by Howard Engel
“I suppose not. I used to have a first edition of The Big Sleep,” he said. I wondered what he was thinking about when he talked like this. “Bought it from that book dealer, Martin Lyster, who you can never get hold of when you want him. Do you know him? A most lubricious fellow.”
“As a matter of fact, I heard he died this morning. It was not unexpected.”
“Well, sorry. Hope he wasn’t a particular friend of yours?”
“I don’t collect books, but I knew him slightly.” Forbes was handling the Perrier water pretty well. After the stories of his drinking (mostly retailed by Teddie), I was wondering what sort of new leaf he was showing off here. The waiter cleared away the soup cups. Mine had tasted of green cheese. I guess there are places where soup is made with green cheese. Now I know where to find it. “Is book collecting what you want to talk about, Mr. Forbes? It’s not something I know a lot about. And I guess it hasn’t much to do with why you’re buying me lunch.”
“How long will you be in McAuliffe’s office?”
“Couple of days more. I shouldn’t think I’ll still be there by this time next week. Today’s a short day and then we are into the weekend …”
“Will you be free by, say, next Wednesday?”
“I might be. Why?”
“I might have a job for you.”
“Me? Why me? I thought Howard Dover worked for you? Don’t tell me you hit him in the nose too?”
“I won’t say I’ve liked you much, Cooperman, but I know to my cost that you give value for money. Dover’s busy doing security for Phidias. What I want has nothing to do with the office.” This was going a little too fast for me. One minute I’m on the outside trying to find a peephole to the inside, then I’m shown the red carpet to the inner sanctum itself. I didn’t know whether to burst out laughing or to cry.
“What kind of job do you want me to do, Mr. Forbes?”
The curry and pasta arrived. Forbes was quick to dig into his, after complaining to the waiter that he did not want his salad served on the same plate. The dish was removed and returned a minute later without the offending salad, which arrived seconds later on a side dish. “There are parts of this town where they still bring you coffee with your main plate,” Forbes said. Did he see himself as a gourmet rolling back the clouds of local ignorance? I should have told him about the Di, where they’ve always treated me right. I held off eating, waving my fork over the pasta while this was going on. Finally we both dug in. “Do you think that you might be interested in what I’ve been talking about?”
“You still haven’t said what you want,” I said. “I’m always interested in making a living, Mr. Forbes, but I also try to keep things simple. I’m afraid I have a conflict that will make it impossible for me to do any work for you for the moment. But if it will keep—”
“Conflict? What do you mean conflict?” Forbes’s lower lip was distorting his face, lengthening out his upper lip and turning the end of his nose white.
“I’m involved in an investigation for your ex-wife.”
“And that will be cleared up by Wednesday, you said.”
“I said it might be. I’ve also got some other files in my office I have to do some work on. It isn’t easy being a one-man band, Mr. Forbes.”
“But you accomplish prodigious miracles I’ve been told,” he said with just the suggestion of a sneer.
“I don’t know about that. I do know that I would find it hard to work for you without knowing in detail what it is you want.”
“You want complete disclosure from me and you aren’t committing yourself to zilch!”
“You’ve got both my ears across the table from you,” I said. “I think the lunch just about pays for that. It also buys a measure of discretion. A PI who runs off at the mouth doesn’t stay in business long.”
“Okay, okay. Don’t bother to rationalize. I’ll come clean,” he said. “Isn’t that what they all say?”
“It’s up to you. Tell me about it or don’t. It’s your dime.”
“I’m being followed, Cooperman,” he said in a voice that was hardly above a whisper. “I don’t like it. There’s a car that’s always behind me. There are clicks on my telephone. There are people in hotel lobbies pretending to read newspapers who later turn up outside my office. Once I noticed the first man, it started preying on my mind. Now I can see that there are relays of people watching, listening and following me. Damn it, Cooperman, I don’t like it! I know I said that already but it’s got me that rattled.”
“Do you have any suspicions?”
“Oh, God! I don’t want to open that can of worms here. Let’s just say there are several possible sources.”
“Does it have anything to do with last spring’s stories about toxic wastes in fuel oil?”
“Well, that’s a better bet than no bet at all,” he said, removing a particularly stringy bit of beef from his mouth and placing it on his plate. He looked neither to the right to the left afterwards, which gave me another glimpse of his social assurance. “The bedfellows in that deal were not of my choosing. It might be one of them. I don’t know. What I want to know is: will you find out? I can’t look around without seeing one of those pale faces and cheap suits.”
“Well …” I knew that if I asked him if one of them was watching him at the moment and he indicated the old geezer with the white moustache or somebody hiding in the leafless bushes outside the window, I’d be hooked. In sifting for information, you always run the risk of getting in too far or too deeply. Having a look at one of the faces Forbes was afraid of would have made it difficult to walk out of the club digesting a good lunch but still my own man. “Well …”
“I’ll pay top dollar, Cooperman. You won’t regret this.”
“Look, I could use the money. I won’t lie to you,” I said. “But it could complicate my life so that I wouldn’t know where I was.” Forbes was beginning to cloud over, as though a storm were coming up over the top of that continuous eyebrow. “I’ll tell you something, Mr. Forbes. I’ve discovered that I have a tendency to try to take the muddle out of my clients’ affairs. When they come to me, you wouldn’t believe it, the mess they’re in. I’d like to help you too, but when I say I can’t, that’s what I mean. Now that’s frank and honest as of this Friday afternoon. When next Wednesday comes and I’m cursing myself for talking to you like this, maybe I’ll call you to say I’ve changed my mind. That’s all I can do for you. In the meantime, if I see anybody following you and I can get a line on them, I’ll let you know. As long as I’m not going to get my knees broken or come to a bad end in the harbour at Port Richmond.” I watched his face when I mentioned Port Richmond but while it was growing angry, it didn’t twig to my hint about Thursday night.
“They told me you’d be difficult!” Here he physically grabbed the passing waiter by the arm. “Joe, I want you to clean these places and bring coffee right away, please. We don’t want dessert.” He could have asked, but in his mood I decided not to press him. I looked slowly around the room to see if I could spot anybody out of place. I came up empty, and returning my eyes to Ross Forbes, I was glad to see that he was controlling his temper.
TWENTY-ONE
The bill finally came and Forbes entered into a mild but firm argument with the waiter. I pretended that I was above such small disputes. Was this the way people got rich, questioning whether the rolls were included with the special or not? I’ll never figure it out.
I left my cigarettes in my pocket, since I thought that Forbes, the spoiled brat, was going to get up and go once it was clear that he was not going to get his way with me. But before he could look at his watch and say “Well …” a face hovered to the right of my host. “Ross! Well, I shouldn’t be surprised,” he said. It was a youngish-looking middle-aged man with a mop of grey hair and a pointed nose. The impression of youth was abetted by the turtleneck shirt he was wearing under a light topcoat of non-animal origins. He looked like a man who was listening when the whisper went up around th
e swimming pool: “Plastics!”
“Harold, the brother-in-law,” Ross explained to me, then completed the introduction giving a hurried, perhaps scanty, description of my present function in the head office of Phidias Manufacturing.
“Yes, I’d heard something about that. Tax people breathing down Teddie’s décolletage, eh? Wouldn’t mind a look myself. Into her books, I mean. Thought you had me there, eh, Ross?” Harold Grier’s face looked as pained as his attempt at humour. I tried to place him. Grier was the brother of Forbes’s present wife and connected by marriage with the man at City Hall who handled the toxic wastes contracts for the city. He also was the head man at Sangallo Restorations. I could now see why he was wearing that expression. The last time bodies were found in one of his restorations they dated from the War of 1812. Not so Alex Pásztory unfortunately.
“I wonder if I could have a minute, Ross? Hate to break up the party.”
“You’ll excuse me, Cooperman?” Forbes said with another trace of a sneer in his voice. What did he think I’d say? I didn’t bother saying anything as a matter of record and Ross got up and went into the lobby outside the restaurant’s front door. I took out my cigarette after all. Once lighted, it began tasting like an old butt I’d rescued from the ashtray of the car. I wasn’t sorry to stub it out on the return of Grier and Forbes.
“We’ll see you tonight, Harold,” Forbes said. “And stop worrying about your friend from the Falls.”
“He’s our friend, Ross! Don’t ever forget that. This is no time to distance yourself from reality. What time is this thing called for tonight? Six or six-thirty?” Grier tried to cover the visible panic of his remark about the Niagara Falls friend with the question about the wedding rehearsal. Ross looked like he was running out of patience. Not only had he bombed out with me, his business arrangements looked like they were in trouble. As far as Grier was concerned, from the look on his face, he seemed to be reacting badly to Ross’s hands-off policy. This was not the moment for greater autonomy for the subsidiaries.
“It’s called for six-fifteen, but I should think that six-thirty will see you all right.”
“Good. You’d better hustle if you’re going to see Paul.”
“I’ll look after it, Harold.”
“Better hustle. No time to be wasted.”
“I hear you. See you tonight.” This last was a curt dismissal directed at an underling. You had to hand it to Forbes. He sure knew how to assume the right face for the moment. Only his temper got the better of him. He couldn’t hide his displeasure. In his place that was a major liability. While I watched Harold Grier leave the restaurant, I wondered who the friend from the Falls might be. Paul was easy; Paul Renner from City Hall. Probably an attempt to cool out the authorities in their investigation of the fort murder. What did I know about Niagara Falls? Not much.
“Come on, Cooperman,” said Forbes, wiping his mouth on his napkin although he hadn’t eaten anything in nearly ten minutes. “I’ll show you around. Do you know the club at all?”
“Only by repute. My father’s a member. He haunts the card room.”
“Oh, you’re that Cooperman, are you? I think my father’s lost a lot of money to him over the years. Gin rummy’s the game, right?”
I nodded as we got up. I followed Forbes out of the dining-room. My father had often been a guest at the club during the years when I was growing up. He joined as soon as the restrictive membership practices of the past had been done away with. For a few years he was the man to beat in the card room. A gin rummy tournament was even set up and named in his honour. They called Pa The Hammer and the annual competition of that name was one of the indoor attractions of the long winter.
Forbes walked along the halls of the club, showing me racquet-ball courts and gyms, one full of women, accompanied by their babies, doing post-natal exercises. He was beginning a cook’s tour of the facilities. Was this for my benefit, or was he working off the pique he had taken to his brother-in-law’s urgent request to hustle downtown to City Hall. With a skeletal running commentary, he led me room to room. “This room is dedicated to the cue and the ivory ball,” he said. The light above the green baize tabletop seemed to conjure up the ghosts of elderly men with stiff white fronts and tepid drinks resting on the edges of the tables.
“Through here,” he said, and we were again back in a central corridor, walking past a little man selling tickets for plump blue robes and towels. Forbes was greeted by name and the compliment was returned.
We went through a door and I was suddenly hit by that locker-room smell that took me back to high school. Even with fancy yearly membership fees and a stiff initiation fee, the locker-room was no rose garden. Men in the buff and semi-buff took no notice as we made our way through to the showers. Here I recognized a former member of a wining water-polo team standing on an old-fashioned scale getting his soaking-wet weight. From the showers we went on to the entrance to the pool area. My attention was caught by a sign on a door just next to the door leading to the pool:
PLEASE TAKE NO READING MATERIAL INTO THE SAUNA
I’d never seen such a clear bias against literacy in my life. I hoped that the rule was broken regularly.
Forbes pushed the door to the pool open for me and the scent of chlorinated water hit me along with the watery echo of happy voices. It was a large but not quite Olympic-sized pool. On one side the wall was made of glass doors which could be opened up in the summer. A life-guard was listening to a small stereo radio near the entrance from the women’s side. Something familiar by Chopin, I think.
At the shallow end of the pool, a group of preschoolers were being instructed on water safety by a chubby woman with red hair peeking out from under her bathing-cap. She wore a blue Speedo swimsuit. All of the other lanes except the one closest to the solid wall were occupied by serious swimmers swimming serious lengths. You could tell just by looking at them that they had all been in the water for the last twenty to thirty minutes and that they’d still be at it half an hour from now.
“What do you think?” Forbes asked. Was he trying to sign me up?
“Glad you like it. My mother was on the committee that designed this place. She also helped raise most of the money to pay for it. Dad is still Membership Chairman, I think.” I nodded my approval of all this energy and Ross took it as encouragement to go on. “They spend most of their time here when they are in town. Do you want to go for a swim?”
“Not after eating. It’ll give me a cramp.”
“You’re behind the times, Cooperman. Swimming’s a great way to keep in shape. Look at my parents out there. Nearly one hundred and sixty years between them. And just look at them go!”
I had to follow Forbes’s eyes to see which of the gliding bodies between the bobbing lane-markers had given him life. There was a swimmer in each of the five lanes. Except for size they all looked alike. They were all wearing goggles and white rubber caps. Murdo Forbes was the first to be spotted. His massive form wasn’t easy to hide. He moved down the far lane like a pilot whale, his long arms moving up and down like flippers. At the far end, he climbed up a chrome ladder out of the pool, picked up a blue towel, and slipped into a matching blue terry-cloth robe and began walking in our direction.
“I meant that about going swimming, Cooperman. It’s no big deal to get you a suit and robe.” He meant it to be friendly, but his voice was already stiffening as the Commander drew closer.
“Thanks, Forbes. Maybe some other time. I should be getting back to your office. Unless my answer has made that deal come unstuck.”
“You must think I’m a real son of a bitch, Cooperman, to say that. Well, you’re right, but I’m not a small-minded son of a bitch. Maybe I still have an idea you’ll see things my way.” Here he turned and waved to the approaching figure. “Hello, Dad! I thought you’d have some lunch before your swim.”
“Still checking up on me, Ross? I nibbled on some chocolate I always carry in my pocket while we were playing golf, if it’s of any
interest to you. I can’t see why. I suppose you’ve been stuffing yourself with this fellow and charging it up to duty entertainment, eh? Who is this fellow? Do I know him?” The Commander looked at me as though I was a dubious piece of horseflesh that was ripe for the boneyard. “I’ve seen you around the office.” He was actually addressing me. Did he think that the gift of speech extended all the way down to me, or did my presence at the club automatically put me in the social register?
“My name’s Cooperman, Commander Forbes. Ben Cooperman. I was having lunch with your son as you’ve already guessed.”
“‘Guessed?’ It doesn’t take much guessing when this fellow has a meal. Wine with lunch! Unheard of in my day. I suppose that mean no more work this afternoon. Given your usual time of arrival in the morning, Ross, I don’t know why you bother. Well, as a man who has been collecting his old-age pension for fifteen years, I guess I shouldn’t lecture you younger people. Just try to remember, Ross, you have a big weekend in store for you. Don’t get yourself stewed when there’s so much depending on you. You don’t want to give the family another black eye.” Ross didn’t even try to correct his father’s false judgment. In fact his lips were tighter together than usual.
“Ross,” he said, as though talking to a lackey. “I want them to take the car around for a wash. Looks like something the cat dragged in. Take it to Jackson’s. Those new people don’t understand the Bentley. They’ve scratched it and can’t get the tarnish off the bright work.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Ross said through his teeth.
“Goodbye, Cooperbloom. I’m off to the sauna to work off some of that chocolate. At least I’ll have the place to myself. The members are taking exception to my smoking cigars in there. Extraordinary, eh? Your mother’s still got another twenty lengths to do, Ross. That makes the rest of her daily mile. You should get yourself involved more here at the club, boy. Put yourself back in shape.” Ross made a sour face but didn’t let his father see it. Murdo Forbes wasn’t looking at him anyway, but the blast of advice kept coming, like it was carried in bulk and delivered in pipes. “I want to see you properly turned out tonight, Ross. Canon Nombril is an old friend. It may be just a rehearsal, but, damn it, it is a church, and I don’t want you coming in half cut. Remember what I said.”
