The Whole Megillah (3 page)

I was a little surprised to find that I had felt nothing more than mild shock over Moore's sudden departure from the living. I mopped up the spilled coffee, wondering if that was going to be the high point of my grief. I'd lost clients before, but this was getting ridiculous. Maybe I was relieved to be rid of the responsibilities he had given me. As I refilled my cup, I was aware of an insistent pang: it wasn't for Moore, but for the loss of my place at the round table on the second floor at Book City.

I shaved and put myself in order in the vast upstairs bathroom. It had more heavy white porcelain in it than a museum devoted to ceramics. The large mirror over the sink showed more of me than I wanted to see following a dose of bad news. Red marks on my cheeks, new lines under my eyes. I did the necessary and got out of there. I'd left a trail of pebbles on the floor on my way in, so I was able to find the door.

Albany Avenue was only two blocks from Brunswick. I walked up to Barton and through the somewhat muddled street arrangements south of a big church in the block between Howland and Albany. It was the only place I knew where cars routinely ignored a one-way sign in order to continue along Barton. On foot, of course, it made no difference.

It was no great test of detective skills to find out which house had become ‘the scene of the crime.' Two police cars were parked on the wrong side of the street and a small group of sightseers was loitering near them, watching for the slightest movement of a curtain or the shift of a blind. A man with a camera around his neck was talking to a policeman on the front steps. I went up and introduced myself to the man in uniform. Five minutes later, I was sitting in Moore's living room, exactly where I'd been sitting last Tuesday when the deceased offered me a drink. This time I was offered nothing more than a portion of couch and the opportunity to twiddle my thumbs waiting for Detective Sergeant Chuck Pepper of the Homicide Squad. I told him quickly about my meeting with Moore and in broad outline the work he had asked me to do for him. He gave no indication of whether any of this was news to him. You get to expect that from the professionals. Information is the coin of the realm and nobody gives change. In the end he thanked me for coming forward and relaxed enough to light a cigarette.

Automatically, I reached into my own pocket. It was a reflex. I'd stopped smoking, but I still had the habit. I brought out a Hall's cough candy and sucked on that. It wasn't as good as a smoke, but it was what I was doing these days. Like a member of AA, I never said I wouldn't start smoking again; I just tried to keep myself away from tobacco one day at a time.

Pepper seemed to find his cigarette very satisfying. I let him know he was enjoying it for both of us. That was a good move. He began to loosen up and talk to me instead of asking questions from behind a barricade.

‘The paper said that the murder weapon was a rifle from his collection?' I tried to make it sound like a question, just to see what kind of answer it was likely to get.

‘The Globe just hinted that. We are keeping mum about the cause of death right now. We sent the broken stock of the gun to see what Forensics could tell us. You can see where he kept his guns.' I followed Pepper's pointed finger to a wall where a group of expensive-looking, hand-made guns hung in a row. The pegs where one gun was missing made its own mute comment.

I couldn't understand collectors. How could they go from guns to rare books? How could the mind that enjoyed illuminated initial letters also admire tools for casting musketballs or tin soldiers?

‘Are you saying that the gun wasn't fired?' I asked Pepper.

‘That, my friend, is the main thing we are not saying, if you follow me. I reckon we might catch a monkey that way as well as another.'

‘Were any more of his rare books taken?' I asked.

‘We've got somebody checking into that,' Pepper said, putting his notebook down on the arm of his chair. His close-cropped, steel-grey hair made him look like an American career officer, but there was a slight English turn to his speech. It wasn't exactly an accent; it was his way of putting words together that gave him away.

‘Any objections to my seeing where it happened?'

‘As long as it's for your own prurient satisfaction, Mr. Cooperman. I don't want to think of you as the competition. As long as you have that straight.'

‘I told Moore that you were the only show in town when I saw him last Tuesday. I told him he shouldn't be hiring a rent-a-cop like me when you were on the job.'

‘Sure, but we needed him to die before we could go to work.'

‘I mean your breaking and entering specialists.'

‘Sorry, I don't follow you.' He looked puzzled.

‘Well, you know that last week, Saturday to be exact, he was robbed of a valuable book.'

Pepper's face went blank like a TV channel after sign-off. I shut up, because I'm sure he wouldn't have taken in what I said. Gradually, I could see blood flowing above his collar-line as his face returned to its customary pink. He blinked and gave a nervous grin. ‘Let's have that again, please.'

I explained what I had thought he would have known already. I was wrong, it would seem, because he questioned me closely. As far as he knew, there had been no report of a theft from this Albany Avenue address. Moore had been robbed of a next-to-priceless book, but he hadn't reported it to the police!

 

 

Chapter Four

 

Honour Griffin didn't look more than thirty from where I was sitting. She was tall and, from a strictly male point of view, very pleasantly put together. With long flaxen hair, green eyes and a face that could have added a few ships to the fleet that Helen launched against Troy, she was, in a word, a knock-out. She was wearing a loosely knitted grey sweater that was too large for her. Her long legs were wrapped in faded jeans. She had a way of pulling at a lock of hair near her ear that I found easy to concentrate on. Sergeant Pepper introduced us as soon as he returned to the room with her. Her walking into the house had interrupted Pepper's questioning for less than three minutes. Obviously, with her entrance, I was returned to the live box with the rest of the small fry.

‘Mr. Cooperman was doing some work for your husband,' he explained simply. She nodded with a certain indifference. Obviously, this was not as big a moment for her as it was for me. But then, I hadn't just become Tony Moore's widow. I wondered whether an estranged wife can become a first-class widow with no points taken off. I expressed my regrets at her loss and told her that I would be glad to do anything I could to clear up the matter of Moore's death. She frowned, not unpleasantly, in my direction.

‘Do you know about the theft that took place here last week?' Pepper asked her. She shook her head.

‘I didn't see Tony last week,' she said. ‘I talked to him briefly on the phone, but that's all.'

‘Then you know nothing, or very little, about who Mr. Moore was seeing during the last few days.'

‘That's right. We were going through a bad spell. To make it bearable, we kept our distance from one another.'

‘Did he have any enemies that you know about?'

‘He had business rivals, if that's what you mean. Most of them would not, I think, include murder in a normal business day.'

I wanted her to name these rivals, but I thought that by keeping my mouth shut I might get to hear more. I couldn't understand why Pepper was letting me hear this much. It didn't sound like routine practice to me. But what do I know? Maybe the antics of my friends Savas and Staziak at Niagara Regional Police are not typical of policemen in general, just the aberrations of working in a community as small as Grantham, where a secret lasts only half an hour on a rainy day.

But so far, Pepper was asking good questions. I simply made a mentallist of the ones I would have added and tried to disappear into the chintz fabric of the couch.

‘May I ask where you are living, Mrs. Moore? Or is it Griffin?'

‘I get both and answer to both. Neither is my maiden name. I have a condominium on Walmer Road.' She gave him the number and he wrote it down along with the telephone number, which she also sup plied. I tried to put both of them into my memory bank, since I didn't want to risk bringing out a pencil.

‘Then I take it that your estrangement from Mr. Moore was not recent?'

‘We've been living apart for more than a year. Do I have to go into that?' Here she threw me a helpless glance, as though I was suddenly an adjudicator of what was fair police practice. Was she some sort of masochist trying to get me to play ‘good cop' to Pepper's ‘bad'?

‘It would help the investigation, Mrs. Moore. I'm sure that Mr. Cooperman would excuse himself for a few minutes.' I knew it was too good to last. I got up and backed my way through the study and out the French doors into the garden. My place was taken by a broad-hipped policewoman in uniform who'd just come into the house. Pepper gave her a grin of welcome.

Outside in the back yard I could almost hear Moore standing at my elbow, showing me where the robbery had occurred. I looked again at the door I'd just come through. The newly repaired glass panel was shattered again. It was as though the thief who had taken the megillah had come back in order to kill Moore and had repeated his steps exactly. I turned around again and sat on the steps. I reached into my pocket for my cigarettes and brought out the inadequate substitutes. I peeled the paper from a cough candy and put it in my mouth.

In the flower bed to the left of the steps, something caught the light. As I moved my head again, it flashed in the sunlight. I got down on all fours and looked among the fading black-eyed Susans. What I found were broken pieces of window glass. There were four fairly big fragments. I kept my fingerprints away from them, but I got as close as I could without looking like I was hunting for worms. The glass shards were all spotted from the recent rains. What were they doing there? Had Moore thrown them there when he fixed the window after the first break-in? Had the workmen who fixed the glass? Hardly likely, I thought.

My mind spun on, like old tires on fresh snow, without much movement. To take the pressure off my head, I began nosing around the garbage cans. The cops will go through these before they're finished with the scene of the crime, but it didn't look as though they'd played about with them yet. I was squeamish about garbage, but it told you so much about people.

I held my nose with one hand and unfastened a wire tag with the other. I was glad to be outside. Here were signs of normal middle-class living: egg shells, orange peels, burned toast fragments and coffee grounds. Under this were grapefruit peels, showing empty pink interiors, and a package of plastic-wrapped green beans that had gone brown before they could be used. Moore didn't seem to like leftovers; I found a chicken carcass with a meal still clinging to one half, and some roast potatoes. Under this mess, I found a white plastic bag. Inside was what at first I thought was movie film, but it was half-inch magnetic tape, such as you find in VCR cassettes. I found four spindles, two with most of the tape still wound around them. The rest of it floated in cramped loops, like squashed noodles or carpenter's shavings. I thought of removing the tape, but I have few mechanical skills and no electronic ones, so I decorated the outside of the garbage can with a few knotted strands and left it for the police to stumble across and declare as evidence.

I didn't know what it might be evidence of. Sexy movies? Blackmail? Who knows? I took another cough candy to suck on the meaning of that for a few minutes.

Before I got very far, Sergeant Pepper was opening the door and pushing it into the small of my back. ‘Sorry,' he said, ‘I didn't see you sitting there.' I got up and he joined me in the back yard.

‘I'm the one who should apologize,' I said, without meaning it. ‘I didn't mean to come between you and your witness.' He squinted into the sun as though he was a western sheriff.

‘What did you make of her?' I asked him, as he moved to a white lawn chair.

‘She could have done it,' he said. ‘At least, I haven't found a better suspect. She seems sort of cold-blooded. I wouldn't put it past her.'

‘But you don't have enough to bring her to book? Is that it?'

‘I'm not in a hurry. It's early days. But when the time comes, she'll do as well as another.' I knew he didn't mean that. He was just flexing the muscles that showed how cool he was. ‘Do you know anything about the rare book business?' he asked.

I smiled and lied to him about my prowess, turning what I'd learned from my hour or two with Tony Moore and the books I'd been reading into as impressive a list of accomplishments as I'd ever heard on the subject.

‘Then you'll have had some interest in this megillah thing yourself, eh?'

Now was the moment to begin paddling backwards. I'd done too good a job of self-promotion. It always gets me in the end. I explained that I had no particular lust after this megillah. I told him that I collected bad debts, not rare books, and that seemed to hold him for the moment.

‘Did you learn anything interesting while I was cooling my heels?' I asked.

‘ "Cooling your heels"? Look, Mr. Cooperman, I could have said thank you and good afternoon to you half an hour ago. I'm just trying to show that I appreciate what you told me. There are a lot of people out there who wouldn't have bothered. Getting involved is the last thing they'd want to do. So that's why you're still here. That's why you heard part of what Mrs. Moore had to say.'

‘That and not having another Metro cop handy.'

‘I got all the help I need on this case. It's not like looking for a stray kid or a rapist, where you need eyes at every street corner. This is a tidy, maybe even old-fashioned, case. Moore was killed probably by his nearest and dearest--like in most cases. I'll know better about whether it was the widow or not after I've seen Moore's will. I've got a man tracking down his lawyer now.'