Читать книгу Quarrel with the Foe - Mel Bradshaw - Страница 6

I wasn’t on duty the night Digby Watt was found lying “in the gutter” in front of his office with a fatal dose of lead in his chest. He was found by a journalist who claimed to have been tipped off by an anonymous phone call at around one forty-five a.m. The journalist’s name was Ivan MacAllister. The date was April 20, 1926.

I first read about it in the newspaper when I got to police headquarters later that morning. The article ended jarringly with the words, “Who’s next?” I accompanied my reading with a cup of coffee and a handful of Aspirins. I had a rather severe morning-after headache, something an enforcer of the Ontario Temperance Act could scarcely admit to.

Especially not with Detective Inspector Sanderson looming over my desk.

“Shameful journalism,” said Sanderson. “What business has that rag asking who’s next as if this were the start of a bloodbath?”

It was easy to imagine the inspector in a clerical collar, fixing a congregation with that blue glare under a straight-across hedge of black eyebrow. The high, broad forehead above only added weight to the disapproval. I knew, though, there was something more. A connection by marriage to the publisher of the Toronto Examiner had made the two men dogged rivals.

“All that fear-mongering does is put my detectives under pressure to do a rush job.” Sanderson papered over the newsprint on my desk with official documents as he spoke. “Get busy, Paul. I want you to read the reports of the investigating constable and the medical examiner. Then go round to the house and interview the family. There’s the son Morris who worked with Watt, and Morris’s wife. Also an unmarried daughter, Edith.”

“Sure thing. But won’t Mr. Fergus’s nose be put out of joint if a whipper-snapper like me gets first crack at the genteel folk?” Wilf Fergus at age sixty-three was the city’s senior detective sergeant and let no one, including the slightly younger inspector, forget it.

“Fergus is indisposed.” A twitch of the eyebrow hedge warned me off asking for specifics. “So—I’m giving youth a chance. I assume in your officers’ mess they taught you something of polite society.”

“I’ll try to keep my boots off the furniture.”

“Never mind Watt’s business associates: Knight and one of the acting detectives are talking to them—lad named Cruickshank from Station Number One if you need him for anything. And never mind looking for eyewitnesses. I’ve a couple more men doing that thankless job. Better see Watt’s fiancée, though, if that’s what she was.”

“Fiancée?” I hadn’t come across that in my reading. “Digby’s?”

“The children’s mother died two years ago. My wife tells me there’s gossip about a younger woman, much younger. Get her name from that journalist MacAllister. You should speak to him anyway. On your way now, and, Paul . . .”

“Yes, boss?”

“I don’t like my men drinking, even on their own time. You don’t have to be angelic, but you do have to be alert.”

“I’ll be both, sir.”

I sorted the documents I’d been given into piles. I continued sorting even after Sanderson had withdrawn and had turned his searching gaze on some other sinner. While this wasn’t my first homicide assignment, it was the first time I’d been asked to interview the principals on my own. It was an occasion, if hardly one for butterflies in the stomach. Despite my inspector’s reference to giving youth a chance, I was well into my thirties and past all that.

I tackled the constable’s report first. He had arrived at 96 Adelaide Street West at 2:33 a.m. in response to a telephone call from Ivan MacAllister, of Broadview Avenue, who remained on the scene. Also present when the police arrived was Morris Watt of Glen Road. There, in front of a six-storey office block, had been found the body of a grey-haired male in his sixties lying face up on the sidewalk. Not, as MacAllister reported, in the gutter, but with his head pointed that way, which suggested he had been facing the building when he fell. The constable had neglected to include a sketch with his report. The deceased was identified by Morris as his father Digby Watt. There was wet blood on the jacket and vest, apparently proceeding from three separate gunshot wounds. On closer inspection, it was found that only two bullets had penetrated the deceased’s chest, the third lodging harmlessly in Daily Strength for Daily Needs, a leather-bound volume nestled in his left inside jacket pocket. This bullet, although deformed by the impact, was judged to be point two-five calibre. No firearm was found at the scene, nor any cartridge cases. The deceased’s wallet was in his pocket and contained ninety-seven dollars. The deceased’s fly was open, and the penis and testicles pulled out in full view.

I sat up when I read that. The Examiner stated only that Watt’s clothing had been “disarranged” and that he had been left “partially naked”.

At 2:45 a.m., the constable used the pay phone at Sheppard Street and Adelaide to summon the medical examiner, who arrived at 3:28 a.m. Based on a temperature reading, the medical examiner estimated the body had been cooling for between one and two hours, placing the time of death between 1:30 and 2:30 a.m. He gave the opinion that the two wounds were most consistent with small calibre bullets fired from the front. Death would have resulted immediately. No other marks of violence were discovered. There were no apparent exit wounds, so an autopsy ought to be able to recover the two unaccounted-for projectiles. In accordance with police practice, these would be sent over to the University of Toronto for ballistic analysis. The deceased had been taken to Grace Hospital at College and Huron Streets for further post-mortem examination.

I rubbed my temples, then picked a nickel from my right side trouser pocket. Heads I’d go to Glen Road first, tails to the newspaper offices. It was a good throw, the coin rocketing straight and high and executing many revolutions before plopping comfortably into the palm of my hand. I slapped it onto the back of my left wrist.

The king’s bearded profile.

I picked up the telephone and asked for the number of the Toronto Examiner. I’d never let chance rule my life more than was necessary and wasn’t about to start. Ivan MacAllister was the first person on the scene and that made him the person to start with. As luck would have it, he was still in the office.

“Wait till I get there,” I told him.

I unlocked the right top drawer of my desk. There, wrapped in its shoulder strap, lay my slate-grey service revolver. The Webley Mark IV, while smaller than the bulky Mark VI lugged about by British officers during the war, was a weight all the same and helped not at all with most detective work. I closed the drawer again and locked the pistol inside. Having already endured my morning visit from the inspector, I decided that today—in defiance of regulations—I’d chance going without.

Headquarters of the Toronto Police Department occupied a cramped suite on the ground floor of City Hall, so cramped that a couple of desks had been pushed out into the wide hall. There a pair of self-conscious clerks drew up their reports in guiltless exile. I envied them, especially on head-sore mornings, and renewed my standing offer of a desk swap when the click of my heels made them look up. The dim corridors with their cool tiles made for a soothing middle ground between the chaos of the office and the chaos of the town. When I got out, too soon, onto the soot-darkened rose sandstone front steps and looked down Bay Street, I couldn’t see Lake Ontario for the new elevated railway tracks feeding into the perpetually under-construction new Union Station. The street teemed with billboards, shop signs, streetcar wires, square black Ford motor cars, jaywalkers in flapping spring overcoats, and a lone traffic cop, straight and tall in his English-bobby style helmet. Him I did not envy.

In sympathy, I took my own hat off and carried it. The morning was overcast, but mild and dry. Truth to tell, there wasn’t a lot of difference between outdoors and the office. The street smelled of traffic, not spring flowers. Doubtless it was the sort of day Digby Watt would have liked. A good day for business in that it did not immediately distract the susceptible with memories of springtime romance, or the more prosaic with thoughts of the golf course.

Digby Watt had rarely been distracted by any sort of weather or any normal notion of quitting time. At age sixty-seven, he had been notorious for staying at his office past midnight. It would not have been difficult for anyone who wanted him dead to find him on a dark and lonely street, empty as only a street in the financial district can be at that hour.

Despite the traffic, it took me no more than five minutes to walk from Queen and Bay to the Examiner Building, a squat four-storey block on King Street West. The commissionaire told me I’d find MacAllister on the second floor, turn right at the first landing and ask anyone in the city room.

The room contained a scattering of eight or ten reporters working candlestick phones rather than pounding the pavement. Some were bleary-eyed veterans who looked even more hung over than I felt, some teenaged cubs in their first pair of long pants. I overheard one of the latter commiserating with a man over the death of his pet monkey and asking for the juicy particulars that might pump readers’ tear ducts or jiggle their funny bone.

They all looked far too industrious to interrupt, but in the end I didn’t have to ask. I recognized my man across the room as the Ivan who had worked the same field gun in Flanders as my former classmate Horny Ingersoll.

Ivan had remained long and thin, with small thin hands I could still see flicking a clasp knife open and shut. Right at this moment, he was playing rummy for cigarettes with one of the women reporters. He had apparently made it through the war and into gainful employment with four limbs and two eyes intact. He had grown a thin, mud-coloured moustache that somehow went with the sneering expression successful newsmen are supposed to have. His brown tweeds could have leaped from the day’s fashion page—loose in the trousers, tight in the sleeves, with four buttons at each cuff. He was easily the best-dressed person in sight.

He’d spotted me right away and, without neglecting the hand he was playing, kept track of my approach, though he wasn’t able to place me until I reminded him we’d met before.

“Sure enough. Horny’s pal.” A smile broke from under the moustache and he stuck out his hand. “Lulu, your revenge will have to wait.”

Lulu moved off with a wistful look back at a hard-earned quarter’s worth of smokes she was leaving on Ivan’s blotter.

Ivan’s grip was firm, his fingers slender but strong. The finger tips were stained nicotine brown.

“What brings you here?” A half-smoked cigarette between his lips wobbled as he spoke.

I showed my wallet badge. “Digby Watt.”

“A copper!” Ivan looked me up and down more closely, evidently thinking of a newspaperly way to describe my un-ironed suit, red eyes, and badly shaved chin. “Maybe that figures. I think you impressed us at the battery as a tough guy who listens more than he talks.”

I shrugged.

“Still,” Ivan continued, “aren’t you about ten years too young to be a detective sergeant?”

Not wanting to start an argument, at least not yet, I omitted to point out that (a) I was the youngest police officer of my rank by only four years, (b) I wasn’t a total upstart as I had been on the force before the war, and (c) I could be garrulous enough when not witnessing the intimate mutilation of a childhood playmate. What I did say was—

“Looks like you’re not doing badly yourself. You have a private office where we can go and get away from these jabbering Teletype machines?”

“You’re a scream. And don’t tell me you have a private office back at City Hall, or I’ll think I’ve missed my calling.”

I threw my weight around and got a junior editor to yield up his glassed-in cubicle on the south side of the building. The sun was coming out over the lake and the room was too hot. I loosened my tie and, pushing some papers aside, sat on the edge of the desk. Ivan took a wooden arm chair and lit a fresh cigarette off the butt of its predecessor.

“You got a phone call late last night?” I began.

“At 1:45. Have you read my article? It’s all in there.” Ivan wasn’t irritated, not yet. You just got the feeling that he was intrigued by the unexpected meeting and would rather have talked about old times and old acquaintance.

“Did you check the time?” I asked, dutifully but mechanically. For my mind also was going back to that afternoon before Ypres.

“I checked the time.”

“Ivan,” I said, “how much did you know about Digby Watt before last night?”

“Lots. I’d be no good at my job if I didn’t. Big man on Bay Street without being larger than life. Came up through commerce and finance. No factory experience. Has a reputation for character rather than personality. Cheerful and humourless. A ready smile, but no wit or appreciation of wit in others. Saw The Gold Rush and didn’t laugh. Generous with money, close with information, protective of women, and appealing to women that like to be protected. But I think you’re asking when I found out who owned Peerless Armaments during the period they were killing our gunners with bum shells.”

“Well?”

“Don’t remember. Years ago.”

“O-kay. Do you live alone?”

Ivan hesitated.

“Yeah,” he said. “Over a sporting goods store, just north of the Danforth. But if you’re thinking there was no call at 1:45, the phone company will tell you otherwise.”

“Did anyone else see or hear you take the call?”

“At that hour? No, no one. I have my own telephone in the apartment. Sometimes the paper calls me late, so it’s worth it.”

“You were asleep?”

“Yeah.”

“Was the caller male or female?”

“A man.”

“Did you recognize the voice? Or is there any voice you’ve heard since that you recognize as that of the caller?”

“No and no.”

Ivan sounded relaxed, resigned now to being questioned. I dug my notebook out of an inside jacket pocket.

“I’d like to hear how the conversation went. Word for word.”

“Ring-ring. ‘Hello.’ ‘Ivan MacAllister?’ ‘Yeah; who’s this?’ ‘Is Ivan a foreign name?’ ‘Not in my case. What is this about?’ ‘Ninety-six Adelaide West. You won’t be sorry.’ Before I could say anything more, he hung up.”

I wrote. “That’s everything? You’re certain?”

“No guff—that’s it.”

“Anything there to suggest the caller’s identity? The foreign-name business, say.”

“I get that sometimes. It would have been worse if my parents had got really cute and called me Siegfried.”

Worse during the war, I thought. By now red Russians were overtaking Jerry in the sweepstakes of villainy. I let it drop.

“What did you do after he hung up?” I asked.

“Lit a smoke and grumbled to myself that it was probably some crank who didn’t like the way I wrote, but while I was grumbling, I was getting dressed and calling for a taxi. The newshound who can pass up a potential scoop might as well hand in his company pencil.”

“What time did you get to 96 Adelaide West?”

“About two fifteen.”

“By that watch?”

“Sure. Did you want to look at it?” Ivan let his cigarette dangle from his lips as he unstrapped the Bulova from his wrist.

It occurred to me that, although Ivan was likely a heavy smoker, too many of his fingers were brown for the stains to be nicotine. What else could they be?

I took Ivan’s watch and noted that it was two minutes faster than my own. Mine was likely the one in error, though; Ivan’s was the better watch, and how! A gift perhaps, or the symptom of a second job. But, if neither, if a crime columnist earned enough to be buying Bulovas, Ivan wasn’t the one in the wrong racket.

“Have you reset it since?”

“Never needs it.”

“So you reached the address indicated by two fifteen. Fast work.”

“I was lucky. The car came pronto.”

“Would you have its number?”

“Didn’t notice, but it was a Danforth Dollar Taxi. They’ll find the driver for you.”

“And was Digby Watt lying dead on the sidewalk when you got there?”

“Sure, just as I wrote.”

“Come on, Ivan,” I said. “Journalism’s show business. And showmen have to pep facts up or, in this case, tone them down to make a picture that thrills the Sunday school teachers but doesn’t shock them. When you and I are talking, I’d never hold you to what you write to earn your pay.”

“Calling my work hokum, Paul?” Calm still, but less agreeable.

“For instance,” I said, “you ask, ‘Who’s next?’ Do you have any reason to believe the killer will strike again?”

“I figured if a man as established as that could be shot down on his doorstep, no one’s safe.”

“And I guess you always want to give folks a reason to buy tomorrow’s paper.” No reaction from Ivan, so I carried on. “Did the caller say anything on the phone, or was there anything at the crime scene to indicate there would be further victims?”

“Neither.”

“And you found Watt just as you write?”

“He was dead when I got there. I didn’t move him.”

“Did you touch him?”

“To see if he needed a doctor and an ambulance—sure. He didn’t. What he needed was the police, so I called you.”

“What about the son, Morris Watt? Was he there when you arrived?”

“He showed up four or five minutes later. He’d been working late with the old man, but he’d gone to get the car from a parking garage. Digby must have been standing waiting for him when someone popped him.”

“Let me get this straight: while you were looking the body over, Morris showed up in Watt’s car.”

“On foot. He said he couldn’t get the car started. Once he arrived, I went to phone the police.”

“And how did Morris take his father’s death?”

“Noisily. ‘This can’t be true! This is terrible! If only the car had been working, I’d have been back in time.’ Stuff like that.”

“So, you were alone with the senior Watt for five minutes. Did you recognize him?”

“Sure. I work for a paper. He gets his picture in the paper.”

“Take any pictures last night?” I asked.

“The Examiner employs me as a writer, not a photographer. And they don’t print pictures of deaders, even fully clothed. You can take that as no.”

Something warned me not to, but I couldn’t pin it down.

“Ivan, who’s this girl Watt was stepping out with?”

“You’d have to ask the guy that writes the Evy Chatters column. He’s not in the office.”

“Was Watt engaged?”

“Search me.”

The sunlight and the smoke from his cigarette were making Ivan squint, which shrunk his already small eyes down to hairline cracks, but I could still see in them a gleam of superiority. He wasn’t altogether enjoying himself, but he still thought he was handling himself well, could perhaps handle any bull’s questions with his brain on two-thirds power.

“When Horny died,” I let fall, “you said you thought you’d look up the man behind Peerless Armaments if you got through the war. Did you ever meet Digby Watt while he was alive?”

“Not once.”

“How come? You did say you thought you’d look him up.”

Ivan stood up and towered over me.

“Now you’re making me sore, Paul. You’d take what a soldier on the battlefield says when he’s just lost a pal, and you’d put it in a police file? Not only is that a dirty trick, it’s a dumb one—and I took you for a smarter guy than that. You were there, weren’t you? You must know that just to keep some shred of sanity men let off steam by saying any number of things. But by the time we came home, the last thing we wanted was to settle old scores. I’d no interest in meeting up with Watt. He was a business story, and I was on the crime beat. To hell with him.”

“Sounds to me like you’re still mad at him. Was his clothing disarranged when you got there?”

“No, but I just never could resist petting stiffs.”

With that, Ivan strode out of the small office and disappeared behind the stairwell door. It was a fine exit, and I decided not to ruin it by giving chase.