The Case Against Owen Williams (40 page)

“Well, maybe. I don't know. I don't go in for that stuff. But I've been rolled once or twice myself. Anyhow. This guy I was talking to went back into the woods a ways to take a leak, and he was standing there when this guy came sneaking along a path and was right on top of him before either of them saw the other. Then this guy looked as if he'd been caught with his hand in a store till and went back off the way he came. He was all dressed up in bib overalls and an old jacket and a railroad cap pulled right down to his eyes.You'll never guess who it was.”

“Daniel Coile?”

“No, that minister Clemens. Very peculiar.”

Dorkin's heart flipped over.

“Yes,” he said. “Very peculiar. Was your friend sure?”

“Positive. He knew Clemens to see all right, and Clemens was right on top of him before he realized he was there.”

“What did your friend think Clemens was doing out there?”

“No way to know for sure. But we think he was out there looking at the girls. There's a lot of screwing goes on out there. I've heard a couple of the girls who are regulars at the dances don't do it just for the fun of it, if you know what I mean.”

“Sarah Coile?”

“No, I never heard anything about her. I don't want to go into names. It doesn't make any difference who. But anyway that night Clemens said he saw your soldier, he may have been out in the woods looking life over instead of talking about God to old Salcher and his crazy wife. Might even have been doing more than just look at the merchandise.”

“Did your friend ever see him out there again?”

“No. Just that one time. And no one else saw him that I know of. But it stands to reason that if he was out there once all dressed up like that, he'd be out there again, doesn't it?”

“Yes, it does. Your friend didn't follow him?”

“No. No reason to. Didn't matter to him what Clemens was doing. Or where he went. But I thought about that, and I'll bet you that what he was doing was driving up to the Salcher place and leaving his car there and sneaking down through the woods.”

“What else have you heard about Clemens?”

“Nothing. I never even heard this until I started asking around about the other stuff. Some of the boys joked for a couple of weeks about Clemens out there all dressed up looking at what he couldn't get at home, then they all forgot about it.”

Dorkin sat listening to the rain on the roof of the car, trying to think it out. Maclean opened the window a crack and threw his cigarette butt out and immediately started rolling another.

“Anyhow,” he said, “that's the news. I thought you might be interested. But it may be too late to do much good now.”

“Yes,” Dorkin said. “Maybe. But I'm glad you told me about it.”

“Makes you wonder a little about that evidence Clemens gave in court. About the time he said he saw your soldier and all that.”

“Yes,” Dorkin said, “it does.”

Maclean finished rolling his cigarette and lit it.

“It wouldn't be worth the price of a little pony of rum, would it?” he asked.

“Yes,” Dorkin said. “Sure.”

He fished out his billfold and took out a five, then thought, and added another.

“Well, now,” Maclean said. “You don't need to do that. You paid me once before and never got anything for it.”

“It's okay,” Dorkin said.

“Well, I ain't going to argue. If you're going down back of the armoury, maybe you wouldn't mind just letting me off there. There's a place there where I think I may be able to get fixed up before morning.”

In the parade square, as he was getting out, Maclean said, “Just one thing. I didn't mention any names, and I don't think this guy I talked to about Clemens would want to be talking to Mounties or anything like that.”

“He won't,” Dorkin said. “I don't know his name, and I'm not going to ask.”

“I don't want to have to talk to any Mounties either.”

“It's okay. There won't be any Mounties.”

“Good,” Maclean said.

He winked and closed the door, and Dorkin watched him walking down the alley in the rain, close into the shadows under the walls of the houses like a stray cat.

“It certainly does make you wonder,” Carvell said. “But it's not very much to go on.”

He sat with his elbows on the desk, smoking a cigarette.

It was nine o'clock the morning after the trial. Dorkin had been awake most of the night. Now he was sitting across from Carvell in the wooden armchair that he had come by habit to sit in over the weeks.

“We don't even know if he was in the woods that night,” Carvell said.

“I think he was,” Dorkin said. “Alden Bartlett told me that he saw Sarah Coile going along Broad Street in the middle of the afternoon on July 1 on her way to Vinny Page's. The parade had been over for two hours or more by then, and none of her friends that I talked to had any idea where she was in the early part of that afternoon. I suspect she had been to see Clemens. I suspect that he was the father of her child, and I suspect that she made him feel threatened enough that he decided to get rid of her.”

“It's a house of cards,” Carvell said.

“I don't think so. Not this time. And whatever she and Clemens said, it also made her uneasy enough that she went about setting Williams up to think that he was the father of her child.”

“You were wrong about Coile.”

“Half wrong. I talked to his sister-in-law, Fern MacMillan, and her husband, and they told me that Coile was messing around with the girls. That's why the older sister left.”

“Could be,” Carvell said. “But suppose Clemens did knock her up and then murder her, why on earth would he attract attention to himself by coming forward as a witness?”

“He may have felt that he was in more danger than we know. If Williams were convicted, that would be an end to it. And I don't think that Williams would have been convicted if it hadn't been for his testimony. Do you?”

Carvell considered.

“Possibly not. But he wouldn't know that.”

“But he would. If he were the murderer, he would know better than anyone else how thin the case against Williams was.”

“It would still be risky stuff,” Carvell said. “He had no way of being sure of what the police knew and whether what he was telling them was going to fit.”

“But he covered himself. He never said it was Williams. If some-thing happened to prove that it couldn't have been Williams, or Sarah either, he couldn't have been accused of anything more than having made an honest mistake. It wasn't as if he'd said that he'd talked to them or met them face to face. It was a very adroit lie, and all the vaguenesses he built into it only made it that much more convincing to the jury.”

Carvell smoked and studied the day beyond the barred windows. The rain had ended overnight, and it was a bright, limpid morning, full of the sounds of Saturday turmoil in a country town— of the normal world flooding back.

“I'll tell you a tale out of school,” Carvell said. “Hooper has always been sceptical of Clemens's evidence, but he wasn't going to break ranks. You know what the Mounties are like.”

“Would he talk to me?” Dorkin asked.

“He might.”

“What about Drost?”

“Drost isn't here. He left for Fredericton this morning. He's being transferred to Ottawa. He only stayed on because of the trial. For the time being, Hooper's in charge. I don't think he'd go very far in bucking the brass, but at least there's no one on the spot to tell him what to do.”

“Their car's in the yard,” he said. “I'll get him to come over here, so he won't have to worry about MacDougal.”

Dorkin let Carvell do the talking, and Hooper sat, his legs crossed, his cap with its yellow band and its buffalo badge perched on his knee. He listened without comment or question, every now and then eyeing Dorkin warily with his guileless blue eyes. When Carvell had finished, he studied the polished toes of his boots.

“We're not trying to get you in hot water,” Carvell said. “But there are some real questions about all this. You've had some doubts yourself.”

“Yes,” Hooper said. “But nothing solid.”

Carvell and Dorkin waited and watched as the two sides of his Mountie soul fought it out.

“Well,” he said finally. “I've always wondered how much Clemens could really have seen that night coming around the corner. I thought we might have some trouble in court about it, so one night about eleven o'clock me and MacDougal went out there. It was a clear night the way it was the night of the dance, but there was probably more moon. We took a white towel along to act like Sarah Coile's dress. MacDougal stood where she and the soldier were supposed to have been standing, and I came down the road and made the turn. I could see the towel but not much detail. Then MacDougal stood there without the towel the way the soldier would have been, and I couldn't see much of anything. Just the shape of someone there. It's hard to see how Clemens could have seen as much as he said he did in that light. The only thing is that if there'd been another car coming up the road or even one behind him, there probably would have been enough light—more than enough.”

“He didn't say anything about another car?” Carvell asked.

“No,” Hooper said.

“And nobody asked?” Dorkin said.

“No,” Hooper said uneasily. “Not that I know of.”

Dorkin bit his tongue. It was no time to moralize.

“There isn't much I can do,” Hooper said. “I can't haul him in just on this kind of stuff.”

“Well,” Carvell said, “I could poke around and see what I can turn up. Maclean and his pals may know more than they told.”

“I haven't got a lot of time,” Dorkin said. “On Monday I'm supposed to be out of here.”

“We can still work on it,” Carvell said.

“I know that,” Dorkin said. “But I want to be here.”

The phone on Carvell's desk rang. He picked it up, took the receiver off the hook, listened briefly, then pushed the whole apparatus across the desk to Hooper.

“It's MacDougal,” Hooper said when he'd finished. “There's been a call. He has to go out, and I'll have to take over the office.”

He stood in the middle of the room, vacillating, his cap in his hand.

“I'll do what I can,” he said finally.

“He's in a tough spot,” Carvell said when he was gone. “If he sets about to undermine their case and they find out about it, he's going to be in the shit with Grant. And if he really does help to prove that Williams didn't do it, everyone will run around saying nice things about him, but they'll never forgive him. The army and the lords of the law may not be all that pleased with you either.”

“Probably not,” Dorkin said.

“Well,” Carvell said, “if Clemens did do it or was an accessory to it somehow, he's going to be thinking he's home dry, and it may rattle him into doing something foolish if he finds out that he isn't. Why don't we go shake the bushes a little and see what flies out?”

CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN

They found Thomas Salcher out back of his house by the pigpen. Over the fence in front of him, two enormous pigs were standing with their snouts lifted in expectation of food.

“That's a couple of good-looking hogs,” Carvell said.

“Yes,” Salcher said. “Pretty good. Just about good enough to have their throats cut.”

He giggled. But behind the chat he was studying them warily.

“We're thinking,” Carvell said, “that you may be able to help us with a little problem we have. Why don't we go inside out of the wind?”

They sat around one end of the kitchen table. Ada Salcher sat in a rocking chair, her dropsied legs above her sneakers like a pair of corpse-white balloons filled with water, the rest of her a shape-less pile of breasts and belly. She eyed them as she might have eyed someone passing on the road. In spite of the cooler weather, the stink in the house seemed to Dorkin even worse than when he had been there before.