by Howard Engel
“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.
McStu and I avoided further confrontations. He didn’t spot me parked outside either of the houses where he left his hat. And I have to confess that after reading all of his books, I sort of liked the guy. Mind you, he was no Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. He didn’t come near Ross Macdonald either. But, he was a good read, if you know what I mean. He played fair with the reader and his hero, Dud Dickens, wasn’t the smart-ass private eye who is always ordering wines I can’t pronounce or picking out the murderer by the pipe mixture he’s been using. Except for the beatings he took from the thugs, Dud Dickens was my kind of private eye. I could identify with him and envy him his coach house across from the old Hamilton Jail on Barton Street.
When I wasn’t out in my car, I was in the library doing some homework on as many of the names I’d recently heard as I could. I read all I could find about Thurleigh Ramsden. He had, according to one recent article about him, been elected alderman in 1985 and had been returned two years later. After that, in 1990, came an unsuccessful bid at the mayor’s chain of linked gold S’s. His late wife, Dora, had been born a Rudloe near Welland, Ontario. Ramsden himself had been born in Toronto’s east end. So much for all his talk about “freeborn Englishmen.”
While Ramsden was on my mind, I put in a call to his office from a pay-phone across from the library’s snack concession. He didn’t keep a secretary so I left a message on his tape. I said I wanted to see him about business relating to the late Elizabeth Oldridge. I thought I might say something about the unpleasantness of our last meeting, but decided that I’d better wait until I was in the same room with him. I get intimidated by answering machines; they make me turn the simplest of messages into a scrambled mess. I left my office number and waited for him to try ignoring me to death.
A guilty thought kept pulling at my pantleg, like an insistent poodle: what was I doing to earn Newby’s money lately? The nightly drive to Papertown after the evening news wasn’t getting me anywhere. Maybe I’d better get in touch with Stan Mendlesham and talk things over with him. I invested a quarter in this notion and got an invitation to meet Stan for coffee. When he asked me to suggest somewhere, I could only think of one place. It’s not that big a town, after all.
He was sitting in one of the booths in the middle of the Di. “I got no time for lunch, Benny; just coffee and a roll. Then I gotta meet Mr. Newby at the office for a lunch meeting.”
“Too early for my lunch too,” I lied. I was thinking that his firm only bought one lunch per customer as I settled down opposite him, looking up at the clock above the swinging double doors to the kitchen.
“What have you got to report?” He was resting both of his pudgy hands on the table top. There were dark stains under his arms. Newby keeps his juniors on the run, it seemed. There was a lot of glitter about Stan: gold chains, expensive watch and three big rings.
“I don’t know exactly what I’ve got, to be frank with you, Stan. I’ve been following the subject and I know one or two things about her, but I don’t know what’s important or not, since I’ve not been let into that part of the bargain. I know she’s living in an on-and-off way with McKenzie Stewart. But that can hardly be news to anybody. I know where she does her shopping and gets her hair fixed. You want to know about that, Stan?”
“You better give me your full report.”
“Interim, you mean, or are you telling me I’m finished?”
“Sure: interim. Whatever you’ve got. I’ve no instructions to cut you loose.”
As succinctly as possible, but without leaving out anything significant, I went over Cath Bracken’s daily grind. He made a few jottings on an envelope and nodded to show that he was still plugged in. I ended up telling him that there was some indication that Cath was getting some unwelcome harassment from her boss at CXAN, Orv Wishart. I told him that I was going to look into that and he didn’t tell me not to.
Mendlesham puzzled me. He didn’t seem interested in anything I’d found out about McStu. In fact he seemed cool on the girl-friend as well. Maybe it was just a job to him: his not to reason why; just carry the news home to Newby and send me off to gather more of the same. Were they looking for a break in the pattern? Did they expect both of them to book flights south or to France or something? I was still in the dark about that when Stan reluctantly took the check up to the cashier at the front of the restaurant.
“Any addi
tional instructions?” I asked, hoping for some clue about the direction all of this was coming from. But there weren’t.
“Just keep up the good work and give me a call in a couple of days, okay? Eventually, Mr. Newby will want to see all of this in writing, Benny.”
“What’s it like working for a man like Newby, Stan?”
“What do you mean? Julian’s the best there is, Benny. We’re the busiest firm in town. Julian’s very well organized. He’s got a team of specialists working for him. He also helps bring along the next generation. He’s got his son on the payroll and Steve Morella’s girl. He keeps us on our toes. That means we all work like hell when we’re working, but he makes sure we all get time to enjoy the better things of life too. He’s got his three antique Morgans he likes to putter with and I’ve got my golf. This is a high-class outfit, Benny. Not like the shop your cousin Melvyn runs. Not by a long shot.”
“I’ll remember that. You ever need any titles searched, Stan, you come to me. I still do a little of that on the side, when I’m not too busy.”
“Sure, Benny. Sure. You take care now.” And he was off down St. Andrew Street, rocking from side to side like a plump pigeon.
I had learned nothing from Mendlesham about what I was supposed to be looking for Did they think that Cath Bracken was secretly flying to New York overnight to do the morning news on NBC? Was she suspected of—? And then it came to me. Of course! It had to be McStu’s gadabout wife who was raising the fuss! Who else would give a damn about what Cath Bracken was doing in her spare time?
Further thought about this was stifled by the sweet smell of a Player’s coming over my shoulder. It was Bill Palmer just coming into the Di. He looked shaggy and in need of a shower under his ancient raincoat, but his cigarette smelled like heaven itself. I came closer as he caught his breath. I greeted him with the stale formula that passes for a friendly hello, and he dragged me back to a booth not far from where I’d been sitting.