A City Called July (8 page)

By now I was feeling like the fifth shoe under a bridal bed. If I’d been looking at this scene through a transom or a keyhole I couldn’t have felt more like a voyeur. The room itself seemed to be crawling away from the patched window. In a way it didn’t seem like the room I’d been in the day before. Somehow a pile of broken glass glinting on broadloom and masking tape on painted woodwork completed the work the mob tried to do. “Safe as houses,” the Welsh say. This house seemed as safe as a circus tent in a hurricane.

“Your wrist, Nathan. Look!” Debbie crossed to where Nathan’s bare arms had been dangling between his knees as he sat on the edge of the loveseat. He raised first one arm then the other. A twisted line of darkening blood snaked down his long left arm. He raised it like a surgeon scrubbing up, and then began to lick it.

“Don’t!” Ruth cried, suddenly coming to life. “I’ll get something.” But Debbie was already binding his wrist with a handkerchief.

“It’s just a scratch,” she said with some colour returning to her face. Nathan looked embarrassed.

“I hate the sight of blood,” he said “Especially my own.” His bum joke brought a laugh which cracked the mood down the centre.

“Nathan, you idiot!” Ruth said. “Here we are with the mob at the door and all you can do is make jokes.”

“Well, the mob’s gone at least. And the house is watertight for tonight. Shouldn’t you get out of here for a few days, Ruth?”

“What and have every stick of furniture stolen or smashed? Don’t be silly, Nathan. Somebody’s got to stick and stay. It’s my home. If the cops can’t protect the place with people living in it, think of what a mob could do to it empty.”

“Good point, I guess,” said Nathan. Rose sipped her coffee, which like mine was chilly.

“Will this find a corner in your report, Mr. Cooperman?” Debbie asked, returning to that annoying note she kept hitting on the first visit.

“Mrs. Geller, I’m not writing a report. I’m not here to judge you people. I’m here now because Rose Craig and I thought you might need help.”

“I called the police,” Rose added. Debbie shrugged and slumped into the long couch under a large painting of a woman in a hoop skirt playing a cello beside another at a spinet. The women were lush in their velvets and satins. Debbie Geller was wearing a large shapeless white sweater over blue jeans. All in all, she had a good face: a high forehead and clear eyes, focused on the patched window.

“You’re a son of a bitch, Mr. Cooperman, whatever you say. If this was my house, I’d show you your way out faster than I can think of my own name. Ever get the feeling that you’re not liked, not wanted?”

“Sure, it goes with the territory. Look, I’m as sensitive as the next guy, but my business is your business as long as the community is paying the shot. I know that doesn’t give me special privileges, and my nose gets slammed in the door often enough for me to wonder if I maybe shouldn’t open up a ladies’ ready-to-wear like my old man did. But as long as I’m taking people’s money as an investigator, I’ll have to go on getting my nose slammed. At least it’s better than getting shot at in a big city. Here at least you sometimes get asked in for a cup of tea or coffee.”

“You’re the strangest man.”

“I’m just out to make a living.”

“But your being here is tantamount to an accusation that my sister was involved in this dirty business with her husband.”

“It’s happened before.”

“Not with Ruthie, it hasn’t. I mean, God, just look at her.”

“Sure. I’m as susceptible as the next man to appearances. What would you have me do? I can’t flash his picture to every airline ticket agent in the country.”

“Well, you could try asking the local ones, at least.”

“The cops have done all of that, I can’t compete with the cops. I’m a one-man band.”

“Elastic band and broken. Sorry. I just don’t trust people, I guess. I m not used to strangers.”

“Look, in your place, I wouldn’t want me around either. What would you do in my position?”

“I know that’s not meant as a trick question, Mr. Cooperman, but I can’t help you. Maybe you should leave it to the police and Interpol.”

“Maybe I should. I didn’t bid on this case, you know.”

“Don’t you ever think of the cunning it took to pull off what Larry did? Don’t you ever get a sneaking admiration for the criminals you go after?”

“Mrs. Geller, I’m just a beat-up divorce peeper. Except for a few odd cases, I’ve never been on a case where anybody got much of what they were looking for. Most of the time they were so worried about being found out, they didn’t have time to enjoy their ill-gotten gains. That’s the truth. So, I don’t imagine that I’m ever going to become jealous of some poor guy who has to hide under a false name and run around frightened of his own shadow. Now, from what I know about your brother-in-law, he was a smart man. Maybe you imagine him having the horse-laugh on the rest of us. But I doubt it. Every time a phone rings, he shudders. Every time there’s a knock on the door, he gets sweaty palms. But, you’ll tell me he has all that money. Well, I wonder. How much of it can be flashed in public without getting people suspicious? If it’s in securities, the cops will find him; if it’s in cash, he has to take a chance every time he crosses a border.”

“What about those famous numbered bank accounts in Switzerland?”

“Mrs. Geller, your brother-in-law could have spent two million just setting up a deal like that. You’re talking big money, political money, exchequer and treasury money. Larry’s robbed a bunch of geriatrics in Grantham, Ontario. He’s in the Little League. He only hurt a bunch of old-timers. He didn’t knock off a bank or run over the premier’s dog. A case like this has a lot of local people hot about it, and the cops are going to do their best to find him. I’m going to do my best to find him. But it isn’t going to rate a column inch in Vancouver or Montreal. There aren’t any votes riding on Larry Geller.”

“So what can you do? What can a single private investigator accomplish?”

“Nothing, maybe. Maybe something better than that. Maybe I’ll figure some angle that nobody’s thought of before.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, like, maybe, and I’m just groping for an example you understand, maybe Larry Geller wasn’t in this all by himself. Maybe we should be looking for two people. That’s at least a different tack from the cops. And it might even pay off.”

“I see. Some sort of confederate.”

“That was just an example.” Ruth interrupted our little talk, drawing Debbie away from me, and I watched the sisters talking across the room.

I could see that Debbie still didn’t trust me, and I guess she had good reason not to. I was more dangerous to them in the long run than the mob had been. At the very least I was out to catch up to the father of the two kids I’d just seen shunted off to a safe haven. Any help I could be to my clients wouldn’t help the Gellers at all. The best thing for them to do would be to sell up and get out of Grantham as fast as possible. Whenever the law caught up with Geller there was going to be more publicity and more newspaper headlines.

“I’m sorry for your trouble,” I said without thinking. I don’t know where it came from, it just came. It was probably something I picked up from Frank Bushmill whose office is across the hall from mine. Frank would have the tact for a session like this if he were sober, which was seldom.

Downtown an hour later, I ran into himself at the door to his consulting room. Frank is a chiropodist on his sign and a podiatrist in the phone book. Podiatrist is the metric term, I guess.

“Hello, Benny. You look like you’ve seen Hamlet’s father. Have a look at your face in the mirror. You’ll swear it’s made of Irish linen.” He dragged me into the small toilet at the top of the stairs and made me face my face in the glass. He was right, I could read the tension of the last hour in my mouth and eyes, although, with Frank standing beside me, I couldn’t be dead sure the tension wasn’t something he generated. I was never fully relaxed with Frank around. It was well-known around town that Frank had an unhealthy appetite for strange flesh. I always had to be on guard in case it was mine.

“I just came back from a mob scene outside the Geller place.”

“Jayzus! The print’s not dry on the paper, and they’re out there like that, eh? Fat lot of hooligans! Hangin’s too good for them. Trying to get them out of the kip, were they now?” Frank was sounding more Irish than usual. He must have been reading that Flann O’Brien fellow again. Frank was always at me to read this or that, and it seemed that every second book that he waved under my nose was by this Flann O’Brien. I managed to read some of the books he lent me, but I couldn’t make head or tail of the O’Brien ones. Frank had taken it into his head that I needed more education. Maybe for a chiropodist with a bent appetite I was ignorant, but when I finished at the collegiate I felt I had more education than I could manage. In none of my cases so far had I been able to put E=mc
²
to any account. “Come into the office and we’ll have a quiet jar together. I’ve got an hour before my next patient. You can tell me all about it.” He led the way to his door then through it into the office smelling of chemicals barely covering the odour of troubled feet. A bottle with his own name on it was produced and in a moment we were both holding and clinking glasses. Frankly, I wanted to talk to somebody about the case. The drink I didn’t need. I never do.

“Frank, I feel like I’m in a room without windows or doors. The walls are like polished granite, like on tombstones, and there aren’t even inscriptions to get a finger-hold in.”

“This Geller business! Families,” he muttered. “They close ranks to the world. But I’d like to hear what they’re after saying among themselves. I warrant that would bear hearing. I gather they’ve made themselves into clams whenever you showed up?”

“Sure. And now that the story’s public property, it’ll be hard to see them on anything but television from now on.” I took a sip of drink and Frank poured himself another.

“If you ask me, Benny, that fellow must have had some haunt or other to do his mischief in. The paper said they found nothing in his office. Ergo, he had another office. Some spot where he could leave papers that wouldn’t be traced back to him. Maybe he had a girlfriend. He could have left his copybook at her place.” Frank began pulling at his necktie to give him better circulation near the thinking parts. “A girl-friend! I like that. She could be the key to the whole business, my lad.”

“Geller was a homebody. Regular habits, no playing around.”

“There you are. A clever bandit, that’s what he is. Never a false step; never a sudden move. Very tricky indeed, is your Mr. Larry Geller.” There was no stopping him now. He elaborated on his theory for the next five minutes, By the time I’d reached the midway mark of my drink I was getting to like the idea. If Geller could fool all his clients, why not the rest of his kith and kin? It was a point to work on. It was the beginning of a finger-hold in the granite face. If I finished the drink, I’d have figured out the bugger’s hiding place, only to find it empty when the sober light of dawn came in my window.

When I left Frank he hardly noticed. He was spinning a fine web of intrigue over the whole case. He remembered a case in Dublin in the 1890s where a doctor was discovered to have been living a bigamous life with two profitable practices. I tried to imagine Geller doing that within the greater Grantham area. Dublin must be a lot bigger, I couldn’t see Geller getting away with an act like that for more than forty-five minutes around here. I wondered whether the Dublin doctor took off for the same reasons Geller did. What did I know about Geller anyway? I’d talked to Rabbi Meltzer and Mr. Tepperman about him. I’d interviewed his family. But what did I know? Was he the type to have a girl-friend on the side, someone to share the money with down south? I didn’t know him that well. I tried to parade the images I could remember of him grinning and shaking hands at a wedding. I could see him slapping Mort Slater’s back at his boy’s bar mitzvah. I could see him at a head table sitting near the rabbi and the president of the shul waiting for the kiddush to be said and keeping his eyes on the twisted loaf of challah waiting to be sliced. I had to admit it to myself. I was still crawling up slippery sides of smooth granite. The only thing I knew for sure was printed on my driver’s licence.

SEVEN

Old Man Bolduc, Alex’s father, was hoeing in the small backyard on Nelson Street. He was ruddy with short-cropped grey hair. His dark green shirt looked too hot for the day and too big for his frame. The two-inch belt that held up heavy industrial trousers was working on a new hole burned about a foot from the trailing end. The toes of his yellow work-boots peeked out from under his rolled cuffs. The sun shone on the skeleton of a canoe, and through its ribs green shoots were reaching up into the light. Near it, a rusted oil drum was crammed with old lath with chunks of plaster adhering to the wood. The grass in front of the unpainted porch was sparse and defeated, the walk cracked and uneven.

“Mr. Bolduc, is Alex home?” The old man didn’t look up. I repeated myself and the hoe stopped in mid-air as he turned to give me the once-over. His eyes were a watery blue that looked like they were seeing through wet doughnuts.

“Who wants see Alex?” The hoe was far enough off the ground for me to give him a straight answer. I told him I was an old friend from school. At that he softened, seemed to get even shorter and shrugged in the direction of the pink flamingo on the aluminum screen door. “It’s his house. He lets me live here. He’s in dere. Go ahead, knock.” I did and waited.

I hadn’t seen Alex Bolduc since I’d last been to the Grainger Park Lacrosse Box. There he’d been electric. As a hockey fan, I didn’t quite approve of this primitive approach to my favourite sport. Screened in, the players ran up and down the box like they were on skates, and the ball whistled through the air and moved from stick to stick with such precision that it must have been guided by remote control from up in the broadcasting booth. But lacrosse doesn’t attract the ink that hockey gets. So, it was on ice that Alex became a local hero. The papers watched him for a few seasons and then bounced rumours back and forth about which of the National League teams he was going to. Alex turned whatever he did into something between athletics and ballet.