A Victim Must Be Found (12 page)

Savas gave a sort of a nod, then tossed the crown of his head in the direction of his door. I followed him inside. “C’mon,” he said. “I’ll getcha some real coffee.”

The office hadn’t changed from the last time Chris and I had reason to talk professionally. The rust-stains on the linoleum still showed where the furniture used to stand before it was moved to the present set-up: the stack of files by the door, a cabinet of official manuals, a desk made of grey metal, bumped and chipped by heavy traffic. A serious-faced Chris looked down from his Aylmer Police College graduation picture along with two dozen other equally serious young officers. Elsewhere he was grinning in a shot taken on the firing range. Large earmuffs protected his ears. The sober look returned in a framed photograph of him getting some honour or other from a former lieutenant-governor. He never told me about that picture. Chris was a good cop, and that included all the shy vices beginning with modesty.

I took the usual chair reserved for guests and left enough leg-room for Chris to get past me when he came back with two mugs of real coffee. Both of us spend long hours drinking the worst coffee ever to stain a pot; that’s why we both appreciate the good stuff whenever we’re lucky enough to get a sample. Outside the door which Savas closed behind him with a swing of his hip and a kick, I could hear the normal sounds of the NRP on duty at a late hour. Two-finger typing was going on next door, a badly distorted PA system blared indecipherably, and occasionally I heard the sound of a male voice raised above the normal drone. Savas sat. He opened a file in front of him.

“Okay, we come to bury Pambos not to praise him,” Savas said, throwing down a few scanty handwritten reports that came from the investigating officers. “We’ll have a wake for the guy some other time, Benny. Right now this is just another routine investigation. What do you know about it that isn’t down here in black and white?”

“It’s all there, Chris. Just like I told Vic Vittorini and his partner. It’s a new guy, I don’t know him.”

“He’s not so new. Name’s Jack Harasti. He’ll go far if he can get his mind off crossword puzzles. That’s your vice too, isn’t it, Benny?”

“It’s not a vice when you know how lousy you are. I’m strictly an amateur.”

“I’m glad to hear that, Benny. Now let’s get down to cases, as they say.” I nodded that that was fine with me, and Savas stared at me for a long time. “You know,” he said, “in all the years I’ve known you, you’ve always been straight with me.” I started to get worried. Savas didn’t need to flatter me. This time he was winding up well back of the mound and I knew it was going to be a fast ball. His face was putting on that phoney avuncular look that he used on lost kids when he was walking a beat. It cut no ice with me, and usually, when our mutual friend Pete Staziak was standing with us, he’d give me a look that said Savas was at it again.

Chris and I went back to the winter of 1980 or around about there. I was getting my butt kicked by a colleague of his in a way that bothered Savas’s set of scruples. So we put our heads together and concentrated on the art of the possible. Since then, I’d seen that big head of his in and out of several investigations. Sometimes I knew he’d like to nail me for a B and E or a felony of some sort just so he’d be one up on me, but I’ve always been too dumb to make an illegal buck and Chris knows it as well as I do. He has a big face with a big helping of nose in the middle. When he takes off the “Mr. Nice Guy” sign, he looks friendly enough, but as soon as he gets serious or worried, his eyes get hard and stony.

He started in on me, taking me through my earlier statement. I told him about meeting Pambos at the United Cigar Store and about how he helped me unpack in my new apartment. I even told him about the list he wanted me to find. I could tell that Savas didn’t want to know about all those pictures that hadn’t been returned to their rightful owners after the death of Arthur Tallon. I asked him if he knew anything about Tallon’s death and he didn’t. But I’d planted a seed. Tallon was a long way from Pambos Kiriakis on the first night of an investigation, so we tried to keep to the body on the carpet. He took my being at the scene of the crime seriously, as he was supposed to. He also did not like the fact that his other key witness had mentioned that he first came across me in the draperies of Pambos’s office.

“For the love of Mike, Benny, open up or I’m going to let you fall off the roof! And don’t go saying you were pushed.”

“I told you three times what I know! You want me to start making things up?”

“I want the whole story, not fragments. What were you doing in Kiriakis’s office? Why did you hide behind the curtains? What are you really working on beside this picture business? What women are involved?”

“Button, button, who’s got the button?”

“I’ve got it, Cooperman, and I want to know where it came from.” He let the button fall on the file folder. There, on the top of his desk, it didn’t look like our best clue to who’d killed Pambos Kiriakis.

“I don’t suppose there were any prints you could get off that?”

“Smeared. The way you’re going to be if I don’t start getting some answers.” He was looking at me like I was a bottle full of answers to all the questions he could think up. I tried again to think of something I’d forgotten to say, but my conscience was clear; I’d been as up-front with Savas as he’d ever been with me. He had dropped a hint about the direction his investigation was leading. I thought I’d see how serious he was.

“Chris, do you honestly think Kiriakis pulled that button off some woman’s coat? A death struggle and all that?”

“Well, it’s not off a seaman’s greatcoat or off the fly of a fireman, is it?”

“You’re barking up the wrong spruce.” I picked up the button and turned it around in my hand. “All you’re going to get from this is bud-worm.”

“How come?”

“Chris, I saw the button when it was still lying in Pambos’s palm, before the forces of law and order had had a chance to pass it around and bag and label it.”

“I hear you. Keep talking.”

“When I saw it first it was lying front side up.”

“So?” Chris was beginning to look testy. It was one of the professional looks he did best. “Cooperman, don’t ration it.”

“If I pulled a button off your coat while in a death struggle, trying to get out of here to catch up on the early night I promised myself yesterday when I finished moving and unpacking umpteen boxes in my new place, the front of the button would be touching my palm and the ripped off, dangling threads would point up. This thing was lying the other way round. So, I suggest that it was planted. It didn’t get there by normal or natural means. That’s all. It didn’t grow there.”

Savas thought about that, unless the process of scratching his late-night beard absently meant the opposite. He seemed to be turning it over in his mind, but what do I know about what goes on in Chris Savas’s head. “Okay, he didn’t pull the button off a female murderer’s coat. Who did it then?”

“It has to be the same character who filed the letteropener between Kiriakis’s ribs. That’s my best shot. Not too many innocent people carry around a button belonging to their hated enemy in hopes of finding some cold palm to leave it in.”

Savas sipped his coffee and I took a long drink from the mug in front of me. It was nearly cold. How long had we been sitting and talking here? Hadn’t Chris just brought in the cups a moment ago? What was going on with time in Niagara Regional? It was often said that they could fix anything but a parking ticket. Now I believe it. “The question to ask, Chris, is who had it in for one of Kiriakis’s lady friends.”

“Okay, spill. Who are they?” I tried to watch myself; I didn’t want to tell Chris for the fifth or sixth time that I had already told him all I knew about Pambos’s private life.

“You haven’t been listening, Chris. There is only one fact I haven’t passed on to you that Pambos told me. And it’s irrelevant and you already know it.”

“Christ. Cooperman, will you let me be the judge of that? That’s my goddamn job not yours!”

“Okay, he let it leak that my old friend Chris Savas’s first name is Christophoros not Christopher. You want me to add that to my statement?” Chris shifted a bubble of air behind his upper teeth and sucked on it. His big face went through the motions of returning to a calm and placid appearance, but muscles under the flesh of his cheeks pulsed with irritation. I tried to make it better. “Chris, I was just doing a job for Pambos. I don’t know any more about him than you do. In fact you probably know a hell of a lot more. I don’t know about his love life. I don’t know his friends or enemies, male or female.” I stopped, maybe a little more abruptly than was expected. I added:

“Come on, Chris. He wasn’t my best friend. I liked him and I’m going to miss him, but I’m a limited resource if you want to know what he did apart from what I just told you. I knew him best in the old days when he was working in the steakhouse. We used to sit up till all hours in those days talking everything from art to politics and back again. There was a gang of us: Wally Skeat from the TV station, Harold from the
Beacon
and sometimes Ned Evans from the Workshop Players, when he was sober enough.”

Chris slapped both thighs with his large hands and stood up. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s leave it there for now, Benny.” I got to my feet and started for the door. When I was part of the way through it, I turned back to face Chris Savas.

“Was there a lot more to Pambos than met the eye, Chris?” Savas winced. At first I thought that was all I was going to get, then he volunteered:

“There’s this whole Cyprus thing.” I waited for him to elaborate, but he had told me all he intended to. We shook hands and in a minute I was walking down the broad front steps of Niagara Regional to the friendly trees of Church Street.

TEN

“Hello, is Phil there?” This time it was a man. I explained that this number had been recently reissued and suggested that he should check with the directory or the operator about the whereabouts of his friend. I envied Phil his devoted friends and was inclined to be a little hard on him for not keeping them abreast of his moves from place to place. I wondered if I would get calls forwarded to me from the City House. I made a mental note to phone Gus at the bar and give him my new number. For some reason, known best to my marrow, I didn’t get around to it for several weeks.

I tried to get Pambos out of my head. He was dead. There’d be no more viewing of his treasures, no more discussions about the poisoning of Napoleon. Pambos was dead. It seemed strange, hard to accept. The image of him moving his coffee cup closer to me at the counter at the United was still at least as clear as the one with the letter-opener. As I looked around the room, I could see him disposing of the contents of my cardboard boxes and then flattening out the cartons and tying them with string. I thought I’d better give myself time, and began with a big bath in my new tub.

Climbing out and drying myself with one of the new towels I’d bought to mark my progress from King Street to Court Street, I began to feel better. I guess it comes to those who discover themselves to be, in spite of a narrow miss, still among the living. I’d just settled down to a book with a title that began
The Man Who …,
when the phone rang. I thought that I would be angry if it was Phil calling to pick up his messages.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Cooperman?” It wasn’t a voice I knew, and I was slightly alarmed that my new number had been traced so quickly. I began to regret the unkind thoughts I’d entertained for Phil’s pals.

“That’s right.” He didn’t speak up immediately. I added: “Who is this?”

“Sorry to bother you so late …” he continued, ignoring my question.

“Nobody else worries. Who are you and what’s on your mind?” Again, the silence between the question and the answer was alarming, not enough for me to grab my clothes and retreat back to King Street, but just enough to make my throat feet dry.

“Mr. Abraham would like to see you.”

“Mr.
Jonah
Abraham?”

“That’s right. He said he’d make it worth your while.” So, my friend from the other side of the curtains wanted to compare notes or get me to back up what he told the cops about his being in Pambos’s office before I got there. He must be a worried man, judging by the hour.

“Not a social call, then?” I gave him a few seconds to respond. He didn’t. “Tell him I’ll see him tomorrow. He can find out where my office is. I’m in the yellow pages.”

“He’d like to have a drink with you tonight,” the voice said, stepping up the insistence.

“It’s past my bedtime. I’ll see him tomorrow.” I didn’t want Jonah Abraham to think he could get me for a drink, like a stale pretzel. “Look,” I said, “I’m tired and ready to turn in. Your boss will understand that this hasn’t been an easy day for me.” The voice at the other end, even silent, had the sound of not listening.

“Mr. Cooperman,” he said at length, “if you look out your window, you’ll see that Mr. Abraham has sent a car to pick you up. He naturally doesn’t want to inconvenience you.”

“He shouldn’t have bothered. It’s after office hours.”

A hand or handkerchief went over the mouthpiece of the distant telephone. I thought I heard, but I might be inventing, the other voice say:

“He says he won’t come. How do you like that? A guy like that!” Still more distant, another voice came through. It sounded familiar:

“Give me the phone, Vince.” The hand came away from the phone and I could hear clearly again. “Hello, Mr. Cooperman?” It was the real thing. It was like being called on the phone by the best rye that money can buy. He went on: “I hear we are not going to have the pleasure of your company tonight. I was looking forward to our second meeting.”

“Look, Mr. Abraham, I’m tired and it’s late. Why not call it a day? As for the pleasure of my company, I’m sure you’ll get used to it. Think of all those days that preceded tonight. Or, if you want to confess to something, you can do it right now on the phone. It’ll save gas and the line hasn’t been mine long enough to have a bug on it.”

“I like to do important business face to face, Mr. Cooperman. It’s a rule of mine. Call it an eccentricity”