Читать книгу A Charlie Salter Omnibus - Eric Wright - Страница 10

‘What would make two guys not speak to each other for ten years?’ Salter asked. They were sitting at the back of their house on a concrete slab, looking at the grass. Their neighbours would have called it having coffee on the patio in the garden, but from motives of inverted snobbery, though different in each case, Salter and Annie referred to the area as ‘the yard’. Salter had been raised in Cabbagetown, and ‘the yard’ was the proper term for the place where Canadians cooled off in the summer; ‘garden’ was an affected, English term. In Annie’s case, the half-acre of lawn surrounding her family home on Prince Edward Island was still called ‘the yard’, and she found the term ‘garden’ Upper Canadian, and effete.

‘Don’t their friends know?’ she asked.

‘No. Bloody mystery. Probably nothing to it, but the guy who didn’t speak to Salter is my chief suspect at the moment.’

‘Why?’

‘No reason. I just don’t like the bugger.’

‘Maybe there was a woman?’

‘Nobody has said anything about it if there was.’

‘Politics, then. What about you and Albert Prine?’

‘What about it? I caught him listening to my phone calls.’ Salter was immediately irritated. What did this have to do with anything?’

‘But you couldn’t prove it.’

‘No, but the bugger knows I caught him. If I had accused him they would have called me paranoid.’

‘He was listening, though. And you’ve never told anyone.’

‘If I did, he’d soon hear about it and I would have to prove it, or get clobbered.’

‘So you haven’t talked to him for a year. You don’t even mention his name around here any more.’

‘No, because sometimes I think you think I imagined it.’

‘Oh, I believe you, Charlie. You see what I mean, though.’

‘All right.’ Salter swallowed his irritation. ‘So you’re saying these two sort of had something on each other. I don’t think it could be politics, though.’

‘Money?’

‘I don’t see how.’

‘Sex, then?’

‘One of Summers’s pals suggested they probably met one night in a body-rub parlour. From what I saw of Dunkley, something like that would bother him, all right. But Summers, I gather, would have been one to make a joke of it, once he got over his embarrassment. He wasn’t shy about suggesting they all go to a girlie show in Montreal, but Dunkley was.’

‘You mean all these middle-aged professors get away from their wives and they act . . .’

‘Just like everyone else. Especially at that age.’

She accepted the tease. ‘Charlie, would you go to a show like that, if you were on holiday away from me?’

‘No, dear. Only on business.’

But she was concerned now. ‘From what you’ve told me, half these people are having affairs their wives don’t know about.’

‘Just one, dear: Pollock. And I don’t know if he’s married.’

‘Of course he is.’

Now they were off on a familiar misery, entitled, ‘Why Do Married Men Play Around?’ with the inevitable sub-theme, ‘Do You?’ Fortunately Salter was saved by the arrival of Angus around the corner of the house carrying a cricket bat. One of the traditions of Annie’s family was that the men went to Upper Canada College, and she had used her trust fund, set up by her grandmother, to keep the tradition going for Seth and Angus. It would have been piggish to object, but their fancy ways made him uncomfortable, and he kept a firm, ironic distance from the goings-on of the quality his sons mixed with, and occasionally brought home.

‘Did you win?’ he asked now. ‘How many bounders did you hit?’

‘Boundaries, Dad. None. I was stumped first ball.’

‘That sounds bad, son.’

‘It is. It means I was out before I even hit one.’

Salter tutted. ‘Did you pitch today?’ he asked wide-eyed.

‘Bowl,’ Angus said. ‘Bowl, bowl, bowl, bowl. NO$$$.’

‘That’s enough,’ said Annie. I’ll get you some supper,’ another word she preserved in the face of Upper Canada’s ‘dinner’.

‘Angus won’t want any supper,’ Salter said. ‘He’ll have had tea. In the pavilion. Won’t you, son?’

The other two ignored him, and his wife moved into the house while his son took her chair, indicating a desire for a chat with his father. This was rare enough for Salter to stop his fooling and take an interest. Angus came to the point immediately.

‘Dad, the Civics teacher wants parents to come and give us a talk on what they do. I said I’d ask you.’

Salter was thrown into confusion. While the subject of his career did not crop up much around the house, he had the impression that the boys, once over their ‘cops and robbers’ phase, were slightly ashamed of him, especially among their moneyed friends. Now here was Angus suggesting he display himself in public. His first instinct was an immediate and derisive refusal, but he was slightly touched, so he played for time.

‘Who have you had so far, son?’ he asked.

‘Pillsbury’s father, who’s a stockbroker, a chartered accountant, two lawyers, and a big deal surgeon who transplants hearts or something.’

Salter returned to his first instinct. ‘No, thanks, son. Too glamorous for me. I’ll tell you what. I’ll get my sergeant to come over. He used to go round the schools in Safety Week, teaching them to “Stop, Look, and Listen”. The kids loved it.’

Angus got up. ‘I know. I heard him. I’ll tell Mr Secord “no”, then.’

‘That’s right. Tell him all my work is highly confidential.’

Annie returned from getting Angus his supper. 7 suggested that,’ she said. ‘He asked me and I said I thought you might. Why don’t you?’

‘Because I’d feel a horse’s arse, that’s why,’ Salter said noisily, and picked up his notebook to cut off the discussion. ‘Now tell me, where have I heard of Pollock?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps, like everyone else, you’ve heard of him as a famous artist.’ Annie was hostile, po-faced.

Never mind. She’d get over it. ‘Right, thanks. What does uxorious mean? U, X . . .’

‘I know the word. It means dotingly fond of one’s wife. Why?’

‘Guy called himself that today. Now tell me this . . .’

But Annie had left.

Late that night, in bed, she asked him, ‘Charlie, have you had any other women lately?’

He grabbed her in a mock-brutal gesture. ‘I haven’t had any women lately.’

She took his hand away. ‘I’m not surprised if that’s how you go about it.’ She sat up and took off her nightdress. ‘Try a little tenderness,’ she said.

Afterwards she asked, ‘Well, have you?’

‘What?’ he asked. ‘What? Oh, for Christ’s sake, go to sleep.’

On Wednesday morning Salter phoned Montreal. He found O’Brien in the office. ‘Hello, Onree. Charlie Salter here. I’ve done the rounds and it looks to me as if the guy we’re looking for is in Montreal. Apparently Summers was celebrating something and throwing his money about. He was drunk, too, even before he got into the whisky. I think someone followed him back to the hotel and clobbered him for his money. Then they panicked.’

‘You have interviewed all the people he was with?’

‘Yes. An unlikely lot. One possibility, but my guess is still a whore and a pimp.’

‘Did he spend the night, what do you call it, pub-crawling?’

‘More or less. But they only went to three places. Here they are: Maison Victor Hugo, The Iron Horse, and Les Jardins du Paradis. How’s my accent?’

‘Bad, Charlie, but I know these places. OK. I’ll put a couple of men on it. You think any of them is the most likely?’

‘Les Jardins du Paradis. They were in there between nine and ten, and my guess is that the killer was, too.’

‘OK. You have seen everybody?’

‘No, no. The funeral is this afternoon. I’ll go to that. And I want to go down to this squash club where he spent so much time. Then there’s the wife, who I’ll see tomorrow. Oh yes, I found out who Jane is—you remember the note in his box? She’s an old pal of his, apparently, so I don’t expect to find anything there.’

‘What about those phone numbers on the little sheet of paper in his wallet?’

‘Not yet. I’ll do that today. But I still think you will be looking for the villain in Montreal.’

‘OK, Charlie.. This is taking up a lot of your time.’

‘Time’s what I’ve got a lot of, Onree. Talk to you later.’ Salter hung up and turned to Sergeant Gatenby.

‘Frank, would you let “Chiefie” know that this Montreal case is continuing, and I am assuming he wants me to stay with it. And here—’ He picked up the IN tray on his desk, piled high with little errands. ‘Send these back where they came from and tell them I’m all tied up. And don’t take any more.’

‘At all? They’ve got quite used to us doing their extra jobs.’

‘Well, they’ll have to get unused to it. They can figure out how to dispose of the surplus horse-shit from Central Stables all by themselves. I’m busy.’

‘Being busy is being happy,’ Gatenby said. He was fond of this kind of ‘old country’ patter. This time he was right.

The funeral was conducted from a parlour on Yonge Street, between an English Fishe and Chippe Shoppe and a tavern. When Salter arrived there were a dozen people sitting silently facing the closed coffin. He identified the widow and daughter, pale without weeping, dressed quietly but not in black. Pollock was there with Marika Tils; all the people Salter had interviewed plus several others, presumably from the English Department, sat in a group. One other man sat alone, several rows behind this group, and a girl of about twenty sat in the back row. The funeral was private, so only the most determined had come. The service was Anglican, without a eulogy, and was soon done. When the small crowd straggled out, Salter caught the stranger on the sidewalk and introduced himself. ‘You were a friend of Professor Summers, sir?’ he asked. The man was making no effort to speak to the widow, unlike the others.

‘Not really. I used to play squash with him, that’s all. Have to find another partner, now.’ A summer-weight business suit and a dark tie; hair slightly shorter than the fashion; a completely typical and nearly faceless Bay Street type, although the shirt was cheap and the shoes too old. Now he acted as if he just wanted to get away, as if the funeral had been a duty of the worst kind.

Salter asked him, ‘Who am I talking to, sir?’

The other man stopped walking away from him backwards, and contented himself with continually looking around him as if waiting for a car to pick him up. ‘Bailey,’ he said. ‘Arthur Bailey. I’m called Bill, because of the song.’

‘And you were his squash partner?’

‘That’s right. He played some other people, though. Me, mostly, I guess.’

Bailey was in an agony to be gone, and out of the corner of his eye, Salter noticed the young girl in the back row, saying goodbye to Pollock and Marika Tils. He said, ‘This is a difficult time, Mr Bailey. Perhaps I could come and find you tomorrow.’

‘I don’t know anything about him, Inspector. I don’t even know what his wife looks like. I just played squash with him.’

‘In a situation like this, it helps to know as much as possible about the victim. Perhaps you can tell me why he was suddenly addicted to squash, Mr Bailey. Where can I find you?’

The man looked wretched. ‘At the squash club, at four, before my game?’ he suggested. ‘I may be late. I have to go to our plant at Oakville tomorrow.’

The girl seemed to be saying goodbye. ‘Perfect,’ Salter said. ‘I wanted to get a look at the club. Where shall I wait for you?’

‘In the lounge.’ Bailey was now moving backwards again.

‘Thank you, sir. I’ll be there.’ Salter turned and swooped down on the girl just as she was starting away. ‘Excuse me, miss, could I have a word?’

Professor Pollock crossed the sidewalk and introduced them. ‘Molly Tripp, one of Summers’s students, Inspector Salter.’

Thank you very much, Salter thought. Now bugger off.

Pollock did a bit of pipe-puffing before he realized that Salter was waiting for him to go. Eventually he made the best of it by inviting the girl to drop by for coffee at any time, and left them alone.

She had shed some tears, but was in control of herself. ‘What do you want me for, Inspector?’

‘I’m trying to find out all about Professor Summers, miss. You are the first student I’ve been able to find. What about some coffee?’

‘I need something.’ She looked at the tavern. ‘I’d sooner have a beer.’

Salter led the way in.

‘You must have felt pretty strongly about Professor Summers,’ Salter began when the beer came.

The girl unbuttoned her raincoat and pulled her arms free. Underneath she was wearing a grey sweater and a dark skirt. Her hair was curly and seemed uncombed. ‘I will miss him,’ she said. ‘He showed me things, and he liked me.’

‘A great teacher?’

‘No. Some of the students didn’t like him. I did, though, and some others.’

‘Why?’

‘I liked the way he got excited over poetry, especially Romantic poetry. It was from him I realized that poetry is written in a different language, not just prose with rhymes. A lot of people already knew that, I guess, but I didn’t.’

Romantic poetry? ‘You mean love poems?’ he asked innocently.

‘No, no. The Romantic period. Wordsworth and Keats, mainly, for him.’

‘Why didn’t the others like him?’

‘They said they didn’t get proper notes. They wanted more history. He wasn’t very formal in class. And some of the stuff he was talking about he hadn’t figured out himself. But he told us he hadn’t,’ she ended, more to herself, apparently echoing an old argument.

‘I want to know what kind of person he was. Did you know him—yourself?’

‘Personally?’

‘Yes.’

‘A little bit. I used to go up to his office once in a while and talk to him. As I said, he liked me and we had a nice time talking about stuff.’

‘He took an interest in you?’

‘He thought I might be able to write a real essay, as he called it. I tried. He told me a couple of weeks ago that the first page of my last essay was the best first page he had had all year. Still only got a B + though!’

While she was talking, Salter ordered two more beers. He could see why Summers liked Molly Tripp. He had very little to ask her himself, but a very great desire to sit with her for a while longer and watch her talk. She was nice.

‘What made the essay so good? The first page, I mean.’

‘I read it this afternoon. It sounded like him talking, you know?’ She smiled as if she and Salter were talking about a mutual friend.

‘And that was it? You were a good student?’

‘Yeah, I guess so. Oh, shit, I see what you’re getting at. He didn’t try to get my pants off. He wasn’t a groper.’

That is what I wanted to know, thought Salter, but I may have screwed this up. He acted puzzled. ‘Huh?’ he said.

‘We talked about poetry, is all. We talked some personal stuff sometimes, but not very much.’

Salter thought of a way to cover his interest, to make it official.

‘Professor Summers was not in the habit of seducing his students, then?’ There. How did that sound? Nice and pompous?

‘Hell, no. Oh, there was something there when I was in his office, Inspector. Isn’t there always between any man and woman?’

Salter tested this against several ladies he knew, and thought, No. He nodded in agreement.

‘The other kids said he spent half the time in class with his eye on me, but I think I was his litmus test. He watched me to see if what he was saying was making sense. I did like him, too. I kissed him once.’

‘When?’

‘The last time I saw him. Last week. He’d just told me he’d given me an A for the course because of a good exam. He was as pleased as I was, so I gave him a big smacker when he wasn’t watching.’

‘What did he do?’

‘He just sat there looking pleased. Now I want to go.’ She stood up. The tears were streaming down her face.

‘Where can I find you?’ Salter asked. ‘Just in case.’

‘Here.’ She gave him a card. ‘I started work on Monday as the assistant to the assistant creative director at an advertising agency, and I have cards already.’ She belted up her raincoat. ‘I hope you find this character, Inspector. What’s your real name?’

‘Salter,’ he said startled. ‘Charlie Salter is my real name.’

‘Well, lotsa luck, Charlie.’

They left the tavern and Salter watched her walk away. Her stride was long and she walked slightly hunched up as if a gale was blowing. At the corner she turned and saw him still there, and waved. Salter waved back and pretended to be looking for his car keys. He would have to see her again, he decided.

That night, after supper, Annie said, ‘I’ve invited your father to eat on Sunday.’

Seth groaned theatrically. I’ll miss Walt Disney. He doesn’t like the TV on.’

Angus said, ‘I have to do my essay in the main library on Sunday. I’ll just have a hamburger at Mac’s.’

There was a silence while they waited for Salter to start shouting.

Annie said quickly, ‘You can watch Walt Disney upstairs. And you can come home by six, Angus. Your grandfather only comes once a month.’

Angus said, ‘But this essay is important, Mum. Besides, I don’t like lamb.’

‘Nor do I,’ Seth said. ‘I hate lamb and stuff.’

Annie said, ‘It doesn’t have to be lamb.’

Salter said, holding on to his temper, ‘You can have a choice, lamb or beef.’

Angus said, ‘Couldn’t we have poached salmon with that terrific white stuff on it?’

‘You know bloody well your grandfather doesn’t eat salmon.’

‘Lasagna, then.’

‘Or any Italian food. Or French, or Greek, or Chinese food. Now knock it off you two. We’ll have roast beef, and you’ll like it, and you can watch the upstairs TV turned down low. After you’ve said hullo to him.’

‘Walt Disney’s no good in black and white.’

‘Fine. Don’t watch him, then. Now shut up, the pair of you.’

This was the true clash of cultures in the Salter home. Unlike the thoughtful, ever-accommodating relatives of his wife, his own father was a narrow-spirited misanthrope who was getting steadily worse in his old age. He watched television, calling most of it ‘bloody American twaddle’, and visited the tavern at the end of his street to moan with one or two cronies. He was a former maintenance man with the Toronto Transit Commission who had retired to a tiny flat in the East End of the city near the street-car barn. They saw very little of him, because he was an ordeal. Salter telephoned him once a week, and visited him whenever he was in the area. Annie, however, insisted on their duty to him and he ate his Sunday dinner with them once a month. She had tried him with every delicacy in her repertoire, and he ate them all with the same comment, ‘Very nice, I suppose, but I like a proper dinner on Sundays. So did Charlie, once.’ A proper dinner was one with gravy and custard. In spite of all attempts by Annie to make him smile, his visits were joyless. The real difficulty lay in coping lightly with his prejudices in front of the children. He was anti-semitic from his youth, and he had since developed a prejudice against every class and race but his own, the poor Anglo-Saxons. No visit was complete without some reference on his part to ‘them Jews’, the ‘Eyeties’, or the ‘Nig-nogs’ who were responsible for his depressed social and financial condition. He watched Annie for any sign that she was patronizing him, and criticized the behaviour of the boys continually until he provoked a flare-up of reaction in Annie or Salter. After a small row, he shut up, satisfied, with a remark like, ‘Sorry I spoke. I was just trying to be helpful.’ Once he caught Angus in a kilt (another family tradition that Annie had brought to Toronto); this offended the old man in several ways at once, including his anti-Scottish prejudice, and he wondered loudly to Salter, if the boy wasn’t turning into ‘a bit of a pansy.’

Now Salter cut the conversation off and brought out his notebook. ‘I’ve got some phone calls to make,’ he said. ‘Stay off the phone for half an hour, will you.’

The boys disappeared, still grumbling, and Salter sat down by the phone. He looked first at a list of numbers that he had transcribed from the scrap of paper in Summers’s wallet. ‘Do these numbers mean anything to you?’ he asked his wife. ‘A couple look like phone numbers, but the others don’t.’ He handed her the list.

She studied it for a while. ‘Hold on,’ she said. I thought so. This one is his Eaton’s Account; this one is the number he used to get money from one of those banking machines. Those two are phone numbers. That one I don’t know. It looks like the combination for a lock.’

‘Well done. Now all I have to do is phone these two and I’ll know all about his private life.’

‘Any ideas yet?’

‘The same one I started with. It looks like he was done in by accident, by a prostitute or her pimp. In the meantime, I’ve got interested in the guy, and I’m trying to find out what kind of person he was, just in case we have one of those clever murders, complete with motive and everything. So far, I’ve found out he wasn’t a bad teacher, and some people liked him and some didn’t. He had one real enemy and two good friends in the department.’

‘Both men?’

‘A man and a woman. And there is a student who liked him. And a woman he used to have a drink with, once a year, out of town. That’s it.’

‘Did the woman in the department like him a lot?’

Salter gritted his teeth. Annie’s remark grew from the problem that always lay between them. She was everything a man could want in a wife except for a continual low-burning jealousy, which had grown partly out of the swinging times they lived in. As she understood the scene, no one was faithful these days, and she was constantly alert to the possibility that her husband, whom she saw as an ideal prize, would be picked off by some other woman. As Salter put it once to a woman whose friendship he had retained in the teeth of Annie’s hostility, ‘Her friends tell her how lucky she is that I don’t screw everyone in sight, and she takes that to mean that they are all ready to lie down whenever I say the word. They are all divorced and it makes her nervous.’ In fact, Salter had been unfaithful (with the same woman friend) only once, and he was such a poor liar that Annie had suspected immediately. After that he found fidelity the comfortable way to live. He loved his wife, and wished she would relax. When he tried to tell her this, she said only, ‘If I relax, you might,’ And that, as his woman friend pointed out, was probably true.

Now Annie asked, ‘They weren’t lovers, then?’

‘She says not,’ Salter replied.

‘You asked her?’

‘I’m a copper,’ he shouted. ‘I’m trying to find out who killed someone. You start by trying to find out who might have wanted to.’

‘Is she attractive?’

Oh, fuck it. ‘The interesting thing,’ he said, ‘Is that I like everyone who liked him, man, woman and child. But I didn’t much take to the ones who didn’t. That doesn’t mean that this woman gave me a hard-on, or that Summers was banging her after hours in the library. It just means that I might have liked Summers, too.’

‘All right, Charlie, make your phone calls.’

The first phone call was embarrassing. The number turned out to be that of Summers’s squash-playing friend, Bailey, whom Salter had seen at the funeral. ‘Sorry, Mr Bailey. I just wanted to check our appointment. Four o’clock tomorrow, at the club? Thanks. See you then.’ There was no reply to the second number. Salter consulted his notebook and dialled again. ‘Miss Homer? Miss Jane Homer? Inspector Salter here. Metro Police. I’d like to talk to you about Professor Summers. I believe you were in contact with him in Montreal.’

The voice was thick and strained. ‘Yes. I never saw him, though. What do you want?’

‘To talk to you, please. Mainly about Summers’s background. May I come to your office in the morning?’

‘All right. I get there about ten o’clock. I am the Dean of Women at Wollstonecraft Hall. On Harbord Street.’

‘I’ll find it. At ten o’clock, then. Fine.’

Salter consulted another piece of paper, Summers’s hotel bill with the record of two calls Summers had made on Friday afternoon. Again, there was no reply to the first. The second one produced a recorded message to the effect that the offices were now closed and he should call again tomorrow. That was that, then. Salter put his notebook away, and went upstairs to his wife’s sewing-room, where she kept all her old college books. He found what he was looking for, Volume II of Representative Poetry, and thumbed through it looking for Wordsworth and Keats. The first Wordsworth poem he found was about fifty pages long, and he kept looking until he found one that had fewer than a hundred words. Slowly, stumblingly, he learned the first two lines, a total of fourteen words. When he was sure of them, he turned to Keats. Again he had trouble finding one to his purpose, so he chose, arbitrarily, the last poem and picked out two lines in the final verse that sounded ‘poetic’. Once more he set himself to learn them. More difficult, these, because he was not sure what the lines meant. He sat there, mumbling, as his wife appeared. ‘What’s going on, Charlie?’ she asked, staring at the book.

‘It’s Summers,’ he said in some confusion. ‘He specialized in Romantic poetry. I was just trying to see what that was all about. Not very lively, is it?’ He smiled falsely.

‘Who have you been talking to today?’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, he shouted. ‘I’m just getting into the man’s mind. That’s all.’

She looked surprised at his reaction, but did not press him further, merely picked up a piece of material she had come for and went back downstairs.

Salter waited until she was well out of hearing and went back to his homework. He had Wordsworth cold, but had to mumble away at the Keats for another five minutes before he felt sure of it.