by Howard Engel
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.’
‘I can’t argue with that,’ I said. Lying was beginning to become a habit with me. Today it was very easy. I don’t know why. Pepper had been frank with me. His manner wasn’t threatening or superior. At home I got along well with his opposite numbers Savas and Staziak. I often told them only part of what they wanted to hear, but I can’t remember actually not telling the truth. Maybe I was still feeling out this big-city cop. Maybe I was trying to see if he was really as friendly as he seemed. I suspected it was part of a clinical manner, the affable exterior that helped witnesses loosen up. I had tricks like that myself.
‘What about rival collectors? Are any of them bloodthirsty enough to break in and kill Moore?’
‘Cooperman,’ he said, ‘I underestimated you. I apologize.’ This was soft-soap from a different box. It was the same stuff I’d been getting, but with a fancier label. I grinned at him to let him think I’d swallowed some.
‘These fellows must be pretty odd, these book collectors,’ I said.
‘I think they were trying to find this rare book you were talking about. This Aaron Kurian is a smart cookie, according to the widow. And so is Wells Dalton. They represent the worst in the rare book trade, one at the top and the other at the bottom.’ He waved his cigarette in my direction for emphasis, while I locked the names in my head. He had told me more than he’d intended. There are always scraps falling from the official head table. The cops are forever giving away samples of what they don’t even know they’ve got. That’s how I make my living. Like the man says, I’m a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles.
‘But aren’t these the guys who’d heard that the book had already been taken last week? If the book was gone, why would they risk their necks trying to make sure?’
‘Maybe they had scores to settle. Maybe there was something besides the Gerson Soncino Megillah lying about.’
‘What else did she tell you? Was Moore trying to get her to come back to him, or was he happy with things the way they were?’ That was the ‘one question too many’ that my mother warned me about. Sergeant Pepper got up quickly and when I looked around, I was back on the street with the door being closed behind me. I walked back to Bloor Street thinking unkind thoughts about the Beatles and the entire Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Chapter Five
I took Anna’s advice and looked up her friend Richard Glendon at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the corner of Harbord and St. George. He was a complete surprise to me. Maybe I’d been expecting a tall, skinny academic who still wore his rimless glasses on a ribbon. Richard was much more down to earth and easy to talk to. Over a beer in one of the nearby colleges, he told me that of all the dealers in the country, Moore seemed to have attracted the most dogged and tenacious of the local book collectors. Wells Dalton, for instance, was a successful businessman--a millionaire and on some twenty boards of directors--and at the same time he was a writer, a historian and a collector of Victorian toys. He had one of the finest bunch of toy banks in North America. Dalton turned his controversial business ethics and practices to his growing collection of rare books. His collection began with a Shakespeare folio. It was only a Fourth Folio, but he wasn’t twenty when he bought it. Older dealers with more sedate manners deeply resented him. Aaron Kurian, on the other hand, was a droll, amusing and softspoken old goat, who won out not by business tactics but by sheer knowledge of the field. A poor man, he generally put up at cheap hotels and conducted his business in coffee shops and restaurants. He was hard to get hold of, unless you happened to run into him at an auction preview going through his catalogue. Kurian collected for other people, not for himself. His appearance at an auction usually masked some secret bidder--a university, a shy collector, a foreign library. Kurian was a wonderful man, Richard told me, but a devil to deal with.
‘Did the name Colin Lowther come up?’ Richard asked. I shook my head. ‘Should it have?’
‘Lowther is as dedicated a collector as Dalton and as dogged as Dalton and Kurian put together. I’m surprised your Sergeant Pepper didn’t mention him.’
‘Where does he hang out
?’
‘Lowther’s a criminal lawyer here in town. You haven’t seen his name in the paper? But then, you’re from out of town.’
‘Grantham isn’t at the bottom of a well. His name does sound familiar,’ I lied, on behalf of all fifty thousand of us Granthamites.
‘Lowther comes from an old Ontario family with monuments in the Necropolis--that’s the oldest cemetery in the city. He went to Upper Canada College and Trinity here at U of T. They say if you have Lowther as your lawyer, you must be guilty. I know him slightly; I’ve been trying to get him to part with some of his rare books. I don’t much like him, to tell you the truth.’
Richard was also helpful on the subject of Tony Moore. As we walked back to his office, he told me about the fakery Moore had discovered in some overpriced collections. He enjoyed taking books out of libraries with elaborate security systems. ‘He could always find the weak spot and then gleefully return his prize to the head librarian. He once borrowed a rare chapbook from us and I still don’t know how he did it.’
‘So Moore was full of tricks?’ I salted that information away in the stacks of my memory for safekeeping.
‘Have you ever seen the Gerson Soncino Megillah?’ Richard asked, as I looked about ready to get up to leave.
‘No. I didn’t think there were pictures of it.’
‘You’re nearly right. It was sold in an auction back in 1919 and it hasn’t been photographed since. Here’s the catalogue of that sale.’ He handed me an old auction catalogue held open by a bookmark and pointed to the picture in the middle of the page.
‘It doesn’t look worth all the fuss they’re making over it.’
‘You’re looking at what’s called the "chemise." Inside, there’s a fan cier cover with jewels and gold tooling. This cover’s mainly for protection. It should really be removed.’
On leaving Richard, I told him that I was still sliding around on thin ice. I was glad when he invited me to call on him whenever I needed to climb back on my feet again. ‘And say hello to Anna for me. I was bowled over by the first of her lectures. She’s a brilliant woman.’
Dalton’s office was a small building in the shape of a Roman temple on Toronto Street. Kurian had no address that remained fixed for very long. Lowther had recently departed the family home in Forest Hill Village, leaving an embittered wife and three children to struggle on as best they could. His divorce, still in the early stages, was being engineered by an old classmate of Lowther’s and one of the best divorce men in the business. I’d once done some legwork for him, at a time when most of my work was in that area. I have been tending lately to think of those as the good old days. Maybe I’m growing old.
Getting through to Dalton was easier than I imagined. I simply told his secretary that I was from Grantham and in Toronto for a short time doing some work on the missing Gerson Soncino Megillah, and he was on the line before his secretary got off. I was discovering that there was magic in the very mention of the megillah. He agreed to meet me for lunch at an Italian restaurant and bakery at the top of Major Street.
Once I’d discharged my responsibilities to my brother’s plants and the children’s livestock, I felt the rest of the day was my own, so I scouted the restaurant about an hour before the appointment. It was called the Via Olivetto, in spite of the fact that it was on Bloor Street facing Major. To kill the hour, I took a hike down the lane that runs behind Bloor on the south side. As lanes go, this one was nothing to write home about. But if you called it an alley, then it started looking better right away. There were weeds growing between the brick walls and the roadway on both sides. Rusty fire escapes from an abandoned restaurant called The Hungarian Castle gave playing space to a pack of stray cats, who made their home in the cellar or in the ramshackle garages of an intersecting lane.
As I came out into Brunswick Avenue, to my right I could see the back of Ye Olde Brunswick House, a pub made famous by undergraduates in the faculty of engineering at the university. Across the street stood the Tranzac Club, a home away from home for lonely Australians and New Zealanders.
Continuing along the north wall of the club and the south wall of the Poor Alex Theatre, I came to a break in the brick that led to an inner courtyard, where the backs of several rooms or apartments ended in a continuous balcony. It reminded me of some pictures of desert khans I’d been looking at in my place at the round table on the second floor of Book City. Khans were primitive motels back in the days when nobody was all that squeamish about privacy. The travellers simply tied up their camels in the central courtyard and claimed as much of the available space as they thought they could hold against all comers. Here behind Bloor Street it looked like such things might have been settled by leases rather than force of arms.
It was getting late, so I returned to Bloor Street and made my way to the Via Olivetto. I was still about five minutes early, so I took a table facing the door. I’d never seen a picture of Wells Dalton, so I wasn’t certain what to expect. What does a multi-millionaire look like, anyway? Would his English tailoring give him away, or would he have adapted himself to the meeting and the meeting place? He gave me twenty minutes to think about it before I went out into the street to reread the name of the restaurant on the sign over the door. I was at the right place, and so was the man just getting out of a taxi.
Dalton, for so it proved to be, muttered a curse as he walked by me into the restaurant. I followed him and caught him assessing the customers, trying to decide which one was an out-of-town private investigator named Cooperman. I put him out of his misery at once and introduced myself. We picked a new table at the back, which the waiter who’d been watching me not order anything for the last half hour didn’t seem to mind. Dalton’s attention went straight to the menu. He confessed that he was dying of hunger, but then ordered a very light salad. I took a chance on their spaghetti with tomato sauce. At least that wouldn’t have any surprises in it. Dalton’s salad had tentacles curling around the lettuce. I could live without that.
Dalton was a shortish, dark-haired man of early middle age. He had the look of a racquetball player; his muscles were pulled and stringy. There wasn’t much fat on him, unless he was sitting on it.
‘Are you another dealer trying to sell the Gerson Soncino Megillah, Mr. Cooperman? The woods are full of them today. There’s no sense buying something when you can never claim a clear title to it.’
‘You’d never have anything like that in your collection, Mr. Dalton?’
‘If you’re referring to my collection of Victorian pornography, you’re barking up the wrong tree. That stuff circulated from smoking room to smoking room during its day and then it went the rounds of dealers, always under the counter because it was always illegal somewhere. I see you don’t know much about the rare book business.’
‘That may be true, but I’m quick enough to notice that you are more defensive about your Victorian pornography than you’re letting on. I think I know the look of a guilty man when I see it. But I didn’t come here to talk about Victorian porn. We both know that. What would you say the street value of the megillah was today, Mr. Dalton?’
‘Roughly? From three hundred to three hundred and fifty thousand is your ball park. I’d put it closer to three-sixty or seventy. But it all depends....’
‘What are the chances of fakery here?’
‘Not very likely. Too easy to checkout. The quality of the paper, the impression of the type, the colour in the hand-painted work. And then there are all those gems on the inside cover. Any jeweller can check out the gold work and the gems.’
‘Telling a book by its cover, eh? Well, I guess it’s been tried before.’
‘Nobody’d buy this one by its outside cover: it’s drab leather without much tooling. It’s on the inside that the glories are hidden.’
‘You’ve seen it, then?’
‘Half a dozen years ago I actually held it in my hands. It was in one of those stately English homes. Now you can get a tour through that house for eighty pence.
’
‘Maybe you should have held onto it. Then we wouldn’t be in this trouble now. Would you steal something if you wanted it badly enough? The Gerson Soncino Megillah, for instance?’
‘The last time I looked, it was still illegal to shoot people, Mr. Cooperman. I’m not in favour of changing that, although I’ll admit Tony tried my patience from time to time.’
‘So you admit there was bad feeling?’
‘Cooperman, I don’t want you playing games with me! I can buy you and sell you fifty times over.’
‘We’ll see that when the time comes. Right now I’m talking about candour, and I think you’re shortchanging me. Look Mr. Dalton, I was doing a favour for my brother when I accepted the job of trying to find the megillah. I’m beginning to think it was a big mistake. The dealer who hired me is at the Forensic Centre downtown, waiting his turn in the post mortem sweepstakes. Not only haven’t I got a huge interest in whether or not you have the megillah, I don’t even have anybody paying my fare in this. But I’m curious enough to want to know who killed my client. After all, he was my meal ticket. I won’t make another dime out of this case, so I might as well have the satisfaction of seeing that the guy who murdered Moore gets what’s coming to him. If that was you, you’ve had fair warning. If it wasn’t, then all I want from you is a little information.’
‘Such as?’
‘Where do I find Kurian?’
‘Go and catch a falling star.’
‘What?’
‘You’ve got as much chance of finding Kurian as you have of getting a carrot pregnant. Kurian isn’t like the rest of us. He pops up when you least expect him, runs off with the object circled in your auction catalogue and disappears. I’ve been watching Aaron Kurian for years. He holes up in the oddest places. One time he’ll take the biggest suite in the best hotel; the next, he’ll be staying in a flea-bitten rooming house on lower Jarvis Street. He has a few favoured haunts, and I always check them when I need him. I’ve discovered that there are habits that even thmost unconventional repeat without knowing it. I’m checking on him now, as a matter of fact. He’s usually a pretty reasonable fellow. But he knows his field, so I’ve never been able to pull the wool over his eyes.’