by Howard Engel
“A week or so later, Samson reacted strongly when Rose Moss was on the campus with me asking questions. He had to get rid of both of us. Somehow, Rose escaped, probably not even realizing her danger. Rose’s mother got her out of the way. Although she didn’t admit it, she knew all about my role in this when I talked to her. In our second conversation, she did admit it. How Flora McAlpine got mixed up in this, I don’t know. There is some evidence that I had questioned her, or was about to, when we both were targeted. Had she played some part in the drug racket? I don’t know. I doubt it.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Cooperman.” It was one of the professors. “I know that this is going to be a long and complicated narration, but please make a bigger attempt to keep to the subject. You were talking about Dr. Samson and why you think he might be implicated. True, he is tall and would have had to move the driver’s seat back in order to drive your car. What else do you have?”
“My main piece of evidence is so subjective I hate to mention it. It’s the sort of thing that would never be admitted as evidence in a court of law. I told you—that is, I think I told you—that when I was first here at Rose of Sharon, I was plagued with a nightmare. It was about a train wreck.”
“Are we sinking to divination now? Is this a seance? What sort of voodoo is this?” Nesbitt was showing signs of revival.
“Sorry. Blame it on my poor head.” I tried to find the nub of the tale I was telling, experiencing a moment of total confusion. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t think. What the hell was I doing here pretending to be in my right mind? I tried to look at Anna. Anna was always a source of calm. She restored my centre of gravity.
“The dream … in my dream … a suitcase flew at me …” I tried to start again. “I … I … I believe that psychiatrists are right when they say that dreams are ways in which the subconscious tries to inform the conscious mind of what it knows.”
“This is beginning to sound like a movie from the nineteen fifties, Mr. Cooperman: Three Faces of Eve, The Seventh Veil, Spellbound.”
“Yes. Do you mean us to take this seriously?”
“Frankly, I don’t care what you do with it. All I know is that I’m compelled to tell somebody. It won’t take much longer.”
“But what was the special meaning of a flying suitcase?”
“Good question, Anna. In this case, the airborne piece of carry-on luggage, which I saw in great detail as it flew through the air with other debris, was one made by the famous American luggage maker, the Samsonite Company. The dream was trying to put the name “Samson” into my head in an important, overriding way.”
“So, you have a dream and the possibility of finding a tall, left-handed man, presumably with a driver’s licence. Not very much to take with you into a court of law, Mr. Cooperman.”
“I know it doesn’t seem like much, but there’s more. We have all seen how he walked out of here: defiant and unpenitent. In less than a minute, he returned, because this young woman, to whom charges may also apply, was being brought into this room.”
The people looked away from me to examine the faces of the two suspects. In a way, even as one of his victims, I felt sorry for Samson. Not because I sympathized with what he had done or that I thought there were any extenating circumstances that made him a man to be pitied. My sympathy came from the fact that Samson would never see that he had crossed the line, that society was right and he was wrong. He’d go to prison feeling the victim of a short-sighted, backward society, a martyr to these unenlightened times. He was venal, predatory, and scheming, but he was also pushed beyond his limits and in thrall to an overwhelming passion. He was protecting his reputation in the firmament of the academy.
From where I was sitting, Samson looked smaller, as though he’d suddenly lost sixty pounds. His eyes were downcast, directed at the floor. He seemed without hope or even hope of hope.
Then it was all over. Quite suddenly, I was awakened from the unreal dream of playing detective, playing at living in the world outside these walls. At this point, Rhymes With came into the room.
“Sorry,” she said. “We need the space for half an hour.” There were three doctors and five nurses at her back.
Sykes and Boyd ushered their suspects from the room. They moved like they’d been shackled with heavy chains all the way to the elevator. Holding a handkerchief to his forehead, a perspiring Nesbitt followed close behind. After that, the few remaining sandwiches held little interest for those of us left in the room. Anna and two of the nurses helped me to tidy the room.
That night, nursing a bellyache, I had a long conversation on the phone with Sykes. By the time I’d finished, there was nothing keeping me from my rest that a couple of antacid pills couldn’t cure.
TWENTY-SEVEN
I was still stuck in the hospital, but Rhymes With let slip that they’d be releasing me soon. How soon? She couldn’t exactly say, except that it would be within days, not weeks.
Anna called and suggested we meet for dinner at a restaurant behind the hospital. Sykes and Boyd invited themselves along.
The restaurant was only a short walk from where the last of the fifth floor gourmets were talking boeuf en daube and cassoulet to a timorous newcomer.
The restaurant specialized in, as I soon discovered, the hotter sort of Chinese cooking. My guess was that it was developed to ensure that only the hardiest of its regular customers survived.
Anna looked on as a blush coloured my cheeks. She managed not to decorate her pretty face with the food, while delicately using chopsticks to put away her share of spicy beef with orange peels. (I had had to request more conventional cutlery.) The two cops introduced a true meeting of east and west: they skewered their meat with a single chopstick. They dabbed at their faces after most of the damage had been done. They were wearing plain clothes as usual.
Some of the dishes were so spicy they made ordinary cold water taste scalding hot. We were all hungry and in no mood to talk until the bulk of the meal had been reduced to rubble in the middle of the table. Sykes ordered more orange beef, saying we should have ordered two portions to begin with. Boyd picked at a tooth with the corner of a rolled traffic ticket, and I dabbed at my face with a napkin. Except for a ladylike belch, Anna emerged unscathed.
“Benny’s eating up a storm, Anna. Don’t they feed him in that place?”
I jumped in to defend the hospital: “Hospital food is designed for the rapid circulation of patients. Nobody can stick it long. Right now, I’m enjoying the break. Now, Jack, show some genuine pity on a poor shut-in and tell us the latest news. What’s happened to the suspects, Samson and his girlfriend?”
“It’ll keep. Enjoy your meal.”
“I’ve enjoyed it! It’s now starting the digestive process. You want to wait that out too?”
“Okay. Okay. What do you want to know?”
“The lot.” Anna said. I liked the way she used these British expressions. I wonder when she collected them.
“Everything!” I added at the same time.
“Well,” Sykes said, looking at his partner’s face for an enabling look, confirmation of Boyd’s agreement that he was about to spill more than the police normally tell citizens outside a courtroom. His partner’s eyes widened, but he was smiling.
“Sure, we might as well. Benny got this case moving again. He deserves to be in at the kill.”
Anna caught her breath and my hand under the table.
“Luckily,” Boyd added quickly, “it didn’t go far enough for a real kill.”
“Yeah, everybody came quietly, just as we suggested.”
“Hold on!” I said. “What have you been up to? I thought you had them in custody when they left the hospital the other day.”
“We couldn’t hold them long on what we learned at the hospital. And Samson got the fastest lawyer in town on the case,” Sykes said.
“So, they walked?”
“Will you let me finish? Anyway, you should know. It was your suggestion. Do you remember calling me the
night of your big hospital soiree?”
“Of course I do!” I lied.
“We put a team to watch Professor Samson. It was expensive: six men, in three shifts. He ended up driving out of the city to a place called Holstein. Ever heard of it?”
There were no responses. Then I remembered that Professor Bett told me something about a village of that name, but I couldn’t remember enough of what he had said to add anything.
After a polite pause, Sykes picked up the story. “It’s a tiny place; used to be on the main CN line to Owen Sound, but that went for scrap metal years ago. There’s a creamery, a blacksmith, and a feed mill. Across from the mill, which is still worked by water, there’s a funny-looking house set into the bank of the Beatty Saugeen River.” He took a breath. “Steve, the missing professor, was being held inside.”
“But you couldn’t have followed Samson all the way by car. He would have seen you,” I said.
“Hell, we had to drop back after he left the 400. Fellow from Brampton named Red Cavers picked him up from the air. He has a couple of copters he uses for God-knows-what-all. He followed him west on 89 and then north to Holstein. He kept me informed by cell phone, so I wasn’t too far away when Samson stopped at Holstein.”
“But from the air, don’t all cars look alike? How did Cavers know he was following the right car?”
“If you were a real cop, Benny, you’d know that this is standard procedure. We put a tracking bug in his car while it was still here in Toronto. Your hunch about that professor, Benny, got us moving.”
“Wasn’t a hunch, it was more like a feeling I get at the back of my knees when I know I’m on to something.”
“Oh, I wish I’d known that. I thought you had something a little more substantial.”
“My knees have never let me down. And that nightmare I told you about clinched it.”
“That nightmare. This case has everything. Can’t you work in a Ouija board, Benny?”
“Look, Jack, you got your murderers, didn’t you? You found the professor in the house on the Whoozis River. What was it called again?”
“The Beatty Saugeen. Okay, the point is well taken. We followed your suggestion and we got lucky. If we admit your hunches and super-sensitive knees, you have to allow for Lady Luck playing a hand.”
“Sure.”
“But, Benny, how did you settle on that couple as the people to go after? The professor has a faultless rep at Simcoe College.”
“The girl, Heather, had been wearing a lot of studs. The dishwasher at Barberian’s remembered seeing them.”
“But, Benny, wasn’t she trying to get you to find Steve and Rosie?”
“Yeah, she wanted me to check myself out of the hospital so that I could more easily be dealt with. You see, she and Samson didn’t know how much I remembered about my earlier visit to the university. They weren’t sure I wasn’t suddenly going to recall everything. And it was too chancy to try something at the hospital.”
“Was that all?”
“No. Heather’s visit to the hospital confused me. She put the idea in my head that both Steve and Rose were missing. That slowed me down. Then Samson said that Steve had a missing tooth. According to his wife, that tooth went missing the day he disappeared. Only someone who had seen him at the time of his abduction or afterwards would know that the tooth was missing.”
“Where can I get hit on the head like that?” This was Sykes, who was looking at Anna.
I kept rolling. “Dr. Samson made a similar mistake; he said Steve had been worried about what to get his little girl, Dympna, for her birthday. He didn’t know I’d talked to Dympna herself on her birthday, which was many weeks after Steve disappeared. So, there had been some recent contact.”
“So that’s it?” Sykes groaned.
“You still don’t know the wackiest part of this whole business!”
“What’s that?” said two voices at once.
“It’s my recurring nightmare. I was hit on the head by a flying suitcase in an upsetting railroad car.”
“I think this is where I came in. I’m beginning to feel as though I bought your ticket.” Sykes was out of beer and took it out on me.
“You see, I went with Rose Moss to question the people who knew Steve. That was before I got hit on the head. I talked to Dr. Samson. He told me something that made me suspicious. I must have had my suspicions when he clubbed me from behind. They used to call him Gauche when he played football.”
“If he was gauche, how did he make the team?”
“Touchdowns mostly. Lots of them. So I’ve been told. Gauche means left-handed as well as awkward.”
“How did you begin to suspect him?”
“We may never know. His must have been the last face I saw before I was brained. Don’t look at me! All we have is my recurring dream. It kept poking his name at me.”
“It took you long enough to figure it out!” Sykes added.
“Yeah,” added his partner, “and you kept it to yourself until you brought it up in front of Samson and the rest of the people involved.”
I muttered, “Sour grapes,” under my breath, and then asked, “Was I wrong?”
“He’s right,” Sykes said to his partner through his teeth. “You would have laughed yourself pink if he’d told you earlier. The only time to admit to a clue like that is when the suspects have been booked for the crime,” said Boyd, grinning.
“And when stronger evidence will support the unprovable.” This from Anna.
“Yeah. I don’t think we’ll have much more trouble from the professor. He’s quite tame now. Told me to tell you that if the muffler on your damned car hadn’t attracted a police car, he’d never have had to park it behind the steak house,” Boyd said, then continued, “You worked it all out, Benny. And you did it from the hospital. That’s so amazing even I have to admit it.”
“No, I’m not your complete armchair sleuth. Remember, I’ve had two shifts of nurses working for me around the clock. And I even went out one day.”
“Well, next door to armchair, then.”
“I’ll accept that, Jack. Now, when am I going to get my suitcase packed, escape out of the hospital, and end up back home?”
“Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” It was Sykes. We looked at him until he caught his breath. “What about Flora McAlpine? The woman in the Dumpster with you. We checked her out, Benny. She went to high school with you in Grantham. How do you explain them apples?”
“She was in school with me? That’s right; you told me. Flora McAlpine?”
“Yeah. Wiggle out of that. We ran her past history. You did time in grade nine together.”
“Flora Mc—Scotty! Yes, I remember her now. Two heavy blond braids and glasses. Blue eyes squinting at the blackboard through thick lenses. I’d forgotten all about her.” It was Flora’s face that the television hostess had reminded me of. “Twin ramparts of blond hair,” I said out loud.
Anna smiled, and took my hand.
“And she died coming to your rescue,” said Jack. “We now have two witnesses who saw Flora, your old schoolmate, watching through her apartment window. They were doing some sort of committee work. Flora suddenly turned, saying, ‘But I know him!’ and rushed out. They expected her to come right back. When she didn’t, they went home. I talked to both of them this morning.”
“Poor Flora! I guess that’s as close as we are going to get until I get my wits back.”
“Yeah, she could have seen you before you got clobbered and arrived at the Dumpster after you were inside. Samson then got rid of Flora the same way.”
“Poor Flora,” Anna said, and we nodded. We indulged in a few seconds of silence, watching the scraps of paper blow across the floor.
TWENTY-EIGHT
I finally met Dympna, Clea, and their parents, Laura and Steve Mapesbury. It was early September, as close as I can figure it, and the occasion was the wedding of Stella Seco’s daughter, Rosie Moss, to a young American with a degree in business administration
. The place was the lawn in the quadrangle at Simcoe College. I liked the irony of that. The ceremony had been held in a little chapel on St. George Street, a couple of blocks from the Gothic-revival college. It was a well-attended affair; people from Stella’s TV network were everywhere, some of them signing autographs. Someone told me that the Ontario government was represented by three ministers among the guests. The father of the bride, looking lost in the glare of celebrity-spotting, was taking photographs with a small Japanese camera. In spite of Stella’s best attempts at upstaging the bride, Rosie was the undisputed star of the afternoon.
The weather cooperated beautifully and the sun failed to dry out the canapés. A breeze riffled the white tablecloths from time to time, but they were well anchored with platters of cheese and crackers. I soaked up as much sunshine as I could; it was the only bit of summer I was going to get. The speeches were unmemorable but perfect in the context. Turned out in a light seersucker suit from a couple of years ago, I allowed myself a glass of red wine and talked to several people who actually knew the happy couple. I faked my way through several conversations in which I pretended to be a friend of the bride or groom, as it took me. On the lawn, the large gathering of men in suits and women in hats and dresses, with sheeplike clouds overhead, made me quite giddy. I wasn’t used to the wine; I’d been on the wagon all summer. All around me, women were slowly sinking into the well-tended turf to the length of their high heels, and as they grew shorter the men they were talking to grew steadily taller. I wasn’t sure whether the fun of that observation was me or the wine.
By then, I had been out of the hospital for a few weeks and had been looking out for myself with some help from Anna and a few Grantham-based social workers, who were concerned about my reading, my physical wellbeing, and whether or not I could cope with making my bed and taking out the garbage. I still carried a Memory Book, but it had now shrunk to pocket-notebook size. It still kept track of my days and nights, reminded me about renewing my medication and other exciting things. In the grocery store I still sometimes mistook grapefruits for oranges, until I smelled or handled them. Since I liked and ate both, I didn’t waste my money. Anna was a godsend in all of this, but she didn’t simply look after me, she saw to it that I learned to look after myself. And, in fact, I was getting pretty good at it.
