“We’re all done, Mr. Cooperman. Nice running inta yeh.”
“Yeah,” Geoff added. “We’ll finish up some other time in the near future.” The three men got into the Lincoln, two in the front, and Geoff in the back. I caught another glimpse of that cigar before the door closed and the car moved off silently down Geneva Street.
“Nice playmates,” Pete said as we watched the car disappear. “You being taken up by a new crowd, Benny? If those guys are who I think they are, I don’t think they play by the rules.”
“Pete, if I didn’t say I was never so glad to see a friend before, I’m saying it now. Where’d you come from?”
“Oh, I was sitting at home thinking of Savas and the rest digging out what you say is in that column, and then I got to getting restless until Shelley threw me out of the house. She said I’d been mooching around since you left. She exaggerates, Shelley does. But I guess I was doing a lot of getting up and sitting down. That sort of thing bring you out?”
“That and a little heartburn. I think I nearly got to meet the great Anthony Thorne Pritchett, head of the English mob.”
“Well, that’s a pleasure I’d rather postpone, if I got the chance.” We had walked over towards the entrance to the building site, but had stopped where the fence would have cut us off if it had been closed. Everybody inside looked busy trying to look busy. Down below they had cut down the footing and column like it was a stump of a dead elm, and were hoisting it to the flatbed of a truck. You could see where the cement cutter had sliced through the footing to where the filling was. I wasn’t sure how the procedure went from there. It would have been one postmortem in a million to watch. Like trying to dissect the Cardiff Giant.
“Benny, we should have a little talk in the morning about all this. If we get a positive ID, we can call off the hounds of Interpol and get back to a nice local investigation. Right?”
“You just saved my hide, Pete. I’m not going to tell you to get a subpoena. What time you want to talk? I’ll be there at eight o’clock.”
“And I’ll be there at nine.”
“Cheap joke. I saw it in a Bogart movie. Good-night, Pete.”
“Good-night, Benny. Sorry about the heartburn.”
* * *
I woke up from a dream in which Gordon, Geoff and Len were trying to turn me into a lasting part of a bridge abutment. They were very polite about it, and I felt peculiar having self-centred feelings about it. Tony Pritchett supervised from his Lincoln with the smoky windows. When I opened my eyes it took more than a minute to find me in Martha Tracy’s spare room. I rolled out of bed and headed for the bathroom.
Forty-five minutes later, I was waiting for Pete Staziak to check in at Niagara Regional Police. I never liked calling at Niagara Regional. Usually when I do it’s after being up most of the night and feeling low in the self-esteem area. At least this Wednesday morning, I was fresh from the shower with a cup of coffee and a bran muffin digesting in my stomach. The day shift at the counter looked starched and rested. The girl on the phones even had dimples. But I felt up to it. I just hoped that Pete had slept well.
Pete Staziak had slept well, as I found out when I got a chance to ask him. Unfortunately it wasn’t Pete who tapped me on the shoulder with a sleep-hungry thumb, it was Staff Sergeant Chris Savas, who had been up all night with a lump of cement and its contents. He had driven to Toronto and back. He needed a shave and no backchat as I followed him down the linoleum-paved corridor to his private office. He breathed in as I passed his massive chest moving through the doorway to his office. I’ve been in Savas’s office before, and I was getting used to the awards and photographs on the wall, the shooting trophies and other signs that made Savas feel at home when he was sitting on the other side of his banged-about metal desk.
“Okay, Cooperman, it’s time. We always get there don’t we?” He moved his chair closer to mine. “I been sitting up all night with a sick friend, so I’d just as soon we skipped the playing around, the games you and Pete play between the two of you. I got the murders of a brace of Geller brothers to figure out and I wanna hear what you got to say with all the crap edited out so I don’t even know it’s there. We talking the same language, Cooperman?” He looked up at me and I couldn’t miss the bruise marks under his eyes nor the way the light from the venetian blind highlighted the stubble on his face.
“Okay. Where do you want to start?” I asked. “I don’t think I know anything you don’t know.”
“So, right away you’re into games. I told you I got no time for crapping around this morning.”
“Listen, Chris, I want to get this thing cleared up as much as you do. Then I can get back to some honest work. The way they’ve been playing around will change the law on divorce even more and there won’t be a buck left in it for a guy like me.” Savas started sucking at his teeth the way he did whenever I began wandering from the subject at hand. He was looking at me the way I imagined I looked at Kogan under the same circumstances. I took a deep breath and tried to see a straight line in front of me. “I’ve been working this case since last Wednesday, Chris, when the Jewish community formally asked me to make some informal inquiries. I’ve been doing that for a week to the minute and I haven’t seen any money. I came within an ace of taking a bribe to stop playing with this deck. I took it, but I sent it back.”
“Petty larceny you’ll be into next, Benny.” I’ve noticed that I bring out strange word orders in the people I talk to. After a week in my company an outsider starts mixing up “lay” and ”lie” and “like” and “as though” like the rest of us Granthamites. Savas continued, “Suppose we start with the bribe. How much was it and who did you take it from?”
“It was five hundred bucks that Glenn Bagot gave me to go fishing far away from home. He wanted to buy my time so I’d stop fooling with this case. But I told you, I sent the money back.”
“You think Bagot iced the Geller boys? Is that how you figure it?”
“Chris, right now I don’t figure it at all. Bagot has good business reasons for keeping the Geller name out of the papers, and since he can’t buy off your gang, at least by trying to pay me off he’s showing his partner that his heart’s in the right place.”
“You’re not talking about the remaining Geller, to wit Sid, are you?”
“Geller’s in there all right, but he’s not the only partner. The other one was watching you and your excavation team last night on Geneva Street.”
“Pritchett, eh? One of my men spotted his car. So he is in with Geller and Bagot. What’s the scam?”
“As far as I know it’s no scam at all, just business, but with the provincial government. Highway job that’s pending. The consortium of Geller, Bagot and Pritchett are bidding on the Niagara-on-the-Lake highway job. Publicity about Geller’s disappearance hasn’t helped, and unless I miss my guess Sid doesn’t know that Bagot has Pritchett as his partner. Some of their interest in keeping me off the case was aimed at keeping brother Sid in the dark. Besides, Pritchett’s name isn’t likely to help things in Toronto when they pull the winning tender out of the box.”
“You got your medical insurance paid up? Broken kneecaps can be expensive. It gets you in the grey area of convalescence and rehabilitation. Crutches, you know, and wheelchairs, ramps and special buses.”
“Cut it out, Chris. What else you want to know?” Savas looked at me sideways for a second, banged about in his top drawer for a minute, and then called to see if Pete Staziak had booked in yet. If he was trying to make me feel like a high school kid forced to cool his heels in front of the principal’s desk, he was doing all right. I tried to squirm a little so we could get this over with. It must have worked because suddenly he was looking at me again, and I had that feeling TV newscasters must get when the little red light goes on.