Dead & Buried (7 page)

“Wrong. There are thousand of places. Well, at least hundreds. I can’t do all of your work for you, kid.” He gave me his big innocent grin and invited me for coffee. Before I got my hopes up, he took an electric kettle from under his desk and two unwashed cups with chipped rims from a bottom drawer. The coffee, when it came, was superior. I shouldn’t judge by appearances so much. While we were sipping the brew, lightened with canned milk, Eric told me more about Dame’s Rocket than I think the world is ready to hear. He told me about its spike of showy flowers, showed me pictures in several books and even found a specimen in a drawer in one of his smelly cabinets. His carefully preserved specimens had about as much colour and life as the samples from Jack Dowden’s cuffs. Eric taught me not to confuse
Hesperis
with phlox.

“How silly,” he said, giving his head a superior twist. “Phlox has five fused petals, while
Hesperis,
like all mustards, has four petals, arranged like a cross—cruciform as we botanists say—which has resulted in the family
Cruciferae,
which has world-wide about twenty-three thousand species in many genera …” He looked up just before I’d achieve the door. “Benny, you didn’t finish your coffee!” I turned and made a helpless gesture.

“Eric, I thought mustards were either mild or hot. I’ll have to come back for the rest of this some other time. Right now Anna Abraham is expecting me to drop into her office in the History Department,” I lied. “Thanks a lot for the stuff on
Hesperis.
You never let me down.”

“Benny,” he said crossing towards me, “do you want to see a newspaper from 1942 about Japanese advances in New Guinea? I’ve got one here about the death of the Duke of Kent in Australia. It’s right here somewhere. It was in a plane crash; I think it has rosehips in it. I had one with the disappearance of Leslie Howard, but that got used up when I spilled coffee on the term paper of a B student.” I backed out the door. “Hey, Benny, I thought you wanted to learn something about this stuff?”

A few minutes later, I knocked on Anna Abraham’s door in the History Department. For several reasons, I thought it would be nice to see her. The very least of them was that it would correct the lie I’d told Eric while I was trying to get away from his tidal wave of information. I’d just given up knocking on her door when she walked into the corridor from the other end, struggling with an overstuffed briefcase.

“Don’t I know you from somewhere?” she said.

“Cooperman’s the name,” I said, continuing in the same vein. “I’ve come to speak to you on a matter of some delicacy.”

“Serious as that, eh? We’d better go down to the cafeteria, then. I’ve got some time before my next class,” she said. I let Anna lead the way to the elevator. “Nearly called you last night,” I said, “but I was staying up late with a fibbing client.”

“At least she has some imagination. That’s something.”

In the cafeteria, Anna brought a tray of coffee and I cleaned off one of the cluttered white tables. She sat across from me and carefully set down two brimming cups. She caught me looking at her and smiled. I could never get enough of the way Anna looked. There were so many of her, all the different Annas I’d learned to recognize, like the school-marmish one with her dark hair pulled back away from her face, like the spoiled teenager who walked into my office a year ago looking like she’d just fallen off a motorcycle. She now brought me down to earth by giving me a demented cross-eyed grin, then let her eyes and mouth droop like an old bloodhound. That brought me around and I lifted my cup. “What brings you up the mountain, Benny? And so early!”

“I’ve come to check up on that Lord Macauley you’re always quoting. I think you have a weak spot for British aristocracy.”

“Thomas Babington is it? Well, I’ve been nuts about him since I was twelve. You’re too late, too late. You’ll have to settle for the dregs he is pleased to leave behind.”

“I’ll settle.”

“Why
are
you up here?”

“I’ve just been to see Eric Mailer, upstairs. He was looking at some seeds I found.” I told her about Irma Dowden and the death of her husband and the trail I’d been following all day yesterday.

“Was Eric much help?”

“Eric is a born teacher. He wanted me to learn all about the mustard family. I nearly didn’t get away from
there. In another minute he’d have had me rolled up in one of his ancient newspapers and gasping out my last breath in one of his foul-smelling cabinets.”

“Poor baby.”

“This is terrible coffee.”

“It’s not so bad when you have a degree. With a PhD you can hardly taste the difference between this and the real thing.”

“Sorry I introduced the subject. You know education’s my weak spot. I want you to tell me why we can’t go out Friday night.”

“Friday night’s fine. It’s
next
Friday night that I’m busy. I told you that I’m the maid of honour at my friend Sherry’s wedding. That’s on Saturday. Friday night’s the rehearsal. You can come if you want.”

“Wait a minute. This Sherry, which Sherry is it?”

“The bride’s a old school friend. I can’t let her down.”

“Last name. That’s all I want. Save your excuses.”

“Sherry Forbes.”

“Ha! I thought so! In Grantham, coincidence doesn’t have to have a long arm. Anna, I love you!” I leaned over the table and nearly spilled both of our cups.

“Hey! There goes the last of my dignity, Cooperman!”

“On you, it looks wonderful.”

“Wait until you see it in pink organdy, kid. We’ll look like a page from
Vogue
of maybe ten years ago. That’s high fashion around here.” Anna checked her watch and wolfed down the first two-thirds of her coffee. “Gotta go, Cooperman. See you on Friday night unless you get a
better offer. And I’m serious about the rehearsal next week. Come and see the Forbeses at play.”

“I wouldn’t miss it. All that and pink organdy too! I’ve died and gone to heaven.”

“No organdy or orange blossoms at the rehearsal. Control yourself.”

I’d met Anna last year when I ended up working on a case for her father, who could buy and sell half of Grantham and not worry about having an overdraft. His family had made their money in the liquor business, but Jonah, Anna’s father, was more interested in collecting art than in making more money. Anna thought I was trying to rip off her old man. When she decided I wasn’t, she’s let me take her to a movie. That has blossomed into a relationship of sorts. I knew that I only knew about a quarter of what was going on in Anna’s life. She finished off her coffee in one gulp.

“You don’t have to work eighteen hours a day, you know.”

“Yeah, it’s not like marking papers.”

“That’s different. It’s not dangerous for one thing.”

“Neither is reading up on environmental concerns, unless I nod off with a lighted cigarette in my mouth.”

“Well, I’m glad to see you’re finally paying attention. If we don’t start taking the environment seriously, we’ll have to start scouting for a new planet to spoil. Everybody knows that the waste-disposal companies all get away with murder around here.”

Anna’s eyes were alive with what she was saying. She’d dropped the kidding manner she put on with me. I let her argument sink in, but I wasn’t blind to the contrast of her light skin against her dark hair.

Before I left, I asked Anna to see if she could find out who in the History Department was researching the past of Kinross Disposals. She said she’d try. She was looking terrific this morning. I went back out into the world feeling like a very lucky private investigator.

SEVEN

Ann once tried to explain to me that there is an important thread in American literature that has to do with “the fixer” coming into the community from outside and then moving off into the sunset after the work is done, leaving nothing but an echo behind him: “Who was that masked man?” Maybe Sam Spade and the Lone Ranger are brothers under the skin, but I don’t see how that affects me trying to make an honest buck up here north of the world’s longest undefended frontier. We don’t have that strain of vigilantism in Canada. Dirty Harry’s looking for work in Toronto, putting in time until the streets get meaner. He may not have to wait long, but in the interval, the traditions aren’t the same. Canadians are big consumers of law and order for one thing. Not spitting on the sidewalk or shooting the pigeons in the park is a sensible way to behave, a small enough price to pay for being allowed to stand aside from the mainstream of North American life. Maybe Anna thought I was part of the great American tradition. Maybe she saw a Canadian tradition with me in it. Most likely I was all that was left of her teenage crush on Nancy Drew.

When I got downtown again, I looked up Brian O’Mara’s number in the phonebook. His wife, or the woman answering his phone, told me that he was at work and wouldn’t be home until just after four o’clock. She asked me who was speaking, but I pretended I didn’t hear her and continued to thank her before hanging up. I noted down the address on a scrap of paper torn from a bank-machine receipt and planned to call on him later in the day.

With a styrofoam cup of coffee in hand, I climbed the stairs to my office, shucked my jacket and then the lid from the coffee. My mind was drifting towards Friday night and Anna. I put a stop to that by getting out the phonebook. That kind of distraction I could do without. No wonder I kept nothing sharper than an electric razor in my bottom drawer.

The number I was looking for was for Environment Front. I dialled it. Every town has its media-conscious, pollution-sensitive activist who is always hard to get to. I talked to three people before I got to Alexander Pastor, who had written the newspaper articles about illegal dumping and bringing in toxic-tainted fuel oil from the United States. I remembered how these pieces kept turning up, keeping me away from my crossword puzzle.

“Yeah?” he said into my ear when I finally got to him.

“Is this Alexander Pastor?”

“You got him,” he said. “You also got Sandor Pásztory. Take your pick.” I didn’t quiz him about that. The fashion for Canadianizing foreign-sounding names is
dying out. Even the business pages of the
Beacon
showing back-lit photographs of newly appointed directors to important companies was a harvest of non-Anglo-Saxon names. In the old days, whatever the origin of the executive, the name was suitably North American. Even actors were sticking to their own names nowadays, and the world hadn’t come to an end.

I explained to Pastor-Pásztory about my interest in the death of Jack Dowden at Kinross a year ago. I didn’t even have to remind him of the case; he was up on the details and agreed to meet me at Gosselin’s Turkey Roost up on the Scrampton Road in half an hour.

“Why that place?” I asked. “It’s right across from the Kinross yard. I’m not looking to walk into trouble,” I said with emphasis.

“There’s something I want to show you,” Pastor-Pásztory said and left it at that. It was a take-it-or-leave-it situation. I took it.

That left me travelling time and not much else to get there.

Gosselin’s Turkey Roost was one of the fast-food outlets on an industrial strip that took advantage of the workers at two quarries, a gravel pit and several trucking firms located along a concentrated three miles of chain-link fences, corrugated steel Quonset huts and aluminum-sided sheds. To me the eateries all looked alike. I was glad it was the pollution expert who chose our rendezvous.

The customers sitting at the counter of Gosselin’s Turkey Roost were mostly workers from the area: men working odd shifts, drivers of the rigs parked out front or in the lot to one side of the one-storey brick-and-cinderblock structure. Men in nylon bomber jackets with the names of their basketball teams on the front and back, or in heavy faded checkered shirts, contemplated the nuggets of turkey or their fresh French fries before putting them into their mouths. At one table, a Hydro crew nodded hard hats of yellow plastic over mugs of hot coffee. The corrugated broadside of a tractor-trailer obstructed my view across the road through big picture windows. Occasionally, as someone came in the door, the waitress or the short-order cook would look up. None of the customers showed much interest. On the wall near me, a sign, framed and covered in glass with a ketchup smear on it, read:

TEENAGERS & YOUNG FOLK EFFECTIVE immediately there will be a time-limit of 15 minutes imposed on all the above!—
Management

As far as I could see, there were no teenagers or young folk counting off the allotted time. The notice was a complete success, unless the faded ketchup smear could be interpreted as a sign of youthful protest. The music,
which held sway over the din of talk in the room, came from a coin-operated, plastic-wrapped, inwardly illuminated juke-box. It played old-fashioned country-andwestern songs by Johnny Cash, Ferlin Husky, Merle Haggard and Hank Snow. This wasn’t a camp re-creation of an era; it was the real thing still happening, without even a sideways glance at fashion. I was trying to imagine what the place might look like after dark, when the man who couldn’t have been anybody else but Alex Pastor-Pásztory came in. He had the look of a low-level bureaucrat crossed with a trailer-camp operator. There was some camp counsellor, graduate student and trail guide in there too. He didn’t have trouble picking me out of the line-up either. He shambled over towards me from the door, removing a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows as he came. Under it was an old sweater, either moth-eaten in places or burned. He moved into the other side of the booth I’d taken and produced a pack of cigarettes at once. As he fished one out, I found matches and struck one. He leaned into the flame, nodding at my Player’s dozing in the ashtray.

“We’re a dying breed,” he said. “In more ways than one. But I can’t fight battles along a broad front. Can’t arm-wrestle the world out there and me at the same time. Oh, well, there’s next year. What’s your excuse?”

“Me? I never thought of quitting. I like my vice. It’s a poor thing, but mine own. I can’t stand the self-righteous propaganda of the anti-smoking lobby either. They’re right, I guess, but I wish they’d find a less self-satisfied
way to make their points. I supposed I’ll have to give it up one of these days, like I gave up jellybeans and licorice allsorts.” Pásztory got up and waved to the waitress. When she didn’t see him, he called out. I admired his direct approach. It brought two cups of coffee within a minute.