Читать книгу A Charlie Salter Omnibus - Eric Wright - Страница 11

At the office the next morning, Gatenby greeted him with a message from the Superintendent. ‘He wants to hear from you about how this Montreal case is going,’ he said.

‘I’ve got an appointment at ten. Is he free now?’

‘He said he would be in all morning. He was very keen to hear from you.’

‘All right. I’ll do it now. I’m going to be out the rest of the day.’

‘Quick cup of coffee first? Won’t take a minute.’

‘All right.’

‘Little bit of sugar, just to take the edge off?’

Salter had recently been making a stab at dieting. Gatenby showed his interest by tempting him continually, like an old granny with a pocketful of sweets that the children are forbidden to eat.

‘No, Frank,’ Salter said, hardly irritated at all. ‘Annie said I mustn’t.’

Superintendent Orliff was not a friend of Salter’s, but neither was he an enemy. The Superintendent had no enemies, a state he had achieved by keeping his distance from anyone who made a lot of waves. He was a small, neat man whose desk was stacked with a dozen tidy piles of paper, each one representing some aspect of his work. He kept records of everything, including all verbal transactions, and the piles grew until the particular project was, or seemed to be (for Orliff was a careful man), finished, when it was put with other piles on the shelves lining his office. Eventually the piles were put into cabinets, but not until they had been dead for a long time. Orliff saw himself as a civil servant surrounded by politicians, and while his opinion was regularly sought, he rarely gave it, offering instead only information. He did not bury himself in his work (one of the piles on his desk contained material about his retirement plans; another charted the progress of a cottage he was building), but he recorded it thoroughly. While the various factions in the organization grouped and regrouped themselves, he sat back, available and promotable. His superiors could trust him to be loyal: his subordinates knew he had no favourites. When the former Superintendent had been promoted, he had taken over the job without opposition. He sat in his office now, waiting for Salter to deliver his report.

Salter said, ‘As of now it looks like a mugging. I still have a couple of people to question, but those I’ve seen so far don’t look very likely.’

Orliff put his finger on the transcript from Montreal. ‘No robbery,’ he said.

‘No robbery,’ Salter agreed. ‘But they probably panicked. Hookers who try this trick are not killers. Maybe she had a new boy-friend who was showing off.’

‘They agree in Montreal?’

‘I speak to Sergeant O’Brien every day. He’d rather have me find a killer with a nice motive here, but, yes, he’s looking for a likely pair.’

‘So. A middle-aged English Professor goes to a convention, has a little fling and he’s unlucky.’

‘Yes, sir. That’s funny, because he told everyone that it was his lucky day.’

‘What did he mean?’

‘I haven’t found out yet.’

‘Uh. So someone sees a party of profs, a bit pissed, our man throwing his money about, at a tit-show, you say?’ Orliff smiled companionably at Salter. ‘As one middle-aged man to another, being middle-aged, the young girls get him going, so he dumps his friends and finds himself a hooker. Not so hard because she has already got him picked out and is waiting for the nod, maybe already arranged while his friends weren’t looking. Back at the hotel he gets undressed, they have a drink, the boy-friend arrives. Our man objects—maybe threatens to call the police—you never know—and all hands panic. Boyfriend clobbers him, then the real panic. That it?’

‘I expect so, sir. Something like that.’

‘What’s the problem with it?’ There was no aggression in the Superintendent’s voice. If there was a problem he didn’t want Salter to make a fool of himself.

‘I’m not happy with it yet. There’s something screwy. He’d drunk too much. As one middle-aged man to another, sir, he wanted his bed.’

‘He was a professor. Maybe they can keep going longer.’ Orliff smiled to show he was joking.

‘Nobody at the hotel saw a whore, sir.’

‘Like I say, he was a professor. Cunning. He would have slipped her past them, all right.’

‘Even drunk?’

‘Sure.’

‘It’s possible, sir, but it’s got no life in it. It lacks verisimilitude.’

‘Say that again.’

‘Verisimilitude, sir. It means believability.’

‘Does it, by Christ. You mean it may be true, but it won’t play?’

‘Well, yes, but in this case I think that means it may not be true.’

‘It sounds likely to me,’ Orliff said agreeably.

‘It’s probably true, but . . .’

‘Now what?’

‘I’m just trying to put myself in this man’s shoes. Here I am in Montreal, feeling good because I’ve just had a stroke of luck—any kind, but it probably involves money because I’m taking the boys out for dinner, a hundred and thirty dollars’ worth. (My guess is that professors are a tight lot.) So, I’ve drunk a fair amount and I feel good, all the time I’m thinking about my luck, whatever it is. Would I feel like a whore? Right then and there? I don’t think so. I think Summers just went home in a cab.’

‘I see—psychology. After a big win at the track you feel like celebrating, not screwing.’

‘More or less, sir, yes.’

‘I don’t know, Salter. I’ve never won a lot of money. Tit-shows make me horny, don’t they you? They are supposed to.’

‘Well, yes, sir, and I expect they made the others feel that way, which is why they are all suggesting that Summers must have picked up a whore. But . . .’

‘All right, all right. So what’s your theory?’

‘If there was a whore, sir, I think it would happen later, after he’d climbed down a bit from his high. He would have had to use the bell-boy—he wouldn’t know any call-girls in Montreal, or anywhere else. And O’Brien says the hotel staff swear they saw and heard nothing like that.’

‘The bell-boy is lying,’ Orliff offered.

Salter felt all the weight of a weary and unintelligible world fall on him. He gave in.

‘All right, sir. I’ll pack it in. I’ll phone O’Brien and tell him that’s it.’

‘No, no. I’m just doing my job. Giving you a hard time. What’s the rest of your alternative theory?’

‘There’s a piece missing somewhere, probably connected with his lucky day. Whoever killed him did it for more money than was in his wallet, or for envy or revenge. He could have told someone what his lucky day was all about.’

‘This guy Dunkley. We’ve got him on file, you say?’

‘He was arrested once for disturbing the peace outside the American Embassy. He’s in most of the protests.’

‘One of them, is he?’ Orliff was mildly interested. It was his strength that he did not feel any enmity towards the citizens who tried to make life difficult for him, the robbers, the rapists, and the civil disobedience crowd. ‘Without them,’ he would say, ‘we wouldn’t have a job, some of us.’ He fingered the report for a few moments. ‘You want to stay on this?’ he asked. ‘We aren’t too busy at the moment.’

And you can always spare me, anyway, thought Salter. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Until I find out more about Summers and his luck.’

‘Many more possibilities?’

‘I haven’t talked to the wife yet. Then there’s this Jane Homer woman. And I have to talk to his pals at the squash club. At least I want a better idea of the man who got killed, and the kind of man who might have killed him.’

‘All right. Don’t spring any surprises on me, though. Keep me in touch.’ Salter got to the door before Orliff spoke again. ‘By the way, this isn’t the dregs. I talked to the Deputy in Montreal. He said O’Brien speaks highly of you, I told our Deputy. He was pleased because we owe Montreal a favour. It wouldn’t do you any harm if this squared the books.’

Salter understood. Just possibly, if he got lucky, he might find himself moving across the desert again, on the way to the fertile land on the other side.

He still had some time before he had to meet Jane Homer, so he paid a rare visit to the canteen for a cup of coffee. The only other occupant was an inspector in the homicide division whom Salter had known slightly in the old days. They, nodded to each other, and Salter sat down at the same table.

‘What are you up to these days, Charlie?’ the detective asked, pleasantly enough. His name was Harry Wycke, and Salter had no real reason to suppose him hostile. They had never crossed each other, and by now most of his old enemies, like his old cronies, rarely bothered him, but he assumed they were all still relishing his demise. Annie said he was paranoiac, to which Salter replied that even the constable in charge of records gave his requests for information a very low priority when he was busy.

‘I’m investigating a murder—in Montreal,’ Salter said.

‘How does that work, then?’

‘A Toronto professor got himself killed in Montreal. I’m helping out at this end.’ Was this a problem? Was he poaching on homicide’s territory?

‘Tough shit. What are you doing, exactly?’

‘I think I’m supposed to be looking for a motive. Just in case there’s someone here who might have done it.’

‘Wife? Lover?’

‘Not the wife. And no lover so far. Someone clobbered him in a hotel room.’

‘Whore, maybe?’

‘Or a pimp. It looks possible, but they left behind a wallet full of money.’

‘They got scared. Did he have any enemies?’

‘That’s what I’m supposed to find out. So far, I haven’t found anyone who looks like a killer.’

‘What do killers look like, Charlie? The ones I know all look different. Couldn’t be a professional, could it?’

‘The mob, you mean. Christ, I don’t think so. He was a professor. Besides, don’t they warn you first, like breaking your legs?’

‘They’ve given that up now. Too much publicity. Now they just leave a little bomb. Then it could be anybody, unless you are on the inside and know who sent it.’

‘This guy was a gambler, Harry. You think that a bookie would do that?’

Wycke laughed. ‘No, I was just kidding. Well, I wish you luck, Charlie. Most killers are easy—you find them two blocks away covered in blood. The thoughtful ones can be very, very hard. How come they gave it to you?’

‘I think you boys were too busy. And I’m just helping out,’ Salter said cheerfully.

‘That’s right, we are. We probably looked at it and gave it back. Still, if you need any help, let me know.’

‘Thanks.’ Salter dipped his toe into the waters of fraternal feeling. ‘This stuff is pretty new to me. I might be glad to give you a shout if I get in too deep.’

‘Any time. You know where my office is.’ Wycke finished his coffee and stood up. ‘I won’t trip you up,’ he said.

Salter understood, and felt a twinge of grateful warmth. He had been lonely for some time. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’

Wollstonecraft Hall, a red sandstone building on Harbord Street, was built by a dissenting church to protect young ladies from the city when they were not in class, but in the ‘sixties it had been forced to swing with the times and had become a mixed residence. As he walked through the halls, Salter passed young men and women in about equal numbers, chatting in groups and pairs, and, in one case, embracing feverishly as if war had been declared.

The Office of the Dean of Women was open, and Salter pushed the door back and walked in. A secretary looked up from her typewriter, and he introduced himself. She was the drabbest girl he had seen for some time; she looked as though she had been hired for her plainness by the original sex-fearing governors of the residence. Her glasses, steel-rimmed, round and tiny, were balanced on the end of her nose; her thick blonde hair was cut in a straight line, parallel with the bottoms of her ears; she wore a brown smock that looked like a shroud. Salter was appalled and piteous. ‘Is Miss Homer in?’ he asked. ‘She’s expecting me.’

The girl stood up, took her glasses off, and smiled, transforming herself like the heroine of a musical comedy. She had beautiful teeth, and the shroud, when she was upright, clothed a perfect figure. It’s a style, thought Salter. They do it deliberately.

The girl went into the inner office and reappeared with another wonderful smile. ‘Miss Homer says you can go right in,’ she said. She put her glasses on and went back to posing as a hag in front of her typewriter.

Miss Homer was another surprise. She was about thirty-five, light gold hair, a buff-coloured denim suit, brown-and-white striped shirt, gold bangles on each wrist, gold rings in her ears, and shoes made of tapestry. At first Salter thought she was sun-tanned, but as he approached to shake hands he realized she was so thickly freckled that the freckles seemed alive and she seemed to be blinking to keep them out of her eyes. Salter, who had been expecting a grey-haired matron in golf shoes, found himself shuffling his feet.

‘Would you like some coffee?’ she asked.

‘Thanks. Yes, please.’ He sat down in the armchair she indicated, one of a pair arranged by a low table. ^To his further surprise, instead of calling her secretary, she went to a table by the wall and poured two cups from a percolator. Ah yes, he thought. Secretaries do not make coffee these days, especially on the frontier of the movement.

The room was a relief after the utilitarianism of Douglas College. On one wall a huge block of photographs of various kinds formed a mural. On another hung a large framed thing made of bits of cloth. The desk was a sheet of heavy glass on two trestles. All this Salter had time to take in before she returned with the coffee.

She hunched over her cup and waited for him to begin.

Salter showed her the note which she barely glanced at.

‘Yes, that’s my note. I’d forgotten about it. Is that why you are here? I never saw Professor Summers.’

‘Were you a good friend of his?’

‘Once. Not any more. David was an old colleague. I taught at Douglas while I was doing my thesis.’

‘How long ago?’

‘Six years. I graduated five years ago, and got this job.’

‘Did’ you often see him in Toronto?’

‘No, never. Except by accident, of course.’

‘But you arranged to meet him at the conference?’

‘At conferences like that you pick up with people you don’t otherwise see. I often had a drink with the Douglas College people.’

‘Were you and Professor Summers in the same field?’ Salter asked out of his new knowledge.

‘What? Oh no. My field is women’s journals.

‘Like Chatelaine?’ Salter asked, surprised at what English Literature covered.

‘No, no. Diaries. I got interested first in Dorothy Wordsworth, and went on from there. As a matter of fact, David was interested in my thesis topic, which concerned journals as literary forms. I think he started one of his own because of me, but I never saw it.’

‘Let me see, then. You arrived at the conference and left a note in his box. Wasn’t he in his room? What time did you leave the note?’

‘About six. No, there was no answer from his room.’

‘And that’s all the contact you had with him?’

‘Yes.’ She got up to refill her cup.

‘How long did you stay in Montreal?’

‘I left on Saturday afternoon, with the people from Douglas. Everyone heard at lunch-time what had happened and I was too upset to stay. Besides, people were talking about it, people who didn’t know him, as if it was an exciting thing, like a president being assassinated.’ As she replaced her cup on the coffee table it rattled in its saucer.

‘I see. That’s that, then. You have nothing more to tell me?’

She shook her head and then began to shiver, trembling at first, then violently. When her teeth began to chatter, Salter shouted for the secretary, who ran in and held her until the shivering subsided.

‘I’m sorry,’ the Dean said, when she had recovered enough. ‘I seem to be a bit of a mess.’

‘Delayed shock, I should imagine,’ Salter said. ‘I should go to bed and call your doctor. If I want you again, I’ll let your secretary know.’

In the outer office Salter asked the secretary. ‘Has that happened before?’

‘Yes. A lot. She’s hardly stopped since she came back from Montreal. I thought she was all right today, but you set her off again.’

‘I didn’t realize she was so fragile, miss.’

‘She’s not. I don’t know why this is so hard on her.’

Salter left. Dean of Women overreacts to routine questioning, he thought. I wonder why?

It was a long time since Salter had gone home for lunch. From the early days of their marriage he associated it with ‘nooners’, making love in the daytime, preferably on the floor. Did the young officers still do that? He and Annie had not done it for years, but now as she stood at the sink he put his arms round her waist and squeezed her in something more than a friendly hug. She twisted in his arms and looked at him, startled and worried, but game. ‘If you want,’ she said. ‘But I’ll have to turn the pot down to simmer.’

‘Fuck the pot,’ Salter whispered, and hugged her close. ‘All right,’ she said. He let her go. ‘We’ll save it,’ he said.

‘Who have you been questioning today?’ she asked suspiciously.

‘Just an old bag who looks after the morals of young ladies. You are the one who turns me on.’

Over their soup and sandwiches, he talked. He came finally to the Dean of Women.’

‘She’s hysterical, and she’s lying, because she’s frightened, I think,’ he said. ‘But I don’t know why. I don’t think she’s a villain.’

‘Then why is she so upset?’

‘I’ll find out. Whatever it is, it is something to do with Summers.’

Before he left, Annie asked him about the holidays. He felt like being gracious. ‘Make whatever arrangements you like,’ he said. ‘The boys will be happy, and I don’t have a better proposal.’

‘What’s got into you lately, Charlie?’

‘I’m busy,’ he said, and opened the front door. As he stepped out he almost walked into a small dark-haired woman in an apron who began screaming at him.

‘You Mr Salter?’ she asked. ‘Come quick. Lady I work for gonna be killed. Come quick.’

Annie reappeared from the kitchen. ‘It’s Rosa. Mrs Canning’s cleaning lady. Quick, Charlie. Something must be wrong.’

It was one of the penalties of being a policeman.

Salter and Annie followed the cleaning lady at a trot across three front yards to Mrs Canning’s house. There in the kitchen they found her, standing terrified in the corner, clutching her two young children. ‘He’s upstairs,’ she said. ‘In the front bedroom.’

Salter climbed the stairs cautiously to the second floor and went along the hall to the front bedroom. The door was closed, and Salter shouted through it without getting a response. Then he threw the door open and stood back. Nothing happened. Salter moved to the doorway and looked around the room. All the curtains had been drawn so that there was only a gloomy orange light to see by, but it did not take much light to see that the room had been wrecked. The bedroom was also used as a study, and the floor was two feet deep in books and all the other bric-à-brac—clocks, mirrors, ashtrays, lamps—that had formerly stood on the tables and shelves. In the big double bed, under the covers, was a young giant, his eyes open, watching Salter.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

‘You are trespassing,’ the boy said. ‘This is my room.’

Salter left, closing the door behind him, and called down the stairs to Mrs Canning. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked. ‘He says that’s his room.’

‘It’s my room. Mine and Albert’s. This is my house. He just appeared half an hour ago asking if I was running a baby farm. He’s got bathing trunks on.’ Mrs Canning was nearly demented. ‘I had to keep talking until Rosa came back. I’ve never seen him before.’

Annie said from beside her, ‘He must be mad, Charlie. Be careful.’

‘Phone Frank,’ Salter said. ‘Tell him what’s happening. Tell him we need a car and two big men. I’ll stay here.’

While they were waiting for help, Mrs Canning calmed down a bit and suggested where the intruder might have come from.

‘We rent the third floor to a girl at the CBC,’ she said. ‘He must have been up there and come down when she left this morning.’

‘Phone her,’ Salter said.

In a minute it was confirmed. He had arrived from Europe the day before and had been given a bed for the night on the third floor. He had seemed very tired, but the girl had not noticed anything strange about him.

Very quickly the squad car arrived, bringing not only two constables but Gatenby himself. ‘You don’t mind, do you, boss?’ he asked like a child pleading to be allowed up late. ‘I haven’t been outside the office for months.’

The assault party formed up in the hallway on the second floor. Salter explained the situation and the two officers pulled out their guns, causing the women on the stairs to make frightened noises, but they only emptied the shells into their pockets and re-holstered the weapons. One of the constables said something to Salter, and he turned to his wife.

‘They won’t hurt him,’ he said. ‘But they might have to hold him tight, or even handcuff him so that they don’t get hurt. You’d better go back into the kitchen.’

They got ready to move down the hall, and Gatenby stopped them. ‘Let me have a go, first,’ he said. ‘I might be able to talk to him.’

The others looked doubtful, but Gatenby pleaded. ‘Is there a dressing-gown in the room, lady?’ he called down the stairs.

‘On the door,’ she said.

‘Right you are.’ Gatenby turned to the others. ‘Come and get me if I holler,’ he said with a wink, and walked into the bedroom, closing the door behind him.

There was a murmuring of voices from inside the room. One of the constables asked Salter, ‘You sure he’s all right, sir? He seems a bit old for this kind of thing.’

‘I don’t know what the hell he’s up to,’ snapped Salter, ‘We’ll give him five minutes, then we’ll go in.’

But in another minute Gatenby reappeared with the boy, dressed now in a tiny striped robe. Gatenby had his arm around his shoulers and was talking to him soothingly, like an old granny. ‘Here we go, then. We’ll just go downstairs, won’t we, that’s it. Out to the car, and we’ll take you where we can get you all fixed up.’

Salter led the way and opened the door of the squad car as Gatenby talked the boy into the seat, closing it gently behind him.

‘All yours, lads,’ he said. ‘Take him down to the Comical College. Don’t shout at him.’

The policeman looked at each other and at Salter, who shrugged. ‘Take him away, lads,’ he said.

Salter and Gatenby drove back in silence for a few blocks, then Salter said, ‘All right, Frank. What the fuck did you do in there?’

‘I used psychology, chief,’ Gatenby said, chuckling happily. ‘I could see he was just a kid, so I went over to the bed and said straight away, “Do you love your mum?” He said, “Yes.” So I said, “Well, if you love your mum, she loves you, so come on up and we’ll go and see if we can find her.” ‘

Salter waited. ‘And that’s it?’ he asked, finally.

‘That’s all. He got up quiet as a lamb and put on that dressing-gown, and that was that.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Salter said, after another long pause. ‘Jesus H. Christ.’

The interlude over, Salter went back to brooding about Summers. What was his responsibility to O’Brien? To ask questions, watch the whites of their eyes, and see if anyone was lying. So who was? At a guess, he thought, everyone except Usher. But what about? Begin with Carrier. It was possible that Carrier was being his natural gerbil-like self, but he certainly acted like a man with a secret. But a killer? Unlikely. Marika Tils? Even more unlikely, and yet she had seemed to be evading him at the end.

Dunkley was still the obvious choice. Hard to tell if he was lying, because everything he said sounded like rehearsed dogma. He was a man of principle, or a self-righteous prick, depending on how you reacted to him, but did that make him suspicious? Would he lie, much less kill, on principle?

Which left Jane Homer, the Dean of Women. There was also someone with a story she wasn’t telling, but what? Did Summers try to rape her, after all these years? Hardly. If she knew anything that would help him she would surely have said so. They were old friends, she and Summers.

What about Summers? He was drunk, he had seen a girlie show, he was in his dressing-gown, there was lipstick on the glass, and he had had a lucky day. Any famous detective would have solved it in five minutes, but all Salter could come up with was the classic ‘whore-and-pimp’ solution. In the meantime he could think of a number of things he ought to do before he went back to cleaning up Yonge Street. Like having a look at the scene of the crime. And seeing Molly Tripp again.

Back in the office, Gatenby picked up their messages. ‘They’ve all been calling,’ he said as if he were reading a children’s story to a four-year-old. ‘Chiefie, DeeCee, the copper from froggieland. There’s no mail, though.’

Wonderful. Not a single silly assignment, or request, for three days. Was it really passing? The Chief was, in fact, the Superintendent’s secretary, asking if a written copy of the report on the Montreal case would be forthcoming; the message from the Deputy was to ask if he needed any help. Deduction. He was on the case the Deputy was interested in. A pity he was getting nowhere, even if he was having fun. He phoned O’Brien.

‘I have talked to everyone in the area, Charlie. They remember him in the bars, but that’s all. I think I’ve talked to every known character who was in Les Jardins du Paradis when Summers was there, but I can’t smell anything.’

‘The hotel staff remember anything?’

‘I question them every day, just for practice, and to see if they start remembering. Nothing. Why don’t you come down and try it yourself?’

‘It’s your turf, Onree,’ Salter said, but thinking, Why don’t I?

‘My what?’ O’Brien asked.

‘Your turf. Your manor,’ Salter explained.

‘Ah yes. Mon fief.’

‘I guess so. Onree, I’ve had a thought. Maybe I will come down. Not to help you out, but just to get a feel of what happened on Friday night. When are you free?’

‘Monday would be good.’

‘Perfect. I’ll come down on the afternoon train.’

‘I’ll meet you, Charlie. Look for me.’

At 3.30 Salter left for the squash club.

Salter was aware of the new concern for health which had filled the streets of Toronto with men and women trotting about in shorts, and had created an industry devoted to selling fitness. One of the products of this concern was the huge growth of racquet sports, especially squash. Annie had suggested to him more than once that it was a sport that might answer his own need for exercise. Salter watched his growing belly, and listened to himself puff up the stairs, and toyed with the idea, but his overwhelming concern not to look, sound, or feel a fool under any circumstances had kept him from enquiring further. Now he had an official reason to look inside one of the new clubs and he was looking forward to satisfying his personal curiosity.

The Simcoe Squash Club is on the edge of Toronto’s downtown shopping district, which is also Toronto’s business district. The location makes it ideal for the man or woman who wants a game on his way to or from work, and it is at its busiest in the early morning, the late afternoon, and at lunch-time. It is housed in a converted warehouse, and Salter found it easily, at a few minutes before four, by following the trickle of men with athletic bags who were converging on the large brick building.

A girl seated at the desk inside the door was checking off members as they arrived, confirming bookings in a ledger and taking money. Salter did not introduce himself officially, saying merely, ‘I’m meeting Mr Bailey here. He’s a member.’

She nodded, and picked up the phone at the same time. ‘If you follow those guys—Hi, Joe, that was a real wingding last night—down the stairs—Just a minute, “Hello, Simcoe Squash Club”—hang on, Mary Lou, I’ve gotta talk to you—Gerry! How are you?—through into the lounge—hang on a second—no, sir, all booked at four-forty—don’t go away, Mary Lou—you could get a cup of coffee and—WAIT, Mary Lou—OK? He’ll see you when he comes in. OK?—now listen, Mary Lou, you know what happened last night?—’

Salter picked out the bits of this that were his and followed the crowd into a large area full of tables and chairs. The crowd disappeared, one by one, through a door in the far corner, and Salter found himself a seat and looked around. Half a dozen pairs of members dressed in shorts and looking more or less exhausted and sweaty were drinking beer. Most of them were in their twenties, but one pair was white-haired and ten years older than Salter. One wall of the lounge was made of glass and formed the back wall of a pair of courts. A game was in progress on one of the courts, and Salter tried to follow it. The players leapt and ran, hitting the ball alternately, sometimes seven or eight times, before one of the players missed. Salter couldn’t follow the ball and instead concentrated on the players, marvelling at the way they ran round each other, never crashing into each other, rarely touching. As he watched, one of them dived to retrieve a ball low against the wall and smashed his racquet in two. It looked like an expensive game. Would he be able to play it? Salter had been a mediocre though enthusiastic athlete in his youth, reduced in the last few years to golf, and not much of that. He had left behind all team sports, he hated the idea of jogging, and his attention span for formal calisthenics was about a minute. In fact, apart from golf, he hardly exercised at all, which is to say for about nine months of the year. He felt the need. This game looked as though it might provide the answer—half an hour of competitive frenzy leading to renewed fitness or a heart attack.

‘Are you a member, sir?’

The young athlete standing beside him in squash gear was obviously an official of some sort.

Salter decided on a touch of rudeness. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Are you?’

‘I’m the club pro, sir. In the afternoons I’m also the manager. Can I help you?’

‘I’m waiting for Mr Bailey.’

‘Oh yes. Old Bill. Mind if I sit down?’ The pro pulled out a chair. ‘You thinking of joining?’

‘I’m not thinking of anything right now, Mister . . . ?’

‘Larry.’

‘Right now, Larry, I’m watching these two, and waiting for Old Bill.’

‘Do you play yourself, Mr . . . ?’

‘Salter, Charlie Salter.’

‘Do you play, Charlie?’

Salter continued to be offended by this boy with dark ringlets cascading down his back, how putting himself on first name terms without permission, but the pro’s easy manner, like that of a new wave priest, disconcerted him.

‘No. I’ve never even seen the game until today.’

‘Like me to explain it?’

No. Why? ‘Yes,’ he said.

Larry outlined the objectives of the game, the elementary strategies employed, and then supplied a brief commentary on the game in progress. Salter was intrigued. The pro said, ‘Like to have a go?’

‘Now?’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m not dressed for it.’

‘I can fix that. We have cupboards full of stuff that’s been left behind in the washing machines. All clean. Shoes, too. I’ll find you a racquet.’

‘No. Some other time maybe.’

‘Tomorrow? Come down in the afternoon. I’ll give you a lesson. Show you around.’

‘Why?’

‘If you like it you might become a member. I get a commission on everyone I sign up.’

‘No secrets with you, are there, Larry? What does it cost?’

‘I won’t charge you anything for tomorrow.’

‘I know that. I mean this place, a year.’

‘Three hundred the first year. Two hundred after that.’

‘And the cost of each game?’

‘The courts are free except between eleven-thirty and one-thirty, and after four. If you played during the day it wouldn’t cost you anything.’

‘Who would I play?’

‘No problem. Lots of people looking for a game.’

‘My age?’ Salter asked shyly.

‘Our oldest member is seventy-two. We have lots of members in their fifties and sixties.’

‘I’m forty-six.’

‘No problem. I’ll see you tomorrow, then, about three.’

‘What? I don’t know. Yes. Maybe. All right. I’ll let you know if I can’t come. By the way—’ Salter looked at the clock; he still had five minutes—’did you know Mr Summers well?’

Larry looked pious. ‘Yes. He was a good friend of Bill’s, of course, that’s how you would know him. Terrible thing to happen.’

Salter let this pass. ‘Did he play much?’ he asked.

‘Every day. He and Bill used to get into a battle royal every day. Bill is going to be lost without him.’

‘A battle royal?’

‘They played hard. Not terrifically good, but they went at it like a couple of one-armed rug-beaters. The loser paid.’

‘Paid what?’

‘They always played for beer. The loser paid for the beer. Hey, Susie,’ he called to a waitress. ‘This is Mr Salter, a friend of Dave Summers. I was just telling him about the great games he used to have with Bill Bailey.’

The waitress struck a sad attitude. ‘Oh, those guys used to really beat up a storm, you know? And you always knew who was going to pay, like. Real kids they were. I mean, you know, for men, like, mature men, it was funny to see how bad it was for the one who lost. Especially Mr Bailey.’ She raised her eyebrows, shook her head, pursed her lips, looked around stagily to see if she were being overheard, all to indicate that Bailey was a poor loser. ‘They were at it every night,’ she concluded.

‘Did they play last week.’

‘Oh, sure. They played Thursday night before Mr Summers went to Montreal.’

‘Who won?’ Salter fixed an expression of warm, sad, piety on his face. He calculated that he had about two more questions before the waitress or the pro asked him why he was asking.

‘Oh, gee, I don’t know. Wait a minute. Yes, I do. Mr Summers must have won, because he was teasing Mr Bailey, you know, pretending to explain the game to him. Wait a minute, though, he couldn’t have won because he paid for the drinks. I think. No. Oh, gee, I don’t know. I guess Mr Bailey must have paid, because he was the loser all right.’ All this was delivered in the form of a passionate argument with herself.

‘I see you’re ahead of me, Inspector.’ Bailey stood by the table. As the meaning of his words got through to the others, the waitress scuttled, terrified, back to the bar, where she locked herself in conversation with the barman. The pro, however, looked quizically at him. ‘Toronto’s finest, eh? Here on official business? I guess you don’t want a lesson after all. You might have let me know, Inspector.’

‘I’d still like a lesson. Do you let coppers join?’

‘This is a club for the downtown professional man. That would include you.’

‘Then I’ll be here tomorrow, at three.’

The pro ducked his curls in a graceful bow, and left, looking like a Restoration beau about to sneak the immortal ‘Anyone-for-tennis?’ line into the wrong century.

Bailey sat down. ‘Thinking of joining the club, Inspector?’ he said, too cheerily.

No one is comfortable with the police, Salter thought.

‘I don’t know. He asked me to give it a try. I might.’

Bailey affected a hearty look. ‘If you want some practice, I’ll give you a game.’

‘I guess you need a new partner. You used to play Summers all the time, you say.’

‘We played a lot. We joined together a couple of years ago and we’ve been kind of seesawing back and forth. Did, I mean. It’s hard to start thinking in the past.’

‘Did you play him last week?’

‘Oh, sure. Every day until he left.’

‘Who won on Thursday? The waitress said you had quite a game.’

Bailey thought for a moment. Then, ‘He did, I think. Yes, he did. Why?’

‘No real reason, Mr Bailey. But it might be useful. For instance, all day Friday, Summers talked about having had a lucky day, and he paid a big dinner bill on Friday night. Now if his wife tells me he was feeling very happy on Thursday night, I’ll know it was just squash, nothing to do with whatever was making him so happy on Friday. See.’

Salter felt proud of this pile of rubbish, invented on the spur of the moment to divert Bailey. The reason was that the more he knew about Summers’s relationships, the more he would know about Summers, and that included knowing whether he was a good loser or a bad one, and what kind of winner he was, too.

Another man appeared at their table, about fifty, bald as a melon except for a fringe, with the calm, kindly face of a contented accountant. He was clean-shaven, and the fringe of hair had been cut to give him an ecclesiastical air. He looked out of place among all the young stockbrokers and lawyers, but seemed completely at home.

‘We were talking about David, Percy,’ Bailey said. ‘This is Inspector Salter, Percy. Percy Cranmer.’

Cranmer had the hand of a farmer, and he gripped Salter’s warmly. ‘Very sad,’ he said. ‘What about his home life? Did he leave any little ones? His wife all right?’

‘I think so, Mr Cranmer. He only had one daughter. ‘She’s at college.’

‘Is that right? We don’t know much about each other here, except for squash. I never met Dave’s wife.’

Bailey stood up. ‘We have a game, Inspector, if that’s ‘it.’

‘That’s it, Mr Bailey. Thanks very much. If I want you I’ll know where to find you.’

‘Like Percy said, Inspector, we don’t know much about each other here. I wouldn’t have a lot more to tell you about old Dave.’

‘I meant about that practice you mentioned. If I join the club.’

‘Oh. Right. Sure, Inspector. Any time. Come on Perce.’

Cranmer said, ‘Good luck, Inspector. I hope you catch the fella. Poor old Dave.’

Salter did not leave at once. When the two men had been gone for ten minutes he found the staircase connecting the courts, and climbed. There were three levels of court, arranged in blocks of eight, twenty-four in all. On one of the top levels Salter found a gallery overlooking the courts below and he stopped to watch. Bailey and Cranmer were playing in one of the end courts, and by standing back, Salter could watch them without being seen. He was surprised to see that the burly accountant played a delicate game, all flicks and soft shots, while Bailey bashed the ball whenever he got a clear shot. By the frequency of service changes, Salter judged that the two men were about even. They were also, compared to the players Salter had been watching in the lounge, very bad. Bailey constantly mis-hit the ball, and Cranmer was only effective if he could flick it around the front wall. They bumped into each other all the time, often interfering with each other’s shots. Bailey was as unsmiling and fierce as the good players downstairs, while Cranmer retained his fatherly smile throughout. Salter came to the conclusion that he should be able to beat either one of them in a week.

It was five o’clock, just the right time to telephone Molly Tripp, the student at the funeral. He was lucky. She was going to an early movie oh Bloor Street, but she agreed to meet Salter for a sandwich first, so they arranged to see each other at a café on Cumberland Street.

He arrived before her and ordered a beer. The café was almost deserted for no reason that Salter could see, because he had passed two similar establishments on the street that were jammed with people meeting after work. While he was wondering, Molly arrived.

‘Hi,’ she said, standing squarely before him, smiling like a child, sure of her welcome. She wore a pair of old blue jeans and a sweat shirt, and she was carrying a yellow slicker.

He stood up. ‘Let me get you a sandwich,’ he said. He pointed to the menu on the wall which listed a dozen kinds of sandwiches, all unfamiliar to him. I’ll have a “Reuben, Reuben”,’ she said. He ordered it, feeling foolish.

‘What’s a “Reuben, Reuben”,’ he asked.

‘A double Reuben, like a double corned beef on rye.’

‘What’s a Reuben?’

‘Oh, it’s great. Corned beef, cheese, and sauerkraut.’

‘Uh. You want something to drink? Beer?’

‘No. I’ll have a sip of yours, though.’ She picked up his mug and took a mouthful. Salter looked nervously around but no one seemed to be watching them.

‘There,’ she said. ‘Great. I love beer but I want to stay awake for the movie. I’d like a coffee, though.’

He placed the order, and they settled down opposite each other.

‘You wanted to ask me more stuff about Professor Summers?’ she invited. ‘I was upset yesterday, but I’m all right now.’

‘Yes.’ Salter nodded. Her hair which had seemed messy at the funeral now seemed just right. Was it ‘carefully tousled’ as they used to say? She had a pleasant face which was made more appealing by a slightly affected use of gesture—her eyes went wide with wonder, the corners of her mouth turned down in despair or disappointment, and joy switched on the sun in her face. And she was wearing no brassiere. Salter smiled at her, ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘As I told you yesterday, I am trying to learn as much about Summers as I can. What kind of man he was. Whatever you can tell me about him.’

‘So go ahead. Ask.’ She smiled encouragingly.

‘Was he a good teacher?’ Salter asked, again. Who cared? All he wanted was an excuse to keep this girl with him.

‘You asked that. I told you. But I’ve thought about it since then. I still don’t know. On the plus side, he knew his stuff, he liked it, and he got excited about it. On the minus side he didn’t lay it out in a way that was easy to take down, if you like a lot of notes. So some of the students, especially the girls, got a bit uptight when the exams came around.’

‘They didn’t all fall in love with him?’ Why was he feeling jealous?

She roared with laughter. ‘You’re a bit out of date, Charlie. Nobody sits swooning in class these days.’

‘What do they do these days? Lie down in the professor’s office between classes?’

She sat back in her chair. ‘No. Usually we just grab the ones we like by the balls when we meet them in the hall. What kind of question is that?’

Salter felt as if he had just pinched her, spitefully. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what goes on in colleges these days with your generation.’

‘What do you think goes on?’

‘I don’t know.’ Salter was miserable. ‘You hear about swinging professors, you know.’

‘Summers didn’t swing. I told you, he taught poetry.’ She was still sitting back watching him. ‘What was it like in your day? Did you go to university?’

‘For a while. Listen: “A slumber did my spirit seal; I had no human fears.” ’

She sat forward, smiling. ‘That’s Wordsworth. It was one of Summers’s favourites.’

‘Was it?’ Salter clawed his way back into her favour. ‘Here’s another bit: “While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue.” That’s Keats,’ he said.

‘ “To Autumn”,’ she said. ‘Right. He liked that one, too. ‘Are all you guys romantics?’

‘No, just me. That was my favourite course,’ he lied. ‘I dropped out of university after second year.’ They were nearly together again, and slightly excited by the exchange.

The ‘Reuben, Reuben’ arrived and she began to eat while he sipped another beer. Nothing was said until she had made some progress with the sandwich.

Then, ‘Good sandwich?’ he asked.

‘Here,’ she said, offering him a bite. He leaned forward to take the corner of the sandwich between his teeth. If anyone is watching this, he thought, they will think we are doing a Tom Jones.

‘Nice,’ he said, chewing, and taking a sip of beer. ‘So. I’ve learned about English professors, and I know a little bit more about Professor Summers. Tell me some more.’

She considered. ‘He was enthusiastic—have I said that? Sometimes he went pretty far and got worked up about what he was saying.’

‘Very emotional?’

‘I thought he kind of looked for highs in class.’

‘How?’

‘He liked the room to turn on to what was happening. If we just sat there, he wasn’t much good. He didn’t seem to have many notes to fall back on. If he didn’t get much response you had the feeling he would just wrap up what he was saying and go on to something else. On a bad day he could do Paradise Lost in twenty-five minutes.’

‘All twelve books?’ Salter asked smugly. In his university course only the first two books were assigned, but it was well known that there were ten more.

‘Yes. It didn’t always work, though.’

‘What about outside the class?’

‘What do you mean?’

Salter took a deep breath. Most of all he wanted to avoid sounding like a dirty old man, but one part of him continued to conduct a police investigation. ‘Students sometimes know what is going on outside the room,’ he said. ‘Was there any gossip about Summers?’

‘Here we go again.’

But Salter had considered his question. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I would like to know if you thought he had any close friends or enemies in the college.’

‘Or lovers.’

‘Or lovers.’

‘We wondered about one of his colleagues. This isn’t any fun, Charlie.’

‘Nor for me. Which one?’

‘Marika Tils. They kissed each other hello and goodbye a lot.’

‘Everybody does that now. It’s called the Elizabethan kiss of greeting,’ said Salter, who had read about it in Saturday’s paper.

‘Yes, well. That’s it. She was an Elizabethan friend, then.’

‘But no students.’

‘I don’t think so. He probably had someone like me in every class. But, as I said, it was all poetry.’

‘No enemies?’

‘Not that I could see.’ She finished her sandwich and picked up the check. ‘Movie starts in twenty minutes, Charlie. Want to come?’

He took the check from her. ‘No, But I’d like to see you again.’

She looked bewildered, and then she laughed. ‘Do you think we ought to go on meeting like this?’

Grateful, he said, ‘Sometimes new questions crop up and you like to be able to come back.’

‘Any time, Charlie,’ she said. She looked at the clock. ‘My turn?’

‘What?’

‘My turn. One. Why did you become a policeman?’

Tell her the truth. So he did, just as if he were talking to a stranger in a foreign country, someone he would never see again.

‘I was fed up,’ he said. ‘I’d dropped out of university . . .’

‘Why?’

‘I found myself counting the number of bricks in the classroom wall while the lecturer was explaining why some poem I hadn’t read was so witty. It wasn’t his fault. I hadn’t tried to read the poem, because it seemed to be in code. To understand the jokes you had to know the Bible. But I was doing the same thing in History, Economics, and Sociology, especially Sociology. I was about to fail the lot, so I quit.’

‘Then what?’

‘I looked for some action. I tried to get on a ship, but you have to be a member of the Union; if there had been a war on I would have joined the army. I was bored stiff, but everything I thought of trying took five years’ training.’

‘It sounds a bit adolescent.’

Salter nodded. Strangers were allowed to say things like that. ‘Childish,’ he agreed. ‘I wasn’t ready to settle down so I guess I hadn’t grown up.’

‘So why the police?’

‘I met a guy. I played hockey on the weekend pickup team—you know, the only ice time you can get is twelve o’clock on Sunday night—and one of the guys on the team was a detective. I’d just been rejected for a job I didn’t want anyway, selling insurance, and he said why didn’t I try out for the police? So here I am.’

‘Did you like it?’

‘I loved it. I was lucky. I did a little bit of everything at first, before I got into administration.’

‘That sounds dull.’

‘It wasn’t. I was full of ideas and I lived and breathed the job. I got sent on study tours to look at other police forces; I got to say what I thought we should change—I had a terrific time. The three stripes came early, and then I got to be an inspector. That was five years ago.’

‘Then?’

‘Then the man who was looking after me all this time, who I thought would become deputy, didn’t, and he retired and I found I had made a lot of enemies, so I was out in the cold.’

‘Sounds like General Motors.’

‘I guess so. Anyway, I got shifted out of the centre of things and I’ve been doing errand work ever since.’

‘Is it all over?’

‘I thought it was. Now, I’m not so sure. I’m enjoying myself this week.’

‘Are you married?’

‘Yes, twice.’

‘What happened the first time.’

‘It lasted a year.’

‘Yes, but what happened?’

‘We broke up, got divorced.’

‘Yes, but why?’

‘She became a hippie, one of the first. She didn’t like being married to a square, and I wouldn’t let her smoke pot. It was a big deal then.’

‘But you got lucky the second time.’

‘Yes. It’s not all hearts and flowers but I’m still married.’

‘Is she pretty?’

‘Everybody else says so.’

‘Do you have a good sex life?’

Salter looked around again. ‘I haven’t compared lately,’ he said. ‘But it’s a bloody sight better than I was having at your age.’

She laughed. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Now I have to go.’ She put out her hand in a weirdly formal gesture. ‘Once more, Charlie, I hope you catch him.’

He still had some beer to finish so he stayed in the café and watched her cross the parking lot and walk between the two buildings on her way to Bloor Street.

After dinner, overwhelmed by a desire to be agreeable, he helped his wife with the dishes, taking the opportunity to kiss her on the neck, an area he was fond of.

‘Go away, goat,’ she said. ‘Or I’ll cover you in suds.’

He dropped the dishtowel on her head to blindfold her, undid the button on her slacks and nearly got the zipper down, preparatory to raping her, dramatically, up against the ‘fridge. ‘ “Strange fits of passion I have known,” ‘ he said.

‘Not so strange,’ she said dodging. ‘But you’ll have to wait. Dorothy is coming in from next door to show me how to make a new kind of patchwork square.’

Half an hour later she came upstairs to look for the sewing-basket and found him posing in front of the mirror wearing a jockstrap.

He failed to look embarrassed, so she tried a joke. ‘If you want to try my underwear on, don’t tear it,’ she said.

‘Me Thor,’ he said, in reference to an old love-making joke. ‘For your information, madam, I am going to play squash tomorrow.’

‘In that?’

‘And my old tennis stuff. Do you know where it all is?’

‘What’s this all about?’

‘I’m going to play squash. Get fit again, like you suggested.’

‘Why now? What’s going on?’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, nothing’s going on. I just decided to take up squash, is all.’ He told her the story of Bailey and the club, and his curiosity about Summers’s passion for the game.

‘Well, enjoy yourself. But take it easy.’ She looked at the slight belly. ‘I don’t want to be widowed by a heart attack.’

‘You think I’m too old?’ he asked.

‘Of course not, dear.’ She tried to make up by tweaking his jockstrap, letting it snap back against him. ‘Have a good game,’ she said. ‘But leave something for me.’

‘Ha, ha, ha. Randy bitch.’ Salter turned happily back to the mirror. He felt as if he were on holiday.