Prairie Hardball

by Alison Gordon

  “Come on, I can’t see one of those old biddies doing it,” Resnick said, impatiently.

  “They can’t be ruled out if the motive is in the past,” Andy pointed out.

  “That’s a big if,” Resnick said. Tremblay shot a look at Andy to see how he’d react to this insubordination. He didn’t.

  “Let’s get back to work,” Deutsch said. “You all did good work yesterday, which may or may not turn out to be relevant. Now we expand the investigation. Tremblay, Resnick, you’ll concentrate on finding as many of the people who were in the bar Saturday night as you can. You can use some of the uniforms for legwork. I want them all tracked down. Start with the bartender. He’ll know who the regulars were. Hugh, you go back to the hotel and talk to any hotel guest who was there that night, whether or not they are connected with the Hall of Fame thing. Someone might have seen or heard something. Door to door. Get back to me as soon as you can. Any questions?”

  No one volunteered. They got to their feet, not looking happy about the drudgery that faced them, and headed out the door.

  “What do you want me to do?” Andy asked.

  “You and I are going to go through those interviews from yesterday and look for that motive from the past. If that’s all right with you.”

  “I agree that’s a good place to look,” Andy said, unsure if he had read sarcasm in Deutsch’s voice. “Just because one of her teammates didn’t do it, it doesn’t mean they weren’t involved.”

  “Or they know something they’re not telling. Let’s get another coffee and get started. Where do you want to start?”

  “With the son. Jack Wilton.”

  “You like him?”

  “Closest to the victim,” Andy said. “As good a place to begin as any.”

  “Tell you what. I’ll go through one stack, you go through another, then we’ll switch and talk about it.”

  “You mentioned coffee,” Andy said.

  “I’ll show you where the pot’s kept. Come with me.”

  Andy followed him down the hall to the lunchroom, which was empty. They filled two cups, added sugar, and went back up the hall.

  They spent the next hour reading files, doing the boring routine work out of which blinding insights sometimes come.

  Chapter 24

  Andy picked me up at one o’clock with the news that he couldn’t have lunch with me, but he drove me back to the hotel. He went to the room to pick up his address book, and I went looking for my parents. I knew they had planned to meet Edna by the pool for lunch and I found them all there. I told them about my morning’s researches.

  “Did you know that Wilma Elshaw once planned to marry Morley Timms?”

  “That peculiar round fellow?” my father asked. “She was engaged to him?”

  “According to an article in her files, yes.”

  “I’m not sure I knew about that,” my mother said. “If I did, I’d forgotten.”

  “Did her relationship with Virna get in the way?” I pressed. This was no time for my mother’s delicacy. “Did she break it off with him because she became a lesbian?”

  “Dear, we don’t know that, do we? She and Virna might have been just good friends.”

  “Mum, I’ve seen the photos. Once she got out from under the charm-school rules of the league, she was butch city.”

  “There’s no need to be vulgar.”

  “I’m sorry, but this could be significant. He could have been holding a grudge against Virna all these years.”

  “But that fellow is obviously harmless,” my father said.

  “But this gives him the motive, don’t you see? Who could I ask about this who would know why the wedding got called off? Maybe I’ll ask Garth Elshaw. He would know.”

  “Do you think you should be asking him things like that about his own sister?” my mother asked.

  “Well, someone in town must know?”

  “Why don’t you leave it to Andy and the other officers,” my father said.

  “Leave what to Andy?” he asked, appearing as if by magic next to the table.

  “Hello, Andy, pull up a chair,” Edna said. “Kate’s tracked down a hot clue.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” he asked. “Thanks, but I can’t stay. What do you think you’ve got now, Kate?”

  I explained about Morley Timms and Wilma Elshaw.

  “No, we didn’t know that,” he said. “At least I didn’t. I’ll pass the word along.”

  He checked his watch.

  “I’ve got to go. I’ll see you later.”

  “How’s the investigation going?” Edna asked.

  “Just plugging along,” he said.

  “No convenient dramatic confessions like they get on television?” I asked.

  “No such luck, just a bunch of bored cops going door to door and shuffling paper.”

  “Aren’t you staying for lunch?” Edna asked.

  “There’s a sandwich waiting at the office,” he said. “If you want the car, Kate, you can drive me back there.”

  “No, I’ve got material to work with here. That’s all right. That place gives me the creeps, anyway.”

  “If you need a car, you can borrow ours, Kate,” my father said, then addressed Andy. “Will you be having supper with us?”

  “I might not be through in time. I’ll have to let you know.”

  “Before six, mind you,” my mother said.

  “Of course,” Andy smiled.

  “And if you’re not ready, I can wait for you,” I said.

  “Oh, no, I wouldn’t want to keep you waiting for your food. I might not be finished until after seven.”

  I was the only one who saw his wink.

  After lunch, feeling too restless to work on my article, I did borrow my parents’ car and drove into Battleford. It was a hot, dry day, with wind swirling the dust in the parking lot next to the Fred Light museum. I parked and wandered to the back of the lot to look down at the North Saskatchewan River curving in the valley below. It was pretty. I could see a baseball game in progress on a diamond in the riverside park, too far away for me to follow it, but I stood awhile and watched the familiar patterns. It was soothing.

  A small brown puppy, which had been doing some fearless hunting in the underbrush, ran over to investigate the stranger, decided he liked her, and jumped up to offer friendship. I took a stick and threw it for him to fetch. It was a game he clearly knew, and one I tired of before he did. I decided to tour the museum, for lack of anything more interesting to do. The puppy followed me hopefully to the door, stick in mouth. I threw it for him one more time, then feeling vaguely guilty, slipped into the museum and shut the door behind me.

  I don’t know why Saskatchewan has so many local museums, but there’s hardly a town that doesn’t have some sort of repository of its history. I’ve been to a few of them over the years, and they have a reassuring similarity. The Fred Light, evidently named for the man whose collection began the museum, followed the same sort of pattern. There was a room done up like an old general store, with long-forgotten products and laughably low prices on the shelves. Then there was a kitchen and a parlour with their displays of household items; an old doctor’s office with scary-looking implements; a railway station waiting room, with a mannequin dressed as a conductor. I wandered through the military history gallery, with uniforms from both world wars as well as from the old fort, and the adjacent room celebrating the area’s native history, reflecting on the irony of the juxtaposition of those two cultures of mutual distrust.

  I was the only visitor, and the silence was welcome and contemplative. While I peered into cases, I let my mind wander over the events of the past few days, and the people I had met.

  Edna was my favourite. Her enthusiasm, energy, and humour were all so contagious that even my mother lightened up around her. Shirley Goodman, on the other
hand, was a self-centred old bore who deserved being married to that fat little creep of a husband. Meg Deneka’s combination of sweetness and bawdiness was startlingly wonderful, and I was half in love with her devoted big guy. It would have been nice to have known her before she began “talking to the birdies,” as Edna had put it.

  And, of course, Virna. Virna of the practical jokes; Virna with the nerve to show up at the banquet in her old uniform; Virna, the biggest star the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League ever had; Virna, the generous-spirited woman who gave such a gracious speech at the banquet; Virna, life of the party in the bar; Virna, the mother who inspired such devotion in her son; but also Virna of the scrapbooks, egocentric, self-serving, and vain; and finally, Virna the “unnatural” woman whose remains now lay in the indignity of the forensic laboratory in Regina. Why? Find the why and you’ve got the who. That’s what Andy always says.

  I was just heading out of the museum, when I was hailed by the volunteer at the museum’s desk.

  “Have you signed the guest book?”

  I went to the desk and reached for the pen.

  “I have to get everyone to sign in so we get our grant every year,” she said. She was a large, red-faced woman in a sleeveless dress, with the broad, placid face of a peasant from a Brueghel painting, except for her tight curls of an improbable strawberry-blonde. Her name badge identified her as Gladys Bieber.

  “We have to prove we had the visitors,” she went on, rather breathlessly. I didn’t dare disobey. After I’d signed, she turned it around.

  “Toronto, eh? What brings you to Battleford?”

  I explained about the Hall of Fame induction, which perked her right up.

  “Oh, where that woman got murdered,” she said, gleefully. “That’s a terrible thing. Just terrible.”

  She looked at me, expectantly.

  “Yes, it was terrible,” I said, trying to edge towards the door.

  “Did you know the dead woman?”

  Curiosity gleamed from her little blue eyes.

  “I had just met her the day of the banquet, but my mother knew her. They used to play on the same team.”

  “Did she, now? For the Racine Belles? Then she must have played with Wilma Elshaw, too.”

  “Yes, she did. Did you know Wilma?”

  “I went all the way through school with Wilma Elshaw. We were best friends.”

  I let go of the door handle.

  “Were you, now?” I asked.

  Chapter 25

  It didn’t take much to get Gladys Bieber to offer me a cup of tea. There was a kettle and a small fridge on a table in a room just off the main hall.

  Gladys explained that she had retired ten years before, but until then had been the history teacher at the high school. No, she’d never married, but all her students were like family to her. She told me of the accomplishments of some of her favourites while we waited for the kettle to boil. The mayor had been a prize pupil, as had the Member of Parliament for The Battlefords-Meadow Lake and the current high school principal.

  “I like to think I instilled the love of education in him, and a sense of history in the other two,” she said. “Now maybe one of them can become a part of history.”

  Any doubts I had about the history-making potential of a small-town mayor or a backbencher in the House of Commons were ones I kept to myself. Gladys paused long enough to open a cupboard where she kept, no surprise, a stash of cookies.

  “Tell me about Wilma,” I said. “I wish I’d had a chance to meet her. She seems so interesting from what I’ve heard or read.”

  “Oh, she was. She was interesting and nice as pie. You should have known her then.”

  “Was she kind of a tomboy when you were growing up? With the baseball-playing and all.”

  “Not a bit of it. No, she was never a tomboy,”

  Gladys kind of glared at me, and I realized that I must have inadvertently stumbled on a code word to make her so indignant.

  “She was just the opposite, in fact. She was all girl. She just happened to love baseball. I did too. Of course I wasn’t ever as good as she was, but when we were young, we all played. We played on the church team.”

  As if that settled that.

  “Oh, I know what everybody said. I wasn’t born yesterday, you know. But as I sit here telling you, Wilma Elshaw was all girl. Normal, I mean.”

  “There was a lot of gossip those days, wasn’t there? I know my mother had problems with some people in Wolseley where she came from. They didn’t think women should play baseball.”

  “Just goes to show what they know, doesn’t it. N-o-t-h-i-n-g spells nothing. That’s what they know.”

  “I was just reading some files at the Hall of Fame. There was an article about her knitting scarves for the boys at the front.”

  “You see, that was just like Wilma, always thinking of others. She had a lovely hand at needlepoint, too,”

  “So the article said.”

  “I still have the knitting bag she made for me the first year she played in the league. I still have it, more than fifty years later. It’s lovely work.”

  “The article said she was engaged,” I tried.

  Gladys looked a little uncomfortable.

  “What happened?”

  “Well, that was a bit of a mystery, you know,” she almost whispered, looking around as if for eavesdroppers or hidden microphones. “I grew up with Morley Timms, too. That was her fiancé.”

  “Yes, I’ve met him,” I said.

  “Well, you haven’t met the Morley Timms that went off to war. You’ve met the one who came back.”

  “You mean something happened to him? He was injured?”

  “The Morley that went off to war with Garth Elshaw was a real catch. All the girls were in love with him back then. You should have seen him. He was so gay!”

  She took another cookie.

  “And I don’t mean gay the way they use it today. They took a perfectly good word and made it dirty. But there’s no other word to describe Morley as he was back then. Happy-go-lucky, merry. He always had a smile on his face and a joke on his lips. He was a wonderful singer, and he loved to dance. Oh, and he was smart, too. No two ways about it. His future was bright.”

  “And he and Wilma were going to share that future,” I said.

  “They’d known it since they were kids. They all grew up together. Garth and Morley were best friends then.”

  “As they are now.”

  “Well, now it’s more that Garth looks out for him. Then, Morley was the one. Garth just sort of tagged along in his shadow. But they were a formidable pair. At first, Wilma was just the kid sister, but that changed as she got older. She got such a crush on Morley. I had a crush on Garth, too. But the day Morley realized that Wilma had grown up, that was that. Unfortunately, Garth never came to that conclusion about me.”

  She laughed, not bitterly, and grabbed another cookie.

  “He played the field, Garth did. He didn’t marry until he was in his thirties. We thought he was going to be a bachelor for life, but he surprised us all. Married a widow with two sons, so he had himself a ready-made family.”

  I didn’t know how to get her back to Morley and Wilma without obviously interrogating her, so I just waited her out.

  “Yes, he broke some hearts. A lot of people in this town, not just me, thought that if he married anyone, it was going to be me. We kept company for a while after the war, but I just never lit his fire, I guess.”

  “He changed after the war, then.”

  “Oh, yes. He was more serious, kind of withdrawn. He’d lost his sense of fun. He never talked about what he’d seen there, but Garth’s sense of adventure was gone when he came back.”

  “Maybe because war is the most deadly adventure.”

  “Morley, now, he came home a diff
erent man altogether. He hasn’t been quite right ever since. It’s a real shame.”

  She took another cookie to fuel the narrative.

  “They had to put him in the mental hospital for a while, even. He was wild. One day he’d be laughing and joking just like the old days. The next he wouldn’t hardly say a word. He took to drinking. Not that he hadn’t had a nip or two from the flask before. I mean, who didn’t? But this was different. And he’d get out there in his car and drive like a maniac. I remember one night after a dance over to Maidstone he almost scared us all to death. He was driving the gang back in a snowstorm. We were all singing and laughing, we’d had a few, when Morley suddenly says he’s going to make the car fly. We all laugh, but Morley says he can do it, and then just begins going faster and faster and faster, and swearing at the car and telling us to stick our arms out the window, I remember it like it was yesterday.”

  Clearly, she did. Poor Gladys had become increasingly agitated, telling the story. Her cheeks had turned quite pink.

  “We all thought we were going to die, truly,” she said. “I never rode with him again, I’ll tell you that. If it hadn’t been for Garth, I don’t know what would have happened that night.”

  “What did Garth do?”

  “He just talked to him, talked him down, like. Wilma and I were screaming and crying and begging him to stop. Garth just leaned forward over the seat, he was in the back with me, and talked to him real quiet, in his ear. And Morley just let his foot off the pedal a little bit, then a little bit more, and then just stopped the car, right in the middle of the highway. And then he began to cry and cry. I’ve never seen a man cry like that before. He cried like a little kid, just blubbering. Then we all got out of the car, and Garth got him to move over and let him drive. And Morley cried all the rest of the way home. Next day they took him right to the Saskatchewan Hospital, they called it the asylum then, and he was in there for a long time.”

  “So Wilma was there that night?”

  “Yes, she was. She was right next to him. All the way home, she held him in her arms and he cried like he was her baby.”