by Eric Wright
Wilkie shrugged, aimed a ball of paper at the wastebasket, and missed. “What do you want to know? What’ll satisfy her?”
“Nothing. If I don’t help, she’ll try someone else. You know the type. She’ll go round and round, bugging everybody. So let me do what I can. What have you got against him?”
“You want me to tell you our case against Siggy? Okay. Everyone in Larch River knows it.” Wilkie outlined the facts, and the reasonable assumptions that he had drawn from them.
Pickett said, “But it’s still circumstantial, then.”
“We’re looking for the gun, which will have Siggy’s fingerprints on it, and specimens of his hair, blood, and saliva, probably. That will wrap it up, I hope. We think Siggy might have been trying to blackmail Marlow, and any day now we expect him to break down and confess. But just in case we’re wrong, we’re also looking for anyone else who might have shot Marlow in the face. So far we’ve questioned and accounted for everyone in Larch River. But at the moment, yes, it’s still circumstantial.”
“Does Siggy seem like the kind to do it? I hardly knew the guy, even to see, but from what I’ve heard he wouldn’t have taken Marlow on.”
“I doubt if he did. I think it must have been nearly accidental, and if he’d reported it right away, we wouldn’t have charged him with much. But he didn’t report it, so we’re entitled to think of manslaughter, at least, just because of the trouble he’s caused us.”
“If he did it.”
“Who else?”
“Can I see him? Is he still here?”
“We have to ask him, fix a time.”
“Today?”
Wilkie looked at his watch. “Let’s try for three o’clock.”
Relieved that Wilkie was making it so painless to respond to Mrs. Siggurdson’s request, Pickett left his chain saw at the hardware store, filled up with gas at a cent a liter cheaper than Charlotte’s boss sold it for, and returned to Wilkie just before three.
“You’re not going to get to first base, Me,” Wilkie said. “He doesn’t want to talk to you.”
“Did you tell him I’m here because of his mother?”
“He says he didn’t realize what she was up to. He’s got nothing to tell you, he says. Leave him alone, is what he says.”
“Can’t I even take a look at the guy?”
“He’s got the right to say no to that, too, I think, but we’ll just spring you on him.”
They walked through to the cell area. Siggy was lying on a bunk in the only occupied cell, a small, fat, semi-bald character dressed in a pair of greasy dark pants and a whitish T-shirt. His yellow boots were on the floor of the cell. Wilkie said, “This is Mr. Pickett, Siggy, the man your mom …”
“Fuck off,” Siggurdson said.
“I was talking to your mother, Siggy,” Pickett said.
Siggy stretched out and rolled on his side, away from them, his face resting on his hand. “Fuck off,” he said.
“Sorry, Mel,” Wilkie said, when they were back in the office. “Not a lot I can do for you. Or you for him, I guess.” He was grinning.
“I’ll just have to find the guy who did it.”
Wilkie looked up at him without lifting his head. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“My client says her son didn’t do it. So somebody else must have.” Pickett smiled to show he was barely serious.
Wilkie laughed. “You’re going to give it a real try, aren’t you? How do you plan to start?”
“Ask around. Find out who had it in for Marlow.”
“Let me know when you find out, won’t you? I’ve tried.”
“You’ll be the first to know.”
It was wise to keep the tone jokey, but Pickett was now slightly intrigued. In the first place you would think that a man like Siggy, facing a manslaughter charge, would welcome all the help he could get. Siggy ought to be shaking the bars, protesting his innocence. It was possible that the reason why Siggy didn’t want to talk to him was that he was in such deep misery, but then it was odd to find him calm, telling him to fuck off in such a vigorously dismissive voice. It was not much, but odd enough to make him want to stay around.
The problem was where to start. Siggurdson himself was the natural person to question about Marlow, about who his cronies were. After Siggy, the other obvious person to ask was Betty. And Caxton.
Pickett was glad of the excuse to call on Caxton, whose behavior was becoming a worry. He had apparently given up his one-man investigation altogether and gone into hibernation. He no longer patrolled the town, staying home unless he was called out by telephone. He seemed to be awake and moving inside the house at any time of the night that Pickett passed; during the day, he sat dozing in an armchair. All of this, Pickett assumed, was because he had lost Betty. The man needed someone to talk to, however tedious that might be.
When Pickett found him at home, in his office, Caxton was still consumed with the idea that Marlow had shaved his beard off for some good reason, and the only one that Caxton could come up with was that he was meeting someone and didn’t want to be recognized.
“What does Betty think?” Pickett asked.
“Betty doesn’t know anything. He told her he was going to Toronto, then he turned up dead here in Larch River. That’s all she knows. She’s still talking to me through the screen door.” He twisted in his chair.
“What does Wilkie think?”
“Who knows what Sergeant Wilkie does or doesn’t think about anything? I haven’t asked, and he hasn’t said. I’m right out of it. I do what he asks, and sometimes he asks me to come along and watch, and that’s all. But that’s all my problem. What can I do for you?”
Pickett said, “Mrs. Siggurdson came to see me. She thinks her boy is being shafted.”
“Why you?”
“She can’t find anyone else.”
“Are you going to help her?”
“I don’t have any status. She doesn’t understand that, though, so I told her I would satisfy myself. I was impressed, Lyman. She calls Siggy a fuck-up herself, but she says there’s no way he would go up against Marlow, and now I have a reasonable doubt, too. What do you think?”
The chief twisted back and forth. “I have to say she’s got a point,” he said. “I never thought that bag of lard would pull a trigger, ever.”
Pickett said, “Somebody did. Who are Siggy’s pals?”
“Wilkie would know by now. Siggy isn’t about to be loyal to his associates if he would do better by ratting on them.”
“So someone else. Not with Siggy. Who else was Marlow close to?”
“He didn’t have anyone except Siggy. See, Timmy was kind of the lone wolf—no, that’s not what I mean—he was a lone operator, never part of a gang. You’d see him in the beer parlor sometimes—there’s two or three layabouts Siggy drinks with, but they’d be drunk and Timmy wouldn’t, know what I mean? He did get drunk sometimes, but roaring drunk, not sitting around a table with a bunch of deadbeats. He thought he was Hud.”
“And Siggy?”
“Siggy was his whatdoyoucallit—his servant, his ass-licker, batman. He hung around Timmy, and Timmy let him. But most of the time Timmy was off chasing women, more and more in Sweetwater.”
“And you don’t know of any enemies he might have picked up.”
“No, I don’t, not lately. Most people gave him lots of room. He could be a mean son of a bitch. He beat up a guy real bad once in Sweetwater, more than he needed to.”
“Will you see if his sister will talk to me?”
“Probably she won’t.” He dialed Betty’s number, made Pickett’s request, looked surprised, said, “He’ll be right over,” and then said to Pickett, “Apparently it’s just me she won’t talk to.”
Before he left, Pickett said, “Lyman, don’t sit brooding, thinking about her. Get out of here. Come up to my place for a beer, game of cards.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Caxton said and sat down, turning to look out the window.
Betty Cullen was surrounded by cardboard cartons, which she was filling with wrapped glasses. The need to pack seemed to be helping her through the stress of Marlow’s death. When Pickett had explained what he was there for, she said, “I don’t see how you’re going to get around Siggy. I wish it was someone I didn’t know, but I guess it must have been him. No one saw anyone else, did they? Even Siggy hasn’t claimed to. Anyway, leaving Timmy out there all weekend like that …”
“I know there’s not much to be said for Siggy, as Siggy. But what his mother says rings true, that he doesn’t have the guts.”
“Did you speak to him?”
“He won’t talk to me.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” Another possible solution occurred to Pickett. “He thinks maybe I’m part of some police trick. Even though his mother came to me, he thinks I’m on their side, not his.”
She looked at him sharply. “You mean he might know something he hasn’t let out yet?”
“It’s possible.”
“What did you want to know from him?”
“Two things. First, to hear exactly what happened, step by step. Talking to me he might not be so uptight and he could remember something he’s been leaving out, something that might work in his favor. The second thing was to see if he could help me put together your brother’s world. The people he knew. That’s why I’ve come to you.”
“You mean who he hung around with lately, or in the past?”
“I wasn’t thinking of the past. Lately, I guess.”
“Timmy never confided in me. He wouldn’t have, though, would he? I was like a mother in some ways, and you don’t tell your mother about your women, do you?” She started to fidget.
Pickett got to his feet, but her question about the past stayed. “How long had Timmy been living in Larch River?”
“Seven years.” She jumped up. “I could look it up. I’ve got the exact date in my daybook in the bakery. My journal. I use it as a diary. I’ll look it up.”
Pickett lifted his palm. “The day doesn’t matter. Seven years is long enough to have acquired all the enemies he needed right here.”
“The only one I know around here who hung out with Timmy was Siggy.”
Pickett thanked her and left.
An hour later she called Pickett as he was opening a beer before supper. “I looked up that date you were wondering about. Timmy arrived in April 1988. I’ll show you in the book.”
“Thanks, that’s good enough. Where did he come from, by the way?”
“Out west.”
“From a town?”
“Winnipeg, I think. Why?”
“Did he ever hear from there? Or go and visit old friends?”
“He never had any money, not to pay for trips.”
He put the phone down and looked at Willis, resisting the temptation to speak his surprise aloud. He was trying to avoid turning into a cute old fart who talked to his dog.
CHAPTER 18
By this point, Pickett had expected that he would have made up his mind already, almost certainly in agreement with Wilkie, but although he had not found a shred of real contradiction, collectively the people he had talked to so far had made him uneasy. Everything he knew and had heard about Siggurdson had made him assume he was a blubbering liar, desperate to convince someone that he did not kill Marlow; instead, an indifferent Siggy had told him to fuck off. Caxton seemed a little out to lunch on the whole issue, and Betty Marlow was a puzzling mixture of aggression and worry. Even Wilkie did not ring entirely true. His current placidity was not justified by the strength of his case, which a real lawyer ought to be able to shred easily. The only person of real conviction was Evie Siggurdson.
Until he noticed Linda McCourt, the girl seen with Marlow in the cottage, crossing the street, Pickett thought he was out of ideas, but seeing her he remembered her early statement and that gave him two more people to talk to. Linda McCourt was the first. He waited until she had gone back to work, and tackled her in her change booth.At first she was hostile. She had been happy with the promise from Wilkie that the police would keep her involvement with Marlow quiet, especially from her father, but if Wilkie had kept his word then this man ought not to have known enough to find her. “The OPP tells me that I’m speaking to them in confidence,” she said, nearly in tears. “Then they tell someone like you everything. I’ve got nothing to say to you. Get out of here.”
“The OPP didn’t tell me a thing. I got it from someone else who saw you with Marlow.”
Her eyes became wet. “I suppose the whole frigging town knows. It’s sure to get back to Dad. Oh, Jesus.”
“Not from me. But, yeah, sure, you have to be ready for the chance that he might find out one of these days. But not from me or the OPP. And I’ll ask the OPP to remind the guy who told me to keep his mouth shut.”
“Dad’ll kill me.”
“They’re not using your evidence. Only the OPP know your name. You’ll probably be all right.”
“Well, what do you want to know? I thought I’d said it all.”
“I want you to tell me what kind of guy Marlow was. What you thought of him then. What you think of him now. Anything that might help me to know him a bit. Let’s try a few possibilities. Was he cheap with his money? What did he think he was good at? What plans did he have? Who did he ever mention that you didn’t know?”
He stayed there for an hour. They were interrupted eight or nine times by customers paying for gas, but in the second half hour he began to get close to his real interest. “Who were his friends?” he asked for the third time.
“He didn’t have any except me. And Siggy,”
“Did he call Siggy a friend?”
“He called Siggy a lard ass, but he let him hang around.”
“Why did he stay in Larch River if he despised it so much?”
“His sister. He had a job.”
“Baker’s delivery boy?”
She snickered. “Right on. I called him something like that once when he was blowing about himself and he hit me across the room. I went back at him with a piece of stove wood. I wasn’t going to let him think he could knock me around as if I was some little chippie he could do what he liked with. Then he said he was sorry. See, I’d injured his pride.” She gave a wide, jeering smile.
A feisty little babe, Wilkie had called her.
“What else was he proud of?” Pickett asked.
“That’s a good question. He was always talking about making a move, but he couldn’t do anything. He didn’t know anything. He couldn’t even add properly.”
“What did he do before he came here? Any idea?”
“Something to do with fishing, I think. I don’t know.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. He hardly ever said anything about it. Somewhere out west.”
“Are you sorry he’s dead?”
“You heard what happened, didn’t you, how he left me up the creek? Course, I’m not sorry. Oh well, maybe a bit. We had some nice times together.”
“Where?”
“In the cottage. We couldn’t go out together, not around here. And you don’t have a lot of choice in this place. I mean, I don’t, except high school kids.”
His other hope was Pat Dakin. He called at the bed-and-breakfast, the Linton House, in order to find her Toronto address, and she opened the door. “I’m sorry,” she said in a tone that had nothing to do with regret. “We’re not in the B-and-B business now.”
For a moment he thought she recognized him from his brief stay more than two years before, but she had barely looked at him. “It’s you I wanted, Mrs. Dakin. My name’s Mel Pickett.”
She stepped forward, looking confused. “Oh yes, the carpenter. You’re building a cabin, I believe.” She opened the door wide. “What can I do for you?” Now she stepped back. “Do you want to come in? I’m packing, so there won’t be any coffee offered.” She turned and swept away, leaving him to close the front door and follow
her into the living room. “My husband and I are separating,” she said over her shoulder. “He’s not here. We have a schedule for packing that lets us avoid each other. There’s a chair there if you want. Now, what can I do for you?” She looked around the room, her mind on her packing. “Hmm?” she asked, still looking around the room, when nothing was forthcoming.
“I wanted to ask you to tell me what you know about Timmy Marlow.” Once again he anticipated having to get past the fear and hostility of someone who had hoped that she had heard the last of Marlow and Siggurdson. But Pat Dakin came from a class that attacked when it was upset.
There was a theatrical pause as she turned to face him. “You’re a carpenter, you say. What else are you?”
Pickett explained his mission.
“I see. Right. I understand that I was identified by the killer as someone he once saw with Timmy. Because of this creature, the police felt they had a right to investigate my relationship with Timmy. I told them that on the night he was killed I was at a lodge, where he was supposed to join me. I was there from five o’clock until the next morning, identified a number of times by the owner. I came back here on Saturday and left for Toronto the same day. I suppose it was useful for the police to establish where he planned to spend the night. Now, though, I understand they have caught the man who killed him.” She swung around to put her back to him. “And now, Mr. Retired Policeman, I am aware that I may find myself on a witness stand, and I’m not looking forward to that. I’m very much aware of what it will look like for a woman like me to be involved with a man like Timmy Marlow. People are going to snigger. So I cooperated with the police in the hope that they might be able to avoid using me at all at the trial. I felt that the sergeant was sympathetic. Now I see he is telling the world I was Marlow’s mistress.”
She turned back to face him. “Well, Mr. Carpenter, I am ignorant of police etiquette in these matters but I plan to find out if the statements of witnesses to the police are confidential or if they are public property, and if the former then I shall ask my lawyer what we might get for the damage I am now suffering in having to respond to the curiosity of outsiders like you, and everyone else the OPP have told about me.” She ended on a high, metallic note, challenging him to respond.