Dead & Buried (16 page)

“Martha?”

“M’yeah. Cooperman? I’ve got that information you wanted.”

“Great, Martha! That’s wonderful!” I was trying to remember what it was I’d asked her to do.

“I pulled out the city’s contract with Kinross, Benny.”

“Great!”

“It ran to forty pages without the appendices.”

“Martha, I can’t wait to buy you lunch.”

“Cooperman, you’re a real womanizer, you know that?”

“Now, don’t
you
start! Tell me about the contract.”

“The main thing is that the city can’t be held accountable for anything Kinross does. There are two clauses covering that. In one Kinross promises to assume the defence of and indemnify the city against all claims, and in the other it accepts all responsibility for its operations and employees. So, if Kinross gets caught with its hose in the Niagara River, the city can hold up its hands in shock at how it has been misled and abused.”

“That’s wonderful stuff, Martha!”

“M’yeah, I thought it was worth a phonecall. Now, don’t you go thanking me again, Benny. You never could do ‘sincere’ if your life depended on it. We’ll do lunch like you said and forget all about being sincere. Okay? Right now I’ve got to put my face on and go out. G’bye!”

“Goodbye, Martha, and thank you from the—” She cut me off with a click.

The
Beacon
on Saturday was usually a plump paper, except after Christmas, when it was as thin as boardinghouse gruel. This Saturday the paper confirmed Pete Staziak’s guess about how Pásztory had died: a single shot in the chest. It also explained that Alex Pastor was the pen name of Sandor or Alex Pásztory, but kept on calling the deceased “Pastor,” which meant that I kept having to translate that back to Pásztory, remembering what he’d said about fine old Hunky names. There was not a word about the scene of the crime apart from a reference to the golf course. That was all. The fix was obviously in at a high level. If Ross Forbes was behind this, he must be calling home all the favours people in high places owed him. It wouldn’t take much journalistic digging to link Sangallo to Phidias. Or to Tony Pritchett and the mob. Where are the newspaper bloodhounds of yesteryear? One of them, it suddenly occurred to me, was recovering from the shock of a post-mortem examination.

Saturday night I took Anna out to the movies. While it was more enjoyable than most of what happened to me that week, my date added nothing new to the case.

Sunday? At least Sunday didn’t add anything new to the story since, as I’ve already mentioned, there is no Sunday
Beacon.
The out-of-town papers were still letting the story alone. There wasn’t a mention in either the Buffalo or the Toronto papers.

On Monday I got a call from the office of Jim Colling, Teddie Forbes’s lawyer. He told me that he’d just had a favourable FAX message from Phidias about the proposal he’d put to them.

“Whoopee!” I said. “When do I start?”

“As soon as their treasurer gets back from his vacation. How does Thursday suit you?” I thanked Colling and, while I was doing it, I was still wondering what he was getting out of this. It was hard to get a lawyer to say hello to you without him running up the meter. So why was Jim Colling such a bundle of friendly helpfulness? If he was sinking his personal hook into Phidias, I didn’t want to be the worm.

FIFTEEN

The main office of Phidias Manufacturing was in the new complex that filled in almost all of the space between St. Andrew and King east of Queen and west of James. They called it City Centre when it went up in the early 1980s. It had been intended to give the sluggish old centre of town a shot in the arm. After all the hoopla died down, it became just another office building with a walkthrough mall full of stores selling things you could live without. But a few important companies were located here, as was our leading criminal lawyer, branches of two banks and the order office for a Toronto department store. I got off the elevator at the sixth floor and asked for the treasurer, who was expecting me. He came at me beaming from his corner office as soon as my name was taken in to him.

“Mr. Cooperman? Good to see you. You didn’t waste any time. Glad to see you’re ready to get started. I have Mr. Colling’s letter, of course, and I even think we can find a corner for you to work in for just as long as you’re going to be with us.” Mr. F.P. McAuliffe was a quick little man in brown, with wispy red hair around his ears and nowhere else except for wild eyebrows of the same
colour. He looked tweedy, and from the signs of ash about him, he was a pipe-smoker.

He led me into his office and told me to make myself at home at what he called a parson’s table. Not knowing very much about parsons, I took him at his word and settled my briefcase on a long table without much depth to it. It wasn’t literally in a corner, but it did occupy space along the cold north wall. Over my head was a framed map of Grantham during its heady days as a busy canal town. There was an inset of the old courthouse at the bottom right-hand corner. I tried to find the location of my office on St. Andrew Street. McAuliffe saw me distracted and smiled with a set of discoloured teeth.

“That’s the Brosius map of 1875. It’s one of the first run, not a reprint,” he said. “I got it from my father and I coveted it every day it hung in his office on Queen Street.” He came over to look too. For a minute, we both did that. “Hasn’t changed much, really,” he said. “It’s still an Indian trail or two, only now they have a modern camber. The original survey lines didn’t make much of an impact in the downtown part, did they?” I smiled. I couldn’t tell where the original survey lines were on the map, but I could tell that he could. McAuliffe smelled of bay rum and tobacco, a very comfortable smell. “My father was a collector of these old maps, Mr. Cooperman. Got interested while he was building the present canal. He was one of the engineers working on it beginning in 1919, as soon as he got out of the army.” McAuliffe pulled a large black book from a shelf and opened it near
the end and pointed at a list of those who had built the canal. There the McAuliffe name appeared twice, once as a junior engineer and then as an assistant engineer among scores of others.

“That was quite a piece of work,” I said, embarrassed by his concentration.

“Labourers, pipefitters, pitmen in those days were getting twenty-five cents an hour. Imagine what that canal would cost today, eh?” I shook my head in tune with his. He closed the book, giving me a glimpse of photographs of the Welland Canal in different stages of construction as he did so. He replaced the book and leaned back against my parson’s table. He seemed lost in thought. Was he thinking of what the pyramids could be built for if you only paid the slaves twenty cents an hour? I guess you don’t have to pay real slaves anything. He held on to his version of the thought, shook himself like an old dog, and returned to his side of the room.

“Mr. Cooperman, I have some of the minute books you need right here on this shelf,” he said indicating a wall of books between two windows. “The rest are in the boardroom, which doubles as our library.” H sat down behind his large, cluttered desk and looked back in my direction. “If there’s anything you want to know about Phidias Manufacturing, please ask me,” he said, selecting a pipe from a rack of them next to his telephone. “I’ve been with the firm for most of my sixty-four years. I remember Miss Biddy Forbes’s father. Not Miss Teddie’s father—although I knew him too; I mean Miss Biddy’s father,
Sandy MacCallum. He was a friend of my father’s in the Royal Flying Corps, and he started all this when he got home from the First War. He established an airline first, but the only biplane he had crashed, so he went into making safety bicycles. Now who would think that that would lead up here to the sixth floor of the City Centre, eh?” Once again I took the cue and gave him the required response. From his manner, I began to suspect that F.P. McAuliffe was not the only chief financial officer of Phidias Manufacturing. He was the financial end’s equivalent of chairman of the board. He held an impressive title, salary, office and had very little to do except pass the time of day with strays who got past the reefs of secretaries and receptionists closer to the door. I couldn’t connect him with the death of Jack Dowden. Maybe he was part of the scheme, but I doubted it. It was a long way from this room in the office of Phidias to the yard of its subsidiary, Kinross. It was most likely that the death at Kinross involved people working closer to Dowden and the trucking end of things than the people, like McAuliffe, here at head office.

“Now,” McAuliffe said, getting up again, “I suppose you want to see some books.” He left his half-loaded pipe on his blotter next to a flat tin of tobacco, and went to the wall of books. His right hand went limply to his chin as he scanned the possibilities. “Now, where shall we start? Where shall we start?”

At this moment I heard a huge laugh come from elsewhere on the floor. It was too big to be contained by the
flimsy space dividers and partitions of modern builders. The laugh was repeated and this time a woman’s voice said something that sounded like a joking protest. All typing in the reception area stopped. I looked to Mr. McAuliffe for guidance. “That would be the Commander,” he said in a near whisper. “He’s come back for the wedding on Saturday. They’ve been in Fort Lauderdale, him and Biddy.”

I heard a door open and shut, a bigger-than-life roar and laugh, like Citizen Kane was walking down the corridors of Xanadu. “Where is that old rip?” a deep, radio announcer’s voice shouted. “Where is that useless reprobate?” McAuliffe brightened.

“He’s coming in here!”

“Fred? Where the hell are you?” The door opened and the Commander easily filled the doorway. He was about the size and shape of Orson Welles.

“Welcome home, Commander!” McAuliffe said, without actually pulling his forelock. The elder Mr. Forbes kept shouting abuse while the two men approached one another and embraced in the middle of the room. McAuliffe almost disappeared in the arms of the bigger man. When they separated, the Commander held McAuliffe at arm’s length, like a brown doll, and examined him carefully.

“You don’t change, Fred. You never put on the years. Hell, man, what’s your secret?”

“Well, sir, I just try to stay busy.”

“‘Busy?’ Hell, you never worked a day in your life. You can cut the crap when you’re talkin’ to me, Fred. You—” He had finally noticed that he wasn’t alone in the room with McAuliffe. “Who in God’s name is that, Fred? Don’t tell me you have an assistant! I’ll put an end to that fast enough, you old scallywag!”

“Oh, Commander Forbes, this is Mr. Cooperman who’s doing some work for Miss Teddie.”

“How do you do, Mr. Forbes?” I said.

“What’s Teddie need with anything here?” he asked. The question was addressed to McAuliffe. He had ignored my greeting. Maybe it was the
Mister.
I should have brought him aboard with a toot from my handy boatswain’s whistle. Meanwhile, he had fixed McAuliffe with a bulging eye so that the little man’s eyebrows moved up and down in confusion. “What are you up to, Fred? What’s going on here?”

A slim woman wearing a silver grey suit that matched her hair came into the room quietly and stood by the door. McAuliffe couldn’t see her on the far side of Forbes’s broad back. She nodded her head slowly in my direction, acknowledging my existence and then called:

“Murdo, they can hear you all the way to City Hall.” The Commander turned and stared at her. She gave McAuliffe a warm smile when Fred moved to get a clear view. “Hello, Fred,” she said.

“Miss Biddy. Well, I declare! You don’t both of you come to the office often enough. How was Florida, Miss Biddy?”

“Everybody’s getting older, Fred. I wouldn’t be surprised to read that the whole population perished on a single night at the average age of eighty-four. They could just ‘cease upon the midnight with no pain’ and there’d be nobody left to notice.”

“Oh, dear!” McAuliffe said in mock surprise. “I don’t think Keats was contemplating such large numbers.”

“What the hell’s going on with you two?” The Commander looked from one to the other and then to me to see if I knew what they were talking about. I shrugged complete ignorance and that settled him for the moment. He took a breath to show that he had decided to skip along to something important, but came around between his wife and McAuliffe, facing me. I felt the parson’s table cornering me from behind.

“Fred, you still haven’t told me what Teddie’s doing with a man working in this office!” Again he fixed me with his eye. I felt like a notice pinned to a bulletin board. McAuliffe moved back behind his desk, sorting through a pile of papers under his pipe and tobacco tin.

“I’ll show you the letter, Commander. I think you’ll find that everything’s in order.”

“There hasn’t been anything like order around here, Fred, since I took my paws off the wheel. That’s a fact. You know it and I know it.” He looked at Biddy as he said this, seeing how the colour came to her cheeks and hoping that with McAuliffe in the room as well as a stranger she wouldn’t pick this moment to argue the point. Biddy held her tongue. The Commander took courage
and went on. “Since the boy took charge, Fred, we’ve all been headed downhill on a runaway toboggan.”

“Murdo, the
boy
is about to give his daughter away in marriage!”

“I never said he couldn’t breed, Biddy! He couldn’t get me grandsons, though. Sherry’s a fine girl. I never said a word against her. And she’s marrying a fine man. Damn it, I don’t care what you say: Norman Caine will put new life into this business. You know as well as I do, both of you, Ross has never taken hold here, damn it!”

“Murdo! You’re talking about your own son!”

“Mother, don’t pretend you haven’t heard that line before. Hello, Fred. Good-afternoon, Dad.”

“Ross!” Ross Forbes was suddenly standing there and none of us had seen him come in. The Commander made a sort of bark at the back of his throat. Ross and his mother exchanged smiles. The old man looked at his son up and down without, apparently, finding anything to write home about. Ross hadn’t changed much. There was still the look of a spoiled child and the private school in every line of his face. He had that unbarbered look of an aristocrat.