by Howard Engel
“Mr. Cooperman? Good to see you. You didn’t waste any time. Glad to see you’re ready to get started. I have Mr. Colling’s letter, of course, and I even think we can find a corner for you to work in for just as long as you’re going to be with us.” Mr. F.P. McAuliffe was a quick little man in brown, with wispy red hair around his ears and nowhere else except for wild eyebrows of the same colour. He looked tweedy, and from the signs of ash about him, he was a pipe-smoker.
He led me into his office and told me to make myself at home at what he called a parson’s table. Not knowing very much about parsons, I took him at his word and settled my briefcase on a long table without much depth to it. It wasn’t literally in a corner, but it did occupy space along the cold north wall. Over my head was a framed map of Grantham during its heady days as a busy canal town. There was an inset of the old courthouse at the bottom right-hand corner. I tried to find the location of my office on St. Andrew Street. McAuliffe saw me distracted and smiled with a set of discoloured teeth.
“That’s the Brosius map of 1875. It’s one of the first run, not a reprint,” he said. “I got it from my father and I coveted it every day it hung in his office on Queen Street.” He came over to look too. For a minute, we both did that. “Hasn’t changed much, really,” he said. “It’s still an Indian trail or two, only now they have a modern camber. The original survey lines didn’t make much of an impact in the downtown part, did they?” I smiled. I couldn’t tell where the original survey lines were on the map, but I could tell that he could. McAuliffe smelled of bay rum and tobacco, a very comfortable smell. “My father was a collector of these old maps, Mr. Cooperman. Got interested while he was building the present canal. He was one of the engineers working on it beginning in 1919, as soon as he got out of the army.” McAuliffe pulled a large black book from a shelf and opened it near the end and pointed at a list of those who had built the canal. There the McAuliffe name appeared twice, once as a junior engineer and then as an assistant engineer among scores of others.
“That was quite a piece of work,” I said, embarrassed by his concentration.
“Labourers, pipefitters, pitmen in those days were getting twenty-five cents an hour. Imagine what that canal would cost today, eh?” I shook my head in tune with his. He closed the book, giving me a glimpse of photographs of the Welland Canal in different stages of construction as he did so. He replaced the book and leaned back against my parson’s table. He seemed lost in thought. Was he thinking of what the pyramids could be built for if you only paid the slaves twenty cents an hour? I guess you don’t have to pay real slaves anything. He held on to his version of the thought, shook himself like an old dog, and returned to his side of the room.
“Mr. Cooperman, I have some of the minute books you need right here on this shelf,” he said indicating a wall of books between two windows. “The rest are in the boardroom, which doubles as our library.” H sat down behind his large, cluttered desk and looked back in my direction. “If there’s anything you want to know about Phidias Manufacturing, please ask me,” he said, selecting a pipe from a rack of them next to his telephone. “I’ve been with the firm for most of my sixty-four years. I remember Miss Biddy Forbes’s father. Not Miss Teddie’s father—although I knew him too; I mean Miss Biddy’s father, Sandy MacCallum. He was a friend of my father’s in the Royal Flying Corps, and he started all this when he got home from the First War. He established an airline first, but the only biplane he had crashed, so he went into making safety bicycles. Now who would think that that would lead up here to the sixth floor of the City Centre, eh?” Once again I took the cue and gave him the required response. From his manner, I began to suspect that F.P. McAuliffe was not the only chief financial officer of Phidias Manufacturing. He was the financial end’s equivalent of chairman of the board. He held an impressive title, salary, office and had very little to do except pass the time of day with strays who got past the reefs of secretaries and receptionists closer to the door. I couldn’t connect him with the death of Jack Dowden. Maybe he was part of the scheme, but I doubted it. It was a long way from this room in the office of Phidias to the yard of its subsidiary, Kinross. It was most likely that the death at Kinross involved people working closer to Dowden and the trucking end of things than the people, like McAuliffe, here at head office.
“Now,” McAuliffe said, getting up again, “I suppose you want to see some books.” He left his half-loaded pipe on his blotter next to a flat tin of tobacco, and went to the wall of books. His right hand went limply to his chin as he scanned the possibilities. “Now, where shall we start? Where shall we start?”
At this moment I heard a huge laugh come from elsewhere on the floor. It was too big to be contained by the flimsy space dividers and partitions of modern builders. The laugh was repeated and this time a woman’s voice said something that sounded like a joking protest. All typing in the reception area stopped. I looked to Mr. McAuliffe for guidance. “That would be the Commander,” he said in a near whisper. “He’s come back for the wedding on Saturday. They’ve been in Fort Lauderdale, him and Biddy.”
I heard a door open and shut, a bigger-than-life roar and laugh, like Citizen Kane was walking down the corridors of Xanadu. “Where is that old rip?” a deep, radio announcer’s voice shouted. “Where is that useless reprobate?” McAuliffe brightened.
“He’s coming in here!”
“Fred? Where the hell are you?” The door opened and the Commander easily filled the doorway. He was about the size and shape of Orson Welles.
“Welcome home, Commander!” McAuliffe said, without actually pulling his forelock. The elder Mr. Forbes kept shouting abuse while the two men approached one another and embraced in the middle of the room. McAuliffe almost disappeared in the arms of the bigger man. When they separated, the Commander held McAuliffe at arm’s length, like a brown doll, and examined him carefully.
“You don’t change, Fred. You never put on the years. Hell, man, what’s your secret?”
“Well, sir, I just try to stay busy.”
“‘Busy?’ Hell, you never worked a day in your life. You can cut the crap when you’re talkin’ to me, Fred. You—” He had finally noticed that he wasn’t alone in the room with McAuliffe. “Who in God’s name is that, Fred? Don’t tell me you have an assistant! I’ll put an end to that fast enough, you old scallywag!”
“Oh, Commander Forbes, this is Mr. Cooperman who’s doing some work for Miss Teddie.”
“How do you do, Mr. Forbes?” I said.
“What’s Teddie need with anything here?” he asked. The question was addressed to McAuliffe. He had ignored my greeting. Maybe it was the Mister. I should have brought him aboard with a toot from my handy boatswain’s whistle. Meanwhile, he had fixed McAuliffe with a bulging eye so that the little man’s eyebrows moved up and down in confusion. “What are you up to, Fred? What’s going on here?”
A slim woman wearing a silver grey suit that matched her hair came into the room quietly and stood by the door. McAuliffe couldn’t see her on the far side of Forbes’s broad back. She nodded her head slowly in my direction, acknowledging my existence and then called:
“Murdo, they can hear you all the way to City Hall.” The Commander turned and stared at her. She gave McAuliffe a warm smile when Fred moved to get a clear view. “Hello, Fred,” she said.
“Miss Biddy. Well, I declare! You don’t both of you come to the office often enough. How was Florida, Miss Biddy?”
“Everybody’s getting older, Fred. I wouldn’t be surprised to read that the whole population perished on a single night at the average age of eighty-four. They could just ‘cease upon the midnight with no pain’ and there’d be nobody left to notice.”
“Oh, dear!” McAuliffe said in mock surprise. “I don’t think Keats was contemplating such large numbers.”
“What the hell’s going on with you two?” The Commander looked from one to the other and then to me to see if I knew what they were talking about. I shrugged complet
e ignorance and that settled him for the moment. He took a breath to show that he had decided to skip along to something important, but came around between his wife and McAuliffe, facing me. I felt the parson’s table cornering me from behind.
“Fred, you still haven’t told me what Teddie’s doing with a man working in this office!” Again he fixed me with his eye. I felt like a notice pinned to a bulletin board. McAuliffe moved back behind his desk, sorting through a pile of papers under his pipe and tobacco tin.
“I’ll show you the letter, Commander. I think you’ll find that everything’s in order.”
“There hasn’t been anything like order around here, Fred, since I took my paws off the wheel. That’s a fact. You know it and I know it.” He looked at Biddy as he said this, seeing how the colour came to her cheeks and hoping that with McAuliffe in the room as well as a stranger she wouldn’t pick this moment to argue the point. Biddy held her tongue. The Commander took courage and went on. “Since the boy took charge, Fred, we’ve all been headed downhill on a runaway toboggan.”
“Murdo, the boy is about to give his daughter away in marriage!”
“I never said he couldn’t breed, Biddy! He couldn’t get me grandsons, though. Sherry’s a fine girl. I never said a word against her. And she’s marrying a fine man. Damn it, I don’t care what you say: Norman Caine will put new life into this business. You know as well as I do, both of you, Ross has never taken hold here, damn it!”
“Murdo! You’re talking about your own son!”
“Mother, don’t pretend you haven’t heard that line before. Hello, Fred. Good-afternoon, Dad.”
“Ross!” Ross Forbes was suddenly standing there and none of us had seen him come in. The Commander made a sort of bark at the back of his throat. Ross and his mother exchanged smiles. The old man looked at his son up and down without, apparently, finding anything to write home about. Ross hadn’t changed much. There was still the look of a spoiled child and the private school in every line of his face. He had that unbarbered look of an aristocrat.
“Wonderful to see you, darling!” Biddy Forbes presented a well-powdered cheek to be kissed. Ross pecked her there and held her around the waist, still keeping a wary eye on his father. When he straightened up, he maintained his hold on his mother and Biddy locked her fingers around his.
“I thought we’d declared a truce until after the wedding, Dad? Have I missed a round of negotiations?”
“Would you like to sit down, Miss Biddy?” Fred said trying to remember to be polite. She shook her head and stood near Ross with her hand in his.
“Place is going to hell, I said, and I’ll say it to your face, Ross. It needs managing not coddling. We knew the difference in my day.”
“We’re not going to settle longstanding differences in the middle of Fred’s office, are we?” He smiled and took a step in his father’s direction with his hand stretched out. The Commander deliberately put his right hand in his jacket pocket, where it made him look both fey and petulant. Biddy’s head tilted and she regarded her son with moist eyes.
“I think I’m going back to the club, Ross,” she said. “There is still so much to do before the wedding.” She looked around the room, gave Fred a warm apologetic smile and went out into the reception area, where I could hear her talking to one of the secretaries as though nothing had happened in Fred McAuliffe’s office that was unfit for the ears of everyone on the payroll or for scores who had never heard of Phidias Manufacturing.
“Well, Dad,” Ross said at length. “Here wo go again. I hope we can agree not to get into another row with Mother around. It can’t be good for her heart.”
“I wasn’t saying anything behind your back I wouldn’t say—indeed, haven’t said—to your face.”
“We agree on that much at least.” It was as though the room had suddenly released a breath it had been holding for the last forty to fifty seconds. “When did you get back? I haven’t seen a light at the house.”
“Nearly a week now. We’ve been keeping to ourselves. Hiding out at the club. Once the family knows we’re back, and with this wedding thing, well, there’ll be no peace for either of us. I hope there are no changes in the plans you wired your mother?”
“Nothing important. Sherry still wants to go through with it. I’ve given up trying to get her to see reason.”
“You mean to see things your way! Well, Ross, the girl’s a match for you, eh? The women in this family always did have the balls. Take your mother. Bloody stoic. Bloody Spartan, if it comes to that. Your mother could lead a charge down St. Andrew Street.”
Ross looked about to go, not to retreat, but simply to leave the field on equal terms with the enemy, when he spotted me. “I remember you,” he said. “You’re Sugarman or Goodman or something.”
“Cooperman, Mr. Forbes.”
“Well, what the hell are you—? Wait a minute. That letter from Colling. I remember it now.”
“I have the letter right here, sir,” said McAuliffe, putting on his manners for the CEO. Was he the AV as well? I’d have to find out. McAuliffe passed the two-page document to Ross. It was intercepted without comment by the Commander who quickly glanced down each of the pages before handing them on to his son. He let loose something like a stifled growl in the back of his throat. Ross studied the letter too and seemed to find something amusing in the contents, so that, when he looked at me, he was almost smiling.
I know what it’s like to have the tax people on my back. If it wasn’t my former wife, I’d be full of sympathy. You may tell her I said that.”
“Messenger boy,” said the Commander, fixing me with a cold eye. “Is that what he is? Come to spoil things for Teddie at a time like this?” I could tell he wanted me to wither up and blow away. Instead, I thought it was time to strut some of the things I’d learned from Jim Colling.
“Mrs. Forbes’s tax status is in dispute, Commander Forbes. We are just trying to clear it up as simply as possible.”
“What Mr. Cooperman is too polite to say, Father, is that Teddie has clout enough to demand a full-scale audit if we don’t cooperate.”
“And you cave in at the first blast of a gale? Ha!” The Commander made another of those croaking noises in the back of his throat and wandered out of the room shaking his head as though he had just come into the office and found it empty.
After a moment, Ross pulled his attention back to me and McAuliffe. It was plain that he had trouble sharing the floor with the old man. “Fred, you keep an eye on Mr. Cooperman here, will you?”
“I’ll be sure to do that, Mr. Forbes.”
“Try to remember that we’re doing Teddie a favour, Mr. Cooperman. If you have any problems that Fred here can’t help you with, which I find hard to imagine, since he’s been here longer than anybody except Father, you bring it to me. Is that understood?” I nodded but refused to pull my forelock. I was still trying to be my own man. “See you at the wedding, Fred.”
“Oh, we wouldn’t miss Miss Sherry’s wedding, Mr. Forbes,” said McAuliffe. “Oh, no. We were at all the family weddings, you remember. Oh, May and I’ll be there with bells on—wedding bells!” Forbes smiled at the older man’s little joke and sucked in his largish belly so that it vanished under the shelter of his barrel chest, giving the illusion of fitness and health. Of the whole Forbes clan and throwing in McAuliffe and me for nothing, the Commander looked about as trim and healthy as the rest of us put together. For a man on the brink of eighty, he was putting us all to shame in the health department. I still wasn’t ready to live under his whimsical, iron tyranny. There might be some hope for the son, but I doubted it. With the slightest of glances in my direction, Ross Forbes left me in McAuliffe’s custody.
SIXTEEN
The first piece of interesting information I learned in the head office of Phidias wasn’t about Kinross Disposals at all. It was about Sangallo Restorations. Recent events had partially obscured my primary mission to the extent that, when I found a description of Sangallo, I ate it
up greedily. As I expected, it was a small firm with an office and small yard on the outskirts of Niagara-on-the-Lake. It had been a subsidiary of Phidias Manufacturing since 1988 and, like Kinross, appeared to operate with a measure of autonomy from the mother house. What raised my eyelids to fully open was the discovery that the chief executive officer was Harold Grier. Grier was a family name I’d run into before in this investigation. With a little discreet questioning of Fred McAuliffe, I learned that Harold was the brother-in-law of both Ross Forbes and Paul Renner of the city’s sanitation department. Harold was the brother of the women they married. I tried not to show my delight at this piece of news. But I could almost hear myself whispering under my breath, “Rub-adub dub / Three men in a tub / The butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker.” And I was forgetting that Grier must be the front man for Tony Pritchett and his boys. The tub was more crowded than I thought.
From his desk across the room from me, McAuliffe sat surrounded by a cloud of his own pipesmoke. He had had a blower unit installed above his head, something he called his “ceiling-hung blower unit,” which had no doubt been put in to obey the smoking by-laws, but from what I could see, McAuliffe rarely bothered to turn the thing on. Wherever I went with him in the office, on any of the floors and once down into the basement to the dead-files room, Fred ignored all NO SMOKING signs posted by the elevators and stairs. He was too old to change his spots, he told me. He spent a good part of his day scraping, cleaning, reaming, filling and, on occasion, smoking one of his fifty briars. They were all a big part of him. Like the burned holes in his desk blotter and the ashes—I’ve seen them even in his eyebrows—everywhere, McAuliffe was a leftover from an earlier day. I hadn’t come into the office with any high regard for Phidias or any of its tentacles, but the fact that it gave office space to this tweedy, Dickensian character, who always had time to digress and give me the history or background on any matter that came up, made me respect it and give it the benefit of the doubt.