There was an Old Woman

by Howard Engel

  “Shut up, Chris!”

  “How long are you going to be? I think we should have a go at the cellar.”

  I knew I was close to some sort of answer, but I couldn’t see it. I looked a little further, collected a few more dead-end references to McNaughton and Patton. As I closed the file, I asked Savas: “What do all these names have in common: Patton, McNaughton, Crerar, Horrocks, Bradley and French?”

  “Horrocks is an English drink, isn’t it? And French is mustard.”

  “You’re cold,” I said. “They’re all top-ranking officers in the British, Canadian or US armies. Montgomery was a Field Marshal, Omar Bradley and George Patton were American generals.”

  “Never heard of French,” Chris admitted.

  “That’s the First World War.”

  “So, what’s that prove? He was a nut on the military, wasn’t he?”

  “Yeah, he was the official historian of the Royal Grantham Rifles. I only heard that last night.”

  “One of the people I was talking to said that he set up the regimental museum, which goes back to Butler’s Rangers, whatever they are. He still has the run of the place, or did have, until he got run through with the Union Jack. Like I said, he was a nut on the military. I’m going to look at the basement. Wanna come?”

  “I’ll join you in a minute. First let me see where this stuff leads to.”

  “If you don’t hear from me in ten minutes, stamp twice on the floor.” And he was gone. I reviewed what I’d seen in the file and then got up and started wandering around. Maybe the evidence we were looking for was in the basement. Chris has as good a nose for evidence as I have and his was trained. Mine was just born that way. I looked at the empty socket in the flagstand. I remembered where I’d seen the missing flagstaff last. I thought, irreverently, of shish kebab. I looked up at the pictures, more to clear my head than anything else.

  Behind the flags hung a letter from General Sir Brian Horrocks. It was addressed to our friend and dated in 1960. It was about some action that had been fought around Arnhem in 1944. I turned the letter over. There was nothing on the back. I replaced it and began to notice other letters mounted in a similar way, between plates of clear glass. There was one from General Omar N. Bradley (retired) about General Patton and one from Patton to someone I’d never heard of. It had a stamp at the bottom showing that it had belonged to a collection. Above the small fireplace was the letter I was looking for: Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery. I moved the captain’s chair and took the letter down. It was a single note from the field marshal, now retired, to Ramsden. It thanked him for his letter, the sentiments expressed in it, but offered no new information. It was the sort of letter that would drive a historian mad. It was a written equivalent of “no comment.” Still, the ego of our friend was such that he preserved the letter and its envelope between the two pieces of glass. Even as an autograph, it would be a hard piece to brag about. I turned it over.

  This is where I got a surprise. Fitted neatly behind the field marshal’s note was a second piece of paper. It was about the same size as the note I’d just read, but the paper was newer and of a different quality. The two pieces of glass had been joined together with dark tape. I took my little red pocket-knife and split the panels apart. I was right: besides the envelope, there were two pieces of paper. The one I hadn’t read began:

  The Beacon,

  20 Queen St,

  Grantham, Ontario.

  Dear Edge …

  and ended:

  As ever,

  Yours sincerely,

  Harlan Ravenswood

  The date was 1965. The body of the letter concerned the setting up of a trust fund for someone called Catherine Chestnut, who from the description was clearly a minor. The letter went into details of support payments to a woman called Renée Chestnut of Toronto. The payments to the older woman were to continue until the woman either married or died. The payments to the child were to continue as long as the child remained in an institution of higher learning or until she was twenty-five, whichever occurred last. Then, a lump sum of one hundred thousand dollars was to be paid to her from the investments made by the trust, giving her also at that time whatever assets remained in the trust or their cash equivalent.

  The “Edge” in the salutation of the letter was Egerton Garsington, the manager of the Central Branch of the Upper Canadian Bank. He was cautioned to use utmost discretion in keeping the name of the benefactor secret. He was told that under no circumstances was Ravenswood’s name to be mentioned to either of the beneficiaries. The letter was dated 2 February 1965.

  “That would make her about thirty,” I said, thinking out loud. There was much here for speculation, but I had no time to get on with it. There were all of those other preserved letters from famous military men to examine.

  Quickly I pulled down all of the glass-encased letters and placed them on Ramsden’s desk. I stamped heavily on the floor twice. It was easier pulling the plates of glass apart sitting down at Ramsden’s desk. It didn’t take me long to get a system going. There was a hidden document of some kind with each of the military letters. I placed each hidden letter with its soldier in a separate pile. One was a note from H.P. Kelmscott, a former member of the Ontario Legislature to a young woman who was addressed in language that could hardly be described as parliamentary. There was a cancelled cheque signed by the head of the biggest paving company in the whole district to a well-known Mafia figure in Hamilton. After looking quickly at the first three, I soon tired of the titillation. Let Savas worry about blackmail in the Niagara Peninsula. I stamped on the floor again. There was no immediate response, but in a minute I heard footsteps on the cellar stairs.

  Savas had wisps of cobwebs spread on top of his hair He looked suddenly aged.

  “Take a look at this, Benny!” he said, smiling and panting at the same time. He put three piles of printed pamphlets on the desk on top of my recent discoveries. One was a stack of white supremacist garbage, the one in the middle made many allusions to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the third appeared to be aimed at all groups except those who shared the guilt for burning the cakes with King Alfred the Great. “There’s a mailing list that comes with this stuff, Benny. I’m glad I went down there.”

  “But it doesn’t give you any names to put on your most-wanted list, does it?”

  Chris wiped his face with a handkerchief. “I guess he could have been unpopular among the oppressed nations, Benny. I can’t say I’d blame …”

  “I can see where you’re going, Chris. Forget it! This stuff,” I said, lifting his pamphlets off my surprises, “is more to the point.”

  “What have you got?”

  “You wanted to find blackmail? I got blackmail. What else can I do for you?”

  “Lemme see!” He moved his big head around to look over my shoulder. I lifted the items one at a time and passed them to him.

  “They were hidden behind the letters. I guess he read Poe after all,” I said, addressing the last bit to myself. Chris let out a few long, low whistles: his way of showing delight and surprise. He couldn’t help grinning.

  “You know, Benny, this is great stuff! Just great!” He pounded me on the back. He meant it as a sign of praise, but his angle was bad, and I felt myself being nailed into Ramsden’s chair.

  “Glad you like it.” I got up and tried to put the material into a pile so that Chris could slip them into a file he’d brought with him.

  “I think you’ve hit the mother lode of stuff here, Benny. It moves your friend Kogan a lot farther down our list of suspects. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  Chris was right. That’s what I was after. But now, I was encouraged to think there might also be a lunch in it as well.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Chris’s cousin runs a kebab parIour on Academy Street where I’d eaten with both Chris and Pete a few years ago. It was usually a busy place because of the activity around the bus terminal, but that Sunday it was all but closed when
we got there. I couldn’t see anything hot on the stove while Chris was exchanging “Yahsoos” and bear-hugs with his cousin and his wife, who’d been reading the weekend papers in back, but in a matter of minutes we were tucking into soft roast lamb and big potatoes and gravy. I declined the offer of shish kebab. Chris was in a great mood, joking with his cousins in Greek and with me in English, whenever he remembered that I wasn’t fluent in his mother tongue.

  The lunch was welcome, filling, but the conversation was not much help to me from a business point of view, although I learned a bit about spring-irrigated fields lying near the north coast of Cyprus. Even when I got him to talk shop, Chris, for all his dancing eyes and grins, was not telling me much I didn’t know already. Temperley had been killed late Monday, some time after the grave was opened in the late afternoon. He’d been killed by two shots from an eight-millimetre piece of some kind. “Our guess is that it was a Japanese Nambu automatic, a handgun used in World War II,” he said. That’s when he reminded me that my pal Kogan had spent some years in the army and might have brought home a few illegal and unregistered souvenirs.

  “So? We’re back to Kogan, are we?”

  “Just a remark in passing,” Chris said breezily. “An observation, if you will. It’s not the sort of piece you see every day.”

  “Tell me, Chris,” I asked, just after Savas smiled at the good taste of roast potatoes in his mouth, “why was Newby trying to see Ramsden? What was that all about? And how was it Newby so conveniently had keys to let him in when Ramsden failed to hear him at the door?”

  “That’s a no-no, Benny. Let me just say that we were satisfied with his reasons. They had business. He had the keys from a while back when Ramsden had the house on the market, after his wife died. Newby had the key on his ring.” All in all, Chris was feeling pretty good about himself, judging by his generosity with the information he had. Giving up information went against all of his inclination and training. Getting news from a cop is like trying to push a piece of string.

  As I walked up Academy to St. Andrew, I found time to ponder the other pieces of information that Chris had parted with. According to the post-mortem report, Ramsden had been killed between eight and ten in the morning. I was thinking about that when I stopped in the middle of the street. For a minute I didn’t see the gaudy Christmas display in the window of a furniture store I was facing or hear the honking of a half-ton pick-up truck with a bent fender that had come to a stop less than five metres from where I’d suddenly rooted myself. When the driver added his voice to the sound of the horn, I returned to reality.

  Eight-thirty a.m. was the time of Cath Bracken’s appointment to see Ramsden! Had she seen him? Had he cancelled? Had she run him through with a flagpole? These were a few of the things I had to find out. McStu, last night, hadn’t hinted at anything wrong. I tried phoning Cath at her house from a pay-phone, without any luck. I tried McStu with the same result. I thought of phoning the station, but she didn’t read the news on weekends. I wondered about trying to get hold of Wishart. I didn’t want to run foul of Antonia, so I closed the phonebook’s weathered pages and walked back to the office. At least on a Sunday, I might get a little peace and quiet.

  Or so I thought. At the top of the steps I found the door to my neighbour’s office ajar. Frank Bushmill, the chiropodist, was inside lying on his carpet. My heart shifted under my shirt: two bodies in two days! That’s too much traffic for me. I checked to see whether the body was breathing. Thank God it was. I pulled back an eyelid and got a look at a pink eye trying to remember how to react to strong light.

  “Frank!” I called out, slapping his face. “Frank!” I tried to pull him over to the waiting-room couch, where he had often slept one off in the past. With his heavy winter coat, it took all of my strength to get him into a sitting position with his back to the couch. He was groaning now, whenever I tried to shift him. “Frank, what happened?” I could see that his wallet was lying on the carpet, open and empty. There was a blue lump on his forehead.

  With another effort, I got him on the couch and called the ambulance from his phone on the other side of the partition. I found an open bottle of Jameson in his middle file drawer and poured a little into a glass beaker. This I waved under his nose until his eyelids twitched.

  “Frank? Can you hear me?”

  “Is that you, Benny? What are you saying at all?”

  “Frank, you’ve been walloped on the head and robbed. Do you know where you are?”

  “Hit on the head, was I? I remember, I remember, the house …”

  “Frank, I’ve sent for an ambulance. I’m going to get the cops too.”

  “Don’t trouble the constabulary. It’s their day of rest. I’m thinking it’s still Sunday, I hope.” He was making a good recovery I wondered how long he had been out. I had been away from the office since yesterday morning. But Frank can’t have been lying there for any great time.

  “Frank, do you know who hit you?” He pulled a hand out from under himself and took the beaker from me. He emptied it and looked at me for the first time.

  “Damn it, Benny I always get walloped when I do a favour for you!” He began exploring his forehead with his other hand. “That’s a fair goose egg I’ve got in your service.”

  “What do you mean, Frank? You’re not very clear.”

  “I heard some noise out here and found two young punks trying to break into your office. I surprised them and then they surprised me. There may have been a third one along the hall who came up behind me. Are you keeping your fortune in your office, Benny? Don’t trust the banks, is it?”

  “Frank, there’s nothing in my office that anybody’d want. No money, nothing but my unpaid bills. I don’t even have any interesting files. Nothing that would warrant this.” Frank made an attempt to sit up. I helped him. I could see that he was weak, but he kept up a brave commentary until the ambulance people arrived and took him, under protest, down the stairs and off to the General. I put in a call to Niagara Regional Police and told them what had happened.

  I waited around for the cops. The investigating officer was called Bedrosian. I remembered him from a long time ago, when I’d been discovered trying to replace a box of jewels that turned out to be a gun. There was no sign that Bedrosian recognized me, but it could have been his investigative style. He’d seen me often enough with Pete Staziak and Chris Savas.

  I told Bedrosian what I’d seen and what I’d done. He wasn’t as interested in my report of what Frank had told me. He’d have to get that from Bushmill himself as soon as he was feeling better. We walked down the office stairs together after he’d seen me turn off the lights and shut the door of Frank’s office.

  Out on the street, the chill wind slapped me in the face. I must have been sweating. I did up a few more buttons, then walked up past the intersection where St. Andrew Street becomes Queenston Road to the old house with the widow’s walk on the turret that housed the offices, mess and museum of the Royal Grantham Rifles. The offices were closed, but the museum was open, empty and warmed by overheated radiators that sounded off occasionally, as though they were being beaten by unseen hammers in the basement. The collection was an extension of Ramsden’s office: flags mounted on the floor and photographs and framed letters on the walls. There were cases of flintlocks and carbines of all kinds, copper bugles and ancient mess kits. I went over to the case of side-arms and looked at them for a few minutes.

  After a bite to eat, I slushed my way over the sidewalks that still hadn’t been cleared. When I found that punks had not tried to force their way into my apartment, I ran a hot bath and spent the next hour in it trying to thaw out.

  That night, I caught up on my television watching. Before going to bed, I tried to reach both Cath and McStu without getting answers. Those on the TV program Mystery! were all the answers I was going to get until morning and the beginning of Christmas week. I wasn’t looking forward to any of it.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Hello?” It was the phone a
nd it was ringing in the dark and I hadn’t answered it yet. My greeting was fakery, mere time-wasting until my hands could locate the instrument. When 1 had it, 1 repeated my rehearsed line with an excellent result. The clock on the bedside table told me that it was eight o’clock in the morning. In spite of the dark, I couldn’t curse the intrusion and call it unreasonable.

  “Hello, Benny?”

  “Yeah? Who is this?”

  “Cath. Cath Bracken. I just heard about Ramsden.”

  “Where the hell have you been for the last two days? I’ve been trying to raise you three or four times a day.”

  “I went skiing. I hadn’t planned on it, but McStu couldn’t get away. I just went off to enjoy the snow and the weekend. I heard about Ramsden on the seven-thirty news as I was driving home.”

  “So, you’ve been totally cut off from civilization since your eight-thirty meeting with the dead man. Are you sure you didn’t panic and run for it?”

  “Benny, if I’d panicked, it would have taken me further away than Fonthill! The hills were wonderful!”

  “Ramsden is dead!”

  “Oh, I know! Now I know, but I didn’t know when I saw him that he was going to be murdered. The weekend’s already making me feel bad. Don’t you spoil it too!”

  “Where are you?”

  “At home. Where else should I be?”

  “Well, one place might be in the cells on the basement level at Niagara Regional Police.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Cath, the post-mortem report shows that he was killed between eight and ten on Saturday. You saw him in that period. Now do you understand?” There was a long pause, then:

  “You better come over.” She didn’t even say goodbye. I heard the click and reached for the light switch.

  About thirty minutes after I’d hung up the phone, I parked the Olds in front of Cath’s house across from the snow-capped mountain of pulpwood on Oakdale Avenue. I recognized McStu’s car parked next to a snowdrift in front of me. Cath’s BMW was in the shovelled-out drive. McStu opened the door before I could knock.