The Weird World of Wes Beattie

by John Norman Harris

  “Well, good luck to you, boy,” Wicklow said. “And when you find her, keep her. She left me last September and took everything I owned that wasn’t screwed to the walls. All she left really was bills, and plenty of them.”

  Her maiden name, Wicklow said, was Swann, and she had come originally from Saskatoon. Her mother, a widow who had remarried, still lived in Saskatoon, but Janice Wicklow had not communicated with her for years. Wicklow had met her during a wild furlough in Montreal and had married her on impulse.

  “I was bushed,” he admitted. “All marriages of guys coming out of the bush ought to be purely provisional for six months. I keep marrying the damnedest women every time I get back to civilization.”

  Janice had indeed known Gadwell before her marriage and had welcomed him as a long-lost lover when they met in Toronto. “High Grade Howie was in the chips,” Wicklow explained. “Money has a fatal attraction for that gal, and this guy Gadwell is quite a hand with the wenches.”

  Wicklow had not heard a word from his wife since her departure. He suspected that she had gone to join Gadwell. “But that guy won’t be nearly as keen on her when it comes to supporting her,” he said.

  Sidney asked for a picture of Janice Wicklow, and the geologist was able to produce a large selection from the Gladstone bag under his bunk. Janice had been a model in Montreal, and there were shots of her modeling furs, dresses and lingerie. There were even some of her modeling something invisible, like perfume.

  “Mrs. Wicklow doesn’t appear to have been a prude,” Sidney said.

  “No, that was never her problem,” Wicklow agreed. “Don’t let these hyenas see those artistic poses, or they’ll want to pin them up.”

  Sidney picked out half a dozen shots which Wicklow was happy to let him take, and then the two men rejoined the other inhabitants of the executive suite, who were singing to the accompaniment of a five-string banjo.

  On Monday morning, somewhat bemused, but back in Toronto, Sidney laid a selection of model photographs, obtained for the purpose, in front of James Bellwood, the lawyer who had defended Wes Beattie on his theft charge. “Identification parade?” Bellwood said, looking the pictures over carefully. “Well, here you are.”

  He put his finger on a photograph of Janice Swann Wicklow. “That,” he said, “is Mrs. Leduc, the witness who said that Wes Beattie stole her purse.”

  “Well, I’m blowed,” Sidney said. “I lightheartedly agreed with Dr. Milton Heber that I would track her down, but I had no idea how elusive she was going to be.”

  “And now you’ve done it. Nice work, Gargoyle,” Bellwood said.

  “No, I haven’t found her. But at least I know who she is,” Sidney said. “And I can put Missing Persons on the trail, as well as the Canadian Association of Credit Bureaus, so we should be able to interview her soon. If anybody can find her, the credit boys will. She’s as addicted to shopping as Lorelei Lee.”

  Four

  FOR A COUPLE OF DAYS after his northern expedition, Sidney Grant was in a quandary as to how to proceed. He arranged to have a discreet look at Howard Gadwell in a bar and caught another glimpse of him in a restaurant. The direct approach to him promised only a brush-off. Until Mrs. Wicklow could be found there was little point in further investigation of the alleged conspiracy.

  However, Wes Beattie’s hour of trial was approaching. Shortly he would be brought before an assize court and charged with murder. His counsel would—as things were—enter a plea of insanity, and if the Crown were prepared to accept it, Wes Beattie would be locked away quietly to inhabit his weird world for the rest of his life.

  At length Sidney decided that Wes Beattie’s counsel, Mr. Baldwin Ogilvy, Q.C., ought to know about Gadwell and Mrs. Wicklow, so he called him. But Ogilvy was a Member of Parliament and was away in Ottawa, so the next best thing was to inform Wes Beattie’s relatives.

  By a strange fluke of real estate values, Sidney Grant lived only a block and a half away from the old Beattie house. Rosedale, a charming quarter of the city, had been mainly built up with large, late-Victorian houses. Some of them, in the modern era, had proved too expensive for private ownership, and they had been converted into rooming houses. As a student, Sidney Grant had shared the large attic of such a house with two of his fellows, and when marriage claimed them he stayed on. It was the sort of house that could have been designed by John Betjeman or Mary Petty, and Sidney loved it.

  The old Beattie house, a block and a half away, was much the same type of building, but when Sidney, one evening, yanked on the old-fashioned bell pull, he was amazed to see another touch of authenticity: a maid in cap and apron answered the door—a dear little old bird of a woman who could well have peeped from the garret of a Mary Petty house.

  She had a large pink angular nose and she talked as one whose adenoids have never been attended to. “Yes sir?” she said nervously.

  “Is Mrs. Beattie at home?” Sidney said.

  “Oh, no sir, Mrs. Beattie is never A Tome in the evenings,” the maid said. “P’raps you might like to write to her and state your business, sir.”

  “Oh. What time are you expecting her?” Sidney asked.

  “Oh, she’s here, but she’s not A Tome, if you understand what I mean. I mean she never sees visitors that call except in the morning.”

  “Oh. Well, would you mind giving her my card and telling her it’s an urgent matter concerning her grandson?”

  “Not a tall sir. A nurgent matter you said, sir? Concerning Mr. Wes?” She looked most anxious.

  “That is correct,” Sidney said.

  “Oh, well, that’s different, sir. Will you come and wait in the hall, please, sir, and I’ll just hurry and tell Mrs. Beattie.” She scampered away, bearing Sidney’s card on a little silver plate.

  Sidney stood on the Persian rug in the large entrance hall and examined the glorious curve of a stairway designed to be descended by beautiful women in evening dresses, and silence gathered about him like a fur robe. Presently he heard a quick step on the parquet floor behind him, and he turned to see a man approaching in a somewhat agitated manner.

  The man was stoutish but firm, and although evidently in his mid-fifties, there was no gray hair among his neat brown waves. His collar was noticeable for its starched whiteness, and his blue pin-striped suit was a beautiful thing.

  “Ah, Mr. Grant?” he said. “Is this anything that can’t wait till morning? Couldn’t you come and see me at my office?”

  “Certainly,” Sidney said. “Do you mind telling me who you are?”

  “Not at all. Paget is the name. Ralph Paget. You’ll find me at Superior Trust. Mrs. Beattie doesn’t like to be disturbed in the evening.”

  “It was actually Mrs. Beattie that I asked to see,” Sidney said. “And since I’m downtown all day, I took the liberty of calling in the evening. But in fact I probably ought to give my information to Baldwin Ogilvy, so I’ll wait till he gets back from Ottawa.”

  “This is something concerning the murder charge against Wes?” Paget said. “The whole subject is very painful to Mrs. Beattie, who is rather old. I’ll be glad to see you in the morning and pass along anything that Mr. Ogilvy ought to hear.”

  “Fine. I’ll give you a call,” Sidney said, and turned toward the door.

  But the little maid came fluttering into the hall at that moment and spoke to Paget in a deferential way. “Oh, Mr. Paget,” she said, “Mrs. Beattie said she would see Mr. Grant.”

  Paget looked irritated. “I don’t think there’s any need, really,” he said.

  “Oh, but I think she wants…” the maid began.

  Paget shook his head and exhaled in a resigned manner. “Very well. Won’t you come in, Mr. Grant?” he said.

  Sidney was ushered into a drawing room which astonished him. Every piece of furniture or fitting in it was either modern or Georgian, yet the sum total conveyed the idea of late Victorianism, and the three women sitting in upright chairs and sipping coffee heightened the effect.

&nb
sp; “Ah, Mrs. Beattie, this is Mr. Grant,” Paget said. “Mrs. Beattie, Miss Claudia Beattie and my wife. Would you care for a glass of brandy?”

  When Sidney had found a chair, and had been furnished with a fine, ancient brandy, Mrs. Beattie turned her long, thin, aristocratic face toward him. She appeared to be past eighty, but sat up very straight in her chair and talked in a high, well-bred voice.

  “You have, I believe, some information concerning my grandson?” she said.

  “Uh, yes,” Sidney said. “You see, I heard that your grandson suffers from delusions. He has a story about being persecuted by a mysterious gang of criminals.”

  “That is true,” the old lady said. “I’m afraid that poor Wes was always something of a romancer, but this tendency increased greatly following —well, as a result of some trouble he had in the spring.”

  “To be specific,” Sidney said, “he claimed that last spring he was framed by these crooks and sent to jail on a theft charge. He claimed that the woman witness who said he stole her handbag had—in a valuable phrase of his own coining—vanished into thin air.”

  “Yes, he did,” Mrs. Beattie said. “He tried to get her name and address from the police, but they refused to furnish the information, because they did not wish her to be persecuted. We quite understood, and we were no more desirous than she of having any further embarrassment over the business.”

  “He also claimed that his Uncle Edgar was searching for this woman witness at the time he was killed, and that, when he got on her trail, a man phoned him and told him to lay off.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Mrs. Beattie said. “But it would be typical of Wes.”

  “Well, Mrs. Beattie, I became curious about it and did a little investigation. I discovered very definitely that Edgar was trying to locate the woman, that she has vanished into thin air, that she gave a false name in court and that it is extremely probable that a man did call and warn Edgar to lay off.”

  “Really!” Mrs. Beattie said.

  “In other words, there are points in this fanciful tale of your grandson’s which aren’t so fanciful after all.”

  “That is most interesting,” Mrs. Beattie said. “But, Mr. Grant, does this in any way affect the main issue? I mean, does it alter the fact that poor Wes murdered my poor son Edgar? Or, for that matter, does it really indicate that he did not steal this woman’s purse?”

  “Well, to take the second point first,” Sidney said, “this woman used a stolen driver’s license to rent a car and a motel unit. Both the car and the unit were given up on the same day. She was with a man who was not her husband. I can find no logical reason why they should do what they did. I mean they took elaborate precautions for concealing an illicit affair, when in fact it was unnecessary. That suggests that perhaps there is something in Wes’s frame-up story.”

  “What possible motive could they have for framing a wretched bank clerk?” Paget demanded testily.

  “I don’t know,” Sidney said. “But it seems possible that they did. Now, if Mr. Ogilvy can show that there was some sort of conspiracy on foot, he might cast real doubt on Wes’s guilt in the murder.”

  “Absolute nonsense!” Paget said. “The boy’s fingerprints were found on the telephone in Edgar’s apartment. By his own admission, corroborated by the housekeeper, he had never visited that apartment since his trouble in the spring. And, in case there is any doubt about the telephone, the housekeeper has absolutely identified it as the instrument which has been in the apartment for twenty-five years at least.”

  “She can identify it?” Sidney said.

  “Yes. Edgar painted the hall three times during that period, and there are paint splotches from each operation on the telephone. Furthermore, someone once scratched a telephone number on the Bakelite with some sharp instrument—the point of a pair of compasses, I believe. The Crown has gone into it very thoroughly because of Wes’s ridiculous claim that his fingerprints were transplanted. Now, in the light of all that, do you really think there is reasonable doubt of his guilt?”

  “I’m not the jury,” Sidney said. “But I felt that this information might suggest some line of action to Mr. Ogilvy.”

  Sidney was aware of the close scrutiny of the three women, and he shifted uneasily and looked at them in turn.

  Claudia Beattie was fiftyish, with large feet and a large, porous nose, which had been powdered with extreme carelessness. All of her attempts at make-up seemed amateurish, like secret experiments with cosmetics by a teen-age girl in a convent school. Her hands were large and coarse, and her face was long and sad, but there were hints of character about it.

  Her sister, Mrs. Paget, was smaller, and smart. There was nothing amateurish about her dress or make-up. As she scrutinized the visitor, her lips were pressed into a thin line.

  “So you don’t take much stock in the conspiracy theory?” Sidney said.

  “None at all,” Paget said. “Of course, I was perfectly aware that Edgar was looking for this woman, and I knew about the man calling.”

  “You were?” Claudia said, turning her equine features toward him.

  “Certainly he was,” Mrs. Paget said. “Edgar told him all about it.”

  “Really?” Mrs. Beattie said. “He never said anything to me.”

  Everyone stared at Ralph Paget, and he began to look a trifle flustered. “There was no need,” he said. “I told Marcia at the time, and we debated whether we should say anything, but we came to the conclusion that it would only stir up a lot of unnecessary scandal.”

  “I really don’t know what you mean, Ralph,” Mrs.Beattie said.

  “Well, damn it, it was all very simple,” he replied. “I mean to say, Edgar asked me to have a new will drafted for him. We held his will at the company, you know. Under the old will, the bulk of his estate went into a trust to provide for Florence Churcher, the housekeeper. She had a life interest in it, and then the trust fund was to be divided between Wes and June, who also inherited the small residue of the estate. June, Mr. Grant, is Wes’s sister.

  “Well, of course, during the past few years Edgar has had tremendous luck gambling in the mining market, and that altered the whole picture. Instead of being a few thousand dollars, the residue of the estate became worth close to two hundred thousand, after the trust for the housekeeper had been set up. Edgar had no intention of putting so much money in the hands of young Wes, after the theft business. Instead, he wanted to set up life trusts for Claudia and the housekeeper, with everything reverting to June eventually. And June would get an immediate bequest of nearly one hundred thousand.”

  “And nothing, of course, for his beloved sister Marcia,” Mrs. Paget said with an acid smile. “Not even his second-best bed.”

  The glance of disapproval which her mother turned on her was all but imperceptible.

  “But Ralph, stop beating about the bush,” Claudia said. “What has all this got to do with Edgar looking for that woman?”

  “I’m coming to that, for heaven’s sake,” Paget said. “At any rate, Edgar was a blunt fellow and forthright by nature. He wanted Wes to know what he was doing, and why. So last August, when you were all at the lake, Edgar came around here one evening by arrangement and read both wills—the one in force and the draft of the new one—to Wes, in my presence.

  “He said, ‘Wes, you knew about this other will, and I don’t want to change it without telling you. I don’t want you to retain any false hopes, in fact.’ Well, Wes listened calmly enough, but then he put on a sort of tantrum. He said he didn’t care what Edgar did with his money; he could leave it all to a home for sick cats, for all he cared, but he added that he was glad his sister would get something. Then he got tearful and said he wouldn’t object to anything at all that Edgar did, if only he would do one last thing for him—namely, search out this woman witness and talk to her. He said that would soon prove whether he was a sneak thief or not. It was a very good stall, if you know Edgar. It appealed to his sporting instincts. So he said all right, he
would hunt up the witness and talk to her, and if Wes was right he wouldn’t change his will. So he left the whole matter in abeyance.”

  “And do you mean he couldn’t find the witness?” Claudia said.

  “No. He wisely refrained from telling Wes anything about this search. But he came to me. He said this was a damn funny thing—the woman couldn’t be found in Sudbury at all. She had obviously given a false name in court. It did seem a bit suspicious, until you remembered that she had been staying at this motel. Obviously she was under a false name at the motel and used the same name in court.”

  “Possibly committing perjury and certainly risking exposure,” Sidney said.

  “Quite. It did seem odd. Then Edgar thought he had found the woman. There had been some jiggery-pokery with her driver’s license, but she was off on a motor tour of Europe with her husband, so Edgar said he would wait until she came back and would question her privately. He refused to tell me who she was. But you know what a bull Edgar was when he went after anything. Instead of simply waiting, he started trying to track down this woman’s lover, and the lover got to hear of it. Edgar told me that the man called him.”

  “And warned him to lay off?” Sidney suggested.

  “No, of course not. He simply called Edgar and said he’d heard Edgar was looking for him. He asked what Edgar was after. And Edgar told him. Well, the man said he had gone to the Midtown Motel with a woman who was not his wife. They had booked in under another name. This man claimed he was looking out of the motel window and saw Wes in the very act of stealing the handbag, and he saw the parking lot attendant seize him. So he sent the woman out to identify her bag and get it back. Unfortunately, the motel people insisted on having Wes arrested and charged. He and his lady friend cleared out right away because all the stir had frightened them. He had thought that was the end of it, but next day he learned that this stupid woman had actually gone into court and given evidence. She was a little upset, and she thought she had to. She hadn’t realized that she could simply vanish. But the man was insistent that he, personally, had witnessed the actual theft, and dragging the whole matter up again and causing all sorts of marital discord wasn’t going to do Wes any good at all. So, he suggested that Edgar should…”