by Howard Engel
“Sure, Kogan. It’s hot enough for a beer.”
We walked along Church Street to James and then up James to the Harding, where I found my old theatrical friends Ned Evans and his pals Jack Ringer and Will Chapman ensconced with a table of amber glasses in front of them, They hailed me loudly, and pulled us over to the two tables they had spread themselves around.
“Ned, you know Kogan, don’t you?” Ned blew air between his teeth and his upper lip to properly evaluate the question.
“Know? Who really knows anybody. You may think you know somebody, and then …” Ned left the phrase hanging in air hoping that one of us would pick it up. Jack and Will didn’t do it and neither did Kogan or me.
“Kogan here’s just come from identifying his best friend in the morgue.”
“God’s blessing be upon you,” said Ned.
Will, who was slipping out of sight in his chair, replied, crossing himself, “And on all Christian souls, I pray God.” They both sounded like they were overdoing it, and they’d climbed into some play script to protect them from something as real as death. I wished I had a page of that script myself.
The room was warm and busy with men wandering towards the john or the potato chips rack. Waiters slid like beefy ballet dancers with their short aprons and full trays between the tables. The air was salty with beer and heavy with opinions. Jack Ringer tugged at Will Chapman and between him and Ned they were able to delay Will’s inevitable sliding off his chair. Jack was Ned’s uncertain stage manager, who listened to Ned plan a new theatrical production every night in the beverage room at the Harding.
“Oh, he had a good life,” said Kogan, redirecting the conversation. In the bidding in the game of life, death is trumps and so the floor was his. A mere projected production of Henry IV–Part I couldn’t compete. “Yes, a gentle soul,” he said drinking the second straight draught since he’d sat down. He had his theme and we were all waiting to hear him expand on it, to eulogize his friend, to erect a monument to him among the emptying glasses. But he didn’t. Kogan was no great talker so Ned wrote an end to the chapter to allow the afternoon and the drinking to proceed.
“God be at your table, and there’s an end.” He banged his fist on the table.
I put down some money and the waiter skirted by, dropping ten glasses and removing the empties. He gave change from his apron without looking and accepted the tip I pushed after him without acknowledgement.
“How did your frien’ die?” asked Jack Ringer, who didn’t always take his cues from Ned.
“Stabbed with a shiv,” said Kogan. “Murdered by person or persons unknown. He was a saint of a man. That’s what Wally was. He got shot at Carpiquet airport, but he wouldn’t let the dressing station send him back to England. Wound the size of a silver dollar through his shoulder. As fine a blighty as you ever saw, but he wouldn’t let them send him down the line. Me, I went right through to the last day without a scratch. I got to be so unlucky nobody’d stand up next to me. Soon as I’d talk to somebody, they was for it. Took Wally longer than most, poor bugger. Poor little bugger.” While he was saying this he brought out a small metal badge. He turned it around and around in his hand as he talked.
“A ruptured duck!” Ned said, “An honest-to-goodness ruptured duck!”
“What is?” I asked.
“Thing Kogan’s holding. Army discharge pin. That’s what the Americans call ’em. I still have mine somewhere, but nobody wears them any more except panhandlers. Funny it should come to that, eh, Benny? Funny. That’s what we used to call ’em when we were on the inside wanting out. I never saw anything as beautiful in my life as the one they handed me. Better than the Victoria Cross.”
“Poor old bugger,” Kogan said.
“They give you that at the police station?” I asked.
“Eh? This? Nope. They wouldn’t let me even see his stuff. Just his face on colour TV.”
“Then where did you get the duck? Is it yours?”
“Please have a little respect, Mr. Cooperman. I’m wearing mine.” We all looked and there it was on the lapel of his blazer. Kogan gave Ned a dirty look for what he’d said about panhandlers. “This was Wally’s. I’d know it anywhere because of the way it’s worn at the bottom. That’s from openin’ beer bottles. I told Wally that’s no way to treat the symbolic tribute of a grateful country, openin’ beer bottles, but Wally just laughs and flips off another cap.”
“Okay, it’s Wally’s duck. Where did you get it? Did he leave it where you were staying?”
“Are you kidding? Wally wouldn’t go out without it. Even if the safety catch was broken. See.” He turned the back of the badge to show the broken catch.
“Kogan, I’m going to bounce a glass off your head if you don’t stop splitting hairs and tell me where you found that thing.”
“You know I told you where Wally used to work?”
“Yeah, you said on St. Andrew Street near the Loftus Building.”
“That’s right. He worked the front of the Loftus building because …”
“Because the workers coming on and off the job were good marks and so were the carpet workers at Etherington’s.”
“Marks? I never said that.” I picked up my beer with blood in my eye. “Okay, he was usually around there, across from where they’re building the new fire hall. Well, I was worried about Wally. I missed the son of a gun. So, I went lookin’ for him all around that area. I found it on the fire-hall site. It was right in the dirt. I could of easily missed it, but there it was shinin’ up at me like a quarter in the gutter. I got a trained eye, you understand. I knew it was Wally’s right away. But what was it doing on a Bolduc building site?”
“That, Kogan,” I said, “is the answer to a lot more than you think.”
SIXTEEN
The authorities refused to release Geller’s body to his family, so that it was impossible to hold the funeral until the coroner was finished with his investigation. It gave poor Nathan a chance to cool off before beginning his eternal rest. In most cases a Jewish funeral is over before the body’s lost all its heat. Even in a small town like Grantham a paid-up member of the shul can sicken, die and be buried within twenty-four hours. It must be an old-country tradition. Me, I’m not in favour of lying around in state for a week or so, but I guess I’m against an unseemly gallop to the cemetery.
First thing Monday—I won’t bore you with my gin rummy games with Martha on the weekend—I collected my car from the police garage. It cost me an arm and half a leg to get it back. I gave the guard a dirty look; he seemed to expect it; then drove to Niagara Regional on Church Street. The desk sergeant told me that Savas was out but that Staziak was in and would see me.
Pete had a file open on his desk when I came in, but he closed it against the temptation of helping out the struggling private sector like I knew he would. I hovered on the threshold for a minute, then we went into the usual song and dance about what he and his wonderful kid did together on the weekend. If Pete was to be believed, his boy was a genius. I hated to admit it, but he was a good chess player. I tried to bring the conversation back to business, but Pete wasn’t helping.
“What is this, Pete? Some new policy? It won’t break your mother’s back to tell me when the bugger died.” I tried grinning, but it didn’t work. Pete put a pained grin on his face to give it an overworked and I-have-no-time-for-triflers kind of expression.
“What do you want to know for, Benny?” he said rubbing the back of his neck with a big hand. “This is out of your hands now. It’s a murder investigation, not just a runaway embezzler. Come on, Benny, you don’t want any part of this.”
“Look, Pete, I’m part of it whether I like it or not.” Pete shifted his bulk in the swivel chair in my direction. I took it as a hopeful sign. I kept talking. “I can’t go back to my hotel, I’m even taking a chance driving my old car. Come on, I came up clean when Chris went over me. I’m not keeping half of what I know under my mattress. You know what I know, and you wouldn’t h
ave anything in that file if it wasn’t for me. Damn it, Pete, you know I’ll only find out anyway.”
“Okay, okay! Spare me the guilties. I got enough of my own.” He opened the flap of the closed beige file and cleared his throat: “‘Medical report on Nathan Geller, deceased of this city …’ Most of this is garbage. Did you know he had cancer of the prostate? Did you know that he had been a drug-user? Did you know that his aorta was pierced by a pointed, long, thin blade?”
“Stabbed? No wonder I didn’t smell powder.” Pete thought that was pretty funny. Let him try unwinding dead arms wrapped around a bleeding body. I couldn’t do it. “Now the big question: when did Nathan get him his grievous hurt?”
“That’s from Miss Lutman’s English class, right? Tennyson?”
“Tell me about Nathan first.”
“According to this he died ten or twelve hours before you found him, which was around noon. Both rigor and lividity were present. ‘The subject was not moved postmortem.’ He died where you found him. What else can I do for you, Benny?”
“Well, I guess I can’t ask you what Alex Bolduc was doing at the scene of the crime?”
“That’s right. You can skip that one. Privileged information. Next?”
“Okay, let’s change the subject. What about Kogan’s friend? Is his a more open file, since he isn’t a solid citizen?”
“You’re working your way through that door, Benny. Don’t push too hard. Pimps, pushers and bank presidents go through the same routine around here. It’s your only true democracy. We tie the same tags on the big toes of every stiff comes our way. We ain’t particular. As for your friend, Wally Moore, he was plain John Doe until Saturday morning. Your other prosperous pal came in and did his duty.”
“Yeah, I know about that. He was stabbed? That’s what you told me last week.”
“Let me find the damn thing.” He played with the paper on his desk, lifting up several files and several loose pieces of paper. Pete and I used the same vertical filing system: everything in the same pile in the middle of the desk. Pete had more stuff, that’s all, and most of it was recent. My stuff went back for months. “Here it is: ‘Bamfylde Moore, a.k.a. Wally Moore, indigent of no fixed address …’ He was found on a park bench in Montecello Park near the bandshell. According to the post they did on him, he was killed someplace else and dumped on the bench. Patrol car found him midnight Thursday. When they did the post on Friday morning, he’d been croaked for forty to forty-two hours.”
“Just a second! Let me walk that back along my fingers.” Pete smiled since he was holding the answer in front of him. “So, Wally was killed around one or two o’clock Wednesday afternoon”
“Looks that way. It’s the lividity of the body that says he was moved, and that would have been any time after the first six hours, if you’re taking this stuff as holy writ.”
“You don’t see me arguing with it, do you? What about the wound, Pete?”
“What about the wound?”
“Was it similar to the one that killed Nathan Geller?”
“Sweet shit, Benny! You have the tidiest mind in town. What makes you think there’s a connection … more than a connection … between the one and the other? You’re saying they’ve a common killer. Come on, Benny, not even you can tie these things together. They’re different flavours of people: social, economic, geographic, any way you want to look at them. What possible motive can connect a low-lifer like Wally Moore and a fancy sculptor like Geller. They weren’t both pansies or something, were they?”
“It’s something Kogan said. He talks a lot of bull most of the time, but he may have been telling the truth for once.”
“Well, it won’t hurt to get those guys in the morgue to test your theory. A different guy did each of them, so it’s not unusual that there wasn’t a connection made on the Geller post-mortem. We still have both of the bodies.”
I decided to try to make a fast getaway. I had done Pete a favour and it didn’t pay to let him thank me for doing it. It was more negotiable the other way. I heard him calling after me but I kept going.
Montecello Park isn’t the biggest in town, but it’s the most central, the oldest and the best kept. It fills most of the smaller angle where Lake Street meets Ontario. There was a rose garden in the middle of the six- or seven-acre retreat, with a slightly over-the-hill display of pink, red and white blooms climbing their thorny way up the white trellis arches. Over all hung the heavy green branches of the oldest and tallest trees in town. Most of them were maples, but there were a few surviving elms among the oaks and lesser breeds.
Squirrels jumped back and forth in the high branches. Their nests were clots of dark leaves. There were two roofed structures under the trees, both red-topped: a bandstand, looking like a puff pastry with a dome perched on six arches, and a large Victorian pavilion, which Ned Evans used in his summer staging of plays by Shakespeare. He told me that it had been built on the unfinished foundations of the home of the son of the chief canal entrepreneur from the mid-nineteenth century. The son died young and the foundations were eventually used to support this whimsical fretwork structure. Underneath were indifferently serviced rest-rooms which were usually locked except when not needed. I’d been in Ned’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so this was familiar territory.
I circled the area near the bandstand. The grass was starting to get a high summer sheen. It was damp underfoot. Park benches were occupied by mothers with baby buggies, couples and singles. People were taking time-honoured shortcuts across the park on the wide paths and paved sidewalks. Around one of the park benches signs of the police investigation were still in evidence. A string with waving pieces of masking tape dangling encircled the bench; a fairy ring, twenty feet across. The bench was about the same distance again from Ontario Street. At night it wouldn’t have taken two people long to take the body out of a car and leave it to be discovered. And at night you could get away without anyone asking silly questions. I went through the roped-off area and like I expected, didn’t find anything. I sat down on the bench to catch my breath. A squirrel came by, wafting its grey tail in the air, another panhandler like poor Wally. And I was fresh out of nuts.
Two heads had been watching me around the corner of the pavilion. At first I thought it was a couple of kids. Whenever I looked up in that direction, I could see either one head or both out of the corner of my eye. Then, I thought that Gordon, Geoff and Len had caught up with me again, but they wouldn’t have played such a foxy game of it. I wanted to get a good look at them and it took me a minute to figure out how. I got up, put the bandstand between me and the pavilion and headed towards Ontario Street. I didn’t dare turn around to see if they’d followed. Once across Ontario, I crossed the street and sauntered up College Street. As soon as I thought I was out of their sight, I turned on what speed was available, ran to the end of College, cut up Yates, and came back in the direction of the park along Norris. This put me near the Lake Street end of the park with a clear view of the other side of the pavilion.
As I walked towards the pavilion I got my first sight of my quarry walking side by side from the bandstand towards the white lattice arches of the rose garden. One was a bearded beanpole of a man in a navy turtleneck sweater and dark trousers with a tattered denim vest over his shoulders. The other was a short, wide figure with a baseball cap and the flapping remains of someone else’s three-piece suit. I’d seen the short fellow before. The beanpole was a stranger. They went on to the corner of the park where Duke Street intersects Lake. That’s when I sat down to catch my breath. I didn’t have to follow them any further. When I wanted them, I could enlist Kogan’s aid. It was about time he gave me more than an inverted headache.
Back on St. Andrew Street I scouted for Kogan. He wasn’t at his usual Queen Street stand by the Stop Me and Buy French-fried potatoes truck and he wasn’t resting in the shade of the bank on the other corner. I walked down Queen Street and up to Larry Geller’s office. The place was closed. There w
as a legal notice in the window about the situation. “Would all creditors with legitimate claims please consult Ms. Joyce See of Bernstein, Carley, Grella and See …” Nice to be able to put a face to a public notice.
From there I scouted the Harding House, the Russell House, the Murray and even my own hotel, the City House. I felt silly dropping around to my place after being away, but darting in and out was different from sleeping there at night. I’d been awakened from a deep sleep too many times at night in the past. With Martha Tracy’s help, for the time being at least, I had things under control. But there was no Kogan to be found, not even loitering in doorways along the shady side of St. Andrew Street.
I saw Pia Morley’s Audi parked across from the Radio Lunch. I couldn’t imagine her trying to tuck her long slender legs under the Arborite counter in there. Maybe she was planning another visit, just to warn me, in case I’d missed the point of her earlier visit and had forgotten all about my trip to the old lodge on the edge of the abandoned canal.
But when I got to the office it was Kogan who was waiting for me, not the attractive Mrs. Morley.
“Don’t you do no work here any more, Mr. Cooperman?”
“I’ve been trying to neglect it. I’ve been looking for you though.”
“Small world. Great minds and all that.”
“Kogan, I want you to do something for me.” Kogan looked dubious and I told him about the two characters from the park. I described them and suggested that I wouldn’t be surprised if they knew something about Wally Moore’s death. He knew the short guy in the baseball cap at once and thought he’d seen the bearded beanpole.
“The short guy’s a Hungarian named Blasko. He’s decent enough. Don’t think I’ll have any trouble finding them.” He looked at me under the brim of his fedora. “Do you think you can let me have something on account, Mr. Cooperman?”
