by Howard Engel
“Look, Benny, without the charges from yesterday, Forbes has a full plate. There’s an investigation going on into the improprieties that Alex Pásztory revealed last spring. As Chief Executive Officer of Phidias Manufacturing and former CEO of Kinross, there is a lot he’s responsible for. There are people who want to know who he sees and whether he is buying any airline tickets, especially the one-way kind. That’s about as far as I can go right now.”
Chris acknowledged Pete’s balance of candour and tact with a nod of his meaty head. “Whom did you think was following him, Benny?” he said. I ignored the “whom” which was aimed at my liver. From there on the conversation degenerated even further. I could see that Savas was proud of himself for pinning the Commander’s death on Ross so quickly. I didn’t blame him for that. Sometimes you can work for months without getting a break. He was lucky on this one and he knew it. The only other fact I learned from them was about the murder weapon:
“We found it in one of those big washing machines that do all those towels and robes at the club. Only one chamber fired, the rest all full. It was a thirty-two with a snub nose. Tidy little fellow. And it was registered to the dead man. How do you like them roses?”
“I give you top marks. Especially if you found a towel or robe with powder burns on it in the same machine. Since nobody heard the shot, the piece must have been wrapped up in a towel or something. But, then, you know all that.”
“Sure,” Chris said, with a glance at Pete.
“What about the slug that killed Pásztory, Pete? Was that another small-calibre piece?”
“It was a thirty-two all right, but—”
“But you haven’t made a comparison.” I shrugged and let out a full breath, just enough to give the impression that the boys in the lab were short-changing my pals.
“You don’t buy Pete’s theory that this was a professional job?” Chris asked.
“I’m not saying one thing nor the other. It doesn’t hurt to check these things out. That’s all I’m saying. Like, for instance, did you check out Paul Renner from City Hall or the other brother-in-law, Harold Grier? Where were they at sauna-time?”
“Grier’s clean as far as we call tell, except for some shady friends. And Renner’s not all that swift in the brain department.”
“Yeah,” Pete added, “if he had a cocaine habit, he’s the sort of guy’d try to snort it off a bathroom mirror. You know what I mean?”
“How smart do you have to be to use a thirty-two?” I asked. That put an end temporarily to Pete’s enjoying himself.
Chris finished his coffee with a flourish and shot Pete a grin I couldn’t interpret. Maybe it had something to do with their having killed a quarter of an hour ribbing me about the cases. They enjoyed making me feel like I was a cop-shop groupie who liked having cops call him by his first name. I finished off the last of my cup—it was cold—and smiled back at them. They got up and slipped back into their coats. When they left me, I felt like I could use a shower, even though I’d started the day with one. As for Chris Savas, he was ready for another eight hours of work.
When the Beacon came out that afternoon, the murder of Commander Murdo Forbes and the arrest of his son were front-page items. What shocked me, however, was something that I don’t think either Pete or Chris knew at the time they were talking to me in the Di. Old Mrs. Forbes, Biddy, the widow of the Commander, had had a stroke on hearing that Ross had been detained at Niagara Regional Police Headquarters. She was in intensive care at the Grantham General.
I made a few calls and discovered that she was putting up a good fight, but that she was paralysed and had lost the ability to speak. I checked this out with my pal Dr. Lou Gelner, who explained that with time, she could expect to get over most of her physical encumbrances. But with a woman her age, there was always a chance of a later and more severe stroke killing her. With that bit of uplift, I turned to the office dictionary and looked up the word Ross Forbes had used at lunch the day before: lubricious. It had been at the back of my mind since he’d said it about poor Martin Lyster. Slippery, smooth, oily; lewd, wanton. Hell, it sounded more like Forbes than it did Martin. I slammed the dictionary shut and went back to the apartment.
I killed the next half-hour or so looking over the book I’d brought away with me from Irma Dowden’s house and the papers I’d taken from the basement files from Phidias’s head office. The book helped add to my skinny background in this area, the papers added specific information. What held my attention was the dispatcher’s log. It looked like any log that clocked cars and trucks in and out of a place. Then I noticed something odd:
NAME
IN
OUT
Dowden
6:00 A.M.
6:10 A.M.
O’Mara
7:00
11:00
Dowden
7:30
Dr. Carswell
7:40
7:50
Dr. Carswell
8:15
11:00
There were other names listed too, but these were the most familiar ones. What I couldn’t figure out was why did Carswell visit the yard twice. He stayed only ten minutes the first time, and the next time took him to the end of the police investigation by the look of it. I tucked the log in a corner of my head and left it there to see what the grey cells could do on their own.
That night, at seven, Anna and I went to the movies. There was a small repertory theatre that played old movies on St. Andrew Street above the Woman’s Bakery. Run by a part-time lecturer from Secord, it had its box office and aisles manned by his prize students. It was the sort of place where they made you feel like your fly was open if you asked for popcorn. The movie was Great Expectations. It was an old black-and-white post-war classic from England with a big scary scene in the first reel. Inevitably, after the show, we found ourselves at the Di, where they are soon going to start charging me rent. Anna asked:
“Well, how did you like it?”
“Great,” I said. I might have confessed that I could have done without all that rowing on the Thames.
“You dozed off!”
“I was carried away by a daydream,” I said. “I was wondering whether the English dumped toxic wastes into those bleak marshes where Pip lived.”
“You were snoring, Benny. I had to shake you!” Anna was in a good mood. “I thought you liked it.”
“I did. It didn’t make me mad the way modern movies do.”
“What makes you cross with them?” She was playing with me now, showing the gamine side of her her colleagues up at Secord knew nothing about. “Let’s hear about it.”
“I don’t like movies where they wreck a dozen vintage cars in a police chase. And I get mad at the way people in movies never have trouble finding a parking space. Even here in Grantham I can drive around the block a dozen times and not see an empty space, but in the movies, even in New York, the hero always finds a spot right away. In my experience, the only time I get a parking space near a restaurant I’m heading for is when it’s closed for Greek Easter or something.”
“You don’t really mean that?” She turned her head on the side, in order to see into my heart better. I could never argue decently with Anna sitting across from me. She had a way of exposing my illogical side. Without even trying, she could argue me into absurdity.
“Okay,” I said. “I don’t really believe it. Let’s just say that such has been my experience. That’s different.”
Anna was looking particularly fetching to me as she sipped her coffee. She was wearing an old sweater over a pink button-down shirt. The way she did it, it didn’t look preppy or fashionable. It wasn’t what they call today a “look”; it was just Anna being comfortable, and watching me squirm. That was the first thing I noticed about her when I met her last year, a brattish quality that is always trying to see how much it can get away with. When she tried that one on, as she still did, she seemed about sixteen. She was now studying my face, like she wanted to sculpt it
. She was making it all the more difficult for me to justify the position I’d taken. And she knew it.
“In my business,” I said, trying to sound like sweet reason itself, “—and probably in yours—you learn to check the odds of some things turning out the way they do. If it works one way once, then there are odds for and against it working out that way next time.”
“Are you saying that lightning doesn’t strike in the same place twice?”
“Maybe I am.”
“Maybe in legend and aphorism lightning doesn’t strike twice, but in meteorology it happens all the time. The CN Tower in Toronto, the Empire State Building in New—”
“Okay, then let’s stick to legend. Like that old movie on that poster in the lobby: Mutiny on the Bounty. What are the chances of a situation like that happening again?”
“You don’t want to know the answer to that.”
“Wrong example?”
“Uh-huh. Did you think Captain Bligh was going to change his spots? Was it likely he was going to learn a lesson from the Bounty?” There was a nice glow in her cheeks now as she leaned towards me. I could smell her perfume, but I kept on listening. “People act according to the way they are. Bligh was a martinet. He thought he had to drive his men with fear to get an honest day’s work out of them. The Admiralty said—in the movie—I haven’t looked up the history—that it was an excess of zeal on the captain’s part.” Anna was really going now, and I loved to listen. “Well,” she continued, “zeal was part of his character. It was excessive on the Bounty in the South Seas, on the Nore in the Thames Estuary and again still later in New South Wales in Australia. You must have seen that in your work, Benny?”
“Sure,” I said. “Some people can hide their motives for a while, but it’s what they do that comes out and damns them. It’s no trick to talk like a saint. My job is to get under that to what they’ve done.”
The talk went on and on while we had another refill of coffee, and I was getting a big kick out of it. In the back of my mind I was beginning to see the faces of all the strange characters I’d run into since Irma Dowden came to see me. There were no Pips or Miss Havishams, no Blighs or Fletcher Christians, but they were interesting in their own rights. I had to admit that I was having fun getting under their skins, trying to guess what made them tick. There was something Dickensian in the character of the Commander. Even in death, he was bigger than life.
“Oh, by the way, Benny,” Anna said, after it became clear that my attention had been wandering, “did you know that Sherry Forbes and Norman Caine got married on schedule this afternoon?”
“What? I don’t believe it! Nobody gets married with a grandfather dead and a grandmother in Intensive Care.”
“To say nothing of the father of the bride in the calaboose,” she added.
“Right. What kind of people are we dealing with?”
“All I know is that Canon Nombril performed the ceremony in a chapel at the cathedral with just two witnesses. So, at least it was as quiet as possible to still be legal.”
“At least Sherry won’t turn into a Miss Havisham. That’s my first reaction. The second is, what are they going to do with the fancy wedding they put into storage?”
“On that note, sir, you’d better drive me home.” And I did that.
TWENTY-SIX
First thing next morning, I looked up the residence of Dr. Gary Carswell in the phonebook. It seemed reasonable that I might find him at home on a Sunday, so I drove around to 153 Hillcrest Avenue and found a large white stucco house with shutters and a lot of green grass to trim. I parked the car a few doors beyond the house and walked back. There I found the doctor delivering a green garbage bag full of leave to the curbside. He was wearing a grey tracksuit with dark sweat stains under the arms. There was something ape-like in the hang of his big shoulders. The headband around his forehead looked wet. He appeared to have been working on his property for the last two hours at least.
“Dr. Carswell? Good-morning!”
Good-mor—” He stopped and set his garbage bag down hard. “Now, look here, Cooperman, I’ve nothing more to say to you!”
“Not even good-morning? I remember you telling me to come back when I’d got myself organized. It was good advice. I was a little wet behind the ears when we last talked.” I was doing my best to put him at ease, but he looked as relaxed as a cat at the vet’s. He needed the props of his office to give him dignity. The beard, which worked in his office, now looked like it was pasted on with spirit gum.
“Whatever I said to you then has nothing to do with now. Things have got too serious for tittle-tattle, Cooperman. Both the Commander and Ross are friends of mine. I don’t think it’s appropriate that I say anything at all to you.”
“Well, you’ll talk to the cops, then. That’ll be just as good. I can’t get rough with you. I can’t work you over until your statement looks the way they want it to.”
“And neither can they. This isn’t 1939, Mr. Cooperman. The third-degree is only found in cheap fiction. I know my rights and the authorities are aware of that.”
“Good luck to you, Doctor. It’s rare that you find people who still believe the system works. I hope they don’t ask you why you visited the Kinross yard twice on the morning that Jack Dowden had his fatal accident. Lovely fall morning, isn’t it?” I started walking back to my car.
“Dowden? What about Dowden? What has that got to do with Ross shooting the Commander? Now, you hold on a minute, Cooperman.” He came after me, grabbed me by the arm. I looked at his hand and he took it away. “Come around to the backyard where you can sit down.” I let him see indecision playing over my face for a moment or two, as though I wasn’t overjoyed at the invitation. Together we walked along the high hedge that separated his place from the neighbour, who, I was told, ran the General Motors distributorship in Grantham.
It was a large green backyard, with an old-fashioned wire fence along the back property line, interrupted by a rusty gate that probably dated from the days when through it you could walk out into fields of open country. Now it was wired shut and you could see into at least a dozen large backyards. In the middle of the lawn, a white table with a faded umbrella formed the focus of attention. Near it were a set of matching chairs and a gas barbecue with its top covered in plastic wrap. We sat down. It was a comfortable setting, but neither of us was relaxed. I looked over the back of the white house and nodded my approval.
“Very nice here,” I said. “You must be very comfortable, you and your family.”
“And nothing’s going to change that, Mr. Cooperman. Nothing! I hope you know what you’re messing in?”
“Dr. Carswell, I have a client. I’m only assisting this client. If my investigation can also help the police in their work, which parallels mine, I’m obliged to cooperate. We have worked like this in the past. And you’re right, I am trying my best to discover what I’m messing in. I was vague when I talked to you last time. I’m better informed this morning. For instance, the dispatcher’s list of comings and goings at the Kinross yard shows that you came and went twice on the morning Jack died. I know you weren’t asked about that at the inquest, but how would you answer that question if it came up again?”
“That’s not likely, is it? What has it to do with Ross and the Commander?”
“We both know the answer to that one, Doctor.”
“You think you know a great deal, but I wonder if you really do.”
“Look, Dr. Carswell, I’m not interested in playing guessing games or power games or button-button-who’s-got-the-button? All I’m interested in finding out is what happened to Jack Dowden. Now, I think that what’s happened to the Commander and to Alex Pásztory is all tied up with Jack’s accident. I think that the Commander’s death has changed things. And you know what things have been changed.”
“You’re not very frightening, you know, Mr. Cooperman. I don’t think you’re going to strong-arm me into saying something I’ll later regret.”
“Yo
u’re right, I’m no threat at all. And I’m no blackmailer, just in case you’ve heard otherwise. Maybe I can find out what I want to know from available sources. If you think about it, there are a few of them, aren’t there? You know that being an accessory to a crime, Doctor, is a very serious business, not one that the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons takes lightly. I’m pretty sure you did a lot of thinking since last Friday night, Doctor. I think your only chance is to cooperate completely with the authorities.” He thought for a minute about that, pulling at his lower lip and then working away at some birdlime on the table with a pocket knife.
“You may of course be right, Mr. Cooperman. But I think you’ll agree that you are not by any stretch of the imagination ‘the authorities.’”
“Hey, I’m with you! Whatever you do cuts no advantage for me either way. If I get a little gold star in heaven, I’ll be surprised. What I’m saying is that if you have ever thought of telling what you know, this is the moment to take it to Sergeant Savas. What with the murders and so on, I don’t think that a little cover-up going back eighteen months is going to shock him into a major crack-down. He’s got bigger fish to fry. That’s all I’m saying. Don’t forget that the police investigation of Jack Dowden’s accident saw what you told them to see. Whether by collusion or pressure or what you might call a blindness to all but the expected, the cops bungled it. I don’t think they’ll want that to get spread around. No, actually, I think your position’s not so bad, if you tell them what you know today. Later on, who knows. This case changes from day to day. If one of the others comes forward, O’Mara or Teddy Puisans or Luigi—you know—they may not need your help. That moves you over to the side of the room where Caine and the others are standing. That’s not where you want to be, I’m guessing.”
