercedes turned around in seconds. It took threequarters of an hour to get to Bancroft. They dropped me in Hatchway from where I telephoned through to the hospital. I told the senior voice at the other end what I suspected and what I’d done by way of first aid. I told him about the bottle cap and warned him to be careful.

  When Dr. Gemmell hung up in Bancroft, I felt abandoned by the action in Hatchway. There was no way back to the lodge. I didn’t have taxi fare either on to Bancroft or back to the park. I told myself that getting overly excited only increased the feeling of abandonment, so I tried to make myself calm for Patten’s sake. Christ! Then I remembered: I’d called him Patten. It was game over for me even if he didn’t die.

  ELEVEN

  I knew that Ray Thornton wouldn’t be in his office on a Saturday, so I called the number just to be right about something. It rang five times before I hung up. If he’d been there I could have told him all about the excitement of the last hour. I could have told the recording device on his phone if he had one, but Ray must be the last guy in the world to hold out against the electronic age. That reminded me of another hold out. I phoned my mother in Grantham.

  “Hello?”

  “Ma, it’s me, Benny.”

  “You’re back? You just left town. You can’t be home already.”

  “No, I’m still up here. Looks like I’ll be here for another week.”

  “I see. So, you’re having a good time up there, Benny?”

  “My nose is peeling. I miss your cooking.”

  “Canned salmon you can get in any store, Benny. I’ll melt in this heat. Benny, you remember the last time you were up in the woods? Camp Northern Pine?”

  “A little.”

  “You remember the load of rocks you brought home?”

  “Ma, I was ten years old. What do you want from a ten-year-old? Handmade moccasins? Besides, they weren’t rocks, they were quartz. That’s next door to gold.”

  “It could be next door to Baron Rothschild. Next door is next door. I nearly had a fit wondering what you’d done with your clothes I stitched the labels in. Benny what could have—”

  “Ma, that’s twenty-five years ago. You’ve got a memory like an elephant and this is long distance. How are you?”

  “I’m fine, your father’s fine. ‘Fine’ is the word around here this week. I get my hair done and your father says it’s fine. I made borscht to serve cold with sour cream right out of the carton from Mr. Atos at the delicatessen, and your father says that’s fine. I’m sure if I told him the doctor told me I had something inside me, that would be fine by him too.”

  “You always exaggerate You miss me?”

  “Who’s got time? ‘Miss me?’ You’ll be home before you’ve gone. But you know, thinking of that summer camp; it takes me back.”

  “Never mind. I haven’t got time. I just called to let you know that I’m okay.”

  “I’ll tell your father. You never know. He might ask. I’ll tell him you’re fine.”

  “Goodbye.”

  I walked through to the edge of town, past the feed store, the drive-in hardware outlet, and the marina that serviced most of the boat engines in the area. Beyond all this I followed the road to the wooden sawmill. Here a chain lifted logs out of the lake and hauled them inside. The saw blade whined like a mosquito’s dive-bombing warning. Through an opening, I could see a man at a machine like a tractor shuffling the rough-cut lumber like playing cards. I watched them squaring timber in another machine and running logs through a battery of vertical saw blades that turned them into two-inch planks.

  A little further along the lake front, two teen-age boys were fixing a dock, nailing planks across the horizontal rails and cutting them off even. The echo of the hammering suggested that another dock was being fixed just out of sight behind a boathouse. There was something very satisfying about watching them work and I watched them for half an hour.

  When I got back to town, I caught Ray at his house and taking calls. I gave him the play-by-play account of what I’d been doing with his money and he kept grunting “Yeah” every few minutes to show that he was still on the line.

  “Ray, I’ve got a couple of favours to ask you.” He grunted assent within reason. Ray would give me his partner’s right arm, but he’d keep reminding me what it cost him. He always put me in the part of someone asking for the moon, and he grudgingly would hand it over. I gave him the plate numbers of the cars in the lodge parking lot and asked if he could get someone to run a check on them.

  “Is that all? Are you finished?”

  “I want you to find out for me what you can about a woman named Aline Barbour. She’s a theatrical designer. She’s registered at the lodge and has been keeping an eye on Patten whenever I go off duty.” I could hear Ray’s breathing getting irregular on his end of the wire. “Do you have two people on this assignment, Ray?”

  “First of all, you don’t go off duty, and if I’d wanted a relay team I would have gone to a real detective.”

  “Hell, you could have gone to the Secret Service.”

  “Benny, how badly off is our friend?” I told him I thought he’d live. I mentioned my first aid and the health of my reflexes under stress. I could hear him shifting ears on the phone so I tried to regain his attention.

  “Look, Ray, somebody in Algonquin Park isn’t playing games. He doesn’t want Patten to leave here, whatever the U.S. Supreme Court rules. He’s had two narrow squeaks. He isn’t going to survive a third. The odds are against it. How does your client stand if Patten gets killed? Think about it. As it is he’s lucky to be alive. Lucky I’ve read so many mystery stories. Nobody outside a book plays games with bottle caps dipped in poison.”

  “Well, Benny, you hang in there.” Sure. It was time for him to water the lawn or trim the hedge. I held on to his sleeve over the wire for another question.

  “Ray, your pulse rate went up when I mentioned Aline Barbour. You don’t want to keep stuff like that bottled up inside; it’ll give you gas. What do you know about her?”

  “Yes, well, yes, I happen to know who she is. But I don’t know what she’s doing at Petawawa Lodge. That’s not part of the script. I’ll have to get back to you on that. Okay?” I nodded assent and he barked at me to buy some decent hiking shoes.

  I walked to the café for a cup of coffee.

  “You staying up at some lodge around here?” the waitress asked. I was so surprised to be asked a direct question, I let a little coffee go down the wrong way, and the two of us got better acquainted while I nearly choked.

  “Uh, huh,” I said when I could.

  “Land, you oughtn’t to talk with your mouth full. Which one? I hear that Neary’s is half empty this year and that Coleson’s didn’t even open up. It’s too expensive you know, what with the price of gas. I hear them complaining about it all the time in here. It’ll cost you twelve dollars in gas to get to Neary’s and back. Tim has to charge fifteen now, if you want his taxi. Used to be five dollars.”

  “Everything’s going up. I’m at Petawawa Lodge.”

  “Oh yes. You
ng couple running it now. Used to be Wayne Trask.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “His Flora came through town one night, and you wouldn’t believe it, but the woman didn’t have a stitch—“

  “I heard about that. They say he was a terrible one for the bottle.”

  “Dead drunk the night of the fire, you know.”

  “You make it sound like yesterday.”

  “Now, what about yesterday? Poor Aeneas. That was a shame about him, a nice man like that, never a bad word to say about anybody.”

  “He lived in Hatchway, didn’t he?” A question was beginning to form: was there a link between Aeneas and Patten, apart from old times?

  “Aeneas rented the second-floor front room from Mrs. Kramer across from the liquor store. Aeneas scarcely used it in the summer. Preferred camping out. Paid only fifteen dollars a week, and it’s a big room. Used to be the master bedroom before her husband died. Maud said she should be able to get twenty-five now without even painting.”

  “Across from the liquor store?”

  “It’s the place with the bird bath and the wind chime. It was built for Horace Waggoner, you know, of the Waggoner Mill, but he sold out in the thirties to Ed Kramer who was with the Hydro …”

  I didn’t stay to hear more than another twenty minutes of oral history. I paid up and walked down towards the liquor store. The house across the street was a buffcoloured frame house with a sagging veranda across the front and most of one side. The front door had stained glass in the fanlight over it, giving a cranberry look to a hall chandelier that hung just inside. The wind chime was rusty and soundless, the bird bath rusty and dry. I turned the old-fashioned bell in the middle of the door, and presently saw a woman coming through the lace curtains covering the two oval glass panels in the door.