The Weird World of Wes Beattie

by John Norman Harris

  Peter L. Mayhew proved to be one of the fifteen vice-presidents in a large advertising agency, and, before heading for the magistrate’s court, Sidney ran him to earth behind a desk which consisted simply of a huge sheet of thick plate glass mounted on wrought-iron legs.

  Mayhew was fair, with long blond lashes and a thin blond mustache. He wore an expression of amused disdain, and there was an irritating superiority in his speech. “Precisely how can I serve you, Mr. Grant?” he asked.

  Sidney outlined the incident at Mac’s Garage, as related by Rick Phelan and watched closely at the caution which crept into Mayhew’s features as the tale proceeded. When Sidney had finished, Mayhew got up and poured himself a glass of water from a thermos jug on a table behind him.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Well,” Sidney said, “all I want to know is who was this old pal who snubbed you so royally?”

  Mayhew laughed lightly. “Nobody,” he said. “There was no such incident. This mechanic fellow must have a vivid imagination. Send him around and I’ll give him a job in our copy department. We need guys with creative imagination.”

  “You can’t remember the incident?”

  “No,” Mayhew said, “and for the very good reason that it never took place. Look, old boy, if any old chum cut me dead, I’d remember, because under this tough, cynical exterior I am really a very sensitive guy. Was there anything else?”

  “Yes,” Sidney said. “Is that what you told Edgar Beattie when he came here to ask you about it?”

  “Edgar Beattie? Who is Edgar Beattie?”

  “A man who came here to ask you about that nonexistent incident,” Sidney said.

  “Nobody ever came here, I tell you,” Mayhew said, the bantering tone yielding to a touch of asperity. “Who is this fellow?”

  “Oh, come, you haven’t heard of Edgar Beattie?” Sidney said. “Get with it.”

  “Oh, you mean the man who was murdered by his nephew?” Bunny Mayhew said. “Yes, of course I’ve heard about him, but I never had the ineffable pleasure of making his acquaintance. Now, if you don’t mind, I have the odd spot of work to do…”

  “Thank you so much for your trouble, Mr. Mayhew,” Sidney said.

  ***

  Lunch that day for Sidney Grant consisted of a chicken salad sandwich and a cup of coffee, consumed at his desk, after a frantic morning in court defending various characters of the minor underworld.

  “It’s true, Miss Semple, it’s true,” he said between bites. “Someone did call Edgar Beattie and tell him to lay off. I’d be prepared to bet heavily on it. Our friend Mr. Mayhew called Mrs. Leduc’s boy friend, and the boy friend called Edgar. And now, by golly, I am going to find the boy friend and see what he has to say about it.”

  “How can you find him?” Miss Semple asked.

  “There is a magazine about ad agency people and such like,” Sidney said. “I think it’s called Marketing. I’ll bet they have biography files about important people in the ad game, although I don’t know if they’d go as low as agency vice-presidents. Anyway, call them up and find out if they’ve got a file on Mayhew. If so, find out what school he went to. What high school, that is. I’ve got an idea.”

  While Sidney finished his coffee, Miss Semple returned to her desk and made the call. She came back with the information neatly written on a slip of paper. “He went to Annette Street Public School and Humberside Collegiate Institute,” she said. “Right here in the city.”

  “Good,” he said. “Well, I’ve already spent a lot of time on this thing, and now I’m going to invest in a cab fare to Humberside for a little historical research. This is a luxury I’m going to allow myself, so, if you will just mind the shop, I’ll be on my way.”

  The school authorities were polite and helpful. The secretary directed Sidney to the library, where the librarian armed him with half a dozen back copies of Hermes, the school yearbook, covering the years 1938 to 1943.

  Sidney sat down at a long table, where he worked with curious teen-agers trying to peer over his shoulder. Each yearbook was crammed with group photographs of teams, and it did not take long to find a hockey-team picture with P. (Bunny) Mayhew in the rear row. Mayhew also appeared with the junior team of the previous year.

  Sidney carefully listed the players on both teams. After all, according to Phelan, Mayhew had more or less described the man at the garage as an old teammate. “What would you do if an old teammate gave you that stuff?” or words to that effect. After duplications had been removed, there were fourteen names on the list. A list of war casualties in a later yearbook further reduced the number.

  Sidney looked at the short list for several minutes, scratching the whiskers on his chin with his left hand as he did. All that was necessary really was to seize Mayhew, tie him to a polygraph lie detector and read the names to him, but there were obstacles in the way of such a bold scheme. As he stared at the names before him, an idea began to flicker in the back of his head, and the familiar satanic grin slowly spread over his face.

  Sidney reached into the briefcase on the floor beside him and pulled out the mining convention program which Mrs. Ledley had given him. Patiently, painstakingly, he went down the columns of names, checking the high school hockey players against the mining people. And then, suddenly, he had it.

  But although he had found a duplication, his lawyer’s training forced him to continue with the job until he had checked out all the names, to make sure that there weren’t two duplications.

  But there was only one. Howie Gadwell had been a defenseman on the Humberside hockey team; Howard G. Gadwell, listed as a “broker-dealer,” had been a registered guest at the mining convention.

  It was just after five o’clock when a taxi delivered Sidney Grant in a high state of excitement at the building where Bunny Mayhew had his office.

  ***

  “I thought we had finished our business,” Mayhew said coldly.

  “How wrong you were!” Sidney said. “Mister Mayhew, you told me a big, fat fib, and don’t attempt to deny it. I’ve got a good mind to tell your mother.”

  “Look, before I get mad, I’d advise you to get the hell out of here,” Mayhew said.

  “Presently, presently,” Sidney said. “But first, why didn’t you want to tell me that it was Howard Gadwell who snubbed you at Mac’s Garage?”

  No polygraph was needed to chart Mayhew’s reaction. “You’re nuts!” he yelled.

  “And after Edgar Beattie came to see you, you called Gadwell and warned him that a gent was looking for him, didn’t you?”

  “Get the hell out of here, you…”

  “Easy boy! And did you call Gadwell again today and warn him that I was looking for him?”

  “Look,” Mayhew said, “I told you this morning that there was never any such incident as you described. Now if you want to barge in here and start calling me a liar, you’d better be prepared to take the consequences.”

  “I’m all prepared,” Sidney said. “I’m on my way to see Gadwell to tell him that you gave me his name, and you can try to convince him that you didn’t.”

  “Do what you damn well please, but get out of here,” Mayhew almost screamed.

  “As you say. I’m on my way to Gadwell,” Sidney said.

  He had his hand on the door when Mayhew called him back, and when Sidney turned around, he found that Mayhew had positively shrunk. “Okay, you win,” Mayhew said. “I’d just as soon you didn’t go to Gadwell. It was him, all right. Now tell me what it’s all about.”

  “He was with a lady at the garage,” Sidney said.

  “Sure. Quite a dish,” Mayhew said. “Then this burly character came in here, and naturally I took him for a jealous husband.”

  “Naturally,” Sidney said, barely suppressing a smile.

  “So I stalled him off. I said I couldn’t remember meeting anyone at Mac’s. Then I phoned Howie Gadwell and warned him. I said I didn’t think much of the way he snubbed his old friends, but all the same, no matte
r how they act, you’ve got to stand by your old friends. But in the paper it said this Beattie had been divorced for years.”

  “What was Gadwell’s attitude?” Sidney said.

  “Damned rude, actually. He told me it was a good thing for me that I’d kept my mouth shut, and if I valued my health I’d better still keep it shut. Well, then I really let him have it. I said he could be damn well grateful and he’d better lay off that tough talk, so he took the other tack and got all old palsy. He said this dame was dynamite, so please keep quiet, and he’d give me some free shares of some Moose Pasture stock he was promoting.

  “Well, when I saw in the paper that Beattie had been murdered, I was pretty scared—I want no part of that stuff. So when I saw that this nephew had murdered him, I was a pretty relieved boy.”

  “I guess you were,” Sidney said. “And now, if you’ll give me a rundown on Gadwell, I’ll go away and leave you alone. But don’t tell him I was asking, if you don’t mind.”

  “Don’t worry—I won’t,” Mayhew said. “What do you want to know?”

  “All I can find out about Gadwell—business connections and all that. Love life, et cetera,” Sidney said.

  “Well, in business, Howie is a sort of minor wheel,” Mayhew said. “He owns pieces of things. Radio stations, a commercial film company, a night club. He started out as a phony stock promoter. He operated a boiler room—you know, a room where about twenty salesmen sit phoning to suckers all over the continent, pushing these mining stocks. He’s been in trouble with the SEC in the States, and with the Stock Exchange and the Ontario Government securities people here. I haven’t met him for years—except that once —but I’ve sort of followed his career.”

  “What about women?” Sidney asked.

  “Gosh, I haven’t got all night,” Mayhew said. “His women are innumerable. He’s been married about four times, but after his last divorce I think he learned his lesson. He likes girls. And he has this approach, you know; with his studio making TV commercials and all, they say any girl can get a bit to play if she approaches High Grade Howie the right way—like without her clothes. One of his earlier wives was Sharon Willison, the TV singer.”

  “Did you recognize the girl he was with at Mac’s Garage?”

  “No, never saw her, but she was quite a dish,” Mayhew said. He was a very different man from the superior being who had first welcomed Sidney Grant in the morning, and seemed only too pleased to appease his interrogator in any way he could.

  During the days that followed, Sidney Grant did a lot more checking on Howard Gadwell, but he avoided the direct approach. He went back to Mrs. Ledley, who did not know Gadwell, but met her husband, who did. From Mr. Ledley he obtained the names of mining people who knew Gadwell and disliked him—it was a goodly list—and whenever he had a spare minute, he called on them and asked the same question: Who was Howard Gadwell keeping company with at the mining convention last May?

  Some of the men were evasive, and some didn’t know, but in due course Sidney came upon a mining engineer with an office on Bay Street who knew and was willing to tell. The engineer’s name was Val Eckhardt, and he was a big man with a bald dome and a craglike jaw.

  “Sure I know who High Grade Howie’s girl friend was,” Eckhardt said. “She was the wife of a fellow I know. A geologist from the Kansas School of Mines, and a very nice guy. He brought his wife down to Toronto from northern Quebec for the convention, and she promptly fell for Gadwell.”

  “And the name?” Sidney said.

  “The guy’s name is Wicklow, Tex Wicklow, he’s called. I don’t know the wife’s name. Someone he met in Montreal, I believe.”

  “Do you know,” Sidney asked, “if she was an old flame of Gadwell’s, or if this was a sudden blooming of love?”

  “I couldn’t be sure, but I’ve got an idea they’d met before, and she just decided that Gadwell was the playmate she needed for this week in Toronto.”

  “Well, that would explain some things,” Sidney said. “So Wicklow was busy around this convention, and his wife would be able to slip away to a motel for a few hours of bliss with Gadwell.”

  “Why slip away?” Eckhardt said. “She had a nice suite all to herself at the hotel.”

  “All to herself?”

  “Sure. You see, the first night of this convention there was a warm-up cocktail party, and around eleven Brother Gadwell scooped up six or eight guests and took them for dinner to the Rathskeller, just across Front Street from the hotel. I wasn’t in on the party, but I saw it—I was at a nearby table. Madame Wicklow was fairly high and throwing herself all over Gadwell, while poor Tex tried to ignore it and got quietly loaded. On the way back Tex fell behind the main party, and managed to stagger in front of a fastmoving cab. They rushed him to St. Michael’s Hospital unconscious, with a suspected skull fracture, and he spent the next ten days being looked after by nuns, just as a contrast to his normal female companionship. Well, his good lady didn’t even break stride. She just whooped it up for the rest of the week with High Grade Howie, who was looking pretty prosperous at the time.”

  “Then there was absolutely no need for them to slip away anywhere else?”

  “No—they had a very cozy setup,” Eckhardt said.

  Eckhardt thought that Wicklow was working at a drill site in far northern Quebec and managed to confirm the fact by means of a telephone call. “They push the drills down into the hard rock, fifteen hundred, two thousand feet,” Eckhardt said. “The shaft of the drill is made of hollow pipes, and when they drill a section, they pull up the pipe and take out the hard rock core. Wicklow’s job is to examine the drill cores and figure the mineral content. He wouldn’t have his wife with him up there—they stake their wives out in Rouyn or Amos, or even Montreal or Toronto.”

  Getting in touch with Wicklow proved to be difficult. His drill site had two-way radio connections with the air base at Senneterre, Quebec, but mails were slow and irregular. Ken Ledley, when the problem was put to him, suggested that Sidney fly up and interview Wicklow on the spot.

  “A nice idea,” Sidney said. “But this little investigation is my own. Nobody is paying me, and I just can’t afford the time, let alone the money.”

  “Well, you seem to have some bug in your head about this,” Ledley said. “And I’m kind of curious about why somebody would steal my wife’s driver’s license. I’ll bet I can fix it to fly you up there at the company’s expense—not my company, but the owner of the mining property.”

  “How could you work that?” Sidney asked.

  “Oh, hell, there are always legal problems,” Ledley said. “You aren’t a member of the Quebec bar, but there are bound to be papers that have to be notarized or something of the sort. If you put your fee high enough, they’ll jump at it. Just leave it to me.”

  A couple of days later Sidney was summoned to the office of the Capuchin Mining Company, where he was asked to take certain papers to the company’s drill site near the shores of James Bay and make some arrangements with the boss of the site. Mr. Ledley had worked well. Sidney could leave on a Friday and return on Sunday, and he would receive a fee of five hundred dollars as well as his traveling expenses.

  Miss Semple was terribly worried about his flying off into the wilds among a lot of tough mining men and wanted him to get a complete survival kit, a revolver and a battery-operated electric blanket. Sidney compromised by getting a fur hat with ear flaps and a pair of fleece-lined fur mitts.

  He moved off from Malton in a TCA Viscount on the milk run to North Bay, Earlton, Rouyn-Noranda and Val d’Or-Bourlamaque, where, on expert advice, he purchased half a dozen forty-ounce bottles from the Quebec Liquor Commission and went on by taxi over a well-swept road to Senneterre.

  It was all very new and wonderful to the city-bred Sidney. The air terminal at Senneterre was set beside a snow-covered frozen lake. It was crowded with all sorts of bush types—prospectors, drillmen, Indians, geologists and engineers—and bush planes of many types were loading up wit
h strange cargoes and winging off into the wilderness.

  Sidney embarked in a DeHavilland Beaver, flown by a veteran pilot about nineteen years old, and loaded with machine parts, sleigh dogs and mining men. He was lucky enough to sit beside the pilot and get a superb view of the countryside, which consisted of spruce forest and small lakes stretching off to a far horizon. Fights broke out among the dogs in the rear, and some of the men were airsick.

  “Don’t worry,” the pilot said. “When the men fight and the dogs get airsick, you’ve got real trouble.”

  They landed on an airstrip bulldozed out of the solid spruce forest, and Sidney finished his strange journey in a caterpillar snowmobile.

  He was accommodated, along with the young pilot, in the camp’s executive suite, a prefabricated hut with eight bunks, a fat Quebec heater, a two-way radio and a large collection of pinups, records, paperbacks, playing cards, chessmen and cribbage boards. He was given a royal welcome, partly because of the refreshments he had brought.

  He had his meals in a cook shack where the drillmen, who spoke a French that was incomprehensible to Sidney, wolfed vast quantities of food amid an obbligato of weird ingestion noises. He had pie for breakfast and heard learned arguments about the specific gravity of the crust. He heard many tall tales of the north, including one about a sample of the cook’s pie crust being sent to the assay office by mistake and causing the Capuchin stock to shoot up forty cents a share. The rumor got out that a natural substitute for Vinyl floor covering had been discovered. He heard about a diamond drill head breaking off far underground and being drawn fifteen hundred feet to the surface by means of a poultice which contained over two hundred pounds of mustard. He sang songs and drank whisky far into the night with the engineers, in a flimsy shack in the remote bush, with no other human habitation between him and the North Pole.

  He completed his legal business with considerable efficiency, and he met Tex Wicklow, a somewhat disenchanted geologist. At first Wicklow got the idea that Sidney was representing his erring wife, and the geologist swore that he wouldn’t pay her a cent, not even on a court order, but Sidney convinced him that all he wanted was to locate the lady.