“Kogan, I’m going to bounce a glass off your head if you don’t stop splitting hairs and tell me where you found that thing.”
“You know I told you where Wally used to work?”
“Yeah, you said on St. Andrew Street near the Loftus Building.”
“That’s right. He worked the front of the Loftus building because …”
“Because the workers coming on and off the job were good marks and so were the carpet workers at Etherington’s.”
“Marks? I never said that.” I picked up my beer with blood in my eye. “Okay, he was usually around there, across from where they’re building the new fire hall. Well, I was worried about Wally. I missed the son of a gun. So, I went lookin’ for him all around that area. I found it on the fire-hall site. It was right in the dirt. I could of easily missed it, but there it was shinin’ up at me like a quarter in the gutter. I got a trained eye, you understand. I knew it was Wally’s right away. But what was it doing on a Bolduc building site?”
“That, Kogan,” I said, “is the answer to a lot more than you think.”
SIXTEEN
The authorities refused to release Geller’s body to his family, so that it was impossible to hold the funeral until the coroner was finished with his investigation. It gave poor Nathan a chance to cool off before beginning his eternal rest. In most cases a Jewish funeral is over before the body’s lost all its heat. Even in a small town like Grantham a paid-up member of the shul can sicken, die and be buried within twenty-four hours. It must be an old-country tradition. Me, I’m not in favour of lying around in state for a week or so, but I guess I’m against an unseemly gallop to the cemetery.
First thing Monday-I won’t bore you with my gin rummy games with Martha on the weekend-I collected my car from the police garage. It cost me an arm and half a leg to get it back. I gave the guard a dirty look; he seemed to expect it; then drove to Niagara Regional on Church Street. The desk sergeant told me that Savas was out but that Staziak was in and would see me.
Pete had a file open on his desk when I came in, but he closed it against the temptation of helping out the struggling private sector like I knew he would. I hovered on the threshold for a minute, then we went into the usual song and dance about what he and his wonderful kid did together on the weekend. If Pete was to be believed, his boy was a genius. I hated to admit it, but he was a good chess player. I tried to bring the conversation back to business, but Pete wasn’t helping.
“What is this, Pete? Some new policy? It won’t break your mother’s back to tell me when the bugger died.” I tried grinning, but it didn’t work. Pete put a pained grin on his face to give it an overworked and I-have-no-time-for-triflers kind of expression.
“What do you want to know for, Benny?” he said rubbing the back of his neck with a big hand. “This is out of your hands now. It’s a murder investigation, not just a runaway embezzler. Come on, Benny, you don’t want any part of this.”
“Look, Pete, I’m part of it whether I like it or not.” Pete shifted his bulk in the swivel chair in my direction. I took it as a hopeful sign. I kept talking. “I can’t go back to my hotel, I’m even taking a chance driving my old car. Come on, I came up clean when Chris went over me. I’m not keeping half of what I know under my mattress. You know what I know, and you wouldn’t have anything in that file if it wasn’t for me. Damn it, Pete, you know I’ll only find out anyway.”
“Okay, okay! Spare me the guilties. I got enough of my own.” He opened the flap of the closed beige file and cleared his throat: “‘Medical report on Nathan Geller, deceased of this city …’ Most of this is garbage. Did you know he had cancer of the prostate? Did you know that he had been a drug-user? Did you know that his aorta was pierced by a pointed, long, thin blade?”
“Stabbed? No wonder I didn’t smell powder.” Pete thought that was pretty funny. Let him try unwinding dead arms wrapped around a bleeding body. I couldn’t do it. “Now the big question: when did Nathan get him his grievous hurt?”
“That’s from Miss Lutman’s English class, right? Tennyson?”
“Tell me about Nathan first.”
“According to this he died ten or twelve hours before you found him, which was around noon. Both rigor and lividity were present. ‘The subject was not moved postmortem.’ He died where you found him. What else can I do for you, Benny?”
“Well, I guess I can’t ask you what Alex Bolduc was doing at the scene of the crime?”
“That’s right. You can skip that one. Privileged information. Next?”
“Okay, let’s change the subject. What about Kogan’s friend? Is his a more open file, since he isn’t a solid citizen?”
“You’re working your way through that door, Benny. Don’t push too hard. Pimps, pushers and bank presidents go through the same routine around here. It’s your only true democracy. We tie the same tags on the big toes of every stiff comes our way. We ain’t particular. As for your friend, Wally Moore, he was plain John Doe until Saturday morning. Your other prosperous pal came in and did his duty.”
“Yeah, I know about that. He was stabbed? That’s what you told me last week.”
“Let me find the damn thing.” He played with the paper on his desk, lifting up several files and several loose pieces of paper. Pete and I used the same vertical filing system: everything in the same pile in the middle of the desk. Pete had more stuff, that’s all, and most of it was recent. My stuff went back for months. “Here it is: ‘Bamfylde Moore, a.k.a. Wally Moore, indigent of no fixed address …’ He was found on a park bench in Montecello Park near the bandshell. According to the post they did on him, he was killed someplace else and dumped on the bench. Patrol car found him midnight Thursday. When they did the post on Friday morning, he’d been croaked for forty to forty-two hours.”
“Just a second! Let me walk that back along my fingers.” Pete smiled since he was holding the answer in front of him. “So, Wally was killed around one or two o’clock Wednesday afternoon”
“Looks that way. It’s the lividity of the body that says he was moved, and that would have been any time after the first six hours, if you’re taking this stuff as holy writ.”
“You don’t see me arguing with it, do you? What about the wound, Pete?”
“What about the wound?”
“Was it similar to the one that killed Nathan Geller?”
“Sweet shit, Benny! You have the tidiest mind in town. What makes you think there’s a connection … more than a connection … between the one and the other? You’re saying they’ve a common killer. Come on, Benny, not even you can tie these things together. They’re different flavours of people: social, economic, geographic, any way you want to look at them. What possible motive can connect a low-lifer like Wally Moore and a fancy sculptor like Geller. They weren’t both pansies or something, were they?”
“It’s something Kogan said. He talks a lot of bull most of the time, but he may have been telling the truth for once.”
“Well, it won’t hurt to get those guys in the morgue to test your theory. A different guy did each of them, so it’s not unusual that there wasn’t a connection made on the Geller post-mortem. We still have both of the bodies.”
I decided to try to make a fast getaway. I had done Pete a favour and it didn’t pay to let him thank me for doing it. It was more negotiable the other way. I heard him calling after me but I kept going.
Montecello Park isn’t the biggest in town, but it’s the most central, the oldest and the best kept. It fills most of the smaller angle where Lake Street meets Ontario. There was a rose garden in the middle of the six- or seven-acre retreat, with a slightly over-the-hill display of pink, red and white blooms climbing their thorny way up the white trellis arches. Over all hung the heavy green branches of the oldest and tallest trees in town. Most of them were maples, but there were a few surviving elms among the oaks and lesser breeds.