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Authors: Eric Wight

BOOK: The Last Hand
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“Should we just think about it overnight?”
“You've been thinking about it for days, haven't you? Weeks? I can tell. I don't need to think about it. I've got an honorary daughter-in-law in the basement who, if Seth can keep his hands off her for half an hour, will shortly cook my dinner. You come home and I'll have a full set again. The baby will probably be a pain in the ass, but that will be your problem, and Angus's. Come home.”
“Hold your breath.”
“What? Oh, right. Something else while I've got you. You think I should join a book club?”
“Which one? Oh, you mean book
group
. A discussion group.”
“Yeah.”
“What brought this on?”
“I thought it might be interesting.”
“It is.”
“What? Oh, right, you used to belong to one, didn't you?”
“For the last ten years. Until this year. You should listen a bit more.”
“Well … when you join up again, could I come?”
“No.”
“Why? Ashamed of me?”
“No. I just don't want you sitting next to me when I'm explaining the hang-ups of the hero of whatever we are discussing.”
“Do you ever hear of other groups?”
“That would suit you? I'll keep my ears open. You could put the word out down at headquarters.”
“I could but I won't. Anyway, do that, will you? Keep your ears open?”
S
alter had never liked movie musicals much. Neither Gene Kelly nor Fred Astaire had danced their way into his heart, and a legion of songs and singers had left him looking at his watch, wondering when the next comic bit was coming. Sopranos with nice tits well-framed in lace as in
The Merry Widow
were okay as long as they didn't shriek, but their male counterparts had him running for the popcorn concession as soon as June started bustin' out all over. The worst, in his experience, were the whimsical movies, the ones with elves. The only exceptions to his prejudice, formed in early adolescence, were
Kiss Me Kate—
in his view the first and only adult musical—and bits of
Guys and Dolls
.
He had never seen
Alexander's Ragtime Band.
The date did not seem promising, sometime before he was born, but he hoped for an antique quaintness that would make up for the inevitable corniness.
 
 
“What are you watching, Dad?”
After the omelette had been cooked and eaten, Seth and Tatti had gone out to get an ice cream, and he had not heard them return. “We were having a discussion at work,” he extemporized, “About favorite movies. One of the sergeants said this was his parents' favorite. I thought I'd take a look.”
“You like it?”
“It's short. Movies used to be shorter, then, didn't they?”
“It doesn't grab you, though.”
“No.”
“Can I have the car for the night?”
“Call me before ten tomorrow in case I need it.”
“With you, Pops.”
“Good night, Mr. Salter.” Tatti from the hall.
Salter shouted back and the door closed behind him.
So far he had nothing. The movie had been pleasant enough; Salter enjoyed watching every device of the Hollywood musical unroll as the classic plot moved Alexander's band up from the roadside cafe to, finally, Carnegie Hall, and brought the boy and girl together, then apart, then together, managing to include what seemed like a one-minute version of World War One. Also, in the early part, set before the War, there were a fair number of vaudeville acts from an entertainment era he was sorry to have missed.
But the neighbor who had mentioned Alice Faye was more than ten years older than Salter, and it now seemed likely to him that the man was treasuring a memory of a night at the cinema, a memory that was gradually losing its definition. Alice Faye did not look like anyone he had seen. Probably the neighbor just meant she had a lot of makeup on. It had always been a long shot, the notion that Alice Faye or Gloria Grahame would look like one of the women in the case. He had retained a mild worry about Lucas's ex-lover, who had seemed slightly deranged, but Alice Faye looked nothing like Janet Rudd.
Gloria Grahame was another matter. He saw that movie through because he found
Oklahoma!
more watchable than most musicals, mainly because of Gloria Grahame's performance as the girl who couldn't say no, and because as soon as she appeared on the screen, he saw immediately what the neighbor had been talking about. Something about the way Gloria Grahame's upper lip stayed put while the rest of her face mobilized around the song, as if she had received a tiny local anaesthetic under her nose. The effect was unmistakeable.
 
 
“I spent a good part of the weekend at it, sir. I think I know every tart in Toronto, and I've talked to half of them, but there's no sign of Puss-in-Boots.”
“She's disappeared, Smitty.”
“Where to?”
“Up her own arse, as they probably say in the Gorbals. She never existed-just a wig and a pair of boots. Which, let-me-not-hide-my-light-under-a-bushel, Smitty-old-son, I kind of expected from the first, which is why I was pleased to get this job and why I'm pleased to find out I was right.”
“You certainly sound pleased with yourself, right enough. Smug, I would say. So she was wearing a disguise? Kinky. Maybe even a ‘he,' sir. Where have you got her now? You send a car to bring her in?”
“Not yet. I'd like to guess at a bit more of the plot. Any ideas?”
“Aye. Jerry Lucas was kinky himself. He couldn't get it on without she's wearing a lot of gear, ye know? So every Friday night she climbed into the costume and away they went.”
“So she did kill him?”
“No, why would she? But you know the rules, sir. So far, yes, she killed him, even though she didn't. Right?”
Salter nodded. “So, does she know who did?”
“Mebbe so.”
“How?”
“She saw him.”
“Where?”
“In the parking lot. The fella we thought was a punter.”
“But now he's the killer?”
“He's the only other suspect we have. A jealous rival, mebbe.”
“Mebbe. What was he driving. Remember?”
“A white pickup with a lock-up box.”
“Which we haven't found so far.”
“Aye. We haven't.”
“Now.” Salter consulted the Yellow Pages lying open on his desk, noted and wrote down an address, and handed it to Smith. “Go up there and call me back when you find the truck. Quick now. If someone finds out I knew who the hooker was when I was farting around like this, my last years in the force will pass very slowly.” He jumped up from his chair in excitement and crossed to the window. “There's a way to go yet, Smitty, but the road's a lot clearer ahead.”
Forty-five minutes later Smith phoned him back. “It's here. Not even in a garage. There's a kind of yard behind the building shaded by a big tree. The truck is tucked away in a corner. You wouldn't see it driving by, either from Yonge Street, or the cross street. You'd have to be on foot.”
“And we don't have foot patrols any more. Did you find out the owner?”
“I didn't ask anybody, sir. I didn't want to expose myself unecessarily because you seemed to be playing it very close to your chest.”
“Come back to the office and we'll talk about it.”
 
 
“I'll start, you listen. What we've got here on the surface is a woman dressing up to excite her lover and being suspected by her husband. He follows her one night when her excuse seems weak—a nonexistent concert, maybe—and figures out who she is visiting. He confronts her in the parking lot when she comes out but she brushes him off, so he goes back to the apartment block and kills the lover.”
“But the parking lot attendant said he drove away.”
“He could have come back.”
“Right enough. I'll check the area again to see if I can find anyone who saw his truck parked somewhere while he was killing Lucas.”
“We won't waste time on that just yet. We have to backtrack. We have to ask what happened to her after she was accosted in the lot, accused by her husband of screwing around, dressed up the way she never would for him.”
“She probably went home and waited for him to come back and pound the bejesus out of her. That's how it would have been in Glasgow.”
“These are solid burghers, Smitty.”
“Solid what? Burgers? What's that the slang for over here?”
“No. ‘Burghers,' with an aitch. Means upright middle-class citizens. The kind that don't pound each other. No, I think she went home and found him there, or the other way round, and they talked. No, that would be later. That Friday night they just …”
“What?”
“I'm not sure. One voice says she crept into his bed and said she was sorry. Another says that she said nothing that night, or the next day, waiting for him to explode. Then, on Saturday afternoon, during the opera broadcast from the Met, a friend called with the news. Right away she thinks her husband did it, then remembers he wasn't out of her sight long enough. Then her husband comes back from the office—he's self-employed, so he works all hours, including Saturday afternoons—and he's heard the news on the car radio and thinks she did it, or might have, but then he remembers that when he saw her across the parking lot she did not look like a killer, more like a woman who has just left her lover.”
“What are the signs of that?”
“More preoccupied than distraught. So they talk long into the night. Saturday night. Have you read the
The Great Gatsby,
Smitty?”
“Aye, it reached Glasgow. We did it at school.”
“You remember the scene at the end where Tom Buchanan and Daisy are talking—it was like that. But this time Gatsby was already dead. Louise and Wilder saw how bad it looked for them if they were identified. Because she was
his
alibi, but she had none for the time before he saw her. Wilder knew she had been unfaithful, but didn't believe she was a killer, but knowing how the cops—us—look for the obvious answer, they came together in a pact.”
“That takes care of them, then, sir, so we'd better do the obvious thing and arrest them and charge them both.”
“What with?”
“Murder and accessory to it. We'd better be quick. As middle-class citizens with access to clever lawyers, they'll know how to be on their way to South America by now, to join that bank robber.”
“You serious?”
“I'm trying to get into the spirit of whatever the hell you are up to which I can hardly follow, by the way. We seem to be pissing about, imitating a couple of characters in a television series.”
“Sorry. Yeah. The fact is, I think they're innocent, I
know
they're innocent, and I'm going to give them plenty of line. So let's prove I'm right, shall we? Back in the beginning, Barlow and Jensen took statements from Lucas's neighbors. One couple were in Florida, so we got the local police there to take a statement from them. This
couple said they heard voices coming from the apartment during the evening, that they thought there was more than one man. The possible interpretation, if there were two men, to fit the theories at the time, was that one of the male voices could have been a pimp, and the hooker and the pimp killed Lucas together. Then the hooker left, and the pimp followed her after he'd ransacked the apartment. Now go over and talk to that couple again, find out exactly what they think they heard, and when. The times.”
“Can we pin it down that close, sir?”
“Yes, we can. We know when she left the parking lot, because the time is on the ticket. If the couple heard voices after that time then she's in the clear.”
“An accessory, though.”
“Go talk to them.”
“Will you be here?”
“I'll wait for your call.”
 
 
Smith called back in the early afternoon. “I don't know if it's bingo, sir, but it's quite interesting. First, these people always go to bed at eleven sharp, so everything they heard took place before then. Second, they never saw the hooker, but others in the building have told them about her. This is what they're sure they heard: One, there was a man and a woman in the apartment until after ten, but after she left it was quiet until he turned on the television and they heard the voices in the movie or the play he was watching. This play went on until after they went to bed. That was all they heard. They were asleep before he switched off. Now here's the thing, see, Lucas doesn't have a television. He was one of those kooks who brag about never watching it, probably.”
“The radio?”
“I checked all the stations in our area, sir. Did you know there is no radio guide here where you can look and see what's on? Like a Radio Times. Do any of the papers publish a schedule? How do you find out what's on?”
“I don't know. Word of mouth, probably. What did you find out?”
“They say the CBC puts one out, but I can't find it in the shops. I had to phone every station in Toronto.”
“And?”
“Everyone including the CBC was broadcasting music at that time. Those voices were live.”
“Well done, Smitty. Now come back. I've got some more errands for you.”
“Are you going to pull them in now?”
“Who?”
“The Wilder couple. It's the other way round now, is it not? Him for murder, her for accessory, because, really, he went home covered in blood and told her about it.”
“I have a few things to do first.”
“For God's sake, sir, you'll get a rocket up your arse if you're wrong and they fly away.”
“Smitty, I want to tie this up in a ribbon and drop it in the deputy's lap.”

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