“Well …” I knew that if I asked him if one of them was watching him at the moment and he indicated the old geezer with the white moustache or somebody hiding in the leafless bushes outside the window, I’d be hooked. In sifting for information, you always run the risk of getting in too far or too deeply. Having a look at one of the faces Forbes was afraid of would have made it difficult to walk out of the club digesting a good lunch but still my own man. “Well …”
“I’ll pay top dollar, Cooperman. You won’t regret this.”
“Look, I could use the money. I won’t lie to you,” I said. “But it could complicate my life so that I wouldn’t know where I was.” Forbes was beginning to cloud over, as though a storm were coming up over the top of that continuous eyebrow. “I’ll tell you something, Mr. Forbes. I’ve discovered that I have a tendency to try to take the muddle out of my clients’ affairs. When they come to me, you wouldn’t believe it, the mess they’re in. I’d like to help you too, but when I say I can’t, that’s what I mean. Now that’s frank and honest as of this Friday afternoon. When next Wednesday comes and I’m cursing myself for talking to you like this, maybe I’ll call you to say I’ve changed my mind. That’s all I can do for you. In the meantime, if I see anybody following you and I can get a line on them, I’ll let you know. As long as I’m not going to get my knees broken or come to a bad end in the harbour at Port Richmond.” I watched his face when I mentioned Port Richmond but while it was growing angry, it didn’t twig to my hint about Thursday night.
“They told me you’d be difficult!” Here he physically grabbed the passing waiter by the arm. “Joe, I want you to clean these places and bring coffee right away, please. We don’t want dessert.” He could have asked, but in his mood I decided not to press him. I looked slowly around the room to see if I could spot anybody out of place. I came up empty, and returning my eyes to Ross Forbes, I was glad to see that he was controlling his temper.
TWENTY-ONE
The bill finally came and Forbes entered into a mild but firm argument with the waiter. I pretended that I was above such small disputes. Was this the way people got rich, questioning whether the rolls were included with the special or not? I’ll never figure it out.
I left my cigarettes in my pocket, since I thought that Forbes, the spoiled brat, was going to get up and go once it was clear that he was not going to get his way with me. But before he could look at his watch and say “Well …” a face hovered to the right of my host. “Ross! Well, I shouldn’t be surprised,” he said. It was a youngish-looking middle-aged man with a mop of grey hair and a pointed nose. The impression of youth was abetted by the turtleneck shirt he was wearing under a light topcoat of non-animal origins. He looked like a man who was listening when the whisper went up around the swimming pooclass="underline" “Plastics!”
“Harold, the brother-in-law,” Ross explained to me, then completed the introduction giving a hurried, perhaps scanty, description of my present function in the head office of Phidias Manufacturing.
“Yes, I’d heard something about that. Tax people breathing down Teddie’s décolletage, eh? Wouldn’t mind a look myself. Into her books, I mean. Thought you had me there, eh, Ross?” Harold Grier’s face looked as pained as his attempt at humour. I tried to place him. Grier was the brother of Forbes’s present wife and connected by marriage with the man at City Hall who handled the toxic wastes contracts for the city. He also was the head man at Sangallo Restorations. I could now see why he was wearing that expression. The last time bodies were found in one of his restorations they dated from the War of 1812. Not so Alex Pásztory unfortunately.
“I wonder if I could have a minute, Ross? Hate to break up the party.”
“You’ll excuse me, Cooperman?” Forbes said with another trace of a sneer in his voice. What did he think I’d say? I didn’t bother saying anything as a matter of record and Ross got up and went into the lobby outside the restaurant’s front door. I took out my cigarette after all. Once lighted, it began tasting like an old butt I’d rescued from the ashtray of the car. I wasn’t sorry to stub it out on the return of Grier and Forbes.
“We’ll see you tonight, Harold,” Forbes said. “And stop worrying about your friend from the Falls.”
“He’s our friend, Ross! Don’t ever forget that. This is no time to distance yourself from reality. What time is this thing called for tonight? Six or six-thirty?” Grier tried to cover the visible panic of his remark about the Niagara Falls friend with the question about the wedding rehearsal. Ross looked like he was running out of patience. Not only had he bombed out with me, his business arrangements looked like they were in trouble. As far as Grier was concerned, from the look on his face, he seemed to be reacting badly to Ross’s hands-off policy. This was not the moment for greater autonomy for the subsidiaries.
“It’s called for six-fifteen, but I should think that six-thirty will see you all right.”
“Good. You’d better hustle if you’re going to see Paul.”
“I’ll look after it, Harold.”
“Better hustle. No time to be wasted.”
“I hear you. See you tonight.” This last was a curt dismissal directed at an underling. You had to hand it to Forbes. He sure knew how to assume the right face for the moment. Only his temper got the better of him. He couldn’t hide his displeasure. In his place that was a major liability. While I watched Harold Grier leave the restaurant, I wondered who the friend from the Falls might be. Paul was easy; Paul Renner from City Hall. Probably an attempt to cool out the authorities in their investigation of the fort murder. What did I know about Niagara Falls? Not much.
“Come on, Cooperman,” said Forbes, wiping his mouth on his napkin although he hadn’t eaten anything in nearly ten minutes. “I’ll show you around. Do you know the club at all?”
“Only by repute. My father’s a member. He haunts the card room.”
“Oh, you’re that Cooperman, are you? I think my father’s lost a lot of money to him over the years. Gin rummy’s the game, right?”
I nodded as we got up. I followed Forbes out of the dining-room. My father had often been a guest at the club during the years when I was growing up. He joined as soon as the restrictive membership practices of the past had been done away with. For a few years he was the man to beat in the card room. A gin rummy tournament was even set up and named in his honour. They called Pa The Hammer and the annual competition of that name was one of the indoor attractions of the long winter.
Forbes walked along the halls of the club, showing me racquet-ball courts and gyms, one full of women, accompanied by their babies, doing post-natal exercises. He was beginning a cook’s tour of the facilities. Was this for my benefit, or was he working off the pique he had taken to his brother-in-law’s urgent request to hustle downtown to City Hall. With a skeletal running commentary, he led me room to room. “This room is dedicated to the cue and the ivory ball,” he said. The light above the green baize tabletop seemed to conjure up the ghosts of elderly men with stiff white fronts and tepid drinks resting on the edges of the tables.
“Through here,” he said, and we were again back in a central corridor, walking past a little man selling tickets for plump blue robes and towels. Forbes was greeted by name and the compliment was returned.
We went through a door and I was suddenly hit by that locker-room smell that took me back to high school. Even with fancy yearly membership fees and a stiff initiation fee, the locker-room was no rose garden. Men in the buff and semi-buff took no notice as we made our way through to the showers. Here I recognized a former member of a wining water-polo team standing on an old-fashioned scale getting his soaking-wet weight. From the showers we went on to the entrance to the pool area. My attention was caught by a sign on a door just next to the door leading to the pooclass="underline"