“But I’m-”
“It’s important. There’s been an accident,” added the other usher. For a moment I thought I was going to get the old heave-ho for barging into a private party, but the word “accident” put another taste in my mouth.
“Accident?”
“You’d better come with us. Mr. Burgess is just outside.” The faces of my mother and father went through my head. Was this the introduction to a major family change? I saw my father slumped over the card table with a pair of aces and a pair of eights in his hand. I saw my mother … I squeezed my eyes shut and got to my feet. Reluctantly, and with a glance at my plate of roast beef and potatoes, I followed the ushers, feeling a little hot under the collar at the interruption. Unless it had something to do with me personally, I was just another guest here. My Red Cross first-aid training became obsolete with the triangular bandage. I was no doctor.
I didn’t recognize Burgess at first. He looked like a lot of other dumpy dark-haired men that sweat a lot. He had done in his jacket. The shirt under it was wet through so that I could see the weave of his underwear top. There were beads of sweat standing on his upper lip as he took my hand. “Mr. Cooperman, how are you? It’s been at least five years since I saw you.”
That’s when I remembered him. Burgess was Jim Burgess, who ran the YMCA on Queen Street when I met him in 1985. His wife wanted an agreement for a trial separation and he’d grown suspicious. He wanted me to check out the missus before he divided up the assets. As I remembered, Burgess’s instincts were dead on. His wife was seeing a schoolteacher on the side and helping him with the costumes for the grade six pageant. Among other things.
“How are you, Mr. Burgess? Good to see you again.”
“Oh, Mr. Cooperman, this is a terrible thing. Just terrible.” I was about to cluck my tongue in sympathy and read him my office hours, when he turned to the ushers and told them how well he knew me of old and what a wonderfully helpful fellow I was. There was no getting away from him. “As soon as I saw you come in tonight, I said to myself I was going to speak to you, never suspecting for a minute, of course …”
“Never suspecting what exactly?”
“Why this, naturally.” I was being drawn away from the door of the dining-room and pulled along a pale green corridor. “In the year and a half that I’ve been here, Mr. Cooperman, nothing like this has happened. He produced a large white handkerchief and began mopping his brow and neck. “Oh, we had accidents at the Y-I don’t mean we had a perfect slate-but never anything like this.”
“Like what?” I asked, trying to keep up with Burgess. “Give me a hint.” Burgess kept up the pace as we came into the athletic section of the club, where men and women in shorts and sweatbands passed us carrying racquets and calmly going in the other direction. Whatever it was, the accident had not disrupted normal activities yet.
“It’s just through here,” he said, as though that was an answer. He led us through the door leading to the men’s locker-room and shower. It looked like an old friend. I could see bodies in various stages of undress as we moved by the doorway, past the old-fashioned upright scale, then the automatic hot-air dryer and into the steaming shower room. The room was empty, but the grey tile walls were still dripping. From the shower room there was nowhere to go except through the door marked POOL or the door next to it. I recognized the notice that came down hard on reading in the sauna. One of the other ushers was posted outside this second door. As soon as he saw us, he stood aside, as the manager opened the door. I caught the room’s hot breath on my face as I tried to make out what it was that Burgess wanted me to see.
The sauna was walled and shelved with golden planks of softwood. A series of benches rose upward from the front, a set of miniature bleachers leading up to the hottest part of the room. On the top shelf in the corner sat the Commander, wrapped in a blue Turkish towel. In spite of the wrapping, most of the Commander lay pink and exposed. I wondered for a moment what sort of trouble he could have got into that wouldn’t allow him to leave the sauna. Moisture was still dripping from his face to the great folds of his body.
“What’s going on?” I asked Murdo Forbes. “Can’t we talk somewhere else?”
The Commander didn’t move. The eyes that had at first seemed to be focused on me were bent on the middle distance. The stillness tugged at my throat. I looked around at Burgess, who was right behind me. “Will you please tell me what’s going on?”
“But I thought they told you,” he said. “Just look!”
I looked at the Commander. At his feet I saw discarded pages of a sodden newspaper with the newsprint turning almost green in the heat and under this light. Was that what he was complaining about? The newspaper? “Damn it, Mr. Burgess, it’s not up to me to enforce your by-laws.”
“By-laws? I’m talking about the Commander.”
“The Commander,” I said in a whisper, “can buy and sell this club. I’d be careful if I were you.”
“Mr. Cooperman. You misunderstand. I think he’s dead.”
That knocked the air out of me. Could anything as round and rosy, so fat and hot, also be dead? I looked back up at him. He hadn’t moved since the door to the sauna was opened. I climbed up the benches to the top of the bleachers where the Commander sat, leaning into a corner. I felt his neck. It was warm and sweaty.
My first thought, if it can be called that, was that the old man was sleeping off a heavy meal or too much to drink. But I knew better. He had skipped lunch and hadn’t had anything to drink. I was about to turn to Burgess with this information when I saw the blood, partly hidden by the towel and already looking dark and sticky. I could see it. I moved some of the newspaper and was immediately sorry. Great gouts of gore had landed on the duck-boards at his feet. In spite of the healthy, reddish look, in spite of the warmth of the body, it was plain that the Commander, Murdo Forbes, was dead.
TWENTY-FOUR
As I waited for the cops to arrive, I thought of my plate of roast beef back in the General Brock Room. I was strangely able to think of it growing cold at the same time I was staring at the notice outside the sauna door. I couldn’t see any reason for keeping the heat on in there, but I never liked to tamper with things at the scene of a crime if I can help it, especially when there are witnesses hanging around.
Burgess, the club manager, had gone to inform the police, when I convinced him that this was a formality that couldn’t be overlooked. I sent one of the ushers, a twenty-five-year-old kid named Brant or Clint, back to the dining-room to make sure nobody left until the police said they could. He was a big kid, built like a football linebacker, and I knew that even Ross Forbes at his most bullish would think twice before crossing him. I checked my watch. Eight o’clock on the nose. It would be ten before even the optimist would predict we’d be clear of this mess. I was never that optimistic. Again I thought of the food.
It was my old friend and sometime antagonist Staff Sergeant Chris Savas who arrived to take charge of the investigation. Savas and I had run into one another on a few cases. I knew him to be a good cop. In spite of those cold, metallic eyes, he was honest and even imaginative for a heavy-duty policeman. He took in his information from the uniformed police already on the scene. He spoke for a few minutes to Burgess, whose arms moved in my direction, as though he was blaming me for not turning off the heat in the sauna. Savas looked over at me, but there was no sign in his face that we had eaten Greek food together or that he had shared a communal teabag in my mother’s living-room. This was business, and if there was an advantage to be had from keeping everybody in a unbroken straight line, he intended to reap it. I didn’t envy him the investigation into the death of a leading citizen. Wherever he walked there were toes to step on, and each of those little piggies came equipped with lawyers and access to the media. No wonder he didn’t look like he was going to enjoy himself.