The Last Hand (16 page)

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Authors: Eric Wight

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“Did you start alphabetically?
“What? Oh, no. Anyway, this fella Lucas was a widower who didn't have anyone looking over his shoulder. His sister wouldn't have approved, I would think, but she wouldn't be peeking in his diary, would she?”
“Where else are you going to look?”
“You think our fella was diddling the fair Louise?”
“I think it was likely.”
“What is it I'm doing, then?”
“Proving it.”
“So I'll search for fond postcards, that sort of thing. Gift tags with loving messages saved in his underwear drawer.”
“Where else will you look?”
“I'll make sure there's no writing on the labels of whiskey bottles and such. Those cardboard cylinders that single malt comes in take a lovely message in grease pencil.”
“Where else?”
“I've a feeling you have some place in mind, sir. A hunch.”
“Once, about ten years ago, I identified a suspect by the flyleaf of a book which he had given to the victim. These are all bookworms, remember.”
“Right you are, I'll check all flyleaves.”
“Her husband is an architect, and she is the secretary of a very swish private girls' school. Keep your eyes open for identifiable notepaper. Off you go now.”
“I shouldn't start with these books we have in the office?”
“No. Start with the books in the apartment.”
Smith called back before noon. His voice was rich with satisfaction. “I am standing in the study of Mr. Jerry Lucas,” he said. “And I have in my hand a book. On the flyleaf there is a handwritten message. “It says, To Jerry, from Louise.”
“Not with love? Something like that?”
“Better than that. The message is completely enclosed within an amateur rendering of the outline of a heart, a valentine, as it were, done in red crayon. I think that's what you wanted, sir.”
“That's the only one?”
“I came across it almost immediately. I thought it might be enough for you.”
“What's the book?”
“
Elective Affinities,
by G-O-E-T-H-E.”
“Goethe.”
“Aye? I knew it would be tricky. That's why I spelled it out.”
“It's not quite enough. That's on the book group list. He might have asked her to pick up a copy for him, and the inscription is a little joke. See what else you can find.”
“Right you are, sir. It is
guid
though, isn't it?”
“Oh, yes. It is that.”
 
 
“I asked you to come down again because I want to show you something to see if you can identify it.”
They were in Fran's again. It was five o'clock, the earliest that Louise Wilder could get away from the school.
Salter drew
Elective Affinities
from his pocket, opened it to the flyleaf, and watched her try to calm down.
“So what was going on? Still just a little hanky-panky?”
She said nothing, her silence an assent. Her face was closed and hostile.
“When did you meet him?”
“The third Thursday in the month.”
“How long had you been meeting?”
“About six months.”
“Since you dropped out of the book group.”
“That was the point of dropping out, obviously. It gave me a night when I didn't have to explain where I had been.”
Salter said, “I was pretty sure this morning that you had been to Lucas's apartment, but it still might have been harmless without old Goethe here. It wasn't, was it?”
“We were lovers.”
“Yes. That's not my concern, though, unless you killed him. What I want to know is, now you know you can talk, do you have anything to say that might interest me? Like who might have killed him?”
“Don't be grotesque.”
“Didn't he ever tell you about his enemies?”
“I don't think he had any. We talked about music, we gossiped a little about the only people we had in common—the rest of the group-and so forth. He wasn't much interested in people, either.”
“Where were you going?”
She understood him immediately. “Nowhere. We were lovers but we weren't in love. We didn't think of each other continually, and we didn't yearn to be together all the time. Once a month doesn't sound like much, but-” she shrugged “—We had both reached the age of enjoyment, which comes after the age of passion.”
“The age of enjoyment. I must remember that.”
“That was Jerry's phrase. The point is we weren't about to upset our other worlds.”
Salter said, “The night Lucas was killed, a woman came to his apartment. She looked like a hooker. Dressed like one, anyway. Now you and Lucas were pretty easy with each other—the age of enjoyment: I like that—so you might have an opinion about what that girl was doing. The usual thing? Did he regularly entertain hookers, as well as you?”
She said, slowly and carefully, “I don't believe that Jerry would have hired a prostitute in a thousand years, if that's what you're asking, though it's not unusual for someone to harbor a secret like that until he dies, is it?”
“Go on.”
“What do you mean, ‘Go on'?”
“I mean tell me what you think. If you don't think he would use a hooker, then what was one doing in his apartment?”
Again, slowly and thoughtfully, she answered. “It could have been a mistake. Did anyone see her go in?”
“Like Pizza Pizza getting the wrong address, you think?”
“Or it might have been some kind of joke.”
“That's a word that's cropped up before. What kind of joke?”
“A practical one. A group of his friends hired her to embarrass him. Did he let her in?”
“We're still finding these things out.”
“Didn't anyone see her leave?”
Salter assumed an amiable expression. “You're not allowed to ask questions. That's
my
job. If you don't have any more to tell me, we can leave it there.” He stood up.
“For good?” She had nearly recovered her poise.
“That depends. I may have to come back to you down the road a bit.”
“Am I going to get dragged into this?”
“At the moment, all I can see is we might need a couple of hairs from you so that the forensic people can place you in Lucas's apartment, and cross the traces of you off the list.”
“Will these do?” She reached up and tugged out a few hairs and handed them to him.
He opened the
Elective Affinities
at the flyleaf and she dropped them in. He said, “These will do. By the way, what's it like? The book.”
“I've no idea. We hadn't done it before I left the group, but I'd bought it early to give to Jerry, as a present.”
“Ah. I wondered about that.”
S
mith said, “There's someone else we should be looking for, sir. Talking to those dollies on Jarvis Street made me wonder. How did Pussy-in-Boots get to Prince Arthur that night?”
“By cab,” Salter said. “I don't think hookers use buses, not when they are in war paint.”
“Barlow and Jensen covered that. No cab driver has been found who drove to that address that night, or who had our lady as a passenger.”
“So?”
“So she drove her own car.”
“Or her pimp did.”
“Aye. But assuming the first, I began to wonder where she parked. You know that area, sir?”
“I lived there a long time ago, with my first wife.”
“Then you'd know there's not many meters in the area. There's a big parking lot that runs behind Bloor Street from Bedford Road nearly up to the back of the Park Plaza Hotel, with a pedestrian exit onto Prince Arthur. That would be pretty good for someone who doesn't want to be seen walking around in fancy dress. She could park up near the Bedford Road end, nip across the street and be in the apartment building in a jiffy. That was my reasoning.
“So I had a chat with the attendant, and wouldn't you know it, my luck was in, he was on duty that night and witnessed an altercation between Pussy-in-Boots and a man who accosted her. Perhaps another punter, sir.”
“A what?”
“A customer. A john. What the attendant saw, then, was Pussy walking towards her car and then being stopped by this man. They talked for a minute and then she went on to her car. He went after her to stop her, it seemed, and the attendant looked out of his booth and shouted across the lot, and she stepped into the car and drove to the booth, paid her money and left.
“Did he get a look at her face?”
“He said he asked her if the guy had been bothering her but she didn't even look up, so he could only see the bit the wig left uncovered, and it was hard to tell. It was just a face, maybe not
too
young, but he's not sure.”
“And the customer?”
“He had his car there, too, and a few minutes later he drove up to the kiosk and paid his parking fee. They had a few words: the attendant told him not to hang around the lot, and the man told him to go fuck himself, and drove off before the attendant could get out of his booth and thump him.”
“A description?”
“Middle-aged. Pretty bald, but long at the back. Mouse-colored hair. Clean-shaven. Leather jacket. Driving a white pickup truck, with a fitted-cargo box behind the cab, like one of those that go around selling frozen food door-to-door. You know them?”
“Does it seem obvious to you?”
“The obvious interpretation is that he propositioned her, and she shook him off. Now if we could find this second bloke, we could get a better description of her, wouldn't you think? Face, voice, all of it, he must have gotten, even in a small argument. But how the hell do you go about finding whoever it was that was looking for a hooker that night?”
“You could start with the pickup truck.”
“Aye, and probably end with it, too.”
“What's that?” Salter pointed to the magazine Smith was carrying.
“Ah, yes. I brought this back from the apartment in case you thought it might be significant.” He put it on the desk. “You know the magazine?
The Hogtowner.
Nasty name.”
“It's the name the people who didn't like Toronto used to call it, once upon a time. Don't ask me why. Something to do with the meat-packing plants, I think. This magazine started as a scandal sheet, you know—gossip columns with rude names for the famous, faked-up photographs of homophobic politicians buggering each other, nothing was sacred; they were always being sued for libel. But it worked, because in a few years it got a glossy cover and began printing real scandal, and you started to find it in dentists' waiting rooms. Well, maybe not, because there was always something in it to offend somebody. Was this the only magazine in the apartment?”
“No, but it was in a drawer and I took that to be significant.”
“So what's in it?”
“Nothing of any interest to an immigrant from Glasgow. But you may see something. And that woman called again. Jane Rudd.”
“Shit. She has to speak to me personally, I suppose.”
“That seemed to be the idea.”
“Let's get it over with.” He dialed the number and Jane Rudd, evidently waiting for his call, said, “I'll have to close the door. A moment.”
What now? Salter wondered.
“I've just remembered another talk we had. He was telling me of an experience he had in Mexico when he visited a Canadian writer once, someone he had been in college with. They wanted a drink, and his friend said that the best bar in town was in the local brothel, so that's where they went. He said he felt like Graham Greene, researching a book. Again, there was no question of his hiring one of the girls.” She stopped.
“Thank you,” Salter said. “That it?”
“You told me to let you know if I thought of anything.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“Are you still seeking information?”
“Whatever you think might be useful. Thanks again.” Salter hung up. “She's still trying to find out what we're up to,” he said to Smith.
He sat down and started to browse through the magazine, and came very quickly to the reason Lucas had kept it, an article about the trial of a crooked stockbroker who had borrowed money from
his clients' accounts and been unable to pay it back before one of the clients found out. Someone had marked the place of the article with a little bundle of newspaper clippings. Nothing else in the magazine seemed to have been touched. Salter settled down to read.

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