“Oh,” she said, as though she’d been stung or bitten.
“No, I came to talk to you about the things you forgot to tell me this afternoon.”
“This afternoon.” She repeated the phrase as though the meaning was beyond her; she hadn’t taken it in. I could see panic in her little gimlet eyes. She was trying to think of what she was going to say.
“You know what I mean. You must have known that I’d find out.”
“I don’t understand, Mr. Cooperman.”
“Sure you do. I’m talking about a matter of time, Mrs. Dowden. Three hundred and sixty-five days that slipped your memory.”
“Oh, that.”
“Yes, that.”
“Well, if you figured out that much, you must have a good idea why I didn’t tell you straight out. I figured you for smart.”
“Save the soft-soap, Mrs. Dowden. From now on, I want from you nothing but the truth. Is that clear? Otherwise you can take your troubles to Howard Dover or one of the other investigators.”
“I’ve already been to them, Mr. Cooperman. You’re all I’ve got!”
“Well, stop abusing me. Go, make some coffee. That’s a start.”
“The kettle’s just off the boil.”
“You said that five minutes ago! That’s not just off the boil in my book!” I surprised both of us with my outburst. Both of us knew that it had nothing to do with the cooling kettle.
In a moment she got up and left the room. Ralph jumped from the couch to the wine-dark carpet and followed her to the kitchen. In another minute, I followed Ralph.
“You’re going to have to settle for tea. I’m out of coffee. As a matter of fact,” she said, in an expression of purest candour, “I haven’t had coffee in this house since Jack died.”
“And how long ago was that?” I asked unkindly.
“A year and three months ago. There! I’ve said it. I won’t tell you any more lies, Mr. Cooperman. I’ve always been a truthful woman. Honest.”
“I’m going to drop the case the next time you aren’t being straight with me. I don’t want to hear any more exaggerations or fibs. You understand?”
“Thank you, Mr. Cooperman.”
On her own ground, Irma Dowden didn’t look so ferret-like, not so small and not so apparently determined to get her own way. She looked serious and I took that to be an humble and a contrite heart. She was used to feeling mistress in her own kitchen, but she gave me lots of room as she fussed with the cups.
“Mrs. Dowden-”
“Oh, please, call me Irma. Goodness!” I nodded and started over.
“Irma, you said that Kinross had sent back Jack’s things-the clothes he was wearing, his wallet, keys. Is that right?”
“At first they said I wouldn’t want to see them, but in the end they sent them. Of course, except for digging out his wallet, I haven’t looked at the rest. They were right about that.”
“Where are they now? The clothes, I mean?”
“Jack’s glory hole is in the cellar. Everything of his is still down there. I haven’t had the heart to touch anything.” She made a gesture suggesting her loss, and I sighed and shrugged to show sympathy. “You can have a look while I finish making the tea,” she said. “His work clothes are in a shopping bag near the workbench, if you want to see them.”
“It all ends up in a shopping bag, somebody once said.” I don’t think she got it, so I turned to the cellar door.
The steps leading down to the basement were covered in linoleum, probably rescued from the most recent redoing of the kitchen floor. At the bottom, I found an ancient coal furnace adapted to natural gas. A pile of stored furniture rested against one wall. Some of it looked in bad shape, but I recognized a few pieces of Canadian pine- some chests of drawers and a hutch-that, with a little work, might pass for Early American. Besides the washtubs, a fruit-cellar, former coalbin, I discovered the workbench, a lathe and a few pieces of his handiwork: an arrow-back chair with one rung about to be replaced by a fine match for the broken pieces. Jack had been doing excellent work down here. He had left things so tidy, I wondered whether he’d had a premonition about his approaching fate.
And there was the shopping bag. I took a breath and dug in. There was less dried blood than I expected. I left the underwear unexamined in a separate plastic bag, through which I could see more than I wanted to. I found a green flannel workshirt made in Taiwan. The pockets held nothing but tobacco crumbs and lint. The trousers, heavy-duty denim that had never heard of Calvin Klein, held a soiled handkerchief, a comb that indicated a need for a dandruff remover, and thirty-seven cents. For some reason, maybe it was some scrap of my formal training showing, I looked in the trouser cuffs. Nothing but dried weeds in there. But I took a second look at them. There were a few stems, fragmented leaves and a long, silvery tissue with tiny dark seeds embedded along the length of the four-inch-long stalk. It looked a little beanlike, except that the pods were flaking off. The seeds were stuck in a delicate tissue that ran between the pods.
I slipped the dead contents of Jacks’ cuffs into the envelope with my electric bill and folded it closed. I had a friend up at Secord University who could tell me what the weeds had to say about Jack’s death, apart from the fact that he may have had a ramble in the woods some time before the fatal day. There was nothing here that told me that the accident was murder. I still had only Irma’s hunch about that. The chalky dirt on the back of the shirt told me nothing about why he was now numbered among the dead.
Irma was just pouring the tea when I went back upstairs. “Did you find anything interesting, Mr. Cooperman?”
“Look, Irma, if you’re going to be Irma and not Mrs. Dowden, then you’d better start calling me Benny.”
“Here’s your tea.” She put two blue-and-white mugs on the green table. She pulled out a wooden chair and slid into it. “This is a piece of early Canadian, Jack told me,” she said, tapping the table top with her teaspoon. “He was always going to strip it down to the wood, but we never could spare it long enough for the whole treatment. Jack always wanted to settle down and get out of driving for a living. He was always talking about setting up in the antique business. Jack loved wood.”
We sipped our tea, while Irma told me about their life together. She dabbed her eyes a couple of times with the handkerchief I lent her. I tried to take in what she said, but the details of the children they never had or the uncles who could never leave them alone didn’t really change anything. Even on the subject of Jack’s relations to Kinross, I could find nothing sinister. Before I left, I asked to see Jack’s papers. Irma shook her head. “Jack didn’t leave anything in writing,” she said, “unless you count the three love-letters he wrote to me, but I’ll show you what I’ve got.” She led the way into the bedroom, where in a corner a shoebox full of credit-card flimsies was produced. I asked if I could borrow these. As I was about to leave, I saw a few books in a pile.
“Are the books yours or Jack’s?”
“Oh, Jack’s. I’m not much of a reader. Television’s too easy. I guess my brain’s been softened, Benny.” I tuned out Irma’s prattle and checked the titles. There was a Robert Ludlum in paperback, two Stephen Kings and then the surprise: Chemical Nightmare: The Unnecessary Legacy of Toxic Wastes by John Jackson, Phil Weller and the Waterloo Public Interest Group. I opened the book and found that it was well thumbed. It wasn’t much, but just what I needed for bedtime reading. Irma made no objection when I asked to borrow it. She saw me to the door and down the walk before she shut the front door to the night.
After a wash, I took the book under the covers with me and read myself silly for about an hour. When I woke up, the light was still burning and the clock told me that I would have to begin a new day in under two hours. I turned off the light and got rid of my bed-partner. Chemical Nightmare could hang around the apartment all day when it got light. It didn’t have to make ends meet.