A Victim Must Be Found (24 page)

TWENTY

“They took the beam and the central control panel.”

“If they’re gonna get in, they’re gonna get in.”

“As soon as I saw the signs, I knew it was the kiss-off for the TV and the VCR, but they even took a vice off my workbench. I mean, I thought they didn’t bother with heavy stuff like that?”

“Yeah, you expect antiques and expensive light stuff like that. Now, Louise, she once lost a coat. It wasn’t all fur, but with a fur collar. I can understand that.”

“Yeah, but a heavy vice. It musta weighed fifty pounds!”

I was sitting on the sidelines waiting for my car. It was high on the hoist and two mechanics were fitting new tires. I hadn’t intended to supervise the work, but they had told me it would be ready around noon and I believed them. Both wore greasy white coveralls and caps without a peak in front. One was tall and skinny, with a face full of vertical lines. The other was short and skinny with a bushy red beard that didn’t belong. Their conversation was punctuated by the whirr of the airgun from time to time as they cemented the nuts in place until the final trumpet. It was no good telling them that I might have to fix a flat myself on the highway some time. They didn’t follow the argument. What’s the sense of leaving the nuts loose when they could be tight?

By the time I drove away, I knew all about a burglary and the security system that made it possible. I was wondering why they stole the vice. Maybe they needed one. It could be as simple as that. I wondered what I was going to do next. I tried to think when I’d eaten last. Ah, yes, breakfast in bed. That reminded me of the note I’d put in my pocket from the great man himself. I took it out and worried away at the flap with my little red pocket knife.

Dear Mr. Cooperman,

I recognize that looking after Anna was not part of our bargain, but I appreciate it just the same.

Yrs,

J.A.

A pink fifty-dollar bill fluttered from the envelope to my lap. I found myself suddenly very hot at Jonah Abraham. If the fifty wasn’t part of my fee, then it must have been a tip. I don’t like tips.

At the Diana Sweets I ordered a chopped egg salad sandwich on untoasted white bread with a glass of milk and a vanilla sundae. This was the kind of food I could understand: simple, readily available, difficult to ruin. It was part of my very conservative character, I guess, to keep returning to the things that matter, what Frank Bushmill calls the immutable basics. I thought about all the things in the world I couldn’t live without while I finished the first half of the diagonally cut sandwich. I liked the way they worked pimento olives into the egg salad. A very nice touch, I always thought, whenever I’d been away from them for a long period. The egg salad sandwich was one of my immutable basics. A place of my own is another. The third is buying a girl a drink because I think well of her and not because her old man is paying my salary. I could already feel the white bread making a knot in my stomach. I reminded myself to buy more antacid tablets next time I was near a drugstore.

The Stephenson House hadn’t changed since the death of Pambos Kiriakis. It still presented an ivy-covered brick front to the visitors arriving from the main gateway. Under the ivy, you could see where later additions to the original central heap had been made down the years. From the front, you got no idea that the back end plunged down the bank of the Eleven Mile Creek to pick up three extra storeys. The creek here was at its swiftest, but the view was uniformly dismal. The meanderings and curves had been straightened out over a hundred years ago when it was made to serve as a chief part of the Welland Canal. More recently, it had lost a tiny island when engineers had further smoothed the watercourse to accommodate an increased runoff from hydro-electric projects some miles upstream. The hotel had taken over part of an old brewery. The bricks had lent authenticity to the new dining-room with huge out-of-period windows that looked up the manicured slopes of Oak Park towards the TV station. Part of the land was used for the additional parking that success had made necessary. As I got out of the car, parked between clearly drawn white lines on the fresh asphalt, I saw no signs of mourning. No crêpe on the door to frighten away tourists or conventioneers. In fact it was business as usual with a big smile right up to the moment I asked the receptionist whether Mrs. Kiriakis was in. His smile disappeared and a suitable dour expression was substituted. “That was terrible about Mr. Kiriakis,” he said. “Just terrible. Will you call 311 on the house phone, please. Have a good day.”

I hadn’t felt low when I came in, but that receptionist scuttled my morale. I walked over to the beige-coloured house phone and was buzzed up to Room 311, but there was no reply. I wondered about the receptionist. Was he born wishing people a good day, did he learn it in school along with the height of Niagara Falls and the date of the Battle of Hastings? Was it something for which he got a commendation in hotel arts in some place of higher learning? I wasn’t really curious, but it made me sad as I replaced the phone and decided to have a look in the restaurant and bar on my way out.

She was in the bar. I hadn’t seen Linda for maybe six or seven years, but she hadn’t changed all that much. Linda was never a raving beauty, and she’d held her own on that. In her late forties she was still striking, almost handsome, in her tailored green suit. It wasn’t a Toronto suit. It looked more like New York or at least Montreal. I walked around the long way, so she’d have a moment to recognize me. The smile wasn’t as automatic as that of the receptionist. It was more of an organic outgrowth of a real emotion. And when it came to her face, it belonged there.

“Benny, how are you?” she said, taking my hand. “Are you alone? Please, sit down.” I did that and we exchanged small talk, trying to postpone the inevitable pause and what came after that.

“Oh, he was always fair to me, Benny. I never wanted for anything ever. We kept in touch about important things. He knew how to make me laugh. That’s what I’m going to miss most, I think. He knew what made me happy even when he knew it wasn’t him any more. Most people write him off as a jumped-up kid, just off the boat and with more ambition than Alexander the Great. He was that all right, but that doesn’t even begin to sum him up. What am I going on about, Benny, you knew him. You know how thoughtful he was.”

I agreed and we talked about Pambos’s fun and his tenaciousness. He’d go a long way to match the right present to the right party. “I don’t want to hold a wake right here in the bar, Benny, but I’m going to miss him.” Linda signalled to a waiter who had been hovering near my elbow. “What’ll you have, Benny?” I ordered a rye and ginger ale without thinking too much about it, and before he got away, Linda handed her own drink back to the waiter. “This doesn’t have any sting left, Karl. Could you get me another?”

“Yes, Mrs. Kiriakis.”

“See, they all remember me from the old days. When we were young and happy and you could wipe off a stain with spit.”

“How long are you going to be in town?”

“I don’t care. Two weeks, two months, two years. I don’t know. I’ve got a share of this albatross around my neck. Want to buy a very chic hotel, Benny? I didn’t think so. It’ll all work out,” she said, and then looked at me with the eyes of a ten-year-old. “Won’t it?” The waiter put down the drinks and cleared empty glasses that had been piling up before I’d arrived.

“When did you talk to him last?” I asked, and then worried that it would seem too much like I was working on the case. But Linda only knew me as a divorce investigator from the days when I could make a living by following people to lovers’ lane or to the Black Duck Motel out old Number Eight.

“I last talked to Pambos about two weeks ago. It was my birthday and he called up my apartment in Montreal. He never forgot my birthday, not Pambos. He was the most thoughtful man in the world. I just couldn’t stand to live with him, that’s all. There’s no crime in that.”

“Was he worried about anything?”

“Oh, he was always worried about something. Let’s see, let’s see, he told me about a friend of his who’d died. And then …”

“Arthur Tallon?”

“That’s right, the art dealer. And then we just talked about the happy times: the trip to Bermuda, our cottage on the Lake of Bays, skiing in Arizona, the month in England. All that.”

“And that’s all?”

“It was just to say happy birthday, really. The rest was to fill up the three minutes. He could be very charming on the phone. He could almost make me forget how much I hated married life. If I let that guy near me for a minute, he’d sweet-talk me back into bed with him and right away I’d be picking up his socks and shorts all over again. Life’s too short to spend it picking up anybody’s socks and shorts all the time, right?”

“What if they belong to Mr. Right?”

“Mr. Right picks up his own socks and he doesn’t wear shorts.”

“Have you talked to the police yet?”

“Yes, I talked to a Sergeant Savas. He knew Pambos, so that made it better. There’s so much about a death that’s maddening: the way people are always handling you, like you’re not all there, the professional manner, you know what I mean? Savas was human and I liked that.”

“He’s a good cop and he liked Pambos. He’ll find out who did this.”

“You’re not drinking. Come on, Benny. Help me through the next half-hour, will you?”

I drank a big sip from my glass and settled down for a long siege. Linda had never been particularly friendly to me in the past, but she’d accepted me as one of the many people in Pambos’s background, one of the yardsticks that reminded him of how high he’d climbed. Maybe I’m just imagining that I was important to him. I tried to remember his kindness to me just three days ago. Linda was talking when I looked up. I could hear her voice, and I caught the drift. She was talking about their favourite holidays. “We travelled very well together for a couple who got on so badly at home,” she said, adding, “although we had a monumental fight in the railway station in Milan and another in the middle of Omonia Square in Athens. He had a terrible bump of direction and was always charging off south when he wanted to go east.” I nodded and sipped. She sipped and had her glass changed at regular intervals. “I’ll never forget the time, though, when he left me in London to shop while he went on one of his historical expeditions to the south. That was our last trip to England, the summer we separated, July ‘85. He called it a farewell present. He was gone two days down in Kent, while I had the run of the shops along Oxford Street. And you know what? I missed him and his twisted sense of direction and was very happy to see him back at the hotel again.” Linda went on in this vein for the next hour, then I urged her to go back to her room for a rest. She held her drinks well, but she’d consumed more than enough for both of us. She took my suggestion without argument and I walked her to the elevator. “I’ll be here for a few weeks, Benny. Please come back and see me, won’t you?” I said I would and I watched the double doors close.

When I got back to my office, I put the car in Pa’s old space at the bottom of the lane and walked up the slope to St. Andrew Street. I scouted the front door before going in. I saw no new desperate characters lurking about along with all the usual desperate characters. My old friend Kogan was on his corner and waved a greeting in my direction through the one-way traffic. Dr. Bushmill had a full waiting room, judging by the sound of conversation coming through the frosted glass of his door. My own door was unbreached, a good thing for a change. As I get older, I think I like surprises, even pleasant ones, less and less.

I scooped up my junk mail from the obscene pile it made inside my door and carried it to my desk. The answering service had two calls for me that looked interesting: one from Paddy Miles of Arthur Tallon’s gallery and the other from Peter MacCulloch of Secord University. I tried the gallery number and got nowhere. I lit a cigarette and put my feet up before trying the second number. The junk mail again failed to lure me into a world of imitation Dutch clocks and appliances that run from the lighter in my car. The secretary at Secord got me MacCulloch’s secretary, who in turn, after a routine cross-examination, got me Peter MacCulloch.

“Ah, Mr. Cooperman! Glad you could get back to me so quickly,” he said and I wondered what he was trying to pull. “Look, I’ve been going over my inventories again. You know the art collection belonging to the university?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’ve found the most extraordinary thing!”

“Well, I’m glad you decided to share it with me.”

“In going through the lists very carefully, you understand, I came across two paintings that were on loan from Arthur Tallon’s gallery that had got mixed in with the university’s own collection.”

“No!” I don’t think I gave a very good performance, but MacCulloch wasn’t interested in my believing him. His problems ended when he told me.

“Yes, isn’t that an amazing coincidence?”

“Extraordinary,” I allowed. “How about your own personal collection? I bet you had a couple of surprises there too?”

“Boy, news really travels fast in a small town, doesn’t it? Yes. You could have knocked me over with a feather.”

“Amazing, as you say yourself. And to think I’d just been to see you a couple of days ago about that very matter. Well, it’s very public-spirited of you to come forward like this, Mr. MacCulloch. I’ll bet there are a few others who will take up their own inventories and make similar discoveries. But I’ll remember that you were the first. What exactly did you find?”

“Ah, yes, I found three Lamb landscapes, a portrait of a woman and two oil sketches on birch panels.”

“Well, that’s quite a find. Congratulations. Have you told Paddy Miles about it?”

“I just got off the phone with him a moment before you called.”

“Good,” I said. “That will make my life a lot easier from now on, Mr. MacCulloch. Thank you very much for giving me this preview of the news.”

“Oh, not at all, Mr. Cooperman. Not at all. Always glad to help out.”

When I got off the phone, I wondered how he could have just got off the phone, when I’d got no answer from the gallery at the time he claimed to have been talking to Paddy Miles. Either my telephone or MacCulloch was lying. And by now I was getting to know MacCulloch very well. I tried the number at the gallery again. The line was still not answering. And I was getting a little uncomfortable sitting behind my desk, feeling smug about Peter MacCulloch.