Ransom Game (18 page)

TWENTY-ONE

It was a very early morning taxi that took me back to the hotel. The blue lights of the snow-removal machines were swinging across the empty expanse of Market Square. A policeman with red hair was trying the locks along King Street. The hotel was deserted, and the stairs creaked loudly as I climbed up to the room. Inside ten minutes I was asleep and miraculously back at the top of the mountain.

I threw something at the clock when it went off and turned off the day for another couple of hours. When the phone started in, I gave up.

“Benny?”

“Yeah?”

“It's Pete. I've got some …”

“What the hell time is it?”

“Come on, Benny, it's eleven already. Remember that ‘sunlit pallets never thrive.' Up boy, up!”

“Pete, go bother somebody who'll appreciate your memory for poetry better than me. You weren't drinking cognac after getting shot at last night. Call me in an hour.”

“Who was shot at? Benny, what are you saying?”

“In the parking lot of the Beaumont Hotel. Check over my Olds, I didn't move it. I've got the casings and I'll bring them over in an hour. But right now, I don't like the look of the day. G'bye Pete, see you at noon.” I tried putting my head under the pillow, but it was no good. Once you know that there's light out there, it isn't the same any more. So I slowly rolled out, showered and dressed. I put on yesterday's tie because I'd left most of the good ones in the back seat of the car. At one time I used to think that I could utterly transform my appearance by a deft change of neckwear. But in those days the highlight of my life was losing two dollars to another detective who was watching the same couple for the other side. They took hours in the motel unit, and we devised a spitting game to break the monotony. He was the best spitter I ever met. He should have been on television I thought, although I hear he went into real estate.

Outside, it was dry and cold. A little puff of vapour preceded me to Bagels, the place that never had any bagels. Naturally they were out of them, but the coffee helped. Thank God the owner hadn't called it The Coffee Shop. Breakfast was good and it helped me feel like something better than egg shells and coffee grounds in the garbage. My shoulder hurt, but so did the rest of me. Even my hair hurt, what was left of it.

It was about ten after twelve that I went through the doors of the Regional Police Headquarters. The fresh nectarine-checked faces of the cops walking up and down the corridor made me feel like one hundred and seven. Savas was in his office with a few file drawers pulled out like he had been working. A Hollywood director couldn't have made it look more convincing. I dropped the brass shell casings on his desk and he removed the transistor radio earplug and slammed a drawer closed.

“Why is it you make so many people mad at you, Cooperman? These guys weren't fooling. Those slugs came from a gun that is tough enough to mess you up even if you were inside the car. It usually comes with a sight that's good enough to read what you had for lunch on your tie. Why not go into retirement for a while? These guys could have laid you out.”

“Sure. Give me a job emptying parking meters, and I'll give up my life of crime. What can you tell me about the gun besides that?”

“Probably next to untraceable. For my money it's a mail-order weapon picked up in New York State. But that's guessing. I'll send the bullets we took out of your car to the Forensic Centre. They may see something, but I doubt it.” At this moment Pete Staziak walked in, smiled and sat on a chair the wrong way around. He repeated Chris's warnings and told me to go into the hand-laundry business and get my thrills pressing skirts. I enjoyed their concern, but when you have a client that gets knocked off, it's bad for business not to do something about it. Then Pete grinned at me: “Benny, I had a brainwave last night. I sent a man with those suits we found in Muriel's closet around to the tailor's where the labels said they came from.”

“So?”

“So, the tailor's never seen Johnny Rosa, but recognizes the suits as the ones a good-looking blonde bought off the rack in ten minutes a couple of months ago. He said he thought she was laying out her seven dead brothers she bought them so fast.”

“The other news,” said Savas putting in his share, “is that the suits were all too big for Johnny Rosa if he still looked like he did when he left Kingston. Now, it is possible that he might have put on a few pounds, but he didn't add two inches to his legs, and one and a half to his arms.”

I looked at both of them; they looked like the cats that licked up the cream. “Brainwave,” Pete said. I could swear I planted the idea on him the last time I saw him. Maybe I'm getting too old for this game. Maybe I should retire, or at least lay low for a while.

“Come on, Benny, I'm buying lunch.” Savas grinned one of his rare grins, which made his face look like a ham with a gash in it, and Pete got up fast, like he thought Chris had said that he was buying everybody a new Cadillac. We went down the corridor together, with me dropping in behind whenever we passed a large object like a showcase full of prizes and trophies won by the police athletic teams. Once out on the street, Chris clapped me on the shoulder. “Benny, if you can only crack the mystery of the missing bottle of rye, we'll have this case sewn up.”

“Go on,” Pete said. “We'll figure that out over lunch. Where, incidentally, are you taking us?”

“Little place I know off Academy Street. Nothing fancy …”

“Wouldn't you know,” put in Pete.

“… but nicely prepared. I hope you like Greek food?”

“Yeah,” said Pete.

“Benny?”

“I'm game for anything.” I tried to keep up with their long legs as they walked up the south side of Church Street, past the library and the convent across the road, and on up to Academy, where the ruin of the first secondary school in the district stood. An architect had thought he could take a good example of a building of the middle of the last century and, by stripping off the eaves, the pediments and other classical features, deliver to the Board of Education a brand new school for the middle of this century. Nobody admitted that it hadn't worked. Nobody wrote in the paper that the school looked as silly as a tutu on a prizefighter. I get angry about the school because I went there for a year.

Once on Academy Street, Chris took the lead. He cut across below the bus terminal and followed a path between two old houses, one now a beauty parlour, the other an insurance office. He stopped when he came to a large lean-to café that had been thrown up in back of the beauty parlour. Chris was first through the door, where he was greeted in Greek by a giant with a handlebar moustache under a real chef s cap and dark suspicious eyes. The greeting was noisy and we were excluded for the first minute or so, during which time both Pete and I stood with grins on our faces. Chris did a little describing of each of us to the chef in Greek, and he looked at us evenly. A dark-haired woman came into the room to see what the noise was all about, and the introductions were made all over again, still in Greek. It was very rude: Chris didn't care whether we knew who they were. The woman wiped her hand on her apron and thrust it out at me. “How do you do?” she said. “Good, better, best. Bring, brought, brought.” I shook her hand warmly and when I looked around we were all attached to one another in this fashion.

In another minute we were seated at a vinyl-topped table and Chris was ordering for all of us, and before long, the chef and his old lady laid a table before us fit for some sort of celebration. There were about twenty small dishes, each with its own specialty, and there was Canadian beer to help it all down. I tried a few things. Nothing huge, you understand. I liked the meatballs best, and there was some fried cheese which went down well. Once the beer had been uncapped, Savas started in on me.

“Okay, Benny. Who killed the Falkirk woman?”

“Get away from me, Chris, I'm eating my lunch! How am I supposed to know what has outwitted the combined forces of the Regional Police?”

“Hey!” Pete put in. “It hasn't outwitted anybody, it's just that you were in it a couple of days before we were, that's all. We want to know about why somebody tried to fake Johnny Rosa's disappearance with those suits and then bumped him off in a car that can be traced as easily as your shorts.”

“Right,” said Savas, eating something with a fin on it. “And what s going on between you and the people in the house on the hill?”

“Tell the truth, you didn't have to spring for lunch to find that out, Chris. I was invited by the lady of the house. I told you. She thinks she had a call from Johnny.” I was nibbling on something chewy with nuts in it. The chef and the woman were grinning as we made each selection. I tried something that tasted like seaweed. When I asked Chris what it was, he confirmed my suspicions. I could see that I was going to have to sing for my supper, so I took a long gulp of beer and started spinning out what I could make of the whole deadly ransom game.

“Somewhere out there, hidden by Johnny Rosa, and unknown to anyone else, is half a million dollars. He put it in a hiding place and went to prison believing it would still be there when he got out. Unfortunately, when that happened, he was being watched. Ashland, Todd and Knudsen were watching because they wanted their pay for the kidnapping job. The Warren family wanted it back too. You never get so rich that five hundred thousand dollars can be written off with a grand gesture. I think that Muriel was interested too, and she let Johnny move in with her to keep a closer watch on him. She may have been in this alone, but the better bet is that her partner was Eddie Milano.” Pete, who had been holding a burning match about half an inch away from doing any good to the cigarette he was trying to light, suddenly yelled and put his finger in his mouth.

“How do you get that?” he said, cooling it in his beer.

“It just makes sense, that's all. Up until Johnny got out, Muriel was Eddie's girl. There's only one smart answer to why she changed the shoes under her bed.”

“Smooth work,” said Chris, sucking on a fishbone.

“Polished marble beside those lunk-heads from the RCMP.”

“How do they come into this?”

“Same way you do, only you haven't picked up one of the kidnappers and hoped that he could be scared enough to start talking. Knudsen may not be too quick in most ways, but he's not soft. The lake will boil over before he tells the Horsemen anything.”

I let the image sit in the air above the table for a few seconds while I tried my first black olive. I'd just tasted something waxy that Pete identified as avocado. I was really mixing it up in the food department. I tried another morsel, something salty and vaguely fishy. Savas was eyeing me steadily without blinking. The old couple had given up on us, since we were not going to return to talking Greek. I wet my mouth with a sip of beer.

“Let's go back to Eddie. I know that Eddie was busy checking out Muriel's little drama. I discovered last Tuesday, the day after Muriel hired me, that I was being followed. When the two mugs finally caught up with me, all they wanted to know was who was I working for. When Eddie heard that, he could see that it fit in with all the other stuff he'd discovered, and some I'd brought to you.”

“The bloodstains in the Volkswagen.”

“Yeah, along with the abandoned toothbrush and wardrobe.”

“But he found out it was all a trick, and took it out on Muriel.” Pete looked happy after saying that.

“Could be. But then again, he may not have had a hand in her death at all. I still haven't figured out about the missing bottle yet.” Savas grinned at Pete, but neither of them said anything.

“Another way to look at it is that something fell through from Johnny's end. Something must have stopped him picking up the ransom money. What else do we know? We know that he has broken cover, abandoned being dead at least as far as Gloria Jarman is concerned. That is, if we take that call Mrs. Jarman says she got as genuine. Supposing it was from Johnny. Why would Johnny contact the victim of the kidnapping about it after all this time? Why would he tell her, ‘You were the one. It had to be you'? Supposing that refers to his discovery that the money was gone, isn't it odd that the first thing to pop into his head would be that the victim of the snatch moved the money? It suggests that Johnny had reason to believe that Gloria Warren arranged her own kidnapping. It's an incredible idea, but not, as you know, unheard of. If Gloria arranged the whole scam, why did she tell me about hearing from Johnny Rosa? Why was Johnny so sure that ‘It had to be you'?” I took another sip. The beer was getting tepid, and I was running out of gas. The remains of the lunch lay spread out on twenty plates between us. Savas stretched in his chair. It was something to watch, like he had started to grow, to double his size before your very eyes.

“Well,” he said, “it sounds good, but I haven't heard a word that sounds like proof or evidence. It's just a plausible explanation which happens to fit most of the facts. It doesn't solve the death of Muriel Falkirk, or tell us where the money is.”

“It's more than we had before lunch, Chris. Admit it.”

“Well, I don't know, Pete,” he said playing with his leftovers the way he'd been taught not to. “Some of it sounded pretty arbitrary to me. Like that stuff about the Horsemen taking Knudsen in for questioning. Have you anything stronger than a feeling in your stomach that it was the RCMP? Come on, you're talking through your lid on that.”

“Why don't you check?”

“What do you mean? You think I should just call them up?”

“If you won't,” I said, brave on beer, “I will.”

“Let it be you then. The only Mountie I ever got along with got fired for wading in the goldfish pond at the Banff Springs Hotel while in uniform and under the influence. He bought his first three-piece suit wearing sunglasses. No thanks. You can have those guys. I know they're supposed to cooperate with us. Yeah! Like racehorses coming into the stretch they co-operate.”