by Howard Engel
The date on Irma Dowden’s clipping had been July 16. I found the 12th, 13th and then the 14th and 15th, but no 16th. What was going on? I looked closer. The 15th was a Saturday. Of course, there was no Beacon on the 16th; it was a Sunday and there is no Sunday Beacon. That set me back, but I ploughed through the papers around my date and hoped for the best. Nothing. Not only couldn’t I find an obituary, or a notice of death, but I couldn’t even find the clipping I’d just read in my office. Things were moving in the direction of peculiar, and peculiar gives me gas.
After about ten minutes, I gave up the search. I knew it had something to do with the uneasy feeling I had about my client. I had to go along with the facts in the library: either the death of Jack Dowden hadn’t rated a word in the papers or it hadn’t occurred. If Jack’s death was phoney, why did the money his widow gave me look so real?
From one of the pay-phones in the lobby, where school kids were drinking pop from the refreshment stand, I made a call to Chet Bryant, the crown prosecutor. I identified myself to him, and he saw no reason why I shouldn’t be able to have a look at a copy of the Jack Dowden inquest transcript. After checking with his secretary to see if there was a copy in the files, he told me to come right over.
Shortly after that, I was sitting in Bryant’s outer office, staring at the date on the transcript, while his secretary prepared to leave the office for the day. I watched her clear her desk of every scrap of paper and rubber bands and turn the key in the drawer. I looked down on the open file on the death of Jack Dowden.
“Shit!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Damn, damn, damn!”
“Mr. Cooperman, are you all right?”
“No! I’ve been had! Jack Dowden didn’t die three months ago, he died a year and three months ago! No wonder I couldn’t find it in the papers!”
“That still doesn’t account for your language, Mr. Cooperman.”
“How do I get suckered into these things?” Bryant’s secretary looked like she had an answer. Some people don’t know how to deal with rhetorical questions. Others have problems with clients with beady black eyes and black leather handbags to match.
Bryant’s secretary snapped closed the buttons along a line of filing cabinets. I hoped the keys were inside one of them. It was with little enthusiasm that I glanced at the transcript.
The medical evidence presented at the inquest showed that Jack Dowden had died of injuries consistent with being leaned on by a ten-ton truck. Three men on the site saw the truck roll from a parked position and catch Dowden by surprise against a wall of concrete blocks. I noted the names of the witnesses, recognizing, in passing, the name I already knew: Brian O’Mara. The other two were Tadeuss Puisans and Luigi Pegoraro. They gave the alarm, and that brought the doctor, Gary Carswell, to the scene. He examined Dowden and declared that in his opinion the man had suffered a crushed ribcage and possibly a broken spine. Dowden had lost consciousness immediately and died almost at once. The medical examination dressed up the doctor’s guess in finer words, but the diagnosis at the scene of the accident was upheld.
The inquest added details to the clipping that Irma Dowden, my fibbing client, had shown me, but the facts remained the same. The false date was the only lie I had caught her in so far. And Dowden was still just as dead.
I was curious about the company doctor. What was Carswell doing at the yard on the day of the accident? It was just a little too neat. I was beginning to think like my client. I looked deeper into the transcript to find out.
Q. Dr. Carswell, how did it happen that you were at the yard that morning?
A. I had arranged to see Norm Caine. We were going to have a bite of breakfast together. But he wasn’t there.
Q. Do you have a regular association with Kinross?
A. Primarily I’m in private practice here in the city, but I also have a part-time association with Kinross, where I act as a trouble-shooter for the company in the whole area of ecological concerns. I’m gravely involved in the issue of disposal of toxic wastes. I’ve been called an expert in the field, although I make no such claim myself. Some say I’m an apologist for the company. That is nonsense, of course. I also attend to the full range of medical matters involving the workmen during my visits to the yard.
Q. When did this association begin?
A. Early April of this year …
Walking back to my office, I got to thinking about the sort of mess I was getting myself into. Dowden had been hauling hazardous toxic wastes in his truck. How close did I want to get to that? Toxic wastes make me nervous. I can take all the areas of family law and never lose a night’s sleep, but the moment I get involved in our polluted environment I begin tossing and turning all night. It’s a bit like all those requests for charity I get in the mail. They are all worthy causes, but I can’t afford to support them all, so how can I choose? Maybe I am getting too old to be involved in a subject that affects the future of the planet. I remembered a series of articles in the Beacon last year. They were calculated to keep me awake all night. The writer told how toxic wastes were being mixed with fuel and moved across the U.S./Canadian border. That was when a provincial investigation started to probe the behaviour of the firms involved. Dr. Carswell joined Kinross in April? Yeah, the timing was about right.
I recognized that any illegal activity involving the disposal of hazardous chemical wastes was a worthy subject for investigation, but with the full resources of the province of Ontario on the trail of wrongdoers, what did they need me for? I was just a little guy trying to make a living. Wasn’t Environment Front the organization that blew the whistle on all aspects of pollution? Weren’t they committed to saving the planet? They are the guys who should be getting Kinross to clean up their act. How can I make them ozone-friendly overnight? I’m a one-man operation. Another thing worried me. It was a question of mental health. I had to protect myself from knowing chapter and verse on the dumping of toxic industrial wastes. Too much knowledge is a dangerous thing, especially when the facts can be detected in so many parts per million in my drinking water.
At the corner of James and St. Andrew, I ran into Chet Bryant on his way back to his office. There was a sweet smell of a friendly drink on his breath. Since he towered above me by a full foot, I wasn’t about to mention the old-fashioned boozy way Grantham still carried on business. The wheels of Grantham had always been set in motion in a back room at the Grantham Club and it looked like things weren’t about to change. I reminded him that I’d just left his office.
“That’s right. Why the hell are you getting into that old case?”
“Just a little research I’m doing. Nothing to get excited about.” Chet nodded without believing me and kept his eye on the changing stoplights over my shoulder.
“Sure, sure,” he said. “For an old file, that one’s been getting a lot of action lately.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, Thelma—that’s my secretary—said that one of those Environmental Front people was in to see it a couple of days ago.” The light must have changed, because Chet beamed down a big smile and challenged me to have a good day. Since it was already getting dark, I couldn’t see how I could improve on what I’d already had. He was half-way across the street before I decided that no answer was expected. That’s when I climbed up the twenty-eight stairs to my second-floor office and made my call to Dr. Carswell.
I made two other calls while waiting for Dr. Carswell to catch up to his accumulated messages. The first failed to find my client at the number she’d given me; the second failed to find anybody at Secord University’s History Department where Anna Abraham worked. No answer got me off the hook as far as dinner was concerned, but it did nothing for that part of me that wanted to hear her voice. Anna was becoming an important part of my life, and I hadn’t heard from her since Saturday night. I didn’t like calling her father’s place up on the escarpment above the city, because I didn’t want to imagine the expression on Jonah Abraham’s
face if he took the call. Abraham and I weren’t in the same tax bracket for a start. He’d been a client of mine, which didn’t make things any easier. The fact that I knew the father before I met the daughter confused things. I didn’t like to mix business with pleasure. I’m sure he felt the same way, and I don’t think he liked the idea of his only daughter being my idea of pleasure. I resolved to try her later in the evening, in spite of my reservations.
I was on the point of going out for cigarettes, when I caught Dr. Carswell calling back. I jumped in before my answering service could take the message and garble it. I wonder whether they have a scrambler specialist on the payroll, somebody who can make Henry Gibson into Henrik Ibsen without even trying. I explained to Carswell who I was, and that I was looking for information and checking some facts. He agreed to see me after his last patient at six-thirty that night. Good, I thought, at least I’ll be able to talk to him before I make a call on Irma Dowden. At least I’ll have been able to add something to the facts in the clipping. That would show I’d been working.
There was over an hour, nearly two hours to kill before setting out to see Carswell. I spent the first half-hour paying bills to the various oil companies that fuelled my car. I began feeling guilty about tapping limited fossil fuels and helping to wipe out the remaining Indians along the Amazon. Was I aiding and abetting in the destruction of rain forests somewhere, or perhaps killing North Sea seal pups? Once you dip into the question of pollution, you soon discover that it’s all around you and that you are the chief villain. I needed to confess to having stuck gum under my desk at Edith Cavell School, to not bundling and salvaging my collected newspapers and to using leaded gas in my car. I was a mass of vices calculated to destroy the ozone layer and speed along the disastrous results of the greenhouse effect. I looked at the yellow patch of ceiling above my desk, my own area of peak pollution. I resolved to put a piece of time away to begin thinking about cutting down on my tar intake. I made an appointment with myself to consider a plan to bite the bullet. I frightened myself out into the street and lighted up a Player’s until all was right with the world again.
There was still time enough to pay a fast visit to my friend Martin Lyster, who was a patient in the Grantham General. He was a book dealer around town and I heard that he was in a bad way. I’d been putting off this trip for over a week.
After getting the room number from Admitting, I took the elevator to the fifth floor, where I walked past the nursing station to Room 509. My hands were sweating already. I poked my head through the half-open door. Martin was in neither of the beds in this semi-private room. The first was occupied by a man with a bright orange face, partly covered by an oxygen mask. His open eyes were wide and staring, his breathing was frantic. The second bed, by the window, was empty. I was about to turn and check the door number again when a familiar voice called my name.
“Benny! Are you looking for me?” I followed the sound of the voice to a corner partly obscured by the open bathroom door. Martin, dressed in a striped terry-cloth robe, was sitting in a chair reading the New York Times. He was incredibly thin.
“Hello. I heard you were in here,” I said, and added stupidly, “How are you?”
“Much better, Benny. I think they’ve got a pretty good idea about this thing now. It’s taken them long enough, I’ll tell you. They won’t let me smoke or drink. I think they want to quarantine my liver. They’ve got a lien on my lungs.” Martin still sounded like Martin, although he looked terrible. He was wearing half-moon glasses. There is something indestructible-looking about people in half-moon glasses. Martin was still speaking, but my daydreaming had partially tuned him out. What was he saying?
“… I found a Brian Moore you might be interested in.”
“Who?”
“He wrote it under a pseudonym. Early on, you know. It’s a detective story. That’s right up your street, isn’t it? I told Anna all about it when she came to see me.”
“Anna? Oh, sure, she told me she’d been in.”
“Would you like to take a walk down to the end of the corridor with me?”
“Sure.” I helped him to his feet. I could hardly find an arm inside the sleeve of his robe. He was as light as cream, and it frightened me as we moved past the IV stands and folded wheelchairs to and beyond the nursing station. Nobody looked up as we went by.
“You’ve got a wonderful woman in Anna, you know, Benny. She’s read just about everything. What a girl! I think I’m going to get serious about finding somebody. We Irish always marry late. It’s time. I can see that.”
“Anna’s great, Martin, but the knot isn’t tied yet. We’re not a number yet. It’s early days. He old man’s suspicion may be the only thing that’s holding us together. But you’re right. I think she’s great too.”
“I told her about the Moore and she knew the title. How do you like that?” Martin leaned into the window alcove at the end of the passage. For a minute or two we watched the eddying circles of fallen leaves down in the street below. They blew in and out of pools of light around the streetlights. It was all rather theatrical.
“Are you still fighting your fate, Benny?”
“If I read you right, I guess I can say that I’m still resisting the call to manpower about a real job? Is that what you meant?”
“Look, Benny, you and I are alike. We’re a dying breed. We’re nearly extinct. What is the French call it? We’re the fin de race, the end of the line. We’re the last individuals left in town. Nobody rates independence any more. It doesn’t count. Everybody’s into life-styles and sitting pretty. I’ll tell you, Benny, we are witnessing the Yuppification of North America. The bottom line has replaced what we used to call ethics. It’s a terrible, terrible thing, Benny. You understand me?”
“Everything has its price but nothing has any value? Something like that?” He turned to rest his behind on the window ledge. He was breathing hard.
“Now Anna, Benny, she’s a great woman, but even the goods one slow you down. She’ll put fancy doilies on all your rolling stones. I know what I’m talking about.”
“I thought you wanted to settle down?”
“I do. I do.” He was smiling. “But I haven’t got the rhetoric down yet. It’s slow work, Benny. Let’s go back to the room, okay?”
“Sure. I have a hard time picturing you inside a picket fence, Martin.”
“Just keep watching. But, before I settle down, I’m going to go south when spring training comes around. I want to cover the Blue Jays for the Beacon the way I did a year ago.”
“Is that Sarasota?”
“That’s circuses. I go to Dunedin. Ah, don’t get me started about it. Baseball, Benny, baseball is the metaphor of our time. I want to explore it.”
“You could do a book.”
“I could indeed. And it would be some book. But first, I have to wait until they let me out of here. My doctor said this morning that I might be out by next weekend.” His expression suddenly changed from a bright, many-lined grin to one of pain. “Oops, I think it’s Demerol time.”
Back in Room 509, Martin got into bed, still wearing the terry-cloth robe to help hide his wasted arms and legs. We talked for another few minutes. From the corner of my eye I could see the man with the orange face, hidden from Martin by the curtains around that part of the bed, had stopped breathing. I was surprised, but I didn’t say anything. It was so ordinary. He had been breathing when we came back to the room, but now he had stopped. There was a tear running down from the eye closest to me to the bright earlobe below it. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t shouting, calling for help, raising the alarm. I simply said good-night to Martin, and mentioned what I had seen to a nurse at the nursing station on the way out.
“It was expected,” she said with a sad smile, as though that would make me feel better.
THREE
At six-thirty I presented myself in the waiting room of Dr. Gary Carswell. He had a fine collection of old magazines. For five minutes I read about the
banning of mussels from Prince Edward Island and the arrival of the Olympic torch in Calgary.
“Mr. Cooperman?” I dropped the magazine and tried to reorganize the pile I had taken it from, while getting to my feet. Before me stood a huge bearded man of perhaps thirty-five, no more. He was wearing an English-tailored suit with a vest to cover his impressive belly. His sandy hair was parted on the right; a lock of hair nearly covered one of his eyebrows. The eyes themselves were wide-set and squinting at me. A muscle in his cheek twitched and his mouth moved. It resembled a pained smile. He repeated my name while we shook hands, and I followed the doctor’s retreating back into his inner sanctum.
It was an interior decorator’s idea of what a doctor’s office should look like. The books on the dark wood shelves looked unread. The plaques and citations on one panelled wall were calculated to impress the visitor, to create a welcome full of warmth and trust. On his broad desk were picture frames with their backs turned towards me. A family man no less. “Well, now,” he said, placing his palms flat on his desk top. “What can I do for you?” For an educated man, he had a short memory. I repeated the information about me and my profession. The doctor nodded in time with my disclosures. I told him that I was looking into Jack Dowden’s death and that I would like to review with him the evidence he gave at the inquest. He kept on nodding through my explanation as though what I was asking was as reasonable as seat belts and Christmas. Jack Dowden might have died yesterday; Carswell’s interest couldn’t be improved upon. He sat back in his chair, letting his bulk carry him hard against the spring, tilting towards the curtains, away from me. “Now, let’s see,” he said, placing a pair of chubby hands behind his head. “You would be representing somebody in this, Mr. Cooperman. May I ask you who that might be?”
