A City Called July (18 page)

Sunlight warmed the brilliant white figures I’d seen on my last trip. The late morning light made the Mountie stand all the straighter and the tourist with the camera appear to have been frozen in the act like bodies found at Pompeii frozen in lava. I called out, and heard only the sound of my own feet echoing across the floor. I had just reached the stairs to the balcony, when I heard a car starting up. I ran to the door and saw Alex Bolduc rapidly backing his car away from the studio then heading back to town in a hurry. His face looked as old as his father’s.

Upstairs I quickly found the reason for Alex’s quick exit. Nathan Geller was lying in a heap on the floor in front of his colour television. A distorted image was running up the screen and reappearing at the bottom again. Geller was lying with his knees bent and his arms wrapped around his stomach. His sleeves were red with blood and his eyes were open in disbelief. I lurched my way to the toilet before covering the telephone with my handkerchief while I dialled for the police.

FIFTEEN

Chris Savas was an old friend. From the moment he came into Nathan Geller’s studio I started to feel better. It wasn’t because the sergeant was considerate of my feelings, far from it. He always gave me a hard time. When he’d finished with me, after a couple of hours of close questioning, barbed sarcasm, and taunting comments on my line of work and personal foibles, I felt I’d been taken to the cleaners and hung up and dried by one of the best. No, it was even better than that. I felt like I’d been put in a crucible and exposed to white heat. There was nothing left but a fine grey ash. As a chemist, Savas was top of the line.

We were sitting in his office at Niagara Regional. Paper cups of coffee with floating corpses of cigarette butts littered his metal desk. The floor had the same rust marks I remembered from last time. The venetian blinds were still dusty and the windows still looked out on the parking lot next to the city’s market square. I could see the old court-house with squadrons of wheeling pigeons circling the geranium which was annually planted in the memorial fountain to commemorate something or other.

Pete Staziak had wedged his large form into the doorway a few minutes before to see what stage we were at. He and Savas exchanged looks and Savas broke down and gave me one of his cigarettes for a change. Staziak had briefed Savas about my activities, judging by the bite of his questions. He’s taken me over the scene of so many crimes in the last five years that I’m going to get them all into one big mulligan stew of who did what to whom. I looked at the bastard sitting across from me, even as his old partner was examining him from the doorway. I wondered if what we saw was the same man.

Staff Sergeant Chris Savas was a hard man and a good cop. He’d been named after a Cypriot painter and on occasion had tried to show a few friends what Greek cooking and drinking were all about. He had a face like a slab of beef, with eyes that could become as cold as steel ball bearings. He had a voice like the sound cardboard makes when you rasp it across a desk. He also had an instinct for when enough was enough.

“You think young Bolduc did it?”

“Christ, Chris, I told you. He was there when I got there. That’s all I said. If I thought you were going to make him the corner-stone of your investigation, I wouldn’t have bothered mentioning him. How do you know he didn’t stumble into it the way I did? Hell, if I got there and thought I might become a suspect I might think twice about sticking around, especially if I heard somebody driving up and turning his motor off. I think he panicked, that’s all.”

“Yeah, you could be right, and you could be wrong. You’ve got a sentimental side, Benny. You always see the roses and never the thorns. When we have the medical report we’ll be closer to knowing which of us is right.”

“You need anything, Chris?” That was Staziak. Just his way of saying that his shift was ending and that if Chris didn’t need him he was going home to his wife Shelley.

“No, we’re okay, Pete. See you tomorrow.”

“Good-night, Pete.”

“Night.”

We listened to Pete’s footsteps echo down the corridor and heard him say good-night to somebody else. When that was all over, and it hadn’t amounted to much, Chris took a deep breath and let it out with a satisfying noise. It was supposed to divide what we’d just gone through from what was coming. The second part always had more of a human face on it, even if it belonged to Chris Savas.

“You still saving things, Benny?” He continued to stare at a marksmanship trophy over my shoulder.

“I told you what’s germane to the best of my knowledge. I haven’t burdened you with theories or speculations. I’ve given you a blow by blow account of my activities since last Wednesday. If I know something that you don’t know, I don’t know that I know it.”

“Don’t bother piping that through again, I got wet the first time. Are you going to make a fuss about Bagot and his boys?”

“What’s the point? What can you get them on? They didn’t try to extort money from me, they didn’t hold me for ransom, and in the end I walked away. The best you could get them for would be molesting me. And at my age that sounds disgusting. Besides, I’m sure that they would find witnesses who’d say they were watching a cement-pouring derby or something, and I don’t have a single witness. Nope, I’ll have to pass on that one. But, I wouldn’t mind feeling safe to go back to my room.”

“Give it a day,” he said, nodding. “I’ll appeal to Bagot’s better side. But that depends on your keeping your bib clean from now on. If you get rattlesnake poisoning after today, be it on your head for monkeying in this business.”

“I hear you.”

“I know you hear me. Damn trouble is you aren’t listening. And for Christ sake will you take that silly thing off your head.”

“Silly …?” I felt my head and pulled off the yarmulka I’d been wearing since I’d visited the synagogue in the morning. I must have been cutting an impressive figure all afternoon. I buried it in my pocket, promising myself, under my breath, to drop it off at the shul when things settled down a little.

“Now, look, Benny, we’ve been sitting across from each other before. I remember that on these occasions you sometimes forgot to tell me things. You got a little forgetful, and I end up coming along just in time to save you going over Niagara Falls or something. I hate that stuff, Benny. Let’s play it my way this time. You empty out your pockets on the whole schmeer and then nobody will need to set you afloat in a barrel. It’s simple as pie. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I don’t believe you when you say you’ve told me all you know. I know that funny memory of yours too well. What I’m saying is you know my phone number if you remember something.”

Savas sucked at his teeth, like he thought that some missing piece would come unstuck from his molars and it would unlock all the sealed doors in this case. I saw the pile of files on the left side of his desk and wondered how often he could put any of these away for keeps. I wondered whether he followed his cases through the courtroom phase into the appeal courts and up to the Supreme Court. Did the nuts and bolts of what was happening on the streets today put practical limits on his interest in the cases that had started in his office but had gone on out into the big world of experts and mistakes in charging the jury? He shifted in his chair and turned back to face me. I put paid to my speculations. “As far as I can see this time, Benny, you don’t have a chance in hell of getting anywhere on this case. You got no organization. Come on now, you’re outclassed on this one.”

“Well at least we agree that Nathan’s death is related to his brother’s disappearance. That’s a bond between us.”

“I may think that, but I’ve got to check it all the way around the weather-vane. Who knows, it might be somebody doesn’t like statues kept inside where it’s warm. Benny, there are a lot of strange people out there that never kill anybody. Spare a thought for the ones that do.”

Before I promised I’d behave myself and not get into deep water without an attendant policeman, Chris told me that I could redeem my Olds from the police parking garage by paying towing and storage on it. I asked him to lend me an envelope, thanked him, then borrowed a piece of paper which I used to wrap around the five hundred dollars I was having trouble living with. Savas looked like I hadn’t been listening to him, but I still walked out of the NRP headquarters a free man.

I stood on the broad limestone step, under the shade of a limestone overhang, and looked across at the convent and thought of the girls in black stockings I used to see when I was in high school. Later on at the theatre workshop under Monty Blair or Ned Evans, black stockings were almost the rule. Those convent girls were the first Bohemians in town, even if they never knew it. I addressed and posted the envelope.

“Hey, Mr. Cooperman!” I looked over my shoulder. It was Kogan with his blazer buttoned up and looking very spiffy for Kogan. “I’m glad to see you. I just come from viewing the remains. Poor Wally.” He wiped his eye with the corner of a polka-dotted bandanna. “Well, he’s in a better world I guess. Ain’t that right, Mr. Cooperman?”

“Well, Kogan, I don’t know whether it’s right, but it sure would be fair. How come you just got around to identifying your pal today?” Kogan rolled his head instead of answering quickly. “I couldn’t be reached,” he said. “Hell, I owed it to him. He would have done the same for me and then some.”

“I’m sorry for your trouble, Kogan. He was a nice little guy, Wally. I’ll miss him.”

“Yeah, and he’d just come into money. Like I told Priam this morning, your money’s a thief in your pocket. The only way to survive is to stay broke. I tried it both ways and I know.”

“Priam who?”

“Priam Phelps. We went to school together. We were on the same football team.”

“You’re a friend of Magistrate P.B. Phelps?”

“Yeah and I’m the only one left who remembers what the B stands for. Ain’t tellin’ either. Old Priam didn’t know Wally so good, but we had a few nights together, the three of us. Priam’s an awful one for the drink sometimes. Only thing’ll straighten him up is a nip of Aqua Velva. I’m a drinking man myself, Mr. Cooperman, but poor Priam lets himself go to extremes. It’s steady family life that does it. It ain’t civilized. Hell, if I couldn’t take it, then it’s a wonder anybody can. Just as hard on the women and kids. I’m no reactionary.”

“I didn’t say a thing. Where did you and Phelps play football?”

“Cranmer College, across the creek. I never had the weight for the line, but I was fast. Priam was big and heavy even back then. We goin’ to stand here all day, Mr. Cooperman, or should we walk over to the Harding House?”

“Sure, Kogan. It’s hot enough for a beer.”

We walked along Church Street to James and then up James to the Harding, where I found my old theatrical friends Ned Evans and his pals Jack Ringer and Will Chapman ensconced with a table of amber glasses in front of them, They hailed me loudly, and pulled us over to the two tables they had spread themselves around.

“Ned, you know Kogan, don’t you?” Ned blew air between his teeth and his upper lip to properly evaluate the question.

“Know? Who really knows anybody. You may think you know somebody, and then …” Ned left the phrase hanging in air hoping that one of us would pick it up. Jack and Will didn’t do it and neither did Kogan or me.

“Kogan here’s just come from identifying his best friend in the morgue.”

“God’s blessing be upon you,” said Ned.

Will, who was slipping out of sight in his chair, replied, crossing himself, “And on all Christian souls, I pray God.” They both sounded like they were overdoing it, and they’d climbed into some play script to protect them from something as real as death. I wished I had a page of that script myself.

The room was warm and busy with men wandering towards the john or the potato chips rack. Waiters slid like beefy ballet dancers with their short aprons and full trays between the tables. The air was salty with beer and heavy with opinions. Jack Ringer tugged at Will Chapman and between him and Ned they were able to delay Will’s inevitable sliding off his chair. Jack was Ned’s uncertain stage manager, who listened to Ned plan a new theatrical production every night in the beverage room at the Harding.

“Oh, he had a good life,” said Kogan, redirecting the conversation. In the bidding in the game of life, death is trumps and so the floor was his. A mere projected production of
Henry IV–Part I
couldn’t compete. “Yes, a gentle soul,” he said drinking the second straight draught since he’d sat down. He had his theme and we were all waiting to hear him expand on it, to eulogize his friend, to erect a monument to him among the emptying glasses. But he didn’t. Kogan was no great talker so Ned wrote an end to the chapter to allow the afternoon and the drinking to proceed.

“God be at your table, and there’s an end.” He banged his fist on the table.

I put down some money and the waiter skirted by, dropping ten glasses and removing the empties. He gave change from his apron without looking and accepted the tip I pushed after him without acknowledgement.

“How did your frien’ die?” asked Jack Ringer, who didn’t always take his cues from Ned.

“Stabbed with a shiv,” said Kogan. “Murdered by person or persons unknown. He was a saint of a man. That’s what Wally was. He got shot at Carpiquet airport, but he wouldn’t let the dressing station send him back to England. Wound the size of a silver dollar through his shoulder. As fine a blighty as you ever saw, but he wouldn’t let them send him down the line. Me, I went right through to the last day without a scratch. I got to be so unlucky nobody’d stand up next to me. Soon as I’d talk to somebody, they was for it. Took Wally longer than most, poor bugger. Poor little bugger.” While he was saying this he brought out a small metal badge. He turned it around and around in his hand as he talked.

“A ruptured duck!” Ned said, “An honest-to-goodness ruptured duck!”

“What is?” I asked.

“Thing Kogan’s holding. Army discharge pin. That’s what the Americans call ’em. I still have mine somewhere, but nobody wears them any more except panhandlers. Funny it should come to that, eh, Benny? Funny. That’s what we used to call ’em when we were on the inside wanting out. I never saw anything as beautiful in my life as the one they handed me. Better than the Victoria Cross.”