A Victim Must Be Found (3 page)

So now Pambos was comfortable, not a millionaire, but with a tidy piece of Grantham history in the form of an interest in the Stephenson House tucked into his pocket. I guess he could afford to part with whatever it took to locate the missing list.

“Pambos,” I asked, “tell me more about this list. A list that has the kind of value you’re putting on it isn’t your average laundry list. What kind of list are we talking about? Why is it so valuable? Tell me why somebody’d want to take it from you.”

“I’ll get to that, Benny. Give me a chance to organize my thoughts, eh?” I didn’t know he was feeling pressured. I was only trying to help, after all. Pambos took a deep breath and appeared to notice his rolled sleeves for the first time. As he spoke, he unrolled them and refastened his cuffs. “You see, Benny, I can be sure it wasn’t anybody working for me that took it. Sten and Andy have been with me for five years. If they wanted to steal from me, which they do, they would take directly from the bar receipts or from the restaurant cash. The list I’m talking about wouldn’t mean anything to them.”

“So, who does that leave?”

“If you ask me, somebody on the list swiped it.”

“Pambos, have you taken up blackmailing or some other kind of extortion?”

“Me? Hell, Benny, this is Pambos Kiriakis you’re talking to! I never pinched so much as an apple off a fruit stand in my entire life! I’m clean, Benny, and so is this list.”

“Pambos, you’re driving me insane!” He looked at me like the shoe was on the other foot.

“What’ve I done? I’m bringing you some business. I’ve helped you unpack. What more can I do?”

“You can give me a lead that isn’t missing for a start. From what you say, all we have to do to find our suspect is to find the damned list. What kind of trick is that?”

Pambos nodded. But he didn’t look too worried. I was not getting a handle on this investigation. I was asking the wrong questions. Here I was at the very beginning of what might become a case, and already I was as mixed up as if it had been dragging in and out of courtrooms for three years. I knew that everything depended on getting a grip on the nature of Kitiakis’s list, in order to find out why it was so valuable, but Pambos was not prepared to tell me until he was good and ready. I felt like I was trapped in a computer that had to learn the entire English language before it could tell me “yes” or “no.” I tried to master my irregular breathing.

“Pambos, can you remember any part of the list that might be important? Can you remember any of the names on it?”

“I been thinking of that. That’s why I came to see you back at the United. I know you keep half your office hours there.”

“And?”

“And, what?”

“And do you remember names from your list”

“Yeah. Sure I do. But, like I said, it’s a delicate business. Most of the people on the list wouldn’t want to be brought into this.”

“Right, Pambos. Maybe I’m the undercover editor of the Grantham
Beacon
instead of a private investigator. Maybe the word private means I’m a stringer for
The Toronto Star
. Is that what you think? Either you came here to trust me—I mean apart from helping with the boxes—or you came to shoot the breeze. Which is it?”

“Benny, don’t get hot at me! I’m just feeling my way through this. If it was somebody on this list that took it, I want to wipe the floor with him!”

“Good! I recognize the emotion. Tell me, Pambos, do you remember the names on the list?”

“I remember some of them. There are about twentyfive names in all. All big shots in the Niagara district. I can remember maybe half a dozen of the names. That’s all.”

“Okay. Have you seen any of the people who appear on the list lately?”

“I was coming to that.”

“I’m glad you were coming to something!” Pambos ignored the anxiety he was building in me brick by brick.

“Three of them were in the hotel shortly before I noticed the list missing.” I rooted through one of the halfemptied boxes and found a scrap of paper and a ballpoint pen.

“Now we’re getting someplace,” I said. “Who were they?”

“Jonah Abraham …” The whistle that came out of me was unpremeditated. It represented genuine surprise.

“I can’t imagine the head of Windermere Distilleries rifling your desk, Pambos.” Pambos looked wounded, like I’d interrupted a vast torrent of information.

“Will you let me finish? Another name is Peter Mac-Culloch. The other is Alex Favell. They were all at the hotel. Any of them could have taken it.”

If Pambos had handed me a
Who’s Who
of the Grantham élite, I couldn’t have found more prestigious names. Abraham, MacCulloch and Favell, while they might never sit at the same table, have graced the best tables in town and beyond. MacCulloch was vice-president of Secord University. He’d come to academia through business. A local boy, he’d made a name for himself in the west, in oil, I think. After more than five years in the job, his face in the paper had become a second logo for Secord. As a fund-raiser, he had no match. He brought into the ivory tower some of the bottom-line philosophy he’d learned in the blitzkrieg of modern business.

Alex Favell, whose name I’d heard around town over the last few years, wasn’t as well known to me. I remembered at once that he had something to do with the paper mill in Papertown, south of Grantham. I’d read or skipped through pieces about him on the business pages of the
Beacon
. I couldn’t conjure up a face to fit the name. The best I could do was remember seeing the name connected to some social note about the opening of a paper-mill- endowed floral clock somewhere along the road between Niagara Falls and Queenston. The floral clock must be among the wonders of the world least included on the endangered lists

Lists. I kept coming back to lists. I tried to imagine what kind of list would include Jonah Abraham, Alex Favell and Peter MacCulloch. Favell and MacCulloch were old Grantham, old Ontario, even old Upper Canadian names. There is no equivalent to the Mayflower in Upper Canada. If you came too early, you were French and not in the pecking-order. If you came too late, you couldn’t qualify as a United Empire Loyalist, which meant that you belonged to them foreigners who came after 1800. The UEL list was an important list for some people, but it wasn’t the one I was looking for because it excluded Jonah Abraham, the well-known and well-fixed distiller of just about everything but attar of roses.

“Pambos, none of these guys are picking up butts from the gutter. And you say the others on the list are just as rich? Why do you think they would stoop to petty larceny? Now grand larceny is another matter.” Pambos looked uncomfortable. He got up and paced the room, finally stopping to fix a few slats in a shutter that had fallen half out of the frame. Very tidily, he picked up the falling pieces and slipped them into their grooves. But he didn’t answer my question. It gave me a moment to wonder why I had used those old-fashioned terms for theft. I took a deep breath and tried again. “Isn’t Jonah Abraham sniffing around trying to get a Senate appointment?”

“The only Senate appointment he’ll get is an appointment to see a senator,” Pambos said, with uncharacteristic cynicism. “And since your memory is so good, you’ll recall that MacCulloch is a leading candidate for a future lieutenant-governor here in Ontario.”

“Noted,” I said with a scowl. And when that had sunk in I added, “Which all adds up to the fact that you have more talking to do, Pambos, before I can tell you whether or not I can help you find this thing.” Pambos sat down on the edge of my bed. He looked like he had avoided all of the hard questions he was capable of avoiding. From now on he would have to play with the facts or not play at all. “Tell me about the list,” I said.

He sucked at something caught in his teeth for a few moments, trying to turn the thing over in his mind sufficiently to find the best starting point. When he had it, he said, “Have you ever heard of the painter Wallace Lamb?” I thought about that and shook my head.

“No, but that doesn’t mean anything. I only heard about Picasso a year ago. How does he figure?”

“His dealer gave me the list. The people on it all have pictures on loan from Tallon’s collection.”

“Tallon?”

“Arthur Tallon. He ran the Contemporary Gallery on Church Street.”

“Oh, yeah. I’ve walked by it.” The Contemporary Gallery, which I had actually been in, although Pambos didn’t have to know how I spend my spare time, was an honest-to-goodness art gallery just like the ones in Toronto or Buffalo. To indicate sales, they used the little red dot system like all the big-league galleries. It was the only gallery in town where picture-framing wasn’t the big deal. The only other large gallery was for exhibitions only. It was located in the mansion built by the man who built the Welland Canal. They didn’t sell pictures at Rodman Hall, you just got to look at travelling exhibitions. The only things for sale were dainty little hasty notes which were just the thing for sending “regrets only” on.

“Why did Tallon give you the list, Pambos? Was he worried about it getting lost?”

“I was buying a Lamb from him. He gave me the list of local people he had lent a few Lambs to.” I was beginning to feel more shepherd than investigator, but at least I thought, now, we are beginning to get somewhere.

“Now, we are beginning to get somewhere. All you have to do is ask Tallon to give you a duplicate list.” Pambos didn’t like my idea. His smile faded on his face and he began shaking his head.

“I can see you don’t read the
Beacon
as thoroughly as you should. Arthur Tallon died in Grantham General four weeks ago.” Light was beginning to sift through the slats in Pambos’s story. If Tallon was dead, that could complicate things.

“We’re still getting somewhere,” I said. “Has Tallon’s death got anything to do with the value of the list?”

Pambos Kiriakis looked at me like he’d been patiently teaching me the two-times-table for the last three hours and I still was stumbling over two times six. “Of course,” he said, making me feel about seven-and-a-half and not too swift into the bargain. “Tallon was a terrible businessman. Disorganized. Depended on his memory or slips of paper. If I didn’t force him to take my money, he would never take payment. The only receipts I ever got from him are written on torn-up pieces of cigarette packages.”

Pambos was setting up Tallon as a bad businessman. I wonder whether he knew what kind of private investigator he was in the process of engaging. I thought of the ratty files in my single, disorganized stack of four filing drawers in the office. Usually I keep everything, new, old, important, sentimental, in an untidy stack in the middle of my desk. Once I start trying to sort things into categories and enter them in different files, that’s when I begin to lose hold of the shape of the universe. If everything’s under my nose, it can’t get lost. The file drawers are good places to hide my lunch in and store my galoshes between winters. I was beginning to get a picture of Tallon in my mind. It was the only substantial thing to come along so far, so I was holding on tight.

“After Tallon died,” Pambos went on, “his assistant, Patrick Miles, couldn’t tell what paintings Tallon had out on loan. Tallon was always lending pictures. You know, ‘Take it home, and give me a call if you decide to keep it.’ That sort of thing. I’m talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of paintings, Benny. I mean, when he started out lending and selling, Tallon didn’t have to trust people very much. A Lamb in those days wouldn’t be worth more than a couple of hundred dollars. Now a single Lamb might be worth twenty or thirty thousand dollars.”

“Tallon seems to have had a special liking for Lamb.”

“Yeah. He discovered Lamb. Not that Lamb would ever admit that anybody discovered him, but you know what I mean. Tallon sold the first Lambs in Canada. When New York wanted to see what Lamb was doing, they had to go through Tallon. And Tallon was always generous with them, even though New York prices were always higher than even Toronto prices. Tallon told me he remembered when he couldn’t get more than fifteen dollars each for a Lamb canvas, not a sketch, mind you, but a full canvas.” I tried to look surprised. I didn’t own a painting or a sketch, and the only genuine oils I saw regularly were the work of my Aunt Dora in my mother’s living-room.

“So, this list is a list of the people that Tallon knew had pictures on loan from his gallery. If the list was written around the time of his death, that makes it a good inventory of his estate not actually under his roof.”

“That’s right. Of the Lambs anyway. He lent other pictures too, of course. Now Paddy Miles and Tallon’s brother are trying to put the estate in order. As it is, a good portion is unaccounted for. Not everybody who has pictures on loan has come forward. Without the list of pictures on loan a lot of people in big houses are going to make unrecorded capital gains.”

I could see the temptation. Only the closest I ever come to that kind of gain is when I get the change from my five-dollar bill
and
my five-dollar bill handed to me by the distracted cashier at the convenience store. I don’t know much about rich people, but I’ve never met anybody who thought he was rich. Everybody always says he’s just getting by, even when I’m not on the point of asking for the loan of a few hundred. Anyway, I could see people at the top of the local cultural ladder sitting on their masterpieces and waiting to hear from the executors. After all, nobody got rich by volunteering to give back borrowed property before it was asked for.

“Paddy Miles is going crazy trying to locate the missing pictures, Benny. When I told him about the list Tallon gave me, Paddy nearly kissed my feet.”

I was beginning to feel strange getting mixed up in the art world, even the local art world, which might look a little parochial from the outside. Has anybody in Paris or London ever heard of Wallace Lamb, I wondered. By Grantham standards Arthur Tallon was a dealer, but by a real picture dealer, say in New York, was he a dealer? I didn’t know. All I knew was that I felt I was sliding into water well over my head. To my rescue came the recollection that I had taken a few drawing lessons when I was a teenager and that Rembrandt’s “Saskia” has always hung at the turn of the landing on the way to the second floor of my parents’ town house. It was a reproduction glued to canvas of which I was very proud as a kid. I remember how disappointed I was when I examined it through a magnifying glass: all those little printed giveaway dots of colour disillusioned me. We didn’t have the only genuine Rembrandt on the street after all.