by Howard Engel
Rabbi Meltzer was sitting at his desk watching, but not with particular interest, the fact that Mr. Belkin, the jeweller, and Mr. Hirsch, the druggist, were trying to outbid one another, but the incremental rise at each bid was not large enough to catch the attention of everybody.
“Benny,” the rabbi called, giving me a warm unshaven Saturday morning smile. “Gut shabbas. What brings you out on a Saturday? Have I ever seen you on a Saturday? I don’t think so.” He cleared a place beside him and I sat down. We both watched Mr. Hecht’s large eyes as magnified by his thick glasses. He looked for an advance on fifty dollars from Mr. Belkin. Mr. Hirsch went up a dollar. “It won’t hit sixty,” the rabbi said. “Belkin’s courage always fails him around fifty-five or six. What can I do for you, Benny? I expected to hear from you.”
“Is it all right to talk?” I asked. “Here, I mean?”
“Why not? I can’t get away, Benny. If you want to talk this morning, this is where I am.” I’d been more concerned with the correctness of talking sordid business in shul than simply having the rabbi to myself, but I let that pass. Rabbi Meltzer waved his hand and mimed something to the right-hand side of the congregation, and shortly we were joined by Mr. Tepperman.
“Good-morning, Benny. Is your father here?”
“Morning, Saul. No, he’s home and in bed where he is most Saturday mornings.” The sun coming into the synagogue glinted for a moment on one of Saul’s gold teeth. There was silence all around us. Hirsch had won the auction, and the rabbi was now needed. He got up and the service continued. Mr. Tepperman let me look at his prayer book as various members of the congregation were called up to the bema to read a small portion. It all seemed to be building up to something, and then it hit me: I recognized David and Lou Gorbach beaming up there. Then the rabbi called out in his familiar sing-song for Lou Gorbach’s boy to come up to the bema. A nervous thirteen-year-old in long pants went up the step and took his position, like he was over-rehearsed. He read the blessings in a strained voice that carried up to the balcony where his mother was sitting. “Vilosechi h’oretz eschem …” The musical decoration was simple and repetitive. I remember that the musical clues were written on the text, curlicues like accents above the words which indicated the next sequence of notes. The boy’s voice cracked a few times, just enough to bring tears to the eyes of most of the women in the balcony, and when he finally came to the end he became the centre of a hail of tiny paper bags with candy in them. Nothing changes in Grantham. I remember scrambling with the younger kids to collect as many of the bags as I could when I was little. Then I remembered that as I stood there on the bema in my first pair of long pants after reading my mafter, suddenly I was a man, too old to scramble for candy. I knew then that there was such a thing as dignity and I didn’t think I liked it.
The Gorbach boy didn’t pick up any candy either. It was a coming-of-age ceremony, and as such things go around the world, relatively painless. The only hazard in my day was getting my cheek pinched by the old rabbi when I got something right.
“My dear rabbi, beloved grandparents, relatives and friends …” The little so-and-so was now giving my speech. He got a few things different and changed some of the details because he’d read a different part from the Torah, but the thrust was the same and so were the lessons to be learned from the text. I felt violated by a thirteen-year-old. I picked up a small bag of candy that had landed at my feet and began feeling better right away.
“Nathan Geller has had a call from his missing brother,” I said to Saul Tepperman. “At least he says so.” I added that to show that I didn’t believe it was necessarily true. “He says that Larry’s in Florida. Daytona Beach.”
“And you believe he’s anywhere but Daytona Beach is that right, Benny?”
“It doesn’t make sense that he would tell me where his brother is hiding.” Saul Tepperman licked his lips and ran his finger over his moustache as though he was confirming that he still existed. “Look, Saul, he could be downstairs for all I know. I’ve talked to everybody in sight. It’s like running a stick against a picket fence. One piece makes the same noise as the last. This thing with Nathan, well, I don’t know. I’ll go see him.”
“You mean you’ll stay with the case?”
“I said I’d took around for a few days. That was last Wednesday. I don’t know, Saul. To find out where Larry’s gone will take a bigger organization that I can offer.”
“Look, if you could stay with it until next week.” He turned his head making a helpless gesture.
“In the meantime I’m not making a living, Saul. I’ve got a licence that has to be renewed and I don’t have the five hundred dollars it takes. If I don’t get renewed, I’ll be just another interested amateur.” I said this, then remembered Bagot’s five bills in my wallet. The way I was thinking, it wasn’t the same as real money. I knew I wouldn’t be able to relax with my debts until I’d put the money in an envelope addressed to Glenn Bagot.
“We’re meeting on Thursday,” Saul Tepperman said. I didn’t see how it followed.
“Eh?”
“The committee. I’ll tell them what you’ve done and at the very least they’ll pay you for the time you’ve already spent.” I wondered what he imagined was the most that the committee might do for my sagging affairs, but I let it pass.
“Saul, who in town, apart from his legal friends and his family, was closest to Larry Geller?”
“Apart from them …” he stroked his moustache between his thumb and the knuckle of his first finger, the one I used to call Peter Pointer. (The others were Tom Thumb, Toby Tall, Reuben Ring and Baby Finger.) “Apart from them I don’t think there was anybody. Close, you know what I mean. A family man, that’s what he was.”
“Or appeared to be,” I added, and once I’d said it, the more I liked the idea. The rabbi had now rejoined us, having quietened a dispute at the back over a procedural wrangle. On these occasions he can shut everybody up with the single word, “Sha!” spoken in a loud stage whisper. I asked him the same question I’d just posed to Saul and got the same answer with this addition: “Why not ask Nathan some further questions. If I had to guess which of his brothers Larry was closest to, I’d say it was Nathan not Sid. Sid was more like a father to the two of them. Talk to Nathan. God forbid we shouldn’t get to the bottom of this thing.” I said “Amen” and left the synagogue as quickly as I could, congratulating the Gorbachs at the door and dodging their invitation to join them downstairs in the vestry rooms for a small kiddush.
Once back behind the wheel of the car, I felt like myself again. There was something about religion that made me nervous. It was too closely connected with childish nightmares to leave me feeling wholly grown up and driving my own car. After an hour in the shul I felt an urge to turn over a new leaf and become a better person. It was the bacon in my stomach giving me heartburn and not God’s interference in my life that made me stop the car and buy some antacid tablets. That took care of my metaphysical speculations for about ten minutes.
I parked the rented car where I’d parked the Olds a couple of days ago, at the side of the two-storey warehouse where Nathan Geller did his sculptures. The green garbage bags had been collected but it looked pretty much the same apart from that. The bell still didn’t work, and the door was still open. I went in.
Sunlight warmed the brilliant white figures I’d seen on my last trip. The late morning light made the Mountie stand all the straighter and the tourist with the camera appear to have been frozen in the act like bodies found at Pompeii frozen in lava. I called out, and heard only the sound of my own feet echoing across the floor. I had just reached the stairs to the balcony, when I heard a car starting up. I ran to the door and saw Alex Bolduc rapidly backing his car away from the studio then heading back to town in a hurry. His face looked as old as his father’s.
Upstairs I quickly found the reason for Alex’s quick exit. Nathan Geller was lying in a heap on the floor in front of his colour television. A distorted image was r
unning up the screen and reappearing at the bottom again. Geller was lying with his knees bent and his arms wrapped around his stomach. His sleeves were red with blood and his eyes were open in disbelief. I lurched my way to the toilet before covering the telephone with my handkerchief while I dialled for the police.
FIFTEEN
Chris Savas was an old friend. From the moment he came into Nathan Geller’s studio I started to feel better. It wasn’t because the sergeant was considerate of my feelings, far from it. He always gave me a hard time. When he’d finished with me, after a couple of hours of close questioning, barbed sarcasm, and taunting comments on my line of work and personal foibles, I felt I’d been taken to the cleaners and hung up and dried by one of the best. No, it was even better than that. I felt like I’d been put in a crucible and exposed to white heat. There was nothing left but a fine grey ash. As a chemist, Savas was top of the line.
We were sitting in his office at Niagara Regional. Paper cups of coffee with floating corpses of cigarette butts littered his metal desk. The floor had the same rust marks I remembered from last time. The venetian blinds were still dusty and the windows still looked out on the parking lot next to the city’s market square. I could see the old court-house with squadrons of wheeling pigeons circling the geranium which was annually planted in the memorial fountain to commemorate something or other.
Pete Staziak had wedged his large form into the doorway a few minutes before to see what stage we were at. He and Savas exchanged looks and Savas broke down and gave me one of his cigarettes for a change. Staziak had briefed Savas about my activities, judging by the bite of his questions. He’s taken me over the scene of so many crimes in the last five years that I’m going to get them all into one big mulligan stew of who did what to whom. I looked at the bastard sitting across from me, even as his old partner was examining him from the doorway. I wondered if what we saw was the same man.
Staff Sergeant Chris Savas was a hard man and a good cop. He’d been named after a Cypriot painter and on occasion had tried to show a few friends what Greek cooking and drinking were all about. He had a face like a slab of beef, with eyes that could become as cold as steel ball bearings. He had a voice like the sound cardboard makes when you rasp it across a desk. He also had an instinct for when enough was enough.
“You think young Bolduc did it?”
“Christ, Chris, I told you. He was there when I got there. That’s all I said. If I thought you were going to make him the corner-stone of your investigation, I wouldn’t have bothered mentioning him. How do you know he didn’t stumble into it the way I did? Hell, if I got there and thought I might become a suspect I might think twice about sticking around, especially if I heard somebody driving up and turning his motor off. I think he panicked, that’s all.”
“Yeah, you could be right, and you could be wrong. You’ve got a sentimental side, Benny. You always see the roses and never the thorns. When we have the medical report we’ll be closer to knowing which of us is right.”
“You need anything, Chris?” That was Staziak. Just his way of saying that his shift was ending and that if Chris didn’t need him he was going home to his wife Shelley.
“No, we’re okay, Pete. See you tomorrow.”
“Good-night, Pete.”
“Night.”
We listened to Pete’s footsteps echo down the corridor and heard him say good-night to somebody else. When that was all over, and it hadn’t amounted to much, Chris took a deep breath and let it out with a satisfying noise. It was supposed to divide what we’d just gone through from what was coming. The second part always had more of a human face on it, even if it belonged to Chris Savas.
“You still saving things, Benny?” He continued to stare at a marksmanship trophy over my shoulder.
“I told you what’s germane to the best of my knowledge. I haven’t burdened you with theories or speculations. I’ve given you a blow by blow account of my activities since last Wednesday. If I know something that you don’t know, I don’t know that I know it.”
“Don’t bother piping that through again, I got wet the first time. Are you going to make a fuss about Bagot and his boys?”
“What’s the point? What can you get them on? They didn’t try to extort money from me, they didn’t hold me for ransom, and in the end I walked away. The best you could get them for would be molesting me. And at my age that sounds disgusting. Besides, I’m sure that they would find witnesses who’d say they were watching a cement-pouring derby or something, and I don’t have a single witness. Nope, I’ll have to pass on that one. But, I wouldn’t mind feeling safe to go back to my room.”
“Give it a day,” he said, nodding. “I’ll appeal to Bagot’s better side. But that depends on your keeping your bib clean from now on. If you get rattlesnake poisoning after today, be it on your head for monkeying in this business.”
“I hear you.”
“I know you hear me. Damn trouble is you aren’t listening. And for Christ sake will you take that silly thing off your head.”
“Silly …?” I felt my head and pulled off the yarmulka I’d been wearing since I’d visited the synagogue in the morning. I must have been cutting an impressive figure all afternoon. I buried it in my pocket, promising myself, under my breath, to drop it off at the shul when things settled down a little.
“Now, look, Benny, we’ve been sitting across from each other before. I remember that on these occasions you sometimes forgot to tell me things. You got a little forgetful, and I end up coming along just in time to save you going over Niagara Falls or something. I hate that stuff, Benny. Let’s play it my way this time. You empty out your pockets on the whole schmeer and then nobody will need to set you afloat in a barrel. It’s simple as pie. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I don’t believe you when you say you’ve told me all you know. I know that funny memory of yours too well. What I’m saying is you know my phone number if you remember something.”
Savas sucked at his teeth, like he thought that some missing piece would come unstuck from his molars and it would unlock all the sealed doors in this case. I saw the pile of files on the left side of his desk and wondered how often he could put any of these away for keeps. I wondered whether he followed his cases through the courtroom phase into the appeal courts and up to the Supreme Court. Did the nuts and bolts of what was happening on the streets today put practical limits on his interest in the cases that had started in his office but had gone on out into the big world of experts and mistakes in charging the jury? He shifted in his chair and turned back to face me. I put paid to my speculations. “As far as I can see this time, Benny, you don’t have a chance in hell of getting anywhere on this case. You got no organization. Come on now, you’re outclassed on this one.”
“Well at least we agree that Nathan’s death is related to his brother’s disappearance. That’s a bond between us.”
“I may think that, but I’ve got to check it all the way around the weather-vane. Who knows, it might be somebody doesn’t like statues kept inside where it’s warm. Benny, there are a lot of strange people out there that never kill anybody. Spare a thought for the ones that do.”
Before I promised I’d behave myself and not get into deep water without an attendant policeman, Chris told me that I could redeem my Olds from the police parking garage by paying towing and storage on it. I asked him to lend me an envelope, thanked him, then borrowed a piece of paper which I used to wrap around the five hundred dollars I was having trouble living with. Savas looked like I hadn’t been listening to him, but I still walked out of the NRP headquarters a free man.
I stood on the broad limestone step, under the shade of a limestone overhang, and looked across at the convent and thought of the girls in black stockings I used to see when I was in high school. Later on at the theatre workshop under Monty Blair or Ned Evans, black stockings were almost the rule. Those convent girls were the first Bohemians in town, even if they never knew it. I addressed and posted the envelope.
“Hey, Mr. Cooperman!” I looked over my shoulder. It was Kogan with his blazer buttoned up and looking very spiffy for Kogan. “I’m glad to see you. I just come from viewing the remains. Poor Wally.” He wiped his eye with the corner of a polka-dotted bandanna. “Well, he’s in a better world I guess. Ain’t that right, Mr. Cooperman?”
“Well, Kogan, I don’t know whether it’s right, but it sure would be fair. How come you just got around to identifying your pal today?” Kogan rolled his head instead of answering quickly. “I couldn’t be reached,” he said. “Hell, I owed it to him. He would have done the same for me and then some.”
“I’m sorry for your trouble, Kogan. He was a nice little guy, Wally. I’ll miss him.”
“Yeah, and he’d just come into money. Like I told Priam this morning, your money’s a thief in your pocket. The only way to survive is to stay broke. I tried it both ways and I know.”
“Priam who?”
“Priam Phelps. We went to school together. We were on the same football team.”
“You’re a friend of Magistrate P.B. Phelps?”
“Yeah and I’m the only one left who remembers what the B stands for. Ain’t tellin’ either. Old Priam didn’t know Wally so good, but we had a few nights together, the three of us. Priam’s an awful one for the drink sometimes. Only thing’ll straighten him up is a nip of Aqua Velva. I’m a drinking man myself, Mr. Cooperman, but poor Priam lets himself go to extremes. It’s steady family life that does it. It ain’t civilized. Hell, if I couldn’t take it, then it’s a wonder anybody can. Just as hard on the women and kids. I’m no reactionary.”
“I didn’t say a thing. Where did you and Phelps play football?”
“Cranmer College, across the creek. I never had the weight for the line, but I was fast. Priam was big and heavy even back then. We goin’ to stand here all day, Mr. Cooperman, or should we walk over to the Harding House?”
