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Authors: Eric Wight

BOOK: The Last Hand
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“She's found God, like.”
“More or less.”
“How is Angus responding?”
“Angry. The fact is, she's only been gone for three days, and he talks about how much he dislikes her. It sounds bad.”
“Why didn't you tell me before?”
“I spoke to a psychologist I know in Toronto first, and she said it might be a temporary thing, that as soon as Linda realizes she won't have Charlotte with her, she'll come back and they can sort it out.”
“She didn't take the baby? Christ! What's Angus supposed to do with it?”
“
Her
. Your granddaughter. Linda said in her note that it was only fair that Angus should have Charlotte because she meant so much to him, whereas Linda will have others, with the folksinger …”
“She just wanted out, didn't she? Didn't she ever seem attached to the kid?”
“You can look back now and see all kinds of signs that point to the fact that she was surprised to find herself a mother. At least that's what
my
mother's been doing ever since, pointing to the signs. But what does it matter? It isn't temporary. So Angus is here with no one to look after Charlotte.”
“Your mother?”
“She's a bit past the hands-on care stuff.”
“Your brothers' wives, until Angus can get something sorted out?”
“I'm testing the water on that. It looks cold.”
“So how long?”
“I'll have to stay until we've found a nanny for Charlotte, probably someone to live in. At least a couple of weeks. How is Seth?”
“Tatti—I guess one day that'll sound like a nice French name instead of how it sounds now-anyway Tatti hasn't moved in yet. Seth won't let her until he's turned the basement into a palace.”
“You helping, Charlie?”
“Don't start nagging, Annie. As you well know, I don't have any of the skills Seth needs. He lets me hold stuff, light things, so I don't rupture myself, but nothing requiring any expertise.”
“Don't keep your distance. He might think you disapprove.”
“He knows I don't. I smile warmly at Tatti every time I see her. That's easy to do.”
“You know what I mean. Make them feel at home. Get an extra key cut so she can let herself in when you're both out. How's the work?”
“I'm on a case, a real case, a homicide yet, involving some of Toronto's movers and shakers. I've got a new assistant just for this case. Very ironic guy. Or do I mean laconic? Anyway, a Scotsman. But never mind him, is anyone listening on the extension? No. Well. You know of Flora Lucas?”
“Of course I do. Everyone does. I've met her at fund-raising events.”
“Symphony? Ballet?”
“No, something noncultural, good works. Raising money for a hospice, that kind of thing. I remember one, a kind of private auction, where a lot of people donated something they valued and then all the donors were allowed to bid to get back their own thing, or someone else's.”
“What did you donate?”
“Some books. The English Idyll series I've been collecting.”
“Those litle green jobs with the gold lettering? I never noticed them missing.”
“They were only gone for a few days. I bought them back.”
“How much for?”
“They're my books, Charlie.”
“Yeah. How much?
“Six hundred dollars.”
“Jesus!” Salter felt a flush of pleasure that he was married to this woman. “So what do you make of Flora Lucas? Give me the dirt.”
“I doubt if there is any. She made a speech about the need for hospices, about the care of the dying being a measure of civilization, and got passionate generally about how proud she was to be associated with the party that had introduced Medicare in the first place …”
“She isn't. It was Tommy Douglas and the CCF who did that.”
“I know. You've often told us. Flora Lucas acknowledges him as the father-philosopher of the idea, but she was proud that the Liberals had written the legislation for the nation. Those were her words. She ended by saying that thing about pain being a form of evil, and anything we could do to get rid of it, we should. It was quite a speech; she's quite a woman. I'd have paid a lot more than six hundred to buy back my books.”
“I can tell.”
“What are you doing about food?”
“I bought a case of baked beans, and I heat two cans a night and Seth and I eat them out of the can with a spoon. Two spoons. One each. Don't worry about the food.”
“Eat some salad!”
“I'll tell Seth. He buys the groceries. Tell Angus I'm sorry. No, don't. I'll call him, talk to him myself. Now I have to go and watch Seth work. Come home soon.”
“Give Seth my love.”
Salter hung up, collected two beers from the fridge, and walked to the head of the basement stairs. “Beer?” he shouted. “Want a beer?”
“Sure,” Seth shouted back. “Who was on the phone?”
“Mom.” And then, because it was better to deal with these things immediately. “Angus's wife has run away.”
Seth reached out for the beer, laughing. “Run away? Who with? The raggle-taggle Gypsies, oh! Wives don't run away these days, Pop. They leave, is all. Good. Now Angus won't have to leave her.”
“Was he planning to?”
“He called a week ago. Put me under a vow of silence which I guess I can now break. Those two have been in trouble for a while. Angus wanted to know if he could come back here, stay here while he looked for a job.”
“Leave the baby on the Island? What did you say?”
“I told him to look after first things first. Sort out his life, then come home, maybe.”
“What about this folksinger?”
Seth considered his words. “I doubt if Angus should be throwing stones.”
“Jesus Christ. And Mom knows nothing about this?”
“You'll have to ask
her
that.”
After a while, Salter said, “You think it's good, them splitting up?”
Seth put down his hammer. “Pop, Angus needs tent stakes, you know? Something to hold him down in a wind. He isn't as solid on his feet as he thinks he is.”
Or as you are, Salter thought. “Don't you like her?”
“Angus needs someone solid, supportive. She was
creative
. He couldn't handle that.”
“Creative is bad now?”
“In her it was a sign of instability.”
Salter experienced a mild sense of diminishment at the realization that his second son was showing signs of wisdom, instructing him, no longer inhabiting any part of his shadow. It was odd. He would have to be more careful around the house in future, learn to treat his own family as a group of friends, no longer nodding in recognition of his omniscience, but listening to what he was saying and judging it. He was going to have to think about what he was saying as carefully inside the house as out. Or stop caring outside
and
in.
“I read your poem, by the way.”
“‘Ulysses'?”
“Yeah. Sounded like Charles Bronson in that movie where he gets his old pals together for one last punch-up. Nothing to do with me.”
S
ylvia Sparrow was a small woman with bright eyes in a tiny, fluffy head. She had her own office, which should have made it easy for Salter to get to the point immediately, but first he had to let her try to get control by moving quickly about the room, closing drawers, moving a box of tissue onto the desk between them and making sharp little remarks that were intended to show that she was amused by the situation.
“I've never been interrogated by a staff inspector before. You must excuse me if I get interested in the process. Oh, dear, I haven't asked you to sit down. Please sit down.” She gave a little laugh. “Is there anything else you're too shy to ask for? Are you allowed to drink coffee on duty?”
When she had fluttered to rest, Salter said, “As you know, Jeremy Lucas, a onetime member of your book club, was found stabbed in his apartment.”
She gave a twitchy smile around the room, then composed herself.
“Did you know him only through the book club?”
“Group. Not a club. Yes. We don't socialize. It seems better that way.”
“How do you get new members, after someone drops out, say?”
“We have a waiting list, made up of people who have heard of the group and want to join. Suggestions are made, and if no one objects we put them on the waiting list.”
“But if you don't know each other outside the group … ?”
“I didn't say we don't
know
each other. One of my colleagues was a member. I said we don't
socialize.
We don't recruit friends.”
“Why? Why don't you recruit friends?”
“It's just something we instinctively agreed not to do in the beginning. I expect that doesn't make any sense to you, but that's our policy.”
“You know what you're doing, I guess. Now, about Lucas. Did you know anything about him beyond his bookishness?” He wanted to say “book learning” or even “larnin” because her last sentence had sounded like a crack, but it would probably misfire.
“I believe he liked the great outdoors.”
“In what way?”
“He communed with nature.”
“How?”
“Physically.”
“Hugging trees? Stuff like that?”
“I believe he
voyaged
.” She pronounced it in the French way.
“He did what?”
“Like a
voyageur
.”
“You mean he loaded up a freighter canoe with beads and whiskey and paddled to Winnipeg to trade them for skins?”
It worked. She stopped smiling at him. “I mean he went on canoe trips.”
“Do you know what else he did in his spare time?”
“Concerts. He was extremely musical. Loved opera, except Benjamin Britten. He was an authority on Purcell. Dido's lament moved him to tears.”
She was back again, making fun of him by pretending that he would know what she was talking about. Salter decided to ignore it. “Do you know who his companions were when he was doing these things?”
“The other people in his canoe? I'm afraid not.”
“How did
he
get to be a member of your group?”
“Someone must have proposed him, I've forgotten who. Like all of the nominees, he came as a guest for a couple of meetings, then we asked him to join.”
“What happens if you don't like someone who wants to join?”
“I can't really spell out our procedures, but they are designed to give the least offense. This is just a way we have of making sure people are in tune with us at the right level.”
“Smart enough? Smart as the rest of you?”
“If you like. There are different ways of being smart, of course. I'm sure you are a smart policeman. Smart about literature is what we are looking for. Intelligent, thoughtful, undogmatic, widely read, and able to listen as well as talk.”
“I understand he dropped out a few months ago. Any idea why?”
“I would guess he found another group more at his level. He was actually
very
smart. An intellectual quester, I would say.”
“You don't have any idea who was in this other group?”
“I don't even know if there is one. I was just trying to acknowledge modestly that although ours is a good group, we know our limits. Maybe he went to look for a group to talk with about
Finnegan's Wake
.”
“That hard?”
“
Very hard.
” She grinned, and Salter found himself thinking that she wasn't so bad. What he had read as her attempts to put him down were probably the signs of a larger than usual nervousness, an effort to get comfortable with herself in a new situation, that of being questioned by a copper.
She continued, “Actually, I can think of one person who might know. She dropped out of our group, too, a bit before Jerry left us. She was a musician, too. I mean she knew a lot about music and played the cello in an amateur orchestra. She hadn't been with us for long, about a year, and I have the feeling we didn't satisfy her. I sometimes caught her looking at her watch while we were trying to sort out an idea. Louise Wilder her name is. She and Jerry sometimes exchanged a remark or two about a concert they had both been to, or the latest singing star. Once when a countertenor came to town in an opera by Haydn, they explained to us what a countertenor was and how they retained their voices. Haydn? No, Handel. Anyway, they had that in common, and possibly bumped into each other more than the rest of us tone-deaf bookworms did.”
Salter pricked up his ears. “Bumped into each other? No more
than that? But they left the group around the same time. Did he drop out because she did, maybe?”
“I don't like that kind of speculation.”
“No? I do. That's my job. Did you ever
wonder,
then, sort of privately?”
“As far as I know, Louise Wilder was and is happily married.”
“And Lucas? What did you know about his love life?”
“I never thought about it. He gave off no vibes of any kind. Not to me, anyway.”
“I'd better talk to Mrs. Wilder, I guess.”
 
 
Louise Wilder lived on Sandringham Avenue, south of St. Clair, west off Yonge Street. The houses on Sandringham are worth a lot of money per square foot, and most of them have been transformed in various ways by people who want to live on Sandringham—but not in the style of a bank manager of the nineteen-twenties.
Not all the residents are rich. Some of the houses have been divided into apartments, or even discreetly into rooms to accommodate the lifestyles of the single apartment-dweller class—lecturers without tenure, young musicians, assistant editors—who prefer to live in the district rather than pay the same rent for a larger space in, say, Etobicoke, because of the easy access to bookstores, coffee shops, cinemas and the subway, and most of all, to other people like themselves.
Salter knew the street well. He and Annie had often walked it on Sunday afternoons, wondering if they could afford to move there. He thought he knew the Wilders' house, near the Avenue Road end where a higher proportion of the houses are still in their original condition, but when he came to it it did not strike a chord. It was a semidetached brick dwelling, and at a glance it looked to Salter as if it had been left alone, including retaining the original porch, but as his eye moved up to the second and third stories it was clear much restructuring had taken place, ending in a number of recently added skylights.
Louise Wilder was waiting for him on the porch. Somewhere between forty and fifty (it was getting harder and harder as he got older to locate them closer than that), dark-haired, plump, pretty–
Salter liked the look of her but regretted that she fell outside his two favorite categories.
“I had to leave school early for this,” she said as she walked him into the house. “I suggested four-thirty so my husband wouldn't interrupt us.”
“You teach, Mrs. Wilder?”
“I'm a secretary at a private school. My husband is an architect who specializes in renovation—you see his signs around here. You've come about Jerry Lucas, of course.”
“I'm just ticking off names on lists, looking for information,” Salter said. “This won't take long. A couple of people suggested that you might know Jerry Lucas better than anyone else in the group. They said you had been seen with him …”
“
Seen
with him? Where? Who said that?” She sounded genuinely surprised, and curious.
“Joe Lichtman, for one. And your leader, Sylvia Sparrow.”
“Huh,” she said, nearly grunted. “The human cannonball and, as you say, our leader. And where did Joe and Sylvia Sparrow see me?”
“I'm trying to remember. Concerts? Yeah. Roy Thompson Hall. I think so. Theaters, maybe. No. Concerts. They didn't say they saw you actually with him, like making up a couple.”
“Good. I wasn't.”
“Just chatting with him on the stairs or round the bar, something like that.”
“If you live in Toronto and go to concerts, you are pretty well bound to bump into everyone else who likes music, at Roy Thompson Hall or the Ford Center or the St. Lawrence Center. The main venues. I went to hear
Xerxes
last winter and talked to six people I know well and waved to eleven others.”
Salter had his notebook out. “What was that word?”
“
Xerxes
. It's got two exes,” she added kindly.
“Thanks. Yes, that was the point they were making, too. But apparently you people in the group don't socialize with each other; you just get together once a month to talk about books. But because of the music, you and Lucas would have more to say to each other when you bumped into each other away from the group. That right?”
“More or less. But I didn't know anything about Jerry except that he liked Baroque opera, and he didn't like Brahms or Schumann. Like me.”
“Many of you like that, are there? Who don't like those two, I mean?”
“I know a couple of others.”
“Uh-huh. Now, let me ask a straight question. Did you ever see Lucas with a woman?”
“I never saw him any other way. He always had a woman in tow at the concerts where I saw him—which wasn't all
that
often. The only one I recognized was his sister, because he introduced her to me.”
“So, apart from the music, you had no idea of his life outside the book group.”
“No idea at all.”
“Did he ever show an inclination to get to know you better?”
“Not in the least.”
“You weren't too upset by the news, then.”
“Of course I was. A man was murdered, a man I knew. But you can't stay upset, can you. I liked him, but we weren't friends. He wasn't part of my life.”
Salter rubbed his hand over his head and yawned slightly as a sign to her that the interview was over and now he was just chatting. “He let someone into his apartment that night. A woman was seen.”
“Where was she seen?”
“Getting out of the elevator. Do you know the building?”
She paused before she spoke. “I don't think we ever met in his apartment. Who saw her?”
“We? You said ‘we.' You and him?”
“Of course not. I meant the book group. Who saw her?”
“A neighbor. Said the woman was kind of dressed up.” Salter held onto the details, one of the oldest tactics in the book. Once in a while a suspect mentioned a detail they should not have known about—not often, but holding something back was instinctive.
“How do you mean, ‘dressed up'?”
“Like, for a party. Of course, this woman may not be the person we're looking for.”
“Surely … ?”
Salter shook his head. “I could give you six alternative explanations, all innocent. But I'd like to find her, because she might be able to point us down the right path.”
“I can't help you, I'm afraid.”
Salter stood up. “When did he drop out of the group? Why? Sylvia Sparrow called him an intellectual quester. That's a good phrase, isn't it? Is it accurate?”
“I don't know when he left because I was already gone. You see, the group always used to meet on Tuesdays, but Jerry had a strong lineup of concerts for that night, so he asked if we could switch to Monday, and they did. But Mondays are difficult for me, so I dropped out. I was looking for a new group, anyway.”
“A bit of an intellectual quester, yourself, eh? Did you find one?”

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