Back in the office, I put in a call to Niagara. Said I was Sergeant Harrow from Homicide. I found out that Thomas Glassock would be on duty as usual in the Caddell Building beginning at five o’clock. Good. I was back on the track. I didn’t quite know what I was on the track of, but I was back on it and it felt better.
To kill the time before talking to Glassock, I wandered over to City Hall. There were tulips in bud in large cement planters in front of the war memorial as I walked up the wide expanse of front steps. I always got a good feeling walking up these steps which rise to a series of eight doors. Eight doors has a kind of New England town meeting feel. But when I got to the top, all but one of them was locked. There was a message there for me someplace; I decided to pick it up later.
I disappointed the girl behind the counter by not having my assessment with me. When I told her that I didn’t have an assessment, it nearly broke her heart. I asked her where I could find the elected members of council. She directed me and I obeyed.
The wall to wall rug down the corridor between the offices of the aldermen was thick and green. The doors were blue, I couldn’t figure that one. I found Harrington’s door, and was about to knock, when a stenographer picked the wrong moment to be efficient.
“Was there something?” she asked as though we were both speaking English.
“Yes, there was. In fact, there is. Is that Mr. Harrington’s office?”
“Yes, but …” I was wondering whether she was just playing a game with me or whether she really cared whether I got in to see him or not.
“Well, is he in it?”
“Yes, but …” It was happening a little too fast for her.
“Is he with someone?” She shook her head. “Is he asleep?”
“Sir, do you have an appointment to see Mr. Harrington?”
“No. Is it necessary to have one to see an elected official?” I pretended to bristle.
“Not really, but may I ask what is the nature of your business with Mr. Harrington?”
“Well, I wouldn’t tell everybody, but since it’s you, I’ll tell you. I want to ask Mr. Harrington just exactly what he intends to do about my wife. Call it family business or private business, whatever you like, but if he won’t see me, I’m afraid he’ll have to see my lawyer.”
“Oh! Oh dear. Why, of course, yes. You can go right in. I know he’s there. Goodness.” She visibly faded behind her pink plastic glasses, leaving only a smear of rouge and lipstick under her permanent wave. I knocked at Harrington’s door.
He was a big man by anybody’s scale. His face looked like a roast beef dinner with all the trimmings, with a huge portion of nose in the middle. The rest of him lived up to that start. I could see why I’d taken him for a cop the other night in front of the Yates house. He wore a two-piece blue suit with a wide dark blue tie. A brown paper-bag lunch lay spread out in front of him, and he began collecting the evidence in a napkin quickly as I crossed to his desk.
“What can I do for you, Mr.…?”
“Cooperman. Ben Cooperman.” He smiled an election smile and shook my hand until it was raw meat. I took a chair that looked like a cream-coloured plastic tulip and found that I could sit in it without being whisked off to the land of the little people.
“Well, Mr. Cooperman?”
“I’m a private investigator, Mr. Harrington, and I’m looking into some of the circumstances surrounding Chester Yates’ death. I know you were a friend of his. I need your help.” He smiled, but there was no charm in it. He began to size me up for the first time.
“What kind of circumstances?” He chose his words carefully. “Chester shot himself. What could be clearer than that?”
“Two hours before he killed himself, Chester bought himself a present.”
“How official is this?” He looked worried.
“I was there; I saw him buy it. If you were going to kill yourself, would you buy an expensive gift for yourself that you knew you’d never live to use?”
“Present, what kind of present?”
“A ten-speed bike. He got it at MacLeish’s on St. Andrew Street.”
“This is absurd. A bicycle! What are you trying to make of this, Mr. Cooperman? A man is dead. Isn’t that enough? I spent a couple of hours with Chester’s wife last night and now you insult a fine man’s memory with talk of bicycles.” His face was getting to look rare on the outside. He was a big man, and I didn’t want to picture him angry. He looked like he could do angry far too well.
“Look, Mr. Harrington, the normal assumption is that a purchase is made to be used. People who kill themselves don’t buy cars, rent apartments or reserve plane tickets. They may be killing themselves for the first time, but if you check the books in any insurance office you’ll see that every move is predictable, from the small nicks on the throat of a razor suicide to the clothes left at the top of Lovers’ Leap. It’s all been done before, thousands of times. It’s as unlikely for a man to have bought a bike before knocking himself off as for a woman to hang her self wearing long underwear or jump from a slow-moving passenger train. This thing will have to be looked into.”
“What’s the difference? Think of his family, Cooper-man. Walk away for it. That’s my advice.”
“I hear you talking, but I don’t think a little nosing around will hurt.”
“Cooperman, I’m telling the truth when I say that it would be best to drop this. You don’t know what you’re getting into. It’s disgusting, really. Like playing in your own dirt. I don’t want to talk about it any more. I can see that you aren’t prepared to be reasonable.”
“What you call reasonable, I call looking the other way.” I heard a buzzer sound. His right hand was moving away from a button on his intercom. His face was moving from mauve to purple. I intended to stay out of his reach, as he got up and started around the end of his desk in my direction. The door opened and the girl with the plastic glasses stood between us.
“Miss Keiller, Mr. Cooperman is leaving now. I want you to take a good look at him, because if he ever comes to the office again, I don’t want him to get by your desk. Do you understand?” She nodded, swallowing her explanation. Harrington grabbed a couple of his folders, and strode past me and Miss Keiller through the door and out into the real world of civic politics. Miss Keiller and I stood fixed like we’d been bolted to the broadloom until a door slammed at the far end of the corridor. I tried to flip her a grin as I went by her, but I think I missed.
Just before five o’clock I walked through the double glass doors of the limestone-fronted Caddell Building and punched the elevator for the eight floor. That put me on the floor above Yates’ operation. I decided to try walking to my right as soon as the doors opened in case I looked lost when some receptionist looked up. But there wasn’t a receptionist. The floor was divided into a number of small offices with doors leading off the corridor. I found the Men’s Room and went inside a cubicle for a smoke. At five after five I found the red exit sign and walked down one flight of stairs. Inside the door of “Scarp Enterprises” all was quiet. I found the door with Chester’s name on it in stand-out white plastic letters. It was locked. I fished around in the top drawer of the desk just outside Yates’ office, Martha Tracy’s, I guessed, and found a key in the paperclip box. I couldn’t be sure when Glassock would make his first check, so I had to get in and out quickly. I tried to ignore the geography once I closed to door again. I could take it all in again later. What I needed now was some link with the dead man that might carry me along for another couple of days. The desk top was clear. So were all the other surfaces. I pulled out the first drawer that opened: envelopes, paperclips, and company letterhead. If he had a private address book that had been taken with other obvious stuff by the police. I was looking for sloppy seconds, and found them in a middle drawer. It was a clipboard with the agenda of a board meeting on it. A few words were underlined and there was a feeble attempt at a drawing of Mickey Mouse in one corner. He was no artist. That was something. Elsewhere on the sheet he appeared to be trying to design a logo. The Arabic numeral two and the letter “C” were drawn in three different possible arrangements. There was one attempt with the Roman numeral for two, “II.” I scanned the agenda and couldn’t find anything beginning with “C” or having a “2” or “II” connected in any way. No, the meeting had to do with Scarp Estates, with a sewage contract, with tenders for foundation construction, and others for roofing. I was getting nervous, so I slammed the clipboard back in the drawer and left the room in a middle-sized sweat.