The End of the Line (15 page)

The color drained out of the man's face. “Well, I'm the section hand here . . . name's Jameson. I look out for the operation when Frank or his number two ain't around. Those men are working for me this afternoon.”

“Well Mr. Jameson, my name is Sergeant Durrant Wallace of the North West Mounted Police. I'm here investigating a murder, and I can talk to anybody I bloody well please, so if you'd be so good as to point me to where the Mahoney boys is working, I'll be on my way.”

“They are working towards the Pipestone,” said Jameson, “about five hundred yards that way,” he pointed.

“Very well,” said Durrant. He turned to set off.

“Sergeant . . .” Durrant turned. “It's rough-going in there . . .” Durrant levelled his gaze at him. “It's just that they are cutting by hand and there haven't been many sleds in and out. It's pretty tough going, well, even for a man with both his legs. The snow's up over your head, you see . . .”

Durrant could feel the heat seeping up his neck like acid. He drew a long slow breath of the cool afternoon air. The men around the fire were silent.

“No disrespect,” said Jameson. “Maybe it would be best if I went and collected the boys for you.”

Durrant let his breath out between clenched teeth. He knew that he needed to catch the Mahoney brothers off guard in order to question them to the greatest effect, but if he ended up chest deep in the snow and unable to move, he would loose all authority with his witnesses, and with the whole camp for that matter. He calculated the risk.

“Go and fetch those two boys, sir,” he finally said, “while I take advantage of the hospitality of this here fire.”

By the time Jameson returned, flanked by the Mahoney brothers, Durrant was alone. One by one the loggers and millers had taken their leave of the fire, tossing their coffee and other elixirs into the flames and muttering about getting back to work.

“Sergeant Wallace?” said Jameson, stepped forward.

“Thank you, Mr. Jameson. Would you tell me, please, where I might find Mr. Thompson Griffin today?”

“He'll likely be down at the yard along the tracks right now.”

“Very well, Mr. Jameson, that will be all for now.”

Jameson looked at the brothers and then turned and retreated into the woods.

“Ralph, would you please wait for me to be finished with your brother over by the sled road,” Durrant said without standing.

Ralph looked at his brother Pete, and then with a sideways glace at the Mountie walked a hundred yards distant and sat down on a log waiting to be skidded into the camp. He watched them with interest.

“Not sure what more I can tell you,” said Pete Mahoney. “I said all I know the other night.”

“You didn't say much of anything,” said Durrant.

The man looked into the flames. “Well, I guess all that needed to be said was said . . .”

“By your boss Dodds. You and I both know that's not the truth,” said Durrant. Pete looked down at his gnarled hands. “How old are you, Pete?” asked Durrant.

“I'm going to be twenty come June,” the man said.

Durrant nodded. He could see that Pete's hands were large and dark from hard work with hammer and saw and likely from a childhood of tough labour. “Your boss isn't here, is he? Where is he?” asked Durrant.

“He's a foreman. He ain't got to tell us where he's at.” Durrant looked at the man for a long moment, letting the silence of the woods settle in. “His business takes him all over the slopes of this here mountain cruising timber and laying out plots for us to fell.”

“So that's where he's at today?”

“I reckon so.”

“Not at his still?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“I think you do, Pete.”

“I don't. Believe me or don't, but that's the God's honest truth.” Mahoney looked down at his hands again. He could see his brother watching him from the corner of his eye.

“You're the younger of the two of you,” said Durrant, catching the boy by surprise.

“Yeah, Ralph yonder is three years my senior.”

“He look after you?”

“I don't need no looking after.”

“I suppose not. But I imagine he sees it different.”

“You'd have to ask him.”

“I intend to. My point is this, Pete: A man is dead. You and your brother and a handful of others were the last to see him alive. My guess right now is that something happened at that card game that got your boss pretty riled. My guess is that Penner came down on your boss about whiskey. It's just a hunch, but you and I both know that it's only a matter of time before I find out about Dodds' moonshining operation and find evidence that Penner was going to turn him in for making illegal whiskey. Your boss has already told me that you boys work for him and wouldn't do anything without being told to. Now I wonder if that night after the card game broke up, Dodds didn't tell one or the other of you to go and find Penner and bash his skull in.”

Pete Mahoney looked up as if he'd been slapped. “We didn't do that!” he shouted.

“You telling me that the card game was all nicey-nicey and that Frank Dodds and Deek Penner didn't have words?”

“Frank and Deek was always at it. Nothing went on that would have led any man to want to kill ol' Deek.”

“That's not the way I hear it.”

“Well, whoever is telling lies should stop it.”

“I hear things got out of hand.”

“Well, it didn't.”

“You telling me that I've been lied to?”

“Mister, I'm telling you that sure, Deek and Frank got under each other's skin. Hell, we've been shut up here in this frozen hell for four months now. People is getting a little testy. It wasn't nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Something happened.”

“Nothing happened,” said Pete emphatically.

“You're a liar,” said Durrant, looking the big man right in the eye. Pete Mahoney's face was still soft; he had tried to grow a beard throughout the winter, but instead he had patches of downy black hair along his jawline and on his chin. Despite the man's childish appearance, Durrant was aware he was dealing with a powerful man, thick in the arms and through the chest. He could see the man's eyes start to darken when he called him a liar.

The corners of Mahoney's mouth pulled back and his eyes widened when he spoke. “You know who is a liar is that snivelling bastard Devon Paine. That's who the liar is. He couldn't keep his goddamned mouth shut about things he's got no right talking about. He got what was coming to him.”

Durrant sat silently. The smoke from the fire swirled around his head and drifted through the snow covered pines. After a moment he said quietly, “I never said it was Mr. Paine who told me that something transpired that night, Pete.”

The man returned his gaze to his hands. “I got nothing more to say to you.”

“I don't suppose you do.” Durrant sat a moment looking into the fire. “Where are you from, Mr. Mahoney?”

The man spat on the ground. “My folks got a place just south of Brandon. That's where I was raised,” Pete Mahoney said, his voice shaking.

“A farm?”

“Of sorts.”

“Not much of a going concern?”

“It's hard country.”

“What did you sign on to do for the
CPR
?”

“We were laying ties.”

“That's heavy work.” Again, the man nodded. “Why didn't you go home in December? You could have ridden a freight the whole way.”

Mahoney shrugged. “Better money working here than freezing through a Manitoba winter.”

“Freeze here, freeze there.”

Mahoney looked at him. “What are you getting at?”

“Just wondering, is all, why a couple of Manitoba farm boys would want to stay in a camp such as this rather than go home and help with the home place. I think Frank Dodds made you an offer.”

“To cut timber. Of course,” said Mahoney.

“No, more than that. More than that. I think you signed on to help with his whiskey operation.”

Mahoney started to stand up. “I don't . . .”

Durrant put his left hand on the man's leg, and with more strength than the younger man would give him credit for, pushed him back down. Mahoney looked at the Mountie askance. “You can go when I say so, Mr. Mahoney.” In his peripheral vision Durrant could see Ralph Mahoney tense. “I think you stayed on in Holt City to make whiskey for Frank Dodds instead of going home to help your mam and your pap with the pigs and cows. Isn't that right?”

Pete just glared at the man.

“And now things have gotten out of hand, which is why your brother over there is wondering just what you're telling me in this long chat we're having here by the fire. I think things got out of hand and your boss Frank Dodds either killed that man Deek Penner or had you boys do it, and now you know that you ain't going back to your family place ever again.”

“I got nothing more to say to you.”

Durrant took up his crutch in his right hand and pushed himself up from the log on which he was seated. He looked down at Pete Mahoney. “Son,” he said so quietly that Mahoney had to look up at him. “In time you're going to see that telling me is a whole lot easier than not telling me what you know. We're stuck here together and I'm not leaving Holt City until I have someone in shackles for the death of Mr. Penner. Am I understood?”

Pete let his gaze slide from the Mountie to his brother who was now standing on the sled road a hundred yards away.

“I'm going to go and talk with your brother now; see if he has any more sense than you do.”

Durrant turned to walk away. He took two careful steps, using his crutch to feel along the snow for soft spots that would trip him up and leave him in a heap on the ground when he heard Pete Mahoney clear his throat. “Mr. Wallace.”

Durrant turned. “It's Sergeant Wallace.”

“Sergeant, this isn't Fort Calgary. Or Fort Garry. This is Holt City. You're alone here. I don't know who killed Deek Penner, but whoever did won't want to get caught, is all I'm saying. There's a lot more going on here than you think. A little whiskey is just the half of it.”

Durrant looked at the man a long moment and then turned and walked toward his brother.

DURRANT WAS A MAN STEEPED
in the legends of the North West Mounted Police. The Mounties had a reputation that they always got their man and they did it without having to resort to violence. Their motto was “maintain the right” which often translated to “keep the peace.”

While most of the work that the
NWMP
did was accomplished peacefully, the myth was overstated by the Toronto media. Newspaper accounts of Mounties riding into distilling operations, being surrounded by rifle-totting moonshiners, and talking their way to an arrest often left out the seminal point: that the Mounties themselves had fashioned a reputation of sorts for the swift and effective use of force. While diplomacy was their carrot, the Enfield Mk II and Winchester repeating rifle were their sticks.

Durrant stood a moment on the road considering Ralph Mahoney.

“You been standing there watching me awhile . . .” Ralph said when Durrant stepped up to him. His voice was deeper than his younger brother's, his tone more self-assured. He drew on the cigarette after he spoke, the frail, dry paper crumbling a little between his fingers.

“I'm just trying to figure out which one of the two of you is more stupid,” said Durrant.

“You got a big mouth, Mister . . .”

Durrant slapped the man across the face. Ralph Mahoney made as if to step into Durrant. Durrant grabbed him by the coat and pulled him towards him and looked the man in the eye. “You know the British Bulldog, Mr. Mahoney?”

Mahoney blinked. “I do. Snub-nosed little gun . . .”

“That's right. Same folks as make the Enfield that us Red Coats wear. I pack one in my coat pocket at all times. I lost my leg in a gunfight up on the Cypress Hills when I got caught reloading and it almost cost me my life. I don't aim for that ever to happen again.”

Mahoney's face changed. “I was just . . .”

“I load mine with .442 Webley rounds. They're easier to come by out here, being made by the same folks that load the Enfield.”

Mahoney broke Durrant's iron gaze. “I didn't mean no dis . . .”

Durrant interrupted him again. “My British Bulldog's aimed at your guts right now, Mr. Mahoney, and I'm not so steady on my feet. If I were to slip on this here road, I'd blow a hole in you big enough for a man to put his arm through.” The two men stood in the fading light. So much for diplomacy, thought Durrant.

“Now, shall we answer a few questions instead of acting like a horse's ass?” Ralph Mahoney just nodded. Durrant let go of the man and stepped back from him. “I just got through with your little brother. He lied to me, Mr. Mahoney, and I don't like to be lied to, so I'm hoping it ain't a family trait.”

“Pete must just be nervous; he ain't no liar.”

Durrant, his voice icy, said, “He told me that during the card game on the night that Deek Penner was killed there was no toss-up between your boss and Deek, or with Devon Paine.”

“It's been a long winter, Mister. Men get on each other's nerves.”

“Men sometimes kill one another when they get on each other's nerves, Mr. Mahoney.”

Ralph crushed out his cigarette with his fingers, the embers dying on his callused finger tips.

“So you admit that there was a row?”

“Tempers flared over a hand of cards is all. There was nothing to it.”

“Sometime after the game ended, Deek Penner had his head crushed. The six of you were the last to see him alive, except maybe the killer himself.”