“Have it your way, Caine. I’ve already talked to some of the others. You may end up in the prisoner’s dock alone, if the others are prepared to give evidence on the other side.”
“You’re bluffing!”
“Maybe I am, but you won’t find out standing in the draught. I suggest we sit down someplace.”
“I’ve got to get back.” His eyes moved in the direction of the elevator.
“On Thursday you were willing to risk prison to talk to me. That’s putting the most harmless construction on that episode. Now you haven’t got ten minutes.” I tried on a rather theatrical laugh and turned away.
“Look, Cooperman, I guess we can talk in the bar for a minute. I’ll have to make a phonecall, that’s all.” He walked over to the house phone and picked it up. I backed away, leaving him lots of room for explanations. It took longer that I thought it would, then he was standing looking at me again. He still resembled a big teddy bear. He was very good at disguising his well-known ambition. “You still want to talk?” he asked. We both started making our way into the bar.
The bar at the Stephenson House on a slack Monday afternoon was not a hive of activity. The bartender was polishing glasses while conferring with the solitary waiter over the Friday stock closings in the business section of the Globe and Mail. There were no customers. As soon as we came in, the paper disappeared behind the bar and the waiter came smiling in our direction. Caine ordered a Campari and soda. The waiter nodded as though this was a normal drink instead of something almost unheard of in any of the other water holes in and around Grantham. The Stephenson House was an echo of the outside world in the centre of rye-and-water drinkers. Actually, I took mine with ginger ale, when I took it at all. By the time the waiter returned with our drinks, I was breathing the smoke of a Player’s at the dark panelling of the wall, waiting for Caine to break the ice and knowing that he was waiting for me to do the same thing.
He looked sallow under a fine fuzz of neglect on his chin. He looked like a senior executive, junior grade, on a holiday. If he’d worn shorts, I wouldn’t have been surprised. “Okay,” he said, slightly more breathlessly than I was expecting, “let’s talk.” The word “talk” seemed to stab between the radar whorls emanating from both of us. He sat up straight in his chair, like I was going to strap him down and play electrician.
“You can assume for a start,” I said, smoothly, I hoped, “that I know a good deal. That will save time.”
“You’re working for Dowden’s widow. That’s no secret any more.” I let that fly over my head without comment. So what if he knows. If he was using this as ammunition against me, he didn’t have much. He was bluffing at least as much as I was. I had to remember that. “I don’t think you know as much as you let on, Mr. Cooperman.”
“I see you’re a poker player. That’s good. Let’s start with Dowden’s death. How much do I know there? I know you faked the accident. You got Carswell to help you get away once you put the body under the truck. Yes, I know he wasn’t killed on the Kinross property. You took him there in his own truck. Hell, without even spreading the mess to Niagara-on-the-Lake, I can get you into a lot of trouble.”
“You’re not even a policeman, Cooperman. What is this, some kind of shakedown?”
“That would simplify things, wouldn’t it? Just another palm held out regularly. The trouble is, I’m not in the blackmail business. And whether I do anything or not, you know you’re in a lot of trouble. The Commander’s death has pulled the tower you’ve been building down about your ears. Take the oil drums buried at the fort to begin with. We both know they don’t contain oil. A couple of years ago you might have got away with it; now anybody who can read knows what PCBs and dioxins are.”
“I think I can stonewall you, Cooperman. Anything you say against me goes double for Ross Forbes. He’s got more to gain in this than I have. And he’s the one they’ve arrested. Your friends downtown won’t like having to let Ross go when you bring me in. And who says you can make your accusations stick?”
“What about Alex Pásztory? Are you going to claim that as a misdemeanor?”
“You can’t touch me for Pásztory!” He said this loudly enough for me to form some hope that I might be able to move him with something else. He tried to distance himself from Pásztory, like Pásztory was the only dirty thing we were talking about. Why was this special? Why was he presenting the fact that he had nothing to do with Pásztory’s death as the one clean thing in his life?
“Everybody knows there was bad blood between you ever since he began writing those articles in the paper last spring. It would have been very inconvenient for him to have passed on to the cops what he found at the fort. I think Pásztory’s got a long reach, Caine.”
“Sherry and I were watching a play at the Shaw Festival theatre that Thursday, Cooperman. I was seen by hundreds of people.”
“You seem to know more about this than has appeared in the paper, Caine. As far as I know no time of death has been reported. Wouldn’t it be funny if it turns out to be the exact time you were watching the play? But then you know, it’s hard to establish the time of death as precisely as they do in books and on television. Your alibi may not have been worth the price of admission.”
Caine realized that he’d fumbled now and his face was getting rosy with anger. That was good for me. An angry man is careless, and God knows I needed every scrap of carelessness I could find.
“What do you want, Cooperman? What’s the bottom line for you?”
All of the questions in the back of my mind began coming out at once. To Caine, I must have looked like hooked carp. I tried to organize myself, impose some order and chronology on the confused and cloudy past. I thought, I should get back to Dowden. It began with Dowden. Begin there.
“I want to know what happened to Dowden at the fort that morning.”
“You don’t want much, do you?”
“I think it will all come out anyway. If you tell me now, it won’t look so bad on your record later on.”
“You say that so smugly. Like we weren’t talking about lives. My life, for instance?” I couldn’t tell whether this was the cut-off point or a preamble to further confidences. I was betting heavily on the latter.
“Come on, let’s get it over with. Dowden was killed at the fort. I’ve seen the dispatcher’s log. I know that Carswell came and went before he arrived for your breakfast meeting. Earlier, Dowden came in and drove his truck to the fort. What happened at the fort?”
“You talked to Carswell?”
“Forget Carswell, damn it! He’ll break in half if the cops raise their voices at him. He’ll dump you if he has to save himself. You can depend on that. And don’t forget O’Mara. The cops are watching his house, so you won’t have another chance to reinforce his silence. Once O’Mara talks, you’re cooked.”
Caine’s eyes moved around the room, looking for an answer that wasn’t written on any of the empty tables. “The medical evidence, Norm. It never would stand up to a serious police investigation. Come on! I thought you were a realist. The game’s over. There’s no sense to the cover-up any more.” Caine glanced up at me from the floor where his eyes had become fixed for the last few moments.
“Okay,” he said. “It happened at the fort! But what does that prove? It was still an accident wherever it happened. It was just more convenient not to have the cops wandering around the fort just then. The tunnels had just been started, but it wouldn’t take a smart cop long to see that it didn’t have anything to do with the archaeological dig.”
“There had to be more than that. Dowden was crushed in the chest area, that’s not consistent with injuries received standing up or walking away from the truck. He was on his knees. Were you behind the wheel?”
“I’m not saying anything else about that. You’re right as far as you went. I hope that makes you happy.”