There was an Old Woman (25 page)

It was deserted of all but the most stalwart of the Christmas shoppers. The rough, red faces of those with market stalls had long ago driven their trucks back into the hinterland, leaving the back tables empty for the likes of Antonia Wishart and me.

I couldn't get a good look at her for some time, because she was rubbing her eyes with a man-sized handkerchief. I got glimpses of red eyes and matching nose and cheeks. I helped her pull off the coat she had hanging on her shoulders. The waitress brought two coffees without being asked. They already had milk or cream in them. I couldn't wait to taste whether the sugar had gone in as well. I tried mine. The sugar was in place. All I had to do was to stir it until the desired degree of sweetness was achieved. I took my time and kept my mouth otherwise shut. By the time I'd finished my coffee and was waiting for a refill, Mrs. Wishart was blowing her nose and trying to pull herself together. After she had replaced the handkerchief in her expensive leather handbag, she looked at me for the first time. “Thanks,” she said. “I keep forgetting I'm not made of granite.”

“Drink some coffee,” I said and she picked up her cup, almost at once. Neither of us spoke while the waitress refilled my cup. When she'd returned to the dark front of the shop, Mrs. Wishart let me see a whisper of a smile.

“Why do you care so much?” I asked, then wished I hadn't said it.

“The usual reason, I guess,” she said, struggling with a cigarette and taking a deep drag when it was finally alight. “I don't suppose you'd understand.”

“I think I know a little. But why is he taking this defeat harder than all the others?”

“He thinks this place is the last law office in town he hasn't somehow let down. Now he's as good as blacklisted all over town.”

“There are a few places up Niagara Street he hasn't tried. And there's always my cousin Melvyn. No, I think it's more than that. It's because he thinks Julian Newby has taken a personal hand in this. Do you think it's true?”

“Julian likes to pull strings,” she said. For a woman who a few minutes earlier had been a moist handkerchief and a spasm of sobs, she had pulled herself together remarkably. The cords in her neck sometimes tightened as she fought to regain her composure. “I used to think he wanted to be the richest man in town, but I was wrong. It's power he's in love with, not money He's happy making Steve Morella rich. He knows that he was the one who made it happen.”

“Why does he dislike Rupe?”

“You really want to know?”

“Yes, I really want to know.”

“I could tell you that he thinks Rupe is giving law a bad name in this town. And he'd be right; Rupe's had a hard life. But the reason Julian hates him is because of me.” She paused before answering my unspoken question. “I was with Julian before I went with Rupe.”

“I see. Julian Newby is quite the man. I just heard about him and Dora Ramsden.”

“Dora? Oh, he knew Dora first long before she married. If Thurleigh knew about it, he was smart enough to keep his mouth shut.”

“But you'll admit, he does get around.”

“Dora and I were good friends. We were, I mean, before Julian saw me coming home very late one night from the Byline Ball. I was with Orv, of course, and Julian told me I was like magic.” I could believe Newby's assessment of Antonia Wishart. Of course, now she looked terrible, with her face blotchy from crying and her hair in a mess, but she had all the right makings. The good bones were there in her face; her figure was more than ample but she carried herself well. I could almost see glimpses of the magic Newby had noticed.

I didn't realize I'd been staring at Antonia until she began speaking again. I couldn't see whether I blushed or not. Maybe she liked it. Maybe there isn't enough magic in the world sometimes.

“Mr. Cooperman, there's something that 1 should give you.” I probably looked blank, because she said the same thing again in different words. While she was doing this, she rooted around in her bag and brought out a rather soiled and much-folded piece of paper, which she handed across to me. I opened it and read. It was a handwritten list of numbered companies, small companies and corporations. The list nearly filled the page.

“Where did you get this?” I asked.

“Rupe would never give it to you. It's his pride. He wants everybody to think that his handling of Sue Ellen Morella's divorce was all his own doing. But this is what made the settlement possible. It's all of Steve's shadowy holdings, the ones he didn't want her to know about.”

“You took it from Rupe's files?”

“And he's never to know that.”

“You want me to use it to get back at Newby? You want me to use it to smear him? You know I can't do that. Not even to please a lady.” I tried to hand the paper back to her, but she held up her palm.

“Keep it anyway. I don't want it any more.” I took it and stuffed it into my inside breast pocket.

“Can you tell me why Rupe is trying to kill himself with drink?”

“It's the wounds he got in Korea. His legs still give him a lot of pain. He drinks rather than take drugs. He came back from Korea with a morphine addiction. He replaced the one addiction with another.”

“He could get help for all of that, you know.”

“Sure, I know. Damn it, even he knows. But he won't do anything about it.

“You could help.”

“I've been helping. I've tried. But I can't do any more as long as my mother's alive. I can't complicate that part of my life right now. It's bad enough as it is.”

“And when your mother passes on?”

“‘Dies,' that's the word. When she dies, I'll be able to write my own script, not follow someone else's scenario.”

“Will Orv be able to swallow that?” I asked.

“Orv's married to a television station. And he's welcome to it. He's never been unfaithful to the station and never will be. I can't make myself jealous, Mr. Cooperman. CXAN won hands down. I'm not contesting the decision.”

“You're feeling a little better, I think?”

“Do you have to go somewhere?”

“No.”

“Then just sit here with me for another minute. Okay?”

I sat with her without saying anything for another ten minutes. We sipped our coffee and when we had both finished we got up and left the coffee shop. For a minute, I thought it was snowing again.

I walked Antonia Wishart to her Volvo, parked behind City Hall. She held my hand briefly before shutting the door and I watched her back out of the space and drive out into traffic on Church Street. I'd been right about one thing: it was snowing.

Coming back to the office I tried to remember a thought that was only semi-visible in my memory. It had something to do with the list of Morella's assets. I'd seen that writing somewhere before.

TWENTY-SEVEN

First thing Tuesday morning I wrestled with the blue pages at the back of my telephone book. I tried a number of government numbers and got lost in making electronic choices with my Touch Tone buttons, choices I had no interest in and choices that kept me away from what I really wanted, which was to speak to a human being. I finally got one at the end of an 800 number in Thunder Bay, Ontario. I explained my problem and was shunted about the freight yard until I came to the roundhouse known as Mr. Stevenson. God bless Mr. Stevenson. May his life be long, may his children honour him until he is overwhelmed by years and riches. I gave him some names and dates and, in return, he gave me information— some of which I had already guessed—that I wrote down for future reference.

Next, I phoned Joe Castaldi, an old friend who worked in the Hamilton Police Department's records department. I gave him the date of Dora Ramsden's fatal accident on the Burlington Skyway and he gave me—finally, after some minutes spent in the limbo called “hold”—the details of the accident report and the name of the garage that towed the car off the bridge.

I phoned the garage and confirmed that Stavro Kouloukis, the owner, would be in all day. I looked at my watch after I hung up. I didn't want to take a long drive out of town, but what could I do? It would be too easy for him to put me off over the telephone. I had to talk to Kouloukis face to face.

The drive along the Queen Elizabeth Way to Burlington runs through flat beach country, studded with vineyards and orchards, where they haven't been displaced by industry. To my right, I caught glimpses of the lake, looking dark and treacherous. To my left, the snow-covered fields ran up to the foot of the escarpment that followed me all the way from Grantham. In general the roads were clear, but they were dirty and wet. I had to keep washing the windshield every time a truck went by in the other direction. It took about ten minutes longer than I'd figured; the directions I'd been given were sound, but I took a wrong turn and got confused somewhere under the Skyway bridge. At least the old canal bridge was down when I crossed and the garage, when I came to it, was well marked.

Stavro Kouloukis was a small man in grease-stained coveralls, who grinned at me like a matinée idol with teeth that were so real and well looked after they looked like cheap fakes.

“Sure, I remember that wreck! She was some mess! Red '89 Toyota. Sure, what do you want to know for?”

I explained who I was and what I was doing. He looked me up and down, searching for confirmation in
my clothes, and finally took me into a small, dirty office with walls covered with pictures of soccer teams at rest and in motion. He flipped through a record book that looked cleaner than I expected and rested a dirty finger on the note he was looking for.

“Yeah! Here it is,” he said, as though all I wanted was to confirm that it existed.

“May I have a peek?” I asked, and he moved out of the way slowly, like that hadn't been negotiated in advance.

The note recorded the damage done to the car, mostly to the front end from going through the bridge railing and coming up against the stiffer resistance of one of the girders that supported the central structure. Grill and lights had been smashed, the fender on the driver's side had been crunched, and the frame bent. Inside, the steering wheel had snapped, which gave me some idea of the speed she'd been travelling at.

“Thing about this is,” Stavro said, as though he was elaborating on something he'd already said, “is that the brake cable broke.”

“‘Broke'? Broke how?” I asked.

“Usual way, I guess. I don't know. Cables can only take so much and then they should be replaced. People never look after their cars. Don't know why there aren't more people killed than there are.”

“So, you don't know for sure how it broke?”

“I don't remember looking all that close, to be honest. We had a three-car pile-up come in right after the Toyota. But, if you got half an hour, I could take a look.”

“You've got the car here?”

“Sure. At the back. I use the parts when I need them.”

I went to a cold, drafty café near the canal that looked as though it had seen its last dollar the day the Skyway opened, and ordered coffee, which turned out to be the best I'd tasted away from home in a long time. The woman who ran it was scanning the Hamilton paper, and making comments to herself about the operation of the Hamilton Harbour Commission. She said a few things to me that suggested we were both fully aware of some scandal that I'd never heard of. Harbours are always a problem. They breed trouble wherever they are.

When I got back to Stavro's Cross-Town Motors, he was holding two pieces of cable in his hands and grinning. “You gotta see this!” he said. I followed him into the office, away from the whine of the pneumatic wrench pulling off the nuts from the wheels of the Volvo on the hoist. On his desk he laid down the two pieces of twisted wire.

“You see these ends?” I nodded. “That's where I just clipped them free from the rest of the cable, just to show you.” I nodded again.

“Now the other ends are the parts that separated.” He held them up for me to get a better look. I saw the ends of two thick wires, nothing extraordinary. I shrugged. Stavro reached to the shelf above the desk and found a murky magnifying glass, which he passed over the two ends held close together.

“You see the jagged bits, where the separate wire threads are pulled and stretched? That's where the cable broke. But look on the other side. Here the threads are smooth and don't show no signs of stress. See, they don't even fit together snug. Yeah! This cable was filed more than halfway through before the lady put her foot on the brake.” I thought of Dora, whose face I had never seen, with her foot on the brake on that downhill run off the bridge.

“Let me see!” I took the glass from him and turned the two cable ends around in my hands. I had to agree with him; less than half of each end showed the stress of being pulled snapping; the rest looked filed.

I got Stravo to put a note on the two pieces and to identify where they'd been taken from. To this he added what he thought they showed. He signed the note and put the whole works into a large brown envelope he rescued from his waste-paper basket.

My trip back to Grantham was slower than my drive out. I took a side trip to the Stoney Creek Dairy for an ice cream, where Pa used to take Sam and me when we were kids, but in the end I didn't get out of the car. The fact that Dora Ramsden had been murdered was too fresh for me to enjoy a sundae or milkshake. I drove home along the twisty Old Number Eight Highway, which I hadn't driven in years. The road was narrow and slow, but dry, even under the overhang of the escarpment. I stopped at an antique store in Grimsby, where I bought a few presents for people on my Christmas and Chanukkah list and accepted an offer of tea with the owner, who was well chaptered and versed in local history. It was a slow ride home because of the lower speed limit. I wasn't sorry. It helped give me time to take in the news Burlington had given me. I didn't like a lot of it, but it was making some things clearer.