I was hauled out of my cell for a couple of hours of True Confessions in the interrogation room by Thuggy and Smiley, with Mutt and Jeff glowering on the sidelines—they had clearly been hoping to work me over themselves—and I was allowed one telephone call. I naturally decided to call my favourite local law firm, which rejoices in the name Wright and Wong, Barristers and Solicitors, etc. (They are my favourite local firm, but not my favourite law firm in all the world; that one is to be found in a village in Suffolk, England, according to a piece I read in the Globe and Mail, and is called Delay and Fibb.) However, I didn’t get either Mr. Wright or Mr. Wong; instead, I found myself connected to an answering machine, which invited me, in a cheery voice, to leave a message at the sound of the beep. The message I left may have given offence; in any event, I never heard from them.
By the time the Prisoner Withers had been properly processed, with fingerprints and all, and a new statement taken—superseding the one collected during my last visit to this home away from home—the dinner hour had come and gone, but not a morsel of food did I get.
So I lay on the flat metal strips which a munificent constabulary kids itself constitute springs and a mattress, hauled up the two woollen blankets that make up the bed linen—scratchy, but serviceable—and settled down for a cozy, if hungry, spell of sorting things out in my own mind. One new and puzzling piece of information had come to me, via Sgt. Smiley, before I was ushered into the slammer. The police had taken the bit of cloth attached to the Rotary pin Hanna had found in the Flannery pew over to the morgue, to see if it came from Ernie’s jacket. It did not. Then where in the hell did it come from?
I would no doubt have worked this out if I hadn’t fallen asleep in the midst of my contemplations.
I woke up several hours later, when Charlie Passenden, one of our town employees, came clomping down the hall. Charlie combines the task of looking after the police cell, when it has customers, with janitorial work at the municipal building, and is known, in consequence, as Jail-Pail Passenden. He it was who had told me that I was a celebrity, when he ushered me to my cell in the first place. Not in so many words, but he called me “Mr. Withers,” when he has never called me anything but Carlton down at the O.K. Café, and he murmured shyly, as he clanged the door to behind me, “You’re my second killer,” in a proud sort of way. I guess Charlie had stood on guard over Molly Jolly, and he knew that he was due to be a hit down at the O.K., describing to the crowd how the guilty man looked.
On his reappearance after my nap, he had another customer in tow, who smelled like a distillery and looked like the wrath of God, and turned out to be Vern Campbell.
“Company for you, Mr. Withers,” Charlie explained. “Come on, Vern, and for Pete’s sake, this time, if you’re going to be sick, do it in the sink.” Vern shuffled in, looked up at me, slyly, staggered over to the other cot, and slumped down on it.
Just what I needed, someone to talk to. And then it occurred to me—have I been watching too much television lately?—it occurred to me that there was something strange about Vern’s presence here, right at this moment. It was barely 11 p.m., for one thing, and Vern doesn’t usually reach a state of bliss until about midnight. Besides, it was Friday night, when everyone knows the proper time to get so tiddled they have to arrest you is Saturday night. Vern would not be careless in such a matter of etiquette. And, why throw him in jail, anyway, merely for getting drunk? Just falling down on the street won’t get you into the slammer in Silver Falls; a single-cell town has to be particular in these matters. You have to smash up furniture in the beverage room, or make a lewd suggestion to the wrong kind of female walking down the main street, i.e., anyone with the rank of member of the Rebekah Lodge or the Junior League, or a relative of someone on the town council. Generally, Vern was just laid to rest down by the canal when he got too sozzled, and allowed to sleep it off. Could it be that he had been sloshed with rye on the outside, and inserted in my cell as a police stool pigeon? It could.
“What are you in for, Carlton?” mumbled Vern.
“Socage in fief,” I replied, speaking loudly, so his tape recorder, if he had one, could pick it up.
“Huh?”
Silence.
“I’m in,” Vern decided to try again, “for drunk ’n’ disorderly.”
“What did you do, Vern, make a pass at Mrs. Wembley?”
Vern chuckled, then suddenly grew serious. He also leaned forward, getting the tape recorder out front, I guess.
“’Course not,” he said, “wunnerful woman.”
This clinched it. Mrs. Wembley, known to all as Wombat Wembley, is the mayor’s wife, and if Vern, in a bad imitation-drunk accent, was saying nice things about her, he was talking for the record.
“C’mon, Carlton,” he wheedled, “whaddidyado?”
“Nothing.” I leaned forward to speak directly into Vern’s chest, where the tape recorder seemed to be. “The police seem to think I had some connection with the deaths of Ernie Struthers and the Rev. Wylie, but I didn’t.”
Vern was looking, if anything, even slyer than before. “Oh,” he said, “they think you did it?”
“They think I did it, but of course I didn’t.”
“Too bad.”
“How do you mean, too bad? Too bad I don’t go around pin-punching people? Or, too bad they think—quite wrongly, Vern—they think I go around committing mayhem?”
“I forget,” said Vern.
The swift give-and-take was obviously too for much him, and he lapsed into silence for a bit. Then, glancing with a cunning grin at me out of one corner of his eye, and giving a passable imitation of a man from whom no one, ever, would buy a used car, he said, “Did you do it, Carlton? You can tell me.”
“I can tell you, and I do tell you, Vern, that I was,” and here I paused to add emphasis, “NOT,” another big pause, “in any way responsible for these deaths. And,” I added, “that’s the truth.”
Silence ensued, broken, shortly thereafter, by the wall-trembling snores of a Campbell without a conscience.
The next morning, about 7 a.m., Jail-Pail reappeared, and told Vern the judge was ready to see him now—which could not be the case because, as we know, no judge in the nation rises before 9 a.m. I smiled a secret smile as Vern was led off, no doubt, to report to the cops that he had failed in his mission to worm a confession out of me. Foiled by the superior cunning of a seasoned reporter.
A couple of hours later, I woke again, feeling flea-bitten and hungry but in good spirits, and when Mutt and Jeff, the local Ontario Provincial Police’s notion of a dynamic duo, rolled around, I greeted them cheerily.
“Come to apologize, have you, boys?” I chirruped, but Mutt—the long one, remember?—gave me a sour look and Jeff extracted one of those tiny tape recorders you can buy, these days, in any electronics store, from his jacket pocket.
“Want you to listen to something,” he said.
“Fine,” I replied. “Always happy to help the police with their inquiries.”
This proved what I had so cannily suspected; the cops, who know no shame, had sicked Vern onto me, probably in return for turning a blind eye to the Campbell brothers’ free-enterprise liquor operation out in the woods. They were undoubtedly ticked off because Thuggy and Smiley had been called in from Toronto to solve the murders, and hoped to pull a swifty, before I baffled them by refusing to cough up a confession. I smiled, complacently.
Jeff punched a button on the tape recorder, and out came the unmistakable tones of Michael Jackson telling somebody, with the accompaniment of a lot of drums and horns, that he was bad, bad, bad. Jeff cursed, stopped the tape, flipped over the cassette, and punched the button again. This time he got it right, and we heard the throaty tones of Vern Campbell asking what I was in for, and self telling him for socage in fief. Then came our little exchange about Mrs. Wembley, and I was smiling and thinking what saps these leadhead
s were, wasting the public’s funds on tape, when we suddenly came to a change in the program.
Vern asked me, once again, “Whaddidyado?” and I replied, “Ernie Struthers’s death. . . . I did it.”
Jeff gave me a big smile, and the tape rolled on. There was Vern, once more, assuring me I could tell him, and self replying, “I was responsible for these deaths. . . . And that’s the truth.”
The swine had doctored Vern’s recording. Hell, I’d even made it easier for them, by my dramatic pauses. All it took was a razor blade, quick fingers, and a little scotch tape to rejoin the splices; then they just re-recorded it onto a new tape, and it came out as the Withers’s confession.
I was stunned. “You rigged the tape,” I told Jeff. “But it won’t do any good; it’s not admissible in court.” I hadn’t learned much in my days on the court beat, but I had learned that much.
“No,” Jeff admitted, “it’s not; but it will keep you in jail until we can make the case against you airtight. Oh, by the way,” he added, “we’ve had a little chat with Ephraim Wylie’s widow. She said that her husband was very agitated about something just before he made that telephone call to you. He’d been out for a walk past your place, according to Mrs. Wylie, and seen something that disturbed him. At first he didn’t know whether he should talk to you about it, she said, but then he decided that he must. Which is why he called you.”
“He didn’t tell her what it was about?”
“No, you’re lucky there. All he said was something like—Mrs. Wylie isn’t sure of the exact words—‘Carlton must have some explanation.’ Interesting, eh?”
And with that, the two cops drifted out, leaving me to my thoughts, which were considerably darker than they had been before. They couldn’t use the tape, that much was clear, but the fact that they went to the trouble to get it showed that they thought, they really thought, by God, that I had done in Ernie Struthers and then, presumably because he had found out about it, spiked the Rev., into the bargain. Who could blame them? Well, I could. Silly flatfeet, why didn’t they go out and catch the real murderer, and leave me alone?
Why were they so anxious to nail me, anyway? Well, I knew the answer to that, didn’t I? I was the obvious suspect; ergo, I did it; ergo, any little tricks they could pull that might result in a confession were okay. When I remembered the cops who had machine-gunned a travelling salesman in a Sherbrooke motel because they thought, on very little evidence, that he might be an escaping robber, I realized that Mutt and Jeff were, if anything, models of decorum.
Jail-Pail appeared a few minutes later, with my breakfast—an egg-in-a-bun concoction from the O.K. Café, burned to a crisp and containing, as I discovered too late, when I had already bitten into it, a note from Belinda Huntingdon. It said, “Hi, Carlton, don’t g‒‒‒” I had bitten off whatever came after this, presumably, “give up hope.” Then there was a crude drawing of a file, suitable for zipping through jail bars, and a scrawled, “Love, Belinda.” The note cheered me up again; not only was it a sign that somebody out there still cared, it tasted just about as good as the rest of breakfast. I was still chewing on it, both physically and metaphorically, when Jail-Pail returned.
“Time for court,” he told me, as he opened the cell door and fastened handcuffs on my wrists.
“Who’s the judge?”
“Carlton, it’s Saturday morning. There’s only one judge on Saturday morning.”
“Tinkerbell?”
“Yep,” said Jail-Pail, and I tottered off to meet my doom.
Chapter 20
The Canadian system of justice is acknowledged by all the best legal minds to be one of the finest in the world. This ought to give us some concern about the legal systems of the world, because one of the minor drawbacks of the Canadian system is that it tends to throw up onto the benches of the land the flotsam and jetsam of the political system. It has been said, correctly, that in the United States, they elect their judges, while in Canada, we defeat them. The prime requisite for high legal office is to make a run for politics at the behest of one of the party bigshots and flunk the test. Next time there is a vacancy on a court somewhere, you will reap your reward. This would not be so bad except that, once installed, a judge cannot be removed, except for heinous crimes and misdemeanours. Mere incompetence doesn’t count. Thus, Herman Fotheringham Tinker, back in the dim and distant past, ran, and failed, for the Conservative cause in Bellingham County and was, in due course, elevated to the bench, where he remained, dumber than a doorpost, and now, to add a dash of piquancy to the proceedings, deaf as a doorpost, with it. He won’t wear a hearing aid, and can’t hear most of what goes on in court. So they try to confine the damage by giving him the Saturday morning drunk court to handle, where all that is required of him is to bang his gavel at a signal from Cyril Filmore, the court clerk, who actually runs the proceedings, and bellow, “Guilty; fifty dollars or ten days.”
He would take my bail hearing, and it did not look good. When I came into the musty old courtroom, with Jail-Pail hovering at my side, fearful, once he had de-cuffed me, that I would make a break for it with consequent ruin to his reputation down at the O.K. Café, I discovered that I was the only person in the prisoner’s dock. No sign of Vern, or any other drunks. Hanna was in the body of the courtroom, and so was Hanson. There were no other spectators. Hanson nodded and smiled. Hanna called out, “Hi, Carlton,” and got a glare from the sheriff’s officer in charge.
“Who’s the girl?” Jail-Pail wanted to know, nodding over towards where Hanna sat wearing, if you can believe it, a skirt and blouse.
“My moll,” I told him. He looked gratified.
Mutt and Jeff were on hand, but not the Toronto cops, Smiley and Thuggy. (Hanna told me later that they had heard about the doctored tapes and wanted no part of that operation; indeed, they had already filed a complaint with their superiors.) Also on hand was the Crown attorney, Stanley “The Slammer” Spencer, who was widely known to be much-bullied at home by his wife, and who got his own back by taking it out on the dregs of humanity who passed through his hands in court.
In due course, we went through the All-Rise, and Tinkerbell entered stage left, swishing his robes and hefting his gavel. He wore a befuddled expression, but that didn’t mean much; he always wears a befuddled expression.
He nodded at Cyril and then looked down to the lawyer’s bench, just beneath his own. There was, to the astonishment of all, a defence lawyer there. Drunk charges, the normal Saturday fare, don’t usually draw defence counsel, since the fee is bound to exceed Tinkerbell’s usual fifty-dollar fine, but this morning, we had Parker Whitney, a member, as I knew from my newspaper work, of the local bar. All the local bars, come to that, but the one that concerns us here is the bar of Queen’s Bench. Parker is the counsel for the Silver Falls Lancer. He is not very expensive, which is why the Lancer hires him, and not very good. I guess he hadn’t been to see me in jail because that might have cost extra. When the judge nodded at him, Parker rose in his place.
“I represent the accused, Your Honour,” he explained, and added, “at the request of the Silver Falls Lancer.” Tinkerbell banged his gavel.
“Fifty dollars or ten days,” he said.
“Take it, Carlton,” shouted Hanna, “you’ll never get a better offer.”
Fortunately, Tinkerbell didn’t hear this, and merely muttered “What, what, what, what?” And then, for good measure, “What?”
Cyril turned around and whispered in his ear. Waste of time, of course. So he bellowed, “Not drunk, Your Honour. Murder.”
“Murder? Bless my soul!” Tinkerbell whipped out a pair of glasses, from somewhere in his robes, and gave me the once over. “Why,” he said, astounded, “it’s Carlton Withers! Isn’t it? Is that you, Carlton?”
“Yessir, Your Honour, it’s me all right.”
“Carlton,” and he wagged a judicial finger at me, “who have you gone and mu
rdered? Not your poor father, I hope?”
“No, sir.”
“That’s good. Carlton’s father,” Tinkerbell explained to Cyril, “splendid fellow. We play golf together.”
They had, too, at one time. My father was no snob, and would even play golf with a judge. Tinkerbell was almost as bad at the game as Dad, and cheated just as blatantly, so they got along splendidly.
“He’s dead, Your Honour,” I explained.
“He is? Carlton, you should be ashamed of yourself.”
Stanley Spencer, representing the awful majesty of the Crown, leapt up and came up to the bench and between Cyril and Stanley, they managed to get the judge on track. I hadn’t killed my father, hadn’t killed anybody, come to that, according to my story—Stanley conveyed, with this information, a strong sniff of disbelief—but the police had charged me with the death of Ernest Charleston Struthers and Ephraim Elias Wylie, D.D., the names on the charge sheet in front of His Honour.
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