The Case Against Owen Williams (25 page)

On Monday morning, Dorkin drove back to the Hannigan Road. He had marked the house a long time before—an ugly storey-and- a-half affair with metal roofing and grey asphalt siding faked up with lines to make it look like shingling.

He parked just beyond the mailbox and walked down the dirt driveway into the dirt yard. At the back, there was a big vegetable garden, a decaying shed, a two-door privy, a chicken coop whose chickens were foraging over the yard, and a pigpen. Dorkin picked his way among the chickens and climbed the back steps onto a rickety porch full of pots and gardening tools.

He knocked on the screen door and heard a mumble of voices from inside, then the scrape of a chair on the floor and a shuffle of booted footsteps. The man who peered at him through the screen was small with a straggly, grizzled beard, receding hair, and black eyes that had something strangely dead about them. He made no move to open the door.

“Mr. Salcher?” Dorkin said. “My name is Dorkin. I'm representing the army in the Sarah Coile case. I wonder if I could talk to you for a few minutes. There are some things you may be able to help me with.”

The dead eyes continued to peer, then cautiously the door was opened.

The smell hit Dorkin as soon as he stepped inside, a smell concocted out of god knows what—unwashed clothes, unwashed bodies, stale cooking, sour scrubwater, mould, dank rot, dead rats in the walls. He was led into the kitchen where a grotesquely fat woman was sitting at an old drop-leaf table drinking a cup of tea. Her hair, mouse-coloured, was so thin that Dorkin could see the shape of her skull through it. Her face was an unsunned pinkish white.

“He wants to talk about the Coile girl,” Salcher shouted at her. And then to Dorkin, “This here is my wife, Ada.”

“You're a soldier,” she said smiling, childishly delighted, with what remained of her teeth. “We don't see no soldiers here much no more. Not since the war stopped. You been in the trenches?”

“No,” Dorkin said. “Not yet.”

“She forgets things,” Salcher said.

“So do we all.”

He had a sense already of the futility of asking what he had come here to ask.

“Mr. Salcher,” Dorkin said, “on the night that Sarah Coile was murdered the Reverend Clemens said that he saw her standing on the corner of Broad Street with a soldier. He'd been visiting you, and he was on his way home. He was a little unclear about the time, and that's what I thought you might be able to help me with. Do you happen to remember what time he left here that night? It was Saturday night, July 1. Dominion Day.”

“That's a long time ago,” Salcher said. “He do come here sometimes.”

“I know,” Dorkin said. “But I thought you might remember that night in particular because of the murder.”

“No,” Salcher said, drawing out the vowel. “No, I can't say I do remember that night in particular.”

Mrs. Salcher looked at them back and forth as they talked, uncomprehendingly, like a deaf woman.

“He's askin' about Reverend Clemens,” Salcher said.

“In overalls,” Mrs. Salcher said.

“No, Ada,” Salcher said. “He don't wear no overalls. He's our minister. He wears a suit.”

“Does Reverend Clemens visit you often?” Dorkin asked.

“Now and then. Ada can't get to church no more because of her legs, so he comes here to see her and talk to her. It does her good. Gets her mind off things.”

“When does he usually come?” Dorkin asked.

“Evenins mostly,” Salcher said. “No particular time. He could have been here that night.”

“Would it have been as late as eleven or eleven-thirty?”

“Could be. Our clock don't work good, so we don't pay much attention. We ain't usually goin' nowhere. Especially Ada.”

He gestured at an old pendulum clock on the cupboard. The pendulum was swinging away, and the clock said a quarter to four. It was, in fact, just after ten.

Shit, Dorkin thought.

“You must have known Sarah Coile,” he said.

“Sure,” Salcher said. “We knew all them Coile kids.”

“Did you know Sarah after she grew up?” Dorkin asked.

“Well, not knowed exactly,” Salcher said. “I seen her goin' back and forth on the road sometimes. And sometimes I seen her over to their place. I've knowed her father from a long time ago, and we sometimes do each other little favours.”

“I hear Sarah grew up to be a good-looking girl,” Dorkin said.

“Yes, sirree,” Salcher said. “The last three or four years. She filled out into a woman pretty early. I tell you the young fellers sure watched her pretty close when she went by, swingin' that ass of hers.”

He dropped his voice.

“Old fellers too, come to that,” he said, glancing sideways at Mrs. Salcher, who seemed now to have drifted off into some world of her own and forgotten all about them.

“Any old fellers in particular?”

“Well, now, it wouldn't do for me to say that,” Salcher said, winking, “but if I was a few years younger, I'd have some thoughts about it. She'd give a man a ride he wouldn't match again in a hurry, I'll bet.”

Dorkin studied him, trying hard to keep up an expression that suggested a man in good, manly talk with one of his fellows.

“Well, she'd evidently given somebody a ride,” he said.

It took Salcher a second to pick it up.

“Yes,” he said, “I guess so.”

“You've never heard any talk about who it might have been?” Dorkin asked.

“Well, everybody says it was that soldier, the one who killed her.”

“I don't think so. I think it must have been someone else.”

“Well,” Salcher said, “if it wasn't that soldier, I don't know who. But there's lots of boys around here would be up to that all right. Them ones who go to the dances. She'd have had lots of chances, all right, a good-lookin' girl like her.”

“Do you think her father knew anything about her being knocked up before she was killed?” Dorkin asked.

“No. I wouldn't know. I wouldn't know nothin' about that.”

“Mr. Coile never said anything to you?”

“No, no. We never talked about nothin' like that. Never talked about his kids at all. Except for the one in the army. We talked about him a little. He's over in France now.”

“In the trenches,” Ada said.

“You didn't happen to see Dan Coile around in his truck that night?” Dorkin asked.

“No, I wouldn't think so,” Salcher said. “But that was a long time ago. And I don't pay much attention to what goes by. We mostly set back here in the kitchen.”

“I thought perhaps if he'd been out that night, he might have seen something that would be helpful to me. He didn't happen to drop in on you that night?”

“Not as I remember. He do drop in now and then, and we sometimes have a little snort if he's got somethin' with him. But I don't remember that night. Long time ago.”

Dorkin looked at the dead eyes and at Ada, wallowing in her chair, communing with her fantasies of the past.

Shit, he thought again. Shit. Shit. Shit. Two months ago, these leads would all have been fresh. Now it was a cold trail. God damn the god-damned Mounties. This was what they should have been doing.

He was wasting his time. He thanked Salcher and got up from the table, and Salcher walked with him to the door. Outside on the porch, out of earshot of Ada, he sidled up to Dorkin and put his hand on his arm.

“We got plenty to eat here,” he said. “Ain't no trouble about that. But I don't come in the way of much cash. You don't suppose you could let me have fifty cents, so that if I get into town, I might have the price of a little somethin' to drink? I'd take that as real kind.”

Dorkin took out his billfold and found a fifty-cent piece.

“Thank you, sir,” Salcher said. “That's real kind. If I hear anythin' I figure you might want to know, I'll get it to you sure.”

Dorkin strode down the driveway, scattering chickens in front of him, resisting an urge to kick them, furiously angry and aware behind the anger of the gathering panic. In one week from tomorrow the trial of Owen Williams was scheduled to begin.

On the flat floodland along the river on the south side of town, Dorkin drove along a dirt road between houses that descended from respectability through humble to a final cluster that was something like a slum. Among these was the house where he had learned from Bartlett that he might find John Maclean. It was a two-storey tenement building with a long verandah that was starting to fall away from the rest of the house. A couple of fat teenage girls were sitting on the verandah on an old hammock. Chewing away methodically at their gum, they stared at Dorkin as he mounted the steps.

He had scarcely reached the top before a woman of forty or so appeared at the door.

“I'm looking for Mr. John Maclean,” Dorkin said. “Is this where he lives?”

“Yes,” the woman said, “this is where he lives, but I ain't sure he's in his room right now. What did you want to see him about?”

“I just wanted to have a talk with him,” Dorkin said. “If he can help me out, there'd be some money in it for him.”

The woman eyed him and considered.

“All right, I'll see if he's in,” she said finally and disappeared into the house, leaving Dorkin to wait outside while the two fat girls on the hammock chewed and watched.

After nearly five minutes, the door opened again, and Maclean came out. He was dressed in an old blue mackinaw, heavy work pants, and ankle-length work boots. For a moment, he studied Dorkin warily.

“You wanted to see me about something?” he said.

“I'm Lieutenant Dorkin,” Dorkin said. “You may remember me from Private Williams's preliminary hearing.”

“No,” Maclean said, “but I've seen you around up town.”

“I'd like to talk to you for a few minutes,” Dorkin said. “Nothing to be alarmed about. Nothing to do with you. Just some information. Why don't we go sit in the car?”

Dorkin opened the door for him, then went around and got in behind the wheel.

“You wouldn't have a cigarette?” Maclean asked.

“No,” Dorkin said, “I don't smoke. But I can get you some. Is there anywhere close by?”

“Down the road here,” Maclean said. “There's a little store.”

Dorkin drove back down the street. At the store it turned out that for some reason, perhaps a scribbler full of bad debts, Maclean didn't want to go in, so Dorkin went in and bought a twenty-pack of Turrets. When he drove back, he went past the boarding house and on a further couple of hundred yards to where the road petered out in a stand of alders by the riverbank. Maclean lit a cigarette and took a deep drag.

“That's good,” he said. “Doctor tells me I shouldn't smoke, but I don't pay much attention. Got gassed in the war. At Wypers. Ever hear of Wypers?”

“Yes,” Dorkin said.

“First spring of the war. Hardly got there. The Germans sent that gas over, and nobody knew what it was then. We had English on one side of us, and some kind of French black troops on the other, and them fuckers all just ran off and left us there.”

“So I heard,” Dorkin said.

“Anyways, I got a little pension out of it,” Maclean said. “They probably didn't know I was going to live so long when they gave it to me, or they wouldn't have done it. You ain't over there killing Germans.”

“No, not yet.”

“Be smart and stay home. Let them fuckers fight their own wars.”

Dorkin took out a two-dollar bill, the price of a couple of bottles of cheap port, and passed it to him.

“I want to ask you about the night Sarah Coile was murdered,” Dorkin said. “You were out on the Bangor Road that night, and I'm wondering if you might have noticed Dan Coile's truck anywhere out there. Do you know it?”

“Oh yeah, I know it. But I don't remember that I saw it that night. And if I'd seen it, I think I'd have remembered it because I'd have looked back when I heard about the girl.”

“You didn't see him anywhere else?”

“No, not that night.”

“What about the next two or three nights? Did you see him anywhere then?”

“I don't think so. I think I'd have remembered.”

“You know him well enough to recognize him?”

“Oh, sure. I've seen him a thousand times. I even used to know him a little. You think he may know something about what happened to the girl?”

“I don't know,” Dorkin said. “I just thought that if he were around out there, he might have seen something that he hadn't said anything about to the police for some reason.”

Maclean meditated for a minute on these manifest lies and let them pass. Dorkin didn't need for him to believe them. They were merely a way for them both to avoid implicating themselves in specifics, as Maclean no doubt understood.

“I hear Dan Coile used to bootleg a little,” Dorkin said, fishing.