“Enough talk,” said Conrad, from beyond the door.
“Coming. Coming,” said Robinson, and he turned and leaned down to squeeze my shoulder once again.
“You have no idea how much I regret this, Carlton,” he said, and then, just as he straightened up, I felt something slide down my arm and into my lap.
Robinson disappeared. What the hell had he left behind?
Hanna must have thought I had gone nuts. I was sitting beside her one minute, and the next, I had thrashed around until I was sitting cross-legged facing her, and nodding my head at her. I was, at the same time, raising my butt off the floor, and pushing my hips towards her. I could make out her face dimly—this room had been whitewashed, and was a good deal lighter than the bedrooms up in the main house—and I could see the fine Ukrainian eyebrows arched into interrogation. Was this, I could see her asking herself, some new, obscene, Withers approach to romance? Then she looked down and nodded. She turned herself around and backed onto my legs, so that her hands could reach into my lap. She found something and hitched herself off my legs again.
I could hear her working away for a couple of minutes, and then, by golly, I could see her raising her arms. Robinson had slipped me a knife. Not the Swiss Army job, just a paring knife from the kitchen. I was in no position to be choosy. Now it was Hanna’s turn to cut me free. First thing I did, once my hands were loose, was to pull the tape off my mouth. Hurt like hell. Hanna had gone through the same process. We sat there, rubbing our limbs. Then we had a little hug. Just a little one, because we were still in a bit of a pickle, weren’t we? Hanna, moving very quietly, so as not to put Murphy to any anxiety, freed Joe Herkimer. He groaned again. She massaged his arms and hands, but he didn’t come to. Hanna came back and sat down beside me, put her lips up to my ear—very nice, too, this evening had its ups and downs—and whispered, “Okay, Withers, what now?”
I grabbed her head, found her ear, kissed it, and whispered, “I can get out of here.”
I could, too. This was my briar patch. Man and boy, I had played in this boathouse for years. I gestured to Hanna to stand up, and we moved, again very quietly, to where Joe was lying. Gingerly, I took hold of him under the arms, Hanna grabbed his feet, and we lowered him to the floor. I stepped over his recumbent body and went across to the shelf where he had been, reached down, hooked my fingers under it, and lifted. Nothing happened. Wrong end. I went to the other end, lifted, and about six feet of plank came up in my hand. When they had replaced the old one-holers, the plank on the men’s side had never, for some reason, been nailed down. The boathouse was built over the water, and down there about two feet was Silver Lake, lapping against the pilings. The wood that had once held what used to be called “the honey bucket” had rotted out long since. There was nothing to prevent me slipping out this way, and, indeed, I had done it a hundred times during the games of my youth.
I could see Hanna’s eyes go very round. My hero, she was perhaps saying to herself. Or perhaps not. I got my mouth over to her ear again, kissed it again, and whispered, “You stay here; look after Joe. I’ll get help.” She nodded and squeezed my hand. I stepped over the edge of the shelf with one leg, sat on the edge, grabbed the side of the plank on the far side, and lowered myself into the water.
There was very little room to manoeuvre, and the water was colder than last year’s love. James Joyce’s graphic line about “the scrotum-tightening sea” came into my head as I got down onto my belly and half-swam, half-floated, into deeper water. Then I ducked, cracked my head on a piling, and kept going. One of my few talents is swimming underwater, and I next emerged perhaps thirty feet offshore, coming up with my face flat to the surface, like a seal, so as to make very little sound in the still, calm water. I looked back towards the shore, where I could see the looming bulk of the boathouse and, beyond it, the lights from the house spilling out over the lawn. Someone had started a sing-song, now, and the plunking of the piano and the bellowing voices came across the water with a freight of nostalgia. They were singing “Roll Out the Barrel,” of all the cornball things.
I swam—the breaststroke, less splashy than the crawl—parallel to the shore for about a hundred yards, before daring to land. I chose the Milner dock, at the bottom of First Street, and, within about two minutes, I was clambering up the ladder and sloshing across the concrete dock towards Lakeshore Road. In fact, I was within a couple of feet of the road, just making my way up the wooden steps that lead to the pavement, when someone stepped out of the boathouse beside me, shoved something round and hard into the middle of my back, and growled, “Hands up, Kemo Sabe.”
“Shit!” the voice went on. “I always wanted to say something like that.”
Chapter 32
I jumped about four feet in the air and whirled around, hit my shoeless foot on a rock, and hopped up and down about ten times, clutching the stricken foot and cussing. One of the Ojibwa warriors, a kid of about seventeen, was standing there in the dark, with a piece of stick in his hand, giggling fit to bust. I was thinking of maybe chucking him into the lake and dropping a rock in on top of him, when I heard a low whistle, on two notes, and Darlene Herkimer’s voice from the bushes, saying, “What’s the joke?”
The kid couldn’t answer, he was still too convulsed. “Kemo Sabe,” is all he could say, then he was off again.
“It’s me, Carlton,” I said, and Darlene came out of the bushes, very quickly, and grabbed my arm. She did not look as if she found anything funny.
“Where’s Joe?”
“He’s in the storage room at the boathouse, with Hanna. Uh . . . Darlene, he’s hurt.”
“I know he’s hurt. How badly?”
“Shot in the foot. But Robinson says he’ll be okay.”
“Robinson? The white guy? You know what I mean.”
“Robinson helped us, as much as he could. But how the heck,” I asked, for the question was one of more than academic interest, “did you get here?”
“Joe called. About forty minutes ago, I was sitting beside the phone wondering whether to call the cops after all, and the thing rang. Nearly scared me out of a year’s growth. It was Joe, obviously in pain, and the first thing he said, the fathead, was ‘I’m okay,’ so I knew he was really badly hurt. Otherwise, why bring it up? Then he said that he was in Conrad Jowett’s study, and there had been a fight, but you had got away and gone looking for Hanna. He didn’t seem to think you were going to find her. I asked him if you had any solid proof that Hanna was there, and he said something funny. He said, ‘Yeah, Carlton worked it out.’ Did you?”
I nodded, which was wasted of course, in the dark, so I said, “In a way, yes, I did. Old Man Jowett has a phone exactly like mine, and when I hit the redial button, my phone number popped up on that little screen. So we knew the threatening call had come from the Jowetts; so Hanna was being held there, most likely. What happened next?”
“I told Joe I’d call the cops, and he said, ‘You do that,’ and hung up.”
“So, where are the cops?”
“On their way. I got a message machine. No kidding, this disembodied voice told me there was no one in the office right now, but I could, in an emergency, call the Peterborough detachment. So I did. The guy there thought I was out of my head, but promised to send a car down from Silver Falls right away. I asked him what he meant by ‘right away,’ and he got a little testy. So I decided to haul a few of the warriors out of the council hall and get the hell over here.”
We had come out onto the roadway now, and I could see a number of figures moving about on the lawn. Murphy, if he’d had his wits about him, should have been up on his feet, screaming bloody murder, and I mentioned him to Darlene.
She nodded. “We’ll take him,” she said. She explained that they had arrived just a few minutes before, and she had sent the warriors fanning out around the house, to see what was going on. They had reported that there was no one in the room
they took to be Conrad’s study, no one at all, and Darlene had been wondering what to do for the best when one of the youths reported that he had spotted something moving on the lake. She sent him over to check it out, and that was how I acquired a welcome wagon when I stepped ashore.
“Okay,” I said, very crisp and decisive, like Gregory Peck in The Guns of Navarone. “Here’s what we’ll do. First we take out Murphy and free Joe and Hanna, and then we spread out and . . . Have we got any guns? Darlene, why aren’t you listening to me?”
“Because we’re not going to do anything of the sort, Carlton. We’re going to get Joe out and then wait for the cops.”
The warriors were pretty ticked off at this development, as I was myself—I mean, it seemed to be so anticlimactic—but consoled themselves with the fact that at least they were allowed to deal with Murphy. I went along to direct operations, but I have no idea what happened. I was standing on the edge of the road, peering towards the door of the former biffy, where I knew Murphy to be planted, when a gaggle of youngsters disappeared from beside me, and, about a minute later, I heard a hollow thump. That was all. Then a young voice said, “It’s okay,” and I strode forward fearlessly, in case my help was needed.
Murphy, I guess it was, was lying on the grass when I got there, looking peaceful. The warriors were struggling with the door, which was fastened with an old hasp lock, so I nipped into the main part of the boathouse and came back with a hammer. I smacked the lock twice, it popped open, and I was very nearly run down from both directions, as Hanna dashed out just as Darlene was going in.
“Evening all,” said Hanna, and she came up and gave me a kiss. “By golly, Carlton, you did something right at last, I guess, eh?”
“Oh, yes, Kemo Sabe very strong medicine,” said one of the warriors, and they all slapped themselves, hopped about, and went into laughing fits again.
“What the hell is that all about?” asked Hanna.
“Later,” I said. “Later.”
Darlene came back out of the biffy and said Joe was conscious now, but she didn’t want him moved, so she would stay there while I went to phone the cops and find out what was keeping them.
“And Carlton,” she said, “sound convincing.”
As I ran across the lawn, still in my wet, stockinged feet, I wondered why, even after my heroics of this night, people still persisted in treating me as if I were an imbecile. In fact, I was so smart that I didn’t call the cops from my place. I went to Emma Golden’s instead. The way I worked it out, we were all going to need a little sustenance later on, and if I used Emma’s phone, she would get on the job without me having to ask her if she minded whipping up something for God only knew how many giggling and snorting Ojibwa warriors. It is this kind of long-range planning that got Rommell his reputation.
When I knocked on Emma’s door, she was watching TV, as usual, but she gladly switched it off when I came squelching in.
“Carlton, what in the name of . . .”
“The phone, Emma. Gotta use the phone.”
She jumped out of the way, and I called Harry Burnett, my contact in the Silver Falls cop-shop, at home. He wasn’t asleep, unfortunately. I told him, very crisply, that there had been a shooting at the Jowetts, that Hanna Klovack was going to press kidnapping charges against Conrad Jowett, and that we needed some cops and an ambulance, right away. Oh, yeah, and that I was pretty sure that someone from the Jowetts had blown up Chuck Wilson.
“Slow down, slow down, for God’s sake, Carlton,” said Harry. “I’m trying to write this down.”
I went through it again, and he said, “This isn’t some sort of dumb joke is it, Carlton?” so I handed the phone to Emma.
She is very quick on the uptake, our Emma, and she barked into the phone, “Harry, this is Emma Golden. Carlton’s telling you the exact truth. And if you ever want another sniff of lasagna out of my kitchen, you get your ass out here right away. Oh, just a minute.”
She gave me back the phone. Harry sounded a good deal more amenable. “Is there anybody watching the place now?” he asked, and when I told him there were about ten or twelve, maybe twenty, teenage Ojibwa warriors, he said, “It needed but this.”
He added, “Don’t do anything. Don’t let them do anything. We’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
I told him the OPP were sending a car, too, and he wanted to know why I hadn’t mentioned that in the first place.
“Well, there’s no sign of them so far,” I said.
“They probably thought it was just somebody playing a practical joke. Kids do that, you know,” said Harry. “Now, get the hell off the phone.”
I sogged my way back to the boathouse to report. Darlene, once she was satisfied that Joe was doing as well as could be expected, took charge of operations, planting members of her little band all around the house, with strict orders to do nothing, but to report anything unusual that went on.
Then Darlene and Hanna and I went in and sat beside Joe, who immediately told me he was sorry he had fainted. “My ancestors would be ashamed of me,” he said. I asked him how many of his ancestors had been shot in the foot with a silenced revolver without fainting, and he grinned.
“Very brave, very macho, you guys,” said Hanna, “but in the meantime, what’s to stop Conrad from taking off any minute now, and getting clean away?”
“He can’t get clean away,” I pointed out. “The old bugger’s a billionaire; he drags his wealth, clanking, behind him. He was going to wait until things died down and then deal with us. If the cops interrupt him, you watch. He’ll welcome them in, sit them down, and rain lawyers all over them.”
Just then, one of the warriors stuck his head around the door.
“Darlene,” he said, “I just saw something unusual.”
“What? Where?”
“Out in the bushes beneath the kitchen stairs. One of the guys in the business suits. He’s out of his business suit, and he’s rustling the bushes all over the place with two women!”
“Well, hell,” he grumbled, as Darlene pushed the door shut in his face, “if that’s not unusual, I don’t know what is.”
I asked Hanna how she happened to be driving down Main Street in Silver Falls with two men, and she explained that, when she came back from her morning jog, there was a car in her driveway.
“I thought nothing of it, probably somebody visiting Mrs. Prendergast, but, just as I got to the door and pulled out my key, the car door opened, and this big lug ran up, grabbed me by the arm, slapped one hand over my face, and hoisted me into the car. It was as simple as that. Then the driver took off, and the gent who grabbed me explained that if I said or did anything to draw anyone’s attention, he would break my arm. Who was I to doubt it?”
I asked, “Was the car a Chrysler?”
“Yeah. A late-model Le Baron. Why?”
“Later,” I said again. “Go on with your story.”
“They drove out of town a way, then stopped and put a blindfold on me. Very corny, I thought, but it certainly confused me. We drove around for a while, and then they led me into a house somewhere. I have no idea where it was,” she went on, before I could ask. “It might have been the coach house at the back here, for all I know. I remember thinking that the fact that they had me in a blindfold meant that they intended to keep me alive, anyway.”
I asked, “Where did they make the phone call from?”
“The house, wherever it was. They just sat me down in a chair and the one guy told the other, ‘Don’t forget to read only what’s on the piece of paper.’ Then I heard the phone being dialled, and then your message machine, so they had to leave the message on that.”
“Was Robinson there?”
“How should I know? Wayne Gretzky might have been there, for all I know. The only people I was ever able to connect with were the two goons who grabbed me and your friend, Amelia Big Boobs.”
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“She came to see you? When was this?”
“Later. We only stayed in the house for a few minutes, then they marched me back out to the car, and we drove around some more. Then they hauled me out of the car again, and took me up a long stairway, which I now realize was the one you and I just bolted down, Carlton, but which, at the time, might have been anywhere. They put me in a room, gagged me, tied me to a chair, and left me. I sat there for about twenty minutes, and then I began to bang on the floor with my feet. They were in the room like a flash, and the one guy started to let me know in no uncertain terms what he’d do to me if I did that again. But I kept shaking my head and wriggling around, until he took off the gag just enough for me to tell him I had to go to the bathroom.
“Well, it really threw them. They hadn’t budgeted on anything like that. I guess they’d been told to make sure I came to no harm, and they didn’t know where wetting myself came in. There was a little conference, and one guy went out, and, a couple of minutes later, I heard Amelia saying, ‘Well, I see we have a house guest.’”
“She took you to the john?”
“She did. With one of the goons, as escort. She told me I wasn’t supposed to know where I was, so I was never to let on, or the goons would get into trouble. I just shook my head at her. I don’t understand the finer points of kidnapping etiquette.”
I said, “Well, at least you have to give her credit for some kindness.”
“She wasn’t there out of kindness. She came in the first place because the goons didn’t know how to handle the situation, and then she stayed, so far as I can tell, to gloat. And to boast. She spent half the afternoon with me. I guess she just had to tell somebody how clever she had been through all this.”
“And how clever had she been?”
“Clever enough to kill Charlie Tinkelpaugh in such a way that even Conrad thought it was mostly an accident.”
“She did? How? And why?”
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