Right Church, Wrong Pew

by Walter Stewart

  The obvious response, because you haven’t got the brains God gave a golf cart, sprang to my lips, but died there. Quentin was dim, but bulgy, and it couldn’t all be fat.

  While he was calling the Ontario Provincial Police and letting the world know that a murder had been committed in a quaint little Ontario village where, until now, our idea of crime was the time the municipal clerk was caught using public stamps on his private correspondence, Hanson walked around the body a couple of times, looking thoughtful. He stirred the ground around a bit with a length of stick he always carried with him on his walks—“in case of dogs,” he said, but my personal opinion was that he substituted it for a swagger stick because it made him feel good.

  He didn’t find anything; in fact, the big discovery, when it came, was made by the Widow Golden, who was wandering around after Hanson, checking up on his technique, I guess.

  “Why Carlton,” she suddenly trilled, causing me to leap about six inches and bite my tongue, “this is addressed to you!”

  “This” turned out to be one of those offertory envelopes they use in church so you can crackle a five-dollar bill in your hand in full sight of the congregation before palming the five, substituting a one, and sealing it in the envelope. It was lying under a small bush that grows in the shelter of my front stoop, about a foot from Ernie’s body. Hanson’s swagger stick must have displaced it enough to catch Emma’s eye and sure enough, when Hanson steered the envelope out into the open with his stick—he automatically kept his fingers clear of what might turn out to be evidence—you could see, typed on it in capital letters, “Carlton L. Withers” staring up accusingly.

  “Hmm,” said Hanson, “I wonder what this is all about?”

  I wondered myself. Whatever it was, it was bound to mean grief for Carlton L. (for Lancelot, product of one of my mother’s bouts of re-reading romantic poetry) Withers.

  Emma immediately started speculating. “I thought you said Ernie hated your guts,” she said. “Why would he come sneaking around at night to bring you a letter? Did he want to make up?”

  “He didn’t, I don’t know, and I doubt it,” I replied, taking her questions in order.

  “Well, we’ll soon have a better idea, in any event,” put in Hanson, “the OPP should be here any minute.”

  Chapter 3

  However, it was close to an hour before the real cops, from the Ontario Provincial Police detachment just outside Silver Falls, arrived, springing Quarter to Three to go back to Silver Falls and spread his feet—and lies—all over town. Hanson searched around to the back of the cottage for footprints and so forth, while the Widow bustled off to make some coffee and Winston and I stared at the ground. There were two police in the OPP cruiser that rolled, inevitably, over my lawn: Sergeant Richard Moffitt and Constable Jack Jeffreys. Since the sergeant was built on the lines of a drinking straw and the constable on the lines of a fire hydrant, they remain in my memory as Mutt and Jeff. They didn’t know what to do, much more than Quentin—murder is not one of the summer festivities in the Kawartha Lakes—and were happy to take gently proffered advice from Hanson, whom they knew by reputation. At his suggestion, a line was strung up along the lawn, to hold back the swarming mobs of twenty people who turned up in response to some unseen tribal signal, in hopes of seeing me hauled off in manacles. Many photographs were taken of the body, by Mutt, the tall one, who produced a camera from the trunk of the car. He also produced a fingerprint set and dusted the handle of the weapon, and the envelope. He called for a coroner, using my phone, of course, and at no time offering to pay the thirty-cent toll to Silver Falls, and in due course up rolled Morton Armstrong, known to one and all as Morton the Morgue. One of those brisk, outspoken doctors, he dreams of the day he will make it into Reader’s Digest as an Unforgettable Character.

  He poked at Ernie and pronounced.

  “Dead.”

  A couple of minutes later, he produced the pin punch.

  “Murder weapon.”

  The cops were all over me, of course, when I explained about the pin punch and Dad’s collection. They didn’t actually say, “Aha!” but it trembled there, unspoken. I took them over to Dad’s workshop at the back of the garage, and ducked in to bring out the rest of the set. But it was gone. Vanished.

  “Aha!” said Sergeant Moffitt.

  “Now, gentlemen,” Hanson said, “if anything, the disappearance of the rest of the set—you’re absolutely sure it was here, Carlton?—” I nodded, dumbstruck, “—points away from this young man. He has been with a police officer since the body was reported, and you can easily check with Mrs. Golden on his story about the rest of the set being there.”

  This calmed down the cops, but not me. I never used my dad’s stuff, carpentry not being one of my strengths, but I had seen the set a few days ago. I had been looking for a screwdriver, with which to bang on the innards of my ancient Peugeot, Marchepas, an uncertain beast that will sometimes start if you hit the distributor cap a shrewd blow with a screwdriver. I hadn’t found a screwdriver, but I had found, and used, a pin punch. It hadn’t worked, but I knew the entire set had been on hand on that occasion. Now somebody had stolen it. But who? And when? And why?

  Hanson pointed out that the most likely possibility was that it had been stolen at the time of the murder.

  “But why?”

  “There is no way of knowing, at the moment,” Hanson said. “When we catch up to the killer, we can ask him.”

  He walked away to greet a couple of lugubrious-looking gents who turned up in an ambulance and, after a lot of backing and forthing and filling out papers and getting the cops to sign them, they carted Ernie away. Drove right over the lawn to get to him, too. I wondered if I could stiff the county for a few yards of sod when all this was over.

  Meanwhile, I paced back and forth around the lawn, went inside, got dressed, ate a bowl of cereal, and, when Jimmy Swart finally turned up with the Toronto paper, read that. I learned that the usual quota of unfortunates in foreign climes had come to harm at the hands of typhoons and tyranny overnight, but I had no sympathy to spare for them. There were perils closer at hand. I wandered outside to watch Hanson waving a dismissive farewell to the departing ambulance and when he turned and called out sharply, “Carlton!” I gave a convulsive leap and bit my tongue again. Hanson beckoned; I came; he opened the door to the cottage and we went in, Mutt and Jeff, then self, then Hanson, who seemed to have taken over the role of host.

  We sat down in the living room. Not at once, of course; first I had to remove the top seven layers of coats, books, old newspapers, dirty socks, and decaying pizza from the sofa and two chairs. I offered the officers a cup of coffee, but Jeff, after retrieving a mug from the floor, examining its layer of scum with a shudder, and returning it, declined on behalf of both officers.

  “Now, Carlton,” Hanson began, “as a newspaper man, you’ll understand that the officers here have a job to do, and I’m sure you’ll want to cooperate.”

  I didn’t, of course; but I made the conventional reply.

  “Good,” said Hanson. “Now, I have suggested to the sergeant here, and he has been good enough to agree, that, since this envelope Mrs. Golden found with Ernie was addressed to you, it might be as well if you open it.”

  “Can I do that? Isn’t that tampering with evidence, or something?”

  “I think not, in these circumstances,” said Hanson. “It has been dusted, and only appears to carry one clear set of fingerprints. I’m sure we’ll find they’re Ernie’s. If you just take it by the corner here, with a handkerchief, and open it carefully, without touching the paper directly with your fingers, I’m sure it will be all right. After all,” he added, “there may be an important clue here, or something that needs clearing up quickly.”

  Oh, I know, I know, I should have refused to touch the thing, and hollered for a lawyer. But it was obvious that the person in charge here was Hanson
, my friend and mentor, and if he said it was okay to open the envelope, I would open the envelope; just as, if he had said, “Take this knife and cut your throat,” I’d have taken the knife and cut my throat.

  Because my hands were shaking, it took me some time to worry the envelope open, and when I had accomplished the feat, I very nearly dropped the contents on the floor. I don’t know what I was expecting—a scrawled, accusatory note, perhaps, or a letter of apology for cluttering up my doorstep. What I drew out was a newspaper clipping which turned out to be the account of the crash that had killed my parents two years ago.

  Silently, I handed it across to Hanson, who said, “Harum, Hmph,” and handed it to Mutt, the police officer closest to him.

  “What is it?” asked Mutt.

  Hanson looked across at me, and when I didn’t say anything, he explained, “It’s a newspaper account of an accident between a car and a truck, two years ago. Carlton’s parents were killed in the crash.”

  Jeff chimed in, “I’ll bet it was some bloody drunk.”

  “Well, yes, actually, it was,” said Hanson.

  “Knew it,” said Jeff, “and I’ll bet they never caught the bugger.”

  “As a matter of fact, they did,” said Hanson. “It was Ernie Struthers.”

  Chapter 4

  I had never been in a police interrogation room before. I had been in the front office of the OPP station outside Silver Falls, picking up details on car accidents for the Lancer, but that was as far inside the place as I had ever been. I hadn’t missed much; the room I now found myself in was about ten feet by ten feet square, with one window, up high on the wall, three chairs, a table, and a lamp on the table. That was it. Not even a wastepaper basket. It smelled, a combination redolent of ancient hamburgers, stale coffee, cold sweat, and hot fear. About forty minutes after Hanson had dropped his bombshell in front of Mutt and Jeff, they had me in there and they were striving, successfully, to reduce me to whimpering terror.

  “You hated Ernie, didn’t you?”

  “Well, not exactly hated . . .”

  “He’d killed your parents, hadn’t he?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Loved him, did you?”

  “Well, no . . .”

  “Disliked him strongly?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Hated the bugger, in fact.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Good, now we’re getting somewhere. That was your father’s thingummy, wasn’t it?”

  “Pin punch.”

  “Your father’s pin punch, wasn’t it?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Part of a set?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Now the set is gone?”

  “Well, yes.”

  I kept thinking I should work out a substitute for well, yes, just for variety, but my mind didn’t seem to be connected to my tongue anymore, as first Mutt and then Jeff—both of them sat backwards on their chairs, just as on TV, maybe it’s a requirement—hammered questions at me.

  “The person most likely to take the set would be the killer, wouldn’t he?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “So, Ernie came to see you and you just opened the door and stabbed him, is that it?”

  “Well, no. I mean, no, nothing like that.”

  “Oh, I see. You met him somewhere else and stabbed him there?”

  “No, no.”

  “So, you stabbed him at your place?”

  “Yes. No. I didn’t stab him. Say,” the thought suddenly occurred to me, “was there a lot of blood around on my stoop?”

  Mutt looked at Jeff. Jeff looked at Mutt. Jeff, almost imperceptibly, shook his head.

  “Well, then, where was he killed?”

  “We’re checking on it. All we know for sure is that the weapon came from your place and the offertory envelope came from the Bosky Dell church.”

  I was impressed. Did they trace watermarks or something? “How do you know that?”

  “There’s a stamp on the back. It says, ‘The Church at Bosky Dell.’”

  I guess I missed that. Our church is non-denominational, which is very broad-minded of us. In the summertime, when it is busy, we have ministers from various faiths alternating, although our permanent cleric is an Anglican. My mother thought it sounded funny to call it just The Church at Bosky Dell. “It ought to be Saint Something,” she contended.

  “Sure,” said my father, “St. Farmer in the Dell.”

  “Anyway,” growled Mutt, “we know you killed Ernie Struthers, and we know why, and we know with what. Why don’t you save us all a lot of time and make a statement?”

  I was spared the necessity of a reply—thank God—by a commotion in the corridor outside the interrogation room, and in came the local OPP inspector, Fred Burgess—him, I knew; I did a profile on him when he was appointed to the job—and, hard on his heels, Hanson Eberley.

  “It’s okay, Carlton,” said Hanson. He nodded at Mutt and Jeff, just to let them know there were no hard feelings for what he was about to say. “The inspector here and I have had a little chat, and we have agreed that perhaps these gentlemen, in their commendable zeal to get to the bottom of this thing, may have skipped a few steps.”

  Jeff gave him a glare. “Such as?”

  “Such as instructing Mr. Withers as to his rights before beginning an interrogation, and giving him a chance to call a lawyer,” Hanson replied smoothly. “And such as explaining why Carlton, if he did the killing, would either stab Ernie elsewhere, such as up at the church, and then drag his body home, or just stab Ernie on his own doorstep and leave him there.”

  “Ah,” said Jeff.

  “Um,” said Mutt.

  Inspector Burgess didn’t say anything. He just looked at the cops, who suddenly jumped up.

  “Well, Mr. Withers, thank you for coming in,” said Jeff.

  “We appreciate your cooperation,” said Mutt.

  “Your voluntary cooperation . . .”

  “. . . and look forward to chatting with you again, when we have done some more investigating.”

  “Because, frankly,” said Mutt, with a genial smile, “we know bloody well you did it, but we haven’t worked out the details yet.”

  Jeff said that a statement based on our little chat would be ready for my signature later, and added a caution about not departing the district, or they would be forced to come and find me and jump all over me. I replied that I had no intention of departing the district. I told them I would be keeping a keen journalist’s eye on their future investigation, but they didn’t seem much impressed. Then Hanson and I got the hell out of there.

  My car was parked outside the cop shop. Hanson—who seldom drives, and doesn’t own a car—told me he had decided, after he dropped a brick in my living room, and the rozzers had scooped me up, that his best course was to drive in and talk to the inspector, whom he knew from the old days. No doubt they traded fingerprint sets at Christmas. So, he had turned the key in Marchepas—no, of course we don’t lock cars or put away keys in Bosky Dell—and, by golly, the engine had started, first time. Nervously—“I really hate driving,” he said—he had come in to spring me.

  We got in, I in the driver’s seat, Hanson beside me, but I didn’t turn the key, not quite yet. I asked Hanson, aggrievedly, whether it wouldn’t have been better just to let the cops find out in due course that it was Ernie who had killed my parents.

  “They probably wouldn’t have got me into jail until this afternoon,” I complained.

  “It was bound to come up sooner or later, Carlton. In fact, it’s better to have it out in the open now than to have that pair dig it up later.”

  I guessed that was probably true.

  “After all,” Hanson said, “it isn’t as if you ever threatened Ernie or anything. Did you?”

  “No
. Never. To tell you the truth, when my parents were killed, I was in such a state of shock, it didn’t occur to me to blame anybody. Ernie was a drunk. We all know that. He should never have been driving. But it wasn’t as if he deliberately set out to kill my parents. He could as easily have been killed himself, except that his truck was a lot tougher than my father’s Datsun. Hell, he and Dad liked each other, they were always stealing each other’s tools.”

  “So you never contemplated revenge?”

  “What was the point? I figured the law would take care of Ernie. When he only got three months in jail, I was angry, sure, but what good would six months, or six years, have done my parents?”

  “There is just the chance that a stiffer sentence for Ernie might have deterred others from driving drunk,” Hanson noted, mildly.

  “It might have. I doubt it, though. You read these stories, but do they stop drunk drivers? Besides, there was another thing . . .”

  “What’s that?”

  “You knew Dad. There wasn’t a mean bone in his body. Revenge wasn’t in him. It wouldn’t have been right for me to go after it.”

  “You’re right. Henry was a hollerer, but not a hater.”

  “Later on, I admit, when Ernie came into that money, I thought about suing him.”

  Ernie Struthers, for most of his career, stacked groceries in the Red and White store, and if he kept the peas off the corn shelves, considered that he had given good service. Then a rich and distant aunt, always the best kind, died, and for some reason, probably because she didn’t know Ernie, left him quite a lot of money. He bought himself a hardware store, since this was about the time Freddie Burnside, who owned one, was getting ready to retire. Ernest Struthers, wealthy hardware magnate, was considerably more tempting as a target for revenge than Ernie, grocery-stacker, and Hanson wanted to know why I hadn’t gone after him.

  “Same reason. Oh, I thought about it. As you know, he didn’t have any insurance, and all I got was a token payment from the Unsatisfied Judgment Fund, about enough to bury my parents, and not much more. So, I thought, when Ernie came into that money, I thought, maybe I’ll sue the bugger and see how he likes it.”