Spadina Avenue looked the same as when my father first brought me here as a kid. Every other Wednesday he used to buy stock for his store in the wholesale outlets south of Dundas. He’d do a little buying, a little gin rummy, have a corned beef sandwich and gossip with his crowd. He’d catch up on the news: who was in Florida, who dropped dead, who was going out of business. He would save up the best bits to take home to my mother.
“Sophie, did I get a shock today on Spadina Avenue.”
“Manny, I don’t want to hear about it.”
“And him just back from Miami.”
“Manny, I don’t want to hear.”
“I just saw him two weeks ago, healthy, in his prime.”
“I don’t want to hear.”
The Basic Bookstore at 986 Queen Street West was wedged between a cleaner’s and an optician’s. As locations go, it didn’t look very promising, unless you were looking for a tax loss. The guy behind the counter wore his hair long and blond. There was a suggestion of a moustache, which looked like a young lawn with signs saying “please” on it. He was in faded blue jeans. Maybe there are no other kinds today. Deep in the fiction department, I saw a guy in a whole suit of blue denim, a three-piece suit at that. His solid leather hat added a gauche touch. I started out lamely.
“I’m looking for a girl.” I immediately wanted to start over. I put the sales slip down on the cash counter. “The girl I’m looking for bought half a dozen books, real classics, here a year ago last March. A good-looking girl with red hair. Is there the remotest possibility that you might remember something about her. She bought some Rousseau, Plutarch, Corneille and Cicero, all in paperbacks. She might have bought a biography of Charlotte Corday, you know, from the French Revolution, here too. Any chance you might remember her?”
“If she was all that good-looking, I’d remember her. Some days, man, the only thing that happens all day is that a good-looking chick walks through that door. But, like, I’ve only been here a year. So she was before my time. Was she an out-patient?”
“A what?”
“Out-patient. Like, you know, that’s the Queen Street Mental Health Centre across the street. They’re the only people buy English books in this neighbourhood. If she bought books here, it was because she was a patient with street privileges, or she was a visitor. And if she ended up with the books, like, the chances are she was one of the shut-ins out for a walk.”
“You ever work for Pinkerton’s?” I asked. I was always careful to watch the competition.
From this side of the street, the Queen Street Mental Health Centre looked like the sort of building that was designed by the same committee that designed the camel. It consisted of a series of wings shorn from the bird. Later, somebody told me that the old asylum on the same lot had been one of the marvels of early Toronto, and like the rest of those marvels was pulled down. Some of the wings had been built before the old structure was destroyed, and now they leaned away from the spaces it had occupied as though it was a way of avoiding contamination. There were a few visitors-maybe they were patients; who knows? — walking in and out of the place. I bellied up to the Information desk. Behind it, a black woman with a pencil through her hair was cleaning her glasses on a piece of tissue.
“How do I go about finding a patient?”
“When did he come in?”
“I’m not sure. It’s a she.”
“Same difference. What’s the name?”
“Elizabeth Tilford.” She ran a long finger down three plastic-shielded pages of names.
“Uh, uh,” she said. “She’s not in here. You sure she here?” I nodded, and she shook her head. It wasn’t a contest I could win. So I asked her to direct me to the medical records department where I very quickly learned that I couldn’t expect to see any of the files without spending eight years in medical school first. Somehow, I doubted whether Myrna Yates would see me through more than pre-meds. I was on the point of leaving when the clerk who had been so forthright in reading me the rules asked what it was I was trying to find. I could see that he had now taken off his cold efficient clerk hat and was sporting one marked “concerned human being.” I told him that I had reason to believe that a woman who might be needed as a material witness in a murder investigation may have been a patient in that institution. He made sympathetic noises, joining me in railing against hidebound rulebooks and the inflexibility of small functionaries. He told me that I’d have to get a doctor to do my research for me, and that even he would have to have a good reason.
“Have you any idea how long this woman was supposed to be here?” he asked.
“I don’t even know when she left. She was in Grantham by August of last year, and that’s all I know about the movements of Elizabeth Tilford.”
“Well, you get a doctor to drop over, because we keep complete files on everybody, mental history, charts, treatments, everything. Did you say Elizabeth Tilford?”
“I did. Why?” He was biting on his nail as though the answer came from there.
“It’s just the name. Elizabeth Tilford. It strikes a cord. I know I’ve seen the name, or heard it. Just a minute.” He lifted a conspiratorial finger in the air and disappeared. After about two minutes, timed by my pulse, which I could feel beating without placing hand over heart, he came back with a grin that threatened to cut his head in two unequal pieces. “I knew I’d heard the name before, and now I’ve checked. Liz Tilford wasn’t a patient here, she was a nurse. They’ll tell you all about her in personnel. You don’t have to be a doctor to find out about staff.” He thought it was a big joke, and I left him there to enjoy it.
Personnel was a big woman with a plastic tag on her white coat that said “Ferrante.” I told her who I was looking for and she looked encouraging. From a file drawer her expert fingers drew a card to which other cards were attached with paperclips.
“Elizabeth Tilford. Yes, she was a nurse here for many years, worked in just about every department, it looks like, except the kitchen. She took courses on vacations. Looks like she was an all-round good nurse. What were you looking for specifically?”
“When did she leave Queen Street?”
“She took her superannuation in February last year.”
“She took her what?”
“Superannuation. Retirement. She left because she’d reached the mandatory retirement age.”
“How old’s that?”
“Sixty-five. Some take it earlier. Depends how long they’ve been here. We have a formula based on the number of years worked and your age. If they add up to eighty-five, you can retire with full pension. Does that help?”
“I’m afraid it confuses me. I’ve been looking for a young woman.”
“Why don’t you talk with Mabel Kline, she’s senior nurse. She might be able to tell you about Miss Tilford.”
“Where can I find her?” She consulted her watch, and then dialled an inside number with four digits. There was a pause. The upshot of the conversation was that for ten minutes I found myself walking down corridors looking for a certain room number. At every junction, there were arrows with numbers pointing in all the possible directions. I simply had to follow the arrow with the number group that included mine. Easier said than done. I was beginning to believe that my grasp of the fundamentals of arithmetic was slipping, when I blundered into the right wing. I asked directions from a gray-haired man in a wine-coloured bathrobe, and soon found myself knocking on a door with Mabel Kline’s name on it.