“Well, you should have seen Bunny! He stood there with his mouth open, and he looked like a little boy that didn’t hold his hand up soon enough in school. So he turned to me and said, ‘How do you like that, Rick? My old pal! What would you do if some old teammate of yours gave you that stuff?’ I told him in my business the first thing you had to learn was the difference between the rear end of a horse and the rear end of a truck, and that made him laugh, so away he went. So then I fixed the fuel pump and that was it.
“Anyway, Mr. Beattie had said to phone him if ever I remembered anything, so I did, and he was so pleased he slipped me a twenty. I told him to forget it, but he shoved it in the pocket of my dungarees. Only I couldn’t remember the last name of this Bunny, although I serviced his Olds quite a bit. Mr. Beattie said would I find out the next time the guy came in, and phone him, but don’t tell this Bunny that anyone was asking. He said he was trying to track down this dame, but she’d gone off to Europe or something, and maybe he could find out about her from the guy.
“So next time Bunny came in, I took down the name and address from his credit card and called Mr. Beattie, and I’m telling you, he was a great sport and a big spender. He came down and gave me fifty—which made eighty bucks in all—for nothin’!”
“And can you remember Bunny’s name now?” Sidney asked anxiously.
“Sure. Now I can. Peter L. Mayhew. Lives out in Scarborough. Now, do you mind telling me what this is all about?”
“Do you mind very much if I don’t?” Sidney said. “I mean, you’ve been very good, and I hate to give you the brush, but the thing may be dynamite.”
“I get it,” Phelan said. “Well, I’d sure like to know—I mean this Mr. Beattie was a real nice guy, but…”
“Well, one of these days, if I ever find out the whole story, I’ll tell you,” Sidney said. “Meantime all I can say is thanks a lot, Rick.”
“That’s okay, that’s okay,” Phelan said. “I get the message.”
“Georgie dear,” Sidney Grant greeted his secretary on Monday morning. “We’ve got hold of something very, very curious. And where it leads to I couldn’t guess.”
“Have you found Mrs. Leduc?” she asked.
“No ma’am. But this I have discovered. Wes Beattie, who is awaiting trial for murder, has a fantastic story about being the victim of a conspiracy. He claims that his Uncle Edgar, at the time he was murdered, was trying to find this Mrs. Leduc, who had once given evidence against him. And he claimed that Mrs. Leduc had vanished. Well, I have now discovered that Uncle Edgar was trying to find the lady and was spending cash on the search. He was really anxious to find her. Nobody believes a word Wes says—but I’ve proved that two of his claims are true.
“He also says that, when Uncle Edgar got close to the quarry, somebody called him up and warned him to lay off—or else. Maybe that was true as well.”
“Will this have any bearing on the murder charge?” Miss Semple asked.
“That is another matter,” Sidney said. “They have some pretty solid evidence that would require a lot of shaking. Fingerprints on a telephone. But the suggestion that there was some sort of conspiracy might stir things up a bit. Meanwhile, would you please look up one Peter L. Mayhew in the city directory and find out where his office is?”
Peter L. Mayhew proved to be one of the fifteen vice-presidents in a large advertising agency, and, before heading for the magistrate’s court, Sidney ran him to earth behind a desk which consisted simply of a huge sheet of thick plate glass mounted on wrought-iron legs.
Mayhew was fair, with long blond lashes and a thin blond mustache. He wore an expression of amused disdain, and there was an irritating superiority in his speech. “Precisely how can I serve you, Mr. Grant?” he asked.
Sidney outlined the incident at Mac’s Garage, as related by Rick Phelan and watched closely at the caution which crept into Mayhew’s features as the tale proceeded. When Sidney had finished, Mayhew got up and poured himself a glass of water from a thermos jug on a table behind him.
“Well?” he said.
“Well,” Sidney said, “all I want to know is who was this old pal who snubbed you so royally?”
Mayhew laughed lightly. “Nobody,” he said. “There was no such incident. This mechanic fellow must have a vivid imagination. Send him around and I’ll give him a job in our copy department. We need guys with creative imagination.”
“You can’t remember the incident?”
“No,” Mayhew said, “and for the very good reason that it never took place. Look, old boy, if any old chum cut me dead, I’d remember, because under this tough, cynical exterior I am really a very sensitive guy. Was there anything else?”
“Yes,” Sidney said. “Is that what you told Edgar Beattie when he came here to ask you about it?”
“Edgar Beattie? Who is Edgar Beattie?”
“A man who came here to ask you about that nonexistent incident,” Sidney said.
“Nobody ever came here, I tell you,” Mayhew said, the bantering tone yielding to a touch of asperity. “Who is this fellow?”
“Oh, come, you haven’t heard of Edgar Beattie?” Sidney said. “Get with it.”
“Oh, you mean the man who was murdered by his nephew?” Bunny Mayhew said. “Yes, of course I’ve heard about him, but I never had the ineffable pleasure of making his acquaintance. Now, if you don’t mind, I have the odd spot of work to do…”
“Thank you so much for your trouble, Mr. Mayhew,” Sidney said.
Lunch that day for Sidney Grant consisted of a chicken salad sandwich and a cup of coffee, consumed at his desk, after a frantic morning in court defending various characters of the minor underworld.
“It’s true, Miss Semple, it’s true,” he said between bites. “Someone did call Edgar Beattie and tell him to lay off. I’d be prepared to bet heavily on it. Our friend Mr. Mayhew called Mrs. Leduc’s boyfriend, and the boyfriend called Edgar. And now, by golly, I am going to find the boyfriend and see what he has to say about it.”
“How can you find him?” Miss Semple asked.
“There is a magazine about ad agency people and such like,” Sidney said. “I think it’s called Marketing. I’ll bet they have biography files about important people in the ad game, although I don’t know if they’d go as low as agency vice-presidents. Anyway, call them up and find out if they’ve got a file on Mayhew. If so, find out what school he went to. What high school, that is. I’ve got an idea.”
While Sidney finished his coffee, Miss Semple returned to her desk and made the call. She came back with the information neatly written on a slip of paper. “He went to Annette Street Public School and Humberside Collegiate Institute,” she said. “Right here in the city.”
“Good,” he said. “Well, I’ve already spent a lot of time on this thing, and now I’m going to invest in a cab fare to Humberside for a little historical research. This is a luxury I’m going to allow myself, so, if you will just mind the shop, I’ll be on my way.”
The school authorities were polite and helpful. The secretary directed Sidney to the library, where the librarian armed him with half a dozen back copies of Hermes, the school yearbook, covering the years 1938 to 1943.
Sidney sat down at a long table, where he worked with curious teenagers trying to peer over his shoulder. Each yearbook was crammed with group photographs of teams, and it did not take long to find a hockey-team picture with P. (Bunny) Mayhew in the rear row. Mayhew also appeared with the junior team of the previous year.
Sidney carefully listed the players on both teams. After all, according to Phelan, Mayhew had more or less described the man at the garage as an old teammate. “What would you do if an old teammate gave you that stuff?” or words to that effect. After duplications had been removed, there were fourteen names on the list. A list of war casualties in a later yearbook further reduced the number.
Sidney looked at the short list for several minutes, scratching the whiskers on his chin with his left hand as h
e did. All that was necessary really was to seize Mayhew, tie him to a polygraph lie detector and read the names to him, but there were obstacles in the way of such a bold scheme. As he stared at the names before him, an idea began to flicker in the back of his head, and the familiar satanic grin slowly spread over his face.
Sidney reached into the briefcase on the floor beside him and pulled out the mining convention program which Mrs. Ledley had given him. Patiently, painstakingly, he went down the columns of names, checking the high school hockey players against the mining people. And then, suddenly, he had it.
But although he had found a duplication, his lawyer’s training forced him to continue with the job until he had checked out all the names, to make sure that there weren’t two duplications.
But there was only one. Howie Gadwell had been a defenseman on the Humberside hockey team; Howard G. Gadwell, listed as a “broker-dealer,” had been a registered guest at the mining convention.
It was just after five o’clock when a taxi delivered Sidney Grant in a high state of excitement at the building where Bunny Mayhew had his office.
“I thought we had finished our business,” Mayhew said coldly.
“How wrong you were!” Sidney said. “Mister Mayhew, you told me a big, fat fib, and don’t attempt to deny it. I’ve got a good mind to tell your mother.”
“Look, before I get mad, I’d advise you to get the hell out of here,” Mayhew said.
“Presently, presently,” Sidney said. “But first, why didn’t you want to tell me that it was Howard Gadwell who snubbed you at Mac’s Garage?”
No polygraph was needed to chart Mayhew’s reaction. “You’re nuts!” he yelled.
“And after Edgar Beattie came to see you, you called Gadwell and warned him that a gent was looking for him, didn’t you?”
“Get the hell out of here, you…”
“Easy boy! And did you call Gadwell again today and warn him that I was looking for him?”
“Look,” Mayhew said, “I told you this morning that there was never any such incident as you described. Now if you want to barge in here and start calling me a liar, you’d better be prepared to take the consequences.”
“I’m all prepared,” Sidney said. “I’m on my way to see Gadwell to tell him that you gave me his name, and you can try to convince him that you didn’t.”
“Do what you damn well please, but get out of here,” Mayhew almost screamed.
“As you say. I’m on my way to Gadwell,” Sidney said.
He had his hand on the door when Mayhew called him back, and when Sidney turned around, he found that Mayhew had positively shrunk. “Okay, you win,” Mayhew said. “I’d just as soon you didn’t go to Gadwell. It was him, all right. Now tell me what it’s all about.”
“He was with a lady at the garage,” Sidney said.
“Sure. Quite a dish,” Mayhew said. “Then this burly character came in here, and naturally I took him for a jealous husband.”
“Naturally,” Sidney said, barely suppressing a smile.
“So I stalled him off. I said I couldn’t remember meeting anyone at Mac’s. Then I phoned Howie Gadwell and warned him. I said I didn’t think much of the way he snubbed his old friends, but all the same, no matter how they act, you’ve got to stand by your old friends. But in the paper it said this Beattie had been divorced for years.”
“What was Gadwell’s attitude?” Sidney said.
“Damned rude, actually. He told me it was a good thing for me that I’d kept my mouth shut, and if I valued my health I’d better still keep it shut. Well, then I really let him have it. I said he could be damn well grateful and he’d better lay off that tough talk, so he took the other tack and got all old palsy. He said this dame was dynamite, so please keep quiet, and he’d give me some free shares of some Moose Pasture stock he was promoting.
“Well, when I saw in the paper that Beattie had been murdered, I was pretty scared—I want no part of that stuff. So when I saw that this nephew had murdered him, I was a pretty relieved boy.”
“I guess you were,” Sidney said. “And now, if you’ll give me a rundown on Gadwell, I’ll go away and leave you alone. But don’t tell him I was asking, if you don’t mind.”
“Don’t worry—I won’t,” Mayhew said. “What do you want to know?”
“All I can find out about Gadwell—business connections and all that. Love life, et cetera,” Sidney said.
“Well, in business, Howie is a sort of minor wheel,” Mayhew said. “He owns pieces of things. Radio stations, a commercial film company, a night club. He started out as a phony stock promoter. He operated a boiler room—you know, a room where about twenty salesmen sit phoning to suckers all over the continent, pushing these mining stocks. He’s been in trouble with the SEC in the States, and with the Stock Exchange and the Ontario Government securities people here. I haven’t met him for years—except that once—but I’ve sort of followed his career.”
“What about women?” Sidney asked.
“Gosh, I haven’t got all night,” Mayhew said. “His women are innumerable. He’s been married about four times, but after his last divorce I think he learned his lesson. He likes girls. And he has this approach, you know; with his studio making TV commercials and all, they say any girl can get a bit to play if she approaches High Grade Howie the right way—like without her clothes. One of his earlier wives was Sharon Willison, the TV singer.”
“Did you recognize the girl he was with at Mac’s Garage?”
“No, never saw her, but she was quite a dish,” Mayhew said. He was a very different man from the superior being who had first welcomed Sidney Grant in the morning, and seemed only too pleased to appease his interrogator in any way he could.
During the days that followed, Sidney Grant did a lot more checking on Howard Gadwell, but he avoided the direct approach. He went back to Mrs. Ledley, who did not know Gadwell, but met her husband, who did. From Mr. Ledley he obtained the names of mining people who knew Gadwell and disliked him—it was a goodly list—and whenever he had a spare minute, he called on them and asked the same question: Who was Howard Gadwell keeping company with at the mining convention last May?
Some of the men were evasive, and some didn’t know, but in due course Sidney came upon a mining engineer with an office on Bay Street who knew and was willing to tell. The engineer’s name was Val Eckhardt, and he was a big man with a bald dome and a craglike jaw.
“Sure I know who High Grade Howie’s girlfriend was,” Eckhardt said. “She was the wife of a fellow I know. A geologist from the Kansas School of Mines, and a very nice guy. He brought his wife down to Toronto from northern Quebec for the convention, and she promptly fell for Gadwell.”
“And the name?” Sidney said.
“The guy’s name is Wicklow, Tex Wicklow, he’s called. I don’t know the wife’s name. Someone he met in Montreal, I believe.”
“Do you know,” Sidney asked, “if she was an old flame of Gadwell’s, or if this was a sudden blooming of love?”
“I couldn’t be sure, but I’ve got an idea they’d met before, and she just decided that Gadwell was the playmate she needed for this week in Toronto.”
“Well, that would explain some things,” Sidney said. “So Wicklow was busy around this convention, and his wife would be able to slip away to a motel for a few hours of bliss with Gadwell.”
“Why slip away?” Eckhardt said. “She had a nice suite all to herself at the hotel.”
“All to herself?”
“Sure. You see, the first night of this convention there was a warm-up cocktail party, and around eleven Brother Gadwell scooped up six or eight guests and took them for dinner to the Rathskeller, just across Front Street from the hotel. I wasn’t in on the party, but I saw it—I was at a nearby table. Madame Wicklow was fairly high and throwing herself all over Gadwell, while poor Tex tried to ignore it and got quietly loaded. On the way back Tex fell behind the main party, and managed to stagger in front of a fastmoving cab.
They rushed him to St. Michael’s Hospital unconscious, with a suspected skull fracture, and he spent the next ten days being looked after by nuns, just as a contrast to his normal female companionship. Well, his good lady didn’t even break stride. She just whooped it up for the rest of the week with High Grade Howie, who was looking pretty prosperous at the time.”
“Then there was absolutely no need for them to slip away anywhere else?”
“No—they had a very cozy setup,” Eckhardt said.
Eckhardt thought that Wicklow was working at a drill site in far northern Quebec and managed to confirm the fact by means of a telephone call. “They push the drills down into the hard rock, fifteen hundred, two thousand feet,” Eckhardt said. “The shaft of the drill is made of hollow pipes, and when they drill a section, they pull up the pipe and take out the hard rock core. Wicklow’s job is to examine the drill cores and figure the mineral content. He wouldn’t have his wife with him up there—they stake their wives out in Rouyn or Amos, or even Montreal or Toronto.”
Getting in touch with Wicklow proved to be difficult. His drill site had two-way radio connections with the air base at Senneterre, Quebec, but mails were slow and irregular. Ken Ledley, when the problem was put to him, suggested that Sidney fly up and interview Wicklow on the spot.
“A nice idea,” Sidney said. “But this little investigation is my own. Nobody is paying me, and I just can’t afford the time, let alone the money.”
“Well, you seem to have some bug in your head about this,” Ledley said. “And I’m kind of curious about why somebody would steal my wife’s driver’s license. I’ll bet I can fix it to fly you up there at the company’s expense—not my company, but the owner of the mining property.”
“How could you work that?” Sidney asked.
“Oh, hell, there are always legal problems,” Ledley said. “You aren’t a member of the Quebec bar, but there are bound to be papers that have to be notarized or something of the sort. If you put your fee high enough, they’ll jump at it. Just leave it to me.”
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