“I’ll try to make the time,” I said.
“He says the locals seem to talk readily to you . . .”
“The journalist’s training,” I interposed.
“. . . because, at least until now, they have always considered you harmless.”
Mrs. Post jumped in, “So the proposal is that you would make notes on how the investigation is proceeding from Staff Inspector Eberley’s point of view, and if he manages to crack the case . . .”
“We get a world exclusive,” crowed Tommy. “If you don’t, or if anything embarrassing comes out, why, we just dump you.”
I said, of course, that I would be delighted to work with Hanson, I had every confidence in Hanson, and I knew he would see me returned to my former high position in the community.
This drew a quizzical glance from Mrs. Post, who didn’t think much of my position in the community, and who still wasn’t convinced that this was a good idea.
“The Silver Falls Lancer has a certain position in this town,” she said, “a certain reputation.”
This was unchallenged. I have already indicated that we were not famous for our robust reporting. There was the time a city alderman, driving home after a Friday night spent at the legion hall trying to answer that age-old question, is it possible to chug-a-lug twenty-one glasses of beer within five minutes and not throw up (the answer is no), took a shortcut between William and Main Streets via the front window of Elder’s soft goods store. He was extracted from the wreckage by his brother-in-law, then second in command of the local constabulary. The accident was put down to “Sudden acceleration of the vehicle in question due to causes unknown.” That was the wording on the Occurrence Sheet. There were those bold enough to wonder whether the matter should have been pursued further, but none of them worked at the Lancer. Other newspapers take mottoes like, “Truth Above All”; our is, “Curiosity Killed the Cat.”
Mrs. Post didn’t want to see us turning into one of those sensational newspapers, like the ones they have in Toronto, New York, London, and other barbarian capitals, but Tommy was able to persuade her that he would exercise rigorous control over the entire operation and that, at the first sign that anything was going wrong, he would, as he put it—unnecessarily, in my view—kick Carlton’s butt out the door.
Mrs. Post took comfort in this. I did not. She gave the enterprise her blessing. So did I. I told Tommy that, in the circumstances, I would be happy to devote my full energies to the pursuit of this story, which would mean, of course, setting aside all other work. Billy Haldane, our junior reporter, could take up the torch, I said.
Tommy gave me one of his looks. “This is not a charitable organization,” he said, one of his favourite lines, although I have never heard anyone, anywhere, make such an assumption. “You can do the other stuff in your spare time.”
“By the way,” he added, “we’ve hired a full-time photographer for a couple of weeks. Just to see how it works, since your pictures are always so lousy. Take her over to the Rotarians with you tonight.”
I sighed and got up to leave. Tommy spoke again.
“Oh, this murder thing. I don’t think you did it, Withers, and I expect you’ll be found innocent. I certainly hope so.”
I murmured a thank you.
“Because if you aren’t, it wouldn’t reflect well on the paper. I wonder,” he was saying as I left, “if we could fire you retroactively, and wash our hands of the whole thing?”
Chapter 6
The Rotarians hold their bunfights in the Ye Olde England Room of the Dominion Hotel. There was a slight mix-up at the door, when I arrived with Hanna Klovack in tow at 7 p.m.
“What is this?” Frank Oakley, the sergeant-at-arms, wanted to know, and I was thinking that if he didn’t recognize a female human being, we were in for a lot of tedious explanations, but then Hanna held up her camera, and we were ushered to the press table. It was not so much a table, really, as a couple of places at one of the eight-person tables set up for the dinner.
The usual performance followed. There were club announcements, and a lot of fun stuff where they fine members and visitors for various things. Marvin Swack was fined fifty cents for having his picture in the Lancer last week (not that anyone recognized it; this was one of my efforts, so we very prudently put Marvin’s name under it, so that people could see that it was not, as might be supposed, a photograph of streptococci dancing in the dark). Henry Roper was fined for sitting at the same table as his best friend, Colin Starnes, and I was fined for bringing a visitor, and Hanna was fined for being a visitor, and then she was fined again for being a girl (much whistling and laughter from the rubes). I paid this second fine, hastily, because I could see that Hanna was seething with rebellion, and I didn’t want a scene.
“The money all goes to a good cause,” I told her, “retarded children.”
“I can see that,” Hanna replied.
We ate dinner—rubber chicken, plastic peas, and fossilized mashed potatoes swimming in grey gravy—and then the president rose to introduce Orville Sacks, our MPP and a man who needed, the president said, no introduction. He then proceeded to give him one full of the ripest tripe you will find this side of an abattoir. This cleared the stage for Orville to lurch to his feet, wave grandly to his pals, burp twice, and then launch into about thirty minutes of oratory. He hammered the Liberal party which was, he wanted us to know, the most scandal-ridden bunch of slackers God ever strung guts in, a scurvy collection of knaves who would, unless we dismissed them at once and replaced them with the sterling, four-square, God-fearing representatives of the Conservative cause, undoubtedly drag this once-great province down the tubes within a twelve-month. All good stuff, if somewhat familiar; there was no need for me to make notes as he went along. It was the refrain as before.
Hanna got up and unlimbered her flash and fired off a few shots—Larry Beaminister, the high school principal, sound asleep with his mouth open, Harvey Menzies picking his nose, Orville, in a pause from his labours, ostentatiously ogling Hanna. She also captured the great man waving his arms and thrashing the wicked Grits, and then she came back to the table and whispered in my ear.
“Hey, didn’t you tell me that Sacks was the local MPP?”
“Certainly. He would never admit it if it couldn’t be proved against him.”
“But isn’t this a Liberal riding?” The girl had obviously taken in something from those back issues of the Lancer.
“Yup.”
“But then, isn’t he attacking his own party? Holy cow, you’ve got a great story here, why aren’t you making notes?”
I saw that a word of explanation was required. “For about the first forty years of his life as a politician, Orville was a Tory, and they re-elected him, regular as clockwork. Then he got into some sort of scandal too odiferous even for the Tories, so they dumped him, and he became a Liberal. By this time, people were so used to voting for Orville that they sent him back to Toronto as a Liberal. Tommy Macklin used to say that as long as we got him out of here, it didn’t matter what they called him in Toronto.”
“Then why is he attacking the Liberals?”
“I was just coming to that. Whenever he’s had a few, and you will agree with me that Orville is in a somewhat liquid state of mind right now, he reverts to his old habits, so, when you shove a microphone in front of him, he attacks the Grits.”
“Still, it makes a good story.”
“Not bad, a few paras on page one, with a picture, and a modest turn.”
“You mean the local MPP attacking his own party doesn’t rate the black line?”
I raised the Withers eyebrow. “Oh, we don’t put that part in. Wherever he says ‘Liberal,’ we change it to ‘Conservative,’ and vice versa, until it comes out right. We always,” I added, making it clear to the meanest intelligence, “support the party that hands out printing contracts.”
“
Dear God,” Hanna muttered, “and I thought I was coming back to the simple virtues.”
We were getting a few frowns from the head table by this time, so I very courteously asked Hanna to stuff a cork in it before the sergeant-at-arms came along and grasped her by the nape of the neck and the slack of the pants—not that there was much slack to her pants—and chucked her out the door. The chairman’s thank you to Orville for what had certainly been an insightful and thought-provoking discourse concluded the festivities, and we headed for the door.
Lying in wait for us just inside the exit was Harry Franklin, one of my neighbours from Bosky Dell, looking a bit sheepish. He is not a Rotarian, and I guess he felt a little out of place.
“Carlton,” he hissed, “need a word with you.”
He drew me to one side, while Hanna stood by, tapping her foot and registering impatience.
“That business with Ernie Struthers,” said Harry.
“Yes, Harry?”
There was a pause.
“Well, Harry?”
“I, uh, understand he was found at your place.”
“You understand correctly.”
“And they think you did it.”
“That is one of the opinions going around, yes.”
“Do you think it’s possible that somebody stabbed him up at the church, and then took the body down to your place?”
“We don’t yet know where he was stabbed . . .”
“Well, listen to this,” said Harry, and he went on to explain that, as one of our little group of church wardens, he had gone into the church this morning, to make sure everything was ready for Ladies’ Choral Practice, one of the large entertainments held weekly at the church.
“I was just picking up some cigarette butts from one of the box pews—you know how the kids sneak in there and smoke, Carlton . . .”
Indeed I did; used to do it myself, matter of fact. Cigarettes seemed to taste better, somehow, in light of the knowledge that at any moment a lightning bolt from on high might bring the puffing to an abrupt halt.
“. . . and I was just going into the Flannery box to check for butts, when I noticed there was something dark on the bench.”
He paused, to give it dramatic effect, “It was Ernie Struthers’s hat. It had his name in it.”
“But Ernie doesn’t even go to church.”
“Exactly. But he must have been there for some reason, and that might have been when he met the murderer and got himself killed.”
“Was there any blood around?”
“Nope. I guess the killer could have cleaned it up.”
“Cleaned up the blood and left behind the hat? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Maybe he heard somebody coming. I don’t know. Anyway, that hat definitely wasn’t there yesterday morning, because I was in checking things out after the church committee meeting. But it was there this morning. So Ernie was there in the meantime.”
“What did you do with the hat? Did you give it to the cops?”
“Be sensible, Carlton. I didn’t know about the murder at that point. I took it around to Ephraim Wylie’s this afternoon.”
Ephraim Wylie, locally known as Ephraim of the Angels, was our permanent, Anglican minister. A gentle, broad-minded soul, he always presided gracefully over his heterogeneous congregation.
“He told me about Ernie being killed, and he told me that Emma Golden had told him that Hanson Eberley was working on the case. I went straight over to Hanson’s place, and gave him the hat. He said he would call the cops right away. He also said that I should tell you about it, he said it would cheer you up. So, when you weren’t at home, I went to the newspaper after dinner, and they told me I could find you here.”
I thanked Harry, but he said it was “no big deal. The wife and I were coming to town for the movie, anyway.”
So Ernie had been at the church last night at some point, apparently, though it didn’t follow that he had been killed there. But if he had been, and we could find the evidence to show it, that seemed to point away from me—I mean, why should I have gone to all that bother of lugging him home? But, on the other hand, the cops had no other suspect, and, knowing the cop mentality, that meant I was far from in the clear.
I said good night to Harry Franklin and joined Hanna.
“What was that all about?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“Well, nuts to you, too,” she said, and banged out the door. Right into a teeming downpour. The local farmers, who had been crabbing about the lack of moisture for their crops, were about to get their just deserts. Hanna broke into a trot, then a run, shielding her camera with one hand. I passed her at the corner of Clarence and Lindsay, but she caught up to me again—younger legs—just as we arrived in front of the Lancer building. I very courteously started to open the door for her, when a large gentleman—when I say large, think of a bus, upended and walking on two feet—emerged from a Cadillac Fleetwood Special parked at the curb, and squelched across the wet sidewalk, with one massive hand in the air in a halting motion. I halted.
“You Carlton Withers?” he asked.
One of my fans, no doubt. “That’s me,” I said.
“Then this is for you,” he said, and balling up the massive fist, hit me between the eyes. Upon which, I decided, like Johnnie Armstrong in the poem, that I would lay me down for to bleed a while, then rise and fight again.
Chapter 7
I awoke on the couch in Tommy Macklin’s office, with a headache and a general sense of grievance. There was light slanting in the window—Tommy gets a view—indicating that I must have spent the night here, and that the clouds, as well as a goodly number of hours, had rolled by. Hanna was hovering, and even Tommy looked a trifle worried. The man—I can read him like a book—was concerned that I was sleeping on company time. It was after 9 a.m.
“You okay?” This from Hanna.
“As well as can be expected when I’ve had a mountain fall on me. That was a mountain, wasn’t it?”
“If it was, it was one of the faster-moving mountains. I took a swing at him with my camera bag”—she probably did, too, the girl has no sense—“but he jumped back in the car and they took off. I came and got Tommy, and he got a couple of the boys in the prints hop to lug you up here. Tommy said there was no need to call a doctor . . .”
Tommy was no doubt terrified that this would get written down as a work-related incident, and thus require worker’s compensation, and the filling out of forms.
“. . . so he said we should just let you sleep it off. When you started to snore, I decided he was right, so we left you for the night. Sure you’re okay?”
I clutched my head and groaned. A little sympathy and soothing, I reckoned, would go well.
“Yeah, you’re okay,” Hanna pronounced heartlessly. “You’ll feel even better when I tell you I got a picture of the car, with licence. Good thing I still had the flash on my camera. We can identify the buggers.”
I looked at Tommy. Tommy looked at me. I looked at the ceiling. Tommy twiddled with his moustache, a growth which, popular rumour has it, supports an entire family of mice.
“That won’t be necessary,” Tommy said. “We already know who they are. Dominic Silvio’s boys.”
“How do you know that?”
I explained. “This is not Toronto. There is only one Cadillac Fleetwood Special in town. It belongs to Dominic Silvio.”
“And who is Dominic Silvio?”
“Local developer. Pillar of the community and all that, but his aides are sometimes a touch impulsive.”
“He is also,” put in Tommy, “one of our major advertisers.” He went on in an aggrieved tone, “What the hell have you been doing, Carlton, to upset a major advertiser?”
“Nothing, not a thing, I swear.” Nor had I, upsetting major advertisers who control their own goon
squads is foreign to my policy. I was just explaining this when Hanna, running her hands through her hair, said in scornful tones that if we were going to take up a collection on behalf of the thug’s bruised hand, we could leave her out of it. She was going to print her stuff from the Rotary dinner. She left.
“Testy wench,” said Tommy, and I had to agree with him. Actually, I always have to agree with him, but this time I really did.
“Great set of lungs, though,” added Tommy. “Well, enough of this crap,” he went on, ever the gracious host. “I’m not paying you to hold down a couch. Get the hell out of my office and file the Sacks story. Give me about eight inches, and none of your smart-ass stuff.”
So I did that. Then, feeling in need of breakfast, I decided to forgo the roach poison that passes for coffee in the Lancer newsroom, and drive up the street to the O.K. Café. It would be nice to chew the fat with Silver Falls’s premier tourist attraction, Belinda Huntingdon.
When I went down to the car, it wouldn’t start, of course. I am the only man I know who, when he takes a girl out for a drive and tells her he has to pull over and park in a shady nook because the car suddenly won’t go, is telling the truth. Alas, it costs so much to keep Marchepas on the road, even part of the time, that I can never afford to replace her. When she decides to sign off, I just hoof it until, as usually happens, she decides on her own, and without prompting, to go again.
Last night’s downpour had presumably dampened her drive shaft, or something, and she was going to sulk. I walked the six blocks up Main Street to the O.K. Café, and fought my way to the counter, where panting hordes were hanging out and trying to peer down Belinda Huntingdon’s blouse.
“Morning, Fathead.”
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