“Well, you can’t make a separate peace with them. We’re all drinking out of the same trough. Same trough Webster was drinking from. I’ll bet Kinross sent a big wreath to the funeral. They’ll do as much for you.” I let him think about that for a moment, while I went back over the list of questions I had stored in my head. When I found a new line of inquiry, I interrupted his drinking again. “The fort’s only been available for a year and a few months. What did you do before that?”
“There was the old Hydro fill near Niagara Falls. That landfill is full of stuff. There’s another twenty or thirty drums under the ornamental floral clock on the Niagara Parkway. The place is dotted with dumping sites. You want me to draw you a map?”
“Why are the hands of the clock in the Kinross yard?”
“A truck from Sangallo left it there. Sangallo has been keeping the damn thing going for the tourists to see.”
“I get it. You even have to set out the plants and water them.”
“That’s Sangallo. We don’t want strangers digging under the petunias, if you know what I mean.” We were steadily progressing through the beer on the table. He was doing better than I was, and I was reaping the rewards.
“Tell me about Sangallo,” I asked, picking up my third glass. “I know the head man’s Harold Grier.”
“Yeah, Grier is the front man all right, but there’s somebody else.”
“Like who?”
“I don’t know, but I get the feeling-it’s just a feeling-that Grier’s fronting for-maybe it’s the mob, I don’t know. What I’m saying is that Grier may sign the cheques, but I think there’s somebody standing behind his chair.”
“You mean like Phidias is behind Kinross?”
“Naw, that’s all in the open. This is more secret like.”
“So you mean that this other element is working at the fort too?”
“I thought you were listening. Sangallo is the whole show in Niagara-on-the-Lake. We just drive and deliver.”
“I thought Sangallo did historical restorations.”
“Yeah, like an iceberg floats on the top of the water without blue ice underneath going down maybe a couple of hundred feet.” O’Mara wiped his mouth on the cuff of his right sleeve and, at the same time, shifted his haunches. “I’ve got to get rid of some of this beer,” he said getting up. “You want chips when I come back, Mr. Cooperman?” His chair squawked against the tile floor and I watched him weave his way through the clutter of tables to the john at the far end of the room.
He was still holding things back, O’Mara, but he had moved his lines of defendable territory from our earlier talk. If he would help, maybe the Jack Dowden case could be reopened. If he wouldn’t come forward himself to be a witness, at least he might be able to point me in the right direction so I could find some proof myself.
The balance of the beer on the red-topped Formica was now tipped in favour of the empty glasses. The waiter danced over, removed the empties and without asking replaced them with amber reinforcements. I put a few bills in the waiter’s hand and he dipped into his apron for some change. When I gave him a tip, it was pocketed silently.
O’Mara was taking his time in the men’s room. I’d noticed other renters of the Harding House beer going to and coming from the toilet, some of them ignoring the suggestion of the management that clothing should be adjusted before leaving the room with all the porcelain fixtures. At last, I got up and walked between the tables myself. I was developing a need of my own, but it was less than serious. Mainly, I was beginning to worry about my friend O’Mara.
He wasn’t in the john. He wasn’t standing at either of the urinals, and the only occupied cubicle produced a stranger after I waited two minutes. O’Mara was gone.
NINETEEN
There were only two things that could have happened. Either he had got tired of our conversation and gone through the back door to return home to Junkin Street, or he had been taken out of the Harding House by people who didn’t like him talking to me. I looked around the floor of the toilet without finding anything that suggested one theory over the other. I followed his probable route out of the john and into the small parking lot. Not even the alley cats were moving. I caught just a cold whiff of the usual night smells of Grantham: papermills and beer from the exhausted air of the pub. I went back to my table and sat for ten minutes in case he sent a message. I was worried for O’Mara, but not nervous for myself. I didn’t think the heavies from Kinross, or wherever they came from, would start anything in the crowded beverage room. I might have been right, because the only company I had was my own.
In the end I abandoned the last of the glasses of draft beer on the table and left the pub through the front door, the one that faced the old courthouse. It had recently been turned into a maze of boutiques. I honestly didn’t know what to do. A phonecall to the O’Mara house in a few minutes would tell me if Brian had got tired and wandered home. It would also tell me if he was still out and unaccounted for. I didn’t relish being the messenger with the news that he might not be getting home for some time. I didn’t want to face Dora and tell her her instincts about keeping quiet were well founded.
I was saved from further speculation of this kind by, first, a vague feeling that suddenly O’Mara wasn’t the only person I should be feeling sorry for, and second, pressure in the small of my back that only in the movies turns out to be the stem of a pipe.
“Keep walking,” ordered a voice behind me. At the same moment my arms were grabbed tightly. My arms were held tightly and close to my body so I couldn’t turn around. I tried, but was tugged back so that I was facing the street. The former courthouse saw what was going on but did nothing, having lost the power to preserve the peace when it was transformed into all those boutiques and shoppes. Of course James Street was deserted.
There were two of them. The one on my right arm was taller than the other, judging from the height of his grip on my arm. He was holding the gun, or pipe, or corner of a box of chocolates in his left hand. I wondered whether I had the courage to call out. I tried, but nothing happened. If I made a sound, it was swallowed up by the din from the Harding House. The emptiness of the street, an emptiness I haven’t seen this side of midnight since I first started staying up late, daunted me, froze my vocal chords. Whatever was pressed into my back, I knew it could go off, leaving the field of private investigations in Grantham open to my chief rival. Right now, Howard Dover could have all my clients. I’d throw in Irma Dowden for nothing.
I don’t know why I was thinking like this, none of it had much to do with getting me moved quickly around the corner and into King Street, where a dark green Toyota was idling at the curb. Here the noise from the Harding House was more mocking than ever. The back door was ajar. The man on my left arm opened the convenient right-hand, rear door of the car and shoved me inside. The man with the gun slid in after me, while the first guy got in on the far side. By now I had seen their faces. They were new to me. I didn’t like that. Hired heavies from out of town.
“I hope you know that I’m being followed,” I said, ad libbing my part as I went along. “I’m going to be missed faster than you figured.” The driver pulled away from the curb and joined the sparse one-way traffic moving towards Ontario Street. That was the only response to what I’d said. On each side of me, my two captors looked straight ahead and said nothing. “Well, I hope you know what you’re doing. There are people who will come looking for me.” I got no rise out of either of them. The driver turned right at Ontario, signalling the turn like a good citizen.
The hood on my right was the taller of the two, as I’d suspected. He was just over six feet, with no neck, and shoulders that could have earned him a football scholarship almost anywhere. His bland face, showing smallish eyes and an unbroken nose, was impassive. The man on the other side was smaller, narrower, with dark eyes deep-set on either side of a thin hooked nose. He was losing his hair early. What remained was spread to disguise the fact. Of the driver, all I saw was a big head and neck that didn’t get smaller as it disappeared into his blue bomber jacket.