A Victim Must Be Found

by Howard Engel

  “This show seems a great success already, Paddy,” Bryant said, clapping him on the arm, before moving off. “I think my wife is looking at something beyond the reach of a poor public official.” He expected the laugh he got, and then he was gone. Miles looked at me, still showing no emotion, still not sweating.

  “I’m calling your bluff, Mr. Cooperman. I think the next move is up to you.”

  “We know everything, Paddy. It’s all over.” My voice surprised me. It was less sharp than I thought it would be. It was quiet and relaxed. “You thought Mary’s death would cover your tracks, didn’t you? One good suicide to cover both murders.”

  “Both murders?” Savas and Miles said it like a chorus in Gilbert and Sullivan.

  “Yes, both. You are all forgetting Arthur Tallon. Tallon was murdered just as Kiriakis was. They’re both connected. But Mary didn’t kill Tallon and she didn’t kill Kiriakis, in spite of that silly cue you planted: the button in Kiriakis’s hand. And one more thing,” I said, catching my breath and watching Paddy Miles’s face trying to deal with this theory of mine. “Mary didn’t kill herself either. She’s a little light-headed at the moment, but in the morning after a good breakfast she’s going to talk her head off. She’s that other witness I mentioned. You’re it, Paddy.”

  Before he could say anything, Chris Savas moved in and put the arm of the law on him. “He’s right, Mr. Miles. Let’s go outside. We’ll go over to the station and see if we can get your side of things.”

  “You must be having me on. You can’t be serious. I’ve got two hundred guests here!”

  “You’d better come along all the same,” Savas said. Miles looked at Savas and then back at me again. His mouth contorted in a sneer.

  “I’ll be damned if I’ll listen to any more of this!”

  In a flash, Paddy Miles made his move. A table overturned, sending blocks of cheese, crackers and cigarette butts flying. A woman screamed. Paddy Miles was halfway to the door before I was fully aware that he wasn’t standing there glaring at us.

  “Hey! Stop that man!” Savas shouted. “Miles, stop! You won’t get far!” But Miles was out the door and on the stairs. Savas worked his way through the crowd with a little more consideration than Miles had. I caught up to him on the top step. “He won’t get far,” he said partly to himself and partly to me.

  “You’re right,” I said. “He won’t get far with a flat tire.” Savas looked at me suspiciously. My little red pocket knife felt warm in my pocket.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Kyle and Bedrosian picked up Paddy Miles crying over the right front bumper of his Volvo. They said they didn’t have any trouble with him. He went as quiet as a lamb with them to Niagara Regional’s Church Street headquarters, while the party at the gallery continue. Savas whispered something to Peter MacCulloch, who then began looking for his light raincoat in a pile of coats that had collected on a small table under the few hooks by the door. When he’d rescued his own from the rest, he quietly left the party with a solemn expression darkening his face as he made for the stairs. Behind him, Alex Favell watched his back. He looked confused both by the fact that Mary was missing and that her husband was leaving so early. He was unlikely to ask me what was going on, and as I turned back into the crowd, still talking about Paddy’s sudden rush out the door, I wondered whether I’d tell him. It was one of those things you never know until you see what you’ve done. Me, I’d just as soon see Favell squirm on in ignorance, but my character isn’t pure. Maybe I’d have told him the truth, just to see how he’d take it.

  Martin Lyster had taken charge of the gallery. He moved through the crowd with skill and charm, occasionally writing something down on the back of an envelope and placing one of those little red dots in a bottom corner of a picture that had just found a new owner. By the time I left, there was a benday explosion of red dots, the walls looked like they’d broken out in measles. The Lambs were snapped up fast. I wondered whether Wally and his Ivy would ever see any of the money. Probably not. Probably not.

  On my own way out, Jonah Abraham caught up with me on the stairs. Anna was a few steps behind him. “What was that all about?” he wanted to know. I tried to put him off with a smile, but he wouldn’t buy that.

  Okay,” I said, stopping on the landing where the stairs turned. “It looks like this thing is winding down.”

  “Then I want to know about it!” he said sharply. Anna had now caught up to him.

  “So do I!” she added, as though I had to be told.

  “Savas, that’s Staff Sergeant Chris Savas, has a suspect in custody. He has enough on him to hold him for the night anyway. I suggested to him that we try to meet someplace later on. He doesn’t like the idea, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he would accept an invitation from you if you asked him up to your place for a drink after he got off duty.”

  “He’d never come, Mr. Cooperman, especially if we were going to ask him questions about the case.”

  “That’s right, but he might just come to listen. I know Chris and he’s one of those cops who knows that listening is the way to learn things.”

  “Are we going to be listening to you?” Anna asked with a wicked smile.

  “Partly, but not completely. That’s why I want to invite some other people to come up to your place tonight, Mr. Abraham, if you don’t mind.”

  “Won’t it be rather late when Sergeant Savas gets finished?”

  “It will be close to midnight, I suspect. He’s been on duty at least since four this afternoon. So his shift should end at midnight.”

  “Who are these others?”

  “I’ll tell you all about it while you give me a lift to my car.”

  “Your car?”

  “Yes, I left it at the General Hospital.”

  Jonah Abraham looked at me like I’d asked him to take me to Winnipeg for a corned beef sandwich. Anna took his arm and after a pause he nodded. We continued down the stairs and out into the night, which had turned chilly.

  * * *

  An hour and a half later, we were sitting in a room at the Abraham mansion. We were holding drinks and making polite conversation in what was a strange setting for most of us. Bill Palmer had had a few of Abraham’s prize Bloody Marys, while Linda Kiriakis was still sipping her first. MacCulloch had arrived a few minutes after Alex Favell had left his rubbers in the hall. It had started raining on the drive up the escarpment, one of those fine, misty spring rains, heavy with the smells of local industry. I’d once complained about that smell to an advertising man who worked in Alex Favell’s agency. He said it was the perfume of money. I wondered while I was waiting for Savas to come and make our group complete whether the smell ever gets too strong for the money to be worth it. I’d thought of asking Mattie Lent to join us, but there wasn’t a good reason, and I’d promised to keep her out of it as well as I could. I did invite Wallace Lamb to join us. I wasn’t sure what he could tell us, or whether Ivy would let him, but they both came when Abraham sent a car to fetch them. Anna was amazed that Lamb was still alive and so was Alex Favell. Martin Lyster came as soon as he was able to close up the gallery and check on what he could do for Paddy.

  “Well,” Jonah Abraham said, as soon as Chris Savas had taken off his wet raincoat and had been handed a Bloody Mary, “if everybody’s comfortable, Mr. Cooperman, why don’t you get started?”

  “Good idea,” I said and immediately wondered where I should start. I told them that there had been an attempt on the life of Mary MacCulloch and that she was still in the General, but that Dr. Leung had told me that he was sure that she would be all right. Favell breathed a raspy sigh at the news. He glanced over at MacCulloch, who was looking at one of the many pictures by Milne and Lamb that decorated the walls of the room.

  “You see,” I said, trying to get closer to the meat of the subject, “Paddy Miles not only tried to kill Mary MacCulloch, but he tried to blame other crimes on her as well. If he had succeeded in killing her, he would have silenced a witness who could conne
ct him to other wrongdoing.”

  “You mean that bum cheque he gave Wally,” Ivy said, collecting glances from everybody in the room.

  “Hush, precious,” Wally Lamb said to Ivy, patting her ample arm on the couch next to him. “Listen to the man.”

  “You’re not being very specific, Mr. Cooperman. What wrongdoing?” asked my employer and host, ignoring Ivy.

  “Paddy Miles had been selling paintings from Arthur Tallon’s collection at scandalously low prices to Mary. She would take them to Hump Slaughter’s auction house where they would fetch a healthy profit, which she in turn would share with Miles.”

  “How do you know this?” asked Peter MacCulloch in an overbearing tone on the edge of rudeness but lacking that last inch of malice that hinted he was half-afraid I had an answer. “Where’s your proof?”

  “I overheard Mary talking, arguing, really, with Slaughter yesterday afternoon. They were worried that the other partner was going to give the game away. There wasn’t much trust between them. I doubt if Hump ever knew that Miles was knowingly lending a hand. He may have thought he was just trying to clear out Tallon’s stuff without realizing the market value of the paintings.”

  “That seems hardly likely,” said Alex Favell. “If Hump auctioned the paintings, then he would collect the money. If he split the profit with Mrs. MacCulloch, it would leave out the third partner Are you suggesting that Paddy Miles took half of Mary’s share? That seems illogical to me.”

  “I think you imagine that Mary was involved in this simply for the money. I think it’s a safer bet to say she was in it for the adventure and the thrill of putting one over. She was a wealthy woman. There’s no sign that she needed the extra cash. To her, crime was a prank, a way of kicking up her heels at society. There were other things we needn’t to go into here that suggest that she was trying to be as unconventional as she could be and get away with it. She’s not a hard case in any way.”

  Favell was looking at the pattern on the rug. Savas gave me a good look at his scowl. His views on middleclass crime were on record. Anna was getting bored by these preliminaries, she was restlessly moving from one perch to another. “So,” she said, “you’re going to forget all about her?”

  “Look, Anna, I’m not an avenging angel; I’m a poor working stiff. All this stuff is up to the cops and then the Crown.” She pouted and allowed herself to slip deeper into her chair. “Let me try to deal with everything that happened in an orderly way. If I get it twisted up, it’s because it’s a complex business.”

  “Start with that dud cheque,” Ivy offered, leaning forward on the couch. “Paddy Miles gave Wally here a cheque and it bounced. I took it to the bank as soon as it arrived and it was no good!”

  “Shut up, precious,” Wally Lamb said. “Keep still and listen.” He put a hand on Ivy’s knee and she moved closer to the painter.

  “A moment ago, Benny, you said there were other crimes that Miles was trying to pin on Mary MacCulloch. Is that a good starting place?”

  “Yeah, Bill, I’ll try it that way.” I should have known that it would be a veteran journalist who’d help me find a hard line through this. He had taken out a pipe and was busy packing tobacco into it. I watched him as I talked, it was relaxing entertainment.

  “We all know that Pambos Kiriakis was murdered,” I went on, keeping an eye on Bill Palmer’s fingers as he tamped down the shag from his oilskin pouch. “Few are aware that Arthur Tallon was murdered as well.”

  “Tallon! What are you talking about?” There was a general sensation when I said that. Martin Lyster merely expressed it for the company. “We all know he died of a heart attack. I mean, I was there! He had a bloody heart attack. No two ways about it.”

  “The symptoms of a heart attack are well known. Anything that appears to have the same shooting pains and so on is often labelled a heart attack when really it is something else. In this case, a dose of penicillin.”

  “That’s impossible!” Anna said, slightly raising her self on her elbows. “Everybody knew Arthur was allergic to penicillin. He wore a bracelet.” She encircled her left wrist with the fingers of her right hand in case the reference was obscure.

  “I know,” I said. “But the bracelet had been removed from the body when it arrived at the General. I checked the list in the Medical Records Department while I was waiting for news of Mary MacCulloch’s condition. The medical team that worked on Tallon had no hint that he was allergic to the drug, because he wasn’t wearing the medical alert bracelet Anna had given him. Without that, the people in Emerge had no way of knowing that this wasn’t a heart attack.”

  “But who would do such a thing?” asked Anna.

  “Someone desperate enough. Someone in a corner,” I said. “You see, Arthur Tallon was such an eccentric, he was a walking opportunity for the rip-off artists of this town …”

  “Now, Cooperman, see here …!” I tried to calm Mac-Culloch with a gesture and by going on quickly.

  “But he wasn’t as dumb as he looked. He began to catch on to some of the things going on around him. When his suspicion of Paddy Miles was discovered, his days were numbered.” I reached into my trouser pocket and found the medical alert bracelet. I handed it to Anna. “Is this the bracelet you gave Tallon?” She looked at it and nodded in the affirmative at once.

  “Yes,” she said, “but how did you get it?”

  “The night I stumbled across Pambos Kiriakis’s body at the hotel, I found this bracelet hidden in a cold cup of coffee. Pambos had hidden it from his murderer, which leads me to think that the person guilty of killing Tallon also killed Pambos Kiriakis.”

  The people in the room weighed the possibility and came up with the same conclusion I’d come to. The proof wasn’t strong, but the logic had a certain compulsion to it. They looked like they wanted me to go on, so I did. “The question arises, how did the bracelet get into Pambos’s possession? Well, we know that he hired me to look for a list of Lambs on loan from Tallon’s collection at the time of Tallon’s death. Clearly, he was curious about Tallon’s affairs. In Alex Favell’s office, Paddy suggested to me that he was hoping to get a free painting from the estate by locating the ones listed on the missing piece of paper. That could be one reason for Pambos’s interest. It also could have been blackmail.”

  “Blackmail?” This from Mrs. Kiriakis, without much outrage. She was simply caught off guard.

  “I’m not suggesting that Pambos was demanding money from the person who had been stealing from Tallon’s collection. I think he may have been demanding that the stolen property be returned or he would take certain steps. If the medical alert bracelet had come into Pambos’s possession, it would make a substantial threat to Miles. After all it had Tallon’s name on it.”

  “This is a high-wire act, Mr. Cooperman,” Alex Favell volunteered “None of this is getting us anywhere. Theories are all very well, but they get short shrift in a courtroom.” He looked to the others for support, and, not finding as much as he’d hoped for, contented himself with draining the melt-waters from his empty Bloody Mary.

  “You’re right, of course,” I said. “But there’s somebody here who might be able to stiffen part of the theory.” I turned to Martin Lyster, who began untwisting his long legs as soon as he felt my eye on him. “Martin, you used to work off and on at the gallery. Is that right?”

  I could see that Martin wasn’t anxious to put Paddy in more trouble than he was already in, but he could see no harm in my first question. He nodded in the affirmative carefully.

  “Good, now the morning after Pambos was killed you told me that you’d fixed up the problem between yourself and your book-loving friend in Boulder, Colorado. Is that right?” Eyebrows went up, wondering how we’d got from Tallon’s gallery to Colorado.

  “That’s right.”

  “You said you’d told Pambos that it was all fixed?”

  “Yes. What’s this in aid of, Benny?”

  “I’ll get to that. When did you tell Pambos that, Mart
in?”

  “It must have been that night in his office. When you were there.”

  “Are you saying you telephoned Colorado from Pambos’s office?”

  Martin tried to look relaxed by interlocking the large fingers of his hands over his jacket “Well, I may have done it the following morning. What’s the difference?”

  “And when did you tell Pambos?”

  “It must have been after that.”

  “On the day he died?”

  “Yes, I guess so. He came to the gallery looking for Paddy. I told him then.”

  “What happened after that?”

  “Nothing. Paddy came back and he took Pambos into the office to talk privately. I didn’t hear what they said, Benny. I didn’t put my ear to the door.”

  “Of course you didn’t. Now, you were a witness to Tallon’s heart attack at the gallery?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Was Tallon wearing this medical alert bracelet when he became ill?” I held it out to him, and he moved his hand towards it, but without taking it from me.

  “Benny, I don’t want to say any more about it.”

  “That’s right, Martin. I’m sure we all sympathize with your loyalty to Paddy.” Here I looked over at Savas. I’d been avoiding eye contact ever since I confessed to having found the bracelet in Pambos’s office at the hotel. He was wearing his usual scowl with a difference. There was a focus to it and I was it.

  “Chris, I’ve placed Pambos at the gallery in conversation with Paddy on the morning of the murder. If the bracelet was there at the time, Pambos had access to it. We know it was in his possession that evening. I think that’s enough to check the tissue samples taken from Tallon at the time of his death. I’m suggesting that you look for an overdose of penicillin.”