Hole in One

by Walter Stewart

  “Not bad,” she said, admiring her nails.

  “Terrific, I would say. And I don’t mean the nails.”

  “Oh, Carlton, get out.” But she looked pleased.

  “I need to look at a file,” I said, “for the Lancer.” This magic phrase meant, “without paying the customary $2.50 for a public search.”

  “Sure. What’s the number?”

  “I don’t know the number. It’s the file covering the golf course out at Bosky Dell.”

  “No problem.” She got up and went over to a computer station, where she began tapping out a series of numbers.

  “See?” She pointed at the screen. “It’s right here. It’s one of the older files, so we keep them in climate-controlled conditions. Most of the others are out back, in the warehouse.”

  “Could I have a look at it? And could you look at it with me, you know, in case I need help?”

  “Sure. Why not? I can do the other hand later.”

  She walked over to a filing cabinet, hauled open the drawer, began to flip through files, and let out a shout. “Larry!” she shouted.

  A man looked around from a desk on our side of the public counter. “Yeah?”

  “There’s a file missing here. What did you do with it?”

  Larry, an elderly and very clerkly-looking clerk, came shuffling over. “Oh, that one. It’s in the copying room, I guess. A guy was in here first thing this morning and made a copy.”

  “Did you sign it out and back in?”

  “I signed it out.”

  “Who signed it in again?”

  “I dunno.” Larry began to pick his nose in a meditative way. Perhaps it aided his thought processes, if any.

  “Jeez!” Thelma give him a look.

  “I wonder if we could get the file,” I said.

  Larry ducked into a small room off the main office and reappeared with a file folder. “Here it is.”

  Like the file folder I had seen that morning, it was empty.

  “It’s empty,” said Thelma.

  “Yeah, the guy said that. He was a strange-looking bird,” Larry added, ever anxious to please. “Very pale.”

  Thelma swivelled over to the public counter, spun around a notepad she found there, and said, “It just gives one name, Robinson,” she said, “and a phone number.”

  “Yeah.” Larry didn’t care.

  “And there is a note here that says ‘File empty,’ in what I presume is Mr. Robinson’s handwriting, and your initials are beside it.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Through the dark that covered him, black as the night from pole to pole, Larry emitted a small gleam of intelligence. “I remember that,” he said. “Well,” he continued, “time for lunch.”

  He reached past Thelma, whipped a sign out from under the counter that said CLOSED, smacked it down on the countertop, and left.

  Thelma gazed after him. “He’s the local MPP’s father-in-law,” she explained. “What can you do?”

  “Thelma, this property was sold, quite recently; there will be copies of the deed in the hands of the lawyers for both sides, and you’ll have a note, somewhere, telling you who they are.”

  “Yeah, I remember that going through. We don’t get many sales registered in this office,” she explained.

  “I thought this was a property that couldn’t be sold. Would you remember anything about that?”

  “Naw. We wouldn’t have put it through in that case. One of the clerks—not Larry—checks the legal work. Of course, it could have been a trustee property.”

  “What in the name of all that’s holy is a trustee property?”

  “You get them with estates.”

  “Well, this was an estate. Go on.”

  “The will will say, ‘I bequeath my old house to the Town of Silver Falls,’ or whatever, ‘to be used as a library, and held in perpetuity, and I name the following Trustees.’ Of course, it’s all in legal language.”

  “So, the trustees could sell it on behalf of the Town of Silver Falls?”

  “Sure. The dough would go to the town, of course, but they could okay the sale. Is that what happened here?”

  “I think it might be. In that case, what would be the point, if there was any point, in somebody stealing the original deed. Wouldn’t there be a lot of copies around?”

  “Sure. It would slow things down, that’s all.”

  “Could somebody come in here and steal the original deed?”

  “Look around,” said Thelma. The office was empty now. “When I go for my lunch,” Thelma explained, “Larry forgets to lock the files half the time.”

  “My god, with Larry in charge, you could steal the whole damn filing cabinet. Okay, what can we find out about who was involved in the transaction?”

  “Do you have any names at all?”

  “Only one. Parker Whitney, the Lancer’s legal counsel.”

  “Well, that shouldn’t be too hard. He doesn’t do much real-estate work. We can fish him out of the computer.”

  Thelma went back to the computer and did a little dance with her fingers. “I’m just pulling up the last month’s transactions,” she said, “and I’ll do a word search for Whitney’s name.”

  After about two minutes, a message flashed onto the bottom of the computer screen. “Not found,” it said.

  “Damn,” I said.

  Thelma give me a sideways smile. “Don’t be so impatient,” she said. “We’ll go back another month.”

  This time, we hit pay dirt almost right away. Five weeks earlier, the computer told us, the title to the golf-course property had been transferred, through the good offices of Wright and Wong, solicitors acting in the name of the trustees of the property, on behalf of the village of Bosky Dell, through Parker Whitney, to his client, the new owner, Ontario Corporation Number 13248994.

  “Thelma, I’m going to kiss you.”

  “Feel free.”

  So I did. It was okay. Thelma is a buddy.

  “What’s this all about, Carlton?” she wanted to know.

  “Newspaper stuff,” I said, and when she kept looking at me, expectantly, I told her it had something to do with the golf course being developed, and maybe, just maybe, something to do with Charlie Tinkelpaugh’s murder.

  Thelma doubted it. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it had something to do with that bank thing,” she said.

  “Bank thing? What bank thing?”

  “You know, the bank thing. The robbery.”

  “Thelma, I haven’t the foggiest notion what you’re talking about.”

  “Boy, and you call yourself a reporter.”

  “Never mind what I call myself. Tell me about the bank thing.”

  “It was in the Sun.”

  “What was in the Sun?”

  “The flashback.”

  I took her by the elbows, backed her to a chair, and sat her down. “Thelma,” I said, “begin at the beginning.”

  “I can do better than that. I can get you the story.” Thelma got up and went over to her desk, where she pulled open a drawer. “We were just talking about the golf-course killing yesterday, and Larry—he’s a nut for crime—remembered that he had read about Charlie Tinkelpaugh about a year ago, in one of those books they bring out at Christmastime, on famous crimes. You know.”

  I knew.

  “He brought it in this morning, because I told him I knew Charlie from Bosky Dell. Here it is.” She hauled out a paperback book, quite large, in tabloid newspaper format, called, The Toronto Sun’s Famous Crime Flashbacks. It’s an annual publication, and this was last year’s edition. There was a bookmark stuck in it, on a page with a head that read: The Far Lake Bank Heist. And, underneath, “Puzzles Abound: Who Did It? How Much Did They Get? What Did They Do with It?”

  The story was only a couple of pages long, but fra
ught with interest.

  There was a bank robbery forty years back at Far Lake, a medium-sized town about forty-five miles straight north of Silver Lake, in which the robbers got off with the payroll from a nearby mine. Somehow, they got into the bank early in the morning and waited for the delivery of the payroll, which took place just before opening time. They jumped the Brink’s guards at gunpoint, as soon as they entered the bank, and got away clean, leaving the guards, plus a janitor who had been knocked on the head, tied up in the bank manager’s office. Someone saw a car rushing off in the direction of the bush country around Apsley—very rugged terrain—but the robbers were never seen again.

  Neither was the swag, which came to a handsome $140,000, or, at least, that was what was reported at the time. What the story called “our recent researches” disclosed the fact that, while the police report put the loss at $140,000, the bank had put in a claim for, and collected, $210,000 from the insurance company. The payroll accounted for $140,000, which was all that got into the newspapers at the time, but a subsequent audit revealed that another $70,000 had been on hand in the bank, representing a cash payment for a major real-estate purchase that was closing the very day of the bank robbery. So that was one angle to the story. Another was, how had the robbers got into the bank? The janitor said they were waiting for him inside when he arrived, and he had no idea how they got there.

  The flashback story, tiptoeing around the libel laws, strongly suggested that the cops suspected an inside job, although they could never prove anything. This became particularly interesting in view of the names of two of the bank employees involved. The bank manager was one Charles H. Tinkelpaugh, who was moved right after the robbery to a smaller bank, at Coboconk, Ontario, and who “declined to be interviewed for this story.” The janitor’s name was given as “Cecil Charles Watson,” and the author of the flashback had been unable to locate him.

  “Sweet suffering soupspoons!” I shouted, when I had read it, and Thelma whipped a copy off on the office machine for me. “Thelma, I’m going to kiss you again.”

  “Be my guest.”

  I thanked Thelma for her help, and she said anytime, on the same terms, and went back to the engrossing task of getting her nails in shape.

  I phoned Hanna at the Lancer, from the public phone in the lobby of the county building.

  “The file was missing from here, all right,” I told her. “But I’ve got something else to tell you.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve got something to tell you, too, and you can pass it along to the cops when you tell them about the leather pouch Dr. Rose found, and which has since disappeared.”

  “Who said I was going to tell the cops about that?”

  “I did. Just phone the Crime Stoppers number, Carlton. Don’t be such a coward.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Think of it now. I can’t do everything. Now, stop interrupting. I’ve found out who Cecil Watson is. It’s Cecil, by the way, not Charles.”

  “Actually, it’s both; I was going to tell you about that. The man’s name is Cecil Charles Watson.”

  “Oh, so you know who he is?”

  “He used to be a janitor in a bank at a place called Far Lake. That’s all I know.”

  “Well, he isn’t any more. He’s right here, in Silver Falls.”

  “He is? You’re wonderful. Who told you?”

  “Olga.”

  “Olga Kratzmyer? The Bratwurst Bombshell?”

  “I thought she was the Polish Pumpernickel.”

  “She is. It’s a matter of mood. How did she come to tell you about Watson, and who the hell is he?”

  “I was trying to do a search in the Globe and Mail files, using the computer system, but I got it all screwed up, and Olga must have seen I was in trouble, because she came over and asked me what I was doing. When I told her I was trying to get information out of Info Globe on a person named Cecil or Charles Watson, she laughed, and said I could just go out and look in the composing room. She said Cecil Watson was Chuck Wilson. Hello, you still there?”

  I was still there, all right, but stunned. “And how in tunket,” I asked when I recovered, “did she come to know that?”

  “His social insurance number.”

  “Your SINs will find you out,” I said. She ignored me.

  “When he first came to the newspaper a couple of years ago, he had been on a retraining program; that’s how he got to be a compositor. The paper got a government grant for hiring him after his retraining, wouldn’t you know, and she had to fill in a lot of poop about him. One of the forms called for his SIN, and when she sent it in to Ottawa, some bureaucrat shot back a letter saying she must have made a mistake. That SIN had already been issued to another name. So she went to Chuck Watson, a.k.a. Chuck Wilson, and he told her he had changed his name because he had always hated his father and had decided to repudiate him by changing his name.

  “That’s a crock, he was trying to—”

  “Are you going to listen to this or drivel on?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Anyway, she remembered thinking that it was pretty smart, if you were changing your name, to keep the same initials, so she remembered it. There. What’s your news?”

  “Well, the first part of it, I’ve already given you. The file on the Bosky Dell golf course is gone, but that’s not the—”

  “How very interesting, Mr. Throckmorton,” said Hanna. “Completely disappeared, you say?”

  “Thelma says it will probably turn up again.”

  “Well, but we mustn’t count on that, Mr. Throckmorton, must we? These vanishing species sometimes never recur.”

  “What’s this Throckmorton crap? Oh, I get it. Tommy’s hovering.”

  “Yes, Mr. Throckmorton. I tell you what, Mr. Throckmorton, why don’t I drop over there right now, and you can tell me about it? It might make a story for the paper.”

  “You do that,” I said. “I’ll show you my stamp collection.”

  Chapter 19

  While I was waiting for Hanna to come and collect me—and sincerely hoping she had had time to call Emma and lay on a late lunch—I put in two more telephone calls. The first was to the Crime Stoppers line of the Ontario Provincial Police. I left a message, in what I trust was a thoroughly disguised voice, even though they promise never to check on the caller, telling the cops about the missing leather pouch, which was beginning, even in its absence, to look more and more like a bank pouch. “Haf a gut look at the site of Dr. Rose’s researches, me in lieber,” I told them. I also told them to check into the backgrounds of Chuck Wilson, Cecil Charles Watson, and Charlie Tinkelpaugh re. the Far Lake bank robbery.

  Then I phoned Amelia. Pure show-offery, this. She had asked me to check into Watson and, practically within the hour, I had the vital information.

  “So his real name is Chuck Wilson, and he’s a member of the Circle Lake Band,” I said.

  “Shit!” squawked Amelia, forgetting, for the moment, to add the usual honey content to her tones. “I mean, how fascinating, Carlton, and how very clever of you to have found that out so quickly.”

  “Oh, nothing to it,” I replied. “Just a matter of being a thoroughly trained investigator.”

  “Well, honey,” she purred, “why don’t you come out here and tell me all about it?”

  “Actually, I am coming out this afternoon,” I said. “With Hanna. I’m waiting for her to pick me up, right now.”

  “Honey, I think you’re wasting your time with Hanna, but I guess I just have to wait for you to find that out for yourself? ’Bye now.”

  I had just hung up the telephone when Hanna came whirling around the corner in the trusty Toyota and slammed to a stop. I jumped in. She pointed to my face. I pulled down the makeup mirror on the sun visor in her car and expunged Thelma’s lipstick.

  “All in the line of duty
,” I said.

  “Uh-huh.” She headed out County Road 32 again, towards Bosky Dell.

  “Start with the deed. Tell me about it.”

  I told her about it.

  “There was a deed; now there isn’t. That’s not good.”

  “Thelma says it will turn up.”

  “Maybe. Maybe it will turn up about ten days after the bulldozers move in.”

  “On the other hand, we know why Whitney could tell Robinson, with as straight a tongue as lawyers ever employ, that he wasn’t acting for Mrs. Post. He was acting for Ontario Corporation whatever-the-heck, which, we presume, is owned by Mrs. Post. So, we’re that much ahead of the game.”

  “At great sacrifice,” Hanna put in, “to our lipsticked reporter.”

  “Where are we going? To lunch, I hope.”

  “And after lunch, over to The Eagle’s Nest. We might as well come clean with Conrad Jowett; there isn’t anything more we can do on this part of it.”

  “Yes, there is.” I had just thought of it.

  “There is? Carlton, you’ve got an idea?”

  “I have.”

  “What is it?”

  “Forget lunch at Emma’s. Let’s go to my place, and I’ll show you.”

  “Oh, that idea. Carlton, I told you, that’s out.”

  “No, no, not that. I’ll give you a hint. Corporations Act.”

  “Corporations Act what? Corporations act greedy? What else is new?”

  “Under the Ontario Corporations Act, the directors of a company have to be registered on the public record. It’s the same under the federal act.”

  “So?”

  “So, all we have to do is to get onto my portable computer and call up the Info Globe data base. The corporate file will tell us the names of the directors. We’ll know for sure about Mrs. Post.”

  “Do you even remember the name of the Corporation?”

  “Sure. Ontario Corporation Number 13248994.”

  “I’m impressed. How did you do that?”