Read The Whole Megillah Online

Authors: Howard Engel

Tags: #toronto, #judaica, #jewish private detective, #canadian mystery fiction, #antique books, #benny cooperman, #jewish crime fiction

The Whole Megillah (10 page)

BOOK: The Whole Megillah
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‘Did you see the videotape in Moore's garbage can?'

‘Sure. It was half of
Casablanca
and all of
A Song to Remember
with Paul Muni and Merle Oberon. Both illegally copied from transmission.'

‘And?'

‘And what?'

‘Did you stop there?'

‘Where can you go from
A Song to Remember
? Cornel Wilde was Chopin. No, Benny, we didn't see any place to go from there.'

‘The tapes came from Moore's collection. If you check the ones that are probably marked
Casablanca
and
A Song to Remember
, I'll bet you'll come across two cassettes that have been emptied of tape and filled with money. About one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in each of them. That's just a guess. I haven't been in the living room since the morning I met you and Honour. I could be wrong. Maybe he got sick of Chopin.'

‘I'll send a man over there right away.' Pepper made his way through to the top of the stairs to where two men in uniform stood browsing through cookbooks. He spoke to one of them, gave him a set of keys and returned to the front room with its two small windows looking out over Bloor Street.

‘I'm not sure where to pick up the story now,' I said. ‘I suppose I might as well get to the fake robbery.'

‘ “Fake robbery''? What are you talking about?' asked Dalton, who had been slowly filling his styrofoam cup with fragments torn from the plastic lid. ‘Stop talking in riddles.'

‘Tony Moore hired me to find the Gerson Soncino Megillah last Tuesday. He told me it had been stolen from his home.'

‘We all know that!' said Dalton. ‘What's fake about that?'

‘Tony kicked out the glass in the french windows of his study. If he'd read any of dozens of detective novels, he would have known that a burglar kicks glass into the room, not out into the back yard. It was a bad job of fakery. Maybe his heart wasn't in it. Anyway, the glass pieces I found out there were rain-spotted. You'll remember that the rain last Wednesday was the first after a dry spell going back to last month. That means the glass was out there after the fake robbery on Tuesday night.'

‘You keep saying "fake"! Why?' insisted Dalton.

‘The megillah was never stolen. Tony only pretended to have it filched. It was a double-barrelled scheme. First, it gave him a breather from all of the dealers and collectors in town. They weren't giving him any peace. Second, he wanted to sell it without sharing the profit with Honour. If the book was stolen, then it wouldn't have to be accounted for, or it would be chalked up as a joint loss.'

‘The son of a bitch!' said Honour in a voice so low that none of us missed it. ‘The son of a bitch!'

‘Tony found out that your separation had taken a turn for the worse, Honour. He knew you were seeing someone and he didn't like it. Until then, he was living in hope that the split could be healed. He didn't know about you, Mr. Lowther.'

‘Now see here, Cooperman! There are laws in this country!' Lowther was on his feet, his heavy shoulders hunched as though he wanted to plough into me.

‘Look, Mr. Lowther, I hope you aren't going to give me a hard time on this. I've been in divorce work for too long. Your office won't tell me where to get in touch with you. Your phone is privately listed. All the familiar signs. So I followed you home. Your home is on Walmer Road. Same place as Honour's. She's listed; you're not. You answer her bell. So please don't protest too much. After all, she's a very beautiful woman. We should all get so lucky.'

‘I'm not admitting anything.'

‘Oh Colin, give up. He knows, he knows, he knows!' There was a note of exasperation in Honour's voice.

‘Well, all right. So what?'

‘My heartiest congratulations for a start,' I said. ‘You managed to access the wife without alienating the husband. Very deft, sir!'

‘Well, Tony was a friend,' Lowther said, shifting nervously. ‘We've always been friends. And Honour and I needed more time. We needed to prepare him. We knew he wasn't going to like it.'

‘But he found out that there was something going on. That made him angry enough to get the megillah out of the house. A private sale to Kurian, who would keep his mouth shut. And Tony covered his tracks with a fake robbery. He even brought me into the scheme just to make it look as though he was doing all he could to get the thing back again.' Sergeant Pepper couldn't hide his grin. He tried covering his mouth, but it was too late. ‘Sure, I was stupid enough to walk in unprepared and get taken for a ride just like the rest of you. But things began to go sour as soon as he got himself killed. First off, it became clear that Tony hadn't reported the loss of the book to the cops. He was smart enough to know that that could get him into big trouble, so he drew the line and brought in a rent-a-cop: me.'

‘This is going around in circles,' Lowther interrupted. ‘Why don't you come to the point and stop wasting all of our time?'

‘I'm doing the best I can, Mr. Lowther. This is complicated stuff and I'm trying to keep it straight in my head. For instance, you were the only one to see the megillah after Tony brought it to Albany Avenue.'

‘How do you know that?'

‘Don't get excited, Mr. Lowther,' Sergeant Pepper said. ‘You just told us a few minutes ago. Things will go better for all of us if we try to relax. This is just an informal get-together as far as I'm concerned.' Pepper turned his smile on the faces watching him. None of the owners of the faces showed any sign of relaxing. Who believes a dentist when he says ‘This isn't going to hurt'? Lowther shrugged when the faces turned from Pepper to him.

‘Sure, Tony showed it to me. But how did you know without my having admitted it?'

‘The book's been buried in a private collection since 1919. All of our descriptions of it go back to a catalogue of that 1919 sale.'

‘We all know that,' said Lowther. ‘It was the Sir Bernard Kendal sale. The catalogue is a collectors' item itself.'

‘Good. That will save time. The description there puts the book inside a protective plain leather cover. Mr. Dalton assured me that the dull outer cover was still there six years ago when he had a private look at it in one of the stately homes of England. That cover has been removed, so that now the book appears with all its precious jewels glittering. The richly designed inner cover has become the outer cover. When you described the book to me, you made no mention of the drab outer covering, so it's a safe inference to say that you've seen it recently. And where? Why not on Albany Avenue in the house of your good friend Tony Moore?'

‘Is that some sort of brilliant deduction, Mr. Cooperman? If you'd have asked me, I would have told you as much,' Lowther said, looking around the room. ‘Yes, Tony showed it off to me. It was spectacular, really. Then it was stolen soon after that.'

‘Was that the Saturday it was supposedly stolen?'

‘It was last Saturday. I still can't credit this invention of yours, a fake robbery. This isn't television. Tony Moore isn't going to walk in here and tell us it was all a grand charade. Tony's dead. His head was bashed in and nothing any of us can do will bring him back again. Yet all of you are treating this matter as though it were a play, some kind of farce. Well, Tony was a friend of mine and I won't buy that!'

‘A very noble speech, Mr. Lowther. I can see why you do so well in the courtroom. I hope your next appearance there will be equally effective.'

‘My next appearance?'

‘Yes, for the murder of Tony Moore.' A silence followed my statement. And that was followed by another. Honour Griffin broke it.

‘Colin? What are they talking about?'

‘Yes,' said Dalton. ‘Colin's right. This farce has gone far enough.'

‘You've made a serious charge, Benny,' said Sergeant Pepper. ‘I hope you know what you're doing.'

‘You and me both.' Here I turned to look at Lowther. ‘Mr. Lowther, may I ask you how it is you know the cause of the injury that led to Tony Moore's death?'

‘Ah!' said Sergeant Pepper, as though a light had just been turned on.

‘What are you talking about?' said Lowther, masking a degree of confusion. ‘Everybody knows that he was killed with one of his guns.'

‘Yes, that's right, but each of you--apart from you, Mr. Lowther--assumed that the gun was used to shoot Moore. How is it you know he was clubbed to death with the weapon?'

‘I ... In legal circles, Mr. Cooperman, in the legal circles in which I move, these things are not difficult to learn.'

‘If I may interrupt, Mr. Lowther,' said Pepper. ‘No one knew that the gun-butt was used to kill Moore. No one. The cause of his death was kept quiet. Only the coroner knows. And he is not given to loose talk-even to the esteemed members of the bar.'

‘Perhaps you can tell us how you know Moore was bludgeoned to death with the butt of a gun?'

‘I don't have to explain anything to you, Cooperman!'

‘Will you explain it to me, Lowther? It's a question of doing it here or down at the station. Suit yourself.' Pepper even gave him a polite smile as he said this.

‘You could only have known this in two ways, either you were yourself the murderer, or you visited the scene of the crime after Moore was dead. Which was it?'

‘You can't prove any of this. You have no grounds!'

‘You killed Moore or you were on the scene after he was dead! Which was it, Mr. Lowther? You're either a killer or an accessory!'

‘I didn't kill anybody!' Lowther yelled. ‘I didn't kill him.'

‘Then you know who did,' I persisted. ‘Who was it? You know who did it!'

‘Who are you covering for?' Pepper's face was close to Lowther's, which had coloured. He was sweating.

‘Shut up, both of you!' It was Honour Griffin. ‘Leave him alone! He doesn't know anything about this.' We were now all looking at Moore's widow. Her knuckles were white and the muscles of her neck betrayed the tension she was feeling. ‘I'm the one you want. I killed Tony! I killed him. Leave Colin alone. I'm the one you want.'

Having said that, she began to cry quietly. Dalton crossed the room and gave her his pocket handkerchief--a big concession, considering how much he disliked the woman. With her face no longer visible, she continued to sob, with her shoulders heaving. Sergeant Pepper put his arm on her shoulder and said something like: ‘There, there. There, there.'

I was still reeling from the sudden change of direction things had taken. I was quite willing to believe in the guilt of my client after he'd made his gaffe, but this was different. Honour Griffin, who had driven her first husband to an early grave--if Dalton was to be believed--killed Tony Moore and had the presence of mind not to fall into the trap Sergeant Pepper had set for her in keeping the cause of death a secret. I remembered when she mentioned the gun, remembered feeling relieved when she passed the test without my even having to lead her through it.

After a few minutes, Honour wiped her eyes and blew her nose. She avoided looking at any of us. ‘Is there any of that coffee left?' she asked, and one of the uniforms near the cookbooks moved down the stairs. When he came back, less than three minutes later, it was with a full silex and a stack of styrofoam cups. He'd forgotten the cream and sugar, but who can blame him. Pepper took the silex and poured a cup for Honour, who accepted it from him without a word. She attempted to look him in the face, by way of thanks, but she couldn't get her head that high. As she sipped, Pepper poured out the rest of the round. We all watched him, as though we'd never seen coffee poured before.

‘That feels better,' Honour said in a voice that showed her courage was returning. It was an even, cello-like voice most of the time. Occasionally it failed her, just as the corners of her mouth gave her away. Her mouth twitched into a grimace as she spoke. Her hands turned the handkerchief in her grip like a twisted rag.

‘I suppose I shouldn't say anything,' she said. ‘But I feel I have to.'

Here Sergeant Pepper quietly and clearly warned her as he was required to by law. He asked her if she understood and she nodded assent. Lowther moved over to sit with her. He was already the defending attorney, but no one objected. He didn't even caution her to be still. We could all see how important it was for her to be rid of what she had been keeping within her since last Thursday night.

‘I didn't intend to kill him, you know. I didn't go there with that intention. We started arguing, that's all. He told me about how he'd got rid of the megillah and how I would never be able to share in any of the thousands he'd got for it. I lost my head. I'm a greedy woman, I guess. He made me lose control. I told him about Colin and me. It was the only weapon I had. I knew it would hurt him and that's what I wanted to do. Once he heard, he lost all sense of reason. He ran around calling me "slut" and "whore." He picked up a piece from the coffee table. It was a handle from an antique printing press. He was coming at me with it. I had to do something. He was lashing out at me with the handle. I felt my back hit the gun rack. I reached one of his rifles. But he was so close to me I wasn't sure I could defend myself with it. Even in that state, I knew it wouldn't be loaded, but I slung it at him. Right from the rack. The gun-butt was stuck at first, but it came free and hit Tony. Without looking, I knew it was a terrible blow. He dropped the handle, which was all I cared about, and then fell on top of it. He never moved.

‘I just ran. I had to get away. I don't think I even closed the front door. When I got home, Colin saw the state I was in. He got me calmed down, gave me something to make me sleep. Then I guess he went back.' Lowther was nodding at her words, perhaps more in time with the cadence of her words than with their meaning.

BOOK: The Whole Megillah
9.95Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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