I parked the rented car where I’d parked the Olds a couple of days ago, at the side of the two-storey warehouse where Nathan Geller did his sculptures. The green garbage bags had been collected but it looked pretty much the same apart from that. The bell still didn’t work, and the door was still open. I went in.
Sunlight warmed the brilliant white figures I’d seen on my last trip. The late morning light made the Mountie stand all the straighter and the tourist with the camera appear to have been frozen in the act like bodies found at Pompeii frozen in lava. I called out, and heard only the sound of my own feet echoing across the floor. I had just reached the stairs to the balcony, when I heard a car starting up. I ran to the door and saw Alex Bolduc rapidly backing his car away from the studio then heading back to town in a hurry. His face looked as old as his father’s.
Upstairs I quickly found the reason for Alex’s quick exit. Nathan Geller was lying in a heap on the floor in front of his colour television. A distorted image was running up the screen and reappearing at the bottom again. Geller was lying with his knees bent and his arms wrapped around his stomach. His sleeves were red with blood and his eyes were open in disbelief. I lurched my way to the toilet before covering the telephone with my handkerchief while I dialled for the police.
FIFTEEN
Chris Savas was an old friend. From the moment he came into Nathan Geller’s studio I started to feel better. It wasn’t because the sergeant was considerate of my feelings, far from it. He always gave me a hard time. When he’d finished with me, after a couple of hours of close questioning, barbed sarcasm, and taunting comments on my line of work and personal foibles, I felt I’d been taken to the cleaners and hung up and dried by one of the best. No, it was even better than that. I felt like I’d been put in a crucible and exposed to white heat. There was nothing left but a fine grey ash. As a chemist, Savas was top of the line.
We were sitting in his office at Niagara Regional. Paper cups of coffee with floating corpses of cigarette butts littered his metal desk. The floor had the same rust marks I remembered from last time. The venetian blinds were still dusty and the windows still looked out on the parking lot next to the city’s market square. I could see the old court-house with squadrons of wheeling pigeons circling the geranium which was annually planted in the memorial fountain to commemorate something or other.
Pete Staziak had wedged his large form into the doorway a few minutes before to see what stage we were at. He and Savas exchanged looks and Savas broke down and gave me one of his cigarettes for a change. Staziak had briefed Savas about my activities, judging by the bite of his questions. He’s taken me over the scene of so many crimes in the last five years that I’m going to get them all into one big mulligan stew of who did what to whom. I looked at the bastard sitting across from me, even as his old partner was examining him from the doorway. I wondered if what we saw was the same man.
Staff Sergeant Chris Savas was a hard man and a good cop. He’d been named after a Cypriot painter and on occasion had tried to show a few friends what Greek cooking and drinking were all about. He had a face like a slab of beef, with eyes that could become as cold as steel ball bearings. He had a voice like the sound cardboard makes when you rasp it across a desk. He also had an instinct for when enough was enough.
“You think young Bolduc did it?”
“Christ, Chris, I told you. He was there when I got there. That’s all I said. If I thought you were going to make him the corner-stone of your investigation, I wouldn’t have bothered mentioning him. How do you know he didn’t stumble into it the way I did? Hell, if I got there and thought I might become a suspect I might think twice about sticking around, especially if I heard somebody driving up and turning his motor off. I think he panicked, that’s all.”
“Yeah, you could be right, and you could be wrong. You’ve got a sentimental side, Benny. You always see the roses and never the thorns. When we have the medical report we’ll be closer to knowing which of us is right.”
“You need anything, Chris?” That was Staziak. Just his way of saying that his shift was ending and that if Chris didn’t need him he was going home to his wife Shelley.
“No, we’re okay, Pete. See you tomorrow.”
“Good-night, Pete.”
“Night.”
We listened to Pete’s footsteps echo down the corridor and heard him say good-night to somebody else. When that was all over, and it hadn’t amounted to much, Chris took a deep breath and let it out with a satisfying noise. It was supposed to divide what we’d just gone through from what was coming. The second part always had more of a human face on it, even if it belonged to Chris Savas.
“You still saving things, Benny?” He continued to stare at a marksmanship trophy over my shoulder.
“I told you what’s germane to the best of my knowledge. I haven’t burdened you with theories or speculations. I’ve given you a blow by blow account of my activities since last Wednesday. If I know something that you don’t know, I don’t know that I know it.”
“Don’t bother piping that through again, I got wet the first time. Are you going to make a fuss about Bagot and his boys?”
“What’s the point? What can you get them on? They didn’t try to extort money from me, they didn’t hold me for ransom, and in the end I walked away. The best you could get them for would be molesting me. And at my age that sounds disgusting. Besides, I’m sure that they would find witnesses who’d say they were watching a cement-pouring derby or something, and I don’t have a single witness. Nope, I’ll have to pass on that one. But, I wouldn’t mind feeling safe to go back to my room.”
“Give it a day,” he said, nodding. “I’ll appeal to Bagot’s better side. But that depends on your keeping your bib clean from now on. If you get rattlesnake poisoning after today, be it on your head for monkeying in this business.”
“I hear you.”
“I know you hear me. Damn trouble is you aren’t listening. And for Christ sake will you take that silly thing off your head.”
“Silly …?” I felt my head and pulled off the yarmulka I’d been wearing since I’d visited the synagogue in the morning. I must have been cutting an impressive figure all afternoon. I buried it in my pocket, promising myself, under my breath, to drop it off at the shul when things settled down a little.
“Now, look, Benny, we’ve been sitting across from each other before. I remember that on these occasions you sometimes forgot to tell me things. You got a little forgetful, and I end up coming along just in time to save you going over Niagara Falls or something. I hate that stuff, Benny. Let’s play it my way this time. You empty out your pockets on the whole schmeer and then nobody will need to set you afloat in a barrel. It’s simple as pie. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I don’t believe you when you say you’ve told me all you know. I know that funny memory of yours too well. What I’m saying is you know my phone number if you remember something.”
Savas sucked at his teeth, like he thought that some missing piece would come unstuck from his molars and it would unlock all the sealed doors in this case. I saw the pile of files on the left side of his desk and wondered how often he could put any of these away for keeps. I wondered whether he followed his cases through the courtroom phase into the appeal courts and up to the Supreme Court. Did the nuts and bolts of what was happening on the streets today put practical limits on his interest in the cases that had started in his office but had gone on out into the big world of experts and mistakes in charging the jury? He shifted in his chair and turned back to face me. I put paid to my speculations. “As far as I can see this time, Benny, you don’t have a chance in hell of getting anywhere on this case. You got no organization. Come on now, you’re outclassed on this one.”