by Howard Engel
PENGUIN CANADA
A CITY CALLED JULY
HOWARD ENGEL is the creator of the enduring and beloved detective Benny Cooperman, who, through his appearance in twelve best-selling novels, has become an internationally recognized fictional sleuth. Two of Engel’s novels have been adapted for TV movies, and his books have been translated into several languages. He is the winner of numerous awards, including the 2005 Writers’ Trust of Canada Matt Cohen Award, the 1990 Harbourfront Festival Prize for Canadian Literature and an Arthur Ellis Award for crime fiction. Howard Engel lives in Toronto.
Also in the Benny Cooperman series
The Suicide Murders
Murder on Location
Murder Sees the Light
The Ransom Game
A Victim Must Be Found
Dead and Buried
There Was An Old Woman
Getting Away with Murder
The Cooperman Variations
Memory Book
East of Suez
Also by Howard Engel
Murder in Montparnasse
Mr. Doyle & Dr. Bell
HOWARD ENGEL
A BENNY COOPERMAN MYSTERY
PENGUIN CANADA
Published by the Penguin Group
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Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1986, 1987
Published in this edition, 2008
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)
Copyright © Howard Engel, 1986
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Manufactured in Canada.
ISBN-13: 978-0-14-316749-5
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For Janet again and always
’Twas in the month of Liverpool
In a city called July,
The snow was raining heavily,
The streets were very dry.
The flowers were sweetly singing,
The birds were in full bloom,
As I went down the cellar
To sweep an upstairs room,
— English skipping rhyme
A City Called July
ONE
I sat in my office cleaning out the fuzzy rubble that collects at the bottom of the jam jar I keep pens and pencils in. Also in the litter I found an old watch strap, paper-clips, slightly used Stimudents, clip-on sunglasses and a book of paper matches from Hatch’s Surf Lounge in Niagara Falls, New York, three-quarters used. The ashtrays on my desk were empty except for the one with my current Player’s nodding off in it. I’d cleaned them all the afternoon before to keep me from falling asleep. It was one of those summer mornings when the telephone didn’t ring and I was edgy because it kept looking like it was going to. I’d written a couple of cheques and paid the back rent on the office and my room at the City House. I should have had that warm feeling that comes with my monthly attempt at putting my life in order, but I felt that if I didn’t have the pens, pencils and other junk to occupy my mind completely, I’d break out in a sweat.
Outside the window, the traffic along St. Andrew Street moved inexorably eastward. Working on the second floor overlooking the one-way main street of this town sometimes gives me the feeling that there is a secret evacuation going on and I’ll be the last to hear about it. I tried to settle my mind with the fact that both Church and King went one way in the opposite direction. There must be some law of physics we covered in high school that accounted for that, some Newtonian principle making traffic east balance traffic west. I played with that notion for a few minutes while blowing lint and fuzz off otherwise perfectly good paper-clips.
There was a rap at my door, and before I could answer it or even shout “Come in!” two heads poked through the doorway. I recognized both of them.
“Rabbi Meltzer! Mr. Tepperman! Come in! Come in!” I tried to turn the surprise I felt into a friendly greeting, but I don’t think I succeeded in projecting it across the room to the door. I glanced for a moment to the trio of bald mannequins in the corner, nude except for a wrapper of unbleached factory cotton. I saw knees and shoulders but nothing to scandalize my visitors. I’d managed to get rid of most of the other left-overs from my father’s ladies’ ready-to-wear business, except for my three bedraggled Graces. The rabbi and Mr. Tepperman, the president of B’nai Shalom Congregation, were both blinking in the bright light of the office after the steep climb up the unlighted stairs from the street They took their hats off and stood with their backs to the girls.
“Good morning, Mr. Cooperman. How are you?” said Mr. Tepperman. Good, I thought, let’s get over the secular things first. At the back of my mind was the plot in the cemetery I was sure they were after me to buy. I had no reason for thinking this, but a visit from the rabbi and the president wasn’t a daily occurrence. I felt my immortal soul was in hazard. They weren’t selling raffle tickets on a car for the Haddassah Bazaar. Of that much I was sure.
“I’m fine, Mr. Tepperman. Come in. Have a chair. Here, Rabbi, why don’t you take this chair?”
“Thank you, Mr. Cooperman,” said Rabbi Meltzer, tucking his lightweight raincoat under him as he settled into the aged foam rubber of a tubular chair that used to stand near the door of my father’s store. It gave my place an art deco look. All I needed were marcelled blonde wigs for the mannequins. The rabbi watched Tepperman settle into the other chair. It matched my oak veneer desk. “We, ah, we are not disturbing you?” continued the rabbi, the thought nearly lifting him out of his seat again.
“Not at all. I’m glad to see you.” This wasn’t exactly true. It had been some time since I’d seen either on
e of them, but I remembered the occasions the way a headstone remembers the name chiselled into its face. I pictured the artificial turf at Sally Lenowitz’s funeral. I remembered the empty space next to Sally’s name when they unveiled the double tombstone. Joe, the widower, made a joke about how they’d never cram him into the narrow space. No wonder my visitors made me fidget.
Once they were both seated, the silence and the embarrassment began in earnest. It was a recognized stage in the interviewing of clients. But it was only my inability to face dealing with plots and eternal upkeep that turned my visitors into clients. I was pretty sure they didn’t want me to put up my name to succeed Saul Tepperman as president. It could have been a touch. Something legitimate on behalf of the community that was going to set me back fifty dollars. It could have been anything. I watched Mr. Tepperman and the rabbi trying to outwait each other, each deferring to the other’s better right to speak first. I sat it out.
“Benny,” Saul Tepperman began at length, and started to cough. He called me Benny and that relieved the tension by half a notch. He’d always been Mr. Tepperman to me, but I wasn’t fifteen any more. He looked like he was ready to begin again. “Benny, we have a problem.” Having got that much out, he looked to the rabbi for encouragement. Rabbi Meltzer nodded to show he couldn’t have expressed it better himself. This was no time to stop. We had a consensus: there was a problem. Saul moistened his lips with the pink tip of his tongue. From under the bush of his nicotine-stained moustache it moved quickly, covering all surfaces and retreating behind the white and gold of his smile. “The fact is, Benny, that we have a situation here in town; like I said: a problem. Isn’t that right, Rabbi?” The rabbi jumped like the spinal cord had snapped to attention. Caught off guard, all he could do was nod vigorously. Rabbi Meltzer was a small compact bundle that had gathered arms and legs together so that they almost disappeared as separate appendages. Next to him, Tepperman leaned forward in his chair like a large parcel about to come apart.
“You know, Benny, in a community, we live in and out of one another’s lives I’ve known you since you were bar mitzvah. That’s the way it is in a small town. You scratch my back … You follow me?”
“Take your time.”
“A community, Benny, is built on cooperation and trust,” he said. “We have to depend on one another. I buy from Rosen, Rosen buys from Katz and Katz buys from me. Sure, today, the circle’s a little wider. There’s a Murphy in there and a Mackenzie. But that doesn’t matter. The idea’s the same. In a community, in any community, big or small, trust is the oil at the joints. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Tell me in your own way. You’re doing fine.”
“Most people in town know they can rely on the other fellow. Take your father. A fine, upright man. Everybody respects him. You could give him your heart to hold in his hand, and he wouldn’t drop it. You understand?” He wasn’t moving forward very quickly, but I bobbed my head to encourage him to move from the forecourt of his presentation into the vestibule and hall of his argument. “You take Mel Lowy and Rube Farber.”
“Salt of the earth,” I said, and we all thought about that for a while.
“You see,” began the rabbi, trying another approach, “what we have is more than simply a religious community. We’re talking about a very complicated social structure here. There’s checks and balances. What I do reflects on Tepperman, and what Tepperman does reflects on you. Don’t take this personally. But if Rube Farber robbed the Upper Canadian Bank of ten thousand dollars, it would give all of us a black eye.”
“What he means is,” Tepperman offered, placing his big hands on the edge of my desk, as though he had suddenly been shown the clear road the argument must take, “we’re all in the same soup. It couldn’t be worse. My God, I never thought I’d live to see a thing like this.” The way was getting cloudy, and he sat back in his chair to catch his breath and try to collect the fragments that he’d been so sure of a second before he began to talk.
“Tell me about it,” I said. “Remember I’m a professional private investigator as well as a member of the Jewish community. It’s like talking to the doctor. Practically the same thing. Just tell the story the way it happened. Just the outlines. We’ll put in the colours later. It’s just like doctors. Okay?” Mr. Tepperman and the rabbi shifted in their chairs and waited for me to look at one of them to continue. I gave the nod to the rabbi. He cleared his throat.
“You know Larry Geller? Everybody knows Larry Geller. Everybody liked him and trusted him.” I made a steeple of my fingers to show that I was taking it all in. Geller was a lawyer with an office on Queen Street across from the post office. I didn’t know him well; I’d met him several times. I remembered expensive suits and cologne.
“Sure, I know Larry. What about him?”
“He’s disappeared,” the rabbi said, as though I’d been missing the point for the last ten minutes. “He’s gone. Vanished.”
“Two weeks ago,” put in Tepperman. “Without a word. Poof! He doesn’t even say goodbye to his wife and children. Off the face of the earth.”
I swallowed a lump of disappointment. I couldn’t see anything but police work in this. Larry Geller, the good-time Charlie. He could be depended upon at bar mitzvahs and weddings to raise more dust with his back-slapping than anyone else. He was a big wheel in the local chapter of B’nai Brith.
I’d seen his picture in the Beacon more than once. In fact I remembered seeing it only a day or two ago. I should have read the caption.
“We all trusted him,” said Saul Tepperman, shaking his head.
“You’ve been to the police about this?” I asked. “At least I suppose his wife has.”
“Police!” the rabbi said, lengthening out the vowel until it sounded like a siren screaming. “The police shouldn’t be brought into this until the right time.”
“The rabbi’s absolutely right, Benny. If we can settle this thing within the community …”
“Excuse me, Mr. Tepperman. With all respect, when a man disappears without a trace, poof! it isn’t a community problem any more. It’s police business. I mean, look, this is serious. This has to be handled right. You don’t know whether the man’s alive or dead. You have to take in all the possibilities. And think of his family, Rabbi. Think of what they’re going through. What you’ve got to do is go directly to the cops on this.”
“Benny, it’s not that way.” Once again an exchange of looks passed between them, making me feel as though I was the butt of a joke I was too dense to follow.
“So, if it’s not that way, what way is it? He’s disappeared but you’re not worried? I can see on your faces how worried you are. Tell me.”
“Like I said, Benny,” said Mr. Tepperman, “we all liked and trusted Larry. He was a lawyer, an educated man. Who would you trust if it wasn’t Larry Geller? I ask you? Hesh Riskin from the bakery trusted him with his mortgage money. I’m talking about twelve thousand dollars. Hesh gave it to Larry to pay off the mortgage on the store. Nine months later, when he’d just come back from Florida, he found a letter from the building’s owners waiting for him. They told him that he could lose the building because he had stopped making mortgage payments. He didn’t know what to do. He had a paper saying the mortgage had been paid off. What was he to believe? That’s when he came to see the rabbi and me. He was the first.”
“One of the first. Don’t forget Naomi Spivak. There are over fifty people in the same position as Hesh Riskin.”
“With some,” continued Tepperman, “it wasn’t mortgages.”
“That’s right, Saul. With the Sterns it was investments, with the Greenblatts it was their life savings. I’m talking about old people, Benny. People who wanted to put up their savings in a mortgage. Something to retire on. A little security. Is that wrong to have a little security in old age?” he asked me with passion in his eyes. I had a hard time remembering that he was only speaking rhetorically. He did it so well, I felt caught up and wanted to answer.
>
“Well it’s gone now,” said Tepperman. “Mortgages, investments, savings, security: it’s all gone. Disappeared with that son of a bitch Larry Geller. Excuse me, Rabbi.” The rabbi gave him absolution with a wave of his hand.
“Let me get this straight. You mean Geller has defrauded fifty people and skipped town? And you don’t want to go to the police about it? That’s crazy.”
“You have to understand. Think of the damage to the community. These people worked hard for that money, Benny,” said the rabbi. “Now you want them exposed as stupid on top of this? There’s a limit!”
“Geller’s not going to walk in with the money. He’s not going to see a blinding light and pay back all his onetime friends and neighbours. It may embarrass individuals in the community, it may embarrass the Jewish community generally, but if they want Geller’s hide, if they want a running start on getting some of their own back, they have to go to the cops. They’re the only game in town on a thing like this. They are victims of fraud. They’ve had the till ransacked and you want them to look the other way. Let me think. There’s breach of trust, there’s fraud over two hundred dollars, theft over two hundred, uttering forged documents, probably false registration of titles. We’re talking about half the criminal code here, Rabbi, and you want it hushed up. I don’t believe you.”
“We thought that you might consider …”
“Are you kidding, Saul?” I said, trying out his first name. “A job like this requires an army of trained personnel. We are looking for a needle in a haystack, and the only thing we know for sure is that the haystack has moved out of town. You want me to hang around the hotels in Miami Beach in case he walks in, Rabbi? It’s more than a million to one that you’d ever hear from either of us again. Should I pack a bag and look for him in Europe? Have you any idea what that would cost? Saul, be reasonable. And speaking of large amounts of money, have you any idea how much he got away with? In round figures?”
