“Are you always called Victoria?” I asked. “It seems such a formal name.”
“Believe it or not, I was named after Queen Victoria. My father wanted only the best for me. Before I met Mickey, my friends called me Vicky, but the combination of Mickey and Vicky was too much. And Mickey refuses to go back to Mike or Michael. When I was in high school I envied a girl with the same last name as me. She was called Lally Tate. Isn’t that marvellous? Wouldn’t you die to be Lally Tate? Are you always called Benny?”
“I hate to admit it, but I can’t get anybody to make it just Ben. I can live with anything, even Benjamin, but I’m hoping one day to meet somebody who’ll take a shine to just Ben.”
“I’ll try it on,” Victoria said just as the plates began to arrive. First there was a beige-coloured paste called “hummus” which went well with the flat pita bread, then came some vegetable salads with rice and tomatoes, followed by pieces of grilled chicken on skewers. There was some eggplant too. When I asked what that was, she gave me a name that sounded like a sneeze.
“Where did you learn about this stuff?” I asked her. Victoria threw her head back and laughed.
“I may have been born here, Ben, but I have lived all over the place. There’s a place in Old Greenwich, north of New York, where I used to live, with the same menu. There are dozens of places like this in Toronto and New York. My first husband was a broker and, because of his clients, he enjoyed all the varieties of Middle and Far Eastern cooking. Do you know the cookbooks by Madhur Jaffrey?”
I told her that I hadn’t run across them. Then she started in on traditional Jewish cooking and I found I knew as little about that as I did about the food we were eating. “I eat simply,” I said. “Soup, a sandwich. Basic fare. That’s me. Were you always interested in food?”
“I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t. The kitchen is the heart of a home, for me anyway. I’ve always loved to cook.” That seemed to stop further conversation in the food line so we ate in silence for a few minutes.
“How did you two get together?” I asked, wondering what kind of answer I might get. They both answered at the same time.
“Victoria came to cook for-”
“Mickey was working-” We all laughed, attracting the attention of the waitress, who smiled at our pleasure.
“Mr. Wise had business in Old Greenwich, and when he heard …” Victoria looked at Mickey for help.
“Victoria’s husband was in a boating accident. They never found him.”
“I’m sorry,” I said inadequately.
“So, I came to Grantham to live,” she said, and added, taking Mickey’s hand in hers, “and I haven’t regretted it.” Mickey moved in the direction of a blush, but he strangled it at birth.
“I dug that slug out of the hutch in Mr. Wise’s office, Benny,” Mickey said, biting into a round, brown meatless meatball. “It was a smallish bullet like a.32.”
“Is the glass in that room anything special?”
“Antique, like the rest of the house. But, I see what you mean: it wasn’t bullet-proof, just ordinary window glass.”
“Wise talked to me of two attempts on his life: the shot and then the steering on the Volvo. Were there other attempts that you know about?”
“We watch him pretty well,” Mickey said. “Victoria does all the cooking in the house. Next door, the boys manage on their own. Fast food, mostly pizza.”
“Give them their due, Mickey. They fry up a storm for breakfast.”
“When they’re not filling their faces, they’re a good team.”
“I didn’t get a very good look at where exactly the house is in relation to the rest of the nearby houses. Do you have a good view of traffic in and out?”
“That’s why Wise picked that place. Dorset Crescent is a dead-end street. No through traffic. There’s always a lookout checking who’s coming and going.”
“Mr. Wise is pretty strict about the lookout, Ben,” Victoria said. The mail gets delivered next door, where one of the boys sorts it and checks odd-looking parcels.”
“There’s no way a letter bomb could get through to Mr. Wise,” Mickey added. “And if anything came to his uptown office, they’d catch it there.”
“Tell me about uptown, Mickey.”
“The legit operation. Wisechoice Import and Export.”
“Gotcha. You were talking about security?”
“He doesn’t even use the Volvo all that much. But if he uses any of the cars, that’s the one he likes to drive.”
“So, whoever it is, it’s someone who knows Mr. Wise very well,” Victoria said, echoing the thought percolating in my head.
Soon the bouncy waitress brought coffee served in little brass ewers. Victoria caught me admiring the bounciness and we both smiled. The coffee inside the ewers was sweet and thick. I liked it. The meal was rounded off with some cake made of puff pastry with green pistachios bathing in honey. I liked that too. Anna would have enjoyed the meal. I promised myself to suggest the Beit al Din the next time it was my turn to be inventive.
“Was there a special reason you wanted to see me again, Mickey? So soon after our chat in your car?”
“Mostly I just wanted to get out of the house. He’s been hell to live with since that cop’s funeral yesterday. He tore my head off six or seven times. I was glad Phil got an abscess.”
“What is the link between Wise and Neustadt? That’s what I want to know.”
“It’s just cops and crooks. Nothing strange about that,” Mickey said.
“No, there’s something more. I’ll be damned if I know what it is.”
“The deputy chief could never make a charge stick against Mr. Wise,” Victoria put in. “He says that all the time. But why would that make Mr. Wise angry? I see what you mean, Ben.”
“It’s a puzzlement, all right. Mickey, was Mr. Wise upset about Neustadt before his death?”
“Mr. Wise hated that cop’s guts. He hasn’t talked about it lately, but after Neustadt’s accident, you couldn’t shut him up.”
“I can vouch for that,” Victoria said.
“If Wise felt that bad about Neustadt, Mickey, he could have done something about it. Would you know about that?”
Mickey took a moment to answer, sipping his coffee. “I’m his regular link with his usual people. But, he has a phone in his office and one by his bed. He knows people who do that sort of work. Beyond that, I can’t say.”
I couldn’t quite get over this sudden glasnost in the air between me and Mickey. Maybe his wife had softened him. I guess it made better sense keeping an eye on me from across a table. It beat sitting in a chilly car or trying to keep out of the wind on St. Andrew Street. From my point of view, I didn’t mind sitting opposite them. It’s easier to study faces close up. And Victoria’s face, which I hardly had noticed that early Monday morning, was beginning to grow on me. She was attractive in a more subtle way than the waitress, and concealed her age very well. She had a style of dressing all her own. Sort of arts-and-crafts school. I doubted whether Julie had been giving her fashion tips.
When they said goodbye, I thought that it was at last time to go to work.
FIFTEEN
At the office, my service passed on the facts that I’d had a call from the Registrar of the Ontario Provincial Police and a message from Har Twize, according to the spelling I was given. I thanked my service for passing on my home number to the OPP and told her never to do it again. When I called Hart Wise, I got an answering machine, which gave me the best idea I’d had all day. I left my number and put my shoes up on my desk. I formed them into a “V” for “Victory” and thought of Joe Tatarski fighting through the war and then coming home to an early grave. It was dirty luck, no matter how you looked at it.
I called Duncan Harvey’s office. Apart from being the big authority on the Tatarski case, next to McStu, he was in a partnership with a couple of people I was in high school with. When Pat Voisard’s voice came on the line, I could still hear him reading out the athletic announcements to the senior assembly. It was a breathless staccato that made me feel young again. I told Pat who was speaking and with only a moment’s delay I was talking to Duncan Harvey. I told him about just finishing McStu’s book and that I was wondering whether I could see him.