by Howard Engel
“Yeah, it’s not likely it had anything to do with that list of your pictures.”
“You talked to Mary MacCulloch yet?”
“Uh-huh.”
“She got away with some of my best. Her old man’s supposed to be the collector, but she’s the one with the eye. I bet Paddy Miles has let her steal him blind. He’s a pushover for a pretty face.”
“Wally.” The voice came from the kitchen, plaintive and intimidating. I got up to go. It was that kind of moment and Wally Lamb didn’t try to stop me. I slipped him the price of a case of beer minus the bottle deposit and got out of the apartment. Before I got to the elevator, I heard the TV set again. The sound followed me nearly out to my car. So, that was Wallace Lamb.
FIFTEEN
I drove back to my place and dropped into Tacos Heaven for a bite of lunch. I found myself confused by the menu; the print was so large I had to hold it at arm’s length in order to get it all in focus. It was altogether a bad experience. I ordered badly and got up, after an unhappy adventure with refried beans, shaking a lapful of tacos fragments to the floor. It was my first attempt at Mexican food, so I didn’t know whether to blame the negative reaction on me or on the lunch. I paid up with nine dollars and a cowardly smile. There was a sense of resentment as I pocketed the change. I thanked the man behind the cash through clenched teeth. “Muchas gracias,” I said.
“Szivesen,” he replied.
It was just after three o’clock when I parked behind Hump Slaughter’s auction house. The lot was posted like a game preserve, threatening everything short of summary execution to illegal parkers. There were only three cars in the lot. I was encouraged by them and the four other empty spaces. I found a back door beside a nearly full bulk-loader, which carried the stencilled name “Bolduc” in capital letters. The message on the door read “Private,” just in case you’d missed the theme up to this point. I ignored this sign too and found the door was unlocked.
I was in a dim loading bay surrounded by packing cases. I’d stepped into one of those B movies with Lloyd Nolan playing the detective. He always found himself in a warehouse like this with the heavies lying in wait for him somewhere ahead in the dark. I was getting lost in the idea that I was Lloyd Nolan, when I began to remember that Slaughter’s auction house was on the site of the former Skippy’s Bowling Alley. I hadn’t spent too many years bowling, but I still remembered the place where I’d learned to keep score and run balls down the gutters, saving wear and tear on the hardwood alleys. I was getting a pin-boy’s eye view of the place. I began to remember where the rest of the space led.
Light entered this back part of the former bowling alley through three tiny square windows at the top of the back wall. Most of this was absorbed without a highlight by the thick velvet curtains that separated this behind-thescenes area with its rubble of wooden packing cases from whatever lay beyond. I moved through a zigzag alley between half-opened crates with glimpses of gilt antique mirrors, furniture under plastic wrappers and stacks of paintings with cardboard guarding their vulnerable edges. In a corner stood a group of marble nymphs playing at archery in unlikely costumes. They reminded me of wet T-shirt night at Widdicombe’s pub on Ontario Street. Maybe those Greeks had the same idea in mind that Terry Widdicombe had. I guess in those ancient days, before photography was perfected, a cold chisel and a lump of marble were the fastest way of putting down a permanent image.
These musings were interrupted by voices coming from the other side of the curtain. I tried walking in their direction. The old yellowed plaster that I remembered had been cleaned from the walls to my left. Now naked brick ran up to the honest rafters and beams of the ceiling. This brick was covered with paintings hanging from a track that ran along the wall and disappeared into the curtains. Catching some of the light, a couple of wood goddesses were cavorting with unicorns on a faded tapestry. The poor unicorns looked grey with age and not at all happy about the crowns around their necks or the attentions of the goddesses. Close up against the curtains, the voices were nearly human. One belonged to Mary MacCulloch. It had her superior teasing quality even at this distance The other voice was new to me. I heard something about “keeping your mouth shut” and “sewing mailbags for a living.” That was Mary.
“If I go over,” the second voice retorted, “I’ll take you with me!” There were English overtones here, although the words were our common Canadian stock. “There’s nothing I did you weren’t part of.” I found the parting in the curtains and struggled with the heavy velvet until I could see light again.
The front end of Skippy’s had been turned into a theatre. The floor was raked, supporting two hundred empty seats facing me. I stood on a raised platform. To my left stood a speaker’s lectern, stolen from a church by the look of it, surmounted by a microphone standing on the end of a gooseneck curve. Mary and a dumpy, roundshouldered man in shirtsleeves were standing at the back. They hadn’t noticed my entrance. It was just like that at the Collegiate when I came on as an actor. Even in my mother’s green hat, I was still part of the scenery as far as the customers were concerned. The guy with the slouch didn’t drop a stitch either:
“Why in five years, Mary, we could both be out on parole and writing this up for the magazines. They like tearstains on the glossy pages …”
Slaughter, if it was Slaughter, had a leer on his face that I wouldn’t want pointed at me. The two of them were at that stage in a quarrel when it becomes pleasurable to throw the worst things imaginable at the other. Neither one seemed to care about putting back the pieces and shaking hands afterwards. For me, at least, it meant that I was still invisible as I climbed down off the stage, taking shelter behind a large ormolu grandfather’s clock and a crate of rolled oriental rugs in front of the first row of seats. The battle continued:
“You low life!” Mary shouted. “You won’t get away with this. I’ll see you take the drop by yourself. And now it isn’t just stealing. It’s murder. Somebody did in Kiriakis. Why not you?”
Slaughter, as I was now pretty sure it was, backed away from Mary. He lost the leer and replaced it with something almost desperate. His mouth hung open and his chin shook as he tried to find words for an answer. Meanwhile I worked my way down a side aisle to the front of the auditorium. But it wasn’t because I couldn’t hear; even poor Pambos might have caught some of the exchange from his file drawer at Niagara Regional’s cold room. “The … the little guy wasn’t hurting me,” he said. “I don’t have any of the pictures on that list. I never handled that stuff. That’s more your department.” I could see he liked the way it sounded. He had turned the ball back at Mary faster than she’d imagined. For a moment she looked confused.
“Paddy told me not to trust you,” she shouted, a second before she saw me moving. She turned her head in my direction as I reached the mid-point of the aisle. “He … Oh! Benny!” Slaughter’s head spun around, his jaw dropped. Mary looked stunned, but coped with it better than Slaughter, who glared back at Mary and then again at me. He must have seen a conspiracy in the fact that she recognized me. After giving me a fast once-over, he turned back to Mary.
“Who the hell is this guy? Mary, if you’re …”
“It’s an investigator. You know, Cooperman.”
“We’re closed!” he yelled. He said it like this was a nuclear warhead assembly plant and I was without the proper security clearance. “The place is closed! You ever hear of doors and knocking on them?” He started across the back of the hall to intercept me as I came to the end of my aisle. “We were talking private business. You have no right …”
“I’m just one of those little pitchers with big ears, Mr. Slaughter,” I said, continuing to move in his direction. “And Mary’s right. It isn’t just stealing. Not since Kiriakis joined the heavenly chorus. But there may be a way to come out of this without doing a long stretch in Kingston.”
“Who the hell …?” Slaughter was closing in on me, blocking for a moment my view of Mary and the door to the street.
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“Shut up, Hump! Listen to what he has to say. He may be right.” Slaughter started to look back at Mary, but ditched the notion before he’d turned his head more than a couple of inches. I was his target, and he wasn’t going to let me out of his sights. It was a big, meaty face, now blotched with angry red patches from agitation. His big sloping shoulders under the sweater looked strong and menacing. Mary glared at both of us, then tried to recapture the situation with a smile. It didn’t match the caughtin-the-act look on her face. “You’re always about doing good works, aren’t you, Benny? Asking questions of all the right people?” Something in her voice slowed Slaughter in his tracks. He moved more cautiously.
Mary was wearing tight-fitting jeans, a white blouse and a denim jacket. She had the outfits all right. Always the right clothes for the occasion.
“Right now I’d trade all my questions for a couple of half-decent answers,” I said. That didn’t stop anybody, and Slaughter was getting close. “For instance,” I went on as though I had all day, “of how much were you bilking Paddy Miles and the Tallon estate?”
I didn’t see Slaughter’s hand as it came in my direction. I felt his knuckles on my jaw as I fell backwards over the aisle seats. There was more shock than pain. Above me, Slaughter hung there, his expression somewhere between triumph and concern. Mary grabbed him by the arm “Hump, let him alone! He can be big trouble. Benny, are you okay?” I went on stroking my jaw. It was still the surprise of the blow that bothered me. What pain there was was mostly in my back where I’d hit the armrest of the seat. Slaughter was breathing harder than I was. His Irish sweater was puffing in and out under a face that had grown sweaty from the exertion.
“I’m dandy. Just hang on to him while I get on my feet.”
“You son of a bitch, coming in here …!”
“Hump, he’s faking. He doesn’t know a thing.”
“You better just get the hell out of here. I’ll have the cops run you in for trespassing!” I used the back of the seat nearest me to pull myself back into an upright position.
“You make that sound tempting enough to wait for,” I said. “But I didn’t come here to call that bluff or any of your other bluffs.”
“Benny, you don’t have any proof that there has been anything irregular going on. Whatever you think you know will take a lot of proving.” I kept the back of an aisle seat between Hump Slaughter and me. It seemed prudent. I didn’t examine its uses in a pinch, but it felt good just holding on to it.
“Mary I’m not out to prove anything. I’m not even looking for Pambos’s killer. That’s police business. I got my hands full just trying to find out what happened to something belonging to Kiriakis that disappeared a few days before he died.”
“The famous list! God, I’m so tired of hearing about that damn thing! You could buy everything on it for two or three hundred thousand!”
“Pin money to you, maybe, but that’s meat and potatoes for lots of people for five years.”
“Benny, please try to understand.” She and Slaughter were standing in front of me. Both wore the same expression of anxiety. Both needed my belief in their accounts of themselves. In Slaughter, that competed with aggression. I watched the way he held one hand back with the other. Mary had stuck one thumb into the wide belt at her waist. Her other hand still checked Hump.
I started talking more quickly now, hoping to scare one or the other of them to guilty glances or stout denials. People put off guard say more than they mean to say. And I was listening with both ears. “Slaughter, I’m sure it would be interesting to compare your books with Tallon’s. Paddy Miles kept books as well as he could. I’ll bet those books would tell a fine story about selling original paintings to a middleman, Mrs. MacCulloch, here, who then puts them up for auction and pockets a tidy profit, even after splitting it with you.” Mary dropped Hump’s arm. She had her shoulders back now. I could count buttons on her white blouse. Hump needed a shave and maybe a low cholesterol diet. They didn’t speak. “Tallon’s death pinched a lot of greedy fingers in the works. Yours,” I said, looking at Mary and then at Slaughter, “and yours. Maybe Miles got his share too. And we’re not talking about the pictures on that list any more.” Mary gave a start and her lips parted like she was going to say something, but didn’t have the breath to make up the words. “Oh, no, we’re talking about paintings that were never on that list.”
“You’re talking through your hair, Cooperman! I run a legitimate place. We get a fair price for all this stuff.”
“Benny, if you’ll only listen to our side.”
“Everybody and his brother took advantage of Tallon. You, your husband, Alex; yes and maybe Paddy Miles and Abraham too. Tallon was a sitting milch cow, just asking to be milked. The only thing that caught everybody with his pants down was that old heart of his. He died, fast. No warning, no chance to put back the money. You can’t hurt a dead man, but it looks like this dead man can hurt you plenty.”
“That’s all talk, Benny!” Mary said. “What of it? You can’t produce a shred of evidence that would stand up in court. Paintings were bought and sold. Nothing was stolen. It’s your word and half-baked theories against ours. My husband’s name means something in Grantham. So does Hump’s. Who’d believe a sleazy detective like you?” It was a good defence from Mary. I liked the part about being protected by her respectability. They all had that: Tallon, MacCulloch, Favell, Miles and Abraham. Pambos Kiriakis and I were on the other side of that line. It all depended on how dearly Grantham would defend her own favoured sons and daughters. And they couldn’t all be guilty. Grantham would be right to show some suspicion. I needed proof that would stand up to a stiff blast blown through the long straight noses of Grantham’s best people.
Mary MacCulloch came over to me and took me by the hand. Her hand was firm but gentle, very intimidating, very sure of its powers. “Now, Benny,” she said in a voice that had banked the fire that had been there a moment before, “why don’t you try to be reasonable? We’re not bad people. Do we look like the people on ‘Wanted’ posters? Benny, why do you hate me?”
“Mrs. MacCulloch, I may not like you very much, but I don’t hate you. I’m not on a class vendetta either. I’m just trying to make sense out of what’s been going on here. And speaking of hating you, there is somebody who hates you. Yes, Miss Mary, you have an enemy I wouldn’t want standing under my window at night.”
“What do you mean?”
“Somebody’s trying to pin Kiriakis’s murder on you. Was it your partner here?”
“Watch it!” Slaughter said, and then to Mary: “I don’t know what he’s talking about, Mary. Honest!” He looked back at me. “Why would I want her out of the way? What’s the percentage? If she bought the pictures, like you were saying, then I needed her. Without Mary, there was no business in Tallon’s pictures?” I had to allow him that, but I didn’t say anything.
“Why would Hump want to break things up?” Mary asked as though she was reading my mind. I tried to answer and I liked the way it came out:
“Because with Tallon dead it was game over, Mary. Time to make up new rules and settle old accounts.” She chewed on that for a moment then got back to the question that had been gnawing longer.
“Benny,” she said, “why would anyone want to implicate me in Kiriakis’s death? Why would I want him dead anyway? He was such a harmless little man.”
“Maybe he tumbled to your harmless scam here. He found out about the borrowed pictures. He’d had the list stolen. It wouldn’t take much to guess that there was more involved than a few missing paintings. You and your partner here, or either one of you acting alone, could have wanted to keep Pambos from doing his guessing in public. And what better way to shut somebody up?”
“Stop suggesting that! We’re not that sort of people.”
“You’re wasting your breath on him,” Slaughter offered. “Look, Cooperman, this is a private showroom. I’ve got to be careful about who I let in here.” He took an aggressive step in my
direction. I’d been waiting for it. In a second I was backing down the aisle as I’d planned. I could already feel my hands parting the velvet curtains. I was at the point where I was hoping the car would start on the first try, when my backing away from trouble banged me right into it.
“Look out, Benny!”
“Oh, my God! Cooperman?”
“Wh …?” The lights went out and the stars came out to play, dancing a jig around my head like a nest of wasps. Then they disappeared too and it was quiet for some time.
SIXTEEN
I was running through Jonah Abraham’s house chasing after something just up ahead. I can’t remember what it was, but it was terribly important that I catch up to it. The rooms in the house kept melting into one another in a way that Mies van der Rohe might have approved. Then it became clear to me that not only was I chasing something, but that, in turn, I was being hunted as well. What the plot needed was faces. All I had to show was a sense of agitation running into panic. When I opened my eyes, the long galleries had vanished, but the sense of the hunt was still fresh in my nostrils. I was alone in the auction room. The head of an ancient Greek woman was in my lap. The rest of her and the column she’d been standing on were in fifty pieces all over the floor. Neither of my hosts had stuck around to collect breakage. The white pieces looked more like plaster than marble, so it figured. The head in my lap with the foolish hat on was probably a refugee from a school art class, a Minerva on the lookout for better things. I moved her gently towards the largest chunk of her torso and made good the second part of my escape.