The Weird World of Wes Beattie

by John Norman Harris

  “But Wes, they can’t transfer fingerprints. Now then, a psychiatrist heard your account of your evening at that apartment. He is a highly trained man. He thinks the story is false.”

  Wes was on his feet, quivering. “Oh sure!” he said. “So they give you truth serum and then say you’re lying. What was wrong with the story?”

  “Discrepancies,” Sidney said. “Now what about the girl? Where did you meet her?”

  “Picked her up. Downtown,” Wes said. “She came and sat at my table and shot me a line and all that, and we made a date. So she picked me up in her car after dark and drove me to her apartment. I wasn’t noticing where we were going, and, well, you know how it is. We fooled around in this apartment, had a couple of drinks and—well, she was a pushover, frankly. Then she said her husband was coming home and she drove me downtown and dumped me.”

  “And what was the apartment like?” Sidney asked.

  “Well, like any other apartment,” Wes said. “Sort of ordinary. I wasn’t there to look at apartments, don’t forget.”

  “But under sedation you described it in detail,” Sidney reminded him.

  “Well, maybe that was my unconscious mind that sort of noticed the details.”

  “Dr. Heber thinks you made those details up to lend verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.”

  “There you go again!” Wes said, his voice rising. “All the time I’m lying, lying. They said there was no gang, and you found them.”

  “This apartment story is true?” Sidney said.

  “Yes!” Wes screamed.

  “Well, it was the third story you told them,” Sidney said. “Which doesn’t help at all. I wondered if there was perhaps a fourth story that you haven’t told yet.”

  “Like what?” Wes said, shooting him a cautious glance.

  “Like Wes Beattie behaving like a lame-brained idiot, and being afraid to tell the truth. It’s happened before.”

  “Yeah? What are you getting at?”

  “Oh, Uncle Edgar got a call from this man. The man told him to lay off. Uncle Edgar said, ‘Never. Not till we meet face to face.’ The man made a date to come and see him on that Friday night. Wes suspected that it would happen, so he figured it would be Friday, the day Uncle Edgar returned from the road trip. He hung about, away down the street. Saw a man go in—too far away to recognize. Figured it was the man. Saw the man come out two minutes later, and went along to investigate. Found the door open and walked in. Saw the body. Edgar had admitted his visitor, and had gone to sit down while the man took off his coat. The man seized the stick and cracked him unawares. So Wes found the body. He was horrified, started to phone the police, heard Flo Churcher call out. Suddenly got frightened and ran away.

  “Maybe Wes had had a key to the apartment for years. Maybe Uncle Edgar lent it to him once, and he put it on his key ring and forgot it. When the police discovered it, he thought it was too incriminating, so he lied—he was accustomed to lying. He remembered the way he had been framed before and tried to work out a similar frame-up for the murder which would explain the key being planted by the decoy woman. But he forgot that he’d left those fingerprints, and he was stuck with his story and couldn’t explain them. He felt that admitting he’d been near the apartment would be putting his head in the noose, because the conspirators were so elusive.”

  Wes Beattie sat staring at him wide-eyed. “Gee, how did you figure it out?” he said. “You know something? That’s exactly the way it happened. I saw this guy go in. The dame was waiting out on the street in a parked car. The same dame that was a witness against me. I crept up close enough to look at her when she lit a cigarette. While I was watching, this guy came down and jumped in the car, and they drove away.”

  “And you took the license number?” Sidney said.

  Wes stopped in full flight. “Yeah,” he said. “I memorized it, but I didn’t have a pencil or anything, and I forgot it afterward. Then I went up, and it was just like you said.”

  “And this is now the truth, and nothing but the truth?”

  “Yes,” Wes said.

  “And you were extremely angry just now when I told you that Dr. Heber thought you were lying.”

  “Gee, I’m sorry,” Wes said. “But you know…”

  “The story of this girl and the apartment? You made it up?”

  Wes paused, and doubt flickered across his face. He hung his head guiltily.

  “Yes, I made it up,” he said.

  “How about the description of the apartment. The details. You made them up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me some of them.”

  “Well, I said—” Wes thought hard, with his eyes closed—“I said there was a Modigliani and classical records and stuff, like ikon paintings.”

  “And you wanted to let on this came from your unconscious, that you couldn’t remember it when you were wide awake?”

  “That’s right. I knew about this heavy sedation bit.”

  “Dr. Heber thought you were clumsy. You described an elegant apartment furnished with some taste, and a girl with a comic-book mind.”

  Wes looked puzzled. He sat and thought that one over for a full minute. “Yeah. That’s sort of funny, isn’t it?” he said. “But I don’t see what’s wrong with it. See, this woman was a decoy for the gang, so it really wasn’t her apartment. It was some joint they planted her in.”

  “But you said you made her up. You said it was a lie.”

  “Oh sure,” Wes said. “But the way I made the lie up, I meant it to seem like it wasn’t her apartment.”

  “Wes,” Sidney said, “to change the subject, did you ever confess that you murdered your uncle?”

  “No, certainly not,” Wes said. “Never.”

  “Someone says you did.”

  “Well he’s a goddam liar.”

  “A big fellow, with a military mustache. He came in with an orderly.”

  “Him?” Wes said.

  “Him.’

  “Oh, God—does he say I confessed?” Wes stared at Sidney in horror.

  “Yes.”

  “Well I didn’t,” Wes said, and his voice was rising with excitement. “I—they had a lot of headshrinkers examining me. I thought—gee, he said I could confide in him. He said it would be better, I’d feel better, if I admitted it. I said I didn’t kill Uncle Edgar, and he said something about me really being responsible, and I said yes. Oh, God—not him.”

  “What else did you say?”

  “Well, he said you could really say I killed Uncle Edgar, meaning on account of my stupidity, and I said sure or something, sort of to get rid of him, see, he bugged me, this guy. He was sort of like the magistrate that sent me up the river. Colonel Blimp kind of. He can’t…”

  “He can,” Sidney said. “So, my young friend, you are going in to bat on a sticky wicket, as the Limeys would say. I will have to move all hell to get as much evidence in the record as possible to show the existence of this conspiracy. Then I have to decide whether or not to put you in the witness box. How do you feel about it?”

  “Swell,” Wes asserted. “I’ll just tell them the truth, like I told it to you…”

  “Wes, the Crown Attorney is going to cross-examine you, and if there is any little inconsistency, he will tear you apart. Now listen, my boy. If this is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, it will stand up to all the Massinghams in the world. It will be indestructible. But if it’s a lie—God help you. Now think it over. In any case, I may just decide to present your story as a hypothesis, to create reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury and keep you out of the witness box. You’re a bad witness.”

  “Why?”

  “When I asked you if you took the license number of that car, you thought it over and decided you didn’t have a pencil to write it down. As a matter of fact, you didn’t get near the car, did you? Maybe you never saw a car. Wes, whatever embroidery you may wish to add to the story, forget it. Stick to the solid truth.�
��

  “Okay, Gargoyle,” Wes said.

  “And don’t call me Gargoyle. Call me Mr. Grant. And we’ll get your hair cut and brush you up a bit, and remember to sit up straight in court and look dignified. Cut out all the smiles and grimaces and try to act grown up.”

  “Yessir,” Wes said, looking astounded.

  Sidney shook his head thoughtfully as he walked away.

  ***

  The last days before the trial raced past in a welter of activity. There were witnesses to subpoena and details to check out about Flatiron Island, where Gadwell had operated his film studio. The title to the island was registered in the name of a man in Cleveland.

  Sidney took a flock of pictures to show to Wes, including one of Howard Gadwell, but Wes didn’t recognize it as anyone in particular.

  The search for a motive was becoming desperate, because without a credible motive the conspiracy was simply part of the weird world of Wes Beattie. But nowhere could Sidney find any link between Ralph Paget and Howard Gadwell, or between Paget and Janice Wicklow.

  Had Paget met Janice, perhaps, during a night on the town in Montreal? Had he offered her money to frame Wes, and had she brought Gadwell into the picture?

  The only course of action open in the time that remained was to follow up the leads on Gadwell.

  Sidney went to the Metropolitan Police and to the Ontario Provincial Police, and stated that he could possibly locate the murder weapon which had killed Sam Black. He said that, owing to the nature of his practice, he sometimes had access to information from the underworld, and he felt it his duty to place it before the authorities.

  He also assured the morality squad that he had located the studio which the FBI believed existed in Canada, and he said that, in due course, he would be able to name the Canadian agent of the mob.

  He got action on both scores. A federal agent flew in from Washington, and Sidney had to waste a valuable day going to Muskoka to show the agent the cottage on Flatiron Island, and to locate the oar, which was still standing like a flagstaff, frozen in the ice. The FBI man confirmed that the man in Cleveland who owned the cottage was, in fact, doing a long stretch in a federal prison.

  The provincials were extremely dubious about trying to find a weapon in the depths of Lake Muskoka in March, but Sidney suggested a powerful permanent magnet lowered on a stout fishing line, and they agreed to try it.

  “Try various weights on the line,” Sidney said, “and keep casting away. If there is a weapon there, it may be lodged in a hole, and you might not get it in the first hundred tries. But a fisherman has to be patient.”

  The threat that the Metro Police would try it if the provincials didn’t was sufficient to settle the matter, and Sidney returned to the city in a fast cruiser to make his final arrangements for the defense. Poor Miss Semple had been handling a load of detailed work almost unaided.

  Naturally the Crown Attorney learned about the information which Sidney had given to the police, and he demanded explanations. Sidney gave him the name of Howard Gadwell—a name not unfamiliar to Mr. Massingham—and suggested that Gadwell be kept under constant and discreet surveillance until further developments.

  “I’m rather busy on another matter at the moment,” Sidney told him.

  “So I understand,” Massingham said. “You are defending Beattie. Am I to understand that you will not plead insanity?”

  “That is correct,” Sidney said.

  Massingham’s answer was to have Wes transferred promptly from the Psychiatric Hospital to the Don Jail. It came at an unfortunate time. The hospital authorities reported that Wes’s condition had deteriorated after his lawyer’s visit. The mood of gaiety and optimism had vanished. Once more he was moody and withdrawn, inclined to turn hysterical at the slightest excuse. The relative comfort of the hospital had given him a feeling of security. The return to the harsh world of prison was unlikely to help him.

  Twelve

  MRS. BEATTIE HAD BEEN taught as a girl that it was polite always to leave something on the plate, and even the rigors of two wars had never cured the habit.

  This had worked out well for Betty Martin, who, after her orphanage upbringing, could never resist polishing off the delicacies left by her mistress.

  Even on that fateful Sunday, the day before the trial, Betty gobbled up the remains of the deviled kidneys on the breakfast tray, as soon as Mrs. Beattie swept grandly into the bathroom, and then hurried the tray to the back stair in order to destroy the evidence.

  In due course Mrs. Beattie emerged from her bath, and Betty, as was her custom, helped her to dress, but she jammed zippers, failed to make the correct junction between hooks and eyes, and was guilty of much hair pulling during brushing operations.

  Mrs. Beattie remained icy calm through all the blunderings, but wondered aloud in an ominous manner whether Betty were not getting a little too old for such work, which only upset Betty and decreased her efficiency still further.

  Marcia Paget appeared and wanted to know if her mother wished to be driven to church in the Jag, but Mrs. Beattie said she would not be attending divine worship that morning. Claudia came in to ask what right Marcia had to take the Jag, and flounced off in a temper when she got no satisfaction. When the toilet was completed, Mrs. Beattie stood up and said to Betty: “You may call me a taxi.”

  “Where shall I say you’re going, Mum?” Betty asked.

  Mrs. Beattie did not answer. She appeared not to have heard the question, and Betty, crushed, went to do her bidding. But Betty had her methods.

  When the taxi arrived, she helped Mrs. Beattie down the steps and took such a time tucking her into the cab that the driver had time to ask, “Where to, lady?”

  It would have been infra dig to ignore the question and let Betty know for sure that her mistress was going on a secret mission, so she spoke up loud and clear. “To the Don Jail,” she said. “Do you know the way, driver?”

  “A hell of a sight better’n I know the way to the York Club, lady,” the driver said, and Betty had to hustle away into the house to avoid giggling.

  The driver’s eyebrows shot up, but, sensing a distinct chill from the back seat, he drove off in silence.

  But already Betty was racing to the bedroom, where she seized the telephone and dialed with trembling fingers.

  “Oh, Miss June, Miss June,” she said, when the connection was complete, “a terrible thing is happening and Miss June only you can stop it. Mrs. Beattie has gone to the jail.”

  “God, not another in the family,” June said. “What’s she charged with? Keeping a disorderly house? Claudia at it again?”

  “Oh, Miss June, Miss June, you mustn’t joke, there was such a to-do. Mr. Paget is in the kennel again, I mean the doghouse, and Mrs. Beattie says he is an officious fool and she says Mr. Grant is a Charlotte Anne and a Mounty Banks, and she is the only one in the family that can do anything right, and now she’s gone down to bully poor Mr. Wes and make him go to the lunatic asylum. Oh do get Mr. Grant and go and head her off, Miss June. Oh I’m sorry about waking you but you must, you must.

  “All right, here we go again,” June said.

  ***

  A wild mink coat and blue-tinged hair will often open doors which are normally closed to anyone not having a proper pass. Besides, Mrs. Beattie’s supreme self-confidence bordered on the faith that moves mountains. She was therefore able, with little difficulty, to obtain a Sunday morning interview with her grandson.

  “Oh Wes, Wes, my poor boy Wes, what are they doing to you?” she said, and the warder withdrew to a tactful distance and averted his gaze.

  Wes, his eyes filled with fear, stared at her.

  “You have retained Mr. Grant, an inexperienced lawyer who is terribly anxious for notoriety,” she continued. “What becomes of you is no concern to him. He will have had his picture in the papers. He will have argued a case before the assizes. He will have produced sensations. He has decided to ring in something about a guilty couple who were having an as
signation at that motel, and this will make a Roman circus of the trial for the evening papers. He will put you in the witness box and subject you to merciless cross-examination. How will you stand up to it? Will you get excited and hysterical? Will you make an exhibition of yourself?”

  “No, no, I won’t, not this time,” Wes said.

  “How do you know? You are in no state to endure this ordeal,” she said. “And for all the sensational material which Mr. Grant can produce, Mr. Massingham will bear down with remorseless logic on the plain facts.”

  “Well, the plain facts, Gran…” Wes began.

  “Spare me, please,” she said. “I am not in the best of health. I came here this morning to make one final appeal to you—to your own good sense. Wes, dear, if it would help you, I would permit myself to be photographed doing the Twist with Mr. Grant. You are the only one who matters. Now—it is still not too late to use the earlier plea which had been decided upon. Mr. Ogilvy, of course, will have nothing to do with the case, but we can get another lawyer. Even Mr. Grant might be persuaded to handle your plea of—mental disturbance. You will go to a reasonably comfortable institution, and at a later date we may be able to free you.”

  “You mean fifty years from now?” Wes said.

  “But if you persist in this folly,” she said, ignoring his remark, “we can expect a sensational trial and a dubious end to it. Think how a jury will react. You are almost bound to be convicted. You will be forced to stand and hear that ghastly sentence—possibly from a judge who has dined at our house. Then there will be appeals and petitions for clemency. But—others have gone to the gallows recently, and the present government would be frightened politically of commuting the sentence for a member of a prominent family.

  “I hope I will not live until the final, dreadful scene—the ghastly ceremony which will take place in this building—shortly after midnight. I dread the night I may have to spend on my knees, praying for the soul of my little Wes. Oh, protest, cry, do what you will. The facts are to be faced.”

  Wes was struggling to speak, but no words would come, only tears.