Ransom Game (3 page)

I paid my bill, the waitress saluted me by tipping the toothpick in her mouth so that it pointed to her short nose, and I made it back through the February wind to my office. A bowel-clawing wind pushed me to my door. Safe upstairs and overheated again, I put in a call to a poolroom I knew in Papertown, asking the owner, whose falsetto surprised me, to get Binny Logan to call. Binny walked and talked like an extra from
Guys and Dolls,
but there wasn't much he didn't know about life in the south end. Naturally, I didn't expect him to be there. No selfrespecting poolhall operator would deliver a message while it was fresh. Like fine wines, a phone message gets better the longer you hold on to it.

Then I called Ella Beames at the public library and told her I was coming down to read some old papers on the iron lung. She laughed and asked what dates I wanted. She knew me pretty well. I told her I wanted everything she had on the Warren girl's kidnapping. She didn't insist on my having the exact date. Ella was like that; she liked doing her job well.

The new library in town couldn't be more different from the old one if it tried. The old place had been full of books on racks in rows with people scattered all over the place, some reading under green porcelain lamps, some chatting to the girl at the check-out desk, sometimes exchanging views about the books around them. This new place started out trying to fool people into thinking that it wasn't a library at all but a picnic ground. There were pools and a fountain, and even a cobblestone bridge crossing a babbling brook. Wherever you went, you were followed by the sound of running water, which is not the easiest sound to live with when you've settled down to a good read. The carpets on the three floors were colourcoded, each being a slightly different shade of burnt orange. At the time the place opened, the
Beacon
carried a story about how the architect had been inspired by an empty egg-cup. I was glad that they'd brought people like Ella Beames over from the old place. You needed the human touch under those bright triangular lights.

I found Ella at her desk in the Special Collections department. She handed me three boxes of microfilm and a key to the microfilm room. It took me less than twenty minutes to find it, and half that again to fit the film on the machine My machine was the only vacant viewer in a line of five. To an observer we might have been a bunch of paraplegic exiles from the magazine rack at the United.

The
Beacon
had had a field day with the Warren case. Only a war could have filled more space. There was a profile of George Warren, the wealthy chairman of Archon Incorporated, one of the largest and most diversified conglomerates on the exchange. I found that the cornerstone of the Warren fortune was shoepolish. First
Warren Blacking
in Britain, where the first of the Warrens employed the youthful Charles Dickens as a bottle labeller near Hungerford Stairs on the Thames. Then
Warren Shoepolish
in North America at the time of the first World War. It was after the second that the big push came: a branching out into wider and wider fields. In the records of Archon, the holding company that linked all these fields to a common Bay Street address, George Warren's name was prominent at the time, but in the most recent history his name was hard to find. For the ten years or so preceding the kidnapping, Warren appeared to have contrived to stay out of the papers.

There was a picture of the large house he had built up on the Escarpment so that it looked down on the few thousand acres of prime real estate he owned through one of his minor holdings. Passing mention was made of his private yacht club, built out of pique after a disagreement with the local millionaires-only club on the Niagara River, his fleet of Lear jets, his private island in the Caribbean, and his beautiful daughter, Gloria, who had become the focus of a kidnapping drama. There'd been an older brother, killed in a car accident shortly before the kidnapping. There was rather less said about him than the others, and I made a mental note to find out why. Warren's wife had divorced him for a handsome settlement a decade before and had quickly spent that and the remainder of her active life at the gambling tables in the south of France. Now she lived quietly in genteel poverty near Ste-Maxime.

I got the feeling that the family had been out of bounds to reporters on the paper before Gloria Warren's abduction. I wasn't surprised to see that Archon Incorporated owned the
Beacon
. Most of the pictures looked about thirty years old and came from out-of-town sources. Several showed the summer cottage at Dittrick Lake, a fashionable piece of vacation-land not far from Grantham. The paper's artist had had a good time marking an X where the door to the frame cottage had been forced, arrows where the kidnappers' car had been parked and more arrows and dotted lines criss-crossing maps of the whole territory involved in the case.

Gloria had been staying for the long Labour Day weekend at the lakeside cottage. Her friend, Robert H. Jarman, had driven up for the day to go waterskiing with her. When they returned from the wharf to the cottage, about twenty yards distant, Gloria, entering the house first, was grabbed from behind. At the same moment, Jarman was sapped on the head. Neither saw a face. Jarman woke up tied hand and foot in the kitchen of the cottage with the ransom demand pinned to his beach robe. Immediately he got loose, he telephoned George Warren. He and Warren knew one another, but Jarman wasn't one of the family circle, I gathered. They contacted the Regional Police here in Grantham, and they brought in the Provincial Police because the lake was in their part of the forest. A joint war-room was established, the ransom note was studied and the police advised Warren to pretend to go along with the ransom demand. The kidnappers promised to return the girl unharmed on the payment of one million dollars. Warren was told to be at a certain public telephone booth in a crowded Grantham shopping mall at a certain time. He was warned not to go to the police, and told that his movements were being watched at all times. Very, very neat.

Warren and Jarman took the money in two suitcases to the phone booth. They only brought five hundred thousand, which was haggling a little, I thought. The kidnappers could take it or leave it and kill the girl. Warren figured they'd jump for five hundred and take their licking like the honest hoods they were. Warren had raised the money through a bank he directed on the side. Jarman got to carry it. The police stood by in unmarked cars, but might as well have been disguised in T-shirts bearing the Inscription
Police Athletic Club.
A bugging device had been placed in one of the suitcases so that the bad guys could be traced and followed by the modern miracle of electronic tracking. Only somebody forgot to put in fresh batteries or something, and the modern miracle gave way to road blocks and tracking dogs on loan from the Provincial Police. At least they used real money. The temptation to use cut-up strips of paper instead must have been all but irresistible.

“We could have used phoney money,” a senior policeman explained, “but anything could have happened. How much money is a woman's life worth?” I hope he asked George Warren that one. Not a cent over half a million.

Soon the money was exchanged. Again, nobody saw anybody. Warren and Jarman were told to move to another country phone booth and there they were given instructions about where to drop the money and where to go to discover the missing girl. They found her wrapped up in a sleeping bag, trussed up like Sunday dinner, in an abandoned shed, an hour's drive from where the pick-up was made. She was unharmed if you overlook a little shock and dehydration. She didn't see a face or hear a word. There was a photograph of her with her head lowered and Jarman protecting her with one arm and making an ugly gesture at the camera with the other. His was a face you wouldn't want to meet coming the opposite way along a cinder path.

With the failure of the electronic bugging device, the police sealed off all highways and secondary roads within the Niagara Peninsula. They searched thousands of cars, upsetting countless tourists homeward-bound after the long holiday weekend. When the cops began getting their breaks they came from tips. There were lots of those, but in the end one of them paid off. Someone drew their attention to some swinging bachelors who met regularly in Suite 616 of the Norton Apartments. After a few discreet calls, a few questions. and answers, one group of men was isolated. In less than two weeks the four kidnappers were in custody. In three months, they had begun serving long sentences in Kingston Penitentiary.

Crime doesn't pay. Except that somewhere on the Niagara Peninsula, probably not twenty or thirty miles from where I was sitting, half a million dollars lay bundled up in two suitcases, just waiting to be picked up. I wondered whether I'd missed the item about the recovery of the money, but I hadn't. The money was still there all right, and only Johnny Rosa knew where to pick it up. I could get interested in Johnny myself with big bucks like that riding just over the top of the next hill.

That's the sap of what I found in the main newspaper clippings. Then there were notices of parole hearings, a journalistic flurry of agitation about the fact that the Grantham kidnappers were serving a bigger part of their sentences than some kidnappers from Toronto in another case, and finally reports of who got released when.

On my way out, I dug into a pile of recent
Beacons
for the account of Warren's death. I found it six weeks down in the stack. It told how the millionaire financier had drowned in his heated pool at home. He was 72 and in the habit of taking a morning swim. He'd been discovered at the bottom of the pool by a servant who'd brought him his morning coffee and paper. And it continued for a dozen more paragraphs telling about his estimated wealth—in excess of thirteen million a year—and the funeral arrangements. It gave another recapitulation of the kidnapping, and some speculation about the effect of his death on Archon Corporation. It ended with a bit of news I'd missed:

Warren is survived by his daughter, Gloria, Mrs. Robert H. Jarman.

That fellow Jarman knew a good thing when he saw it, no mistake about that. I thought that maybe I'd pay a call on the couple. Since I was trying to locate Johnny Rosa, I felt practically one of the family.

THREE

I was surfing a few hundred yards from shore, just coming up beautifully on the crest of a wave that peeled away under me, when I heard a sharp warning from a big cabin cruiser trying for the same stretch of ocean. It hooted at me about fifty times, without changing course. It came toward me like a shark only a hundred times bigger. I shouted at the top of my voice, but it overwhelmed me and everything went blue. And then I was sitting up in sweaty pajamas with the phone in my hand and the bedclothes tangled about my knees.

“Hello?” I asked, wondering whether it was a complaint from the cockpit of the cruiser.

“You Cooperman?” a voice asked.

“Yeah. Who is this?”

“It's me, Binny. The word is out you want to talk to me.”

“Binny, hold on a second.” I reached into my jacket pocket for my cigarettes. When I was lit, and my hands had stopped shaking, I reached for the phone again. “Hello, Binny, what do you know, what do you say?”

“Little of this, little of that. You want to chat, ask me about my old man, and I should ask you are you getting much, Benny, or what do you want from my young life, eh?”

“Binny, have you seen Johnny Rosa since he got out?” I could hear the line hum between my hotel room and Papertown, like somebody was hanging up his shorts on the wire.

“Cooperman, not you too? Everybody's looking for Johnny. You think he's going to walk into the poolroom? He'd never walk out alive. I mean, if you can't buy a piece of half a million, you could grab a piece of Johnny.”

“You know Muriel Falkirk?”

“What's to know? She used to be Eddie Milano's girl. I hear that she and Johnny had been keeping house in a quiet way since he got out. She's a good-looking broad, what do you want me to say?”

“Is she straight?”

“What am I, a philosopher? What's straight, for crying out loud? She's been around, she's seen a lot. A lot of people know her. She thinks she knows everybody.”

“What are the odds on Johnny being around next Christmas?”

Binny thought a moment, then: “Same odds as the Second Coming. Cooperman, what are you mixed up in?”

I could see the end of my cigarette in the mirror across the room. I couldn't see much more, although the neon light from the hotel sign was turning the pillow blue then pink. “Don't ask me, pal. I get roped into these things. If you hear anything about Johnny, I'd appreciate, you know.”

“Sure, Benny. See you.” And he was gone. I looked at the illuminated dial of my watch. It was nearly three in the morning. I knew that I wasn't going to get any more sleep, so I pulled a paperback off the chair from under my shorts and read until the neon blinked out and the trucks began coming from out in the country to the farmers' market.

By the time I'd hauled myself out of the hotel and into the chair behind my desk, I could think of at least fifty things I should have asked Binny when he called.

I resolved to write myself a stiff note about it. One of the troubles of working for yourself is that there is no boss to tear a strip off you. What I needed was the kind of push my older brother had. He sprinted through medical school and didn't stop to catch his breath until he'd been appointed head of surgery at Toronto General. His leftover push is now devoted to collecting antique cars and fighting minor traffic violations. He could spare me a little. Not too much. I could overdo it. I could become such a success I wouldn't want to know me.

I looked up at the address of the local office of the National Parole Board, and found it under Correctional Services of Canada. It was in the post office building, the one that was built just before a big general election, like all the post offices in this country. I spent nearly an hour trying to sort through the papers on my desk, putting answered correspondence in one file folder and unanswered correspondence in the same folder, until I got fed up. Even the prospect of trying to find Johnny Rosa or any other needle in any other haystack looked better.