by Howard Engel
“Isn’t everybody? Taking humanity all at once is a little like trying to put your arms around one of those giant Douglas firs they have out in British Columbia.” Joyce See ordered tea and I ordered coffee. “And I guess I feel guilty about what Geller did. Because of what he is and because of what I am.”
“Yes, that’s what it’s like being part of a minority.” She nodded as the tea and coffee arrived. A teenager returned the sugar to our table. “I share an apartment with an Armenian girl,” she added by way of explanation, then went on, “Chinese people are both a minority and a majority. In my heart I know there are vast millions of us in Asia, but that doesn’t seem to mean anything here where the numbers are very small. The closest I’ve ever come to feeling like I was really Chinese is walking down Dundas Street in Toronto.”
“Your firm handles Geller’s legal affairs?”
“Such as they are, we do. It’s mostly things going back to the old partnership.”
“Then you know about his property holdings?”
“The file stopped when it got to me. Full of dead ends, really. Just things Irving and Mr. Geller acquired, paid mortgages on and then sold or traded.”
“Traded?”
“There was a property on Woodland Avenue, an office building. Nothing huge. It was traded for six condominiums. Irving still owns his, but I understand that Mr. Geller sold his three.” She sipped her tea slowly, looking at me over the rim of the cup.
“Who bought the Woodland Avenue place?” I asked.
“It was Tom MacIntyre.”
“Who is?”
“Tom MacIntyre? Oh, Tom MacIntyre’s a lot of things. He’s been buying up most of unwanted Grantham, he drives a fast car, has a boat at Port Richmond, keeps an apartment in New York and is very cosy, in a business way, with Glenn Bagot.”
“Oh, I’ve heard about him. He’s connected with Larry Geller’s brother. The one who’s in construction. Sid. And Sid’s live-in friend used to be Mrs. Bagot.”
“You’ve forgotten to mention the connection with certain powerful names at Queen’s Park.”
“You mean he’s a bagman as well as driving a fast car? I don’t believe it.”
“Well, he grew up eating local peaches and drinking local wine. What can you expect?”
I got the exact address of the Woodland Avenue property from Joyce and found out where Tom MacIntyre hangs his hat in the daytime. It was still a good hour before closing time, so I walked into the solid marble temple in which he did business. His office was on the sixth floor behind a door marked McHugh & MacIntyre, Consultants. The secretary had never heard of a person without an appointment before, and so I introduced myself.
“You didn’t phone. Did you write him?” Her eyes were wide under her red bangs.
“No, you see I didn’t get up this morning knowing that I wanted to see him. I had breakfast and I still didn’t know I needed to see him. It came over me suddenly.”
“I’m afraid that Mr. MacIntyre doesn’t see people without appointments.”
“It’s a rule, I guess?”
“Oh, yes, sir. Never as long as I’ve been here.”
“I see. I like a place that stands by its rules. May I borrow that telephone book, just by your elbow, for a minute?”
“Oh, of course.” She handed it to me and I flipped to the yellow pages, stopping at Consultants. The girl was clever about keeping her sandwich out of sight. It didn’t go with the buff marble walls or the framed posters of ancient art shows that hung on them.
“Plummer and McCullough. Are they good?”
“I beg your pardon?” she said, looking up at me.
“Plummer and McCullough, Consultants,” I repeated with a smile. “They’re reputable? Sound, in a business way?” Her cheeks went hollow. “Or what about C.N. Geale, Consultants? I’ve heard only excellent things about them. Yes, Geale. It sounds like a name you can trust, doesn’t it?” She was sitting like a poker was sticking down the back of her white poplin blouse. She got up without bending the poker or making the chair squeak and asked if I would kindly wait for one moment. I promised.
A minute later she ushered me into the august presence of Tom MacIntyre, who looked me up and down then smiled. He was a man in his mid-thirties, I would guess, but the white hair totally fooled me. He was an albino, or an albino’s cousin. His pink eyes looked me over through thick lenses. Then he started to laugh.
“Well, you put the wind up Vicki, Mr. Cooperman. You took her in and more power to you. Will you have a drink?” He pulled a bottle from an open tray to the right of his desk and paused, waiting for instructions. The room was full of music. I could hear the sound of penny whistles, fiddles, pipes and a drum. They were busy doing a lilting jig tune in an enthusiastic but none too slavish way. He turned it down.
“That’s my brother’s group, The Far Darrig. This is their second album.”
“Nice, very nice.”
“And you’re drinking?”
“Ah, rye with water unless you have ginger ale.”
“I have, and I’ll give it to you as long as it’s rye you’re drinking. My arm wouldn’t bend if it was Jameson you wanted the ginger ale poured into. I also have some Black Bush, if you like.” I shook my head in the negative. He made a drink for me and poured an inch from a bottle marked Jameson into a glass with his fingerprints on it. The light coming through the large window framed his very impressive head. When we both had had a chance to take a sip of our drinks, he brought the conversation back to business again. “Mr. Cooperman, you are not looking for a consultant, whatever you told Vicki Daubney. She’s a wonderful typist, and she does usually take care of the tinkers. Are you a tinker, Mr. Cooperman?”
“I’m a private investigator, Mr. MacIntyre. I’ve been looking into some property once owned by Larry Geller.”
“Then it’s a tinker you are and no mistake. Good. I was getting bored sitting around here today. Larry Geller … ah! He’s the one who’s flown the coop. What did they say he got away with? A tidy sum, a tidy sum, to be sure. Here’s to enterprise, Mr. Cooperman. Enterprise and imagination.” We both drank to that; I didn’t know how to refuse a toast.
“I’m interested in 44 Woodland Avenue. What can you tell me about it?”
“Not very much. I own it and have since Geller splintered his partnership with what’s-his-name. Bernstein. It was a two-way real estate deal. No money passed. All very simple, honest and, I’m afraid, dull. Nothing spectacular there, Mr. Cooperman. A very dull property, on a dull street and filled with dull tenants who send in postdated cheques for a full year in advance. I even have a set from …” He stopped talking and looked at the tufts of white hair growing on his pink knuckles.
“You were saying?” MacIntyre got to his feet and stared down at the city from his window. From where I sat, the city could have been London or New York. It didn’t seem to interfere with his concentration that he was seeing the roof-tops of Grantham, Ontario. After a minute he turned back to look at me, with his arms leaning back on the window ledge.
“Well, you may be on to something after all.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, your quarry is, or was, a tenant of mine. Has been for several years.” I felt like I was running up a flight of stairs in a dream. “Small office,” he was saying when I was again able to tune in, “in the back, if I remember. Rents are cheaper in the rear. Silly of me not to have remembered sooner.”
It wasn’t behind a bookcase. It was a small office on Woodland Avenue. “The false wall,” I said out loud.
“I beg your pardon?” MacIntyre was splashing another ounce of Jameson into his glass. I was still sipping on my first rye and ginger ale.
“If Geller gave you a set of post-dated cheques for his rent, how would these cheques be honoured? Are you going to find those cheques bouncing?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Cooperman. I wasn’t thinking about that. Here we have stumbled upon a situation alive with possibilities, and all you can th
ink of is whether I’m going to be out of pocket a few hundred dollars. You mustn’t imagine Geller’s office in terms of this place or even in terms of his Queen Street location. I’ve never been to Woodland Avenue to inspect it—I have people who do that for me—but from the outside I wouldn’t have high hopes about what I would find up there.”
“How exactly did he pay you? I mean was it through a company or what?”
“Look, Mr. Cooperman, my brother’s the brilliant member of the family. All I know how to do is make money. I’ll have to see the ledger.”
When he came back into the room, his face was looking like he’d just stepped out of a sauna. He’d been in the file room and I’d heard him speaking with Vicki. I wondered if she thought any better of me. “Here it is,” he said, opening an old-fashioned ledger on his desk. “We set it up in this book when the property was transferred. It’s been put on the computer, of course, but this is the original of the arrangement. His cheques were drawn on the Bank of Upper Canada. Never any problem with them. He paid his money and I assume he made use of the space.”
“Want to take a look?” I asked.
MacIntyre grinned and finished his drink. He replaced the empty glass on his drink trolley.
“I don’t want to be caught any closer to 44 Woodland Avenue than I’m now standing. If I’d had my wits about me I would have informed the police as soon as I read about Larry in the paper.”
“Who said anything about getting caught? You have keys, don’t you?”
“Mr. Cooperman, I’m tempted, honestly tempted. But I suspect that the trail is cold. Besides, I’m far too conspicuous to go about doing that sort of thing except in my sleep.”
“I see. You wouldn’t let me borrow the keys for an hour or so. I’d like to have a look around.”
“No doubt you would, Mr. Cooperman. And no doubt the police will want the same opportunity. They usually like to arrive first on the scene. In fact they insist on it.”
“A little slow off the mark today. They usually do better. I don’t suppose you could study that ledger for an hour before tumbling to its true significance?”
“Mr. Coop—”
“I was afraid not. I have to play all the angles, you understand.”
“And you see that I would be playing a very silly game if I went over there with you. I’ll have to telephone the police. But perhaps it can wait until this evening. I do have a great deal to do before I leave the office. Yes, I think I can wait until this evening, when I’m home after I’ve had a run in my boat.”
MacIntyre wouldn’t go so far as sharing a conspiratorial grin with me. Instead he began playing with the papers on his desk in a way to suggest that the nub of the interview was over, and that I should begin my farewells. I was backing away from his desk and heading towards the door I’d used earlier, when he looked up from his papers and interrupted my speech of thanks. “Mr. Cooperman, why don’t you let yourself out the side door? It will save embarrassing Vicki any more.” He got up and took my drink from me without making the situation awkward. In my excitement, I’d forgotten I was holding it. “I see you haven’t got very far with that drink. I’m not surprised. Ginger ale and rye indeed. You should try a good malt one day, Mr. Cooperman. Good afternoon to you.”
I went through the door his left hand had indicated and found myself in an abandoned office with piles of papers and open filing cabinets everywhere. On a desk sat a box full of dusty Christmas decorations and next to that one of silver platters and trays. On the far wall hung a large board with bunches of keys dangling. Street addresses had been painted neatly dividing the space logically into the required rectangles, but some of these had been crossed out in chalk or felt pen, sometimes changed several times and new addresses filled in. Near the bottom of the board, off by itself and still legible in chalk, I read 44 Woodland Avenue. I took the small bunch of keys from the hook and let myself out into the outside corridor wondering why MacIntyre was making this so easy for me.
From the open window of my Olds, 44 Woodland Avenue looked like a building that had gone up the wrong year with too little invested in it and a hard-luck story right from the moment nobody arrived for the sodturning ceremony. It was a four-storey yellow brick building with a small entrance on the left side as I faced it after getting out of the car. I let myself in with a key when the door wouldn’t open for nothing. There was a directory near the entrance and somehow I wasn’t surprised that I couldn’t find Larry Geller’s name on it. I went over the names one by one until I had discarded them all. One looked as flea-bitten as the last. I tried walking down the main corridor to the back. MacIntyre had said that Geller’s office was at the back. He’d also said that he’d never been there. I looked at the bunch of keys. The labels were marked with room numbers beginning with 100 and running up to 405. I eliminated the denture-making establishments and the two rare-stamp wholesalers. I discarded the jeweller with the Swiss awards after his name. There were eight back offices and I had already disposed of five of them. Thank God for the invention of dentures. One of the remaining offices was marked Lawrence Peyre, R.M.T., Cranio-sacral Therapy, and the other two doors were unmarked except for their numbers. I tried the one on the top floor first. It was a single room with a desk of the roll-top type, with bookcases on all three walls. A standard typewriter stood on a frail-looking metal trolley in front of a leather-backed swivel chair. An ancient electric fan in a wire cage and an upright telephone on the desk made the whole place look like a scene from The Front Page. I could imagine the tenant wearing a green eye-shade and sleeve garters reading proofs.
A closer look at the books lying open and closed on the desk led me to believe that this was the haven of an author of Harlequin romances. The first page of each of the books suggested a similarity of authorship. I liked the names of the authors: Bonita Culver, Samantha Ross and Madras Richardson. I went through the desk but came up with nothing of interest except maybe to other Harlequin romance writers: plot charts and lists of names.
There remained the office on the next floor down, room 304. Here I hit pay dirt. The office contained a desk, swivel chair and a small filing cabinet. The room smelled of burned paper, and I could see flakes of paper ash in a green waste-paper basket. It was discoloured on the outside from the heat. A layer of dust covered the faded green desk blotter. I went over the place from top to bottom, bringing all the textbook tricks to bear short of making holes in the wall. Under one of the dark leather triangles that kept the desk blotter in place I found a torn-off piece of an envelope. On it was part of the name and address of Bolduc Construction on Facer Street. I promised to give myself a medal as soon as I got out of there.
The telephone on the desk was one of the cheap, Made in Taiwan types. I lifted it off the desk and heard a dial tone. On the bottom row of the push-button display was a button marked “redial.” I tried it. I could hear the seven tones jingle in my ear.
“Hello?” I didn’t recognize the voice. But then I seldom do.
“Hello. It’s Benny Cooperman here. Who’s this?”
“Oh, hello, Mr. Cooperman. This is Ruth Geller. What a surprise. Any news?”
“Just checking in. You know that your brother-in-law claims to have heard from your husband? He called me last night.”
“Why would Sid phone you and not me? That seems strange.”
“It wasn’t Sid; it was Nathan.”
“Same thing. Although Nathan’s a little less predictable. Do you believe him?”
“I don’t know. I’m surprised he didn’t tell you. I’m naturally suspicious, but all the same I think you’d get to hear all the real news first, don’t you?”
“Nathan’s trying to put you off the scent, you mean?”
“I’ll settle for that. I honestly didn’t expect him to help me collar your husband. Still it’s strange. The call was supposed to have come from Daytona Beach.”
“Nathan knew about our holiday in Daytona two years ago. But why would he …? I mean, that might be
where Larry went. At least he knows Daytona better than the rest of Florida.”
“I’m sure that Nathan is not trying to close the net around Larry. It’s either mischief or he knows something. Naturally, if I go down to Daytona looking for him it’s because Nathan knows that Larry’s living in a loft in Papertown on canned anchovies and Ry-Krisp.” I heard a sigh from the other end. “If he is hiding out locally,” I said, “he’d better be careful who’s bringing him his meals. The cops aren’t completely up the road on this. I’m sure they know where Sid and Nathan and you have been since they opened a file on this case.”
“I guess you’re right. We’re no longer invisible. That’s another thing Larry hadn’t counted on.” She sounded like she was spiralling down into depression.
“Mrs. Geller, this may sound peculiar, but have you been talking with a man named Wally Moore, a panhandler you may have seen on St. Andrew Street? He and his partner are part of the scenery. Has he phoned or come to the door?”
“There have been dozens of calls. People threatening. I hate answering the phone. But I don’t remember him. I hope it’s not important. I’ve got to go. Debbie’s just come back. I’ll pass you to her and talk to you later, okay?”
“Never mind Debbie. Just one thing. Did Larry call you for any reason that last day?”
“The day he …? No, I don’t think so. No, I’m sure he didn’t. Why?”
“Just wondered.”
“I’ve really got to go, Mr. Cooperman.” I said “Sure” and she was gone.
So Larry burned his papers and telephoned home before he skipped out. And Ruth doesn’t want me to know about the call. It wasn’t much, but it was something I didn’t know ten minutes earlier. In this business you have to be thankful for mouldy crumbs sometimes.
I sat in Larry Geller’s chair for a minute trying to see things his way, from his point of view. Inspiration didn’t rain down on me from the ceiling, so I got ready to leave.
Making a mental note to get the keys to Larry’s door and the building duplicated at Coy’s, I went out into the unlighted corridor. The door closed with a punctuating click behind me. My memory is vague on the subject of what I was thinking about next. In fact, apart from the ghost of an idea that I might have been thinking of my supper, things aren’t very clear at all about the next part. When I turned around from the door, thinking whatever I was thinking, I was staring into three badly lit mean faces and the open end of a .32 calibre revolver.
