“Thought it might.”
“I mean, after all, it is the duty of the fair-minded, objective journalist to examine all aspects of a story.”
“Exactly.”
“So if I were to go down and check out this Bosque Del in California, with your group picking up the expenses—your group would pick up the expenses?”
“Plus a bonus.”
“Plus a bonus, it would really be a sort of service to the reader, wouldn’t it?”
“It would.”
An unpleasant notion entered my noggin unbidden, and would not go away. What would Hanna Klovack say to all this? Would she consider an all-expenses-paid trip from an advertiser who wanted his product boosted to be, well, a trifle compromising? Would she take it the wrong way? Do pigeons poop? She wouldn’t see it for what it was, an opportunity to better myself, to broaden myself by travel and thus become a more effective journalist. Not a chance. She’d start in about selling out your own community for return airfare, and about sucking up to developers and abandoning journalistic principles, never realizing that the foremost journalistic principle in real life is to suck up to developers. Also, she would probably go on to point out that it could very well turn out that Dominic was a murderer. Which might well be the case, but which was entirely beside the main point, the main point being that Dominic represented first-class airfare and incidentals to California, a place I’d never been. If I played my cards right, I could get my trip in before they arrested Dominic and then, what harm could befall? The project would be dead, but I’d have broadened my outlook, anyway. Again, this was not an argument which, for some reason, I was anxious to lay before Hanna, and I had a feeling it was not a topic she would be willing to leave alone. Maybe it was just as well we were not—at least, I assumed we were not—on speaking terms right now.
Dominic could see I was cogitating, and misunderstood; he thought I needed another shove.
“This could lead to other things, you know.”
“It could?”
“Sure. A big organization like the one I and my associates run, we are always on the lookout for talent. As, for instance, in our public relations department.”
Public relations. A journalist’s heaven. Expense accounts treated with flexibility and understanding. Buying drinks for former colleagues, and watching them snarl with envy. Beginning sentences with, “We here at Dominic Associates believe success comes in Cans, not Can’ts . . .”
The Widow Golden, who had walked out to the living room so we could have our talk in private, broke into my reverie by suddenly singing out, “Boys, the police are here.”
She added, “I forgot to tell you. I called them earlier, when I saw that extra body on Carlton’s lawn.”
Chapter 14
In the end, it was the cops who got the lasagna. Mutt and Jeff, mostly. They were accompanied by two flinty-eyed gents from the homicide division of the Ontario Provincial Police. These, presumably, were the detectives sent up from Toronto to take over the case. Tall, rangy types they were, Sergeant Arthur Smollett and Detective Frank Thurston. Like most police investigating teams, they consisted of an experienced hand and younger man. I called them Smiley and Thuggy, to myself, of course. Smiley, the sergeant, was greying and gloomy; Thuggy was about my own age and had a craggy look.
Mutt and Jeff concentrated on scoffing the Widow Golden’s edibles, while the imported talent, who had clearly been brought along in the first place to break down my foolish story and nail me for the murder of Ernie Struthers, got on with the investigation. Everyone’s a specialist these days. They didn’t say a whole lot, preferring to express themselves—this is often the case with flatfeet—with grunts and words of one syllable, “Huh,” was one of their favourites, and if you don’t think it is possible to convey a world of disbelief in the single syllable, “Huh,” then you have not met Smiley and Thuggy. When they actually broke into speech, it was to work the old tough-cop-soft-cop routine.
Thuggy said, “All right, Withers, suppose you start telling us the truth for a change,” and I stumbled, once more, through my tale, which even to my ears sounded like something you read on the front page of one of those supermarket tabloids that features Skydiving Grandma Gives Birth to Twins in Mid-Air, or I Worked in a UFO Slave Labor Camp, and Smiley beamed at me in a friendly way and said, “And then?”
What are you supposed to say when a cop smiles at you and intones, “And then?” You feel obliged, somehow, to keep the conversational ball rolling, so you blurt out something you never intended to put on the public record. As when I explained that I had arrived home late at night, and there was no sign of anyone around the place, honest to God, officer, not that I was looking, you understand, I was tired, pooped, really, and just flopped into bed.
“And then?”
“And then Mrs. Er . . . whoops!” I stopped. Thuggy was on it like a duck on a June bug. “Who?”
“No one. Nothing. I made a mistake.”
So, out it came. Mrs. Eberley had been passing by and had decided to pay a surprise visit and we had a little chat, and that’s all, officer, cross my heart and spit. This was not received with that suspension of disbelief that the dramatist prefers to attend his storytelling. None of the cops actually shouted, “Liar, liar, pants on fire,” but the phrase was implicit in the raised eyebrows and exchanged glances on the part of Smiley and Thuggy, while Mutt and Jeff broke off their chewing long enough to shake their heads, more in sorrow than in anger.
“You’re forgetting about Hanna, dear,” the Widow Golden put in. Just being helpful.
“Who’s Hanna?” Thuggy wanted to know.
“Carlton’s lady friend . . .”
“A colleague of mine, from work . . .”
These phrases chased each other out into the room, arriving in a dead heat. Thuggy chose to accept the Widow Golden’s version.
“So, this bimbo came out for a little whatchamacallit and discovered you with the body, is that it?”
“Officer,” barked the Widow, in a tone that snapped all the forces of justice in the room to attention, “you have it quite wrong.”
So then she got into her version of the story. Heard a car screech to a halt over at Carlton’s place, so she went to the window, saw Carlton’s front door open, heard voices raised in anger, saw Hanna come bolting out of the house, jump into her car, and drive off.
“She seemed a little upset,” Mrs. G. added.
Thuggy said, “That’s probably because Withers told her he’d just murdered another man. You thought Mr. Silvio here was dead, didn’t you, Withers?”
“No, of course not.”
“Huh. You knew he was just unconscious, and you were planning to finish him off later, is that what you’re telling us?”
“No, no, no. I didn’t know he was out there. Honest. C’mon, fellows, be reasonable. If I’d known Dominic was out there, would I have calmly gone to bed?”
“And then?” put in Smiley, but I think it was just from habit, so I ignored him.
It was Dominic who persuaded the cops that it wasn’t me who knocked him out. “Look at the fellow,” he said. “Use your loaf.”
I stand six feet one, but I am built along whippet lines, whereas Dominic is based on the bull mastiff model. Having nothing to go on, except, as Thuggy pointed out, the very real possibility that I had earlier terminated Ernie Struthers, they were forced to conclude that it was unlikely that I would attack someone like Dominic, even if he had dared to tread on my lawn.
They took me once more through the story of finding Ernie Struthers’s remains on the doorstep, and then conceded that they did not have, as Thuggy put it in his comforting way, “enough direct evidence to make an arrest at this time.”
They seemed to be intrigued by the fact that I claimed—claimed is the way they put it—that there had been a package of tools taken from my dad’s workshop.
> “Wasn’t that just somebody grabbing a souvenir?” I asked.
“Could be,” replied Smiley.
“Or . . .” added Thuggy.
“Or . . . ? Or what?”
The rozzers all looked at each other. Mutt and Jeff looked at each other, then at Smiley and Thuggy. Eyebrows were raised. Superior smiles appeared. It reminded me of a meeting of senior bureaucrats. Dominic and the Widow looked out the window, checking for more bodies, no doubt.
Finally, Smiley unbent.
“The killer,” he explained, “may be preparing to do it again.”
“Oh my God!” blurted.
“But I don’t really think so,” said Thuggy.
“Thank God!” I blurted.
“Because I think we already have the killer,” said Thuggy, with a loaded glance at your obedient servant.
“Oh my God!” I blurted again.
Smiley broke what was becoming one of those silences pregnant with meaning to suggest that, at the earliest opportunity they should consult with Hanson Eberley, to bring him up to date on “this latest development.” My heart sank.
“You’re not going to tell Hanson about Mrs. Eberley, er, accidentally wandering into my place?”
“I don’t see how we can avoid it,” replied Thuggy, and positively wriggled in anticipation.
Smiley added, more kindly, “We have great respect for Staff Inspector Eberley. You can be sure this matter will be handled fairly.”
Which, of course, is just what I didn’t want. What I wanted was for it to be handled unfairly, viz., to be ignored, dropped, expunged from the record.
Finally, the cops left. Mutt and Jeff had to be pried away from the remains of the lasagna, which they were scraping out of the empty bowl. The Widow Golden and Dominic settled down in the kitchen.
“I’ll just fix us a little snack,” said the Widow, and Dominic smiled and reached for a fork, with which he was obviously intent on digging his grave. I wandered disconsolately across the street and back to my house. As I came in the front door, the phone was ringing.
It was Hanna.
“Where the hell have you been?” she demanded. “Seeing the tootsie home?”
I replied, frigidly, “Mrs. Eberley came to my place, apparently, under a misapprehension. Discovering that, she went home.”
“Yes, well, strangely enough, I believe you. I’ve been talking to someone about you, and she said you were—she has a strange way of talking—‘without a stain on your character.’”
“You’ve met Tilda.”
“I have.”
Tilda is Tilda Handfield-Browning, our drama critic. Entertainment columnist they call it nowadays, but the entertainment stuff we just rip off the Canadian Press and Capital News Features wires—what’s doing in Hollywood, some rock star’s recipes for goulash and universal peace, that sort of thing. The local dramatic offerings are covered by Tilda. Not because she knows anything about drama, it’s her pension.
Tilda began her working life back about the time of the Crimean War, when she was known as Gwen Funk, secretary to Sam Marston, founder of the Silver Falls Lancer and as pronounced a poop as ever drew breath, from what I’ve heard. He was one of those swaggering, puff-faced types, a lumber baron—that’s where the early big money came from, in our county—who bought a newspaper late in life so that he could be sure to have swell things written about him in it. Sam and Gwen, a dainty, fawnlike thing in those days, became an item, in due course. Her fawnlikeness got to him, and I guess she was attracted, as so many people are, by the stench of power and self-adulation he exuded like after-shave lotion. His wife didn’t seem to mind—wives apparently didn’t, back in the Golden Age of Fooling Around—and the affair went on for years and years until one day Sam keeled over at work and expired. Someone had just told him that the godless forces of socialism, in the name of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, were running second in the Ontario provincial elections, and Sam’s affronted ticker couldn’t take the strain.
Proving for all time what a poop he was, he left no provision for Gwen. Not a nickel. Sam’s son-in-law and heir, Donald Post, the man who had had the good luck to hire me before going to the Great Newsroom in the sky, wasn’t anxious to take Gwen on in either of her capacities—secretary or mistress. So he made her our drama critic. Why not? What skills are required to pen newspaper criticism? Eyes, ears, fingers. She had them all in working order, and the fact that she knew diddley-squat about the theatre meant that she could view productions as a consumer, without preconceived prejudice, in the same way that other newspapers hire relatives and intellectual cripples to review the arts. So she changed her name from Gwen Funk to Tilda Handfield-Browning, for byline purposes—it sounded like the kind of name a critic might have—and went into business. She was a howling success from the start, for the very good reason that she loved everything, and if there is one thing local dramatists like, it is to be loved. A sentimental soul, Tilda cried at musical comedies. She hated the villain in the melodramas and loved the worthy but dim-witted hero—just the opposite, you see, from most of our modern, frank, and fearless critics.
No play was so turgid, so lifeless, so appallingly performed that Tilda couldn’t find something nice to say about it. When the backdrop of the main set in Brigadoon, the clunker we put on in my final year of high school, collapsed in Act II and damn near smothered the chorus, Tilda merely noted that “the sets, while they lasted, were splendid.”
Anyway, that’s Tilda, kindness on the hoof, and Hanna had met her, and been informed of my sterling character. I did not tell Hanna that Al Capone, Machine-Gun Kelly, and Attila the Hun all got rave notices from Tilda. Hanna went on to say, mysteriously, that Tilda had told her to tell me to go and see her. She had some information for me. And, even more mysteriously, that she, Hanna, was going to Toronto.
“Why?”
“To check on something.”
“What?”
“All shall be revealed, my good man, in due course. In the meantime, have you worked out the clue of the newspaper clipping?”
“The what of the what?”
“The newspaper clipping, fathead.”
“Well, no, not actually what you might call, worked it out.”
“I’ll bet you haven’t even looked at it.”
“Well, no, now that you come right down to it, I haven’t. Why should I? Hanson says it probably has nothing to do with the murder.”
“Yes, but what if he’s wrong? What if Ernie was trying to tell you something with that clipping?”
“Then why didn’t he just tell me? Why not leave a note that says, ‘The butler did it,’ or whatever? Why all this fuss?”
“That part’s easy.”
“It is?”
“It is. That is, to anyone with the brains God gave a graham cracker it is.”
Silence.
“You aren’t going to tell me, are you?”
“Can’t you figure it out?”
“In a word, no.”
“But you do have an explanation?”
“Not an explanation. Just a theory.”
“I’ll bet it’s rotten.”
“You’ll never know if you don’t listen.”
“I’m listening.”
“Okay. Ernie was in the church, waiting to spy on this meeting between the Rev. and the developer. He had this clipping with him . . .”
“Why?”
“We don’t know, as yet. Don’t interrupt. He had this clipping with him, for reasons unknown, while he sat in the box pew, waiting for the meeting between the developer and the minister to get under way. Maybe he was reading it, to pass the time. What did you say?”
“I said ‘Fadoodle.’ It’s an old English expression conveying doubt.”
“Well, fadoodle to you, too. Do you want to hear this or not?”
/> “Yes. I guess so.”
“Where was I?”
“Reading old newspapers, in the dark, in the church.”
“Oh, yeah. Anyway, Ernie was hidden in the box pew where he could see the killer, but the killer couldn’t see him, and then he made a noise, or else he saw something that alarmed him, or made him think he might be in danger.”
“Then, why didn’t he just leave?”
“He couldn’t, could he? He was trapped in the box pew. So he decided to leave a clue, just in case. He was worried that whoever he was afraid of would discover what he was up to, so he put the clipping in the envelope and sealed it.”
“He already had the envelope typed out?”
“Well, yes. No, wait a minute. He was going to go to your place after the meeting, and that’s why he had the envelope with him. But he made a noise, so he was discovered and killed.”
“That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard of. Suppose you had just stabbed somebody to death and he happened to be clutching an envelope at the time, addressed to somebody else. Would you just say, ‘Oh, an envelope, eh? I’d better deliver this, we can’t count on the mail these days,’ pick up the body, with envelope, sling it over your shoulder, and carry it three blocks to my place, thus saving the deceased thirty-nine cents for a stamp?”
“I didn’t say it was a perfect explanation, just a theory.”
“Well, it’s rotten, as predicted.”
“It’s a hell of a lot better than anything you’ve come up with.”
“If you’re so hot on theories, what’s your theory as to why Nora Eberley inserted herself in my bed?”
“How should I know? Maybe Hanson isn’t doing his husbandly duty. Maybe she finds you sexy.”
“Me, sexy?”
“Well, you are, a little, you know.”
“I am?”
“A little. I said, a little.”
This was good. A little sexy, from the Klovack menace, it had to mean something.
“Hey, I’ve got a great idea,” I said. “Why don’t you drive over here and we can thrash this out?”
Right Church, Wrong Pew Page 11