Hole in One (20 page)

“I'm not at all sure you do. Willie wanted desperately to succeed at something on his own. I gather, from what he told me later, when it went so horribly wrong, that he meant to use the money to start some sort of business by himself. He knew nothing about Far Lake, or the bank, but he drove up from Toronto one day to, I believe the expression is ‘case the joint.' That's where he ran into the janitor who worked in the bank. A man named Watson. In another beer parlour, this time in Far Lake. There were two or three meetings between them, and they came to an arrangement. Professionals would be brought in to carry out a robbery, with the aid of the janitor. The proceeds would be evenly divided among the four of them.”

“What about the original tipster? The guy in the Toronto beer parlour?”

“He was not party to the arrangement. Just a man who talked too much.”

I looked at Joe out of one corner of one eye. He was looking at me. We were both thinking the same thing. Conrad Jowett thought he knew everything, but he hadn't, at least not yet, connected Watson to Chuck Wilson.

“Who contacted the thugs? Was it Watson?”

Conrad nodded again. “Apparently he had met one of them during a brief sojourn of his own in jail.”

“How did they happen to get killed?”

“The robbery itself went off smoothly enough, and the four men—the two hired thugs, this fellow Watson, and my brother Willie—fixed a rendezvous to . . . ah . . . divvy up the spoils. Willie suggested the golf course here; he had played a few rounds while visiting friends and knew it was a place far enough away from Far Lake to be safe, and was easy to find. He also learned, by looking at an Ontario roadmap, that you can drive here from Far Lake without ever going on any main roads, which were likely to be blocked by police after the robbery. The arrangement seemed agreeable to all, and they were to meet on the fifth fairway, out of sight of both the clubhouse and the road, the day after the robbery.”

“But they didn't.”

“Not the next day, no. Not, in fact, for two weeks. There was so much excitement, and so many police crawling all over all the roads, that they split up, and had to postpone their rendezvous twice.”

“By which time,” put in Joe, “you had scooped the proceeds and thrown it into the commodities market.”

“Not all the proceeds,” Conrad protested. “Just about two-thirds. The robbery actually produced an . . . um . . . return of $210,000. It was in two bags; Willie grabbed one of these, and one of the hired thugs had the other. The arrangement was that they would pool the proceeds and split them evenly, in due course. But, as things worked out, I took over Willie's bag, which turned out to have $140,000 in it.”

“How?” I wanted to know. “How did you get Willie's share?”

“Well, of course the poor fellow came to see me, right after the robbery, and blurted it all out. I told him to hand over the money, and he did, just like that. Willie was never able to stand up to me. I knew about this situation in sugar, and I certainly wasn't going to turn my own brother over to the police. So, I put the two situations together. I told Willie to tell his colleagues that half the loot had been invested—they had no reason to suspect that it was rather more than half—and that, later on, there would be more for the . . . uh . . . syndicate to share, as soon as the options came due.”

“That must have led to a certain embarrassment between Willie and the boys,” I said.

Conrad grunted. “You could call it that. Willie must have stolen my copy of the options agreement. I don't even remember it disappearing, and it is only a record in any event. The actual transaction is registered at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. I can only conclude that Willie took this along to the rendezvous, as proof of good faith. It was not accepted as such.”

Joe said, “No surprise there.”

“I don't know the details,” Conrad went on. “Only that Willie, who had provided himself with a gun, apparently shot the two thugs during their . . . uh . . . discussions. He and Watson then came to an understanding that Watson would keep the second bag of money from the bank robbery. Watson, who was not a very bright fellow, apparently felt that, because there were two bags of money in the bank safe, they represented equal shares. The news reports of the time mentioned a sum of $140,000 rather than $210,000; his bag contained $70,000. He believed, mistakenly, that he had half the take. It was Watson who actually buried the bodies.”

“I presume Willie told you all about it?”

“Not about the options slip. I never even knew of its existence until Robinson heard of it on the radio, and, of course, recognized both the significance of the numbers and the possibility that, sooner or later, someone, somewhere, might work out the significance of that slip—even though quite a different form is used today—and trace it back to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. And thus, to me. We began at once to close down operations here. You may have noticed a moving van.”

“The moving van comes from Maryland. Are you headed for Maryland? That's where you shipped Willie off to after things went sour, isn't it?”

“It is. I told him to get out of my office and out of the country as quickly as possible. Robinson arranged for us to open a small operation in Baltimore, ostensibly for Willie to run, but, of course, he just drank himself silly and got into trouble of all sorts. He was killed, apparently by a local hoodlum, probably over some falling out down there.”

“You mean that stuff about dying in Bellevue Sanatorium was just a story?”

“Just a story. It was not hard to plant it, in a community as fond of gossip as this one.”

Joe said, “I take it, then, that the real reason you bought The Eagle's Nest was to keep an eye on the golf course?”

“That was an added bonus. You see, we had no idea at that time that it was possible to buy the golf course, which would have been the simple solution. In fact, when Robinson investigated the matter, he was told that it could not be done. It seemed to us the best we could do was to leave things as they were. While we were up here, on that original trip to check out what Willie had told me, we saw that The Eagle's Nest was for sale. It was and is a most desirable property, and, of course, it did have the advantage of allowing us to keep an eye on the golf course, in case anything were to be . . . ah . . . disturbed. We concluded the purchase, and everything went along quite smoothly, until recently.”

There was a brief pause while we thought about that.

“Coming back to your story file, Carlton, I must say I am grateful to you for the information that the golf-course purchase was arranged by—how did you put it?—‘a local personality with publishing interests.' Mrs. Post. Stupid of us not to have thought of that. For some reason, when you think of developers, you immediately imagine outsiders, from Toronto. It has all become rather academic now, but I presume that it will not be difficult to get the development stopped, since the sale is doubtless illegal.”

“Does it matter? The bodies have been found. Your charade is over.”

“Of course it matters. Robinson was quite serious when he told you that I undertook to protect Sir John's bequests to the village. When I leave, which is in only a matter of a few hours now, the golf course will be as it was.”

“Minus the bodies, of course.”

“They were not part of Sir John's bequest.” Another smile.

“Who orchestrated the sabotage at the golf course?”

“Amelia.”

The reply came not from Conrad Jowett but from Robinson, who had re-entered the room and was now standing directly behind Joe, holding, I regretted to note, a very sinister-looking gun of some sort, which had, unless ten thousand TV shows had led me astray, a silencer on the barrel.

“Amelia,” Robinson repeated, “my great-niece. She got a tremendous kick out of it. She and Harrison—not that Harrison does much but trail around after her and do her bidding—arranged it all.”

“She said he had just arrived.”

“Amelia,” Robinson smiled, “does not always tell the truth.”

“Wouldn't it have been simpler to buyout the other party and get the golf course yourselves?”

Conrad replied, “Ah, but we didn't know there was another party, did we? I think you'll find, if you check the dates on the deed, that this whole sale was orchestrated very carefully before anything was done, and then it was all done within a couple of days. The closing wasn't to take place until last Friday, the very day Charlie Tinkelpaugh met with that unfortunate accident; the very day the village councillors, as we now know, left for their yacht ride.

“We had heard—it is impossible not to hear things in a community this small—that someone was looking at the golf course. About six weeks ago, a survey crew from Toronto appeared, presumably at Mrs. Post's behest, so she would know exactly what she was buying. One of my employees spotted them and reported to me. We decided that, if someone was able to buy the golf course, we would, as you have so wisely pointed out, be better to get it ourselves. But first we had to discourage the other party. We presumed, quite wrongly, that they were trying to buy the golf course as a golf course. So far as we knew, and in fact, so far as we know today, it couldn't be converted to any other use.”

Conrad looked down briefly at his nails before continuing.

“But if it could be purchased, we would purchase it. That was the point of asking Amelia to . . .”

“. . . conduct a campaign of terror.”

“. . . see to it that the golf course became a less attractive proposition. Very quietly, of course; not actually concealed, but keeping very much to herself. She didn't really show herself until, you will recall, Mr. Tinkelpaugh's demise brought that aspect of things to an abrupt halt.”

“Tell me about Charlie Tinkelpaugh.”

“You understand, of course,” Robinson said, “that we knew nothing of what Amelia was actually doing. We asked her to take care of it; she is a very intelligent and ruthless young woman, and we felt we didn't have to say more than that. However, she was perhaps a little more ruthless than anyone expected. She has a rather strange turn of mind, and she has always had a penchant for rather elaborate, sometimes cruel, practical jokes. Thus, the laxative in the well.”

“Yes, but explosives?”

Conrad sounded apologetic as he took up the tale. “I ought to have predicted that, but I did not. Amelia has a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Maryland. I gather she found no difficulty whatever in rigging up what was supposed to be a harmless, time-delayed explosion, which would be set off thirty seconds after the pin was removed from the hole. As you know, the normal practice is to lift the flagstick and set it aside, and then go and line up your putt.

“A thirty-second delay should have caused a very loud explosion, but nothing more. As it was . . .”

He paused.

I asked, “Where did she get the explosives?”

“Made them herself, in the lab in Maryland, and brought them over the border in her purse.”

“There's something wrong here,” said Joe. “For a chemical engineer, it isn't hard to calculate how much of a bang how much explosive will generate. If Amelia was merely setting out to scare the bejabbers out of people, the blast would have been a tenth, a hundredth, of what actually occurred.”

There was silence again. I swivelled my head to look at Robinson. He was looking at Conrad. Conrad nodded.

“Yes, of course, you are quite right,” said Robinson. “The fact is that Amelia is, has become, or is very rapidly becoming . . .”

“As crazy as a coot,” I said.

“. . . somewhat out of control. There were a number of signs of this. The most dramatic was the quite unnecessary death of Mr. Tinkelpaugh. Then, of course, there was the attack on yourself and Miss Klovack, in the car.”

“You knew that was deliberate?”

Robinson nodded. “Harrison came to me. I gather that something you said to Amelia on the telephone caused her great excitement. She said you had information that was dangerous to us all and rushed off in her car. When he heard about the . . . uh . . . accident later, even Harrison recognized that Amelia had to be stopped. Despite his appearance, he is really quite a sweet chap, although, of course, utterly devoted to Amelia. He recognized that, for her own good, something had to be done. Not only was her attack on you and Hanna quite pointless, it was very likely to be brought home to her.”

Conrad jumped in. “She will be given the finest of care.”

I was now beginning to realize that we were being told too much and too little. Too much to leave us alive, not enough to satisfy my natural curiosity. If I was going to die, I wouldn't die ignorant.

“Did you people arrange for Chuck Wilson to kill Dr. Rose?”

“Carlton, my dear chap, we didn't arrange for anybody to kill anybody,” Conrad replied, with the utmost sincerity. “Amelia killed Charlie Tinkelpaugh, we grant you that. She says she didn't mean to injure anyone with her little device, but you may choose to doubt that. My brother William killed two thugs, years ago. That is all. As for Wilson, whoever he may be, we have never spoken to the man.”

“Did you ever speak to Charlie Watson?” Joe asked.

Robinson answered this one. “No. We wanted no connection whatever with him. We hadn't heard anything of him for forty years.”

Conrad said, “As to Dr. Rose, you will understand, if you think about it for a minute, that we had nothing to do with that. As you yourself pointed out in the first story written under Hanna's byline—”

“Where did you see that?”

“It was on the front page of the
Lancer
this very day, Carlton.”

I'd forgotten. What with one thing and another, I had completely forgotten to read the
Lancer
today. Shame on me.

Robinson went on, “That story pointed out that another expert would be sent to investigate, and then another. As was bound to be the case. We couldn't keep killing them. Surely you see that?”