About time, Paul. Do you have someone we can send to the gallows for this?” Detective Inspector Sanderson was belching pipe smoke and bearing down on my desk, not waiting till I’d had a chance to read the messages piled there.
One of them, I noted, was from Morris Watt, to the effect that the name of the union boss at the time of the Canada Ski and Snowshoe strike was Sam Godwin. I shuffled it to the bottom of the pile.
“You’re not asking who did it, sir?”
“A prominent victim means someone has to pay and pay soon. If there’s no arrest in the next forty-eight hours, it’s a detective’s head that will roll. But you do have some latitude, Paul. I don’t object to your collaring the actual guilty party. Past practice suggests a killing within the family; modern politics makes assassination by a communist more likely. Take your pick.”
“Your boy Cruickshank has left me a summary here of Digby Watt’s will.” I held up a sheet covered in painfully neat handwriting.
“Read it later. The salient point is that Morris Watt and his wife are left the house on Glen Road and the income for life on nearly half of Digby’s estate.”
“Amounting to . . . ?”
“That remains to be calculated, but I understand the assets they’ll have to live off will be worth above a million dollars. Maybe substantially above. Whatever the amount, it passes at the death of the surviving spouse free and clear to their heirs. Edith the same, with the family cottage substituted for the house.”
“Huh. The old man didn’t trust either of his kids not to squander the principal.”
“You talked to Morris, Paul. Do you think he knew?”
“Possibly. He was pretty aware of being kept under Daddy’s thumb. Can I get you a chair, boss?”
“I’m comfortable standing.”
Well, stand then, I thought, and stop pacing in front of my desk.
“Who gets to decide how the wad is invested?” I asked.
“Morris and the lawyer are co-executors. It’s not a bad deal, Paul. Quite inoffensive men have killed for a tenth as much.”
“All right,” I said. “Let’s see how the case would go. Morris must have known he’d inherit something juicy. Digby Watt wasn’t the sort to tell his son to go out and make it on his own. So he’d have had the motive of greed, and likely resentment at Daddy’s control. Digby kept Morris from soldiering in France, then kept him dangling the last seven years with deferred promises of a position. Perhaps Morris had been looking forward to the old man’s end. It was just a matter of time. With Digby courting, though, time was no longer on Morris’s side. Morris says he didn’t think his father would have married, but in his heart he mightn’t have been so sure that a stepmother and a new, less favourable will weren’t in his near future. So far, it adds up. Opening Dad’s trousers doesn’t fit quite so well, unless you suppose Morris had a screw loose.”
The inspector’s eyebrows bristled in disgust. “I don’t like the indecent exposure aspect of this case. What’s the city coming to that a man can’t even get himself shot without sex coming into it?”
“Suppose Morris didn’t like the thought of sex either,” I offered. “Specifically the thought of his father with a girl his daughter’s age. Maybe Morris saw Digby’s late-life interest in Olive as deserving of a public shaming.”
“He had motive enough without that,” snapped the inspector. “Motive galore. And Morris was on the scene. He could have sabotaged the car himself—just to throw us off his track. Frankly, Paul, it’s hard to make sense of the car part of this crime any other way. How long would Digby Watt have been left standing alone on the street, even if the car had been working?”
“Five minutes, according to Morris.”
“There you are! What kind of gunman needs more time than that to get off three measly rounds?”
A long-winded one, I thought, but didn’t say.
“Well, sir, Morris did seem interested in whether we could get fingerprints from the missing steering pin. Still, how will it sit with the Rosedale crowd to see one of their own hanged?”
“Morris hasn’t earned their respect the way his father did. They wouldn’t like the idea that their sons might rise against them, but they see Morris as too insignificant to have sprung from their own loins. They’ll let him take his lumps. Of course, we don’t want to get the wind up him until we’re sure we can make it stick, but—as I say, Paul—blood ties . . .”
Sanderson paused for effect, but the effect was lost in the full-chorus katzenjammer of typewriters and telephones. Headquarters suite at City Hall was only slightly less crowded in the evening than the morning. Why couldn’t the Detective Inspector have made us both a little more comfortable by inviting me into his office? The eccentricities of the high and mighty. I stood up to lessen the height difference.
“I bet his wife Lavinia thought they were going to inherit,” I said. “She tried to make me believe Digby Watt killed himself. I pointed out that he would scarcely have wasted a bullet on the book.”
“Unless as a result of a dying spasm. But he certainly wouldn’t have shot himself from more than ten inches away, and at any shorter distance—even supposing smokeless nitrocellulose powder was used—grains would have been deposited on his suit around the bullet holes. The chemist has found nothing of the kind. Has, in fact, noted the absence of powder grains. You have his report on the clothes in that pile of yours.” Sanderson relit his pipe. “Why would Mrs. Watt be raising the subject of suicide? Is it a hare-brained effort to divert suspicion from herself?”
“Hare-brained she may be, but the sabotaged car doesn’t fit her style that I can see, and the newsman says the phone call that brought him to the scene was from a man.”
“A conspiracy, then.”
“It wouldn’t have to be a conspiracy, sir. She may suspect Morris and be trying to steer us away from him.”
“If you like.”
But I couldn’t leave well enough alone. “It’s also possible, though, that her suicide theory springs from vanity. Digby Watt spotted her three or four years ago in Winnipeg and married her off to his son. Lavinia may think her father-in-law really wanted her for himself and after his wife’s death was consumed by melancholy and world-weariness because the fair Lavinia was no longer available.”
“Foolishness.” Sanderson cleared his throat. “Is she that much of a knockout?”
“I wouldn’t sacrifice any vital organs for her, but you might have a different opinion, sir.”
“What about the daughter Edith? She inherits big too.”
I thought about Edith, but didn’t feel like sharing any of my thoughts with the inspector. Edith struck me as strong-willed and more resentful of her father’s relations with Olive—or of what she imagined those relations to be—than she cared to let on. A murderess? If homicidally inclined, she’d have been more likely to do away with Olive than with her father. Unless she saw Digby as bound and determined to marry one Olive or another.
“I think I need more time with Edith before saying what she’s capable of.”
“Come on, Paul,” Sanderson continued maliciously. “These modern girls are capable of anything. I bet they think nothing of crawling under a car and removing a piece of the steering linkage.”
“Any servants mentioned in the will?” I asked.
“The cook Hubbard is named to get a pension. Bequests of a fixed amount, enough to get them reestablished, go to any male servants in his employ at the time of his decease, and a smaller amount to any female servants.”
“The chauffeur, Curtis Ritter, has a record we should look up, though he claims he never used firearms. At least his fingerprints will be on file. To be thorough, we should check up on the previous chauffeur too, a man called Thomas Webster. Maybe he didn’t leave on as friendly terms as they say.”
“Make a note of what you want in that line, Paul, and I’ll have Knight or Howarth look into it.”
“With pleasure, sir. As for the women, I can’t see either of them doing it. The cook is verging on senility, but seems in no hurry to be pensioned off. And what the housemaid wanted most was for Digby Watt to help reconcile her parents to her marrying Curtis. Digby’s death means no help and probably no marriage.”
“Don’t let the romance blind you,” Sanderson warned. “It seems to me the maid’s and chauffeur’s combined legacies would finance a tidy elopement.”
“I’m not putting Curtis in the clear, boss: he bears watching. But if Nita had any hand in the murder, she has the Gishes beat for acting.”
“I’m sure there’s a lot of new talent out there. What about the lady friend?”
“Olive Teddington.”
“Not a name I saw among the heirs. Do you rule her out as well?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “She seems pretty miffed with Watt. Feels, I figure, that he misled her, posed as a simple old church-going nobody, then had her round to Glen Road, where he stood revealed as Mr. Moneybags. That’s scarcely a motive for murder, though.”
“No indeed. Some girls would have been pleased, at least till they found out the rich fiancé had died before changing his will.”
“They weren’t engaged, sir. She would have considered it at one time, she says, but not after that visit to his hearth and home last Sunday. There’s probably more to her grudge than feeling made a monkey of.”
“Let’s look at the Bolshevik angle. Digby Watt was capitalism personified. We’re not accustomed to red violence in the streets of Toronto, but one has to keep an open mind. Move with the times. You’ve a note there about a labour leader. Knight and Cruickshank came up with the same name when they were asking questions up and down Bay Street. Get onto that, Paul.”
“Sure.” I turned over in my mind the possibility that Olive might be a radical, resentful of anyone with two cents to rub together, but for now I had enough to follow up. “Can I assume we still have no eyewitnesses, no cartridge cases, and no weapon?”
“And nothing as regards the bullets but the calibre. If it’s a revolver, the cases would have been carried away in the gun.”
“I don’t know of any .25 revolvers,” I said.
“Neither do I,” Sanderson admitted. “I’ve been trying to hurry up the autopsy all day, but I’m told we won’t have anything till late tonight or tomorrow morning. Yes, Lindstrom.”
The stenographer seemed surprised to have his approach noticed so promptly. There was a quaint fussiness about the man that reminded me of a rabbit.
“Phone call for the sergeant, sir.” Lindstrom’s nose twitched. “A Miss Edith Watt.”
“Take it, Paul,” said Sanderson. “I’m prepared to grant you a good deal of latitude in your conduct of this case. Just remember the clock is ticking. Your day’s work isn’t over, not by a long shot. I want to hear from you last thing before you go to bed tonight and the later the better.”
“Did you want to give me your home phone number, sir?”
“I’ll be here,” Sanderson answered grimly.
“Inspector,” I said, “if this is such an important case, why didn’t we have a detective at the crime scene last night? I should say, the two crime scenes—the sidewalk outside 96 Adelaide West and the roof of Braddock’s Garage.”
Sanderson’s scowl was such that I believed he now really was going to send me to blazes.
“Very well, I’ll tell you. And then the subject is closed. Not to be referred to again. Last night, Detective Sergeant Fergus was on his way to 96 Adelaide West when he suffered a stroke. The cab driver took him to the Toronto General Hospital. I wasn’t notified till seven thirty this morning, by which time the crime, as you know, was far from fresh. Wilf can’t speak yet, but he’ll live—in retirement. This was the big crime he had been waiting for all his career, and when it finally came along, the thrill was too much for him. You can imagine how delighted I wasn’t.”
“I’m sorry about Mr. Fergus,” I said.
“Yes, yes. We’re all sorry about him, and sorry for him. But I decided this morning I was not about to take that chance again with another of the old guard. You’re their equal in rank and, when sober, the fittest detective sergeant I have. Now pick up that bloody phone.”
I did so, using the mouthpiece to cover a smile.
“Yes, Miss Watt, this is Paul Shenstone.”
“Mr. Shenstone, I’ve a suggestion to make regarding the rifle.” It was one of those voices that made a telephone connection sound clearer. “Have you done anything about checking up on it yet?”
“Is it still a Remington Model 8 Autoloading .35?”
“Point two-five—Morris found a record of it somewhere. Does it make a difference?”
That cured my grin.
“Somewhat,” I replied with heroic mildness. “If you have a caretaker up there with a key, you could have him let one of the local constables in to have a look for it.”
“Curtis will drive me up, and I’ll let you in—or a policeman from East Gwillimbury, if you’re too busy.”
“Were you thinking of going tomorrow morning?”
“No, this evening. My father has been murdered, after all.”
“Are you at home, Miss Watt?”
“I’ll phone you back within the hour.”
Rich girls, I thought. I was supposed to be speaking to Sam Godwin. After calling all the possible wrong numbers, I concluded he was not a telephone subscriber. I checked his last known address and found he wasn’t in the city directory either. I phoned the Mounties, who make a point of keeping track of radicals. The sergeant I talked to started by saying that any request such as mine, involving national security and all, would have to be made through my chief. Even after some ice breaking chit-chat, he couldn’t promise me anything before morning. It was going to take the better part of a day to run Brother Godwin to earth. At the same time, if I left checking for the gun till tomorrow, I would have to prevent anyone else from getting to it first. Edith or another family member might well drive up to Roches Point on their own. I phoned her back.
“Will you ride with us?” she asked, “or do police rules require you drive your own car?”
I didn’t think the ancient motorcycle would make it. Besides, riding with her would give me the opportunity to question her further.
“How soon can you pick me up at police headquarters?”
“You won’t have had supper, Mr. Shenstone. Am I right?”
“In this instance.”
“Well, don’t. I’ll have Mrs. Hubbard pack us something to eat on the way up, and we’ll be at City Hall in forty-five minutes. Please don’t wait on the sidewalk. The sight of you there would echo unpleasantly.”