“Hey, what’s going on?”
He looked up. “Oh, it’s you. Bodies,” he said, and gestured.
There is a large rock bunker directly across the narrowest part of the fifth fairway, and anyone who wants to know what a golf ball sounds like when it strikes a boulder has only to stand by this while I am playing the hole. Right in the middle of this pile, the backhoe, pulled off now to one side, had been digging, and I could see where it had scooped out the stones for about ten feet along the bunker in a swath about six feet wide. There was a hollow back there—lately, I guessed, a grave.
“How many bodies?” I asked Sergeant Moffitt.
“Two,” he said. “And before you ask, no, we haven’t any identification on them yet. They had been there for some time. Not much left of them, in fact.”
“You mean, this was an Indian burial ground after all?”
He gave me a look full of scorn. “Not unless your average Mohawk . . .”
“Ojibwa,” I said.
“Whatever . . . used to wear a Bulova watch.”
“How come you went looking for bodies there?” Hanna asked, about fifty yards ahead of me, as usual. “I thought you were investigating a murder at the third green.”
“Information received,” said Moffitt, shortly. Then he relented a little. “We got a phone call in connection with the Rose murder that led us to check the site of his researches.”
Hanna gave me a small nudge. “Who was the caller?”
“Some foreigner. It was a call on the Crime Stoppers line.”
“A helpful citizen.” Hanna nudged me again.
“Exactly.” He gave her a sharp glance. “You know anything about this?”
“No, just curious. But there’s one aspect to all this that you might want to look into, officer.”
“What’s that?”
“Whoever was trying to close down this golf course has now succeeded, haven’t they?”
Chapter 22
The Martini Classic had lasted exactly four holes, involved five foursomes, and netted about twenty dollars for charity. Mrs. Post, once she got it through her noggin that the game was actually over—for a time, she went around saying, “Just exactly what in the hell is going on, here?” and prodding people with her putter—declared herself overall winner, and wrote out a personal cheque for $500 to fatten up the take. The last I saw of her, she was being driven home by Tommy Macklin, and she stuck her head out the car window long enough to shout, “Hey, Carlton! Come on over later; we’ll have some fun.”
“Thanks,” I shouted back. “Look for Hanna and me about ten o’clock.”
She made a rude gesture.
“It’s a good thing you’re fired,” said Hanna, “or she’d fire you again.”
“Why should she fire me? What did I do wrong?”
“Tell it to twenty generations of women employees,” said Hanna. “Tomorrow morning, she’s going to remember making an ass of herself, and she’s going to blame you.”
Joe Herkimer, who had been skulking in the clubhouse lounge, his invariable practice during the Martini Classic, drove us back to Silver Falls. Marchepas, in that unaccountable way she has, had gone on strike again. Probably she reckoned that two trips on one day without breakdown was stretching things, and declined to venture a third.
We sat in his car in front of Hanna’s apartment—I had been invited to dinner, which made up for a lot—and talked about the baffling developments of the day, without getting anywhere.
“I can’t imagine Chuck Wilson ordering Duke out of town,” he said. “It’s like something out of a B western.”
“Maybe it was just a joke,” I ventured.
“Peculiar sort of joke,” he replied. “I’d have thought Chuck would be hoping to use Duke for publicity. He said as much to me.”
Hanna spoke up, “Maybe you’d better do some checking into where Wilson was last Wednesday morning, when George Rose got killed.”
“I don’t have to; I already know.”
“Where was he?”
“He was taking part in a band council meeting, according to the chief. It was a breakfast meeting, one of the horrible habits we’re beginning to borrow from the white side, on the subject of the alleged burial grounds, and it lasted for about two hours.”
“Does that rule him out?”
“I’m pretty sure it does. The Star piece said the autopsy placed the death somewhere between seven and nine in the morning, which is just about the exact time of the council meeting.”
“Could he have been working with someone else, who looks after the rough stuff?”
“Oh, I guess so. What I can’t see him, or anyone from the Circle Lake Band, doing, is carrying on a long campaign of sabotage against the golf course, or working out that time-delay thing that killed poor old Charlie. It just isn’t an Indian sort of thing to do.”
“Boy,” I said, “you’re beginning to sound like Tommy Macklin. What’s an Indian sort of thing to do?”
“I put it badly, but you know what I mean. If you feel so strongly about tribal customs and sacred sites, and all that sort of thing, that you’re willing to murder for them, you’re not going to get into a lot of crap like sticking laxatives in the well, are you? It doesn’t make any psychological sense. The Rose killing, with the tomahawk and the banner, sure; that’s just combining a modern message with an ancient one. Wilson might go along with something like that. But I swear he wouldn’t pull anything like the blast that killed Charlie Tinkelpaugh. And I can’t imagine how he would be connected to today’s batch of corpses.”
Hanna looked at me. I looked at her.
“You tell him,” I said.
“You found it out; you tell him.”
So I told him about the Far Lake robbery, and the possibility that Wilson might have had a strong motive for killing either Charlie Tinkelpaugh—an argument over shares in the loot—or Dr. Rose—because he found the bank pouch.
“I flatly refuse to believe that Charlie Tinkelpaugh had anything to do with a bank robbery. I’ve given the man golf lessons and watched him go around the course. He would never think of cheating.”
Hanna commented, “From which you deduce that he would never arrange a bank holdup at his own branch?”
“Well, I wouldn’t go that far, but I would say that someone who is as scrupulously honest at golf as old Charlie was would be an unlikely suspect for anything crooked.”
Hanna pointed her finger at me. “Using that logic, here is your killer right here.”
“Very amusing, Klovack,” I said, “but we are losing sight of the main issue, which is that Chuck Wilson is not what he seems, even if he has an alibi for the Rose killing. Hell, he may not even be an Ojibwa.”
“Oh, he’s Ojibwa, all right. When he turned up here, he would have had to prove that he was a status Indian before he was admitted to the band council. You know,” Joe added, “it’s perfectly possible that he told the exact truth about what happened during the robbery at the Far Lake bank.”
“Then why did he change his name?”
“Because he knew that most people, like you two, would take one look at him, register the fact that he was an Indian, and conclude that he was a crook, even though nothing was ever proved against him. The bank probably fired him as soon as they could, and he probably knew that any job he applied for using his real name would disappear. God knows, it’s hard enough for a native Canadian to get work as it is, especially one who is getting on in years, without carrying around something like that.”
There was a rather embarrassed silence in the car.
“I think I feel a bit cheesy. Do you feel cheesy, Hanna?”
She nodded.
“Never mind,” said Joe. “Look at the bright side. Maybe he is a crook and a murderer. The fact that he’s of the first nation doesn’t make him any more inno
cent than it makes him guilty. Well, out of my car, you two. Darlene will be wondering what became of me.”
We got out of the car and went into Hanna’s apartment. At her suggestion, I put in phone calls to the deputy reeve and all three of the village councillors, but got nothing but a series of empty rings and, in the case of Freddy Tomkins, the deputy reeve, a recording inviting me to leave a message. I asked him to call me at Hanna’s, which would make it necessary, I explained to her, for me to stay the night.
“Nice try, Withers,” is all she said.
What with one thing and another, it was well after midnight when the gabby representative of Friendly Cabs—Silver Lake’s Congenial Cab Company—deposited me in front of my darkened Third Street abode back in Bosky Dell. On top of the other warm memories of that evening, I could count the distinct thrill it gave me to pay off the cabbie with part of the twenty bucks I had swiped from Peter Duke that morning. Was it only that morning? It seemed eons ago.
Mrs. Golden was still up; I could see the light on in her living room. She was watching the late-night movie, no doubt, and scoffing popcorn. I decided to drop in and tell her not to pay across that five bucks from her bet with Marianne Huntingdon, but I didn’t get a chance. I banged on the door, her porch light came on, she gave me one look and shouted, “I win my bet!”
“You do,” I said, stepping in and ducking through the plants that she always has slung on hooks about her living room—she talks to her plants, by the way, so they must, in consequence, be the best-informed asparagus ferns and philodendrons in the county. “How did you know?”
“My God, Carlton, you’re glowing with it,” she said.
Well, maybe I was. Why not?
We chewed a companionable bowl of popcorn together, and watched the tail end of a movie in which a giant monster, for reasons that were never clear—perhaps he was merely hungry, poor fellow—ate about half of the city of Tokyo, before catching an atomic bomb in the midriff and signing off. Over the obligatory snack afterwards—grilled-cheese sandwiches—I asked Emma if she knew what had become of the village councillors. I told her about putting in phone calls to all of them, in vain.
“Wasn’t Freddy Tomkins, the deputy reeve, due at your place for tea the other day?”
“He was, but he never showed.”
“Where did he get to, do you know?”
“Oh, I guess he went where the councillors went.”
“Which is?”
“Sylvia Post’s yacht.” She chuckled. “Henrietta Tomkins told me, she was so excited about it. The entire council, with their wives, were invited to take a cruise, all expenses paid, on Sylvia Post’s yacht. Around the Caribbean, for ten days. She even came up with airplane tickets to Miami.”
“She got them out of the way until this development hassle is cleared up.”
“I guess so. She’s a pretty shrewd lady.”
“She’s a pretty ladylike shrew.”
“Does it matter?”
“Oh, I imagine it matters, or she wouldn’t have done it. It must have something to do with the trusteeship of the golf course.”
“Carlton, don’t you know anything?”
“Why? What do you mean?”
“The trustees for the golf course: they’re the three members of the council and the reeve. Well, now the deputy reeve. That’s what it said in old John Flannery’s will. Shoot, I thought everybody knew that.”
“I didn’t. How come you do?”
“Harry was interested in that kind of stuff. He had a copy of the Flannery will for that history of the village he was always going to write. It’s probably still around somewhere.”
Harry, the late Mr. Golden, had been gathered to the bosom of Abraham some years before. He was, as advertised, an amateur historian and collector of odd items. Any odd items. A regular packrat. I once saw him haul the broken wheel that had come from a deceased industrial wheelbarrow of my father’s out of our garbage and lug it off home, so I asked him what he hoped to do with it.
“Well, I’ll tell you, Carlton,” he had said. “If somebody should happen to give me a wheelbarrow without a wheel, all I have to do is fix this baby up, and I’ll be in business.”
Yes, we could rest assured that, if the late Harry Golden had been given a copy of the Flannery will, he had not chucked it out.
“Could you find this copy of the will, Emma?”
“I imagine so. Why? Is it important?”
“It could be, if it reads the way you say it reads.”
It did. Emma wanted to look for it the next day, but I kidded, bullied, and chivvied her into getting after it right then, and it only took her about twenty minutes. It was in a box labelled, simply, “Village Stuff’—I said Harry was an amateur—in an envelope that said “Important Stuff.” It was marked, “Certified Copy,” which Emma said meant it wasn’t done on a copying machine, because there were no such things when this document was created, but was photostatted in a notary public’s office. It even had a seal in the corner.
The will was pretty straightforward and written in clear English, which probably meant that Sir John, a shrewd old bird, hadn’t let a lawyer within fifty feet of it. It set forth the bequest to the village, in perpetuity, of both the church and the golf course, and set down the old boy’s request that they be kept “as unchanged as possible, for future generations.” The church was to be managed by the church committee, under the guidance of the minister, but the golf course, lacking celestial protection, was more directly governed. “To oversee the operations of the golf course, and to take whatever steps may become necessary in a world we can’t even visualize today, I hereby appoint as trustees of this arrangement, the serving councillors and reeve of the village of Bosky Dell. They must take whatever action they see fit to meet future requirements, by a straight majority vote, but,” it said, finishing with a typical Flannery touch, “bearing in mind that if they violate my clearly stated intentions, I will find some way to punish them, even from the other side of the grave.”
“Well, does it help?”
“I don’t know,” I told Emma. “I don’t have enough legal knowledge to form an opinion. It might, though, depending on . . . oh, hell!”
“Why ‘oh, hell’?”
“Because the importance of the Flannery will probably depends on the answer to a question I should have answered at least twenty-four hours ago, but I completely forgot about it.”
“And what is the question?”
“Who are Mrs. Post’s partners in Ontario Corporation Number 13248994?”
Chapter 23
I dashed home, dragged out the portable computer, plugged it into the telephone, and called up the Info Globe number. Computers may be the curse of mankind—no, they are the curse of mankind—but they never have any time off. It took me about twenty minutes to connect with Info Globe’s data base and then to work my way around the entries. I’m used to searching news files, not financial documents. Then, like magic, my computer screen lit up with the list of the directors of Ontario Corporation 13248994.
“Gotcha!” I shouted.
Mrs. Sylvia Post was listed as president and chief executive officer; Frederick H. Tomkins, the deputy reeve, was listed as secretary; and, under “Other Directors,” appeared the names of Randolph Morrison, R. Gordon Ferguson, and Thomas Lamont, the three village councillors. Under “Purposes of the Corporation,” was a single clause: “To develop certain properties within the village of Bosky Dell.” I copied the file into my computer and called Hanna.
“Can’t it wait?” she complained when she finally answered the phone. “I was sound asleep.”
“No, it can’t wait.” And I told her what I had found.
“Call me dense, but I don’t see how that helps. The councillors okayed the sale of the golf course, as trustees, to a development company. They happen to be directors of the development co
mpany; indeed, that’s why they did it. They’ll probably all wind up rich. I repeat, how does that help solve any murders?”
“I don’t know that it does, but it sure as heck helps with stopping the development of the golf course.”
“Do we care?”
“We do.”
Pause. “Okay, we do. You do. Somebody does. How does this stuff about the trustees help with that?”
“Because they can’t do it. Even I know that. Or, at least, I think I know that. I’ll have to check with a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t an arm’s-length transaction. My guess is that they’re open to a charge of soccage in fief, or leg before wicket, or conflict of interest, or something. I can’t imagine how they thought they could get away with it.”
“I can.”
“How?”
“Well, if you’re right, a laughable thought, but one we will entertain for purposes of argument, then the transaction could be set aside, if anybody knew about it. But, my guess is, it could be covered up pretty quickly, and pretty easily.”
“It could? How?”
“Well, all these jokers must own some stock in the company, right?”
“Of course. You have to, to be a director.”
“Okay, try this on. Mrs. Post forms a numbered company for purposes of this development, issues some stock, gives some of it to the council members and the reeve—”
“Deputy reeve.”
“Deputy reeve. They then okay the sale, smashing the trust all to hell. But who, except for the lawyers involved, all of them bound by client privilege, is ever going to know exactly what happened? The original document has been lifted from the county office, and the connection between the trustees and the councillors only came to light by a fluke—”
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