Murder Sees the Light (25 page)

“Why did he give it to Norrie?”

“Because he wanted Norrie to have it assayed to see if it was real.”

“And was it?”

“Ask him yourself. How should I know? He gave it to Ozzie Prothroe to look after. Ozzie'll be back tomorrow.”

I got the teabag out of the first cup and into the second. I added a squirt of condensed milk from a small can with gummy-looking holes punched in the lid. We sat down with the candle between us. Her eyes were very blue, her hair was very dyed. In the candlelight it looked black, but by day it looked like antique furniture, a little darker than chestnuts. I was looking away, conscious that I'd been staring, when a new source of light entered the room. A moving yellow circle bobbed on the dark screen door, like a drunken full moon. I heard a voice in something like a stage whisper.

“Benny? Can I come in?” It was Aline Barbour. When the door slapped shut, I found that I'd stood up without thinking. It wasn't because I was confusing Aline with the Queen Mother. There were natural laws affecting the behaviour of men in the company of one woman when another comes into the room. It isn't a question of form; it's more basic than that. “Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you were—Oh, it's you! Well, isn't this cosy. He give you the evening off?”

Lorca recognized the manner if not the face at once. But even that wasn't long in coming. She took in the jeans, turtleneck, and denim jacket as well as the fresh makeup Aline was wearing. Lorca didn't move, none of us did, until Lorca's hand went to her face.

“Turn off that Goddamned light,” she said. Aline didn't flick off her light at once. She lowered the beam to the table first. I was still finding my tongue. I felt like Archie in the comics telling Veronica and Betty that he could explain everything. But neither of them was looking at me. I could have done a handstand on the table and it wouldn't have sliced through the daggers running between them.

“Sit down and have some tea,” I said when I could manage to put words together. Aline didn't budge.

“With her? With Norrie's incumbent? Don't make me laugh!”

“We've been having a talk,” I said, reaching.

“Is that what you call it now? I'm sorry I intruded.”

“Shut up, Aline, and sit down. Do yourself some good.”

“And interrupt this charming spectacle? Certainly not. I'll bet the maid doesn't get a night out more than once every two weeks.” Her eyes were black with anger, and I knew that it didn't have anything to do with me or this afternoon. Norrie Patten was the third person in the room not me.

“So this is Aline Barbour?” Lorca asked, scanning the figure facing the end of the table, whose face was thrown into high relief by the stub of a candle. “I'd heard that you were good-looking. but now I can see you're fading away. Norrie likes them young, like me. I guess you know that.”

“You'll never trick him into a run-of-the-play contract. He doesn't work that way. You're all washed up. The only thing is, you don't know it yet.”

“You Goddamned bitch,” she said flatly, even dully, as she lifted her raised cup in her hand and flung it in Aline's face. The cup bounced off her raised elbow, but the tea reached her face. She screamed. It must have been shock. It couldn't have been that hot.

“Get the hell out of here, both of you!” I heard myself shouting, and then heard the hills across the lake yell at them too. “Get out of here, Aline. Just turn around and get out!” I threw her a damp towel from the back of a chair. She turned and went without saying anything. But I could hear her sobbing as she made her way across the field with the aid of her flashlight.

“Well you've picked yourself a good enemy,” I said. “Norrie'll love you for this. What's to prevent her from going off to get the cops? There's a reason for all the secrecy, remember?”

“Oh, Benny! What am I going to do? Norrie can't find out. He can't! And that woman! She's got to be stopped! We've got to do something!”

“‘We'?”

“Well, yes. You and me. We have to stop her.”

“Look, Lorca. I'd do a lot to please a lady, but I'm not going to try to get between Aline Barbour and Norbert E. Patten without knowing a lot more about them than I do now. A man'd have to be crazy to get involved. Now, I'm all for watching what happens, but I won't be pushed into the ring with them, not for all the gold in the local gold mine.”

“But I don't know anything! I've told you all I know.”

“Where did they know each other?”

“I told you I don't know! Why won't you believe me?”

“There has to be something you remember. Some scrap. Something unconnected with anything else. A fragment, a name, anything.”

“There is a name. I'm not sure where it fits. I heard Norrie say it once, almost to himself. John Malbeck. It's somehow tied up with Aline Barbour. Don't ask me how.”

“Good. Now we're getting somewhere. Try to remember anything else. Get back to the cottage now. I'll think of a reason to drop in tomorrow. Something short of having another shipwreck. Does that make sense?” Malbeck? The name was lurking somewhere.

“Yes. Sure. But please don't forget what I said. I don't want to get trapped into an extended cruise. You understand?”

“You have my sympathy, Lorca. You really do. If worse comes to worse you can always bury your passport, can't you?”

“Benny, I never thought of that. You're right. There is a bright side. I could be a stateless person.”

TWENTY-THREE

Joan Harbison was still cool when I saw her in the morning. She talked to me about the fine weather and about the fact that an OPP bigwig from Toronto had been asking her questions and pacing off the distances from the culvert to Aeneas's campsite. She knew he must be a big shot because Harry Glover left his cap on and his shirt buttoned. From the dock, where I went to take a fast swim, I couldn't see a cop car in the parking lot, only the regulars frying in the early sun. I could almost smell the rubber sizzling.

“Joan, how well do you know David Kipp?” Joan lost a beat as she stirred the contents of a can marked “Williamsburg White.”

“Oh, not so very well. He spends most of his time watching birds. He's never without his binoculars. He's from New England. He looks after his kids. What else? He brought me this whiter-than-white paint.”

“Then he's been up here before?”

“According to Cissy, he and his wife used to be regulars. But she's been unwell for some years now. Mental, she said, but I didn't go into it. I'd never seen him before this summer. The paint was a goodwill gesture to the struggling new owner. Cissy said that they used to be very fussy about their food. She said that Michelle once made a fuss about Onions' not stocking a brand of yoghurt she liked. Can you beat it?” She still wouldn't look me in the eye. She had a strip of paint on her cheek. Apart from that, she was making a good beginning at the deck chair she was painting. “Why do you ask?” she said not looking up.

“I just had a run in with him. He seems to take himself very seriously.”

“Oh, he's a fanatic! I like to see lots of people around me when he comes into the Annex.”

I watched her making long strokes with her paint brush along the slats of the chair. I liked the calm it seemed to write on her face as she dipped the brush into the can and carefully removed the excess from both sides of the brush before continuing. I thought a moment about Tom Sawyer whitewashing his Aunt Polly's fence, then I went for my swim.

I made it to the raft in about fifty lazy strokes, then hauled myself, walrus-like, out of the water, and flopped on the belly-warming canvas. From this happy position I saw David Kipp come out his door to retrieve some towels and bathing suits from the line. Everything on the shore looked hazy and moved at half-speed. I rolled back into the water again and kicked my way down to the mollusk-strewn bottom. I swam a few metres observing the shadow of the raft. A chain attached to one corner of the raft arced down to a millstone or other heavy weight half-sunk in the fine marl and sand. I swam closer and got a surprise. The anchor was a circular flat stone with an equilateral triangle cut into the nearly buried face of the stone. I rubbed away the fine mud that covered part of it and found myself looking into a rough relief etching of a goat with monstrous horns. My lungs were beginning to crack, so I forced my way up through the warmer water at the surface, breathing in a mouthful that was mostly air.

When I stopped coughing, I went down for another look. There was no mistake: the stone anchor was the altar stone I'd seen in Dick Berners's crude painting in Aeneas's room in Hatchway. I kicked my way up once more, thinking that the stone was about four metres below the surface. Something was making me feel good. Maybe it was thinking metric so early in the day.

Half an hour later, I was sitting in the Annex with Harry Glover. His shirt was wet under the arms, unbuttoned. There was no sign of his cap, so I knew his superior officer was probably on his way back to Toronto. He didn't smile when I came in and found a place to sit down. We both knew this wasn't a social call. How is it that some cops can do their jobs and remain human at the same time? Glover looked worried, tired, and cross, like he'd just had a bad half-hour with his boss and he was going to see if something good could be salvaged by passing on some of the heat to me.

“Ain't it nice to get paid for taking it easy when the weather is as good as this? Why I hear it's a real sizzler in Toronto today.”

“You keep putting me in Toronto, Harry. It's Grantham, remember. We get the breeze off Lake Ontario and the spray off Niagara Falls.” I gave him a glance that I hoped he'd take as wondering whether he was going simple on me.

“That tip about Mr. Westmorland paid off. I had me a long heart-to-heart with the head of Security in Ottawa. It's Desmond Brewer all right. No mistake about that. And George McCord knew all about it and was trying to make hay while the sun shines. He didn't get far. But it doesn't look like Brewer killed him just to shut him up.”

“It's nice to be sure. How do you know?”

“Well, I mean, an Ottawa type like that? A bureaucrat? Hell, he'd get lost in the bush ten minutes after leaving the lodge. He's a tenderfoot if I ever saw one.”

“Think again, Harry. This tenderfoot goes white-water canoeing when things get dull at the Treasury Board. Maybe he used to be a mountain climber like the former prime minister. Don't write off all the Ottawa mandarins as cream puffs. I'm not saying he did it, but right now we don't know.”

“Shit. Nobody ever lets me off easy. I always have to walk the long way round. Say, Benny, the fingerprint man from Toronto told me the craziest thing this morning. He says he saw your prints on the axe that killed George. Isn't that a howl, now?”

“Sure, that's why I'm sending you after Des Brewer. Just to get you off my track. You know, Harry, I always carry an axe in my ungloved hand. Very careless of me. Where'd you get my prints for comparison, by the way?”

“We lifted a plate you'd just washed up. That's not positive ID, but it can be firmed up if we get more interested. You sure are house-proud about that cabin of yours. Bet you don't see any dust in your place in Grantham.”

“If you're still playing games with me, I can see you must have been making a lot of headway with the three murders.”

“We are carrying on a textbook investigation up here. We got pictures, sketches; we got … What do you mean
three
murders? I can only count up to two. Where'd you go to school? You count with me: Aeneas DuFond, one, and George McCord, two. Ain't that right?”

“You didn't give a place to Wayne Trask. Trask was murdered, Harry. His death wasn't an accident, whatever you said about it in your report. Sorry.”

“That's ancient history. Why drag that up? I'm not saying I'm buying it. What's the sense in bringing it in now?” I shrugged. I didn't have the whole answer, only parts. So I tried to explain that to him.

“Trask's death is tangled up in other things that are still going on around here. He's connected to that mine I found for one thing. He's as important to the unravelling of this case, Harry, as any of the things we've found out so far.”

“Well, I'll be.”

“Who was up here at that time, Harry? Who'd you talk to?”

“Damn it man, you don't want much for nothing, do you?” He was resting his chin on his hand and making shaving motions over his right cheek with his thumb. “Come to think of it, there were a lot of the same people: Maggie and George, the Rimmers from over on the point, the Pearcys …”

“What about Kipp?”

“Remember, we're talking about early spring. There was still snow in patches on the ground when they brought him out. This was only a couple of months after old Dick died.”

“Three months, I heard.”

“Yeah, well make something of that if you can. The Pearcys weren't staying at the lodge. They come up to see the Rimmers that time. The park made them get off their own land, because the policy then was that there were to be no more private camps. But there were always exceptions to the rule. When they changed the policy, Lloyd had pulled the cabin down and sold everything.”

“Did that make him bitter?”

“Well, Lloyd still works for the government up in Sudbury, don't he? I guess he knows about governments. City, province, country: they're all the same. One end's making rules and the other end's trying to get them changed.”

“Did you ask any questions about Trask's wife, the one that disappeared?”

“Sure. I talked to Flora on the phone myself, down in St. Mary's or St. Thomas or someplace. It was natural to get suspicious when she disappeared like that. I thought we'd end up dragging the lake for her. But no, I found her mother's name and number and Flora answered the phone herself. I phoned her again when Wayne died. She even got a little weepy on the phone but didn't come up to the funeral.”