A City Called July

TWENTY-NINE

It was some time before anyone spoke. What at first appeared as a gross slander was now being considered, not believed or taken for gospel, but it had been born, had a life and weight of its own. The silence brought with it the distant sounds of traffic moving along Welland Avenue. It was Sid who finally spoke. “First you make damaging statements about Pia, and now you’re giving Debbie a working over. What kind of guy are you, Cooperman?”

“Well, Sid, I had to pretend that I suspected Pia in order to catch Debbie off balance. Debbie intended us to suspect Pia and built a trail of phony evidence leading to her door. You saw what happened on the phone. Debbie did that, a bit of inspired malice Debbie dreamed up when I told all of you about how we’d nailed somebody through the redial memory on the phone. You remember that Debbie then went to look for the Scotch. What she really did was go out across to this building to remove the redial memory that pointed at her, and replace it with the one you heard.”

“But she wasn’t gone for more than a few minutes.”

“The back door of this building is practically at the foot of Debbie’s backyard. How long does it take to cross the garden, run up three flights and dial a telephone number?”

“Francis Street and Woodland. He’s right. They’re next to one another and both about the same distance down the block.”

“Debbie had used the short cut many times before when she went to visit Larry. And, I’m sorry to say, Ruth, that Larry used it when he visited your sister.”

“You’ll never make me believe you,” Ruth said, holding on to her sister to show the strength of her belief. “You have no proof, no rationale, nothing but malice. Why do you hate us, Mr. Cooperman?” Ruth said this so simply that Staziak looked at me with the same question.

“I don’t hate anybody, Mrs. Geller. I don’t like the things I’ve come across, but after being in the divorce business for so long, I’m used to unpleasant surprises. I’m sorry for the hurt in all this. I wanted to hurt you least of all, because they took advantage of you from the start. Nathan was aware that something was going on. That’s why he was killed. That’s what he wanted to talk to Pia about the night he was murdered. She got there just after Debbie had stabbed him, before she had even left the studio. That gave her an idea. So she left the lighter, which she had found earlier in the day. She didn’t know, and couldn’t have known, that Pia noticed the loss and arranged to have it picked up.

“In one way you’re right, Ruth, I don’t have a lot of proof. But I do have this.” Here I pulled the desk away from the wall and showed where Steve Tulk had installed a second telephone, and where I’d hidden the phone that Larry had been using.

“Two telephones? In an office this size? I don’t get it.”

“Well, Mr. Tepperman, I wanted to trap the murderer. I told that story back at Debbie’s house, knowing that the phone up here in the office was a newly installed one. It was put in today as a matter of fact. There was nothing on the redial memory, nothing important anyway. But this other phone, hidden back of the desk, is the one Larry used. It’s the one I used too that day I talked to you, Ruth. When I questioned you about getting a call from Nathan, you threw me for a loop. You answered the phone, therefore it followed that Larry had called you. You said that maybe I had the facts but wasn’t reading them right. You were dead on. It took me a long time to get the idea that you were visiting Debbie when I called not your house but Debbie’s. Larry placed that call to your sister to say that he had finished burning all his papers and was ready to make a dash to Toronto International with her, after making a short stop to pick up his suitcase with the diamonds at the Bolduc building site on Geneva.”

Tepperman was whispering to the rabbi, but the rest of the people in the room, including Kogan, were waiting, looking like they had just felt the floor tremble. “I know we don’t have a lot of proof. Much of what we’ve got is circumstantial. But we do know for a fact that someone from Debbie’s house crossed the garden and came into this office alone less than an hour ago. She may have thought she was unobserved, but there was a witness. Kogan, do you see the person who came to this office before we came as a group?”

“I do,” said Kogan like he was under oath. “That’s her with her arm on Mrs. Geller.”

“You’re pointing at Mrs. Debbie Geller, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Since I had Mr. MacIntyre’s keys to this building, I made use of them. Kogan was in the office across the way which has a glass panel in the door.”

“I thought she saw me once,” said Kogan. “She looked right at me. You forgot to mention,” Kogan said, “that when I called a few minutes ago and asked for Sergeant Staziak, I used the other phone and the redial button.” Kogan looked like he had more of his adventure to share with us, when he was interrupted by Debbie Geller making a sudden move. I missed the first part, I was looking at Kogan. So were the rest of us, including the hefty cop that Staziak had assigned to the possibilities of the night, as he called them.

“Look out!” Rabbi Meltzer was shoved out of the way, and Debbie darted past the uniformed man to the corridor. She was on the stairs before the rest of us, except the rabbi, knew what was going on.

“Carswell, catch her! Don’t let her get away!” Carswell was in a better position to get her than the rest of us. We all had to take turns going through the narrow office door. By the time I got to the stair landing, she had reached the first floor. I stumbled on the first half of the second flight and almost crashed down the rest of the steps. I grabbed the rail and nearly pulled my arm out of its socket breaking my fall. When I got up, I looked behind me. I was the only one in hot pursuit. Cool at the top of the stairs, Staziak was looking down at me.

“Pete, for God’s sake, she’s getting away!” Pete walked down towards me and helped me test the foot that had let me down. “Pete, are you crazy? She’s got a car in the driveway!” Staziak beamed at me. “It’s all taken care of; I’ve got a man on each of the doors. She’s going nowhere.”

“But what the hell were you yelling at Carswell for?”

“I lost my cool, Benny. Have you ever lost your cool?”

Half an hour later, with the exception of Debbie Geller, who had been taken back to Niagara Regional, warned and booked, and her sister Ruth, who was upstairs sedated, we were all back in her living-room drinking Debbie’s rye when Staziak returned from Niagara Regional. He reported that she was in good hands, and a doctor had given her something to help her get through the night. He further announced that he was no longer officially on duty. So Sid fixed him a rye with water. I was working on a weak rye with ginger ale while my right ankle was using up all of the remaining ice-cubes in the house. Pia had made an attempt at first aid with the ice wrapped in a dishtowel. To protect the rug, my foot was sitting in a shallow basin with the melt-waters. Pia was sitting near by just to check on the patient.

When we left 44 Woodland Avenue, Ruth went downtown with Pete. She returned after a few minutes, when she found that there was little she could do after getting in touch with a lawyer. Irving Bernstein, Larry’s old friend from Osgoode Hall days, had agreed to defend Debbie, at least until Debbie’s own wishes were known. I thought of Irving, and wondered if he was still wearing his ring from law school the way Larry was.

“I hope you haven’t been shooting your mouth off while I was gone, Benny. I want to hear your version of what you think was going on in this town.”

“For you, Pete, I’ve got a cleaned-up version all prepared.”

“Good, that way we’ll know it’s a load of sheep-dip from the beginning and not have to wait till the end.”

“You don’t have to wait at all.” I said, calling his bluff. “I’d as soon listen as talk any day.” There was a protest from Saul Tepperman, who had been trying to explain things to Rabbi Meltzer, without much success.

“You’re not going to get out of it that way,” said Pete settling down in a chair near Sid Geller. “We want a full confession, don’t we, people?” For a minute, Pete reminded me of an old music teacher who plied his trade in the public-school system. He called the pupils “people” as though it was his private joke and we weren’t people at all, just little horrors with bad pitch. I don’t know why I thought of Mr. C. Lawson Raven and his “Now, people, pay attention.”

“You don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to, Benny. You should have a doctor look at your foot in the morning if the swelling hasn’t gone down.” Pia was being very helpful, but I suspected that this was a bad time for everybody. Here we were in Debbie’s house, drinking her booze and about to talk about why she’d killed three men. I was glad about my foot. I could have been like the rabbi or Kogan, just sitting and waiting.

“Well, Benny,” the rabbi prompted, “when you’re ready, we’re ready.”

“Okay,” I said, lighting one of the last of my Player’s. I knew there were only other brands in the room so I resolved to make fast work of my explanation. “When Debbie left Sid, she was happy enough for a while. She had a good settlement, which meant that she would never have to go out to work. Not a bad spot for a divorced woman without any kids. So, she devoted herself to the arts, helped her former brother-in-law Nathan get established, but that wasn’t enough. There was an unfinished part to Debbie, she was on the lookout for a main chance, an entry into the big time. Fixing up this place didn’t begin to consume her energies. Then she recognized in Larry, her sister’s husband, the way to satisfy that craving. First there was the adventure of a secret affair in a small town. A world first for Grantham, probably. Then she encouraged him to dip into his trust funds and stockpile securities against the day when they would be able to make a flit that would shake the dust of Grantham off their feet forever. Larry arranged to have an office for his dark deeds near Debbie’s place. Underneath almost everything Debbie planned and did was a sense of the practical. She has a very tidy, uncluttered, unsentimental mind. When the time for the great escape grew closer, she began to try to imagine herself in foreign places-this is conjecture of course-travelling with Larry. Larry would have a price on his head, naturally. They would forever be on the lookout for the police wherever they went. And she knew that Larry had the power to implicate her if he were ever cornered. She had to think about the part she’d played in taking advantage of those fifty families back home. Not easy to sleep on, I guess, especially when you know that your bed-partner has his picture in every police station where Interpol circulars are sent. About that time, Larry hit upon the idea of converting the bonds and securities to diamonds. He went to Toronto and New York often enough to convert his fortune to a tidy, easily hidden bag of diamonds.

“I don’t think it was greed. It was the practical side of her nature coming front and centre again. It was more practical for Debbie to have all of the diamonds. It was more practical not to leave town with Larry. And above all, it was very practical to have Larry out of the way, where he could never double-cross her. She’d never wake up in some casino town in the south of France and find him gone off with a cute croupier. So that short stopover at the construction shack became the last stop for Larry. I gather, Sid, that Debbie wasn’t completely at sea on a construction site?”

“Hell, no. She used to follow me around when we were first married. She even had her own hard hat for when she was visiting me on the job. I don’t know whether she could do all the jobs, but she sure saw most of them being done. She could even trade a few choice Italian expressions with the boys. No, she wasn’t strange around a building site of any kind.”

“Well, there you go. She knew what she was doing. What she missed didn’t have anything to do with her knowledge of construction. She didn’t see that an old rubby, a friend of my pal Kogan …”

“Wally was no rubby. Call him a wino, if you want, but he was no rubby.” Kogan had looked like he was dozing off, but he hadn’t missed a word. “Sorry, Kogan, didn’t mean to give offence. Anyway, Wally Moore saw what happened. He was smart enough not to show himself. When he saw that the paper was asking for information about the missing Larry Geller, and printed his picture, Wally knew that first of all he had to tell the poor man’s wife. He also thought that it might be good for some sort of reward. He called Mrs. Geller over on Burgoyne Boulevard, and Mrs. Geller met him briefly and gave him fifty dollars down on a reward.”

“She told you she never met him,” Pia said, showing the strain of these last few days in her voice pulled tight as a piano string.

“I thought she was lying when I first asked her, thought she was covering up for somebody, but now I can see what happened. Debbie had come over to visit her, to deal with the phone and the door. It was only natural that she was the Mrs. Geller that Wally met.”

“I’m not sure I understand. You mean Debbie pretended to be Ruth?” Pia was entwining her fingers, making steeples. The nervous gesture didn’t suit her.

“She met Wally at the front door. If he asked her if she was Mrs. Geller, she wasn’t being inaccurate, just a little misleading.”

“What about the grass she was smokin’? Remember Wally said she was smokin’ up some pot?” Kogan asked, hoping that I’d forgotten all about it.

“I’ll get to that, Kogan. Give me breathing room. Debbie arranged to meet Wally someplace quiet where they wouldn’t be interrupted. I don’t think Wally would be too suspicious of her picking the pavilion in Montecello Park. It was out of the way, but not sinister in any degree. And after all, Wally thought he was dealing with the widow, not the killer. So, she stabbed him too and left him lying in a corner, where some other down-and-out citizens encountered him and thought that he was asleep.

“Now we come to Nathan. Nathan was the youngest of the Geller brothers and very fond of his two sisters-in-law. He pretended that he didn’t notice much of what was going on around him. He isn’t the first artist to adopt that kind of protective colouring. But in fact he noticed a lot more than he pretended to. As I once told someone, nobody could make the kind of sculptures he made without an excellent eye for the behaviour of his fellow man. For a long time Nathan had been suspecting that something was going on between his brother Larry and Debbie. I don’t know how he knew, but he knew. He saw them in every sort of family gathering, and maybe he got lucky; saw them when they didn’t know they were being observed. Or maybe it was his artist’s radar. Who knows? When Debbie asked him to try to put me off the scent by saying that he had heard from Larry, Nathan got worried. Perhaps for the first time he wondered where his brother had got to. If he ran away with Debbie, why was Debbie still at home? I think that’s why he told me such a dumb story. He didn’t want me to go down to Daytona Beach; he wanted me here. He got in touch with his old friend Pia Morley and asked her to come around for a talk. He was worried, but he didn’t know what to do about it. After all, everybody in this case is family. Where should he turn? Pia was at least only a member of the family by association. He could talk to her without the alarm bells going off.

“If Debbie’s scheme had a weak point, it was Nathan. He was bright and intuitive. Once he began to wonder about things, to speculate out loud, Debbie feared her days were numbered. So, she developed a secondary plan, one which she’d fall back on if Nathan began wondering aloud about Larry’s whereabouts. She knew about Nathan’s friendship with Pia, so Pia had to become part of the plan. When she talked to Wally, she was smoking a joint of pot, just in case Wally did any talking before she could silence him for good. When the chance came to take Pia’s lighter, she snapped it up and left it at the scene of the crime. Everything seemed perfect when Pia herself arrived just after Debbie’d iced Nathan. She hid until Pia left and placed the lighter where the police were sure to find it. The fact that they didn’t wasn’t her fault. Pia noticing the loss sent a friend to collect it.

“Does that cover all the loose ends, Pete? Does anybody have any questions?”

“How could she do it, Benny?” Pia asked. “She knew all of us. She was our friend. We all loved and trusted her.”

“Well, I’m no psychiatrist. Blame it on the rivalry between the sisters when they were being brought up by their father on his own. Blame it on jealousy. Ruth had a husband and kids, Debbie had thrown away her chance at both. Blame it on the fact that she was bored by the ordinary lives most people around her were living. She always had a short attention span. She left school early, married and divorced early, never settled to anything but being big sister. Maybe you can get your fill of being big sister. I don’t know. And don’t forget the fun she had in using Larry to pull the rug out from under all of you. Yes, the whole Jewish community was up in arms over the defrauding of innocent people. A mind like hers might glory in that.”

“But she was at Ruth’s side right through the worst of it,” Pia said.

“That’s right,” echoed Saul Tepperman. “I never saw the like. They were the picture of dedication.”

“I don’t think that was an act,” I said. “I think that Debbie was honestly devoted to Ruth. She wasn’t playing a part. But that wasn’t all there was to Debbie. There was this whole buried part, hidden in shadow and full of envy and guilt and blame. There were more than half the original deadly sins walking arm in arm with the loyal, leave-it-to-Debbie side of her. She makes me wish I knew more about this kind of thing.”

“What about all that money?” Pete asked. “You say Larry converted it into diamonds, two point six million dollars’ worth. What happened to the diamonds, Benny?”

“Like the fellow in the hot seat says, I’m glad you asked me that. I figured that they were hidden someplace here in the house. I knew that the original bag had been buried in Larry’s hideaway. Diamonds are fairly easy to hide. She could have planted them in the hems of some of the curtains in this room or upstairs. She could have put them in holes behind pictures. She could have done two point six million different things with them. I thought that maybe, Pete, you’d have to get a team of demolition experts over here and take the place apart stone by stone, board by board.”

“But you don’t think that any more?” Pete was great at noticing tenses. And he could tell from mine that I had found out something very recently.

“While I was talking, my ankle began bothering me. Now Pia went to a lot of trouble to put together an ice pack for my poor sprained foot, so I was reluctant to complain. A few minutes ago I opened up the dishtowel to see why the ice was not cooling my foot any better than it was. What I found was ice of a different kind. She must have got the idea from a movie. Diamonds in an ice-tray are invisible. Dissolved in a foot basin, they have limited cold-producing qualities. But a fortune in diamonds is nothing to trouble a sprained ankle about.”

Everybody got up and came over to see the hard particles in the melt-waters and in the dishtowel. “Remember how Debbie insisted that we get ice from the fridge under the bar. She didn’t want to give away a fortune with a couple of free drinks. I’ve heard of crooks hiding single diamonds in ice, but this takes the Nobel prize for hiding places.” I turned to Pia: “Pia, I think you’ll find some real ice-cubes left under the bar. This stuff might look lovely on you, but on my foot it leaves a lot to be desired.” She looked at me as though she had completely forgotten the fact that my ankle had swollen to twice its normal size. Some people just can’t keep their perspectives straight.