by Howard Engel
PENGUIN CANADA
DEAD AND BURIED
HOWARD ENGEL is the creator of the enduring and beloved detective Benny Cooperman, who, through his appearance in twelve best-selling novels, has become an internationally recognized fictional sleuth. Two of Engel’s novels have been adapted for TV movies, and his books have been translated into several languages. He is the winner of numerous awards, including the 2005 Writers’ Trust of Canada Matt Cohen Award, the 1990 Harbourfront Festival Prize for Canadian Literature and an Arthur Ellis Award for crime fiction. Howard Engel lives in Toronto.
Also in the Benny Cooperman series
The Suicide Murders
Murder on Location
Murder Sees the Light
The Ransom Game
A City Called July
A Victim Must Be Found
There Was An Old Woman
Getting Away with Murder
The Cooperman Variations
Memory Book
East of Suez
Also by Howard Engel
Murder in Montparnasse
Mr. Doyle & Dr. Bell
HOWARD ENGEL
A BENNY COOPERMAN MYSTERY
PENGUIN CANADA
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in a Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1990; Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1991; Published in this edition, 2008
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Copyright © Howard Engel, 1990
Excerpt from “Bless 'Em All,” words and music by Jimmy Hughes, Frank Lake and Al Stillman. Copyright © 1940 by Keith Prowse and Company Ltd for all countries. Copyright © 1941 by Sam Fox Publishing Company Inc., New York, New York for the United States of America, Canada and all countries of the Western Hemisphere. Used by permission.
Excerpts from "Desiderata" from The Poems of Max Ehrmann, copyright © 1927 by Max Ehrmann. Reprinted with permission of Robert L. Bell, Melrose, Massachusetts, 02176, U.S.A.
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Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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ISBN-13: 978-0-14-316750-1
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For my friend
David Berger
1936–1989
I would like to express thanks to my friend Doug Monk for his help in getting the business, corporate and taxation details as nearly correct as they appear. Any errors, of course, are mine, not his. I would also like to thank my friend Gary Thaler for putting me in touch with Hesperis matronalis, upon which so much depends.
Dead
and Buried
ONE
Irma Dowden looked over my office. She took in the convenient downtown location, the active business files scattered in front of me and the framed licence behind my desk. Furtively she gave the cotton-draped mannequins in the corner a rapid scrutiny. Their breasts were peeking out from under the cloth again. I cleared my throat before she formed a question. “My father closed out his ladies’ ready-to-wear business downstairs,” I explained. “I’m temporarily minding some of his things. You may speak quite freely in front of them.”
She nodded like she knew already. Come to think of it, the mannequins had been around for a few years now. Even without their wigs and wearing a dusty remnant of factory cotton, the trio had become indispensable for second to fourth opinions. As company, they still made me nervous. But Mrs. Dowden didn’t want to know about that. She sat there, cheeks daubed with half-hearted rouge, straight as a post, with her black purse in her lap.
“How can I help you, Mrs. Dowden?” I pushed the files to one side. I didn’t want to discourage her by suggesting that I had other business on hold while we shot the unprofitable breeze. I sat there, giving her all my attention and trying to look affordable. That little black purse could buy my time for a few days at least.
Irma Dowden hadn’t just walked in my door that Tuesday in early October; she’d phoned first for an appointment. I was impressed. I’d cleaned things up a little and cursed the dirty windows which didn’t give my place of business the cachet I was trying to inspire. But in Grantham there’s only one reliable man for windows and I hadn’t seen him in months. Waiting for Mrs. Dowden to keep her three o’clock appointment had made me nervous. I had even thought of getting up and opening the door for her, but the last time I did that it was a patient of Frank Bushmill’s, the chiropodist who shares the running toilet, the rent and the second floor overlooking St. Andrew Street with me. I realized I was rambling in my thoughts, so I asked my question a second time.
“Did you read in the paper about Jack?” she asked, her eyes like two black currants rolling in my direction. I told her I’d not read anything about Jack, whoever Jack might be, but I was prepared to be sympathetic. She pulled a clipping from her purse and handed it to me. A pencil scrawl in the white space on one side of a heading said: 16 July. That was nearly three months ago. I recognized the type as belonging to the local paper, the Beacon. It was a small item, insignificant enough so that I was now no longer guilt-ridden for missing it in the first place. The heading read: LOCAL MAN CRUSHED BY TRUCK. The story described the death of Jack Dowden on the 13th at the yard of Kinross Disposals. The truck had apparently slipped off the brake and pinned Dowden against a cement brick wall. I read the details and handed the clipping back to Irma, who was now looking like she was Jack’s widow.
“I’m sorry,” I said. She nodded her head in sympathy with mine. She looked small and insubstantial sitting there. The falseness of the ro
uge was standing out on her velveteen cheeks in the greying light coming in through my venetian blinds. I went back to my opening question for the third time: “How can I help you, Mrs. Dowden?”
She leaned closer to my desk and tried to find the words that would convince me to take her case. “Mr. Cooperman, I want you to look into Jack’s death. I think they murdered him, the bastards, I do!” That made me blink and I smiled to encourage her to go on. At the same time, my heart was joining the Titanic on the bottom of the North Atlantic. Rule number one for private investigators: you’ll never make a nickel competing with the cops. I asked Mrs. Dowden to continue. She moistened her narrow lips and tried to find the place where she’d left off.
“Jack wasn’t the sort to get himself killed in an accident like that,” she said. “I’ve lived with the man these eighteen years and I know the things he’ll do and the things he won’t. If they told me he’d run off with the payroll, I wouldn’t have liked it, but it would have been like him. Jack could do a daft thing like spending his wages on a pine cupboard, anything made of wood, but walk in front of his truck, no sir. When it comes to machines, Jack was as careful as an airline pilot. You see, his friend Charlie Bowman was killed that way ten years ago.”
“Was there an inquest into your husband’s death, Mrs. Dowden?”
“Oh, yes. They held one of those. Company doctor told how he came on the scene and there was nothing he could do. A company director told how there were signs posted everywhere warning the drivers to be careful. Another driver said that Jack hadn’t been keeping his mind on the work the last few weeks. Well, that’s a plain lie and Brian O’Mara knows that, Mr. Cooperman.”
“O’Mara’s the other driver, right?” She nodded. “Who’s the company doctor?”
“Name’s Carswell. Imagine him just happening to be there!” I wrote down the names on a pad of paper that so far only held the name of my client.
“Why do you say O’Mara lied at the inquest?”
“I don’t know why he lied, unless he was paid off, but I know for a fact that Jack was talking about the job all the time. He never shut up about it. He was more involved in his work than before, not less.”
“I see,” I said, drumming my ballpoint pen on the desk and trying to look intelligent. “What do you think was on Jack’s mind?”
“He was worried about the stuff he was hauling, that’s what. I’ll admit he was worried, but he wasn’t ever careless with his truck.”
“And you think they murdered him? Who exactly is they, Mrs. Dowden?”
“Why, Kinross, of course. All of them. They just roll over little people like us!” She looked at her knuckles for a minute before going on. They looked cold. “I want you to see if Jack was killed to hush up something he found out about. I know he was murdered. I’m not looking for another whitewashing inquest. I want you to find out what Kinross wanted covered up.”
“You don’t want much, do you?” She looked back at me with a set jaw and steady eyes.
“I want you to get the goods on Kinross. You’ll do us all a favour if you put them out of business.”
“Look, Mrs. Dowden, that’s not really my sort of thing. You know I used to do mostly divorce work. I look into small fraud cases and some family law. I don’t usually get involved with outfits as big as Kinross. And I don’t dig up dirt just to make things look bad, not even to please a lady.” She was looking over my shoulder to the wall where my licence was hanging in its Woolworth’s frame. She didn’t rush her answer.
“Mr. Cooperman, I’m not asking for you to be making things up about Kinross. I didn’t say it right. I know the dirt’s there. But I don’t expect you to be convinced just because I say so. I tried speaking to the police about Jack’s death. They don’t want to get involved.”
“They didn’t say that, Mrs. Dowden.”
“No, but they thought the inquest was very convincing. It was tidy, all tied up at the end like a movie. If Jack wasn’t my husband, I’d have been taken in by it too. But he is—was—so I could see through it. They appeared to be so concerned for my welfare, so broken up about their spoiled safety record, so solemn about everything. They sent me a big cheque. If it had been smaller, I would have been less suspicious. It seemed to say ‘keep your mouth shut and nobody’ll get into trouble.’” By now she was daubing at her eyes with a small piece of blue tissue. I pushed the box of Kleenex across to her side of the desk.
“What else have you got for me besides this? You have to admit that the cheque could be seen as the very opposite of what you’re saying just as well. What else is there?”
“Another cheque! I phoned Brian O’Mara—the other driver?—just to talk, you know? And I got another cheque a week later.”
“These things might not be related.”
“When they sent Jack’s things, there was another cheque, Mr. Cooperman. There’s a fishy smell to it. I watch TV. This has cover-up written all over it.”
I tried to explain to her about the differences between real life and television. She wasn’t listening. “Businesses do a lot of crazy things, Mrs. Dowden, but not all of them are illegal. Have you been threatened in any way? Have you been warned off?”
“I went up to the yard when it happened.”
“On the Scrampton Road?”
“Oh, you know the place?”
“A divorce case once took me up there.” It was a dusty road I wanted to forget. The memory of that case was still green and unpleasant.
“I took a taxi one day when I couldn’t stand it any more. Jack was the driver in our family, I never learned. I wanted to see the scene of the crime.”
“I hope you didn’t call it that.”
“Give me credit for some sense, Mr. Cooperman. I went in the gate at about noon and I was back on the road in less than ten minutes. Everybody I talked to was so polite and understanding and helpful that it made my head spin. Everybody was so kind, it made me sick. You know what I mean? I felt like I’d been handled, manipulated like a puppet. I still haven’t seen the place where it happened.”
“What do you think I can do?”
She looked at me like I’d been missing the point for the last half-hour. “You can go up there, can’t you? Say you’re taking a survey of some kind. A man can go places a woman can’t. You can get the other drivers talking. Don’t expect me to teach you your trade, Mr. Cooperman. Will you help out a poor widow woman?” She tried to look as pathetic as she sounded, but the phrase “widow woman” was overplaying her hand. Without a grey hair in her head and with a jaw that strutted its independence, she looked a lot of things, but helpless wasn’t one of them. I tried to imagine Irma Dowden in her prime: tiny, animated and cheeky. The late Jack Dowden had a formidable champion in his widow.
“What do you say to this?” I said. “Supposing I go up there to Kinross’s yard, supposing I dig around for a couple of days and come up with nothing more than a case of ptomaine poisoning from those fast-food outlets on the Scrampton Road. What then?”
“I can try somebody else. There are three other private investigators in the book, Mr. Cooperman.”
“Wherever you go, it’s going to cost you.” Irma moved the corners of her mouth. It wasn’t a smile, but maybe the ghost of one. “Mrs. Dowden, hiring a private investigator can run you into money. I hope you know that.”
“I’ve got his insurance money. I thought I could die of old age waiting, judging from the stories I’ve heard, but the company saw to it that the insurance was paid in record time.” I made a note of that on my pad. Something for the record books. “You know, Mr. Cooperman, Jack wouldn’t want me blowing his money on a big headstone. Whatever way I look, this is the best way to use all that money. Somebody killed Jack, you see. If you won’t help me find out who did it, I’ll find a detective who will. I’ll do it myself, if I have to.”
“My rates are three hundred and twenty-five a day plus expenses.” The hard numbers sometimes sober clients who are really playing around or looking fo
r sympathy. Irma Dowden kept her steely eyes on mine. Never a wobble escaped her out-thrust chin. She reached into her black leather purse and left a flush of pink fifty-dollar bills on my desk. I felt guilty just looking at them. I didn’t have the nerve to pick them up and feel them in my fingers.
“I’ll want to ask you some more questions, Mrs. Dowden, after I’ve had a chance to think about the case as it is shaping up. How can I get in touch with you?” She gave me an address on Glen Avenue, off Hamilton Street, over on Western Hill, and a phone number. I was thinking how much bigger fifty-dollar bills look than twenties, when Mrs. Dowden got up. On the way to the door, she told me that she hoped I wouldn’t get hurt. I smile confidently at her as she headed for the stairs. As she went down them, I started feeling the pain in my nose where I’d been hit the last time I went through the gate that guarded the Kinross yard on the Scrampton Road.
TWO
Dr. Gary Carswell was not answering his telephone. I got a worn-out recorded message on his answering machine that was no asset to his practice. Even the beep at the end sounded like a badly administered hypodermic needle surprising a tenor in the rear. I left a message.
When Irma Dowden had left my office, I started wondering how badly I needed her money. There was something about what she’d told me that didn’t ring like my mother’s crystal wine glasses. I couldn’t put my finger on it, and hiked down James Street to the library. In the reference section, I looked up Kinross Disposals in a directory of Canadian businesses. The first news was good; there were no sign of Ross Forbes. He had been Chief Executive Officer at Kinross when I was acting for his estranged wife. The honcho of the moment was Norman Caine, who was new to my files, I was glad to note. That made me feel a little better about things. In the newspaper-and-periodical section, I went to the stack of old newspapers. My friend Ella Beames, who used to run the special collections department, and who had always been a big help to me in the past, before she retired to Newburyport, Massachusetts, told me that if you dug down deep enough in the stack of local papers, you could come up with the first in the series. They used to have a man on staff who pasted stiff paper on the insides of the covers of magazines and then carted them off unread to a vault somewhere, but they’d got rid of him. Here at the Grantham Library, library science was tempered by local need. Having the old papers on microfilm or in a warehouse on the bank of the Eleven Mile Creek met no local need, so, when you wanted to find an obituary, as I did, all you had to do was dig in. I dug in.
