Authors: Ted Wood
Val poured the coffee and I slopped in some brandy. Just for her. I had one more call to make and I wanted to be as sharp as I could manage. If the Sumner woman had a grenade with her, anything could happen.
Nancy came back out as we were sipping and listening to the two prisoners ask very politely if they could have coffee, too.
"My father wants to speak to you," she said. I nodded and gestured to the coffee. "Have some, it will warm you up."
I could hear Carmichael speaking to someone else at the other end so I said, "Bennett here," in a businesslike voice and waited. At the other end he was telling somebody to wait upstairs, but she wouldn't. I imagined it must be the Iron Butterfly he had married. Then he spoke into the phone.
I was expecting a thank-you speech for saving his daughter, but he was too important to waste time on trifles like that.
"Bennett. Good. I wanted to talk to you."
"What's on your mind?" I didn't feel polite. My job involves keeping the peace in this backwater and except for his daughter's involvement in this crazy scheme I would have been in bed for five hours now. Instead I had been shot at, slapped, had my girl threatened with rape, and been obliged to kill a man. Just in the line of work, but it didn't make me very tractable.
"She said there was a woman called Margaret involved in this plan of hers."
"Yes, Margaret Sumner, maybe fifty-five, one-forty, around five foot four. Looks as if she might be an Indian."
"Is that her married name?"
That made me think. I hadn't noticed any wedding ring, but then, we hadn't met at a cocktail party. I'd been busy.
"I'm not sure. It's not an Indian name that I've heard in any of the bands up this way."
"Fifty-five, you say?" He was nervous. When he spoke to me first he had been scared, angry, but now he was nervous. His voice had the metallic tingle of tense people, heart attack candidates. And this was not much to do with his daughter, this seemed more personal.
"Around fifty-five. You know how it is with Indian people, they don't shrivel up like city folks. But they don't have face lifts, you have to guess. I'd say from fifty-two to fifty-eight would be right. Why are you asking?"
He cleared his throat, an unpleasant dry rasp in my ear.
"Well, thing is, I wasn't always in industry. I started out after the war in geology."
Save it for your memoirs! My mind was racing ahead, hurdling over the dribs and drabs of life story he was going to send my way. The fact was he knew this Margaret, or somebody very much like her. And from the sound of his voice, she had no reason to love, honor, or respect him.
"Look, I don't have time for all the details. Are you telling me that you know somebody who might fit this description?"
His voice rose in alarm, which he masked as indignation. "Now don't go jumping to conclusions."
"I am not prying into your private life. I'm just putting two and two together and coming up with sixteen. From what I read you used to work in the north, you knew a girl who would be the age of this Margaret. Is that right?"
He coughed again, like somebody easing the bolt on an old Lee Enfield rifle. "Yes. You could say that."
"And what was her name?"
A long sigh. "Her name was Peggy. Peggy Burfoot."
Burfoot! I felt a shock of understanding race up my arms from the fingertips and into my brain. I almost shouted at him "Burfoot? Did she have a baby? Would this have been back around nineteen forty-seven, forty-eight?"
"I don't know about any baby." He whispered it. I guessed his wife was standing over him.
"Don't jerk me around. This is important. Did you leave her knocked up back a couple of years after the war?"
Again the sigh. Bless me officer for I have sinned. "It's possible. I lost track of her. I moved away, down to Montreal."
And meanwhile a frightened, pretty Indian kid found herself pregnant. Her father would have been ready to kill her. He would have thrown her out. She would have headed for Toronto and had the baby, a black-haired, bright-eyed little bastard that nobody wanted. Those were the days when babies were a dime a dozen. People were marrying and moving to new suburbs and having three kids each. The baby would have been shunted from one foster home to another. By the time he was six or so the other kids would have started slapping him down and calling him a half-breed. I could see the whole pitiful pattern, the thefts, the sadness, the punishment, the bigger crimes, the penitentiary I had put him into. I felt humbled. If the nickel mine stope had collapsed on my father when I was eighteen months instead of eighteen years old, this could have been almost my story.
At last I said, "Mr. Carmichael. I think I've met your son. Why don't you get yourself a double shot of brandy out of the bar and settle down? I'll call you back later."
There was no answer and after an eternity the phone went down, as gently as the snow that was still falling outside the window.
I replaced the receiver and sat on the edge of the table. You can't afford to be sentimental as a policeman. Kind, yes. Merciful, compassionate, but never sentimental. The child Carmichael had abandoned was dead and buried under thirty-five years of grief and change. The man who had replaced it was pinioned in a snowbound cottage. I was only glad I had pulled that kick.
Valerie said, "What's the matter? You look terrible."
I tried a grin. "Old age, kiddo. This is a young man's occupation and I feel about ninety."
She smiled at me nervously. "It's not that bad," she said, but she didn't come over to me and put her arms around me the way she would have done eight hours before, when the world was a warmer, happier place. I could sense that I had lost her somewhere along the trails I had covered this night.
"I'll be fine. Maybe I'll have a touch of that brandy before I go."
"Go where?" Her voice rose in horror. "You're not going anywhere else, surely not?"
"I have to close the circle, tell the folks at the Legion that everything is all right." It wasn't the whole truth but I wasn't sure how much more she could handle. "I'll be back in half an hour. I'd phone but the line must be down."
Her voice was harsh. "You don't have to go out and do any more. Nobody expects that of you."
"Just my boss," I said, and explained what I meant by flipping one cocky thumb at myself. "Me."
I
prepared for the trip to the Legion as carefully as I would have done for a night patrol in Nam. Not with armaments. I knew I would be better off with my handgun than the shotgun. You can't use buckshot when there are civilians around, it spreads into a cloud that cuts through the air like grapeshot from Napoleon's cannons. I needed a clean, single shot, if I had to fire at all. But I was hoping it wouldn't come down to violence. It usually doesn't, even when you're up against men. Unless these two women were dedicated terrorists, they wouldn't fight.
The first thing I did was to check the address book I maintain in the office. It gave me Margaret Sumner's permanent address—or it should have. All the other property owners in the area have their names and addresses and phone numbers listed with me in case someone breaks into their place and I have to contact them in an emergency. But Margaret Sumner had no telephone number. I could now remember making the entry last summer when she bought the place. She gave me a post office box number in Toronto, no phone. In an explanatory P.S. I had added the note, "Travels extensively, cannot be reached quickly."
So that was one blank. I had nowhere to send the Toronto police to cover. I did the next thing I could. I separated the two prisoners and brought Freddie into the front office to talk to me. She came gladly. After talking to Nancy Carmichael and learning that I had shot the man at the Tavern, she realized that there are other sides to my character than guardian angel. And she had probably spent a lot of her time in the cell thinking about how close she had been to death.
As I brought her out the other girl snapped at her, "Don't help him. He's the enemy." I figured that humiliating herself at the Legion had stoked up her own personal hatred of men. She was useless to my investigation. But Freddie took no notice of her.
"What is it you want to know?" Her voice was neutral but there was tension to it. She was wondering if I was going to be harsh. I wasn't, anyway, but I had no need to be. I had the advantage that interrogators like to build up. It had happened for me accidentally but I knew it would work. She was still wearing the clumsy clothes I had brought her out on the ice. Their shapelessness made her feel incomplete and foolish, but their presence reminded her of what I had done. She had unzipped the parka in the warmth of the station, but she sat now clenching it together with both hands.
"To start with, why did you unload my gun? It could have gotten me killed."
She didn't answer. She looked at me, then lowered her eyes and shrugged one shoulder nervously. She spoke softly after a while, not raising her head. "I'm sorry. I didn't think you needed it. I thought it was just a symbol of—you know-masculinity. Emptying it was a kind of a joke."
Good guys versus clowns one more time, I thought. I was the blustering sexual cliché, she was the wise woman of the world. I wondered whether I should bring her up to date on everything that had happened since our encounter on the ice, but I didn't bother. I sat and looked at her without speaking. I could see her eyes were brimming with tears. She was like a child found playing some dangerous prank, not knowing how close to death she had been. It seemed to me that she had silently changed sides over the last couple of hours. The reality of the cold out there on the ice had convinced her that C.L.A.W. didn't make any sense. My help when her life depended on it had washed away her ability to believe the jargon of any ideology. I figured she was ready to help me, to make amends. So I asked her my questions.
"I'm going to the Legion Hall. I have reason to believe that Margaret and the woman you call Rachael have gone there, planning some kind of disturbance. Before I go, I want to know anything you can tell me that will help me to deal with Margaret."
"But I thought you'd met her." Her head came up again and she looked at me shyly.
"I need to know her attitudes, her point of view, anything that will help another policeman arrest her if she gets away."
She thought for a moment, changing her grip on the front of her parka.
"I need help now," I reminded her softly. "If you can't help, I have to get up there. They have a grenade with them and that hall is full of people."
She started. "You don't think they'd use it?"
"One man's been killed with one already. Think quickly."
"There isn't much to tell. But it did seem to me that she was educated and proud of it."
"Why do you say that?"
"She quoted a lot." Freddie paused and waved one hand, pushing her hair back with the other, but it was an unconscious gesture—she was working for me. "I mean, she would give us examples of what she meant and then she would always tell us who had said it. That was part of the thrill of being involved with her. She made us feel special, particularly intelligent and educated."
"Examples like what? Marx, that kind of stuff?"
"Oh yes, him of course, but not just jargon. Like she gave us, when one of the girls was wavering, a long speech about everybody who is with us, the magistrate who hesitates to give the maximum sentence because of being afraid of looking reactionary, and so on and so on. And then she told us it was from some Russian, not Tolstoy …"
"Dostoyevsky,
The Possessed
," I said. That made her look up again in sudden respect. "Do you think she was a professor somewhere?"
"She might be." Freddie pushed her hair back, and the gesture seemed to clear not only her face but her memory. "That's right. She said once, 'I tell my students,' whatever it was."
"And did you meet at odd times or always on weekends?"
She gave a little bemused laugh. "You ask the strangest questions."
"Think." I needed answers, I had to leave my life insurance package with Valerie before I went, the information that would convince Margaret not to pull the pin on that grenade.
"It was through the week, weekends, any time, no pattern."
"Thank you." I stood up. "What about Rachael?"
"She's a total mystery. She never said anything except in answer to questions or to applaud Margaret sometimes."
"Okay. I have to lock you up again. I'm sorry, but I appreciate your help."
She stood up now, gracefully, both knees together, every inch the model. "It's mutual, you know. I know what could have happened to me on the ice."
"Let's not get into that. When you emptied my gun you could have gotten me killed. I'd prefer to forget that end of our acquaintance." I ushered her to the back again and locked her back in her cell. The other woman hissed at her, "Lackey."
I gave Valerie a nod and she followed me out front. "This Margaret could be a political science professor, perhaps only a schoolteacher, but she must live or work within driving distance of Toronto."
Valerie looked at me dumbly. I reached out and patted her shoulder. "I want you to make a note of that. If anything goes wrong at the Legion and she gets away, that's the information you give to the OPP investigators."
"If anything goes wrong?" She looked as if she could weep. "Reid, what could go wrong?"
"If she isn't there, or gets away before I get there and the OPP call. That's what you tell them. That's all. Her name is Margaret Sumner, she is an Indian, and her maiden name was Burfoot. That should give them enough to go on."
"But you'll tell them." Her eyes were wide. "I don't want you getting hurt, you'll tell them, won't you?"
"I'll have no need to. I'm going down there to arrest her right now. Meantime, you're in charge. I'm taking Sam, but I'll leave you the shotgun and there's a can of Mace. If anyone tries to get in, spray that in their face."
She was pale to start with but in that moment she whitened even more. I tried to reassure her. "Nobody will. The women are at the Legion and the only male members of the outfit are handcuffed together a mile away from here."