You didn’t report last night, Paul. I’m docking you a day’s pay.”
“You wanted me to call before I went to bed, sir. I haven’t actually been to bed yet.”
“Two days’ pay for arguing jesuitically. You were seen with a bottle of Aspirin in the washroom just now. Do you have another headache?”
“It doesn’t ache in that way. I bumped it.”
“You were drinking last night, Paul, weren’t you? God’s truth now.”
“A little, but I didn’t enjoy it.”
The inspector lit another match and set it to the contents of his favourite meerschaum. He was smoking a mixture that smelled like roofing tar and not appearing to enjoy it much either.
I was sitting in his cramped office with the door closed. No other cops were present. I’d noticed that Sanderson’s way with investigations was to keep the strings in his own hands: the men he assigned to particular aspects of a case reported to him individually rather than assemble as a group. He’d plead lack of meeting space at HQ. He’d pay lip service to teamwork. All the same, you can bet it suited him to have the spokes that were his detectives communicate mainly through the inspectorial hub. Will to power? Absolutely. But he also had to soften and blur the professional jealousies bound to arise among so many underlings of equal rank. Only by operating as he did could he have given me so much to do. I should have thanked him. Under most circumstances, I liked paddling my own canoe. The deuce of it was that the big job he was thrusting on me—to finger someone for Watt’s murder—was the one job I didn’t want.
“So, Paul,” he said, “whom do we arrest?”
“Sir, I’d like to be taken off this case.”
Sanderson gave me his hellfire glare.
“Why?”
“This is painful for me to talk about,” I said, “so I hope you won’t press me for details. It’s my mother out in Cape Breton. Her angina is troubling her again, and the doctor has cabled to say she could go any time. I should be at her bedside.”
“You have no mother, man. You’ve never had a mother, and if you ever had had one, she’d never have set so much as a big toe in Cape Breton. Pull yourself together.”
I ignored this mark of disrespect and soldiered on—
“My brother would go, but he’s trying to set a new flagpole-sitting record—and my sister’s no good in a sick room, not since she sprained her wrist playing mah-jong.”
“One of your few virtues as a subordinate, Paul, is that you have no family, no family emergencies, no excuses. Ever.”
“I’d still like to be assigned other work. The truth is I’ve no sympathy with the murdered man.”
“Good. I wouldn’t want sentiment clouding your judgement. Your job isn’t to sympathize; it’s to deliver to the Crown an accused and enough evidence to secure a guilty verdict.”
“You have more than twenty other detective sergeants, sir.”
“Good men all of them—most of them. But I assigned you to the Watt murder, and there you’ll stay. Request denied.”
“But—”
“Sergeant! The subject is closed.”
I took a deep breath of well-used pipe smoke and went back to work.
“Last night, I brought in Watt’s Remington Autoloading rifle. Has the university made anything of it?”
“As a matter of fact, I was just reading the analyst’s report when you came in. Professor Linacre did some tests on it. What’s more, the two bullets have been recovered from Digby Watt’s body. They both ran into bones and are to a degree misshapen; that’ll make it difficult to link them with confidence to a specific gun. However, they aren’t Remington rounds. Linacre has identified them as Automatic Colt Pistol ammunition, which cannot be fired from Watt’s rifle.”
“Here’s a handgun I’d like them to look at.” I passed it across Sanderson’s desk. I had already removed the three bullets from the magazine, dumping them into an envelope without touching them—in case I wanted them dusted for fingerprints later. “I found it in the dockyard area.”
“You’ll have to be more specific than that if the lab is to spend time on it. Is it a Colt?”
It wasn’t often I caught the inspector out, and I could only wish I felt more like gloating.
“No, sir, but there are easily a hundred different makes of pistol that fire .25 ACP.”
“Own goal,” Sanderson huffed. “Linacre can’t go testing hundreds of guns, whether there’s any plausible connection to Watt’s murder or not.”
“I’m not sure that there’s a connection, but I’d like it tested.”
“Where did you find it? It wasn’t just lying on the street, was it? I suppose it was at the bootlegger’s.”
“Let’s say it was at the bootlegger’s, and Digby Watt was a temperance advocate. Is that connection enough?”
“Who is this bootlegger?”
I didn’t answer.
“Well,” said Sanderson, “we’re conducting a murder investigation here, and we don’t want to get sidetracked. You can always tell me later.” He tucked the pistol in a drawer. “Now about that strike leader Sam Godwin . . .”
“I haven’t tracked him down yet,” I said. I was feeling keener to do so now that I knew it wasn’t the Sam from Horny’s battery.
“Cruickshank has. Our Bolshie union organizer is disturbing the peace of Winnipeg with public meetings, and scores of witnesses attest he was a thousand miles from Bay and Adelaide the night before last. Do you have anything more promising on the political angle—as opposed to the personal?”
“Sometimes the two intersect, sir.”
I told the inspector about Olive’s blaming Digby Watt for the death of her sister Janet. Sanderson expressed no surprise that the police had been ordered to ignore assault allegations made by women working night shifts.
“How tight is Miss Teddington’s alibi?” was all he said.
“Her aunt, Amelia Prentis, denies Olive could have been out of her house at any time it was possible for the murder to have been committed.”
“Do you suspect a conspiracy, Paul?”
This was the second time Sanderson had clutched at this straw, but my bias was for a simple solution. Multiple accused made for a messier trial.
“The aunt denies sharing Olive’s view of Watt’s guilt. She sounds sincere.”
“Still, family is family, and when your niece is in trouble, you may lie to save her even if you don’t agree with her.”
“I’ll see if either woman has a vehicle registered in her name. The aunt claims not. I’ll also have the taxi companies review their records. There would have been no streetcars or buses at the time of the murder, and it’s a two-hour walk from their house.”
“Do whatever wraps this up. Speaking of records, Knight did some digging on that rum-running case. Curtis Ritter got a light sentence for testifying against his gang. But he was carrying a Mauser ten-shot magazine pistol when arrested, more firepower than anyone on our force has access to. This is the joker who told you he never used guns!”
“I’ll speak to him again.”
“Speak? Speak nothing. An arrest is what I need, Paul—by tomorrow night. An arrest that will stick. Get to it.”
Back at my desk, I made phone calls and collected information without much expectation of wrapping up the case. There had never been a driving permit issued to Olive Teddington, Amelia Prentis, or Amelia Bowen—as I discovered she had been called before marriage—although of course the aunt was old enough to have been driving since before permits were required. Neither had a car registered in her name. No taxi trips had been made from the immediate vicinity of either Amelia Prentis’s house or shop to that of Digby Watt’s office on the night of April 19/20—although of course Olive or Amelia or both could have walked at least part way at either end of the trip.
I wondered if getting a conviction were indeed all the inspector cared about. Would he send an innocent man or woman to the gallows just to get rid of the pressure a celebrity murder put him under? I had been a policeman eight years now in total, from 1911 to 1913 and 1920 on. I’d been a detective sergeant for two years, three months. Sanderson had been there all along. He had shown me some indulgence these past two days, but was no softie. With no facetious intent, he would say that if an accused were wrongly convicted of one crime, the blighter was doubtless guilty of something worse.
While crude at the best of times, this maxim seemed to me particularly inapplicable to the present case. If, for example, Morris Watt had lost patience with his controlling father and blasted away at him one dark night, it would likely have been the first violent act of his life. And if he were sentenced to hang for patricide and were innocent, one could scarcely fall back on the comforting assumption that he had previously got away with another crime equal or greater. The same went for Olive, or Lavinia or Edith. The only jail-bird in the picture was Curtis. The only known one, at least.
I proceeded to check whether either Tinker Taylor or Ivan MacAllister had criminal records. Ivan, I learned, had once been suspected of tampering with a crime scene before the arrival of police, but nothing had been proved, and he had also provided clues leading to convictions, so the balance of police opinion was in his favour. Tinker, by contrast, had convictions and a few days’ lock-up time to his discredit. Drunk and disorderly—naturally. Bad debts—owed principally to landlords. Committing a public nuisance—urinating against the doors of Massey Hall. I rather liked that one: had they offended the cinema Paderewski by not inviting him to give a concert there? A year ago, Tinker had been arraigned for sodomy and acquitted. Nothing, however, indicated any involvement with firearms in the seven years since his discharge from the army.
So, back to Curtis. I called the fingerprint expert at Station Number One. He was still going over the Gray-Dort, but had so far found no loops or whorls anywhere near the steering linkage. I wasn’t holding my breath. Meanwhile, there was a note from Detective Sergeant Howarth regarding Stone’s Garage. The place seemed reputable to him, and they backed Curtis all the way. So the only thing I had on the chauffeur was that he had been less than forthcoming about the Mauser. If he could handle that much heat, he’d have no trouble with the smaller pistol that had killed Digby. I phoned the Watt residence. Nita told me that Curtis and Miss Watt were out in the Austin and not expected till six o’clock.
Still four hours away.
I tried not to think of the hollow space that was crying out to be filled by an ounce and a half of rye. It wasn’t easy to say where exactly in my anatomy this craving was located. My mouth was dry, but that wasn’t it. Not the throat either. Further down, in the chest. Where the heart should be, and maybe was. My heart’s desire was Seagram’s whisky. I hadn’t even the decency to be ashamed. So often you’re wrong about what you want. What you plan and work for, what you believe will make your heart rejoice, may not even touch the tickle. Drink always made you want more drink, true, but it definitely did its job. There was nothing else that gave so reliably. You dropped your coin in the vending machine and out popped the prize. Every time.
Drink and not enjoy it? The idea was ludicrous.
But I was not going to have a drink. Just steps from City Hall, at 90 Queen Street West, there was a place called Uneeda Lunch. I took the hint.
After a two-sandwich blowout, I went back to Sanderson’s office. The inspector wasn’t in, but his centre desk drawer was unlocked. I removed and pocketed the pistol I had asked him to send for tests. I took the Harley-Davidson round to Cliff Braddock’s to get it patched with something more substantial than chewing gum and whisked myself up to the U. of T.
Professor Dalton Linacre should have been lodged in the Chemistry Building, since that was his department, but overcrowding had resulted in his office and lab being wedged into one twenty by twenty-two foot room in the bowels of the Mining Building on College Street. I’d been there on occasion to drop off anything from safe-crackers’ jimmies to specimens of deceased parties’ vomit, and—whether the analysis required was toxicological, metallurgical or something in between—Linacre always fired back a report within thirty-six hours. And we weren’t the only constabulary bringing him these brainteasers. His mail bag must have been full of them, for his responsibilities were province-wide. Small wonder he never seemed to have much time for chat. I don’t know when he had time to give his lectures, let alone sleep.
Linacre’s door, like all the others on the brick corridor, sported a huge pane of ripple glass. A stack of horizontal stripes that might have been a person didn’t move when I knocked, but I was told to come in, so I did. A plank and two-by-four partition subdivided the room. I was now standing in the smaller portion, evidently the office as opposed to the laboratory.
Linacre was hunched over a pharmacopoeia and a pile of notes at a cramped desk facing the side wall. His wavy black hair was parted low on the left and tufted up a little at the back, where it likely didn’t show in the mirror. He wore wire-rim spectacles, a black toothbrush moustache and a smart bottle-green bow tie. That he was no upstart was evident from the condition of his lab coat, which was as limp and discoloured as noodles stewed in dishwater. I thought he might be five years older than I, approaching forty.
He looked around and, whether from memory or trained observation, recognized me as a policeman.
“Just leave it on the table, whatever it is,” he said. “Has your inspector told me what I’m to do with it?”
There was no surface space available on any table I could see.
“Detective Sergeant Paul Shenstone,” I said, hoping he’d overlook the part about needing authorization from the inspector. “I’m investigating the Digby Watt shooting.”
“Three .25 ACP bullets, one with its nose in a book, two knocked about by deceased’s rib cage. You haven’t brought me the cartridge cases by any chance?”
“Be nice, wouldn’t it?” I said. “Could this have been the murder weapon?”
Linacre lifted his spectacles onto the top of his head and peered at the little semi-automatic I handed him. He slid out the magazine.
“I’ll show you the best we can do. First, I’ll get you to fire off a few rounds. No marksmanship required.”
“You’re spoiling the fun,” I said.
The professor went to a vast grey metal cabinet with hundreds of small drawers and found in one of them bullets as similar as possible to those removed from Watt’s body. He tried to match not just make and type but date of manufacture. Apparently satisfied, he charged the clip and slid it back into the pocket pistol. Then he unlocked the door in the floor-to-ceiling partition and led me into the lab portion of his workspace.
“Had to build this wall to keep the crime stuff secret,” he grumbled. “Obscure glass in the windows as well. Damned nuisance. Now, this long metal box you see is packed with cotton wool and sectioned off by light wooden partitions so I can find the slugs after you fire them off.”
I liked the way his voice brightened up as soon as he started talking about his work. I did not like the thought of firing the piece of junk I’d taken from May. Still, it would be a greater disaster for the forces of law and order in Ontario if Linacre’s hand were to be blown off than if I lost mine. I took up a shooter’s stance at the end of the box and waited for his signal.
“What are you waiting for?” was the form in which he gave it. “Christmas?”
The small room, even with sound-proofing panels, made the reports loud. I emptied the gun without mishap and found the experience rather like shooting into space. Into an indifferent universe. There was no body to be seen crumpling as you looked down the sights, not even a distant target blossoming with tightly grouped perforations. All your sound and fury for nothing.
As I fired, the gun threw the empty cartridge cases diagonally out to my right and back against the wall, from which they bounced harmlessly. Linacre scooped them up. It took him longer to recover the bullets from his box contraption. When two of the six were back in his possession, he led me to what he called a comparison microscope. From this point, I was very much at sea. I simply couldn’t get my eyes to pick out the rifling grooves on the projectiles, or rather I saw them without sufficient comprehension to make them speak to me. I had to rely on Linacre, and Linacre could not be definitive. The most that could be concluded was that the bullets recovered from the deceased were consistent with those fired from May’s gun. If this was not the murder weapon, then a similar model likely was.
When I thanked him, he told me to find the missing cartridge cases. Unlike the bullets extracted from Watt, they would not be misshapen, and a comparison with those cases he had collected today would settle the question whether this Spanish Prince was the murder weapon. It sounded as if he loved guns, but maybe he just loved puzzles.
“Easier said than done,” I muttered.
“Don’t worry if it takes a while,” said the scientist. “I’ve enough work to keep me here till eleven tonight at least.”
When I closed Linacre’s door behind me and found myself once more in the brick corridor of the Mining Building basement, I felt like slugging somebody. The fight at the blind pig last night and my roughhousing with Tinker had just whetted my appetite. But there was new venom to it too. I was angry with my assignment to pin this murder on someone. I wondered if I could make myself mean and angry enough to do it. A group of students passed me on my way out to the street. I nodded pleasantly and guess I managed pretty well not to look like a killer.
A phone message from Edith was waiting for me at HQ. She wanted to know if the Gray-Dort could be returned in time for the funeral on the twenty-fourth. The number she left was that of the Watt residence on Glen Road, so possibly she and Curtis were now home.
Instead of returning her call, I rode over. This time I didn’t stop to be announced at the front door, and when I swung the old motorcycle smartly around the corner of the drive to the garage, I surprised Nita and Curtis in a close embrace. The girl was on tiptoes with her lips pressed up against her man’s, her arms locked around his chest. His square head inclining to the right, he eagerly returned her kiss while holding and caressing her waist.
Hot stuff, I thought, but what interested me more was the way they sprang apart on hearing my Harley-Davidson. Curtis, a precise man in my experience, seemed to stumble and to favour an uncommonly stiff right foot. Nita reached for him solicitously and was pushed away.
Back in possession of himself, Curtis was striding forward with a decidedly dirty look by the time I had dismounted and propped my machine on its stand.
“You lied to me, Curtis,” I said, not waiting for words to go with the look. “Would you excuse us a moment, Nita?”
The housemaid, who had rushed forward, put her hand to her mouth, looking from one of us to the other.
“Go in the house,” said Curtis.
When she had done so, I returned to the attack.
“You were stupid enough to tell me you never used firearms. All the time knowing exactly what I’d find when I read the arrest report.”
“I didn’t use it. Look, you don’t have the right—”
“A Mauser automatic. Just for show?”
“They made me carry it. For emergencies, they said.”
“But you’d have shot policemen with it. Don’t pretend you wouldn’t.”
“I wouldn’t. Ah, what does it matter?”
“It matters, Curtis. It matters because you stand to gain handsomely from your employer’s death—so handsomely that you fancied your legacy combined with Nita’s would console her for marrying without her parents’ blessing. It matters because you would have known better than anyone how to sabotage the Gray-Dort. Most of all, it matters because you are the only person connected with Digby Watt in the habit of carrying a pistol.”
“I never shot it. I couldn’t have shot it.”
“Hooey. You were in the war: you know all about guns. Pull down your right sock.”
“Your foot is wood, isn’t it? Nita as much as told me you’d been shot in the war, but I didn’t think anything of it until I saw you stumble just now. If you want to keep your secret, you’ll have to be less embarrassed about kissing. She’s a terrific kid, nothing to be ashamed of. I just hope she’s not a hanged man’s widow before she gets to be a wife.”
“Easy to pick on the servants, isn’t it?” The effort at self-control had turned Curtis’s face very purple.
“I’m more on your side than you think,” I said. I didn’t want to goad him into apoplexy. “I’ve nothing in common with your employers.”
The chauffeur snorted.
“Sure, Curtis. You and I were both soldiers. We should be able to understand each other. You don’t waste words. I respect that. And yet you were very clever last night the way you let it be dragged out of you that Olive Teddington accused Digby Watt of killing her sister. That was an excellent way of diverting suspicion from yourself. Of course Olive never said that at all, but you were very convincing.”
“She did.”
“It’s no good, Curtis. I have the gun you used. Here it is. Packs less punch than that Big Bertha you’re used to, but it’s so much easier to hide.” I showed him the Spanish pocket pistol and then made it disappear completely inside my fist. “Easier to hide, easier to get rid of. And deadly enough when your victim trusts you, lets you in close.” With the hand that held the gun, I tapped the region on Curtis’s chest corresponding to that where the bullets had entered his employer’s. “You’re the last person Digby Watt should have trusted, aren’t you? And the last person he did trust.”
“It’s a frame,” said Curtis, his voice loud with consternation. “I’m not answering any more questions.”
“You’ll answer here or at the station. Do you want Nita to see you go in handcuffs?”
“I won’t speak without a lawyer.”
“Oh, does the accused have the right to a lawyer in Germany? I didn’t know. It was in the German army you fought, wasn’t it? Nicht wahr, Kurt Ritter?”
A vein in Curtis’s temple was throbbing; he was within an inch of hitting me. Then I would really have some leverage over him. Already within arm’s length, I moved in even closer to make it more tempting for Curtis to lay hands on me.
“Actually, sergeant, he was born in Kitchener, Ontario, and served in France as a stretcher bearer with the 9th Canadian Field Ambulance.” Morris Watt had emerged from the house, a pained look on his handsome face. “I’ll be glad to arrange legal representation for Curtis. In the meantime, if you have no warrant for his arrest and don’t have to rush off, the family would appreciate a word with you in the living room.”