“I’ve been asking about Deputy Chief Neustadt. You know anything there?”
“Nope. I never had the pleasure. What’s he got to do with anything?”
“He may have been murdered for one thing. He probably was, for another. And your old man may have been behind it. He may have been defending himself against Neustadt before the old cop did something to him. There was bad blood. That’s known.”
“I draw a blank there.”
“I was admiring your TR2 the other day.”
“I knew you’d get to the car.”
“Well?”
“So, I wrote a bad cheque. I’ll cover it. I told you.”
“You know that Shaw and his lawyer, York, are trying to use you to get some cash from your old man?”
“Lighten up, Cooperman.” He finished off the last of the beer in front of him and wiped his mouth before speaking again. “Have you seen my sister yet?”
“Not yet. I may get lucky.”
“When you do, give her my love,” he said with a sneer. That was the first sign of the Hart I’d seen at his mother’s house; and we’d been sitting at the bar in Smart Alex for nearly an hour.
“I’ll remember that,” I said. He put a bill on the bar and slipped me a grin before grabbing his jacket and heading out past the three sophomores and their football heros to his TR2. I finished my beer, thought about the special burgers with curry fries, and placed an order with a waitress who tried to make me feel that she was having one hell of a time looking after all the empty tables that the snowstorm had created. Over my meal, which was better than I expected, I tried to assess all that I had just heard, and figure out what it told me that I hadn’t known when I got up in the morning.
EIGHTEEN
The tree that Dulcie Osborne had crashed into was still standing beside the sharp curve on the Lewiston-Youngstown highway. Even through the storm, you could still see where she and many other drivers had ploughed into it after misjudging the curve. In her case the steering of her car had been tampered with, so the death was not purely accidental. That had happened years ago, when I was first dealing with a case in Niagara Falls. I hadn’t been down this road often enough in the interval to become inured to the sudden appearance of the tree as I came around the curve. There was a guard-rail now. I was safe from the deadly white oak, although I had nearly come a cropper a few times on the terrible roads that night.
The Patriot Volunteer hadn’t changed either. You could hear the live band from the parking lot. At five to one, the place was jumping and, if the licence plates in the lot told the truth, most of the jumpers paid Canadian taxes. The hat-check girl fought me for my coat and shook the snow from the collar like it was a vicuna. Most hat-checks have no sense of humour. The maitre d’ couldn’t find an empty table until I crossed his palm with paper. He led the way to a small table close to the double kitchen doors, where news of the orchestra could be had by e-mail.
Basically, the Patriot Volunteer was got up to look like a frontier fort, with waiters dressed as minutemen and waitresses in hoop-skirts. A collection of muskets, drums, bunting in red, white and blue furnished most of the decor. There were reproductions of scenes from the Revolutionary War: the crossing of the Niagara on the morning of the Battle of Queenston Heights, the shelling of Fort Niagara, the burning of Niagara-on-the-Lake. The New Yorkers tended, just as we did on our side of the river, to confuse the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. They were both costume pictures with three-cornered hats and clap pipes. The orchestra, a band of seven or eight sidemen, made no attempt at historical accuracy, so they blended better with the clientele. Most of the men were necktied and jacketed; the women wore cocktail dresses, except for a few in long dresses- suggesting that this was still a place to come to put the icing on the evening you had already had.
When the waiter insisted that waiting was something one did while holding a drink, I tried that red stuff that I’d run into at the Wellington Court: Campari and soda. The waiter frowned as though such a drink was quite out of place in colonial America. I thought that it should fit in very well considering that the cocktail was invented just down the road at Lewiston.
Julie came in with an entourage of five people: three men and two women. The three women together couldn’t have weighed much more than two hundred pounds. One was blonde, hacked about the head with sheep-shears and wearing a long man’s undershirt and making less of an impression in it than I would. Her collarbones were her most prominent frontal appendages. The other model, I took the first apparition to be of that profession too, was a gaminelike presence with red hair sculpted close to her head all the way around. She looked a little more womanly than the first: I could tell right off when she was facing me. She wore a long dress of rumpled earthy colours and never smiled. The three men were wearing dinner jackets, one in pink, one white and one in a floral pastel print. They all surrounded Julie, who seemed to be eating it up like chocolate, if she allowed herself to eat chocolate. I recognized her froth her parents: she had her mother’s height and sharp features and her father’s animation. She wore an amber-coloured dress that clung to her body like it had been put on with shellac. It was a good body, if a little undernourished. Her smile, under a set of big brown eyes, was nothing less than terrific.
They marched through a gap between the tables, followed by a platoon of minutemen, busboys and the maitre d’, forming squares around my tiny table, then moved off in good order to a big table with a Reserved sign and flowers on it. I was dragged along as a hostage. If we were any closer to the orchestra, we would have had to join the union. I carried my Campari and a minuteman brought my soda. How Julie recognized me, I’ll never know. Champagne came to the table in a magnum, with pink foil on top. There were also cans of Diet Coke and Pepsi for the working girls as well as bottled bubbly water.
“I’m Julie Long,” said Julie, whose last name had been the chief mystery I’d run into so far. “My Mom told me what you looked like. If that hadn’t worked, I was going to test voices. It would have been fun.” The pastel-jacketed guy in the blue aviator glasses was introduced to me as Didier Santerre, the publisher of Mode Magazine. The gamine was Morna McGuire, the local modelling success story, and I didn’t catch the full names of the others. The blonde was Christa. One of the men was a make-up artist called Pierre, and the other was Felix, a designer of rainwear from New York, who apparently was paying.
“How are we going to talk with this floor show in our laps?” I inquired. Julie just rolled her eyes.
“You have to forgive us, we’ve been on an all-day shoot on the Maid of the Mist. You can’t believe how cold it was. We nearly sank the boat with our electric generator. We needed so much light!”
“Couldn’t wait for spring?”
“Can you believe this weather? It’s-”
One has to fight the weather in this crazy business,” said Santerre. “When it’s cold, one shoots for summer. When it’s hot, naturally, one shoots with artificial snow and ice. But otherwise, we would have to anticipate the season by an impossible margin. The lead-time is bad enough already.” We exchanged names and handshakes.
“We had to get them to put the boat in the water early. Imagine what that cost?” the blonde interjected.
“What’s your place in all this?” I asked Julie.
“Julie has flair, style éclat,” the boyfriend answered again for her. I was beginning to regret the bridge toll I’d paid to get here and the one I was going to have to pay on the way back. Julie tried on a shy smile at Santerre’s praise. It didn’t suit her.