Hole in One (19 page)

“What murder? I thought you said he was blown up by his own propane tank. It was an accident.”

“Maybe. If so, it was a hell of a convenient accident for somebody.”

“Jesus, Carlton, you newspaper guys are all alike. Full of crap. Let's let the crime-lab boys do the work before we start imagining wild conspiracies.”

“There isn't time for that, Harry. We have an emergency going here.”

“You mean, on top of Chuck Wilson blowing himself up?”

“Uh-huh. Harry, how would you feel about leading an expedition out to Bosky Dell to rescue Hanna Klovack?”

He chuckled, a rich chuckle, full of amusement.

“No, really, Harry. We have reason to think Hanna has been kidnapped by the Jowett clan . . .”

“The Jowett clan? Get serious, Carlton.”

“. . . because Uncle Willie . . . say, Harry, maybe we'd better come over and explain this.”

“Forget it, Carlton. It's a serious offence to mislead the police, and you know it. If you get some evidence on any of your crazy theories, give me a call.”

The phone banged down.

“I guess I didn't do that too well, did I?”

“No, you didn't,” Joe said.

Darlene was kinder. “Well, you have to remember, the police think they have this case wrapped up, and when you suddenly ring in the name of one of the most powerful figures in the province, and suggest he has kidnapped Hanna, without the slightest trace of evidence . . . or, do you have some evidence, Carlton?”

“Sure we do.”

“What evidence?”

“Robinson said it would soon be over, and there's a moving van over at the Jowett's joint right now. What's more, I'll bet you a dollar to a doughnut that there's a 1989 Chrysler Le Baron in one of the drive-sheds behind the Jowett house.”

“Well, in that case, of course the police will leap into action. Probably call out the army, as well.”

I detected a note of sarcasm in there. I looked at Joe. Joe looked at Darlene; I don't know why, I guess she's a lot easier on the eyes than I am.

“Well, back to Plan A,” said Joe.

“And which is Plan A?”

“That's the one where we go along to the Jowetts tonight at nine o'clock and collect some concrete evidence to lay before the cops.”

“Oh,
that
Plan A.”

We had dinner at the Herkimers, and very disappointing it was, too. Hamburgers. Not even deerburgers, but hamburgers, which Joe barbequed on the grill in the backyard of the rather spiffy ranch bungalow, set on a large, treed lot along the bank of the Omog River, about halfway between the reserve and Silver Falls. After dinner, we did the dishes—the four kids vanished with the clatter of the last spoon on the last dessert plate, as swiftly and silently as ever their ancestors slipped into the woods to make life difficult for the local fauna, and left this chore to Joe and Darlene and me. Then we got ready to ride to the rescue.

Before we left, Darlene issued her orders: no funny stuff, no taking chances, and she would be sitting right here by the phone, waiting for word of success or a call for help, whatever.

“Yes, hon,” said Joe, and rolled his eyes at me.

We drove over to my place at Bosky Dell just before nine o'clock, and walked through the trees from there. It was only a few hundred yards to the Jowetts, and we were hoping to spot something along the way. The Jowett place stretches from Forest Road on the south side to the lake on the north, about two hundred yards, with the house, if you can call a joint that size a house, slightly closer to the lake than to Forest Road. There is a road along the lake, as well—Lakeshore Road—and the boathouse is built out into the water beyond this. The evening was as advertised in the travel brochures. There was a moon just starting up over the lake, with that orange look you get in the best-bred moons, and a soft breeze rustled the leaves of the oaks that dotted the Jowett lawns. The mosquitoes were out for a ramble, too, squadrons of them wheeling in formation and attacking in droves. Nothing's perfect. We came through the trees from the east side of the house and stood there for a few minutes, trying to see if we could spot anything that would help us. We snuck around the back for a look in the two drive-sheds, which were dark, and locked, and either did or did not contain a 1989 Chrysler Le Baron. We couldn't tell.

The moving van was still sitting in the yard, which meant either that the movers had been picked up by somebody from town, or they were bunking down with the Jowetts. Lord knows there were enough bedrooms. One end of the ground floor was ablaze with lights, but, from where we were, we couldn't see much inside, just a number of figures moving around. At Joe's suggestion, we cut down to Lakeshore Road, once we were satisfied that there was nothing more to be seen, and approached the house openly from there.

As we came up the long, sloping lawn towards the front porch, we could see, in the living room behind, a fair gaggle of people perched about on chairs and couches, many of them with brandy snifters in their hands. The post-prandial snort, no doubt. The rest of the congregation, once I got a closer look at it through the French doors, was a mixed bag, about half business types in dark suits, with wives or mistresses in long dresses, and the other half Jowetts, or hangers-on, in sports clothes. There also seemed to be a number of the beefy gents we had noticed earlier in the day, spotted here and there. From Rent-a-Thug, I guessed.

Amelia was there, I was glad to see, in a low-cut, sleeveless dress that probably began life as a silk scarf and then got lucky. Her red kerchief, for a marvel, was missing, and her hair hung down almost to her waist. She was being clustered around; no surprise there. Husband Harrison was nowhere in sight. Probably off at the vet's for his distemper shots.

Robinson must have been watching for us, because, as soon as our feet hit the wide verandah steps—mine clumping, Joe's patting—he yanked open the door, and, with the briefest of smiles, steered us in and turned us immediately left, so that we skirted the assembled hordes, on our way to another room.

This turned out to be the room to the left of the fireplace, behind the door Robinson had appeared out of the other day. It was a working room, set up with a large pine table, two desks, a couch, and a few chairs, with a fax machine in one corner. Conrad Jowett was seated behind the larger of the two desks, reading something. There was a telephone at his right hand, and, I noted with interest, it was a Northern Electric job, exactly like my own, with the same, but no more, bells and whistles as regards automatic dialing and redial. Ma Bell, the great leveller, I thought. There was a door at the far end, obviously leading outside. The fireplace was at the end where we entered, and obviously used the same chimney as the giant model in the living room, just beyond; there was a sullen fire burning. The walls of this room had no phony trophies, only real ones, diplomas for the various honorary doctorates Conrad had gathered in from the universities on whom he showered donations every time his PR firm told him the image needed a little jolt of juice.

Two chairs had been pulled up in front of the desk where Conrad Jowett sat reading, and Robinson gestured for us to sit in these. Then he leaned down, and, for the first time in either of our lives, put a hand on me. He gripped my shoulder, very briefly, then slipped silently out of the room.

Conrad Jowett went on reading—what a hambone, I thought, has to take control of any encounter right off the top—and we sat there, thus, unmoving, for about two minutes. Then I felt a slight pressure on my right foot, the one closest to Joe's chair, and I looked down. His left foot pressed briefly on my right. I looked at him and he gestured—just a small movement of his head—towards the wall to my left. One of the framed diplomas there looked a little different from the rest, and had caught Joe's hawk-like glance. It testified that the under-named had graduated,
magna cum lauda,
from the University of Toronto in business administration and then it named the under-named, in that swirling Gothic writing that is so hard to read: Robinson Harrison Jowett.

“Holy shit!” I exclaimed.

“I wondered if you'd notice that,” said Conrad Jowett, without even looking up. “Robinson is actually my youngest brother.”

“But he calls you ‘Mr. Jowett.'”

“Yes he does. Between you and me, I think he thinks of me as Mr. Jowett. I am ten years older, for one thing, and I am probably somewhere between a father-figure and a villain, perhaps both, in his rather orderly mind.

“We are, you may have noticed, a somewhat unusual family. In fact, if there is anyone among us who is fairly normal, it is Robinson. Strange that he should be the albino in the family; just one of nature's little jokes, I guess. When I say Robinson is my brother, that is not absolutely accurate. He is my half-brother, the illegitimate son of my mother and my late Uncle Theodore. Not her brother, you understand, we are not quite so Appalachian as that. Her brother-in-law.”

I could think of no snappy comeback to that.

“The diploma you have just been reading in such a wide-eyed fashion, Carlton, normally lives in a locked drawer. I put it there myself, today. For amusement; just to see if you'd notice.” We got a brief burst of the stones-down-the-tin, but he was on his own; I didn't find it all that amusing.

“The deception is quite harmless, and often effective. You have no idea how often business enemies of mine, who know my assistant only as Robinson, have attempted to bribe him, or hire him away from me, only to discover, too late, that he has used the opportunity to gain information from them. Well, then . . .”

He shifted forward in his chair and changed gears.

“I have just been reading this most interesting story with the byline Hanna Klovack, but which I strongly suspect came from you, Carlton.”

“You have? Where the hell did you get it?”

“Ah,” the old buzzard looked positively coy. “That would be telling. That would be revealing trade secrets.”

“No secret.” Joe spoke for the first time. “Somebody from the
Lancer
.”

“More or less, yes. Robinson . . . ah . . . obtained it from a lawyer in town who said he had been given the file to read for libel. As it happens, we have retained the lawyer on another matter, and I guess he wanted to curry favour with Robinson.”

“Parker Whitney, by all that's holy,” I said. “He can't do that. It's a breach of privilege.”

“What lawyers may do and what they can do are not always the same,” Conrad noted. “In any event, that is how we obtained your file.”

Well, I'd said it would be making the rounds.

“Of course, as is often the case with news stories, the really important information was left out of the material to be published.”

“You mean the notes about the Far Lake bank robbery.”

He nodded.

“Why is that important to you?”

“Not so much to me, directly. To my good name. To the family and the family name. A matter of some importance, not merely to me, but, I may say, to the nation as a whole.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“If you had done your homework, Carlton, you would know. This gathering tonight was, in the first instance, both a party to recognize my birthday, and the occasion for a far greater honour.”

“Companion of the Order of Canada? That's what all the public-relations crap has been about?”

“Not even close, Carlton. It was to have been announced tonight, in Ottawa, by the prime minister's office, and here, by my good friend the premier . . .”

“I didn't see the premier.”

“I said, ‘Was to have been,' the matter has been put off. Perhaps dropped entirely. In any event, what I was about to tell you was that Her Majesty had seen fit to appoint me as her viceregal representative.”

“You!”

“A little less shock, please Carlton. You wound me.”

“Well, I know that bunch in Ottawa have made the lieutenant governor's job into a bit of a joke, and I know you coughed up for the party, but . . .”

“In any event, Carlton, you will see how crucial it had become that nothing appear in the press that would in any way reflect on the good name of the Jowett family.”

“Oh, I can see that, all right. But our story was pretty harmless. And it didn't even mention the Jowett family.”

“Not the story, Carlton. The background notes with the story. They brought the bank robbery into issue.”

“I don't get it. What's the connection? A couple of bozos hold up a bank, maybe with the help of Charlie Tinkelpaugh and/or the janitor, and disappear with the money. What has that to do with you? More importantly, how would it ever get tied to you?”

“As to the second, we were confident for some time that it never would be. In fact, we were sure right up until yesterday, when we learned that the police had found an old commodities ticket with the bodies.”

“A commodities ticket? The pink paper?”

He nodded. “The letters and numbers released by the police department were ‘SU 2000 JO 15 03.' A mistake, clearly.”

“What mistake?”

“The JO was obviously read in error for JY. A fortunate error, since it lessens the possibility that anyone will recognize it as the seller's copy of an option to buy two thousand contracts of sugar on June 15 at the price of three cents a pound. A contract of sugar, at that time, represented eleven thousand pounds. More than five tons.”

“That's a lot of lumps.”

Conrad smiled a thin smile. “In this case, more than twenty million pounds, which, at three cents a pound, represented quite a gamble.”

“Your gamble,” said Joe. “It had to be your gamble. You were the one in commodities.”

Jowett shot him a glance. “Very shrewd,” he said. “And quite correct.” He smiled. “It was, in fact, the most important gamble of my career. Sugar was at two cents when I bought those contracts, just before a Cuban sugar-crop failure was announced. I had had, as we say, advance information. The price went to twelve cents within weeks. I optioned those sugar contracts on a twenty percent margin. With the broker's fee, my total investment was just under $140,000. That's all the cash I had to put up. It's the wonderful thing about commodity markets. Then, when the price went up, I exercised the options and, on June 15, I bought the sugar for three cents and sold it again for twelve. I made nine cents a pound, just under $2 million. It was the foundation of my fortunes.”

“Where did the original money come from?” I wanted to know.

“And,” asked Joe, “how did the slip get into the wallet?”

“Had to be the bank robbery,” I said.

“You mean,” said Joe, “the money behind the Jowett legend came from a bank robbery? Mr. Jowett, I'm surprised. I would never have taken you for a bank robber.”

“Nor am I,” said Conrad. “It was my brother William.”

“How do you mean, your brother William? You mean Uncle Willie, the one who went bonkers? Was I right? Did he bury a couple of corpses on the fifth fairway?”

Conrad looked up at the ceiling and tented his hands together, gathering his thoughts, I guess.

“Willie was not, as you so crudely put it, bonkers. That is a story the family and I put out afterwards.”

“But he did kill those two birds and bury them on the fifth fairway?”

Conrad nodded, slowly. “Yes, he did. You see, Charlie Tinkelpaugh was not, as your notes seem to suggest, the brains behind the Far Lake bank robbery. Willie was.”

“Holy mackerel!”

“He was rather a pathetic creature, really, poor Willie. He worked for me in the grocery business, in the early days, as a kind of administrative assistant. Not the way Robinson does, you understand. Even forty years ago, when he was a very young man indeed, Robinson was invaluable. Willie was an odd-job boy, and I gather he didn't care for it. Then, one evening, he got talking in a Toronto beer parlour, where he spent most of his time in those days, with a man who worked in the mines near Far Lake. In the payroll office. This man told Willie about the payroll, and how it was sent to the same bank branch each week. Willie got the bright idea of stealing it.”

“I see.”