Authors: Eric Wight

The Last Hand (12 page)

BOOK: The Last Hand

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“Let me ask the question in another way. Would you say you
didn't
know him well?”

“We've been canoeing together, four of us, for about twenty years, believe it or not. All of us married except Jerry, and our wives have the sense not to try to talk us out of our annual canoe trip. Now if you canoe with guys for a week, share a tent and all that, you hear, and maybe overhear, all about them. We'd talk about everything, sex and death for starters, of course, God, Spinoza, literature, morality. On a canoe trip with the right person you get back to talking the way you did in college, and the way you never do the rest of the year. The word is âintimate.'”

“So you
do
know him, you think?”

“I could tell you what he thinks about all of the above, and about his politics, too.”

“Try giving me a sketch of him.”

“Lives lived, sort of? Okay. Let's go across the hall to my other office. We won't be interrupted there.”

In the other office, he said, “You want to take notes? Sit behind the desk. I can think better on my feet. We really need a canoe to do this properly. To begin, then, most of all, he had no secrets, no
life. What you saw was what you got. He loved music and his sister. Have you met Flora?”

“Yes. No other people?”

“He had friends.”

“But no one else he loved.”

“He spent it all on Flora. That's what I learned in the canoe.”

“He had women, though.”

“Sure. He was happily married for a while. He loved his wife, too. But since her he has had a lot of ladiesâwomenâwhat's the right term? He wasn't very interested in sex in the abstract, unlike a lot of my patients. I mean he didn't think about it much, or talk about it. It was just something he did. I imagine some of his women could have resented him for it. He wasn't very attached to any of them.”

“Except Flora.”

“Except Flora.” Baretski waited and Salter picked up the cue.

“Was his relationship with Flora â¦ did it ever seem strange to you?”

“Absolutely, in the sense of unusual, unique, even. They were devoted to each other, or maybe I should differentiate. He was devoted and totally protective of her, and he had always been the one she leaned on. The parents never figured much, you know that.” He paused, then said, “I think some of his girlfriends resented Flora, because they all found out that those two had a private world that no one could enter. The same thing applied to Flora, but the difference with men is that her boyfriends probably felt content to be relieved of the full emotional responsibility for someone else.”

“You've thought about this a lot, haven't you?”

“Over the years. Ever since I was sure there was nothing sexual in their relationship. And now, because I knew you would ask about just that, so that you could leave that out of your inquiries.”

“And you guys. Was he aâwhat's the word, a nature lover? a naturist?”

“It's obvious you're not.”

“I like fishing, when the mosquitoes have gone.”

“Jerry was at home in the bush, and on a lake, but he didn't yearn after it the way I do all winter. He had all the skills that you
want at the other end of the canoe, but for him canoeing was a fishing trip in the closed season. I'm not doing a good job of this. Try this: by the beginning of April I'm down on Front Street in my lunch break, in and out of the outfitters' stores along there, looking for stuff to make the next canoe trip better. I can hardly wait. For Jerry it was an event on the calendar, to be thought about the weekend before.”

“Did he get excited about anything? Gambling, maybe?”

“His passion, in that sense, was music. He got from music what I get from nature, I would say. Have you ever considered the different kinds of pleasure that different kinds of experiencesâphysical or aesthetic, for example-provide you with, and whether the experience of canoeing on the French River is primarily physical or aesthetic, or perhaps a kind of synaesthesia in which the aesthetic blends with the physical? And with music, whether it's the emotional content or the aesthetic pattern that you are responding to?” Baretski had become very animated, his face alight and his hands trying to shape his words, and he spoke as if he had said these things often.

“No. No, I haven't.” Salter hoped he had chosen the right verb and tense to conceal the fact that he had lost track of what Baretski was saying.

“We used to talk about it a lot. About the different kinds of pleasure, the pleasure of paddling down an unexplored river compared to the pleasure he got fromâwho was that woman he was just crazy about, played the celloâyeah, Monica Huggett. You know her?”

“No.”

“Don't misunderstand me. He liked canoeing, and I like music. I'm just getting on to Mahler, some of him. And as I said, the four of us were very compatible, but there was a day last fall when Jerry and I clashed over all this. He went too far.” He cleared his throat and got to his feet.

“We were on a weekender in Killarney Provincial Park. Do you know it? It is without doubt the most beautiful park in Ontario. A lot of people must agree with me, because if you want to camp there on a weekend you have to book a site months in advance.

“On this weekend, Jerry was looking after the cooking and I
pitched the tent. We were only out for two nights so we kept everything to a minimumâwe ate chili that night, I thinkâand by the time I had the tent up the supper was ready.

“It was a terrific moment. As far as we could hear or see there was no one else in the world: the fish were jumping, a wolf howled, then the bullfrogs started up, but all these sounds just emphasized the
purity
of the silence they were part of.” He looked pleased with himself. “The sounds of silence, that's what they were. It was what I came for. And then, right in the middle of it, a trace of the aurora borealis appeared in the sky above us. Too much. Then Jerry said, âHold on,' and ran up to the tent. A few minutes later he came back and sat down, and out of the tent came this fucking
background
music.
The Archduke Trio,
it was. Beethoven. You know it?”

“No.”

“It goes like this.” Baretski mouthed the opening, loudly, harshly, in a crashing way, and waved his arms, conducting: “âDA da DA da DAAA!' and Jerry said, âNow it's perfect.'

“I wanted to kill him. Once, up in Algonquin Park, in the days when people who didn't know any better tried to have an outdoors experience there, we finally found a place to campâwe had been paddling for hours in the dark as every campsite we came to was fullâand the traffic on the lake slowed down to like the four-oh-one on a quiet Sunday as canoeists in their hundreds trekked byâas I say, we finally found a spot, got the fire going, took our first drink and began to feel less sorry that we had come, and out of the night, from a tent maybe fifty feet away, came the sound of a ghetto blaster at full volume.

“They were just a gang of young kids; when I went over to throw their ghetto blaster into the lake, and them after it, they apologized and turned it off. Well this was a moment like that, only with the
Archduke Trio.
My worldâthe loons, the fish, the bullfrogs, the aspens playing with their leaves-all that disappeared behind âDA da DA da DAAA!' I went to the tent and found the machineâit was a portable CD playerârestrained myself and just unplugged it. Then Jerry and I had a chat.

“We started a long way apart in every sense, and very noisy, but eventually we agreed that he wouldn't play fucking Beethoven in the
camp if he could play what he liked on the drive up and the drive back. See my point? I think, for him, everything was secondary to, or enhanced by, music. If the four of us had ever gotten into one of those âWhat-was-your-greatest-sex-experience?' conversationsâas I said, sometimes on a canoe trip you can go back to the dorm at collegeâwhich we never did, and maybe that's because Jerry wasn't very interested in talking about it, but if we had, I doubt that Jerry would have said it was the night a hooker wore her silver boots in bed. No, he would have said it was the night he got laid to the sound of the first movement of the âArchduke Trio.'”

He paused, then added, “I'm getting carried away, aren't I? Well, I won't deny that was a strong experience, up there in Killarney, but we didn't let it upset twenty years ofâwhat? I loved the guy, and I'll miss him. There was no one else I'd rather be in a canoe with.”

“Was he your lawyer?”

Baretski looked surprised. “For wills and stuff? No. I did ask him to be, but he just said he found it hard to be really professional with friends, and recommended the guy I have now. Afterwards, I kidded him about not wanting his friends to know the size of his fees, but I let it go.”

S
alter descended, after the longest wait for an elevator he had ever experiencedâhow would one of those emergency response teams on television respond if they had to use an elevator like this? he wonderedâand found a telephone on the ground floor, where he called Bonar Robinson and established that Robinson would wait for him if he came right away. He called Seth to synchronize the dinner hour.

“Mom called again.”

“To find out when you two are moving in?”

“Not really. There is a lot of stuff to do in the basement before I can bring Tatti here. No, I think she has other things she wants to talk about.”

Annie was still staying with her mother at the family home on Prince Edward Island. From the time Salter and Annie married, old Mrs. Montagu had never ceased pointing out how nice it would be if the whole family were together; that is, in her view, the natural thing would have been for Salter to have given up his job and taken his place in one of the family businesses on the Island. Gradually, over the years, the pressure had weakened without quite going away, until the situation was temporarily resolved by Angus, Salter's elder son, who, upon graduation from business school, had been offered a job in the business and moved east with his girlfriend. Salter thought that old Mother Montagu would be unhappy at the prospect of having a grandson on the Island living in sin, but his mind had been
trudging along conventional and dated lines. Mrs. Montagu not only ignored Angus's unmarried state, but welcomed the couple into her home. She had even welcomed the news that Linda was pregnant.

That first pregnancy had miscarried, as did the next, but now, finally, there was a baby girl, Salter's granddaughter and the old lady's great-granddaughter. Life on the Island was therefore idyllic, Salter assumed, leaving him in Toronto looking forward to being visited by Angus and his granddaughter at their leisure. And now with the prospect of having Seth and Tatti around. Perfect.

“If she calls back, tell her I'll be home in an hour.”

The firm of Lollard and Lollard, of which Bonar Robinson was a partner, occupied a large section of an upper floor of the Toronto Dominion building.

From the elevator, Salter emerged into a space through the glass walls of which he could see people moving back and forth like fish in a tank, along corridors and in and out of glass offices. Looking down the length of the corridor in front of him, he could see Lake Ontario at the far end. On his left, one of the glass walls had a square hole to let a woman behind the wall speak through and find out what Salter wanted. She told him she would let Mr. Robinson know he was there, spoke the message into a handset, and told Salter exactly what he expected to hear, that Mr. Robinson would just be a few minutes, and would he take a seat and would he like a cup of coffee.

Salter wondered if the few minutes' wait was something learned in law school, or business school: “You will be issued a timer. Always make the client wait two-and-a-quarter minutes to show how busy you are.” In this case, Salter was exactly on time and said, “Is he hiding the evidence, or just having a nap?” to the startled receptionist, but before she had to cope with him, a glass door opened near Lake Ontario and she looked up and said, “Here he is now.”

Robinson walked quickly into the reception area, shook hands, and led Salter back along the corridor to his office. (“Once you've made him wait the two-and-a-quarter minutes, be sure to conduct him personally into your office to show that, busy as you are, an important client comes first.”)

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said. “I was desperate for a pee.” (Try for a light remark to open the interview.) Before they sat down, Robinson led Salter over to the exterior wall, and showed him the view.

Salter tried to think of something that would please Robinson. “You get a real view of the lake here,” he said.

“It's fantastic during a snowstorm.”

“I'll bet.” Salter turned firmly back into the room and sat down on the other side of the desk, sucking Robinson along in his wake.

“Coffee?” the lawyer asked, his hand moving toward an intercom switch.

Salter shook his head.

“Then how can I help you?” Robinson splayed out his hand on the desktop to examine his fingernails. He was a carefully groomed man who spoke over half-glasses and articulated his consonants with care. Pleased with himself, Salter thought.

“Tell me who killed Jerry Lucas.”

Nodding, as if to say “Quite funny,” but not smiling, Robinson said, “Some thug. Got interrupted robbing his apartment.”

“Possibly, but that's not what it looks like, although they don't have very good security in that building. It's not hard to get yourself buzzed up.”

“Really?” The lawyer sounded genuinely surprised. “I've never been inside the building. It's a joke among his poker crowd that none of us has ever been invited into his place. So it was someone he knew?”

“I was hoping you could help us on one possibility. How well did you know him?”

“I played poker with him, that's all. There are, were, seven of us in the game, though we usually only got six or even five out on a particular night. Below four we called it off.”

“Friends?”

“Apart from the game, you mean? Some of us are. But it isn't a group of friends playing cards. It's a poker game. You play?”

“I have.”

“Ever been in a big game?”

Salter caught a flicker of amusement in Robinson's voice. Did
Salter want to know what Robinson considered big?

“I lost a hundred dollars I couldn't afford once, thirty years ago,” he said, handing Robinson the advantage.

“What was your biggest win?”

“A couple of hundred. Once.”

Robinson said, “Our biggest pot two weeks ago was five thousand. That would be the equivalent of five hundred thirty years ago. Not so different,” he added, graciously.

“The difference is you can afford it.” Salter wondered how much Robinson made, and whether it compensated him for all the jokes, all the hositility, that were the lot of lawyers.

“You were over your head?” Robinson asked.

“In nineteen-sixty a hundred and twenty-five was the month's rent. Losing that much made a difference to my life, in the short term. Would losing five thousand make a difference in what you plan to do tomorrow?”

“That was the pot, not what I lost. No. I would probably spend any winnings on wine. Normally I don't pay more than twenty a bottle. My puritan streak. How about you?”

“Ten.”

“You like the fresh roughness of the simple vintages, I guess.” Robinson mouthed the words with a flourish to show he was making a wine joke. “Remind me not to eat dinner at your house. Apart from that, it's just like winning a lottery. Offhand, I can't think of anything I can't do now that winning half a million in a lottery would allow me to do. By the standards of some of our clients, I'm not rich, but I do travel first class. I can afford to lose. That's what you want to know, isn't it? Can any of us not afford to lose? No. That would put a strain on the rest of us, having someone at the table we had to be concerned about.”

“Winning money isn't important?”

“It's not what the game's about. It's about cleaning the clocks of the other guys. Beating them. Whipping ass. The money is there to show the score. It defines us, for the night. But, yeah, it's just a friendly game for decent stakes.”

“When did you play last? Two weeks ago?”

“The night before Jerry was murdered.”

“Who won?”

âJerry and Bob Pender. The money went back and forth until about one o'clock, and then it all shifted over to the two of them and they tried to have a shoot-out, but the cards wouldn't cooperate. They probably made a couple of thousand each.”

“And you lost a thousand.”

“About that.”

“And that's about the way of it every week?”

“More or less. I bring a thousand to the table, just in case I fight a serious hand, but once I've lost five hundred I'm ready to quit. I've lost it all a couple of times, and once I made three. Thousand, that is. That's about everybody's experience. So I don't think any of us killed Jerry for the pot he was taking home.”

Salter said, “Did you know anything about the guy?”

“Not much. He went paddling in a canoe, and to just about every concert that came to town.”

“Did he have a partner? A woman?”

“Every time I saw him at a theater or some such lately, he had a different woman, sometimes his sister. So I would guess not. But once upon a time, maybe ten years ago, he had a relationship with a woman I know, and that lasted two or three years. You would still see them together sometimes, even lately, in a restaurant, or at an art gallery. That's all I can tell you.”

Finally Salter came once more to the story of the woman in silver boots. Robinson listened, nodding to show he was familiar with the story. “I've no idea what she was all about. My guess would be that she was looking for someone else. But, as I said, I knew nothing about his private life, not even enough to guess at the answers you're looking for.”

“You don't think he might have actually wanted a hooker?”

“I think he'd be a bit more discreet than that. But that's just my impression of the guy. I have no hard evidence for you. Ask the others.”

“I will. Can you give me the list?”

Robinson pressed a button on his desk. “Sydney, print out the poker group, would you? And the schedule.” He leaned back. “I agree it sounds weird; there's got to be an explanation that fits with the
little I knew of the man. It's a question of taste. Jerry was particular in all his other pleasures, the quality of the whiskey he drankâin his case, vintage Irish pot distilledâthat sort of thing. I would have expected him to have a discreet arrangement with a lady cellist, no mention of money, but lots of presents.” Robinson smiled slightly. “At any rate, no Jarvis Street hookers. Ah, here they are.”

A beautiful woman in her forties dressed in black and hung about with gold chains came through the door and handed him two sheets of paper which he glanced at and handed to Salter. “There's the names, and, let's see, we meet next Thursday. Christ, at my place. I'd better tell Marion to stay out of the way.” Robinson paused, regarding Salter. “Why don't you come along, watch for a while, if you like. We could maybe each drop out of a hand in turn and you could talk to all of us one at a time, that way.”

Salter sensed that Robinson was up to something, perhaps simply wanting to show off in some way. But Lucas, his hunch told him, was probably killed by someone close to him, and since all homicides are rooted in sex, revenge, or money, then he should take a look at these guys. He said, “Maybe I could sit in for a couple of hands.”

Robinson looked startled. Then, after a few seconds, said, “I don't see why not.”

Salter stood up. “You play at a different house every week?”

Robinson said, “More or less. But we never played at Jerry's place. When it was Jerry's turn, he brought the wine and had some sandwiches catered. Yes, come and play poker.” He was enthusiastic now. “Thursday.”

“There's been a development. I'll need to stay a few days longer,” Annie said.

“Now what?” He was immediately on edge. Any “development,” he feared, would be bound to keep Annie on the Island longer. What could it be? Perhaps the family had lost all their money, and Annie was needed to cook while they looked for work?

“What's up?” he asked. This time he tried to sound jaunty.

“Linda has left Angus.”

“Oh, Jesus. Poor Angus. Why? Where's she gone? What was wrong?”

“She ran away with a folksinger from Moncton. She's in Moncton now.”

Salter laughed in spite of the distress he could hear in Annie's voice. “A folksinger? Where did she find him?”

“He played at a bar in Charlottetown for a week. She heard him the first night and went back every night afterwards. She told everyone she had decided to learn to play the guitar and wanted to watch a live performer while she got the chance. She did buy a guitar, and plucked at it a few times. Then she told Angus it wasn't just the guitar. She had become disenchanted with his life ethic, as she called it, and wanted to inhabit a more creative environment.”

“That's bad. Sounds like more than a counselor could patch up. She become a hippie? That what she means? A bit late.”

“There are new words for it, but that's the idea.”

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