Prairie Hardball (13 page)

It didn’t take much to get Gladys Bieber to offer me a cup of tea. There was a kettle and a small fridge on a table in a room just off the main hall.

Gladys explained that she had retired ten years before, but until then had been the history teacher at the high school. No, she’d never married, but all her students were like family to her. She told me of the accomplishments of some of her favourites while we waited for the kettle to boil. The mayor had been a prize pupil, as had the Member of Parliament for The Battlefords-Meadow Lake and the current high school principal.

“I like to think I instilled the love of education in him, and a sense of history in the other two,” she said. “Now maybe one of them can become a part of history.”

Any doubts I had about the history-making potential of a small-town mayor or a backbencher in the House of Commons were ones I kept to myself. Gladys paused long enough to open a cupboard where she kept, no surprise, a stash of cookies.

“Tell me about Wilma,” I said. “I wish I’d had a chance to meet her. She seems so interesting from what I’ve heard or read.”

“Oh, she was. She was interesting and nice as pie. You should have known her then.”

“Was she kind of a tomboy when you were growing up? With the baseball-playing and all.”

“Not a bit of it. No, she was never a tomboy,”

Gladys kind of glared at me, and I realized that I must have inadvertently stumbled on a code word to make her so indignant.

“She was just the opposite, in fact. She was all girl. She just happened to love baseball. I did too. Of course I wasn’t ever as good as she was, but when we were young, we all played. We played on the church team.”

As if that settled that.

“Oh, I know what everybody said. I wasn’t born yesterday, you know. But as I sit here telling you, Wilma Elshaw was all girl. Normal, I mean.”

“There was a lot of gossip those days, wasn’t there? I know my mother had problems with some people in Wolseley where she came from. They didn’t think women should play baseball.”

“Just goes to show what they know, doesn’t it. N-o-t-h-i-n-g spells nothing. That’s what they know.”

“I was just reading some files at the Hall of Fame. There was an article about her knitting scarves for the boys at the front.”

“You see, that was just like Wilma, always thinking of others. She had a lovely hand at needlepoint, too,”

“So the article said.”

“I still have the knitting bag she made for me the first year she played in the league. I still have it, more than fifty years later. It’s lovely work.”

“The article said she was engaged,” I tried.

Gladys looked a little uncomfortable.

“What happened?”

“Well, that was a bit of a mystery, you know,” she almost whispered, looking around as if for eavesdroppers or hidden microphones. “I grew up with Morley Timms, too. That was her fiancé.”

“Yes, I’ve met him,” I said.

“Well, you haven’t met the Morley Timms that went off to war. You’ve met the one who came back.”

“You mean something happened to him? He was injured?”

“The Morley that went off to war with Garth Elshaw was a real catch. All the girls were in love with him back then. You should have seen him. He was so gay!”

She took another cookie.

“And I don’t mean gay the way they use it today. They took a perfectly good word and made it dirty. But there’s no other word to describe Morley as he was back then. Happy-go-lucky, merry. He always had a smile on his face and a joke on his lips. He was a wonderful singer, and he loved to dance. Oh, and he was smart, too. No two ways about it. His future was bright.”

“And he and Wilma were going to share that future,” I said.

“They’d known it since they were kids. They all grew up together. Garth and Morley were best friends then.”

“As they are now.”

“Well, now it’s more that Garth looks out for him. Then, Morley was the one. Garth just sort of tagged along in his shadow. But they were a formidable pair. At first, Wilma was just the kid sister, but that changed as she got older. She got such a crush on Morley. I had a crush on Garth, too. But the day Morley realized that Wilma had grown up, that was that. Unfortunately, Garth never came to that conclusion about me.”

She laughed, not bitterly, and grabbed another cookie.

“He played the field, Garth did. He didn’t marry until he was in his thirties. We thought he was going to be a bachelor for life, but he surprised us all. Married a widow with two sons, so he had himself a ready-made family.”

I didn’t know how to get her back to Morley and Wilma without obviously interrogating her, so I just waited her out.

“Yes, he broke some hearts. A lot of people in this town, not just me, thought that if he married anyone, it was going to be me. We kept company for a while after the war, but I just never lit his fire, I guess.”

“He changed after the war, then.”

“Oh, yes. He was more serious, kind of withdrawn. He’d lost his sense of fun. He never talked about what he’d seen there, but Garth’s sense of adventure was gone when he came back.”

“Maybe because war is the most deadly adventure.”

“Morley, now, he came home a different man altogether. He hasn’t been quite right ever since. It’s a real shame.”

She took another cookie to fuel the narrative.

“They had to put him in the mental hospital for a while, even. He was wild. One day he’d be laughing and joking just like the old days. The next he wouldn’t hardly say a word. He took to drinking. Not that he hadn’t had a nip or two from the flask before. I mean, who didn’t? But this was different. And he’d get out there in his car and drive like a maniac. I remember one night after a dance over to Maidstone he almost scared us all to death. He was driving the gang back in a snowstorm. We were all singing and laughing, we’d had a few, when Morley suddenly says he’s going to make the car fly. We all laugh, but Morley says he can do it, and then just begins going faster and faster and faster, and swearing at the car and telling us to stick our arms out the window, I remember it like it was yesterday.”

Clearly, she did. Poor Gladys had become increasingly agitated, telling the story. Her cheeks had turned quite pink.

“We all thought we were going to die, truly,” she said. “I never rode with him again, I’ll tell you that. If it hadn’t been for Garth, I don’t know what would have happened that night.”

“What did Garth do?”

“He just talked to him, talked him down, like. Wilma and I were screaming and crying and begging him to stop. Garth just leaned forward over the seat, he was in the back with me, and talked to him real quiet, in his ear. And Morley just let his foot off the pedal a little bit, then a little bit more, and then just stopped the car, right in the middle of the highway. And then he began to cry and cry. I’ve never seen a man cry like that before. He cried like a little kid, just blubbering. Then we all got out of the car, and Garth got him to move over and let him drive. And Morley cried all the rest of the way home. Next day they took him right to the Saskatchewan Hospital, they called it the asylum then, and he was in there for a long time.”

“So Wilma was there that night?”

“Yes, she was. She was right next to him. All the way home, she held him in her arms and he cried like he was her baby.”

“So she called the wedding off.”

“No, it wasn’t her. It was him. She was prepared to stick by him through thick and thin, Wilma was. She went to see him every day at the hospital, and he just refused to talk to her. He just sat staring at the wall, she told me. She didn’t know what to do. So when spring rolled around, she just decided to go back to baseball, and she never came home again, except to visit.”

“That’s very sad,” I said.

“And once she hooked up with that Virna, she changed.”

“How?”

“She just kind of hardened her heart. After Morley got better, maybe he wanted to marry her. But it was too late. And I can’t say as I blame her. Because Morley still acted pretty cuckoo, if you want to know the truth. He never did hold down a real job, and he became kind of the town eccentric, wandering around at all hours, dressed in all manner of strange get-ups. But likable, you know? He wasn’t dangerous or anything. They gave him some kind of shock therapy, like they did in those days, and some sort of experimental surgery, and he just sort of flattened out. He lost part of his mind, I guess. He was never as wild again, but he didn’t have any drive and he wasn’t smart any more. Well, you’ve met him. That’s how he’s been ever since.”

The front door opened, and we heard the clatter of footsteps and the chatter of voices. Gladys looked at her watch.

“Oh, my goodness, I’ve been babbling on and not looking at the time. Here’s my group from the Golden Years Lodge. I’m afraid I’m going to have my hands full for a while.”

She got heavily to her feet and went to the door. I followed her, thanking her for the tea and her kindness to a stranger.

“You know what I always say, dear,” she said, patting my arm. “A stranger’s just a friend you haven’t met yet.”

By four that afternoon, Andy and Deutsch had finished reading through the interview transcripts and statements from all of the people who had been at the banquet. Grenfell, Tremblay, and Resnick came back to report on their first round of door-to-door.

“What’ve you got?” Deutsch asked. “Start with you, Tremblay. Who was at the bar?”

“First we had to find the bartender, Rock. He wasn’t at home.”

“He was shacked up with his squeeze,” Resnick laughed. “He wasn’t pleased to see us. He was so hungover he didn’t know which way was up.”

“I don’t care about the state of his health,” Deutsch said. “What did he tell you?”

“He gave us a list of the people he remembered, about twenty of them,” Tremblay said. “Some names already known to this office.”

“A bunch of rounders, for sure,” Resnick added.

“We talked to as many as we could find, and got more names from them. We’re up to fifty-three, now, in addition to the ones we knew about already. The constables are still out talking to them, but we ran the names through the computer. And we’ve come up with something interesting.”

“Yeah, wait ’til you hear this, Sarge,” Resnick added. “We’ve got a live one.”

“Nathan Rowley,” Tremblay interrupted, glaring. “He’s got a record that you should know about.”

“Never heard of him,” Deutsch said.

“He’s new in town. He lives with his aunt, Ruth Fernie, over on 28th Street near the Convention Centre.”

“Ruth Fernie? The Ruth Fernie from the Hall of Fame?” Andy asked. “She found the body.”

“Exactly. The same Ruth Fernie. Rowley is her nephew. He’s been staying with her for the last four months, working in the Wal-Mart warehouse.”

“You going to get around to telling me what’s interesting about this guy any time soon?” Deutsch asked.

“He’s on parole. He served three years for a series of assaults in Saskatoon,” Tremblay said.

“Yeah? So what?”

“He specialized in old ladies, Sarge,” Resnick said. “That’s so what. Broke into their houses in broad daylight, roughed them up and stole their money. But it seemed like he enjoyed the rough stuff. They never had much cash, and he didn’t take anything else. TVs or anything like that he could sell.”

“Have you got a printout?” Deutsch asked.

“Right here, sir,” Tremblay said, handing it to him.

“Good work,” Deutsch said, then began to read. Tremblay shot his partner a smug glance, pleased with the boss’s approval.

“I’m going to call the arresting officer in Saskatoon on this,” Deutsch said. “See if he can tell me any more about this character.”

He went to a phone at the other end of the office.

“You guys go on,” he added. “Tell Andy what else you’ve turned up.”

“Has anyone talked to Rowley yet?” Andy asked.

“No, we just learned about his record,” Tremblay said.

“You said some of the others in the bar are known to the police.”

“Nobody as interesting as him,” Resnick said. “Got guys did some B and E’s, drunk driving, cigarette smuggling. A couple of hookers in there, and their pimps. Small stuff. One guy can’t stop beating on his wife. But nobody looks as good as Rowley. Just feels right.”

Deutsch came back from the phone.

“The guy who handled the case down there says that none of the women were killed, but he threatened them with it. Terrorized them, played with them, made sure they got really scared. One of them he choked until she was unconscious, but she lived. Another thing. He didn’t steal the big stuff, but he always took something away from the scene. A small piece of jewellery, a porcelain figurine.”

“A trophy,” Andy interrupted.

“Exactly.”

“It would be nice to get a look at his house. Can we get a warrant?”

“I don’t think we’ve got enough to convince a judge yet,” Deutsch said. “But I think we’ll invite Mr. Rowley in for a little chat this afternoon. Hugh, find out when he gets off work. Have someone waiting for him when he gets home.”

“Why not do a follow-up on Ruth Fernie’s statement?” Andy suggested.

“Good idea,” Deutsch said. “It’s a legitimate reason to be there, and maybe have a little look-see at the situation. Go for it, Hugh. But first, give us what you picked up at the hotel.”

Corporal Grenfell flipped open his notebook.

“A number of people heard a commotion in the back parking lot after about one in the morning, when the bar let out. Yelling, a woman screamed, but when they looked out the window, there were a bunch of people around, and it didn’t look like anyone was in trouble. A little later, Reverend Henry got up to go to the bathroom, he thinks it was just after two, and he heard a truck pull out of the parking lot. He couldn’t see who was in it, but he’s pretty sure he heard two doors close.”

He looked up from the notes.

“Then Peter Deneka was up at about 5:30. He says even a retired farmer always wakes up early. Anyway, he saw another pickup truck pulling out, and wondered if someone was skipping out on the bill.”

“Christ, from what I’ve seen around here, everybody drives pickup trucks,” Andy said. “That’s not much of a clue.”

“You’re right,” Deutsch said. “I drive one myself.”

“That’s all. I’ve got home addresses on some people who checked out,” Grenfell said. “You want me to follow them up now, or go get Rowley?”

“Go to the Fernie house. Leave your notes here. Dewey, I want you to put together a time chart we can plug the information into as it comes in. Try to get a handle on who was where, when.”

“What about me?” Tremblay asked.

“You get the information from the other guys as they come in and put it in some sort of form for your buddy to use.”

Andy could see that neither was pleased with his assignment. But that’s the way it worked in every police force. The constable is trusted to dig up the lead, but not to follow it through.

“I’ve been thinking,” Andy said. “Maybe we can’t charge him with anything yet, but I bet we could bring him in for parole violation. I bet there’s a clause in there that says he has to stay away from liquor and bad company.”

“Bingo,” Deutsch said. “We’ve got to have that information somewhere around here. Louis. See what you can get. Look in the computer. If you have to call the parole office in Saskatoon, do it.”

“Right away, Sergeant.”

“Faster than that, if you can,” Deutsch said.