Читать книгу A Charlie Salter Omnibus - Eric Wright - Страница 8

Charlie Salter usually woke up badly these days. The worst mornings were those after nightmares when it took him whole minutes to realize that he was awake in his own bed, that he had not killed anyone or committed any other desolating or irretrievable act. There were other bad ways of waking, including times like this one when he lay waiting for the memories of all his failures to fade into the daylight. His first failures at school (‘as soon as anything gets hard, you want to drop it’), his aborted university career (‘you never finish anything’), his first, foolish marriage which collapsed within a year, and finally, his failure at his job. Salter was a police inspector; he had been an inspector for five years and he would almost certainly remain one for another fifteen years until he retired, a long way short of his early estimate of himself. It was this last failure which burned at the centre of his waking world, illuminating the others as they emerged from the base of his skull.

His eyes opened and he set about making the world liveable again. Beside him, Annie slept on, and Salter shoved his hand under her nightdress (one of his favourites, a thick cotton one she had inherited from her great-aunt, more erotic in the act of being lifted than any negligee) and stroked her, casually at first and then methodically, until she opened her eyes. He continued to caress her, waiting for her to pull out of reach or offer herself to him. She did neither, simply lay there under his hand, awake now, but with her eyes closed. He stopped, and she said, ‘You are going to be late.’

He gave her one last squeeze, then pushed her on her back and rolled on to her, kissing her hard, grinding himself against her. This was all he needed. As his desire awoke (no failure here, yet) the ghosts of his other failures crept back underground for another day. Salter locked himself around her in a last playful hug, just for good measure, and sat up. The day could begin.

Downstairs, the door slammed. Seth, the younger of their two sons, had returned from his paper route. Seth was always back by seven o’clock. His fourteen-year-old brother, Angus, worked a double route and would arrive in another fifteen minutes. Salter swung his legs out of bed and stood up. ‘You want some juice?’ he asked. His wife turned away and pulled the covers up to her chin. ‘Yes, please.’

In the kitchen, Seth was already eating the granary-floor sweepings that were traditional in the family, a mixture of grains and nuts that Annie compounded from ingredients bought at the St Lawrence market, inedible to Salter, but preferred by the boys to anything else. Salter grunted at his son and poured some orange juice. He filled the kettle from the hot-water tap to make some coffee, and took the juice up to his wife.

She was half asleep again, and he stood watching her come to life. As everyone reminded him repeatedly, she was an astonishing forty-year-old, with the same absolutely flawless, fresh complexion, the same short, thick brown hair with no trace of grey, and most astonishing of all, the same brilliantly white teeth as she had when she was fourteen. She was not a beauty, but she was as perpetually radiant as an advertisement for her own cereal. As she sat up now and took her juice, the door slammed downstairs once again as Angus returned.

‘Big day?’ she asked.

‘No big days now,’ he said as he moved into the bathroom. ‘As far as I know, all I have to do is show some New York cops around the office.’ He lathered his face and tried to guess which of the seven disposable razors on the edge of the bathtub was the sharpest.

‘It’s nice,’ she said. ‘You are always home on time.’

‘So you’ve said.’ Salter found a razor with an edge and began stroking off the stubble. Behind him, he heard her get out of bed and go downstairs. He finished shaving and put on his plain-clothes uniform: clean shorts and socks, yesterday’s shirt, blue tweed jacket, grey pants, dark blue tie with red geese, and black shoes. After a tour of the second floor in which he switched off six lights and one running tap, he went downstairs, switching off two more lights on the way, and opened the front door to let in the cat which was howling on the doorstep. The two boys were eating their cereal watching a cartoon on television, and Salter switched that off, too. The day had proceeded normally so far, from despair to irritation; there was only boredom still to come.

‘Duncan called,’ Annie said, when he was seated with the paper and his coffee. ‘He wants to confirm we’ll be down for July 1st.’

‘I wouldn’t mind doing something else this year. We have a month. I wouldn’t mind a change,’ Salter said.

There was an uproar. Seth pleaded, in a whine, ‘O - come - on - Dad - let’s - go - to - the - Island, - please ‘Dad - please,’ and so on. Angus said, ‘Uncle Duncan said I could crew for him this year in the regatta.’

‘Did he?’ Salter responded to this last. ‘Well, maybe you two could go, and your mother and I will take a trip.’

Annie looked concerned, and seeing this, Salter became further irritated. ‘I’d like to see something other than the bloody Island while I still have a few teeth left,’ he said, shaking out his paper. ‘We’ve been to the Island for four years in a row, and most years before that, too.’

Annie said, ‘Dad’s had a bad winter. He isn’t very well.’

‘All right, all right. Could we talk about it tonight?’ He glared at the boys who were waiting for him to concede.

The Island was Prince Edward Island, Annie’s birthplace and for generations the home of her family, the Montagus, a family that was prominent, ancient, and soaked in Island tradition. Two of her brothers were lawyers, her uncle was a judge, and her father a doctor who had given up medicine to devote himself to his real estate interests. He owned two gas stations, a street of houses in Charlottetown, a small lumber-mill, a fish-canning plant, and a resort hotel, one of the oldest in the Maritimes. It was in this hotel that Salter had met Annie one summer as he passed through on the run from the wreckage of his first marriage. Annie was helping to manage the hotel in an undefined but concerned capacity; she had registered him, taken his order for dinner, chatted to him on the hotel porch after dinner, walked with him along the beach at sunset, and, after three days, refused to join him in bed, but made it clear that there were other places, and other times. He-felt himself blessed that the Island princess had fallen for him, and persuaded her, after the season was over, to move to Toronto to be near him.

In Annie’s family there was a tradition that the girls spend a year away from the Island before they settled down, rather like a year of finishing school—in Toronto or Montreal, or even London. Before they left the Island for this last, safe fling, the girls usually got engaged to apprentice lawyers or doctors, often their childhood sweethearts, and they returned, on time, when the internship or the articling period was up, to set up house and cottage. Annie shook her family by not making any arrangements for her return, and appalled them by wanting to marry a Toronto police sergeant, but they were full of goodwill, and when Annie brought Salter home to the family church the following spring, they welcomed him and made him an honorary member of the clan.

Each year after that the Salter family made the trip to the Island for the vacation. Sometimes they drove, though it took three days; more often they went by train and were met by Annie’s brother with one of the cars that the family lent them for the holiday, along with the keys to the family guest cottage.

Salter had married a tradition, a tradition that Annie guarded with the resolution of a Colonial among the natives. They used some of the family silver on Sundays (old Great-grandmother Montagu having apparently had place-settings for about three hundred, a collection that was broken up when she died), and about their Toronto house were a number of pieces of dark, polished furniture that Annie had inherited from the family homes (there were no harvest tables or other pine pieces, for such peasant artifacts had not formed part of the Montagu world for the last century and a half). Annie ritualized their lives slightly, too. Once a week, on Saturday, she made the porridge she ate as a child, although no one liked it much. She cooked fish chowders a lot and baked her own bread, but since the Island has no cuisine except salt cod and potatoes, their meals, except for one or two dishes which she had borrowed from the other maritime provinces, were otherwise the same as if she had been born in Calgary.

Annie’s family were well-bred, tactful, and keen to include Annie’s choice in the clan. They absorbed Salter’s family into their world of fishing, sailing, riding and perpetual lobster suppers as if he had paid dues. Most of the time Salter was happy to enjoy their world. Occasionally, impatient and constricted by it, he felt like the lone Christian in-law in a family of Jews, conscious of his uncircumcised state, his slightly albino look, and of the determination of his relatives never to let him feel like an outsider.

‘We have to let Duncan know soon if we aren’t coming,’ Annie said, as Salter rose from the table. The guest cottage was free to them whenever they liked, but it was much in demand during the season.

Salter felt himself on the brink of going too far. Clearly his words had upset everybody slightly. That was enough.

‘Tell him we’ll come,’ he said. ‘But entertain the possibility that you and I might take off for a week, would you? We could have a mad fling in Moncton.’

‘You’ll be late,’ she said. ‘Don’t work too hard.’

‘Didn’t I tell you?’

‘Yes, I know Charles, but couldn’t we talk about that soon, too?’

‘About quitting? Go to work for brother Duncan? I’m a policeman.’ He cut off any reply by walking out of the door.

Salter’s household was in an Anglo-Saxon ghetto off Oriole Parkway in an area that not so long ago had been North Toronto. But with the expansion of the city after the war, accompanied more recently by the building of the subway to the perimeter, his neighbourhood found itself at the heart of the city. When they first moved to the area, Salter had driven to work like everybody else; now he left his car at home for Annie and took the subway. Once, for a month, he had tried cycling to work long before it became fashionable, but the city sloped the wrong way for him, so that while the ride to work was easy, the sweating uphill return came at the end of a long day.

This morning the train was crowded as usual, but he managed to get the connecting door at the end of the car to lean against, a desirable spot because it let him read the paper with both hands. As usual, there were far more young girls on the train than any other single group—the roads to downtown were still packed with automobiles occupied by lone males—and when the car filled up, Salter found himself agreeably wedged between a tiny, pretty, Japanese girl who smiled at him to show she saw no danger in him, and, on the other side, an equally small Caucasian girl with a clean-smelling, frizzy head that came to just below his nose. He put down his paper to avoid mussing either of the heads beneath him and concentrated on looking fatherly. As the train arrived at his station he looked down to make sure he didn’t crunch any little feet as he shuffled forward. Both girls looked up and smiled at him. The English are right, he thought. They are birds.

He arrived at the headquarters building, and was greeted, as he was every morning, by Sergeant Frank Gatenby, The Oldest Sergeant on the Force. Gatenby was not really that; there were a number of sergeants older than he, but he had earned the title by his white hair and avuncular manner, which he had acquired before he was forty. For a long time he had been The Oldest Constable on the Force, then someone in a burst of sentimentality recommended his promotion, and he had been given to Salter as an assistant.

‘Quite a lot on your plate this morning, sir,’ he said. ‘You’ll be quite the busy boy today, all right.’ He smiled like a butler addressing the young master.

Salter took his mail: arrangements to be made for the tidying up of Yonge Street for a visit by the Mayor of Amsterdam (I’ll put a tart in an armchair in all the shop windows, he thought; that’ll make his worship feel at home); report requested on the value of police horses in suburban plaza patrols; an inspection of gunshops to make sure they weren’t selling machine-guns to minors; a committee to be formed to investigate complaints about the police cafeteria; a request for information from the Montreal police. A typical pile of rubbish.

For Salter had been put out to pasture. In one year he had gone from being a power in the internal structure of the Force to the status of a non-person, simply because he had backed the wrong man for Deputy Chief too enthusiastically and without regard for the consequences. Too young to retire, as his mentor had done, he was too old to shift careers. His future had been with the Force; now he had no future.

Salter looked at the last item. ‘What’s this, Frank? What information do they want in Montreal?’

‘Who can say, sir?’ Gatenby said. ‘Who—can—say?’ he repeated, pronouncing each word slowly as if at the conclusion of an intense metaphysical speculation that had occupied him all morning. ‘They phoned before you came in. I’d only just arrived myself. A man was found dead in Montreal last weekend. One of ours. I mean a Toronto man, not one of our boys. There’s a sergeant coming in on the Rapido after lunch, so Chiefie is putting him on to you.’ ‘Chiefie’ in Gatenby baby talk was the Superintendent. The Deputy Chief of Police was called ‘Deecee’. ‘There’s a lot going on today, sir, and I suppose they couldn’t spare anyone else.’ The sergeant smiled like a host of a children’s TV show.

‘When’s he coming?’

‘Two o’clock.’

‘All right. Tell “Chiefie” I’ll do it. You never know. It might be a real job.’

‘Chiefie’s up with the Commission, sir. I think he just thought you would.’

Salter always went out to lunch. He didn’t enjoy the food or the horseplay in the canteen, which was probably, he thought, why he had been put on the committee to investigate complaints. On this day he walked through to Yonge Street to a store that sold out-of-town newspapers, bought the latest edition of the Montreal Gazette and took it into a coffee shop that specialized in corned beef sandwiches. He found what he wanted on page three, a small item to the effect that one David Summers, of Toronto, had been found with his skull fractured in a Montreal hotel room. Police were investigating. Nice, old-fashioned murder. Sex, money or what? Why did the Montreal boys need help already? He paid for his food and worked his way back across a number of parking lots to his office.

Gatenby met him at the door. ‘He’s here,’ he whispered, pointing elaborately over his shoulder into the office. Salter, resisting the temptation to put his finger in his mouth and roll his eyes in wonder, contented himself with walking past the sergeant into his office and holding out his hand. Gatenby trotted behind. ‘This is Inspector Salter, Sergeant,’ he said from under Salter’s elbow. ‘Cup of tea, anyone? Coffee? No? I’ll leave you alone, then, to have your chat.’

When the door closed, both men sat down.

‘Someone got clobbered, I hear,’ Salter offered. ‘How can we help?’

‘My name is O’Brien, Inspector. Henri O’Brien.’

‘Sorry. Yes. Charlie Salter.’

O’Brien took some papers out of a large envelope he was carrying. ‘What we would like is some help with the questioning.’ He was a small, trim man, a few years younger than Salter, with close-cropped hair and a weatherbeaten look like a lumberjack or a sailor. He handed Salter one set of papers and kept a similar set for himself.

‘Let’s go over it first, Sergeant. I know nothing about it. Start at the top.’

O’Brien started to read in slightly accented English. ‘David Arthur Summers. Age 47. Married. One daughter. Professor at Douglas College. Found dead in the Plaza del Oro Hotel on Saturday, May 18, at 11 a.m. by the maid. Cause of death—fractured skull, probably caused by a whisky bottle found on the floor. Victim naked except for a dressing-gown. Room contained the clothes he had been wearing in a pile on the floor, his suitcase, still unpacked, the whisky bottle, nearly empty, two glasses, one with lipstick. No sign of a struggle. Time of death, about twelve hours previously.’

Salter wasn’t listening. He was watching O’Brien read from a typescript in French arid translate it simultaneously into English. Was there anyone here who could do that, he wondered? His own copy was in English.

O’Brien stopped.reading, and there was a long pause.

‘All right,’ Salter said. ‘What do you know about him?’

‘His wife came to Montreal for the identification,’ O’Brien said. ‘She told us Summers was in town for an academic conference. It began on Friday and was to last until Wednesday. She said Summers and his colleagues went to this conference every year at this time, when the term was over. It is held in a different place each year so they get to see the country. A little ‘oliday before they go off for the big ‘oliday in the summer.’

The two detectives, who each got five weeks’ paid leave a year, smiled at each other.

O’Brien continued. ‘I have a statement from her here. She was not a great deal of help. She didn’t know any reason why anyone should kill her husband. We couldn’t question her too hard, of course, because she was very upset. We’d like you to talk to her again, also.’

‘All right. He picked up a whore who rolled him, right? The badger game. What’s that in French?’

‘The badger game, Inspector. But his wallet was still in his jacket, with over a hundred dollars in cash.’

‘They got disturbed,’ Salter offered.

‘We know most of the hookers in the city, except the teenagers. We are checking. We don’t know any killers among them.’

‘Someone he knew, then. Some woman. An affair de cur.’

‘What?’

‘You know. An affair of the heart. Sounds, silly in English. The lipstick looks pretty obvious.’

‘The blows were heavy. The doctor said it was someone quite strong.’

‘They all study martial arts these days, Sergeant. My wife can lift her end of a railway tie.’

‘Yes? But do English professors get into fights with their lovers?’

‘What difference does it make what he teaches?’

‘I meant English-Canadian professors, Inspector. Though, as a matter of fact, he did teach English.’

‘I see.’ Salter paused. O’Brien had introduced East/West relations into the discussion. You Anglos are a mystery to us Québécois. ‘I guess professors are the same everywhere, Sergeant. Give them three drinks and they smash each other’s heads in.’ Screw you, froggie, he thought.

‘Yes. Sorry. But your sergeant said something about he had heard we had a “crime de passion” we needed help with. He said he thought that was allowed in Quebec. I thought he was making jokes. Maybe you and he together.’

‘Frank is an asshole, O’Brien. That’s why he makes the coffee. But he’s harmless. We don’t make fun of foreigners, even Canadian ones.’

‘And you, Inspector? You are in the homicide department?’

‘No. I’m not. I am what we call General Duties.’

‘I see.’ O’Brien looked around the room that Salter shared with Gatenby, at Salter’s nearly bare desk, at the uncarpeted floor, at the room’s single decoration—a photograph from a newspaper of Gatenby saluting with one hand while he held open the door of some royal duke’s limousine with the other.

Salter thought: He thinks he’s been fobbed off with me and Frank. So he has. He said, loudly, ‘You asked for help with the questioning. What else can we do? Check up on Summers? I’ll put Frank on to it.’

‘A bit more than that, Inspector. Some of our separatists are making noises. We have our hands full.’

‘But they just lost a referendum!’

‘Yes. It’s made them angry. Like English soccer fans when their team loses. In England, I mean.’

Here we go again. ‘Or like French hockey fans when Maurice Richard is suspended.’

‘That’s right, Inspector. I remember that, too. Well, what with the separatists and one or two other things we have had no leave for a month, so we do not have much time for cases like this.’

‘Besides, it’s just unlucky that he was killed in Montreal, right?’

‘Right. What I am concerned with is screwing up at the beginning. Look. Like this. This man, at a conference with his colleagues, is hit by an enemy, or a lover, or, maybe, a whore. But if it is someone he knew, then a stupid investigator might talk to the person right away and not know it. He might miss the signs. There it is. I am busy and I am French. You see what I mean?’

‘Yes. You haven’t got the experience to watch out for English liars. So you want me to do it.’

‘Yes. If you can.’ O’Brien grinned. ‘All Anglos sound like liars to me,’ he risked.

Salter laughed. ‘That’s exactly what my wife said the other day about the French MP’s you see on TV. Especially the cabinet ministers.’

‘Tell her she’s right, will you? You can’t trust any Frenchman in Ottawa.’

They sat there, grinning at each other.

Salter said, ‘Let’s get down to it, Onree. What you are asking me to do is take over the investigation from here and give it back when I’ve got something for you.’

‘If you have the time and the men.’

‘I’ve got me, and Frank, and all the time I need. Now, what else? The suitcase. Anything unusual in it?’

‘Nothing. Underwear, shirts, socks, two books. What you could expect.’

‘The wallet?’

O’Brien read from the list. ‘One hundred and six dollars. Two credit cards. Two library cards. Driving licence. Some lottery tickets. Membership of a squash club. A dirty piece of paper with some numbers on it—they look like telephone numbers—some charge slips. Here.’ He dug into the envelope again and produced the wallet. ‘You’d better take it. Show it to the wife when you talk to her.’

Salter took the wallet and dropped it into a drawer. ‘That’s it then. Coffee now?’

‘Tea, if you don’t mind.’

‘Frank!’ Salter gave the order and waited until the door closed. ‘Anything I can do for you here in town, Onree? You know Toronto?’

‘Not much. I thought I would spend a few hours here. I have a reservation on the overnight train, so my evening is free. But you weren’t expecting me, so just point me in the right direction and I’ll leave you to solve my case.’

‘Which direction is that?’ Sherlock Holmes would have known. The tan, the windswept haircut—what did they point to? The harbour for a quick sail around the islands?

‘Greenwood racetrack. I’ve never been to the races in Toronto.’

Of course. ‘I’ve never been either. Would you like some company? I wonder what time they start.’

‘Seven-thirty.’

‘Ah. Well, then, we could go and have some dinner, and go out to the track afterwards.’

‘Fine, Inspector.’

‘Charlie.’

‘Fine, Charlie, But why don’t I come back at, say, five-thirty, and then we could go out and have dinner at the track.’

‘I don’t know if they have a restaurant, Onree.’

O’Brien looked knowing. ‘They all have restaurants. I will be back at five-thirty.’ He put his envelope back in his briefcase and shook hands with Salter.

When the door closed, Salter phoned his wife. ‘I won’t be home for dinner,’ he said. ‘I think I may have a real job.’

Annie said, ‘Fraud, arson, robbery with violence?’

‘Murder.’

‘And they gave it to you!’

‘It’s not on our turf so “DeeCee” and “Chiefie” don’t give a pinch. But it’s just like a real job to me.’

‘Now we start skipping dinner again? Working all night?’

‘Not yet. But you never know. It might come to that. I hope so. Don’t wait up. First, I’m going to the races. ‘Bye, dear.’ He hung up, agreeably mysterious.

Annie was waiting up for him when he got home.

‘You look pleased with yourself,’ she said. ‘Did you win?’

‘I didn’t lose,’ he said smugly, and waited to be asked again.

‘How much?’ she asked.

‘A “C-note”,’ Salter said, out of the corner of his mouth like a regular gambler.

‘Enjoy yourself?’

‘Bloody marvellous. Want to hear about it?’

‘Of course. I’ll make some tea.’

What’s going on with her? Salter wondered. She’s acting strange.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked truculently. ‘You jealous of my night out?’

‘Don’t be silly, Charlie. Just tell me about it. What happened?’

Salter gave a mental shrug and resumed his euphoric mood. ‘The thing is,’ he began. ‘It’s harness racing—you know—chariots.’

She nodded, a little girl hearing about Daddy’s day.

‘They have two kinds of horses—trotters and pacers—you know about this? The trotters move differently from the pacers.’

‘They trot?’

‘Yes.’ What the hell was going on? ‘They move diagonally, but the pacers move one side at a time—or is it the other way round? I couldn’t really see the difference, even when I knew. Anyway, it’s quite a sight when the lights go up and there they go.’

‘Did you bet on every race?’

‘Yes. Onree explained it to me . . .’

‘Onree?’

‘This Frenchman whose case I’m on. I picked out my own horses, though. I chose ones with names I liked, although the trouble was, half of them seemed to have similar names like Armbro or Hanover or something. Anyway, to make the story short, I won on seven races and picked up a hundred and twenty dollars. Onree lost fifty, betting on form. Ha, ha, ha. It was terrific. I would have won on eight but my horse stopped running properly—they had a name for what it did wrong.’

‘Broke stride.’

‘What?’

‘It’s called breaking stride.’

‘How do you know?’

‘They use the same term on the Island.’

Salter was dumbfounded. ‘You mean those races in Charlottetown are the same as these?’

‘That’s right, Charlie. The races we’ve been trying to get you to come to for the last fifteen years. The trots, we call them. Daddy used to own a standardbred—that’s what the horses are called. You have refused to have anything to do with them all this time and now some Montreal policeman comes to town and you come home to tell the world about this new thing you’ve discovered. Charlie, you are the bloody limit.’ She walked past him up to bed.

After a while Salter had found enough justification to stop feeling horrible. Surely no one had mentioned horses around the Montagu home for years? (Right, but only out of politeness to him.) Certainly no one had taken the trouble to explain the sport to him lately. (No, not in the face of his “I-don’t-want-to-know” attitude.) The truth was that harness-racing was only one, if the most outrageous, example of Salter’s attitude to the whole Montagu world when he was there. From the beginning, he had defended himself against feeling like the poor cousin by refusing to get involved in activities such as sailing, playing bridge, tennis, trout-fishing with flies, and constructing bonfires suitable for baking clams. Apart from the skills involved, he was sure he would get the costume wrong, and appear in sandals for some activity that required hiking boots or bare feet. So when he was on the Island he played golf, a game he had been introduced to by some police pals; he swam; and he watched the other activities from a distance, or ignored them altogether. Over the years his bloody-mindedness and their consideration for his feelings had created two worlds, one which involved him, and the other one which they talked about and enjoyed among themselves. It was an arrangement that suited him, preserved his independence, as he put it to himself, and he took the same attitude in Toronto to his wife’s interest in and understanding of art, horticulture, and science fiction. Salter came by his attitudes honestly enough; his father had tried no new foods, at home or in restaurants, for thirty years, on the grounds that it was all foreign muck and you couldn’t tell what you were eating. The truth was that the old man was afraid he would make a fool of himself by not knowing how to eat it.

Salter’s attitude had its dangers, and the chief one was just being demonstrated to him. He could never be sure, when he did entertain a new enthusiasm, that his wife hadn’t tried to interest him in it ten years before. Science fiction was forbidden to him because she had been recommending it for so long that he had no idea who were her favourite authors. He once knew that science fiction would bore him, and now that he was not so sure, it was too late.

But harness-racing. Jesus Christ! Gradually Salter recalled bits and pieces of things he had seen or heard and ignored over the years until he became fairly sure of the truth: that harness-racing was the major maritime pastime, and that the Montagus figured prominently in the sport. Oh shit, he thought. For another half an hour he swung between justification and guilt, until he went to bed in a mood of truculent misery.