Murder Sees the Light

by Howard Engel

  Ten minutes after Aline returned to her cabin, Glover’s car pulled into the clearing covered with a fine powdering of yellow dust. I watched him slowly climb out of the front seat, decide to leave his cap where it was lying on the seat beside him, and head in my direction. I walked away from the door and had climbed into my clothes before I heard Glover’s rattle at the screen door.

  “Have you got a boat?” he asked as he pretended not to see the two cups on the table.

  “There’s a rowboat I was using. The boat with the outboard met with an accident.” He didn’t sound interested.

  “Okay, take me rowing. I’ll tell you where.” We went down to the dock. I untied the bow line and Glover got in heavily. “Head off to the right,” he said from the stern, and I figured out that that meant my left as I sat facing him and the shore. Rowing is a peculiar art. It is arranged so that you get the best possible work out of your muscles but at the cost of having your back turned towards the direction you want to go. I skirted the raft and already the lodge clearing was beginning to close up to resemble a brief break in the forested shoreline. “That’s right,” Glover said. “Keep heading in this direction.”

  “Will you give me a hint about where we’re going, or do you want to wait until we’re in the middle, in case were overheard?”

  “You’re pretty good with the cheap shots, Mr. Cooperman. May I remind you this is a murder investigation? We can do without your big-city sarcasm.”

  “Cut it out, Glover. That stuff doesn’t rile me. Save it for the old ladies who wouldn’t think of spitting in your eye.” I thought I’d have a try at bearding the bully in him. It couldn’t make matters worse.

  “Now, look here, Mr. Cooperman. There’s been two murders, and I was the first police officer on the scene both times. That means I’m working close to the inspector. I’ve got the feeling that you’re not helping out as much as you could.” It was working. I could tell when he began to explain himself. He must have forgotten the golden rule of aggression: never apologize, never explain. Or is it the other way around?

  We were coming down to the bottom of the lake where the far shore, with a few brief changes of direction, moves closer and closer to the shore I was familiar with. I kept looking over my shoulder to see if I was headed correctly, but frankly I got better headings from Glover’s expression. When I was moving too far from his destination, I could see his lips tightening in displeasure, so I leaned on the other oar until his jaw relaxed. “Has the body count mounted overnight? Have you got the medical reports you were waiting for?”

  “Yeah, I’ve got all that. Couple of days ago. Didn’t change much: we knew that Aeneas hadn’t been dead more than twenty-four hours when you found him. And George, we got to him when he was six to eight hours dead. We flew him right to Huntsville. Besides the time of death, we didn’t find out anything you couldn’t tell by looking. Aeneas had his head concussed, but it didn’t kill him. He drowned. George, well, I don’t have to tell you about George. Was that an axe from the cabin?”

  “It was the one I’d taken with me for protection against being surprised by a bear. In fact I did run into one.”

  “Bear, eh? They don’t usually range this far south so early in the season. I guess it’s because the flies were bad this spring.” He looked at me with a blankish look that could mean anything. He moved his head to the right and I strained my neck trying to see what he was pointing to. There were reeds in this part of the lake, but through them I could see a wooden dock standing about a foot above the water line. I pointed the boat in that direction and soon I could hear the gentle caress of the reeds on the boat’s underbelly. Now I could hear shore sounds: birds squawking at one another, chipmunks chattering, and the buzz of insects on a hot afternoon. A policeman in his short-sleeved blue shirt came down steps cut in the clay bank and waited for us on the dock. He caught the end of the boat which threatened for a moment to shift the dock inland by a few feet. He tied the painter to a ring and Glover introduced him as Sergeant Ted Valentine, who had been taking pictures of the site of Aeneas’s camp. So, I knew where I was.

  The part of the landscape the OPP was interested in had been surrounded by string with pieces of masking tape hanging down and blowing in the wind. Seeing pieces of scenery isolated like that, washed the colour out of the rest of the setting. The trees and bushes within the barrier looked like trees and bushes in a museum diorama or on a stage. They were both realer than real and not quite real, all at the same time. The principal island of string surrounded Aeneas’s tent and campfire. It was a small pup tent, slit open and laid back like the corpse of its owner in the dissecting room in Huntsville’s hospital. The orange plastic underside looked nearly new. The sleeping bag in it was spotted and stained with much distinguished service indoors and out. While I was looking around outside the marked areas, Glover and Valentine conferred silently.

  Aeneas had pitched his tent on flat ground where a cabin had once stood. It commanded a view that went from the southernmost part of the lake to the top, where the lake twisted in its crook. The two islands looked small and were made into afterthoughts or details on the lake. The lodge was hidden, so was Patten’s place. I could see the point of land with the Rimmers’ house standing on it. The surface of the lake was calm but unreflecting, like the matte finish on a photograph. The four corners of Aeneas’s camp were marked by piles of fieldstone which had been the supports for the cabin’s main sill beams. The piles looked like monuments you see in pictures of the Arctic tundra. Glover came back and looked with me, sympathetically.

  “The Pearcys had a cabin here once. I remember it from when I was a kid. My brother and me used to keep a boat just over there.” He pointed through a stand of trees to where the shoreline must have been. “You see, the road’s just below here, less than an eighth of a mile. Come over here.” I followed him inland for about fifty yards. I wasn’t thinking metric today. Neither one of us was. That’s metric for you; it hits you every so often and then goes away. We were standing at the edge of a flooded piece of ground. I could see that it was usually dry from the trees and bushes that were awash and the grass swept in the direction of the flow.

  “There’s a brook comes down that hill,” he said. “But instead of emptying into the lake here, it runs down in the other direction, crosses the road, and joins the Dennison Creek, which feeds into the Rock Lake.”

  “But on the map it’s called something else.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “I’m a great reader.” We both looked around. I found a well-worn path that led from the campsite to the road.

  “Is that path dry all the way?” I asked Sergeant Valentine who was hunkering nearby and examining a wad of chewing gum disposed of in its wrapper. I knew the brand. I’d seen it around.

  “Oh, no. It runs into the water just beyond the trees ahead. It used to be wide enough to bring a car in, but now there’s only one narrow path open, when it’s open.”

  “Did you find what hit Aeneas?” Glover shook his head and rubbed his nose with a run of knuckles.

  “Well, what have you got then? What do you make of it all?” Glover motioned me down the slope away from the campsite and the sergeant. I hoped that he was in a mood to trot out all his treasures. At least he didn’t lean over and push my face in as we sat on some flat rocks above the shore. He took out a cigarette, lit it with a wooden match, which he then broke between his fingers and threw into the bush. I took out my Player’s and borrowed a match, just to show I wasn’t rejecting him altogether, just his brand of cigarettes.

  “I got suspects coming out my ass,” Glover said. “Every cabin is full of suspicious people. It’s like in a movie. Maybe they all did it. I saw that in a movie once.”

  “Besides the people at the lodge, have you talked to anybody else at the lake?”

  “Sure. I saw the Rimmers and a fellow named Edgar who’s staying in Senator Woodward’s place. And I talked to Maggie McCord, naturally.”

  “Anyth
ing interesting develop?”

  “I told you. I got suspects coming out my ass.”

  “All you need is one live one. Let’s go over the list,” I said, trying to be helpful. Glover was focusing on a spot out in the lake where a loon might poke his black head out of the water. He took a thoughtful drag on his cigarette.

  “I can’t do that,” he said.

  “Okay, let’s not go over your list. The fish are biting out there,” I said, getting up and brushing off the dirt from my trousers. “Give you a lift back?” He got up, went to speak to Valentine for a minute, then returned to the boat. He got into the stern and I did the honours of casting off. Valentine watched us from the high ground like we were the last human beings he was likely to see for some time. “You still haven’t found a murder weapon at the site?”

  “No,” Glover mumbled. “We’re looking for something that could give a serious, long but narrow impression to the back of Aeneas’s head. He wasn’t battered with a rough piece of firewood.”

  “Not a piece of pipe? That would be easy to drop or throw into the lake.”

  “They’ve covered the area with divers and metal detectors. Nothing. Besides, the bump he got was even narrower than you could get from a pipe that was heavy enough to do serious damage.” I was rowing out into the middle of the lake, taking the long way back to the lodge. I thought about the murder weapon while the oars gave my muscles something to think about.

  “I’d like to help, if I could,” I said.

  “We’re doing fine. Everything’s on schedule. So don’t get your shirt in an uproar for me, eh? Don’t get high blood pressure on my account. The sergeant’s getting things in shipshape order.” I could hear the echo of my oars from the first island. We didn’t talk for a minute. “I can’t get advice from you, Cooperman. We don’t pay for it. The OPP don’t deal with hustlers. You’re not the law up here, I am.”

  “Uh-huh.” Glover and I listened to the water and the sound of my oars.

  “There are rules about seeking outside help.”

  “Uh-huh.” There was a squeak in the oar lock punctuating the silence.

  “If anybody ever found out …”

  “Uh-huh.” Another silence.

  “It wouldn’t hurt just to talk, I guess, would it? After all, I’m supposed to gather information from all possible sources. But we’re not doing business together. You got that? I’m not buying anything. That clear?”

  “Uh-huh. Okay, who are your suspicious characters? Let’s deal with them. I mean the ones whose stories don’t check out.”

  “That fellow Westmorland’s at the top of my list. He asks too many questions and answers too few. It’s like talking to the chief inspector. He’s nervous enough to be holding something back.”

  “George McCord was trying to gouge money out of Westmorland. If you want the reason, take another look at that clipping you found in George’s breast pocket.”

  “I don’t see …”

  “Westmorland’s a big shot in Ottawa. So is his wife. The lady on the other end of his amorous glances in the last motel unit isn’t his wife. George was dumb, but he was smart enough to see where he could make some extra change.”

  “Blackmail, eh?”

  “Add that to the other things that made George everybody’s least favourite character up here. You’ve got the photograph and you can check up on his car plates.”

  “So Westmorland followed George into the bush and killed him to stop him spoiling things for him in Ottawa. Except we only have a clipping that says so.”

  “For what it’s worth, I saw Westmorland throw George out the back door of his cottage unit on Saturday?’

  “Good, so we’ve got the clipping, a motive, and a witness.” I told Glover about the elaborate way in which Des avoided being caught on the Kipp boy’s film. I didn’t want to throw Des to the wolves, but I figured that if he was innocent of murder they wouldn’t come down on him for the extra-mural hanky-panky.

  We were sitting about a quarter mile off the Rimmers’ point. Their cruiser was tied to the dock and I could hear the distant high-pitched whine of a circular saw. Across the lake I could see the boat from the Woodward place was cutting doughnuts in the water not far from their cove. I didn’t think it was Patten, but I couldn’t be sure that cabin fever hadn’t spread from Lorca to other members of the household.

  “At the end of the first day up here,” Glover said, “I’d figured the first killing was a hate killing; you know, like somebody didn’t like Indians. But McCord was the prime suspect. He never did have a good word for either Aeneas or Hec. Then George gets himself killed just to spoil my plot.”

  “I’d heard that George was hard on Indians. Was it really as pronounced as that? Would he have, say, picked a fight with Aeneas in town?”

  “Naw, that wasn’t George’s style at all. George would have waited for him where he parked his truck and pounded him there. He didn’t want any witnesses. He comes from canny stock, you know. That mother of his got him out of more trouble than you got minnows in a bait pail.”

  “What sort?”

  “Oh, illegal stuff: theft under two hundred dollars, poaching, trapping in the park, hunting without a permit, or out of season, other things contrary to statute or the Provincial Park Act.”

  “I heard that you grew out of wild days too.”

  “That’s right, I grew out of them. Hell, I’m not perfect. I got a girl in trouble when I was in grade ten, but I made it right. I married her. I’m supporting her and four kids. It’s a real world out there and I’m real seven days a week. Some days I think I’ll bust if I don’t get a promotion. I sometimes think I’m in a dead end, that the clockwork of my life is running down. My wheels are spinning but they ain’t even touching the ground. Damn it. It makes me so mad! Who told you about that? Never mind, I don’t want to know. I suppose you heard that there was bad blood between me and Aeneas?”

  “Yes, I did. Was there?”

  “There was on his side. I tried to warn him off a woman once. She’d been keeping a whole clinic busy trying to keep up with her exploits. Aeneas thought I was telling him not to fool around with her because he was Indian. I was trying to do him a good turn without citing chapter and verse about the woman. That’ll teach me to ration good turns.” He grinned, which deepened the dark lines on either side of his nose.

  From out in the middle of the lake I could hear pieces of distant conversations without knowing from which direction they came. Far away I could hear a lumber truck crunching over a corduroy road deep in the bush. I heard a plop close at hand, and when I looked, concentric circles were opening out from the direction of the noise. “Trout,” Glover said. I took his word for it, and charted a new course back to the lodge. It only took me about ten minutes without asking any more questions.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I didn’t want to drive all the way into Hatchway just to phone Ray Thornton, but that’s what I was being paid for, so I did it. The Band-aids on my hands covering the blisters felt awkward on the steering wheel. I listened to news of the outside world sprinkled with static on the car radio. Hearing the names of heads of state in the newscasts made me feel like I’d been away in the woods for eight months not eight days. I parked the car in Onions’ nearly deserted lot and dialled Thornton’s office in Grantham.

  “Yes, I’m still alive, but no thanks to you. Somebody up here’s trying to kill me, Ray. I should get danger pay.”

  “You’re expendable. What about our friend? Is he still in one piece?”

  “Sure. At least he was when I saw him yesterday. The bastard saved my life, Ray. He pulled me out of a sinking boat.”

  “You’re always dramatizing. Benny. Why can’t you have a day like everybody else? You get up, you go to work, you come home, and you go to bed: what’s wrong with that?”

  “I can’t make a living that way. Tell me, did you get that information I asked you about?” Ray then went over the car ownerships with me. After I’d cleared that up
I tried to get him to open up about Aline Barbour. He wouldn’t budge.

  “Look, Benny, maybe I should drive up and talk to you. It’s about my client. Let me think about it overnight.” I’d asked him about Aline, and he started talking about his client. I supposed that it added up, but right then I couldn’t see it.

  I bought some hamburger buns and a package of Shopsy’s corned beef at Onions’ and then hit the homeward trail. I tried baking potatoes in the big stove but I couldn’t get it going. The cats weren’t interested in my leftovers either.

  I didn’t go into the Annex that evening. I intended to but I fell asleep waiting for it to get dark. It was after eleven when I heard the power go off. The sound of the dying generator brought me out of a dream in which Patten and his friends were chasing me over the Little Crummock portage with me in full pack and carrying a canoe. Whenever they started gaining on me, Aline appeared in her terrycloth robe and made them run up a different path for a minute. Then they were hot on my trail all over again. I got up, went outside, listened to the crickets for a few minutes, and then tried to go back to sleep again. This time the dream involved a rattlesnake that wiggled its way out of a burlap bag in the bow of the canoe I was paddling far from shore. It had the face of a massasauga rattler I’d seen stuffed once, but this one wasn’t crooked or dusty. It was well aware of where my bare feet were placed flat-footed on the ribs of the boat. When I sat up in a sweat, the rattle continued. But the snake wasn’t at the foot of my bed. It was the screen door, and somebody was scratching fingernails over the wire.

  My wristwatch, parked on the night table, blinked 12:46 at me in ruby numerals. “Who is it?” I shouted at the screen.

  “It’s me,” came a woman’s voice. “Lorca Shahn.”