“That you, Benny?” she asked without turning her head.
“Yes, Ma.”
“I thought it was you. Your father’s playing cards at the club tonight. This is his night to play cards.”
“Uh huh.”
“Did you eat?”
“I had a sandwich downtown about an hour ago.”
“Good, because there’s nothing to eat around here.”
“Uh huh.”
“That was too bad on the news, wasn’t it?”
“What?”
“Too bad.”
“Too bad about what, Ma?”
“About Chester Yates.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I just told you.” I went over to the set and looked for the button to turn it off. She protested, but I found it. I looked at her half expecting to see a decreasing circle of light end in a pinpoint of brightness and then go out, but she just sat there looking at the blank set.
“You shouldn’t do that, Benny.”
“You started to say something. I’m trying to help you finish it. Tell me and I’ll turn the set on again. Cross my heart.”
“Don’t get funny with your mother.”
“Ma, for God’s sake tell me what you saw on the news about Chester Yates.”
“He’s dead, that’s all. Now turn it back on again.”
“What do you mean he’s dead? I just saw him this afternoon.”
“Well, about an hour ago he put a bullet through his brain.”
THREE
For a full minute I just looked at my mother. Her face looked old and drained of colour under her blond curls. I sat down hard on one of the vinyl stools in front of my father’s other hobby, his bar, trying to get the fact through to the right terminal in my brain. I couldn’t believe that the guy who’d carried all that overweight and a three piece suit for ten blocks, leaving me huffing and puffing like the Big Bad Wolf behind him on the hottest day this spring, had suddenly become work for the undertaker. It didn’t make sense. Do people get up from their hour on the shrink’s couch and quietly plug themselves? It didn’t jell somehow. I looked around the room, hoping that something somewhere would have an answer. There was a bookcase full of all the books I’d ever bought, except for the dozen I had in my room at the hotel. There were some of my brother’s medical text book discards: Histology, Dermatology and all the other ologies which a chief of surgery can safely discard. But no answers. Right about then I would have settled for a couple of good questions. I wasn’t getting anywhere, and I had that itch at the back of my knees that said “move.” I have good ideas only at the back of my knees. So I moved. I flicked the switch and turned my mother on again. The colour came back to her face and she smiled at a familiar commercial.
Upstairs, in the living room, with a portrait in oils of my mother at forty, when she was a brunette, hanging above the fireplace, I sank into a tangerine chair on the tangerine rug looking at the tangerine chesterfield and the tangerine curtains and tried to think. I could call Mrs. Yates. Bad idea. She would be playing jacks with the cops until midnight. I had money to return to her, but that could wait. I had news for her, but I wasn’t sure whether news that her husband hadn’t been playing around with another woman would exactly light up the sky for her. I could drop by the widow’s house. I even wondered whether she was a widow yet. Maybe there was a three days’ grace period when she was just the bereaved and bereft. Then I remembered that I only had her phone number and that was unlisted. I’d have to go back to my office downtown to look her up in the city directory. There didn’t seem to be any more I could do just then, except make sure that I saw the 11:15 local news.
I let myself out. The moon shining through the windshield had a big bite out of it, and I rolled the window down as I drove through the razzle-dazzle of the fast food traps on both sides of the north end of Ontario Street. “Chazerai,” my father would say. But everybody to his poison. I turned left at the light when I got to the end of Ontario, and then joined the one way traffic along St. Andrew. There was lots of parking space where I needed it. I left the Olds in front of my office, a two-storey brick building, with a crowning cornice that jutted out two feet from the front, like all the other places that dated from the same bad year in domestic architecture. The streets were as bare as my bank account at the end of the month. I’d passed a couple looking at the pictures outside the Capitol Theatre. Except for them, everybody was safe and secure behind closed doors, or off in some shopping mall turning pay envelopes into down payments on appliances.
Frank Bushmill had either taken himself home or pulled himself the rest of the way into the bottle. His lights were out. Once, when I’d picked him up off the floor and poured him into a taxi, he half-opened his befuddled eyes from the backseat and said, “Benny, you’re a decent old skin and God bless you.” Maybe he was off with the gay crowd having a hell of a time. I hoped so, but doubted it. Around here, poor Frank was the gay crowd. No wonder he drank.
My place always looked spooky at night, with moving shadows and lights crawling over the walls and filing cabinets until I found the light switch. The fluorescent light stamped on the shadows. The office was a mess, with everything where it should be. I dragged out the city directory from under the telephone to look up Chester’s address. It was in the right neighbourhood all right. He lived up to every dollar he’d earned right to the end. To think of him lying dead, when I’d seen him healthier than me only a couple of hours ago, stubbed all reason. Well, now he can be the healthiest body in Victoria Lawn. And what about his wife? She was sitting pretty. There would be no divorce. No further business for me in her direction. She was going to come out of this smelling of cut flowers, and only I knew how close she came to blowing the whole deal. I tried her number. After three rings, it was answered by a voice deep enough to belong to a police sergeant. She was under a doctor’s care and not taking any calls, thank you. “Yeah. So what are you still hanging around for?” I wondered after I’d hung back the phone.
I’d come to a dead end. It was getting late and I’d earned my pay, so what was I worried about? If I had a private life, it was time to be getting on with it. Only I didn’t feel like going back to my hotel yet. If I were a drinking man, this is where I would open my filing cabinet and pull out a bottle of rye from behind the dead files. There was a dried-up orange back there and some dried apricots. The one was inedible and the other gave me gas. To hell with it.
I locked up the door with the frosted glass and squired myself to the car. There were two drunks talking in front of the beverage room of the Russell House. I looked in my glove compartment for matches. I sat behind the wheel, startled by the brightness of my tie as I lit a cigarette in the dark interior, and decided to take a run out past the Yates place. It couldn’t hurt. And I’d like to think Myrna Yates would do as much for me.
I drove along the curving length of the main drag, then turned down into the valley where one hundred and fifty years ago the ship canal that the town had grown around had been dug. Now it ran in a filthy black arc behind and below the stores on St. Andrew. The road followed the canal for a while, being choosy about picking a crossing point, then doubled back to climb up the opposite bank to the two-hundred-thousand-dollar homes of South Ridge. Beyond that, on top of the escarpment, I could see a line of lights from streets like Minton and Dover in the South End, just this side of Papertown. The illuminated green water tower stood out as usual above everything.