Getting Away With Murder (17 page)

“We had to get them to put the boat in the water early. Imagine what that cost?” the blonde interjected.

“What’s your place in all this?” I asked Julie.

“Julie has flair, style éclat,” the boyfriend answered again for her. I was beginning to regret the bridge toll I’d paid to get here and the one I was going to have to pay on the way back. Julie tried on a shy smile at Santerre’s praise. It didn’t suit her.

The designer, Felix, whose pink “smoking” appeared to have lost its lapels, was pouring out the champagne into far more glasses than there were people. The models were covering the glasses nearest them with their hands. One said she never drank champagne, the other said she ingested nothing after six. I liked “ingested.” She added that it was an inflexible rule.

“Who’s trying to kill your father?” I asked over giggles, and Julie’s turned head as she spoke with Santerre in French. When she turned back to me, with a little flip of her head and a smile, she said that her mother had robbed her of a night’s sleep with the news.

“Can’t imagine my life without Daddy,” she said, biting down on a slim piece of carrot. “He has always encouraged my interest in fashion and design.”

“I was guessing you got this from your mother.”

“True. Mommy adores clothes. She loves Sonia Rykiel better than the truth. But Daddy actually puts his money where his mouth is.”

“I thought you two didn’t get along?”

“Heavens no! He loves it now that I’ve found myself. Now that Didier and I have found one another.”

“That was written in the stars,
chérie,”
Santerre added. From it I guessed that
Mode Magazine
was in need of a backer with the financial clout Abram Wise could give it. As long as Wise was putting up part of the money, Julie could think herself into any social butterfly net she liked and Daddy would keep on paying. But, after all, that was what Abe Wise did best.

“Are you two planning to make this permanent?” I asked, trying on a wide ingenuous smile.

“Just as soon as we can make it legal,” Julie said, patting Santerre’s left hand with hers. There was a white mark on the third finger of one of the hands. It was Didier’s. “I’m still legally married to my old John Long but not for long,” Julie said making Didier and Morna laugh. The others were involved, thank God, in a conversation of their own. “But my divorce will be final in three months. I’ve already got my decree nisi. So, I’m going to do the bride thing again. Getting to be a habit with me, as the song goes, but this time, I think Didier’s going to make an honest woman of me.”

“My compliments to the bride and congratulations to the groom or vice versa.” Both beamed at me and then at one another, exchanging hugs and kisses.

“Benny,” Julie said, leaning into me in a friendly but unnecessary way, “would you be an angel and get a white paper bag from the front seat of our car?” She said it in such an intimate way that I thought she had fallen under the magic spell of my charm. In fact, the reverse, for the moment, was true. “I’ve got a perishing headache and there are some Tylenol there.” She took car keys from her bag and told me the car to look for. I took them from her and made my way out into the dark and the snow which was still coming down.

I found the dark red Le Baron under a white shroud and the paper bag with the bottle of pills inside. On leaving, I noticed that one of the headlights had been damaged. Expensive repairs. The night was cold on the back of me, and my fingers tingled from handling the car door. I rushed away from the unpleasant truth about the drive home into the noise and light of the Patriot Volunteer.

“You’re an angel, Benny!” Julie said, as she took two pills with a swallow from her champagne glass.

“It’s a terrible night out there!” I said, hugging myself and trying to get warm.

“Let’s leave it out,” drawled Christa, who was holding a sipping straw, and trying to focus on my eyes. Felix and Pierre had straws in front of them too, although they were drinking champagne. Didier was twisting one around in his fingers and got rid of it under the table. Julie lent me an arm to restore my circulation. Santerre applied stimulants of a more conventional kind than they had just treated themselves to. I moved in closer to Julie and tried to keep my mind on my job.

“Tell me, Julie, has your father ever mentioned his feud with Ed Neustadt to you?”

“Is that the one who just died?” I nodded. “I think he once said that he was the only man who ever questioned him in a police station. Imagine! With all he’s done! It’s incredible!”

“But, your father has no record. That means, Neustadt didn’t follow through. He was still ‘assisting the authorities,’ they call it, and then they let him walk. In law, a miss is as good as a mile. Why do you think he hated Neustadt?”

“Ask him. He never told me. Maybe he hates to be beholden to anyone. I can understand that.” She reached over to get another glass of champagne and toasted me over the rim. She was in great spirits and I was rapidly going downhill. Everybody who knows Abe Wise says just about the same thing about him. If there was a conspiracy, at least it had a good leader. I was yawning into my wine glass. It was time to go home. Our little group was being closely watched by other people in the room. When the designer got up to dance with Christa, the blonde ragamuffin in the underwear shirt, the waiters stared. Didier got up and pulled Julie after him. He must be French after all, I thought. I couldn’t think of anyone I knew leading the way to the dance floor.

“You’re a detective?” Morna asked. I smiled a sad admittance.

“I’ve got an office on St. Andrew Street,” I said, wondering what I could say to this exotic creature.

“My grandfather worked with Pinkerton’s for thirty-five years. He used to tell us stories about his cases. He should have been a writer.”

“They’re a big outfit. Go back to the Civil War.”

“I knew that. What’s his face, the writer, used to be a Pinkerton.”

“Hammett,” I said. “Dashiell Hammett.” She had lovely deep green eyes under her red hair.

“Do you want to dance?” she said with a golden smile.

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

NINETEEN

Anna was away early: signs of her after-breakfast cleaning around the sink were in evidence. A half-pot of coffee was inviting me to start the day. There was a container of bran for me to pour on top of my Harvest Crunch.

In the shower I thought about all of the characters I had met the night before. It was a peep-hole into another world, a world that my father should know a lot about, if he had ever read a fashion magazine. But he hadn’t. His knowledge of women’s ready-to-wear came not from
Vogue
or
Women’s Wear Daily
, but from his pals the manufacturers along Spadina Avenue in Toronto. Every other Wednesday, he drove to the provincial capital to buy stock and play a few hands of gin rummy with his cronies. After a corned beef sandwich at Shopsowitz’s Deli, he would visit the factories and have a shot of schnapps in a showroom before a few more hands of cards. This was the world of fashion as he knew it. To him it was all merchandise. It could have been men’s wear or hats as far as he was concerned.

At least Pa knew more about the business than I did, I thought, while I was rinsing the shampoo out of my hair. It had fed us and clothed us for over twenty years. He had sent Sam through university and medical school. He would have anted up for me to go to college too if I’d had the inclination. He made a good living for a high-school drop-out and knew as much about the fashion business as he had to know in order to be a success. In a place like this, that wasn’t much. Me, all I knew about the business was how to make coat and suit boxes from the pile of flat cardboard Pa kept under the coat rack. Sam and I both got our first taste of the commercial world making tops and bottoms for a penny each on lazy Sunday afternoons while Pa was going over his accounts or drawing up an ad for the
Beacon
.

I was no reader of
Vogue
either. Anna was and she had told me that Morna McGuire was not just a model, but a supermodel, which meant that she could make good her boast that she wouldn’t get out of bed for less than ten thousand dollars.

After cleaning my teeth a second time to get the bran out, I walked to the office. My service had messages from Dave Rogers and Major Colin Patrick for me. Both of them would talk to me, one at eleven and the other at noon. I put in time working on my interim report for Wise.

Once again I was sitting face to face with Dave Rogers. Only this time we were perched on bales of rusted eighth-inch wire in his yard off North Street. The sign outside read “C. Rogers & Sons: Steel Fabricators.” Earlier, we had been walking up and down the aisles or paths that led through the canyons of metal heaps. It was filled with every sort of metal imaginable, except maybe lead for toy soldiers. But who knows? Along the right-hand side of the path through the rusty forest were bales of wire: bright red copper, green, older copper, oxidized steel hoops looking like great balls of knitting wool gone off a little in the rain. On Dave’s side were stacked shoulder-high piles of H-beams. In and out of the pile three or four feral cats wove their way looking for vermin. Dave picked a place to perch. He lit up a cigarette and I found a final Halls at the end of a package.

“I told Wise I’d talk to you once. I didn’t say I’d have you for lunch and dinner too. Are you going to phone up every time you run into a problem? What kind of detective are you?”

“We’re talking about your childhood friend’s life here, Mr. Rogers.”

“Call me Dave for Christ’s sake and let’s get through with this.”

“Tell me about Neustadt.” He wasn’t in a hurry to give me a pat answer. I could afford to wait.

“He wouldn’t tell you?” I shook my head.

“He told me a few little things,” I said, “but nothing important. Why was Abe so glad to see the last of that cop? Why did he practically dance on his grave at the funeral?”

“You saw that? I can believe it; I can believe it.”

“Good for you. Now, let me have the truth.”

“Abe, you know, is a self-made man. Nobody gave him a handout. Nobody handed him a family legacy. Abe’s proud of that. But that cop, Neustadt, gave him a break when he was still a kid. Neustadt gave him a second chance when he was pinched with a pillowcase full of silver knives and forks. They had him dead to rights, but Neustadt turned him loose. Anybody else and Neustadt would be remembered with honour and thanks. Ha! Not Abe Wise! Wise hated that. He thought the bum was soft. He couldn’t find a good thing to say about him. Can you beat that?”

“It still doesn’t explain the intensity, Dave. All that happened back just after the war. How much baggage are you still carrying around from the fifties? Not much, I’ll bet.”

“Oh, I always thought that Neustadt had him on the carpet for a while, gave him a bad time, scared the shit out of him, then let him go.”

“I guess … I guess. Still …”

“Who is it you’re going to hate if you’re Abe Wise? Somebody who shafted you or somebody who gave you a break?”

“He ever talk about it?”

“He hit that dud note a lot at the time, but after that he never mentioned it again. It was Abe on the ropes, Abe down for the count He wanted the earth to open up and swallow that cop. It embarrassed him.”

“But is it believable that he’d hate the man who let him go?”

“Not you, not me, but Abe? What good is a self-made man if he had help?”

“He could have had one of his boys put him in his place.”

“I’ll bet he thought about it. Boy, I’ll bet he did.” Dave put his butt out on the top of an I-beam and we both got up. There was a rusty stain on the back of his coat and, I noticed later, on the seat of my trousers. We walked in silence, thinking.

“We better turn here. There’s nothing up that way but railroad tracks my old man bought when they got rid of the streetcars. Could never sell ’em; too much cement attached.”

“You hear how Neustadt died?”

“Yeah, it was an accident in his driveway.”

“His car settled from a hydraulic jack onto his chest.”

“Jesus! That’s tough.”

“How does a hydraulic jack come down on you, Dave? Neustadt would have had to have ten-foot arms to turn that trick on himself. And they don’t release on their own.”

“Jesus!”

“Would Abe have done that, Dave? Just to be free of him?” Dave thought about that while we came down the aisle towards the yard hut. At last he shook his head:

“Naw. You couldn’t get me to believe that. Abe’s not the type. Look, he’s been in the rackets for nearly fifty years. He’s made his bundle over and over again. He’s been into every crooked kind of business you can think of. But, and I say ‘but,’ not once in all that time did he even a personal score. He had a lot of guys sore at him and Abe as mad at them. But not once did he ever turn it into a hit. It’s not his way.”

“Maybe one of the boys thought he was doing Abe a favour. Especially if Abe still sounded off at Neustadt. Ever see that movie
Becket?
Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole? O’Toole’s the king, you see, and Burton’s a bishop. And Burton’s handing O’Toole a lot of grief because he doesn’t want church law to give way to civil law. Finally, when the king’s had it up to here, he shouts out: ‘Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?’ Now he later claims that he didn’t mean it, that he was just shooting his mouth off, but four knights heard him say it and they rode out of town and did the job expecting a handsome reward. They didn’t get it.”

“Mickey wouldn’t go off half-cocked like that. And he’d never let any of the boys under him get out of hand. No, I think you’re barking up the wrong tree there, Cooperman. You want some coffee? I think there’s some fresh-made in the pot.”

We entered the shed and Dave Rogers poured coffee from a cracked Silex into a pair of blue enamel cups.

“You know,” Dave said, “when you think of us, Abe and me, it takes a lot of explaining. I’ve always played it straight down the line and Abe, well, Abe never did see the line, if you know what I mean. Take the case of Julie and Bernie.”

“Who?”

“Abe’s daughter and my middle son, Bernie. Bernie was Julie’s second husband. After she left that painter she married to get away from Abe. I thought that Julie and Bernie would get along fine. He had everything the painter lacked … but that wasn’t enough. She wanted more, and this fellow Long she married next, he couldn’t give it to her either. Now she’s playing with a French magazine publisher, who needs Abe’s money. Funny, eh?”