by Howard Engel
My second cup of coffee lifted my spirits. So did an ad for McKenzie Stewart’s new book. I was a great fan of his detective, Dud Dickens. Haste to the Gallows was a good title. I’d pick up a copy as soon as I could. Elsewhere in the paper, I read a few captions, headings, the odd fragment, but I couldn’t focus on any more of the stories. I found myself staring at the obituaries—so much for the effects of good coffee—letting the names, dates and pieces of lives that had ended fill my head: Suddenly at Grantham General … in his 57th year … after a brave struggle … survived by … fondly remembered by … resting at … donations in lieu of flowers … followed by cremation …”
Back in my office, I punched in Dave Rogers’s number. I missed the trio of bald mannequins, leftovers from my father’s ladies’ ready-to-wear store, that I had finally cleared away to the basement. For years they had supervised my activities, covered indifferently with unbleached factory cotton in all the unnecessary places. Whenever I had a half-hour to kill, I rarely thought of all the stored junk that had accumulated in my office. Why didn’t I give in to the family curse and go into the shmate business? I had the window dummies for a start, my clients’ chairs were tubular items from an art deco renovation that my father ordered in the 1940s. There might even be some stock in the basement, where my brother, Sam, and I used to play while waiting for my father to close for the night. The phone kept ringing at the other end.
“Yeah?” I was surprised to hear a human voice. It took me a moment to return from my memories.
“Dave Rogers?”
“Yeah. Who wants him?”
“My name’s Cooperman. I want to talk to you.”
“What makes you think I wanna talk to you, Mr. Cooperman?”
“Abram Wise thinks you will.” That had him. He couldn’t wise-ass me any more. Still, there was a pause.
“Where are you now?”
“Corner of St. Andrew and James. My office is on the second floor of—”
“Meet me at the Chinese restaurant on your left as you come off the high-level bridge. You know the place? Twelve-thirty and don’t bring any friends.”
“There’s an eager beaver from Wise’s operations hugging my shadow. I can’t do much about him.” Again there was a pause at his end. Finally:
“Well, if he’s one of Abe’s boys, he won’t give me any heartburn more than I’ve got already. Twelve-thirty,” he repeated and was gone. I nodded to the instrument in my hand and replaced it.
My watch told me that I had three hours to kill before I had to keep the appointment. I rummaged in a drawer for an old address book that I thought might help me fill the time. The names in it belonged to people who were either dead, moved or vanished into the unknown. Who’s going to throw away a thing like that? Under the “Bs” I found what I was looking for and punched the long-distance number into the phone, trying to imagine the voice I was going to hear at the other end.
“Hello?”
“Ella?”
“Yes, this is Ella Beames.”
“It’s me,” I said. “Benny.”
“Benny Cooperman! Well, as I live and breathe! I hope you don’t mean to pay me a visit. I’ve got the painters in and—”
“I’m calling from Grantham, Ella. I’m not pushing the tourist season. I’m nowhere near Massachusetts. Don’t worry.”
“Well, Benny, you gave me quite a turn. I haven’t heard a word from home since I got a card from the girls at the library. They think my birthday’s in March and it’s not really until November. But they’ve always sent the card in March. I don’t remember how it started. You’re the one with the March birthday. I hope you had a good one. How are you, Benny?”
Ella Beames had retired from the Grantham Public Library at the mandatory age and had left the Special Collections Department in very capable hands. But they lacked, with all the good will in the world, Ella’s many years of experience. For a minute we talked about the weather here and in Newburyport, where she had moved on her retirement. Then we talked about local people, mutual friends and public characters. She was surprised to hear that Kogan, a one-time panhandler along St. Andrew Street, was now my landlord.
“Kogan was always a caution, Benny. And bright too. He got that from his mother, who was a Dodd. You remember the Dodds? They kept the leather goods down the street from your father’s store.” I let the conversation ramble; Abram Wise was paying expenses. It was good to hear Ella ramble; she put her heart in it. She said more in a minute than most people do in half an hour and the better part of it was worth remembering. When she finished talking about the Kemps’ fish market on Queen Street, she brought herself up short.
“Benny, you didn’t call all this way to hear an old woman’s twaddle. What’s behind this?”
“You never kept a file on crime families at the library, did you?”
“Of course not! Not the local ones anyway. We kept all of the big, international stuff in the morgue downstairs. But you’re talking about local crime families, am I right?”
“As usual. I’m trying to find out about Abram Wise. I know he’s a bad egg, but I’m still vague about where his illegal earnings come from. I’m having lunch with an old school friend of his, Dave Rogers, but I don’t want to go as ignorant as I am now.”
“Well, if I were you, I’d avoid the issue and get on a slow boat to China. The pair of them were nothing but trouble if my memory hasn’t gone potty.”
“I wish I had that option, but I haven’t.”
“So you called me to find out where I’ve hidden all of the dirt I couldn’t put on file?”
“I took a guess, Ella. I suspected that you squirrelled away what you know under an innocent label, where nobody but you could find it.”
“Well, after that crazy Ultimate Church bunch stole our files on Norbert Patten, I’ve had to use my head. There is a master file marked CHISHOLM, GORDON, Benny. You remember the Chisholm family, don’t you? Well, there never was a Gordon Chisholm that I ever heard of, so I made him up to put all of the key data in there. You can look up the names you want to trace and find the fictitious names I’ve hidden them under. I meant to find a better system before I retired, but I never got around to it.”
I tried to remember Ella’s face. I could see freckled eyelids and velvet cheeks. I was surprised to find so much of her in my memory. Her voice carried her face, her humour and even the scent of pale roses to my office from a town north of Boston somewhere. Ella has a way of evaporating the miles.
The new face behind the desk that had been Ella’s for as long as I’d owned a library card smiled as I came in. Neither of us knew the other’s name, but we knew one another the way you do in small towns. We nodded and exchanged a few words before she let me loose with the range of file drawers.
I opened the one showing CATH–CHURCH in the slot in front. CHISHOLM, GORDON was right in its proper place: after Elizabeth and Fred and before Harold. I lifted the file from the drawer and found a table near the corner of the room. After moving a few heavy atlases out of the way, I opened the file.
The air in the room was, as I had remembered it, smoke-free and artificial, as though it had been made up from a recipe in a laboratory where such things as dust, acid and other computer-eating atoms had never penetrated. Breathing it, besides me and Ella’s successor, was a photographer named Stefan Something, who was a bit of a town character. Stefan was a regular presence at civic and cultural functions, where his camera bag got him past the registration table. The locals knew that he never represented a paper or magazine. His camera was usually assumed to be empty, so that only visiting dignitaries were impressed at the quickness of the exposures he made as he worked his way to the luncheon sideboard or, on special occasions, the bar. Stefan was seated at a broad wooden table just in front of the main index terminals, busy reading up on the history of Grantham’s first families. I was glad that he hadn’t noticed me. The last time we talked, he was convinced that he wanted to go into the detective business.
&
nbsp; The master list was a sheet of foolscap divided into two columns. In the first were the names of the local entrepreneurs who had run afoul of the law or were at least believed to have done so whether or not they had ever been brought to book. As a demonstration of the assumption of innocence it lacked something. I noticed the name of a big corporation lawyer named Henry Markland. Markland took up a career of making licence plates when he ran out of banks to finance a scheme or project that, as far as I was able to discover, only existed in his imagination. He was to be found in a file marked O’REILLY, NATHAN, a pretty bogus combination if you ask me. There were other names I’d seen in print before. I was glad to see a scattering of Anglo-Saxon ones mixed in with the consonant-happy ethnic names. The right-hand column was almost free of surnames which had arrived on recent boats and planes. It was as though Ella, even in making up names to hide the guilty, didn’t want to tarnish people with names that had already had a bad enough run of it.
WISE, ABRAM, was there towards the bottom of the page. To find him, I was directed to look up CLELAND, JOHN. The name whispered something in my ear, but I couldn’t catch it. It didn’t seem to belong to a local family, crooked or straight. (Later Frank Bushmill, my neighbour, told me that it belonged to the author of Fanny Hill, a very famous naughty, once-banned novel. I wonder if Ella would have blushed if she knew I had penetrated her little game?)
I ran my eyes down the paper to see if there was any mention of Dave Rogers or Rottman. I couldn’t find it. So, at least Rogers wasn’t the superstar Wise was. He sounded tough on the phone, but I shouldn’t confuse that with illegal activities.
Wise was bad enough for both of them. I found this out easily enough once I’d replaced the master list and pulled the file on CLELAND, JOHN. Wise was born in 1933, which put him in his seventh decade. He had been walking the thin line between business and crime since the late 1950s, when he may or may not have been behind a ring that supplied the still unnamed flower children with the weed that dreams are made of. A few of his friends did time for this, but he escaped because the local police were unable to find a link between the cannabis grown, packed and stored in a barn out Pelham Road with the owner of the property, an absentee landlord whose tenant could not be traced. In the 1970s he became interested in pre-Columbian art and made regular visits to South and Central America. Although searched at all the best airports, he still managed to stay free of the law. When a big drug bust occurred in Toronto and Wise’s name was mentioned, no charges were laid and the newspaper was advised by its legal staff to print an apology, which it did. After that, Wise managed to stay out of print until the eighties, when his great interest in pre-Columbian art extended to South-east Asia, Hong Kong and Afghanistan, from where he told one investigative reporter “all the best samples may be found.”
From drug-dealing, Abe—I started calling him Abe to myself as we got better acquainted—began to take an interest in the plight of political refugees and stateless persons. This was followed by a passion for shipping and small airlines. He was once called “the wetback’s best friend” by a Toronto magazine that not surprisingly changed its address for every issue. Local authorities thought that they had finally caught up to him when a ship loaded with “refugees” struck an abutment of the Peace Bridge near Buffalo and nearly sank with all aboard. The survivors told the police through an interpreter that they were just out for a cruise and hadn’t brought any papers with them since they had no intention of landing on the other side of the border. They denied knowing Abe Wise or any of his associates. A week later they were still sticking to their story. Abe knew how to pick his refugees.
Two years ago, a new pattern began to show up. Abe began collecting artifacts from native Canadian reserves along the St. Lawrence River. He also gathered arrowheads, beadwork and baskets from the reservations along the New York shore of the river. Quite incidentally, the increased trade in illegal cigarettes began about that time. Abram’s interest in the art and history of the original Americans took him to Poland, Romania and the former Soviet Union. Only a couple of sharp reporters specializing in organized crime ventured to link Abram Wise and the sudden appearance in both Canada and the United States of cigarettes that originally had been shipped taxfree to Poland, Romania and the former Soviet Union.
This phase didn’t last long and, unlike some, Abe was well out of it before the cigarette game went out in a sudden puff of smoke. Smuggling bonded booze across the border was a ready-made substitute. It used the same boats and trucks he had bought for moving cigarettes.
You couldn’t help admiring his cleverness: never an arrest, never more than unfounded accusations. Whenever the police or press became bolder than usual, they had to backtrack and issue an apology. The nearest thing to a bust came in the mid-eighties, when a ship that could be traced to a company he could be connected with was found to have one of its winches stuffed with heroin. It was a multi-million-dollar haul, but only those found on board did any time because of it. I noted their names. Abram explained that he only owned a piece of the company that owned the ship; he didn’t know what cargoes any of his ships carried. I rather liked the idea of hiding things in the core of a winch under hundreds of feet of steel cable. It spoke of a fertile mind, one I was learning to know and respect.
I decided that there was a limit to the amount of information I could absorb at a sitting. Now that I knew where the file was kept, I could relax a little. Not as much as I thought I might, because when I looked up from the file I saw Mickey Armstrong leafing through the pages of an 1875 atlas of Grantham. Sitting next to Stefan, the photographer who never exposed any film, he looked up long enough to see if I had any plans for lunch. Mickey had the air of being cut out for better things than shadowing the likes of me. He looked like a soldier whose wartime experience was all in administration. I had to watch him, but I couldn’t give him the slip. I needed his regular reports to Wise to keep me alive. When I returned the file to its drawer, Mickey closed up the atlas so that it blew paper off the librarian’s desk. By then I had put my coat on and was pretending not to see the photographer grinning at me.
FOUR
“My father was in junk, Mr. Cooperman. I’m in steel and my kids, Jerry and Bernie, are in the fabrication business. It’s all the same: same yard, same office, same books, same people working there. Just the names get changed, like there are innocent parties to be protected.”
Dave Rogers was fat. That’s the only word for him. He had jowls like a hound and his belly kept the rest of him a foot and a half away from the table we were sharing. I suspected that under all that jelly there were the remains of youthful muscles gone to grass, muscles that used to be able to shift loads of steel about the yard.
“The old man started with rags, bones and bottles like every other junk collector in the 1920s. Then he moved to lead pipe and copper wire and other metals. By the time I came along it was scrap metal not junk. Now Jerry is doing special jobs with I-beams and H-beams for bridge companies. He’s got a few government highway contracts. In a couple of years the boys’ll be right up there with the big guys like Bolduc. Me? I’m semi-retired. I take things easy: I go to the track, travel, spend the winters in Arizona. Just got back. I don’t go to Florida no more. That’s too violent down there. It scares the piss out of me, some of the things I’ve seen.”
Judging by the nests of broken capillaries on his nose and cheeks, I thought Dave Rogers had better start looking after himself right here in Ontario, never mind Florida. High blood pressure was shouting at me from the moment I saw him biting into an egg roll. Still, he wore an ancient windbreaker with markings of some long-dead hockey team. My impression that he had been fit once was reinforced by that, even though it had been years since that open zipper fastened any higher than his crotch. A pink-and-blue necktie was displayed over his midsection like an oversized tongue that had abandoned itself to lunacy. At the upper end, the loosened knot tried to define the impossible: Dave Rogers’s neck.
“When I f
irst met Abe, we were both in school. Grade Four! We learned all about Columbus together. It made a big impression on Abe. It didn’t show at the time, but later on, he became quite an authority on statues and pots that come from down in Central and South America. Abe can tell you whether a pot was Inca or Aztec or Mayan as fast as I can tell a chopstick from a fork.” Dave shook his head, smiling while he chewed. With his jowls in movement, it was quite a sight. “Abe was always smart,” he said, touching a large knuckle to his forehead twice. “He always took his cover serious. You know what I mean? He didn’t fool around. He said he was an expert on pre-Columbian art, so he became one. Nothing fake about his expertise; nothing fake about his collection either.”
“What moved him into a life of crime?” I asked. “Was it the Depression?”
“It was the fifties. We were born before the war, but we grew up in the forties and fifties. They were boom years and there weren’t too many restrictions on free enterprise. Even in the scrap business, we had to use a little muscle once in a while. My old man kept two sets of books. Hell, everybody kept two sets. Abe used to work in my old man’s yard once in a while just to keep me company. He watched the way the business was organized. He didn’t break his back loading trucks when he could help it. He was knocking off burglaries before he was buying shaving cream. I went with him one time. I didn’t believe the stories he was telling about the stuff that was stashed away in those old homes up on Welland Avenue. He said he did places off Ontario Street and over on Mortgage Hill too. But I went into one house with him.”
“What did you get?”
“Scared shitless! That’s what I got. Breaking and entering is too real for my system. I didn’t like it that one time and it’s lasted me ever since. Abe was different. He didn’t have any nerves in those days. He walked into a house and went through all the drawers like it was his own place and he was looking for his lost car keys. He found a box of jewellery that time. It was a tortoise-shell box. Ain’t that funny? I can still see it! There were some valuable pieces. Abe could tell the good stuff from the fake, which he didn’t bother with.”
