Dead & Buried (22 page)

On the way to collect my car, I tried to place Fred’s loyalties. He was surely in the Commander’s camp. His age and manner would have him there rather than standing under the Ross Forbes standard. Ross was too sloppy for Fred, who was more the Commander’s man. I couldn’t imagine McAuliffe quite as antediluvian as Murdo Forbes, however. Fred was essentially a gentle man, whereas the Commander was probably still complaining about the fifty-hour-week, unions, social security, unemployment insurance, maybe even the vote.
The more I thought of it, the more I could see that the Commander wasn’t as out of touch with his age as I thought at first. A lot of this kind of thinking was very popular. I could almost hear him saying that it’s time to cut our losses on the railways, time to deregulate, time to end farm-price subsidies. For an old robber baron who had cut his teeth before the Second World War, he was sounding a very contemporary note. Paternalism has it all over creeping socialism. Had the Commander got over the shock of discovering that the working man, whose friend he was, had been replaced by organized labour?

The car cut left down the hill near the old firehall, following the twisting road down to the bridge over the Old Canal. On the other side, the road twisted back up to the original level again. The Golf Club occupied prime real estate right in the middle of town. There are many odd things about Grantham, but none odder than this. Any map of the area confirms the truth, however. The Eleven Mile Creek curved sharply where it joined the Old Canal. On the outside of the curve, the old business section followed ancient Indian trails, creating a maze of familiar blocks and corners. Across the canal, on the inside of the curve and reached by only a few bridges, the fairways of the Golf Club separated the old town from its newer suburbs.

From the street the club didn’t arrest your attention. The church next door did that. The club consisted of a random assembly of hangars and sheds adapted to leisure pursuits. A bit of ivy ran up one stucco wall and landscaping
had improved matters, but it never could be said, for all the terraces looking out over the tennis courts and greens, that the Grantham Golf Club was an architectural prize. From the outside it was almost an eyesore, but it was the interior that mattered. Here you could find a shed to house and repair hundreds of golf carts, a curling rink with a heated gallery for onlookers and a card room for Manny Cooperman to spend his time in. There was a huge pool that could be opened up to the warm summer weather for three months of the year. A large restaurant served dependable if not inspired food, or so Frank Bushmill used to tell me. I always thought the food there must be the best in town since it was so hard to get a table when you wanted one.

I found a spot reserved for guest-parking and walked around to the deserted terrace in front of the restaurant. A few hardy souls were playing golf. I could see the bright colours of their jackets far away over the rolling landscape. The parking lot reserved for members made a challenging contrast to the guest lot with my beat-up Olds in it. Here I saw three Rolls-Royces, an antique Bentley and a Thunderbird of an early year. I didn’t bother to count the Corvettes and Triumphs. I was surprised to see a full lot this early on a Friday. But what do I know about such things? I suppose the restaurant was booked for every day of the year. The door to the patio was closed; I had to walk around through another door and enter the dining-room in the approved autumn manner. I could see no sign of Ross Forbes.

A few heads turned when I entered. I asked a waiter if there was a table with Ross Forbes’s name on it. I followed him to a place near a window and accepted the two menus he handed me. Naturally, he’d get a view. I was discovering that the club made me nervous.

I was looking at a rosy-faced bald-headed man with a white moustache as he dug into a portion of clubhouse curry. I was trying to discover why I was so sure it was curry when I could neither smell nor taste it. I’d decided that I had an irrational side after all, when Ross Forbes cleared his throat beside me. “Hello, Cooperman!” he said heartily. “Are you doing sums in your head or coming down with a migraine?”

“Oh! Hello! I didn’t see you come in. I was woolgathering. I do a lot of it these days.” I didn’t know whether to get up or not. I made a gesture and left it at that. He seated himself opposite me and deployed his napkin against future problems on his lap. Mine was still nestled in a wine glass. I didn’t want to copy Forbes in all things, so I left it there.

Forbes was well above medium height, in fact he was taller than he looked. His great barrel chest and round shoulders took inches off his apparent height. His wavy dark hair was going grey at the temples, giving a touchedup-by-professionals look to it. His brow was wide, but not high, and separated from the rest of his face by a nearly continuous dark line of eyebrow. The rounded end of his nose was echoed in the heavy chin. Add to that rather petulant brown eyes and a lower lip that returned to
a pouting expression when his features were not animated with talk. He had a way of talking which seemed to add quotation marks around certain phrases in order to lift them to something more memorable than chat. His smile showed even teeth. I hadn’t seen him smile before.

“Well, now, Cooperman, I hope that we can both agree that the past is dead and buried?”

“I’m on your side there,” I said. “No sense keeping a feud alive.”

“Exactly! So, the less said about our scuffle downtown, the better.”

“It was outside your office at Kinross Disposals. But, sure, no hard feelings. I was just doing my job; you were just repelling trespassers.”

“Glad you see it in that light.” He let his eyes drop to the menu that lay across his plate, and curled his lower lip in thought. “The curry looks good,” he said at length. The thought of strange pieces of meat in a pale greeny yellow sauce did nothing for my appetite. I scanned the menu looking for a friend. Where were the chopped-egg sandwiches hiding? My eyes went down one column and up the next. I couldn’t understand what half of the words meant. I wondered whether on a menu in France they might not think it’s chic to use English. I finally settled on the soup and pasta of the day and hoped for the best.

“Would you like some wine with that, sir?” the waiter asked, once he had written what he thought of me on his order pad.

“Not for me, thanks.”

“Mr. Forbes?”

“Bring a bottle of Perrier, Joe.”

“Right away, Mr. Forbes.”

Once the pale green bottle came and I found myself sipping what tasted like seltzer; it seemed that Forbes was going to get down to the reason for inviting me to lunch. Some people can put business off until coffee, others bring it up casually over the last part of the main course, but Ross Forbes was a man for the direct approach. Before I had even dipped into the basket of warmed Parker House rolls, he was at me.

“May I ask why you continue doing business for my ex-wife here in Grantham, Mr. Cooperman?” He held his glass as though he had had lots of practice holding glasses. I had been surprised about the mineral water. In fact I had been ready to trade him Scotch for Scotch well into the evening if I had to. But Perrier was a new direction.

“Let’s agree not to talk about Mrs. Forbes, okay? Either you’re going to say something you’ll regret or I will. Either way it will spoil the lunch. I’m surprised you aren’t wining and dining out-of-town company for the wedding, Mr. Forbes. Tomorrow’s the big day, isn’t it?”

“People are still arriving. I’ll stay clear until this evening. There’s a rehearsal.”

I nodded, keeping quiet about the fact that I would be there. I could see him trying to think of a new way to ask the question that was bugging him.

“Do you do a lot of income tax work, Cooperman?”

“When I can get it. It makes a change from waiting around for people to check out of the Black Duck Motel. Nowadays a lot of the work is going through credit-card receipts, telephone bills, that kind of thing. It’s not like in the movies.”

“I suppose not. I used to have a first edition of
The Big Sleep,”
he said. I wondered what he was thinking about when he talked like this. “Bought it from that book dealer, Martin Lyster, who you can never get hold of when you want him. Do you know him? A most lubricious fellow.”

“As a matter of fact, I heard he died this morning. It was not unexpected.”

“Well, sorry. Hope he wasn’t a particular friend of yours?”

“I don’t collect books, but I knew him slightly.” Forbes was handling the Perrier water pretty well. After the stories of his drinking (mostly retailed by Teddie), I was wondering what sort of new leaf he was showing off here. The waiter cleared away the soup cups. Mine had tasted of green cheese. I guess there are places where soup is made with green cheese. Now I know where to find it. “Is book collecting what you want to talk about, Mr. Forbes? It’s not something I know a lot about. And I guess it hasn’t much to do with why you’re buying me lunch.”

“How long will you be in McAuliffe’s office?”

“Couple of days more. I shouldn’t think I’ll still be there by this time next week. Today’s a short day and then we are into the weekend …”

“Will you be free by, say, next Wednesday?”

“I might be. Why?”

“I might have a job for you.”

“Me? Why me? I thought Howard Dover worked for you? Don’t tell me you hit him in the nose too?”

“I won’t say I’ve liked you much, Cooperman, but I know to my cost that you give value for money. Dover’s busy doing security for Phidias. What I want has nothing to do with the office.” This was going a little too fast for me. One minute I’m on the outside trying to find a peephole to the inside, then I’m shown the red carpet to the inner sanctum itself. I didn’t know whether to burst out laughing or to cry.

“What kind of job do you want me to do, Mr. Forbes?”

The curry and pasta arrived. Forbes was quick to dig into his, after complaining to the waiter that he did not want his salad served on the same plate. The dish was removed and returned a minute later without the offending salad, which arrived seconds later on a side dish. “There are parts of this town where they still bring you coffee with your main plate,” Forbes said. Did he see himself as a gourmet rolling back the clouds of local ignorance? I should have told him about the Di, where they’ve always treated me right. I held off eating, waving my fork over the pasta while this was going on. Finally
we both dug in. “Do you think that you might be interested in what I’ve been talking about?”

“You still haven’t said what you want,” I said. “I’m always interested in making a living, Mr. Forbes, but I also try to keep things simple. I’m afraid I have a conflict that will make it impossible for me to do any work for you for the moment. But if it will keep—”

“Conflict? What do you mean conflict?” Forbes’s lower lip was distorting his face, lengthening out his upper lip and turning the end of his nose white.

“I’m involved in an investigation for your ex-wife.”

“And that will be cleared up by Wednesday, you said.”

“I said it might be. I’ve also got some other files in my office I have to do some work on. It isn’t easy being a one-man band, Mr. Forbes.”

“But you accomplish prodigious miracles I’ve been told,” he said with just the suggestion of a sneer.

“I don’t know about that. I do know that I would find it hard to work for you without knowing in detail what it is you want.”

“You want complete disclosure from me and you aren’t committing yourself to zilch!”

“You’ve got both my ears across the table from you,” I said. “I think the lunch just about pays for that. It also buys a measure of discretion. A PI who runs off at the mouth doesn’t stay in business long.”

“Okay, okay. Don’t bother to rationalize. I’ll come clean,” he said. “Isn’t that what they all say?”

“It’s up to you. Tell me about it or don’t. It’s your dime.”

“I’m being followed, Cooperman,” he said in a voice that was hardly above a whisper. “I don’t like it. There’s a car that’s always behind me. There are clicks on my telephone. There are people in hotel lobbies pretending to read newspapers who later turn up outside my office. Once I noticed the first man, it started preying on my mind. Now I can see that there are relays of people watching, listening and following me. Damn it, Cooperman, I don’t like it! I know I said that already but it’s got me that rattled.”

“Do you have any suspicions?”

“Oh, God! I don’t want to open that can of worms here. Let’s just say there are several possible sources.”

“Does it have anything to do with last spring’s stories about toxic wastes in fuel oil?”

“Well, that’s a better bet than no bet at all,” he said, removing a particularly stringy bit of beef from his mouth and placing it on his plate. He looked neither to the right to the left afterwards, which gave me another glimpse of his social assurance. “The bedfellows in that deal were not of my choosing. It might be one of them. I don’t know. What I want to know is: will you find out? I can’t look around without seeing one of those pale faces and cheap suits.”

“Well …” I knew that if I asked him if one of them was watching him at the moment and he indicated the old geezer with the white moustache or somebody hiding in
the leafless bushes outside the window, I’d be hooked. In sifting for information, you always run the risk of getting in too far or too deeply. Having a look at one of the faces Forbes was afraid of would have made it difficult to walk out of the club digesting a good lunch but still my own man. “Well …”

“I’ll pay top dollar, Cooperman. You won’t regret this.”

“Look, I could use the money. I won’t lie to you,” I said. “But it could complicate my life so that I wouldn’t know where I was.” Forbes was beginning to cloud over, as though a storm were coming up over the top of that continuous eyebrow. “I’ll tell you something, Mr. Forbes. I’ve discovered that I have a tendency to try to take the muddle out of my clients’ affairs. When they come to me, you wouldn’t believe it, the mess they’re in. I’d like to help you too, but when I say I can’t, that’s what I mean. Now that’s frank and honest as of this Friday afternoon. When next Wednesday comes and I’m cursing myself for talking to you like this, maybe I’ll call you to say I’ve changed my mind. That’s all I can do for you. In the meantime, if I see anybody following you and I can get a line on them, I’ll let you know. As long as I’m not going to get my knees broken or come to a bad end in the harbour at Port Richmond.” I watched his face when I mentioned Port Richmond but while it was growing angry, it didn’t twig to my hint about Thursday night.