Ransom Game (25 page)

“Better than passing grade, I'd say. You forgot to take her glass. That was careless. But even with the bottle found on the scene, it wouldn't have meant a thing unless the cops had more concrete evidence.”

“You're right. I wasn't being very rational. It surprised me. Just as the phone call had. You see she'd been stalling me for weeks. I kept checking with her to hear whether she'd heard from him, and she'd keep asking me what we were going to do now that he'd disappeared. I didn't swallow her story completely. I had my doubts, that's how you happened to meet Frank and Vito. But that last call. It was Muriel being Muriel again. Muriel buttering me up, wheedling for information, whining, telling me how much I meant to her. She wanted to see me. Out of the blue. Then a hand went over the receiver so I couldn't hear, and the line went dead.

“That's when I decided to pay a call at the apartment. I walked in and found Muriel packed and ready to leave town, except for the fact that she was floating face down in the bathtub.” I could see him shudder as that picture hit him again. I got a few splinters myself.

“I liked Muriel, Mr. Cooperman. I had a lot of respect for her. She was intelligent and amusing at the same time. She was fun to be with. She … well, you met her; perhaps you know what I mean. She was Muriel.” He must have felt his image of a man of business beginning to slip, because he suddenly rescued it, recomposed his face with the old calm interest and sat listening aggressively from his chair. I tried a new line on him.

“Now, tell me why your boys took a shot at me the other night.”

“What are you talking about? You mean Frank or Vito? Don't make me laugh. I'll be frank with you, Mr. Cooperman, if I wanted you to be removed from the scene, it would be a simple matter for me to buy you dead. I don't like to do it, I pride myself on having called in these tidiers on very few occasions. That's why I'm sitting here. I've got a reputation and I've come by it as honestly as a man in my position can. Perhaps you read too many magazines or too much cheap fiction: in business I do what's necessary for business, nothing more, nothing less. I know that you may think it's unflattering of me to say it, but your life does not stand in the way of any of my objects.”

“Is that why you brought me here in the middle of the night, because I was so unimportant?”

“I didn't say you were unimportant. I said you aren't in my way. There's a difference. About your being brought to me in the middle of the night, well, I apologize about that, but you can understand my position. I have colleagues, business associates, whom I'd like to leave uninformed until I choose to inform them; a simple matter of self-preservation. I hope that when you see your friends from the police you'll be as generous with your theories with them as you have been with me. There remain, Mr. Cooperman, only two further matters of interest: the whereabouts of Johnny Rosa and of the ransom money.”

“If told you where the money was, would you still want to find Johnny?”

“A good point. Yes, my main interest is in the money. It isn't as great an interest as it was a few months ago— business has been very good to me lately—but, yes, I would like to find that money. Johnny Rosa? To me he is a dangerous man. It is unlikely that the details of his supposed death will implicate me, but I would just as soon see that he stayed dead. It is one of those cases I described, Mr. Cooperman. I would be happy to see him permanently out of the way. Is that frank enough?”

“Sure. In that case I've got good news for you: I ran across Johnny's very dead body yesterday afternoon. He'd been shot with a small calibre gun at fairly close range. That's the good news, from your point of view, Mr. Milano. The bad news is that I found the body where the money should have been. It wasn't there, and I'm no closer to finding it than he is.”

“I see. So Johnny Rosa can go on pretending that he is dead now that he is dead.”

“That's right. I don't think the cops will revive him in order to involve Muriel in a conspiracy case and then kill him off again. Life's too short. They'll leave his story as simple as possible, since the complicated version ends up with the same corpse. Sorry about the money. You're not the only one who is going to be disappointed about that.”

“You mean those associates of his? The lawyer, the hippy and the loudmouth? Don't make me laugh. If they see the money in their dreams, that's as close as they're going to get. Now, Mr. Cooperman, it's late, and I have some other work to do before I can go home. Whoever said that the weed of crime bears bitter fruit might have developed his metaphor more fully: he might have said that it needs constant attention, that it needs careful pruning, that it grows up amongst the most respectable of flowers, and that its fruit, while bitter to those most closely associated with its cultivation, has been found to be most palatable to those not directly involved in its care. Sorry, I shouldn't lecture you when you didn't come here on your own. That's unforgivable. Good night, Mr. Cooperman. The boys will see that you get back to your hotel safely.” We shook hands, he smiled, I smiled and I saw him press a buzzer on the top of his large pine desk.

TWENTY-EIGHT

It was Friday, five days since Muriel Falkirk had walked up the dirty stairs to my office wanting me to find Johnny Rosa. I said I'd try. It only took four days. Unfortunately, she only lived two of them. Her menthol cigarette butts were still in the ashtray when I opened up the shop after letting myself sleep in. I'd have to clean them out one of these days, I promised myself, like I was promising to fix somebody's roof.

The place was gloomy and deserted except for the sound of patients limping up the stairs to Frank Bushmill's office. The limps never came my way. I don't know why I was feeling the Februaries so keenly that morning; I had a rich client, and I'd just evened the score for the dead one. I'd found the hiding place where the money was kept. I'd seen Eddie Milano in his office and lived to drink coffee in the morning. I'd even had a postcard from my mother saying that they were coming home because the weather had been disappointing. Disappointing! She should measure disappointment from here.

I still had a few little problems to figure out. I didn't know what kind of work Gloria Jarman wanted me to do, for instance. Unless she suspected that Bob was mixing it up with the typing pool. She didn't need a go-between between her and Johnny Rosa. I used to be a red-hot divorce investigator. Everybody forgets that. Well, maybe it amuses rich ladies to keep a detective on the staff. In case something goes missing, I could be sent out to trace it like a bloodhound. Also, if Eddie Milano wasn't the man behind those shots at Helen and me, who was? At least Eddie was a pro. I didn't like the idea of some amateur looking down a telescopic sight at me. I felt the same way about amateurs that Savas did, only usually when he talked about amateurs, he meant me. And there were a few other questions to be answered, like who killed Muriel, and where had the ransom money hopped to next. And there was old George Warren's death troubling me too.

The mid-morning speculations stopped with the ring of the telephone. It was Savas.

“They just finished cuffing up Johnny. You want to hear about it?”

“Sure. Any surprises?”

“You were right about the gun: .32 calibre hand-gun. He died almost instantly from one shot in the heart and the other close enough to have paid him up just the same. He was dead five to seven hours when you found him. That makes the time of death an hour either side of noon. Surprises? Didn't see any in the report, unless you're surprised by some pinch marks on his bum. That interest you, Benny? I thought that that might be up your street.”

“Where on his bum, Chris?”

“Just a sec: yeah, they were low on the left buttock, where it's just becoming the top of the thigh. Just red pinch marks. Are you going to make a high court case from this, Benny?”

“The rest of him was clean? Any idea of where he'd been?”

“Some mud on his boots, straw, manure, like he'd walked through a barnyard to get to the barn. Brilliant, eh? That's all. Be talking to you.” He hung up.

So Johnny Rosa was killed around the time of his appointment with Gloria Jarman. She said—and her husband confirmed—that she didn't keep it. Maybe, like a few people I keep running into, she wasn't telling the truth. I should check with Helen to see whether she left the house before noon. Gloria had also said that only she, Russ Warren, and their grandfather knew about the hole. Well, Johnny Rosa knew about it and so did old George Warren. Little Gloria imagines the truth or invents it.

The pipes in the overheated office began to croak, like a swamp full of bullfrogs. My galoshes under the hall tree were the mothers of many waters. Outside the frostcornered window, the one-way traffic was moving slowly up St. Andrew Street, puffing in the cold like an ageing track team. The office was a mess. It made me feel busy, and busy was the best feeling.

I could sit around all day just chewing over the case, but I put an end to reverie by calling Nelson Christie at the Correctional Services office. I got someone named Simpson, who put me on to Miss Wright, who at last, after my second explanation, turned me loose on her boss.

“Oh, it's you is it? Well, I hope you haven't telephoned to gloat over my being wrong about that bandit, Rosa. He may have been alive when I talked to you, but he's just as dead now, Mr. Cooperman, as I said he was then. I've just spoken with Staff-Sergeant Savas of Niagara Regional. He wanted to know … Well, never mind what he wanted. What do
you
want? That's more to the point.”

“I hear that Ian Todd is back in your live box.”

“I should have guessed you'd be on about that. Yes, I had him here for an hour or two yesterday. He's here now, as a matter of fact, talking to one of the parole officers. He's calmed down a good deal. The woman isn't going to press charges, confesses to being frightened and confused. Bit of racism there, I think, but it won't come to the surface.”

“If I come down there, can you tell it to me slowly and in words I can understand?”

“Come here? Well, if you must, you must. I'll tell Miss Wright to expect you. Goodbye.”

I didn't waste any time getting over there. The post office building looked just as solid as it had earlier in the week, and Miss Wright looked just as devoted to Nelson Christie. Through an open doorway, I saw Ian Todd sitting in an orange office chair with big wrists and hands hanging idle between his spread knees. He looked like he was studying the carpet. He didn't see me, but then he wouldn't have seen the Moscow Circus if it had tumbled in behind him. This was a chastened Ian Todd, an Ian Todd who wasn't going to tell anybody to “piss up a rope.” Miss Wright cleared the way into Christie's office and there he was in the same combination of greens that didn't match.

“Well, that didn't take you long. Sit down.” I pulled a chair up to the desk to advertise my interest. Christie took out three pipes and began playing with them one after another while he talked. It was the same ritual with each one. If he departed from the liturgy, he'd have to go out and buy three new ones. In and out with the pipe cleaners, examine the effect, test the draw, scrape away at the bowl with a pen knife, empty the contents into the waste basket, dust the residue from his lap, put pipe in tobacco pouch, repeat again from the beginning.

“Tell me what happened.” He nodded, and picked up a report sheet.

“Mrs. Charles Rothwell was on her way to the bus terminal on Academy Street. She was going to Toronto. Her name is Susan. She's been married to Mr. Rothwell since 1962. Rothwell works for Hyland Newbury at the …”

“I'm not going to write it up, Mr. Christie. Just the essentials will do.”

“What a careful listener would appreciate, Mr. Cooperman, is that we have a dependable, middle-class witness here. No axe to grind, no notion of who Todd was. As she got out of the taxi, the driver took her suitcase from the trunk and placed it on the sidewalk while she paid the man. Meanwhile, Todd came up, looked at the suitcase and picked it up. Mrs. Rothwell assumed that Todd was stealing it. She panicked and tried to pull it away from him. He started to question her. The taxi driver got involved. There was some pushing and shoving. Todd kept asking Mrs. Rothwell in a highly excited way where she got the suitcase. Racial slurs were exchanged. Constable Moodie, off-duty, seeing his sister off on the Hamilton bus, intervened. Todd was detained. Too upset to take the bus, Mrs. Rothwell called her husband, and a complaint was made. They've since withdrawn it. Todd has been seriously shaken by the whole experience. He has been warned, and after a lot of consultation, we've decided not to send him back. He doesn't know that yet, because it hasn't been approved. Apart from this, his record is clean. He's just been blown off course, that's all. He'll straighten up.

“What's his version?”

“He says he was coming from the terminal, had just arrived from the Falls. The suitcase looked like one he'd lost some years ago, and he was simply looking at it to see if it had marks he might recognize. He is sorry, but blames the woman for losing her head. Says he wasn't trying to steal her case,”

“Where did she get the suitcase?”

“I say, you are thorough. She says it came from a shop called ‘Ex-Toggery,' where you can find superior secondhand items. It's not a flea-market by any means. She's had it for some weeks. If he'd tried to pop it he couldn't have made more than a few dollars. But that's never been his game. I'm treating it as a misunderstanding and that's how I'm going to represent it when it goes before the board. What else?” He packed away the last of his pipes in the oilskin pouch. Like himself they were small and conservative.

“I'd like to talk to him.”

“Help yourself. You might cheer him up. Now, get out of here, I've got serious things to attend to.” I got up, and left him with three pipes ready for action as soon as someone fired the starting pistol.