Death of a Hired Man

by Eric Wright

  He said, “The most helpful you could be is if you’d take yourself up to Sweetwater tomorrow morning, to the OPP there, see Sergeant Wilkie. Explain what you were doing in the area, so he can cross you off his list.”

  “Fuck that. Let Sergeant Wilkie come to me. He’s the one who wants to talk.”

  “He’s got a lot on his plate.”

  What Pickett had seen described in fiction as “a look of low cunning” crossed Gruber’s features. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll go up there. I mean, if I build a cabin up there, I’ll have to live with those guys, won’t I?”

  Gruber was an urban rat with a pickup truck and an occasional pocketful of money from a drug deal. To the eye of a purist who had built a log cabin, Gruber lacked the smarts, the resources, the manual skills, or the sheer stick-to-itiveness to build anything larger than a dog kennel, but Pickett nodded encouragingly.

  “They police Larch River, sure. You should cooperate, if you can.” He added, “If not, I’ll call Sergeant Wilkie. He may ask us to pick you up and hold onto you until he can get in. Depends.”

  “On what!”

  “On whatever he thinks connects you with that body.”

  “Nothing. Nothing connects me with any fucking body. Nothing.”

  “Then there’s nothing for you to worry about.”

  Gruber chewed the inside of his cheek. “How come you know I was up there?”

  Pickett shrugged. “I just got a request to check you out. I don’t know where they picked up your name. You’re known to us, of course.”

  “Was I seen?”

  “I imagine so. Somebody recognized you. You used to play hockey, right? Semi-pro?”

  “I was a fucking pro, mister.”

  “So your face was on TV?”

  “A few times when I was in the NHL. They don’t show the American League in Toronto.”

  “You know how it is, though. You must have played against hundreds of guys on your way up. Somebody you were with on the Brandon Wheat Kings third line once? Or the Flin Flon Flyers? The Longborough Huskies maybe? Something like that?” Again he watched Gruber considering. If the police really connected him, then they wouldn’t leave him loose, even for a night. “If you wanted to hide, you’d need a face lift,” he said. He tapped the idea into place. “Maybe they just picked up your license plates. You know, the highway patrol is taking pictures all the time to catch speeders. So they’ve got a bunch of numbers recorded as seen close to Larch River the night the guy was killed. They pass them through the computer and there you are.”

  “I wasn’t driving my own truck. I don’t own a truck.”

  “That right? So someone must have recognized you.”

  “It was while I was driving around that area, looking for a site, that I heard about you, a retired cop, who had built his own place. But I never went near it.”

  “But they remembered you asking about it.”

  Gruber said, “When did they find the guy? The dead guy.”

  “That I don’t know.”

  Gruber nodded slowly, like a man coming to a decision. “Okay. Sure. I’m kinda busy, but I’ll go up.”

  “Tomorrow morning. I’ll call and tell them to expect you.”

  Gruber stood up. “You tell them,” he said.

  Pickett waited until Gruber had scuttled through the door, then caught the eye of the undercover man, finished his beer, and walked out to the street.

  Passing behind him, a few moments later, the undercover man said, “The A and P,” and Pickett followed him at a distance into the supermarket and picked up a basket, remembering that the store sold several staples of his former widower diet that deserved to be brought into his marriage, the most important being Patak’s vegetable curry. You only had to heat it, shovel it over some rice, add a dollop of Major Grey’s chutney, heat two poppodums in the microwave, slice some cucumber into a dish of yogurt, and you had a dinner fit for a rajah. Pickett found the curry on the shelves, chose the medium level of hotness, the can with the blue background, and someone said, “That’s pretty hot, ain’t it?”

  They only had a minute. The months of carefully building his cover could be wasted if the wrong person saw that the undercover man was talking to a cop; Pickett had to concede, after his talk with Gruber, that the whole fraternity could identify him as an old copper.

  “You know Gruber?” the man asked.

  “He’s part of the scene I’m watching. Just a small part. He’s nothing, really.”

  Pickett took down the mild version of the curry and showed him the label. “You know where he lives?”

  “Easy to find out. He leaves the bar pissed most nights. Easy to follow.”

  “Good enough.”

  “How about the one with the black label? Hot, it says. They mean that?”

  Pickett scanned the shelves for a black label until he saw what the undercover man was talking about. Ten feet away, a man in a black bomber jacket was sliding toward them, his ears perked.

  “It’s real good for a hangover,” Pickett said. “As good as chili.”

  The undercover man nodded, picked up the can and walked to the checkout.

  The man in the jacket said, “You know about this stuff?”

  “What?”

  “Curry. I’ve had a couple of Indian dinners lately. The first was nice, but the other one took the skin off my tongue. I still like it, though, and I’d like to make my own. I asked the clerks, but I think they’re all Ukrainian. They don’t know Indian from nothing. Then I heard you guys comparing notes. So, do you mind? Is this stuff easy to make?”

  “It’s already cooked. All you have to do is heat it. Start with the mild.”

  “Yeah? And kind of work up?”

  “That’s it.” Pickett walked away, saying over his shoulder, “One can is big enough for two people, three if you’re careful.”

  Outside, the undercover man had gone.

  16

  Pickett called Wilkie from Toronto the next morning to let him know what to expect.

  Wilkie said, “This is one giant step too far, Mel. If he doesn’t turn up, they’ll have my ass for letting you near the case. You know that. Deep shit. And I will off-load as much of it as I can on you.”

  “Gruber will turn up.”

  “He’d better. I tell you, if it wasn’t for the fact that I think this whole Gruber thing is a waste of time—yours, thank Christ—I’d be very, very pissed off. Even more than I am. I’m not as goddam stupid as you seem to think. But there’ve been a few developments up here, and by the time you get here, I don’t think anyone will be worrying about Gruber.”

  “Like what? What developments?”

  “We’ve got a couple of people here helping the police with their inquiries. I’ll fill you in. Then we’ll have a serious chat about what retirement means. Okay? Right now, I have to talk to a lawyer.”

  Wilkie was still keeping an open mind because it was still a possibility that someone, reasoning as he did before the talk with Linda Perry, had been looking for the treasure that an old bachelor might keep under the mattress. But the discovery that Norbert Thompson was a disappointed man led to some new speculation. First things first. First he had to find the lawyer that Thompson had consulted.

  It might have taken twenty phone calls, but Wilkie made it on the seventh. He identified himself and asked the lawyer if a Norbert Thompson had consulted him recently.

  “If you mean the man found dead in Larch River, yes. He was my client.”

  “What did you do for him? There’s a sum of money that—” Wilkie had intended making a reference to the missing part of Thompson’s wages, but the lawyer cut him off.

  “Advice, for which I charged him three hundred dollars. That the sum of money?”

  “There’s no receipt that we can find.”

  “Then how did you get onto me?”

  “Police work.” Wilkie realized that he had just caught this lawyer out in some probably tiny breach of the law, like pocketing a cash
fee and planning not to declare it in his income-tax return.

  “Did you issue a receipt?”

  “Not yet.”

  “When did you give this advice?”

  “A few weeks ago.”

  “January?”

  “It might have been.”

  “Are you free? Now? I’d like to come over there now.”

  “I could free myself.”

  “I’ll be right down.”

  Byron Toogood, barrister and solicitor, had a law office in the municipal building, a small, concrete-block structure that housed the local government offices, the elected officials, including the mayor, and a number of commercial tenants on the second floor, including Toogood. He was a handsome man in his mid-forties who groomed himself carefully. He was obviously fit—squash probably, Wilkie thought; there was a club in Lindsay. His clothes, though they looked casual for the working dress of a small-town lawyer—leather jacket, collarless shirt, boots—looked faintly like the costume of an actor playing the part of Byron Toogood. The lawyer and his outfit were out of place in Sweetwater, and Toogood gave off an air of being slightly contemptuous of his world.

  “What did Thompson pay you to advise him about?” Wilkie asked, keeping the clouded payment fresh in the conversation.

  “My practice is primarily in family law—” Toogood began.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Most of the time, representing one of the parties in a dispute.”

  “Like divorce?”

  “That’s part of it.”

  “Thompson was a bachelor. What’s the other part?”

  “Property rights, wills.”

  “Thompson wasn’t his brother’s heir as long as Mrs. Maguire was alive, so where did you come in?”

  “You know the situation at the farm, before the brother died?”

  “Norbert Thompson was the hired man.”

  “Making a hundred a week.”

  “And?”

  “Board and room, of course.”

  “I meant ‘And?’ like ‘So?’. You seem to find that remarkable.”

  “A hundred a week?”

  “He saved a little, though, didn’t he? Three hundred for you, for instance.”

  “The final bill would have been a lot bigger. I billed him just for the initial meeting. He’d been in several times since then.”

  Now Wilkie got a glimpse of light. “Were you working for him on a contingency basis?”

  Toogood shook his head. “Not as such, no. But I expected to be paid eventually.”

  “So if I find he had a few hundred dollars stashed away, will you make a claim on it?”

  “It’s too much trouble now.”

  “What were you advising him about?”

  “His rights. I thought he had a claim on the estate by virtue of what he did, how they interrelated, what he was promised.”

  Wilkie sat back. “Tell me. The man’s dead. You mean he wasn’t the hired man?”

  “You remember, a few years ago, somewhere in the maritimes, a case of a woman living common-law with a farmer, and they split up? She claimed a portion of the farm on the grounds that she had been his partner as well as his wife—marital duties, including running the house and helping out with the farm. She won.”

  “Was the sex important?”

  “She had to establish that she had been the same as a wife, because it was already established that a divorcing wife would be entitled. So it was helpful.”

  “Apply this to Norbert Thompson. I think I can do it myself, but go ahead anyway.”

  “As I understand the terms, women-persons are the same as men-persons. Right? And when a woman-person and a man-person separate, each is entitled to half of what they have jointly accumulated. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the basic idea. So if Thompson had been a woman kicked out by her male companion, she would have had every feminist in Ontario campaigning for her. No, she wouldn’t have needed them, because nowadays it’s automatic.”

  “So you took the case. On a contingency basis.”

  “I didn’t worry about the money; I just thought it would be a good case to win.”

  “So what did you advise him?”

  “That he had a case.”

  “But she paid him a hundred a week.”

  “A lot depends on what you think that means. It looks to me like they took advantage of him. The guy did everything. They fed him and gave him pocket money, and one day off a week. For that, he ran the farm.”

  “And he did a husband’s duties with the sister-in-law, as they say in the Bible?”

  “Well, no, he wouldn’t allow that. He didn’t even want to talk about it. No, what he was sure of was the promise made him by his brother, who told him he’d left him half the farm in his will, and he hoped Norbert would continue to look after his wife. In fact, he made Norbert promise to marry his wife when he was gone. It was a secret, though. Mrs. Maguire herself wouldn’t hear of any such talk. But he couldn’t have lived with her at the farm unless he did marry her, could he?”

  “You know that Mrs. Maguire got married again right away? To someone else. What do you make of that?”

  “I think Norbert Thompson got screwed.”

  “Do you think Maguire, the sick man, knew that Sproat was in the wings, that sort of thing?”

  “I wouldn’t think so.”

  “Do you think Norbert Thompson knew about Sproat?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “And you advised him to sue?”

  “We hadn’t reached that stage. I went over the ground, told him his rights.”

  “As you saw them.”

  “As a judge might see them.”

  “You never met with him again? Why not? Didn’t he want you to represent him?”

  “I believe he wanted to try it on his own first.”

  “Ah. So he went to see Mrs. Sproat, as she was now known as?”

  “I understood that he was going to.”

  “But you never saw him again to find out what happened.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll have to ask Mrs. Sproat that, won’t I? Tell me, though—what about his rights under Maguire’s will? Didn’t the will promise him half the farm?”

  “So Thompson claimed. But the will hasn’t appeared.”

  “Did you know that the farm always belonged to Mrs. Sproat?”

  “I found it out very quickly. I advised Thompson to forget about that claim, concentrate on his other rights.”

  “And you did think Thompson had a case?”

  “Of course. That’s why I was advising him.”

  “Yeah, but did you really think he would win?”

  Gruber had not appeared at the OPP detachment when Pickett arrived at eleven. They waited for an hour; then he and Wilkie crossed the street to the Fisherman’s Wharf, a diner on the main street specializing in pot-roast sandwiches. Over sandwiches and coffee, Pickett gave Wilkie his account of his Toronto adventure.

  “I think he heard my name when he was in the lineup at the Bail-and-Parole Unit. I think they were probably making fun of me. You know, ‘Old Mel Pickett and his log cabin,’ or maybe ‘Pickett and his new wife, did you hear?’ That sort of stuff. So Gruber heard that a former cop was building a cabin in a place called Larch River.”

  “So he wanted to build one and he drove up to see how it was done. Like the kid in the hardware store said.”

  “Then why didn’t he say so? Why didn’t he say, ‘I heard a guy in the B-and-P Unit shooting off about your cabin, so I drove up to have a look. I was hoping you would give me some tips.’”

  “You know who you’re dealing with, Mel. Guys like Gruber automatically lie to us until someone, a lawyer usually, tells them to tell the truth, or they carry on lying. They do it to give themselves time to think, while they’re wondering which of their latest activities we’ve caught up with. A guy like Gruber is starting to lose track of what’s allowed and what isn’t. Somebody got killed, and he probably o
verheard that later, maybe in the same hardware store. People like Gruber have the experience to know we’ll take a hard look at someone like him if we find him near a body. I mean, wouldn’t we? Aren’t you now? Gruber now? I’ll give him until—what?—sundown?—isn’t that the usual deadline?—before I ask the Toronto people to pick him up.”

  “You don’t think this is real?”

  “Actually, now I think we should talk to him, because where is he? He’s taken off. But that’s the only reason. In my right mind, I tell myself to forget about him. You sure you’re not connected in the past?”

  “I’ve been through his record. We never touched. But I’m goddam sure we’re connected now. I’m the reason he came up to Larch River.”

  “Easy, Mel. You’ll frighten the customers in here. I guess trusting him to come up here kind of lets you prove your point, doesn’t it? There’s no problem. First thing in the morning, I’ll send a message down to Toronto to reel him in. He’s been identified near the scene of the crime, and we can find out his license-plate number.”

  “That won’t work. He said it wasn’t his truck, and I believe him. Stick to visual ID.”

  And then the call came in to headquarters from the owner of The Quiet Man to say he had just repaired the muffler of one Aaron Sproat.

  “Let’s think about this,” Wilkie said. “The lawyer told us that Thompson might have called on the Sproats to argue his rights. And Sproat’s was one of how many mufflers they repaired this week?”

  “Eight,” Copps said. “And I’ve checked out the other seven. None of them looks to have any connection with Thompson or Sproat or a kid joy-riding around on Friday night. All good, decent, bingo-playing, grocery-shopping, in-law-visiting folks. Salt of the earth. It’s Sproat we want to talk to, even if it’s just to cross him off the list.

  “But there’s something else,” he went on. “When the muffler man was telling me this, he told me about another pickup truck that came by on Friday morning, asking for directions to Larch River. He’d forgotten about it until we talked a lot about all the pickup trucks with broken mufflers. This one didn’t have a broken muffler, and anyway, if it did, the owner could probably fix it himself—it was a welder’s truck. A white three-quarter ton. Now, didn’t we hear about a welder’s white truck around the cabin? So I asked the muffler guy if he could remember what the driver looked like, and it checks out. He’d been in some fights, the guy said. And the other guy looked like a rough customer, he said.”