by Mel Bradshaw
Detective Sergeant Parsons liked to say that a Mr. Lopez out on Woodbine made Toronto’s best cigars, but Ernestine denied having any kin north of the Rio Grande.
I followed her through a ground floor storage area. By the light a few dirty windows let in, we picked our way among life-size and larger sculptures in plaster and stone. Some were of animals. Those of men and women were for the most part either nude or in uniform. We mounted a set of concrete stairs to the former sanctuary. This space was divided in half by a transverse plank wall that stopped well below the high ceiling. On the near side of the partition, Ernestine Lopez had organized her studio and living space. She pointed me to a wooden kitchen chair and went promptly back to work on a yard-high model of an infantryman bowed in sorrow over a grave marker. Rather than grieving bare-headed, the soldier wore his metal helmet. I understood that his position was meant to be still vulnerable to enemy fire and that he would be returning to his battle station. To pay tribute to his comrade, he had snatched from the struggle the briefest moment. The image was wrong in some ways, the cross too official-looking, too precisely engraved. Still, I felt — across the gap of gender and situation — the compassion that guided Miss Lopez’s hand.
“For a war memorial?” I asked.
“No guff!” She was using a tool to deepen a crease in the sleeve of the soldier’s tunic.
“Where?”
“Buckland Lake, Ontario. You won’t have heard of it — so small you could drive through and miss it. But still eight names to list on the pedestal.”
I said nothing. I was thinking of the cost to such a small community of those eight deaths, with the cost of a statue on top. Marking their loss, but also their pride.
Ernestine filled in the silence. “Their loss, my gain. Painters could be war artists, recording the action and the wreckage. Then, a year after the Armistice, not needed anymore. The appetite for sculpture is just getting started and won’t run its course for years yet.”
And a painter with a German name, it occurred to me, might not even have found work as a Canadian war artist. Sales to the National Gallery in Ottawa, while good for the reputation, couldn’t be frequent. Ernestine Lopez made it sound as if Herman Koch, unlike herself, had not enough work. He wasn’t too busy, at least, to take on new portrait commissions. I wondered if he had been financially dependent on Nora Britton.
“Did Mr. Koch’s wife live here with him?” I asked.
“He’ll answer that if he feels like it.” Ernestine Lopez nodded at the plank wall, on the other side of which someone had just started to pick out a tune on the piano. “There’s no way through. You’ll have to go downstairs, out, and around to the other door. I’ll tell him to let you in.”
I thanked her. The music stuck in my head on my way around. It sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
A stocky man, five or six years my senior, met me at the door. Herman Koch’s eyes were bloodshot and showed a lot of white below the pupils. He wore a green knitted tie and a brown corduroy suit, one that looked like he’d had it on for many months. Although his brown hair was receding around a widow’s peak, he retained a shabby, bohemian glamour.
“Mr. Koch,” I said, “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Did you know Nora?”
“No — I’m investigating her death. Can we go up to your studio?”
Koch stepped outside and locked his door. “You can say what you have to say out here.”
His voice was firm and calm with no trace of a foreign accent. I went straight to the point.
“Have Nora Britton’s remains been buried?”
“No.”
I was glad to hear it. Next of kin, however composed they appeared once their loved ones were in the ground, almost invariably got upset at the prospect of disinterment.
“Where are they?”
“Buffalo.”
“Buffalo, New York?”
“Yes.”
“Is she being buried there?” I couldn’t make this out. Her birth family was supposedly in Aurora.
“No.”
He was playing with me, but I’d rather this than have him walk back inside his studio and slam the door in my face. While I was thinking how to get him to open up, I took my flask out from an inside jacket pocket. I sipped some whisky and handed the flask to Koch. He put it to his lips and drained it, returning it to me neck down to rub it in that he’d left me dry. I saw him smile for the first time.
I smiled back. “When did you send Nora’s remains to Buffalo?”
“Tuesday afternoon.”
“What for?”
“To have her cremated.”
I felt a hole open in my stomach. I took Koch at his word about the cremation. I’d read of cadavers sent to Buffalo just because no crematorium was yet operating in Ontario. The one slight ray of hope arose from my certainty that he was lying about how soon Nora’s remains had gone. The coroner hadn’t released them, according to Inspector Sanderson, until Wednesday morning. Perhaps when I arrived outside his studio, Koch was returning from making the shipping arrangements.
“The cremation has to be prevented,” I said. “The coroner is ordering an autopsy.”
“Too late,” said Koch. “It’s already happened. An autopsy wouldn’t serve any purpose anyway.”
“Give me the phone number or at least the name of the crematorium.”
“I don’t know anything about it. Bates Burial Company here in Toronto handled all the arrangements.”
I left him without a word, making my way at something between a walk and a run to the nearest business on Strachan Avenue. The John Inglis Company boiler factory granted me extensive use of one of their phones. My first call was to police HQ at City Hall. I got one of the detective sergeants there to phone every crematorium in Buffalo with a view to preventing Nora Britton’s remains from being destroyed. It was my good fortune to pass this task to Harry O’Brian, one of my younger and more reliable colleagues. I figured he had as good a chance as anyone of getting Inspector Sanderson to authorize the long-distance charges. Next, I called Bates Burial Company, who unsurprisingly had never heard of Nora Britton or Herman Koch. Then with the help of the City Directory, I started in on all the other undertakers in the city, working from Koch’s neighbourhood outward. Telford Squires acknowledged having Nora Britton’s remains picked up from the morgue at Grace Hospital on Wednesday and held at their Dufferin Street funeral parlour while arrangements were made to send them out of the country. The late Miss Britton’s casket had been put on a Buffalo train this morning and picked up in that city by a hearse from the Buffalo Cremation Company for transfer to their facility on Delavan Avenue. I had hopes that the cremation might have been held over from Friday to Monday. Perhaps there was a backlog of bodies to be burned. Perhaps the staff of the Buffalo Cremation Company had wanted to start the weekend early. I was about to phone them when an Inglis clerk informed me there was a call for me from Detective Sergeant O’Brian on another line. We were, Harry reported, an hour too late. Nora Britton had been the oven’s last client of the day and the week.
Chapter 5
While I still had Harry on the line, I asked if he’d let me rope him into another job. He laughed and pointed out that it was quitting time on payday, and a Friday to boot. What did I have in mind? I said I wanted help interviewing a murder suspect and that he should make sure to bring his service revolver.
“I’m never without it,” said O’Brian, “unlike some slackers I could name. But I don’t get to use it much. Where do I report?”
“The former chapel of the Central Prison — quick as you can.”
I gave him directions, and while I was waiting for him to arrive asked around the Inglis plant whether anyone had had any encounters with the two tenants of the old chapel, either the sculptress or the painter. No one reported having had any conversation with them. One manager thought from seeing them walking together that they were a couple. An accountant told me that the pair of them would hav
e to move in the new year as John Inglis owned the building they occupied and would be requiring it to expand their operations. The artists were at present getting a bargain and were unlikely to find comparable accommodation for the same price. It was the woman, he said, who came by the Inglis offices each month to pay the rent for both of them.
I thought I’d got everything I could from the office personnel by the time Harry found me. While he had been a detective sergeant a shorter time, he was a man I looked up to, having two or three inches on me in height. A little sparring with him had convinced me that he was able to use his long arms to deliver quick punches from a safe distance. Indeed, he’d distinguished himself as a better than decent amateur boxer in the most recent police games. None of the detective sergeants were under thirty, but Harry’s round face and broad grin made him look a good deal younger. Like a jack-o’-lantern with a full set of teeth.
The sun was not yet down, but sinking. If Ernestine Lopez was correct, Koch would be at his easel. His haste to make an autopsy impossible was enough in my books to earn him a more thorough grilling. I’d asked Harry along to impress Koch with our seriousness and also to keep an eye out for any tricky attempts to evade us.
“This place has three doors,” I said, “all metal. Two go to artists’ studios. I don’t know about the third. I’m going to knock on Herman Koch’s. Stand where you can see if anyone leaves through either of the others.”
Harry asked if there was anything he needed to know about the background. I told him he’d pick it up as we went along.
“Okay, Paul,” he said, “as long as you don’t mind if I let you do the talking. I don’t want to put my foot in it.”
“Yeah, fine. But speak up if I’m missing something.”
After three minutes of intermittent knocking, first with my knuckles and then with a fragment of brick left lying around the demolition site, I heard Harry raise the alarm. It seemed Koch had left by Ernestine Lopez’s door. He tried to run towards King Street, but Harry and I were both faster. Harry closed in on him first. I was afraid O’Brian would bring the painter down with a football tackle, which might have been construed as excessive force. But he simply blocked the way, whichever way Koch turned, until I came up.
“Mr. Koch,” I said, “We have to talk. You are not under arrest, but we believe you can help us with an investigation. Now, shall we go up to your studio? You don’t want us to take you to police headquarters: there’s a pretty bad odour of rotting fish down there just now. Besides, the coffee’s cold.”
Koch didn’t react to mention of the fish or the coffee.
“I don’t see that Nora’s death is any of your business.”
“Perhaps we can explain, inside. It seems to me you owe me a drink.”
“My studio is for my friends and my patrons.”
“There you never can tell. Perhaps Detective Sergeant O’Brian will want a charcoal head — if he can bargain you down to under sixty dollars.”
O’Brian shot me a mocking glance as we, one on each side, steered Koch back towards the chapel.
His half of the ground floor, unlike Ernestine Lopez’s, was swept and empty. Upstairs, a few canvases had been framed and hung. Dozens upon dozens more stood in stacks leaning against the outside walls while an Ennis upright piano had been pushed against the plank partition. Koch perhaps wanted Ernestine Lopez to hear every note he played. Whereas she had screened off her sleeping area, Koch’s extra wide bed stood in full view. It sported a number of Turkish-looking cushions and a satiny emerald coverlet. His own clothes, mostly checked shirts and corduroy, were strewn over a couple of easy chairs. There was no sign that Nora or any woman lived here or had done so recently.
On the easel under the east windows sat a landscape of pine trees clinging to rock and assailed by a wind that was doing its utmost to pull them out by the roots. Behind this drama, another involved whitecaps foaming up and being driven by the same gale across a wide body of water. The rushing clouds above showed brown and grey and, fleetingly, golden. Patches of calm blue even broke through from the distant sky, promising that the storm itself was on the point of being blown away.
I looked more closely and saw only thick patches of paint bearing the marks of the brush. There was no precision or detail; the landscape simply vanished. And yet when I pulled back no more than eighteen inches every element was realized to perfection. It was all there.
I had, as I’d admitted to Ruth Stone, almost no experience of oil painting, but I believed I had a nose for honesty and a not much below average eye for beauty. This picture, for my money, had both. This was the Canadian Shield territory as I’d passed through it and as I’d dreamed it. It was heart-stirring. Plainly Herman Koch knew his onions. I could see why Joe Deane loved his art. It was much richer, but had the direct patriotic impact of the recruiting posters Deane had sponsored.
“Okay if we sit?” I asked. “Just shift the clothes off one of those chairs, detective.”
Harry took the piano bench instead. I noticed without thinking about it much that it was pushed against a side wall, a long way from the piano. Koch sat down in a wicker chair on top of a pair of his pyjamas, crossed his legs, and proceeded to roll himself a cigarette. I took the stool in front of the easel, as much as anything to see if it made me feel talented. At the Canadian National Exhibition once, I had been allowed to sit behind the wheel of an eight-cylinder supercharged race car capable of more than 120 miles per hour and had fancied I looked like an ace driver. I wasn’t so sure about my present perch, but all the same … I had another squint at the work I would have been proud to put my name to.
“You haven’t signed it, Mr. Koch,” I said.
I expected him to tell me the picture wasn’t finished, although it looked to me as if one more brushstroke anywhere would subtract from rather than add to its effect.
“I no longer sign any of my work,” he said. “Let it stand on its merits.”
“Why give people that dislike a German name an excuse to dismiss it?”
“Something like that.”
“Mr. Koch lost a commission on account of his name,” I explained to Harry, “lost it to his late wife.”
“Am I supposed to have killed her out of jealousy?”
“The rector of Christ Church Grange Park doesn’t think so. But then there are some things he doesn’t know about your marriage. For instance, that you lived apart.”
Koch threw away his cigarette without lighting it and leaned forward, clearly rattled. “I loved her — more than you can understand!”
I gave him a minute. Meanwhile the tune he’d been picking out earlier on the piano came back to me, this time with a name — “The Saint Louis Blues.” Most of the words as I remembered them didn’t fit Herman’s situation, but there was stuff about the grief resulting from the singer’s lovin’ baby having left town.
“Why did you have her cremated?” I asked.
“She had a horror of people just rotting slowly away in the ground.”
“Cremation takes a lot of arranging, though. Sending the remains across an international border and all that.”
“It was what Nora wanted. She told me often.”
“How are you paying for it?”
“You think I’m broke?” Koch shouted.
Nobody answered.
After a moment, Koch said, “She gave me money especially for that and nothing else. She wasn’t expecting to die, but if she did she wanted her wishes respected.”
“Why were you so secretive about it? You lied to me about when you got Miss Britton’s remains. And you lied to me about which undertaker was handling the arrangements from this end.”
“I thought her parents had put you on to me. They’re small-town Christians, totally against cremation. They believe if her body isn’t intact, they won’t be reunited with their daughter in heaven. I didn’t know what they might do to prevent Nora’s wishes from being carried out, so I tried to throw you off the track.”
I e
xchanged glances with Harry. If I was reading his mind correctly, we both thought this story somewhat plausible.
“Why are the police making this fuss anyway?” Koch asked. “Do you have the same stupid prejudice as my in-laws?”
“Were you aware that threatening language was used about your wife in the weeks leading up to her death?”
“Threats? Hell no.” Koch stabbed an accusatory index finger at Harry and me in turn. “Why didn’t you policemen do something about them?”
“They didn’t come to our attention until after your wife’s death.” Not wanting to inflame Koch further, I didn’t add that we as yet had no evidence that Nora Britton had actually received any threatening letters or been the object of any direct verbal intimidation, and that in the absence of either no Crown attorney would have prosecuted.
“Some slander — yes, I knew about that,” said the painter. “Just because she was my wife. I was supposed to have been the true author of her design. Quite unnecessary. After me, she was the best artist in the country.” He let that sink in, then asked, “What were these threats?”
“One involved poison,” I said.
“But her death was an accident. That’s what we were told. She lost her footing and fell from the scaffold where she had been working.”
“All we know for certain at this point is that she was found dead at the foot of the scaffold. If she fell, it may have been because she was poisoned first.”
“So she was already dead when she fell?”
“Possibly. Or the poison might have made her lose her balance and caused her to fall. Once the subject of poison came up, the coroner’s verdict of accidental death was called in question. An autopsy — previously thought unnecessary — was ordered. By your actions, Mr. Koch, you have made this autopsy impossible. We don’t know if your wife was murdered, but your haste to cremate her remains has raised suspicions. Suspicions, I might add, not calmed by your attempt to run away from us just now.”