Murder Sees the Light (2 page)

“I haven't asked you yet. But since you're here, I'll tell you. The defectors have launched a four hundred million dollar class-action suit against the church. My client is in the way of picking up part of that if Patten turns up to face those charges. If the Supreme Court rules against Patten on the tax-evasion business, Patten's going to walk away from the States without going back for his hiking boots.” I chewed on my sandwich, listening to the crunch of toast and finely chopped celery, while in my head I was trying to count a chorus line of zeros that were highstepping to the right of a four.

“When you say that Patten's disappeared, what do you mean? He's not been gathered to his fathers, has he?”

“A week ago he crossed into Canada at Port Huron. He was travelling with five others. A little bird close to the people who make a living knowing these things tells me he's holed up in Algonquin Park.”

“What a way to go. How old was he?”

“He
is
forty three. And he's a long way from becoming the dear departed. What we need first of all as a positive identification. Can you get that for us? Then we'll need to have a resident baby-sitter until he makes a move. Will you be our limpet, Benny? It will mean staking out the place for a week or so. There's a lodge on the same lake where you can stay.”

“Well, I don't know.”

“Come on, Benny, don't look so glum. You can get a lot of fishing done while you're waiting for him to show his face. It's a great place from what I hear. Christ, Benny, I'm offering you a fat fee for sitting by the water getting a suntan. When's the last time you were paid to be a tourist?”

So, I spent the weekend cleaning up my desk and explaining things to my parents. I threw some clothes into a club bag and headed north to Petawawa Lodge on Big Crummock Lake.

“Another game, fella? Give a man a sporting chance to get even,” Patten said. I grunted, and we began setting up the pieces again. This time I'd let him win. A wasp was busy doing himself in in the dregs of my orange juice. They'd tried blowing Patten up, maybe they'd try poison next. Before I got to knit my brows and worry about it, Patten's girlfriend, Lorca, arrived with a fresh glass. She had a smile on her face that led me to believe she knew where the real stuff was hidden. I watched two distorted versions of her long-legged self in Patten's glasses as she walked back up the rustic stone steps to the cabin.

“Lust not after her beauty, Benny, she's mine.” Patten knew more about reflecting sunglasses than I gave him credit for.

I was to play black again. I tried to throw him the advantage by castling too early. I popped off a few offensive Pawns, thinking that would get me in enough trouble to keep me concentrated on the game. It didn't work. I thought of the long dusty drive north. I thought of Petawawa Lodge, a ten-minute paddle from where I was sitting, out of sight, but nestling on its own cove on Big Crummock Lake. I thought of Joan Harbiston showing me my cabin and teaching me the mysteries of coal-oil lamps and propane stoves. In spite of her instructions I managed on my first night to wolf down a dinner of half-burned, half-unthawed french fries. I remembered the thrill of walking into my first suspended yard of flypaper. It was a real treat.

Algonquin Park wasn't new to me. As a kid of twelve I'd been sent on a canoe trip lasting five days beginning at Canoe Lake. Camp Northern Pane taught me to paddle, to swim a mile, and to make hospital corners. Nowadays I preferred urban landscapes where the symbol of untamed nature is the dandelion growing between the cracks in the sidewalk.

For two days I had sat in an aluminum rowboat with my fishing line in the water and my eyes fixed on the activities at the Woodward place, Patten's nest in the woods. Usually there was nothing stirring except for a curl of smoke hanging above the large fieldstone chimney. Whoever it was in there, I thought, hated the damp as much as I did. I'd noted comings and goings from the cabin to the white Mercedes parked in the clearing at the end of a rustic lane which connected with the one-lane lumber trail, the closest thing to a freeway in this part of the world. I'd given names to Lorca and the others as I watched them carrying groceries into the house after foraging missions to Hatchway. Until the boat had exploded, I hadn't had much to put into the report of what I'd been doing with my time. “Subject has not been sighted. Body Beautiful and Mr. Clean drove to town. Shorty went for a boat ride in an aluminum boat like mine. Pair of suspicious loons came within one hundred feet of surveillance craft and submerged. Detected no limpet mines. Baited hook with worm number twenty-three. Lowered same into lake to depth of forty feet. Remained in position for sixteen minutes. Removed fishing line from water. Examined where worm had been nibbled away at both ends. Retired remaining mid-section and fitted worm number twenty-four in place….”

Patten was moving his Queen around like he hadn't another able-bodied piece left on the board. He'd allowed a cunning grin to bend the line of mouth visible above his beard. I'd have to try to get him in a poker game later on. That grin of his promised a good evening. I threw him the last of my Knights and prepared to hustle my King from square to square as he tried to pick me off with an alliance between his Queen and the edge of the board. I could imagine his eyes narrowing behind his glasses. He had the true killer instinct. I was glad I'd studied up on him before I packed my flannelette pajamas and drove the Olds up here.

Patten. I kept calling him that in my head, and it was going to get me into trouble if I called him that out loud. I had saved, and was now playing chess with, Norrie Edgar. That's what he was calling himself. With the beard and sunglasses he could get away with it. On television it was clean-cut smooth grooming that made his face memorable.

“Mate!” said Patten with a smirk. I looked at the board. He was right, and he swelled with triumph. I made a clicking sound of appreciation in the corner of my mouth. He had the scent of blood now, and began setting up the pieces again. “I'm going to clean my shoes with you, fella.” Luckily, Lorca, the girl I'd been calling Body Beautiful until Patten introduced us, called down to him.

“Norrie! Ozzie's just driving up.” Patten looked with regret at the chessboard, as though it assured him of an endless run of victories, and got up. I followed him from the dock to the house. A black Buick had just driven into the clearing. Slowly the doors opened and two men got out, arching their backs to unlock their spines from the miles. Lorca went over, and they looked happy to see her. The driver, a tall, blond kid in a blue T-shirt, carried a briefcase. The other guy, getting a hug from Lorca, wore new blue jeans, a short-sleeved shirt, and a bald head to rival that of Mr. Clean, Norrie's man of all work. The driver, who I was already starting to call Surf's Up in my head, gave the briefcase to Ozzie, his boss. They both looked like they had tried to dress down for the occasion. Patten in his ratty tan army shorts went over to the car and shook Ozzie with one hand and gave him half a bear-hug with the other. I hung back, feeling outnumbered. They started for the house. Patten turned back to me, lighting up another dark cheroot with his Spanish lighter, and tilted his head back like he was smoking a threedollar cigar. I felt like I was the gardener or somebody hired to rake leaves.

“I got business, Benny. Better clear out. Looks like it's clouding up. May not get another chance for a return match today. Anyhow, seize the day, fella. Time's a gift and time's a-wasting.” And he was gone. I got into my rowboat and pointed it in the direction of Petawawa Lodge. A couple of loons gave me the raspberry as I passed them, then got out of sight. The sky was getting dark.

TWO

A hot, mid-afternoon heaviness hung above Petawawa Lodge as I came around the point where the lodge's cove began. Ghosts of lightning far away lit up the insides of the clouds like fireflies in a smoky bottle. The dock was deserted unless you count the various boats rubbing their flanks against the rubber bumpers nailed to it. I tied up the rowboat and stowed the oars in the tack shed. The beach was guarded by an inflated innertube and an abandoned pail and shovel in the sand. A scrap of wind began to whip dust on the road and play with a line of towels and bathing suits hung out to dry.

The lodge was made up of two medium-sized buildings and about six individual cabins fanned out under the trees at the edge of the lake. The large log building near Joan Harbison's cabin was the Annex. This served as Joan's office and the general get-together point. The long low building with the shadows of agitated birches blowing over it looked more like a bunkhouse or a primitive motel running parallel to the road. It contained four joined cottages, the Algonquin equivalent of row-housing. To the Annex, the motel, and the cabins, add a leaning double gas pump and an electric bug-zapper by a notice-board and you have Petawawa Lodge.

My cabin was dark when I closed the screen door behind me. I couldn't switch on the light. There wasn't any electricity until Joan started the Delco generator. I pulled a coal-oil lantern from its nail in the beam above my head. I was still trying to light it when the sky opened up like it had something personal against us. The rain drove itself into the dust of the lumber trail. It flattened the petunias around the notice-board and beat upon the screens and windows. Across the lake the rain blew in waves and patterns from the first island, outlined against the hazy far shore. Nearer home it bombarded rowboats tied up to cleats on the dock. It was like a machine gun opening up from above. The tarp covering the big cruiser at the end of the dock looked like it had given particular offence; a froth of white water splashed off it in all directions. The cover looked riddled. My roof took a beating, but until I got some light I was helpless to see whether a puddle was collecting on my bed. Through the window, steamy with humidity, I saw Joan Harbison park her red Honda, unpack a carton of groceries from the back, and close the hatch with her shoulder. Her old straw hat dripping, she carried the box out of sight along the duckboards. She had a plastic bag of milk for me in there somewhere, but I could wait until the weather cleared. Meanwhile thunder rattled the spoons in the porcelain jar on the counter and lightning showed between the cracks in the two closed shutters. I got a candle going and tried to concentrate on what my next step might be while I stared through the patched screen. In the cabin, the only sign that life was still going on was a fly stubbornly struggling against the inevitable at the end of a coil of fly-paper.

Before I'd left Grantham, I'd asked my old friend Ella Beames at the library to dig out for me all she could find on Norbert E. Patten. Ella was the farthest thing from a detective's assistant in the business. She looked like a sweet, middle-aged woman with bright eyes under freckled lids, with velvet jowls on either side of a small perfect nose. Ella didn't know she was on my payroll for the simple reason that I'd never put her there. Her cover as a librarian in charge of the Special Collections Department was too perfect to share even with her. She handed me a fat file and indicated a table.

“Spread it out here, Benny, and tell me if you need more. We used to have a lot more on your man, but somebody walked off with every scrap we had about three years ago and didn't bring it back. We had to build up the file from scratch.”

“But you don't let this stuff circulate?”

“Of course not. I mean it was stolen. When I was at a librarians' convention in Toronto I found out that the Patten files had been lifted from libraries right across the country. They even cleaned out the morgues of two newspapers. So, what I'm saying is, we are still sketchy on your Mr. Patten and his Ultimate Church.”

“This will get me started, Ella. Thanks.”

Norbert Edgar Patten was born in Huntsville, Ontario, forty-three years ago. I checked an atlas and found Huntsville about where I expected, 215 kilometres north of Toronto. His parents ran a bakery on the main street, were nominally Baptists, but admitted to being only “wedding and funeral Baptists.” Patten went to local schools, appeared in
The Mikado
, and took summer jobs in nearby Algonquin Park. When he was eighteen he went off to the States. It was a break in the pattern. What could he be doing in Washington, D.C.? I sifted through the rest of the file without seeing what had taken him from Huntsville to the Harland Lee Academy in Maryland for two years. The Vietnam War halted the American adventure for a time. Like a lot of young Americans, he went north to Canada until the heat cooled. But no sooner had the U.S. Army evacuated Saigon than Patten was back in the District of Columbia area. It was on the road to Washington, near Alexandria, where Patten claims to have seen a blinding light. “With the nation's capital shimmering in the distance, like St. Paul of old, I saw it and it changed me as it changed him.…” There was a newspaper clipping advertising a rally near the historic Presbyterian Meetinghouse in Alexandria, and a write-up describing its success. Taking full-page ads quickly became Patten's style. Thousands attended a rally near the Lincoln Memorial the summer after the war. He packed a stadium with sailors in Annapolis. Norbert Patten became news. He began to rival the Bible-belt evangelists with his calls for making an end to war.

Soon after the east-coast success, he went off to California to consolidate what he called the Ultimate Church in that hotbed of cults and religions. His first California branch was located in Burbank, with others starting and slowly spreading up and down the San Andreas Fault and across the Midwest to New York, New England, and finally the birthplace of the movement, Washington.

Patten was the first of the new wave of evangelists to make full use of television. Preachers had been seen before on the tube talking to thousands in a stadium and millions on the air, but Patten had hit on the idea of pitching his sermons, whatever the size of the audience, to one viewer at a time. It didn't seem to matter whether you caught the show in the flesh or at home; Patten made you feel like he was talking to you. He was also the first into the field of prime-time television when nobody in the networks had guessed the audience potential. Or maybe they'd guessed and decided to forget about it. Patten made them take him seriously.