“Is your office any safer?” I asked in a whisper as we headed down the corridor on the twentieth floor.
“Your guess is as good as mine, Benny. Of course, I don’t trust Sally. She comes with the space, like the air conditioning. Her loyalties go with the twentieth floor. I don’t know who she’s talking to.”
“I want you to get someone to move your desk, Vanessa. When your door is open, I can see you behind your desk from the elevator. Nice target. Nice furniture. What’s her full name?”
“Sally’s?”
“Who else have we been talking about?”
“Sally is Mrs. Gordon Jackson. She lives in Richmond Hill, north of the city.”
“Good,” I said, making a note. Vanessa slipped out of her jacket and slid it over the back of her chair. “What’s next on your schedule?”
“One hour and a half from now a meeting’s taking place down the hall. All of the people under me will be there, except for those out of town or in a body cast. Wanna meet ’em?”
“I guess I’d better. What are you up to in the meantime?”
“I’m having a massage, and you’re cordially not invited.”
* * *
Before paying a courtesy call on the cops in charge of Renata Sartori’s murder investigation, I phoned home, left word with my answering service and had a laugh with Frank Bushmill about where my much-needed holiday had taken me. At least it wasn’t Buffalo. I gave him my number at NTC in case he needed to get in touch.
I had never visited 52 Division, City of Toronto Police, before. I was impressed by the brightness of the place: lots of glass and windows and overhead lighting. Glass brick from the sixties or earlier. The man at the reception desk looked more like a hotel clerk than a desk sergeant. I told him that I wanted to see Staff Sergeant Jack Sykes, who was in charge of the Renata Sartori case. I had my name taken and was shown where I could sit down and wait.
I had not researched many of last year’s periodicals when I heard my name called in a brisk, metallic voice. I closed the magazine, immediately forgot what I had been reading in it and got to my feet. Watching me was a body that could have belonged only to a big-city policeman. He stood six foot two and was carrying about seventy pounds of extra weight around his waist, which even a heavy belt couldn’t disguise. This effect was strengthened by his narrow hips and tiny butt. His hair was straight and sandy, tending to fall across his right eye. Blue eyes and a firm jaw set in a ruddy face completed the first impression. He held out his hand and showed a double row of even, friendly teeth.
“Mr. Cooperman. Glad you dropped in.”
“Staff Sergeant Sykes?” I asked.
“Boyd,” he said and amended it to “James Boyd,” giving me the feeling I’d heard the combination before. “Jack’s on the phone; with luck he may be finished by the time we get there.” He turned and left the reception area without looking over his shoulder. I followed him to a room at the back without getting a glimpse of holding cells or suspects in handcuffs. It must have been a slow day.
Sykes’s door stood open. He was leaning back in a swivel chair, in some danger of overbalancing. He was still on the phone, but waved James Boyd and me into the room. In front of him lay a thick Toronto phone book, with “VICE” written in felt pen along the open edge. The desk was a mess of paper. I liked him already.
“… Go look it up in the transcript of the trial. Don’t ask me. Listen, Sheldon, I’m a working stiff, okay? Why don’t you go down to the Police Museum and talk to Les Mayhew. He knows all that ancient stuff. He was there, which I wasn’t.” He cupped his hand over the phone and said he’d be with us in a minute. I could see that he had long ago grown tired of this call. “Sheldon, you get credit on the cover for writing your books, right? In your past three books did I see a word about the time I’ve given you? What I’m saying is go write your book. I told you all I know about the case.” There was a long pause, while Sheldon tried to pin him to the line for another minute. Sykes held the phone away from his ear and sipped cold coffee from a cardboard container. When the dregs had gone, he interrupted his caller: “Sheldon, buy me lunch next week and I might remember something new, but right now your time is up. I got a desk full of problems and that’s what I’m being paid for … Sheldon! … Shut up, Sheldon! Call me at home … Mr. Zatz, here’s how it is: I’m busy Tuesday next week and Friday, but lunch is clear on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. I gotta go.” He banged down the phone and swivelled straight in his chair.
“Never agree to sit on a panel with writers. They get your name and you never breathe an easy breath again.” Boyd sat down and I took the chair he’d left for me. I presented my warrant card to him, which he assessed, nodding. He passed it across the desk to Sykes, who let it sit there without picking it up. Sykes was a big man too, but he handled the belly weight better than his partner. His muscles hadn’t begun their migration towards fat yet and he looked like he could throw me across the room if I asked him to help with a little plotting problem I was having. There was a patch of red fuzz above his forehead where his hair should have been. It looked like a dying plant in a shining vase. He was wearing a blue suit that had been tailored by a computer program that misfired. His tie looked like an enlarged tongue lolling on the right side of his green shirt. I figured that he was colour-blind and living alone. He didn’t say anything for a moment as he settled his hands behind his neck and relaxed back in his chair. The chair wheezed like an expiring sea lion. I wondered why he’d bothered to take his hat off. Except for that, Sykes looked like a movie cop from the 1940s. Something out of Hammett or Chandler, Leonard or Ellroy.
“So, you’re Cooperman,” he said at length, disappointing me with the clichéd introduction. Sheldon Zatz, whoever he was, was on to something in Sykes. You could fill up a lot of pages just describing the way he sat there drinking his cold coffee. I nodded and showed some teeth.
“And you’re in charge of the Sartori case,” I said, moving things in the direction of my preoccupations.
He said nothing, but he was running me through his assessment apparatus. I could imagine him sucking a toothpick. “Jim, this is the guy from Grantham that Chris Savas is always talking about.”
“Yeah?”
“He’s the one who does the Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade bit in Grantham. Population 1,280, right? No offence, Mr. Cooperman, but we’ve been getting whiffs of the legend from the Greek.”
“Cypriot, not Greek, sergeant. He makes a good case for the difference.”
“Whatever,” he said. “You worked these mean streets once before too, didn’t you? Something about a murder over a rare book?”
“That was a few years ago.”
“Yeah. Up in the Annex. I remember it now; you assembled all the suspects in a bookstore and pointed the guilty finger. Chuck Pepper told me about that. Right out of an Agatha Christie movie for television. You like private-eye movies, Mr. Cooperman?”
“Sure. Doesn’t everybody?”
“Savas told me you answer a question with a question. How is he? Has he made inspector yet?” For two minutes I brought them up to date about Chris Savas and his present status in the Niagara Regional Police. When I’d finished, Sykes shook his head as if I’d just asked him a question. “You know,” he said, “after all the shit going down in Grantham these days, I don’t know why a freelancer like yourself gets in his car and drives to Silver City looking for work. You know what I mean? When those tapes turned up under the false ceiling in the Medaglia case, after the place had been searched a dozen times, I mean, don’t you want to hide your head or something?”
“Are you making a soliloquy, Sergeant, or was that a question?”
“Don’t get me wrong. You weren’t on that case probably, being a rent-a-cop, but when there’s that much shit going down, a little brushes off on everybody whether they’re involved or not.”