There was an Old Woman Read online

  “She was, ah, not sartorially in the same class with Dr. Chisholm, for example,” he said with a smile directed at the bench.

  “She was a sloppy dresser?” Webley asked.

  “She was a poor dresser. Personal hygiene was never one of her strong points.” Webley, who was wearing a polyester shirt, looked like he wanted to move on, but we both caught another attempt to get a smile from the coroner.

  “How did you come to have joint signing authority over her accounts at the Upper Canadian Bank?”

  Ramsden let a slow smile reveal his large, beaver-like front teeth. He sucked in air, and seemed to expand. His small eyes looked like they were about to be popped from the stretched skin of his face. His wispy moustache waved as he exhaled.

  “I don’t know where you got that idea. I never had any authority over any of her bank accounts.”

  “Yes, but she kept the bulk of her money in her safety deposit box. You had joint signing authority there, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, but her bank accounts were her own business.”

  “Do you know how much was in her savings account?”

  “I have no idea. I have a great many things pressing upon my attention. I don’t pretend to know everything.”

  “Would you be surprised to learn that Miss Oldridge had less than ten dollars in her accounts?”

  “If you say so, I suppose I’ll have to take your word.”

  “How did you become the executor of Miss Oldridge’s estate?”

  “Quite simply: she asked me.”

  “Under what circumstances?”

  “It was after a meeting of a society I founded, the Guild of the Venerable Bede. Miss Oldridge was a member, a member of long standing, if I remember aright. She used to sing the national anthem at our meetings. When she was younger, she had a remarkably beautiful voice.”

  “And?”

  “And she took me aside and asked if I would act as executor in the will she was having drawn up.”

  “You were one executor among several?”

  “No, young man, Miss Oldridge trusted me. I was the sole executor.”

  “You weren’t by any chance her lawyer too, were you?” Webley asked in what appeared to be an offhand way.

  “No, sir, I was not!” Ramsden shot back. The coroner frowned at Webley, but did nothing with the gavel he was holding.

  Ramsden was sweating under his black-and-white striped shirt. You could see his undershirt through the damp fabric. His blue blazer with a yacht club crest made him look quite the confident man about town.

  “Was it at that time that she asked you to enter into an agreement whereby it took both of your signatures to gain access to her safety deposit box?”

  “No. That came later, when she felt that her physical and mental powers were overtaxed. I reluctantly agreed, but only after convincing her to arrange to draw a regular allowance from her funds. She had the habit of turning all of her loose cash into term deposits, you see. She left herself short more than once. By my plan, she would have living money every week.”

  “Do you remember what amount?”

  “She liked to economize. She was a frugal woman.”

  “Please answer the question.”

  “I think the amount was set at sixty dollars a week. But she had the power to alter that at any time.’

  “Did she alter it?”

  “I have no information on that point, young man.”

  “If she had changed the amount, you would have had to come down to the bank, isn’t that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did you?”

  “I went to the bank several times, as I remember, and once to her lawyer’s when she signed her will.”

  “What bank and branch did she deal with?” Webley asked, pretending to look at a piece of paper. It was a trick he should have saved for a real trial. Here it didn’t mean anything.

  “We’re talking about the central branch of the Upper Canadian Bank on St. Andrew Street.”

  “Do you know the manager at that branch?”

  “Clarence Temperley has been the manager since Egerton Garsington died back in the late 1960s. I have my own accounts at that branch. Naturally, I know Mr. Temperley quite well.”

  “It would have been a help if Mr. Temperley could be reached to assist us in this inquest, Mr. Ramsden. Can you think of any reason why he has not come forward?”

  “Are you asking me to speculate, Mr. Webley?”

  “You needn’t answer that,” the coroner directed, giving Jack a dirty look.

  “This is the beginning of the holiday season, Mr. Webley,” Ramsden said. “Many people who have the means flee the inclement weather to warmer climes. And who can blame them?”

  I listened to a few more minutes of this, drawing an unpleasant picture of the witness from what he said himself, and then I went out the double back doors for a cigarette break. Of course, since I no longer smoke, it’s difficult to figure out what to do during a cigarette break. Chewing on cough candies is something one does in private with the knowledge of consenting adults. It’s a private vice and the less said about it, the better.

  I was crunching a Halls between my molars when I heard a voice calling me. “Cooperman! Benny Cooperman! What in hell’s name are you doing here?” I turned around and found myself staring into the worried little eyes of Stan Mendlesham of Newby, Boyle, Weaver and Mendlesham. They had an office across from St. Thomas’s Church on Ontario Street. The word on the street was that Mendlesham was a sham Mendlesham, that his name was simply Mendle. But I don’t know about that. If he was Jewish, he was even less observant than I was, which was going some. I thought I took the prize in non-attendance and un-belonging.

  “Benny! What brings you to coroner’s court on a cold, wet day like this?” Stan was a short, round man, with pear-shaped tones to match his figure. He fancied himself an orator, loved to make love to a jury. In fact, his whole approach to law was like courtship. He wooed jurors with winks and nods from the defence table, sent bouquets of lacy words over the crown attorney’s head to fall gently into the lap of each juror. He wore gold cufflinks and an expensive watch.

  “Just killing an hour, Stan. How about you?” Stan coughed into his fist and avoided my eyes.

  “I worked with Thurleigh Ramsden when I got my call to the bar,” he said. “That’s when Thurleigh made his big bid in politics. I kept his clients happy while he attended rallies and made speeches. I just came to see that he was well represented, that’s all. Call it curiosity.”

  Stan was showing stains under his arms that didn’t go with the weather. He was nervous about something.

  “Tell me, Stan, who drew up this will they were talking about?”

  Mendlesham shrugged. “Search me,” he said evasively.

  “What are the chances of criminal charges being laid after the inquest, Stan?” It was a naïve question on my part. It was just intended to keep the conversation going. I was surprised by his answer:

  “Who the hell tipped you off about this, Benny? What’s your game? What the hell do you think you know?” Stan glared at me like I had just corrected his grammar.

  THREE

  The weather was still spitting at me when I came out. For some reason it wouldn’t just rain; it had to play at being fog. There was a perversity about it that chilled my innards as I crossed the street at the light. I looked up Oldridge in the remaining shreds of a telephone book shackled to a pay-phone in the market behind City Hall. There she was:

  Oldridge E B 3 Brogan…..960-3829

  I tried to place Brogan Street and couldn’t. I’d look it up back at the office, I thought, as I continued up James Street. There was a crowd of people outside the seed store on King Street. A pre-Christmas special in tulip bulbs? I didn’t investigate.

  There were plywood hoardings nailed in front of the glass windows of the hardware store part-way down the next block. After more than one hundred years in business, Foley Bros. had closed its doors. E
verybody had been shocked. There had never been a time within living memory when you couldn’t buy a bag of three-inch nails or dry paint mix at Foley Bros. On a post next to the hoarding stood a sign I’d never noticed before: Brogan Street. It began just south of the empty hardware store. I worked less than a block away, but I’d never noticed.

  To be fair, Brogan Street was more an alley than a street. There were garbage cans, refuse carts and green garbage bags beside the back doors to the stores along St. Andrew Street. A deserted loading bay at the back of Foley’s had become an aerie for two yellow-and-black cats, who studied my progress through their territory with contained suspicion.

  The Oldridge house was the only building that fronted on this back alley. It was a broken-down, two-storey frame house with a tilting front porch and gable roof. I say the porch tilted; the whole building listed, inclined away from the perpendicular. Behind it I could see the lean-to-like summer kitchen with a shed behind that. The rear of the property was marked by a rotting board fence. The house had been painted white, but I doubted that the painter was still among the living. Great gaps in the paint curled back from the doorposts and siding, exposing weathered wood and constant neglect. The boards protested my weight on the porch as I tried the front door. I didn’t really expect to find anyone there, but I knocked anyway: a gesture of appeasement to the household gods.

  The door was locked, but it gave when I added a slight pressure to the rusty round doorknob. I pushed it open and my expectation of hearing the hinges squeak was satisfied. Inside, the place was a mess. Newspapers in stacks and in plastic bags stood against the walls as though they had been driven there by an internal blast of wind. The kitchen was large enough to accommodate a huge wood stove, which trailed black stove-pipes across the pressed-tin ceiling. Fly-paper strands dangled like spotted corpses from a ceiling lamp and from the stovepipes themselves. The sink was full of filth and dishes that were covered by a mossy fungus. I didn’t look too closely. In the centre of the floor stood a round wooden table with a faded oil-cloth or plastic covering. A spider had spun a web from an empty wine bottle to a plate on the table. On the plate, something moved, then ran along the table and down a leg. I stood back, trying to concentrate on the faded cloth lampshade that was barely attached to a tall floor-lamp from the thirties. Everywhere, the smell was poisonous.

  I shouldn’t go on describing the mess I encountered, but I became fascinated. “Mess” hardly covers the territory. I was looking at squalor that had the depth of many years behind it. The rats in the kitchen were generations removed from the pioneers who knew a good kip when they found one. The stench in the blocked plumbing was what my father used to call “pre-war,” which would have made it at least fifty years old. The bedroom at the back was a woollen mass of moths in bliss. A cloud of dust particles stood in a beam of light coming through the back window, revealing a view of outdoor plumbing just a block and a half away from City Hall. Light fell on a clot of discarded clothes and linen that had been pressed into a kind of felt on the floor near the bed. When something moved in the bed, I took it as a cue to leave bad enough alone. I tried not to run.

  Once out in the misty wet, I took a few deep breaths while looking back at the house. Something in me was delighted by the gall of the old lady to pull this off in the middle of Grantham. It takes courage to become an eyesore to all you meet. The house was a wooden sermon on the futility of storing up goods here on earth. Who, in his right mind, could have warned old Liz that she couldn’t take it with her?

  I rarely take a drink in the afternoon, but after walking through Liz Oldridge’s place, I needed one. The Nag’s Head was an English pub imitation that had come along some time in the sixties. It did well for a while with the young people, but finally it was left to a few regulars who used to haunt the old Harding House, until they pulled it down. It had a lot of engraved frosted glass on the outside and darts and half-timbering inside. Like all the places in town, they served the same draft beer and all the regular brands. They had tried fancy specialty beer, the imported and the locally made, but the customers only wanted the old stuff, the familiar amber glasses with a few bubbles moving up regularly to the tiny white head on top.

  I sat down at a round table near the dark-stained door and ordered a draft, which I downed in a gulp. Without comment, the waiter replaced it. As a non-serious beer drinker, I took my time with this one. It seemed thicker, more tepid, harder to get down, than the first. I looked around me to see who else could spare a few moments for a beer this soon after the beginning of licensed hours. I was curious. Against the wall sat a man whose face I’d seen before. It was a grey, lined face with red hair that had gone dusty instead of white. I guessed he was about ten years older than me, but, on him, it looked more. It took me a minute to remember that his name was Rupe (short for Rupert) McLay. A few of the boys at the registry office used to call him the “Philadelphia lawyer” and grin at one another. I guess they meant that at one time he appeared to be promising. And then he’d broken his promise. Isn’t that the way with promise?

  There were a string of empties on McLay’s table, which the waiter didn’t seem in a hurry to replace. He sat patiently, staring into his beer, not trying to locate the waiter in the room. When the waiter took away my next empty, I indicated the empty glasses across the floor. “Oh, him?” he said. “He only gets one trayful and then he’s washed up, old Rupe. He likes to sit and stare at them for a while, then he goes down to the library to have a nap. He’s got an office around the corner on King, but I guess they don’t let him sleep there.” I looked around at a few of the other customers, who appeared to be close to that happy state.

  There was a fug of warmth and cigarette smoke in the air that both cheered and relaxed me. I didn’t blame old Rupe either. Even staring into his last glass, at least he knew where he stood and that was something. Rupe looked like he’d just told himself a joke.

  Over behind the bar, a woman with red curls baked into her head was filling glasses from the draft tap for the solitary waiter, dangling a cigarette and squinting over her glasses at the Toronto paper. Wherever you lit up in this pub was the “Smoking Area.” A nice arrangement for everybody except a few of us reformed sinners.

  “I ain’t seen you in here before, Mr. Cooperman,” the waiter said, looking over my head at the door. “You celebrating the death of a rich relative?”

  “Does it take a death to get customers in here?”

  “Aw, we got enough business. You stay and see the lunch-hour traffic. We get the overflow from the Mansion House. And the nights! You wouldn’t believe.” The waiter’s flushed and pock-marked face was familiar. I’d seen that blowzy nose on St. Andrew Street for years, without ever knowing where it belonged. He should have worn a plaque on his chest that read: “I’ve been serving drinks to the thirsty and taking no guff since1952.”

  “I’ll remember that,” I said, returning to the here and now.

  “But to hear Ev talk, you’d swear we hadn’t had a customer for peanuts since Easter.” I glanced at the redhead reading her paper behind the bar. She had the concentration of a proofreader.

  “Naw,” the waiter continued, as though I was giving him an argument, “I’ve seen pubs of all sorts and this is making a living. What I meant before, Mr. Cooperman, is you must be off your trap-line. Never saw you in here, like I said.” He placed a third draft in the centre of my collection of beer rings on the Formica table.

  “I was doing some exploring in the alley,” I said. “Wanted to see where Liz Oldridge lived. I was at the inquest over at the court-house.”

  “Old Liz?” he said, the grin showing his fillings. “She was a real ringa-dang-doo in her day, was Liz.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “When she was younger, she used to keep a bunch of young boys on her place, looking after it and all. Orphans, some of ’em, and nobody looked too close at what was happening besides spring cleaning.”

  “That must have been a long time ago. I
just saw inside the house.”

  “Oh, yeah. Police had to put a stop to her. Never got in the papers on account of her father being an alderman and her grandfather a judge. Liz went funny after that, though. Well, I mean, you can see by the look of her house, can’t you? ‘Funny,’ you know what I mean?”

  I had settled in my chair to hear more about the late Liz Oldridge, when an attractive woman in her early forties came into the pub. Without letting her eyes get accustomed to the gloom, she walked directly to Rupe McLay’s table, where she hovered, observing him without saying anything. From where I sat, she looked worth Rupe’s time. In his place, I would have looked up from the empty glasses. She was wearing expensive clothes, a steel blue suit that hadn’t been made on this continent, but the effect was untidy. She had the look of a woman who had thrown herself together in a hurry. Her jacket hung unfastened and the blouse had been buttoned wrong: I could see a glimpse of white and a pucker of flesh through the gap. She was breathing hard. The waiter winked at the woman behind the bar. To me he said: “Antonia Wishart,” as though that explained everything.

  “Who?”

  “Missus money-britches. You know: Harlan Ravenswood’s girl. Mrs. Orv Wishart.”

  “Oh!” I said, mainly to stop the bombardment. “That Antonia Wishart. Glad to know.” The Ravenswoods were the local media family: they owned the Beacon and the radio and TV stations.

  She stood watching Rupe inspect his rare collection of empty crystal goblets for a few minutes before saying his name gently. His chin came up. There was no smile on his face. Who likes being found out, traced to one’s hideaway, photographed in living colour with one’s pants down? Not McLay, anyway. Soon they were yelling at one another. Soon there was broken glass on the floor and Antonia Wishart was heading for the door full of sudden resolve and anger, while McLay ordered more beer with a smile that successfully covered his anger and guilt. The waiter brought a single draft and swept up the glass.

  I went over to the bar to talk and buy some chips. From the woman behind it I learned some home truths about the idiocy of some women who have it in their minds to save some men from themselves. I also learned that Ev, short for Evelyn, wasn’t herself but her absent husband. She was May. She had married Ev after the Renovation. She said Renovation like it was the Renaissance or the Inquisition. She also confided that Bill, the waiter, was depressed because Ev intended to close down the pub in the New Year. I got her talking about Liz Oldridge.