Got something to sell? A place to rent? An announcement to make? The Kountry Pantree community notice board in the front entrance of our store is the place to post it! With a donation to our local food bank, you can let everybody in the area know! See our front service counter for details.
—Another ad in the Laingford Gazette, right next to the classifieds
Rico Amato’s Antique shop, called “The Tiquery”, was tucked into a little strip mall by the highway leading into Cedar Falls. He did a brisk trade in Canadian pine furniture and bric-a-brac, haunting the flea markets and estate auctions in the area and occasionally (I happen to know this) buying pre-owned-and-sadly-missed goods without asking too many questions. If Morrison was investigating a bunch of break-ins in the Black Lake area, he might perhaps have been wise to drop in to Rico’s place, where a gorgeous Georgian oak tea table I hadn’t seen before sported a price tag of $165.
“Rico . . .” I said, spotting the table at once.
“What? A nice boy from Sikwan brought it in yesterday. He let me have it really cheap, and just look at the finish.”
“French polish,” I said. “Very nice. A hundred and sixty-five bucks?”
“You have to move your stock, you know.”
“This is worth three times that, Rico. You get the kid’s name?”
“He was wearing a very big hat. And he had a cold . . .”
“So he was wearing a scarf or something, right?”
“I thought he was sweet being so careful not to spread germs.”
I sighed. The Black Lake district was full of monster cottages owned by city folk with a lot of disposable income. They stuffed their usually vacant summer palaces full of antiques, top-end stereo equipment and booze and then squealed like stuck pigs when their cottages got stripped like clockwork every summer.
“You better move this one fast, Rico, honey—Morrison’s on the case,” I said.
“Morrison? Oh, hell. I like Morrison. And he knows his stuff.”
“I know he does. You don’t want to get fined again, do you?”
“Well, what could I do? The boy would just have gone over to that wretched Peter Teal in Sikwan, and I’d be the loser. How come the police never check out his stock?”
“The meek shall inherit the earth, Rico,” I said.
“Goodness. Where did that come from?” he said, his eyes wide.
“Dunno. Let’s go upstairs. Susan can’t come. Delayed by a flat tire. I’m her deputy.”
“Brent’s taking a bath. He’s awfully upset.” I followed him up the narrow staircase to the apartment above the shop.
Rico’s cat, Oscar, greeted us at the door, purring and winding himself around my legs. He wasn’t the smartest of cats, as T.S. Eliot would put it, but he made up in size for what he lacked in grey matter. He was as big as Morrison’s poodle.
“Oh, stop, Oscar,” Rico said, shooing him away. “You’ve been fed twice already. Brent? You pruney yet?”
A sloshing noise emanated from the bathroom. “Almost,” Brent said. “Is that Susan?” Rico went to the bathroom door and talked through it. I could smell a lovely perfume, jasmine, I think, and the air was comfortably moist, as if Brent had been bathing with the door open.
“Susan is stuck on the highway,” Rico said. “Polly’s here instead. Susan’s niece. She’s okay. You can talk to her.”
There came that big sploosh that’s made when someone who has been lying in very deep bath water stands up. “I’ll be right out,” Brent said.
Rico rapidly put together some tea things and set them out on a low coffee table in the middle of the room. There were china cups (Royal Doulton, I checked), a silver tea service and nice little cucumber and smoked salmon sandwiches, cut in triangles.
“We all need a little civilization these days,” Rico said. “Lemon or milk?” Brent emerged in a cloud of vapour, wearing a plaid bathrobe. “I won’t be a minute,” he said and disappeared into the bedroom.
I leaned back in the soft, overstuffed sofa, sipped my cup of sweet, milky tea, and allowed Oscar to give me a massage on my left thigh.
“Jeez, Rico. You should rent your cat out. He’s phenomenal,” I said.
“He is, isn’t he? Although he hogs the bed something awful,” Rico said. “Now, quick, before Brent comes back, let me fill you in on the details.”
“You and Brent are seeing each other, I take it,” I said.
“Well, duh,” Rico said, smiling in a pleased kind of way. “We met just after that nasty little episode at that theatre you were working for in the spring. He works in the town office, or he worked there, I should say. He was canned after the council meeting.”
“I have some inside information about that,” I said. “Susan doesn’t even know it yet.”
“Well, Brent has inside information too, of course. And he’s pissed off enough to want to go public with it, at least as far as talking to the League of Social Justice is concerned.” He paused and looked sharply at me out of the corner of his eye. “You are a member, are you?”
“Well, not as such,” I said, “but I’m interested in this landdeal thing, Rico, and I promise on my honour that I won’t tell anyone other than Susan whatever Brent has to say.”
“No pillow talk?”
“Becker will not hear it from me,” I said. Which was a safe statement, as the police didn’t seem to be interested in the Kountry Pantree land deal anyway. If Brent’s information had any bearing on Vic Watson’s death, I could ask Susan to tell Morrison or Becker, and thereby stay pure as the driven . . . er, soot.
Brent emerged finally, with his hair slicked back, wearing a shirt I’d given Rico for Christmas the year before. I stood to shake hands, which annoyed Oscar, who was just starting in on the muscles around my knees.
“Brent, Polly. Polly, Brent,” Rico said.
“Pleased to meet you,” Brent said. He was in his late twenties, with dark, close-cropped hair and a lanky build. He had slightly protruding teeth and his cheekbones were dusted with freckles. Cute. Very.
“If you’re in on this, you probably know that I was the one who passed along those documents Susan Kennedy referred to in the meeting on Tuesday,” Brent said. I nodded, having figured as much.
“They fired me on Wednesday morning. I was expecting it, of course. After all, we all have to sign a confidentiality agreement when we start working for the Town, and, well, I suppose I blew that one sky high.”
“Well, if you were aware of wrongdoing, you could hardly keep quiet about it,” I said.
“That’s what I told him,” Rico said.
“But still, the interesting thing is, they weren’t concerned so much with the memos from the ministry as they were about the voting record, which didn’t even come up.”
“Voting record?” I said.
“Yes. The record of who voted yes or no to the Kountry Pantree development in the first place, back in May. It was a secret ballot.”
“Meaning what?” I asked.
“Well, if there’s an issue which the council has to vote on, but they don’t want their votes on the public record, they have a secret ballot. The clerk oversees it, so it’s all legal, but it lets the councillors vote on a motion without letting the people attending the meeting know who voted for what.”
“It sounds South American,” I said.
“Nope. Pure North,” Brent said. “So the motion on the table last May 12 was whether or not to approve the initial Kountry Pantree proposal for the Superstore. Of course, it was really early on, before the Ministry of Natural Resources got involved, and not a lot of people knew about it. We’d had planning meetings and so on, and this was like the first big go-ahead. There were plenty of people present who knew enough about it to care who supported it.”
“Like who?” I said.
“Like David Kane, for example. And Duke Pitblado. Archie Watson was there, as well. He’d heard about it, I guess, through his brother Vic. He was a real pain at that meeting, shouting and saying the store would ruin him. The mayor threatened to have him removed a couple of times.”
“So it was a secret ballot, but you knew who voted for what?” I said.
“Well, nobody was supposed to know, of course. But the idea was that Vic Watson would vote against it and everybody else would vote for it. So it wouldn’t matter. Four to one, right, because the mayor only votes if there’s a tie and there are five councillors.”
“So what happened?”
“The vote came out officially, when Mrs. Berry read the ballots aloud, with two in favour of the development, two against and one abstention. So the mayor had to publicly vote in favour of it, which decided the motion. She wanted to remain impartial. She was livid. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so angry. You see, it was all set up so that there would only be one vote against. Everybody would know that the against vote was Watson’s, and it wouldn’t make any difference, except in principle.”
“So what’s the big deal? Two of the councillors, apart from Watson, thought the development wasn’t a good idea. So what?”
“Well, it wasn’t just two of the councillors. It was three of them. I saw the ballots afterwards. The council went into private session after the vote, and there was so much shouting the paint practically peeled off the walls. The ballot box was sitting right there and everybody had gone, so I just, you know, took a look at them.”
“And what? It wasn’t a tie?”
“There was only one vote in favour of the development, three against, and one person wrote ‘I abstain’. Even with the mayor’s vote it would have been defeated. Mrs. Berry deliberately lied in open council. I was flabbergasted.”
“Holy cow.”
“Well, yeah. That’s what I thought,” Brent said. He had become agitated while telling his story. His cheeks were flushed and his dark hair was all over the place, from his having run a frantic hand through it. He was really a very theatrical raconteur.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“The only thing I could do,” Brent said. “I gathered up those ballots and took them home with me. I had to think.”
“Do you still have them?” I said.
“Of course I do,” he said. “And when they told me I was being let go yesterday, I could tell that they knew I had them, because Mrs. Berry was flexing her nails and looking bullets at me.”
“What are you planning to do with them?”
“Well, I suppose council would deny that they were genuine, if it came to an inquiry, but you never know. Handwriting experts, and all that. But for me, that was reason enough to be comfortable about handing over those other documents about the MNR to Ms. Kennedy. I was working for a bunch of crooks, and I wanted out.”
“What I want to know is who voted for what, and how come nobody complained at the meeting when the votes were read out wrong?” Rico said.
“Well, let’s say that the three of us were going to do a secret ballot,” Brent said. “I vote no, and you two vote yes, okay?”
“Okay,” Rico said.
“So, I personally know who voted no, but neither of you two do. You’d suspect each other, right? Or me.”
“Right,” I said. This was too much like math, but I was with him so far.
“Okay, so now say there are five of us,” Brent said. “We all know that one of us is definitely going to vote no, right?”
“Right. Vic Watson. He’ll vote no.”
“And the rest of us are planning to vote yes, okay?”
“Okay.” Rico grabbed a sheet of paper, ripped it quickly into five pieces, and put one in front of me, one for Brent, one for himself, one for Oscar and one for the teapot.
“Great,” Brent said. “The Teapot is Vic. So, what we’re expecting is four Yeses to one No. Got that?” We nodded.
“Now, when it gets down to the moment of voting, three of us have a crisis of conscience. We know we’ve been told to vote yes, but two of us decide to vote no instead, and one of us decides to abstain, so we do it. All right?” Brent marked a big “N” on Vic the Teapot’s ballot, a “N” on Oscar’s, an “A” on Rico’s, a “Y” on his own and an “N” on mine.
“Hooray for the good guys. Yes, I’m with you,” I said.
“I abstain,” Rico said, loftily.
“Now, when Mrs. Berry reads them out loud, she’s honest until the last one,” Brent said and flipped all the ballots over. He took a red marker and marked a big “N” on the Vic the Teapot’s ballot (which had an “N” on the other side), an “N” on Oscar’s (which also had an “N” on the other side), an “A” on Rico’s (which truly had an “A” on the other side), a “Y” on his own ballot (which had a real “Y” on the other side), and then after gasping theatrically and looking right and left like a vaudeville villain, writing a “Y” on mine (which was really marked “N” on the other side).
“She was on the ball,” Rico said. “She knew, when she got to that last ballot, that it was a deciding vote.”
“You got it,” Brent said. “So, when the votes are counted aloud, you, as a councillor, hear that there are two no votes. Vic Watson’s, which was expected, and your own. You hear there’s an abstention and it’s either your own or someone else’s, so you feel better, knowing someone else had a change of heart.”
“Oh, I see,” Rico said. “Because it was secret, you wouldn’t know that three people had changed their minds. You’d think it was just you and one other person.”
“Exactly! So it wasn’t until they went back into closed session, after the public meeting was over, that they realized that the real, true vote defeated the Kountry Pantree motion. It was only then that they knew Mrs. Berry had lied, when she admitted it, and by then it was too late. They couldn’t go back on it, or they’d bring the whole integrity of council under scrutiny. There would be a scandal.”
“So who voted no and who abstained?” I asked.
“Well, that’s the funny part. Although Mrs. Berry and the mayor didn’t think it was very funny,” Brent said. “After I grabbed the ballots, I listened on the other side of the door where they were meeting.”
“I’ve done that,” I said.
“All the councillors, with the exception of Vic Watson, swore black and blue they had voted yes. Every one of them. And all but one of them was lying. But there was no way to tell who was telling the truth. It was great! That was when Mrs. Berry screeched that she’d get the ballots and do a handwriting test. There was a lot of yelling. I ran for the exit.”
“Good idea,” I said.
“And now, I guess, they’re all implicated in an unbelievable piece of municipal fraud,” Rico said.
“Which is why they were so eager to keep the lid on it on Tuesday night,” I said, and told them about the closed session I’d overheard. Brent thought it was hilarious, especially the part about demoting him to the bylaw department.
“I would have gone for that in a big way,” he said, turning to Rico. “A uniform, Rico. My very own uniform!”
“It’s time I was on my way,” I said. “You want me to pass this along to Susan, I guess, Brent?”
“If you would. Tell her I’ve still got the ballots, if she wants them. I’ll testify, too, if there’s ever an inquest.”
“I’ll let her know. Thanks for the tea, Rico.”
“My pleasure, dear. I’ll see you to the door.”
At the bottom of the stairs, Rico touched my arm. “Polly,” he said, “about the tea table . . .”
“Rico, if it’s gone tomorrow I won’t say a word about it,” I said. “Sometimes, if it’s a question of ethics, we just have to abstain from voting.”