Murder Sees the Light

by Howard Engel

  THREE

  “… Of the nine of them, Manfred Gunning is the only one you can be sure of. At least Gunning will write a minority opinion that will go down in legal history.” It was Patten’s voice on the cassette recorder I’d planted on the island nearest the Woodward place. Not guessing that I would become a friend of the great man himself after picking him out of the water, I’d set up some fancy borrowed surveillance equipment in two plastic garbage bags under a groundsheet hidden by pine boughs and leaves. It took me five minutes to locate the hiding place myself. Inside the machine, the tiny reels turned slowly. “… It’s not Gunning I’m worried about,” Patten said in a controlled whisper. “It’s Harper, and Bartenbach, and the woman, what’shername, McCready.”

  “Because they’re Democrats? Surely …”

  “I’m not talking politics, Ozzie. Haven’t you been listening? Harper and Bartenbach both have a history of upholding decisions made in the lower courts, everything else being equal.”

  “If the decision goes against you, they’ll be opening up a can of worms that every church in the country’s going to yell about. There will be shouting from the pulpits in every hamlet in America. Think of it, Norrie.”

  “What do you imagine I’ve been thinking about? I’ve been through all the arguments. Diodati made only a third of the points I raised with him.…”

  “Now, Norrie …”

  “You told me he was the best.”

  “Diodati? He is the best. He’s one of the club. You need that. You can’t parachute an outsider into Washington. They’ve got to start from the same mark. Diodati gave it his best shot.” Considering the compactness of the microphone and the distance between it and the island, I was getting excellent value from the equipment. It even knew when to turn itself on and off. I’d never want to own stuff like this; I’d use it maybe once in ten years. I moved the tape ahead. There was more crackle now. It was Patten again with Ozzie.

  “I want to talk to Van,” Patten said.

  “Norrie, please, leave him out of it.”

  “You heard me. Or is he leading this vendetta against me? Maybe it’s him I can thank for dragging my name through the courts. My friends scorn me. That’s the first step.”

  “Norrie, the senator’s been your most loyal friend since the beginning. Since before the beginning. Please don’t start up with him again. Why he even let you use this place. Is that unfriendly?”

  “He could have been behind that motor exploding like that. He was one of the few who knew where to find me.”

  “Norrie, you’re not talking sense. The senator loves you.”

  “In the last days men shall be traitors. I don’t trust Van or you or Lorca, here. I don’t trust anybody. You’re all out for yourselves. Don’t think I don’t know your little games.”

  “Norrie, you know we all love you.”

  “I only know one thing: I’m Norbert Patten. That’s my beginning and my end, my going out and my coming in. The rest of you have your hands out.”

  “Be reasonable, Norrie.”

  “You too, eh, Ozzie?”

  “Norrie!”

  “Shut up, Lorca. If Ozzie wants out, that’s all right. We’ll pay him off right now. I’ve been alone before. Man is born to strive by himself. Everything else is an illusion. Ozzie, it’s up to you. If you’re with us, good; if not, Lorca’ll write your ticket.”

  “Norrie, I’ve never been a ‘yes-man,’ and I’m not going to start now.”

  “The ancients used to kill the messenger, Ozzie. That wasn’t such a bad idea.”

  “But there hasn’t been any news. Van’s holding the phone like the rest of us. We all have to sit and wait. By Friday we’ll know.”

  “Seven days! God built the universe in seven days and took the last day off. Don’t you think we can be undone in seven days? Here I sit in the middle of nowhere while out there the whole organization is waiting for a sign. If I live through this, is it going to be a victory cruise or is it time to leave the sinking ship? I know they’re thinking that. You tell them, Ozzie, tell P.J., tell them all that whatever happens I’m counting on them.”

  “They know that. You don’t have to …”

  “Say it, damn it! Get it into the papers. Bring out extra editions of Good News.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “Whatever the Supreme Court says, our ministry must go on. You got that?”

  “Sure, it’ll be in Good News, and I’ll see that the press gets hold of it. Now, don’t worry about Van, Norrie. He’s all right.” I heard Ozzie sigh, like he’d started running down. “My plane leaves at six, Norrie. I have to get back to Toronto.”

  “Well, cover your trail. I don’t want the whole world knowing I’m up here. Having somebody on the lake who’s trying to kill me is enough.”

  Eavesdropping is a funny business. As a peeper doing divorce work I spent a lot of time listening in one way or another. After a while you wish people would snap up their conversation a little. When you’re standing in the muck getting dripped on every time a leaf moves, you’d like to edit out the long pauses and the false starts to every thought. But I liked that last bit from Patten. I rewound the tape a few feet and played it again: “Having somebody on the lake who’s trying to kill me is enough.”

  My feet were sinking in the ooze, and I didn’t want to waste too much battery power playing back what I’d recorded. I had another machine back at the cabin. Whenever Joan’s generator was working I could hear the rest of this summit meeting. I replaced the used tape with a new one, removed the earphone, and set the thing recording again inside the camouflaged setting. With shoes squeaking in the muck, I took to the boat again. I’d pulled it up on some flat rocks and fixed the painter to some bushes. Once aboard, I took her out to my usual fishing ground, two hundred yards off Patten’s dock, and dropped anchor. I’d stopped counting worms. I drowned a few, keeping my eyes on the cabin. Nothing moved for half an hour except sweat into the creases around my neck. The Buick had gone, but the Mercedes was beginning to fry in its usual place as the sun broke through the clouds.

  Van was the senator, Senator Woodward, who was with Patten before the beginning. I salted that away. I would have to phone Ray Thornton in the morning about Patten. He wanted reports every other day. He already knew about my daring rescue and my positive identification. Now I was a limpet, a baby-sitter.

  I was wondering whether I knew Patten well enough to come out and ask him during our next game of chess what his plans were for after the Supreme Court decision, when my fishing rod jumped out of my lap and jammed against the gunwale of the boat. I could hear the reel spinning. I grabbed the cork handle before it disappeared over the side. I could see water skipping off the line as it went taut. God damn it, I thought, what a hell of a time to catch a fish! The reel was spinning so fast, the handle of the reel was a white blur. I knew enough not to try to check the line as it ran out, as the fork in the reel ran back and forth across the diminishing yardage. I tried putting my thumb lightly against the line and gave myself a rope burn. The core of the reel was coming up fast, and I had no other play. The short rod I was using didn’t have much bend in it, and it took all my strength to hold on to it.

  Then I felt the pressure easing on the line. He’d run as far as he was going to, or else he’d turned and was going to ram me. God, I hoped he wasn’t that big. Instead of thinking, I began to reel in the slack. I was expecting him to take another run any second, and I was ready for him. I’d picked up an end of the boats painter and had it ready to use inside the reel instead of my thumb next time he took off. I could feel that he was still there someplace. I hoped that he wasn’t running under the boat. He could have me tied up like a birthday present if I let him.

  When I had about three-quarters of my line back on the reel he started to take it away again. It was a see-saw operation. In the movies the fish ends up in the net; I didn’t even have a net. The fishing line was as tight as a power line and met the water at a sharp ta
ngent. Then I remembered, or my thumb did, that there was a ratchet on the side of the reel which added a drag to the line. I liked the drone it added to the banging about of my feet against the hot bottom of the boat. He didn’t run as far with it this time, and I was working the reel again. It was funny, this fishing business. Some of the things I was doing I’d never done before, but my hands seemed to know what they were doing. There wasn’t any thinking to be done, just keep things calm and simple. The fish was there all right. I could feel him through the rod and line. It was a different feeling from the drag of a snagged line. There was something electric or living about it. Suddenly as I started reeling in again, it wasn’t drowning worms any more.

  When I finally got my first look at him, I wanted to call the whole thing off. He was long and as big as a supermarket pyramid of canned salmon. My rod wasn’t long enough to keep him from sounding under the boat, but that wasn’t one of the cards in his deck. His shadow came closer and closer to the surface. I didn’t know what to do next. I needed a landing net. I had to make do with my shirt. As I lifted his slate-grey nose out of the water, I grabbed him with the shirt in my other hand. There was a little splashing, but when it was finished, we were both in the boat.

  I lay back trying to catch my breath for a minute, while the fish—it looked like a lake trout to me, but I’m not asking you to take my word for it—flopped about. I bashed its head with the small bait pail and it stopped moving. It was mottled and speckled with bright colours showing through a darker greenish brown. I put a line through the gills and tied it securely to the boat seat before throwing it back into the lake.

  I headed north along the shore for about half a mile, then turned the motor so I’d be able to see as much of the long lake as possible, out past both islands. A couple of loons started a serenade but cut it short, as though their hearts weren’t in it or the acid rain was getting them down. From the middle of the lake I turned the sharp end of the boat towards the shore and watched the lodge get slowly bigger.

  Nobody was on the dock when I brought in my catch. There was an electric hum of heat in the air, and most signs of the recent storm had vanished. I hauled my fish in and dallied on the dock, but the whole population of the lodge was off boondoggling or pressing flowers or something. I put the fish in the propane refrigerator. As I sat at the pine table eating soda crackers, I thought that somebody up at Petawawa Lodge knew quite a lot about my chess partner and right now might be planning further means for reducing the total number of cult leaders in North America.

  FOUR

  The main building of the lodge was called the Annex, although it wasn’t near anything except the edge of Big Crummock Lake. It was a one-storey rectangular log house with a big fieldstone fireplace at one end and an office and tack shop at the other. The unpainted log walls were decorated with chinking plaster and bear skins. There were a number of comfortable, over-stuffed sofas and chairs arranged around the fireplace, where a hardwood fire was falling away into white ash. To the right of the fireplace and dwarfed by it stood an old upright piano with the hammers and strings showing through the gap where the front panel had been.

  When I’d arrived I asked Joan about the name, the Annex, and she explained by pointing to the south end of the property where I could see a smoke-blackened remnant of stone and masonry rising through the bracken. “That was the sawmill,” she said, “built in the 1880s, as far as I can find out, and burned to the ground about fifteen years ago. There’s rusty machinery under the brush. Kids are always bringing me pieces of it or skinning their knees on it. The Annex was the office. I guess it seems funny still calling this the Annex, doesn’t it?”

  Lloyd Pearcy was bending over an old wind-up Victrola phonograph near the ping-pong table. His wide-open eyes were concentrated on the deep, rolling music that came out of the tattered cloth of the speaker. Lloyd had been there the night I arrived from Grantham and was still there the night after that. I’d seen him on the dock getting in and out of his boat, but in the evening he was seldom far from the Victrola. Back in my Grantham office it had seemed reasonable that up in Algonquin Park I should appear to be a fisherman. So I bought a mediumsized pickerel, had it cleaned, and brought it north with my fancy eavesdropping equipment. Lloyd had caught me filleting the pickerel and right away knew what kind of fisherman I was. He told me he’d worked for the parks commission in Sudbury for twenty-five years and was a regular up at the lodge. Right now he was trying to write down the words to the song on the turntable. I think it was Paul Robeson. He kept taking the tone-arm off the old 78 and putting it back again.

  Lindy Lou, Lindy Lou!

  O Lawd, I’d lay right down and die …

  There was a card game going on by the fireplace. I knew some of the faces from the last couple of days, but there were faces new to me too. Both kinds looked up at me as I steered in their direction.

  Mah liddle Lindy Lou-oo-oo.

  An urn of coffee was perched on a corner of the pingpong table. I drew a cup, added milk and my usual two heaping teaspoonfuls of sugar. From here I tried to sort out the faces. George McCord was in the card game. He was the chief source of noise on the lake, running his powerful speedboat up and down Big Crummock like he was on an assignment for the Mounties and the park rangers rolled together. His sweating head rested its chin on his chest while he examined his cards. From under meeting eyebrows he watched the other players while doing arithmetic on the inside of his cheek with the tip of his tongue. Lloyd’s wife, Cissy, was sitting next to George and frowning at the cards she held, like they were making them smaller this year. The player who looked like she had all the cards was Maggie McCord. She was as smug as a Persian cat on a pillow.

  “Three, no trump,” she said, almost licking her lips.

  “Oh, Maggie, have a heart!” That was Cissy, who palmed her cards and then had to fan them out again. The fourth card player was David Kipp. It was one of his towheaded kids who was always following Joan around. Kipp was staying at the lodge with both of his sons. His wife, Michelle, was in hospital in Vermont. The kids had that kind of blondness that takes to a tan. Kipp was fair too, but his short legs and long arms took the shine off it. Looking at the kids you could imagine Michelle with the kind of fragile blondness that makes you think of dandelion fuzz.

  Maggie handled her cards with small, delicate hands. Small hands and feet aside, everything else about Maggie McCord was huge. Joan, the source of most of my information, had told me she was the widow of a park ranger, who’d left her with property on the lake next door to the lodge. She looked like she was somewhere in her seventies. Bridge wasn’t my game, but I watched them through the bidding just to be polite. Maggie’s skilled hands managed her cards and her chain-smoking with a rare elegance under the naked electric lights of the Annex.

  Honey, did you heah dat mochin’ bird sing las’ night?

  I found a quiet corner by a bookshelf that contained copies of National Geographic going back to before Columbus. Behind one of them I recognized the elder of Kipp’s two boys. He told me his name was Roger, and he was thirteen. Before I asked him he told me that his mother was laid up in Bennington with hepatitis she had caught eating at a vegetarian restaurant. I thought this might lead to further conversation, but the lure of the girls of the atolls consumed the boy’s attention.

  Lloyd continued to write down the words of his song. Maggie McCord added another trick to the pile in front of her. Her son was glaring at her with a grab bag of emotions displayed on his face like Spencer Tracy wondering whether he has Mr. Hyde tucked up for the night.

  On my first night at the lodge, I’d seen a furtive couple who sat knee to knee as far away from everybody as possible. I called him Silverthorne, just to put a name on him, and his lady, Griselda. There was something patrician about him, something awkward and withdrawn about her. During the day, I didn’t see either one of them, but in the evenings they came to sit near the people, like wild animals at the edge of the forest clearing. This time they w
ere sitting next to the log wall, with an inverted bearskin hanging overhead, the savage mouth leering at the occasional words that passed between them. They both looked like they were slightly in pain. Even behind the protective cover of mosquitoes, black flies, and miles of dirt road, they weren’t having a hell of a time of it. He was the sole occupant of number six in the motel unit. His girlfriend was just the kid next door. Not even that; a dull couple of newlyweds lived between them. Their name was Hellman and they took picnics and went off by car to other parts of the park. Tonight they were probably curled up in front of a fire on Lake Opeongo eating soft ice cream from the outfitter’s store. I was just beginning to get depressed thinking how many city people were up here, when we all turned towards the sound of a car coming into the clearing. The noise drowned out the Delco generator. I could hear voices after the doors were opened and closed.

  “It’s the Rimmers!” Lloyd announced, turning off “Mah Lindy Lou.” “Former owners,” Lloyd said to me in a stage whisper, “with a place across the lake.” I put down my coffee as the voices grew closer and finally burst through the double doors.

  “I’ll be damned if I’ll pay a nickel for that tire. I tell you that right now. I won’t have any wedges or plugs or patches, I promise you that.”

  “Dalt!”

  “Peg, I’m telling you straight out I’m not spending good money to have a flat tire with less than two hundred miles on it. No, sir. Good evening everybody. Is Joan here? We’ve got some things from town,”

  “Hello, Maggie,” said Peg, doing the rounds of the people she appeared to know. “Say, it must have rained bad up here. The culvert’s flooded again. Joan should keep it clear.”

  “Never mind about that now, we’ll have that cement washed off the dock where I left it.” Dalt Rimmer didn’t try to make sense. He knew what he meant and that was good enough for him. For a man of less than five feet four, he made a lot of noise. He strutted into the Annex like a little bantam rooster followed by his adoring hen.