“What was he doing?”
“He told me, let me see, what was it? Oh, yes, he was working on a paper about pleading. Very technical, or so I understood. I never read it. I don’t even know if he ever finished it.”
“Was it part of some course work he was doing?”
“Not after graduation. He was just a bit backward about getting his feet wet, I think. Or, to give him credit, he was very serious in those days. When we set up together, I leaned on Larry a lot. He knew a lot of law.”
“So he was bright and serious. Doesn’t sound like the Larry I knew: Larry the glad-hander, Larry with the three funny stories?”
“That came along later. I guess practical law got him down. Not enough intellectual challenge. When you’ve winnowed away the theoretical law that you study from the law as she is practised in a small town, there’s not much to write academic papers about.”
“Why did the partnership break up?”
“That’s no secret. You’ve talked to Sergeant Pete Staziak, haven’t you?”
“Sure, we just had breakfast.”
“Well, Larry and I worked well together for a few years. We both made our mistakes and cried about them in each other’s offices. We were a young firm in a town full of established WASP firms. It was hard getting a foot in the door in those days, but we did get a start. The good old community threw us some business, couldn’t see home-town boys starve. And then we started getting a mixed range of business, not just from our Jewish relations and friends. I think that’s where the split came. I tended to play the field, ethnically speaking, and Larry tended to stay with the known and the true. His business got to be at least ninety percent Jewish. Mine was never more than, say, fifty-fifty.”
“Is that what did it?”
“Not exactly. We just started thinking differently, wanting different things. He changed a lot too from the pal from law school.” He thought about that one for a minute. I could hear the hum of the thought on the silent phone line. “When we split up, Larry wanted to make a lot of money. That’s what he wanted more than anything else. Now, don’t tell my wife, but I’m not in law primarily for the money, after all the jokes of course, and after I freely confess that I like being comfortable and being able to afford to belong to the club where I regularly beat the bejesus out of your cousin at racket-ball, after all of that shit, I have to tell you that I’m in law because of law. I’m hooked on it. I’m no intellectual the way Larry was when we graduated, but I’m learning. It’s getting to be my second skin. I enjoy trying to translate it to bewildered people who don’t know a writ from a tort. Law can be brutal, especially to people who didn’t grow up under English law. It’s complicated and it’s a lot more than just complicated. Hell, I could do twenty minutes on the law in a night-club. You should catch my act up at Secord, where we’re just starting a law program.” Another pause. “What else do you want to know, Mr. Cooperman?”
“The partnership was dissolved?”
“That’s right. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
“What happened to the ashes and dust?”
“We split it up the middle, according to our accounts. It was a fair enough split. I kept the building and the office, so he got a little more cash.”
“I see.”
“Your cousin should take a few lessons, Mr. Cooperman. He’ll never be good, but it will give me a better game. Is there anything else?”
“Not on the order paper, Mr. Bernstein. But I’d appreciate being able to call you back when and if I get stuck.”
“Any time. Any time. The least I can do.”
I filed what Bernstein had told me along with all the other stuff and sat there liking Geller a fraction of a scruple more. He wasn’t a cardboard figure any more. I could begin to see some weight and shading. I thought of calling his wife again, but I thought better and didn’t. Ruth might be keeping something back. Hell, she was. She’d seen Wally Moore. But I didn’t want to strip all the masks away at once. I thought of the murder case that Pete was talking about. Ruth Geller said she’d told me the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth and it still didn’t amount to anything. I wondered how Priscilla Gesell felt when she discovered she didn’t have any little white lies left to tell.
TEN
Joyce See was shorter than I was which made me like her right off the bat. She was wearing a short-sleeved summer dress with small flowers on it. Her black hair gleamed and so did something in her bright brown eyes. We were walking under shade trees on King Street from the registry office. She swung her attaché case as she walked, making it seem all the more out of place with that dress which should have been completed by a picnic hamper or a wide-brimmed straw hat with a fat ribbon on it. She’d called and we’d arranged to meet at three-thirty, at the corner of King and Ontario. In the summer, the registry office is the coolest place in town. And it doesn’t have air-conditioning. It must have to do with the thickness of those old walls and the rationed windows.
“Did you know Larry Geller?” I asked.
“No. But I’ve been hearing a lot about him. It’s hard to turn on the television for the local news without seeing that picture of him. As you may know I’m the newest partner in B.C.G. and S. This is a town of four-partner firms and they needed me so they could get on with business. I was like the second shoe dropping, the resolving chord on a piano. Why do legal partnerships in Grantham come in fours, just as in English almost everything comes in threes?”
“Like what?”
“Oh, like lock, stock and barrel, like win, lose or draw, like the long, the short and the tall.”
“Like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly?”
“Same thing. I read it all the time. Maybe it has something to do with trinity. I’ll have to look it up.”
“What about The Sound and the Fury and The Bad and the Beautiful?”
“Exceptions that prove the rule. Are you hungry? I usually stop for a cup of tea in a little place by the market.”
“Fine,” I said, and we crossed King Street’s one-way traffic and went into a restaurant with a soda fountain on one side and an out-of-town paper rack on the other. Further back there were booths, one of which was not overloaded with teenagers half-way home from the Collegiate. One head of hair was dyed purple, and another was streaked blonde on black. At least there wasn’t a juke-box. They were trading a pair of earphones and gyrating to the unheard beat of a rock band.
“You’re doing this for the Jewish community?”
“Who told you?”
“The senior partner. I told him I was going to be seeing you. You feel responsible to the community?”
“In a way, I guess. It’s the weak spot in my armour. There’s nothing in the book about how to get out of talking to the rabbi and the president of the synagogue when they come to you with their hats in their hands.” I thought a second. “And I guess I owe it somehow.”
“You’re not just involved in mankind, but in certain specific strands of it. Is that right?”
“Isn’t everybody? Taking humanity all at once is a little like trying to put your arms around one of those giant Douglas firs they have out in British Columbia.” Joyce See ordered tea and I ordered coffee. “And I guess I feel guilty about what Geller did. Because of what he is and because of what I am.”
“Yes, that’s what it’s like being part of a minority.” She nodded as the tea and coffee arrived. A teenager returned the sugar to our table. “I share an apartment with an Armenian girl,” she added by way of explanation, then went on, “Chinese people are both a minority and a majority. In my heart I know there are vast millions of us in Asia, but that doesn’t seem to mean anything here where the numbers are very small. The closest I’ve ever come to feeling like I was really Chinese is walking down Dundas Street in Toronto.”