“Oh yeah, I know it. But I don’t remember that I saw it that night. And if I’d seen it, I think I’d have remembered it because I’d have looked back when I heard about the girl.”
“You didn’t see him anywhere else?”
“No, not that night.”
“What about the next two or three nights? Did you see him anywhere then?”
“I don’t think so. I think I’d have remembered.”
“You know him well enough to recognize him?”
“Oh, sure. I’ve seen him a thousand times. I even used to know him a little. You think he may know something about what happened to the girl?”
“I don’t know,” Dorkin said. “I just thought that if he were around out there, he might have seen something that he hadn’t said anything about to the police for some reason.”
Maclean meditated for a minute on these manifest lies and let them pass. Dorkin didn’t need for him to believe them. They were merely a way for them both to avoid implicating themselves in specifics, as Maclean no doubt understood.
“I hear Dan Coile used to bootleg a little,” Dorkin said, fishing.
“Yes. I guess.”
“What do you think of him?”
“Just between us?”
“Just between us.”
“A mean son of a bitch. Used to sell watered stuff. May still do if anyone’s fool enough to buy it. Once sold a pal of mine a bottle that didn’t have hardly anything in it at all. Just water with some flavour of some kind. Figured he was too drunk to know the difference.”
“Do you think he would be up to killing someone?” Dorkin asked.
“Maybe. If he was drunk enough or mad enough.”
“I don’t think the soldier killed Sarah Coile. You’ve never heard anything about anyone else?”
“No. Nothing like that.”
“Do you know Reverend Clemens?”
“Oh, yeah. But just to see.”
“He testified that he saw Sarah Coile and a soldier out near the dance hall that night. You didn’t happen to see him anywhere out there?”
“No. I heard what he said in court. But I wasn’t anywhere near where he said he saw the girl and the soldier.”
“You don’t know of anyone else who might have seen Dan Coile or Clemens that night?”
“Not right now. But there could have been, I suppose.”
“Do you think you could find out?” Dorkin asked. “It would be worth ten dollars to me to know if anyone saw either of them driving around out there that night. Or any of the next three nights. I’d particularly like to know what time it was when anyone saw Clemens the night of the dance. Do you think you could ask around?”
“I might. But it’d be tricky. I wouldn’t want to ask right out. But I suppose I could make up some story and see if anybody gainsaid it. I could say I’d heard talk that Dan was hanging around out there and see if anybody would say yes or no. Same with Clemens. But I wouldn’t be too hopeful if I was you.”
“It’s worth a try.”
“There’s only one thing,” Maclean said. “I don’t want to have to end up talking to the police. Or getting anybody else in a spot where they have to talk to the police.”
“That won’t happen. Once I find out what happened, I can get it proved some other way.”
“Well, I’ll see what I can do. But I don’t expect to see any ten dollars.”
“I’ll give you five just for trying,” Dorkin said and dug out a bill.
Back at the boarding house, he let Maclean out and watched him as he mounted the rickety steps, slowly, with the drunkard’s habitual exaggeration of care. He knew that nothing was likely to come of this, but it was important, he reflected, if only for his own subsequent peace of mind, that all the stones be turned.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
The next morning, Dorkin sat in his office, looking out the window at a dark, unwelcoming day, autumnal raw, with a low cover of dirty grey cloud. He had gone late to breakfast at the hotel, ate slowly, killing time, and now sat, killing more time, afflicted by a gathering sense of depression.
He was still sitting, as if waiting, it seemed to him afterwards, when the phone rang.
It was Carvell, and Dorkin sensed at once from the calculated care in his voice that something bad had happened. His immediate thought was that it was Williams. He had killed himself, or tried. But it wasn’t Williams.
“Louie Rosen’s been killed,” Carvell said. “His truck went off the road. I thought you’d probably want to know.”
It was too abrupt for Dorkin to take it in all at once. It also seemed somehow too improbable. Louie didn’t seem the sort of person to die of anything but extreme old age.
“When did it happen?” Dorkin asked.
“A couple of hours ago,” Carvell said. “I’ve been out of town, and I just heard about it now. He went down into a gulley. The cab of the truck was smashed in, and they only got him out a few minutes ago. I heard about it from Drost. The truck’s still there, and they’re trying to haul it out. I thought I’d better go out and have a look in case there’s an inquest.”
“Where did it happen?” Dorkin asked.
“The Berkeley Road. It’s about four miles out the Bangor Road on the right. You know it?”
“Yes,” Dorkin said. “I’m going to go out too.”
There was nothing much on the three-quarters of a mile of the Berkeley Road—no farms, no cleared land, just a couple of small hunting cabins and one ramshackle tarpapered house. It was probably a logging road that had later been fixed up a little to make a shortcut between the Bangor and Hannigan roads. In its better stretches, it was gravelled. In its worse ones, it was just dirt. It started flat from the Bangor Road and then climbed steeply through the woods for half a mile. It was near the bottom of that hill that Louie had gone off the road.
Dorkin saw the wrecker and the collection of cars and trucks that marked the spot as soon as he turned off the Bangor Road. Carvell was already there, and Constable Hooper, and a couple of dozen other men, garagemen and onlookers in mackinaws and slickers. The drizzle had now turned into a light, steady rain, and the road, which was dirt here, shone dully.
Louie’s truck was at the bottom of a little gulley maybe twenty feet deep that angled down across the face of the hill. The side and bottom of the gulley were scattered with granite and sandstone boulders dropped by the glaciers, some of them the size of basket-balls, some of them bigger than the cab of Louie’s truck. The truck was lying on its side between two of the larger boulders, the top crushed, the engine driven partway back into the cab. The door on the driver’s side, which was the one that was turned up, was twisted and crumpled, hanging on one hinge. The windshield was completely broken out except for a fringe of pointed shards. The wooden body was smashed to pieces.
For a quarter of a mile on either side of the gulley, there weren’t even ditches, and the road was bordered closely on both sides with evergreens, slender-trunked, soft-branched, into which Louie could have driven and hardly scratched a fender.
“He sure picked his spot,” Carvell said.
There were lines from the wrecker hooked onto the back of the truck, and as Carvell and Dorkin watched, the wrecker started up. The lines pulled taut, the wheels of the wrecker spun on the wet road, spitting mud and small stones. Louie’s truck did not budge. The wrecker stopped, and the driver got out.
“I’m gonna take the clutch out of her,” he said.
Down in the bottom of the gulley, two other garagemen stared at Louie’s truck, meditating their next move, while Constable Hooper looked on.
Carvell began to descend the steep bank, cautiously over the wet grass and weeds, and Dorkin followed him. There was a trail of devastation where the truck had gone down—vegetation gouged and sheared off leaving raw clay, small rocks dislodged, pieces of broken slats from the back of the truck, shards of glass, unidentifiable bits of metal, cow hides, pig hides, a shovel, a peavey.
“Not m
uch left of her,” Carvell said to Hooper.
“No,” Hooper said.
“What happened?” Carvell asked.
“I don’t know.”
“He lost control on the hill maybe.”
“Maybe,” Hooper said.
Dorkin leaned over the corner of the truck and looked down into the cab. There was blood everywhere, the seat and the floor soaked, the twisted steering wheel and the dash smeared.
“He was broke up pretty bad,” one of the garagemen said.
“I can imagine,” Carvell said.
“He wouldn’t have suffered none anyways,” the garageman said. “He wouldn’t have known what hit him when he got to the bottom here.”
Hooper, after another turn around the truck, was looking at the left front tire.
“That could have been what put him off the road,” Carvell said.
“Maybe,” Hooper said.
The tire was partway off the rim, the red inner tube protruding. The tire and the tube had both been given a thorough mauling as they had been rolled around under the rim, but there was no obvious reason for the tire to have gone flat.
Hooper went over it inch by inch. When he had finished, he sent one of the garagemen back up to the wrecker for a tire iron, and he carefully got the tire and tube off the wheel himself. He put them on the ground and took out the tube. As Carvell, Dorkin, and the garagemen watched, he extracted a small blob of metal. Dorkin did not at once recognize what it was.
“A .303?” Carvell said.
“Yes,” Hooper said. “Or a 30/30. Something like that.”
It was a small, unpretentious frame house among other unpretentious houses on the lower side of a little street without paving or sidewalks that ran for a quarter of a mile along the side of the valley just downhill from Main Street and just uphill from the CPR tracks. All the curtains were drawn.
Dorkin tapped discreetly, and the door was opened almost at once by a man whom Dorkin recognized as the owner of a clothing store on Main Street, a small, brisk, balding man, a sidewalk talker and joker, now solemn and officious. Dorkin introduced himself.
“I know, I know,” the man said. “I’m Milton Geltman. It’s an honour to have you come. A terrible thing.”
“Yes,” Dorkin said.
He was led into the living room, where a dozen people were crowded together.
“Ruby,” Geltman said, “this is Lieutenant Dorkin. Mrs. Rosen.”
She had a long face, a long nose, a small mouth, full-lipped but narrow, one of those homely faces that looks as if it were being seen in a distorting mirror. She lifted her heavy eyes and a long hand.
“I’m sorry,” Dorkin said.
“You knew him?” she said.
“A little,” Dorkin said. “We met a couple of times.”
Geltman took him around the room, and names flew by in lowered tones. Among the mourners, Dorkin recognized J. Meltzer, from whom he had bought the stuff for Williams. Apart from Meltzer, they all seemed a little intimidated by him, and he had the feeling that his arrival had broken an atmosphere of intimate grief that would only be restored by his departure. He stood awkwardly in the silence.
“What will I do?” Mrs. Rosen suddenly burst out, sweeping the room with her eyes. “I have nothing. Nothing. We only had what he made. He never even bought the house.”
“Everything will be all right,” Geltman said. “You have your friends. You will have your house. We will see to it. You should lie down for a while.”
He gestured behind him, and two of the women helped Mrs. Rosen to her feet and walked with her out of the room to the stairs.
“Do they have any children?” Dorkin asked Meltzer.
“One boy,” Meltzer said. “He was no good. He and Louie didn’t get on. He went away five or six years ago. Nobody knows where he is. In the States somewhere. I suppose we’ll have to try to find him, but I don’t know how. What a terrible thing.”
“Yes,” Dorkin said again.
He stayed on for another half an hour and drank coffee, unable to effect an exit that would not seem rude, regretting that he had come, filled with guilt and rage. He felt sure that if he had not talked with Louie, Louie would not now be dead.
It was early afternoon when Dorkin arrived at Louie’s yard. The big double doors in the fence were closed, but to one side there was a smaller door, like a house door, and Dorkin let himself in. The doors to the big warehouse were also closed, and there was a general air of desertedness. Dorkin picked his way among the rain-filled potholes in the yard, tried the door of the office and, finding it locked, went across the yard and around to the back of the warehouse. In the far corner of the yard, almost up against the fence, there was a small shack.
When he was still a dozen paces from the shack, the door opened, and Cat Polchis stood watching him.
“I’d like to talk to you about Louie,” Dorkin said.
Cat continued to stand, as if he hadn’t heard him. His eyes were so black that there was no sense of there being an iris and a pupil, only blackness, uniform, opaque, impenetrable. After an uncomfortably long pause, he stepped back, holding open the door.
“Okay,” he said.
Except for a cubicle in one corner, presumably the bathroom, the shack was one big room. There was a black cookstove for heat as well as cooking, a pine table, some pine chairs, a big pine cupboard with pans and dishes, a single bed, and an old Morris chair, the kind of thing that Louie might have picked up somewhere. On the wall above the table, there were two pictures of baseball teams and one of Cat by himself in a baseball uniform. Everything was very neat, very clean, with an almost military orderliness.
Dorkin sat down at the table.
“You want to be more comfortable?” Cat asked, motioning towards the Morris chair.
“This is fine,” Dorkin said.
Cat sat down opposite him.
“You heard that somebody shot out Louie’s tire?” Dorkin said.
“Yes,” Cat said. “I heard. It’s all over town.”
“You didn’t hear anything about who might have done it?”
“No.”
“Any idea?”
“No,” Cat said. “Not yet.”
“Do you think somebody might have been waiting for him?”
“Could be. I don’t know.”
“Do you know if anybody phoned him this morning?” Dorkin asked. “Do you know if somebody might have set it up?”
“No,” Cat said. “I was over in the warehouse. I don’t know who he talked to.”
“Did he say where he was going when he left?”
“Across the river to a couple of places. After that, I don’t know. Might not have been set up anyway. Somebody might just have been out with a gun and seen him comin’ and took a shot.”
“Just for the hell of it?”
“Maybe. Maybe for some reason.”
“Such as?”
Cat shrugged.
“The talk around town is that you think it may have been Dan Coile himself who killed his daughter and that you were out here questionin’ Louie. Louie fired Toady a couple of days after you were here. He probably spread it around.”
“I talked to a lot of people,” Dorkin said, suddenly turning defence lawyer on his own behalf, trying to deflect the accusation against himself that he himself had already made. “Why should someone pick on Louie?”
“Because he knew stuff,” Cat said.
“He didn’t tell me anything that I couldn’t have found out from almost anyone,” Dorkin said.
“I know that,” Cat said. “But Dan Coile and his pals didn’t know that.”
“I don’t understand,” Dorkin said.
“Louie knew that Coile was messing around with his daughters,” Cat said. “A couple of years ago, he was driving into the Coile place, and he saw Dan and the sister of the one who got killed coming out of the barn. Louie could tell that something funny was going on, so he pretended he hadn’t seen them and kept on going and park
ed up by the house, but he could tell from the way Coile acted afterwards that he knew Louie had seen him and the girl.”
In the doorway, as Dorkin was leaving, Cat said, “You should have left Louie out of it. It didn’t have nothin’ to do with him.”
Outside the window, the rain poured down, sweeping along the street in gusts, bringing down with it cascades of sodden leaves. In spite of the rain, Dorkin had walked from the armoury to the RCMP office, and his raincoat now hung on the rack by the door, dripping water onto the floor.
Carvell was sitting in his chair against the wall. Hooper was manning the desk with the phone and the typewriter. Drost was seated behind the desk where they did business with their assorted visitors, willing and otherwise. Dorkin stood in the middle of the room. Except at a distance, he had not seen Drost since the day he had gone through the boxes of evidence. He had not liked Drost from the day he had first seen him in court, and he sensed clearly enough that Drost did not like him.
“Whoever did it,” Hooper said, “was ahead of him up the road on the left-hand side. The bullet went in just by the corner of the tread and then hit the back of the wheel. If he’d waited until the truck was a little closer, it would have gone out the other side, and we’d probably never have known it wasn’t just a flat tire.”
“You’ve no idea who it was?” Dorkin asked.
“No,” Drost said.
“I doubt if whoever it was intended to kill him,” Carvell said. “It was just Louie’s bad luck that it happened on a wet day and he went off the road where he did. Someone could have been out with a gun and just decided to play games.”
“A dangerous game,” Dorkin said.
“Yes,” Carvell said. “But it isn’t the first time somebody’s shot a tire out just for the hell of it.”
“You don’t think that it might have been someone who had something against Louie?” Dorkin asked.
“Could be,” Carvell said. “Louie could be pretty sharp when it came to dealing with people. I imagine he’d made his share of enemies. But I still doubt if anyone intended to kill him.”
The Case Against Owen Williams Page 18