The Case Against Owen Williams (26 page)

“Yes. I guess.”

“What do you think of him?”

“Just between us?”

“Just between us.”

“A mean son of a bitch. Used to sell watered stuff. May still do if anyone's fool enough to buy it. Once sold a pal of mine a bottle that didn't have hardly anything in it at all. Just water with some flavour of some kind. Figured he was too drunk to know the difference.”

“Do you think he would be up to killing someone?” Dorkin asked.

“Maybe. If he was drunk enough or mad enough.”

“I don't think the soldier killed Sarah Coile. You've never heard anything about anyone else?”

“No. Nothing like that.”

“Do you know Reverend Clemens?”

“Oh, yeah. But just to see.”

“He testified that he saw Sarah Coile and a soldier out near the dance hall that night. You didn't happen to see him anywhere out there?”

“No. I heard what he said in court. But I wasn't anywhere near where he said he saw the girl and the soldier.”

“You don't know of anyone else who might have seen Dan Coile or Clemens that night?”

“Not right now. But there could have been, I suppose.”

“Do you think you could find out?” Dorkin asked. “It would be worth ten dollars to me to know if anyone saw either of them driving around out there that night. Or any of the next three nights. I'd particularly like to know what time it was when anyone saw Clemens the night of the dance. Do you think you could ask around?”

“I might. But it'd be tricky. I wouldn't want to ask right out. But I suppose I could make up some story and see if anybody gainsaid it. I could say I'd heard talk that Dan was hanging around out there and see if anybody would say yes or no. Same with Clemens. But I wouldn't be too hopeful if I was you.”

“It's worth a try.”

“There's only one thing,” Maclean said. “I don't want to have to end up talking to the police. Or getting anybody else in a spot where they have to talk to the police.”

“That won't happen. Once I find out what happened, I can get it proved some other way.”

“Well, I'll see what I can do. But I don't expect to see any ten dollars.”

“I'll give you five just for trying,” Dorkin said and dug out a bill.

Back at the boarding house, he let Maclean out and watched him as he mounted the rickety steps, slowly, with the drunkard's habitual exaggeration of care. He knew that nothing was likely to come of this, but it was important, he reflected, if only for his own subsequent peace of mind, that all the stones be turned.

CHAPTER
ELEVEN

The next morning, Dorkin sat in his office, looking out the window at a dark, unwelcoming day, autumnal raw, with a low cover of dirty grey cloud. He had gone late to breakfast at the hotel, ate slowly, killing time, and now sat, killing more time, afflicted by a gathering sense of depression.

He was still sitting, as if waiting, it seemed to him afterwards, when the phone rang.

It was Carvell, and Dorkin sensed at once from the calculated care in his voice that something bad had happened. His immediate thought was that it was Williams. He had killed himself, or tried. But it wasn't Williams.

“Louie Rosen's been killed,” Carvell said. “His truck went off the road. I thought you'd probably want to know.”

It was too abrupt for Dorkin to take it in all at once. It also seemed somehow too improbable. Louie didn't seem the sort of person to die of anything but extreme old age.

“When did it happen?” Dorkin asked.

“A couple of hours ago,” Carvell said. “I've been out of town, and I just heard about it now. He went down into a gulley. The cab of the truck was smashed in, and they only got him out a few minutes ago. I heard about it from Drost. The truck's still there, and they're trying to haul it out. I thought I'd better go out and have a look in case there's an inquest.”

“Where did it happen?” Dorkin asked.

“The Berkeley Road. It's about four miles out the Bangor Road on the right. You know it?”

“Yes,” Dorkin said. “I'm going to go out too.”

There was nothing much on the three-quarters of a mile of the Berkeley Road—no farms, no cleared land, just a couple of small hunting cabins and one ramshackle tarpapered house. It was probably a logging road that had later been fixed up a little to make a shortcut between the Bangor and Hannigan roads. In its better stretches, it was gravelled. In its worse ones, it was just dirt. It started flat from the Bangor Road and then climbed steeply through the woods for half a mile. It was near the bottom of that hill that Louie had gone off the road.

Dorkin saw the wrecker and the collection of cars and trucks that marked the spot as soon as he turned off the Bangor Road. Carvell was already there, and Constable Hooper, and a couple of dozen other men, garagemen and onlookers in mackinaws and slickers. The drizzle had now turned into a light, steady rain, and the road, which was dirt here, shone dully.

Louie's truck was at the bottom of a little gulley maybe twenty feet deep that angled down across the face of the hill. The side and bottom of the gulley were scattered with granite and sandstone boulders dropped by the glaciers, some of them the size of basket-balls, some of them bigger than the cab of Louie's truck. The truck was lying on its side between two of the larger boulders, the top crushed, the engine driven partway back into the cab. The door on the driver's side, which was the one that was turned up, was twisted and crumpled, hanging on one hinge. The windshield was completely broken out except for a fringe of pointed shards. The wooden body was smashed to pieces.

For a quarter of a mile on either side of the gulley, there weren't even ditches, and the road was bordered closely on both sides with evergreens, slender-trunked, soft-branched, into which Louie could have driven and hardly scratched a fender.

“He sure picked his spot,” Carvell said.

There were lines from the wrecker hooked onto the back of the truck, and as Carvell and Dorkin watched, the wrecker started up. The lines pulled taut, the wheels of the wrecker spun on the wet road, spitting mud and small stones. Louie's truck did not budge. The wrecker stopped, and the driver got out.

“I'm gonna take the clutch out of her,” he said.

Down in the bottom of the gulley, two other garagemen stared at Louie's truck, meditating their next move, while Constable Hooper looked on.

Carvell began to descend the steep bank, cautiously over the wet grass and weeds, and Dorkin followed him. There was a trail of devastation where the truck had gone down—vegetation gouged and sheared off leaving raw clay, small rocks dislodged, pieces of broken slats from the back of the truck, shards of glass, unidentifiable bits of metal, cow hides, pig hides, a shovel, a peavey.

“Not much left of her,” Carvell said to Hooper.

“No,” Hooper said.

“What happened?” Carvell asked.

“I don't know.”

“He lost control on the hill maybe.”

“Maybe,” Hooper said.

Dorkin leaned over the corner of the truck and looked down into the cab. There was blood everywhere, the seat and the floor soaked, the twisted steering wheel and the dash smeared.

“He was broke up pretty bad,” one of the garagemen said.

“I can imagine,” Carvell said.

“He wouldn't have suffered none anyways,” the garageman said. “He wouldn't have known what hit him when he got to the bottom here.”

Hooper, after another turn around the truck, was looking at the left front tire.

“That could have been what put him off the road,” Carvell said.

“Maybe,” Hooper said.

The tire was partway off the rim, the red inner tube protruding. The tire and the tube had both been given a thorough mauling as they had been rolled around under the rim, but there was no obvious reason for the tire to have gone flat.

Hooper went over it inch by inch. When he had finished, he sent one of the garagemen back up to the wrecker for a tire iron, and he carefully got the tire and tube off the wheel himself. He put them on the ground and took out the tube. As Carvell, Dorkin, and the garagemen watched, he extracted a small blob of metal. Dorkin did not at once recognize what it was.

“A .303?” Carvell said.

“Yes,” Hooper said. “Or a 30/30. Something like that.”

It was a small, unpretentious frame house among other unpretentious houses on the lower side of a little street without paving or sidewalks that ran for a quarter of a mile along the side of the valley just downhill from Main Street and just uphill from the
CPR
tracks. All the curtains were drawn.

Dorkin tapped discreetly, and the door was opened almost at once by a man whom Dorkin recognized as the owner of a clothing store on Main Street, a small, brisk, balding man, a sidewalk talker and joker, now solemn and officious. Dorkin introduced himself.

“I know, I know,” the man said. “I'm Milton Geltman. It's an honour to have you come. A terrible thing.”

“Yes,” Dorkin said.

He was led into the living room, where a dozen people were crowded together.

“Ruby,” Geltman said, “this is Lieutenant Dorkin. Mrs. Rosen.”

She had a long face, a long nose, a small mouth, full-lipped but narrow, one of those homely faces that looks as if it were being seen in a distorting mirror. She lifted her heavy eyes and a long hand.

“I'm sorry,” Dorkin said.

“You knew him?” she said.

“A little,” Dorkin said. “We met a couple of times.”

Geltman took him around the room, and names flew by in lowered tones. Among the mourners, Dorkin recognized J. Meltzer, from whom he had bought the stuff for Williams. Apart from Meltzer, they all seemed a little intimidated by him, and he had the feeling that his arrival had broken an atmosphere of intimate grief that would only be restored by his departure. He stood awkwardly in the silence.

“What will I do?” Mrs. Rosen suddenly burst out, sweeping the room with her eyes. “I have nothing. Nothing. We only had what he made. He never even bought the house.”

“Everything will be all right,” Geltman said. “You have your friends. You will have your house. We will see to it. You should lie down for a while.”

He gestured behind him, and two of the women helped Mrs. Rosen to her feet and walked with her out of the room to the stairs.

“Do they have any children?” Dorkin asked Meltzer.

“One boy,” Meltzer said. “He was no good. He and Louie didn't get on. He went away five or six years ago. Nobody knows where he is. In the States somewhere. I suppose we'll have to try to find him, but I don't know how. What a terrible thing.”

“Yes,” Dorkin said again.

He stayed on for another half an hour and drank coffee, unable to effect an exit that would not seem rude, regretting that he had come, filled with guilt and rage. He felt sure that if he had not talked with Louie, Louie would not now be dead.