Whoever did Jack Dowden’s last tax return had forgotten about or never knew about this box of credit-card receipts. Most of them were from oil companies. Following a paper trail was like old times again. I must have followed hundreds of them when I was in the divorce business. I started putting the flimsies in piles according to oil companies and locations to see what kind of pattern would show through. There were a few fill-ups in distant places like Tarrytown, New York, and Springfield, Massachusetts. There were a couple from as far west as Dryden and Kenora, Ontario. I inspected the bunch from places in Grantham. Nothing odd about them. I used some of the same service stations myself. What surprised me were the receipts from Niagara-on-the-Lake. Niagaraon-the-Lake isn’t on the road to anywhere except Niagara-on-the-Lake. Unless Dowden was meeting a boat, and I doubted that, Niagara was the end of the line. What was the attraction, I wondered.
I was still dreaming over Jack Dowden’s shoebox, when the phone rang. It was too late for business, so I answered hoping for personal. It was Anna, the particular personal caller I was hoping to hear from.
“Hi, Benny. You really work for your money in your racket. It’s late!”
“I’ve been busier. I just got back from Martha Tracy’s.” I filled Anna in on the beer, pizza and conversation. I added: “Martha’s a fan of yours. She thinks I could learn about fish forks from you. What’s to know about fish forks?”
“She still looks out for you, doesn’t she?” Anna said. “As for fish forks, I’m sure Martha knows as much about them as I do. I eat mussels with my fingers,” she said, making slurping sounds. “Hey, Benny, when do you let your operatives make their reports?”
“What do you have, H21? I’ll take it down in invisible ink. No, I’ll have to settle for invisible crayon.”
“I found out that the person looking into the history of Kinross Disposals is the guy who writes about the environment in the Beacon, Alexander Pastor. He’s with Environment Front.”
“I should have guessed.”
“Thanks a lot! Next time you can do your own digging.”
“Sorry, Anna. It’s just that I saw him today for a few minutes. It makes sense that it should have been Alex.”
“What’s my next assignment?”
“Get some sleep. That’s what I’m going to do. All play and no work, you know. We should go to the movies again soon, okay?”
“There’s the weekend.”
“You’ve got that wedding.”
“That’s next weekend! Benny, you never listen. How do you stay in business?”
“That’s part of the secret. Good-night, Anna.”
I hung up and reached for my map of the area. Unfolding it over the desk blotter, I found the village. There was Niagara-on-the-Lake on the way to nowhere for a truck loaded with dioxins and PCBs. No bridge over the mouth of the Niagara River. Was the truck headed up the Niagara Parkway to a favourite dumping place? Was O’Mara going to speed up or retard the time on the floral clock with a watering of choice poisons? The map wasn’t passing on any answers so I pulled out the dictionary instead. I flipped through to the end where the abbreviations were kept. I was worried about the term Alex Pásztory had used on me: AV it was. What was an AV anyway? The dictionary let me down like the map. Unless Alex was talking about paying a visit to the Authorized Version or the Artillery Volunteers. There were some Latin things too but they didn’t fit either. I tried to recapture my former line of thought, but Anna’s voice kept running through my head. After another minute, I put the still unlighted cigarette I’d been holding in my mouth back in the package again and turned out the lights.
On my way through the door, the light from the hall hit something white in my mail slot. Another handbill? I reached for it. It was a folded sheet of letter-size paper with a photocopied piece of fancy calligraphy. It was a familiar quotation, I’d seen it a dozen times. It may have been a final examination that calligraphers have to write in order to get their masters’ papers. It began:
DesiderataGo placidly amid the noise and haste and remember what peace there may be in silence …
The quotation went on and on. The part I’ve quoted had been underlined with red ballpoint. What was going on here? Was this somebody’s idea of a warning for me to keep my mouth shut? Whatever happened to notes made out of letters clipped from newspapers and magazines? If I wasn’t giving way to a persecution mania, I was standing in the way of a very classy type of goon. I shut the door behind me and reflected upon the virtues of silence as I went down the stairs.
TEN
I got up late. I’d been dreaming about Anna, Irma Dowden, Brian O’Mara and me going for a picnic to Niagara-on-the-Lake. We were being followed by an empty picnic hamper. In the end all we could find to eat was fudge. I tried to finish off the dream in the shower, give it a happy ending, but after the first minute of sweet-toothed joy, the dream became a glucose nightmare. The ringing of the telephone, as usual, ended the shower.
“Cooperman. Hello?”
“Benny! I only half-thought I’d find you there. But there was no answer at your office.” It was Teddie Forbes.
“’Morning, Teddie. What time is it?”
“I never wear a watch,” she said. I don’t know why I asked. “Benny, I’m sorry I didn’t call yesterday, but I’ve been hung over since Tuesday when some guy got me loaded in The Snug. The reference went over my head. At first I didn’t think her drinking had anything to do with me. Then I remembered her three martinis. I apologized to her.
“It was your fault. I’m not used to it any more. And there was somebody at the table I couldn’t completely trust after I got started. I don’t mean you, Benny.”
“That’s all very flattering, Teddie. What’s it going to cost me?”
“Is that the thanks I get? I’ve been in conference with Jim Colling since sun-up, as we say down in Arizona, and you don’t even want to hear what we came up with.” Jim Colling was Teddie’s lawyer, a smooth, intelligent man, with tiny corn-kernel teeth. He’d steered Teddie’s divorce into the big numbers.
“Okay, astonish me. What did you two think up?”
“Meet us at the Di right away.”
“Make it twenty minutes and you’ve got a deal. I have to put some clothes on.”
“Right, you make yourself presentable, then hurry to the Di.”
“What kind of lawyer is Colling anyway he can afford to put a hole in his morning? There aren’t many Grantham lawyers who step out of their offices for under five hundred dollars.”
“Jim has a score to settle with Ross, too.”
“Hey, Teddie, I don’t want to get in over my head! I try to keep things simple and as honest as I can afford to be.” Teddie laughed into the phone.
“Just make it snappy,” she said. “See you in twenty minutes.”
“Yeah,” I said, wondering if I had any clean socks.
There was an eddy of wind blowing dust and chewing-gum wrappers into a minor disturbance outside the apartment when I stepped out into the sunlight nearly half an hour later. I caught some of it in my left eye. It was still bothering me when I entered the Di, which is short for Diana Sweets. Gus, the counterman, paused with his chopping knife held above his sliced olives, and smiled as I walked past him looking for Teddie. I spotted them with my good eye, half-way down the aisle on the right side. They looked buoyant.
“Benny, what kept you? Aren’t you excited to know-? What did you do to your eye?” Teddie went from being generally excited and friendly to instant motherly concern in less than a second. She caught me under the chin and tilted my head up towards the suspended globes of light. “That’s dirt in there,” she said with emphasis that didn’t put me at ease. I handed her a wad of tissue from my pocket. She took it and dabbed at me with it, her long fingernails making a permanent impression in the back of my neck. “There!” she said at last, after scouring my cornea and holding up the tissue like a trophy of battle. “There, it’s out!”