Right Church, Wrong Pew

by Walter Stewart

  “Nice try, Withers. Now, where were we?”

  “We were about to work out some plausible reason for Nora to come calling on me in night attire.”

  There was a long silence on the phone.

  “Hey, you awake?”

  “Certainly, I’m just thinking. Carlton, tell me again about Ernie Struthers.”

  So I told her again. Jerk. Drinker of Catawba. Grocery store clerk. Lecher. Beneficiary—or so everyone thought—of an aunt’s estate. Hardware tycoon. Still a jerk . . .

  “Hey, stop there. That could be it.”

  “What could be what?”

  “If Ernie was as lecherous as you say and Nora is given to getting into other people’s beds, perhaps at some point the two of them . . . Nora may know more about Ernie than anyone.”

  “So you think she felt that the best place to explain that would be in my bed?”

  “Maybe, especially if she was just looking for an excuse to crawl into your bed. No, that’s out. You’re not that sexy.”

  “Thanks, I needed that.”

  “I think you should go and confront Nora and ask her what was on her mind, besides lust.”

  “Not a chance. Hanson would be bound to find out about it.”

  “Well, if you won’t, you won’t. Maybe I’ll tackle her. But all this does is to make one thing clear even to someone of your limited intelligence. Which is . . .”

  “. . . that if there really is a clue anywhere in this mess that we can use, it’s in that newspaper clipping.”

  “That’s my boy.”

  “Well, if that’s the case, I’m in deep trouble. Mysteries are beyond me.”

  “Along with most other things?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Don’t worry about it. Look, I’ll work out the clipping, nothing to it.”

  “I bet you don’t.”

  “In the meantime, you go and see Tilda Handfield-Browning, she has something to tell you.”

  “Is it important? I mean, I’ve had a rather full day already, what with one thing and another.”

  “Well, I don’t know. I guess it all depends on what you call important. She seems to think Tommy Macklin might be the killer. Well, I’m off to Toronto. See you.”

  Chapter 15

  After this little bombshell, I decided to delay reporting for work—I was already late, anyway—until I had had a chance to talk to Hanson, so I walked quickly over to Fifth Street. Hanson and Nora were both on the porch, and Nora looked a little peaked, which was no surprise. She had had a busy evening, what with one thing and another, and it was only about 11 a.m., an hour she knows mostly by second-hand report. I shot her a quick glance—had she said anything to Hanson, I wondered?—and got back a tiny, almost imperceptible, shake of the head, which might have meant No, or might just have meant, Keep your big mouth shut.

  I was a bit embarrassed, so I started right in with a cockamamie story about deciding to clear up my cottage last night, just for something to take my mind off my troubles, when I came across this glasses case, complete with sunglasses, behind the cushion on the couch.

  Hanson looked blank. “So?” he said.

  “Well, I was going to throw it out, but then I wondered . . .”

  “You wondered what?”

  “I wondered if maybe it had been put there, for some reason. We were talking earlier about how the murderer might have planted clues to make me look like the murderer.”

  “You think these glasses belonged to Ernie, and somebody planted them on you?”

  “Well, it’s possible.”

  Hanson chuckled. “Carlton, I think you watch too much TV. Either that, or this business is getting to you. Chances are these things have been behind that cushion for the last year or so. They don’t belong to Ernie. At least, I never saw them on him. Did you?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. They’re broken, anyway, so he couldn’t have worn them. But I thought they ought to be turned over to the police, just in case. They could take fingerprints, and find out if they were Ernie’s.”

  “Hmm. Well, give them to me. I’m sure it’s a waste of time, but you’re quite correct. Anything that seems to be out of order that might have the remotest connection with Ernie ought to be checked out. Have you got any other surprises for me?”

  I told him about Hanna’s call, and he seemed intrigued.

  “This lady drama critic thinks Tommy Macklin might have done it?”

  “That’s Hanna’s story.”

  “Why?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “Hanna didn’t say, or Tilda didn’t say?”

  “Tilda didn’t say.”

  “Well, perhaps you’d better go ask her, and maybe, if you will be kind enough to drive me into town, I’ll have a quiet word with Tommy Macklin. After all, we scarcely know each other, and now I’m practically working for him. It’s time we got acquainted.”

  Marchepas worked, again, a miracle, so we drove to town at once, and I treated Hanson to lunch at the O.K. Café. He chewed his blackened hamburger thoughtfully, but didn’t leer, not once, at Belinda, not even when she came and sat at our table for a while after the crowd thinned out. He addressed her throughout as “Miss Huntingdon;” she told me later that he didn’t seem like any of the cops she’d ever met before. Then I drove Hanson down to the newspaper and took him up to Tommy’s office. They had met before, I gathered, but really only knew each other to nod to. Tommy immediately put on his sucky expression, and invited Hanson to come in, sir, come in, it is such a pleasure to meet so distinguished a gentleman, while inviting me to get out, get out, and get some work done. As soon as they were settled, I charged off to see our drama critic.

  Tilda Handfield-Browning, née Funk, works out of an office on the ground floor of the Lancer building, a drafty, overstuffed room—not unlike Tilda, in this respect—containing a lot of old furniture, about a thousand theatre programs, and seventeen pictures of the late Sam Marston.

  Tilda is a gentlewoman, in the old-fashioned sense. No longer fawnlike, she retains an air of poise and grace that even some of the wicked were able to capture in her generation, and which seems almost entirely missing in my own. She may have kicked up her heels in her time, but today, you can’t even imagine her mentioning her heels in public, or offering Sam anything more personal than tea, crumpets, and cucumber sandwiches. As a matter of fact, she poured me a splash of oolong as she waved me into a velvet-covered armchair festooned with antimacassars. I took a sip, burned my mouth, swallowed a curse, and smiled brightly at Tilda.

  “Hanna told me you had some news for me.”

  “That is correct, Carlton.” Pause. “She is quite a vivacious young lady.”

  “She is that.”

  “Perky. In my day, we would have called her forward, or even cheeky.”

  “In my day, we call her rude.”

  “And yet she possesses, shall we say, a certain gamine charm.”

  Tilda talks like that; it comes from reading old plays.

  “I don’t know about gamine charm. She has a dandy right cross, I can tell you that.”

  Tilda fluttered, positively fluttered, her eyelashes. “Why, Carlton, I believe you’re smitten!”

  Smitten. You see why I like living in the boondocks. Down in Toronto, when boy likes girl, he gets the hots for her. Here, he is smitten. Nicer, I think. I may have blushed; I’ve been doing that, lately.

  “Why, you are, Carlton, you are smitten. Olga will be so pleased.”

  Olga Kratzmeyer, the Bratwurst Bombshell—she is of German extraction and ample charms—is the editorial secretary down at the Lancer, and a motor-mouth whose information service rivals the Widow Golden’s.

  “Tilda, if you say a word to Olga, you will, I swear to God, kill any chance I have with Hanna. She is not, as you say, smitten.” />
  “I wouldn’t be so sure, Carlton. She called you ‘totally weird.’”

  Well, it was better than “queer,” maybe even a step up from “fathead.” Weird implies exotic, doesn’t it, and therefore interesting?

  “Tilda, I beg of you, make this our little secret. Hanna has just been through a rough time . . .”

  “A Tragic Affair?”

  “A tragic, as you say, affair. This is not the time to put her through the old peer-and-leer routine they’ll get up in the office if they think something is going on. Which, I hasten to add, it isn’t.”

  “Very well, Carlton, you may count on my discretion. My lips are sealed.” She delivered this line as if she had just invented it.

  “Tilda, what’s this about Tommy Macklin?”

  “Carlton, you are very abrupt. All you young people nowadays are very abrupt.”

  “We are. Well?”

  “As you know, Carlton, I am on the Silver Falls Amateur Dramatic Society Board. Honorary,” she preened herself, “Patron.”

  “And?”

  “And, after last week’s meeting, Mrs. Macklin—she is on the board, too, Carlton . . .”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Not that she is really a patron of the thea-tuh. I remember the late Mr. Marston saying of her—this will amuse you, Carlton—saying of Bernice Macklin that she thought Sheridan was a hotel chain.”

  “Very droll. And?”

  “Don’t bustle me, Carlton. You’re bustling me.”

  “A thousand pardons, Tilda. You were mentioning about Mrs. Macklin.”

  “She said a very strange thing.”

  “What about?”

  “About Tommy. She said that Tommy had come home from work the night before in a rage.”

  “Tommy’s always in a rage, Tilda. You know that. So does Bernice Macklin.”

  “Quite. Quite. But this was different. He wasn’t shouting, you know, the way he does. He was coldly furious. That was the phrase Bernice used, ‘coldly furious.’ I’ve never seen Tommy coldly furious, have you?”

  No, I hadn’t. Tommy is usually incandescent. He takes fire faster than an oil-soaked rag.

  “At what was he coldly furious?”

  “That’s just the point. That’s why I told Hanna, as soon as I heard about your little trouble, that I had to speak with you.”

  Long pause here, while Tilda peered over her glasses at me, a trick she had picked up from Lady Windermere’s Fan, or some such place, and then said, “Ernie Struthers. Bernice Macklin told me—mark this well, Carlton—that Tommy had said he could just murder that Ernie Struthers.”

  “Oh. Well, thank you, Tilda, but I don’t think that actually means a whole lot. Tommy offers to have my guts for garters about three times a week, but he’s never actually hit me.”

  “But ‘coldly furious,’ Carlton?”

  “Well, I’ll pass it along, for what it’s worth, to Hanson Eberley. Hanson,” I added, “is helping me.”

  “I know. Such a distinguished man.”

  “Yes. I’ll tell him. But the fact is, Tilda, Tommy was probably mad at Ernie over that three-part series we ran about his hardware store. I wrote the copy.”

  “Such a nice series, Carlton.”

  “Ernie bought four ads to go around the copy, and he didn’t pay for them.”

  “That would make Tommy angry.”

  “It did. He sent me around to hound Ernie, and Ernie called me names, and that’s why I’m probably going to be slam-dunked into jail for his murder. No mystery there.”

  “I don’t think it was that, Carlton. I really don’t. That’s the sort of thing that would make Tommy shout, but not go I coldly furious.’”

  “Hmm.”

  “I think you should go and talk to Tommy, Carlton. Confront him.”

  “Me? Confront Tommy Macklin? You can’t be serious.”

  “You can do it, Carlton. You know you can. Be brave.”

  This one hurt. I would as soon tackle Tommy as ask a mother tiger if I could borrow her cubs.

  “Think how impressed Hanna would be.”

  “Do you think she’d cry at my funeral?”

  So we left it at that, that I would, perhaps, confront, ahem, Tommy Macklin and pummel the truth out of him. I pushed off upstairs to the newspaper, on the off-chance that Hanna might not have left for Toronto yet.

  When I came into the newsroom, I could see that Hanson was still in Tommy’s office. Then it occurred to me that the best way to tryout Tilda’s story might be to tackle Tommy with Hanson standing by. Tommy might not shout at me with a witness there. So I wandered down to the managing editor’s office, knocked, and walked in. The two men were sitting with their feet up on the coffee table, sipping at the office scotch, which Tommy keeps in the bottom drawer of his desk, and which is known as the office scotch because it comes out of the editorial budget, not because anyone else in the office ever gets a sniff of it.

  “Ah,” said Tommy, “Carlton. We were just talking about our little project.”

  My courage is an evanescent thing. Gossamer, practically. It would look well on Nora Eberley. If I was going to do anything with it, I had to do it now, before it wafted away.

  “Tommy,” I said, sternly, “why did you say you’d like to murder Ernie Struthers?”

  His feet crashed to the floor and his head jerked up. “Who said I did?”

  “It’s true, then?”

  He gave me one of his looks. “None of your damned business, Withers.”

  “Now, now, now,” Hanson interceded. “Everything is grist for the mill, Tommy. What’s this all about, Carlton?”

  “I have information” (the old police court formula again, you see) “that Tommy here was really teed off at Ernie Struthers, and now Ernie is dead, and I’m just curious, that’s all.”

  “It’s nothing that concerns you, Carlton.”

  “Now, I’m not sure that’s quite fair, Tommy,” Hanson put in, smoothly. “Everyone is undergoing some interrogation on this murder. The police even came to me and asked for an accounting of my movements on the evening of Ernie’s murder. Quite proper, too.”

  “Oh, yeah, where were you?” Tommy obviously had decided that the best defence was a good offence.

  “In the early part of the evening, I was, um, attending to my wife, and then about nine o’clock or so, an old friend of mine who happened to be in the area dropped in to see me.” He paused.

  Tommy, of course, wanted to know who the old friend was, and Hanson was delighted to accommodate him.

  “Fred Burgess,” he told Tommy, “the local OPP inspector, and a very old friend of mine. He stayed until about 10:30, and then drove over to Kennedy Beach, where his kids have a cottage.”

  Trust Hanson to have a cop for an alibi. He looked across at Tommy. “Satisfied?”

  “Well, of course, Hanson, I didn’t mean to suggest . . .”

  “No, of course not. Nor does Carlton mean to suggest anything, Tommy. It’s just that when these matters come up, people like answers. Perhaps if you told us . . .”

  “Well, I won’t. By God,” Tommy got to his feet now, towering to his full five feet four inches, “I certainly don’t have to account for myself to Carlton. If I were to answer to every jumped-up reporter who comes barging in here . . . Get the hell out, Carlton.”

  It doesn’t work this way on TV. On TV, the reporter just pops the question and the bad guy collapses with a sob of remorse. Tommy doesn’t watch the right shows. He pointed his finger at the door, and I flowed back through it, like jelly slipping off a hot plate, and was gone.

  I wandered back over to my workstation, and went to work on some of the routine stuff that always awaits me. “Nature Notes,” I typed. “Mrs. Mary Brown of Bosky Dell reports seeing a pileated woodpecker in a pine tree outside her back porch,” a
nd I was just beginning to wring the drama out of that damn woodpecker when the phone rang. Not my phone, the one on the city desk. I walked over and barked into the instrument, “Silver Falls Lancer.” I got a patch of heavy breathing, and then a throaty voice rumbled, “I know who killed Ernie Struthers.”

  “That’s nice. Who?” We get a lot of these calls, at the newspaper.

  “Tonight. Ten o’clock. Under the north goalpost at the football field. Meet me there.”

  Click.

  I chuckled to myself, and when Hanna turned up about 5:30—she must have driven the eighty miles to Toronto, done whatever it was she was doing in about an hour, and come back again without let or pause—I told her about the crank call.

  “Phone the cops,” she said, shortly.

  “I’m not going to phone the cops. It’s a waste of time.”

  “Probably. Still, the cops like to know about such things; it keeps them busy.”

  “Maybe in Toronto. Here, the cops prefer not to be busy.”

  “Well then, tell Hanson.”

  “Why should I bother Hanson with this?”

  “Because there just might be something to it; and, even if there isn’t, you ought to tell somebody.”

  “But, suppose he tells me to go and meet this person at 10 p.m.?”

  “Well then, I guess you’ll have to go.”

  “Yes, but, what if he turns out to be a lunatic?”

  She brightened considerably. “Then I guess,” she said, “there’s a pretty good chance he’ll cut your throat.”

  “I suppose I could ask for police protection.”

  “Look, as a matter of ordinary common sense, you ought to tell somebody about the call before you go off to meet some lunatic.”

  “That’s easy. I won’t go to meet the lunatic.”

  “But what if he isn’t a lunatic? What if he has some important information?”

  “Would you come with me?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  I should never have let Hanson wander off without telling him about this, I knew that. I had seen him get up, shake hands with Tommy, and leave the office about 4:30. He’d even given me a merry wave as he went, but I hadn’t said anything. Crank calls are so common, why bother the man? Because it made sense, even as Hanna said. So I phoned him. He hadn’t come home yet, Nora said. He had mentioned something about going around to the OPP office in Silver Falls after he finished at the paper and getting someone there to drive him home. Sure enough, I caught up to Hanson at the OPP detachment, in Fred Burgess’s office. They had been talking over a new development in the case, Hanson told me.