Dead & Buried (6 page)

“Oh,
that.”

“Yes,
that.”

“Well, if you figured out that much, you must have a good idea why I didn’t tell you straight out. I figured you for smart.”

“Save the soft-soap, Mrs. Dowden. From now on, I want from you nothing but the truth. Is that clear? Otherwise you can take your troubles to Howard Dover or one of the other investigators.”

“I’ve already been to them, Mr. Cooperman. You’re all I’ve got!”

“Well, stop abusing me. Go, make some coffee. That’s a start.”

“The kettle’s just off the boil.”

“You said that five minutes ago! That’s not just off the boil in my book!” I surprised both of us with my outburst. Both of us knew that it had nothing to do with the cooling kettle.

In a moment she got up and left the room. Ralph jumped from the couch to the wine-dark carpet and followed her to the kitchen. In another minute, I followed Ralph.

“You’re going to have to settle for tea. I’m out of coffee. As a matter of fact,” she said, in an expression of purest candour, “I haven’t had coffee in this house since Jack died.”

“And how long ago was that?” I asked unkindly.

“A year and three months ago. There! I’ve said it. I won’t tell you any more lies, Mr. Cooperman. I’ve always been a truthful woman. Honest.”

“I’m going to drop the case the next time you aren’t being straight with me. I don’t want to hear any more exaggerations or fibs. You understand?”

“Thank you, Mr. Cooperman.”

On her own ground, Irma Dowden didn’t look so ferret-like, not so small and not so apparently determined to get her own way. She looked serious and I took that to be an humble and a contrite heart. She was used to feeling mistress in her own kitchen, but she gave me lots of room as she fussed with the cups.

“Mrs. Dowden—”

“Oh, please, call me Irma. Goodness!” I nodded and started over.

“Irma, you said that Kinross had sent back Jack’s things—the clothes he was wearing, his wallet, keys. Is that right?”

“At first they said I wouldn’t want to see them, but in the end they sent them. Of course, except for digging out his wallet, I haven’t looked at the rest. They were right about that.”

“Where are they now? The clothes, I mean?”

“Jack’s glory hole is in the cellar. Everything of his is still down there. I haven’t had the heart to touch anything.” She made a gesture suggesting her loss, and I sighed and shrugged to show sympathy. “You can have a
look while I finish making the tea,” she said. “His work clothes are in a shopping bag near the workbench, if you want to see them.”

“It all ends up in a shopping bag, somebody once said.” I don’t think she got it, so I turned to the cellar door.

The steps leading down to the basement were covered in linoleum, probably rescued from the most recent redoing of the kitchen floor. At the bottom, I found an ancient coal furnace adapted to natural gas. A pile of stored furniture rested against one wall. Some of it looked in bad shape, but I recognized a few pieces of Canadian pine— some chests of drawers and a hutch—that, with a little work, might pass for Early American. Besides the washtubs, a fruit-cellar, former coalbin, I discovered the workbench, a lathe and a few pieces of his handiwork: an arrow-back chair with one rung about to be replaced by a fine match for the broken pieces. Jack had been doing excellent work down here. He had left things so tidy, I wondered whether he’d had a premonition about his approaching fate.

And there was the shopping bag. I took a breath and dug in. There was less dried blood than I expected. I left the underwear unexamined in a separate plastic bag, through which I could see more than I wanted to. I found a green flannel workshirt made in Taiwan. The pockets held nothing but tobacco crumbs and lint. The trousers, heavy-duty denim that had never heard of Calvin Klein, held a soiled handkerchief, a comb that indicated a need
for a dandruff remover, and thirty-seven cents. For some reason, maybe it was some scrap of my formal training showing, I looked in the trouser cuffs. Nothing but dried weeds in there. But I took a second look at them. There were a few stems, fragmented leaves and a long, silvery tissue with tiny dark seeds embedded along the length of the four-inch-long stalk. It looked a little beanlike, except that the pods were flaking off. The seeds were stuck in a delicate tissue that ran between the pods.

I slipped the dead contents of Jacks’ cuffs into the envelope with my electric bill and folded it closed. I had a friend up at Secord University who could tell me what the weeds had to say about Jack’s death, apart from the fact that he may have had a ramble in the woods some time before the fatal day. There was nothing here that told me that the accident was murder. I still had only Irma’s hunch about that. The chalky dirt on the back of the shirt told me nothing about why he was now numbered among the dead.

Irma was just pouring the tea when I went back upstairs. “Did you find anything interesting, Mr. Cooperman?”

“Look, Irma, if you’re going to be Irma and not Mrs. Dowden, then you’d better start calling me Benny.”

“Here’s your tea.” She put two blue-and-white mugs on the green table. She pulled out a wooden chair and slid into it. “This is a piece of early Canadian, Jack told me,” she said, tapping the table top with her teaspoon. “He was always going to strip it down to the wood, but we never
could spare it long enough for the whole treatment. Jack always wanted to settle down and get out of driving for a living. He was always talking about setting up in the antique business. Jack loved wood.”

We sipped our tea, while Irma told me about their life together. She dabbed her eyes a couple of times with the handkerchief I lent her. I tried to take in what she said, but the details of the children they never had or the uncles who could never leave them alone didn’t really change anything. Even on the subject of Jack’s relations to Kinross, I could find nothing sinister. Before I left, I asked to see Jack’s papers. Irma shook her head. “Jack didn’t leave anything in writing,” she said, “unless you count the three love-letters he wrote to me, but I’ll show you what I’ve got.” She led the way into the bedroom, where in a corner a shoebox full of credit-card flimsies was produced. I asked if I could borrow these. As I was about to leave, I saw a few books in a pile.

“Are the books yours or Jack’s?”

“Oh, Jack’s. I’m not much of a reader. Television’s too easy. I guess my brain’s been softened, Benny.” I tuned out Irma’s prattle and checked the titles. There was a Robert Ludlum in paperback, two Stephen Kings and then the surprise:
Chemical Nightmare: The Unnecessary Legacy of Toxic Wastes
by John Jackson, Phil Weller and the Waterloo Public Interest Group. I opened the book and found that it was well thumbed. It wasn’t much, but just what I needed for bedtime reading. Irma made no objection when I asked to borrow it. She saw me to the
door and down the walk before she shut the front door to the night.

After a wash, I took the book under the covers with me and read myself silly for about an hour. When I woke up, the light was still burning and the clock told me that I would have to begin a new day in under two hours. I turned off the light and got rid of my bed-partner.
Chemical Nightmare
could hang around the apartment all day when it got light. It didn’t have to make ends meet.

SIX

The drive up to Secord University was one I always liked. It took me over the course my father used when he taught me how to drive. The curves of road leading up the escarpment were recorded in my elbows and feet like they’d been programmed. The escarpment was heavily wooded, but the trees were beginning to lose their leaves. There were still plenty of maples strutting their stuff in reds and gold. The sumachs were scarlet at the edge of the quarry, where I caught a glimpse through the trees of the shack where Garth Gardenia and I’d spent a teenage afternoon with a Mrs. Stagg. Mrs. Stagg lived alone with a collection of photograph albums full of turn-of-thecentury showgirl beauties. She might have been in the theatre herself, but we never asked. We’d heard that one of her legs was wooden, but it was hard to tell under her long skirts. During the spring and summer, her cabin is invisible from the road. Maybe that’s why I never think of her except when I drive up the escarpment in the autumn and winter.

I’d phoned Eric Miller, an old friend of mine, who’d once been a cut-up in grade ten science with Miss Red Scott at the helm. Now he was a lecturer in botany. I
wonder whether Red Scott ever knew that Eric used to circulate drawings of flowers showing the reproductive parts in unmistakable human forms. And I remember a verse that accompanied one of them, something with the rhyme “saturnalia” and “genitalia” in it.

I found Eric by following a colour-coded strip painted along the corridors. All of the departments were colourcoded for the illiterate. History was dark blue, biology was green. Eric’s office was a large, dim room on the tenth floor.

“Benny! How are you?” Eric’s grin took me right back to Red Scott’s lab tables. “You son of a gun! I haven’t seen you in five years. What have you been doing with yourself that you can say in a room that may be bugged by the Mounties?”

“I keep seeing your name in the papers, Eric. Didn’t you get some honour a few months back? I’m sorry, I should keep up on these things.”

“Yeah, I agreed to suppress some startling facts about the procreation of trilliums so that the province wouldn’t have to find another official emblem for its logos. So they gave me a gong. I used it to crack nuts with, like Tom Canty in
The Prince and the Pauper.

For a minute or two we chatted away, recalling old friends and trying to reconcile our present faces with the younger versions in our memories. “It’s a nice place you’ve got here, Eric,” I said at last, as an exit ramp from memory lane. Nothing very bright as an observation, but it did deal with the here and now.

“This, Benny, is not a place, it’s a herbarium. Come in and roll up in an old newspaper.” I followed Eric through rows of cabinets taller than both of us. The dark, institutional green killed much of the light coming into the room from the generous windows along one wall. Between the back-to-back cabinets, a few wooden desks were scattered, all of them stacked high with drying plants between layers of newspaper showing various tints of yellow. “This department should double as a periodical archives, you know, Benny. Look at this.” He picked up a folded copy of a Toronto paper and read the headline:
JOHNSON REFUSES TO SEEK ANOTHER TERM
. I’m sure I’ve got one with Roosevelt going for a fourth term around here somewhere.” Eric found his desk. Like the others, it was cluttered and dusty. It must be the last desk on earth with a well in it for hiding a typewriter. I was amazed that the university would allow such ancient equipment into the science departments. It didn’t seem so odd that I might find it in the humanities departments.

“I’m working on a case, Eric,” I began, trying to remember that my time was being paid for. Eric nodded as he took off his tinted glasses and began cleaning them with a tissue from his pocket. His strawlike hair, which made him a wonderful Sir Andrew Aguecheek in
Twelfth Night
at the Collegiate when we were in grade twelve, was looking pale and thin. It was that sort of blond that goes grey without anybody noticing. I took the envelope with my electric bill and poured out the contents into a small pile on a clear spot on Eric’s desk. I hoped I wasn’t
going to ruin years of research by bringing the pods and leaves from Jack’s cuffs to the herbarium. For all I knew, this might have been a closed environment. Eric’s mouth frowned slightly as he examined the mess I’d made on his desk. He poked about at the pods with a yellow pencil with a pink Ruby Tip eraser on the end.

“Hesperis,”
he said.

“What?”

“Hesperis matronalis
to be exact.”

“And once again in English, Eric. What do you know about it, and where is it found?” Eric smiled over the seed pods, prodded them again and lifted up a silvery membrane with tiny brown seeds caught in the fine fabric of the centre section of the beanlike pods.

“That’s the septum,” he said, “as in your nose and mine.” He touched the membrane gently.
“Hesperis
is also known as Dame’s Rocket. It’s a member of the mustard family. The septum’s the give-away; no native Ontario plant has one.”

“Where does it come from, if it’s not from here?”

“Oh, it’s been here for a long time. Like starlings, Benny, they arrive here and multiply.”

“Are you saying it’s a weed, Eric?”

“Not usually. It’s usually an ornamental plant found in gardens, but it sometimes escapes, and if it finds an agreeable habitat, Dame’s Rocket does very well.” Eric pushed the rubber-tipped end of his pencil into his ear and turned it absent-mindedly. “I’ve seen them at building sites and by streams. Never heard a wild one complain.
Now, judging from this other stuff here, the things that aren’t from
Hesperis,
I’d say that this one was wild and not cultivated.”

“How can you tell?” With Eric, I could never be sure when he was pulling my leg.

“Trust me, Benny. Here are wild-grass fragments, a bit of burdock, hummm, goldenrod, ragweed. No, these pods came from a wild, somewhat moist area, maybe a river or bridge, or—”

“Eric, stop shovelling it! You can’t tell that much from an envelope of dead seed pods! Who do you think you are, Basil Rathbone?”

“I said ‘trust me.’ Look, Benny,
Hesperis
is usually found cultivated as I told you. But when it’s found rough, it’s got to be near some explanation of how it got there. Now this could have come from a building site, where the original cultivated plants had been allowed to go back to nature. Or you could make just as good a case for a stream or river.”

“Yes, but where’d you get the bridge?”

“Elementary, my dear Benny. The seeds had to come from some contact with civilization. I see them falling off on moist soil where a highway crosses a river or even a culvert. These plants came with garbage that was dumped or fill thrown over a guardrail. Something like that.”

“And now you’re going to tell me that in all of the Niagara Peninsula there is only one place where all of these conditions are met. Right?”