Murder Sees the Light (28 page)

“You going to live?” he asked. It seemed like a good idea until I tried to nod, then I felt as though I'd been introduced to the Scottish Maiden that Maggie had been talking about. I didn't hear the head roll on the floor and began to think that maybe it was still on my shoulders. I thought of John Malbeck and his machine in a rented room.

I tried to shift my weight so that I was half sitting. That seemed to help. I looked around. The room was full of people. At the edge of my vision, a uniformed cop was talking to Lloyd Pearcy. Joan Harbison was standing next to Maggie McCord, who was sitting in Lorca's wicker chair. I couldn't see Patten or the other residents anywhere.

“What's going on?” I asked in Glover's direction. He leaned in closer: “Aline Barbour burst in and started blasting away with a .32.”

“I stayed awake for that part. I mean, what happened next?”

“She didn't kill anybody, but she nicked Patten pretty bad. He's on his way to the hospital in Huntsville. They've got heart-lung machines there. Miss Barbour went to pieces after we got here and she's under guard. I never saw the like of her face when I got here: the woman's crazy as a loon.” Harry might not know a lot about cranes. but he knew more about loons than most.

“When did all this happen. I mean how long have I been like this?”

“That Lorca woman says she ran right over to the lodge. That would have taken ten minutes. I was talking with Joan in the clearing near the gas pumps, and so it didn't take more than another couple of minutes to get my car here. Patten was down behind that chair. Take my word for it; don't turn around. I've had everybody that was here taken back to the Annex. You were keeping things from me, Benny. You knew it was Patten all along. Sly as a ferret you are. See where it gets you.”

“I'm going to try to get up,” I said. Nobody seemed to think much of the idea, and, after the first try, neither did I. I'd been lying on the couch. The wooden top plank of the back was shattered by a bullet within a football field of where my head had been. There was a blood stain on the rag carpet. I looked at Glover, who looked off at a piece of fly-paper dangling from a Coleman lantern. The second try got me on my feet, and the third was a complete success.

“Benny, what do you know about Aline Barbour?”

“Won't it keep? My brain rattles when I talk. I think I've got it all straight now, but it has to settle.”

“All right, everybody. The shows over. He's going to be right as rain tomorrow. Thanks for your help, Mrs. Harbison. Thanks everybody.” Maggie leaned over and pressed my hand. It was the first tune I'd seen her since George's death. She looked more like her true age than before. Joan sent a pained smile over Maggie's shoulder. The others waved or called out some thing reassuring. The uniformed men were making chalk marks on the floor and measuring off distances with a metal tape.

“Can I give you a lift?” Lloyd Pearcy asked. After getting a confirming nod from Glover, I walked out into the afternoon sun, a little wobbly, like Disney's Bambi when he stood up for the first time. Lloyd didn't say anything but opened the door of his Ford and I got in.

“Just settle back and don't worry,” Lloyd said, starting the motor. The front seat felt like a sauna even with the windows open. I tried to close my eyes, but things began turning upside down. Once things begin turning, I might as well cancel all immediate plans. I kept my eyes off the road, away from the forest parting around us. The sky proved the right target. I kept my eyes there.

“Lloyd, do you remember me asking you about the fire at the mill?”

“The night Cissy took a snootful? That was quite a night.”

“Sunday. Seems like a month ago. You told me that Dick Berners wasn't around.”

“That's right.”

“But it isn't right, Lloyd, and you know it.” Lloyd kept his eyes on the road. He didn't offer anything, so I went back at him. “I respect your motives, Lloyd, but Dick's dead and right now the truth is more important. You think he set that fire, don't you?”

“I don't rightly know what I think about that. I know I don't have to say anything. So I don't intend to, if it's all the same.”

“If it was all the same I'd agree with you. But people have been killed, Lloyd. Maybe the murderer isn't finished yet. In books—I don't know about true life—but in books it's secrets that account for half the bodies on the library floor. Secrets are a one-way ticket to the mortuary. Best way to escape the curse of a secret is to give it to somebody else. You said Dick hadn't showed his dirty face around the lodge at the time of the fire, right?”

“Uh-huh. I said that.”

“And?”

“Well, I guess it's a few degrees off the dead centre of the truth.”

“You did see him?”

“I seen him in the bushes sneaking off to his canoe. He was black with smoke and ashes. I mean, even more than usual. And for Dick that's saying something.”

“Did it ever occur to you that Dick might have pulled Trask out of the fire?” Lloyd swallowed and I saw his neck in profile as his Adam's apple rose and fell.

“No, it never did. Hell, Trask couldn't have made it on his own that night.” We'd come into the clearing. Lloyd rounded the gas pumps and pulled up to my place. “So you think it was Dick? Well, now that's a poser. Maybe gettin' burned in the war made Dick do a crazy thing like rescuing Wayne Trask. It kinda makes sense.”

“What about the guests at the mill?”

“I don't know. Wayne never mentioned them. They just took off. But I can't say whether it was before or after the fire started. Hell, Benny, that was a long time ago.”

Two minutes later, I was in my cabin, where everything was looking strange and half-forgotten, including my face in the mirror.

TWENTY-SIX

It was that evening in the Annex that I tried out some of the ideas I'd been having about the case. All of the usuals were there with the addition of Harry Glover and his two constables. Lloyd was sharpening thorns for the Victrola, which was playing his favourite, “Mah Lindy Lou.” There was a fire burning, and a card game was in progress, involving Maggie, Cissy, David Kipp, and Joan. Young Roger was looking on without too much interest. A few heads turned when I came in. I looked like a stranger with Joan's Band-aids on my cheek and my jaw swollen to whale-like proportions.

I took a place by the fire. Chris Kipp handed me a stick with a marshmallow on the end of it. I put it in the fire until it caught. When it was properly ablaze, I pulled it out and turned it so that the fire heated the interior until it was smooth and liquid. Then I blew out the flame, and ate it with a private grin. The only problem was that I could feel eyes on my back. I turned and saw that not a card had been played since I sat down. What did they want? My face was too sore to make a speech. Were they angry at me for fooling them? So, what if I wasn't in ladies' ready-to-wear? I could have been. My father was.

I could be yet. You never know. They were looking at me whenever they thought I wasn't looking at them. Even Harry Glover, who should have known better. Des Westmorland, also known as Des Brewer, and Delia were watching me like a pair of cats at a mousehole. Delia was wearing a pink sweater and a denim skirt. I could see that Des was very fond of her. In fact the two of them looked more devoted than newlyweds. Where did that leave his cabinet-minister wife I wondered. Was there a divinity that smoothed over the rough-hewn ends of highly placed public officials? If there was, then I wouldn't be reading about it in the paper.

Outside I could hear a far-off commotion as a car came out of the woods and settled into the black muck of the parking lot. A minute later, looking like he'd been up all night, Ray Thornton, my client, and a stranger walked into the Annex. Joan got up and, after a word or two, passed them along to where I was staring into the fire.

“Now we'll get some plain sense. Benny, this is Bert Addison, Aline Barbour's husband, and my principal in this business. He asked me to get you to determine whether it was Patten staying on the lake and then to keep an eye on his movements.” We exchanged nods, and how-do-you-dos, but no smiles or handshakes. Both their faces were grey and grim. Ray picked up the story: “We've left Rob Kobayashi, one of my juniors, in Huntsville to monitor things there. Patten seems to be out of danger, and that's a relief. We should get a bail hearing before Friday, earlier I hope.” Addison looked around the room as though he'd just had a blindfold removed in a freshman's initiation. What was he doing there, he seemed to be asking with his raised eyebrows.

I gave them an account of Aline's attack on the Woodward place, adding Harry Glover's additional information. Addison still looked like a perplexed businessman. I could imagine him looking at himself in the shaving mirror and saying: “Does he look like a fellow whose wife goes around shooting people?” Addison had a face that didn't like the five o'clock shadow on his chin. He appeared out of place in this rustic setting. His casual clothes were stiff and unbending. I tried to say something.

“Mr. Addison, Patten was mixed up in diabolism fifteen years ago. This was before he got mixed up in the Ultimate Church. You know, strange rites and ceremonies. His partners were an older man and his girlfriend. The girlfriend was your wife.”

“I didn't know about that,” he said rather testily, with even teeth showing under a reddish moustache. “But I knew in general that she'd lived a raffish, Bohemian life. That didn't matter to me. She put all that behind her.” He didn't look as though he was doing any of this easily, and I got the feeling that this wasn't the beginning of a rich, new acquaintance. I could imagine Addison looking right through me if we met again sometime.

“From what I've learned, these rites that they performed had a peculiar object in mind.”

“What object was that?” Addison asked, hoping, I think, that I wouldn't answer.

“I don't pretend to know the ins and outs of it.” I thought that would make him happy.

“Please try to be clear, Mr. Cooperman.” Now he was asking for it.

“These rites were highly charged things, I understand. They were trying to bring about the birth of a purely evil being, maybe even the devil himself.”

“Do we have to hear the details, Benny?” asked Ray.

“I'll shut up altogether if you like. It hurts to talk.”

“Let him get on with it, Ray.”

“Well, use your judgement, Benny. Don't take all night.”

“Needless to say they didn't engender the evil one. She didn't even get pregnant. More important, Aline transferred her affections from the older man to the younger. That was Patten. She went off with him and stayed for about five years. She was in on the beginnings of his religious reawakening. They started this whole movement together. She felt that she was just as much at the centre of it as he was. Meanwhile, the man she'd left killed himself in a bizarre manner, passing on seeds of guilt to Aline. More seeds were planted when Patten discarded Aline from both his personal life and the life at the core of his new church. Today we saw the fruit of those seeds. Today's attack wasn't a random meeting, Mr. Addison. Maybe you can tell us something about that?” Addison nodded.

“Yes, she left home on Thursday morning on a holiday. I didn't know she was here. I thought she was in Muskoka with friends. She called every day or so and asked for your latest news. I didn't imagine she was watching Patten's every move herself.”

“Ray, when you first brought me into this, you told me that you'd located Patten on this lake. You said ‘a little bird' had told you. Who was the little bird and where did he get his information?”

“I'd better answer that, Ray,” said Addison, worrying his moustache with a nervous thumb. “P.J. Tredway is an associate of both Norbert Patten and Senator Van Woodward. I got to know him through some investments I had made in the church. It was through the senator that I met Aline. Tredway, I'm afraid, has been playing a cautious game. He wants to save himself if the cult founders but isn't ready to make a break with it
unless
it founders. Is that what you call a waiting game?”

“So Tredway is sweating out the Supreme Court decision along with everyone else. I can see now why Patten was sure that the senator had shopped him, sold him out.”

“Is that the whole story, Benny? Is that it?” Thornton was restless. I felt like he didn't trust me to serve the dinner without getting my tie in the gravy boat.

“Mr. Addison, your wife tried to hurt Patten a few days ago. I wasn't sure it was Aline. She didn't do any harm to Patten. Not like today. She fixed Patten's boat so it blew up.”

“Have a heart, Benny!” Thornton was getting cross, but Addison was looking at me calmly enough.

“Where'd she learn about motors, Mr. Addison?”

“She looks after her sports cars herself. Tunes them, that sort of thing. Tell me, Mr. Cooperman, what sort of woman does these things?” He looked like he was about to break in two. I thought hard about what to tell him and hadn't organized my thoughts very well when I started talking.

“I'm just a peeper, Mr. Addison. I know a lot about divorce work. Your question takes me out of my territory. You need to talk to somebody who knows these kinds of things, somebody like my cousin Simon Heller. He's a shrink, I mean a psychiatrist, in Toronto. For what it's worth I'd say a person who does these things does them because of serious injury to her sense of herself. I don't think a person like that is a danger to the public at large. But, like I say, I'm out of my depth talking about that kind of stuff.”

“Thank you just the same. I hope you're right.” I smiled, and Ray and Addison smiled, as though the smiles would float the hope higher.

“Will you be coming back to Grantham now, Benny?” Ray asked.