Getting Away With Murder (16 page)

SEVENTEEN

The road that wound its way up the Escarpment to Secord University was the road I practised on for my driving test many years ago. It was narrow, curving and steep, and, remarkably, totally unchanged in twenty years. There are all sorts of intersections that are carved up regularly by the Department of Public Works, intersections that offer a clear view on all sides. I wasn’t complaining. God knows there’s little enough of my home town left the way it used to be.

That night, this familiar hill was thick with snow, and slush. The evening rush hour hadn’t cleared much of a path; it just made the climb slower. No salt or gravel had been scattered to make our way easier. I could see tracks where a car had applied too much brake coming down. The car could just be seen off to the side in a thicket of saplings. To my right, as I came safely to the top, lay Secord University, named after the heroic wife who brought news of a forthcoming battle to the British officer whose headquarters were not much farther down the road. There was a commemorative plaque attached to the ruins of the house containing the ambiguous information that Laura Secord spent three nights under this roof with Lieutenant (later Colonel) Fitzgibbon.

The university was housed in one huge tower sitting on the edge of the Escarpment, where it beamed the virtues of higher education to the hundreds of thousands of people living on the plain below (to say nothing of those in passing lake boats).

Smart Alex was a watering-hole for undergraduates. The decor and atmosphere, as well as the crowd, spoke loudly of early cynicism and idealistic values twisted around a pretzel. The beer was fairly cheap and available on draught. The circular room was divided into curved areas on two or three levels, with a long bar running along one side for those who were looking for a listener. The space was punctuated with relics from the past: figureheads, anchors, gum machines, penny scales and old-fashioned business signs.

I sat down on a stool and ordered a draught of the local Grindstone lager and waited. It was still about seven minutes to nine. I watched, by way of the mirror behind the bar, three young women with short hair being sandwiched between crew-cut linemen or their look-alikes. They were all having a great time ordering burgers and potato skins. When one of them caught sight of a sign that read “bust developer,” the young woman who least needed this sort of therapy began pounding the nearest male on his chest. They all thought it was very funny. Glasses of beer were emptied as the food was consumed and new glasses appeared to replace them.

“Hi! Come to spy out the talent?” It was Hart Wise and he was right on time. Hart was full of surprises. I moved my gaze away from the pretty sophomores to the expensive leather jacket—black, naturally—and blue jeans of Abram Wise’s son. The stiff, cold wind that came with the snow had reddened his face, so that it borrowed colour from his hair. Hart was wearing a grey sweater under the jacket, which he had taken off and placed on his stool before sitting down. He stuffed a wool cap into the dangling sleeve of the jacket. Wise ordered a draught beer from another small Ontario brewery and we both settled into putting foam moustaches on our upper lips.

“Where do you stand in your father’s will?” I asked when we had placed empty glasses on the deck.

Hart smiled at my forthrightness, I guess, and said: “Go fuck yourself.” He said it smiling, so I ignored the suggestion.

“You know there have been attempts on his life?”

“What else is new? That’s the sort of life he’s led. He’s a first-rate candidate for a closed coffin. He always was.”

“But you’re not trying to put him there?”

“Hey-hey! Let’s keep this friendly. I couldn’t be on worse terms with my father. We hate one another’s guts. There’s too much history between us to change that. But I’ve been trying to find out who’s behind this since my Mom told me. Not a word of this to the old man, you understand?” I nodded in some surprise, more to see if I was still hearing correctly than as a promise of anything.

“What have you found out?”

“This latest crop of hired men are the worst set he has ever had. Apart from Mickey, who isn’t just one of the boys and has always been above suspicion, I wouldn’t trust the rest with delivering handbills.”

“Mickey’s not above suspicion. That’s the first rule. Nobody is above suspicion. It’s the only way to operate.”

“Okay, okay! I hear what you’re saying. But as for the rest of them …!”

“Where did he find them?”

“He picks them up through the jobs they do for him. If they work out, after a while he reels them in a little closer. Finally, they’re working for the house. Phil Green’s been there longest after Mickey. He’s not as dumb as he looks, but not much smarter either. Sidney, he’s the driver, has a record of petty crime going back to the seventies. He’s great as a driver, but he doesn’t know which side of a stamp to lick.”

“That leaves one.”

“Sylvester Ryan’s a punk that fell off a motorcycle and landed where my old man found him, bought him some new clothes and gave him a job. Syl’s loyal, as long as he’s being paid, and tough, but that’s all. Dad thinks he can be pointed against artillery to advantage. He hasn’t been tested yet.” And then he added, “As far as I know.”

“Is that place of your dad’s an arsenal? I haven’t seen much of it?”

“It could hold off the United States Marines for a few hours. The place is well set up and has an escape tunnel that comes out behind the house.”

“I thought I had a headache before I talked to you, now it’s worse. Why do you keep up this feud with your old man?”

“Didn’t my mother tell you?”

“She told me what she thought. That’s not the same as asking you.” He was halfway down his third draught and I was just starting in on my second. He paused to think before speaking. A good precaution.

“We’ve been scrapping since I was a kid. He was the one who sent my mother away. He tried to explain it, but that made things worse. He said she’d always be there for me, but whenever I wanted her, it ‘wasn’t convenient.’ The same thing happened with my dog, Sparky. ‘He’s still your dog, Hart. He just doesn’t live here any more.’ Is it any wonder we fought?”

“So you blame him for your rotten life?”

“I didn’t ask to be born, Cooperman! I didn’t plan on being the son of Abe Wise, the big-shot gangster. Give me a break!”

“Sorry. Just trying to understand. All of the people I’ve talked to are sure that the threat to Abe’s life comes from close to home, not from his business contacts. What do you think?”

“As a crook, he plays it as straight as he can, as straight as anybody. He doesn’t talk to the cops, they don’t ask him any questions. It’s a funny game of cops and robbers. They make the rules up themselves out of I don’t know what, but they all stick by them once they’re there.”

“Isn’t it peculiar that he’s never been caught?”

“He’s clever. He keeps his secrets and pays everybody along the way.”

“Does he pay off the cops?”

“Ha! He’d love to hear you say that. They come in too many flavours for that. Besides even the cops are occasionally hit by bouts of moral correctness. It would be a bad investment.”

“I’ve been asking about Deputy Chief Neustadt. You know anything there?”

“Nope. I never had the pleasure. What’s he got to do with anything?”

“He may have been murdered for one thing. He probably was, for another. And your old man may have been behind it. He may have been defending himself against Neustadt before the old cop did something to him. There was bad blood. That’s known.”

“I draw a blank there.”

“I was admiring your TR2 the other day.”

“I knew you’d get to the car.”

“Well?”

“So, I wrote a bad cheque. I’ll cover it. I told you.”

“You know that Shaw and his lawyer, York, are trying to use you to get some cash from your old man?”

“Lighten up, Cooperman.” He finished off the last of the beer in front of him and wiped his mouth before speaking again. “Have you seen my sister yet?”

“Not yet. I may get lucky.”

“When you do, give her my love,” he said with a sneer. That was the first sign of the Hart I’d seen at his mother’s house; and we’d been sitting at the bar in Smart Alex for nearly an hour.

“I’ll remember that,” I said. He put a bill on the bar and slipped me a grin before grabbing his jacket and heading out past the three sophomores and their football heros to his TR2. I finished my beer, thought about the special burgers with curry fries, and placed an order with a waitress who tried to make me feel that she was having one hell of a time looking after all the empty tables that the snowstorm had created. Over my meal, which was better than I expected, I tried to assess all that I had just heard, and figure out what it told me that I hadn’t known when I got up in the morning.

EIGHTEEN

The tree that Dulcie Osborne had crashed into was still standing beside the sharp curve on the Lewiston-Youngstown highway. Even through the storm, you could still see where she and many other drivers had ploughed into it after misjudging the curve. In her case the steering of her car had been tampered with, so the death was not purely accidental. That had happened years ago, when I was first dealing with a case in Niagara Falls. I hadn’t been down this road often enough in the interval to become inured to the sudden appearance of the tree as I came around the curve. There was a guard-rail now. I was safe from the deadly white oak, although I had nearly come a cropper a few times on the terrible roads that night.

The Patriot Volunteer hadn’t changed either. You could hear the live band from the parking lot. At five to one, the place was jumping and, if the licence plates in the lot told the truth, most of the jumpers paid Canadian taxes. The hat-check girl fought me for my coat and shook the snow from the collar like it was a vicuna. Most hat-checks have no sense of humour. The maitre d’ couldn’t find an empty table until I crossed his palm with paper. He led the way to a small table close to the double kitchen doors, where news of the orchestra could be had by e-mail.

Basically, the Patriot Volunteer was got up to look like a frontier fort, with waiters dressed as minutemen and waitresses in hoop-skirts. A collection of muskets, drums, bunting in red, white and blue furnished most of the decor. There were reproductions of scenes from the Revolutionary War: the crossing of the Niagara on the morning of the Battle of Queenston Heights, the shelling of Fort Niagara, the burning of Niagara-on-the-Lake. The New Yorkers tended, just as we did on our side of the river, to confuse the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. They were both costume pictures with three-cornered hats and clap pipes. The orchestra, a band of seven or eight sidemen, made no attempt at historical accuracy, so they blended better with the clientele. Most of the men were necktied and jacketed; the women wore cocktail dresses, except for a few in long dresses— suggesting that this was still a place to come to put the icing on the evening you had already had.

When the waiter insisted that waiting was something one did while holding a drink, I tried that red stuff that I’d run into at the Wellington Court: Campari and soda. The waiter frowned as though such a drink was quite out of place in colonial America. I thought that it should fit in very well considering that the cocktail was invented just down the road at Lewiston.

Julie came in with an entourage of five people: three men and two women. The three women together couldn’t have weighed much more than two hundred pounds. One was blonde, hacked about the head with sheep-shears and wearing a long man’s undershirt and making less of an impression in it than I would. Her collarbones were her most prominent frontal appendages. The other model, I took the first apparition to be of that profession too, was a gaminelike presence with red hair sculpted close to her head all the way around. She looked a little more womanly than the first: I could tell right off when she was facing me. She wore a long dress of rumpled earthy colours and never smiled. The three men were wearing dinner jackets, one in pink, one white and one in a floral pastel print. They all surrounded Julie, who seemed to be eating it up like chocolate, if she allowed herself to eat chocolate. I recognized her froth her parents: she had her mother’s height and sharp features and her father’s animation. She wore an amber-coloured dress that clung to her body like it had been put on with shellac. It was a good body, if a little undernourished. Her smile, under a set of big brown eyes, was nothing less than terrific.

They marched through a gap between the tables, followed by a platoon of minutemen, busboys and the maitre d’, forming squares around my tiny table, then moved off in good order to a big table with a Reserved sign and flowers on it. I was dragged along as a hostage. If we were any closer to the orchestra, we would have had to join the union. I carried my Campari and a minuteman brought my soda. How Julie recognized me, I’ll never know. Champagne came to the table in a magnum, with pink foil on top. There were also cans of Diet Coke and Pepsi for the working girls as well as bottled bubbly water.

“I’m Julie Long,” said Julie, whose last name had been the chief mystery I’d run into so far. “My Mom told me what you looked like. If that hadn’t worked, I was going to test voices. It would have been fun.” The pastel-jacketed guy in the blue aviator glasses was introduced to me as Didier Santerre, the publisher of
Mode Magazine
. The gamine was Morna McGuire, the local modelling success story, and I didn’t catch the full names of the others. The blonde was Christa. One of the men was a make-up artist called Pierre, and the other was Felix, a designer of rainwear from New York, who apparently was paying.

“How are we going to talk with this floor show in our laps?” I inquired. Julie just rolled her eyes.

“You have to forgive us, we’ve been on an all-day shoot on the
Maid of the Mist.
You can’t believe how cold it was. We nearly sank the boat with our electric generator. We needed so much light!”

“Couldn’t wait for spring?”

“Can you believe this weather? It’s—”

One has to fight the weather in this crazy business,” said Santerre. “When it’s cold, one shoots for summer. When it’s hot, naturally, one shoots with artificial snow and ice. But otherwise, we would have to anticipate the season by an impossible margin. The lead-time is bad enough already.” We exchanged names and handshakes.