by Howard Engel
“I hope you haven’t been shooting your mouth off while I was gone, Benny. I want to hear your version of what you think was going on in this town.”
“For you, Pete, I’ve got a cleaned-up version all prepared.”
“Good, that way we’ll know it’s a load of sheep-dip from the beginning and not have to wait till the end.”
“You don’t have to wait at all.” I said, calling his bluff. “I’d as soon listen as talk any day.” There was a protest from Saul Tepperman, who had been trying to explain things to Rabbi Meltzer, without much success.
“You’re not going to get out of it that way,” said Pete settling down in a chair near Sid Geller. “We want a full confession, don’t we, people?” For a minute, Pete reminded me of an old music teacher who plied his trade in the public-school system. He called the pupils “people” as though it was his private joke and we weren’t people at all, just little horrors with bad pitch. I don’t know why I thought of Mr. C. Lawson Raven and his “Now, people, pay attention.”
“You don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to, Benny. You should have a doctor look at your foot in the morning if the swelling hasn’t gone down.” Pia was being very helpful, but I suspected that this was a bad time for everybody. Here we were in Debbie’s house, drinking her booze and about to talk about why she’d killed three men. I was glad about my foot. I could have been like the rabbi or Kogan, just sitting and waiting.
“Well, Benny,” the rabbi prompted, “when you’re ready, we’re ready.”
“Okay,” I said, lighting one of the last of my Player’s. I knew there were only other brands in the room so I resolved to make fast work of my explanation. “When Debbie left Sid, she was happy enough for a while. She had a good settlement, which meant that she would never have to go out to work. Not a bad spot for a divorced woman without any kids. So, she devoted herself to the arts, helped her former brother-in-law Nathan get established, but that wasn’t enough. There was an unfinished part to Debbie, she was on the lookout for a main chance, an entry into the big time. Fixing up this place didn’t begin to consume her energies. Then she recognized in Larry, her sister’s husband, the way to satisfy that craving. First there was the adventure of a secret affair in a small town. A world first for Grantham, probably. Then she encouraged him to dip into his trust funds and stockpile securities against the day when they would be able to make a flit that would shake the dust of Grantham off their feet forever. Larry arranged to have an office for his dark deeds near Debbie’s place. Underneath almost everything Debbie planned and did was a sense of the practical. She has a very tidy, uncluttered, unsentimental mind. When the time for the great escape grew closer, she began to try to imagine herself in foreign places—this is conjecture of course—travelling with Larry. Larry would have a price on his head, naturally. They would forever be on the lookout for the police wherever they went. And she knew that Larry had the power to implicate her if he were ever cornered. She had to think about the part she’d played in taking advantage of those fifty families back home. Not easy to sleep on, I guess, especially when you know that your bed-partner has his picture in every police station where Interpol circulars are sent. About that time, Larry hit upon the idea of converting the bonds and securities to diamonds. He went to Toronto and New York often enough to convert his fortune to a tidy, easily hidden bag of diamonds.
“I don’t think it was greed. It was the practical side of her nature coming front and centre again. It was more practical for Debbie to have all of the diamonds. It was more practical not to leave town with Larry. And above all, it was very practical to have Larry out of the way, where he could never double-cross her. She’d never wake up in some casino town in the south of France and find him gone off with a cute croupier. So that short stopover at the construction shack became the last stop for Larry. I gather, Sid, that Debbie wasn’t completely at sea on a construction site?”
“Hell, no. She used to follow me around when we were first married. She even had her own hard hat for when she was visiting me on the job. I don’t know whether she could do all the jobs, but she sure saw most of them being done. She could even trade a few choice Italian expressions with the boys. No, she wasn’t strange around a building site of any kind.”
“Well, there you go. She knew what she was doing. What she missed didn’t have anything to do with her knowledge of construction. She didn’t see that an old rubby, a friend of my pal Kogan …”
“Wally was no rubby. Call him a wino, if you want, but he was no rubby.” Kogan had looked like he was dozing off, but he hadn’t missed a word. “Sorry, Kogan, didn’t mean to give offence. Anyway, Wally Moore saw what happened. He was smart enough not to show himself. When he saw that the paper was asking for information about the missing Larry Geller, and printed his picture, Wally knew that first of all he had to tell the poor man’s wife. He also thought that it might be good for some sort of reward. He called Mrs. Geller over on Burgoyne Boulevard, and Mrs. Geller met him briefly and gave him fifty dollars down on a reward.”
“She told you she never met him,” Pia said, showing the strain of these last few days in her voice pulled tight as a piano string.
“I thought she was lying when I first asked her, thought she was covering up for somebody, but now I can see what happened. Debbie had come over to visit her, to deal with the phone and the door. It was only natural that she was the Mrs. Geller that Wally met.”
“I’m not sure I understand. You mean Debbie pretended to be Ruth?” Pia was entwining her fingers, making steeples. The nervous gesture didn’t suit her.
“She met Wally at the front door. If he asked her if she was Mrs. Geller, she wasn’t being inaccurate, just a little misleading.”
“What about the grass she was smokin’? Remember Wally said she was smokin’ up some pot?” Kogan asked, hoping that I’d forgotten all about it.
“I’ll get to that, Kogan. Give me breathing room. Debbie arranged to meet Wally someplace quiet where they wouldn’t be interrupted. I don’t think Wally would be too suspicious of her picking the pavilion in Montecello Park. It was out of the way, but not sinister in any degree. And after all, Wally thought he was dealing with the widow, not the killer. So, she stabbed him too and left him lying in a corner, where some other down-and-out citizens encountered him and thought that he was asleep.
“Now we come to Nathan. Nathan was the youngest of the Geller brothers and very fond of his two sisters-in-law. He pretended that he didn’t notice much of what was going on around him. He isn’t the first artist to adopt that kind of protective colouring. But in fact he noticed a lot more than he pretended to. As I once told someone, nobody could make the kind of sculptures he made without an excellent eye for the behaviour of his fellow man. For a long time Nathan had been suspecting that something was going on between his brother Larry and Debbie. I don’t know how he knew, but he knew. He saw them in every sort of family gathering, and maybe he got lucky; saw them when they didn’t know they were being observed. Or maybe it was his artist’s radar. Who knows? When Debbie asked him to try to put me off the scent by saying that he had heard from Larry, Nathan got worried. Perhaps for the first time he wondered where his brother had got to. If he ran away with Debbie, why was Debbie still at home? I think that’s why he told me such a dumb story. He didn’t want me to go down to Daytona Beach; he wanted me here. He got in touch with his old friend Pia Morley and asked her to come around for a talk. He was worried, but he didn’t know what to do about it. After all, everybody in this case is family. Where should he turn? Pia was at least only a member of the family by association. He could talk to her without the alarm bells going off.
“If Debbie’s scheme had a weak point, it was Nathan. He was bright and intuitive. Once he began to wonder about things, to speculate out loud, Debbie feared her days were numbered. So, she developed a secondary plan, one which she’d fall back on if Nathan began wondering aloud about Larry’s whereabouts. She knew about Nathan
’s friendship with Pia, so Pia had to become part of the plan. When she talked to Wally, she was smoking a joint of pot, just in case Wally did any talking before she could silence him for good. When the chance came to take Pia’s lighter, she snapped it up and left it at the scene of the crime. Everything seemed perfect when Pia herself arrived just after Debbie’d iced Nathan. She hid until Pia left and placed the lighter where the police were sure to find it. The fact that they didn’t wasn’t her fault. Pia noticing the loss sent a friend to collect it.
“Does that cover all the loose ends, Pete? Does anybody have any questions?”
“How could she do it, Benny?” Pia asked. “She knew all of us. She was our friend. We all loved and trusted her.”
“Well, I’m no psychiatrist. Blame it on the rivalry between the sisters when they were being brought up by their father on his own. Blame it on jealousy. Ruth had a husband and kids, Debbie had thrown away her chance at both. Blame it on the fact that she was bored by the ordinary lives most people around her were living. She always had a short attention span. She left school early, married and divorced early, never settled to anything but being big sister. Maybe you can get your fill of being big sister. I don’t know. And don’t forget the fun she had in using Larry to pull the rug out from under all of you. Yes, the whole Jewish community was up in arms over the defrauding of innocent people. A mind like hers might glory in that.”
“But she was at Ruth’s side right through the worst of it,” Pia said.
“That’s right,” echoed Saul Tepperman. “I never saw the like. They were the picture of dedication.”
“I don’t think that was an act,” I said. “I think that Debbie was honestly devoted to Ruth. She wasn’t playing a part. But that wasn’t all there was to Debbie. There was this whole buried part, hidden in shadow and full of envy and guilt and blame. There were more than half the original deadly sins walking arm in arm with the loyal, leave-it-to-Debbie side of her. She makes me wish I knew more about this kind of thing.”
“What about all that money?” Pete asked. “You say Larry converted it into diamonds, two point six million dollars’ worth. What happened to the diamonds, Benny?”
“Like the fellow in the hot seat says, I’m glad you asked me that. I figured that they were hidden someplace here in the house. I knew that the original bag had been buried in Larry’s hideaway. Diamonds are fairly easy to hide. She could have planted them in the hems of some of the curtains in this room or upstairs. She could have put them in holes behind pictures. She could have done two point six million different things with them. I thought that maybe, Pete, you’d have to get a team of demolition experts over here and take the place apart stone by stone, board by board.”
“But you don’t think that any more?” Pete was great at noticing tenses. And he could tell from mine that I had found out something very recently.
“While I was talking, my ankle began bothering me. Now Pia went to a lot of trouble to put together an ice pack for my poor sprained foot, so I was reluctant to complain. A few minutes ago I opened up the dishtowel to see why the ice was not cooling my foot any better than it was. What I found was ice of a different kind. She must have got the idea from a movie. Diamonds in an ice-tray are invisible. Dissolved in a foot basin, they have limited cold-producing qualities. But a fortune in diamonds is nothing to trouble a sprained ankle about.”
Everybody got up and came over to see the hard particles in the melt-waters and in the dishtowel. “Remember how Debbie insisted that we get ice from the fridge under the bar. She didn’t want to give away a fortune with a couple of free drinks. I’ve heard of crooks hiding single diamonds in ice, but this takes the Nobel prize for hiding places.” I turned to Pia: “Pia, I think you’ll find some real ice-cubes left under the bar. This stuff might look lovely on you, but on my foot it leaves a lot to be desired.” She looked at me as though she had completely forgotten the fact that my ankle had swollen to twice its normal size. Some people just can’t keep their perspectives straight.
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM PENGUIN CANADA
MEMORY BOOK
Howard Engel
A BENNY COOPERMAN MYSTERY
Benny is recovering in a Toronto hospital from a serious blow to the head. He was found unconscious beside a dead woman in a dumpster, so he figures he must have been close to solving a case, though he has no memory of the events. With his girlfriend, Anna, working as field agent, he tries to piece together the events that led to a murder―and his own injuries.
Find out more about Howard Engel mysteries at www.penguin.ca/mystery
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EAST OF SUEZ
Howard Engel
A BENNY COOPERMAN MYSTERY
Left with short-term memory loss and unable to read, Benny Cooperman is ready to pack in his career as a private investigator. But an old schoolmate convinces him to locate her missing husband—or at least the family savings. Benny’s quest takes him to the seductive environs of Murinam, a former French possession in Indonesia, where nothing is as it appears to be. The heat is on as mayhem and murder ensue among the colourful denizens of the tropics, but Benny keeps a cool head.
Find out more about Howard Engel mysteries at www.penguin.ca/mystery
