Hole in One (17 page)

“Well, no surprise there,” said Hanna. “If Willie went batty, you can be sure he would be edited off the family coat of arms now they've gone uptown.”

“Yeah, but what if it was something worse than that?”

“Worse, as in, dressed up in Wifie's clothes and made passes at the mailman or worse as in . . .”

“
Arsenic and Old Lace
,” said Emma.

“Now she's gone loopy,” said Hanna.

“No, she hasn't. It's a play. A very funny play in which a couple of old ladies go off their heads and start poisoning perfect strangers and burying them in the basement.”

“You think Willie buried people in the basement?”

“Golf course,” said Emma.

“That's it!” I said. “Or, it could be.”

“Explain,” said Hanna. “It could be what?”

“It could be that old Uncle Willie, as Emma says, crazy as a coot, went a little overboard during one of his spells and wound up with a couple of bodies on his hands. And, it could be that the family rallied round, stashed the bodies under the rock pile on the fifth fairway of the golf course, and then shoved Willie into the nuthouse, where he died.”

“Sounds pretty farfetched,” said Hanna.

“And then, it just could be that the family started the sabotage campaign when the word of the golf-course sale leaked out, because they didn't want people poking around. Maybe they were going to frighten off any prospective buyers or, if all else failed, buy the place themselves. That's why Conrad wanted me to find out about who was behind the development.”

“Doesn't fit,” complained Hanna. “What about Charlie Tinkelpaugh?”

I took another tart, to fuel thought. “Maybe Charlie Tinkelpaugh's death came from some scare tactic that went wrong. Then Dr. Rose came around, and was getting close to digging up the evidence, so he had to be knocked off, too.”

“What about the pink note?”

“I have no idea.”

Hanna was her usual sceptical self. “That scenario creates more questions than it answers. Besides, I thought we had Chuck Wilson marked down for the Rose murder.”

“We did, but he's got an alibi.”

“Well, Carlton, of course, I'm not very clever . . .”

“Yes, you are, Emma.”

“But, if the sale had already gone through, what was the point of a campaign to keep anyone from buying the golf course? It was already sold.”

“Maybe they didn't know that. Maybe they were just trying to queer the deal. I don't know.”

“And why did Mrs. Post suddenly take the village council out for a ten-day spin in her yacht?”

“I don't know that, either.”

Hanna broke in. “Well, when you get the answers to some of these questions, give me a call. In the meantime, I'm heading home. I'm bushed.”

“Gee, Hanna, I thought maybe you'd . . .”

“Like to stay the night? Don't look so embarrassed, Carlton. You're not going to shock Emma.”

“Not a bit,” said Emma.

“I've got a couple of things I have to do in town. But you call me first thing in the morning, Carlton, and we'll get this thing worked out yet.”

R-r-ring, it said, and said and said. I let the damn phone ring twenty-one times at the other end, slammed down my receiver, punched the redial button, listened to another score of fruitless rings, and then dialled in the number, digit by digit, just in case there was something wrong with the redial program on my automatic phone. Although there couldn't be, could there? I had dialled this very number just yesterday. It was seven a.m., a trifle early for me to be calling Hanna, I know. Not early for her; she rises with the lark and is full of jollity and merry quips long before this, the amazing creature. But it was early for me.

Drat the wench, she wasn't answering, which meant she was in the shower, or out jogging. Hanna is one of those people who count no day well started until they have rambled a few miles over hill and dale, using up good oxygen that is probably badly needed by the rest of us. I have a theory that global warming isn't caused by chlorofluorocarbons at all, whatever they may be, but by the heat given off by millions of joggers sweating themselves into a state of moral rectitude every morning.

I let it go for half an hour, then called again. Still no answer.

I called Joe Herkimer to no avail—out at the golf course, naturally, for an early morning lesson—and then finally decided to drive to town,
Marchepas
willing, and contact Hanna personally.

Marchepas
was willing, for a wonder, and when I got to Hanna's place, there was her rental car, sitting in the driveway. That settled it. She'd been out jogging. I went up and rang the doorbell. No answer. I hadn't rung it often, no more than forty or fifty times, when Hanna's landlady, who lives right below her, stuck her head out the door and said, “Carlton, for pity's sake, she's not home.”

“Oh, hello, Mrs. Prendergast. Her car's in the driveway.”

“It is? I thought I heard it pulling out earlier this morning. That's funny. Well, maybe she decided to walk downtown and have breakfast there.”

Of course she did.

I drove down to the O.K. Café, but Hanna wasn't there. Belinda Huntingdon, who pretty well runs the O.K., was busy with customers, so I sat at the counter to wait until she got a breathing spell.

It was, perhaps, twenty minutes before most of the seething mob had been served and Belinda was able to pour herself a cup of coffee and sit down beside me.

“Don't go into the restaurant business, Carlton,” she told me. “It's a mug's game.”

I promised her I wouldn't. “I couldn't wear the uniform,” I explained.

“Sure you could. They've got different ones for men.”

“Boy, what will they think of next?”

“You're kidding me again, aren't you?”

“Never. Passing quickly to another subject, Belinda, I've been trying to get hold of Hanna, and I was rather hoping to find she'd dropped in here for breakfast.”

“No-o-o.”

“Belinda, you say that as if there is some reason why you wouldn't expect Hanna to drop in for breakfast. I thought you two were buddies.”

“Oh, we are. It's just that, well, you wouldn't expect her to drop in for breakfast with a couple of men. They'd go to the Dominion House, or some place with cloth napkins.”

“A couple of men? You saw Hanna with a couple of men?”

“Uh-huh. In a car. Funny, I waved, but she didn't wave back.”

“When was this? This morning?”

“Uh-huh. Just before I opened at eight o'clock. I heard this car coming down Main Street pretty fast. Well, that was okay, because there's not much traffic that early in the morning, and I looked up and there was Hanna, in the front seat of a car, between two men, and, like I say, I waved and she didn't wave back.”

“Can you remember anything, any single thing, about the car?”

“No. It was just a car.”

“Red, black, blue? Grey-blue?”

“Carlton, how would I know? Hey, you're upset. Were they bad men?”

“Bless you, Belinda, yes, I have an idea that they were assholes and thugs, which comes, I guess, under the category of bad men. Are you sure you can't remember anything about the car?”

She furrowed her brow in concentration. “There was something.”

“What? What?”

“No use, it's gone. Say, listen, Carlton, I can see you're really upset, so as soon as the morning rush hour is over, I'll sit down with a pencil and a piece of paper and write it all out, and see if I can't remember something else.”

“You do that. Belinda?”

“Yes?”

“I need a hug. Could I have a hug?”

“Sure, honey.”

So she got up and gave me a hug, while every man in the restaurant hated me. I gave them all a wave as I rushed out.

I drove back to Hanna's place at speeds that would have had any radar detection device having conniption fits, and, with a lot of hand-waving and screeching, persuaded Mrs. Prendergast to let me into Hanna's apartment.

Nothing. There was nothing. No note, no dropped glove, nothing.

I phoned Joe Herkimer from Hanna's.

“Okay,” he said, very calm. “Here's what we do. You start back for your place at once—we need more reliable transportation than
Marchepas
—and I'll meet you there. It's about halfway to my house, anyway. We won't call the cops just yet, because if Hanna has been kidnapped, the kidnappers might not like that. Instead, I'll get a few of the warriors out in their cars; it may not do any good, but you never know. Then we'll have a major strategy session and decide what to do next. Got that?”

“Go to my place.”

“That's it. Go to your place,” Joe said, as if speaking to a rattled child. “I'll meet you there. Scoot.”

I scooted. Even so, Joe's station wagon turned the corner at the top of Third Street just as I was pulling into my driveway. He must have come through trees and parked cars. We went into the house together.

“First thing,” Joe said, and I thought how handy it was to have someone around whose brain still worked, “check your telephone-answering machine.”

I dashed through to the bedroom, and there it was, blinking, the way they do when they've got a message for you. Except that it was saying “2 . . . 2 . . . 2 . . .” There must be two messages. I punched the replay button, and out came a voice like a pound of plums, obviously disguised.

“Carlton Withers,” this voice said, “I am speaking to you on behalf of certain parties interested in the recent developments at Bosky Dell. We understand that, with your colleague Hanna Klovack, you have prepared certain materials to be released concerning these developments. We have Miss Klovack. Here she is.”

I heard, with a stab of agony, that familiar voice say, “Carlton?” Then it was cut off abruptly, and the pound-of-plums voice went on.

“Do not release these materials. Do not prepare any more material. Do not contact the police. Drop your investigation into this matter at once. In due course, Miss Klovack will be returned—if, and only if, you carry out these instructions. You will be contacted la—” The tape cut off. Even kidnappers can't make a telephone-answering machine cough up more than a minute of tape.

The tape stopped. There was the usual buzzing and whirring as the machinery hitched up its pants to deliver the second message, and then Belinda's voice came on the line.

“Carlton? Oh, God, I hate these machines. Your tape says I have one minute to leave a message. God, I can't do it in one minute. Here goes. Hi, Carlton, this is Belinda. I sat down, like I said I would, and this is what I remember. The car had one of those stickers, you know? On the back fender. You don't see them much around here. Which is funny, when you think about it, 'cause it's our paper, isn't it? It said, ‘Read the
Lancer
.' Bye.”

“I'll kill the bitch,” I said.

“Mrs. Post?” I told you he was smart.

“Yeah, Mrs. Post. Nobody uses those dumb bumper stickers. They tried to sell them, then they tried to give them away, but who's going to boast about reading a paper like the
Lancer
? If Belinda saw a
Lancer
bumper sticker, it was on one of the company cars. Let's go.”

“To the cops?”

“No, to Mrs. Post's. I'll strangle her a little, for starters.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute.” I had already started to get up, but sat down again. “There's something wrong here.”

“I agree. We're going to set it right.”

“No, no. Think about it. You are Mrs. Post. You learn, maybe through your managing editor, Tommy Macklin, that a story is about to break that will not put you in a good light. You decide to suppress the story. Grabbing Hanna would certainly do that, wouldn't it?”

I nodded vigorously.

“So, you call in a couple of the boys from the shipping room, and tell them to go and grab Hanna. ‘Oh, and by the way,' you tell them, ‘be sure to take a company car. I hate paying mileage.'”

“Ah. You think it's a fake?”

“I think it could be a fake. Any car could carry a
Lancer
bumper sticker. The ad guys probably go around and slap them on parked cars in the shopping mall. I think you should put in a phone call to Mrs. Post and see if you can learn anything from that. I mean, if she's just grabbed Hanna, the conversation is going to be a little constrained, isn't it?”

Well, it
was
a little constrained. Very considerably constrained by the fact that, according to Mrs. Post's housekeeper, Rowena, the mistress was not at home. Had not been at home since early Sunday morning, when, according to Rowena, she took the limousine to the Toronto airport, headed for Nassau, to meet her yacht. There was going to be a colloquium of conspirators, I guessed.

“Rowena, how did she look?”

“How did she look when, Mr. Withers?”

“When she left.” It would be a little indelicate to ask if the woman had worn the look of someone who had just arranged a kidnapping, but I couldn't think of any other way to put it.

“She looked bagged, Mr. Withers.”

“Bagged?”

“Bagged. She was wearing an ice pack, under her hat, and she instructed me to destroy all stocks of liquor now in the house, and never to buy any more. Are there any further questions? I have the rugs to vacuum.”

“No, that's it, and happy Hoovering to you. Thanks.”

“I guess she had the mother and father of all hangovers after your little romp on the golf course,” said Joe, when I repeated the conversation to him.

“Does that let her out, as kidnapper?”

“I think it does. Not absolutely, but pretty well. You don't come home with a buzz on, lie down, wake up with the feeling that a foundry has just been opened in your forehead, and set about arranging to kidnap people.”

“Okay. Who's next? Amelia Jowett and the Anthropoid? Chuck and the Slugs?”

“I'm glad you put it that way, because I think we've been unable to get anywhere on this thing because we keep trying to tie everything together.”

“We should be tearing them apart?”

“We should be looking at the most obvious aspect of the whole situation, which is its built-in contradictions.”

“Come again?”

“We have been beating our heads against a tree trying to figure out why somebody would be, in the first place, sabotaging the golf course and going so far as to plant a bomb out there, which we have assumed means they are trying to block the sale and, in the second place, doing everything they can to further the sale, such as getting the councillors out of town so they can't be grilled about allowing the deal to go through. The obvious conclusion is—”

“Two bunches of blackguards.”

“Right, first time. But only partly right.”

“Why only partly?”

“Because there are two groups of people who might want to make sure the sale didn't go forward. Two Deers and his band of zealots, for their own political reasons, and Conrad Jowett and his family, because they think it would be indelicate to release the facts concerning Uncle Willie's indiscretions. If there were any indiscretions, since all we have so far is your wild guess that he happened to be a homicidal maniac. Then there is a third group, wanting the sale to go forward: namely, Sylvia Post and her gaggle of unindicted co-conspirators.”

“Emma Golden says the Jowetts wouldn't have done the sabotaging bit, because the sale had already gone ahead. There was no point in it. And you say Chuck and the Slugs didn't, because it isn't their style.”

“Well, it sure as heck wasn't Mrs. Post. Hell, I don't know, Carlton, maybe there's yet a fourth villain out there somewhere, or maybe there's something about the timing that explains what's been happening. I think we should dot the I's and cross the T's later; right now, I think we should get over to the Jowett place and see if we can get them off our list of suspects. Although, I'll tell you one thing,” he went on, as we headed out the door. “That telephone message didn't sound like anything that Chuck Wilson ever wrote, much less said.”

“You know who the phraseology sounded like?”

“Yes. Your old pal, Robinson, the friendly ghost.”