Detective Sergeant Paul Shenstone?”
A throaty purr over the office phone, but classy. I wondered if I knew any women like that.
“Who wants me?”
“It’s Lavinia Watt, Mr. Shenstone. Edith and I were wondering if we could invite you to tea on the Twenty-fourth of May holiday.”
“What’s the occasion, Mrs. Watt?” I didn’t think the Glen Road ladies had pegged me for a special admirer of the old queen.
“We feel you were treated rather badly last time you were over at the house.”
That would be the evening Morris gave me the bum’s rush.
“So you’d like the chance to do it again?”
Lavinia’s laugh was more polite than a guffaw, heartier than a titter.
“No-o. But I suppose there is a condition of a sort. Is the month that has passed since Arthur Ingersoll’s arrest time enough that you feel you can discuss the case?”
“Up to a point.”
“Then consider yourself welcome ‘up to a point’ at three thirty, Victoria Day.”
I wasn’t on duty that day, so I decided to go. I even got my suit dry-cleaned, which must have been a shock for it. I washed and ironed my newest shirt and tightened my tie well past the point at which it was comfortable. I didn’t take them flowers, as we’d be sitting in a greenhouse. I didn’t take them anything. I wasn’t courting, after all.
There was no answer at first to my ring, so I tried knocking as well, and wondered if they had changed their minds. Eventually, Mrs. Hubbard opened the door.
“Yes, there’s the policeman. Nothing wrong with the bell. I just don’t step as quick as Nita, and she has the day off.” The portly housekeeper adjusted her bifocals. “Don’t you look spruce!”
“Hello, Mrs. H.” I felt a smile break out on my face before I could think to put it there. “How have you been?”
“Oh, I suppose we’re getting adjusted. I will admit I still have teary times when I think of Mr. Watt and how he just missed seeing his first grandchild.”
“A pity for him, but glad news for the family.”
“I hope I haven’t said more than I should have.”
“Of course not. You can keep it under my hat.” I handed it to her. “Are they in the conservatory? I know my way.”
The Watt women wore short, light spring dresses—Lavinia’s daffodil yellow, Edith’s virginal white—with stockings to match. Their blonde and dark heads were huddled over the Toronto Examiner, apparently the real estate ads. Lavinia was first to notice I’d arrived. She actually stood up. Primed by Mrs. Hubbard, I noticed the incipient bulge at her waist.
“Mr. Shenstone, how good of you to let us have part of your holiday!”
“My pleasure, Mrs. Watt. Is it not a day off for your husband?”
“Unfortunately not. Morris has just started a new job.”
I could hear this change didn’t exactly thrill her.
Edith, who had remained immersed in her reading, looked up at last. Once they were on you, those eyes of blue fire made having been ignored worth it.
“With the Y.M.CA.,” she said, “work much better suited to his temperament than Dominion Consolidated Holdings.”
I remembered Marie Burgess’s eavesdropping and Morris’s explanation of what he had meant by doing it. Now he’d done it. I wished him well.
“And he’s also dead set on selling the house.” Lavinia sank back down into her well-cushioned wicker chair, indolently waving me into one only just less upholstered. “Please don’t tell the servants, Mr. Shenstone. It would only upset them.”
Solid footsteps in the hall announced the arrival of Mrs. Hubbard with the tea and scones. Big scones—she must have known anything too dainty would make me ill at ease.
“I believe Lavinia has warned you,” said Edith when everyone had been served, “that this is not strictly a social occasion. We intend to pump you unmercifully.”
“I’d like to know why Arthur Ingersoll killed Father,” Lavinia sighed. “Such a sweet man, a kind man—I still can’t imagine why anyone would want to take his life.”
“It had to be because Peerless made the shell that killed his son,” said Edith. “The why is clear, but how did Arthur Ingersoll know about the shell? Morris said the families were never told their sons died of bad Canadian munitions rather than good German ones.”
“Good?” Lavinia made a moue.
I grinned to show I knew what she meant.
“He knew,” I said, “because in February, Ivan MacAllister finally told him. No one told him sooner because he didn’t want to hear, and what good could it do him anyway? I tried to talk to him about it in 1919 and didn’t get very far. MacAllister didn’t even try, not then, though he knew who Ingersoll was. Horner Ingersoll had talked about his dad’s concession at the King Edward Hotel. MacAllister worked downtown and was always buying smokes or magazines, so he knew Ingersoll by sight.”
“What changed MacAllister’s mind about telling Ingersoll?” asked Edith.
“In a word, Ingersoll’s bigotry. Do you two remember how you felt about Germans during the war?”
“I don’t recall,” said Lavinia. “I’m sure I was too young to feel anything.”
“I hated them in a ten-year-old way,” said Edith. “Meaning I had no idea what a German was—or what hate was, for that matter.”
“That’s what was wanted during those years. Keep hating, keep making sacrifices for the cause. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have gone to war. The Germans were aggressors and no mistake. But the venom seemed to increase in potency the farther you got from the fighting. Those of us at the front didn’t love Fritz, but we knew the soldiers we faced had no more decided to invade Belgium than we had. Now Ingersoll, on the other hand, got this letter from his son’s lieutenant. A letter saying his son’s butchers would be shown no mercy. A word like butcher just slid off the officer’s pen, but it didn’t slip out of Arthur Ingersoll’s mind. An idiotic word to have written, even if the lieutenant’s story had been true. The German gunners were no more butchers than was his own son or Ivan MacAllister or Robert Taylor. But the lieutenant called them butchers and swore Horner Ingersoll would be avenged. ‘Take up our quarrel with the foe,’ Arthur Ingersoll heard his son say. ‘If ye break faith with us who die we shall not sleep.’ And then Ingersoll saw Germany beaten and get a soft peace, a gutless peace. The bigwigs had broken faith with the men they sent into battle.”
“You sound as if you’re not just speaking from Arthur Ingersoll’s point of view,” said Edith.
“As regards the peace treaty, I can see his point. But he didn’t see that point; he lived with it twisting and turning in his gut because he had lost his son, his first-born.”
“Please stop,” Lavinia begged.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Let me just say that Arthur Ingersoll did not sign on to the Treaty of Versailles. He continued to wage his own guerrilla war against the German people. But not really the German people, who were too far away. He waged war on anyone he met with a German accent or a German name. He lost his concession at the King Edward Hotel after a complaint against him by a Swiss manufacturer. In his next shop on Sheppard Street, his opportunities were more limited, but he still had his apartments to rent out, and it gave him great pleasure to tell tenants those apartments weren’t for them, or maybe to let them rent and then throw them out in the middle of winter. There weren’t enough Germans to absorb his animosity, so he took exception to foreigners in general, any one of whom might have come from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. Are you with me so far?”
Nodding blonde and dark heads. A hum of assent.
“Now, here’s where MacAllister comes into the picture. One day, he’s in the Sheppard Street shop, and he hears Ingersoll chewing out some poor Schmidt or Mueller. MacAllister killed his share of Germans, but that was wartime, and now he has a German landlord. So he puts Ingersoll wise.”
“Did Ingersoll believe him?” asked Edith. “I mean, after seven years, his mind was so set. He had his villains all picked out.”
“And he still despises foreigners to this day. Bit by bit, however, he stopped blaming them. Once it sunk in that MacAllister was telling the truth, Ingersoll had a new villain. And his rage against your father was all the greater because he had been lied to. His rage was all the greater because he had been led to persecute not just innocent individuals—he’d never cared about that—but individuals from the wrong category altogether. Why should he have had a worse conscience about the latter than the former? You tell me. All I know is that he wanted to make Digby Watt pay for the pain of that bad conscience, and for the pain of learning that Ingersoll’s own country let his son down, and for the pain of having a far less glorious death to remember. In the corrected history, Horner Ingersoll figured not as a hero but as a chump.”
“You’re not sparing our feelings,” said Lavinia. “Silly of me to be afraid you’d be too discreet.”
“I think he is. He could have said a gelded chump.”
“Edith!”
“No, Vinnie, that’s important. That’s why Ingersoll left Father . . . exposed.”
“Now again,” I hastened on, “I’m speaking from Arthur Ingersoll’s point of view. Your father was no more guilty in 1926 than he was in 1915. In fact, he had done a great deal of good for soldiers and their families since then. But for Horner’s father, your father was the new Satan. And it sure didn’t help that your father was a business success while Ingersoll was a business mediocrity.”
“I’m suddenly feeling less brave about this.” Edith shivered inside her gossamer frock. “I know Ingersoll’s already done his worst, but still—he must have been obsessed.”
“He was. From February to April, he studied Digby Watt’s movements with fanatical care. He learned which office your father used, which window to watch, which garage the Gray-Dort was parked on top of when he worked later than eleven. He told me he thought of replacing the steering pin with a piece of soft metal that would give out under the least pressure of use—something like the metal of those shell casings.”
“Morris could have been hurt,” Lavinia gasped.
I stammered a little as the parts of Ingersoll’s confession I was not going to tell these women flashed through my head. How, for instance, he’d at one time considered rigging the car to explode. A son for a son. But he couldn’t believe losing Morris would cut Digby Watt up as much as he, Arthur Ingersoll, was cut up over Horny’s death and the lies surrounding it. Nothing short of confronting Digby Watt would do—confronting him and then executing him.
“In the end,” I managed to get out, “he just wanted your husband delayed. Maybe scared a little too, but principally kept out of the way so he could rant longer before shooting. It was a battle of the fathers, the prewar generation, not of the sons.”
Lavinia refilled my cup, absentmindedly adding milk.
“You spoke,” she said, “of the soldiers’ not harbouring hard feelings after the war. That was Morris’s point about ex-servicemen not being vindictive. He was right, wasn’t he?”
“Partly,” I replied. “Of very few people can it be said they are or are not vindictive one hundred per cent. Take Ivan MacAllister. He would never have killed Digby Watt, but he did remove the shell casings in the hopes of making a solution to the murder more difficult.”
Not to mention—and I had no intention of mentioning—the trophy photograph.
“Why do you think Ingersoll left those shell casings?” said Edith.
“Carelessness,” I replied. “I don’t think he bothered to find out whether they could be matched to his gun—as they have been.”
“But is it also possible he was asking to be arrested?”
“A great detective can’t admit that,” Lavinia objected, evidently grateful to be able to inject a jocular note into our post mortem. “It makes his solving the mystery seem less spectacular.”
“I’m only moderately vain,” I rejoined, “so I can half admit it. I did accuse him of wanting to be caught, but on further reflection it seems to me this is another question where the answer lies between yes and no. The revenge killer wants to get away with it, but he also wants his deed recognized. What Ingersoll most required was for your father to die, but that death would bring no joy unless the reason for it became known. Not known to everyone, perhaps, but to someone. Hence it was important that MacAllister find the body. So important that Ingersoll took the chance of phoning MacAllister before the murder even happened. MacAllister would interpret your father’s murder as justice for Horner Ingersoll, even if he wasn’t allowed to report it that way.”
“Did MacAllister know Ingersoll was the killer?” asked Lavinia.
“He must have had his suspicions,” Edith asserted.
“I agree, Miss Watt. It wasn’t till after we’d arrested Ingersoll that MacAllister ‘remembered’ telling him about the true cause of Horner’s death. But I’d be surprised if it wasn’t the first thing that occurred to him when he saw your father’s body.”
“What will happen to him?” asked Lavinia.
Ivan’s art photos had not become public knowledge or the subject of criminal charges. To my mind, he had trouble enough. I’d expended a certain amount of venom on Ivan, but from this distance I had to recognize that we had at least this much in common: the war had left us both with a stubborn thirst for justice and a shallow sense of fun.
“In view of past services to the police,” I said, “he’ll draw a light sentence. But of his own volition, he contributed nothing to the investigation, so he will be tried and convicted as an accessory and will have to carry a record. The Examiner, you’ll have noticed, has already replaced him.”
“Yes,” said Lavinia. “The new man writes that even though Ingersoll has confessed, his lawyer is working on an insanity plea. So there’s hope he may not hang.”
“And you, Mr. Shenstone?”
“Still employed, thank you, Miss Watt.”
“Speculation is buzzing as to why you decided to fight Arthur Ingersoll rather than just arrest him.”
Talk about vindictive. Part of me had wanted to knock Arthur Ingersoll down since I was ten years old. But I didn’t think I’d tell Edith that till I knew her better.
“It was quicker than obtaining a search warrant. I needed the gun to force a confession, so I goaded him into showing it.”
“Morris tells me you had Harold’s pistol,” said Lavinia, “but you didn’t fire it to defend yourself.”
“A movie detective would have, wouldn’t he?” I said. “I wasn’t in a movie, though, and here’s how I thought. First off, I wasn’t going to rely for my protection on a firearm I didn’t know and hadn’t loaded. Another thing: if I shot Ingersoll with a gun that big, I couldn’t be sure of not killing him. Then we’d never have been able to answer the questions you’re asking today. What’s more, the wall behind Ingersoll was flimsy. What if Mrs. Ingersoll were on the other side? I just couldn’t take the chance of a stray bullet finding her. She’s quite innocent of your father’s death.”
“I think that’s very responsible of you, Mr. Shenstone.” Lavinia bestowed on me a toothy smile.
Her sister-in-law was not about to let me off so lightly.
“There was gunplay, however,” said Edith. “In view of the flimsiness of the partitions, wasn’t it reckless on your part to allow that?”
“Ingersoll had a smaller gun, a .25 Beretta rather than a .455 Webley, and Ingersoll’s was pointed the other way. What I had to make sure of was that no bullet went through the front window into the street. If the shot went into the side wall of the shop, it would sink into the wood without ricochet and be stopped by the exterior wall of stone behind. I took a gamble, and it paid off.”
“Reckless,” Edith murmured—not accusingly, but as if she were trying to work something out in her own mind. “Do you like lilacs, Mr. Shenstone?”
“Are they the purple flowers that grow on trees?”
“Why don’t you come and see?”
“I think if you don’t mind, Edie, I’ll sit here awhile longer.” Lavinia picked up the paper and turned from the real estate page to an account of the fashions worn at Woodbine for the sixty-seventh running of the King’s Plate. “On your way through, could you ask Mrs. Hubbard to clear the tea things?”
Edith and I went out by the French doors and strolled to the right of the hedge screening the garage. Slowly in the spring sunshine, we crossed a broad lawn towards the far border, where purple blossoms—and white ones too—weighed down the lilac bushes. My nose twitched with the anticipation of the heady feminine perfume before we were remotely within range. Except for that moment in her cottage, it was the first time I had been quite alone with Edith. I could sense her to my right, the crest of her jet-black waves of hair rising and falling at the level of my ears, her left hand swinging loose and open at her side. I felt that I should have been wearing tennis whites, that my suit was quite wrong for the setting, and that she was showing me a pointed and personal indulgence by not mentioning it.
“There’s something I’d like you to do,” she said.
“What?”
“You remember the night we drove to Lake Simcoe?”
“Sure.”
“On the way up, Curtis told us that Olive accused my father of killing her sister. Do you remember that?”
“Yes.” Perhaps I was talked out. Or made tongue-tied by Edith’s closeness and the lilac bushes looming up ahead.
“I paid a call on Olive and got the whole story. She didn’t want to tell it, especially not to me, but I persisted.”
I nodded without turning my head.
“To me,” said Edith, “it’s quite clear who killed Janet Teddington, and it wasn’t my father.”
“If one is guilty, everyone else is innocent?”
“No. Two are guilty. I despair of finding the abortionist, but I’ve got the address of Billings’s Garage. I’m assured there is no time limit for commencing a prosecution for rape. Can you help make sure the man’s charged?”
We had reached the end of the garden. I stopped and turned towards her. She was looking up into my face.
“I can’t beat a confession out of him, and the only witnesses are dead.”
“I suppose you’re right,” she said after some internal struggle with life’s unfairness.
“If you want to do some good,” I suggested, “why not make it your project to talk Nita’s parents into accepting Curtis as a son-in-law?”
Edith put her hand to her throat. Her face was wearing its quizzical look.
“Maybe I shall. I’m surprised you take an interest in Curtis’s happiness.”
“Judging by the last time I was here? With all your talk that day of trench raids and close-quarters homicide, I thought you were trying to get me hanged.”
“I just wanted to see if you’d react guiltily.”
“To provoke me—as I provoked Arthur Ingersoll in his shop?”
“Well, yes.”
“My technique with Curtis.”
She smiled and looked back across the lawn.
“Did I, in your practised judgment, react guiltily?”
“Not at all.” She faced me again abruptly. “You’re laughing at me.”
“Only because I think you’re big enough to take it.”
“I’m actually quite petty and small.” She returned to surveying her rich domain, her shoulder almost touching my chest. “Unlike Lavinia, I won’t cry if Ingersoll dies on the scaffold.”
“Improbable,” I said. “They’ll bargain with him to prevent the story of the bad shells coming out. Some of the negligent manufacturers are still living and influential.”
The lilac branches swayed above us, shaking down their scent. High bushes, established wealth. But the property was about to be sold. Its owner was working for the Y. Maybe I wasn’t so far out of my social set, after all. I settled my hand into the small of her back. She didn’t shrink from the touch.
“Dad hung his last radio antenna, his biggest, from the garage all the way over to that tree—the oak. Three days later the wind blew it down.”
“And for those three days, did it improve his reception?”
“Not so you’d notice. Tell me, Paul, are you sorry Digby Watt was murdered?”
“Murder stinks. I’m sorry as anything you had to lose a father that way.”
“Cut it out!” She had already wheeled out of my grasp. “It’s too late in the game to palm me off with that.”
I hope I looked ashamed. I felt it.
“The things I’m feeling,” said Edith, “and the way you’ve been acting towards me have put a big decision on my plate. To make it, I need you to look me in the eye and tell me that you wish my father were alive.”
To say I felt like hell would be understatement. This girl was the thing that made most sense in my world. She wasn’t just beautiful. She was luminous—uniquely clear in outline and substance. Her shortcomings were the perishable ones of youth. Her loyal and forthright heart was built to last. I was thirty-four, and this was the best chance I had ever had for something big and long-term. I couldn’t promise myself there’d be another like it. And the damnedest was that that bullshit answer I gave had just lengthened the odds against me. From being sorry her father had been murdered, I now had to be sorry her father was dead.
I could give it a try. I could certainly admit to myself I’d exaggerated when I told Sanderson I had no sympathy for Digby Watt. For one thing, he’d fathered Edith. Would he ever have given me a look-in with her? He had walked out with Olive. That gave me hope he was no snob. “I’m sorry your father is dead.”
“A hundred per cent sorry, or is there some small part of you that thinks he got what he had coming? I have to know.”
“If you’ll hear me out, Edith, I’ll be as straight as I can.”
She was open-minded enough for that. She arched her clean black eyebrows a little higher to show she was listening.
“Yes, I went back a long way with Horner Ingersoll, but I got over his death long ago. If my feelings were all that mattered, I’d hold no grudge. But you said yourself we’ve no right to blot out others’ pain. To kill your own soldiers in wartime, even unintentionally, is pretty bad.”
“My father was not a bad man. He did more good in the world than someone like you could ever imagine. Surely he can be forgiven what was no more than an oversight.”
Here was a change from the young hanging judge of a moment earlier. Mercy for Digby Watt, none for Arthur Ingersoll.
“I don’t know who has the right to forgive your father. But I always heard, if you’re to be forgiven, you have to admit guilt. You have to be sorry and try to make things right.”
“Have you forgotten the papers I found in Dad’s desk?”
“I was just thinking of them. His diary didn’t say he was sorry exactly, but he was uneasy. That’s something. His letter acknowledged some degree of guilt, and in it he offered to help Robert Taylor. I treated that letter pretty lightly when you read it out, but it would have been a landmark if Taylor had received it. Did he? He says not.”
“He may have forgotten or be lying.”
“Quite possibly—or his rooming house might have lost it. But when I asked you if you thought your father had sent it, you didn’t venture an opinion. Was it because you couldn’t be sure? Digby Watt had a decent impulse when he wrote the letter to Taylor. What did he do with that impulse? If he squashed it—if he trampled on his own best nature—I’d rather he’d never written those words at all. Can you tell me now, in so many words, ‘If he wrote it, he mailed it’?”
“You know, I don’t much care for being put on the spot.”
“At least now you know how it feels.”
“What does it matter if he mailed it?”
“It bears on your question which bears, I guess, on whether I see you again.”
A couple of things hit me now, late in the game. I had banked too heavily on a rich girl’s sense of fair play—that was for starters. And besides, it was too soon after her father’s death to be talking about any of this.
“Better not,” said Edith.
I stole a kiss from that perfect mouth of hers and walked away with as much nonchalance as my tingling lips left me across the broad lawn for the second and last time. I later read she had married a Russian count.