by Howard Engel
I slipped the dead contents of Jacks’ cuffs into the envelope with my electric bill and folded it closed. I had a friend up at Secord University who could tell me what the weeds had to say about Jack’s death, apart from the fact that he may have had a ramble in the woods some time before the fatal day. There was nothing here that told me that the accident was murder. I still had only Irma’s hunch about that. The chalky dirt on the back of the shirt told me nothing about why he was now numbered among the dead.
Irma was just pouring the tea when I went back upstairs. “Did you find anything interesting, Mr. Cooperman?”
“Look, Irma, if you’re going to be Irma and not Mrs. Dowden, then you’d better start calling me Benny.”
“Here’s your tea.” She put two blue-and-white mugs on the green table. She pulled out a wooden chair and slid into it. “This is a piece of early Canadian, Jack told me,” she said, tapping the table top with her teaspoon. “He was always going to strip it down to the wood, but we never could spare it long enough for the whole treatment. Jack always wanted to settle down and get out of driving for a living. He was always talking about setting up in the antique business. Jack loved wood.”
We sipped our tea, while Irma told me about their life together. She dabbed her eyes a couple of times with the handkerchief I lent her. I tried to take in what she said, but the details of the children they never had or the uncles who could never leave them alone didn’t really change anything. Even on the subject of Jack’s relations to Kinross, I could find nothing sinister. Before I left, I asked to see Jack’s papers. Irma shook her head. “Jack didn’t leave anything in writing,” she said, “unless you count the three love-letters he wrote to me, but I’ll show you what I’ve got.” She led the way into the bedroom, where in a corner a shoebox full of credit-card flimsies was produced. I asked if I could borrow these. As I was about to leave, I saw a few books in a pile.
“Are the books yours or Jack’s?”
“Oh, Jack’s. I’m not much of a reader. Television’s too easy. I guess my brain’s been softened, Benny.” I tuned out Irma’s prattle and checked the titles. There was a Robert Ludlum in paperback, two Stephen Kings and then the surprise: Chemical Nightmare: The Unnecessary Legacy of Toxic Wastes by John Jackson, Phil Weller and the Waterloo Public Interest Group. I opened the book and found that it was well thumbed. It wasn’t much, but just what I needed for bedtime reading. Irma made no objection when I asked to borrow it. She saw me to the door and down the walk before she shut the front door to the night.
After a wash, I took the book under the covers with me and read myself silly for about an hour. When I woke up, the light was still burning and the clock told me that I would have to begin a new day in under two hours. I turned off the light and got rid of my bed-partner. Chemical Nightmare could hang around the apartment all day when it got light. It didn’t have to make ends meet.
SIX
The drive up to Secord University was one I always liked. It took me over the course my father used when he taught me how to drive. The curves of road leading up the escarpment were recorded in my elbows and feet like they’d been programmed. The escarpment was heavily wooded, but the trees were beginning to lose their leaves. There were still plenty of maples strutting their stuff in reds and gold. The sumachs were scarlet at the edge of the quarry, where I caught a glimpse through the trees of the shack where Garth Gardenia and I’d spent a teenage afternoon with a Mrs. Stagg. Mrs. Stagg lived alone with a collection of photograph albums full of turn-of-thecentury showgirl beauties. She might have been in the theatre herself, but we never asked. We’d heard that one of her legs was wooden, but it was hard to tell under her long skirts. During the spring and summer, her cabin is invisible from the road. Maybe that’s why I never think of her except when I drive up the escarpment in the autumn and winter.
I’d phoned Eric Miller, an old friend of mine, who’d once been a cut-up in grade ten science with Miss Red Scott at the helm. Now he was a lecturer in botany. I wonder whether Red Scott ever knew that Eric used to circulate drawings of flowers showing the reproductive parts in unmistakable human forms. And I remember a verse that accompanied one of them, something with the rhyme “saturnalia” and “genitalia” in it.
I found Eric by following a colour-coded strip painted along the corridors. All of the departments were colourcoded for the illiterate. History was dark blue, biology was green. Eric’s office was a large, dim room on the tenth floor.
“Benny! How are you?” Eric’s grin took me right back to Red Scott’s lab tables. “You son of a gun! I haven’t seen you in five years. What have you been doing with yourself that you can say in a room that may be bugged by the Mounties?”
“I keep seeing your name in the papers, Eric. Didn’t you get some honour a few months back? I’m sorry, I should keep up on these things.”
“Yeah, I agreed to suppress some startling facts about the procreation of trilliums so that the province wouldn’t have to find another official emblem for its logos. So they gave me a gong. I used it to crack nuts with, like Tom Canty in The Prince and the Pauper.
For a minute or two we chatted away, recalling old friends and trying to reconcile our present faces with the younger versions in our memories. “It’s a nice place you’ve got here, Eric,” I said at last, as an exit ramp from memory lane. Nothing very bright as an observation, but it did deal with the here and now.
“This, Benny, is not a place, it’s a herbarium. Come in and roll up in an old newspaper.” I followed Eric through rows of cabinets taller than both of us. The dark, institutional green killed much of the light coming into the room from the generous windows along one wall. Between the back-to-back cabinets, a few wooden desks were scattered, all of them stacked high with drying plants between layers of newspaper showing various tints of yellow. “This department should double as a periodical archives, you know, Benny. Look at this.” He picked up a folded copy of a Toronto paper and read the headline: JOHNSON REFUSES TO SEEK ANOTHER TERM. I’m sure I’ve got one with Roosevelt going for a fourth term around here somewhere.” Eric found his desk. Like the others, it was cluttered and dusty. It must be the last desk on earth with a well in it for hiding a typewriter. I was amazed that the university would allow such ancient equipment into the science departments. It didn’t seem so odd that I might find it in the humanities departments.
“I’m working on a case, Eric,” I began, trying to remember that my time was being paid for. Eric nodded as he took off his tinted glasses and began cleaning them with a tissue from his pocket. His strawlike hair, which made him a wonderful Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night at the Collegiate when we were in grade twelve, was looking pale and thin. It was that sort of blond that goes grey without anybody noticing. I took the envelope with my electric bill and poured out the contents into a small pile on a clear spot on Eric’s desk. I hoped I wasn’t going to ruin years of research by bringing the pods and leaves from Jack’s cuffs to the herbarium. For all I knew, this might have been a closed environment. Eric’s mouth frowned slightly as he examined the mess I’d made on his desk. He poked about at the pods with a yellow pencil with a pink Ruby Tip eraser on the end.
“Hesperis,” he said.
“What?”
“Hesperis matronalis to be exact.”
“And once again in English, Eric. What do you know about it, and where is it found?” Eric smiled over the seed pods, prodded them again and lifted up a silvery membrane with tiny brown seeds caught in the fine fabric of the centre section of the beanlike pods.
“That’s the septum,” he said, “as in your nose and mine.” He touched the membrane gently. “Hesperis is also known as Dame’s Rocket. It’s a member of the mustard family. The septum’s the give-away; no native Ontario plant has one.”
“Where does it come from, if it’s not from here?”
“Oh, it’s been here for a long time. Like starlings, Benny, they arrive here and multiply.”
“Are you sa
ying it’s a weed, Eric?”
“Not usually. It’s usually an ornamental plant found in gardens, but it sometimes escapes, and if it finds an agreeable habitat, Dame’s Rocket does very well.” Eric pushed the rubber-tipped end of his pencil into his ear and turned it absent-mindedly. “I’ve seen them at building sites and by streams. Never heard a wild one complain. Now, judging from this other stuff here, the things that aren’t from Hesperis, I’d say that this one was wild and not cultivated.”
“How can you tell?” With Eric, I could never be sure when he was pulling my leg.
“Trust me, Benny. Here are wild-grass fragments, a bit of burdock, hummm, goldenrod, ragweed. No, these pods came from a wild, somewhat moist area, maybe a river or bridge, or—”
“Eric, stop shovelling it! You can’t tell that much from an envelope of dead seed pods! Who do you think you are, Basil Rathbone?”
“I said ‘trust me.’ Look, Benny, Hesperis is usually found cultivated as I told you. But when it’s found rough, it’s got to be near some explanation of how it got there. Now this could have come from a building site, where the original cultivated plants had been allowed to go back to nature. Or you could make just as good a case for a stream or river.”
“Yes, but where’d you get the bridge?”
“Elementary, my dear Benny. The seeds had to come from some contact with civilization. I see them falling off on moist soil where a highway crosses a river or even a culvert. These plants came with garbage that was dumped or fill thrown over a guardrail. Something like that.”
“And now you’re going to tell me that in all of the Niagara Peninsula there is only one place where all of these conditions are met. Right?”
“Wrong. There are thousand of places. Well, at least hundreds. I can’t do all of your work for you, kid.” He gave me his big innocent grin and invited me for coffee. Before I got my hopes up, he took an electric kettle from under his desk and two unwashed cups with chipped rims from a bottom drawer. The coffee, when it came, was superior. I shouldn’t judge by appearances so much. While we were sipping the brew, lightened with canned milk, Eric told me more about Dame’s Rocket than I think the world is ready to hear. He told me about its spike of showy flowers, showed me pictures in several books and even found a specimen in a drawer in one of his smelly cabinets. His carefully preserved specimens had about as much colour and life as the samples from Jack Dowden’s cuffs. Eric taught me not to confuse Hesperis with phlox.
“How silly,” he said, giving his head a superior twist. “Phlox has five fused petals, while Hesperis, like all mustards, has four petals, arranged like a cross—cruciform as we botanists say—which has resulted in the family Cruciferae, which has world-wide about twenty-three thousand species in many genera …” He looked up just before I’d achieve the door. “Benny, you didn’t finish your coffee!” I turned and made a helpless gesture.
“Eric, I thought mustards were either mild or hot. I’ll have to come back for the rest of this some other time. Right now Anna Abraham is expecting me to drop into her office in the History Department,” I lied. “Thanks a lot for the stuff on Hesperis. You never let me down.”
“Benny,” he said crossing towards me, “do you want to see a newspaper from 1942 about Japanese advances in New Guinea? I’ve got one here about the death of the Duke of Kent in Australia. It’s right here somewhere. It was in a plane crash; I think it has rosehips in it. I had one with the disappearance of Leslie Howard, but that got used up when I spilled coffee on the term paper of a B student.” I backed out the door. “Hey, Benny, I thought you wanted to learn something about this stuff?”
A few minutes later, I knocked on Anna Abraham’s door in the History Department. For several reasons, I thought it would be nice to see her. The very least of them was that it would correct the lie I’d told Eric while I was trying to get away from his tidal wave of information. I’d just given up knocking on her door when she walked into the corridor from the other end, struggling with an overstuffed briefcase.
“Don’t I know you from somewhere?” she said.
“Cooperman’s the name,” I said, continuing in the same vein. “I’ve come to speak to you on a matter of some delicacy.”
“Serious as that, eh? We’d better go down to the cafeteria, then. I’ve got some time before my next class,” she said. I let Anna lead the way to the elevator. “Nearly called you last night,” I said, “but I was staying up late with a fibbing client.”
“At least she has some imagination. That’s something.”
In the cafeteria, Anna brought a tray of coffee and I cleaned off one of the cluttered white tables. She sat across from me and carefully set down two brimming cups. She caught me looking at her and smiled. I could never get enough of the way Anna looked. There were so many of her, all the different Annas I’d learned to recognize, like the school-marmish one with her dark hair pulled back away from her face, like the spoiled teenager who walked into my office a year ago looking like she’d just fallen off a motorcycle. She now brought me down to earth by giving me a demented cross-eyed grin, then let her eyes and mouth droop like an old bloodhound. That brought me around and I lifted my cup. “What brings you up the mountain, Benny? And so early!”
“I’ve come to check up on that Lord Macauley you’re always quoting. I think you have a weak spot for British aristocracy.”
“Thomas Babington is it? Well, I’ve been nuts about him since I was twelve. You’re too late, too late. You’ll have to settle for the dregs he is pleased to leave behind.”
“I’ll settle.”
“Why are you up here?”
“I’ve just been to see Eric Mailer, upstairs. He was looking at some seeds I found.” I told her about Irma Dowden and the death of her husband and the trail I’d been following all day yesterday.
“Was Eric much help?”
“Eric is a born teacher. He wanted me to learn all about the mustard family. I nearly didn’t get away from there. In another minute he’d have had me rolled up in one of his ancient newspapers and gasping out my last breath in one of his foul-smelling cabinets.”
“Poor baby.”
“This is terrible coffee.”
“It’s not so bad when you have a degree. With a PhD you can hardly taste the difference between this and the real thing.”
“Sorry I introduced the subject. You know education’s my weak spot. I want you to tell me why we can’t go out Friday night.”
“Friday night’s fine. It’s next Friday night that I’m busy. I told you that I’m the maid of honour at my friend Sherry’s wedding. That’s on Saturday. Friday night’s the rehearsal. You can come if you want.”
“Wait a minute. This Sherry, which Sherry is it?”
“The bride’s a old school friend. I can’t let her down.”
“Last name. That’s all I want. Save your excuses.”
“Sherry Forbes.”
“Ha! I thought so! In Grantham, coincidence doesn’t have to have a long arm. Anna, I love you!” I leaned over the table and nearly spilled both of our cups.
“Hey! There goes the last of my dignity, Cooperman!”
“On you, it looks wonderful.”
“Wait until you see it in pink organdy, kid. We’ll look like a page from Vogue of maybe ten years ago. That’s high fashion around here.” Anna checked her watch and wolfed down the first two-thirds of her coffee. “Gotta go, Cooperman. See you on Friday night unless you get a better offer. And I’m serious about the rehearsal next week. Come and see the Forbeses at play.”
“I wouldn’t miss it. All that and pink organdy too! I’ve died and gone to heaven.”
“No organdy or orange blossoms at the rehearsal. Control yourself.”
I’d met Anna last year when I ended up working on a case for her father, who could buy and sell half of Grantham and not worry about having an overdraft. His family had made their money in the liquor business, but Jonah, Anna’s father, was more interested in collecting art t
han in making more money. Anna thought I was trying to rip off her old man. When she decided I wasn’t, she’s let me take her to a movie. That has blossomed into a relationship of sorts. I knew that I only knew about a quarter of what was going on in Anna’s life. She finished off her coffee in one gulp.
“You don’t have to work eighteen hours a day, you know.”
“Yeah, it’s not like marking papers.”
“That’s different. It’s not dangerous for one thing.”
“Neither is reading up on environmental concerns, unless I nod off with a lighted cigarette in my mouth.”
“Well, I’m glad to see you’re finally paying attention. If we don’t start taking the environment seriously, we’ll have to start scouting for a new planet to spoil. Everybody knows that the waste-disposal companies all get away with murder around here.”
Anna’s eyes were alive with what she was saying. She’d dropped the kidding manner she put on with me. I let her argument sink in, but I wasn’t blind to the contrast of her light skin against her dark hair.
Before I left, I asked Anna to see if she could find out who in the History Department was researching the past of Kinross Disposals. She said she’d try. She was looking terrific this morning. I went back out into the world feeling like a very lucky private investigator.
SEVEN
Ann once tried to explain to me that there is an important thread in American literature that has to do with “the fixer” coming into the community from outside and then moving off into the sunset after the work is done, leaving nothing but an echo behind him: “Who was that masked man?” Maybe Sam Spade and the Lone Ranger are brothers under the skin, but I don’t see how that affects me trying to make an honest buck up here north of the world’s longest undefended frontier. We don’t have that strain of vigilantism in Canada. Dirty Harry’s looking for work in Toronto, putting in time until the streets get meaner. He may not have to wait long, but in the interval, the traditions aren’t the same. Canadians are big consumers of law and order for one thing. Not spitting on the sidewalk or shooting the pigeons in the park is a sensible way to behave, a small enough price to pay for being allowed to stand aside from the mainstream of North American life. Maybe Anna thought I was part of the great American tradition. Maybe she saw a Canadian tradition with me in it. Most likely I was all that was left of her teenage crush on Nancy Drew.
