A City Called July

by Howard Engel

“Oh, Wally,” I bluffed. “No, I haven’t forgotten him.”

  “You say that, but what news have you got?” I stirred uneasily in my chair. Kogan must have taken lessons from Savas, or I was more than normally vulnerable that morning.

  “I know a few things, Kogan. But they don’t add up to who killed your friend. I know that he used to hang around that building site where you found the discharge pin.”

  “Holy Christ, I told you that when I talked to you!”

  “You want to talk or listen, Kogan?”

  “Okay, I’m listening.”

  “He had a private kip arranged down below between piles of lumber. The watchman knew him and didn’t make a fuss. One night your pal witnessed a murder. He didn’t show himself, but when he saw the victim’s picture and name in the paper, saying that he was missing, that’s when he blew his cover. He told the wrong person about it, and that’s how he was murdered.”

  “Are you telling me he told the wife that he saw the murder? He didn’t even tell me what he saw.”

  “That’s what it looks like, Kogan.”

  “She must of done it, right?”

  “She denies any knowledge of Wally.”

  “You can’t trust a bloody murderer! Why would she tell you the truth?” This was going to be one of those days when everybody knew more about my business than I did.

  “Take it easy, Kogan. I didn’t say I believed her. But with Wally unavailable to make an accusation, what he told you is hearsay and about as useful in court as a movie ticket stub. To build a case you need evidence. And evidence is what we have least of.”

  “So nothing Wally told me is any good?”

  “Come on, Kogan. What did he tell you? He told you he was going to see Mrs. Geller, that they had business, and that you were eating your last can of cat food. You see, I remember.”

  “Yeah, but Wally had that bottle of gin. The guy in the liquor store said he broke a fifty-dollar bill for him. Where’d that come from? You’re supposed to be the investigator!” Kogan screwed up his lined face so that it looked like an ordinance survey map. He was practically rubbing his hands together.

  “Right,” I said. “He must have met her, got the fifty and made an appointment to meet her in the park later on, before going for the gin and finishing up the cat food. Why didn’t he spend some of the fifty on people-type tuna?”

  “Wally was never one for sudden change.”

  “Let me think. Wally figured he could turn what he saw down in the cellar of the building site into cash. He tried it out and it worked. Not only that, but there was promise of more to come. He must have recognized that the victim was Larry when the paper first did a story on his disappearance.” I chewed on that for a minute, but I couldn’t see how the cops would make more than mashed potatoes out of it. “Kogan, what we’ve got here is a lot of conjecture. It could have happened this way, but it could have happened other ways too. We can’t prove it happened one way over another.”

  “So, what do we do? Here we are sittin’ twiddlin’ our toes and there she is smokin’ Mexican grass and laughin’ at us. There’s gotta be some way we can stop …”

  “What’s this about grass? She was smoking marijuana? How do you know that?” I was getting a little excited, so I tried to calm down. I took a breath, then started in again. “Wally told you, right?” Kogan nodded proudly. “But you didn’t bother to pass it on. You didn’t tell me anything about his meeting with Mrs. Geller. What else are you saving? You going to gift wrap it and wait till Christmas?” Kogan’s smile went indoors. “What else are you saving for later bulletins? I have to know everything, Kogan. I can’t help you if I’m playing with only thirty-eight cards. I need the whole fifty-two.”

  “I already told you everything. I forgot about the grass. He said she lit up right in front of him. He could tell it wasn’t a regular smoke by the smell.”

  “What else did he say? Did he describe her? Was she short, fat, tall, cross-eyed, what?”

  “He didn’t say nothin’ about that, except that she wasn’t hard to look at.”

  “Kogan, we may be getting somewhere.” Kogan grinned. “We’ve just eliminated ‘fat’ and ‘cross-eyed’ from the description.”

  “Well, I dunno. Wally didn’t hold much with women at all, so there’s no tellin’ what wasn’t hard to look at from his standpoint.”

  “Welcome home ‘fat’ and ‘cross-eyed.’” I tried to picture Ruth Geller lighting up a joint and it didn’t work. That was not the Ruth Geller I knew. Instead, I saw another face and it wasn’t the face I wanted to see.

  Then minutes later, I had given Kogan a couple of dollars for a cup of coffee and he gave me a dirty look by way of change. I left him at his usual stand, the corner of Queen and St. Andrew, with his hand out. I headed for the marble mausoleum that Tom MacIntyre used as an office. Ever since I’d borrowed the keys to the Woodland Avenue building from MacIntyre, I’d been meaning either to have them copied or to return them. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but I was sure that I wanted to have a heart-to-heart with Larry Geller’s former landlord.

  The redhead was at her desk surrounded by the cold marble of business trying to ape classic architecture. As long as the receptionist took the occasional breath or reached for the remaining half of her morning blueberry muffin, the room would never work. Replace the girl with a stone column and you might achieve an effect but whether or not you’d do any business was another question. I began by telling her that once again I didn’t have an appointment. With some badly concealed pleasure she told me that Mr. MacIntyre was not in the office and wasn’t expected until later in the day if at all. I figured she was telling the truth. If she was expecting her boss, the blueberry muffin on desk blotter would have been out of sight. I told her that MacIntyre wanted to see me. She looked suspicious but smiled with guile: “Then why did he tell you to come here instead of having you meet him at the boat? I don’t think you are telling the truth.” I looked hurt, and offered her my pack of Player’s. She fooled me and took one.

  “Is that the one in the marina at Niagara-on-the-Lake?” I asked her as she held my hand steady for the match.

  “I only know about the Port Richmond boat. If he has another, he hasn’t told me about it.”

  “Well, if I miss him, you can tell him I dropped by.”

  “Yes, Mr. Cooperman.”

  The road to Port Richmond led to the north end, past my parents’ town house. The marina was bunched up into the funnel-like opening of the entrance to a lock in the old canal. It was a forest of aluminum masts each emitting a ping as loose cables hit the metal uprights. I parked the car across from the main street, which looked like the set for a western movie in the back lot of one of the old Hollywood studios. The view from the shaded balconies looked across to what locals still called the “Michigan” side, even though the Michigan Central tracks had been pulled up before most of them were born. From the wharf, where as a kid I remember the two lake steamers from Toronto used to tie up, I could see the two wooden lighthouses on the twin piers jutting out into the lake towards Toronto. A couple of huge trees, left over from the heyday of Lakeside Park, now sheltered only a few sunbathers. The beach had, of course, been condemned for swimming at the beginning of the month, but a few kids in bathing suits were beachcombing with an active fox terrier. I couldn’t see the skyline of the provincial capital in the summer haze, but remembered the CN Tower and a few other tall buildings standing out on frostier days than this one. I wanted to take my shirt off, or wander down the now vanished corridor of ride and refreshment stands. Only the old merry-go-round survived, and that in a new location.

  I could see no activity on any of the boats from the wooden catwalks that separated the marina into berths for some hundreds of boats. The hatches were covered with canvas, the booms wrapped in coloured plastic. I watched and listened to the ping-ping-ping of the masts for a couple of minutes, but heard no other sound.

  The antique store I went into for informatio
n looked pitch dark when I came in out of the sun. A woman on a ladder ignored me and spoke to the gnarled old man who’d just come in from the back of the store. “Mr. Helwig, I moved ‘God is Love’ down there. Hope you don’t mind.” I asked where the sailors went to eat. “You’ll find most of them drinking in the pub at the end of the road, but a few eat at Marie’s or Murphy’s.”

  “Who are you looking for?” the old man asked.

  “Tom MacIntyre. White-haired man, owns a boat in the marina.”

  “He’ll be at Murphy’s feeding the piranha.”

  “I never been there,” the woman on the ladder volunteered.

  “I should think not,” said Mr. Helwig as I found my way out towards the light.

  I found him as advertised, with a paper carton of goldfish in one hand and a lobster claw in the other. Except for the piranha and the goldfish, he was alone at a wooden table laminated in transparent plastic.

  “Well, well, Mr. Cooperman! Are you still hot on the trail of Larry Geller?”

  “Mr. Geller’s dead, Mr. MacIntyre. The police are holding his body.”

  “Well, well, how does it go? ‘The weed of crime bears bitter fruit …’ You’d better sit down and join us.” I did that, and as I collected a chair I took in the heavily nautical trappings of the room: everything from anchor chains and fish-nets to model ships in bottles and polished brasswork. The bar was a lifeboat levelled off for landlubber duties.

  A white suit in July is dramatic enough, but when it’s filled by a large pink-knuckled albino, you’ve moved from dramatic to sensational or whatever the next step is. He could see me checking him out as he sipped an amber drink without ice. “Will you join me in a drink, Mr. Cooperman?”

  “I’ll have a beer, I think. It’s warm enough.” I noticed that I was sweating. MacIntyre grinned, then called out for a round of drinks. I could see his bluey-pink eyes were vibrating. The piranha nipped at the tail of one of half a dozen goldfish in the tank. The others were sheltering under a curve in the ornamental driftwood inside. But not for long.

  “Have you sought me out to return the keys you borrowed, Mr. Cooperman? I had to send Vicki out to have another set cut. I should charge you.”

  “I borrowed the keys because you wanted me to. Let’s not run around in circles, Mr. MacIntyre. You tipped Glenn Bagot off about my visit last Friday, didn’t you? He borrowed some help from a friend and they met me coming out of Larry’s little hideaway on Woodland.”

  “You have the Levantine imagination, Mr. Cooperman.”

  “Nobody else knew I was headed over there. Only you.”

  “Why would I want to set you up? You’re nothing to me but a break in the routine. You remind me that I was a one-man band not so many years ago. You remind me of my youth.” He tried to end things there with a winning grin, but I wasn’t in the market for winning grins. I wanted to nail MacIntyre for all he knew.

  “You knew that Geller rented that place from you. You don’t forget just because he took French leave. You had guilty knowledge, which wasn’t so bad until I came snooping. But after me would come Grantham’s finest with more questions of an embarrassing kind. So you phoned Bagot in a panic: Cooperman’s on his way over to 44 Woodland. What are we going to do? Bagot told you to leave it to him. He’d throw a little scare into me. He knew how to handle my type. Something like that? Am I close?”

  “I’ll deny it all. I honestly forgot that Geller had that place. You’ll have to believe that.”

  “I don’t take a lot of convincing, Mr. MacIntyre. But juries do. And for what it’s worth I’m not trying to see how muddy I can make the waters. I just once in a while want to meet a half-way honest man.”

  “You and Diogenes the cynic.”

  “I haven’t come to him yet. How long have I got before you will be renting that place?”

  “Geller’s? Since it’s paid up until the end of the year, I think I can afford to let it rest fallow until the end of the month. Are you thinking of moving in?”

  “It might help me to think through this business.”

  “Then, help yourself.”

  “If I do, Mr. MacIntyre, I’d prefer to think that just the two of us know about it. In fact I might leave a memorandum to that effect somewhere. I wouldn’t like to run into that trio of goons again without knowing that your part in it wouldn’t go unrewarded.” The goldfish in the tank now numbered four. MacIntyre wasn’t even watching. “And since you forgot to call the cops on Friday, let me tell them about the hideaway when I’m ready for them.”

  I tried to look him in his shaky eyes, but he was looking to the window where a starfish caught in a fish-net was silhouetted against the light. My last view of him, before I went out the door, was of a totally white figure pouring a stiff drink from a flask of Irish whiskey.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Steve Tulk worked for the telephone company. He was a big guy even in high school where he made a better captain of the football team than he did a Duke in Twelfth Night. I played Curio, and we had a scene together near the beginning. The scene goes like this:

  CURIO: Will you go hunt, my lord?

  DUKE: What, Curio?

  CURIO: The hart.

  After that I was ready for the showers, while Steve had the rest of the play and a curtain call. A few years later I was able to do him a favour professionally when his ex-wife disappeared with his two kids. He wanted me to snatch them for him, but I simply gave him the address in Barrie and let him do what he wanted himself. When I talked to him on the phone, I didn’t have to remind him of all this. In fact he sounded glad to hear from me. I was able to let him know that the time had come to return the favour without putting that short temper of his out of joint. We met for a beer and there, in the Men’s Beverage Room of the Harding House, I explained what I wanted him to do in Larry’s hideaway at 44 Woodland Avenue. Steve shrugged when I asked him if he could handle it, so I took it that the job was as good as done. Just the same, I arranged for him to call me at my office when the dirty deed was done. The call came a little after six.

  An hour later, I presented myself at the front door of Debbie Geller’s house on Francis Street off Welland Avenue. It was a hot night, but I’d put on a jacket and tie just to show that I knew about the little things that divide society up the middle into those who know better and those who are comfortable. I heard the chime sound on the inside and saw a shadow approaching through the cranberry stained-glass windows that ran up either side of the door.

  “Mr. Cooperman! This is a surprise. I was expecting Sid. You’re early for the minyan. Won’t you come in?” Debbie looked mildly shocked to see me, but spoke with a voice that was too tired to put much expression into her reading of the line. “It’s not Sid,” Debbie called ahead of us. “It’s Mr. Cooperman from the … It’s Mr. Cooperman.”

  “Like a bad penny,” I said. She led the way through the vestibule and through an arch into the living-room. Instinctively, I found my eyes drawn to the spot where I’d last seen the tray of cold cuts. They had vanished, of course. Debbie’s sister, Ruth, was sitting in the centre of a large chintz-covered couch. The room looked bigger without a hundred people shoving their way towards the smoked carp and carved turkey. That was a funeral to remember. Now they would have to have one for Nathan’s brother Larry. Would anybody come? Two brothers within a week. I could see from the faces of the two women, as Debbie slipped into a Queen Anne chair nearest the archway, that they had been thinking along similar lines. Ruth hardly looked up. She was examining the pattern cut into the wall-to-wall broadloom. “I’m sorry for your trouble, Mrs. Geller,” I said, echoing both myself a few short days ago and Frank Bushmill, the neighbour who taught me this useful Irish expression of sympathy. I thought of adding about it being all for the best and another observation about how certainty beats uncertainty every time, but I couldn’t find the right words. I gave them a break and sat down and kept my mouth shut.

  “As you can see, Mr. Cooperman,” Debbie said, “we ar
e still stunned by the news. Even though he’s been away all these weeks, it’s still a shock.” Ruth raised her eyes from the floor and looked at her sister as though she was trying to see how close what Debbie said came to what she was feeling. Debbie went on: “I invited Ruth over here. I didn’t want her to be alone in that big house tonight. She’s going to be staying with me, aren’t you Ruthie?” Ruth made an inaudible response. “May I get you some coffee, Mr. Cooperman, or would you prefer a drink? Sid will be here in a few minutes. Maybe then we’ll all have a drink? In the meantime, coffee?” I nodded, and Debbie left the room. Ruth had returned to the pattern of the smokey-blue carpet. Sharing a silence with her was next door to sitting by myself. I couldn’t think of anything to say anyway, so I thought I could be building up points on tact by just keeping still.

  About the same time I could hear crockery on a tray coming from the direction of the kitchen, a big car pulled up and parked in front of the house. Sid and Pia came in and Debbie greeted them, managing the coffee tray at the same time. Ruth got to her feet and Sid held her close with his arms around her for a long time. When they broke the clinch, both of them had tears in their eyes. Pia was the first to light a cigarette. It game her something to do. This couldn’t be easy for her. After the funeral all those people made for substantial insulation between herself and Debbie. As for me, I’d tried to make myself into a fly on the wall.

  For the first few minutes, I don’t think anyone but Pia noticed me. Everybody but me got a hug from somebody. Pia was short-changed by Debbie, but she was still holding the tray. It was Sid who first took official notice of me. He didn’t sound unfriendly but his greeting needed more work before it could convince a drama critic. “So, Mr. Cooperman, bad news travels fast. No sooner is my brother found than you turn up. Have you started chasing ambulances in your old age?”

  “Mr. Geller,” I tried to say in an even voice, “I’m sorry about your brother.”

  “Which one?” He shrugged, which is hard to do with as short a neck as Sid had. “Did you come over here to ask more questions, Mr. Cooperman? Why don’t you let the cops handle this?”