“But why did Ernie suddenly decide to tell me about it, and why was he killed?”
“The two are probably connected,” said Smiley. “When Eberley said earlier that there were three sets of initials in the blackmail book we found at Carlton’s place—planted there, no doubt, by Eberley himself—he was quite correct. But there had been at least four names, originally. One of the pages had been torn out. It was very carefully done, but, just as part of our routine, we counted the number of pages in the notebook. It came to 31; the same kind of notebook we picked up in the stationery store in town had 32 pages in it.”
“Pretty smart, these leadheads,” I told Hanna.
“Shut up,” she said. “He’s still talking.” And so he was.
“It’s pretty clear from Struthers’s bank records that Ernie was bleeding Eberley, more often and for more money than his other blackmail victims, and Hanson was running out of resources. Ernie made the same mistake most blackmailers make; he got too greedy.”
I looked back at Hanson, to see how he was taking this. He was craning his head around, checking to see if there was any way out, no doubt. Obviously, he’d had no idea that the fuzz had been so busy on his behalf. He caught me watching him, shrugged, and half-smiled. He had been down this road too often not to know that the jig—whatever that is—was up. Why up?, I wondered. I wondered about a lot of things. I decided to see if I could clear some of them up.
“But why would Ernie be bringing the clipping around to me? We weren’t exactly chums.”
This time, it was Thuggy, moving ever so slowly closer to where Hanson sat, who replied.
“Just as Miss Klovack says. It was a clue, a pointer. It didn’t even matter if you worked out what it meant, we believe. Ernie was going to leave it for you to find, at your front door. It might mean something to you, or it might not, but, whatever happened, you would take it to your friend, your very clever friend, Hanson Eberley. Ernie could count on that. Eberley would get the message. Or, even if he didn’t, he would know that any dealings between you and Ernie, under the circumstances, had to be a threat to him. The whole thing was aimed at pressuring Eberley to come across with more money. Ernie apparently thought Eberley was holding out on him.”
“But if Hanson killed Ernie, why at my place? And why didn’t he just remove the envelope?”
Smiley took over again. “Our guess is that he ran into Ernie, quite by accident, while he was out for a stroll late that evening, after the meeting at the church. Miss Klovack is quite correct, again, when she points out that the whole purpose of trying to draw attention to the church was to establish an alibi for Eberley. He was covered for the time between about nine o’clock and about 10:30. It is clear now that Ernie Struthers spent most of that time drinking, probably down at the federal dock, which was his favourite hangout; there is seldom anyone there.”
These gents had being doing some local research. The federal dock at Bosky Dell is normally deserted because it is one of those government boondoggles, built in entirely the wrong place, about five blocks away from what might be called the hub of activity, which is the public dock, at the foot of Fourth. The sergeant went on.
“If Ernie Struthers decided, after he had been drinking for some time, to go and see Carlton Withers, his shortest route would be along Forest Road and down Third Street. That would take him right past the Eberley place. It seems most likely that Eberley saw him—perhaps he merely wondered what had happened to him earlier in the evening—and followed him.”
Thuggy took over again. It was getting to be a cross-talk act.
“We think there was a confrontation. Eberley was not the sort of man to panic and lash out. If he was going to kill Ernie, you would expect him to do it carefully, but we think Ernie must have said something to him that so enraged him that, for once, he lost his cool. What it was, we don’t know.
“He knocked Ernie out—we haven’t found the weapon yet, but we will. Then he slipped into the Withers’s workshop, found the set of pin punches, and stabbed Struthers in the kidneys with it. A simple, quick, sure way for someone of Eberley’s experience to commit a killing. There was not much blood—most of the bleeding was internal—but we have found traces on the lawn outside the door, despite the rain.
“Once he knew Ernie was dead, he searched the body and found what he was looking for—that blackmailing notebook. Either that, or he went up to Ernie’s house, and found it there. The fact that he didn’t destroy it suggests that he at once began to take steps to incriminate someone else, and realized that the notebook could serve exactly that purpose.
“When the autopsy indicated that Struthers had been hit on the head as well as stabbed, and that he had a considerable amount of alcohol in him, we began to reconstruct what might have happened. Frankly, for a time, we could make no sense of what we seemed to be finding.”
“Because of the misdirection?” I wondered.
“Yeah. The stuff about the church, and the clipping. Obviously, when Eberley turned up the next day, just in time for the body to be found, he decided to make the most of the connection with the church that was suggested by the envelope.
“So, he planted the hat in the church to make the connection stronger. He could have done that, easily enough, in the hour or so when everyone was waiting around for the police to arrive from Silver Falls.”
“Well, then, what about the tool set?”
“He removed that at about the same time, and deposited it in the lake—probably last night, it hadn’t been in the water long—because he knew it would be retrieved by ordinary police investigation, and would seem to be one more tiny shred of evidence pointing to you.”
My mind was, as the saying goes, in something of a turmoil. Hanson, my old friend, my hero, not only turned into a killer, but arranging to drop the blame on me. For Nora. There was that, at least. He had got into this horrible mess to protect his wife, it wasn’t anything deliberately aimed at me.
“Nothing personal, Carlton,” Hanson said softly, as if he had been reading my mind. “You see, the detectives have at least some of it right. Nora was driving the truck and Ernie did take her place behind the wheel after the accident. It would have killed her to be convicted of a driving death,” he explained, calmly. “For someone like Ernie, it was just a spell in jail. Everything else flowed from that.
“Ernie was blackmailing me, that is correct, too. But I didn’t kill him because of that, although I certainly would have, in a rather less crude manner, if he’d kept it up. No, Sergeant Smollett’s version is not so very far off. And if you want to know precisely what he said that so enraged me, Sergeant, I can tell you. It is not something I am ever likely to forget. He said, ‘Well, Eberley, I see you’ve got your boozing under control. How about the Missus? She kill anybody lately?’
“But, Carlton, you must believe me when I say that I was sorry that I felt I had to land you with the crime. I never wanted to hurt you. It became a, well, practical necessity.”
“How about me?” Dominic Silvio wanted to know. “Was the hit on the head I got a practical necessity?”
“Exactly,” Hanson replied. “You see, I put Nora to bed that night”—another wintry smile—“as I so often do, but when I woke up about midnight, she was gone. I went out looking for her. I must have wandered up and down every street in the village and I was about to give up and go home, when, on my final trip down Third Street, I noticed someone moving about on Carlton’s lawn. It was you, Mr. Silvio, and you were looking through Carlton’s bedroom, ogling my wife in Carlton’s bed. So I picked up a piece of oak—a windblown branch, in case you’re wondering, Sergeant Smollett, the same thing I used on Ernie, they are never in short supply around here—and hit you. That would clear you as a suspect and point, once more, to Carlton,” he finished, with a rueful smile.
Well, that seemed to be that, and I was just waiting for the cops to scoop up their man when Hans
on made a sudden dart at the table in front of him, grabbed the pin punch—had the cunning rascal brought it along just in case?—grabbed Hanna with one hand, whirled her about, and put the point of the punch close to her throat.
“Without wanting to appear melodramatic,” he said, in a cold, calm voice, “I wish to point out that I can kill this young woman very quickly, and if anyone here moves, I will certainly do so. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I believe we’ll be on our way.”
He began to back away from the table, dragging Hanna with him, and he appeared to be going to get clear away when, suddenly, from somewhere, there came a bellow of rage, a bellow so loud, so angry, so incoherently malevolent, that I was astonished to find that it was issuing from my own throat. I really was quite cranky. Not content with his role in the death of my parents, he had to go on and slaughter Ernie Struthers and the Rev., while trying to pin the blame on me, not satisfied with cold-cocking Dominic Silvio, who looked as if he might stand me a trip to California, not happy with trying to stage a public showdown, when the thing was getting out of hand, to make me panic, as I very nearly did, and make a run for it, this wily old thug was now about to make off with a girl for whom I had, as you may have gathered, formed an attachment. Something snapped, and I came out of my seat like a berserk bull. Startled, Hanson relaxed his grip for an instant and Hanna, never one to stand on ceremony, promptly drove her elbow into his midriff. I arrived about half a second later and hit Hanson across the bridge of the nose with all the violence that had been boiling around within me for some time. He went galley-west, the weapon clattered loose, and I clutched Hanna.
Chapter 25
This is the place, you’re saying to yourself, where the heroine flutters her eyelashes, murmurs, “My hero,” in fluted tones, and we get smooch, smooch, and the happy ending. I was expecting something of the sort myself, and it would have been all right with me. But we are wrong, both of us; we reckon without Hanna Klovack, the most cross-grained female to emerge on the planet Earth since Catherine the Great handed in her sceptre. Not the eyelash-fluttering type, our Hanna, nor the My Hero type, either. Instead of sinking into my arms, she shook me off like a terrier shaking off a rat and yelped, “You big jerk, what did you do that for?”
I ask you.
“Because, pinhead, the man was getting set to massacre you.”
“Oh, Carlton, don’t be so dramatic.”
“Dramatic?” I appealed to Smiley and Thuggy, who had scooped up the dazed Eberley Hanson and were giving him the arrest routine. “Was this man, or was he not, getting set to massacre the young twerp?”
Smiley paused to think about it. “He might have,” he said, “but I don’t really think so.”
“There.” Hanna was triumphant. “He just lost his cool for the second time in his life. He couldn’t go anywhere. There are probably cops all over the place. Aren’t there, Sergeant Smollett?”
He nodded.
“See? There was no need to hit the poor man.”
Poor man. You got that?
She went on, “Really, he was quite pathetic when you come to think about it. The cops were onto him almost from the start.”
“They were? Then why did they throw me in the slammer?”
“Oh, well, not the Silver Falls boys. They were pathetic. But the Toronto cops. By the time I went to them with the stuff about the sunglasses, they were already running checks on Hanson and . . .”
“You told them about the sunglasses? I thought Hanson was doing that.”
“Why should Hanson do that? He knew where the sunglasses came from. Ten to one, they were Ernie’s. They were the very sunglasses he was wearing in the crash, I’ll bet. Hanson got hold of them and put them in your place. He figured the cops would find them because he knew they would be coming out to your place with a search warrant, pretty soon. It was pure routine.”
“SO, when I took them over to him . . .”
“It queered the pitch. He didn’t know what a diligent housekeeper you are”—significant lifting of eyebrows at this point—“and when you promptly turned them over to him, it must have put him out quite a lot. There was the whole weary job to do over, so he stuck you with the notebook, instead, and this time, the cops did the tidying before you could.”
“That is quite incorrect,” Hanson interjected.
“Oh, yeah, then tell us what really happened,” Hanna challenged.
“I have nothing more to say until I see my lawyer.”
“Suit yourself. It was also pretty pathetic, when you come to think of it, how he went around the church planting clues, like the hat and the Rotary pin and the Lancer pen, which his police experience must have told him were not going to be accepted for more than the time it took to check them out.”
“Well, but, be fair, he was under a lot of pressure.”
“Exactly my point. He was desperate. That’s why he staged this little farce, he thought that if you didn’t panic before, you would when he named you . . .”
“Well, I did.”
“. . . and make a break for it.”
“I would have, but I couldn’t get my limbs to function.”
“Anyway, when you told me about the sunglasses, I called Sergeant Smollett, here, and when Hanson hadn’t bothered to say a word to him about them, it was pretty clear that something really fishy was going on.”
“If the police were onto Hanson, why did they let him go ahead with this performance here?”
“Why not? If they refused, he might make a run for it, and somebody might get hurt.”
“That’s not quite it,” Sergeant Smollett said. “The truth is, we were suspicious of Eberley, but we didn’t have enough to justify a search warrant until one of our boys interviewed the witness who saw the Eberleys in Ernie Struthers’s truck. That was late last night. We brought the search warrant out with us, and it seemed a useful thing to let him stage this little charade while we searched the place. There’s a team over there right now, and my guess is that, among other things, they’ll find that case with the sunglasses, and we’ll find it belonged to Ernie Struthers.”
“There,” said Hanna again, with her irritating and triumphant grin. “When you think about it, for a former homicide detective, Hanson was really quite incompetent.”
“He didn’t look incompetent to me when he had that pig-sticker up against your throat.”
“The trouble with you, Carlton,” the young blot went on, “is that you think you’re on television, and you’re not. This is real life. Real life in Canada,” she added.
That was a bitter blow. In the United States—and this is one of the things that makes that great republic what it is—the good guys behave like good guys, and the bad guys go down snarling and slashing, but in Canada, to be a good guy and rescue the fair damsel is to invite the contempt of the multitude. What a country.
Well, not all the multitude. Mrs. Golden made a fuss over me, and so did Dominic Silvio. “Nice work, kid,” he said, and, with a wink, “We’ll talk later.”
Obviously, he still didn’t know that I’d been canned from the Lancer, and was no longer in a position where flying trips to California made much sense. However, I was speedily uncanned. Tommy Macklin, scuffing his shoes, and looking positively human, came shuffling up, stuck out his hand, and said, “Carlton, forget the crap about being fired. You’re hired again.”
“How about Hanna?”
A glower, a sigh. “Oh, all right. She can have her job back, too.”
“With a raise?” This, needless to say, was Hanna talking, not me.
Another glower, another sigh. “Small raise,” he said.
“Okay,” said Hanna, and smacked me on the back. “See, Carlton, you’ve got to strike while the iron is hot.”
The iron, in this case, was positively glowing. Tommy wasn’t giving me my job back, or Hanna hers, out of boyish affection. We kne
w about the role he had played, or not, in the war. So did the Widow Golden, which of course meant that most of Bellingham County would have the story in about forty-eight hours, but that was not the same as having two journalists spreading the tale to the people who counted in Tommy’s mind, viz., the rest of the trade. If he kept us on the payroll and under his thumb, we wouldn’t rat; if not, we would. That was the unspoken deal that re-employed us.
“Great,” said Hanna, “I’ll just take a few shots before the police haul Eberley away. We can do a terrific feature for next week’s paper.”
I looked at Tommy; Tommy looked at me. More to be pitied than censured, our mutual looks said.
“Hanna,” I told her, “there isn’t going to be a feature for next week’s paper.”
“The hell there isn’t.”
“In the first place, the Toronto dailies will have it in about eight hours, and they’ll pluck it clean. We’d be scooped on our own story.”
“And in the second place,” put in Tommy, “it isn’t a Lancer kind of story. Murder. Blackmail. Drunken driving. That’s not the sort of thing our readers want with their morning coffee.”
In this, as we know, he had his facts twisted. Murder, blackmail, and a dollop of booze and sex is just what our readers want, morning, noon, and night, which is why the weekly issue of the National Enquirer is always gone from the newsstand in Silver Falls long before the Lancer. But the readers who don’t want all that juicy stuff appearing in the newspaper are Mrs. Post, our proprietor, and some of the advertisers. Moreover, the Lancer had been interested in an exclusive about sponsoring Hanson Eberley’s investigation; it would be embarrassing to have to admit the paper had been working with the killer. Tommy didn’t feel it incumbent upon him to spell this out.
“Well, my hat,” Hanna exclaimed, “what kind of story do your readers want?”
Tommy smiled a secret smile. “Oh, I dunno.” He gave me a little nudge. “I think we can come up with something, eh, Carlton? Something, for example, about a snazzy new condominium development right here in Bosky Dell?”
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