“Well, now, Cooperman, I hope that we can both agree that the past is dead and buried?”
“I’m on your side there,” I said. “No sense keeping a feud alive.”
“Exactly! So, the less said about our scuffle downtown, the better.”
“It was outside your office at Kinross Disposals. But, sure, no hard feelings. I was just doing my job; you were just repelling trespassers.”
“Glad you see it in that light.” He let his eyes drop to the menu that lay across his plate, and curled his lower lip in thought. “The curry looks good,” he said at length. The thought of strange pieces of meat in a pale greeny yellow sauce did nothing for my appetite. I scanned the menu looking for a friend. Where were the chopped-egg sandwiches hiding? My eyes went down one column and up the next. I couldn’t understand what half of the words meant. I wondered whether on a menu in France they might not think it’s chic to use English. I finally settled on the soup and pasta of the day and hoped for the best.
“Would you like some wine with that, sir?” the waiter asked, once he had written what he thought of me on his order pad.
“Not for me, thanks.”
“Mr. Forbes?”
“Bring a bottle of Perrier, Joe.”
“Right away, Mr. Forbes.”
Once the pale green bottle came and I found myself sipping what tasted like seltzer; it seemed that Forbes was going to get down to the reason for inviting me to lunch. Some people can put business off until coffee, others bring it up casually over the last part of the main course, but Ross Forbes was a man for the direct approach. Before I had even dipped into the basket of warmed Parker House rolls, he was at me.
“May I ask why you continue doing business for my ex-wife here in Grantham, Mr. Cooperman?” He held his glass as though he had had lots of practice holding glasses. I had been surprised about the mineral water. In fact I had been ready to trade him Scotch for Scotch well into the evening if I had to. But Perrier was a new direction.
“Let’s agree not to talk about Mrs. Forbes, okay? Either you’re going to say something you’ll regret or I will. Either way it will spoil the lunch. I’m surprised you aren’t wining and dining out-of-town company for the wedding, Mr. Forbes. Tomorrow’s the big day, isn’t it?”
“People are still arriving. I’ll stay clear until this evening. There’s a rehearsal.”
I nodded, keeping quiet about the fact that I would be there. I could see him trying to think of a new way to ask the question that was bugging him.
“Do you do a lot of income tax work, Cooperman?”
“When I can get it. It makes a change from waiting around for people to check out of the Black Duck Motel. Nowadays a lot of the work is going through credit-card receipts, telephone bills, that kind of thing. It’s not like in the movies.”
“I suppose not. I used to have a first edition of The Big Sleep,” he said. I wondered what he was thinking about when he talked like this. “Bought it from that book dealer, Martin Lyster, who you can never get hold of when you want him. Do you know him? A most lubricious fellow.”
“As a matter of fact, I heard he died this morning. It was not unexpected.”
“Well, sorry. Hope he wasn’t a particular friend of yours?”
“I don’t collect books, but I knew him slightly.” Forbes was handling the Perrier water pretty well. After the stories of his drinking (mostly retailed by Teddie), I was wondering what sort of new leaf he was showing off here. The waiter cleared away the soup cups. Mine had tasted of green cheese. I guess there are places where soup is made with green cheese. Now I know where to find it. “Is book collecting what you want to talk about, Mr. Forbes? It’s not something I know a lot about. And I guess it hasn’t much to do with why you’re buying me lunch.”
“How long will you be in McAuliffe’s office?”
“Couple of days more. I shouldn’t think I’ll still be there by this time next week. Today’s a short day and then we are into the weekend …”
“Will you be free by, say, next Wednesday?”
“I might be. Why?”
“I might have a job for you.”
“Me? Why me? I thought Howard Dover worked for you? Don’t tell me you hit him in the nose too?”
“I won’t say I’ve liked you much, Cooperman, but I know to my cost that you give value for money. Dover’s busy doing security for Phidias. What I want has nothing to do with the office.” This was going a little too fast for me. One minute I’m on the outside trying to find a peephole to the inside, then I’m shown the red carpet to the inner sanctum itself. I didn’t know whether to burst out laughing or to cry.
“What kind of job do you want me to do, Mr. Forbes?”
The curry and pasta arrived. Forbes was quick to dig into his, after complaining to the waiter that he did not want his salad served on the same plate. The dish was removed and returned a minute later without the offending salad, which arrived seconds later on a side dish. “There are parts of this town where they still bring you coffee with your main plate,” Forbes said. Did he see himself as a gourmet rolling back the clouds of local ignorance? I should have told him about the Di, where they’ve always treated me right. I held off eating, waving my fork over the pasta while this was going on. Finally we both dug in. “Do you think that you might be interested in what I’ve been talking about?”
“You still haven’t said what you want,” I said. “I’m always interested in making a living, Mr. Forbes, but I also try to keep things simple. I’m afraid I have a conflict that will make it impossible for me to do any work for you for the moment. But if it will keep-”
“Conflict? What do you mean conflict?” Forbes’s lower lip was distorting his face, lengthening out his upper lip and turning the end of his nose white.
“I’m involved in an investigation for your ex-wife.”
“And that will be cleared up by Wednesday, you said.”
“I said it might be. I’ve also got some other files in my office I have to do some work on. It isn’t easy being a one-man band, Mr. Forbes.”
“But you accomplish prodigious miracles I’ve been told,” he said with just the suggestion of a sneer.
“I don’t know about that. I do know that I would find it hard to work for you without knowing in detail what it is you want.”
“You want complete disclosure from me and you aren’t committing yourself to zilch!”
“You’ve got both my ears across the table from you,” I said. “I think the lunch just about pays for that. It also buys a measure of discretion. A PI who runs off at the mouth doesn’t stay in business long.”
“Okay, okay. Don’t bother to rationalize. I’ll come clean,” he said. “Isn’t that what they all say?”
“It’s up to you. Tell me about it or don’t. It’s your dime.”
“I’m being followed, Cooperman,” he said in a voice that was hardly above a whisper. “I don’t like it. There’s a car that’s always behind me. There are clicks on my telephone. There are people in hotel lobbies pretending to read newspapers who later turn up outside my office. Once I noticed the first man, it started preying on my mind. Now I can see that there are relays of people watching, listening and following me. Damn it, Cooperman, I don’t like it! I know I said that already but it’s got me that rattled.”
“Do you have any suspicions?”
“Oh, God! I don’t want to open that can of worms here. Let’s just say there are several possible sources.”
“Does it have anything to do with last spring’s stories about toxic wastes in fuel oil?”
“Well, that’s a better bet than no bet at all,” he said, removing a particularly stringy bit of beef from his mouth and placing it on his plate. He looked neither to the right to the left afterwards, which gave me another glimpse of his social assurance. “The bedfellows in that deal were not of my choosing. It might be one of them. I don’t know. What I want to know is: will you find out? I can’t look around without seeing one of those pale faces and cheap suits.”