Hole in One (23 page)

“You mean he was lying there, expiring on the rug, and he told her the story of the Far Lake bank robbery?”

“No. I gather she knew all about that beforehand. I guess he and Amelia were pretty close, and, since he didn't think much of his own son, he unburdened to Amelia.”

“Sit on my knee, granddaughter, and I will tell you of my misspent youth?”

“Something like that, yeah. Anyway, she knew about the robbery, knew he had set it up, and knew it was an inside job. But he must have edited the story somewhat, because he told her it was the inside partner, not himself, who had killed the two hired hands. And he said the same person had come down to Maryland and accused him of cheating him on the split.”

“Chuck Wilson,” said Joe.

“Must have been,” Hanna replied. “I've been thinking about it; I didn't have much else to do, after Amelia finally left. The way I work it out, Wilson must have read the same crime flashback that Carlton's pal at the county office showed him the other day, only he read it when it first came out in the Sun. From that, he knew that he had been shortchanged in the split of the proceeds from the bank robbery all those years ago, and he went down to Baltimore to see what he could do about collecting another $35,000.”

“Why $35,000?” Mathematics is not my strong suit.

“Silly, that's half of $70,000. The story said the original amount mentioned as loot was $140,000, but the insurance claim was for $210,000. The difference is $70,000.”

“That's the money Conrad Jowett got from Willie.”

“Huh?”

I explained how Old Man Jowett had invested the bank spoils in commodities, and cleaned up.

“Actually,” I corrected myself, “Conrad got $140,000.”

“Amelia didn't say anything about that. She just said that they had lots of money while she was growing up, and then it kind of petered out in recent years. I guess Willie eventually ran through whatever Conrad gave him, so he didn't have anything left to share with his former partner, who took it rather hard, and shot him.”

“And he told Amelia the erstwhile partner was Charlie Tinkelpaugh? Why would he do that?”

Hanna shook her head. “No. What he told her was, ‘Charlie.' She was very clear on that. She had said to him, ‘Who did this to you, Grandpa?' And he said, ‘Charlie.' And then he died.”

“Charles Watson. Charlie Tinkelpaugh,” I said. “It was as simple as that.”

“I guess so. Anyway, Amelia was pretty sore about what had happened to her dear old grandfather, but she could hardly just jump up, grab the family blunderbuss off the wall, and come charging up north for vengeance. Then, when she received the summons to come up to Bosky Dell and use her particular skills to protect the family's interests by queering the sale of the golf course, she saw her chance.”

“Lord have mercy. You mean, she packed her toothbrush and her little kit of combustibles and lit out for Bosky Dell?”

“Right. And when she did some checking on the story, she came up with only one person named Charlie who was still anywhere around: Charlie Tinkelpaugh, who perfectly fit the description of an insider on the bank robbery. She decided that the family honour, the need to keep the story hushed up, and good old-fashioned revenge all directed her to kill Charlie Tinkelpaugh.”

“Did she tell you how she did that?”

“Sure. She figured somebody ought to know. She said the timing device was just a blind. She was following Charlie Tinkelpaugh around and knew quite a bit about him and his habits. I gather she even approached him once, to ask him if he had ever known a man named William Jowett, and he brushed her off. She concluded that he was simply covering up, but the fact is, there is no reason why he ever would have heard of Uncle Willie.”

“That just made her more determined to kill him?”

“Uh-huh. She worked it into what she called ‘the golf-course project.' She knew Tinkelpaugh and his cronies played golf first thing every day, so she arranged her little package of dynamite in the hole and hid in the bushes just off the rough. She watched until she saw Charlie bending over the hole, and set off the charge with a radio signal. Simplest thing in the world.”

“But she must have had second thoughts,” I said.

Hanna nodded. “She did. Everybody was discussing the murder, of course, and apparently Amelia got talking to one of the maids about it. She mentioned, oh, so casually, that the killing might have been connected to the big bank robbery she had heard about around here so many years ago, and the maid told her flatly that Charlie Tinkelpaugh had had nothing to do with that, except that he was the manager of the bank. I guess the maid had worked at the Tinkelpaughs, at some point, and said Mr. Tinkelpaugh would never be involved in anything crooked. If you asked her, she said, the whole thing had been engineered by the janitor, the one who disappeared. The maid said she thought the name was Watson. Cecil, or maybe Charles, Watson.”

“That's why she wanted me to check out Watson, who turned out to be Wilson.”

“Yup. And you did. And the minute you gave her the name Chuck Wilson, she realized that Willie might just as well have been referring to him as to Charlie Tinkelpaugh. She also realized that you were bound to get onto the fact that both Wilson/Watson and Charlie Tinkelpaugh were connected to the Far Lake robbery, and the whole thing would come out. That's why she decided to put you and me out of action, too.”

“Well, I have to be grateful to her for that, at least.”

“Grateful?” Darlene Herkimer was intrigued. “Why are you grateful?”

“Because,” her husband told her, “it was the messed-up attempt to wipe out Carlton and Hanna that brought them together again. But never mind that,” he went on. “It's what happened after that that counts.”

I said, “You mean Chuck Wilson's death? Did she say anything about that, Hanna?”

“Oh, yes. I told you she was boasting. She found out where he lived simply by asking at the arts shop; so she went around, loosened the propane fitting on his outside tank, and left a lighted twist of paper behind as she took off. She said the simplest things work best. She also said, and I am not making this up, ‘Grandaddy would be pleased.'”

We thought about this for a minute, then Joe pronounced.

“Crackers,” he said.

“This whole thing is crackers,” I replied. “Why did they grab you, Hanna, in the first place? Why not just grab me?”

Darlene knew the answer to that. “In Bosky Dell? You can't come driving up to a house in this village and just hoick somebody away. All hell, beginning with Emma Golden, would break loose. It made much more sense to grab Hanna and use that leverage to keep you quiet until—”

“Until what?” I wanted to know. “Were they going to knock us off, or get out of town, or what?”

“I don't think they knew,” said Joe. “This whole affair has had a makeshift, botched-up look to it. I think you're expecting too much logic out of the Jowett clan, when, in fact, they were in a blind panic from the moment they realized that the commodities slip had been found. They were just doing anything they could to buy time and, as it turned out, Conrad and Robinson had quite different notions of what was acceptable. Didn't it strike you as kind of funny that Conrad was telling us all that stuff?”

“I thought he was just boasting.”

“I don't. I think he was deliberately giving us so much information that we would have to be killed, and that Robinson would see we had to be killed.”

“Robinson didn't even know half of what Conrad was saying to us.”

“He could guess. Or Conrad could tell him. He's a gambler, Carlton; every big businessman is. Think about it: one day, he's slated to be lieutenant governor, the next, practically, he's headed for the hoosegow. He had no clear way out, but he could buy time. The only way he could do that was to up the ante. So he did. I'll bet he didn't know himself exactly what he was going to do to us, or to Hanna. For all Conrad knew, Hanna had no idea where she was. She could be turned loose. But could we? The only thing he knew for sure was that he would be better off if he could get even a few hours head start, and that if it turned out to be necessary to knock us off, well, that would bind Robinson, the one person who knew everything there was to know about him, to silence.”

I thought about this a bit. “Maybe. But he guessed wrong, didn't he?”

“In the end, he did,” said Joe. “Robinson was prepared to keep silent, all right, but he wasn't prepared to go along with more killing.”

“Why didn't he just call the cops?”

“I don't think he could,” said Hanna. “After all, it's one thing to drop a knife in someone's lap, another thing to call up 911 and say you want to squeal on your brother. He was doing the same thing Conrad was, just desperately reacting to events on the spur of the moment. You keep looking for logic, and there was none.”

Then the cops were there. No sirens. You could just hear cars, about four of them, turn up the driveway and roll out onto the lawn. A car door slammed. There was a knock on the porch door of the Jowett place, and a low murmur of voices. I don't know what I was expecting—a shoot-out, I guess—but there was nothing of the sort.

After a few minutes, all the lights went on all over the Jowett place. We later learned that the OPP and the Silver Falls cops had finally gotten together, deployed, come in from both ends of the house, and just moved in and scooped everybody. Hanna and I ran up and found them in the living room with Conrad Jowett, who was looking suave, Robinson, who actually waved and smiled when he saw me, and Amelia, who had Sergeant Moffitt by the arm, and was babbling in his ear—trying, already, to cut a deal.

Hanna looked around at the bewildered businessmen and their women, the Jowett hangers-on, the milling cops, and the warriors, now dodging about and trying to snaffle bits of birthday cake from the plates scattered all over the room.

“Well, Carlton,” she said, “it's too bad we don't work for a newspaper. This would make quite a story.”

The shades of evening, beloved in song and story, were drawing down on the peaceful little golf course on the edge of Bosky Dell a few days later, and Hanna and I were out on the sixth fairway, the one that runs along Willow Creek, happily hacking away. I had lost a ball in the bushes, of course, and Hanna came to help me find it, and a certain amount of extraneous activity not covered by St. Andrew's Rules took place, and then Hanna said, “What about Robinson?”

“How do you mean, ‘What about Robinson?'”

“Will he get a long jail term?”

“Who knows? They'll have the best lawyers money can buy. I was talking to Harry Burnett this afternoon, and he says he's sure Robinson will cooperate with the Crown—not so much in return for a lighter sentence as to get the thing over and done with. The cops will put in a kindly word for him. They're sure it was Robinson who called them on the morning of the golf tournament and tipped them off to check out the fifth fairway. I didn't tell them it was me. Conrad, of course, will bluff and fight and lie and do his damndest, but if Robinson goes into the stand and tells the truth, Conrad is going to wind up in the clink for a spell, as an accessory to murder.”

“How about your girlfriend?”

“Amelia? I, personally, think she's headed for Penatanguishene; she's buggier than a flophouse mattress. I'd be willing to bet that every psychiatrist in the nation is going to fight for the chance to peer into her twisted head.”

“To say nothing of her shirt front.”

“Poor old Harrison is more likely to do time than Amelia, and he probably never had any idea what was going on.”

“Isn't Mrs. Post going to be a trifle upset when her role in all this comes out?”

“It will probably get lost in all the other excitement. After all, it wasn't really much of a role, was it? She tried to buy the golf course and suborned the village councillors, who will have a lot of explaining to do, but the whole thing went phut! on her, and really, no harm done. It doesn't make much of a story compared to multiple murders.”

“Well, didn't she steal the deed? Won't she be charged with that?”

“Oh, no, didn't I tell you? That was Robinson; you were right to be suspicious of him. He just went in, got the file out, slipped the deed into his attaché case, and then presented Larry, the clerk, with the empty file folder. Larry duly signed that there had been nothing in it.”

“But why? What was the point of stealing the deed?”

“Just to delay things. He wanted us to find out who was behind the dummy corporation, and grabbing the deed would confuse matters for a time. You'll remember the deal was set up to close in a hurry, but if the original of the deed was gone, there would have to be a new one issued. It was a delaying tactic, that's all.”

Hanna started to walk out onto the fairway, and sort of muttered, “Carlton?”

“By golly, I think this is my ball.”

“Carlton?”

“It is! Titleist 2, with a nick right through the 2. It's my ball. You realize this is an epochal event, Hanna.”

“Carlton!”

“I've never actually found one of my balls before. I've found balls before, but never actually the very one I put into the bushes myself. This is . . .”

Hanna had stomped back over to me by this time, and grabbed my arm, just as I addressed the ball, which caused me to hit it right, for a change, and it whipped up through an opening in the branches and disappeared, headed, if you can believe it, for the green.

“Listen to me.”

“I won't. I won't listen to you. Why do you think I'm babbling on?”

“You know what I'm going to say?”

“Of course I know what you're going to say. I've seen how revved up you've been the past few days, giving interviews, helping all your media buddies with the story, running around Bosky Dell and Silver Falls snapping pictures, about four feet off the ground.”

“That isn't what I was going to say.”

“And I saw you talking to the old gent in the car with the
Toronto
Star
logo on the side.”

“That was Norman Schacter, the Insight Editor.”

“He's offered you a hell of a big raise to come back and work for the
Star
, hasn't he?”

“He has.”

“And you're going to take it, aren't you?”

“Boy, you know everything, don't you? Carlton, come with me.”

So I went with her. I was drooping on my stem, but I went. We tramped out of the woods, onto the fairway, and along about fifty yards, where Hanna's ball sat in a little hollow, kind of hard to reach, but perfectly playable. My own ball, I noticed, was further along, but then, I was a stroke behind. I am always, it seems, a stroke behind.

“Carlton, pay attention!”

I transferred a listless gaze to where Hanna stood with her nine iron in her hand. She reached down with the iron and deliberately, and quite feloniously, hooked the blade of the club under the ball and shifted it onto level ground. Then she smacked it onto the green, about ten feet from the pin, turned around, and glared at me defiantly.

“You cheated,” I said.

“Winter rules,” she said.

“Miss Klovack,” I said, “will you marry me?”

“Well, hell, I guess I'd better,” said Hanna. “You've corrupted me completely.”