Hole in One (7 page)

It was Klovack, of course, looking fetching in a bright orange blouse, white slacks, and an expression of implacable hatred.

“Ah, Hanna. I was just . . .”

“I can see what you were just, and it doesn't surprise me a bit. It goes with the magazines,” she snorted, and then charged ahead, before I could explain how wrong she was in what she was thinking—well, perhaps not so much wrong, as inconvenient. “However, that is none of my concern. I was told up at the house that you would be down here, but not,” she added, “that you were bruising your eyeballs.”

“And perhaps you would be good enough to explain, Miss Klovack,” I responded—chilled steel, you understand—“why you have come here in the first place, butting in—”

“I was not butting in. I came to deliver a message.”

“Pardon me, butting in to deliver a message, interrupting my busy schedule—”

“I thought you might be glad of a break. I was told by a very strange-looking gent that you were painting screens.”

“I am painting screens.”

“With what, your tongue? It was hanging out a foot when I came in here.”

I did not deliver the stunning riposte this crack deserved, in part because I couldn't think of anything to say and in part because, just at that moment, thank God, the screen door that led out to the dock banged open and in came Amelia. She was wearing all her bathing suit by now, such as it was, and yet managed to look just about as uncluttered by clothing as before. There was quite a lot more material in the kerchief than in the bathing suit, and I wondered if she had ever considered switching the two. She just stood there, gazing at us, and I may have done a certain amount of gazing myself, because I suddenly received the Klovack elbow in the midriff, just as Amelia crooned, “Why, Carlton, honey, aren't you going to introduce us?”

“Certainly, certainly. This is . . .” And I couldn't, for the life of me, what with one thing and another, immediately recall Hanna's name.

“Klovack. Hanna Klovack.” Hanna produced her name and her hand, which Amelia shook, uncertainly.

“And this is . . .” Well, then, of course, I couldn't remember her name, either. It was not one of my good mornings.

“Amelia. Amelia Jowett. I'm surely pleased to meet you?”

“Oh. Are you one of the daughters of the house?”

“Great-niece of Mr. Conrad,” Amelia explained. “My granddaddy was Conrad's brother? And you're a friend of Carlton's?”

Well, that was a laugh.

“No. Just a colleague. I came to deliver a message.”

“Former colleague,” I explained. “Hanna and I worked together at the Silver Falls
Lancer
, before I decided to explore other avenues.”

“Before you were fired, you mean.”

“Carlton, honey, you're a reporter?” Amelia seemed to think that was something—people do, who know nothing of journalism—and she kind of oozed over, reached out to put one cool hand on my trembling forearm, and gave me the business out of those tawny eyes that resembled limpid pools. “Maybe you'll write something about little ol' me?”

Hanna, whose eyes are black, and resembled a couple of blowtorches, shot back, “Well, he won't be writing anything about little ol' anybody if he doesn't get his ass over to the armoury. He's supposed to cover the Dairy Queen contest. That's the message,” she told me. “From Tommy. You're hired again.”

This needed thinking on. I turned to Amelia. “Miss Jowett, I wonder if you'd excuse us a minute, I need to discuss something with my . . . ah . . . former colleague.”

“Certainly, honey. I just came in to see what the noise was all about?” she explained.

With that, she swayed out the door, and it may be that I stared after her longer than is considered in the best of taste, because Hanna suddenly stamped on my foot.

“Hey, that hurt!”

“Good. Now, Tommy said to tell you you're rehired. He said it wasn't his idea, and I was to tell you that the publisher is the one who made the decision. I gather the Johnson chain lost a lawsuit recently for wrongful dismissal, so Mrs. Post told Tommy he had to have a good reason to fire you.”

“But he did, for once! I told him I was working on this freelance assignment with you and couldn't do a job for him, so he fired me.”

“Hmm.” Something approaching remorse appeared in Hanna's eyes, but it didn't last long. “Well, be that as it may, Mrs. Post told him to put you back on the payroll. So you're back on the payroll, and Tommy told me to tell you to get back to town and over to the armoury. The Dairy Queen contest kicks off in half an hour. I,” she added, “am going to take the pictures.”

“Well, snappy shutters to you. But I'm not going.”

“You're not going? What do you mean, you're not going?”

“I've got a job. Here.”

“Here? You mean painting screens and ogling Grits-for-Brains? You call that a job?”

“I do. A good job, too. It pays almost as much as Tommy paid me, and I don't have to put up with that little pipsqueak.”

“Yes, well, now you've got that out of your system, stick your eyeballs back in their sockets, stop drooling, and come with me. We're going to cover Miss Dairy Queen.”

Hanna started out the door, then stopped as she realized I wasn't coming.

“Carlton, you're smiling. Why are you smiling?”

“I was just thinking of Tommy Macklin having to cover the Dairy Queen contest himself. He can't send Billy Haldane; he'll screw up all the names.”

This was a lie. It was not a lie that Tommy couldn't send Billy Haldane because he would screw up the names—history records that he once inscribed Betsy Teskey as Buzy Titsup, and I'm not even going to tell you what he did to Marilyn Farquahar—but it was a lie that I was smiling at the thought of Tommy having to cover the contest. I was smiling because I could see what must have happened. Hanna must have stuck up for me again, and made Tommy give me my job back. Why would Mrs. Post stick up for me? She never had on my previous firings. But I wasn't going to take it back, no sir, not until I had straightened out this murder business and made Hanna see what a fathead she had been to bring in this outside hotshot from Toronto. Then, and only then, would I consider re-employment at the
Lancer
. With a raise. But, of course, I couldn't explain that to Hanna.

“Carlton. This is serious.” She, in turn, came over and put a slender hand on my forearm—it was one of my forearm's better days—and, in turn gave me the business with her eyes, and, if I tell you that the urge came over me to cover her upturned face with burning kisses such as we find on page 178 of
My Vagrant Heart
(Edith Primrose Wharton, Drool Romances, 1989), you must promise to keep it to yourself. “I went to some trouble to get Tommy to give you your job back, and, besides, Pete needs you to do some legwork for him.”

“Pete? Peter Duke? Legwork?” I shook the Klovack mitt off my forearm. “He's the hotshot. Let him do his own legwork.”

“Oh, Carlton, get serious. He's a television reporter.”

Television reporters, it is pretty widely known, are hired for their throaty voices and cultured eyebrows. They read the news; they don't report it.

“Well, I guess it shows something, if he asked for me.”

“He didn't ask for you. He doesn't even know about you.”

“Hey, wait a minute. You said he needed me to do some legwork.”

“So he does. But he doesn't know that yet. He's too busy signing autographs to get started on the case. But when he does, he's going to need some help from someone who understands the local scene. And that, my boy, is you. C'mon.”

Again, she headed for the door, confidently expecting me to trail along in her wake. “Forget it,” I said.

She stopped, again, turned wearily around, and muttered, “What now?”

“You come out here, interrupting me at my work, interfering with my job arrangements, insulting my friends . . .”

“Ha, friends! You mean Miss Magnolia Blossom?”

“. . . and think you can just order me around. Well, you can't. Tommy fired me, and I'm staying fired. Put that in your camera case,” I finished, “and see what develops.”

She gave me the wide-eyed stare. “Well, spunky little devil, aren't you? Okay, have it your own way, and many prurient dreams to you.”

And she banged out the door.

A few minutes later, after Amelia had returned and reclaimed the chaise longue, and I had begun splashing the paint around again, a four-wheel-drive station wagon came bouncing across the greensward and pulled to a halt just outside the door. Joe Herkimer was in the driver's seat, and he gave me an imperious come-here wave. I went out.

“Morning, Joe,” I said. “What brings you here?”

“Get in,” he said.

I went around to the passenger's side.

“I ran into Hanna on the road to town,” he said, as he wheeled the station wagon across the grass and headed off down Lakeshore Road. “She told me where I could find you, and she also told me she hoped I would find that you had dropped dead. What is that all about?”

“Nothing. Well, not nothing, but . . .”

“Well, never mind, we have more important things to worry about than your love life. There's been another murder.”

Joe didn't say anything much during the ride to town; my repeated questions were met with a stern, “Wait and see,” as we whizzed, at Hanna-like speeds, along County Road 32 to Silver Falls and out the other side. We drew up at the Bide-a-Wee Motel, “Your Home from Home in the Kawarthas,” on Highway 4, about a mile west of downtown, and pulled in directly in front of one of the cabins along the Magog River. There was a cluster of other cars around the cabin; one, I noted, had a Red Power bumper sticker on it, and one was Hanna's. Obviously, she had cut herself in on this, somehow.

As Joe got out of the station wagon, he extracted a large key with a metal tag on it from his pocket, and, walking around the vehicle, gave it to me.

“Cabin 10,” he said. “You go in.”

“This is where the body is?”

He nodded.

“And you want me to go in? Why should I go in?”

“Figure it out,” said Hanna, and she whipped out her Nikon and strode over to the tree-shaded door of Cabin 10, where she waited, expectantly.

“Nobody's called the cops yet,” I said, “is that it?”

A grizzled gent with an eagle feather stuck through the top of a black felt hat replied, “That's it.”

I looked at him again. “Chuck Wilson, by all that's holy. What are you doing here?”

“What does it look like?” he said.

“I didn't know you were . . . uh . . . given to wearing eagle feathers,” I said.

Chuck Wilson worked in the composing room at the
Lancer
, and I knew him as a competent, if somewhat surly, colleague. We had once had a screaming match at press time, when a headline I had put over a photograph of a teenager doing the twist at the high school's Oldtime Dance came back to me, in proof form, with a typographical error in it. The overline was supposed to say, “Look at the Twist on This Teen!” but that is not the way the proof read. When I had gone out into the backshop to get it changed, Wilson told me it wasn't his page, and the guy responsible had left for the day. That was when I started screaming, and, after much cursing, he replaced the offending type, but we were never what you might call close after that. Now, he gave me an up-and-down look, spat deliberately, and grunted. “You didn't know I was Ojibwa. It's not exactly the sort of thing you boast about around here.”

That was a point. In small, tightly knit, neighbourly communities like Silver Falls and Bosky Dell, the firm handshake of friendship can be replaced by the knuckled fist of bigotry faster than you can say “Indian.” If you can get away with passing as white, you do so, and I guess Chuck, who was swarthy but not obviously Indian, had decided to keep his native background to himself, at least during working hours. He gestured somewhat impatiently towards the still-closed door of Cabin 10.

“Get on with it,” he said.

“Let me make sure I understand the position,” I replied, punctuating my words with waves of the key. “Inside this cabin, I am going to find the body of someone recently, and unpleasantly, deceased.”

“Right,” said Joe, and Chuck nodded.

“And you guys want somebody else to report it, is that it?”

“That's it,” Joe agreed.

“But that's crazy,” I said. “It doesn't matter who reports a murder, unless . . . Oh, that's it.”

“Bless you, my child,” said Hanna, “for finally working it out. Now come open the door.”

I fumbled with the key. “Yeah, but, there's a body in here,” I said. “A dead body.”

“That's often the case with bodies,” said Hanna.

“And there's something wrong, some reason these guys want outside witnesses in on this.”

“Right.”

I stopped. “If I go in there, and find the body, and call the cops, maybe they're going to think I had something to do with it. Cops,” I added, for I had reason to know, “are liable to leap to conclusions.”

“That's exactly why Joe and these other fellows want you to do the finding. So the cops won't leap to any wrong conclusions. After all, there's a whole bunch of witnesses here, if you need us.”

I was still holding onto the doorknob. “Joe, do you know who's inside here?”

He nodded.

“Is it anybody I know?”

He shook his head.

I was satisfied. “Okay, Hanna,” I said, “you go first.”

“Fine. And you'll take the pictures, right?”

“How come I'm always the fall guy?” I asked no one in particular. I opened the door on the word “guy” and very nearly fainted dead away. Sprawled across the bed directly in front of me was the body of an elderly man, obviously deceased. His eyes were open, but that was not what drew the attention of the onlooker: there was a large, fierce-looking, ceremonial tomahawk buried in his chest and, across his stomach, a sort of banner of white paper, on which was written “Death to Desecrators!” This was in the very large type you can generate on a computer, if you have a good printer.

“I just remembered,” I told Hanna, “I promised to have those screens painted by this evening over at the Jowetts. I'll have to go back to Bosky Dell.”

“Forget it, Carlton,” the heartless female replied. “You're in this now, and you're staying in.”

“The cops aren't going to be pleased,” I pointed out. “They're going to ask a lot of rude questions I can't answer. What am I supposed to say? I just happened to be passing the Bide-a-Wee and thought I'd check out Cabin 10 on a whim, and there was a body inside?”

Joe Herkimer suddenly appeared at my elbow, causing me to start like a frightened roe.

“No,” he said, “you're going to tell them you had an appointment this morning with Dr. George Rose, and—”

“The late Dr. George Rose?”

“The late Dr. George Rose. And when you knocked on his cabin door, you noticed that it was ajar, so you went in and found him dead.” He added, “That is actually what happened, except that I was the one who had the appointment.”

“Then why aren't you the one who's going to call the cops?”

“Figure it out,” said Hanna, again.

“Oh, you think the cops will come down on you like a ton of bricks, because of the notice and the tomahawk and everything.”

“Don't you?”

I thought about it. “I guess I do. You mean, you know the cops are bound to tie this murder in with your people, but you think the mixture would be too rich if you were the one who found the body.”

He nodded. “We're not trying to obstruct justice, Carlton, but you will admit that the treatment of native Canadians before the courts leaves a little something to be desired.”

Of course I would admit it; anyone would admit it; it stuck out a mile.

“Okay,” I said. “I'll do it.”

Hanna, who had been rushing around photographing everything in sight, suddenly let her camera dangle on its cord and rushed over to me, and, I could tell, was going to give me a hug, before she suddenly remembered that I was Public Enemy No. 1. So she punched me on the arm instead.

“Good for you, Carlton,” she said. And added, “I'll bring flowers to you, in jail.”

“Yes, well, just before I call this in, you can tell me about Dr. George Rose, and what he's doing in the Bide-a-Wee Motel.”

“He was working for us,” Joe explained.

“By us, you mean . . .”

“The Circle Lake Band.”

“What does he do?”

“He's an anthropologist, a colleague of mine at Trent University. We hired him as a consultant as soon as we began to suspect there might be a native burial ground on the golf course out at Bosky Dell.”

“Has this got something to do with the burial-ground business you went to see Tommy Macklin about?”

“It does. As you know, we think there may be an ancient burial site under part of what is now the fifth fairway, but we only have some old documents that may or may not give an accurate location. We could get an injunction to stop any development if we could come up with some hard evidence, so we hired Dr. Rose to check it out. He's been poking around for a couple of weeks, now, whenever he could get a day or two off. Last night, he called me at home. He said he had found something very puzzling on the fifth fairway.

“I asked him if it had to do with a burial ground, and he sort of laughed and said he didn't think so. But he thought it ought to be looked into.”

“Well, what was it?”

“He said it was some sort of leather pouch.”

“A leather pouch? An Indian leather pouch?”

“I asked him that, and he said, no, definitely not. It was machine sewn.”

“So, he found a leather pouch. Was that why he called you?”

“No. He said it was time for a meeting with the elders to talk about the project. He hadn't found anything yet to point to a burial ground, and we were going to have to decide whether to spend more money on the next stage, which would involve some digging. We'd have to go through the channels of getting permission from the golf club. I said I would bring some of the band council around this morning, about ten. He said there was something else he wanted to talk to me about, and I said, sure, I'd come over earlier, and we'd have breakfast together.

“Then, of course, a club member phoned and just had to have a golf lesson at seven a.m., and then someone else came along just as I was finishing that, and, with one thing and another, it wasn't until just before ten that I got here. I discovered the body just about the time the others showed up, so I told them to wait and went to fetch you. I could kick myself.”

“Hey, it wasn't your fault. You had no way of knowing there was any danger to Dr. Rose.”

“But I did. Or, at least, I should have.”

“Why? What did he say?”

“He said that he had a feeling somebody was watching him all the time he was poking around. He hadn't done much, really, just some preliminary scratching. I told him it was probably curious golfers, wondering he was up to, but he said he didn't think so. Someone was definitely out there in the bushes, and it was getting dark. I said teenagers often go out after people are finished for the day, to look for balls, and he thought that was probably it. But you could tell by the tone of his voice that he was worried; he didn't like it. That's what he wanted to talk to me about, and I didn't even show up.”

“Was he the kind of guy who spooks easily?”

“I wouldn't think so. He was a field anthropologist, after all. He'd been all over the world and worked in all kinds of conditions. I'd have said, if anything, that he was unflappable. He was the typical absentminded professor.”

He smiled. “In fact, he once put one of his neighbour's kids to bed.”

“He what?”

“Absolutely. This was quite a while ago, when he had a flock of young kids, four or five of them. His wife went out for the evening and gave him strict instructions to make sure the kids got to bed on time, so, in due course, he put them to bed. One of them kicked up a stink, but Dr. Rose paid no attention and went back to work in his study. A couple of hours later, one of his neighbours turned up, looking frantically for a kid who was long overdue at home, and, sure enough, he was upstairs in bed, sound asleep.”

He went on in a very mild voice, “The son-of-a-bitch who killed him murdered a very interesting character, as well as a fine scholar. I think it's clear that whoever did it had him under surveillance at the golf course, followed him here, and then went away and set up all this elaborate arrangement with the tomahawk and the sign. And then they came back and killed him.”

“Could it have been someone from the Circle Lake Band?” I asked.

“Don't be silly,” said Hanna. “If Dr. Rose was working for the band, why would someone from the band kill him?”

“Look at the message across his chest,” said Joe. “It might be a totally false lead, or it might suggest just what it says. The Circle Lake Band is divided, like every other group, by a lot of factions. Someone might have decided that Dr. Rose, by digging around, was, in fact, desecrating sacred ground.”

“Well, we can't get anywhere this way,” I said. I was getting increasingly edgy about sitting around in a motel room with Dr. Rose, however fine a fellow he might have been. “You guys better scram out of here, and I'll call the cops.”

As predicted, the police were not pleased to hear that there had been another murder on their turf. Staff Sergeant Harry Burnett did a bit of cursing when I gave him the glad tidings over the phone and then told me to “stay the hell right there,” even though I told him that I had screens to paint. He said he would call the Ontario Provincial Police, since the Silver Falls bunch, like the
Lancer
, don't do murders.

About five minutes later, two cruisers from the local Ontario Provincial Police detachment pulled up and, pretty soon, we were up to our hips in cops, with the fingerprint kits and the photography kits and the measuring tapes and the works. Hanna and I were taken outside for what Sergeant Richard Moffitt, the gimlet-eyed gent in charge, called “a little chat.” I had pretty well convinced him, against what was obviously his better judgment, that I had not, in fact, done in Dr. Rose, a man I didn't know from Adam, on some foolish whim, and then tried to pin the whole job on the Circle Lake Band, when Hanna, who was frisking around, taking more pictures, decided to be helpful.

“You guys tried to pin a murder on Carlton once before”—which they had, policemen are creatures of habit—“and you were wrong then, too. Can't you see this is connected somehow to the other killing at the golf course?”

“Maybe, maybe not,” replied Constable Jack Jeffries, Moffitt's sidekick, who had been in on the earlier attempt to ship Withers off to a federal institution to make licence plates.

“Well, never mind, Carlton,” Hanna told me, completely ignoring my frantic signals to her to take it easy, for Pete's sake, we don't want to rile the rozzers. “These leadheads won't be in charge of the case, anyway. They'll have to bring in some real cops, with brains, from Toronto.”