Dead and Buried

TWENTY-FIVE

I was having my morning coffee at the Diana Sweets and reading the Saturday Globe and Mail, when I felt an extra two hundred pounds on the bench I was sitting on. Staff Sergeant Chris Savas had joined me and the napkin dispenser. He carried his own coffee in a foam cup with a plastic lid. He didn’t say anything. Before I even got my mouth open to tell him what he knew already-that he looked like he’d been up all night-Pete Staziak moved into the place opposite me. He carried no coffee of his own, but he too didn’t look like a man who’d spent the night in the bosom of his family. I waved for the waitress. Savas surrendered his foam cup, and we ordered a new round to start afresh.

“Okay,” I said. “I won’t make any clever remarks about burning the midnight oil. I’ll speak when spoken to.”

“Damn right,” said Pete, taking off his hat and giving us all a look at the red line around his head.

When the coffee arrived, Savas, at my elbow, took a sip and then turned to me. “What the hell do you think’s going on? I’ll be damned if I can figure it out.” Such an admission from Chris was simply a ploy of some sort. He was too good a cop to be all that much at sea. It was meant to disarm me, to turn me into a cooperative witness. I shrugged. It seemed the best thing to do under the circumstances. Then Pete joined in:

“What cards are you holding face down, Benny? That’s really all we want to know.”

“Just the name of my client. That’s all I care about. The rest is yours or anybody else’s. But remember, I only came into this thing a week ago last Tuesday.”

Silently, Pete pulled out his wallet and handed Chris a five-dollar bill. “What’s that all about?” I asked.

“Chris said you wouldn’t volunteer the fact that there was bad blood between you and Ross Forbes. I said different, that’s all.”

“You didn’t give me time, damn it! I didn’t know you were putting money on me. Hey, and besides, Ross Forbes isn’t in the morgue. It’s his old man, who has never laid a glove on me.”

“The point is, you aren’t as freshly into this as you let on, Benny. That shows a lack of trust, a lack of openness-”

“Bull! I gotta mouthful of coffee and you just sat down, for crying out loud. What do you want, a printout of my comings and goings for the last ten years?” Chris leaned away from me. Either my breath was bad or I was making my point and he was not going to dispute it. He certainly wasn’t going to return Pete’s five. I ignored Chris for the moment and faced Pete. “How are you getting along on the other one?”

“Professional job. Very tidy,” Pete said.

“Those pros took one of the Kinross drivers for a ride on Thursday night. I’d keep an eye on the house of Brian O’Mara who was within an ace of being accurately described as ‘late of the parish.’”

“He didn’t report anything.”

“What do you expect? These guys always play deaf and dumb when it does them the least good. I know it happened because I was there.”

“Damn!”

“They tried to get you too?” I nodded, and Chris gave Staziak a look.

“What’s more, after we left the club last night, Anna and I went to that ex-bank restaurant at the corner to talk. When we left, a car was following us. We had to scuttle through back alleys to my place.”

“What time was that?”

“After eleven-thirty. Maybe a quarter to twelve.”

“What kind of car was it?” Pete was leaning towards me as though a lot was riding on my answer.

“Some kind of Ford, I think. I didn’t wait around to get the registration.” Pete looked at Chris and then at me:

“I was looking for you around then, Benny.” He had taken on a sheepish look. “I didn’t think you’d take me for a hoodlum with the mob.”

“You son of a bitch!” I yelled, louder than I intended. Heads turned to see what was happening in our booth. I was getting hot where my tie was tied too tight. “You nearly scared Anna to death!”

“Sorry, Benny. Really, I had no idea!” He kept looking at Chris to help him out, but his partner let him stew. “Jeez, Benny. I only wanted to talk to you. Maybe I shouldda honked?”

“We woke up Apply Mary and ran four or five blocks!”

“Why don’t you two continue this on your own time,” Chris suggested. “I’ve got the jist of both your arguments. Just give it a rest.” Chris looked at each of us and I bit my tongue.

“What’s happening with the Pásztory investigation?” I asked Pete, hoping that it was an embarrassing question. “I didn’t read in the Beacon that the body was found under Fort Mississauga in a hole with a few tons of poisonous waste.”

“We don’t want to scare the villains away, Benny. If they know we have the body, they must know where we found it.”

“I don’t see the advantage,” I admitted.

“If we talk to somebody who knows more than has appeared in the paper, then we know we’re on to something. Crooks have a hard time keeping straight what they know and what they’ve read in the press.”

“In that, crooks are like everybody else,” I said. “But, I’ll remember that. I can, by the way, give you a description of the three hoods who borrowed me and O’Mara from the Harding House on Thursday night.”

“Is that where your consulting rooms are located these days?” Chris was beginning to sound like his old self.

“Why don’t you go home and have a shower?” I asked. “It’s one thing to be up all night, but another to look it. Chris, you look it.”

“I will, I will, but first I want to know why you were having lunch with Ross Forbes yesterday at the Grantham Club?”

“Boy, you’ve had your little people out beating the bushes, haven’t you?” Chris eyes were not crinkling at the corners showing signs of laughter and humour. I changed tactics. “Nothing mysterious in my breaking bread with Forbes. He wanted me to do a job for him. Nothing to do with Kinross or Phidias. I turned him down.”

“Why?”

“Conflict.”

“You mean scruples, Benny?”

“I mean conflict of interests. I’m already working in that area, and Forbes is one of the people I’ve got my eye on.”

“Well, you’ll save expenses on him from now on.”

“What do you mean?” Peter grinned at Savas and waited for him to enlighten me.

“I just had Forbes arrested,” Chris said.

“Ross Forbes? For the murder of his father? You’ve got to be pulling my leg!”

“Let’s not get technical. I’m telling you he’s been arrested. Right now, as a matter of fact, he’s cooling his heels in the lockup.”

“Chris, you can’t believe that he’d kill his old man. They’ve hated one another too long for it to end this way.”

“Well, read the paper when it comes out. He was the last person to talk to the Commander. He even admits it. Says they had a little chat in the sauna in the afternoon. Of course the way he tells it, they were getting along better than ever. Benny, he was seen at the club, seen on his way to and coming from the sauna as he went through the changing room.”

“You didn’t book him for just being in the club at the same time, Chris. Now did you? Damn it, the old man was slow-roasted in that sauna for so long that the best bet you have of getting the time of death is by checking the date on the newspaper he was reading. All you know is that he was killed some time, maybe hours, before he was found.”

“We’ve got the gun.” That stopped me.

“Oh?”

“It came from the Commander’s collection. Ross had access.”

“Sure, and so did the rest of the family, I’ll bet. Come on, Chris. Has he confessed or what?”

“No, he’s stonewalling us, but he’ll talk in the end.”

“Why do you think he did it?”

“The old man was trying to bump him out of the family business. After the wedding, Norman Caine would become top dog at the next board meeting on Monday.”

“You think he killed Pásztory too?”

“We’re still working on that. We’ll drop you a line if we link them up. Right now, according to Pete, Pásztory was snuffed by professionals from out of town.”

“You’re repeating yourself. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard about Jack Dowden?”

“Dowden? Doesn’t ring any bells with me,” said Savas, looking over at Pete who was dredging into his memory and almost but not quite remembering.

“Come on, Benny, this isn’t a TV quiz show. There are no prizes for the right answer.” I started to remind them and it was Pete who remembered the rest of the story. Between the two of us we filled Savas in.

“So, you’re saying that this accident was maybe not an accident?”

“Chris, if you stand in front of me and I run you down with my Freightliner, I will pulverize your lower back and pelvic area. Dowden’s chest was crushed. So, he was on his knees when he was hit. Witnesses have been paid off and have left town. Another one, O’Mara, was the object of a snatch on Thursday night. He told me that they saw nothing of the accident in spite of what they told the coroner.”

“A minute ago you were going to bat for Ross Forbes. Now you’re trying to stick two more bodies on him. What’s going on?”

“I’m not saying Ross didn’t do them all in. All I’m saying is that the picture is bigger than the one you were looking at in the club last night. It has to include Dowden and Pásztory. By the way, Pásztory was in Chet Bryant’s office looking up the facts on the Dowden case. He read the coroner’s report. Does that tie things more tightly together for you?”

“That ties Pásztory to Dowden. How does it put them closer to Ross Forbes? He was top dog at Phidias not Kinross. Maybe we should be talking to Norman Caine.”

“I don’t care whom you talk to-”

“You catch that ‘whom,’ Pete? Very pretty. That Anna of yours is sure a classy woman, Benny.”

“I’ve been talking English all my life. Get off my back, Chris!” That came out a little more forcefully than I’d intended. I shot Pete a grin to show I was only fooling, and that reminded me of something. “Pete, Ross Forbes told me that he has noticed a tail on him. You know anything about that?” Pete rubbed the back of his neck, like he’d just got out of a car after a long trip. It gave him time to think of what he could afford to tell me.

“Look, Benny, without the charges from yesterday, Forbes has a full plate. There’s an investigation going on into the improprieties that Alex Pásztory revealed last spring. As Chief Executive Officer of Phidias Manufacturing and former CEO of Kinross, there is a lot he’s responsible for. There are people who want to know who he sees and whether he is buying any airline tickets, especially the one-way kind. That’s about as far as I can go right now.”

Chris acknowledged Pete’s balance of candour and tact with a nod of his meaty head. “Whom did you think was following him, Benny?” he said. I ignored the “whom” which was aimed at my liver. From there on the conversation degenerated even further. I could see that Savas was proud of himself for pinning the Commander’s death on Ross so quickly. I didn’t blame him for that. Sometimes you can work for months without getting a break. He was lucky on this one and he knew it. The only other fact I learned from them was about the murder weapon:

“We found it in one of those big washing machines that do all those towels and robes at the club. Only one chamber fired, the rest all full. It was a thirty-two with a snub nose. Tidy little fellow. And it was registered to the dead man. How do you like them roses?”

“I give you top marks. Especially if you found a towel or robe with powder burns on it in the same machine. Since nobody heard the shot, the piece must have been wrapped up in a towel or something. But, then, you know all that.”

“Sure,” Chris said, with a glance at Pete.

“What about the slug that killed Pásztory, Pete? Was that another small-calibre piece?”

“It was a thirty-two all right, but-”

“But you haven’t made a comparison.” I shrugged and let out a full breath, just enough to give the impression that the boys in the lab were short-changing my pals.

“You don’t buy Pete’s theory that this was a professional job?” Chris asked.

“I’m not saying one thing nor the other. It doesn’t hurt to check these things out. That’s all I’m saying. Like, for instance, did you check out Paul Renner from City Hall or the other brother-in-law, Harold Grier? Where were they at sauna-time?”

“Grier’s clean as far as we call tell, except for some shady friends. And Renner’s not all that swift in the brain department.”

“Yeah,” Pete added, “if he had a cocaine habit, he’s the sort of guy’d try to snort it off a bathroom mirror. You know what I mean?”

“How smart do you have to be to use a thirty-two?” I asked. That put an end temporarily to Pete’s enjoying himself.

Chris finished his coffee with a flourish and shot Pete a grin I couldn’t interpret. Maybe it had something to do with their having killed a quarter of an hour ribbing me about the cases. They enjoyed making me feel like I was a cop-shop groupie who liked having cops call him by his first name. I finished off the last of my cup-it was cold-and smiled back at them. They got up and slipped back into their coats. When they left me, I felt like I could use a shower, even though I’d started the day with one. As for Chris Savas, he was ready for another eight hours of work.

When the Beacon came out that afternoon, the murder of Commander Murdo Forbes and the arrest of his son were front-page items. What shocked me, however, was something that I don’t think either Pete or Chris knew at the time they were talking to me in the Di. Old Mrs. Forbes, Biddy, the widow of the Commander, had had a stroke on hearing that Ross had been detained at Niagara Regional Police Headquarters. She was in intensive care at the Grantham General.

I made a few calls and discovered that she was putting up a good fight, but that she was paralysed and had lost the ability to speak. I checked this out with my pal Dr. Lou Gelner, who explained that with time, she could expect to get over most of her physical encumbrances. But with a woman her age, there was always a chance of a later and more severe stroke killing her. With that bit of uplift, I turned to the office dictionary and looked up the word Ross Forbes had used at lunch the day before: lubricious. It had been at the back of my mind since he’d said it about poor Martin Lyster. Slippery, smooth, oily; lewd, wanton. Hell, it sounded more like Forbes than it did Martin. I slammed the dictionary shut and went back to the apartment.

I killed the next half-hour or so looking over the book I’d brought away with me from Irma Dowden’s house and the papers I’d taken from the basement files from Phidias’s head office. The book helped add to my skinny background in this area, the papers added specific information. What held my attention was the dispatcher’s log. It looked like any log that clocked cars and trucks in and out of a place. Then I noticed something odd:

NAME

IN

OUT

Dowden

6:00 A.M.

6:10 A.M.

O’Mara

7:00

11:00

Dowden

7:30

Dr. Carswell

7:40

7:50

Dr. Carswell

8:15

11:00

There were other names listed too, but these were the most familiar ones. What I couldn’t figure out was why did Carswell visit the yard twice. He stayed only ten minutes the first time, and the next time took him to the end of the police investigation by the look of it. I tucked the log in a corner of my head and left it there to see what the grey cells could do on their own.

That night, at seven, Anna and I went to the movies. There was a small repertory theatre that played old movies on St. Andrew Street above the Woman’s Bakery. Run by a part-time lecturer from Secord, it had its box office and aisles manned by his prize students. It was the sort of place where they made you feel like your fly was open if you asked for popcorn. The movie was Great Expectations. It was an old black-and-white post-war classic from England with a big scary scene in the first reel. Inevitably, after the show, we found ourselves at the Di, where they are soon going to start charging me rent. Anna asked:

“Well, how did you like it?”

“Great,” I said. I might have confessed that I could have done without all that rowing on the Thames.

“You dozed off!”

“I was carried away by a daydream,” I said. “I was wondering whether the English dumped toxic wastes into those bleak marshes where Pip lived.”

“You were snoring, Benny. I had to shake you!” Anna was in a good mood. “I thought you liked it.”

“I did. It didn’t make me mad the way modern movies do.”

“What makes you cross with them?” She was playing with me now, showing the gamine side of her her colleagues up at Secord knew nothing about. “Let’s hear about it.”

“I don’t like movies where they wreck a dozen vintage cars in a police chase. And I get mad at the way people in movies never have trouble finding a parking space. Even here in Grantham I can drive around the block a dozen times and not see an empty space, but in the movies, even in New York, the hero always finds a spot right away. In my experience, the only time I get a parking space near a restaurant I’m heading for is when it’s closed for Greek Easter or something.”

“You don’t really mean that?” She turned her head on the side, in order to see into my heart better. I could never argue decently with Anna sitting across from me. She had a way of exposing my illogical side. Without even trying, she could argue me into absurdity.

“Okay,” I said. “I don’t really believe it. Let’s just say that such has been my experience. That’s different.”

Anna was looking particularly fetching to me as she sipped her coffee. She was wearing an old sweater over a pink button-down shirt. The way she did it, it didn’t look preppy or fashionable. It wasn’t what they call today a “look”; it was just Anna being comfortable, and watching me squirm. That was the first thing I noticed about her when I met her last year, a brattish quality that is always trying to see how much it can get away with. When she tried that one on, as she still did, she seemed about sixteen. She was now studying my face, like she wanted to sculpt it. She was making it all the more difficult for me to justify the position I’d taken. And she knew it.

“In my business,” I said, trying to sound like sweet reason itself, “-and probably in yours-you learn to check the odds of some things turning out the way they do. If it works one way once, then there are odds for and against it working out that way next time.”

“Are you saying that lightning doesn’t strike in the same place twice?”

“Maybe I am.”

“Maybe in legend and aphorism lightning doesn’t strike twice, but in meteorology it happens all the time. The CN Tower in Toronto, the Empire State Building in New-”

“Okay, then let’s stick to legend. Like that old movie on that poster in the lobby: Mutiny on the Bounty. What are the chances of a situation like that happening again?”

“You don’t want to know the answer to that.”

“Wrong example?”

“Uh-huh. Did you think Captain Bligh was going to change his spots? Was it likely he was going to learn a lesson from the Bounty?” There was a nice glow in her cheeks now as she leaned towards me. I could smell her perfume, but I kept on listening. “People act according to the way they are. Bligh was a martinet. He thought he had to drive his men with fear to get an honest day’s work out of them. The Admiralty said-in the movie-I haven’t looked up the history-that it was an excess of zeal on the captain’s part.” Anna was really going now, and I loved to listen. “Well,” she continued, “zeal was part of his character. It was excessive on the Bounty in the South Seas, on the Nore in the Thames Estuary and again still later in New South Wales in Australia. You must have seen that in your work, Benny?”

“Sure,” I said. “Some people can hide their motives for a while, but it’s what they do that comes out and damns them. It’s no trick to talk like a saint. My job is to get under that to what they’ve done.”

The talk went on and on while we had another refill of coffee, and I was getting a big kick out of it. In the back of my mind I was beginning to see the faces of all the strange characters I’d run into since Irma Dowden came to see me. There were no Pips or Miss Havishams, no Blighs or Fletcher Christians, but they were interesting in their own rights. I had to admit that I was having fun getting under their skins, trying to guess what made them tick. There was something Dickensian in the character of the Commander. Even in death, he was bigger than life.

“Oh, by the way, Benny,” Anna said, after it became clear that my attention had been wandering, “did you know that Sherry Forbes and Norman Caine got married on schedule this afternoon?”

“What? I don’t believe it! Nobody gets married with a grandfather dead and a grandmother in Intensive Care.”

“To say nothing of the father of the bride in the calaboose,” she added.

“Right. What kind of people are we dealing with?”

“All I know is that Canon Nombril performed the ceremony in a chapel at the cathedral with just two witnesses. So, at least it was as quiet as possible to still be legal.”

“At least Sherry won’t turn into a Miss Havisham. That’s my first reaction. The second is, what are they going to do with the fancy wedding they put into storage?”

“On that note, sir, you’d better drive me home.” And I did that.