Hanna looked thoughtful. “Well, the cops will test the envelope for fingerprints, and they can soon find out who handled it.”
I gave her a pitying smile. “This is not the kind of community where everybody’s prints are on file, and if the cops start rousting the populace for their prints, they will be able to hear the screams down in Toronto. What’s more, nobody these days commits a crime without wearing gloves. Besides . . .”
Hanson held up his hand, like a traffic cop. “Hold it,” he said. “I think we’re going a little too fast, here. Before we speculate too much on the meaning of this newspaper clipping, we have to know a great deal more, such as, where and when, exactly, was Ernie killed? And, was the clipping a part of the killing, a motive for the killing or—and I have to tell you, this is my own view—did the clipping have nothing whatever to do with the killing, and does it have some other entirely logical explanation we know nothing of as yet?”
My heart sank. Here was a clue, a genuine clue, the kind of thing Perry Mason uses to tear the mask off the evil-doer just before the shampoo commercial, and it was turning into a red herring. Or not. Hanson gave me a kindly smile.
“Don’t worry, Carlton, it’s early days. In the end, most murders are solved by routine investigation, not dramatic clues. We’ll get to the bottom of this yet.”
So far, he was willing to admit, there was not much to go on. The OPP twosome had had a preliminary look at the church, and cordoned the place off. He had told them about Harry Franklin finding Ernie’s hat, which was now in police possession. The hat, they agreed, might prove that Ernie had spent his last evening at the church, or, as Hanson pointed out, “That someone wanted us to think that was what happened.”
“Has there been an autopsy?” Hanna asked.
“Not a full-scale one. There has been a preliminary medical report, not properly an autopsy. A much more thorough one will be done later. The police were kind enough to give me the result. Ernie’s death was due to internal bleeding, undoubtedly caused by being stabbed with the pin punch. He died somewhere between 6 p.m. and midnight Monday night.”
“Does the report suggest whether the body was moved?”
Hanson shot her a keen look. “That’s a very astute question,” he said. “No, it doesn’t, not in so many words. But it does show something else.”
“What’s that?”
“There was extensive bruising on the back, and to one side, of Ernie’s head.”
“You mean he was knocked on the head and then stabbed?”
“It appears that way, yes.”
The police had also done a cursory search of Ernie’s home—he lived alone—which hadn’t revealed anything astonishing, although no forensic analysis had been done there yet.
“Oh, yes, and the boys tell me they’re getting some help,” Hanson added. “Two officers from the homicide branch are coming up from the Toronto headquarters of the OPP. They’ll do the real investigation, I imagine, while the local detachment do the routine work.”
That was encouraging; the Toronto cops had to be better than Mutt and Jeff.
“How will they feel about you working on the case?” Hanna wanted to know.
“They won’t object, I don’t imagine, as long as I don’t get in the way. If I do, they will very properly tell me to butt out.”
“Well then, let’s get it done before they get here,” I said.
“We can but try,” was Hanson’s response. “What we must do,” he continued, “is to work out who might have had a motive for killing Ernie, and then narrow it down to somebody who had the means, and the exclusive opportunity. When you have motive, means, and opportunity, you can usually see who did it quickly enough.”
“As far as motive goes,” I said, “there’s . . . well, there’s me.”
“That’s a fact,” said Hanna, helpfully.
“As for means, well, there was my dad’s pin punch.”
“And as for opportunity,” Hanson chipped in cheerfully, “if Ernie was right there on your doorstep, you wouldn’t even have to leave home to stab him.”
This was not going well.
Hanna looked thoughtful. “Okay,” she said, “Carlton did it. So what’s the connection with the church?”
“Misdirection,” Hanson explained. “To throw police off the scent.”
“Certainly,” said Hanna. “That’s it. Shall I call the cops?”
“Yes, well, skipping all this delightful banter,” I put in, “what we ought to be asking ourselves is, What in hell was Ernie doing in the church, supposing he really was there in the first place? The only time I ever saw Ernie cross the threshold of the church was the time he saw all the candles burning for evening service one night when he himself was lit up, thought somebody was holding a birthday party, staggered in, threw up, and passed out. The Rev. Wylie was not too pleased with Ernie, as I recall. He ticked him off properly, complete with some good stuff from the Book of Revelations.”
“When was this?” asked Hanson.
“Oh, a couple of years ago. I doubt if the Rev. would have waited two years and then stabbed Ernie for messing up the pews.”
Hanson agreed that it didn’t seem likely, but Hanna wasn’t so sure. “A lot of these clergymen are seething with suppressed passions,” she said. “We once had a priest in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, where my family belongs, who smiled and bowed and looked as gentle as a lamb, but if you got on the wrong side of him, he was as cruel as a cat.”
“Caught you smoking in the vestry, did he?” said Hanson, “and smacked you one?”
Hanna looked impressed. “How did you know that?”
“He’s a detective,” I explained, “he detects. But, I can’t see the Rev. Wylie in the role of killer. There is no way he would go about sticking things into people’s backs—even if they weren’t parishioners.”
“Well, perhaps not,” Hanna conceded, “but I still think we should drop in on him, maybe he can tell us what Ernie was doing in the church.”
“Actually, I already have a pretty good idea about that,” said Hanson, mysteriously, “but there are some points I’m not quite clear on, so why don’t I give him a call, now, to see if he’s free to drop by?”
Hanson went inside and reported back almost at once. “He’s on his way.”
So he was, and within a minute or so—Ephraim Wylie lives on Sixth Street, right next to the church—we saw him turn the corner at the top of Fifth and lumber towards us, a large, dark, fat, unhappy-looking man in a clerical collar. He knocked timidly at the porch door, entered at Hanson’s invitation, stood dithering through an introduction to Hanna, wiped a sweaty brow, and told Hanson he had something to tell him “of the Utmost Importance, you know, Touching the Matter we were Speaking of”—you could hear him putting the capitals on the letters.
He clearly wanted us to scram, and I began to get up, but Hanna grabbed my arm in a grip that will probably leave a mark that I can show my children, and stuck her nose in again.
“Does it have anything to do with Ernie Struthers’s death?” she asked.
The Rev. looked startled, dithered some more, wiped his brow some more, and then blurted out, “It has everything to do with Ernie’s death. I’m responsible for it.”
Chapter 9
“Not personally,” he added swiftly, in response to my startled yelp and yes, I admit it, the look of relief on my face. “I don’t mean that I personally stabbed the poor man. No, no, of course not. What I mean to say, is that I believe I am responsible for Ernie being in the church last night.”
“You’re sure he was in the church?” Hanson asked.
“Quite sure. As you know, Hanson, he was doing me a bit of an, um, favour,” the Rev. explained, looking slightly sheepish.
“Favour?” I couldn’t imagine Ernie as a pal of the Rev. “What sort of favour?”
“Well,
I had asked him to be there. For the meeting.”
“Meeting? What meeting? A prayer meeting?” This from Hanna, missing another wonderful opportunity to keep her mouth shut. The Rev. immediately clammed up.
“Hanson . . . Mr. Eberley . . . Hanson . . .” He couldn’t seem to make up his mind. “Could we not discuss this in, uh, more private circumstances?”
“Certainly, Ephraim, these folks were just leaving, anyway. We’ll talk later,” Hanson told me in an aside, and he whooshed us out the door like a householder giving an insurance salesman the bum’s rush.
As we walked to the car, I told Hanna that if she hadn’t insisted on butting in, we might have heard what the Rev. had had to say, and she said, no, we were going to be given the heave-ho no matter what. “So much for your inside story,” she added.
“Hanson will fill me in later,” I responded, “but we could have got it first-hand if you hadn’t put the wind up the Rev.”
She doubted it. “These clergy,” she said, “tight-lipped bunch. You’ve got to pry it out of them.”
Not in my experience; in my experience, the trick is to turn off the tap once the flow starts. In the Bosky Dell church, we have a system to curb the Rev. when he gets the oratorical bit between his teeth. When the sermon hits twelve minutes, the leading citizens begin to scrape their feet, and if he goes past twenty, Arthur Blenkins, a retired stockbroker and all-around imperious buzzard, gets up and stamps out, with Mrs. Blenkins whispering frantic asides as she wallows up the aisle in his wake. “Roast in the oven. Must go.”
Hanna said that sort of thing didn’t count, because it was official gab. “All clergymen are blabbers when you get them on Balak the son of Zippor, or what bums the Philistines were,” she contended, “but on anything juicy, they’re tighter than a bank vault.”
Then, changing the subject abruptly, she asked, “Have you known the Eberleys long?”
“Quite a while.” And I told her about Nora transmogrifying herself from Hanson’s secretary to his wife when they were still on the police force, before the couple moved up here permanently.
“I’m not surprised,” said Hanna, “he is a very sexy man. Don’t you think so?”
Weird question. Why should I find Hanson sexy? I preserved a diplomatic silence.
Hanna got in, turned the key, and, just before I could slam the door and wish her Godspeed, asked, “What now? Can we rustle up a cup of coffee around here?”
We could. I could make one, and, after some hesitation, I agreed to do so. I wasn’t keen on Hanna seeing my place, somehow, and I was even less keen on introducing her to the Widow Golden, who would be out the door with her eyes on stalks before Hanna had been on the premises for five minutes. Still, it couldn’t be helped, so I directed Hanna around the two blocks over to Third Street. We entered by the kitchen door—at the side, and harder to see from the Golden spy-tower. Hanna looked about and rolled her eyes.
“The cleaning lady hasn’t been in,” I explained.
“Not since the turn of the century, I would guess. Tell me, is this the result of conscious effort, or leftovers from the Great Bosky Dell Avalanche?”
I dug through the mound on the kitchen table until I located a couple of mugs and the coffee pot. Hanna held out her hand, took them from me, and cleared away a hollow in the kitchen-sink clutter, where she proceeded to scrub the things before handing them back. I ground fresh coffee—my only extravagance—boiled the kettle, and made a potful of the drip variety. The rich, dark smell of the brew filled the kitchen, covering some of the background dankness. I pushed the accumulated detritus off a couple of chairs onto the floor, poured out the coffee, and we were just sitting down to sip when there came a knock at the front door.
“The Welcome Wagon, no doubt,” said Hanna.
“Our local version,” I explained. “The Widow Golden. Lives across the street and likes to keep an eye on things.”
In point of fact, it might not be so bad to see the Widow Golden, after all. The disadvantage of having her for a neighbour was that she was always popping over to spy on me, the advantage was that she usually hauled along some food, and it was lunchtime.
However, this was not the Widow Golden standing on the other side of the screen door, bent on charity, it was the same large plug-ugly who had busted me one outside the Lancer offices last night, bent on more mayhem, from the way he glowered at me. With a startled yelp, I slammed the inside door in his face. There came a blam, blam, blam on the screen door and a voice like the sound of tumbling coal.
“Open the door, Mr. Withers,” this voice growled. “I wish to speak with you.”
“Go away,” I shouted through the door.
“Mr. Withers, I wish only to speak with you, is what.”
“You wish only to hit me, is what.” And I shouted back in the direction of the kitchen, “Hanna, call the cops, we’ve got an intruder.”
Sheer bluff, of course. The phone is in my bedroom, not the kitchen, and Hanna couldn’t have found it without the aid of a tracker dog. However, my bellow brought her into the living room.
“Now, Carlton, we’re not afraid of the Widow Golden, are we?”
“Yes, we are. But this isn’t her. This is that galoot from before. The one who belted me.”
“Is it, then?” said the fearless female, and she came marching across the room. “Let’s by all means give him a Bosky Dell welcome.”
Before she could get to the door, it was gone. There was a kind of rending sound—there goes the screen door, I thought—and then a crunching sound, and the inner door flew open, and there stood the plug-ugly, about six-foot six of him, and broad in proportion. He lowered his head, to avoid the doorframe, and peered in.
“Honest, Mr. Withers,” he began, “I just . . .”
But that is as far as he got, when the Widow Golden’s bell-like tones cut across his rumble.
“Out of the way, there,” said Emma, “this thing is hot.”
The galoot obediently shuffled to one side, and through the door came the Widow, wearing a pleased smile and a pair of oven mitts and carrying a deep-dish pizza pan. While the galoot stood stunned, I slammed the inner door in his face and slid the bolt across.
“Mrs. Golden,” I told her, “you’d have made a wonderful Italian St. Bernard.”
“Oh, get out,” the Widow replied. As she trundled through to the kitchen and hoisted the pizza-pan onto the stove, she asked, over her shoulder, “Say, Carlton, who is that man on the porch? Some sort of salesman?”
She re-emerged into the living room, doffing her oven mitts and giving Hanna a speculative glance. “And who might you be, young lady?”
Hanna smiled, demurely, a trick I wouldn’t have thought she could pull off. “I’m a friend of Carlton’s. Hanna Klovack. We work together.”
“At the paper?” Maybe the Widow thought I was holding down two jobs. Hanna nodded. “Then how come I’ve never met you?” She sounded accusing.
“Hanna is a new employee,” I explained. “Just joined the salt mines today. She hails from Toronto.”
“Aha,” said the Widow, with a now-I’ve-got-you-pegged air. She looked both curious and satisfied. All those months of keeping the Withers residence under surveillance with nothing to show for it but paperboys and visions of the garbage going out, and now, in one day, a genuine corpse and an indisputable big-city bimbo.
“Shouldn’t you do something about that fellow on the porch, Carlton?” she asked. “He’s still there. Lurking.”
So he was, peering forlornly through the little window in the inner door. He leered at me through the glass.
“Let him lurk,” said Hanna. “He can’t scare us.”
“Speak for yourself.”
Mrs. Golden went back to the kitchen, so we followed her out and sat down at the kitchen table while she dug out three plates, washed them, and began serving out
the pizza. She suggested we give some to our lurking visitor.
“Who is he, anyway, Carlton? An angry subscriber?”
“He’s one of Dominic Silvio’s thugs. And I don’t know why he defrocked my front door.”
“People are so rude these days,” the Widow said, and, turning to Hanna, she added, “Carlton needs looking after.”
Brief pause to give Hanna the old up-and-down, and then she closed in, purring, “So nice for Carlton to have a young lady come to call,” she simpered. “We seldom see Carlton with ladies.”
“Women,” Hanna corrected. “I guess Carlton doesn’t much care for them.”
Emma begged to differ. “Carlton is a gentleman. Not like some I could mention.” She went on, “And yourself, Miss, what is it, Klovack? Are you currently, ah, occupied?”
“Sure, I told you; I work at the paper.”
“No, no, no, my dear. How foolish of me. What I meant was, is there a young gentleman in your life?”
No fooling around with the Widow. Goes straight for the facts.
“There was,” Hanna replied shortly. “Although I don’t know if you would call him a gentleman. A louse is what he was. The premier louse of western civilization, if you want to be accurate about it. That’s why I left Toronto.”
Aha, I said to myself, reasoning swiftly, the louse didn’t do right by our Nell, which is why she downed tools at the centre of the journalistic universe and bobbed up here. What we had here was the classic case of a woman scorned, a notoriously tough proposition.
This was good. Two minutes into her acquaintanceship, and the Widow Golden knew more about Hanna than I’d gleaned all day. Shows what it means to be a trained reporter. While I had no reason to doubt the lousiness of this unnamed gent, I had to respect his raw courage. Doing wrong by Hanna is not the sort of task I, myself, would have taken on. I wondered what had become of the bold fellow, but I didn’t want to seem nosy, and ask. Not to worry, leave it to Emma.
“And where is this louse now?” she asked.
“Toronto,” snarled Hanna, “with his wife.”
Right Church, Wrong Pew Page 6