Authors: Howard Engel
Then the spell was broken. Gauche came back into the room, looking older. Gone was the truculence, the cold sneer, the bearing of spoiled rectitude. He walked slowly and for once seemed completely unaware of his audience. His eyes were on the floor. It was painful to look at him.
Behind him, walking between two uniformed female police officers, came the young woman who had introduced herself to me as Sheila Kerzon, Rose Moss’s roommate. The wind had gone out of her sails, too. She didn’t look at any of us. Her face was marked with defeat. The cops led her to a chair and she sat down automatically, still not focusing on any of us.
After what seemed about a year and a half, George Nesbitt moved away from the people with whom he had been standing.
“Heather?
Heather,
what are you
doing
here?” he said.
The girl looked up for a moment and dropped her head again. She said nothing. Nesbitt looked at her in silence for a moment, then looked at me with eyes demanding me to make sense of this situation.
“What are you trying to pull off here, Cooperman? What are you trying to do to me?”
I tried to think of something to say, but I wasn’t thinking fast enough to satisfy Nesbitt. He was halfway across the room with his fists tightly knotted before Boyd stepped in front of him and eased him into a chair in a neutral corner beside Sykes. The fire seemed to go out of him as he was handled by these professionals. In a moment, he was as quiet as a brick wall.
On his way back to where he had been standing, Boyd slipped a piece of paper into my hand. On one side was a cluster of words I couldn’t read, ending at a tear through a line of type. The tear told me that the text on this side wasn’t what I should be trying to decipher. (Later on, I slowly worked out that the note was an invitation to hear Henry Oughtread, a former patient, speak about his rehabilitation. It was dated three months back.) The real surprises were on the other side in Boyd’s messy handwriting. I slowly worked it out and was glad I did.
Once again, the people were looking at me as though I could answer all of their questions at once. Somebody
slipped a cool drink into my hand and I started rummaging for the right words. “I’m sorry for that somewhat sensational demonstration. I think we have no more dramatic effects up our collective sleeves. Just to explain about Dr. Samson’s sudden return, I would suggest that he has more than a routine interest in the young woman who has just joined us. She is Heather Nesbitt, the daughter of George W. Nesbitt, the gentleman over there.” I indicated where the girl’s father was sitting. He still looked confused and angry, but just managed to remain quiet.
“According to this note,” I said, waving it for all to see, “Heather was arrested at Pearson Airport, where she had bought a one-way ticket to New York.”
“Damn you! You’re making that up!” Nesbitt was on his feet again and in full fury now: red in the face and loud. “Goddamn it, this is my life you’re playing with, Cooperman. It’s not a clever parlour game.” One of the cops, very gently, forced him back into his seat. The force was professional, but not brusque or unfeeling.
“In this note, passed to me a minute ago by Staff-Sergeant Boyd, are all the details. If you want to argue this, he’s the man with the facts, Mr. Nesbitt.”
Instead of moving on to Boyd and arguing things with him, Nesbitt became deflated and sank deeper into his chair.
Judging from the eyes staring at me, a few questions were hanging about in the air. I made a stab at answering them:
“Earlier this week, I think it was this week—you’ll have to forgive me on matters of time—Heather came to see me here at the hospital. She came twice, in fact. I missed her the first time; I hadn’t yet caught up with my memory. That time she claimed to be my wife. The second time she borrowed the name of a friend, one of her roommates. ‘Three little maids from school,’ and all so different.
“In early April, I was hired by Rose Moss, the daughter of an old schoolfriend and former client, to find out what had become of one of her professors, Steven Mapesbury. I then drove here from my home in Grantham. I met Rosie on the campus or near it. Shortly after that, I was clobbered and ended up here. Flora McAlpine was less fortunate. How do I know that Heather played a part in what happened to Flora and me? The truth is that I don’t. Not completely. Toronto police have found, among the belongings she was taking with her to New York, a wig that matches the account given by a dishwasher at Barberian’s Steak House as part of his description of the woman who dumped my car behind the restaurant. Her height and colouring match. The wig makes the identification more certain, but not absolute.”
Dr. Samson tried to cross his legs, but the girth of his thighs would not cooperate. At last, after several tries, he gave it up. His gaze seemed to be drawn to the impassive face of Heather Nesbitt. She looked straight ahead, as if
she were alone in an empty room. The two policewomen flanking her kept alert, but didn’t seem to be trying to keep up with what was going on in the room. There were still fragments of the refreshments on two or three trays. I snagged a dumpling filled with flavoured rice and wrapped in a vine leaf. It was good enough to snag a second and gobble that, too. When my mouth was empty again, I started talking again.
“Dr. Samson has, almost from the beginning, struck me as the perfect suspect in the disappearance of Steve Mapesbury and his student. He is well placed in the scientific community. He knows the missing man. He has a good reputation here at the university, which he would not like to see damaged by the kind of exposure that he may have thought Steve was threatening. There had been arguments: Steve lost a front tooth. An implant. His wife told me that, and that he lied about how it had happened. Samson took Steve from the campus on Good Friday, when the campus was all but deserted. That was the last day Steve’s wife saw him.
“A week or so later, Samson reacted strongly when Rose Moss was on the campus with me asking questions. He had to get rid of both of us. Somehow, Rose escaped, probably not even realizing her danger. Rose’s mother got her out of the way. Although she didn’t admit it, she knew all about my role in this when I talked to her. In our second conversation, she did admit it. How Flora McAlpine got mixed up in this, I don’t know. There is some
evidence that I had questioned her, or was about to, when we both were targeted. Had she played some part in the drug racket? I don’t know. I doubt it.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Cooperman.” It was one of the professors. “I know that this is going to be a long and complicated narration, but please make a bigger attempt to keep to the subject. You were talking about Dr. Samson and why you think he might be implicated. True, he is tall and would have had to move the driver’s seat back in order to drive your car. What else do you have?”
“My main piece of evidence is so subjective I hate to mention it. It’s the sort of thing that would never be admitted as evidence in a court of law. I told you—that is, I
think
I told you—that when I was first here at Rose of Sharon, I was plagued with a nightmare. It was about a train wreck.”
“Are we sinking to divination now? Is this a seance? What sort of voodoo is this?” Nesbitt was showing signs of revival.
“Sorry. Blame it on my poor head.” I tried to find the nub of the tale I was telling, experiencing a moment of total confusion. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t think. What the hell was I doing here pretending to be in my right mind? I tried to look at Anna. Anna was always a source of calm. She restored my centre of gravity.
“The dream … in my dream … a suitcase flew at me …” I tried to start again. “I … I … I believe that psychiatrists are right when they say that dreams are ways in
which the subconscious tries to inform the conscious mind of what it knows.”
“This is beginning to sound like a movie from the nineteen fifties, Mr. Cooperman:
Three Faces of Eve, The Seventh Veil, Spellbound.”
“Yes. Do you mean us to take this seriously?”
“Frankly, I don’t care what you do with it. All I know is that I’m compelled to tell somebody. It won’t take much longer.”
“But what was the special meaning of a flying suitcase?”
“Good question, Anna. In this case, the airborne piece of carry-on luggage, which I saw in great detail as it flew through the air with other debris, was one made by the famous American luggage maker, the Samsonite Company. The dream was trying to put the name “Samson” into my head in an important, overriding way.”
“So, you have a dream and the possibility of finding a tall, left-handed man, presumably with a driver’s licence. Not very much to take with you into a court of law, Mr. Cooperman.”
“I know it doesn’t seem like much, but there’s more. We have all seen how he walked out of here: defiant and unpenitent. In less than a minute, he returned, because this young woman, to whom charges may also apply, was being brought into this room.”
The people looked away from me to examine the faces of the two suspects. In a way, even as one of his victims, I felt sorry for Samson. Not because I sympathized with
what he had done or that I thought there were any extenating circumstances that made him a man to be pitied. My sympathy came from the fact that Samson would never see that he had crossed the line, that society was right and he was wrong. He’d go to prison feeling the victim of a short-sighted, backward society, a martyr to these unenlightened times. He was venal, predatory, and scheming, but he was also pushed beyond his limits and in thrall to an overwhelming passion. He was protecting his reputation in the firmament of the academy.
From where I was sitting, Samson looked smaller, as though he’d suddenly lost sixty pounds. His eyes were downcast, directed at the floor. He seemed without hope or even hope of hope.
Then it was all over. Quite suddenly, I was awakened from the unreal dream of playing detective, playing at living in the world outside these walls. At this point, Rhymes With came into the room.
“Sorry,” she said. “We need the space for half an hour.” There were three doctors and five nurses at her back.
Sykes and Boyd ushered their suspects from the room. They moved like they’d been shackled with heavy chains all the way to the elevator. Holding a handkerchief to his forehead, a perspiring Nesbitt followed close behind. After that, the few remaining sandwiches held little interest for those of us left in the room. Anna and two of the nurses helped me to tidy the room.
That night, nursing a bellyache, I had a long conversation on the phone with Sykes. By the time I’d finished, there was nothing keeping me from my rest that a couple of antacid pills couldn’t cure.
TWENTY-SEVEN
I was still stuck in the hospital, but Rhymes With let slip that they’d be releasing me soon. How soon? She couldn’t exactly say, except that it would be within days, not weeks.
Anna called and suggested we meet for dinner at a restaurant behind the hospital. Sykes and Boyd invited themselves along.
The restaurant was only a short walk from where the last of the fifth floor gourmets were talking
boeuf en daube
and cassoulet to a timorous newcomer.
The restaurant specialized in, as I soon discovered, the hotter sort of Chinese cooking. My guess was that it was developed to ensure that only the hardiest of its regular customers survived.
Anna looked on as a blush coloured my cheeks. She managed not to decorate her pretty face with the food, while delicately using chopsticks to put away her share of spicy beef with orange peels. (I had had to request more conventional cutlery.) The two cops introduced a true meeting of east and west: they skewered their meat with a single chopstick. They dabbed at their faces after most of
the damage had been done. They were wearing plain clothes as usual.
Some of the dishes were so spicy they made ordinary cold water taste scalding hot. We were all hungry and in no mood to talk until the bulk of the meal had been reduced to rubble in the middle of the table. Sykes ordered more orange beef, saying we should have ordered two portions to begin with. Boyd picked at a tooth with the corner of a rolled traffic ticket, and I dabbed at my face with a napkin. Except for a ladylike belch, Anna emerged unscathed.
“Benny’s eating up a storm, Anna. Don’t they feed him in that place?”
I jumped in to defend the hospital: “Hospital food is designed for the rapid circulation of patients. Nobody can stick it long. Right now, I’m enjoying the break. Now, Jack, show some genuine pity on a poor shut-in and tell us the latest news. What’s happened to the suspects, Samson and his girlfriend?”
“It’ll keep. Enjoy your meal.”
“I’ve enjoyed it! It’s now starting the digestive process. You want to wait that out too?”
“Okay. Okay. What do you want to know?”
“The lot.” Anna said. I liked the way she used these British expressions. I wonder when she collected them.
“Everything!” I added at the same time.
“Well,” Sykes said, looking at his partner’s face for an enabling look, confirmation of Boyd’s agreement that he was about to spill more than the police normally tell citizens
outside a courtroom. His partner’s eyes widened, but he was smiling.
“Sure, we might as well. Benny got this case moving again. He deserves to be in at the kill.”
Anna caught her breath and my hand under the table.
“Luckily,” Boyd added quickly, “it didn’t go far enough for a real kill.”
“Yeah, everybody came quietly, just as we suggested.”
“Hold on!” I said. “What have you been up to? I thought you had them in custody when they left the hospital the other day.”
“We couldn’t hold them long on what we learned at the hospital. And Samson got the fastest lawyer in town on the case,” Sykes said.
“So, they walked?”
“Will you let me finish? Anyway, you should know. It was your suggestion. Do you remember calling me the night of your big hospital soiree?”
“Of course I do!” I lied.
“We put a team to watch Professor Samson. It was expensive: six men, in three shifts. He ended up driving out of the city to a place called Holstein. Ever heard of it?”