“Boy, you’ve had your little people out beating the bushes, haven’t you?” Chris eyes were not crinkling at the corners showing signs of laughter and humour. I changed tactics. “Nothing mysterious in my breaking bread with Forbes. He wanted me to do a job for him. Nothing to do with Kinross or Phidias. I turned him down.”
“Why?”
“Conflict.”
“You mean scruples, Benny?”
“I mean conflict of interests. I’m already working in that area, and Forbes is one of the people I’ve got my eye on.”
“Well, you’ll save expenses on him from now on.”
“What do you mean?” Peter grinned at Savas and waited for him to enlighten me.
“I just had Forbes arrested,” Chris said.
“Ross Forbes? For the murder of his father? You’ve got to be pulling my leg!”
“Let’s not get technical. I’m telling you he’s been arrested. Right now, as a matter of fact, he’s cooling his heels in the lockup.”
“Chris, you can’t believe that he’d kill his old man. They’ve hated one another too long for it to end this way.”
“Well, read the paper when it comes out. He was the last person to talk to the Commander. He even admits it. Says they had a little chat in the sauna in the afternoon. Of course the way he tells it, they were getting along better than ever. Benny, he was seen at the club, seen on his way to and coming from the sauna as he went through the changing room.”
“You didn’t book him for just being in the club at the same time, Chris. Now did you? Damn it, the old man was slow-roasted in that sauna for so long that the best bet you have of getting the time of death is by checking the date on the newspaper he was reading. All you know is that he was killed some time, maybe hours, before he was found.”
“We’ve got the gun.” That stopped me.
“Oh?”
“It came from the Commander’s collection. Ross had access.”
“Sure, and so did the rest of the family, I’ll bet. Come on, Chris. Has he confessed or what?”
“No, he’s stonewalling us, but he’ll talk in the end.”
“Why do you think he did it?”
“The old man was trying to bump him out of the family business. After the wedding, Norman Caine would become top dog at the next board meeting on Monday.”
“You think he killed Pásztory too?”
“We’re still working on that. We’ll drop you a line if we link them up. Right now, according to Pete, Pásztory was snuffed by professionals from out of town.”
“You’re repeating yourself. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard about Jack Dowden?”
“Dowden? Doesn’t ring any bells with me,” said Savas, looking over at Pete who was dredging into his memory and almost but not quite remembering.
“Come on, Benny, this isn’t a TV quiz show. There are no prizes for the right answer.” I started to remind them and it was Pete who remembered the rest of the story. Between the two of us we filled Savas in.
“So, you’re saying that this accident was maybe not an accident?”
“Chris, if you stand in front of me and I run you down with my Freightliner, I will pulverize your lower back and pelvic area. Dowden’s chest was crushed. So, he was on his knees when he was hit. Witnesses have been paid off and have left town. Another one, O’Mara, was the object of a snatch on Thursday night. He told me that they saw nothing of the accident in spite of what they told the coroner.”
“A minute ago you were going to bat for Ross Forbes. Now you’re trying to stick two more bodies on him. What’s going on?”
“I’m not saying Ross didn’t do them all in. All I’m saying is that the picture is bigger than the one you were looking at in the club last night. It has to include Dowden and Pásztory. By the way, Pásztory was in Chet Bryant’s office looking up the facts on the Dowden case. He read the coroner’s report. Does that tie things more tightly together for you?”
“That ties Pásztory to Dowden. How does it put them closer to Ross Forbes? He was top dog at Phidias not Kinross. Maybe we should be talking to Norman Caine.”
“I don’t care whom you talk to-”
“You catch that ‘whom,’ Pete? Very pretty. That Anna of yours is sure a classy woman, Benny.”
“I’ve been talking English all my life. Get off my back, Chris!” That came out a little more forcefully than I’d intended. I shot Pete a grin to show I was only fooling, and that reminded me of something. “Pete, Ross Forbes told me that he has noticed a tail on him. You know anything about that?” Pete rubbed the back of his neck, like he’d just got out of a car after a long trip. It gave him time to think of what he could afford to tell me.
“Look, Benny, without the charges from yesterday, Forbes has a full plate. There’s an investigation going on into the improprieties that Alex Pásztory revealed last spring. As Chief Executive Officer of Phidias Manufacturing and former CEO of Kinross, there is a lot he’s responsible for. There are people who want to know who he sees and whether he is buying any airline tickets, especially the one-way kind. That’s about as far as I can go right now.”
Chris acknowledged Pete’s balance of candour and tact with a nod of his meaty head. “Whom did you think was following him, Benny?” he said. I ignored the “whom” which was aimed at my liver. From there on the conversation degenerated even further. I could see that Savas was proud of himself for pinning the Commander’s death on Ross so quickly. I didn’t blame him for that. Sometimes you can work for months without getting a break. He was lucky on this one and he knew it. The only other fact I learned from them was about the murder weapon:
“We found it in one of those big washing machines that do all those towels and robes at the club. Only one chamber fired, the rest all full. It was a thirty-two with a snub nose. Tidy little fellow. And it was registered to the dead man. How do you like them roses?”
“I give you top marks. Especially if you found a towel or robe with powder burns on it in the same machine. Since nobody heard the shot, the piece must have been wrapped up in a towel or something. But, then, you know all that.”
“Sure,” Chris said, with a glance at Pete.
“What about the slug that killed Pásztory, Pete? Was that another small-calibre piece?”
“It was a thirty-two all right, but-”
“But you haven’t made a comparison.” I shrugged and let out a full breath, just enough to give the impression that the boys in the lab were short-changing my pals.
“You don’t buy Pete’s theory that this was a professional job?” Chris asked.
“I’m not saying one thing nor the other. It doesn’t hurt to check these things out. That’s all I’m saying. Like, for instance, did you check out Paul Renner from City Hall or the other brother-in-law, Harold Grier? Where were they at sauna-time?”
“Grier’s clean as far as we call tell, except for some shady friends. And Renner’s not all that swift in the brain department.”
“Yeah,” Pete added, “if he had a cocaine habit, he’s the sort of guy’d try to snort it off a bathroom mirror. You know what I mean?”
“How smart do you have to be to use a thirty-two?” I asked. That put an end temporarily to Pete’s enjoying himself.
Chris finished his coffee with a flourish and shot Pete a grin I couldn’t interpret. Maybe it had something to do with their having killed a quarter of an hour ribbing me about the cases. They enjoyed making me feel like I was a cop-shop groupie who liked having cops call him by his first name. I finished off the last of my cup-it was cold-and smiled back at them. They got up and slipped back into their coats. When they left me, I felt like I could use a shower, even though I’d started the day with one. As for Chris Savas, he was ready for another eight hours of work.
When the Beacon came out that afternoon, the murder of Commander Murdo Forbes and the arrest of his son were front-page items. What shocked me, however, was something that I don’t think either Pete or Chris knew at the time they were talking to me in the Di. Old Mrs. Forbes, Biddy, the widow of the Commander, had had a stroke on hearing that Ross had been detained at Niagara Regional Police Headquarters. She was in intensive care at the Grantham General.