There was an Old Woman (10 page)

“Yes, Mr. Cooperman. I've heard something about you, haven't I?”

“I can't think what, Mr. Ramsden. I haven't been to a meeting of the guild before.”

“Someone pointed you out to me at the court-house. Look here, I won't be harassed in this way! I suggest you finish your oatmeal cookie and leave as quickly as possible.”

“Chocolate chip,” I corrected. Ramsden's eyebrows went up as though I'd flung hot coffee in his face. He took me by the arm and began pulling me down the aisle.

“Hey! Let go!”

“I want you out of here!”

“This is an open meeting! Nobody stopped me coming in!”

“The meeting's over. This is now a private party and you are not invited! Most assuredly
not
invited!” Ramsden had me at the top of the stairs and I was getting mad. I kept crunching tiny clods of dried mud that came from Ramsden's shoes, giving me the feeling that the floor was on his side as I nearly tripped. The open mouths around me looked like fish in a tank. I felt I had to make a stand, or I would be pushed down the stairs. I tried to get a hold on the handrail. I could feel it bend as my weight hit it. I found my footing and leaned back in Ramsden's direction.

“Just a minute!” I protested. Ramsden went over backwards above me as I turned into him. Maybe he didn't expect even a feeble counter-attack. Anyway, he
was down on the floor with all the women suddenly groaning, like I'd hit him or something. Immediately, he began pulling himself away from me, sliding in the dust and in his own clods of earth, away from the lethal terror of my famous right hand, which, incidentally, I was holding out to him to help him to his feet.

“You get away from me!” he said. “Get out! You're not wanted here!” By now he was supported by the stack of chairs he had pulled himself up to.

“This is ridiculous!” I said. “Get up yourself if you don't want help.”

“I don't need help from you or your kind!” he said.

“And what kind would that be?” I prompted. I didn't know whether he was being racist or whether he thought I was one of the Ravenswood myrmidons. Like a surprised beaver concluding a yawn, Ramsden's jaw, which had been hanging slack, snapped back into place.

“Get a doctor, Maureen! I think my back is gone!”

“Oh dear!” said Maureen and the thought was echoed by the group in various ways.

“I can't feel my feet! Maureen, get a doctor!” Maureen disappeared in a blue smear down the other stairs. “I'll have the law on you, Cooperman! You can't bully freeborn Englishmen and get away with it!”

Ramsden groaned and rolled around in the dirt at the foot of the stacked chairs. “You newcomers think you can run everything! We'll teach you a lesson, won't we friends?” His appeal to the guild members was less than overwhelming. Shock was written on most of the faces,
but, at the same time, they pushed themselves forward so as not to miss a moment of the show.

Suddenly Maureen was back at the top of the stairs. She was alone. But her eyes were as big as platters. “There's a man out there in the street without any clothes on!” For a moment no one moved. Then, in a rush, everybody moved past Ramsden and me and down the stairs to see this marvel. Ramsden had to hitch himself out of the way in order not to be trampled. He was on his hands and knees before the room was half empty and fully upright by the time the room was cleared. As I looked him over, he sneered at me, like a heavy in a Chaplin two-reeler. I looked him up and down as though I was witnessing a miracle.

“Hallelujah!” I said, bursting out laughing. “Hallelujah! The Lord be praised!”

“Go to hell, you dirty bastard!” he said, spitting out the venom. I turned to see what was going on downstairs in the street.

TWELVE

Except for Ramsden, I was the last down the steps and out into the street. I don't know what I expected to see. I don't even recall whether any picture formed in my mind as I came out to see what was going on. Now, when I think back, I can't see how I could have failed to guess what I would find.

Coming from the warm hall and the activity at the top of the stairs, I found the night air sharp against my face, a cold reminder of winters past and the winter that was just beginning. As soon as my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could see him: Kogan, in the middle of Ontario Street, naked as a jay-bird and carrying a placard that read: “Ramsden Killed Lizzy Oldridge.” The Bede Bunch was gathered on both sides of the street, taking in Kogan from every angle. There were still no signs of the Niagara Regional Police, but I thought I could hear a siren in the distance. Kogan was drunk, of course, but not drunk enough to miss the effect he was having on the blue-rinsed women on the sidewalk. Even the old gentleman in the wine-coloured cardigan looked shocked.

Kogan did a sort of pirouette on a manhole cover and shared his smile with all of us. His face altered, however,
when he saw Thurleigh Ramsden come out into the street. “There he is!” he shouted, pointing at Ramsden framed under the lighted pediment of the doorway. “Look at the bastard!” The crowd turned to stare at Ramsden, who was now red above the collar. The noise of the siren was growing louder. Kogan didn't seem to hear it, or, if he did, he didn't care. I thought that I'd better try to get him out of there.

While the crowd was still surrounding Kogan, perhaps even protecting him from being seen from a few points of the compass, I took off my coat and went over to him in the middle of the street. “Here!” I said. “Put this on!” I threw the coat over his shoulders and tried to get at least one button through a buttonhole. I'd never thought of Kogan as a big man, but I never thought he was so little either. My coat was dragging on the pavement as I pulled one of the armless sleeves towards the far sidewalk.

Even Kogan realized that the time for action had arrived. The arrival of the police was announced in flashing red and yellow lights. Kogan grabbed at a plastic shopping bag with a shirt-tail hanging out and dropped his placard. I pushed him into the convenience store across the street from the Kingsway Hall and hurried him down the middle aisle. When I turned around, two policemen had just come to the entrance, their breath making white patches on the glass door as they opened it. Just then, Kogan pulled away from me and ran in the direction of the cops.

“Kogan!” I shouted, but he ignored me. What he was doing was a flash of genius in a hunted man. He opened up all of the vents in the coffee-bean receptacles. A Niagara of coffee beans from half a dozen openings began bombarding the floor. Into this the two cops blundered. As I rounded the end of the aisle, with Kogan right behind me, the two lawmen were skating and falling into one another. We heard, rather than saw, them fall, as we went out the side door into the alley that runs behind St. Andrew Street to William. At the head of the alley, I could see the lights of the cruisers throwing tall moving shadows against the walls of the buildings.

Once I had started Kogan running, he stopped being a problem. He had dropped his protest at the earliest opportunity and entered into the problem of escape with the concentration of a chess master. Soon we had come to the back door of the
Beacon,
which was a dark corner. We sheltered between two parked delivery trucks and waited for our panting breath to give us away to the cops who came through the alley behind us. There were two of them. One poked a flashlight beam over the truck that stood between us, but he quickly lost interest. For some reason, I wasn't ready to put a hand over Kogan's mouth. I thought that his moment in the sun was over and that he had given up his one-man protest. If I had been right, I wouldn't have spent the next hour and a half in the corridor at the Niagara Regional Police Headquarters on Church Street.

What I'm saying is that Kogan shouted an obscenity in the direction of the investigating officers and the rest of our evening plans were settled for us. I'm glad I hadn't made an arrangement to meet anyone. I just hoped that Ramsden himself wouldn't put in an appearance at the station. That's all we needed.

At least I was able to get some black coffee into Kogan before he was taken in for questioning. He was still wearing only my overcoat, but by now he had invested an arm in each sleeve. I watched the way the cops walking up and down the hail either looked him over or overlooked him, as Miss Lauder, my old history teacher, used to say.

I had just thanked my stars that there was no one of my acquaintance working this shift when I caught a glimpse of Pete Staziak going into his office down the corridor. Staziak and I go back a long way, to high school in fact. I knew that he was working in the homicide area, so I didn't worry too much about seeing him officially that night. But, of course, he had to stop by to kibitz.

“Why, hello, Benny! Long time no see!” We shook hands. Pete was trying to keep a straight face. “Are you mixing in another murder, Benny? Anything I can do?”

“Pete, go blow it out the flue! I've got all I can handle with Kogan playing Lady Godiva. Don't
you
start.”

“Kogan? You don't say. What has the citizen of the year been up to tonight?”

“You tell me, Pete. I haven't seen the sheet on him. The only thing the investigating officers got—”

“Those worthy young men, Martin Ayre and Leslie Green. So young, so impressionable at that age, don't you think?”

“Okay, Pete, have your fun. Has Ramsden come down to make a complaint? If he does, he'll only collect more bad notices. The
Beacon
doesn't like him.”

“Ramsden hasn't turned up yet, as far as I've heard. But there are three blue-haired biddies from the Bede Bunch talking their heads off to Bedrosian downstairs.”

“Some people have all the luck.”

“Didn't Bedrosian pinch you once for B and E, Benny?”

“That was years ago and you know it!”

“I don't know about the people you're hanging around with, Benny. Isn't protecting Kogan gutter traffic even for you?”

“Go to hell, Pete! Climb off my shoulders and cut the rope! It's time to either book me or let me go home to bed. I'm getting tired of all this. All I need is for Chris to walk in and add a little gingerbread of his own. You guys!”

“Chris is on a heavy murder, Benny. The sort of thing you used to be interested in in the old days.”

“Okay! Okay!” I shouted. “I confess! I confess!” Doorways opened up all along the corridor and heads looked out. Pete turned pink and retreated behind his own shut door. Nobody appeared to take a statement, but after about five minutes Pete came back with some drinkable coffee.

THIRTEEN

The heavy murder that was occupying the attention of Chris Savas that Tuesday night turned out to be that of Clarence Temperley, whose dead body was found in an open grave in Victoria Lawn Cemetery. According to the
Beacon,
which printed the story for the first time on Wednesday, Detective-Sergeant Savas said that they were treating the death of the bank manager as a homicide. Pete Staziak told me that the post-mortem finding of two bullet holes in Temperley's heart led them to this view.

The paper said that the body had been found on Tuesday morning under some loose earth when the grounds crew were arranging the lowering mechanism for a funeral scheduled for that afternoon. James Balham, who was in charge of the grounds crew, said that it was only by chance that the body was discovered under the freshly excavated clay. The investigation is continuing, the paper stated at the end of the article.

The word on the street about Temperley was mixed. He was a likeable little fellow; he was a tight-fisted son of a bitch. The nicest, most endearing fact I learned was that he and his wife were veteran bird-watchers, who took a few weeks every year to spy on the mating habits of
their feathered friends. I recognized the face on the front page of the
Beacon.
I'd seen it sitting behind his desk at the bank and also in the Di at lunch-time, often eating alone. Of course, everyone expressed his shock and disbelief that Temperley, who had no known enemies— apart from those whose loans he had refused to approve—should have been so cruelly murdered in the autumn flowering of his life.

While I found this diverting to read, and enjoyed Pete's gloss on the newspaper account, I couldn't see how I could turn it into rent money. I'd been talking to Pete on the phone about the fate of my dear friend Kogan, the well-known buff-artist. Naturally, Pete took this as another opportunity to kid me about the company I was keeping, but in the end he had to admit that as far as he knew, Kogan had been turned loose some time Tuesday night.

“So they didn't book him?” I asked.

“Doesn't look that way, Benny, but what do you expect a humble cop from Homicide to know of these weighty matters. Hasn't he turned up at your office?”

“His not turning up doesn't mean anything. You can never find Kogan when you want him.”

“Let's hope he finds some clothes soon. It's going to be a long, hard winter.”

During the middle of the week, I kept myself busy with the case I was working on. I had to collect data for Julian Newby, or he would find another PI to do his legwork. Wednesday and Thursday, I followed Catherine
Bracken from her job at CXAN to either her house in Papertown or to McStu's house on St. Patrick Street. McStu spent a few hours a day up at Secord University, while Bracken did shopping in the malls along the Lakeshore Road, which was a little off the beaten path for her. When I checked it out, I found that she used to live in the North End, near the lake.

Although it was good to be in work, Bracken wasn't the most exciting character I ever followed. Her movements were regular and predictable. As far as I could see, she was an outstanding citizen. She checked out her library books and returned them on lime. She recycled her newspapers and plastic and metal containers. She bought miles of dental floss every time she went into a drugstore. She bought books, liked peppermints, didn't buy products that were harmful to the ozone layer. If I wasn't already predisposed to admire the woman, I would have been won over by her routine.