by Howard Engel
Once out of the shower and into my clothes, I put the list with jam and Anna on it into my pocket. I wondered as I let myself out of the apartment whether I was stuck with showers for the rest of my life because of my years at the City House. Here I was on the second morning in the new apartment abandoning the bath and taking the quick, easy way out. I sometimes thought that my character should be sent out, like my father’s old fedora, and reblocked.
Once out in the street I felt a little bewildered. I’d had my morning coffee, so why was I heading towards the United? Breakfast done, I should be on my way to work. Only it didn’t feel right. I did it anyway. The right way to start the day was with a coffee at the United; especially when all around me were rumours that the place had been sold and was going to be pulled down. I had to let my vote of protest be counted. I’d have a second cup of coffee at the United for as long as it was possible.
Last night’s Beacon, of course, had nothing of the murder in it, but I went through a discarded copy on the counter for the news I’d missed waiting to be questioned by Chris Savas. In the box marked City and Vicinity I saw that Humphrey Slaughter was having a show of contemporary paintings beginning on Friday. This was still Wednesday. Friday was the first of April, which still seemed more than a month away.
“Hello, Benny? How’s everything?” It was Pambos Kiriakis’s friend Martin Lyster, the book-tracer. He was well over six feet tall but so thin that he couldn’t have weighed more than one hundred and fifty pounds.
“Morning, Martin.” Seeing a ghost from that last evening with Pambos made me nervous. Idiotically I asked him: “Found any good books lately?”
“Never mind the books, did you hear about Pambos? What’s this bloody planet coming to?” Martin adjusted his long legs around the pedestal of the stool he was sitting on as he leaned in my direction. His long, lined face was dark with worry. “They’ll be murdering us all in our beds next!”
“When did you hear about it?” I asked, moving the paper to give him elbow room.
“I was having a jar with Wally Skeat around closing time last night and he told me. Shot through the heart. Bang! Bang! and good luck to you! Terrible!”
“Wally gets some things right too,” I muttered to myself.
“And Pambos Kiriakis of all people! What did the likes of him ever do to anybody?”
“Might have been a fired dishwasher or an old girlfriend. I don’t know much about his private life.”
“I still can’t believe it. The night I saw you, Bill and I were with him until nearly three in the morning. He was an old dear friend.”
“Tell me about his wife? I only met her a few times.”
“Linda? She’s not been near him for two years at least. You know they were separated? She’s living in Montreal. She was, I mean, last time I heard. But, Benny, you don’t think she would have done it? Pambos was generous with her, to a fault, I hear. He was sentimental about the girls.”
“That’s something for the police to run down. Was there anyone local on the scene?”
“Now, Benny, I don’t like speaking ill of the dead,” Martin said. “I’m depending on your discretion, Benny.” I nodded and made the required noises. “There’s a German girl he was seeing. He called her Schätzchen, which I gather is nothing very flattering. Her name’s Mathilde Lent. She lives in a room or apartment somewhere on lower Queen Street. Place is run by Dutch people.” I made a mental note then tore it up. I didn’t want to get mixed up in the police side of this investigation. I’d crowded Chris Savas before, and I didn’t like the sensation.
“Where are you staying, Martin? Pambos never told me and I see you’re not in the book.”
“Well, now, Benny, I’m always on the move. Best thing is for me to get in touch with you. Never know where I’m going to be. Right now I’d like to be down in Florida to watch spring training.”
“I didn’t know you were a baseball fan.”
“I nearly swapped a mint copy of the Criterion, October 1921, for a single for one World Series game. If it was a pair, I would have done it. Well, almost. I take books seriously too.”
“What’s the Criterion, October 1921?” I asked.
“The Waste Land. You know, T.S. Eliot and all that. That’s where it first saw the light of day. Now, Benny, are you into this Napoleon business?”
“I wasn’t there, I don’t know anything about it. Why?”
“I’ve got a copy in fair condition of Dr. O’Meara’s journal of his time in St. Helena. Pambos was going to buy it. I’ll try Bill Palmer at the Beacon; he’s interested, but a poor risk.”
“You cleared up the angry man in Boulder, Colorado?”
“Where’d you hear about that, now?” He looked down into the depths of the green marble counter-top. “That night, I guess. Well, Benny, you see that fellow’s a terribly wealthy man, and he’s bloody impatient with people like you and me. He’ll have called everyone I know trying to reach me. Oh, I talked to him. Settled him right down. I told Pambos it was all fixed. Storm in a teacup.”
“So you can’t be contacted directly, Martin?”
“Well, I’m staying not far from here, but the lady in question has a reputation I wouldn’t like to tarnish. But, I’ll drop by here again, and catch you at your eleven o’clock break like today.”
I didn’t tell him it was breakfast, or the second half of it. A man should have minor secrets to practise on. Days of large deceits may not be far away. I paid the check, bought a pack of cigarettes and helped myself to the penny matches with United Cigar Store written on the front. For all I knew, this branch might be closed down the next time I need matches. I thought of all the places I knew whose only monuments were the books of paper matches in my winter coat or bottom drawer or overnight bag.
The office looked like neutral ground. It always looked that way after I’d spent a night waltzing with Niagara Regional. My name on the door and window gave me assurance that I really existed. I took out Abraham’s envelope and opened it; the cheque gave me further assurances of existence. Quickly I signed the back and wrote the account number underneath. I tried to plan out the rest of my day so that I’d pass my bank before 3:00 P.M.
After moving a few library books, some apricot pits and my old electric fan, I got out the city directory. I flipped through it and stopped at Queen Street. I found the block I wanted, then carefully checked the east and west sides of the street. Near the south-west corner of Duke and Queen, I discovered:
Dirk and Gertrude Bouts
35 Queen St., freeholder
Mathilde Lent, tenant
Good, I thought, then remembered that I’d declared Pambos’s murder out of bounds for this private investigator. For years I’d been telling clients that the cops are a hard act to follow when it comes to investigating serious crimes. So, what was I doing even thinking in this direction? It wouldn’t hurt to pass by the house and have a look, I thought. I have to get to the bank don’t I? It wouldn’t hurt to look. I tried to imagine what kind of girl Pambos would call Schätzchen. There was so much about the little guy I wanted to know and now it was too late to ask. I wasn’t being fair. Until I met him on moving day, he was a casual acquaintance. Okay, a friend, but nothing close. Then he became a client. He told me all about the list of pictures. That’s all. I’m no authority on his private life, his business, his taste in women, books or booze. We were never close. That’s it; we were casual pals and then we were doing our first stroke of business together. Why should I even care who killed him? What’s it got to do with me? Jonah Abraham’s picking up the tab, so I can see Pambos right. I can finish the job he hired me for. But that’s it. The cops can nail the killer. Let Savas go dig up Mathilde Lent. Let him see where she was last night. All I want to do is do what I’m being paid to do and get paid for what I’m doing.
I think there was room in my head for this argument to run a few more laps and I was inclined to let it rip just to see if any nuances occurred to me that I missed on the earlier circui
ts, but I was suddenly uncomfortably aware that I was sharing the space with somebody. I could tell without looking up. I didn’t hear anything, but I knew I was right. When my head moved in the direction of the door, I could see. I wasn’t alone. Anna Abraham was standing in my doorway. I hadn’t even heard the door open.
“Is this where you do it?” she asked, walking in and peeking through my venetian blinds. She was still wearing the jeans of the night before, but had put on a man’s pink shirt, the kind that buttons down at the collar. There was nothing mannish about the effect.
“Do what?”
“You know, detect things.” She was winding the cord from the blinds around one of her fingers.
“It serves its purpose. It’ll do. What brings you slumming?” The dust from the blinds began to get to her. Silvery motes glistened in the bands of light coming around her head. She walked over to the filing cabinet and tugged one of the drawers open. I may have fallen in love with her for a moment the night before, but just then she was giving me a pain. “What do you want, Anna?” She looked at me like I’ve never been looked at.
“You don’t seem very busy.”
“Interesting opinion. What do you want?” She continued giving my place the once over, as though I was out of town and she had all day to kill.
“I suppose you have cameras for taking pictures through keyholes?”
“Six or seven of them. Thirty-five millimetres down to eight. If you want smaller, it can be arranged. Anna, what the hell do you want?” I felt the anger that had been simmering in my stomach begin to boil over. “Just because I’m doing a job for your old man, it doesn’t mean I have to entertain his kids during working hours!”
“What about after working hours?”
“We never sleep.” Anna smiled at the quotation and I liked that. I suddenly didn’t feel as chair-bound as I’d felt with her wandering around the office, looking at my certificates and licences hanging on the wall. “Tell me, Anna, does your old man keep office hours?”
“He has an office at the Windermere Building downtown, if that’s what you mean.”
“But does he spend any time there? Does he keep office hours?”
“Daddy!” She enjoyed the joke by herself. Then she started wandering the space again. “His secretary keeps office hours for him. If something important comes up, she can get him wherever he happens to be. Daddy’s always hated business.”
“But he enjoys the fruits of it well enough.”
“Don’t be cynical. It’s easy to be cynical. What kind of hours do you keep?” The boiling started again. Again I was trapped in my chair, barricaded behind my desk. “Anna,” I said, “get lost.”
She didn’t move. She looked like I’d slapped her, but she held her ground. I wrote Mathilde Lent’s name and address on a piece of paper to look busy. Anna came closer and leaned over the yellow block of foolscap, with her arms supporting her as she gripped the edge of the desk. “You’re not very friendly, Mr. Cooperman.” I debated about looking up and decided against it. I tore the top sheet off the pad and put it in my pocket.
“Just tell me what the hell you want, Anna.” She picked up the plastic top of an inkwell in the penstand I’d inherited from my father and stared into its dry bottom. She replaced the lid and began examining a jam jar full of pencils. “Stop rearranging my desk!”
“Want me to leave you alone with those three bald ladies?” She’d seen my trio of graces under their unbleached cotton covers—left-overs from the days when my father ran his one-store retail empire from this room.
“So, okay, I’m kinky for group sex. Go home and tell your father. You wouldn’t understand, Anna, I’m trying to earn a living. Now scram!”
“How old are you?”
I got up, took her by her left wrist and spun her around so that she faced the door.
“Hey!” I didn’t hurt her, but without changing my grip, I was able to propel her through the open door, I closed it and slipped the spring lock with Anna Abraham on the other side. My collar was burning. I had to loosen my tie. The nerve of that kid …! I thought. I went back to my chair, far more angry than I should have been. I could hear her clomping down the stairs slowly. If it’s possible to clomp in a sullen manner, she was doing it. What the hell had she wanted?
I waited ten minutes, during which I cleaned up the place for the next visitor and walked down my twentyeight steps to St. Andrew Street. I couldn’t see any sign of her. I closed the door behind me.
St. Andrew Street on a spring morning was on the move: a truck was unloading cartons of books and greeting cards across the street at Graham’s; shoppers were coming out of Bevitt’s Fine China with packages; two farmers, father and son maybe, stood peakcap to peakcap in worn, heavy cloth jackets, arguing on the curb. The familiar panhandlers were plying their trade, unsuccessfully, when I passed them on my way to the Upper Canadian Bank at the top of Queen Street. I waited in line behind the ropes, which divided the customers who were unable to cope with the machines from the others, until a cashier accepted Jonah Abraham’s cheque. While I was waiting, I read the latest notice that began, “In order to serve you better …” My heart fell whenever I saw one of those. It meant that some valued service had been discontinued. I lived in dread of the day when they would no longer allow me to deduct cash from a cheque that was going into one of my accounts. They’d tried to wean me a few years ago from this practice on the grounds that it led to messy bookkeeping. I suggested that the slide into fiscal confusion had begun when they did away with the stubs in my chequebook. It was a spirited counterattack, enough to get me a reprieve, if not a pardon. I didn’t look forward to another argument with Mr. Alistair Openshaw, the manager of this branch. I’d had discussions with him before and had formed some biased and badly based generalizations about bank managers from the encounter.
Back out on the street, I wondered if it would hurt to see whether Chris Savas’s investigation had extended to the other end of Queen Street. It was a short walk past the Beacon on the left and the bookstore on the right down to the address I’d memorized. Thirty-five Queen Street was a square three-storey brick building that looked like it had once been a private house. There were two tall windows on either side of a curved entrance with pilasters, and six similar windows on the floor above. The top floor was a handsome mansard roof with dormers on at least three sides and a diseased-looking rail running around the flat centre of the roof. There were signs of a lopped porch on one side, and the hooks which used to restrain shutters still protruded from the smoky red brick.
“Yes?” It was a woman’s head that came through the front door when I rang the bottom bell. I’d got no reaction to the bell above that. The woman was short and blonde with a smile but a certain distrust of strangers written on her face. From inside, I could hear the sounds of morning television and of an infant crying.
“Mrs. Bouts?” She nodded, continuing to wipe her hands on the dishtowel she’d brought to the door for protection. “My name is Cooperman, and I’m trying to reach your tenant, Mathilde Lent:”
“Oh, Mattie’s not here. She’s out.”
“Do you know when she’s coming back? It’s important.”
“I see, well, you could give me your name and I’ll have her telephone you when she gets back.” Gertrude Bouts had a trace of an accent that was probably Dutch. “Will you come in? I have to see to the baby.” I followed her down the hall and into a large front room full of comfortable contemporary furniture with a large TV set supplying the focus of all the arrangements. Only the baby’s playpen was set on a different axis. Mrs. Bouts picked up the child, who looked to be under a year old, and began to address him as Willum. I sat down into the deep comfort of a piece of sectional armchair-sofa, and waited. At last she put Willum back into the playpen and smiled again in my direction.
“Sorry about that,” she said. She had the idiom exactly, but there was an accent under it which escaped her ear. “My husband’s in Hamilton this morning. He works as
a dot-etcher for a photo-engraver. You said it was important that you see Mattie?”
“Yes,” I said. “A friend of hers has been killed.”
“Oh, no!” she said, holding tightly to the arm of her chair. “How awful!” I told her what had happened, the whole schmeer. She didn’t seem to recognize Pambos’s name when I got that far.
“When do you expect her back, Mrs. Bouts?” Here she looked awkward and failed to meet my eyes.
“To tell you the truth, Mr. Cooperman, Mattie’s not here. I mean, she’s gone away. She left nearly a week ago.”
“Do you know where she went or where she’s staying?”
Gertrude Bouts shook her head. She didn’t know anything. I began to feel a tightening at the bottom of my stomach. I took a breath before asking any more questions.
“Are you from the police, Mr. Cooperman?” She tilted her head like she was asking if I liked the temperature of the room. I explained that too.
“As a friend of the dead man, they will try to get in touch with her before too long. They’ll want to know where she went.”
“I see,” she said. “I see.” She stared at the carpet.
“What can you tell me about Mattie, Mrs. Bouts? I never met her.”
“Well, she was a very pretty, fun-loving thing, you know.” She put her hand to her mouth suddenly. “Why did I say was? Oh my God, you don’t think …?” There wasn’t a particle of evidence to suggest that any harm had come to Mattie Lent, but I found myself sharing the same fear that Gertie Bouts had voiced. We were both fearing the worst for that pretty fun-loving thing.
THIRTEEN
“Oh, no, Mattie is Austrian, not German. She comes from Schruns, the skiing centre up in the Montafon Valley in the Vorarlberg. Her father had an inn on the Kirchplatz, or as you would say ‘Church Street.’” Gertie handed me a black-and-white photograph of a pert blonde, smiling through snow-glare at the camera. In the snapshot, Mattie was standing in an up-to-date ski outfit in front of an inn. Snow-laden firs flanked the end of the inn, and latemodel cars that owed nothing to Detroit were jammed together along the street.