by Howard Engel
“I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” I said, trying to come up with a name to fit the place before he gave me the answer.
“My name doesn’t matter,” he said, changing the subject. “But I think you should explain what you were doing hiding in the draperies.”
I’d seen his face in the Beacon, not so long ago. He had something to do with business. Then it came to me:
“I was just testing your powers of observation, Mr. Abraham. I think I’ve seen your picture in the business section of the Toronto papers and also the local one. I’ll be glad to explain what I was doing, if you can explain why you were going through the papers on Kiriakis’s desk. Especially since Pambos can no longer tell you to push off. By the way, did you misplace your letteropener?”
Abraham smiled. There was some pain behind it, but it must have seemed the right gesture at the time. “The one in our friend behind the desk, you mean? No, I didn’t mislay it.” He moved a few steps back away from the desk. This permitted me to clear the area. I felt more comfortable with the desk to my right, and Pambos’s body concealed by the angle and the top of the desk itself.
Hadn’t I told Pambos that I couldn’t imagine Jonah Abraham going through the papers on his desk? Now I’d seen it and I couldn’t share the joke with the little guy. I started feeling sick again.
Abraham wore a silk tie with a lot of green medallions floating against a ground of yellow. It was tied too tightly for my taste, made him look uncomfortable. “The letteropener is part of Pambos’s collection of American turnof-the-century memorabilia. He kept it on his desk.” He tried that smile again. He was trying to be ingratiating. I knew a little about that game too. “I hope you don’t imagine it has my fingerprints on it. I assure you it doesn’t.”
“You didn’t act very surprised to run into a corpse.”
“I must compliment you on the quality of your vision. Those curtains are thick brocade.” I ignored his observation.
“You just dug into those drawers like a little beaver. You must run into a lot of bodies to take them so coolly.”
Jonah Abraham, if it was Jonah Abraham—and he had neither affirmed nor denied my guess—sat down in one of Pambos’s leather chairs. Again the leather heaved a great sigh. He crossed his hands in his lap, like a little old lady, and gave me a taste of that near smile with the pain behind it again. I nearly leaned back on the desk, but I decided that I would try to keep the Cooperman fingerprints on the Cooperman knobs and glass surfaces and not spread them around indiscriminately. Abraham looked like he had a confession to make. I sat down opposite him, and when the cushion stopped protesting my weight, he began:
“When I was here ten minutes ago, I was very shocked to discover … what I discovered. I would describe it as more than ‘very surprised.’ I was surprised enough for the two of us. I left the room to telephone the police. I didn’t want to touch the phone on his desk. They should be here in a few minutes. If I had had anything to do with Pambos’s death, I wouldn’t have raised the alarm, would I?”
“So you thought you’d kill time going through his mail.”
“Nothing of the kind, my friend. I was nervous, that’s all. And I didn’t feel like looking at that large Wallace Lamb over there. Death and Lambs don’t mix very well.” I glanced over at the painting he referred to. It looked like a Dutch still-life reflected in a broken mirror.
“So that’s what a Lamb looks like. It looks like a Dutch still-life reflected in a broken mirror.”
“Really?” He didn’t sound interested in my opinion. He looked back at the picture and something happened to his face, like it had softened and then tightened again fast, before the eye could register it.
“That’s ‘Breakfast in Ayton,’ one of his best. I’d give a pound of flesh to own it.”
“Whose?” Jonah Abraham ignored my question. He didn’t like people near him sounding off. I guess I came on like a TV cop show. Silence flowed and filled the gap. Then he looked down at the figure on the floor. From where I was sitting, I could see the top of his head and the arms thrown back. He looked like he’d been shot after being told to put his hands up. But, of course, I knew this wasn’t so, even though the wound and the letter-opener were out of sight. I thought for a moment about how Sam, my brother, and I used to practise being shot standing at the top of a small rise in Coleman’s lawn. Once hit, we would corkscrew down to the ground or fling ourselves backwards, imitating the best deaths on celluloid as seen the previous Saturday at the matinée at the Granada Theatre on James Street. I wondered where Jonah Abraham practised his dying. Then I was looking at Pambos’s pale palms again.
“Pambos,” Abraham said. I didn’t know whether he was answering my question about the pound of flesh, or whether it was an involuntary response to the fact of death in general and that of an acquaintance in particular. “What’s that he’s holding in his palm?” I got down on my knees and leaned closer.
“It’s a button. Looks like it comes from a woman’s coat or jacket.”
“Let me see!” Abraham moved closer.
“Better let the police pick it up first. There might be prints. Looks like there are threads attached to the underside.”
“So, that lets both of us out, my friend. He was killed by a woman.”
“Or that’s what the killer wanted us to believe.”
“You’re making a television melodrama out of it. Simple solutions are best.” I could just make out the beginning of the sound of a far-off police siren. Or maybe it was a fire somewhere. I couldn’t tell the difference. But my own involvement with this murder made me select the police as the most likely source of the sound. As it grew closer, my guess was confirmed. Both Abraham and I got up off our knees and sank back into the responsive leather chairs and waited.
NINE
I thought about Jonah Abraham, my fellow suspect in the murder. It provided a more interesting way of spending the time than counting the change in my pocket without looking, or culling out-of-date membership cards from my worn wallet. I tried my hand at mentally redecorating the corridor in the downtown offices of Niagara Regional Police, discarding the furniture and putting down a thick rug to deaden the footsteps of innocent and guilty alike. But I couldn’t concentrate on anything for long. Abraham held my attention. He was real. I should have an unread paperback sewn into the lining of my coat for unexpected long waits like this. I always get stuck this way and I never have a thing to read.
I knew I had to stay away from Pambos. He was too good a friend and his dead face was much too recently dead for me to think about him in a personal way. For the moment, he was the body in the Stephenson House, the reason I was being questioned. There would be time to mourn him, but not that night.
I had already been through the usual mill at the scene of the crime. I had told all, or nearly all, to the first officers at the scene and then to the detectives that came with the clean-up boys and the medical people. At least the medical people didn’t want to know what I was doing there. They concentrated on Pambos. Like a team of make-up men on a movie set they worked him over, bagging his hands like they intended to run him through a beehive. The fingerprint boys left me alone too, except for the fellow who had seen me on the scene of at least two other crimes I could think of. In a big city, it would all be more anonymous. Imagine getting asked in London or in New York about whether you were the same Benny Cooperman who left fingerprints on the sink in Dr. Zekerman’s office five years ago, and found the hanging body of a movie star in a Niagara Falls hotel room three years ago. He greeted me like we were lodge brothers who’d strayed from the convention floor and found ourselves holding up the same bar at three in the morning.
I looked at my watch. It was nearly ten o’clock. The cops had arrived at the Stephenson House just after eightthirty. We had danced around Pambos’s study and then transferred the action to a small meeting room in the new part of the hotel. In the background we could hear the staff having hysterics about their fallen leader
or the possibility of changes in the next regime. By the time we were told we were needed downtown, it was nine o’clock. They had Abraham wait in a separate room. I’d noticed that from the moment the cops took out their day books, they were treating Mr. Abraham with kid gloves.
Jonah Abraham, I thought. He was rifling the desk. That meant he was looking for the list. That meant it must be either Favell or MacCulloch who took it. It sounded right, but I wasn’t sure I bought it. Abraham could have seen my shoes under the curtains when he came into the room and saw that by going through Pambos’s papers he would appear to be innocent of stealing the list. I tried to let that drip through the filter. It came out looking thin and unappetizing. This was a murder investigation not a treasure-hunt for some list of paintings and who has them. Pambos was murdered, sure, but who could tell me that it was because of the things he had talked to me about. Maybe he had an argument with his chef about wages. Maybe it was some waiter or housekeeper he’d fired. It could be a dozen different things and none of them close to the fine arts.
That seemed the sensible thing: Pambos’s death was not an event that had a single answer. Not yet, anyway. But Abraham being there. The connection with the list was clearer. Pambos said that Abraham was known to have been on the list and that he was one of the three people who had an opportunity to have taken it. I needed to learn more about that. Maybe Jonah Abraham was an old family friend. Maybe the Stephenson House was his favourite watering hole. Maybe he and Pambos were cronies who used to talk about fine art long into the night. I could picture some of that.
Abraham said that he called the cops. The caps came, so likely he was telling the truth about that. Step one. He tells the truth about small things. What about big things? Time will tell, time will tell. He took the death of an old friend coolly enough. No shouts or tears, no prostration or obvious grief. Now wait a minute. We don’t know he and Pambos were pals, do we? He recognized the murder weapon. He was familiar with the office. And when it comes to showing signs of grief, neither of us carried on. We didn’t rend our garments or don sack cloth. Not made for showing instant grief. What are the cops making of that? They like neat packages. Okay, so maybe Abraham’s no sentimentalist. He takes death as he takes life, as he finds it. How inconvenient of him to find it in Pambos’s private study, under his desk.
There was a floor-model coffee machine in the corridor of this part of NRP Headquarters. When you put the right number of coins into the right slots, the machine poured a brown liquid into a styrofoam cup, then lightened it with a chalky shot from another opening. The sweetener, as I’m sure the manufacturer calls it, was already in the mixture that in the end was not hot or recognizably coffee. It tasted like death but it killed the time. When I finished with the beverage, which I doubted had ever seen a coffee plantation, I began methodically destroying the cup it came in. First I scored the top around the rim with my fingernails, than began tearing off strips of the foam and putting them in the ashtray beside me along with the butts of my last three cigarettes. I wondered if the law would allow them to install a machine that would, for good money, sell cigarettes that bore as remote a relationship to real tobacco as the product of the machine I’d just been swindled by. I continued tearing up the cup, wondering whether Mr. Abraham was sitting in a similar corridor on the other side of the building, or whether the well-known distiller was already on his way back to his little place on the escarpment. I was working on this when my old friend and fellow defender of the law, Staff Sergeant Chris Savas, came out of his office and glared at me.
“Hello, Benny.” I was expecting something with more energy, more of Savas’s brand of sarcasm directed towards private investigators. He sounded a little hoarse, the way he did when we batted evidence back and forth in the small hours. I swallowed my opening line, deciding to save it for another time. I’d been savouring the information that Pambos had let slip when we’d been talking at the United: Chris’s first name was Christophoros and not Christopher as I had always supposed. I guess in Greek it amounts to the same thing, but I’d planned to spring the name on him. But with Pambos dead, the joke went flat.
“Hi, Chris. I’m sorry about this. Pambos was a nice guy. I liked the little bugger. I’m sorry he had to go out that way.”
Savas gave a sort of a nod, then tossed the crown of his head in the direction of his door. I followed him inside. “C’mon,” he said. “I’ll getcha some real coffee.”
The office hadn’t changed from the last time Chris and I had reason to talk professionally. The rust-stains on the linoleum still showed where the furniture used to stand before it was moved to the present set-up: the stack of files by the door, a cabinet of official manuals, a desk made of grey metal, bumped and chipped by heavy traffic. A serious-faced Chris looked down from his Aylmer Police College graduation picture along with two dozen other equally serious young officers. Elsewhere he was grinning in a shot taken on the firing range. Large earmuffs protected his ears. The sober look returned in a framed photograph of him getting some honour or other from a former lieutenant-governor. He never told me about that picture. Chris was a good cop, and that included all the shy vices beginning with modesty.
I took the usual chair reserved for guests and left enough leg-room for Chris to get past me when he came back with two mugs of real coffee. Both of us spend long hours drinking the worst coffee ever to stain a pot; that’s why we both appreciate the good stuff whenever we’re lucky enough to get a sample. Outside the door which Savas closed behind him with a swing of his hip and a kick, I could hear the normal sounds of the NRP on duty at a late hour. Two-finger typing was going on next door, a badly distorted PA system blared indecipherably, and occasionally I heard the sound of a male voice raised above the normal drone. Savas sat. He opened a file in front of him.
“Okay, we come to bury Pambos not to praise him,” Savas said, throwing down a few scanty handwritten reports that came from the investigating officers. “We’ll have a wake for the guy some other time, Benny. Right now this is just another routine investigation. What do you know about it that isn’t down here in black and white?”
“It’s all there, Chris. Just like I told Vic Vittorini and his partner. It’s a new guy, I don’t know him.”
“He’s not so new. Name’s Jack Harasti. He’ll go far if he can get his mind off crossword puzzles. That’s your vice too, isn’t it, Benny?”
“It’s not a vice when you know how lousy you are. I’m strictly an amateur.”
“I’m glad to hear that, Benny. Now let’s get down to cases, as they say.” I nodded that that was fine with me, and Savas stared at me for a long time. “You know,” he said, “in all the years I’ve known you, you’ve always been straight with me.” I started to get worried. Savas didn’t need to flatter me. This time he was winding up well back of the mound and I knew it was going to be a fast ball. His face was putting on that phoney avuncular look that he used on lost kids when he was walking a beat. It cut no ice with me, and usually, when our mutual friend Pete Staziak was standing with us, he’d give me a look that said Savas was at it again.
Chris and I went back to the winter of 1980 or around about there. I was getting my butt kicked by a colleague of his in a way that bothered Savas’s set of scruples. So we put our heads together and concentrated on the art of the possible. Since then, I’d seen that big head of his in and out of several investigations. Sometimes I knew he’d like to nail me for a B and E or a felony of some sort just so he’d be one up on me, but I’ve always been too dumb to make an illegal buck and Chris knows it as well as I do. He has a big face with a big helping of nose in the middle. When he takes off the “Mr. Nice Guy” sign, he looks friendly enough, but as soon as he gets serious or worried, his eyes get hard and stony.
He started in on me, taking me through my earlier statement. I told him about meeting Pambos at the United Cigar Store and about how he helped me unpack in my new apartment. I even told him about the list he wanted me to find. I could tell that
Savas didn’t want to know about all those pictures that hadn’t been returned to their rightful owners after the death of Arthur Tallon. I asked him if he knew anything about Tallon’s death and he didn’t. But I’d planted a seed. Tallon was a long way from Pambos Kiriakis on the first night of an investigation, so we tried to keep to the body on the carpet. He took my being at the scene of the crime seriously, as he was supposed to. He also did not like the fact that his other key witness had mentioned that he first came across me in the draperies of Pambos’s office.
“For the love of Mike, Benny, open up or I’m going to let you fall off the roof! And don’t go saying you were pushed.”
“I told you three times what I know! You want me to start making things up?”
“I want the whole story, not fragments. What were you doing in Kiriakis’s office? Why did you hide behind the curtains? What are you really working on beside this picture business? What women are involved?”
“Button, button, who’s got the button?”
“I’ve got it, Cooperman, and I want to know where it came from.” He let the button fall on the file folder. There, on the top of his desk, it didn’t look like our best clue to who’d killed Pambos Kiriakis.
“I don’t suppose there were any prints you could get off that?”
“Smeared. The way you’re going to be if I don’t start getting some answers.” He was looking at me like I was a bottle full of answers to all the questions he could think up. I tried again to think of something I’d forgotten to say, but my conscience was clear; I’d been as up-front with Savas as he’d ever been with me. He had dropped a hint about the direction his investigation was leading. I thought I’d see how serious he was.
“Chris, do you honestly think Kiriakis pulled that button off some woman’s coat? A death struggle and all that?”
