“Help yourself.” Pete glanced around the room to see whether there were any spies from the NRP or any local peace officers in sight. The coast must have been clear, because he had the glass in his hand and returned to the table before I could take in the fact that he was breaking the rules. Of course, I only found the body. I didn’t have to stand by while it was being dug out of the tunnel. I didn’t have to scrub off Pásztory’s face so that the mud and clay wouldn’t get in the way of the Polaroid flash.
“Thanks,” Pete said. “That picture won’t be good enough to get a positive ID, but it will do until we can get to Environment Front’s office in the morning.” He was looking at my glass again, but keeping his hands clear. “Benny, if you were sniffing up the same tree as Pastor, I’d take a holiday. I’m not joking around. This was no case of manslaughter followed by a cover-up. This was murder in a neat, professional package.” He underlined what he was saying by holding onto my eyes with his while he was talking. “Is there anything more I should know about this?”
“Look, Pete, I don’t have anything but suspicions. By now, you’re going to have the same suspicions. I’ve been working on this file since Tuesday. So far I’ve only been doing research. I haven’t even met all the characters yet. I’ve been going sideways three steps and backwards two steps for every half-step I move forward. I haven’t been able to get very close. The only thing I know is that there is a lot of money involved. Maybe finding Pásztory will blow the lid off. Maybe it will all have to come out into the open now.”
“Yeah, maybe getting himself killed like this is going to accomplish more than all those pieces for the paper and those damned letters to the editor. Funny, eh?”
“Yeah, funny.”
Pete and I talked for another ten minutes. I tried to quiz him about how Pásztory’s death, and more particularly where it had taken place, was going to be received downtown. Pete pulled his big head closer to his collar and shook his head. “Nobody’s going to thank me for tonight’s work, Benny. It opens the lid on a can of dead bait and I can already smell it all over town.”
“I thought you might say something like that. What are you going to do?”
“Hell, I’ll just write it up and treat it like any other homicide. In cases like this, you have to go through the book without skipping. If I skip a line, they’ll nail me and say it was all my fault. No, Benny, when I write this up, it’s going to be a model in procedure.”
We got up after I settled the check with Des. Staziak and I started for the door together, when Des called attention to a tangle of weeds adhering to Pete’s left trouser leg, above his muddy boots.
“You got some weeds wrapped around your cuff, sir!” Pete looked down, holding his leg at an awkward angle to see it better. I saw that a scrap of bindweed was making itself at home on his pant leg. With it, an old friend, I helped Pete remove the bindweed and the familiar long pods of Dame’s Rocket. It was a nice note on which to end the evening. I went home to bed.
FOURTEEN
The next morning, Friday, I had to get ready for a court appearance in Toronto. It had nothing to do with Kinross or Phidias and, as such, it was a welcome change for me. I enjoyed cleaning current work out of my briefcase and filling it with Fermor vs Tutunjian. The Queen Elizabeth Way was crowded, but traffic moved steadily until the beginning of the Gardiner Expressway, where cement baffles reduced the number of lanes temporarily. In going over the bumpy bridge across the Humber, I got a good look at the CN Tower. It set a challenging mark for developers to shoot at. The tower seemed to be saying, “I dare you!’ to the powers within the Queen City. There was a new bridge over the railway lands at Spadina. From here I got a good view of the SkyDome, the fancy new stadium with its retractable roof. It spread an impressive curve over the vanished shunting yards that used to separate the waterfront from the rest of the city. The Dome, according to the papers, has displaced the centre of gravity in the city southward, making a serious traffic problem possible. For instance, I nearly had to mortgage my Olds to get a parking space within an easy hike of the Provincial Court Building across from Osgoode Hall. At least that historic site hadn’t been turned into a parking lot. It still looked like the calmest place in town with its Greek columns and the expanse of lawn surrounded by a high ornamental iron fence. I caught a glimpse of the wide, ornate gates, which had been built to keep cattle from wandering into the precincts of the courthouse in the middle years of the last century. It was hard to imagine that as I looked for a way to cross Queen Street.
While I was waiting to do my bit in the case of Fermor vs Tutunjian, I put in a call to the Royal Archaeological Museum of Ontario and had a brief chat with the head of the North American section, a Dr. Walter Graves. From him I learned that the man in charge of the Niagara-onthe-Lake dig was Dr. John Roppa. From Roppa I heard that there hadn’t been any archaeological work going on at the fort since a week after Labour Day. All of the digging, he told me, was confined to small sites near the wall of the fort proper and a narrow trench on the west side (which I had missed). When I asked him about the large-scale earth-moving equipment, he said that that had to do with Sangallo’s restoration of the earthworks. “That’s tourism,” he said. “It’s only of marginal interest to us in that Sangallo will be following plans that were discovered at Fort York in Toronto.”
“Is that right?” I responded, hoping I was priming him for further disclosures.
“Perhaps you’ve heard of the Ridout Papers, Mr. Cooperman? The plans were found among them, undisturbed for the past-”
“I’d like to hear about that sometime, Dr. Roppa. I really would.”
“Yes, well I was looking through my log-book only yesterday and found-”
“Dr. Roppa do you keep a daily log on all your jobs?”
“Oh, yes. In fact the Ridout papers came to light when-”
“And that includes the dig at Fort Mississauga?”
“It’s normal procedure. If we didn’t we’d quickly lose track of where we were. You see-”
“Excuse me, Doctor, but I wonder if you could look something up for me. I’m looking for a break in the routine at the fort, an unusual event, a departure, something like that about fifteen months ago.”
“I see,” he said, drawing out the vowel as he thought. “That would have been fairly soon after we started. Hmmmm.”
“Dr. Roppa, I didn’t mean you should look it up right now. I don’t expect you have your logs sitting right in front of you. Even I’m not that organized. But, if you could give me a call-” Now it was his opportunity to interrupt me.
“Oh, Mr. Cooperman, I’m a great believer in staying on top of things. You can’t let things get out of hand, you know. Look what happened to Schlieman at Hissarlik!” I didn’t catch his allusion, but I got the sense of it.
“Dr. Roppa, I don’t expect that you’ll be able to-” Again he chopped me off with enthusiasm.
“I am looking at the logs of twenty-three years in the field as I’m talking to you. A year and a quarter ago, let’s see, a break in the daily routine. Let’s see …” This was followed by a silence that was punctuated from time to time with remarks the doctor was addressing to his own thought processes and not to me. They were grunts that ran from deep in the bass clef to squeals high in the treble upon discovering half-forgotten treasures. “I don’t seem to be doing very well, Mr. Cooperman. Nothing in the spring that was out of the normal routine. But, I’ll keep trying.”
“No need to take time, right now, Dr. Roppa. I understand that you’re a busy man and-”
“Who told you that, I wonder? Oh, just a minute! Here’s something! But you wouldn’t call that a break in the routine probably.”
“What was it?”
“Here’s a reference to a visit by the head man. Yes, I remember now, fine old gentleman it was.”