“Who are you looking for?” the old man asked.
“Tom MacIntyre. White-haired man, owns a boat in the marina.”
“He’ll be at Murphy’s feeding the piranha.”
“I never been there,” the woman on the ladder volunteered.
“I should think not,” said Mr. Helwig as I found my way out towards the light.
I found him as advertised, with a paper carton of goldfish in one hand and a lobster claw in the other. Except for the piranha and the goldfish, he was alone at a wooden table laminated in transparent plastic.
“Well, well, Mr. Cooperman! Are you still hot on the trail of Larry Geller?”
“Mr. Geller’s dead, Mr. MacIntyre. The police are holding his body.”
“Well, well, how does it go? ‘The weed of crime bears bitter fruit …’ You’d better sit down and join us.” I did that, and as I collected a chair I took in the heavily nautical trappings of the room: everything from anchor chains and fish-nets to model ships in bottles and polished brasswork. The bar was a lifeboat levelled off for landlubber duties.
A white suit in July is dramatic enough, but when it’s filled by a large pink-knuckled albino, you’ve moved from dramatic to sensational or whatever the next step is. He could see me checking him out as he sipped an amber drink without ice. “Will you join me in a drink, Mr. Cooperman?”
“I’ll have a beer, I think. It’s warm enough.” I noticed that I was sweating. MacIntyre grinned, then called out for a round of drinks. I could see his bluey-pink eyes were vibrating. The piranha nipped at the tail of one of half a dozen goldfish in the tank. The others were sheltering under a curve in the ornamental driftwood inside. But not for long.
“Have you sought me out to return the keys you borrowed, Mr. Cooperman? I had to send Vicki out to have another set cut. I should charge you.”
“I borrowed the keys because you wanted me to. Let’s not run around in circles, Mr. MacIntyre. You tipped Glenn Bagot off about my visit last Friday, didn’t you? He borrowed some help from a friend and they met me coming out of Larry’s little hideaway on Woodland.”
“You have the Levantine imagination, Mr. Cooperman.”
“Nobody else knew I was headed over there. Only you.”
“Why would I want to set you up? You’re nothing to me but a break in the routine. You remind me that I was a one-man band not so many years ago. You remind me of my youth.” He tried to end things there with a winning grin, but I wasn’t in the market for winning grins. I wanted to nail MacIntyre for all he knew.
“You knew that Geller rented that place from you. You don’t forget just because he took French leave. You had guilty knowledge, which wasn’t so bad until I came snooping. But after me would come Grantham’s finest with more questions of an embarrassing kind. So you phoned Bagot in a panic: Cooperman’s on his way over to 44 Woodland. What are we going to do? Bagot told you to leave it to him. He’d throw a little scare into me. He knew how to handle my type. Something like that? Am I close?”
“I’ll deny it all. I honestly forgot that Geller had that place. You’ll have to believe that.”
“I don’t take a lot of convincing, Mr. MacIntyre. But juries do. And for what it’s worth I’m not trying to see how muddy I can make the waters. I just once in a while want to meet a half-way honest man.”
“You and Diogenes the cynic.”
“I haven’t come to him yet. How long have I got before you will be renting that place?”
“Geller’s? Since it’s paid up until the end of the year, I think I can afford to let it rest fallow until the end of the month. Are you thinking of moving in?”
“It might help me to think through this business.”
“Then, help yourself.”
“If I do, Mr. MacIntyre, I’d prefer to think that just the two of us know about it. In fact I might leave a memorandum to that effect somewhere. I wouldn’t like to run into that trio of goons again without knowing that your part in it wouldn’t go unrewarded.” The goldfish in the tank now numbered four. MacIntyre wasn’t even watching. “And since you forgot to call the cops on Friday, let me tell them about the hideaway when I’m ready for them.”
I tried to look him in his shaky eyes, but he was looking to the window where a starfish caught in a fish-net was silhouetted against the light. My last view of him, before I went out the door, was of a totally white figure pouring a stiff drink from a flask of Irish whiskey.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Steve Tulk worked for the telephone company. He was a big guy even in high school where he made a better captain of the football team than he did a Duke in Twelfth Night. I played Curio, and we had a scene together near the beginning. The scene goes like this:
CURIO: Will you go hunt, my lord?
DUKE: What, Curio?
CURIO: The hart.
After that I was ready for the showers, while Steve had the rest of the play and a curtain call. A few years later I was able to do him a favour professionally when his ex-wife disappeared with his two kids. He wanted me to snatch them for him, but I simply gave him the address in Barrie and let him do what he wanted himself. When I talked to him on the phone, I didn’t have to remind him of all this. In fact he sounded glad to hear from me. I was able to let him know that the time had come to return the favour without putting that short temper of his out of joint. We met for a beer and there, in the Men’s Beverage Room of the Harding House, I explained what I wanted him to do in Larry’s hideaway at 44 Woodland Avenue. Steve shrugged when I asked him if he could handle it, so I took it that the job was as good as done. Just the same, I arranged for him to call me at my office when the dirty deed was done. The call came a little after six.
An hour later, I presented myself at the front door of Debbie Geller’s house on Francis Street off Welland Avenue. It was a hot night, but I’d put on a jacket and tie just to show that I knew about the little things that divide society up the middle into those who know better and those who are comfortable. I heard the chime sound on the inside and saw a shadow approaching through the cranberry stained-glass windows that ran up either side of the door.
“Mr. Cooperman! This is a surprise. I was expecting Sid. You’re early for the minyan. Won’t you come in?” Debbie looked mildly shocked to see me, but spoke with a voice that was too tired to put much expression into her reading of the line. “It’s not Sid,” Debbie called ahead of us. “It’s Mr. Cooperman from the … It’s Mr. Cooperman.”
“Like a bad penny,” I said. She led the way through the vestibule and through an arch into the living-room. Instinctively, I found my eyes drawn to the spot where I’d last seen the tray of cold cuts. They had vanished, of course. Debbie’s sister, Ruth, was sitting in the centre of a large chintz-covered couch. The room looked bigger without a hundred people shoving their way towards the smoked carp and carved turkey. That was a funeral to remember. Now they would have to have one for Nathan’s brother Larry. Would anybody come? Two brothers within a week. I could see from the faces of the two women, as Debbie slipped into a Queen Anne chair nearest the archway, that they had been thinking along similar lines. Ruth hardly looked up. She was examining the pattern cut into the wall-to-wall broadloom. “I’m sorry for your trouble, Mrs. Geller,” I said, echoing both myself a few short days ago and Frank Bushmill, the neighbour who taught me this useful Irish expression of sympathy. I thought of adding about it being all for the best and another observation about how certainty beats uncertainty every time, but I couldn’t find the right words. I gave them a break and sat down and kept my mouth shut.
“As you can see, Mr. Cooperman,” Debbie said, “we are still stunned by the news. Even though he’s been away all these weeks, it’s still a shock.” Ruth raised her eyes from the floor and looked at her sister as though she was trying to see how close what Debbie said came to what she was feeling. Debbie went on: “I invited Ruth over here. I didn’t want her to be alone in that big house tonight. She’s going to be staying with me, aren’t you Ruthie?” Ruth made an inaudible response. “May I get you some coffee, Mr. Cooperman, or would you prefer a drink? Sid will be here in a few minutes. Maybe then we’ll all have a drink? In the meantime, coffee?” I nodded, and Debbie left the room. Ruth had returned to the pattern of the smokey-blue carpet. Sharing a silence with her was next door to sitting by myself. I couldn’t think of anything to say anyway, so I thought I could be building up points on tact by just keeping still.