A Victim Must Be Found (6 page)

I parked the car in front of a sign marked “Reserved” in the parking lot closest to the office block. The watchman gave me a dirty look as I walked towards the main door. He didn’t challenge me because I was wearing a jacket and not a windbreaker. People who wear windbreakers have a hard time with parking-lot attendants.

The stairs to the second floor reminded me that I’d drunk my lunch at the golf club. I brushed my pants off with dirty palms and made an attempt at general repairs. My shin hurt where I’d barked it against the top step. When I had my breath under control, I walked through the big buff door into Alex Favell’s outer office.

On one wall a huge blow-up of a photograph made during the twenties or thirties showed off the past of the paper mill. It was grainy and fuzzy in its details. The lineup of bosses in front of the mill looked out confidently at me while their dark business suits kept a note of panic at bay. Out the big window to my right, I could see almost the same view. But where was the bustle, where were the pyramids of pulpwood, where was the industry the beaver over the front door symbolized? Things were slow in the paper business? I made a note of it.

The drink gave me confidence I wasn’t used to possessing. It felt like I was wearing a six-shooter or that I was six foot five instead of five foot seven. I was breathing courage when I went up to the woman behind the reception desk.

“Yes?” she said sweetly, like I was delivering rose petals. I went around her desk and tried to focus on the white letters on the door across the broadloom reading “ALEX FAVELL.” “You can’t go in there!” she said. “Who are you, anyway?”

“I’ve found a painting he’s been trying to get. He’ll see me,” I said. I hoped she’d heard that line before. She fell back in her chair like I’d blasted her out of my way with a shot in one of her fleshy shoulders. Once in the inner office, I closed the door behind me and flopped into a leather and chrome seat in front of a vast black desk that looked like it had escaped from a sci-fi movie. On the far side I saw a tall, balding man with a moustache that would go well with his tennis whites. His eyes were wide with surprise, but held off judgment until I announced my business. After I’d given him my spiel about looking up Tallon’s unrecovered inventory, he allowed an angry look to settle all over his face. What I got was a “My dear Mr. Cooperman, we are not at all pleased by this visit” look. He allowed displeasure to make him look like he had touched a copper cent to one of his fillings.

“Well?” I asked. “What can you tell me?”

“You can go to blazes, Cooperman! I’m not obliged to tell you a thing.” I tried to see from his face whether I had a guilty creature sitting across from me, one whose fingers I was slamming in the cash drawer. On the face of it, it seemed unlikely. The suit he was standing up in was equal to the stress of being stretched as he gripped the edges of his desk and glared at me. It probably cost more than I’d put on my back for the last five years. Maybe ten. “Tallon was an imbecile when it came to keeping books and records. If his affairs are in disorder, he has only himself to blame. I warned him often enough.”

“Have you got an aspirin?” I was suddenly becoming absorbed by my own problems. I should never drink on the job. I tried to remember where I’d got the drinks, and then I remembered the charming Mrs. MacCulloch. Favell must have seen something on my face; he interrupted his telling me off and stopped himself.

“What?”

“I need something for my head. Have you got any aspirin?”

“Oh, er, yes. I’ll get them.” He began to move in the direction of what I took to be an executive washroom, when, for some reason, I continued asking questions. When will I learn not to provoke my benefactors until after the benefits have begun to take effect?

“Then you’re not going to surrender any of the pictures belonging to the Tallon collection without a fight?”

“I’ve said all I intend to say. I’ve just got off the phone talking to somebody else you’ve been bothering. You can go straight to hell for all I care. Is that clear? I’m nobody’s fool, Cooperman.” He opened his mouth to continue the tirade and I was bracing myself for more of the same, when he stopped abruptly. He saw that I was not arguing with him. In fact, I was sitting in the chrome and black leather chair with my head in my hands. I couldn’t see Favell, but I felt him near me trying to think.

“Aspirin,” he said at last “Yes, I’ll be right back” I heard the door to his bathroom open. The pain in my head was getting worse. If I didn’t know that I didn’t suffer from migraines, I’d swear that this was a migraine. The light slipping between my fingers was blinding. Footsteps from a new direction came into the office.

“Mr. Miles is here to see you, Mr. Favell.” It was the secretary. I straightened up and screwed on a smile. “Oh,” she said. “What have you done with Mr. Favell?” she asked suspiciously.

“He’s in the toilet getting an aspirin.”

She rolled her eyes. “It’s those two-hour lunches,” she said. “Honestly!”

A man stood in the doorway. “Alex? Where are you?”

“I’m afraid he’s nursing a headache in the bathroom,” the secretary said, trying to make eye contact with the visitor. She moved off after pausing near the door to the bathroom. She decided not to knock and left me and Paddy Miles staring at one another.

Miles was a long thin drink of water with thick dark hair, a high forehead and smiling eyes. The suit he was wearing looked older than mine, but its provenance was better. What is there to making a suit that they know on Savile Row in London that they can’t learn on Spadina Avenue in Toronto?

“He’ll be out in a minute,” I said, offering him the remaining half of the room. “You’re Paddy Miles, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” he said drawing out the “s” until it broke. “And you?”

“Benny Cooperman.”

Miles’s face cracked into a thousand lines. He suddenly looked very friendly and about ten years older than he had a second before. “Oh, you’re the fellow doing some private investigating for Pambos Kiriakis. Somebody should give Pambos a big gold medal. Once we have that list of his we can start winding up this estate” Favell came out of the bathroom. He looked at me and then at Miles, who had assumed a knowing, sympathetic look on his lean face.

“What the devil are you looking at?” he said, rather loudly and without disguising his anger.

“I just wanted to show sympathy, Alex. Thought you might be interested in a hair of the dog.”

“Hair of the dog?” he asked, not understanding any of this. He shouted for his secretary through the closed door of his sanctum sanctorum “Miss Bertolli! Get me MacLeod in Detroit on my private line. Mr. Cooperman, I looked everywhere. I’m out of aspirin, I’m afraid. ‘Hair of the dog,’ Paddy, what are you raving about?”

“Sorry, Alex. I’m afraid I was confused by Mr. Cooperman, here.” The “here” sounded a little condescending. I felt a little like a specimen in a bottle. Favell glared at me. It was a crowded office, and I was being blamed.

“Look, Mr. Cooperman,” he said, “if you were sent to spy on me by that little creep, Kiriakis, you can tell him from me he’s finished as far as I’m concerned. That goddamned Turk’s not fit to wait on tables in a greasy spoon.” I reared up in protest, but it didn’t stop him.

“And what are you fit for, Mr. Favell?”

“Me? We’re talking about that snooping bastard, that
other
snooping bastard!”

“Hey, hold on, Alex! Mr. Cooperman’s only trying to help.” Miles tried, but it didn’t begin to dampen Favell’s anger, which I was very happy to see demonstrated in such an obvious way. Where did it come from, I wondered. Who had been ruffling Favell’s fine feathers before I came on the scene?

“Look, Mr. Favell,” I said, trying to see if I could bother him some more, “maybe Pambos Kiriakis isn’t the sort of fellow who rubs shoulders with you at the Mallet Club or gets his name in the social register, but he doesn’t steal pictures from a dead man, which puts him higher in my personal ‘Blue Book’ than a few others I could name.”

“Going to bat for the little Turk, are you? I guess you guys stick together.” I expected that the next salvo would have a fleeting reference to
Our Crowd
, but Paddy Miles cut him off.

“Alex, for God’s sake! He’s only doing his job!”

“Well, let him do it someplace else. There’s no law that says I have to talk to him. He’s not even sober. He just walked in here demanding aspirin!”

“Mr. Cooperman, if that’s true, perhaps you should abandon this meeting and try to reschedule one later on.” Miles was trying to help, but Favell was not in the mood for it.

“In a pig’s eye! Drunk or sober, I don’t have to say a word to any investigator, public or private, unless he serves me with papers.”

“Alex!”

“Just get rid of him. Show the little shit out the door and off the property!”

“Alex!” The secretary came in.

“I’ve got Mr. MacLeod’s secretary in Detroit, Mr. Favell.” Funny how her voice sounded like it was recorded on a balmy day without any ruckus going on in her boss’s office. She sounded as calm and as matter of fact as an usher saying “Side aisles, please.” I couldn’t make out Favell, unless he really had come back from a liquid lunch ten minutes ahead of me. I only came to ask a few questions, not foreclose on his mortgage.

“Right, Miss Bertolli. I’ll be right there.” He sounded confused. He meant to say that he would take the phone. He went around to the side of his desk, which put the world in order for him. From there, with the flow charts on the wall and the view down into the yard on the familiar side, he grew a little calmer. His eyes even began to sparkle as an idea came to him. When he spoke, I got a good look at the gold inlays on the right side of his mouth. What well-insured villain gave Favell a left hook, I wondered.

“You think your friend Mr. Kiriakis is blameless, don’t you? Well, you’ll find out that things are a little more complicated than that. His hands aren’t so spotless. You should do a little more digging, a little honest research, before you come in here with your accusations. Before you start shooting your mouth off about something you’re totally ignorant about.”

“Hold your horses,” I protested. “I never made any accusations. I’m looking for information. I didn’t come to start the Third World War. But I see the welcome I get, Mr. Favell. Maybe that tells me more than the red carpet treatment, As for being drunk, it’s just not true. I had a drink with Mary MacCulloch half an hour ago at the golf club. Now tell me why Kiriakis’s motives are so dishonest. He blew the whistle on you, didn’t he? That sounds honest from here.”

I liked the effect I’d made when I dropped Mary MacCulloch’s name into the conversation. Favell and Miles looked at one another like I’d been giving her the third degree with a rubber hose and she’d broken, naming Favell and Miles as her partners in crime. It only lasted a second, but there was no missing it. I was surprised that Favell shared the moment with Miles. I thought, up to then, that Paddy Miles was on the side of the angels. He was one of the people representing the injured party, wasn’t he? Arthur Tallon was the owner of the strayed or stolen paintings. At least his estate was. And Paddy Miles was as involved in trying to get the pictures back as I was. Wasn’t he? I thought I’d better ask a question.

“Mr. Miles, do you have any reason to distrust Pambos Kiriakis’s attempt to round up the missing pictures belonging to your late employer? Do you know who would have taken the list of names that he asked me to try to recover?” Paddy Miles wet his lips with a nervous tongue.

“Tell him, Paddy, tell him. Educate the man!”

“Well,” he began, trying to dissociate himself from Favell’s hectoring. “While we were very happy to hear about Mr. Kiriakis’s list, which he says was given to him by Arthur Tallon, it is possible that he never had such a list at all. Arthur was erratic, God knows. I tried to keep books, but it was next to impossible. He may have made such a list, but again, he may not. It wasn’t like him to keep records of any kind. I found no other lists of items on loan among his papers. And, to tell the truth, I wasn’t surprised.”

“So, if Tallon’s list didn’t exist, why did Pambos get me involved? Why did he manufacture a cock-and-bull story about a list that didn’t ever get written? You knew Tallon. Can you guess at Kiriakis’s motives?”

“Bloody Turk’s as crooked as a bentwood chair!”

“Quiet, Alex. You’re not making this any easier!”

“Detroit’s waiting, Mr. Favell.”

“To hell with Detroit! Tell him I’ll call in ten minutes!”

Miles thought a moment or two before trying to answer. He looked at me in a way that tried to break through the flak that Favell was sending up at us. He looked grave but careful, measuring his words in a metric scale. “We only know about this list from Pambos Kiriakis, Mr. Cooperman. He is the only one who has seen it. If it was a fabrication, one obvious way to support it and give it life is to get an investigator involved. Since he’s paying you to find it, it must be missing. It must exist. You’re a sort of alibi. You stiffen his story. You give it starch.” He paused a moment, then added, “But we must always remember that he could be telling the truth. If he is, then what he has done in getting you involved would appear to be completely straightforward and logical.”

“Bullshit! You can’t tell me you believe that, Paddy! That creep is out to feather his nest, or out to become the spoil-sport of the year.”

“There’s something in what he says, Mr. Cooperman. He may be hoping that we will give him the pick of any paintings he recovers. I’m sure that George would want to reward him if he uncovers items belonging to the estate. And I would agree to it as both fair and just. But that’s not quite the same thing as saying that Kiriakis is without a profit motive in all this.”

“That’s the wee Turk all over!”

“And as I said, Mr. Cooperman,” Miles said, ignoring Favell, “we only have Kiriakis’s word for it that his marvellous list ever existed at all.”

“Well, Cooperman, well?” Favell was grinning at me with the golden side of his mouth catching the light. “You’re looking a little greener now than when you walked in here. I don’t think it’s the drink. You better sit down.” I sat and looked at both of them. I tried to see whether I had a feeling that I was being used. I didn’t like it. It could have come from Favell’s smug look on that business-as-usual face of his, or from the sour pinch in my stomach. Paddy Miles stood by, letting me see that he was a sympathetic soul and that he was sorry that the facts were so unsettling. My head was beginning to spin again. I needed that aspirin.