I made a few calls and discovered that she was putting up a good fight, but that she was paralysed and had lost the ability to speak. I checked this out with my pal Dr. Lou Gelner, who explained that with time, she could expect to get over most of her physical encumbrances. But with a woman her age, there was always a chance of a later and more severe stroke killing her. With that bit of uplift, I turned to the office dictionary and looked up the word Ross Forbes had used at lunch the day before: lubricious. It had been at the back of my mind since he’d said it about poor Martin Lyster. Slippery, smooth, oily; lewd, wanton. Hell, it sounded more like Forbes than it did Martin. I slammed the dictionary shut and went back to the apartment.
I killed the next half-hour or so looking over the book I’d brought away with me from Irma Dowden’s house and the papers I’d taken from the basement files from Phidias’s head office. The book helped add to my skinny background in this area, the papers added specific information. What held my attention was the dispatcher’s log. It looked like any log that clocked cars and trucks in and out of a place. Then I noticed something odd:
NAME
IN
OUT
Dowden
6:00 A.M.
6:10 A.M.
O’Mara
7:00
11:00
Dowden
7:30
Dr. Carswell
7:40
7:50
Dr. Carswell
8:15
11:00
There were other names listed too, but these were the most familiar ones. What I couldn’t figure out was why did Carswell visit the yard twice. He stayed only ten minutes the first time, and the next time took him to the end of the police investigation by the look of it. I tucked the log in a corner of my head and left it there to see what the grey cells could do on their own.
That night, at seven, Anna and I went to the movies. There was a small repertory theatre that played old movies on St. Andrew Street above the Woman’s Bakery. Run by a part-time lecturer from Secord, it had its box office and aisles manned by his prize students. It was the sort of place where they made you feel like your fly was open if you asked for popcorn. The movie was Great Expectations. It was an old black-and-white post-war classic from England with a big scary scene in the first reel. Inevitably, after the show, we found ourselves at the Di, where they are soon going to start charging me rent. Anna asked:
“Well, how did you like it?”
“Great,” I said. I might have confessed that I could have done without all that rowing on the Thames.
“You dozed off!”
“I was carried away by a daydream,” I said. “I was wondering whether the English dumped toxic wastes into those bleak marshes where Pip lived.”
“You were snoring, Benny. I had to shake you!” Anna was in a good mood. “I thought you liked it.”
“I did. It didn’t make me mad the way modern movies do.”
“What makes you cross with them?” She was playing with me now, showing the gamine side of her her colleagues up at Secord knew nothing about. “Let’s hear about it.”
“I don’t like movies where they wreck a dozen vintage cars in a police chase. And I get mad at the way people in movies never have trouble finding a parking space. Even here in Grantham I can drive around the block a dozen times and not see an empty space, but in the movies, even in New York, the hero always finds a spot right away. In my experience, the only time I get a parking space near a restaurant I’m heading for is when it’s closed for Greek Easter or something.”
“You don’t really mean that?” She turned her head on the side, in order to see into my heart better. I could never argue decently with Anna sitting across from me. She had a way of exposing my illogical side. Without even trying, she could argue me into absurdity.
“Okay,” I said. “I don’t really believe it. Let’s just say that such has been my experience. That’s different.”
Anna was looking particularly fetching to me as she sipped her coffee. She was wearing an old sweater over a pink button-down shirt. The way she did it, it didn’t look preppy or fashionable. It wasn’t what they call today a “look”; it was just Anna being comfortable, and watching me squirm. That was the first thing I noticed about her when I met her last year, a brattish quality that is always trying to see how much it can get away with. When she tried that one on, as she still did, she seemed about sixteen. She was now studying my face, like she wanted to sculpt it. She was making it all the more difficult for me to justify the position I’d taken. And she knew it.
“In my business,” I said, trying to sound like sweet reason itself, “-and probably in yours-you learn to check the odds of some things turning out the way they do. If it works one way once, then there are odds for and against it working out that way next time.”
“Are you saying that lightning doesn’t strike in the same place twice?”
“Maybe I am.”
“Maybe in legend and aphorism lightning doesn’t strike twice, but in meteorology it happens all the time. The CN Tower in Toronto, the Empire State Building in New-”
“Okay, then let’s stick to legend. Like that old movie on that poster in the lobby: Mutiny on the Bounty. What are the chances of a situation like that happening again?”
“You don’t want to know the answer to that.”
“Wrong example?”
“Uh-huh. Did you think Captain Bligh was going to change his spots? Was it likely he was going to learn a lesson from the Bounty?” There was a nice glow in her cheeks now as she leaned towards me. I could smell her perfume, but I kept on listening. “People act according to the way they are. Bligh was a martinet. He thought he had to drive his men with fear to get an honest day’s work out of them. The Admiralty said-in the movie-I haven’t looked up the history-that it was an excess of zeal on the captain’s part.” Anna was really going now, and I loved to listen. “Well,” she continued, “zeal was part of his character. It was excessive on the Bounty in the South Seas, on the Nore in the Thames Estuary and again still later in New South Wales in Australia. You must have seen that in your work, Benny?”
“Sure,” I said. “Some people can hide their motives for a while, but it’s what they do that comes out and damns them. It’s no trick to talk like a saint. My job is to get under that to what they’ve done.”
The talk went on and on while we had another refill of coffee, and I was getting a big kick out of it. In the back of my mind I was beginning to see the faces of all the strange characters I’d run into since Irma Dowden came to see me. There were no Pips or Miss Havishams, no Blighs or Fletcher Christians, but they were interesting in their own rights. I had to admit that I was having fun getting under their skins, trying to guess what made them tick. There was something Dickensian in the character of the Commander. Even in death, he was bigger than life.
“Oh, by the way, Benny,” Anna said, after it became clear that my attention had been wandering, “did you know that Sherry Forbes and Norman Caine got married on schedule this afternoon?”
“What? I don’t believe it! Nobody gets married with a grandfather dead and a grandmother in Intensive Care.”
“To say nothing of the father of the bride in the calaboose,” she added.
“Right. What kind of people are we dealing with?”
“All I know is that Canon Nombril performed the ceremony in a chapel at the cathedral with just two witnesses. So, at least it was as quiet as possible to still be legal.”
“At least Sherry won’t turn into a Miss Havisham. That’s my first reaction. The second is, what are they going to do with the fancy wedding they put into storage?”