Right Church, Wrong Pew

  RIGHT CHURCH, WRONG PEW

  Walter Stewart

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Dedication

  For Heather Rowat

  Chapter 1

  It was one of those summer mornings when all of nature smiles. The sun was shining, birds were frisking, a soft breeze was frolicking in the woods, and, in a tree just outside my bedroom window, a male robin was telling a female robin that he would too respect her afterwards. The sort of morning, in short, when a man of sense pulls the blankets up over his head and refuses to budge because he knows that on such a day something rotten is bound to happen. I paid no attention to the warnings of nature. Leaping from my bed, I donned the bathrobe, slipped on the slippers, strode to the door, flung it open, and very nearly stepped on the body of Ernie Struthers, who was curled up on my front stoop.

  I stared down at Ernie. He stared back, but you could see his heart wasn’t in it. I slammed the door. This would bear thinking on. A fine thing, I was thinking, when a person goes to his front door to retrieve the morning paper and finds, instead of news of death and desolation in far-off places, a local body. Ernie was local all right. He ran the hardware store in town, but lived right here in Bosky Dell. He is—was—in his mid-fifties, a thin reed of a man with a mean face, although I concede that he was not, in his deceased condition, really looking his best. Ernie is—was—a bit of a character, but then, so are most of the people who live here. Figure it out for yourself: would you live year-round in a small cottage community with a name like Bosky Dell if you were normal? Present company excepted, of course.

  I opened the door again, hoping that Ernie would be scrambling to his feet and explaining that it was all a big joke, ha, ha, and I should have seen the look on my face. Ernie liked jokes. Not this time, though; he lay there, dead as yesterday’s news. I bent down and gingerly touched his cheek. Stone cold. That ruled out the possibility that he had conked out while calling around for a morning cup of coffee. Why would he call round for a morning cup of coffee, anyway? The last time I had spoken to Ernie, on behalf of the paper, he had called me a needle-nosing son of a bitch. While I am no expert on etiquette, I don’t think you can call a person a needle-nosing son of a bitch and then drop in for coffee. In any event, the cold, hard touch of his flesh showed that he had been deceased, as we say in the newspaper game, for some time. I slammed the door again; time for more thinking.

  You will be saying to yourself, hey, this guy is a journalist; finding a body on the doorstep will be terrific for him. Not so. I work for the Silver Falls Lancer. The Silver Falls Lancer is interested in death, true, but only so we can crank out those warm-hearted obituaries that begin, “His many friends were saddened to learn this week that Thaddeus Fuddpucker has departed this vale of tears . . .” We are not one of those hairy-chested, hard-hitting papers that is never happier than when it is ferreting out all the dirt about the mayor, or digging into garbage pails behind city hall. When the police chief of Silver Falls killed himself a few years ago—blew his brains out with a service revolver and, if the gossip had it right, barely beat half a dozen others to the job—we reported that he had “died suddenly at work.” We’re that kind of paper. “Mrs. Mildred Lumpen recently hosted a delicious luncheon for the Women’s Institute in her commodious Warren Avenue home”—that sort of thing. The only reason Ernie called me a, what he called me, was that I had asked him, on behalf of the paper, when he was going to pay his advertising bill.

  We are a weekly, anyway, and since this was a Tuesday and we publish on Monday, whatever news value there was in Ernie would not come into play for us until next week, when the story would be history. No, I was not going to get a big pat on the back if I phoned Tommy Macklin, the managing editor, and woke him up to a raging hangover and the news that there was a body on my front stoop. I opened the door again and bent over Ernie again and was just about to roll him over when—

  “Yoo hoo!”

  It was the Widow Golden. She lives across the street from me and likes to, as she says, “keep an eye on things.” A lot of small towns sport those little signs that say, “This is a Neighbourhood Watch community”; ours, if we were honest about it, would simply say, “Emma on Duty.” Emma Golden is a comfortable woman of about forty-five, whose husband expired about a decade ago. From that time on, she has lived on the insurance while keeping an eye out for prospects, but since most of the bachelors around these parts are as shy as shot-over partridge, no business has so far resulted. Although chubby, she is a comely woman, and friendly and nice, and if she weren’t such a damn Nosey Parker, we would get along fine. She was walking out her front door now, and heading towards me.

  “Oh, ah, Mrs. Golden.”

  “Is that Ernie Struthers passed out on your porch?”

  This was not such a surprising question; Ernie had what was known locally as “a bit of a problem with booze.”

  “Looks like it,” I replied, but of course, that didn’t satisfy Emma. She came waddling across the road, wagging a large, jeweled finger at me.

  “Well, my goodness, Carlton,” she said, as she came right up to the porch and bent over Ernie. “I believe Ernie Struthers is dead.”

  “I believe you’re right, Mrs. Golden. I suppose the poor old fellow had a heart attack.”

  “Heart attack, nothing,” she shot back. “There’s a whacking great knife sticking into him.”

  There was, too. How I came to miss it I don’t know, except that Ernie was sort of lying on his side, and the knife was low down and towards the back. I gulped about seven times in rapid succession. The Widow Golden, needless to say, was as calm as a salamander; she waddled round the other side of Ernie, so she could get a really good look at the knife. She touched his cheek once, gently, and sighed. You could imagine her mentally ticking off one more possibility on her Might Marry list.

  “Why, Carlton,” she said, “isn’t this the funniest thing?”

  “Funny?” I gabbled, “why funny?”

  “This isn’t a knife at all, Carlton. It’s a whaddyecallit.”

  “A whaddyecallit?”

  “It’s a tool of some sort, Carlton, and it’s one of your dad’s.”

  She pointed to the handle of the instrument, which I now recognized by its round shape as one of my dad’s set of pin punches. I told Emma this.

  “Pin punch?” said Emma, “what’s a pin punch?”

  She had me there. It had something to do with putting holes into wood, but not, at least not usually, people. “Thing for punching pins,” I told Emma.

  “Well, whatever it is, it’s got your dad’s initials on it.”

  So it did. There, in bold letters for all to see, were the initials “HCW”—for Henry Carlton Withers, my late father. He had burned his initials into all his tools because,
as he used to say, “the thieving buggers around here would walk off with a hot stove if they owned oven mitts.” In fact, in the matter of lifting tools that belonged to others, my dad always gave as good as he got—or, rather, vice versa—but local tradition held that if you had actually burned your initials into the handle of something, chances were it belonged to you. So Dad laid a scorching path across every tool in sight and here was the fruit of his labour, so to speak, staring up at me.

  It was hard to know what to say. However, just as I was trying to frame a suitable pronouncement, a police car drove up on the lawn, right over the tulips I had planted a few weeks ago, and out stepped Quentin “Quarter to Three” Winston, of the Silver Falls police. I knew this was going to be a rotten day.

  Chapter 2

  Picture the scene if you will. Over there, glimmering through the trees, we have the tranquil waters of Silver Lake, burnished gold by the summer sun and without a thing on its fat-headed mind. A narrow road wanders along the foreshore, a thoroughfare which our imaginative forefathers called Lakeshore Road. (This connects, in due course, to County Road 32 and meanders fourteen miles into Silver Falls, population fourteen thousand, our metropolis.) Off Lakeshore Road, several streets run southwards into the woods, and cottages, many of them now converted into year-round homes, dot these streets. Along Third Street, my street, the third cottage on the right as you proceed up from the lake is a small, white, frame affair adorned by three brick chimneys, the product of my mother’s determination to be a good citizen, and conserve oil. She had three fireplaces installed during the energy crisis of the early 1970s, and all of them smoke. When you get all three going at once, the cottage is cozy on the coldest winter day, it is also filled with smoke. So you open the doors, let out the smoke, and let in the cold.

  The lawn, a stricken patch of greenery where moss and dandelions cavort among the tufts of grass, is now festooned with three people. We have, reading from left to right, one plump and tender Widow Golden, in a rosy dressing gown decorated with pink kittens, one long and lanky journalist in a dun bathrobe decorated with ancient egg, jam, and coffee stains, and Quarter to Three Winston, who ought, by rights, to be out harrying the criminal element instead of flattening the remnants of my lawn in his size thirteen regulation boots.

  I may say I was impressed, even while I was terrified, to find Quarter to Three so swiftly on the scene of the crime. His name comes from his habit of standing with his broad brogans planted heels together, toes out. He is normally to be found in this pose on the main drag of Silver Falls, where his principal duties are to breathe in and out and, occasionally, hand out a parking ticket to some stranger in town. Locals, needless to say, do not get ticketed, or, if by accident they do (sometimes it takes Quarter to Three a while to recognize when one of the natives has purchased a new car), the tickets are indignantly torn up and strewn across the street. Quarter to Three doesn’t get upset, his mind, such as it is, is normally occupied with thoughts of food or of the delectable Belinda Huntingdon, waitress in the O.K. Café on Main Street. Quentin does not possess one of those steel-trap minds you read about, and it was a puzzle to me how he came to bring me so swiftly to book.

  “Morning, Carlton,” he said. “Nice day.” He smiled at the Widow Golden—you can get the effect of Quarter to Three’s smile if you hit a cantaloupe with an axe. “Morning, Mrs. Golden. Some hot.” (Quentin grew up in the Maritimes.)

  “Oh, hello, Ernie,” he added, “didn’t see you at first.”

  Quarter to Three had fallen into the same error that Emma had embraced, in supposing that Ernie was supine as a result of the effects of Catawba, his usual tipple.

  “I came to see you, Carlton,” he went on, grabbing me by the elbow and moving me over to one side where we could talk confidentially, “about getting a write-up in the paper for my sister’s wedding.”

  Well, he could have phoned me about that, of course, but that would have courted the danger of being overheard in the police office trying to square the press, or being overheard at home—he lives in Burnt River, one of the surrounding towns—by his wife, who can’t abide any of his numerous sisters. Easier to drop in on me on his way to work. I told him I would be happy to do right by the girl, and would no doubt have eased the oversized flatfoot back into his car and on his way, but Emma Golden stuck her oar in.

  “Quentin,” she said, “somebody has murdered Ernie Struthers.”

  “It’s my sister Clara,” Quarter to Three rumbled on, “she’s marrying that fellow who works with the Hydro.” He stopped, shook his head as if to clear it. Emma’s words had penetrated the concrete and were trickling down inside his head, on the lookout for brain cells. They found some. He looked up.

  “You don’t say,” said Quarter to Three. “What do you know about that.”

  He strode over to Ernie’s body, glowered at it as it he had just caught it hanging a U-turn on Clarence Street, and reached for a notebook. He came up with his book of parking tickets, glowered again, shrugged, unlimbered his ballpoint pen, started to write, stopped, pushed the top of the pen down to produce the ballpoint, started to write again, stopped, shook the pen, gave the whole thing up as a bad job and stood there, looking confused and not unlike a bull worked to a frazzle by a matador, if the bull happened to be wearing a uniform that was several sizes too small for him and had emblazoned across the chest pocket, “Silver Falls Police.”

  Emma decided to be helpful. Helpful people—this is recognized by all the leading authorities—are the cause of most of the world’s unhappiness.

  “Quentin,” Emma said, “shouldn’t you call this in?”

  “Right,” said Quentin. “Call it in.”

  “You can use the telephone in Carlton’s place,” said Emma, being helpful again. “After all, that’s Carlton’s dad’s whaddyecallit sticking in Ernie’s back.”

  Whatever made me think Emma Golden was friendly?

  “It is?” said Quarter to Three, as he bent over Ernie and was just about to seize the evidence, when a deep, commanding voice shouted, “Well, good morning, all!”

  Quarter to Three stopped. We all looked back towards the street where, striding purposefully over the weeds and looking, to me at least, quite a bit like the cavalry on a rescue ride, came my neighbour and friend, Hanson Eberley, with a coffee mug in his hand, and a light in his eye.

  The coffee mug was evidence of the fact that Hanson, like many of the retired folks in Bosky Dell, had a habit of wandering around the little village after breakfast, for a chat. Cold coffee, hot gossip. The light in his eye came from the fact that he had spent most of his life on the Metropolitan Toronto police force, and had retained the policeman’s habit of wanting to be in on things. My front stoop, with its recumbent body and confused cop, looked promising. Hanson is a tall, rangy, good-looking man, with steel-grey hair, piercing blue eyes, and a pencil-thin moustache. If David Niven had had steel-grey hair, he would have looked a lot like Hanson and the resemblance was heightened, although I am sure Hanson was unaware of this, by the fact that he is a natty dresser, and always wears a cravat to top off his costume.

  My mother was not fond of Hanson. “What kind of a man, for God’s sake,” she would say, “wears a cravat in a place like Bosky Dell?” My father, on the other hand—it was not the only subject on which they ever differed—was a great admirer of Hanson’s, and often pumped him for stories of his detecting days which Dad turned into flashbacks and sold. He was a freelance, for which read “starving,” writer.

  Hanson had taken early retirement from the Toronto force, where he had attained the exalted rank of staff inspector on the homicide squad, eight years ago and retreated to Bosky Dell with his wife, Nora. They were working, had for years been working, on Hanson’s memoirs, which everybody guessed were really going to be something when they came out. Nora used to be Hanson’s secretary, but they must have worked better together when they were both on the force than they
did after settling in Bosky Dell, because no one had ever seen any actual writing result from their joint endeavours.

  Hanson was one of my heroes, in part because my father admired him, and there were not many people Dad admired, and in part because he radiated self-assurance, a quality I have always yearned for. Once, I tried to grow a moustache like Hanson’s and my mother, after handing me an SOS pad and advising me to wipe it off, asked why I thought I needed a moustache. I said so I would look like . . . and then, thinking quickly, substituted David Niven for Hanson Eberley, not wishing to provoke my mother’s scorn.

  “But, honey, you already look like David Niven,” she said. “David Niven has a head, you have a head. He has two eyes, you have two eyes. He has a nose, you have a nose . . .”

  I wandered off, and cancelled the Great Moustache Project, but my desire to be like Hanson Eberley never faded. When my parents were killed in an auto crash a couple of years ago, Hanson offered me, along with the sympathy that is never in short supply on these occasions, cold, hard cash, which is. While I didn’t take it, the offer increased my admiration for Hanson, and to see him cutting across the lawn, alive with intelligent curiosity, filled me with reassurance. Hanson would fix things.

  It took him about two minutes to “debrief,” as he put it, Quarter to Three Winston. Ernie Struthers was deceased. Right. Apparently stabbed to death with that thing now sticking out of his lower back. Right. Which had Carlton’s father’s initials carved into the handle. Hmm, right. Quentin had been about to check out the weapon, sir, when you came along, sir, and . . .

  “And just stopped you from making an ass of yourself by smearing your fingerprints all over the evidence. Well,” said Hanson, taking charge, “get on your radio, Quentin, call the office, and have them send out somebody from the OPP.”

  “Yessir,” snapped Quentin, and headed for his car, muttering, “The radio, why didn’t I think of that?”