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Authors: Eric Wight

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BOOK: The Last Hand
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Again Salter shook his head. “Just the two of you?”
“We took Esther, of course.” Fury pointed through the door. “She's been with us from the start and she does most of the work. And on the day we generally gave each other a small gift. Last time he gave me this tool, The Leatherman, do you know it?” He opened a drawer and held up a small leather case about the size of his hand, and took out a folded steel instrument. “It's wonderful. Unfolds into about twelve different tools. I can repair everything that breaks around the office.”
“Otherwise you didn't overlap. Your personal lives, I mean.”
“We had nothing in common,” Fury said patiently and earnestly, as if he had explained all this twice already. “He was a man-about-town who liked roughing it in the bush in his spare time. I live for my family.”
“Who would I ask about friends? Do you know any of his close friends?”
“He belonged to several social groups. He played cards with one
group and canoed with another. And of course he was invited out a lot to dinner parties.”
“Did he do any entertaining himself?”
“Quite regularly. Always in restaurants, because it was less trouble than entertaining in his apartment. His sister, Flora, was often his hostess. He invited me occasionally, and he came to my house once or twice a year, but more out of politeness than anything else. My wife said it would seem odd if he never came.”
“Did he ever have a hostess apart from his sister?”
Fury smiled roundly, looking over Salter's shoulder to the unseen audience. “A permanent lady friend, you mean? Not for the last couple of years, at least. Before that he had several, in succession, I mean, you know what widowers and bachelors are like. Some of them for years. But I had the impression he no longer bothered.”
“He no longer had a regular partner, to your knowledge?”
“That's it.”
Salter waited for more, arranging himself expectantly. Eventually, Fury said, “I think he had just inherited his own nature to the full. He was a natural bachelor, a dear sweet man who would do absolutely anything for you as long as it was no trouble, do you know what I mean? Mostly he avoided spending time on things or people he didn't want to. Money was no problem. He was very comfortably off, and he could be extremely generous if it meant he could avoid doing anything more. Any legitimate appeal had him reaching for his wallet, and he always picked up the check in restaurants. He was, I think, completely and absolutely selfish, and he showed it by his generosity. He wouldn't spend a minute doing what he didn't want to, helping out in a soup kitchen on Christmas Day, say, but he disguised his selfishness by giving them money.”
Fury sat up and leaned forward. “Now that we are there, I think his late-developing selfishness might account for his changing attitude toward women-you know, this is
interesting
.” Again there was the sudden flash of Fury's smile. “I never thought about it before, but he simply had no time to spare for what we used to call courting, you know-meeting ladies for cocktails, that sort of thing. When he felt the need for … the company of a woman, he satisfied it. Sounds like a monster, doesn't he? But he never misled them, I'm sure. And these
days, people
are
more direct about these things, aren't they? I don't know.”
Salter scratched around to find another entry into the same topic, then barged in. “On the night your partner was killed, there was a woman seen at the door of his apartment.” Salter described her outfit. “What do you make of that?”
“I've already been asked about that. I suppose anything's possible, isn't it?” The smile flashed. “If I can imagine it, someone is doing it, eh?” He thought for a few moments before he continued. “At the same time, if you work with someone for nearly twenty years you must hang onto what you have come to know about him until you are forced to let it go. Everything I know about Jerry tells me that what you have described is not what it seems. It is bizarre. Why would he hire a creature like that? If he did pay for sex, he could afford the best, especially in these perilous times. As I speak I'm making sense of another possibility. This woman was a crude practical joke, played on him to embarrass him by one of his trekking friends. That's what I would bet on.”
“Someone else suggested the same thing. I'll find out. Now, what do you know about his personal affairs? His financial affairs?”
“I'm his lawyer, and the executor of his estate, as he was of mine. Because of my children and an old aunt I support, my world is more complicated than his; he left everything to his sister, except for the residue of the partnership. He still hadn't come into all of his inheritance. His mother died a month ago and her lawyer was just about to hand over her estate to Jerry on behalf of the two of them, Jerry and his sister. I'll take possession of it now on behalf of Jerry's estate. I was looking at his desk calendar–he had an appointment with his mother's lawyer, Larry Holt, next week, so I suppose they were to wrap it up then.”
“Can I have that book?”
Fury handed the calendar across the desk and Salter looked at the entry, then put the book in his pocket. “You want a receipt?”
“It's not
my
calendar.”
“Do you know where Holt's office is?”
“On Church Street, just past Isabella, on the east side. It's in one of those huge old mansions.”
“Maybe I can catch him on the way back. So he had no responsibilities, and it is likely that everything goes to his sister.”
“His only real responsibility was towards Esther out there, and the partnership has made sure of her pension, which she can take any time she wishes. At the moment she prefers to work.”
“And you? How will it change your life?”
“I will own the office furniture outright.” Fury said. “This has made me wonder if I shouldn't take the opportunity to shuffle off myself, while I can. All my children are well on their way to being established. I'll be lonely here without him. It'll be like being a widower, and I don't want to get another partner. You know, he was the ideal partner …”
Salter interrupted. “If you don't mind a comment, sir, you don't seem very … well, sad about him.”
Fury sat back in his chair and adjusted his glasses. “Let me see if I can explain. It was like having the perfect neighbor, someone who would do absolutely anything for me as I would for him without ever seeing the inside of each others' houses-that's a bit mixed, but ‘perfect neighbors' is a good analogy. Nothing either of us did ever irritated the other, or got in the other's way. I know a lot about him because we chatted a lot over the garden fence, as it were, but left each other strictly alone. I shall never have another neighbor like that. I was shocked to hear of his death, especially like that, but there was nothing between us for me to grieve over, so now I'm just sad for myself. I shall probably start taking those cruises my wife has been wanting us to go on for the last ten years.”
Salter referred to his notebook. “Do you know the people he canoed with? And the names of the card players?”
“Of course. Esther will write them down for you because she was his sort of social secretary, but I know them all, of course. Of the poker gang, talk to Bonar Robinson. His office is in the Toronto Dominion tower. Here's his telephone number. And for a sporting type, talk to Tim Baretski. He's a doctor, practically retired, but still works in a group practice on Bathurst Street.
“I've heard Jerry on the phone to his canoeing pals, and I gathered they were all free to go on a trip without much warning whenever they felt like it, all sort of working part time, like Jerry. The card
players, on the other hand, are a more hard-faced lot–busy, busy, busy making money-who squeeze their cards into a very tight schedule. Prominent citizens all. If one or two of them couldn't make the regular Thursday, you would hear Jerry trying to find an alternative night, any night except Friday was good for him, but the others were usually all booked up.”
“Why Friday?”
“I wondered myself once, then I assumed what now looks likely. But I still find this woman you've described incredible.”
Salter put away his notebook and turned sideways in his chair. “The idea of a prostitute or call girl doesn't make any sense to you, then …”
“Certainly not the dressing-up thing. I think I met all his respectable partners over the last twenty years. None of them would have worn silver boots.”
“Married men have been known to indulge themselves outside the house.”
“Jerry wasn't married. He could respond to his sexual nature directly. All the signs say that he wouldn't have liked silver-booted women in bed. But perhaps I'm out of touch.”
“What about his nonsexual life? What kind of lawyer was he? Should I be looking among his clients for someone who wanted to kill him for giving them bad advice? Maybe someone who is in jail because of him?”
Fury laughed softly. “Oh, no. First of all, his clients–and he had very few–were rich and lived their lives legally, or he sent them away. Upright citizens all. He wouldn't touch anything doubtful. And confidentially, because that's what it is, confidential, I've skimmed through his financial affairs, including the trust matters, and nothing odd has jumped out at me. If you want more than that, you'll have to turn his affairs over to a forensic accountant, but you would be wasting your time.”
“He didn't have to, did he? Touch anything doubtful, I mean.”
“That's right. Honesty is easy if you have plenty of money, so why aren't more of the rich honest? But as a lawyer, Jerry went beyond not responding to greed. You know he was a gambler, apart from the cards?”
“It's been mentioned.”
“That was his only vice, unless you count the sex thing. He agreed that gambling was a social evil but it was one of his great pleasures, and he didn't want to give it up. So he went to the races, and played poker with a group of lawyers who could afford to lose.”
“All lawyers?”
“That was the connection between them. But it was one of the few contacts Jerry had with his colleagues. Oh, he still had lunch occasionally with an old pal from law school, but he had no close lawyer friends, except me, I suppose.” Fury ended on a note of surprise. “I think that fits with Jerry not having any shady clients. And he sat on the most important committee on ethics of the Law Society. I suppose it sounds odd, but apart from gambling and, I suppose, sex, and his hobbies–canoeing and music–the thing he cared most about was the law. He loved it and he hated those who brought it into disrepute. On the ethics committee he could take up a fierce stance. It was Jerry's view that lawyers, like priests, had a responsibility to behave more ethically than others.”
“He doesn't sound like someone I would have relaxed with.”
“Oh, you'd have gotten along. He was good company.”
Salter put away his notebook. “Now I have to talk to some of these people. Larry Holt is his family lawyer, I'm told. But you were Lucas's lawyer …”
“Holt is the
mother's
lawyer.”
“What part does Calvin Gregson play? He seems to be in there somewhere.”
“Really? Perhaps looking after Flora's interests.” Now Fury's face was alight with mischief. “What's he wearing these days? I haven't seen him lately.”
Salter again described Gregson's boots and suit and tie. Fury gurgled with joy. “He's still on that, is he? Perhaps he's found himself at last. One thing, he really brightens up the law courts, don't you think?”
On his way out, Salter called Larry Holt from the secretary's office and established that if he hurried, Holt would be happy to see
him. Lucas's telephone was still connected, so he called Smith and told him to meet him outside Lucas's apartment building. “I want you to take me to Church and Isabella, then take my car back to my space at headquarters. I'll walk back to the office.”
L
arry Holt was waiting on the curb outside his building as they arrived, leaning on a walking stick.
“Staff Inspector Salter? I'm afraid I screwed up. I have a date in court in thirty minutes. Could we reschedule?”
Salter said, “In court? The provincial court? In the old Eaton's building on College Street? I planned to walk over there anyway, when we finished, and what I want from you won't take long. Why don't I walk with you, talk on the way. Won't take thirty minutes, surely.”
“For me it will. I just got a new hip. I haven't learned to run with it yet.” Holt buckled a strap on his briefcase, and the two men set off across Isabella. “I called your office, by the way. Did you get the message?” Holt spoke confidentially, his body slightly turned, apparently to prevent a third party from overhearing. It increased the difficulty of walking together on a crowded sidewalk.
“Yes,” Salter said. “What for?”
“To offer my services, I'm Jerry's mother's lawyer, you know. But actually I was using it as an excuse to find out if you're making any progress. Are you?”
“We don't have any suspects in custody. That what you mean?”
“More or less. From my point of view, the sooner the better. I can finalize the estate, then, you see.”
“I see. We've only got thirty minutes, you say. So let me ask you about Lucas.”
“I'll walk in front. People see my stick and get out of the way. Oops, sorry, Miss. Let's cross over. This sidewalk's too crowded. Now! There's a gap.” The two men scrambled across the street, Holt's face showing the effort, and resumed walking more or less side by side, though Holt stayed confidentially close to Salter.
“Let's start at the beginning. You're Jerry Lucas's mother's lawyer, right?”
“I was. Sorry.” This to another pedestrian he had shouldered as he tried to stay beside Salter. “I was. She died recently.”
“So I heard. What happens next?”
“In what sense?”
“What do you do now? You have control of her money, right? What do you do with it?”
Holt waved his stick at three teenagers who were barging along the sidewalk toward them, parting the group to let the two men through. “I take steps to dispose of her estate to her heirs,” he said when the two men were side by side again.
“Have you done that yet?”
“I'd made an appointment with Lucas for next week. Now I guess I'll sort it out with Flora Lucas, or Derek Fury. It's fairly simple.”
“A lot of money?”
“They are a well-established family.”
“Why wouldn't Lucas have managed his own mother's affairs?”
“He didn't want to and she didn't want him to. She didn't believe he knew anything about managing money. Anyway, Jerry had very high principles–sorry, Ma'am–and insisted himself on a third party for his mother. As for Flora, he didn't want to be accountable to her if he managed it badly, I suppose.”
“Surely she wouldn't have held him
seriously
accountable. I heard that she and Jerry were very close.”
They had reached the corner of Yonge Street. Holt steered Salter's elbow south towards College. “They were. Very close.”
“You must have been very close to Lucas yourself.”
“I played poker with him, that's all. You don't have to be close to play poker. Better not, in fact, then you can feel good when you win. We lived in different worlds. Let's cross here now.”
“Did you meet his sister?”
“Once or twice. She was very beautiful when she was younger. There's a portrait in the art gallery by Augustus John that's very like a painting of her that Jerry had.”
Finally, by the elevators that connected to the courtroom, Holt looked at his watch. “We did that in twenty minutes. A record for my new hip. There's almost time for a coffee.”
“You okay? Maybe we'll just sit down for a minute.”
“Good enough.”
“I'll be quick. Did you know anything about his sex life? Specifically, did he use prostitutes?” Salter told him about the woman in the silver boots.
Holt appeared to give the question a lot of thought, then started to shake his head. “All I can tell you is that I don't know the opposite. I never heard him mention the name of any woman for months. Before that I think there was someone he referred to as his regular date, but I don't think he'd lived with anyone for years. I don't know. I just knew him as one of a group of lawyers who got together to play cards. The others are all married, all except Jerry Lucas and me. I have a girlfriend who will marry me one day, I hope. I was lucky once, why not twice?” He looked at his watch.
“So you don't think the idea of Lucas and a prostitute in dress-up is unlikely?”
“I hardly knew the guy. Now, you know where my office is. Any time you want me. I have to run, in a manner of speaking.”
In other words, thought Salter, you're one crony who dodges the question because he thinks it is possible that Pussy-in-Boots was just that. Because, as his mother's lawyer, you must have known him a little, surely.
 
 
Back in his office, Salter made an appointment to see Dr. Baretski, Lucas's canoeing pal, the next afternoon, and drove home early enough to eat dinner with Seth, if that was possible.
“Mom called,” Seth said when he entered.
Salter had found him in the basement, apparently tidying it up. Salter said, “Did Mom ask you to clean it up?”
“Sort of,” Seth said. “I just thought I'd see what's down here.”
“Make a list of what we can throw out. Have you thought about dinner?”
“I was going to get some pizza and eat with Tatti.”
“Fine. I'll send out to the Swiss Chalet for some chicken for myself.”
“Hang on a minute. Let me call Tatti and put her off. Why don't we walk over to the Swiss Chalet? You and me.”
“Bring Tatti. Take the car and fetch her up.”
“She doesn't like Swiss Chalet.”
“She doesn't like Swiss Chalet? Have you given serious thought to your relationship with this woman? Swiss Chalet chicken is the one thing left this family all agree to eat.”
Seth laughed. “Tatti is nearly a vegetarian. No, it's okay, She won't mind a night off. Let's go.”
 
 
After the “medium halves” of chicken had been consumed, the fries dipped in barbecue sauce, after the ice cream and the single bottle of Upper Canada Lager, after Salter had ordered coffee, Seth came to the point. “Dad, we were wondering, Tatti and I, if we could move into our basement. And now I'll go pee to give you a chance to think about it.” He stood up and made his way to the stairs at the back of the restaurant.
The proposal was one he ought to have seen coming, but hadn't crossed his mind. The Salters' house was narrow and three stories high and had a finished basement lined with knotty pine by the previous owners; the basement contained a bathroom of sorts that had last been used regularly when the boys were small and had their friends in to play in winter.
At one time the previous owners had rented out this basement as a separate apartment with its own access at the back of the house, and the rudiments of a kitchen still remained–a small electric stove, a sink, some cupboards, and a counter. Annie used the sink now to wash out paintbrushes, and the cupboards were full of the jetsam that all basement cupboards are full of, and the counter was scarred by Salter's using it as a workbench when he wanted to saw something,
or hammer something flat. But the damage was superficial, and it would take only a few days to restore it to a living space for a homeless couple.
“You can't have the laundry area,” Salter said, when Seth returned.
“I was thinking, we could put up a partition of wallboard at the foot of the stairs with a door so we could access the laundry area, too.”
“Who's the ‘we' who are putting up this partition?”
“You and me, Dad.”
“You know how to build a wall?”
“No.”
“Well, the time has come, son, to tell you that I don't, either. Get yourself a carpenter to help you. I'll pay for the material. What about the stuff we have stored? My golf clubs, the suitcases, the old cans of paint, your mother's bike.”
“We should chuck out most of it. Some of that paint dates back to before I was born. The rest can go in the laundry area.”
“You have it all worked out.”
But it was Annie who was in charge of living space, she who would know immediately if this were a good or bad idea. And Annie was on the Island. “We'll have to wait until your mother gets back.”
“I already asked her when she called to see how things were going. She said great, but she said I'd have to ask you.”
“I'll ask her again, myself, now she's had time to think.”
“Is there a problem?”
What Salter was actually feeling was a relaxation of his wariness in this area, his natural caution that saw change in terms of the problems it might bring, and the replacement of that wariness, in this instance, with the pleasurable thought that his household, far from shrinking into an aged couple listening for the telephone to ring, waiting for the children to call, was expanding into a multifamily unit, one that would include a neo-daughter-in-law that he liked. But he had a role to play.
“I don't know if there's a problem. If not, I'll talk to your mother and figure one out.”
But when he called Annie that night, she really was all for it, her pleasure like his at the idea of starting a family compound outweighing any qualms she might have.
 
 
He found Dr. Baretski late in the afternoon in an office on an upper floor of the Toronto Hospital on Bathurst Street: a small, fit-looking bald man wearing sandals, blue jeans and a khaki work shirt, all made respectable by the white coat hanging off his shoulders.
Baretski said, “We've known each other a long time, all four of us, but apart from the odd Christmas party I never saw the others except to plan a trip. I think it was the same for them. We got along very well together–you might say we'd achieved compatability over the years, and we were so used to each other we could trust any of us to buy the supplies. I'm not Orthodox, so the meals were no problem as long as they didn't bring hot cross buns.” He had a tiny speech impediment, a lisp held at bay, expressing itself not in esses turned into th but in occasional slightly stressed sibilants. He was also highly energized, speaking and moving in quick little bursts. “We met at Jerry's club for dinner to plan the year's trip, the big one. We sometimes went for a weekend late in the year, but the big one was for a week at the end of July, after the worst of the flies.”
Salter asked once more about Lucas's private life.
“I know more than most, but less than nothing, really. I'm a doctor, so he asked me a couple of things. Look, I'm not going into the witness box to talk about Jerry's sex life, am I?”
“That won't happen.”
“Good. He asked me recently, in a general sort of way, about Viagra, like half my patients over fifty. I told him I would get him some if he wanted. It wasn't legal here then yet, but I'm a urologist.” Baretski grinned. “I get samples that I distribute to needy cases. He backed off, saying he was just curious. I asked him once if he'd ever thought of remarrying, and he said he wouldn't inflict himself on anyone again.”
“If he did have any sexual problems, he'd have been likely to confide in you, wouldn't he?”
“No. You know what he would have done? He would have asked
me the name of another urologist. But he never did.”
Once again Salter described the woman in the silver boots, adding Fury's comment that it was so out of character that it must have been a practical joke. It occurred to him to jolt Baretski in case the canoeists had played the gag, which seemed possible. Horseplay, he guessed, was more likely to come from canoeists than card players.
Baretski considered. “As I said, I'm a urologist, not a psychologist, thank God, but I would have thought that it was possible that Jerry had hired her himself. Experimenting maybe? Thought maybe a prostitute would help? Who knows? Poor guy.”
“So you think it's likely she was … real?”
“No. I think it's
possible
., and if you were a doctor, let alone a urologist, you would know that's what I'm bound to say. But with Jerry, knowing him as a friend, I would vote against it. We talked a bit about AIDS a couple of times, and everyone agreed that the days of casual sex were behind them.” He grinned. “In a manner of speaking.”
BOOK: The Last Hand
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