A Victim Must Be Found

by Howard Engel

  Opposite me, a coal barge was unloading across the slate grey water Gulls were grabbing at something dead in the corner of the harbour where garbage collected. I didn’t want to see what it was. For the first time I noticed a tiny wooden hut on the top of the old lock. It must have been a shelter or summer lock-keeper’s hut—a stone house across the road was the restored residence of the lock-keeper. The shelter was a simple structure with tidy lines and I became fond of it at once. I tried a sketch and then another. It helped to pass the time. My old art teacher, the one I had a handful of lessons from when I was in high school, was also an expert on the canal. He knew where each of the old locks had been, and what the land looked like before the roads were relocated to accommodate four successive Welland Canals. He knew where there were tunnels under abandoned locks and bridges with grown-over roads running under them. Some of these places made great swimming holes when summer heat lowered standards of hygiene and raised the need to cool off. Nowadays the kids swim in public swimming pools, and the old weir and the place we called “The Showers” are left to birdwatchers and hikers.

  I was on the point of calling it a day here in Port Richmond. If I wanted to attend the vernissage at the Contemporary Gallery, I should be making plans to have a shower and change. I didn’t know what people wore to things like that. I had one suit that had to do for all fancy social occasions. I put away the sketchbook and took a last friendly look at the shelter by the lock and got up, unexpectedly stiff, from the bollard. I was about to cross Canal Street, when a dark Volvo parked near Marie’s Restaurant. Paddy Miles got out. I felt a little peculiar seeing him, since his shindig at the gallery was the most recent thought in my head. It was almost as though my thought had drawn him into the picture.

  I stayed with my feet on the curb, for all the world an admirer of the fine line of restaurants and stores that faced the harbour. Today they were pubs, bookstores and eateries; a hundred years ago they were ship chandlers and hotels for homesick sailors. Miles walked up the hill and turned in to the bungalow I’d been watching. He was carrying a narrow brown paper bag in his hand, the sort men take when they go calling on women they are not married to. I crossed the street and kept the line of parked cars between me and Paddy Miles as he rang the doorbell. After a few seconds, through a windshield decorated with plastic religious symbols and two parking tickets, I saw a startled Mary MacCulloch open the front door. Miles waved the paper bag, Mary grinned and both went inside. I unlocked my own car and made myself comfortable in the front seat.

  For half an hour I played with some chess problems in a book I kept in the glove compartment. There is a lot of waiting around in this business. That’s why I liked watching private eyes in the movies. They never have to wait for anything. And TV is just as good. From the opening credits to the last commercial or the fadeout, the hero is on the run and never even has trouble finding a parking space. In real life, investigators tend to put on weight because of all the sitting around and waiting we do. The chess problems helped me pass the time, and I never remembered the solutions from one long wait to the next. “Black to move and mate in three.” I tried it out in my head, while beginning to work down the second row of cigarettes in my pack. Just past the thirty-minute mark, which made this a short wait, the door opened on the front porch and Paddy Miles came out. He wasn’t exactly running, but he was going at a fair clip for a man having just made a social call. Then I remembered that he had his gallery opening to get to. He walked down the street, missing the chance to catch me by looking straight ahead of him as he went, and got in the Volvo at Marie’s. He drove off in the only really useful direction: back to Grantham.

  For a moment I thought of following him, but as I replaced the chess book, I knew I could catch him again if I wanted him. The more interesting prospect was right on the street. I climbed out of the car and locked it, then walked up the front steps and rang the doorbell of Mary MacCulloch’s little hideaway.

  There must be thousands of houses like this one in the Grantham area. It was tiny by any standard, but with the pebble-dashed stucco exterior and the brave little front window, it looked like somebody’s dream of independence and enterprise. I liked the echo of my feet on the wooden porch as I put in the minutes waiting for Mary to come to the door. I rang again. No answer. It wasn’t as if she had miles of corridors to hurry through and stairs to run down: it was a bungalow. The bell was in working order, I could practically hear it echo from across the street. I tried again, and still there was no response from inside. I must have tried the bell seven or eight times before I started getting those old radio program worries that come with unanswered doorbells. I thought of earlier this week, finding Pambos. That’s when I decided to try the door. It was practically broad daylight, so I couldn’t be charged with Breaking and Entering. I don’t think so, anyway. Besides, I knew the occupant. And what was I going to steal? I was just doing my job. Mary was one of my suspects and I thought of a whole horror movie of things that might have happened to her while I was trying to get black to mate in three moves. The door came open in my hand to a little pressure. My stomach was beginning to feel vulnerable. I closed the door behind me and walked along the cheaply decked out corridor towards the light coming from the back of the house. The feeling at the back of my knees and below my rib-cage signalled trouble. So why was I still walking down the hall towards the kitchen?

  TWENTY-THREE

  She was sitting at the kitchen table wearing a pink T-shirt two sizes too small and bikini panties with a Sony FM Walkman clipped to her hip. There was a lot of Mary MacCulloch showing. The silk dressing gown covered convention and little else. There was a drink on the table in front of her. Most of it had disappeared into the woman now moving in time with the rock music that spilled out of her headset. She was having a ball all by herself. She didn’t even look up when I came into the room.

  “Mrs. MacCulloch? Mary? Are you okay?” She looked up with a happy smile on her face. For a moment her forehead creased as she plumbed her memory for my name, and then the grin returned.

  “Benny! How the hell are you?” she said, shaking my hand formally. “Come in and join the faculty wives. We’re very, very informal tonight. Let me get rid of the earphones.” She removed the headset and placed the Walkman on the white vinyl table top. “What did you say?” The music spillover from the headset stopped abruptly as she clicked off the radio. “Tell me,” she asked, “could you use a drink? You look cold. Like a man who could use a little stimulation.” The bottle Paddy Miles had brought was standing half-empty on the table. She pulled down a tumbler from a shelf above her without having to get up, and filled it with about three ounces more rye than I consume in as many weeks.

  “Didn’t that old charmer Paddy Miles have a drink with you? I just saw him leaving.”

  “Sure he did,” Mary said. “We even drank a toast. What was it? What the hell was it? ‘To …’ What was it to? Ah, I remember,” she said, lifting high her glass once more, “‘Here’s to crime!’ That’s what he said. Here’s to crime, Benny.” I lifted my glass and joined in.

  “To crime,” I said, but I didn’t drink from my glass yet. Something wasn’t right here. Paddy Miles had brought the bottle, he and Mary had consumed most of it, and now there was no sign that he had been there at all. Why would he clear away his glass, wash it up and return it to its shelf?

  “Benny, drink up!” she admonished me from her side of the table, while trying to pile her hair back on top of her head with her free hand. It wasn’t working, but she didn’t seem to notice. “Benny, what’s another toast? Give us a good one.”

  “Here’s to Wallace Lamb,” I offered and it didn’t even make Mary blink. She seemed in a world of her own. If it included me, it was at a distance. She looked at me like I was sitting across a ballroom. Something was funny about the set-up.

  On the table in front of Mary I found a scrap of notepaper. It had been torn neatly both above and below the writing, which read: Ending it all.
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br />   “Do you like sushi, Benny?”

  “Sushi? What’s sushi?” She was leaning with both elbows on the table and her head wobbled towards the middle of the table. “Mary, where did you get this scrap of paper? Is this your handwriting?”

  “Lemme see.” I handed it to her and she held it up very close to her face. “Paddy asked me to make tags for a bunch of the pictures he’s got in tonight’s show. He said he likes the way I write. I used to do calligraphy, you know. I bet you never even knew that, and you’re supposed to be some kind of detective or something.” She looked at the paper again. “Ending it all,” she said. “Very melodramatic. He took the rest of them with him. I must have written out twenty of them. Do you like sushi?”

  “Let me smell your glass.” I reached over and took it from her.

  “Hey! I was using that!” I took a sniff. I got the smell of the rye first, but my second sniff took in something faintly chemical, like the glass had been disinfected in a strong solution of caustic.

  “Do you have any sleeping pills here?” I had to repeat the question.

  “Sure. You’re not bad looking, Benny. Did you know that? In your oh-so-quiet way.” I reached over and took her hand, not because I had suddenly seen the beauty of her mind and body, but because, by holding it tightly, I could get a better share of her attention.

  “Where are they? The sleeping pills?” She regarded me with strange eyes, like I was changing the subject unreasonably. “Where are the damned sleeping pills, Mary?”

  “Bedroom, of course.” I got up and rushed through the bungalow looking for the bedroom. I didn’t have to run far through this oddly furnished love-nest with its secondhand furniture and framed prints. The phial of pills looked empty even from across the room. It lay on its side with the top and a cotton wad next to it. I checked and I was right. The cotton ball smelled a little like the caustic scent of the rye Mary was sipping. I came back to the kitchen. Mary’s head was now resting on her arm flung across the table.

  “Mary, where’s the telephone?” Again, I had to repeat the question.

  She looked at me like I’d just reappeared in her life after thirty years’ absence. “Fr-front room, Benny. Don’t phone and tell anybody I’m here. That’s the big secret. Shhhh!” I didn’t wait to hear more, but returned along the corridor to the front room with its brushed plush easy chairs and couch. The telephone was where you’d expect to find the television set. I dialled the number for the Emergency Service. Behind me I could hear Mary going on about the sushi bars in Toronto and the lack of them in Grantham. It was only then, while waiting to be connected with the ambulance service, that I remembered what sushi was. I’d never had any, but I had a picture of people sitting around a bar eating raw fish off wooden rafts passing for platters. Once I got the dispatcher I discovered that I didn’t know the street number. I had to dash to the porch to read it off the front of the house. I thought I should be able to behave like a tried professional, but I found myself sweating and giving unnecessary details over the phone. At least I repeated the important information:

  “Hurry, it’s a drug overdose!” I was assured that the vehicle’s status was now active. I hope he meant it was on its way. I hung up and returned to the kitchen. Mary was quiet, with her head buried in her crossed arms on the table. I slapped her face twice before she opened her eyes slightly.

  “Hey! Quit that!”

  “Mary, I want to talk to you. I need to know all about you. Mary! Wake up! Don’t go to sleep while I’m talking!” She stirred, then closed her eyes again. I swatted her again until her eyes came open again with irritation showing.

  “It’s raw fish-sh-sh,” she said. “Sing a song of sixpence, a belly full of rye. Raw tuna’s best. You ever looked a monkfish in the eye?”

  “Mary, try to get up!” I lifted her to her feet. I tried to wrap the dressing gown around her so that I could concentrate on business. “Come on, Mary. We’ll go for a walk.” I tried to take a step with her and we fell over in a pile on the linoleum.

  “Hey, buster! What’s the big idea?” I tried to unscramble myself from her and got to my knees. She was out again. I couldn’t get her off the floor. I tried, but I had to face facts. I tried slapping again, but it wasn’t reaching her. She curled up into a fetal position on her side. I got to my feet and tried to imagine what thinking clearly might be like. I went back to the bedroom and pocketed the phial that had contained the pills. I collected some clothes into the suitcase under the bed and went back to where I’d left her. I shouted at her, calling her name loudly, but it made no dent in her unconsciousness. I gave up and sat down in one of the straight-backed kitchen chairs. I could hear the sound of the ambulance coming in the distance. That made me feel better.

  The boys in white got Mary MacCulloch into their ambulance. I remember her hunched shoulders as they lifted her to the stretcher. They were able to rouse her slightly. An eye blinked and I crossed my fingers as they slammed the double doors and hurried off in the direction of the General. I took a brief look around the house without turning up much of interest. It was clear that bills weren’t paid from there. There were no stacks of last year’s Christmas cards in the back of a drawer. For the most part, the closets were empty. Alex Favell had made sure that if anybody could link him to this place it would have to be the forensic experts in Toronto. I tucked the bottle of open rye under my arm and pocketed the suicide note. I even checked to see that the stove and the lights were out before I locked the door and headed for the car.

  * * *

  The waiting room at the General is not a place I like to spend much time in. In spite of efforts to take the institutional curse off the place, it remained, under the curtains and the assortment of recent magazines, exactly what it was. Across from me a middle-aged couple sat as close together as the seats would allow. She was staring a hole in the wall; he worked a set of amber worry beads between his large worn thumbs. A fourteen-year-old kid sat bolt upright every time an intern or orderly walked by the glass windows that looked out into the corridor of the Emergency Department. I’d already started distorting time; hospitals do that to me. When I arrived, I handed in the empty pill phial and gave the nurse on duty my health insurance number. When they thought that Mary was my wife, I let them go on thinking it. I could clear up any misunderstanding later on. I sat in a seat watching the old couple and the teenager. It probably calmed me to be a watcher instead of a waiter like them. It suited my personality. I went through to my last cigarette in spite of the intimidating signs that warned of the evils of smoking. I read all the posters. Even as a smoker, I agreed with the message. I’d been promising to give up the filthy habit as soon as things calmed down and I could give it the attention it deserved. But I still resented the superior moral tone the posters took. Why couldn’t they find a way to say what they had to say without sounding smug and selfrighteous?

  “Are you Mr. Cooperman?” I got to my feet and found myself face to face with a good-looking Chinese in operating room greens. A surgical mask hung around his neck, and his hair was still covered by a green cap. I guess by standing up, I acknowledged his identification. He went on. “I’m Dr. Leung,” he said. “I just left your wife and I want to tell you that we think she’s going to be all right. She’s a very lucky woman, you know.”

  “She’s going to be all right?” I know he’d just said that, but sometimes you just have to say the things that pop into your head without editing or polishing them.

  “You’re Dr. Young?” I was still trying to take hold.

  “Not Young, Leung. Kiu Leung,” he said patiently. “If you’d delayed another half-hour, I don’t think we could be so certain of recovery. I could have been giving you some very bad news. You understand?” I nodded gravely, which seemed to be what was required of me. Did he think that we were playing games with those pills and one went off by accident or what? “We had to pump her out thoroughly. She’s going to feel like hell for a couple of days. We’ll be admitting her and there will be
more information later tonight, if you’d like to check in. You can see her now, if you want, but they’ll be moving her to a room very soon.”

  I never seem to take in more than about forty percent of what a doctor tells me. If I concentrate on getting the name, I lose his message. If I get the message, I can never locate the doctor again. I should always leave my office with a wire taped to my liver so that everything will be recorded and nothing will be lost. Even while I was thinking this, I was missing something Dr. Leung was saying. “Now, Mr. Cooperman, I’d like to get the details of how this accident happened. Who prescribed these pills in the first place? The combination of the drugs and the alcohol gave us a very hard time in there.”

  “Well, I’m not sure I know about all that. But could I get back to you when I’ve got the details fixed in my own head? Right now, I have to get in touch with the police. Can I use your phone?” He pulled at his chin, trying to decide whether or not to quiz me further on this or to return to his patient. He indicated a phone inside the nurses’ station and I helped myself. When I looked up again, Dr. Kiu Leung had gone through one of the doors back into the wonderful world of medicine and the thousand-and-one stories that unfold every day in a general hospital. I called Savas.

  * * *

  I could say I went up to the Medical Records Department to kill time while waiting for Savas to arrive, but the results deserve a better place in the record than that. And it didn’t hurt when I saw that the clerk on duty was Alison Simmers. She read the letters from George Tallon and his lawyer, then disappeared into the office of her supervisor after asking me if I had seen my brother, Sam, recently. I confessed that it had been some weeks. While she was gone I realized that it was really several months since I’d been to Toronto to see him. By the time she returned, I was quite homesick for my older brother and feeling guilty about not getting to Toronto more often.