Town of Masks (15 page)

Copithorne cocked his head like an old gossip, Hannah thought. “Nothing, Frank? You didn’t hear a thing?”

Small grief here for Maria, and John an old love. He would bow his head at the memorial—and notice that his shoelace was untied.

“As a matter of fact, we did hear something, the grinding of car gears. It’s not the sort of thing you think much about. I believe I made a joke about it—a woman driver, or something like that.”

Not much of a joke, Hannah thought, but par for Franklin Wilks.

“Now that’s real queer, Mr. Wilks.” Hannah did not recognize the speaker. “I was standing outside Molly’s Diner. I work down there. Me and another fellow was standing there jawing about something, and we heard the most god-awful grinding of gears.”

“All the way from her place?” Copithorne asked.

There were times when he was quite stupid, Hannah thought. Without Ruth, he was nothing. With her, he was a leader in the Cove.

“No later than nine-thirty,” the restaurant worker said. “I’m in bed by ten. I get up at four.”

Then hurry home,
Hannah thought,
hurry home.

Matheson turned to Wilks. “What time did you hear it?”

“After ten. I’m sure of that. Is Jim Travers here?”

Travers, principal of the high school, was haled into the group, and confirmed Wilks’s calculation of the time. They had begun their last rubber at ten minutes after ten and they had heard it not long afterward.

“It indicates a line of travel,” Matheson said.

“And perhaps someone else heard the gears grinding when he returned to the water front,” Hannah said, and wished immediately that she had kept her silence.

Matheson looked at her. “Well, there’s enough deputies down there right now.”

“What sent them down there?” Copithorne asked.

“Can’t you guess that?”

Annie Tully, Hannah thought, allowing herself to be jostled back. They were seeking the jewels, the trail of the thief.

“Pounding hell out of our people, that’s what they’re doing down there right now, turning our houses in on us.” O’Gorman had found an audience. The big Irishman pounded his fist on the back of a bench, and, Hannah thought, he could cleave it in two. Around him were gathered twenty or more of his kind, fishermen or the descendants of fishermen, their eyes as blue and deep as the water they plumbed for a living. A clannish sort by trade and origin, by the hours they kept and the church they supported, they were first suspect in every trouble in the Cove, and suspect now. She was infected with O’Gorman’s wrath, knowing it to be righteous. The whole chamber was rocking with unrest, and there was not a hand raised to steady it.

“We’ve the rights of citizens,” O’Gorman cried, “and it’s time we proclaimed them.”

“And time they were heard,” Hannah called, loud and clear.

The O’Gorman group parted like waves, opening a way for her. She moved through it, awed at the effect among them of her words on their behalf. She raised her voice again, louder still. “Councilmen, will you call the meeting?”

“Aye, call the meeting!” the fishermen echoed. Beyond them, another group picked up the demand. Soon the whole chamber was reverberating with the chant: “Call the meeting! Call the meeting!”

Hannah thrilled to the sound and the echo of it. She strained on tiptoe to see its effect on the Bakers, the Copithornes, the Wilkses. Their faces seemed collapsed in the shock. A hand beneath her elbow propelled her to the side a few steps and then hoisted her up on a bench. The quick strength of O’Gorman ran through her, doubling the beat of her heart. She laid her hand on his shoulder to steady herself and felt the rough wool of his shirt and beneath it the taut-muscled power.

One by one the council members were recovering, disentangling themselves from the crowd, working forward. Copithorne caught up the gavel and pounded it on the table, soundless in the chant. He was striking rhythm with the chant, wood meeting wood on the word “call,” accelerating the cry, not breaking through it. Wilks plucked the gavel from him and made an ack-ack of sound.

Seven men took their places at the table. The eighth chair, where one woman had previously sat with them, was unclaimed.

The noise would not be stilled. Hannah pounded down from the bench and lunged through the dissidents. When she reached the railing, she flung herself through the gate and faced the townspeople. Raising her arms like an evangelist, she started to sing the “Star Spangled Banner,” and summoned everyone to join her, her hands demanding a conductor’s response.

The chant was stilled and halfway through the anthem, everyone was at attention. She glanced at the council. They were hunched behind their chairs, holding onto the backs of them for dear life. John Copithorne wiped the sweat from his face. She left the song to its own command and moved to his side. He motioned her toward the vacant chair.

No,
Hannah thought.
I shall have this seat, but not at an invitation from you, John, nor by your referment, Franklin Wilks.
She ignored the gesture, and pulled him down to where she could speak into his ear.

“Start the meeting at once. Don’t lose a minute.”

“With this mob?”

“Just start it!” Hannah shouted.

“We’ll adjourn out of respect to Maria!” Again he indicated the empty chair. “That’ll fix their carts for ’em.”

“Let Frank take it over.”

Wilks was watching them. He had caught the gist of it and reached for the gavel. Copithorne nodded assent. Hannah retreated beyond the gates and the crowd accepted her. She finished the anthem, a spectator, in their forefront. Wilks called the meeting to order.

“I’m going to suggest that you sit down,” he called out, “on the benches or on the floor. Sit down! We’ve got a good janitor. Sit down!”

Like a field of grain before the wind, the Cove citizens settled low, and whispered their anticipation.

“We shall not adjourn—I say we won’t adjourn, but we should—out of respect. Mrs. Verlaine served on this council. She deserved more from us than a near riot in its chamber.” He let the reproach sink in while he polished his glasses. “Doctor Copithorne has asked me to chairman the meeting. He is here in spite of his indisposition over the loss of his friend.”

Indisposed, Hannah thought, but by his own inadequacy, his failure of understanding, of imagination. Everything was “now” to him, and without precedent, he could not foresee consequence—the day’s experience lost in the night’s surprise. He slumped in his chair responding to the false solicitude of Franklin Wilks. Hollow, hollow men.

“Mrs. Verlaine, I feel sure, would have us carry on as usual.”

How Maria would have responded to a situation like this! There would not have been a disturbance. She would have brooked no delay—“To what purpose, gentlemen?” Doctor Johnson, a council member, moved that the minutes of the last meeting as published in the
Cove Gazette
be approved. Seconded and carried. The crowd watched in some awe as the machinery of the meeting ground into progress. A marvelous thing, Hannah mused, the response of human beings to ritual, to a show of patriotism, to an authoritative voice. One word from her when she stood with her hand on O’Gorman’s shoulder would have been sufficient to stampede the meeting.

“Chief of Police Matheson is with us tonight,” Wilks said presently. “He’s taken time out from his investigation of this tragic affair to give us a report. Mr. Matheson, will you come up?”

As the policeman wove forward among them, the crowd gave him encouragement. “Let’s have the truth, Matt” …“No soft soap” …“What gives?”

Matheson had been police chief since Hannah was a young woman. He had been promoted to the post, in fact, the year she went into the bank from college. A steady and affable man, he had never been brilliant, but brilliance, she thought, could make a policeman suspect.

Matheson, before the council, brushed his nose with the back of his hand. “I want to correct something you said if you don’t mind, Mr. Wilks. The way it’s going now, this isn’t my investigation.”

“’Atta boy!” O’Gorman shouted.

Wilks used his gavel.

“I think just about the lowest trick in the book,” Matheson continued, “is to use a murder investigation for some tinhorn politician’s own ends.”

Again the crowd responded. Hannah watched Wilks’s mouth straighten into a taut line. He was a national committeeman of the party in power. It shepherded him and Walker and Senator Cravens—quite a trio!

“It’s been given out,” Matheson started again, choosing his words slowly, “that me and the Campbell’s Cove force was making a mess of the investigation. We didn’t even get started on an investigation.” He took a notebook from his pocket and moistened his thumb to turn the pages. “At twenty minutes to eleven this morning, I got a call from Jim Nolan, deliveryman for Railway Express. He was delivering a package to 327 Cherry Street and didn’t get any answer back door or front door. Going round the house, he noticed a light burning inside and he looked in the window. He saw a woman lying in a chair and went across the street and called me.” Matheson turned a page. “I left the station with Officer Tom McKay at seventeen minutes to eleven after I gave the day sergeant instructions to alert the deputy police in case we needed them.”

Hannah recalled the scene with a nauseating vividness, as he told of his arrival and first exploration. Was this his intended effect on someone in the room, she wondered? Now and then his eyes shifted abruptly to the onlookers, fastening on someone, she thought, and never on the same face twice. He was doing more than defending himself.

“The important thing is,” Matheson pounded his fist on the table, “nobody except McKay and me was in that house as long as I was in charge. It’s true there was people all over the lawn. They came down on us from the highway and down the street like locusts, but they didn’t get in the house.

“Now it’s the practice in this county, as you gentlemen know, that in towns having a police force, that force is in charge of every criminal offense that isn’t federal. You notify the sheriff’s office, but they don’t step in unless there’s a complaint of incompetence. I called Walker, and I swear to you here now, he says to me, ‘Just let us know if you need us,’ and I said I would, and then I called the state police for their laboratory equipment.”

Matheson put the notebook away. “I went back to her place and waited. Before the noon siren sounded, the sheriff and two carloads of deputies drove up. The deputies started pushing people back. Now them people shouldn’t of been there. But as far as I could see, once they was there, nothing was going to be saved by pushing them away.

“Now the funny thing, gentlemen, the sheriff didn’t come in that house when he got there. No, sir. He just waited in the car till the state police lab truck got there. He gave them orders before they come into the house, and from then on they reported to him. That’s about all, Mr. Wilks, except when him and his deputies came inside, he told Officer McKay he was relieved. The trouble was he didn’t put anybody in McKay’s place, and for about five minutes after that people came pushing in like it was a prizefight ring.”

Wilks fingered the head of the gavel. “Doesn’t McKay take orders from you?”

“Yes, sir. But if he was going to follow my orders this morning he’d of had to keep the sheriff out, too, because I said everybody. And I can’t blame him none for not taking that on himself.”

“Just what happened when you and Walker met inside?”

“He says to me, ‘I’m going to take over here, Matheson.’ Sure, I was sore, but the way I figured it, an awful lot of criminals have gone scot-free in this state because the authorities bogged down in their authority—who has the jurisdiction over who. Remember the fellow writing a new kind of bible? The one who got an ax in his head, and got his whole family massacred? Remember?”

Hannah shuddered as did everyone in the room.

“The state police, the county, and the metropolitan police had a fine go-round about it, and somebody’s still got that ax, and he’s still got his own head on his shoulders, and God Almighty knows what he’s using it for these days.”

The frightful image brought a moan from the crowd. Matheson looked over them coldly, one face at a time again. Hannah lifted her chin and met his eyes boldly. When they left her she could feel a moisture oozing out of her pores.

There was a conference among the members, after which Wilks appointed a committee to study Matheson’s complaint and bring in a report to the next council meeting. “In the meantime, I should suggest for the records,” Wilks concluded, “that you withdraw your remark on—I believe you said ‘tinhorn politician.’ It’s prejudicial.”

Matheson shook his head. “No sir. If Duff there”—he pointed to the town clerk, “wants to erase the word ‘tinhorn,’ that’s okay with me. I’m not a kid, Mr. Wilks. I don’t pick up my toys and go home if I don’t get my way. I’m telling you, half them deputies right now are giving Front Street a going-over. That’s not a sheriff’s posse down there. That’s a gang of strong-arm boys from the back rooms of the county machine. They’re getting in their licks against the only block of votes they didn’t line up last election.”

A roar went up from Dan O’Gorman’s followers. Wilks banged his gavel, but it was Matheson waved them into silence.

“That’s conjecture!” Wilks said, his wrath shaking his voice. “You have no right to use this occasion for politics.”

“And they’ve got no right using it to abuse innocent people.”

When he had gaveled the audience into silence, Wilks said coldly, “We may assume from that, Matheson, you know the guilty party?”

Matheson saw his mistake, but too late. “No, sir.”

“And as a police officer, wouldn’t you say that it’s much too early to conjecture on the outcome of the investigation?”

“Lord Almighty, I’d be the first one to say that, Mr. Wilks. There can’t be an autopsy report yet.”

Wilks was in command now. That he felt it himself, Hannah knew from long observation. He was tapping his pencil on the table, a staccato measure of the time it would take him to make the kill. As it turned out, the killing was done with kindness.

“You know, Matt, if things are the way you say they are, you and the Campbell’s Cove force are the only insurance we have of justice.”