A City Called July Read online

  The rabbi cleared his throat and said something. I didn’t catch it. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Two …”

  “What?’

  “Two million dollars.”

  “Oh, my God! Two million! And you want to keep it buttoned up! What about his wife? What about his partners? Are they going to cooperate and help keep the lid on? You can’t just replace the divot and play through. Somebody’s going to want to yell good and loud. Rabbi, you can’t honestly tell me that that would be letting the community down?”

  “The people I’ve talked to don’t want a fuss. They don’t want to see their names in the paper. That’s not unreasonable.”

  “Look, both of you, the Law Society has a fund that tries to pick up after crooked lawyers like Geller. Don’t flatter yourself that Geller’s the first. There are lots of Gellers. There’s a Geller in every ethnic community and Gellers wearing Trinity College blazers too. Geller is universal. Where was I …?” I was riding my rhetorical bicycle too fast again. “Oh, yeah. In order to get some of their money back, first of all Geller has to be disbarred. That’s a legal process. And it can’t happen unless you go to the police.”

  “We’d just as soon …”

  “Mr. Tepperman, if a thief broke into your store, wouldn’t you phone the cops right away? Well, this is the same thing.” Tepperman was moistening his lips again. He shifted inside his grey tweed coat. His face had taken on a high colour where his skin was pulled tightly across his cheekbones. The rabbi next to him looked birdlike and brittle. They both looked at me like I’d been beating them over the heads with two-by-fours. I felt like I was trying to roll the stone away from the gate to the ghetto. I was dealing with intelligent reasonable men. I’d known both of them for years. They both looked at me with frowns on their lined faces. I was being difficult. All they wanted was no fuss. Fuss was the enemy, fuss got into the papers, fuss was at the root of anti-Semitism. They hated fuss more than they hated Geller or more than they hoped to see the two million again. You had to respect them for it, I guess.

  “Tell me about his wife. Does he have a family?”

  “A boy and a girl. Ruth, his wife, is a sensible girl. She’s Morris Kaufman’s daughter. Your family knows them. Morris was in the needle trade in Toronto. Your grandfather would have known him on Spadina Avenue. Ruth is very worried, naturally. She hasn’t seen or heard from Geller. She doesn’t know where he is; she can’t even guess. I don’t think she knows about the money. I didn’t have the heart.”

  “And the partners?”

  “Only former partners. Geller was independent for the last ten years. He used to be with Bernstein, Wayne and Hart. But that is a long time ago. He used to chum around with Eddie Lazarus and Morrie Freeland. They were at Osgoode together.” I began making a few notes to go with the doodles I’d been manufacturing on my block of lined yellow foolscap.

  “You didn’t talk to any of them?” I failed to establish eye contact with either of my visitors. “I know you didn’t because they would have told you what I told you. You have to tell the police about this. I mean, you’re talking about two million dollars.”

  “Think of the old people, Benny. I’m talking about widows and people from the old country who don’t understand about our laws and the whole shooting match.”

  “Saul, you’re breaking my heart. Look, I told you my professional opinion. If I told you the only way to make suits was to do them one by one you’d tell me I’m crazy. You know that you cut out dozens at a time. Well, I’m telling you the way to find Larry Geller is to tell the boys at Niagara Regional all about it. I mean, Rabbi, you are talking about fraud with a very big F. Call Chris Savas. You’ll be glad you did.”

  “Benny, we aren’t saying we won’t go to the police. My God, as far as I know maybe the police know all about it. I’m just asking you … both as a friend and as a member of the community … to see what you can see. Find out his assets. Maybe he’s left a trail. We don’t expect miracles, do we, Rabbi?” The rabbi shook his head. The last thing he expected me to deliver was a miracle. I was a plodder, a keyhole-gazer, not a worker of miracles. “For a few days,” Tepperman said after a pause. Then there was another silence. If there is such a thing as an unshared silence, this was it. “We’ll pay whatever it costs. After all you’re a professional.” Out the window I could hear a transport truck pulling a heavy load through town towards Queenston and Niagara Falls. At the same moment, I felt in my bones, a truck with an equal load was rolling off the Queen Elizabeth Way and on its way via King or Church to the west end of town and the old highway to Hamilton.

  “It wouldn’t hurt,” said the rabbi. Another pause. Both Tepperman and the rabbi looked at me like the barrels of a Gatling gun. I thought about my other possibilities. I supposed I could continue cleaning the jam jar.

  “I’ll do what I can,” I said.

  TWO

  As soon as I heard the last of the clatter of the tailor and the rabbi on my stairs, I called Staff Sergeant Chris Savas and got instead my old friend and schoolmate Pete Staziak, who also serves the forces of law and order in the Niagara region. To be truthful, Pete wasn’t really a friend from school-days. We’d both been there at the same time, I’d been in a play with his sister, but we only took one class together in five years. Much more recently, we’d been mixed up in a few cases, and since we were both stamped with the indelible impression of Grantham Collegiate Institute and Vocational School, we gave support to the fiction that we’d been pals. With some of the teachers, it didn’t matter when you had them, you ended up with the same memories. Pete could finish any snatch of poetry I could remember, and I could complete the Three Results of the Persian War if he gave me a start. Being pals made introductions easier and in the end we’d come to believe it.

  “How’s the private sector, Benny? Busy?”

  “Have to beat the business away with sticks, Pete. How about you?”

  “Routine stuff, Benny. I think time this week is running slower than usual. I start to doze off around three-thirty in the afternoon.”

  “Yeah, time behind a desk crawls on all fours.”

  “It’s summer. That’s what does it. I’m sweating just talking on the phone.”

  “Well, you can comfort yourself with the fact that the days are growing shorter already,” I said. Pete grumbled and I told him I wanted words in person. He told me to drop over towards lunch-time and we’d grab a sandwich together at the Di.

  The Di was Diana Sweets. It was the oldest establishment on St. Andrew Street. It must have been started when the street was still an Indian trail curving along the high bank above Captain Dick’s Creek. Ella Beames at the library told me once that Captain Dick was a “man of colour” who was reputed to have hidden a crock of gold not far from the water. If anybody ever found it, I never heard about it. I tried to imagine the captain sitting in one of the stained cherry-wood booths of Diana Sweets, with shining, knowing eyes.

  Pete and I took a booth for four and surveyed the menus. When I was young, my father and mother brought me in here for a “Newsboy,” a single scoop of ice-cream with a dollop of marshmallow on top. It came with a glass of water and the curled paper check for five cents. In those days the Di had one menu totally given up to sundaes, sodas, frappés, fizzes, phosphates and other frosty desserts.

  Pete ordered a cheeseburger and I tried a tuna on white, toasted, with a glass of milk and a vanilla sundae. The girl claimed she’d never heard of a Newsboy. I didn’t push it. I was on the second triangular half of sandwich when Pete brought me back to business.

  “You got something on your mind, Benny?”

  “Yeah. This morning I had a visit from Rabbi Meltzer and Saul Tepperman. Two worried men, Pete.”

  “I’d be worried too, if I was in their shoes. Not that they are liable in any way.” Pete wiped his mouth on the tiny paper napkin. A bit of paper was lost on a face that big. He leaned his weight into his forearms along the edge of the table and examined the melting
cheese running down his cheeseburger.

  “So it’s no secret, then?” Pete’s face split into a smile that showed me more of his mouth than I wanted to see just then.

  “Oh, the Beacon hasn’t tumbled to it yet, but that’ll happen tomorrow or the day after. It’s no secret at Niagara Regional.” He took another messy bite of the cheeseburger. He was looking at me with an indulgent smile drawn over his working jaw. “They get you in to try to keep it quiet? No way, Ben. I know this isn’t going to make anybody look too smart, and nobody wants that kind of publicity. But we aren’t in the publicity business. We don’t get it for you when you want it, and we don’t stop it when it comes looking for you.”

  “I’m glad you heard me out, Pete. You know, a lot of guys would have jumped to the conclusion that I’d been retained to hush something up.” I tried to look indignant. Pete took another bite of his cheeseburger. We continued to banter and eat.

  “And don’t give me that crap about your even-handed righteousness. When was the last time the sitting member got his name in the paper for driving while impaired?” Pete looked at his plate. “Since you ask,” I said after swallowing, “I’ve been retained to look into this business, not put the cork in it.’

  “For the Jewish community?”

  “Right.” He smiled like he’d been right all along. “Okay, okay,” I admitted, “naturally they don’t want publicity. Nobody wants to look stupid or have a trusted member of the community exposed as a crook. They’d rather see their money back, but I guess you know the odds on that better than I do. You taking bets?”

  “Not on that. Geller’s made the cleanest flit I’ve seen since the carnies stopped coming to town. As closely as we can figure it he got away with two point six million. Money like that can inspire a lot of careful detail work. As far as I can see, he’s free and clear. Unless he does some quarter-baked trick like leaving a trail of credit card receipts, or signing his real name on hotel registers. But he’s not going to do that. Hell, he’s smooth as pus.”

  “I’m talking to the right guy, aren’t I?”

  “That’s no secret. Yeah, I started the file nine days ago. There’s a lot of this stuff going around, Benny. Your guy isn’t breaking any new ground. There are a couple of cases in Hamilton just like it, and half a dozen in Toronto. The Law Society has hired an ex-Toronto Metro cop to run interference for them. There are so many lawyers with their hands in the till there isn’t room for money. Funds held in trust are the first place hit when the economy takes a downward spiral. Where else is a lawyer going to get his hands on fast free money. For most it’s only a temporary measure, a stop-gap.”

  “You sound like they’re all doing it.”

  “I just got carried away. There’s always an element. The rotten apple. I mean, look: it’s very tempting. A sweet old widow comes up to you with thirty or forty thousand and asks you to pay off her mortgage. You hand her a phony discharge of mortgage and tell the mortgagee that you’ll be making monthly payments on behalf of your client.”

  “So that’s how it’s done.”

  “One of the ways. You get to use the money at the cost of the mortgage payments. Now multiply that fifty or sixty times and you quickly come to the point where you’re running around so fast covering yourself that you don’t have any time for the good life you thought you were buying. Pretty soon you have to make the big flit.”

  “So off you go to find him in Florida and Nassau?”

  “I do my finding here. We’ve got out a Canada-wide warrant for Geller. We’ve got Interpol notified. And I’m sitting near the phone. What more can I do? The world’s his oyster. He’s not going to look up old friends in all the old familiar places. Geller’s smart. He could be at the next table or he could be anywhere in the world where a dollar makes you top dog. Oh, Geller’s cute as a tick.” Pete finished off his cheeseburger, which he had been neglecting, with three massive bites. Coffee had arrived and I spooned in two large helpings of sugar then watched the cream marble the dark surface of my cup.

  “Have you seen his family?”

  “Wife and a son and daughter. That wasn’t much fun.”

  “On the up and up?”

  “She reported him missing.”

  “All by herself and out of the blue?”

  “We were following up a complaint from one of the old-timers about him not making mortgage payments on time. Kaplan, a farmer from out in Louth township. He must be a free-thinker or something, because he didn’t go to the rabbi first. He phoned us as soon as he smelled something funny, and that’s when we started looking for him. At first Geller’s wife just said he wasn’t in. Then I put on my best Department manners and she broke down saying she didn’t know where he was and would be happy to see him again herself.”

  “Sounds up and up. You buying it?”

  “Nobody could act that befuddled. I mean, she was completely out of it. She needed both kids and her sister-in-law to calm her down. She understands the operations of high finance the way I understand Chinese. I feel sorry for the lot of them. They don’t know where they stand. She couldn’t even tell me whether the house was in her name or in his. I hope he at least left her that much, because they won’t leave a shingle or keyhole if he didn’t.

  Creditors are going to settle on that house like locust on ripe corn.”

  “Mortgage Hill, I’ll bet.”

  “Give the peeper a chocolate mouse; 222 Burgoyne Boulevard. Between an alderman and the president of Secord University. We don’t live right, Benny. You still at the hotel?”

  “Sure. They don’t bother me. The sheets are clean, and the music quits at midnight sharp.”

  “You’ll settle down one day. There’s a cunning skirt with your name on it heading your way. She’ll get you same as Shelley got me. Don t fight it. I never had it so good.”

  “Stop selling. I haven’t got time to settle down yet. How can I support a wife on what I make? A well-fixed private investigator is as rare as a wealthy panhandler.”

  “Maybe you’re too honest. Thought of that?”

  “Yeah, I’m not sharp enough to be crooked. Take this guy Geller. A scam like his took planning. No smash and grab. Dealing in mortgages, bonds, investments, stuff like that, and not keeping a record in your books. It’s easy to step into your own traps.”

  “You don’t give yourself credit, Benny. You’re swifter than you think. Savas and I’ve talked about it.” I was feeling a little warm where my tie was pulled too tight. I put my last sip of coffee in my mouth and let it chill all the way down.

  “Well, I’m not fast enough to make a successful villain. I’m not in Geller’s class.”

  “I don’t know. A little work and …”

  “Go to hell!”

  I tried to get the conversation bent back to the subject at hand, but Pete was stubborn sometimes. After all, I wasn’t even offering to pick up his share of the check. But before we even got to the point where I might have arm wrestled him for it, something on his belt had started beeping and that put an end to our conversation.

  I walked back to the office slowly thinking about a noisy glad-hander like Geller taking the Jewish community of Grantham for two point six million dollars. Why should a guy like Geller come into money like that, while I pick up nickels and dimes looking through keyholes and tracing people who’ve defaulted on their credit-card debts? How does a guy get the guts to pull off a scam like that? Does he keep up his courage with a vision of himself sipping long cool drinks on some southern marina with white-coated waiters fussing about the tilt of the awning over his table? When was I in Florida last? When was my last long cool drink? Was I going to make enough this month to sustain me through the dog days of summer?

  St. Andrew Street was a griddle, frying tires parked along its shadeless curve. Even the awnings in front of the stores seemed to be rationing the amount of shadow they cast. I looked across the road into the window of Cottonland Ltd. to see if I could see Geller’s reflection in the glass laughing a
t me for getting mixed up in his little gold mine.

  THREE

  It wasn’t a warm invitation I got from Mrs. Geller, it was more like come if you must, come while the fit is raging and get it over with. Even when I told her that I was acting on a request from the rabbi and the Jewish community, I felt like I was as welcome as an eviction notice. By the time I’d parked the Olds in the circular drive I’d worried the invitation into a “no trespassing” sign and when I heard the sound of chimes exploding on the other side of the uncompromising front door, I was ready for the old heave-ho at the very least. But within five minutes of being admitted and introduced, I had a rye and ginger ale in my hand and was sinking fast into a chintz-covered chair that felt like it had no bottom. There were two Mrs. Gellers in the room, and it took me a couple of minutes to figure out which was the much-abused Mrs. Larry Geller.

  This distinction belonged to the frail-looking beauty in a knitted casual suit of burgundy wool. I was able to put a price tag on it and found myself impressed. Those Saturdays helping out in my father’s store had taught me plenty, even if I hardly ever needed to draw upon the lore. She kept nervously brushing a wispy strand of strawberry hair out of her green eyes, and made passes at her drink with a very pretty mouth from time to time. The ice in the glass had melted, and it looked warm and watery in her long curved hand.

  “I should explain, Mr. Cooperman, that Debbie is both my sister and my sister-in-law, or I should say former sister-in-law. She was divorced from Larry’s brother Sid … How long is it, Deb? It’s nearly ten years, isn’t it?”

  “Ten years, on the nail. Is all of this information important, Mr. Cooperman? Would you like us both to give you a character sketch, or do you pick up that sort of thing from the neighbours?”

  “When I can’t get it from the servants,” I said, not much liking the sister.

  “Servants?” the sister snorted. “He must mean Bessie. She’s the cleaning woman, Mr. Cooperman, and she comes every Thursday at nine in the morning. Ruth’ll give you her address and phone number so you won’t cut into time she’s being paid for.”