“Morning, Scribbler.”
“Poisoned any customers lately?”
“No more than usual. Written any lies lately?”
“No more than usual.”
I hope you’re impressed. By the crisp dialogue, I mean, the easy backchat with a girl who, as I have already indicated, ranks among the Top Ten in pulchritude. No, I lie. Make it the Top Five. Belinda is tall, with long, blonde hair and a curvesome body. S.J. Perelman, that exacting stylist, once described a girl emerging onto the boat deck of a cruise ship in a stiff wind: “Eyeballs popped like champagne corks, and strong men sobbed aloud.” When I tell you that Belinda could produce the same effect on land, in a flat calm, you will see what I mean.
She is not brilliant and, indeed, she has about half an ounce more brains than a pop-up toaster. This is not a negative factor, locally. My recent inamorata, Mildred Tilbury, for example, would be hard put to hold her own in a battle of wits with a dustball, but that didn’t prevent us from engaging in a friendly grapple on Friday nights in the back seat of Marchepas. When I had lost Mildred about three weeks earlier, it was not because of my demands on her intellect, but because she fell prey to the charms of Willie Tempest, an adenoidal clothhead whose magnetic qualities include slicked-back hair, an out-of-tune guitar, and a Can-Am sports car that starts every time. (So, to be fair about it, does Mildred.) In local terms, Belinda has it all, and displays quite a bit of it daily, in décolleté blouses provided expressly for the purpose by the management, down at the O.K. Café. She is no teenager, our Belinda, but, perhaps because she has never known a moment’s worry or a second’s twinge of conscience, she looks as fresh and blooming as she did a decade ago. The O.K. does a roaring business, most of it among the male populace, even though Belinda, comme chef, is no great performer. It is not her hamburgers that draw the men and boys up to her counter; they come more to feast the eye than the body. Indeed, I have known Tommy Macklin to order four frosted malts in a row, just for the jiggling, and throw them all out.
Belinda and I grew up together. Not in the same house, but as near as makes no never mind. Her father, Foster Huntingdon, is a farmer, with a hundred acres of mixed farmland on the outskirts of Bosky Dell. In fact, the village was carved, back in the nineteenth century, out of the king’s grant that became the Huntingdon farm. The first day I went to school, I shared a hard bench on the school bus with Belinda, and a skinny, sorry-looking little rat she was, in those days. We were the first picked up and the last dropped, every day. It forms a bond. From the very start, I could talk to Belinda and she could talk to me. That very first day at school, when we were sitting on the floor in a circle playing some idiotic game—Mrs. Smith Goes Shopping, I think it was—Millicent Bridges, the well-known loudmouth, suddenly began to bellow, in that joyous, accusatory voice of childhood, “Belinda wet her pa-ants, Belinda wet her pa-ants,” and all the other little thugs shunned Belinda. Not me. Hers was not an unusual crime—not unusual to me, anyway—and I couldn’t believe that one schoolroom accident indicated blackness of soul.
So we became fast friends, but not, you know, friends. We were, and remained, buddies, even when Belinda grew, and rounded, and all the other boys began to breathe heavily whenever she walked by. Oh, once, when we were about fourteen, I made a grab at Belinda, but she just smacked me and said, “Oh, Carlton, for heaven’s sake, don’t be silly.” The flame went out. We are more like a brother and sister than most brothers and sisters—who seem to spend much of their time fighting. When, in Grade Nine, “Fingers” Gerlack, who taught geometry and also took the after-school detentions, began to hang around Belinda, radiating lust from every pore, I made sure that she never, ever was allowed to endure a detention alone with Mr. Gerlack. One time, it meant throwing out a term paper I had done, and drawing four detentions in a row. It was worth it. In return, on the notable occasion when Mary Farnsworth told a goggling gaggle of females at a slumber party that I had once attempted to thrust my hand up her sweater, Belinda socked her one, thus vindicating my good name, even though the charge was true as stated.
When she was fifteen, Belinda lost her virtue to Stephen Swackhammer, her father’s hired hand. She gave it up without regret and indeed, I gathered from her telling, with enthusiasm, even though Stephen, she reported, had the coldest hands this side of Lapland. Three years later, she ran off to Toronto with a TV producer who came up to Bosky Dell to make a documentary on the joys of rural life and found most of them in the person of Belinda. That didn’t last long. They lived in a swank Toronto apartment, but he wanted to talk about the soul and art, while Belinda’s conversational specialties are make-up and clothes, so she came back to Bosky Dell, and pretty soon she landed the job at the O.K. in Silver Falls, where she has been ever since, burning toast and libidos. She was living, at this time, with an amiable gent from Thunder Bay, working in the area on a construction project, but I continued to be her—and she my—best friend, confidant, and ally. Nothing had happened, officially, in my life, until Belinda had been told about it.
So, as the morning coffee crowd thinned out, and the lads got their pulses back under control and wandered off, I told Belinda about Ernie Struthers’s murder—much intaking of breath: she had known Ernie, and fought him off on a number of occasions—about the Rotary dinner and, of course, about the new employee over at the Lancer, Hanna Klovack.
Whether I was fair in describing Hanna as a “snot-nosed, tight-assed, stuck-up, big-city bimbo” is debatable. (Her nose, as a matter of fact, is rather attractive; it swoops down in a gentle curve and then suddenly takes a dive, giving her a faintly hawk-like look—very regal.) But a man is entitled to his little exaggerations on these occasions and I was getting off a few good lines about Hanna’s total inability to comprehend how a real, honest-to-God, by-the-people-for-the-people newspaper is run, when a slender hand slammed a bill down at the cash register by my side, and a familiar voice hissed, “Well, Mr. Withers, we meet again.”
It was Hanna, of course, snorting like a steam engine and shooting flames out of the corners of her eyes. Not satisfied with the perfectly good coffee provided by management right on the Lancer premises, she had gone sneaking off to the O.K. Café, and had been sitting there, hidden behind a seething wall of men, I guess, all the while Belinda and I were exchanging views.
It is hard to know what to say on these occasions, but, after a brief, embarrassed pause, I thought of something. “Oh, Hanna,” I said, “we were just talking about you. Hanna, Belinda, Belinda, Hanna. Say, Hanna, how about driving me out to Bosky Dell?”
The bold approach, you see. I was in the soup with this pestilential female anyway, so I thought I might rescue something from the wreck by hitching a lift home. The cab fare is six bucks each way, which would blow a monumental hole in my slender resources, and I knew I had to get back and check in with Hanson Eberley.
Hanna gave me a glance of the sort that peels paint, then jerked her thumb towards the street, where a newish Toyota Corolla lay in wait, and we left the café in solemn stillness and were on our way.
Chapter 8
The silence didn’t last long, which was too bad; you can’t get into trouble with your mouth shut. I directed Hanna onto the road to Bosky Dell—first right when you hit the end of Main Street, and keep going—and then she had to, or apparently felt she had to, comment on our recent contretemps. Where another, and more sensitive soul, might have let the matter rest, Hanna plunged right in.
“Tight-assed, big-city bimbo, eh?” is what she said.
Hard to know how to phrase a reply. “You said it, kiddo,” seemed undiplomatic, while, “No, no, not at all” invited the question that if it was not the case, why had I felt compelled to say it was to Belinda? I hemmed and hawed.
“Don’t mumble, speak up.”
“What am I supposed to say?”
“Oh, I don’t know. ‘Sorry, Ms. Klovack,’ would go well, or ‘Just kidding, Ms. Klovack,’ or, ‘On further reflec
tion, Ms. Klovack, I can see I had you all wrong, and will hasten to make amends.’ Any of the above.”
“You don’t give a guy much room to manoeuvre.”
“No, I don’t. That’s the way it is with us big-city bimbos.”
Conversation ceased momentarily as Hanna wheeled around a Ford Thunderbird, dove in between two Chevvies, popped out again to pass a panel truck on the wrong side, and, after an exchange of civilities with the driver of the last-named, suddenly caught sight of the sign that marks the county road into the Dell, slammed on the brakes, spun left across the nose of the panel-truck driver, and began to peel gravel off the surface of the road.
“And speaking of bimbos,” Hanna resumed, “who was that bimbo in the coffee shop?”
“That was no bimbo, that was Belinda Huntingdon. One of the Bosky Dell Huntingdons,” I added, “and a particular friend of mine.”
“A particular friend, eh? Then how come you weren’t trying to peer down her blouse, like the rest of that drooling mob in there?”
“I do not drool over women,” I replied stiffly. This was not strictly true, but it seemed permissible to edit the facts a little. “And I do not go about peering down the front of their blouses.” At least not, I amended to myself, Belinda’s blouses.
“Above all that sort of thing, are we?”
“Not so much above as to one side,” I replied.
Hanna’s eyebrows shot up, but she said no more, for a mile or two, and then she started to ask about the murder of Ernie Struthers—everybody was talking about it at the O.K. Café, she said, “except those who were devoted to character assassination.”
I told her as little as possible; Ernie had been found, dead, on my front stoop, and the cops thought I had done it, but I was going to be cleared, I hoped to God, by my old friend Hanson Eberley, formerly chief of the Toronto homicide squad. In fact, that’s why I was so anxious to get back to Bosky Dell, to confer with Hanson.
“Wow!” said Hanna, “some doings!”
“You sound,” I told her crushingly, “like Quarter to Three Winston.”
As she had no idea who I was talking about, the insult was wasted, but at least it kept her quiet until we whisked past the hand-painted sign that marks the entrance to Bosky Dell, where, under my instructions—except that she ignored the one to “Slow down, for Pete’s sake!”—Hanna veered right just in time to keep from plunging into Silver Lake, skittered along Lakeshore to the foot of Fifth Street, turned right again, and stopped in a small cloud of dust in front of Hanson’s cottage.
He was sitting on the screened-in front porch with a notepad and a newspaper clipping—presumably the one discovered with Ernie Struthers. I got out and started to thank Hanna for the lift, but she got out too, so there was nothing for it but to take the pest in. Walked in as if she had a right to be there, she did, and when I introduced her to Hanson, she gave him a five-hundred-watt smile and settled gracefully into a wicker armchair, obviously prepared to take root. This was going to make it a bit awkward for me to talk confidentially to Hanson, so I tried a tactful hint.
“Well, Hanna, it’s been very kind of you to give me a lift, but I’m sure you have a million things to do . . .”
“No, I don’t.”
“. . . hang up the old toothbrush, fluff out the frilly dresses . . .”
Hanna gave me a look. “In the first place, I don’t have my stuff unpacked yet; it just arrived from Toronto. And in the second place, I want to see how a real murder investigation is conducted.”
Hanson appeared amused. “Well, Carlton,” he said, “if Miss Klovack wants to sit in on our strategy session, I see no harm in it. We need all the help we can get.”
Betrayed by my own friend. Hanna settled back to listen, obviously prepared to enjoy herself.
“Hanson, darling, please introduce me.”
This was Mrs. Eberley speaking, as she hove onto the scene, dressed to the nines as usual, asparkle with gems and agleam with make-up as usual, and, as usual, slightly tanked. She is a slender woman, all joints and angles, although she retains the outlines of girlish good looks. She is a couple of decades younger than Hanson, and apparently she keeps her slenderness by substituting beverages for food. While I have never seen her falling-down drunk, I have seldom seen her entirely sober, either. She has a voice that normally perches somewhere between a shriek and a whine, and local opinion holds that when Hanson traded in his first wife for her, some years ago, he did not do a wise thing.
Nora Eberley lurched through the screen door from the living room with one hand out to guard against obstacles, and the other clutching what looked like a glass of water, but was probably straight gin. I jumped to my feet, upsetting a small table in the process, and introduced Hanna.
“Such a pleasure,” purred Mrs. Eberley. “We’re not used to seeing Carlton with young ladies.”
Which, just to set the record straight, is the case. Bosky Dell having the most sophisticated intelligence network outside the superpowers, it has always been my policy to keep my dates miles away from the place; I do my gripping and groping elsewhere. Mildred Tilbury, for example, came from Silver Falls, where she was known as “Main Street Mildred, the Fun of the Falls.”
“Not much for the girls, is he?” Hanna asked.
“No,” replied Mrs. Eberley, “Carlton seems immune to female charms.”
“Except yours, of course, Mrs. Eberley,” I said gallantly. It seemed the thing to do.
Her eyes widened. “Why, Carlton,” she trilled, “perhaps I’ve misjudged you. Well, ta-ta all.”
Apparently, she had just come out to check on the voices, and see if it was anyone important. Since it wasn’t, she stumbled back into the living room, leaving one of those awkward silences.
Hanson brought out the clipping again, and handed it to me. “This mean anything to you yet, Carlton?”
It didn’t. The truth is, I found it awakened memories of my parents so poignant that I couldn’t bear to read the thing, much less pore over it for clues.
Hanna held out her hand, and I passed the clipping across.
“Oh,” she said, “a newspaper clipping. What does it have to do with anything?”
Hanson explained, “It was found in an offertory envelope from the church just over on the next street. The envelope had Carlton’s name typed on it, and it turned up quite close to the body of Ernie Struthers. What it means, if anything, we don’t yet know.”
“Well, then, I’d better check it for clues, hadn’t I?” chirruped Hanna gaily, but then, as she read the article, the smile fled. She turned and touched me briefly on the back of the hand and said, “Oh, Carlton, I am so sorry.”
I knew I had to change the subject, quickly. “Well,” I said, “Ernie must have been reading that thing over for some reason, when whoever it was snuck up and stuck him in the back.”
Hanson said “Um.”
Hanna, deciding, I guess, that she had been kindly long enough—twenty seconds or more—was more pointed in her response.
“I see,” she said, “and then the murderer carefully folded up the clipping, put it into an envelope which he happened to have with him, hauled out a typewriter which he also happened to have about his person, typed your name on the envelope, and left it beside the body. He wanted to give the cops a fair chance.”
“All right, all right,” I said, “but people do things like that in murder mysteries.”
“Only weak-minded ones,” Hanna shot back.
Hanson noted, “Ernie was either bringing you this clipping for some unfathomable motive, or reading it, for some equally unfathomable motive, up at the church before he was killed. If he wanted you to have it, why wouldn’t he just call round and hand it to you?”
“I can think of two reasons,” I said. “The first is that we weren’t on very good terms”—I didn’t bother to spell this out for them�
��“the second is that the subject was not the sort of thing Ernie was ever likely to raise with me, or I with him, even if we were speaking. I mean, you don’t go knocking on somebody’s door to say, ‘Oh, by the way, here’s a little newspaper article I happened to come across when I was going through some back papers, about the time I wiped out your parents.’”
“I can’t imagine him coming to your place with an article like that,” said Hanna. “What reason could he possibly have?”
“No. Hold on a minute,” said Hanson. “Let’s go back to something you said a minute ago, young lady.”
I could have told him you don’t call young ladies young lady anymore, they are young women. Hanna started to bridle, but then shrugged and subsided as Hanson went on. “Suppose the whole thing was staged for the simplest of all possible reasons?”
“Which is?” I was completely at sea.
“Of course,” said Hanna, and I could have kicked her. “Carlton was going to be made the fall guy. Even the cops pardon me, Mr. Eberley—could see that he’s the obvious suspect. What’s more natural than that someone should put the envelope on Ernie, addressed to Carlton, to cinch the thing?”
“But the envelope wasn’t on him,” I pointed out. “It was under the bushes. If it hadn’t been for Emma Golden, it might never have been found—it could easily have blown away.”
“It’s a point,” said Hanson.
Pleased, I pursued it. “If you ask me, Ernie put the clipping in the envelope and was going to slip it in under my door.” Hanna wanted to know why not in the mailbox so I explained that we don’t have such things. There is a bank of boxes at the top of each street. “Crikey,” I added, “now you’ve made me forget where I was. Oh, yeah, Ernie didn’t want to face me, although for some godawful reason of his own, he wanted me to have the clipping, but before he got to the door, somebody saw him, killed him, and the envelope fell out of his hand. The killer never saw it, because it was dark at the time.”
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