by Howard Engel
“Get it,” he said. The one who wasn’t Bill pulled his six foot length upright and disappeared. Bill looked at me, relaxing a little. He took off his cap and placed it in the middle of the table. His rusty-coloured hair was dark with sweat. My own armpits stuck to my sides. Then the other cop was back with the package. He swung his tall knees under the table and looked at me.
“Is this the package you brought into the house?”
“I didn’t say I’d brought a package into the house.” I felt like a politician caught telling the truth.
Bill began to tear the tape and pull off the paper. I watched in silence. At least the blue cardboard box came out without dribbling white powder on the table. From the box, Bill lifted a small, short-barrelled hand gun, about .32 caliber, with a dull blue look to it that I didn’t like one bit.
FIFTEEN
It was about an hour later by my wrist watch, but in time as measured by my lifespan I had moved forward by a year at least. I felt as though I had been hauled under a bright light and slapped a few times by a crew who knew how to do it without leaving bruises where they show.
They brought me into the Regional Police office from the parking lot through a side door, the kind you open by punching in a code on the handle, and left me to cool my heels on a wooden bench for a half hour or so. It was busy with men coming and going, half of them in uniform. I found a magazine and read some movie reviews of pictures I’d already forgotten. On the wall was a bulletin board with a few “Wanted” posters on it, like in the movies. Unlike the movies, there was a handmade notice that a second-hand camper was for sale. The bottom of the notice ended in a fringe of telephone numbers. Someone brought in a cardboard box full of coffee. I was offered one at normal cost as though I wasn’t about to be subjected to questioning in a Breaking and Entering matter. I thought of explaining that to the coffee man, as I fished out my quarter, but he didn’t look as though he gave a damn. I sipped my coffee after levering off the plastic cap. It was bad enough to replace the traditional third degree. But just then it was warm and wet, and that’s all I wanted.
When I was finished all but the last swallow, a cop in uniform came over to me and established eye contact, which I had begun to think had gone out of style since I’d been brought into the station.
“You Cooperman?” I nodded. He pointed down the corridor. “Fifth door on your right,” he said. I downed the last of the bitter coffee and moved in the direction he’d suggested.
It was a very office-like office, with all of the usual furnishings, except that most of them were made of gray metal, and looked like somebody regularly went at them with a ball-peen hammer. The light came from a hanging fluorescent fixture. I took one of the gray chairs. Beigecoloured files were stuck in a metal rack and others blossomed from a file drawer. The floor was covered with rubber tile, with rust marks from where the furniture used to be, and dark smears around the cold radiator under the window. On the wall I saw some photographs in plain black frames: on the firing line with target pistols, smiles and handshakes in front of a wooden shield with a lot of silver on it, and a class picture of thirty young faces at cop college. Dusty Venetian blinds divided a view of the floodlit court house into long uninteresting strips.
When my two cops came back, they brought a bonus with them, who introduced himself as Sergeant Savas. I finally found out that the other two were Bedrosian and Kyle. Kyle was the Bill of earlier in the evening. I never did find out what Bedrosian’s first name was. Savas looked like a hard man, but a busy man. At the moment he wasn’t very interested in me. I was glad of that. I wouldn’t ever want to be the centre of Sergeant Savas’ undivided attention. He flipped through a number of reports that I’m sure had nothing to do with me and then looked up. He was almost casual.
“We checked out the telephone number you say your client gave you. Turns out to be a Chinese restaurant on Niagara Street. Pay phone. We tried it about twenty minutes ago and didn’t get diddly. We checked on that name you gave us, Twining. That’s another bad joke. Two Tom Twinings in town, neither the owner or tenant of that house. He’s unknown at Griffiths and Dunlop. She probably found the name on a teabag. As for the gun, it’s not registered. And you know as well as I do that a peeper isn’t licenced to carry a piece since 1966, right? We’re running some checks on it to see whether there’s any priors on the weapon. Never can tell. If I were you, Mr. Cooperman, I’d reconsider telling us the name of the woman who bought your ticket to this hayride. What do you say?” I looked for a minute into his leathery face and those eyes like steel ball-bearings and tried to decide. The gun was a real surprise. She had two packages in her bag: one for show and one to go. Everything about the deal looked phoney, so probably the name she gave me was at the top of the let’s-pretend list. I’d have to check that out anyway. Might as well put the cops to work for me. I’m a tax-payer, or at least I hope to become one one of these days.
“Okay,” I said. “She told me her name was Phoebe Campbell. She’s a tall brunette with green eyes. Good looking with a face that cries out to be believed. She works as a teller at the Upper Canadian Bank. I don’t know which branch.” Savas tugged on his earlobe, and motioned Bedrosian out the door to check on it. While we were waiting, Savas continued reading a report about something important. Bedrosian was back in fifteen minutes, shaking his head.
“There’s no one of that name or description working at the Upper, as far as we can find out at this hour. I’ll try your description around the branches tomorrow. But, Sergeant, I don’t know what we’d book her on if we found her. We didn’t find anything on Mr. Cooperman, and it wouldn’t take much to get out from under what we’re holding.” Kyle looked at Savas and so did I. He was working his upper lip tightly over his teeth like he had a few strands of steak lodged between a couple of teeth.
“You know, Mr. Cooperman, in a way you’re lucky your story is so crazy. We hear all kinds in a week, but you win the prize. If any of this stuff had checked out, I’d nail you to the wall with a B and E in a minute, but it stinks to high heaven, and I’ve been around long enough to know that all the stink doesn’t come from you. Think about it. Why would anyone want to set you up like that?”
“I’m beginning to think of a few reasons. But I’ve got a good imagination.”
“I don’t want a whodunit, just facts. When you’ve coughed up something solid like a fact, I want to know about it. You read me?”
“Loud and clear.” I wasn’t going to tell him how popular I’d made myself with Harrow, or mention that I suspected a chill wind blowing my way from City Hall. If he was a good cop, and I suspected that Savas was a good cop, he’d hear about this in the morning. Savas warned me about what happens to naughty private investigators when they come up in the world and become common burglars. He told me that I’d better blow my nose somewhere else from now on, and not to leave town. And, just when I’d been prepared to curl up in the holding tank overnight, I found myself being driven back to my car by Bill Kyle, who was going off duty anyway. I couldn’t imagine something like that happening in a big city. There have to be a few advantages to living in a place like this. It was about time I found out about one of them.
“You got a tip about me from a woman over the phone?” I asked Kyle.
“It was a phone call. Could have been a woman; I didn’t take it. Check the dispatcher. It’ll be on his sheet.”
“What did you hear, then? What was I supposed to be doing: stealing the silver, popping the safe, what?”
“The way I heard it, you were a suspicious character about to plant something suspicious in the top bureau drawer of the master bedroom.”
“And you believed that?”
“What do you mean? I call that hitting it close.”
When I finally crawled behind the wheel of the Olds, I could feel most of me shouting, “Take me home. Enough’s enough!” and a look at my watch only confirmed that as good advice. But something in the back of my head, which I was seriously thinking of donat
ing to science, told me to drive by the office just to see that everything was in ship-shape shape.
The streets were nearly deserted, except around the Murray Hotel on St. Andrew. The stoplights always take twice as long this side of midnight. While I was stopped at one of them, I noticed for the first time that the pavement was wet. It had rained while I was trading yarns with the cops. My mother would have said, “Good, if you’re a farmer.” I parked out in front of my place, and used my last strength to pull myself up the twenty-eight steps. A three-bulb fixture hung at the top of the stairs. Tonight it wasn’t doing so well; two of the bulbs had blown. But there was enough light for me to see that the front door of my office stood open, and that there was a foot sticking out of it. Again I felt that tearing at my stomach I thought I’d left in Dr. Zekerman’s office. I had to force my feet to obey. I took out my handkerchief, and turned on the lights. Frank Bushmill lay on his side, with one hand thrust forward as though he had been hit by lightning while in the act of waving goodbye. I heard my knees snap with middle age as I knelt at his side. By now I could see that he was breathing. For a second I felt a flash of rage run around inside my collar. The bloody drunk had passed out once too often. But then I saw a wine-coloured mark at the base of his skull. He had been helped to oblivion by more than a bottle tonight. I went across the hall and got a towel from the bathroom and wet it. Frank looked just as out of it when I got back. I laid the towel over his forehead and called his name loudly. I thought I saw an eyelid flutter, but not much. I loosened his collar, and tried biting on one of his finger nails. He was really out. I went around behind my desk and found the phone book and called the ambulance.
Looking down at my desk blotter, I saw for the first time that the place had been gone over by someone who knew what he was looking for. I knew that I’d left the three pages of notes that Dr. Zekerman sent me sitting belly up on my green desk blotter. I felt my breast pocket. Miraculously, the thief had not also been there. I held at least half a head on my shoulders. Soon I could see that Frank was making a few low sounds, his mouth moved a little like a beached whale—not that I’ve seen one—and a little more colour was beginning to be seen in his face. I now remembered that I should have looked at his eyes. That’s the way they do it in the movies. You can tell all sorts of things just by lifting an eyelid. By now, however, I could hear the sound of the siren coming up James Street. Frank would be beyond my tender loving care in less than three minutes.
To kill the time, I dialled the Regional Police. I got a tired desk man and asked to be put through to Sergeant Savas.
“Yeah,” Savas said, when I got him.
“It’s Cooperman,” I said.
“You didn’t go home like a nice boy, did you?”
“No. I came back to my office. I thought you’d sleep better if I told you what I found when I got here.”
“Try me.”
“Somebody’s been through my place. I’ve been robbed. And the guy that rents the office next to mine has a nasty bump on his head that he still can’t feel yet. The ambulance is just parking outside. I don’t think he’ll be able to tell us anything for a couple of hours. Just thought I’d let you know.”
“Kinda makes sense now, doesn’t it?”
“If that’s sense.”
“Well, I’ll come over and have a look. In the meantime …”
“I know, don’t touch anything.”
SIXTEEN
At three o’clock in the morning, Sergeant Savas and I started looking for coffee. St. Andrew Street was tight as a drum, and all of the usual places that either of us could think of were sensibly shut down and their operators in bed. Savas thought I was trying to be funny when I offered him a dried apricot. I always thought it would be a good idea to keep a bottle in the bottom drawer of my desk or in the filing cabinet, but with Frank Bushmill for a neighbour, and me for a tenant, it wasn’t necessary.
The Sergeant had arrived a few minutes after they’d carted Frank off to the hospital. In the movies and on television, a bump on the head is a temporary inconvenience. It doesn’t hold the hero up for long, and the rest of the cast bounce back just as quickly. Savas looked around my place, not taking things very seriously, since I hadn’t reported the loss of the Kohinoor diamond, or the Crown Jewels. He had the edges of the puzzle that was bugging me stuck in his teeth, like bits of his dinner, and he wanted me to tell him what was going on. He didn’t say that in so many words, but all those scowls couldn’t have been indigestion.
“C’mon,” he said, and I followed him out into a fine ran, that reflected the stoplights and street signs in a way that made me turn up my collar. The Sandman had already dumped a truckload of dirt in both my eyes, and every bone in my body cried out to be laid to rest. Instead, we got into the Sergeant’s car and I could hear the hiss of the tires on the wet road. I didn’t much care where he was going. I think I even closed my eyes for a minute, because when I felt the car stop, I could feel my mouth shouting for a toothbrush. It was cold and nearly dawn on a day I knew I would want to forget.
I couldn’t tell where we were, but Savas seemed to know what he was doing. He knocked on a door in a one-storey frame building that came a car-length from the edge of the sidewalk. The door was opened by a short fat man with the shortest arms I’d ever seen on a grown man.
“How are you, Lije?” he said without a great deal of warmth.
“Good morning, Chris. Come on in. You’re up early. I was just thinking of closing up. Nothing much doing.”
“This Lije Swift, Mr. Cooperman. Lije is short for Elijah. He’s a regular prophet, aren’t you, Lije. Mr. Cooperman here got himself burgled tonight while he was out burgling somebody else. You got any coffee hot?” He let us into a large dining room full of family-sized dining room tables, not the usual restaurant tables, and we both collapsed into Lije’s antique press-back chairs.
“Okay, Mr. Cooperman,” he said with his eyelids half closed, “what are you going to tell me about tonight? I don’t want any stories, I don’t want to hear any garbage, just the facts, like they say on TV. I know that I’m looking at a small part of something a lot bigger. Can you tell me anything to set my mind at rest? I want get some sleep just as much as you do, but I know I won’t sleep until I hear you say your piece.” Lije brought over two large ironstone mugs of coffee. It was the best I’ve ever tasted. Savas knew that too. Savas was a good cop. He was a cop twenty-four hours a day and he knew about coffee.
“I can’t tell you who I’m working for, and I shouldn’t tell you that I’ve already had my ass kicked for asking too many questions and not letting the dead bury their dead. It started with Chester Yates. He shot himself. That’s what it said on television and in the papers. I know, they have all the usual suicide evidence, but you know as well as I do that there are a few ways to make a murder look like suicide.”
He was watching me, with the big hands wrapped around his mug and nodding in time with my disclosures. I took another sip, already beginning to feel better. “When I mentioned this to the boys in Homicide, they thought I was messing their bed. They liked it as suicide, I can’t blame them. But then a couple of days later Dr. Andrew Zekerman also gets dead, this time from a bash on the head with a traditional blunt instrument. Zekerman is a shrink. Chester Yates was one of his patients and guess whose file is missing from the doctor’s office. Here’s another one to try on. A girl named Elizabeth Tilford used to work in Chester’s office. Two months ago she disappeared and hasn’t been seen since. And behind all these deaths and disappearances is the shadow of a man who was a friend and former business partner of Chester, the boy-friend on the quiet of the girl and the last name that Zekerman told me on the phone two hours before somebody addled his brains for him permanently. There are a lot of questions I would like to get answers for, and I’m bucking a stiff wind blowing from City Hall. If I don’t come up with some answers soon, I’m going to have my licence revoked in jig time.”
“Tell me, Cooperman, who’s the
guy you think ties up all these threads?”
“I can’t go public on that, Savas. I don’t have a breath of proof.”
“This public you can go. I’m telling you that, and I don’t tell that and then make a report.”
“The mayor has a special assistant named Bill Ward.” Savas gave a low whistle, and bit his lower lip, which turned into a lopsided grin in about ten seconds.
“Interesting,” he said, nodding, “very interesting.”
“So Phoebe Campbell got me out of the way tonight so that she or a pal could go through my office. Only one thing is missing. Before he died, Zekerman mailed me these.” Here I took the photograph and the clipping from my inside breast pocket. He glanced at the photograph, and scanned the clipping, then, after another look at the picture, looked up at me again. “He also sent me a few pages of jottings from his office. They looked like the sort of notes a shrink might take during a session of therapy. I was going to get a G.P. friend of mine to translate them into English for me this morning. I’ll have to cancel that now. Too bad. They were important enough for somebody to go to a lot of trouble to get.”
There was a slate-coloured sky looking in the front window of Lije’s place. The coffee mugs were empty. I was wool-gathering. Savas had been talking and I’d missed the first part of what he was saying. I saw his mouth making the words, all right, but my own depression made reception difficult. He was talking about Lije Swift.
“He used to run a fast boat above the falls during the prohibition years in the States. The American Coast Guard used to boast that if they didn’t nab him, the falls would. He ran his boat full of bootleg Canadian whiskey from below Chippewa. For a while he was a driver for a bunch of high-jackers, and drove a car right into the 1960s that had bullet holes in the back from the Provincial police.” He was talking in a drone, his voice scarcely above a whisper. The story heard some other time would have been a good story. I’m not knocking Savas for trying to bring in the new day with fresh information on bootlegging operations on the border way back then. The only effect it had on me was that prohibition made some people on both sides of the border rich, and it was almost bad manners in some circles to mention that the families who made those big bucks owed so much to men like Lije Swift, who ended up running a roadhouse through the small hours of the morning.