Ransom Game (20 page)

As I was crossing St. Andrew Street, Harvey Hinden called my name and looked like he wanted to chew my ear off. I waved and kept on going. Harvey could say more about less than anyone I ever met. I ducked into the alley between the Wool Shoppe and Lady in Waiting, a maternity store. It led to another that ran behind the north-side stores. The trouble was not all of them identified themselves in the rear. You had to go by the “No Parking” signs and the look of the garbage. I recognized the “Stop Me And Buy” van behind the fish and chip place. The back door was closed and marked “Privite” by an unskilled hand in white paint. I tried the handle; it turned.

A skinny man in dirty white was feeding dishes to a steaming dishwasher with a curved metal hood. I put a finger to my lips as I walked in and he looked up. I could see the back of the counter from this unaccustomed side and there was Jennifer with a coffee in front of her. I pulled a white apron on over my coat and took off my hat, winking at a waitress who began to give me a look. I went straight to Jennifer.

“Is he still there?”

“Benny!” Her eyes looked like she'd been rubbing them. Her hair was dirty and lank.

“Is he still out there?”

“I don't know. I m scared to turn around.”

I looked over the top of Jennifer's head at the passing figures on the street. Everybody appeared to be minding his own business. I felt a tug at my elbow. I looked over and it was the manager, a short man with a stubble of curly hair beginning and giving up soon after it left the shelter of his ears.

“What's going on?” he asked.

“Police work.” I lied. “We'll be out of your way in a minute.”

“I don't want no trouble,” he protested, and I nodded that that was the way I saw it too. That was when the face looked in the window. It was a big enough face to cut off a large share of the light and the body under it reduced the view of the street to a tall narrow strip. I couldn't make out his features, because he stood in his own shadow. It didn't look as though he could see too well either, because he brought both hands up to shield his face.

“Listen, Jennifer. When I say the word, get up and come around the counter. Put some money by your saucer now, but don't do it too obviously.” Then I thought better. “Never mind, let me.” I dug out a dollar after moving away from Jennifer along the counter. I slipped it near her coffee cup on my return trip. The face was still pressed to the glass, hat pulled down over the eyes, standing about six one or two. Nobody you'd want to run into in the dark. Luke Handler: Bill Ashland's ticket to half a million bucks, unless my guess was wrong.

The shadow on the window shifted, then moved off.

“Now!” I rasped to Jennifer, who was up in an instant and on her way around the right end of the counter. I slipped off the apron and put it back on a peg, just in time to grab Jennifer's mittened hand as she caught up to me. “Out the back,” I said and we went through a billow of steam from the dishwasher and a cry from the manager for an explanation.

There was a truck unloading pastel blue and pink cribs jamming the alley, but we were able to slip past. When we got to the entrance to St. Andrew Street, I held her back while I looked around the corner in the direction of the fish and chip store. I saw the guy's back walking slowly away from us. A second later, we were both cutting across the street toward the theatre. I brought out my wallet when we reached the box office, and the woman behind the glass smiled so that I could see where her molars used to be. Jennifer glanced toward the restaurant. I saw that two tickets would eat up all of a ten dollar bill, so I put my wallet back and pulled the girl along the sidewalk away from the theatre. Next door sat St. Andrew Street Presbyterian Church. We went up the walk and through the modern doorway that spoiled the effect of the pointed front door. I liked a Presbyterian church better than the Lincoln; you didn't even have to buy candles.

Inside, there was a table with brochures fanned out and a noticeboard telling that the Boy Scouts were now meeting in the basement on Tuesday nights not Wednesday nights. Ahead the fading light came through tall pointed windows on each side of the nave, and the pulpit was caught in a beam that added extra authority. I led Jennifer down the nave to the middle, where I opened up one of the white box pews. We had a chance of hiding successfully here even if we'd been followed. Jennifer was clutching the back of the pew in front. I could feel her breathing next to me through my overcoat. I was a little out of breath myself.

“Okay,” I said. “Tell me about it.” She rolled her head so that it touched the back of the pew. A sign on the wall by the pulpit advertised the hymns to be sung, a series of numbers that could as well be lottery winners.

“He told me his name was Chandler or Handler,” she said, putting a fuzzy black mitten in her mouth and tugging on it until it came off. Then she did the other one. She was wearing the familiar faded blue jeans and a sweater under her red nylon parka. “He wanted to talk to Rolf, but wouldn't believe me when I told him he'd been taken away.” I nodded and she seemed to calm down a little. “He said he wanted to look around. He s so big, I couldn't do anything to stop him, so I just got away as soon as he was out of sight. Rolf left the keys to the Fiat. But he followed me into town. I saw him waiting for me outside the doctor's office, so I went out the back way. He followed me somehow from there to the General, then he saw me go to the restaurant. I don't think he cares whether I see him or not. I think he's working on my nerves.” She rubbed a balled Kleenex into her red eyes and managed to do further damage.

“Why all the medical attention?” She suppressed a shy smile. Then she went blurry again, and started to cry.

“Rolf and I are going to … I just found out. The radiologist did an ultra-sound. He says it's going to be twins. And Rolf doesn't even know!” The word “know” was stretched so that it became part of the long sob that shook her. She wasn't happy about the news at all. I guess twins kind of put a cramp in lives built around a sleeping bag and a knapsack. I patted her shoulder and muttered “there, there” a few times. It had worked the last time.

“Jennifer, listen to me.” I shook her gently until I got a bigger share of her attention. “I'm going to leave you here and I want you to stay for ten minutes, then go back to the farm. It will be all right.” She was looking at me with wide-open eyes, but her head was shaking like an albino trying to focus in bright light. I told her again, but she held on to my arm. I had to peel off her fingers one at a time. “Remember, ten minutes, then get back home.” This time she nodded slowly, and I got up and left her. She was still nodding when I got up the nave. It had grown a few hundred feet since I'd come in.

From the front of the church I could see Handler standing on the sidewalk, looking up the street and down. I cut across St. Andrew Street moving away from him. Then, when I was sure he wasn't watching me, I went up to him.

“Are you Luke Handler?”

“Who wants to know?”

“My name's Cooperman. I'm an investigator same as you are. Only I don't bother little girls.”

“Yeah, but I hear you lose your clients in the bathtub.”

“That beats finding them in the gutter. I want to talk to you.”

“Who needs it?”

“Your boss talked to me. You could do worse.”

“I doubt it.”

“Lets get out of the draught,” I suggested, and he walked me down St. Andrew Street to the Murray Hotel, into the noise and yellow smoke of the Gents' beverage room.

Handler found a red-topped pedestal table and retrieved the chairs that belonged to it from the neighbourhood. I took one from him, and sat down in it in my own way to show that in small things at least I was my own man. The waiter plunked down two draft beers between us, and Handler downed his without a second thought. I sipped at mine.

“Well,” he said, daring me to tell him something he didn't already know.

“You're wasting your time on the girl,” I said. “She's clean, and besides that she's the Crown Prosecutor's daughter.”

“That tramp?” he grunted.

“That tramp has a line in the social register any day she wants it. Her old man is pretty thick with the Tories. He's got home numbers for the whole provincial cabinet, I'll bet. Without getting up, he could have your licence on his desk.”

“Where did her boyfriend go?” He looked like it pained him to talk at all. A man of some pride. I thought of what Savas had said about him. The top portion of his heavy, brooding bulk was given over to springy, dirty blond hair that came down under his fedora in a widow's peak, about a half inch above his bushy eyebrows. The eyes were a washed-out blue that reminded me of tinted Kleenex. His large nose had been moved permanently to a new address on the right-hand side of his face. The chin looked hard, and the mouth didn't smile. He rested big hands on the table top. I didn't feel like messing with his powerful left, or his right for that matter.

“The Mounties picked him up for questioning.” He chewed on that for a minute, then I added, “They'll let go soon. If he knows something, he's not likely to spill it. He's not the type to scare easily.”

“Why the Horsemen?”

“Sounds like their kind of show,” I said, sounding more British than I'd intended. “Who else have you bothered? Todd? I'll bet you haven't taken on Eddie Milano and his boys yet.”

He sat there like a post with a knot in it, as close to a smile as he got. “What about Todd?” I asked, sensing something.

“Todd's been picked up.”

“What!” I said, a little too loudly.

“Grabbed an old lady at the bus terminal, tried to take her grip. Nobody can figure it out.”

“When did this happen?” He didn't answer, and I couldn't make him.

I'd pictured Todd as a cool customer, not someone who would try a trick like that and spoil his parole record. It didn't make sense. But then what did? The only thing I could believe in was Handler, sitting within poking distance, in a stained wash-and-wear shirt and dirty necktie. I wasn't going to get any more answers from him.

“Listen,” I said. “I hear that Johnny Rosa's car was just towed in to Steve's Garage out on Niagara Street. There may not be anything in it, but maybe you could let me know what you find out. I'd appreciate that.”

“Check. There's room for a lot more co-operation in this racket.” He scraped his chair away from the table, drank the last of his beer on his feet. “You'll be hearing from me,” he said, and walked out of the beverage room with a broad grin.

TWENTY-THREE

The Warren farm was set in a valley where complicated glaciation had interrupted the regular blue line of the Niagara Escarpment. A stream cut a notch through the rich earth instead of cascading over the lip of a precipice, as the Niagara River itself did, spectacularly, seventeen miles to the east. It meandered around the gently descending hills, just then reddened by the last of the sun, to the lakeshore plain. The farms along Gillingham Creek were some of the most sought after in the whole Niagara district. Peaches, cherries, plums from these orchards were prized in the central markets of the great cities of North America, and rightly so. The abandoned Warren farm seemed a sin against the whole community, the conspicuous luxury of the very rich.

As I came up to it on the concession road, I could see vistas of neglected peach trees etched against the duncoloured sky and the darkening blue of the hills, all returning to the wild condition of their ancestors. The fences were down in many places and no attempt had been made to mend them even with binder twine. I could see the wreckage of Pop's racing stable, a gray board and batten structure with a lantern and a bent weather-vane on top. In places the white wooden fence that enclosed an oval track appeared intact above the snow drifts, but mostly the wood had fallen away, or been carted off. The sign on the mail box read “Henry Angus Warren.”

The house itself looked sound enough. I'd have traded all the comforts of my hotel room for it without even looking through the glass in the many-paned windows. The eaves overhung the cut-stone walls by two feet on either side, and it rose three storeys as though it had been forced in on itself and up, just like Knudsen's place. The main impression was of stern respectability, especially in the failing light. It was as grave as the bearded faces I'd glanced at in the library while waiting for Muriel to show up. No wonder old Pop turned and returned to drink.

I was just manoeuvering the car to allow for a speedy withdrawal when I noticed an elderly man standing with his legs wide apart across the middle of the lane. If it was a boozy ghost of old Pop, I wondered why he was holding a twelve-gauge shotgun across his chest. I stopped the car, got out, and made a gesture with my hand going up to my hat that was aimed at his humane side. He didn't move. He stood up in a worn pair of twill trousers and a red wool jacket with leather patches on the pockets. His black hat had flaps to it which were like me, hanging loose.

“Afternoon!” I called, dropping the “good” so as to be taken for a friend from up the road rather than an enemy from the alien city. He didn't say anything. He didn't move.

“There's more snow predicted for the weekend,” I said, scanning the horizon like a landowner. His grizzled chin didn't budge from the solid block of air it was leaning on.

“Are you Mr. Lyon?” My trump card, my ace in the hole, my last spit in the ocean.

“Who might you be?” His voice was a hunting knife.

“My name's Cooperman. I'm working for Mrs. Jarman. You can check. She knows I'm here.” His face relaxed a notch.

“Get your tail over where I can see you better.” Then, “What's your business?” He moved one leg, relaxing his stance so that he didn't look “on point” any more. I knew his next gesture would be to drop the gun and lean on it as though it were just a support for his infirmity all the while.