A City Called July (21 page)

“I wasn’t planning to spend the night. Mr. Geller. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a drink for your former wife.” I didn’t rub it in about it being her house and not his. I didn’t want to find myself rediscovering the world through the ice-bucket. Debbie had the house, Sid had the mortgage, I guessed. I don’t think that gave him special privileges. But he had at least seventy pounds on me, and it was his brother we’d just buried, so I shut up and carried the glass back to Debbie.

“You’re getting friendly with my ex,” she said, nodding her thanks for the drink. “He doesn’t often get along that well with people of your sort.”

“Well, I’m more than usually cunning for my sort,” I said. “When are they holding the minyan?”

“Just before dark. Isn’t that the normal thing?” She looked just the least bit confused. “The rabbi’s coming to start things off; or so I was told. I don’t see him.”

“It’s not half-past four yet. It won’t be dark for hours.”

“You’re right. I don’t know what I was thinking of. This hasn’t been one of my best weekends, Mr. Cooperman. There were a lot of decisions that had to be made, and I ended up making them.”

“What about Sid?”

“My dear ex-husband was unreachable for the first day and then he was inconsolable, which is another way of being out of reach. Oh, Ruth helped, and so did Aunt Hazel in Toronto. But the feeling I’ll take to my grave is that I did it all myself.”

“It couldn’t have come at a worse time,” I said. It sounded all right to me, but she shot me a warning with her eyes. I started to back away, but she grabbed my elbow and stopped me. It was a mimed apology, and I let her hang on my arm and lead me over to meet the senior relatives sitting on the treasury bench of this gathering with refilled paper plates balanced on their knees. I met the uncles and aunt. I met Morris Kaufman, Debbie and Ruth’s father. I explained twice that I had no connection with medicine or Toronto General Hospital. I wonder if my brother Sam is telephoned in the middle of the night by people wanting their wayward spouses followed. I should wear a medical alert bracelet saying that I’m not Sam under any circumstances.

Before I left, I thought I’d have another shot at Sid. He had been joined by Pia Morley and Glenn Bagot had arrived to bolster Sid’s side of the room. They were being eyed by the aunt and the uncles. Bagot looked like he had dressed for the Toronto Stock Exchange not a
shiva
on Francis Street in Grantham. You couldn’t fault an item he was wearing, but it was all wrong, like a surgical mask at a wedding. Bagot got my eye before I reached Sid. Something struck him as mildly amusing.

“Well, Mr. Cooperman, the athletic Mr. Cooperman. Will you have a drink with me? I think you’ll remember Pia?” I bobbed my head twice and watched what the lad in white put in my drink. Another trip in the trunk of a car and I’d be ready for the rubber room for good.

“I don’t have any time for you,” Sid glowered at me over the rim of his glass. He’d been putting a lot of rye between himself and his grief.

“Oh, Benny’s all right,” said Bagot. “He won’t misbehave in Debbie’s house.” Pia hadn’t said anything. She was wearing flamboyant mourning: black satin, black crepe, black nylons. I wondered if she’d had her Audi painted for the occasion.

“Poor Nate,” said Sid. “If Label knew about it, he’d be here. We are brothers after all. He wouldn’t care that …” Here he snapped his fingers perhaps more noisily than he’d intended. “ … for the consequences. And him,” he wasn’t pointing at Staziak,
“him,
with the gall to come in here and eat our food.”

“Steady on, Sid. He’s just going. Aren’t you, Mr. Cooperman?”

“You have paid all the respects you intend to pay, haven’t you, Mr. C?” Pia looked very fetching even when adding her vote for rejection. I couldn’t do anything but leave after that. I took a look at the newly arrived cold cuts they were standing in front of, and beat my retreat for the door.

The place was still humming with mourners. New ones on the porch weren’t of the crowd from the cemetery. They were mourners who disliked funerals. They were washing up on the porch as I tried to remember where I’d left my car.

EIGHTEEN

The old man was nowhere in sight when I banged on the Bolduc front door. Inside I could hear the professional tones of a TV host cajoling a husband to tell all about the first time he was alone with his wife. A give-away show. Lots of laughs. I banged on the door again, but either the viewer inside was caught up in the program or the set was running unattended. I tried the door: not only wasn’t it locked, it opened to a little prodding.

“Alex!” I called, and the studio audience laughed. The living-room was empty, but the velvet cushions looked appreciative and reflected the colour of the TV screen. I called for Alex again, and got no more than an echo in reply. I let myself out the front door and wandered around to the back of the house. A spade was standing up in the garden where the old man had abandoned it. The ribs of the abandoned home-made canoe made the yard look bigger and emptier than on my first visit. I followed the garden hose around to the front of the house, and got back in the car.

Alex was the next person I had to talk to. I might as well wait. I lit a cigarette and checked the glove compartment for something to read. I found a murder mystery I’d been working on for the last nine months: nothing special, but it was good to have something on hand when you couldn’t get away to restock on cigarettes, sandwiches and newspapers. In theory I always kept an extra pack of Player’s on hand in case I was pinned in the car. In practice I used them up to prevent them going stale. A book was harder to consume in that way, so I’d often gone hungry and smokeless, but this old dog-eared mystery with the stub of a parking ticket serving as a bookmark went on forever.

One of the things I liked about reading mysteries was the way things happened bang-bang-bang one after the other. Nobody in print ever sits around listening to the shadows growing longer. It’s like in the movies when the scene where the detective is waiting dissolves to the same scene four hours later and there is the hero just as fresh as he was in the last shot. I wish I had a dollar for every hour I’ve wasted in the front seat of my car waiting for the shot to dissolve.

Old man Bolduc was coming up the street with a pack of beer in each hand. He was moving slowly, with the left foot dragging a little. He slid away a piece of green lattice-work and put the cardboard cartons under the porch. As he moved the lattice-work back into place he looked up and down Nelson Street to see if any of the neighbours were watching. He didn’t see me slouched down in my seat.

I gave him five minutes, and then I walked up on the porch and banged again at the screen door. I heard the old man stir and then slowly, maybe even suspiciously, make his way to the front door. “Yes?” he said, keeping the screen closed between us. “You lookin’ for Alex? His shif’ not finish yet. Come back later, mister.”

“Mr. Bolduc,” I said, and he turned back to look at me with his washed-out blue eyes. “Could I talk to you for a minute?”

“I got nothin’ to say about anythin’ around here, mister. Alex says you’re some kind private police. Whatfor you bodder my son? Alex’s a good boy. He no mix up in nothin’ crooked. You understan’?”

“Your son’s in no trouble, Mr. Bolduc.” He looked at my face like I’d just said the opposite.

“I think you go ’way from here now. I don’ want to talk about bad things Alex get mixed up in. Mister, you come back when Alex is here. Hokay?” I went back to the car and slouched in my seat again wondering what the old man was so frightened about.

An hour later, Alex drove up in a blue Dodge that made my ten-year-old Olds look good. The winters had eaten big helpings from his fenders and the bodywork under the doors. A woman in a dark coat over a white uniform got out from the passenger side and went up into the house. Alex drove the Dodge into the garage and closed the door on half-empty paint cans, a rusty bicycle and a collection-of back issues of the
Beacon
for the past ten years. I hailed him from my open window as he crossed the grass to the porch and he came over.

“Benny! Hello. Glad to see you. Will you come in and meet the wife?” He said the words but he wasn’t putting much into them. They zipped away over his shoulder like deflating balloons.

“Thanks, Alex, but not today. I was just passing. But I do want to talk to you. You must have been spending some time talking to the cops over the weekend, and I guess you’ve got me to blame for it. I got there just as you were leaving.”

“I thought it was you, but I couldn’t be sure. But as far as the cops go, no sweat. I guess it was wrong for me to take off like that. I panicked, that’s all.”

“Sure,” I said, “I’ve done the same thing in my day.” I was beginning to sound like Pete Staziak with a suspect. He can make a suspect feel secure by agreeing with him about everything from poisoning grandpa to burning down City Hall. He’s even tried that line on me a couple of times. “Now who hasn’t wanted to get the jump on the cops from time to time,” he suggested, trying to make it easy for me to spill my guts. But I saw it coming and bit hard on my tongue. Now I was using the same technique.

“They sure do ask a lot of questions, Benny. I even got so I didn’t know whether I was telling the truth myself. Everything sounded made up.”

“Why did you go to Nathan’s?”

“I can’t tell, Benny.”

“I understand. What did you say when they asked about finding anything at the scene of the crime.”

“I just said I didn’t, that’s all.”

“Good. That was the right thing to say. But you could still get into a lot of trouble.”

“Why, nobody saw anything. You weren’t even there yet. So how come you think you know so much, Benny? I was on my way out when I heard your car.”

“When you heard the car, Alex. But you didn’t hear me earlier when I came on foot.”

“Tell me another, Benny. You can stick-handle better than that.”

“Look, Alex, you’re a bright character. You know that the cops have determined the time of death and that puts you in the clear. The coroner has made it easy for both of us. The cops aren’t going to bother with either one of us. I figure you picked something up at the studio. You’ve got incriminating evidence that you lifted from the scene. It’s highly illegal, but you see it all the time on television. The tube shows us what’s right and wrong these days, not the letter of the law. Come on, Alex, I’ve done the same thing in a good cause. Was it to protect a lady’s good name by any chance?” Alex gulped while his Adam’s apple shifted like a wary defenceman near his own net.

“Okay, Benny. I’m not trying to get away with anything. But supposing I did find something?”

“If you keep it to yourself, you’re likely to end up the way Nathan did. We’re both mixed up with people who don’t think twice about killing. Look at poor Nathan. He knew a secret too many, and now look where he is. If you know something, and you want to go on breathing, I’d tell as many people as I could. It’s the only guarantee that your breath won’t be interfered with.” Alex creased his brow as though he imagined that useful thoughts would begin to flow automatically to his brain.

“Suppose I did find something?”

“Then you’re as good as dead right now.”

“Hell, you’re kidding me, Benny. Who’d want to kill me? Why would anybody want to hurt a broken-down hockey player?”

“Somebody’s done in a sculptor and a panhandler in this town. Maybe there’s no connection, but secrets can be deadly company, Alex.” He thought a minute, then went to the porch where he shouted something through the screen door. Returning, he came round to the passenger side and got in.

“Let’s drive around the block, Benny.” We did that. A couple of times, Alex looked over his shoulder to see if we had won a popularity contest. I didn’t see Geoff, Len or Gordon in their car following in the rear-view mirror either.

“What exactly did you tell the cops?” I asked. It seemed a reasonably low-key beginning. I turned into Welland Avenue and headed west. We passed Tarlton Avenue and Albert Street in silence. Somewhere in the block between Woodland and Francis he started opening up.

“I didn’t lie to them. I just said I went to see Nathan. When I found him dead, I got scared and left. That’s all.”

“Why did you say you picked Saturday morning to pay your visit?”

“I told them I was on the company entertainment committee, which is true, and I went to try to talk him into giving a talk at the PPA.”

“The what?”

“Paper Producers’ Association. It’s a joint management-union thing. Arranges Christmas parties and a few cultural events every year.”

“Then they asked if you touched anything and you denied laying hands on anything but the doorknob on your way out.”

“Something like that. I told them how shocked I was, and then, when I heard you coming, I went out the back way as fast as I could.”

“I’d believe you though thousands … Never mind. Now tell me what you took with you.” I kept my eye on the street, but I could feel him staring at my profile.

“I never said I took …”

“Alex, this is me, Benny, you’re talking to. Remember what I told you about secrets.”

“Well, I …”

“Just tell me what you took and why you took it. I don’t need names. Not at this point.”

“Okay. I got a call Saturday morning from a friend of mine. This friend told me that Nathan was dead and that … this friend had left something with initials on it at the scene of the crime.”

“This must be some friend for you to stick your neck out like that for her.”

“I didn’t say it was a woman.”

“You didn’t but all those ‘shes’ you avoided told me plain enough. Besides, I can’t see you going back to cover for a guy. It had to be a woman. What was the object? The one with the initials?”

“It was a lighter. Fancy job. Easily traced, she said.”

“How do you know your friend didn’t ice Nathan herself?”

I felt that look again on the side of my face as I pulled up to the stoplight at Welland Avenue and Ontario. I turned and he suddenly found the white house on the corner, where the rabbi used to live, much more interesting.