Having shut himself off from his favourite topic, it took him a minute to remember the topic at hand. He blinked a bit, like a golfer swatting tall grass, going through the motions of looking for a lost ball.
“Larry,” I said. “Your other brother.”
“Right! Yes, good old unreliable Larry. He went missing on July 3rd. I saw him the weekend before. As far as I could tell he wasn’t taking leave of us. He tried to impress Sid as usual with his inside information and kidded me about all this.” Nathan was carefully tearing off the oval beer label as he spoke. The object seemed to be to get it all without ripping it or leaving a white residue on the bottle. “Sid bellowed at both of us the way he usually did. Big brother stuff, very old country. Larry didn’t slip me any secret messages. He didn’t anticipate his going by giving me my birthday present early. He didn’t make any statements full of double entendres. No hits, no runs, no misses. Just Larry, with his jaw set tight when he talked about my work. Larry doesn’t approve of what I do. It’s funny, but Sid, with no education to speak of, understands me better. When I got a Canada Council grant it really fazed Larry, he couldn’t understand why anybody’d give a dime to me for these glorified plaster pies. He just doesn’t understand what I’m all about.”
“Have you any idea where he might have gone? Is there a place he might hole up until this blows over?”
“Come on! What do you take me for? I’m not going to play those cards. He’s flesh of my flesh and all that.”
“Routine question, that’s all. No offence intended. Did he travel much in the last few years?”
“Now you think you’re getting clever, eh? Sure he travelled. Winters in Miami Beach. We’ve got a duplex down there. You can get the address from the cops or from Ruth. He went to Phoenix a couple of times. Do you want to hear about the places he went skiing?” I would have looked sillier with a pencil in my hand taking all this down. As it was, I felt silly enough. Nathan wasn’t through with me yet: “… In 1981 he spent some time near Arles in the south of France. He travelled to West Berlin on business that year, and was in London twice in 1982. He stayed at the Dorchester …” I thought of shutting him up, but you never know about these things. Sometimes the first thing you find in a haystack is the needle. “He went to Scotland one time. Can’t remember where. Some cranny or is it a corrie north of Edinburgh. Went hunting with some MP he tried to butter up. Did I tell you about his two weeks in China?” He went on with his Cook’s tour for a few more minutes then finally stopped.
“What about around town? What were his haunts?”
“He was always going to B’nai Brith meetings as far as I could tell. Tell you one thing: I never once saw him in an art gallery. You can have that for nothing.” I put it down in my head with all the other nothing I’d heard. I slipped him a little silence to prime him. He didn’t need it. He was still working his joke and didn’t look like he was going to run out of places. “His office is on Queen Street across from the post office. He was a member- hell he was treasurer! — of the shul. He had regular habits. And you know what? I think he’s a son of a bitch leaving those kids of his to face this alone. That’s what I think. He’s got the backbone of an amoeba.”
“Who drives the silver Audi?“ I asked, trying to move on to new territory.
“The silver …? Oh, you mean Pia Morley. She’s Sid’s girl-friend.”
“‘Girl-friend?’ That sounds like he’s borrowing the family car on Saturday night. Can you be more specific? This isn’t for a newspaper. Just background.”
“Okay, Pia’s his live-in pal. Since they invented palimony, I guess that pal is an okay legal status, right?” He pronounced Pia to rhyme with Hi-yeh. “She’s divorced too, has been around, I’m told, and they’ve been together since a few years after Debbie flew the coop.”
“Was she friendly with your brother?”
“Pia and Larry? How should I know? They were friendly enough. Nothing special. But you’re asking the wrong guy. I’m not all that fast on the uptake. Relationships are things you have to put down on paper for me to see. My God, I mean I just don’t notice.”
“If there was something, I couldn’t count on you to tell me about it, could I?”
“I suppose not.”
“How is Larry’s disappearance affecting your family?”
“Shit, Mr. Cooperman, you ask dumb questions sometimes. Personally, I’d like to climb into a hole in a Henry Moore and pull it in after me. Ruth’s on Valium, with a doctor and Debbie standing by twenty-four hours a day. The kids want to see their Daddy. What would you tell them, smart guy? Daddy’s a crook? Daddy’s stolen a lot of money and run off with it, but be good and maybe if you say your prayers he’ll send you a postcard.” Nathan Geller drank off the last of his bottle of beer, gasped and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. I got up to go. Agreeing with him about the questions, I couldn’t find any better ones. So I thought I’d save my next visit until I had something to stick to him. I said my goodbyes and started for the stairs. He called after me, “Cooperman? Let me give you some advice: don’t mess with Pia. She doesn’t fool around, and she has some friends who have a habit of not liking the people she doesn’t like. Now if you’ll get out of here, I can go back to work.”
So I got out and I suppose he went back to work.
FIVE
I parked my car in the usual place behind the office and climbed out into the sunshine. It was really doing it today. Even the mossy backs of these ancient St. Andrew Street buildings looked like they were giving up the last ounces of a century’s accumulated moisture to those perpendicular rays. On my way up the sloping alley, I saw weeds trying to make a go of it against the brick wall of the Standard Bank Building. The weeds would be more successful than the bank. It closed down before I was born.
The glare on the pavement made me squint as I opened the outside door to the office. I tried to imagine the street with a rampart of snow over the curbs and ice on the sidewalk I should complain to the janitor about. It didn’t stop the sweat from running down the inside of my shirt. The hall and the stairs to the office were cooler. Old buildings, I thought, as I unlocked my door.
I went through my mail without finding anything of interest, then got busy on the telephone. Pete Staziak couldn’t let me have the key to Larry Geller’s Queen Street office. It wasn’t right for the public cops to go around helping out the private cops even though, as I pointed out to him over the telephone, the private sector had once or twice …
“Don’t give me any of that nail polish, Benny. When have you done anything for me when it didn’t get you off some hook or other? You’re like that goddamned bird that cleans out the teeth of the mud-loving crocks in the bayou down south. Show me once where what you did for me and Savas …”
“I told you about Kogan, didn’t I?”
“Big deal, so we pull a drunk out of a doorway so he doesn’t freeze to death. Besides it was your doorway he was freezing in, wasn’t it?”
“It was next door. Okay, I’ll bother Geller’s wife for a key, knowing how much you’d love to get me on a B and E.”
“Ah, now you’re talking. You could loid the lock, set off the alarm and we could waltz around all night together. You know Rose Craig?”
“Never heard of her.”
“Geller’s secretary. She’s got keys. What’s more she’s still trying to deal with the traffic in there. Which means she has more guts than brains, if you ask me. I don’t see any harm in you snooping around there, as long as I don’t have to wait until Christmas to find out if you discovered anything.”
“You’re always the first to know, Pete.”
“Only when Shelley’s pregnant, Benny. With you, I’m always playing guessing games. I’m at the foot of your Must Be Told list. But I got faith in human nature, that’s what I got. So, go to it. Go up there and uncover all the clues we poor working stiffs have overlooked because of our superficial and hidebound ways.”