“Dave Rogers?”
“Yeah. Who wants him?”
“My name’s Cooperman. I want to talk to you.”
“What makes you think I wanna talk to you, Mr. Cooperman?”
“Abram Wise thinks you will.” That had him. He couldn’t wise-ass me any more. Still, there was a pause.
“Where are you now?”
“Corner of St. Andrew and James. My office is on the second floor of-”
“Meet me at the Chinese restaurant on your left as you come off the high-level bridge. You know the place? Twelve-thirty and don’t bring any friends.”
“There’s an eager beaver from Wise’s operations hugging my shadow. I can’t do much about him.” Again there was a pause at his end. Finally:
“Well, if he’s one of Abe’s boys, he won’t give me any heartburn more than I’ve got already. Twelve-thirty,” he repeated and was gone. I nodded to the instrument in my hand and replaced it.
My watch told me that I had three hours to kill before I had to keep the appointment. I rummaged in a drawer for an old address book that I thought might help me fill the time. The names in it belonged to people who were either dead, moved or vanished into the unknown. Who’s going to throw away a thing like that? Under the “Bs” I found what I was looking for and punched the long-distance number into the phone, trying to imagine the voice I was going to hear at the other end.
“Hello?”
“Ella?”
“Yes, this is Ella Beames.”
“It’s me,” I said. “Benny.”
“Benny Cooperman! Well, as I live and breathe! I hope you don’t mean to pay me a visit. I’ve got the painters in and-”
“I’m calling from Grantham, Ella. I’m not pushing the tourist season. I’m nowhere near Massachusetts. Don’t worry.”
“Well, Benny, you gave me quite a turn. I haven’t heard a word from home since I got a card from the girls at the library. They think my birthday’s in March and it’s not really until November. But they’ve always sent the card in March. I don’t remember how it started. You’re the one with the March birthday. I hope you had a good one. How are you, Benny?”
Ella Beames had retired from the Grantham Public Library at the mandatory age and had left the Special Collections Department in very capable hands. But they lacked, with all the good will in the world, Ella’s many years of experience. For a minute we talked about the weather here and in Newburyport, where she had moved on her retirement. Then we talked about local people, mutual friends and public characters. She was surprised to hear that Kogan, a one-time panhandler along St. Andrew Street, was now my landlord.
“Kogan was always a caution, Benny. And bright too. He got that from his mother, who was a Dodd. You remember the Dodds? They kept the leather goods down the street from your father’s store.” I let the conversation ramble; Abram Wise was paying expenses. It was good to hear Ella ramble; she put her heart in it. She said more in a minute than most people do in half an hour and the better part of it was worth remembering. When she finished talking about the Kemps’ fish market on Queen Street, she brought herself up short.
“Benny, you didn’t call all this way to hear an old woman’s twaddle. What’s behind this?”
“You never kept a file on crime families at the library, did you?”
“Of course not! Not the local ones anyway. We kept all of the big, international stuff in the morgue downstairs. But you’re talking about local crime families, am I right?”
“As usual. I’m trying to find out about Abram Wise. I know he’s a bad egg, but I’m still vague about where his illegal earnings come from. I’m having lunch with an old school friend of his, Dave Rogers, but I don’t want to go as ignorant as I am now.”
“Well, if I were you, I’d avoid the issue and get on a slow boat to China. The pair of them were nothing but trouble if my memory hasn’t gone potty.”
“I wish I had that option, but I haven’t.”
“So you called me to find out where I’ve hidden all of the dirt I couldn’t put on file?”
“I took a guess, Ella. I suspected that you squirrelled away what you know under an innocent label, where nobody but you could find it.”
“Well, after that crazy Ultimate Church bunch stole our files on Norbert Patten, I’ve had to use my head. There is a master file marked CHISHOLM, GORDON, Benny. You remember the Chisholm family, don’t you? Well, there never was a Gordon Chisholm that I ever heard of, so I made him up to put all of the key data in there. You can look up the names you want to trace and find the fictitious names I’ve hidden them under. I meant to find a better system before I retired, but I never got around to it.”
I tried to remember Ella’s face. I could see freckled eyelids and velvet cheeks. I was surprised to find so much of her in my memory. Her voice carried her face, her humour and even the scent of pale roses to my office from a town north of Boston somewhere. Ella has a way of evaporating the miles.
The new face behind the desk that had been Ella’s for as long as I’d owned a library card smiled as I came in. Neither of us knew the other’s name, but we knew one another the way you do in small towns. We nodded and exchanged a few words before she let me loose with the range of file drawers.
I opened the one showing CATH-CHURCH in the slot in front. CHISHOLM, GORDON was right in its proper place: after Elizabeth and Fred and before Harold. I lifted the file from the drawer and found a table near the corner of the room. After moving a few heavy atlases out of the way, I opened the file.
The air in the room was, as I had remembered it, smoke-free and artificial, as though it had been made up from a recipe in a laboratory where such things as dust, acid and other computer-eating atoms had never penetrated. Breathing it, besides me and Ella’s successor, was a photographer named Stefan Something, who was a bit of a town character. Stefan was a regular presence at civic and cultural functions, where his camera bag got him past the registration table. The locals knew that he never represented a paper or magazine. His camera was usually assumed to be empty, so that only visiting dignitaries were impressed at the quickness of the exposures he made as he worked his way to the luncheon sideboard or, on special occasions, the bar. Stefan was seated at a broad wooden table just in front of the main index terminals, busy reading up on the history of Grantham’s first families. I was glad that he hadn’t noticed me. The last time we talked, he was convinced that he wanted to go into the detective business.
The master list was a sheet of foolscap divided into two columns. In the first were the names of the local entrepreneurs who had run afoul of the law or were at least believed to have done so whether or not they had ever been brought to book. As a demonstration of the assumption of innocence it lacked something. I noticed the name of a big corporation lawyer named Henry Markland. Markland took up a career of making licence plates when he ran out of banks to finance a scheme or project that, as far as I was able to discover, only existed in his imagination. He was to be found in a file marked O’REILLY, NATHAN, a pretty bogus combination if you ask me. There were other names I’d seen in print before. I was glad to see a scattering of Anglo-Saxon ones mixed in with the consonant-happy ethnic names. The right-hand column was almost free of surnames which had arrived on recent boats and planes. It was as though Ella, even in making up names to hide the guilty, didn’t want to tarnish people with names that had already had a bad enough run of it.
WISE, ABRAM, was there towards the bottom of the page. To find him, I was directed to look up CLELAND, JOHN. The name whispered something in my ear, but I couldn’t catch it. It didn’t seem to belong to a local family, crooked or straight. (Later Frank Bushmill, my neighbour, told me that it belonged to the author of Fanny Hill, a very famous naughty, once-banned novel. I wonder if Ella would have blushed if she knew I had penetrated her little game?)
I ran my eyes down the paper to see if there was any mention of Dave Rogers or Rottman. I couldn’t find it. So, at least Rogers wasn’t the superstar Wise was. He sounded tough on the phone, but I shouldn’t confuse that with illegal activities.