Murder Sees the Light

by Howard Engel

  “Uh-huh. I said that.”

  “And?”

  “Well, I guess it’s a few degrees off the dead centre of the truth.”

  “You did see him?”

  “I seen him in the bushes sneaking off to his canoe. He was black with smoke and ashes. I mean, even more than usual. And for Dick that’s saying something.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that Dick might have pulled Trask out of the fire?” Lloyd swallowed and I saw his neck in profile as his Adam’s apple rose and fell.

  “No, it never did. Hell, Trask couldn’t have made it on his own that night.” We’d come into the clearing. Lloyd rounded the gas pumps and pulled up to my place. “So you think it was Dick? Well, now that’s a poser. Maybe gettin’ burned in the war made Dick do a crazy thing like rescuing Wayne Trask. It kinda makes sense.”

  “What about the guests at the mill?”

  “I don’t know. Wayne never mentioned them. They just took off. But I can’t say whether it was before or after the fire started. Hell, Benny, that was a long time ago.”

  Two minutes later, I was in my cabin, where everything was looking strange and half-forgotten, including my face in the mirror.

  TWENTY-SIX

  It was that evening in the Annex that I tried out some of the ideas I’d been having about the case. All of the usuals were there with the addition of Harry Glover and his two constables. Lloyd was sharpening thorns for the Victrola, which was playing his favourite, “Mah Lindy Lou.” There was a fire burning, and a card game was in progress, involving Maggie, Cissy, David Kipp, and Joan. Young Roger was looking on without too much interest. A few heads turned when I came in. I looked like a stranger with Joan’s Band-aids on my cheek and my jaw swollen to whale-like proportions.

  I took a place by the fire. Chris Kipp handed me a stick with a marshmallow on the end of it. I put it in the fire until it caught. When it was properly ablaze, I pulled it out and turned it so that the fire heated the interior until it was smooth and liquid. Then I blew out the flame, and ate it with a private grin. The only problem was that I could feel eyes on my back. I turned and saw that not a card had been played since I sat down. What did they want? My face was too sore to make a speech. Were they angry at me for fooling them? So, what if I wasn’t in ladies’ ready-to-wear? I could have been. My father was.

  I could be yet. You never know. They were looking at me whenever they thought I wasn’t looking at them. Even Harry Glover, who should have known better. Des Westmorland, also known as Des Brewer, and Delia were watching me like a pair of cats at a mousehole. Delia was wearing a pink sweater and a denim skirt. I could see that Des was very fond of her. In fact the two of them looked more devoted than newlyweds. Where did that leave his cabinet-minister wife I wondered. Was there a divinity that smoothed over the rough-hewn ends of highly placed public officials? If there was, then I wouldn’t be reading about it in the paper.

  Outside I could hear a far-off commotion as a car came out of the woods and settled into the black muck of the parking lot. A minute later, looking like he’d been up all night, Ray Thornton, my client, and a stranger walked into the Annex. Joan got up and, after a word or two, passed them along to where I was staring into the fire.

  “Now we’ll get some plain sense. Benny, this is Bert Addison, Aline Barbour’s husband, and my principal in this business. He asked me to get you to determine whether it was Patten staying on the lake and then to keep an eye on his movements.” We exchanged nods, and how-do-you-dos, but no smiles or handshakes. Both their faces were grey and grim. Ray picked up the story: “We’ve left Rob Kobayashi, one of my juniors, in Huntsville to monitor things there. Patten seems to be out of danger, and that’s a relief. We should get a bail hearing before Friday, earlier I hope.” Addison looked around the room as though he’d just had a blindfold removed in a freshman’s initiation. What was he doing there, he seemed to be asking with his raised eyebrows.

  I gave them an account of Aline’s attack on the Woodward place, adding Harry Glover’s additional information. Addison still looked like a perplexed businessman. I could imagine him looking at himself in the shaving mirror and saying: “Does he look like a fellow whose wife goes around shooting people?” Addison had a face that didn’t like the five o’clock shadow on his chin. He appeared out of place in this rustic setting. His casual clothes were stiff and unbending. I tried to say something.

  “Mr. Addison, Patten was mixed up in diabolism fifteen years ago. This was before he got mixed up in the Ultimate Church. You know, strange rites and ceremonies. His partners were an older man and his girlfriend. The girlfriend was your wife.”

  “I didn’t know about that,” he said rather testily, with even teeth showing under a reddish moustache. “But I knew in general that she’d lived a raffish, Bohemian life. That didn’t matter to me. She put all that behind her.” He didn’t look as though he was doing any of this easily, and I got the feeling that this wasn’t the beginning of a rich, new acquaintance. I could imagine Addison looking right through me if we met again sometime.

  “From what I’ve learned, these rites that they performed had a peculiar object in mind.”

  “What object was that?” Addison asked, hoping, I think, that I wouldn’t answer.

  “I don’t pretend to know the ins and outs of it.” I thought that would make him happy.

  “Please try to be clear, Mr. Cooperman.” Now he was asking for it.

  “These rites were highly charged things, I understand. They were trying to bring about the birth of a purely evil being, maybe even the devil himself.”

  “Do we have to hear the details, Benny?” asked Ray.

  “I’ll shut up altogether if you like. It hurts to talk.”

  “Let him get on with it, Ray.”

  “Well, use your judgement, Benny. Don’t take all night.”

  “Needless to say they didn’t engender the evil one. She didn’t even get pregnant. More important, Aline transferred her affections from the older man to the younger. That was Patten. She went off with him and stayed for about five years. She was in on the beginnings of his religious reawakening. They started this whole movement together. She felt that she was just as much at the centre of it as he was. Meanwhile, the man she’d left killed himself in a bizarre manner, passing on seeds of guilt to Aline. More seeds were planted when Patten discarded Aline from both his personal life and the life at the core of his new church. Today we saw the fruit of those seeds. Today’s attack wasn’t a random meeting, Mr. Addison. Maybe you can tell us something about that?” Addison nodded.

  “Yes, she left home on Thursday morning on a holiday. I didn’t know she was here. I thought she was in Muskoka with friends. She called every day or so and asked for your latest news. I didn’t imagine she was watching Patten’s every move herself.”

  “Ray, when you first brought me into this, you told me that you’d located Patten on this lake. You said ‘a little bird’ had told you. Who was the little bird and where did he get his information?”

  “I’d better answer that, Ray,” said Addison, worrying his moustache with a nervous thumb. “P.J. Tredway is an associate of both Norbert Patten and Senator Van Woodward. I got to know him through some investments I had made in the church. It was through the senator that I met Aline. Tredway, I’m afraid, has been playing a cautious game. He wants to save himself if the cult founders but isn’t ready to make a break with it unless it founders. Is that what you call a waiting game?”

  “So Tredway is sweating out the Supreme Court decision along with everyone else. I can see now why Patten was sure that the senator had shopped him, sold him out.”

  “Is that the whole story, Benny? Is that it?” Thornton was restless. I felt like he didn’t trust me to serve the dinner without getting my tie in the gravy boat.

  “Mr. Addison, your wife tried to hurt Patten a few days ago. I wasn’t sure it was Aline. She didn’t do any harm to Patten. Not like today. She fixed Patten’s boat so it blew up.�
��

  “Have a heart, Benny!” Thornton was getting cross, but Addison was looking at me calmly enough.

  “Where’d she learn about motors, Mr. Addison?”

  “She looks after her sports cars herself. Tunes them, that sort of thing. Tell me, Mr. Cooperman, what sort of woman does these things?” He looked like he was about to break in two. I thought hard about what to tell him and hadn’t organized my thoughts very well when I started talking.

  “I’m just a peeper, Mr. Addison. I know a lot about divorce work. Your question takes me out of my territory. You need to talk to somebody who knows these kinds of things, somebody like my cousin Simon Heller. He’s a shrink, I mean a psychiatrist, in Toronto. For what it’s worth I’d say a person who does these things does them because of serious injury to her sense of herself. I don’t think a person like that is a danger to the public at large. But, like I say, I’m out of my depth talking about that kind of stuff.”

  “Thank you just the same. I hope you’re right.” I smiled, and Ray and Addison smiled, as though the smiles would float the hope higher.

  “Will you be coming back to Grantham now, Benny?” Ray asked.

  “Sure. Just as soon as I can get clear of the other investigation that’s going on up here.” Then I told them about the three deaths and how I happened to be involved in two of them. Ray told me to take it easy and to come into his office as soon as I got back in town. They had a cup of coffee with me, met Joan and the Pearcys, before they started the long drive back to Huntsville.

  Then the unexpected happened. It was Mike Harbison standing in the doorway. I counted the days on my fingers but couldn’t make it come out better than Wednesday, which Cissy, when I leaned over, corrected to Tuesday. He stood there for a minute. Joan hadn’t noticed anything since she’d picked up a smoky globe from a lantern and started giving it a polish. Harbison went to the coffee urn, drew two cups, added sugar and stuff, then took them over to Joan. She looked up at him with a smudge of soot on her forehead, and her face lit up like she was the lantern. It was a smile that included all her features. She nearly upset the lantern when she pulled him over her for a hug and kiss. I caught myself smiling to myself, then looked around to see if anybody else had noticed. I could have guessed that it would be Maggie. Old Maggie hadn’t missed the grand reunion or my observation of it.

  For somebody who didn’t like talking, I’d not been exactly silent that evening in the Annex. I had another cup of coffee, watched Mike and Joan sneak out the back door and saw Kipp bundle his two off to the cabin. By the time the fire was reduced to a fine grey ash, the company was reduced to the nub of regulars. Maggie was bidding a no-trump hand, Des and Delia were reading, and Paul Robeson was belting out “Mah Lindy Lou” as Lloyd turned the crank on the Victrola.

  I’ll lay right down and die, and die …

  “I’ll be heading back to Whitney for the night now, Benny,” Harry Glover said, placing his dirty cup near the urn. “Good night everybody. I’ll be back in the morning. I think were beginning to get somewhere on this thing.” He went out, and everybody breathed a detectable sigh of relief when the two uniformed men followed him through the double screen door.

  “I pass,” said Cissy, giggling at the loud noise she seemed to be making in the otherwise silent room. Even the fire had stopped snapping its fingers. Lloyd’s record began to run down. I glanced in the direction and saw an empty place where Lloyd had been. I hadn’t heard him go out, but he wasn’t there. While I was wondering where he’d gone, leaving his pet spinning on the turntable, I could hear voices coming towards the door.

  “Well,” Dalt Rimmer was saying, “it will have to wait until morning. Glover said he’d be here, so here I came. Good evening everybody!” Dalt was wearing a rustcoloured corduroy jacket, whose boxy shape whittled another two inches from his stature. “I just wanted to tell him my lad saw Aeneas run his pick-up truck up the old lumber trail behind my place last Thursday. The road’s not on any of the maps, and I have them all.” Peg, who’d gone right over to Maggie when she came in to press her shoulder and whisper something, looked the room over while Maggie patted her hand with her thanks.

  “Benny here’s a private investigator from the city, Dalt. So you’d better watch what you say.”

  “Hoots! I don’t care whether he’s the attorney general himself. They’re all a bunch of Nosy Parkers.”

  “When was that on Thursday, Mr. Rimmer?” I tried to put a kilo of authority into my voice and hoped.

  “He went up just before the storm hit and came back about an hour and a half or two hours later. The lad only told me this evening.”

  “Yes, you were away from the lake on Thursday. Is the boy sure it was Aeneas in the truck?”

  “I only know what he told me. I said what I know, man, what else I say is no help to anybody.”

  “Where does that road go?” Rimmer looked on me as though I couldn’t tell the difference between Toronto and Timmins.

  “You know the one I mean, Lloyd; it takes you in to Buck Lake …?”

  “Sure. It’s called Four Corners on the map.” I nearly rolled my eyes towards the spider-free beams of the ceiling. For a moment I thought Dalt Rimmer and Lloyd were going to lead me on that merry chase all over again.

  “It heads north behind my place and circles around the south end of Little Crummock. It’s a fair piece of road as those old trails go: deeply rutted in places, but you don’t need a four-wheel drive to manage it. I’m sorry the lad didn’t speak up sooner. He just remembered and asked me if it was important.”

  “So,” I said, thinking aloud, “Aeneas overcame his fear of Little Crummock. He had an argument with Hector about it, then decided to overcome his superstition.”

  “He had an argument with his brother. I heard that in town,” Maggie said. “I heard people talking about it in Onions’ store.”

  “And he told me himself that the subject was Aeneas’s long-standing fear of that part of the country.”

  “So?” said David Kipp, putting in his hand-crafted paddle.

  “So, not long after he left his brother, he drove his truck up that road. He went as far as he could go on wheels towards Little Crummock. He must have gone the rest of the way on foot.”

  “Heading for Dick’s cabin!” suggested Lloyd.

  “Why would he want to go in there?” asked Maggie McCord, who had moved a chair up to where the talk was. “He wasn’t seen after Thursday, the night of the big thunderstorm. Why would he pick a time like that?”

  “But, you see, it was the thunder that frightened him.”

  “Don’t be silly, Benny,” Maggie said. “Aeneas wasn’t frightened of anything.”

  “He was frightened of thunder when it wasn’t preceded by lightning, Maggie. That shook him all his life. But not this time. This time he was going to pursue his fear all the way to the lake, then along to old Dick’s cabin.” Everybody’d given up all attempts at looking busy or being not busy. Delia Alexander dropped her knitting. Desmond sat with his mouth open. Maggie was on the edge of her chair, a dangerous place for Maggie.

  “What he found when he got there exploded his superstition. What he found was a mine, with someone working it during the storm, blasting with black powder.”

  “Well, I’ll be!” Lloyd said, with his fingers in his mouth.

  “Go on, Benny, please don’t stop now,” said Cissy.

  “He saw the mine. It was hidden by an outhouse. The workings were down below. Mining in the park is illegal, of course, and so far the miner had managed to keep the secret to himself. So he decided to kill Aeneas. It was nothing personal; just good business. Our friend the miner isn’t a murderer by profession, remember. He’s not naturally callous. He’s not a hit-man. He probably didn’t intend that the body would be discovered so fast. That put the wind up him. He didn’t want Harry Glover running around asking questions. He’d been hoping for a crime that at best would be apprehended, snuck up on, come across. You know: Aeneas at first is ju
st missing; after several weeks it becomes more serious, but still not a federal case, because Aeneas was quite a loner with only his brother to worry about his absence.

  There’s another thing about our miner: he wasn’t the original miner. That was old Dick Berners, who hid his mining by pretending to still be prospecting. Berners was clever. He also had a soft spot for somebody who could take over the place for him once he got sick and knew he was going to die.

  “A few days after Aeneas’s body was found, I went up to Dick’s cabin and stumbled across the mine. That was the second interruption for the miner. He hit me, tied a weight to my leg, and dumped me into the lake. Luckily, I cut free of the weight and came up for air. When I visited the mine again, I came across the miner again. Only this time he was dead.”

  “Liar! Liar! Cut his tongue out!”

  “Maggie!”

  “George didn’t do it. George wouldn’t. Don’t listen to him! George is dead. He didn’t kill anybody.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Maggie. Not now. He had a larcenous streak in him, George did. You admitted that much to me. He was afraid because he was found out, Maggie. It’s not like he’d planned to do it from the beginning. It’s not like that other time.”

  “What?” The voice was high, like a plucked string. “What other time?”

  “I’m talking about another time, Maggie, and a time before that.” Maggie McCord slumped forward off her chair, upsetting the chair as she fell, so that it came down heavily on top of her large inert figure.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  It was Wednesday morning. Through the screen I could see Mike Harbison cutting the grass in front of my place. Joan was replacing the green skirting around the motel units. Mike was whistling and from time to time went over to confer about something with Joan. He never forgot to collect a kiss or hug on each of these trips. Closer to home, I was completely out of socks, and the refrigerator was as bare as a peeled grape, except for half a dozen pieces of no longer freshly-caught lake trout, a jar of mayonnaise, and an egg. I put the latter on to boil and remembered to take it off after thirty minutes or so. While it boiled, I saw Harry Glover roll up in his car. A police cruiser followed him into the spongy lot and the two familiar uniforms climbed out. Glover tilted his hat at Mike and Joan, then ambled up to my screen door. He looked in, shielding his face from the sun so he could see through to my domestic mess. I opened the door.