Ransom Game (8 page)

She was in another sweater. This time it wasn't angora but it was blue and a size too small for getting away without causing a stir. Her navy skirt was slit up one side revealing a froth of white lace and long slim calves.

“Will you call me tonight?” she asked, tilting her head so that I forgot I was on the pay-roll. I nodded and grinned, and she started packing up. I helped her back into the Persian lamb and she gathered gloves and bag. We left together.

There was no Mustang parked in front of the library, but I walked her down the steps past the monumental pediment of the old library which had been re-erected on the approach to the new one. When we parted, she pressed my hand and gave me a peck on the cheek I didn't feel I'd earned.

“Call me tonight,” she said again, but in a confidential, almost conspiratorial voice. “Try me around nine. I may have good news. God bless,” she said, and moved off in the direction of Lake Street without looking back once.

NINE

Steve's Garage was a rusting, tin-fronted, overgrown shack that had been built back in the late thirties with the hope that it might last for ten years. It wasn't always Steve's Garage. Steve Tokarski had come on the scene fairly recently. He had installed pumps calibrated metrically and once in a while put up streamers when the oil company sent them. But he didn't know what to do about that rusting front. The stain slid down a new coat of paint the first time it rained. To the right of his small office were two large bays, with cars drawn over the pits. In back, he had an acre of wrecks. They looked like the remains of a metal-eater's lunch.

I drove on to the edge of the lot and put on the emergency brake. I was far enough from the pumps so I wouldn't be confused with business. I got out and walked toward the office.

Half an hour earlier, I'd got a call from the Regional Police telling me that a yellow Volkswagen had been towed to Steve's Garage on the Lakeshore Road near Niagara Street. I found Steve Tokarski in the back of the garage looking through a parts catalogue in an aluminum binder bolted to a workbench. He was a stocky, grease-covered man in his thirties, in a peakless peaked cap and a pair of overalls the colour of the last muffler I passed on the shoulder of a highway. He had a chubby face, and a one-sided smile that hoisted the left corner of his mouth into the cheek. His metal-framed glasses were streaked with oil as was the stub of a cigarette in the middle of his face. He didn't remove the cigarette to remove the ash, just blew hard without dislodging the butt. He had an oily rag to wipe his hands on when he saw company. When he saw me, he didn't touch it, but went on looking for the part he needed in the catalogue. A man with a safety light on the end of an extension cord glared at me. I waited and watched a crankcase drain its last oozings into a hubcap.

“Are you Steve Tokarski?”

“Yeah, I'm Steve. But I'm pretty busy right now, can it wait? I got both trucks out.”

“It's about the car towed in earlier, the Volkswagen.”

“Yeah,” he grinned his lopsided grin. “What about it?”

“Well, I'd like to see it and hear where you found it.”

“Who are you?” He had got suspicious suddenly. It sat well on his normal conservatism.

“Cooperman's my name. The car belongs to a client of mine.”

“You a lawyer, eh? I spotted you for a lawyer. As soon as I saw that car, I knew there was going to be lawyers. You want to take it away with you? There's towing and storage on it. To hell with the storage. Let me have twenty bucks and you can drive it out of here.”

“I didn't walk from town. I've got my own car. You hang on to it for a couple of days, and the lady who owns it will come for it. Where is it?”

“I'm not going to leave that heap of bones out front. Are you kidding? It's in back with the rest of the junk. I spotted it a week ago, off the road beyond the first lock of the canal. You know where the picnic ground are? Well it was in the bushes there. It hadn't driven off the road or anything, it was standing there with the keys on the floor. I took a look, but didn't think too much of it. Then after a couple of days I started to get curious, wondering why it had been left there, you know? So I called the cops and I had Walter bring it in on Monday night. I haven't seen the cops yet. In the summer, that's a regular lovers' lane down there. If the car wasn't a wreck, I'd have figured it was hot, you know? But you couldn't hardly give away this heap of bones.” He indicated that I was welcome to take the air and let him get on with his work, so I nodded my appreciation and walked around back.

It was a mustard-coloured VW with tattoos of rust everywhere. The winter had taken its toll a couple of times over on its poor blemished carcass. From the front, it looked solid enough. It hadn't bumped into anything, and there were no recent dents that I could see. Through the windows, everything looked in order. A religious medal dangled from the rear-view mirror. The back seat looked crowded but ordinary. I opened the door on the driver's side. The seat had been pushed back so that some long legs could be freed from confinement. I looked at the ratchet along the floor. I could see the mark where Muriel had had the seat, nearer the wheel, and then, a little further back, the mark of Johnny's favourite position.

I was just about to close the door when my eye caught a dark stain on the back of the driver's seat. In my work, I haven't come across much dried blood, but when I saw this, I got out my penknife and chipped a few crumbs of it into an envelope. I shone a pocket flashlight around the floor of the car, front and back, looking for other clues such as used theatre stubs, hotel bills, or a bank draft for five hundred thousand dollars, but all I saw was the cellophane wrapper from a pack of cigarettes. I thought I'd better leave the cops something to look at, so I left it where it was.

Back in my car, I lit up a smoke of my own, and headed over the canal bridge to see if I could find the place where the car had been left. It wasn't difficult. A black patch in the snow stood out too well. I stopped the motor but left the parking lights on, and crawled out. These narrow two-lane roads are hazardous in the dark. If I'd been hoping to find footprints, I was disappointed. There were a couple of good ones from Walter's boots, but all other prints had been swept away by the stiff breeze blowing in off the lake.

I wandered into the main office of the Regional Police when I got back to town, and asked for both of my old pals, Sergeants Savas or Staziak. Both were off. But I left Savas the envelope and told him to check it for blood type. I didn't need to mention Johnny Rosa. Savas was a good cop.

When I left the Regional Police I bought an evening paper, and found myself feeling hungry again. I solved that problem at the Diana Sweets with the
Beacon
propped up in front of me. The front page carried the news that a Canada-wide warrant for Johnny Rosa's arrest had been issued. The kidnapping was chewed again like an old cud, but there wasn't anything I didn't already know. I ordered a bowl of vegetable soup and a well-done omelette. I hate runny eggs, and as usual, I had to send them back to the kitchen to be fried for another five minutes.

TEN

My headlights easily picked out the name “Sanderson” stencilled on the rusting mailbox, which leaned intemperately toward the road. The lane leading into the property was dark with naked poplars on either side. The black mass of a barn stood at the end of it, with the moon going down behind. To the left was the house, a typical Ontario farmhouse, its three storeys squeezed into a narrow silhouette, as though it had been forced to move upward because expansion in other directions was impossible. In fact it sat quite alone on a fat ten-acre lot with nothing threatening it but a chicken coop and that was fifty yards away. It was going to ruin slowly. The wooden shutters bracketed the windows precariously where they hadn't fallen off. White paint was peeling from the clapboard. The wooden porch subsided under my weight as I looked for the door. I rang the old-fashioned hand bell and waited. Light from inside lit up the porch from tall narrow windows on either side of the door. It was quiet on the porch, and I could hear the poplars. Even without leaves they made a poplar-like noise.

Something stirred inside the house and I could hear footsteps coming closer to the door. It was opened by a girl of about nineteen, wearing old blue jeans and a purple T-shirt. Her straight brown hair hung to her shoulders. “Are you Mr. Cooperman?” she asked, opening her dark eyes wider and arching her right eyebrow. I nodded and she led me through a messy hallway and kitchen to a messy back room. It had been a summer kitchen when the house was built, but now it had a woodstove and plastic over the inside of the windows. It didn't pass any
House and Garden
standards, but it looked comfortable. Rolf Knudsen was sitting in a wooden rocking chair with a guitar leaning against it. About a dozen empty beer bottles either stood at attention beside the rocker or had rolled to the low end of a slightly raked floor. The carpet was worn through in places. He looked up.

“Cooperman?” I nodded again, and took a seat on a brown couch against the inside wall. He inclined his head toward the girl. “This is Jennifer. Would you like a beer?”

Knudsen was wearing a heavy black wool sweater with a tartan-patterned shirt collar showing at the neck. He wore faded blue jeans too, with ragged cuffs covering his worksocks. A pair of yellow boots were melting into a pool of water beside the back door. Jennifer brought me an opened bottle of beer and left the room.

“Jennifer is the best,” he said, when the sound of her footsteps had vanished. He looked me right in the eye and spoke with intensity. I figured that he had put away a quantity of beer, but that it took an ocean of it to shake his steady blue eyes. He kept rocking back and forth, easy and relaxed. He was a long, skinny man, in whom you could see the teenager he'd been. I couldn't picture him in a business suit trying to sell insurance, unless it was to university students. His hair was blond and he wore it long, but neatly. I tried to imagine him at the Warren cottage. Did he grab the girl from behind and gag her, or did he knock out her boyfriend? Maybe he just drove the car and kept his eyes on the road. Yes, I guessed he'd be able to do any of it without flinching. Christie from the parole board was right: he wasn't officer material, but he was the sort of soldier that officers depend on.

“You want to talk about Johnny? Okay, we'll talk about Johnny. I didn't see him after he got out. I expected that he would try to get in touch, but he didn't. I know that he has to be careful. They're watching him.”

“Who do you mean?”

“The Horsemen. They want to find the money, and they hope he'll lead them to it.”

“And you?”

“I'll wait,” he said shrugging. “I've waited two years since I got out. I can go on waiting.”

“You trust Johnny then? You think he will finally split that ransom money with you?”

“That's right. I could stub my toe on a gold brick too. I'm not holding my breath.”

“Tell me about the snatch. Who did what to whom?”

“That's all in the transcript.”

“I know. I want to hear it from you.”

“Why me? I saw less than any of the others. I sat in the first car. When Johnny whistled, I drove it up to the cottage. They brought the girl out, all tied up, and put her in back. Bill Ashland got into the back too for a while, and we took her to the shed where we left her. We drove back to Grantham. That's all.”

“How did you get involved in the first place?”

“I knew Johnny. Don't remember when I met him. Maybe at the Kit Kat Klub. I don't go for the cards much, but you can always get a drink there. Johnny took me aside one night and asked me if I had the stomach to go after something big. I told him I had a very strong stomach. I was living on credit in those days, was in way over my head. I couldn't afford to know anyone who lived at the Norton Apartments, let alone live there myself. I was ripe for something as crazy as the Warren deal, and Johnny could see it. He was like that, Johnny. He laid out the plan for me and I couldn't see how it could miss. If Ashland hadn't …” He didn't finish. He took a long swallow of beer from the bottle in his hand and sat quietly for a moment.

“None of us had prepared alibis, you see.” He looked up and grinned sadly. “Once the cops started sniffing around our place, they were bound to stumble on to us. We were nearly home and dry. He didn't have the stomach for it, Ashland.” He had now finished the beer he was holding. He placed the empty near the curved rocker by his right hand and found a full bottle on the window sill. He got up and removed the top on an opener fixed to the imitation wood panelling. The bottle was steaming from the top. He reminded me oddly of Nelson Christie, the parole officer; their economy of movement was the same.

“The word is that Johnny won't be coming back,” I said, when he had settled his tall, lean body back into the rocker. He stared at the new beer bottle, looked at the label like it was a ten-thousand dollar bill. After a minute he shrugged.

“He was a good man. I'm sorry they're saying that. He always treated me right. I won't forget him, I'll tell you that.” He nodded at his beer, like it was a holy icon.

“What do you think he did with the money?”

“The original plan was for the second car …”

“That was Johnny and Todd?”

“Yeah. They dealt with the money. We never saw it.” He took another long swallow, his Adam's apple moved like a mole under the skin of his throat. Then he grinned: “I guess now I'll never see it. He said he had a good place for it, a place where it would be safe until it was time to divide it up.”

“Any idea where that was?”

“You sound like Ashland.” He got up and pulled another bottle from the window sill. He looked over at me, still struggling with my first, and came back to the rocker.