Murder on Location (21 page)

“Okay. Double. I'll be right back. In case of fire write ‘Help' on a note and slip it under the door.” I heard a drawer open and the sound of keys landing in a clump on other keys and paperclips. “She's got matches,” the voice said to itself as I heard noises of the man climbing into his coat. “Her funeral,” he concluded and closed the outside door behind him. I didn't move for a minute in case he forgot his hat. I was about to come back into the world
of light when I heard Billie, on the other side of the inner door, testing the lock.

“Shit!” she said when nothing happened. I tried to find the right desk drawer for the keys and got it first time. Desk drawers of the syndicate, the Upper Canadian Bank or the Anglican Church of Canada are all filled with the same junk: paperclips, a staple remover, a dusty roll of cellophane tape, odd tops to ball-point pens, thumb tacks, elastic bands, empty typewriter ribbon spools. It was a free-masonry that was bigger than morality or the law. And there were the keys I wanted at the back. Most of them were for cabinets with refills of more paperclips and rubber bands, but three were for the office doors. The second one worked. I turned the knob and walked in.

Billie Mason sat curled up on a dark leather chesterfield with a French magazine on her lap. She looked like she had given up waiting for her date who was three hours late; the silk dress she was wearing had lost some of its crispness. On the marble-topped table, the colour of halvah, six other magazines were piled, all expensive and either French or Italian. She was smoking and by the look of the ashtray she'd gone through more packs than a few. She didn't look up at once.

“You forget your wallet?” That was when she saw me. “Benny! Oh, Benny! How did you get here? Are you trying to get yourself killed? Angelo will be back in a few minutes.” She had jumped to her feet, shaking the magazine from her lap to the floor with a rustle of the lively Liberty print material. She came at me with both arms. It
was a nice hug. I can't say I didn't like it. Billie knew all there was to know about hugs.

“Exactly how long have we got before he gets back?”

“Twenty minutes, maybe just ten. Oh, I'm so glad to see you.” I pulled her head off my shoulder and her hands away from my tie.

“We can get out of here right now. Do you trust me?”

“I don't want to get killed.”

“Me neither. But you'll certainly get yourself killed if they find out you've been playing games with them. They'll want something for their time and effort, even if it's only your head for a trophy. And if Pritchett finds out you've been here without a chain holding you to the wall, he may stuff what's left. So either side can write your epitaph if you stick around here any longer. Your only chance is to walk out of here with me right now.”

“All right, if you say so,” she said, like I'd asked to cut her grass or something. I grabbed her coat, wrapped her in it and pulled her wrist, hoping the rest would follow. I went to the door to the corridor and peeped out. The coast was clear.

“I hope your friend Angelo likes double cheese and all the trimmings.” Neither of us drew breath until the fire door closed behind us.

Once again in the core of the Pagoda, the echoes of footsteps trampled my ears. Our enlarged shadows climbed the eight flights ahead of us, and the wall wrapped around us like an overgrown piece of sewer pipe stuck on end. I was glad when I could shove Billie ahead
of me through the fire door in the TV station's hallway. The smiling photographs of the TV stars on the wall applauded our deed and for a minute made me think we'd finished. But I didn't even dare to catch my breath. This was only a half-way house for safety. I pushed the button to summon the outside tourist elevator, watching Billie's face as she tried to smile assurance at me. She didn't say anything. She couldn't. The elevator arrived and we got in. The door closed us into the view of the falls slowly moving up to our level.

“Benny, my car!”

“Never mind your car. We're saving your neck.”

“But it's here in the Pagoda. I parked it here days ago because it was central.”

We dashed to the stairs. It was wet and chilly going down that last few flights. In a couple places water actually gushed out of the side of the concrete: an underground spring or a sign of early thaw. Elsewhere columns of ice tinted with rust held up parts of the wall. The lighting that followed us down the tightly wound spiral of stairs looked like it had been designed not only to withstand the dampness but to work underwater. There was enough light for me to make out the little French car when I saw it parked up against a fat square pillar.

Billie found her keys and opened the door on her side, then she leaned across and let me in the passenger side. I hoped her driving was going to be good enough for the ride I was imagining. She got the car started on the first try and backed expertly into the exit lane for a fast getaway.
She handed the attendant a two-dollar bill and he opened the barrier.

“They didn't take your keys?” I asked.

“I told Angelo they were duplicate keys to Lowell's car. Are we going to be all right?”

There were two ramps, the east and west. The east one led down the hill toward the falls and the other led toward the residential and industrial side of town. Billie took the ramp heading west. A good choice, I thought, for avoiding the ravenous Angelo with his hot pizza pie. The ramp curved around coming up to ground level just to remind me again of the echoing tubes at the core of the Pagoda. At ground level I could see a long main-line freight train was stalled under the two great legs that held up the tower. While traffic on Clifton Hill, the east-west street, stood idling waiting for the freight to move further along the track, the engineer totally ignored the artery he was temporarily severing. With the Pagoda and the tracks behind us, Billie turned west. We had a clear road; it was the other lane that was stopped.

We hadn't gone very far when I heard Billie groan. That's what it was, a real groan. I followed the look in her frightened eyes.

“Benny,” she whispered. “It's Solmi!”

“I looked straight ahead. One of the cars waiting in the line for the train to move was filled with five men. For a minute it looked like they hadn't seen us, then the car nosed in front of the Renault and stopped. the back door opened and a man started to get out.

“Back up!” I said through teeth that had frozen together. Billie shifted the gear and turned to look out the rear window while racing the car back to the tracks. We narrowly missed clipping a Ford, coming down the ramp from the Pagoda behind us. Nice, I thought. He'll block Solmi from coming after us on wheels. “C'mon,” I shouted, only it came out a strangled rasp. We both got our doors open, and Billie followed me up the incline to the Pagoda's upper entrance. “We've got to get up to the ticket hall!” Billie looked at me as well as she could as we pounded up the hill to the western leg of the tower. She followed, but I never my hand from her wrist. When we got up to the ticket hall, right on top of the shunting freight, Billie stopped, as though I had some fool notion to buy a ticket to view the sights in all their glory.

“This way,” I croaked, out of breath, and feeling my lungs pinch. I dragged her down the steps leading to the downhill leg, the eastern leg that was on the other side of the tracks. From the entranceway, it was a short run to the parking lot where I'd left the Olds. Billie was an extension of my arm. Thank God, I thought, she doesn't have one of those ankles like they have in the movies. I was in no mood for a scene with Billie limping after me shouting: “Save yourself! Don't bother about me!”

By the time I could see figures standing in the entrance of the Pagoda, I'd bailed us out of the parking lot. The freight train had started shunting back through the tower again, like a thread being withdrawn from a needle. The men stood on the steps with their arms, as they used to
say, akimbo. By the time we had turned into Falls Street, with a clear road back to Grantham, the train had stopped again.

EIGHTEEN

“Cooperman! What are you doing banging on my door at this hour?”

“Martha, I want you to meet a friend of mine, Billie Mason. Billie, this is Martha Tracy, my best friend in all the world, a girl you can trust in an emergency and depend upon completely.”

“Cut the blarney, Benny, what's going on? I just got rid of a house full of people and I don't have the strength left to empty the ashtrays.”

“Martha, there are some people who are trying to find Billie. If they catch up to her it won't be pretty. Can she bunk here in your spare room until things blow over?”

“Hell, why didn't you say straight out instead of buttering me up? Sure she can stay, but I got no time for you, Cooperman. Banging a maiden lady's door at this time of night.”

I'd driven a fast but complicated route from the Falls to Grantham and headed straight to Martha's. Nobody would think of looking for Billie there, and nobody would link Martha to me. Martha always pretended to spit nails, but she was all peppermint cream inside. I handed Billie in through the storm door to Martha, with
some relief on both sides I think, then I headed for my parent's house off Ontario Street.

I let myself in with my key and tiptoed unnecessarily on the tangerine broadloom down the stairs to the TV room. I could catch some sleep there before heading back to the Falls.

“Benny! I thought it was your father. What are you doing here?” My mother was wearing her wine-coloured robe and sitting in front of the colour television. In her lap lay a Chatto & Windus paperback. By craning my neck around I could read the title,
Time Regained
by Marcel Proust. The television set was flickering, but the picture had gone out of phase or something.

“No good movie tonight?”

“Oh, I've seen them all about fifty million times. I'm enjoying this. I like family stories and this is the end of eight of them. I get hooked on these complicated series things. I guess it started with
Upstairs Downstairs
and the
Forsyte Saga
on television. Then I went through Trollope and Balzac and now this. Did he do any other books, Benny? I'd like to get them.” I shrugged. She told me a bit of the story, and then we went upstairs to put the kettle on. My coming home like this unexpectedly meant that we were going to have a talk. And you can't talk without tea.

As the kettle came to a noisy boil, Ma asked me if I'd enjoyed meeting Linda Levin the other night. I told her that, yes, I enjoyed the evening.

“I didn't ask you about the evening, I asked you about Linda. I wasn't fishing for compliments for the way I make Campbell's soup. You and Linda seemed to be talking nicely together and getting along without too much pushing from your father and me, so I was just wondering, you know, whether … whether, you know …”

“Ma, it's still a secret. We don't want anybody to know until we're sure. But when we are, you'll be the first to know. I promise.”

“Always joking, Benny. They'll remember you as always joking and going back to a hotel room. You can joke too much, Benny. It's like the boy who cried ‘Wolf!' You can't expect to be taken seriously if you are always telling jokes. Do you want some lemon?” I nodded and she got the plastic lemon from the refrigerator. I gave the teabag a bash or two with my spoon and removed it to the saucer. A squirt of lemon, two spoonfuls of sugar and I was in business.

“Do you mind if I catch some sleep on the couch downstairs? I don't want to bother going back to my place tonight.”

“The couch? What do you think the guest room's for? We don't have that many guests and I think the sheets are clean from when Sam was here at Christmas.”

“The couch will be fine. I'm going to have to make an early start back to the Falls.”

“You can start early from the guest room too. But suit yourself. I've finished reading for tonight anyway. I'm not going to wait up for your father. He went out to see
what was going on downtown at ten o'clock. I guess he found a card game. Who knows?”

We talked for another ten minutes about family things, the birth of twins to a cousin that I still imagined as an eight-year-old, the story of Aunt Julie's forty-four-day visit to her rich brother, my Uncle Irv, whose wife counted the days herself, and reported the tally by phone not ten minutes after Aunt Julie's plane left for Miami.

“Well,” she said, as though she'd come to a momentous decision, and hoisting herself out of her chair at the round table, “I'm going up. I'll put a pair of your father's pyjamas in the guest room. If you hear a noise in the night, it'll be your father. I've given up sleeping with one eye open for him a long time ago. Benny, you'll turn the lights out before you come up?”

I decided to stay in the guest room. It was an independent decision based on the fact that I could have a morning shower without waking everybody up. After all the running I'd been doing it was no secret I'd been doing a lot of running. I found the pyjamas, pulled down the bed and got out of my clothes. I decided that the shower couldn't wait until morning.