A City Called July (27 page)

“She went missing the same day Larry did. She doubled back, that’s all.”

“Did Larry double back with her?”

“God, don’t you think I’ve been asking myself that? How could she do it? And while living with his brother! What is that woman made of?”

“Try to stay calm When did she get back to Grantham? How do you know for sure that she went with …”

I didn’t finish the sentence. There was something else in the photograph that suddenly grabbed me by the tie and shook me around.

“What is it?” Ruth asked, looking at my sagging jaw, I guess. “Mr. Cooperman? Are you okay?” She was gone for a moment and then came back to the counter “Here,” she said “Drink this.” I took a glass from her and felt the heat as I swallowed something straight and alcoholic. I never asked about the brand name. But it was the right medicine for what ailed me that day. “Is that better?” Ruth asked, the tone of worry in her voice as genuine as I remember hearing from anybody.

“Mrs. Geller,” I asked as soon as I could locate my tongue, “where did your husband get that ring he’s wearing?”

“Ring?” She looked puzzled. “Oh, you mean in the photo. Why that’s his ring from Osgoode Hall, the law school. They all have them, all the lawyers who go through Osgoode. The crest is usually in gold, but I had this cut specially for Larry’s birthday three years ago. Why do you ask?”

I still felt like I’d just taken a beating, like my stomach had been removed and the local anaesthetic was just wearing off. I didn’t know what to tell Ruth Geller. What I heard myself say at length was, “Oh, I’ve always been an admirer of fine rubies.”

TWENTY-THREE

I suppose I should have headed straight to Niagara Regional with what I’d just found out. At least I’d have been taking some of the advice I’d been handing out all over town. If everybody passed on his secrets, nobody’d be sent for a post-mortem because he knew too much.

I hadn’t stayed at Ruth’s for more than another few minutes. I’d not confided my suspicions to her, but I did hit her with one more big question before I left. It was the one that had been bothering me since the day I’d been snatched coming out of Larry Geller’s bolt-hole.

“Mrs. Geller,” I’d asked, “why won’t you admit that Larry called you on the day he disappeared?” She looked blank, but still managed to smile vaguely, like it was through a fog or mist.

“You’ve asked me that before. Why is it so important? He didn’t call. I had no contact with him after he left that morning. Nobody here spoke to him. I checked.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not sure why it’s important, but what I have amounts to evidence in a way. It’s the sort of evidence that doesn’t lie.”

“Well, Mr. Cooperman, maybe it doesn’t, but then maybe you aren’t reading it right. Have you thought of that?”

Since leaving the Geller place, that’s what I’d been thinking about. The evidence of the phone call. By pushing the redial button I was automatically connected with Ruth. We’d talked about Nathan’s midnight phone call to me about Daytona Beach. At least I wasn’t imagining things. I pushed the button and the phone made the connection. I didn’t dial her number, the memory in the machine dialled the number. Then it hit me. It could have been from the day before or the week before. But she’d told me that he never called. Not for weeks. Who was I going to believe: the redial button or the wife?

Pete Staziak wasn’t working that night. He was in the middle of his long narrow backyard trying to get a charcoal fire started with his vacuum cleaner. That’s where I found him and he went a little red when he saw me coming over the newly mowed lawn. “Hi! You looking for a chess game with my kids? He’s out. Pull up a lump of charcoal and sit down. Shelley’s inside getting a salad together. You’ll have a hamburger, Benny? When I get this going?”

“Be careful you don’t electrocute yourself.”

“Nuts, I do this all the time. It’s the quickest way. It’s a little more bulky than using Shelley’s hair dryer, but I cracked that. This works very well, when you hook it up backwards so that it blows instead of sucks.” I walked closer and showed an interest in the arrangements. I hoped he was using grounded wires, that’s all. He turned the vacuum on again and the sparks shot out of the middle of the bed of coals. In the centre they were red going on yellow. It looked as hot as a blacksmith’s forge and smelled about the same. Pete added another load of charcoal from the sooty blue and white bag. Once this lot began to burn, Pete made himself busy handing me the blackened racks to the hibachi and a wire brush. He didn’t try talking over the racket made by the vacuum cleaner. At first I thought that working the brush over the racks would be very satisfying, turning the soiled, carbonized grease-covered metal grates into silvery gridirons, but it was hard work and unrewarding. There was no transformation even after I’d gone over them twice. So, I gave up at about the same time Pete turned off the vacuum cleaner. I handed the grates to him and he fitted them into the black holders. He unplugged the vacuum and reeled in the cord. “Don’t let me leave it out here all night. That’s the sort of thing that brings on a midnight downpour. Will you have a beer, Benny?”

“Sure.” Pete went into the house to explain the unexpected visitor and returned with a tray with four bottles and one glass.

We didn’t speak until we were a quarter-way into our first beer. It was Pete who broke the silence: “Well, you might as well tell me now. Let’s get it over with. I want to eat with a clear head.” I gave Pete a fast rundown of what I’d been doing since Nathan’s funeral. The highlight was the ring in the fire-hall footing.

“Unless I miss my guess we just located Larry Geller.”

“You’re sure about the ring?”

“Ruth says it’s a class ring from Osgoode Hall, only she had the crest engraved on a fair-sized ruby. Can’t be too many of those around.”

“So, you figure, if it’s Larry’s ring, it’s Geller’s finger, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”

“Seems a reasonable assumption. Unless he lost it in a crap game to our John Doe in the column. But that’s looking for complications. Let’s see what the forensic boys tell us.”

“You tell Ruth?”

“Give me some credit. I’m not a half-wit.”

“Let’s not quibble over fractions, Benny.” Pete gulped down the last of his first beer and opened another. He tried to make it as a steel-edged cop through and through, but I could see that it was at least partly an act. Pete looked at the hibachi and not at me. He was figuring out whether the coals were ripe yet. He decided that we could talk for another five minutes or so before he had to tie on his apron. “I’ll phone in a call to the station and they can get cracking on the job of removing the body overnight. They’ll have to get an engineer to judge about what it does to the structure. That means Sid Geller will have to know about it soon, I mean before we have an identification that we can go to court with.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“So, Geller didn’t run away after all?”

“Looks possible.”

“Who gets rich out of that?” Pete was looking at me, and I shrugged the fact that it was anyone’s guess. Who’s to benefit is the time-honoured question we’re supposed to ask ourselves in an investigation. Who’s to benefit? Who in a town with a population of fifty thousand could possibly make use of two million dollars and change? The faint shadow of suspicion settled on everybody from Papertown to Port Robertson, from Louth to Niagara Falls.

Pete went into the house through the aluminum door with a floppy screen and returned in five minutes with a platter of fat generous hamburgers ready for the fire. He hadn’t put on an apron, probably because I was there, or maybe he never used one. He put the burgers on the grill; they began to sizzle and snap at once. Pete let them alone for a minute, then turned them over. “That seals them,” he said, then added: “I talked to Chris. He’ll look after things at the fire hall.”

We both watched the hamburgers turn from pink to brown, saw the juices run into the fire and ignite a lump of charcoal. The dripping sizzled like the tick of a slow clock.

In a few minutes Pete’s wife, Shelley, appeared at the back door with a friendly greeting and a basket of buns. By now the backyard was pungent with smoke. Shelley split the buns and placed them around the darkening meat. As soon as they were cooked on one side, Pete turned the patties over, and meanwhile we practised small talk without showing much aptitude for it.

* * *

An hour later, I parked outside the Woodland Avenue building. It was dark and quiet. I’d been carrying the keys to the place since last Friday, and they’d been getting heavier in my pocket every day I ignored them. I’d intended to have them copied, but like my other schemes I realize only about fifty percent of them. I climbed out of the car and opened the front door.

Heartburn was working its way up my innards. Relish and mustard, I thought, but I knew better. On a case like this I should try to stay strictly kosher. During the last couple of years I’d been finding that harder and harder to do. I guess that’s why I enjoy going home on Friday nights for dinner with Ma and Pa. It gives me a new start for the week. In their own fashion, Ma and Pa keep a kosher house, without reading the fine print on the labels too closely. But it was better than I could do eating in restaurants all the time.

As I made my way up the unlighted stairs, a bubble was growing under my ribs. It loosened with movement and left a charred taste in my mouth. I found the right door and enough light from the window at the end of the hall to help me fit the key into the lock of Larry Geller’s bolt-hole.

For the second time I stood in that small office. It didn’t seem to have changed since my last visit. I hoped that it wouldn’t end the same way. I turned on the light and for a second the brightness stung my eyes. I went at once to the telephone, lifted it and tried the redial button. I heard the usual telephone noises. They matched the ones now being made by my stomach. The phone rang and rang again. After the third and fourth ring, I started to lose confidence in the opening gambit I had in mind. It rang a fifth, sixth and seventh time without any additional luck. I replaced the phone. I wasn’t going to catch anyone out in a lie tonight, I thought.

The smell of burned paper was less clear in the air this time. I could still see wisps of charred paper near the discoloured waste-paper basket. I’d given the full Cooperman treatment to the room the first time around, so I knew there weren’t any secrets to be uncovered. But feeling a little caught up short by the telephone’s failure to cooperate, I shifted the desk, just to see if anything had slipped through my fine-meshed net the first time around.

It was my foot that found it, not my eyes. I felt an irregularity underfoot and looked down and saw nothing but an uneven floor. A second glance proved more interesting. It was a scrap of cotton cloth. It was scorched around the edges, and of double thickness. On the other side there was writing; part of a printed label: “ …
herstone, S.A.”
It didn’t mean anything to me, but on the probability that anyone with half an education might be able to make something out of it, I put it carefully into one of the plastic compartments of my wallet after reshuffling the gas company credit cards. Before I left the office, I tried the redial button again, but with the same unhelpful results.

* * *

As I parked at the curb in front of 40 Monck Street, Martha’s lights were on. Once again I felt like I was treading on her hospitality, even at fifty bucks a week. I was hiding out at her place under false pretences. Glenn Bagot was soon going to send his borrowed boys after me to see why I hadn’t accepted his five hundred dollars. I figured that he wasn’t going to enjoy reading about Larry’s body being discovered on the building site a hell of a lot. And I couldn’t blame him. The name of the corpse was sure to be Geller, and the name of the construction company was Bolduc. But at least if the provincial government noticed and picked another tender to the big Niagara-on-the-Lake highway project, I couldn’t see how Bagot could find Mrs. Cooperman’s little boy at the bottom of it. Niagara Regional wasn’t going to spread the credit around, I hoped. And maybe, with Larry Geller’s whereabouts finally established as some fair distance from Daytona Beach and his activities restricted to decomposition, things would settle down around town. Once more it had been demonstrated: greed begets serpents, and serpents sting.

“Well, you’re home early! Couldn’t keep away, could you?”

“Hi, Martha.”

“When are you going to help eat some of the grub you bought? The fridge has never been so loaded with good things, and I’m eating it myself.”

“I was at a friend’s barbecue. We had hamburgers, salad, fruit salad and now heartburn.”

“A little something to remember her by.”

“How do you barbecue without doing yourself an injury?”

“I’ll show you sometime, if you’re ever around here that long.”

Martha had been flipping through a magazine in front of the TV set, which was turned off. It was a glamour magazine. I’d never thought of Martha as a consumer of glamour and all that stuff. You never know about people. I took out my wallet and retrieved the bit of cotton. Palming it I held it out for Martha to see. “Can you make anything of that?” I asked. She picked it up and looked at the letters.

“S.A. means it’s a European company most likely. It’s the same as our use of the word incorporated as part of a company’s name. So this is a big, non-North American outfit. I suppose you could look it up in …” She broke off without finishing the suggestion. Her face lit up like a Coleman lantern in a dark cottage. She got up, left the room and rummaged around in her room for a minute. When she came back, she was waving a coloured page from a magazine. She turned over the coloured page showing the ads in small type on the other side. She tapped one of the ads and cocked a smiling face in my direction. “Benny, the missing letters are
At. Atherstone
S.A. is just about the biggest diamond exporter in the world, that’s all.” She handed me the piece of paper with
the ad in it. As soon as I held it I knew that I’d seen it dozens of times. Martha handed back the scrap of cloth, and I was suddenly plunged into a brand new puzzle.