Dead & Buried (21 page)

“Benny!” Hy chimed in. “I didn’t think we were going to see you too!” I wished they would underplay the stuff about this being a chance meeting. I’d already begun
planning a new strategy involving the Stillmans. I could say that I was followed everywhere by Hy and Edna Stillman, who ran
Lambkins,
a children’s clothing store and baby outfitter on St. Andrew Street. It was the perfect cover for surveillance work. Hy was still talking:

“Manny said it would just be the four of us.” It wasn’t going to do me any good now to smile as though the plot I’d been talking about in the car was beginning to unfold on time.

“They’re late,” I said evenly. I think that’s how it came out. “Evenly” was my intention, anyway. At that moment a black 1980 Caddie parked beside us and my mother and father got out.

“Here they are!” said Edna with her usual oboe-like intonation. “We’re not going to split hairs about being late.” She went on to greet my mother and father. Pa gave Edna a kiss and Hy did as much for my mother, who hadn’t taken her eyes off me and the rogues’ gallery I was standing with since she’d come out of the car.

“Benny, is everything all right?”

“Hy and I were early for a change,” Edna finished up what she had started to say. “Are your friends coming into the restaurant too?” she asked, giving the three hoods and O’Mara a bright smile. O’Mara pulled away from the guy holding him.

“I’m coming,” he shouted. The driver and the thin-nosed hood stood back so that there never could be a question of their having stood in his way.

“Is Anna with you, Benny?” Ma asked, still looking the hoods up and down. “Your friends don’t look like they enjoy seafood,” she added in a lower voice. My father slammed the door on his side of the Cadillac and came up behind Ma. We exchanged nods as he gave the group standing by the open trunk of the car a careful scrutiny. The big guy, who now showed no sign of his gun, smiled back at him awkwardly.

“Anna’s gone to Boston on a research project,” I lied. I hoped that the hoods would know as much about research at this time of year as my mother did. “She’ll be away until the end of the month,” I added, in case my lie needed buttressing.

“What have you got, a case of bootleg beer in the trunk?” my father said. “You look like a bunch of rubes with a bottle in the trunk.” The hoods, and even O’Mara, moved away from the rear of the car to show that the trunk contained no illegal extras. “The way you were standing there, it made me want to get in line!” There were some poor attempts at grins, nothing to win any prizes.

“Benny,” Ma said taking my arm, “when are you going to bring Anna over to the house? Your father and I would like to meet her. You keep her such a big secret, I’m beginning to think maybe you’re not getting on so well. Is that it?”

“She has other friends besides me, Ma. We only go to the movies once in a while.”

“But, I can tell she likes you. Just from the way you talk. But it’s just as well you don’t bring her over just yet. The slip-covers are still not ready. When they’re done, she can come over and bring that father of hers too. I’ll charm both of them with my chicken soup.”

“Campbell’s Chicken Broth?”

“Benny! That’s
my
secret! Have a little respect for your Aged P!”

Hy Stillman came over and put an arm on my shoulder: “Benny, the reservation’s just for the four of us, but I think it can’t be too busy on a Thursday night. What do you think?”

“I think my friends have another date,” I said, looking at the stout-necked driver. He blinked and glanced at his two buddies.

“Thanks a lot, but we gotta be gettin’ back to town,” he said. The other two grabbed O’Mara under the arms as though they were just having a little fun. In a second they would have had him stuffed back into the car. The back seat was an improvement on the trunk, but I felt obliged to protest.

“Just a minute!” I said. “I don’t think Brian wants to go home yet. I’m sure the restaurant can find another extra chair.” Brian peeled the hands that were clutching him off his arms and propelled himself past the hood and away from the car.

“You’re pushing it, Mr. Cooperman,” said the driver slowly.

“It was fun running into you fellows. Sorry that our plans changed so quickly. That’s life, isn’t it?”

“We’ll run into you again sometime,” the driver said, going to his side of the car. Meanwhile, O’Mara had crossed over to the side of the good guys and was looking back at his erstwhile abductors.

“We’ll see you again,” said another of the hoods as he opened the car door.

“Maybe it won’t be for some time,” I added hopefully.

“Don’t count on it,” he said as he slammed the door shut behind him.

“Nice running into you boys,” Edna said as the remaining hood stirred himself.

“Yeah, nice,” he said, brushing back his scanty hair with the palm of his hand. He shut the lid of the trunk and climbed into the back seat.

At the same time, the car’s motor jumped to life and a lot of unnecessary exhaust was piped in our direction. The car reversed, backed out and gunned its motor as it left the street to O’Mara, the Stillmans and the Coopermans.

“Those fellows look like they just walked out of television,” my mother said. I nodded agreement. “There’s still something not very kosher about this.”

“What do you mean, Ma?”

“Since when have you become such a fan of seafood?”

“I’ll tell you all about it in the restaurant.” We walked across the street and into the dining-room with its fishnets on the ceiling and a bar made from a cut-away lifeboat.
O’Mara was still looking stunned, but Edna was talking a blue streak at him. I thought that with a little nourishment, he might come around.

TWENTY

“He was a decent old skin,” Frank Bushmill said as we sat in a booth at the Di on St. Andrew Street. “He was the only man in town who could talk intelligently about rhetoric. And he knew books. I got my Swift from Martin.” Martin Lyster had picked Friday the thirteenth to die in his room at the Grantham General. When I went to see him a few days earlier, he was still hoping to make it down to Florida to watch the Blue Jays in spring training. Frank and I were toasting his memory in Diana Sweets’s coffee.

“He sure knew a lot about books.”

“Sold me my copy of Flannery O’Connor.”

“Yeah, he knew all that Irish stuff.”

“American. O’Connor was American.”

“Well, he was always talking about James Joyce and Yeats and all that gang.”

“He should have died hereafter.”

“You can say that again.”

Frank and I drank up our coffee and I followed him out into the sunlight. I took a good look first to see if any green Toyotas were lurking at the curb. The sidewalks
were clear of hoods as well as shoppers. Maybe it was too early for either group. I was going to miss Martin. He was always talking over my head, like Frank, but it made me feel good, like there was a real world out there far away from Grantham, where people didn’t get bundled into cars against their will, where books mattered and where all questions weren’t submitted to the test of “the bottom line.” As a matter of fact, I don’t think I ever heard either Martin or Frank use the phrase. I respected them for that.

Frank was trying to organize a wake for Martin. I agreed to go as long as it didn’t collide with Anna’s plans for my time during the next few days. Sherry Forbes’s wedding rehearsal was the main obstacle that night. In fact, I was rather curious to see all the Forbes clan acting on their best behaviour in public. The promise of a good dinner at the Grantham Club was an extra dollop of jam. The following day, Saturday, the wedding itself was scheduled to take place. I had to be there as well. Frank said that he would try to work around these events and let me know the time and place. Together we climbed the twenty-eight steps to our offices, he to his patients with their corns and bunions and me to my notes on Kinross, Phidias and now Sangallo Restorations. I played about with this for a few minutes, then remembered that there was another office where I was expected. I didn’t want McAuliffe’s opinion of me to sink to the level of his regard for Ross Forbes as a manager:

A diller, a dollar,

A ten o’clock scholar,

What makes you come so soon?

You used to come a ten o’clock,

But now you come at noon.

It was close to ten when I arrived at the sixth-floor head office of Phidias Manufacturing. I don’t know whether I beat Forbes in or not. By the time I was sitting at my parson’s table, I’d passed several busy-looking people. I spotted a Harlequin romance behind one copy of the
Report on Business
section of the
Globe and Mail.
McAuliffe’s greeting to me was warm but from a distance. I was sure that should he have asked me to show him, I would have been able to make a good case for Teddie’s arguments with American Internal Revenue, which I could now document from sources at Phidias. When the phone rang, as usual, I made no effort to answer it, although an extension was within my reach. Fred picked it up quickly, almost as though it might snap at him. I guess it often had, judging from Murdo Forbes’s boardroom manners.

“It’s for you,” McAuliffe said, almost as surprised as I was. “It’s Mr. Ross,” he added with his hand over the receiver.

“Yes?” I said, as McAuliffe hung up softly.

“Cooperman, it’s Ross Forbes here.” I nodded idiotically and waited. “You and I have a score to settle from a
long time ago. I’ve been thinking of it all night and it still bothers me.”

“Why not have a word with your analyst about it?”

“Now, don’t get on the defensive. As far as I’m concerned the past is over and done with. But that’s because Teddie stays seventeen hundred kilometres away from here and I value each of them. Her coming back for the wedding has upset me. Everything about this damned wedding upsets me. But that’s neither here nor there. You and I have to talk, Cooperman. What are you doing for lunch?”

“First you hit me in the nose and now you’re buying lunch! I assume you’re buying?”

“And I won’t repeat my bad manners again, I assure you.”

“What time do you want me to meet you?”

“I’m going to be tied up in a meeting until noon. Can you make it, say, twelve-thirty at the Golf Club?”

“Will they let me in? I’m not a card-carrying member.”

“I’ll fix it. You won’t have any trouble.” It sounded like a promise, so I believed him.

When I hung up the phone, McAuliffe kept his face in a series of printouts for a few minutes. The office seemed quieter than usual. I felt I had to break the ice. “He wants to take me to lunch,” I said.

Fred McAuliffe looked across the room at me. “It’s getting hard for Mr. Ross to find people to lunch with him.” He shook his head while dusting off the printouts
which had collected a fine spray of ash from the pipe he was cleaning. “It’s not just his drinking—there are plenty of drinkers over at the club, though most of them are a lot older than Mr. Ross—it’s the fact that he has been involved in the unsavoury stories about the marketing of contaminated fuel last May. People want to distance themselves from him in public.”

“Was he head of Kinross in May?”

“Oh, no, he was in charge here. Mr. Caine was in charge at Kinross.”

“Then why is Mr. Ross getting all the social heat? Shouldn’t some of it rub off on Norm Caine?” McAuliffe opened his mouth to answer, but stopped himself. He caught his breath and tried it another way.

“You make a good point, Mr. Cooperman. He should have let Mr. Caine answer the questions. I told him that. I’m not telling you anything I didn’t tell Mr. Ross to his face. Phidias was not involved at all, until Mr. Ross tried to get the story hushed up.”

“But that story was too big for anybody to hush it up. It was a big international exposé. Nobody could have kept a lid on it.”

“Yes, well …” McAuliffe got his pipe started, holding a box of wooden matches over the bowl and drawing down deeply. “Let’s just say it’s more complicated than that.” I felt that I was on the verge of learning something important and I hoped it wasn’t showing in my face.

“I don’t want you to betray a confidence, Mr. McAuliffe,” I said hoping he would spill his guts to me then and there.

“I’ll only say this,” he said. “The stories in the paper didn’t get it right where Mr. Ross was concerned. Not a bit, they didn’t. I wish more people knew the truth. Maybe some day they will. But right now, it’s not my secret to break, though it festers inside me, I’ll tell you.

I could see that that was the end of the conversation, so I went back to the papers on my desk before he did. Maybe it gave me a moral advantage, like not taking the last olive or not being the last person to leave a party. Fred returned to his seat as well, but, looking up, I could see he wasn’t comfortable. I knew it wasn’t the old chair with the green almost worn off the backrest. After a few uneasy minutes, he left the room for a short time and returned with one of the minute books from the boardroom. From his desk he took a ledger key and removed the heavy binder. At this point he glanced up at me, but saw that I was deeply involved with work of my own. Actually, I could get a good picture of what was going on on his side of the room from the reflection in the glass of the picture of the Commander and his father-in-law, Sandy MacCallum. He took pages out of the ledger and put them in his desk drawer. Minute books are serious documents, records of what the board of directors does while in office. They aren’t to be added to or altered at will. How unlike Fred McAuliffe to remove pages; how like
him to do it where he could be seen. What was the old man up to?

At exactly 12:05, Fred hung up his grey cardigan on a wooden hanger, put his jacket back on and removed his Irish cap from its peg in the old-fashioned hat-rack. He gave me one of his friendly twinkles as he passed my table and he was gone. I waited four minutes before discovering that he’d locked his desk. I didn’t have the time or the tools to make a tidy entry, so I settled for a trip to the boardroom to see which was the missing book. It was easy to spot: 1985 was gone. There was a space between 1984 and 1986 the size of the ledger in Fred’s drawer. Nineteen eight-five was long before Jack Dowden’s death. It predated the digging at Fort Mississauga as well. It was food for speculation if not for thought. I deserted the high-backed chairs placed around the boardroom table. I could feel the eyes of all the board members on my back as I grabbed my coat and caught the next “down” elevator.