Authors: Howard Engel
I made two other calls while waiting for Dr. Carswell to catch up to his accumulated messages. The first failed to find my client at the number she’d given me; the second failed to find anybody at Secord University’s History Department where Anna Abraham worked. No answer got me off the hook as far as dinner was concerned, but it did nothing for that part of me that wanted to hear her
voice. Anna was becoming an important part of my life, and I hadn’t heard from her since Saturday night. I didn’t like calling her father’s place up on the escarpment above the city, because I didn’t want to imagine the expression on Jonah Abraham’s face if he took the call. Abraham and I weren’t in the same tax bracket for a start. He’d been a client of mine, which didn’t make things any easier. The fact that I knew the father before I met the daughter confused things. I didn’t like to mix business with pleasure. I’m sure he felt the same way, and I don’t think he liked the idea of his only daughter being my idea of pleasure. I resolved to try her later in the evening, in spite of my reservations.
I was on the point of going out for cigarettes, when I caught Dr. Carswell calling back. I jumped in before my answering service could take the message and garble it. I wonder whether they have a scrambler specialist on the payroll, somebody who can make Henry Gibson into Henrik Ibsen without even trying. I explained to Carswell who I was, and that I was looking for information and checking some facts. He agreed to see me after his last patient at six-thirty that night. Good, I thought, at least I’ll be able to talk to him before I make a call on Irma Dowden. At least I’ll have been able to add something to the facts in the clipping. That would show I’d been working.
There was over an hour, nearly two hours to kill before setting out to see Carswell. I spent the first half-hour paying bills to the various oil companies that fuelled my
car. I began feeling guilty about tapping limited fossil fuels and helping to wipe out the remaining Indians along the Amazon. Was I aiding and abetting in the destruction of rain forests somewhere, or perhaps killing North Sea seal pups? Once you dip into the question of pollution, you soon discover that it’s all around you and that you are the chief villain. I needed to confess to having stuck gum under my desk at Edith Cavell School, to not bundling and salvaging my collected newspapers and to using leaded gas in my car. I was a mass of vices calculated to destroy the ozone layer and speed along the disastrous results of the greenhouse effect. I looked at the yellow patch of ceiling above my desk, my own area of peak pollution. I resolved to put a piece of time away to begin thinking about cutting down on my tar intake. I made an appointment with myself to consider a plan to bite the bullet. I frightened myself out into the street and lighted up a Player’s until all was right with the world again.
There was still time enough to pay a fast visit to my friend Martin Lyster, who was a patient in the Grantham General. He was a book dealer around town and I heard that he was in a bad way. I’d been putting off this trip for over a week.
After getting the room number from Admitting, I took the elevator to the fifth floor, where I walked past the nursing station to Room 509. My hands were sweating already. I poked my head through the half-open door. Martin was in neither of the beds in this semi-private room. The first was occupied by a man with a bright
orange face, partly covered by an oxygen mask. His open eyes were wide and staring, his breathing was frantic. The second bed, by the window, was empty. I was about to turn and check the door number again when a familiar voice called my name.
“Benny! Are you looking for me?” I followed the sound of the voice to a corner partly obscured by the open bathroom door. Martin, dressed in a striped terry-cloth robe, was sitting in a chair reading the
New York Times.
He was incredibly thin.
“Hello. I heard you were in here,” I said, and added stupidly, “How are you?”
“Much better, Benny. I think they’ve got a pretty good idea about this thing now. It’s taken them long enough, I’ll tell you. They won’t let me smoke or drink. I think they want to quarantine my liver. They’ve got a lien on my lungs.” Martin still sounded like Martin, although he looked terrible. He was wearing half-moon glasses. There is something indestructible-looking about people in half-moon glasses. Martin was still speaking, but my daydreaming had partially tuned him out. What was he saying?
“… I found a Brian Moore you might be interested in.”
“Who?”
“He wrote it under a pseudonym. Early on, you know. It’s a detective story. That’s right up your street, isn’t it? I told Anna all about it when she came to see me.”
“Anna? Oh, sure, she told me she’d been in.”
“Would you like to take a walk down to the end of the corridor with me?”
“Sure.” I helped him to his feet. I could hardly find an arm inside the sleeve of his robe. He was as light as cream, and it frightened me as we moved past the IV stands and folded wheelchairs to and beyond the nursing station. Nobody looked up as we went by.
“You’ve got a wonderful woman in Anna, you know, Benny. She’s read just about everything. What a girl! I think I’m going to get serious about finding somebody. We Irish always marry late. It’s time. I can see that.”
“Anna’s great, Martin, but the knot isn’t tied yet. We’re not a number yet. It’s early days. He old man’s suspicion may be the only thing that’s holding us together. But you’re right. I think she’s great too.”
“I told her about the Moore and she knew the title. How do you like that?” Martin leaned into the window alcove at the end of the passage. For a minute or two we watched the eddying circles of fallen leaves down in the street below. They blew in and out of pools of light around the streetlights. It was all rather theatrical.
“Are you still fighting your fate, Benny?”
“If I read you right, I guess I can say that I’m still resisting the call to manpower about a
real
job? Is that what you meant?”
“Look, Benny, you and I are alike. We’re a dying breed. We’re nearly extinct. What is the French call it? We’re the
fin de race,
the end of the line. We’re the last individuals left in town. Nobody rates independence any
more. It doesn’t count. Everybody’s into life-styles and sitting pretty. I’ll tell you, Benny, we are witnessing the Yuppification of North America. The bottom line has replaced what we used to call ethics. It’s a terrible, terrible thing, Benny. You understand me?”
“Everything has its price but nothing has any value? Something like that?” He turned to rest his behind on the window ledge. He was breathing hard.
“Now Anna, Benny, she’s a great woman, but even the goods one slow you down. She’ll put fancy doilies on all your rolling stones. I know what I’m talking about.”
“I thought you wanted to settle down?”
“I do. I do.” He was smiling. “But I haven’t got the rhetoric down yet. It’s slow work, Benny. Let’s go back to the room, okay?”
“Sure. I have a hard time picturing you inside a picket fence, Martin.”
“Just keep watching. But, before I settle down, I’m going to go south when spring training comes around. I want to cover the Blue Jays for the
Beacon
the way I did a year ago.”
“Is that Sarasota?”
“That’s circuses. I go to Dunedin. Ah, don’t get me started about it. Baseball, Benny, baseball is the metaphor of our time. I want to explore it.”
“You could do a book.”
“I could indeed. And it would be
some
book. But first, I have to wait until they let me out of here. My doctor said this morning that I might be out by next weekend.”
His expression suddenly changed from a bright, many-lined grin to one of pain. “Oops, I think it’s Demerol time.”
Back in Room 509, Martin got into bed, still wearing the terry-cloth robe to help hide his wasted arms and legs. We talked for another few minutes. From the corner of my eye I could see the man with the orange face, hidden from Martin by the curtains around that part of the bed, had stopped breathing. I was surprised, but I didn’t say anything. It was so ordinary. He had been breathing when we came back to the room, but now he had stopped. There was a tear running down from the eye closest to me to the bright earlobe below it. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t shouting, calling for help, raising the alarm. I simply said good-night to Martin, and mentioned what I had seen to a nurse at the nursing station on the way out.
“It was expected,” she said with a sad smile, as though that would make me feel better.
THREE
At six-thirty I presented myself in the waiting room of Dr. Gary Carswell. He had a fine collection of old magazines. For five minutes I read about the banning of mussels from Prince Edward Island and the arrival of the Olympic torch in Calgary.
“Mr. Cooperman?” I dropped the magazine and tried to reorganize the pile I had taken it from, while getting to my feet. Before me stood a huge bearded man of perhaps thirty-five, no more. He was wearing an English-tailored suit with a vest to cover his impressive belly. His sandy hair was parted on the right; a lock of hair nearly covered one of his eyebrows. The eyes themselves were wide-set and squinting at
me. A muscle in his cheek twitched and his mouth moved. It resembled a pained smile. He repeated my name while we shook hands, and I followed the doctor’s retreating back into his inner sanctum.
It was an interior decorator’s idea of what a doctor’s office should look like. The books on the dark wood shelves looked unread. The plaques and citations on one panelled wall were calculated to impress the visitor, to create a welcome full of warmth and trust. On his broad desk were picture frames with their backs turned towards me. A family man no less. “Well, now,” he said, placing his palms flat on his desk top. “What can I do for you?” For an educated man, he had a short memory. I repeated the information about me and my profession. The doctor nodded in time with my disclosures. I told him that I was looking into Jack Dowden’s death and that I would like to review with him the evidence he gave at the inquest. He kept on nodding through my explanation as though what I was asking was as reasonable as seat belts and Christmas. Jack Dowden might have died yesterday; Carswell’s interest couldn’t be improved upon. He sat back in his chair, letting his bulk carry him hard against the spring, tilting towards the curtains, away from me. “Now, let’s see,” he said, placing a pair of chubby hands behind his head. “You would be representing somebody in this, Mr. Cooperman. May I ask you who that might be?”
“Dr. Carswell, that comes under the head of privileged information. You wouldn’t tell me what’s ailing Mrs. Brown, if Mrs. Brown was one of your patients. It’s the same thing in my business. Now, Jack Dowden wasn’t one of your patients; you just happened to be there when he died. You gave testimony at the inquest. I’d just like you to expand on what’s already on the public record.” I made a gesture to show that I wasn’t asking for the crown jewels.
The doctor thought about that for a second, nodding over the width of his desk and bringing his brows together to add the necessary accoutrements to deep thought. He was generalling this interview very well so
far. I was prepared for bad news. He was going to stonewall me with that smile on his face. “I see,” he said. “Mr. Cooperman, I don’t quite know what to say. You see, in a way, Mr. Dowden
was
my patient. I am retained by the company to deal with medical problems that arise from the dangerous substances that the Kinross people come in contact with. They routinely handle some very nasty things, you see, and I have to deal with things like skin eruptions and generally give advice about the results of contamination from these toxic wastes.” He took a deep breath and he was off again, this time it sounded like part of a prepared text.
“You know, everybody’s excited about what’s happening to the environment these days, and the Environment Front people aren’t above using scare tactics, exaggerations and half-truths. That’s why you see my face on television so often. I’m just trying to keep things in perspective.”
“Excuse me, Doctor, but what has this got to do with Dowden’s death?”
“The point is, Mr. Cooperman, that I’ve been turned into a busy man by all this. I have to watch my time. I don’t want to insist on that, but since I’ve already said everything about the incident at the inquest … You see what I mean? It’s all on public record. Besides, I don’t think I have anything more to add that would be helpful. You see the spot you put me in? And, remember, it was well over a year ago.”
Now it was my turn to nod and look sage. It’s easier to do sitting behind a desk. Carswell wasn’t going to give me much time. He was already shifting papers off his desk and into an attaché case. “I think I understand your position, Doctor,” I said. “I’d just like to be sure that the account of the injuries sustained in the accident square with the circumstances described in the inquest transcript.”
“Well, I can put your mind at rest there, Mr. Cooperman. I was one of the first on the scene, and I saw the man just after it happened.”
“But you didn’t actually see the accident?”
“No. I thought you said you’d read the coroner’s report?” He was getting angry now, but keeping his hands on the arms of his chair helped to modulate his voice. I tried grinning to ease the situation.
“I’m just trying to get it clear in my head.”
“I understand your problem, Mr. Cooperman, but I don’t see how I can help you. I don’t think that Norman Caine would appreciate me speaking to you without you going through him first. I’m sure that that would be his view and I’m sure that Ross Forbes would back him up in that.”
“What does Ross Forbes have to do with this?” I thought I had put that name behind me for all time. “He’s no longer top man at Kinross, is he?” I hoped that my agitation wasn’t showing. I wanted nothing further to do with Ross Forbes.
“Of course not,” Carswell said, pitying my ignorance, “but he is still CEO of Phidias Manufacturing. Kinross, Mr. Cooperman, is a subsidiary of Phidias. Ross Forbes would support Mr. Caine in this, I think.”
“You’ve changed a speculation into a certainty, Doctor.” Carswell got up, terminating our conversation.