Hole in One

by Walter Stewart

  “I would prefer to call it hard digging and shrewd detective work.”

  “Uh-huh, by Mrs. Golden. All you did was make a telephone call and talk to a computer. Where was I?”

  “You had just smashed the trust all to hell.”

  “Oh, yeah. Mrs. Post then buys back the stock she gave the deputy reeve and the councillors for a nice, fat sum, so their payoff comes in the form of a capital gain on the stock they owned—legal, and lightly taxed, dollars. Then she replaces them with a whole new bunch of directors, and they’re out of it. She obviously hadn’t got around to this last step, yet, but once she did, there would be no connection between the councillors and the corporation. Even if there was, and they had angry voters to face next time, so what? There isn’t much glory in being a village councillor.”

  “You could still trace what happened, if you went back in the files.”

  “But who would? Why would they? If it hadn’t been for the death of poor old Charlie what’s-his-name, this would all have been over and done with before anybody even knew what was going on. My guess is that the councillors knew they were doing something pretty dodgy, but not necessarily crooked. They sure as hell weren’t going to tell anybody; in fact, they all removed themselves to the Caribbean to wait for the All Clear. And if they didn’t rat, who would? Who could?”

  “Carlton Lancelot Withers,” I replied. “He could, and will, tell the world.”

  “Not in the Lancer, he won’t.”

  “I don’t know. Tommy wasn’t cut in on this; he might accidentally let me slip it into the paper as a way of getting back at Sylvia Post for leaving him out of the deal. She could hardly fire him for printing the news.”

  “You’ve never heard of anyone being fired for printing the news?”

  “Um, ah, matter of fact, I have. Well, it’s worth a try, anyway. I’m going to call Tommy at home and ask him to come down to the office first thing in the morning.”

  “That’ll be nice. He’ll like that.”

  “He’ll come, though. Maybe I’ll tell him Olga Kratzmyer said she was going to be in the office tomorrow. Are you coming?”

  “Am I coming? Wild horses couldn’t keep me away. Oh, and Carlton . . .”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “I think you should call Joe Herkimer, too. We don’t know what, if anything, this has to do with the murders, but if there’s any connection, we need . . .” She paused.

  “. . . somebody smart on hand,” I finished for her.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “No, but you thought it. Okay, I’ll call him. I’ll see you at the office at . . . what? Nine o’clock?”

  “Yeah, okay. But I can’t stay long. I arranged to pick up a rental car about ten-thirty. My own won’t be out of the shop for a few days, and I don’t want to be dependent on that lump of junk you drive.”

  “You arranged to pick up a rental car in Silver Falls on a Sunday morning? How did you manage that?”

  “I phoned up the Tilden guy at home and whined at him. See you.”

  After due consideration, I decided not to call Tommy right away. It might not put him in a receptive mood. I let it wait until morning, and I arrived at the office just after eight o’clock, let myself in with my own key to the outside door—I always hold on to it during my firings, because of their temporary nature—and copied the file of my notes from my portable computer into the office computer.

  Tommy was not pleased to hear my cheery voice a few minutes later, summoning him to work on Sunday. He reminded me, seven times, that I wasn’t even on the payroll anymore, so he, for one, didn’t know what in the hell I thought I was doing on the premises in the first place. I let him rant.

  “You want to be here, Tommy,” I told him. “I’ve got a big story.”

  He registered the view that I wouldn’t know a big story if it came wrapped in the entry papers for the Pulitzer Prize. He had a good mind to call the cops and have me arrested for trespassing.

  “You do that, Tommy,” I said, “and I’ll let them drink the office scotch.”

  “I’m coming. I’m coming,” he growled. “I’ll be there in about an hour.”

  Joe Herkimer wasn’t in when I called his place, but Darlene said she’d send him along as soon as he got back. He’d driven over to the Circle Lake council house for some sort of meeting.

  While I waited for the cast to assemble in this building drama, I began drafting a story for the Lancer. I put into it everything I knew—not much—and everything I guessed, speculated, or imagined, about the golf-course development. I made no reference to the murders, either ancient or recent, since there was nothing to show that they had anything to do with the development story—and because Tommy would have cut them out, anyway.

  Just the same, I decided to phone Staff Sergeant Harry Burnett, at home, to see if yesterday’s bodies had been identified yet.

  He wasn’t noticeably braced to be called at home on Sunday morning, either, but told me that, yes, as a matter of fact, they knew who one of them was. A small-time hood named Barney Newsome.

  “That was quick. How did they track him down? Wasn’t the body pretty well, uh . . .”

  “Decomposed. Yeah. But he had a wallet. It had his name in it, on an identification card sealed in plastic. We read it.”

  “Isn’t science wonderful? And the name rang a bell?”

  “The OPP searched their back files, and it turned out Barney Newsome had a record—theft, break-and-enter, that sort of thing. But—and here’s the funny thing—there was nothing on him in the current files. In fact, the last thing they had on him was a theft charge, which he beat, back in the early fifties.”

  “How about bank robbery?”

  “No, not bank robbery. Not that I know. Why?”

  “Just wondering. Wasn’t there a bank robbery around here someplace a long time ago, and the money and the crooks disappeared? Maybe Barney was one of the crooks . . . Hello?”

  I said this because of the long silence.

  “You might have something there, Carlton. I would never have suspected it of you, and I have no doubt you’re up to something, but I think I’ll just put in a phone call to my good friend Sergeant Moffitt over at the OPP, and tell him to check into this.”

  I bade him a cheery goodbye, and thought about shovelling some of this into the golf-course story, but decided, once more, that there was still no provable connection between the Far Lake bank robbery and the recent events. The way things were piling up, though, there had to be a connection, so I typed what I had learned about the bank robbery, Chuck Wilson, Charlie Tinkelpaugh, and Barney Newsome into a note after the “30” at the end of my story, and marked it “Not for printing, background only.” It turned out to be almost as long as the printable file. Then I slugged the main story, “Golf course, new,” and put in a note to Tommy, “Needs outside legal read.” This meant that he would be well advised to run whatever form of the story we finally printed past a lawyer, but not Parker Whitney, the Lancer’s legal counsel. Actually, most of Parker’s work for us consists of trying to beat speeding tickets for Tommy Macklin; we do not stray, much, into territory demanding the services of a libel lawyer.

  I was feeling pretty pleased with myself when Tommy blew in, glowered at me, stormed into his office, and grabbed the scotch bottle from the locked drawer in his desk. I handed him his teacup, and he poured about three inches of brown liquid into the bottom, drained it, wiped his foul moustache, and glowered at me some more.

  “Nice day to you, too,” I said, and gave him the file I had just printed out, He snatched it from me and gestured to the door. I left, closing it behind me, and gave Tommy a cheerful wave from the hall, through the floor-to-ceiling windows that grace the offices of the Lancer.

  Hanna turned up while I was in the office kitchen—or library, take your pick—fighting with the coffee machine.
I always lose. She took from me the little basket that holds the filters, which I had been trying to jam, totally without success, into its parent place on the machine. For her, of course, it behaved beautifully.

  “How can a man who works with computers be defeated by a coffee maker?” she wanted to know.

  “Everybody’s a specialist these days,” I told her. I passed across the second copy of my file, which she read, bug-eyed, while the coffee brewed. She took the mugful I handed her, gave it a glance, jumped up, said, “Jeez, Carlton!” poured it out, washed the mug, and filled it up again. Needless fuss, in my view.

  Tommy came into the kitchen as Hanna sat back down, and gave us the benefit of his views as managing editor and chicken-in-charge.

  “Well, we can’t run it. You realize that, of course.”

  “Why not?”

  “It would not reflect well on the publisher.”

  I was ready for this one. “We won’t name her; we’ll just say ‘the developer,’ and let the Toronto papers fill in the blanks. Why shouldn’t we get a jump on the story for once?”

  He was tempted, you could see that. We had not run a really big story in the Lancer since the time the town’s largest car dealer went belly up—sticking the Lancer for about $20,000 in unpaid advertising bills in the process—and the owner turned himself into a populist preacher. “Car Czar Is Convertible,” was the head I put on that one.

  “Naw,” said Tommy, after thinking about it for a bit. “Not our kind of story.”

  “Let’s not be too hasty, Tommy,” I said. “Why don’t you edit it, and get it ready for setting, and then ask a lawyer whose name is not Parker Whitney to have a look at it?”

  “I said ‘No,’” said Tommy, swelling up, the way he does. “Kill the file.” Testy little devil.

  And he slammed out.

  “Boy,” said Hanna, “I’ve got to hand it to you, Carlton. The way you bent that man to your will was something to see.”

  “Anyone can be masterful,” I replied testily. “I’m going to be sneaky.”

  “Why? What are you going to do?”

  “I’m not going to kill the file in the first place. The boys in the composing room will undoubtedly print it out, and, unless I misunderstand human nature by a very wide margin, there will be pirated copies of the thing all over town by about four o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”

  “What good will that do?”

  “Well, for one thing, it will cover my ass when I send a copy down to the city desk at the Toronto Star by courier, first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “Tommy will know it came from you.”

  “It won’t. I think we should stick your byline on it. After all, I’m not even an official journalist anymore.”

  “Okay,” said Hanna, very quickly—we are all of us hams at heart—“Only we won’t send it to the city desk. We’ll send it to Norman Schacter, the Insight Editor. He’s a friend of mine.”

  “Great. They’ll no doubt run their own check on it, but within a couple of days, you’ll be famous.”

  “Or infamous. Tommy isn’t going to be fooled into thinking I wrote the story. He’ll know it was yours. After all, he’s already read the draft.”

  “So what? All he needs is deniability, as they call it down at the White House. He wants the story to come out, you could tell that. He just doesn’t want to take any of the flak for it.”

  “Flak for what?”

  Tommy had reappeared in the doorway.

  “Flak for the disaster at the golf course yesterday,” Hanna replied swiftly, while I was still trying to get my brain into gear. “We were just talking about the Martini Classic.”

  “Um,” was all Tommy said. Then, “Carlton, first thing tomorrow, I expect to see the start of that series on the history of Bosky Dell.”

  “Certainly, Tommy. I take it that is your gracious way of saying I am back on staff again.”

  “For now,” Tommy growled. “Whoops!”

  This was not aimed at me, but at Joe Herkimer, who had come in, crossed the newsroom floor with nary a twig breaking beneath his moccasined feet, and suddenly appeared at Tommy’s elbow.

  “Oh, it’s you,” said Tommy.

  “How,” said Joe, and executed a peace sign with the flat hand, like Tonto in The Lone Ranger.

  “Very strange man,” he remarked thoughtfully, as Tommy moved off, no doubt voicing those very same words silently to himself.

  “Well, here we are,” said Hanna.

  “Were,” responded Joe. “We’re getting out of here.”

  “That’s nice. Where are we going?”

  “To a meeting of the Circle Lake Band’s tribal council,” said Joe.

  Chapter 24

  “Just for the heck of it,” said Hanna, as we emerged from the Lancer office onto Main Street, “why are we going to a band council meeting?”

  “Well, it isn’t really a band meeting, or you wouldn’t be allowed in the door,” Joe explained. “It’s more of an information meeting, open to all, on the subject of the burial grounds. It’s been going on all morning, which is the way of council meetings, while everybody gets up and explores whatever happens to be on his or her mind. Some of us think the whole issue is dead now. Certainly, when a couple of the elders went over the diggings on the fifth fairway last night, after the cops left, they could find no sign of anything suggesting a burial ground.

  “But there’s another faction, led by Chuck Wilson—his native name, by the way, is Two Deers—that says we ought to keep pushing for the land, because we got stung over the first land grants, back in the eighteenth century, which is certainly true, and if claiming a burial ground is a way to launch a new claim under the land-settlements legislation, well, we ought to do it.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” said Hanna, “but I still don’t know why you want us to go to the meeting.”

  “I want your opinion, for one thing. I’m too close to these people to make any objective judgments, so I’m probably imagining things, but I get a feeling that there’s an edge of fanaticism creeping into the talks these days, and it makes me uneasy. I want to know if you two react the same way. And, of course, I think there ought to be somebody there representing the press, just in case we are able to come to some sort of conclusion. Here’s my car,” he said.

  “And here’s mine,” said Hanna, who had managed to wring a brand new Ford LTD out of the rental agency.

  “Why do I have the feeling that Carlton’s going to ride with you?” asked Joe.

  “He isn’t. He’s going to ride with you, so he can tell you everything he put into a very full file at the Lancer this morning. I’ll meet you there.”

  She ran over to her car and took off at her usual rapid rate, while Joe and I followed at something close to the speed limit, until we lost sight of her over the horizon.

  During the drive—it is about twenty miles from Silver Falls to the reserve, northeast of the town on about six hundred acres of utterly unfarmable land—I brought Joe up to date, but he was unable to make any more sense of the unrolling of events than I was.

  “Maybe the cops will put it together,” he said hopefully.

  “That was a joke, right? I’ve never been able to understand the Indian sense of humour.”

  We pulled into the parking lot outside the council house, which was pretty well full, and managed to find one of the last spots, well down towards Lake Omog, on whose swampy shores the Ojibwa had been settled as soon as they had been diddled out of the only decent farmland at this end of the county—around Bosky Dell; that’s what set off the argument about burial grounds. Hanna was waiting for us and came running across the rutted, dirt lot towards us.

  “Did you see them? Did you see them?”

  “Did we see who? Whom?”

  She threw her hands up. “Oh, mighty tracker,” she said. “Oh, keen-eyed j
ournalist. About two minutes ago, while you were dawdling along the road, a car pulled in here and Carlton’s good friend, the Maryland Morsel, got out with some guy who’s about ten feet tall. They both went into the meeting.”

  “So what? Robinson told us Amelia was interested in Canadian natives. Turns out she really is.”

  “Here’s the car I saw them get out of. Anything strike you about it?”

  “It’s rented, from the same outfit you got yours from. So what?”

  “What colour is it?”

  “Sort of bluey-grey. What of it?”

  “Are you suggesting,” asked Joe, “that this is the car that ran you off the road?”

  “Hanna, you’re crazy. Why would Amelia want to run us off the road?”

  “I don’t know. But I’m sure as hell going to ask her if she did.”

  “This is nuts. Or, if it was her, it was an accident. She didn’t even have any way of . . . I forgot what I was going to say.”

  I had just remembered that Amelia did have a way of knowing that Hanna and I were in her car and driving out to Bosky Dell. I had told her so, in my boasting telephone call, which I had very prudently refrained from mentioning to Hanna. Well, then, it was an accident. Wasn’t it? Hanna was giving me an intent look.

  “Spit it out, Carlton.”

  “Nothing to spit.”

  “You just thought of something, didn’t you?”

  “I just thought that it might be a good idea to find out the identity of the gent with Amelia, that’s all.”

  “That shouldn’t be too difficult,” said Joe. “One of the boys will have marked any stranger who came to the meeting.”

  “What if it isn’t a stranger?”

  “They’ll know that, too.”

  There were, I now noticed, about half a dozen young Indian men slouching around the parking lot and near the door to the council house in attitudes of exaggerated nonchalance.