The Drowned Man

by David Whellams

  For some time now Leander had professed to be content with who he was, how he had turned out. At the age of sixty-two his life was settled and, in his words, satisfactory. Being gay had become easier over the years. Montreal was a cosmopolitan city, largely tolerant of its gay population. Not that Leander participated actively or openly in the community. He linked up easily enough with younger men but these were individual connections; it did not suit his personality to climb the ramparts on gay rights or flaunt his sexuality. His round belly and black beard gave him a benign aura and customers accepted him because he was unthreatening. As Georges said, “They don’t care if you’re Freddie Mercury or Santa Claus.”

  His business ventures, like his life, had advanced in stages. He created the shop with a firm philosophy: he would always be professional, tough, and ethical, the best book dealer in town, with a front-of-the-store demeanour to match. Within ten years, he was able to buy the building and pay off the mortgage. He branched out into rare documents and marketing on the internet won him an international reputation. At sixty, he convinced himself that there would be no more great changes in his life. He had always wanted to be rich but had reconciled to making a good, if not spectacular living in the trade.

  Georges Keratis transformed Leander. Georges gave him love. The young man was honest, loyal, and optimistic about the future. At first, it was unclear to Leander why Georges would want to love a rotund book seller twice his age and this pebble of doubt wore on him. Until he met Georges, Leander had done little other than trade books, make buying trips and attend conferences of the like-minded (regarding books, not sexual preference).

  “Book collectors are a stiff-spined group,” Georges chided once, and toasted Leander with a glass of wine.

  Georges worked as a bartender, waiter, and sometime manager at Club Parallel, a large bar and dance club in Old Montreal. The venue brought in gay and straight clientele in equal numbers and was almost unique among local clubs in that respect. Management valued his easygoing charm with both kinds of customers. The relationship between Leander and Georges took a year to mature. At times, the younger man mocked Leander’s profession, once saying in jest that Leander’s dusty volumes and crackling parchments kept dragging him back from human warmth to cold pages. It was hard to change; Georges called him an antiquated antiquarian. The real change began when both men recognized that they were a fine match of complementary opposites. Part of the younger man’s appeal was his intellect, although even here there were differences. He once asked which books Leander considered funny. He cited Vanity Fair and Tristram Shandy. Georges had Catch-22 in mind.

  Leander’s affluence had never been on display in either his business premises or in his upstairs apartment but now he began to lavish money on Georges. Initially he didn’t disclose his accounts to Georges, nor did the younger man ask about the funds that financed their regular trips to New York and Toronto. To Georges’s credit, it was only Leander who obsessed on money. He imagined that their future depended on a higher level of wealth. Thus began the saga of the letters.

  It took Leander three years to assemble the Civil War correspondence, the third letter, Williams to Booth, falling into his hands first. He was startled by the British commander’s language in promising to suppress French-Canadian agitation in the Civil War period and realized that he had something valuable. Moreover, he had come across the prize fairly, as part of an estate sale in the Townships; his ownership was indisputable. He scouted for the right buyer, and in a flash of unorthodox inspiration, approached professor Olivier Seep with an offer for a quick sale.

  Leander began to agonize over cash flow. Business in 2010 had tailed off from the year before, as much due to the inscrutable ebb and flow of the collecting trade as to the recession. He had been biting into his savings to cover his presents to Georges. His strategy in approaching Seep was inspired. Leander had never plugged himself into the separatist community, although he frequently sold rare books to academics across the province. He knew that Seep had family money — ironically, he lived in a big house in the Anglo enclave of Westmount — and that he was outspoken in his attacks on the federalists. Leander unfortunately overlooked a third factor. Seep was cheap. The professor balked at paying the $20,000 the dealer demanded. He would have had to sell one of his paintings, he complained, as if Leander should have any sympathy for the wealthy. For a month, Olivier Seep hounded Leander to lower his price.

  Leander’s timing was serendipitous, but not for the professor. Later that month, the other two letters landed in his lap. The Thompson–Williams note, bought for pocket money from a small-time dealer in Lévis, should have filled in the puzzle neatly but Leander had doubts about its provenance. There were also rumours in the trade about a document or two that had disappeared from the Quebec Archives. Seep rejected the new package price of $40,000 and thus it made sense for Leander to strike a quick cash-for-parchment transaction with Madam Hilfgott. The three linked documents were extraordinary historical treasures but he set a bargain bottom line of $30,000.

  But it was the young woman who challenged all of Leander’s complacent assumptions. A scant two hours after John Carpenter’s first visit to set up the transfer on Nicola’s behalf, the beautiful sylph wafted into his bookstore haven and tried to seduce him with a scenario of betrayal. It was that dramatic, he recalled. Her offer was simple: he could keep a third of the money and all three documents. Maybe he could resell them. He had laughed at her. The original deal was simpler, he stated in a patronizing tone. She waited until he finished. He laughed at her again. She took off her blouse and simply stood there half nude and waited a bit longer in the silence of the store. Leander was put so off-kilter that he almost reached out to touch her breasts. She seemed to challenge his sexual proclivities, as if there were another sexual choice for him, and in fact he felt lust creeping up from his groin. But he did not back down.

  But it had only been her first offer. Before he could eject her, she buttoned herself up, then went and locked the front door, turning over the “Closed” sign.

  Until Alice’s invasion of his shop, Leander believed that he had played the consul general perfectly (that harpy), keeping the price up and locking in an under-the-counter cash sale. But now he worried that Nicola was behind the woman’s manoeuvre. Nicola had seemed capable of anything, even sabotaging her own deal. The locked door roused panic in the book dealer. He felt a trap being sprung.

  Alice spun out a fantastic plan to drug the young Scotland Yard officer, her boyfriend, and steal the letters before he could deliver them to Nicola.

  He pointed to the obvious flaws. “How do I explain retention of any of the letters?”

  “Hide them wherever you want. I don’t care, I just want the money. I will keep you out of the dirty work. I will get Johnny so drunk he’ll never remember the robbery.” Her voice was cold.

  “You said you were going to drug him . . .”

  Alice’s temper flared at his challenge and she took out a knife with a six-inch blade. She drove the tip into the nearest leather-bound book, which happened to be a volume of Trollope.

  Before he could speak again, she removed the knife and unlocked the door. She repeated, “I’ll keep you out of the dirty work.”

  If only.

  Two nights later, Leander handed all three documents over to the Englishman at midnight for a package of hundreds, then retreated to the second-floor apartment above the store. He put the bills in his safe. To establish an alibi for the next several hours, he left the store and showed up at the Club Parallel, idly wondering if Georges would be willing to backdate his arrival to midnight. But Georges hated him sitting at the bar like a pick-up artist and sent him home.

  When the bell downstairs rang at three fifteen, Leander assumed that Georges had left work early but it was the woman, and she had her knife in hand and a brand new story to tell.

  “Johnny is dead but I didn’t kill him,”
she said. Her face was flushed and tears made rivulets through her makeup. She calmed herself in a minute; her voice steadied.

  “How the hell did that happen?” he asked, locking the door behind her and flipping off the front bulb. He now prayed that Georges would stay at work until four, past closing time. He grasped right off that he was about to become the logical murder suspect. How could he explain away the double-cross, her double-cross?

  It got worse.

  “I’m screwed,” he stated, in despair, but she stared coldly at him.

  “I need the money and I’m keeping the letters,” she said.

  Leander was almost relieved but this was $30,000. He thought of asking for half. His calculations swung like a pendulum. He wasn’t sure that his visit to the bar coincided with the timeline of Carpenter’s killing. He couldn’t stop thinking about Georges — would he provide the necessary alibi? The woman appeared to read his every thought. She came up to him and, just like that, cut a shallow two-inch line along his jaw. It was small enough to call a shaving mishap but the trickle of blood sickened him.

  That changed the conversation. Desperate, keeping the knife in view, Leander suggested they split the cash evenly.

  “Two thirds for me,” she said. “Go get it.” She followed him to his safe and he retrieved $20,000. Something about her chilled him, cancelled any thought of resistance. Alice hadn’t deigned to show him the recovered letters. It was closing in on 4 a.m. and he feared Georges blithely walking in the front door. He marshalled the last of his courage and suggested that she leave him one of the documents, perhaps the Williams–Booth letter.

  “It’s only fair,” he said.

  Alice laughed. She took a set of keys from her coat pocket. The car locks beeped outside and Leander saw the Ford for the first time. Had she run down the callow boyfriend? Perhaps she had drugged him and thrown him out of the car. How cold-hearted was this succubus? He looked at the shine in her eyes and was afraid.

  Alice left before he could say another word. He stood in silence, short $20,000 and three rare pearls.

  Georges did arrive home a few minutes early, having caught his lover’s jittery mood at the bar. Leander’s account of the Carpenter exchange was minimal. He lied, saying that he had heard on the radio that the buyer of his wares had died. He feared that Georges would stalk out, leave forever. In other circumstances Georges himself might have contacted the police — Leander’s neck was bleeding — but the week before the young man had been roughed up outside the bar by a group of Neanderthal straights who took out their philosophy on his ribs. The MUC cops had been unsympathetic.

  They decided to wait. Leander kept the “Closed” sign in the window.

  Deroche and his men descended just after dawn. Leander, in a silk dressing gown, answered the door and let the two detectives inside. By now he had his storyline clear. Yes, he had made the deal with Hilfgott, done the exchange with Carpenter, and accepted the cash. Ten thousand dollars? Sure, here it is. Will I get it back from you, officer? I don’t know any girl.

  Deroche interviewed him again at the Sûreté offices two hours later and challenged him on the scar on his neck.

  “Shaving,” the book dealer said.

  “You shave in the middle of the night?”

  The morning was long but Leander’s alibi held. The serving staff at Club Parallel all agreed that he arrived at the bar around the time of Carpenter’s death. Leander returned to the store and by midday was on a bus to Toronto. He left no message for Georges, who took his lover’s abandonment in stride. Georges closed the shop but maintained the upstairs apartment for Leander’s return. He knew that Leander would not call. Both men understood the need to preserve Georges’s deniability regarding the book dealer’s whereabouts.

  Leander’s thin alibi was enough to delay his detention, but Inspector Deroche later regretted not arresting Leander Greenwell on the spot, and he miscalculated again when Leander arrived home from his wanderings. Almost as if to compensate for his earlier mistake, Deroche and his men threw the book dealer in jail and asked the attorney general to prepare a charge of conspiracy to commit murder. The lawyers were willing to add second-degree murder. All this was readied before taking Leander’s full statement.

  Leander’s interrogators sat him in a chair in the centre of a featureless cube in the Bordeaux Prison and threatened him with beatings, prison rape, and the permanent closure of his precious bookshop. It was all too extreme, and Leander began to balk. Worse for Deroche, there was an anti-gay undertone to the threats by the police. Leander, initially in dread of prison, found his courage as the threats piled up. He concentrated on remembering every word.

  His very sharp lawyer quoted those words back to the presiding judge at the habeas corpus hearing the next morning. “Conspiracy to commit murder!” he thundered. “What a convenient charge. But, your honour, the last time I checked the Criminal Code, you need another person to conspire with. Where is this chimerical second party?”

  Deroche found no evidence confirming Alice’s participation in the assault and drowning, and no connection at all to Greenwell. Late in the hearing on Leander’s habeas corpus motion, the prosecution did allude to the exotic girl and presented a copy of her passport photo. The presentation rang hollow and desperate in court.

  “Couldn’t we have some evidence that is a little more local?” jibed the defence counsel, who went on to enumerate the police abuses inside the interrogation chamber. Even more damning was the Crown’s failure to address Leander’s alibi and that lacuna highlighted the vagueness of the conspiracy charge. The judge looked down his nose and suggested to the government’s counsel that the Crown’s chances at a preliminary hearing on any homicide counts were looking slim.

  Deroche’s people dug a deeper hole. Montreal Urban Community police arrested Georges Keratis on charges of lying to the police and kept him overnight in a drunk cell. A curled phone book was used to soften him up during questioning. But Georges wasn’t soft and he kept his mouth shut. He fought off two assaults from other detainees before he was released the next morning. The young man’s employment required him to be bonded; the owner of Club Parallel was sympathetic but he wasn’t pleased, and he said so. But when the boss, who was a good guy, saw the blue bruise on Georges’s zygomatic bone, he handed him a stick of make-up and told him to get back to work.

  Greenwell dug in and clammed up. Deroche stretched the book dealer’s stay at the Bordeaux to a sixth day, in spite of the habeas corpus ruling. In that time, Leander hardly got to know his cell. If he wasn’t being shouted at by officers and guards, he was in court benefiting from his lawyer’s stream of motions. Only a passionate pitch by government counsel won a postponement of the process, rather than outright dismissal of the charges.

  The Crown wanted Leander kept on a short leash, and the judge granted a long list of bail conditions, which included his turning in his passport, informing police of any plans to travel outside Montreal, and avoiding contact with anyone with a criminal record. His lawyer filed a counter-bid to have the passport restriction voided, since the book dealer travelled to New York regularly to conduct business. He won that round as well.

  Perhaps overconfident because of his alibi and the lack of witnesses at the Carpenter murder scene other than Renaud, Leander decided to say nothing to anyone, even his lawyer, after his release. Deroche, realizing that he had jumped the gun on the two heavy charges, let him be. No one seemed in a hurry to schedule the preliminary hearing.

  Leander could not stop thinking about the woman with the knife. He called Georges to warn him off. “It’s just till the legal stuff is over with. Stay away until then.”

  Georges, always direct, said, “Why?”

  “I’m trying to protect you.”

  “I don’t need you to protect me. I need you to love me,” Georges replied.

  “Just for a while,” Leander said.

&nbs
p; And so Leander continued to live alone in his shuttered store.

  CHAPTER 28

  There’s no way to improve a red-eye, Peter grumped as he boarded the direct overnight flight from Montreal. This time he was on British Airways rather than Air Canada but the amenities were the same. An air hostess offered him a plastic glass of champagne the moment they took off; first-class seat, second-class champagne. He started to watch the in-flight feature, Inception, but found he wasn’t in the mood to sort through multiple dream levels or listen to repeated explications of dream-world rules. He took off his earphones and ordered a good British ale from the woman.

  The BA flight arrived twenty minutes early and this time Maddy was waiting at Arrivals without the dog.

  “Jasper is home with Joan. She’s off to visit her sister but’ll be back for dinner.”