“Sure.” He stretched the syllable out making Chester sound like a regular democrat.
“And you’d seen the bookshelf open before last night?”
“Mr. Yates used to tell me things. He’d invite me in here and we’d chew the fat, you might say.” He looked over to me like I should hand out little gold stars. “Many’s the night we’d have a noggin and he’d stand looking out the window at the lake, sort of far away in his thoughts, and jangling his keys in his pocket with his free hand.” Glassock showed me exactly what a far-away look was and tried to imitate Chester rattling his keys. On a cliff-top, it would have made quite a picture. Under the fluorescent lights, it lost something.
“Where does that door lead?” I asked him, shattering his reverie.
“Just a cupboard.”
“May I …?”
“Help yourself.” Inside the door was sports wear for all occasions: a track suit, three different kinds of brand-name running shoes, a squash racket, and something that looked like headphones for a stereo set. I picked them up. There were no wires attached. “Them’s ear-plugs for the firing-range. He was a crack shot, they say. Used to practise with the police shooting team sometimes.” Near the ear-plugs hung a black leather holster. It was empty.
“He was quite a sportsman,” I said.
“He could afford to be.” Glassock was beginning to shift from haunch to haunch.
“Tell me one more thing: did Mr. Yates like a good time?”
“Same as most, I guess. Never told me anything personal. He mostly went on about the opportunities in this country for people like me from the old country. He’d get a few drinks under his belt. He liked to drink, he did. But he wasn’t the sort to … play around, you know. But then, you never know.” He let his words hang in the air for a second or two, then I broke his beautiful moment again by crossing the room with my hand outstretched. I thanked him for his help. He asked me not to print anything that might get him in trouble and to be sure to let him know when the article was coming out. I backed my way into the elevator while he discussed the best time to get pictures of himself with Violet, his wife, and Alfred and Edward, the twins. When I hold him that he had been very helpful, I wasn’t telling a word of a lie, as Dr. Bushmill would have said.
FIVE
It was nearly six o’clock when I got back to my room at the hotel. I stripped off my clothes like a snake sloughing last year’s skin, and slipped into the shower. I let the water run at full pressure first as hot as I could take it and then slowly I turned the tap around to cold. I stepped onto the white bathmat feeling somehow like I’d deserved the good feeling building up in me. Then I remembered that I was going to my mother’s for dinner.
I drove up Ontario Street past the drive-ins on both sides of the road, and finally parked a quarter of a mile beyond in one of the guest parking spots at the condominium.
“It’s you!” my mother said, as though she was Stanley looking for Livingstone. I didn’t try to figure it out. I was so surprised to see her up, dressed and in the kitchen. “I wasn’t really expecting you,” she said.
“I told you yesterday I was coming.”
“What?” She made the vowel so you could slide it under the door.
“Ma, you knew I was coming. I told you last week, and I told you last night.” She frowned and looked hopelessly in the direction of the refrigerator.
“You’re going to kill your mother one day with these surprises. You hear? Well, I guess I could put a couple of frozen steaks on. Your father’s downstairs. You’ll eat a steak, Benny?”
“Sure, Ma, but try not to broil the hell out of it, please.”
“So look who’s telling me how to cook. Go talk to your father and leave me to be the Mystery Chef if you please.” I found the unopened Beacon on the tangerine loveseat and took it with me downstairs into the rec room. Pa was sitting in front of the television. My parents spell one another off like that. Between the two of them they don’t miss much.
“She said you weren’t coming.” He was looking older tonight; his gray-black hair, his brow, like onion skin, and the purple ant-tracks on his cheekbones made me go over and give him a hug and kiss on the cheek. He smelled of talcum. He’d been in the sauna at his club. “Are you working hard?”
“A little.”
“Melvyn. I saw Melvyn your cousin today. He said that you haven’t been to see him like you promised. He could throw some work your way, Benny. He’s got contacts. You shouldn’t end up like your father a poor man at the end of your life.”
“Pa, what are you talking about? You’re comfortable, aren’t you. So what if you’re not a millionaire.”
“Leave my brother Harry out of this. Believe me, Benny, if I had wanted to make money, I would have made it. There’s nothing easier. Like the poet says, ‘Does a rich man sleep as soundly as a poor man? Is he happier?’ Still, don’t put me off what I was saying. You’ll promise me to go in and talk to Melvyn on Monday. Okay? Tomorrow, he and Doreen are going to the Seligman bar mitzvah in Toronto at Temple Sholom.”
“Good for them. I’ve got the paper. You want to see it?” He dismissed it with a wave of his hand.
“I get all the bad news I want on TV. I don’t need it in the paper too.” I took that as permission to open it myself. In the first section, there was a short editorial about Chester running twenty lines after a long piece on the abuse of higher education by taxi drivers who are actually Ph.D.s in sociology. Writing about Chester the editorial writer mused on the pressure of modern life, the loneliness of the men at the top, and the loss of our ablest citizens because they are always willing to walk the extra mile. For a minute it looked as though he was going to throw in a blast at food additives, but at the last moment he swerved off in another direction. Food additives came in for a column on their own further down the page. On the inside of the back page under Deaths, Marriages, Funerals and In Memoriam I discovered that the Yates funeral was slated for Monday. The coroner hadn’t seen fit to hold Chester’s body while the investigation continued. I was still way out in front in a field of one.
In about twenty minutes, my mother called us to the table. The Friday night candles had been lit, and there were two bowls of soup on the plastic cloth, one for me and the other for my father. It was canned vegetable.
“Where’s your soup?” my father asked.
“I never eat soup,” she answered. I was still in short pants when I first heard that exchange. “If anyone wants a salad, I can make one,” she dared us. I said that a salad would be just the thing. She didn’t budge. Pa went into the kitchen to retrieve the steaks from the broiler. “Manny, let Benny have the rare one.” He placed the platter of steaming meat in the middle of the table, after I cleared a place. “You know how he likes his rare.” He handed me my plate and I cut into the meat. It was liver gray all the way through. The vegetables were canned peas and carrots; lukewarm. Ma repeated her invitation to salad. Maybe there remained in the back of her mind the ghost of a servant lurking in the kitchen who could whip up these trifles at a moment’s notice. The meal concluded with the traditional passing of the teabag from cup to cup, followed by the time-honoured squirt from the plastic lemon. After his last sip of tea, Pa pushed himself away from the table observing, “Benny, it does you good to get a home-cooked meal for a change, after the chazerai you eat in restaurants.”
Later, back at my office, I did a few useful chores. I attached the key I’d taken from Martha Tracy’s desk to a piece of paper with Scotch tape, slipped it into a stamped envelope, addressed the envelope to Martha Tracy care of her office in the Caddell Building on James Street and put it with my out mail. Then I tried to reach Dr. Zekerman again. No luck. I left my name for a second time with his answering service. Then I lit a cigarette and dialled the number Myrna Yates had given me.