by Anna Porter
He hooked a finger inside his starched shirt collar and loosened it. The diamond stud snapped and jumped out of sight. Zimmerman either hadn’t noticed or didn’t care. He drank more of his amber drink. “It’s the air I remember most. Clear, fresh air full of the rich scent of grapes and raw wine. He had so much life then. He died young.” He banged his chest with his fist. “His heart.”
He mumbled something else, but Judith couldn’t quite make out the words.
He sat still, his shoulders slumped forward, his arms resting on the table. He was gazing into his plate where the blood had congealed around the boeuf en croûte and soaked into the noodles, turning them pink. He shook his head from side to side, once, with a quick, jerky movement. He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.” Then he fell, face first, into the noodles.
For a moment nobody moved. Jane, still frozen in an attitude of exaggerated interest, dropped her knife with a clatter. Conversation stopped. Judith jumped up, bent over him, listening for his breath. Her hand reached out to touch his massive shoulder. But Brenda was already there, her arms around him. As she pulled him back, his head lolled to one side and crashed into the back of the chair. His mouth had fallen open, his eyes stared up at the ceiling, his face, all pink from the beef blood on one side, was yellow-white on the other.
Brenda screamed.
Seven
BROTHER TWELVE AND the Indian hadn’t stopped at the Harbour Light since 1975. Brother Twelve claimed he had once preached to a Methodist congregation in Bismarck, Manitoba, and simply couldn’t countenance the ministrations of the competition. The Indian said he hated all white men’s religions even when accompanied by soup and a bed for the night. Parr suspected that, in both cases, it was a point of pride.
Daytime the two men spent in parks up and down Jarvis, at the lower end of Church, and across Sherbourne south of Queen. Summer nights they slept on the benches. The winters were toughest. They got by with underground parking lots, subway entrances, underpasses, and those downtown buildings that still allowed vagrants to sleep over the hot air vents at night.
At 8:30 A.M., the Indian dropped by Madame Roche’s for coffee. He had been hopping around the four corners of St. Lawrence Hall since 7:30 A.M. and had collected some $20 and change. His collection technique varied from day to day, but the most fruitful routine involved a combination of dreadlocks, tambourine, and a fierce, sullen, threatening face he could never maintain for more than an hour at a time.
He liked his coffee thick and black and he never asked for credit or any favors. Here he was a paying customer, like any other. He had pulled a black knitted tuque over the dreadlocks and was warming his hands around the cardboard cup when Madame Roche noticed his shoes. They were brand new, shiny, dark brown leather lace-up brogues.
That’s why Madame Roche called Detective Inspector David Parr.
Parr found the Indian and Brother Twelve on a bench in Regent Park. It was where they spent most mornings, waiting for the Dove to open for business at noon. It was a sunny, cold, crisp day. Brother Twelve was counting his change, laying out the coins slowly, quarter by quarter, dime by dime. It was a laborious process. He wore dark blue knitted gloves with the fingertips cut or worn away. The Indian had stretched out crosswise on the bench, the back of his head supported by his clasped hands, his elbows high, his face turned to the sun, his legs blocking the path.
He wore four or five multicolored pullovers, a checked hunting jacket, an army coat circa World War II, an old pair of baggy woolen trousers. His shoes, as Madame Roche had observed, were brand new. Years ago, as Parr remembered, the Indian had worn a good pair of rubberized working boots, but he had never had anything as swish as these brogues.
“Good morning,” Parr said, positioning himself on the path next to the legs, but careful not to block the sun.
The Indian pushed his tuque farther down on his forehead in slow motion. Then he squinted up at Parr. “Hello, Officer,” he said in his early-in-the-day croaky voice. “How’s everything with you today?”
“Good, good,” Parr said, wondering how come the Indian had such a memory for faces. “Yourself?”
“Can’t complain,” he said and shut his eyes again. “Can’t complain at all.”
“I can,” Brother Twelve said, “but I can’t say as anyone wants to hear it.” He had shifted all the change into the inside pocket of his long overcoat, wrapped his wilted scarf around his neck, and hunkered down to roll a cigarette from a handful of butts.
“Some fancy shoes you got there,” Parr said, coming to the point. He nudged one shoe with his foot so there would be no mistake about which shoes he meant.
“Oh yeah?” the Indian said, inspecting his toes with interest.
Parr tried a more direct approach. “Where did you get them?”
The Indian shrugged. “Don’t know.”
“Where were you last Thursday night, the 26th?”
Brother Twelve looked up from his task to ascertain that he’d heard right, then he began to laugh—a deep, shaky, mirthless laugh.
“How the hell would I know where I was last Thursday night, man?” the Indian asked stiffly. “I don’t even know where the hell I was last night. Or last year. And I don’t give a shit. I don’t know what goddam day it is now, nor never mind some bleedin’ Thursday away back. Why don’t you just come right out with it? What are you looking for?”
There was no sense running them in. But if that was the only way he was going to get at those shoes, he had no choice. That’s what he told the Indian. “A man has been murdered and dumped into the doorway of a fancy eatery, foot of Church and Esplanade. He’d been robbed of everything including his shoes. You’re wearing brand-new shoes that look like they’d fit him.”
“Never killed anybody,” the Indian said, starting to take notice.
“Not since the bleedin’ war, anyhow,” Brother Twelve added.
“Best way to prove that is to let me take the shoes. We have a bunch of people up on Jarvis Street who can figure out if they belonged to the dead man. You can wait there while they do.” Parr was trying to sound reassuring. He didn’t succeed.
“You mean you want to run me in?” the Indian yelled.
“For an hour or so, that’s all.”
“On what charge?”
“No charge. You’d be helping the police.”
“That’s grand, man, truly grand. Me helping the police. You hear that?” he said to Brother Twelve, who was laughing again.
“Either that, or I’ll charge you with obstructing justice. Or assaulting a police officer.”
“That’s five days,” the Indian said, outraged. “I ain’t goin’ in there for five days, man. You know I didn’t do nothin’. You know I wouldn’t kill anybody. I’ve been hangin’ around here some ten years, man, never got in any trouble. Mind my own business...” The fight had gone out of him at the prospect of not being there when the Dove opened. Nor the next day. That’s what Parr had been counting on.
“Get you back by noon, sharp,” he promised. If the shoes aren’t the dead man’s.
The Indian sure hated the inside of a police car. Parr suspected he hated all closed spaces and locked doors, and lost confidence away from his buddy. He’d pulled his coat tight round his shoulders, turned up his collar, and stuck his hands in his armpits. He was shivering. “The shoes were a gift, man,” he said, as though he’d just remembered. “I was under the archway at the market. Late night. Dark, anyhow. A heel of red to pass the time. Big black car came by. Driver threw them at me. There was even a five-dollar bill inside. Some pages from the Book. That’s God’s own truth. People do that, man. They come and throw us stuff. Makes them feel better.”
But that wasn’t true either. Later, when the shoes came off and were hustled away to Forensics (“Let those bastards get a whiff of this...”), the Indian said he had fished them out of the cream-colored garbage bin on the corner of Church and Front, back of the Flatiron Building. It
was on his daily route. His property. No one else dared put one finger to that bin. The shoes had been inside a plastic bag. White, he thought. Though he had worn them for two or three days they were still like new. Size 14 silk-lined brogues. In the center of the lining the manufacturer’s trademark had been stamped in gold: Dack’s Fifth Avenue, New York.
***
By now, Yan was beginning to bitch about the body cluttering up his morgue. “Man with 14 points of definite identification features murdered near a crowded Yuppie hangout and you turkeys can’t find one goddam relative to collect the remains.”
There had been no reaction to the mass postings of the mug shot and personal details, though they had been run in some of the major papers now, and no recognition from the dentists. There was still hope the ad in the Dental Journal would bring in something.
The Canadian Jewish News had agreed to run a picture but they didn’t have an issue going to press for another week.
The silk-lined shoes turned out to be the 1986 best-selling Dack’s Classics for the fall season, and the Fifth Avenue store in New York thought they might have sold a thousand of them since they first came out. They were willing to look at the photograph, but couldn’t see how anyone would remember a face. That meant asking for help from the NYPD. The chief problem with them, however, was they generally had more bodies of their own lying around than they knew what to do with, and this one was off their lot.
At least someone had come to collect Madame Cielo. She had a daughter in New Orleans married to an enterprising Cajun cook. The two of them ran a small restaurant on Canal Street that hadn’t yet made a cent. Mother, whose real name had been Barbara Fleming, had supplied the seed money and frequent extras, most recently a check for $3,000 to pay back taxes. Desjardins, the son-in-law, claimed all this was a repayable loan, though neither he nor the daughter could recall exactly how much they had borrowed over the past three years.
Mrs. Fleming’s well-kept bank account recorded a total of $24,500 going to Mrs. Desjardins, but it had suffered little deprivation. The old lady had had bonds, stocks, retirement accounts, and term deposits totaling over a quarter of a million dollars—not bad for a small-time fortune-teller.
The daughter claimed she was as surprised as anybody. Her father hadn’t left money, and she had no idea her mother had become so prosperous.
The Madame Cielo business generated cash only, in uneven bursts ranging from $100 one week to $5,000 the next. She deposited regularly from a brown envelope, Fridays at the Dufferin branch of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. The tellers remembered her bringing the cash in a variety of denominations. Her totals, entered in a large blue binder, were always accurate.
There had been no cash on the premises on Spadina Road and no blue binder.
There were eight witnesses to swear, if necessary, that the Desjardins were both in the restaurant the night of the murder.
Stewart and Giannini would spend the next week interviewing the neighbors. After the lousy day they’d had tracking the rest of the garbage from the Flatiron Building’s garbage bin, it would be a welcome change.
Eight
FOLLOWING ZIMMERMAN’S death, the press was unrestrained in its appreciation of all his good works. The New York Times gave him a corner of the front page, recycled the old picture from Business Week, and called him a “titan.” The Globe, tastefully, put him on page 2 (same photograph) and labeled him a “Canadian philanthropist.” He deserved a full column in the Wall Street Journal, with a list of his holdings and predictions of trouble at Pacific. None of the family had spoken to the press, and “the family’s spokesman” said the funeral was going to be private. Donations were to be sent to the United Jewish Appeal.
Only the Star mentioned that the funeral would be at Forest Hill Catholic.
Though he complained about the last-minute changes he still had to make in the funeral arrangements, Philip Masters readily agreed to Judith’s request for an interview. He seemed almost eager to fix the time, get it over with.
Paul Zimmerman had been dead only one day. Judith was halfway into the Finance International story. “Some small changes in direction, I think, Judith,” Giles had suggested helpfully. “It’s one of the largest corporate empires in America. We’ll still want to know where it came from, but do try to find out where it’s going as well. Perhaps a new header piece. Maybe a sidebar or two. Backgrounders. Profiles of family members. Close associates. That sort of thing. None too often one of our writers is right there when...” He paused to find the correct phrase, and gave up: “...the subject croaks.”
“Right.” For $5,000, American, he could have all the side-bars he wanted.
Time to recheck her Who’s Who. Philip Masters, she discovered, was a CM, a QC, a B.Comm., and an MBA. Born in 1925 in Montreal to Stephanie Goldberg and Colin Masters. Attended Queens, McGill Law School, Osgoode Hall, and Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. Senior partner in Masters, Goldberg, Griffiths, with 22 directorships, most in conjunction with Paul Zimmerman’s holdings. Director of all seven subsidiaries under the Monarch umbrella, as well as of the Monarch Enterprises holding company. There were a number of development companies, the Bank of Massachusetts, Linden Industries (real estate and gold, with a recent interest in construction), two hospitals, the ballet, the New York Philharmonic, the NYC College of Art, the Boston Museum, and an assortment of Jewish charities.
He belonged to eight clubs, including Edinburgh Golf, The Leash, Lyford Cay, Checkers, Long Island Lawn Tennis, Vail Golf Club, and the Royal Hunt. His interests, in contrast to his appearance, were all sports. No children.
Masters, Goldberg, Griffiths was on the 24th floor of the Monarch Building at Bay and Richmond. It was a black, antiseptic tower with two-level underground shopping, bank, waterfall, escalators, and four sets of elevators. No parking lot.
The 24th floor was gray plush carpeting, white walls with Christopher Pratt prints, a semicircular receptionist’s desk with matching receptionist. Masters’s secretary was exchanging light-bulb jokes with her. They were both writhing with laughter when Judith announced herself.
“Mr. Masters is waiting,” the secretary said, recovering her composure. She looked like a life member of a strenuous fitness club, broad-shouldered, muscular, tanned, and tall. Masters must have a penchant for surrounding himself with tall people. “You’re late,” she observed, with a tight smile, motioning Judith to follow her.
Judith checked her watch. Only ten minutes late, which, considering she had had to abandon the Renault six blocks away behind a semi in a no-parking zone, was not too bad. “Being late for an appointment,” Marsha had told her, “is not so much rotten manners as an insult. It’s telling the other person your time is more important than theirs. It’s like having a secretary place your calls.” Perfection came easier for Marsha.
The quality of art took a sharp downturn along the corridor: sunset photographs and pencil sketches of 19th-century Indians in full feathers. Masters’s office was in the far corner. It was two sides glass, two sides framed photographs of Masters with assorted friends, pets, and clients. In one he was dressed in Western garb, riding a white quarter horse, his short legs stretching around the horse’s ample sides. In another, he and a young Zimmerman were leading a pair of ridgeback hounds with numbers on their sides.
The younger Paul looked remarkably like Arthur. There were pictures of Masters pitching the ball for the Blue Jays (he had been one of the original sponsors), in morning coat and top hat with Zimmerman, with E.P. Taylor and the Queen at Woodbine for the Queen’s Plate.
“Coffee?” the statuesque secretary asked.
“No, thanks.”
For a moment Judith thought she had been left alone in the room, then Masters popped up from behind the three-foot-high red plaster and plexiglass tower that occupied the pine side table near the center.
“It’ll be the tallest tube building in the world,” he said, patting the top of the tower. “And that colour is re
al. Red Napoleon granite blocks from northern Sweden, polished by hand in Italy, cut into 42,000 perfect pieces, each marked for its exact position on the face. It’ll be the most distinguished landmark in the city.”
“The new Harbourfront Tower?” Judith asked, getting down on her haunches and looking up at it from the tiny people’s perspective. There were not only tiny people, but tiny trees, benches, and azure blue lakefront with tiny sails. Right out of Lilliput.
“We started construction a month ago,” Masters said. “Our first joint project with the Restman group. Come to think of it, our first joint project with anyone. Zeidler’s design. We had hoped Paul would be around to see the opening. He was so proud of it. And he did like putting one over on the Reichmanns.” He winked at Judith, as if to suggest she knew what he meant, which she didn’t.
“First Canadian Place,” Masters explained. “It’s been the tallest tube to date. Won’t be this time next year. Paul’s always liked competition. A striver. A winner. What you’d call a Type A personality.”
“I wouldn’t,” Judith murmured, “but I know what you mean.”
Masters asked: “Why don’t you sit by the window? Super view. You can write while I walk about. Never too comfortable sitting.” Another Type A.
“That stuff,” Masters continued, “it’s jargon. A kind of shorthand. Don’t misunderstand me, he wasn’t typical in any way. One of a kind. Created the whole damn thing with his own hands. From nothing.” He was pacing behind her. When she turned, he said, “He told you how we met?”
Judith shook her head.
“Montreal, 1948.” He pronounced every word: “Nineteen hundred and forty-eight,” as though pausing over the numbers would bring the memory closer. “I was 23, a graduating student at McGill, celebrating old McCarthy for allowing me to article with him. There were six of us at Le Vieux Coq. Champagne toasts, Scotch chasers. That sort of thing. We were showing off for the girls at the next table. Started tossing some glasses into the fireplace, Russian-style.” He giggled. “The waiter asked us to leave. We were so outraged by his impertinence—and we were drunk, must have been drunk—we refused to pay. Next morning the maître d’, still dressed in black tie and red cummerbund, arrived at McCarthy’s and told me if I didn’t ante up, he’d have to see if the senior partner had the money. From petty cash, he told me. That was Paul Zimmerman: Six-foot-three, ham-handed handsome, dreadfully uncomfortable in his tight-fitting clothes. A few years younger than me, but had he lived!”