by Howard Engel
“Well, Mr. Cooperman! Small world, right?” I was standing now by the closed back door of the Olds. Gordon slammed the front door, so I wouldn’t attempt to re-enter the car unassisted.
“Hell, Mr. Cooperman,” said Geoff. “We been looking all over for you. Where you been?”
“Now, look, you guys. There are two dozen cops over there.” I tried to make a snatch this close to trouble sound ridiculous. The boys laughed away the suggestion that this was a snatch.
“We just want conversation, that’s all.” I didn’t want to encourage their kind of conversation. I hoped that I wasn’t going to come down with a sudden case of broken kneecaps.
“We want to talk to you, Mr. Cooperman. You come easy and there’ll be no trouble.” Len moved in behind me as Gordon pulled me away from the dubious redoubt offered by the Olds. By now I could see a large black Lincoln parked across the street. Even in the mist I could see it was one of the kind with the windows darkened. But I had the feeling it wasn’t empty. There was someone in there watching what was going on and waiting.
Gordon had shifted his grip on my arm but he found a better one higher up. From the rear, Len offered encouragement. I was sure that as soon as we were across the street, I was going to feel another sap on the back of my head where I was still getting over the clout they’d given me at our last meeting. I moved as slowly as I could. The boys were going to have to earn their pay. I didn’t want to wake up in the trunk of another car even if it was a Lincoln. Again I could smell the exhaust from the first car I’d tried out. I was glad I’d fixed their spare tire with my Swiss Army Knife. That, I thought, might be my very last unrecorded thought. I could see the light at the end of a cigar through the dark window of the car.
“Step lively,” Geoff said. “Move along.” He sounded like a London bobby in a movie directing traffic in front of Harrods.
“You wouldn’t have a match, would you, Benny?” It was Pete Staziak. He was standing there on the sidewalk partly masked by the Lincoln. He’d been watching the building site from there.
“Good evening, Sergeant Staziak,” I said, feeling Gordon’s grip on my upper arm loosen. “A foggy night for honest people to be out.” I thought I was sounding a little Irish in my relief at seeing Pete.
“Cool night for this time of year,” Pete said.
“If these gentlemen can spare me, I’d like a word or two with you, Sergeant. You are finished with me, aren’t you?” Gordon had stopped in his tracks and Geoff had bumped into him like boxcars in a shunting yard. Len managed to find his voice:
“We’re all done, Mr. Cooperman. Nice running inta yeh.”
“Yeah,” Geoff added. “We’ll finish up some other time in the near future.” The three men got into the Lincoln, two in the front, and Geoff in the back. I caught another glimpse of that cigar before the door closed and the car moved off silently down Geneva Street.
“Nice playmates,” Pete said as we watched the car disappear. “You being taken up by a new crowd, Benny? If those guys are who I think they are, I don’t think they play by the rules.”
“Pete, if I didn’t say I was never so glad to see a friend before, I’m saying it now. Where’d you come from?”
“Oh, I was sitting at home thinking of Savas and the rest digging out what you say is in that column, and then I got to getting restless until Shelley threw me out of the house. She said I’d been mooching around since you left. She exaggerates, Shelley does. But I guess I was doing a lot of getting up and sitting down. That sort of thing bring you out?”
“That and a little heartburn. I think I nearly got to meet the great Anthony Thorne Pritchett, head of the English mob.”
“Well, that’s a pleasure I’d rather postpone, if I got the chance.” We had walked over towards the entrance to the building site, but had stopped where the fence would have cut us off if it had been closed. Everybody inside looked busy trying to look busy. Down below they had cut down the footing and column like it was a stump of a dead elm, and were hoisting it to the flatbed of a truck. You could see where the cement cutter had sliced through the footing to where the filling was. I wasn’t sure how the procedure went from there. It would have been one postmortem in a million to watch. Like trying to dissect the Cardiff Giant.
“Benny, we should have a little talk in the morning about all this. If we get a positive ID, we can call off the hounds of Interpol and get back to a nice local investigation. Right?”
“You just saved my hide, Pete. I’m not going to tell you to get a subpoena. What time you want to talk? I’ll be there at eight o’clock.”
“And I’ll be there at nine.”
“Cheap joke. I saw it in a Bogart movie. Good-night, Pete.”
“Good-night, Benny. Sorry about the heartburn.”
* * *
I woke up from a dream in which Gordon, Geoff and Len were trying to turn me into a lasting part of a bridge abutment. They were very polite about it, and I felt peculiar having self-centred feelings about it. Tony Pritchett supervised from his Lincoln with the smoky windows. When I opened my eyes it took more than a minute to find me in Martha Tracy’s spare room. I rolled out of bed and headed for the bathroom.
Forty-five minutes later, I was waiting for Pete Staziak to check in at Niagara Regional Police. I never liked calling at Niagara Regional. Usually when I do it’s after being up most of the night and feeling low in the self-esteem area. At least this Wednesday morning, I was fresh from the shower with a cup of coffee and a bran muffin digesting in my stomach. The day shift at the counter looked starched and rested. The girl on the phones even had dimples. But I felt up to it. I just hoped that Pete had slept well.
Pete Staziak had slept well, as I found out when I got a chance to ask him. Unfortunately it wasn’t Pete who tapped me on the shoulder with a sleep-hungry thumb, it was Staff Sergeant Chris Savas, who had been up all night with a lump of cement and its contents. He had driven to Toronto and back. He needed a shave and no backchat as I followed him down the linoleum-paved corridor to his private office. He breathed in as I passed his massive chest moving through the doorway to his office. I’ve been in Savas’s office before, and I was getting used to the awards and photographs on the wall, the shooting trophies and other signs that made Savas feel at home when he was sitting on the other side of his banged-about metal desk.
“Okay, Cooperman, it’s time. We always get there don’t we?” He moved his chair closer to mine. “I been sitting up all night with a sick friend, so I’d just as soon we skipped the playing around, the games you and Pete play between the two of you. I got the murders of a brace of Geller brothers to figure out and I wanna hear what you got to say with all the crap edited out so I don’t even know it’s there. We talking the same language, Cooperman?” He looked up at me and I couldn’t miss the bruise marks under his eyes nor the way the light from the venetian blind highlighted the stubble on his face.
“Okay. Where do you want to start?” I asked. “I don’t think I know anything you don’t know.”
“So, right away you’re into games. I told you I got no time for crapping around this morning.”
“Listen, Chris, I want to get this thing cleared up as much as you do. Then I can get back to some honest work. The way they’ve been playing around will change the law on divorce even more and there won’t be a buck left in it for a guy like me.” Savas started sucking at his teeth the way he did whenever I began wandering from the subject at hand. He was looking at me the way I imagined I looked at Kogan under the same circumstances. I took a deep breath and tried to see a straight line in front of me. “I’ve been working this case since last Wednesday, Chris, when the Jewish community formally asked me to make some informal inquiries. I’ve been doing that for a week to the minute and I haven’t seen any money. I came within an ace of taking a bribe to stop playing with this deck. I took it, but I sent it back.”
“Petty larceny you’ll be into next, Benny.” I’ve noticed that I bring out strange word ord
ers in the people I talk to. After a week in my company an outsider starts mixing up “lay” and ”lie” and “like” and “as though” like the rest of us Granthamites. Savas continued, “Suppose we start with the bribe. How much was it and who did you take it from?”
“It was five hundred bucks that Glenn Bagot gave me to go fishing far away from home. He wanted to buy my time so I’d stop fooling with this case. But I told you, I sent the money back.”
“You think Bagot iced the Geller boys? Is that how you figure it?”
“Chris, right now I don’t figure it at all. Bagot has good business reasons for keeping the Geller name out of the papers, and since he can’t buy off your gang, at least by trying to pay me off he’s showing his partner that his heart’s in the right place.”
“You’re not talking about the remaining Geller, to wit Sid, are you?”
“Geller’s in there all right, but he’s not the only partner. The other one was watching you and your excavation team last night on Geneva Street.”
“Pritchett, eh? One of my men spotted his car. So he is in with Geller and Bagot. What’s the scam?”
“As far as I know it’s no scam at all, just business, but with the provincial government. Highway job that’s pending. The consortium of Geller, Bagot and Pritchett are bidding on the Niagara-on-the-Lake highway job. Publicity about Geller’s disappearance hasn’t helped, and unless I miss my guess Sid doesn’t know that Bagot has Pritchett as his partner. Some of their interest in keeping me off the case was aimed at keeping brother Sid in the dark. Besides, Pritchett’s name isn’t likely to help things in Toronto when they pull the winning tender out of the box.”
“You got your medical insurance paid up? Broken kneecaps can be expensive. It gets you in the grey area of convalescence and rehabilitation. Crutches, you know, and wheelchairs, ramps and special buses.”
“Cut it out, Chris. What else you want to know?” Savas looked at me sideways for a second, banged about in his top drawer for a minute, and then called to see if Pete Staziak had booked in yet. If he was trying to make me feel like a high school kid forced to cool his heels in front of the principal’s desk, he was doing all right. I tried to squirm a little so we could get this over with. It must have worked because suddenly he was looking at me again, and I had that feeling TV newscasters must get when the little red light goes on.
“You ever hear of a Lewis Gosnold? Lewis Emmett Gosnold?” I shook my head and waited for more information. It came after Chris’s natural sadism had its fill. “Name on the passport in Geller’s pocket. The picture was him all right. And he was also carrying a first-class airline ticket in that name to Paris, France.”
“Well you know a lot I don’t know, Chris. But then, I don’t have the can-opening equipment you borrowed to get into that inside breast pocket. Funny how people picking new names hold on to the initials of their old one.”
“Yeah, I’m having convulsions over it. What else have you got for me?”
“Just questions. Is there any sign that our boy meant to leave town with anybody? Some woman, for instance?”
“No sign of that in his personal effects. Try me again.”
“Let me see the ticket.” Chris opened up a file in the middle of his desk and took from it a plastic envelope from which he removed a travel bureau’s cover with the usual flimsy joined-together pages backed with red carbon. They looked very well preserved considering where they’d spent the last few weeks. The travel agent was located in Hamilton. The flight was one that left Toronto’s Pearson International Airport at 9:10 P.M. on the evening of Larry Geller’s disappearance. “The travel agent? Have you talked to him?”
“I’ve got a man on it. Give us in the public service a break, Benny. We got overnight developments we’re working on. This whole case has been upgraded from a disappearance to homicide. What I want to know is what did the brother Nathan find out.”
“Yeah, he seems to have come into deadly information late in the game. I told Pete that he called me the day before he was murdered.”
“Yeah, with a song and dance about hearing from his brother down in Florida. He was playing games with you, Benny. You should know better.”
“Thanks, Chris. Maybe I shouldn’t have booked that flight. I could have saved a bundle if we’d had this talk last week.”
“Go to hell. Sometimes, Cooperman, you’re as touchy as —”
“As you are. It must be the company I keep.”
“Okay, so who did all the icing in the Geller clan? I know for a fact that you’re holding out on me. You always do. I’ve got pressure on me from every direction to bring about a speedy and tidy solution to this investigation. My ass is in the wringer. You’ve been doing a local snoop while we’ve been waiting by the phone. I gotta know what you got.”
“Well, you got my theory that Geller was running away with somebody, right?”
“Check. Next?”
“Well, you know that this woman was a smoker.”
“How do we know that?”
“The ticket cover requests a window seat in the smoking section.”
“So what?”
“So Geller was a non-smoker. But being a perfect gentleman he arranged for a smoking seat for him and his girl-friend. What you gotta find out is who she was. Check car rental agencies in Hamilton for a car rented in the name of Gosnold. Check the travel people for the name of the other person travelling with Gosnold. When you’ve got her name you can get her picture from the passport division of External Affairs.”
“You’re not half-bad when I get you kicking over, Cooperman. As a matter of fact we are checking out some of that, but we missed some.”
“You aren’t going to tell me until I get down on my knees and ask, are you Chris?”
“Ask what?”
“You know damn well I want to know what killed Larry Geller.”
“Oh, yeah. Right. I got the post-mortem results right here.” He waved a sheet of foolscap at me, but didn’t hand it over.
“Well?”
“Larry Geller was stabbed once through the heart. Very neat.” Savas’s hand went over his eyes like he was going to wipe away his scowl. When he brought his hand away, his expression was unchanged, except that now I felt one too many in Savas’s office.
“Were they able to compare Larry’s wound with the ones that killed Wally Moore and Geller’s brother?”
“Cooperman, they can’t get Larry Geller to lay down yet like a decent stiff should. How the hell are they going to probe a wound in a corpse that’s stuck in the fetal position?” I tried to imagine the problem, then decided to take Savas’s word for it. I got out of there as fast as I could.
TWENTY-SIX
I came out of the police station with a blank empty feeling. I’d just given the case away. The rabbi and Mr. Tepperman had asked me to find Larry Geller. Tonight everybody in town would know where he was. I knew I owed the rabbi a phone call at least, so I walked up James Street without even the interest in life to see whether there were any bagels at Bagels Deli. The weather was spoiling to break the record for this day. The sun cut right through the back of my shirt. I tried to walk in the shade of the stores kind enough to have lowered their awnings. American tourists were walking down St. Andrew Street in short sleeves and seersucker. At first I thought they were pushing the season, but this was the season. Maybe, I thought, I should take a bus tour to see the ruins of the neighbourhood. When was the last time I’d seen Brock’s Monument? The only time I ever climbed to the top I came down to talk to an old custodian who’d been gassed at Ypres. At the time I didn’t know what he was talking about. I somehow got World War I confused with the War of 1812, when General Brock led his famous last fatal charge. I could skip the rabbi and hear about it all over again. Or I could drive to the Falls and watch the not overrated splendour of the great cataracts. Nuts, thought. You’ve seen the falls.
I crossed St. Andrew Street. My haunches reacted stiffly to climbing the twenty-eight steps to t
he office door with its peeling gold-lettering.
I lit a cigarette and called the rabbi. I told him the news and he thanked me for being a big help. He said that in spite of the fact that Larry Geller was now in no shape to undertake the restitution of his ill-gotten gains, I was to be commended for the work I’d put in. He said that I could expect payment of my bill as soon as they had my invoice.
After I hung up, I felt worse. I’d found what they wanted, the cops were sorting out the last parts of the puzzle, and now I had to bill the Jewish community in order to get some money. I knew that I was incapable of writing up the invoice, and so I would never see a dime. I felt sunburned top and bottom; there was no comfortable way to sit. I let a second smoke from the first. I could tell this was going to be a great day.
And suddenly there was Kogan standing in the doorway. Just when you think your life is brimful of headaches, it overflows. “Kogan,” I yelled across the room. “I’ve got no time for you today. I’m a busy man. Go haunt some other citizen. Go see Dr. Bushmill.” Kogan was very good at looking hurt. He did that best. I caught him with only one foot on the stairs and watched him consider my apology. “I didn’t sleep well, Kogan. I’m in a lousy mood. I would have yelled at anybody. My own mother even.” Slowly Kogan shifted his weight back to the leg that was on the top step, and he followed me back through the open door.
“That’s no way to do business, Mr. Cooperman.”
“I know that, Kogan. I’m sorry.” I sat down behind the desk and watched while Kogan rounded one of the chairs, like a dog trampling the vanished grass in his dreams, and finally settled and pulled the chair closer to the desk.
“What’s the report, Mr. Cooperman.”
“Report on what?”
“Do you know who killed Wally yet?” He looked at me as though I had forgotten the date of the discovery of America.
