The Whole Megillah Read online

  ‘Who knew you had the book?’

  ‘Every dealer and collector in North America. There was a lot of pressure for me to sell it. There were earlier attempts at getting the Gerson, but I managed to hide it well enough so that they couldn’t find it. There were two earlier break-ins. One through a side window and another forced the front door.’

  ‘Why wasn’t the book in its hiding place on the night it was taken?’

  ‘I’m afraid I’d been showing it off to a friend of mine that afternoon. The break-in occurred while I was asleep in another part of the house. I’m a notoriously deep sleeper. I once slept through an earthquake in Mexico City.’

  ‘Of course the police were brought in?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then what do you want an out-of-town private investigator playing around with this for? I’d say you are in good hands. The cops can put a lot of men on a case like this. It’s right up their street. It’s not like a murder with the papers and TV sticking their tape recorders in front of them all the time. Nobody gets all that excited about a missing book. And that gives the cops elbow room so they can get on with the job of finding it.’

  ‘Are you saying you’re not interested in taking the case?’

  ‘I’m trying to save you some money, Mr. Moore. I know borscht about the world of book collectors and fine editions and all that stuff. I wouldn’t know a megillah from a first edition of a Superman comic.’

  ‘Action Comics, June 1938.’

  ‘Ha! You know your Superman! My father had a copy of that when he was a kid.’

  ‘That, too, is worth money.’

  ‘My mother threw it out, along with the first Batman.’

  ‘May 1939. Detective Comics.’

  ‘Mr. Moore, I’m trying to turn you down! You’re not making it easy.’

  ‘Do both of us a favour and take the job,’ he said. ‘I think that with you on the case, the thief will make a move. The book world is in a state of equilibrium, Benny. It’s all balanced. If I make a move, they’ll know about it in New York and London. When the thief makes his move, somebody like you’ll be more likely hear about it before the cops will.’

  ‘I doubt that,’ I said, taking another bite of rye bread. I saw his face cloud over with a frown, so I took a breath. ‘But I won’t argue with you. After all, you’re a pal of Sam’s, aren’t you?’

  ‘I don’t want this to be a favour. I expect to pay you for what you do.’

  Here I recited my rates to him, just in case the numbers might sober him. A lot of people like to tell their secrets to a private investigator just to get things off their chest. They don’t really want you to do anything. The numbers usually bring them back to their senses. In that way we offer a kind of psychiatric service, for which the Ontario health insurance plan pays nothing.

  When he simply nodded at the numbers and pulled out his chequebook, I felt backed into a corner: my time was about to be mortgaged. And all I could do about it was to sit there watching him write the cheque out, shake it in the air and hand it over.

  Chapter Three

  Anna Abraham and I sat at a counter on tall red stools in the rear of the Cinnaroll Gourmet Bakery and Deli, sipping café au lait. We had just come from a double bill at the Bloor Cinema, where we’d seen Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Bandwagon. It was peculiar programming, but it suited this weird town. Anna particularly liked ‘The Girl Hunt’ ballet at the end of the musical. She told me it had been written by Alan Jay Lerner, who wrote Brigadoon and My Fair Lady. I pass this along at no extra charge.

  ‘So what have you found out?’ she asked.

  ‘The depth of my ignorance of the rare book business. That’s about all. I went around Moore’s place to see where the break-in occurred. A French window had one of its glass panels broken so that the thief could open up the door from the inside. It wasn’t really a scene-of-the-crime location any more. It had all been cleaned up and the broken panel replaced. I tested the putty; it was fresh.’

  ‘You know there are excellent libraries at the university. You can find out what you need to know about rare books from the Robarts or the Thomas Fisher libraries. My friend Richard Glendon will be glad to help you out if you get in too deep.’

  ‘It’s not so much the rare book part of this deal that bothers me as the ordinary things that go on in the book trade. It’s not like ladies’ ready-to-wear, is it?’

  ‘That’s why it’s so fascinating, Benny.’

  ‘My education always seems to be just beginning.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Benny. You know more than you think you do about almost everything. You keep on surprising me, for one. What do you make of your client?’

  ‘Moore? He’s an elderly hippie, I think. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him wearing a bandana around his head or flowers in his hair. He seems straight enough, as far as I can tell. You, by the way, are looking particularly good this evening.’

  ‘Thanks for the non sequitur. It’s for things like that that I drag myself from hairdresser to hairdresser. And speaking of hairdressers, I think I’ve found somebody I’m going to try to take back to Grantham with me. He’s a Spanish part-time actor with flashing eyes.’

  ‘I’m jealous as hell, but I still think you look wonderful.’ She was, in fact, looking great in her summer candy-striped cotton dress and white sandals. I walked her back to the apartment she was subletting on Prince Arthur. It was a cool night with a bite of late summer muted under the shade of the high maples. Anna’s hand brushed against mine and I caught it. We walked that way around the semi-circular approach to the front door. It was several hours later that the gerbils welcomed me home by running around the wire wheel in their cage.

  For two days I read what I could about rare books, both at the Metro Library and at the university. It rained all day Wednesday and Thursday morning--the end of a dry spell. I wasn’t unhappy to be indoors and missing the weather. There is something unfriendly about a strange house--too many empty rooms. I took to haunting the second floor at Book City: there was a round table where I could work quietly without getting the fish-eye from any of the staff. Whenever I felt guilty, I found a detective novel I’d missed and bought it, remembering to enter it in my list of expenses as ‘rent.’ Among the things I discovered in my research was the fact that while the Gerson Soncino Megillah was obscure to me, and maybe most of the world, it was well known to collectors and other learned buffs. The books confirmed what Moore had told me, adding that the thing hadn’t been seen since a sale in London in 1919. No wonder collectors were hungry to get their hands on Moore’s copy.

  After feeding the livestock and watering those plants that required a mid-week wetting, my third day on the job, I opened the Globe and Mail and promptly spilled coffee all over page six. It carried an account of the death of my client, Tony Moore:

  Book Dealer Found Slain

  In Annex Home

  Police are investigating the death of Anthony Blake Moore of Albany Avenue, Toronto, this morning, after his body was discovered by Roberta Koughnet, his cleaning woman, early yesterday. Detective Sergeant C.R. Pepper said that the death is being treated as a homicide and that a further statement would be made after a post mortem report from the Forensic Centre was in the hands of the Metro Police. Pepper also stated that a rifle from a collection owned by the deceased is being examined at the Forensic Centre...

  The article went on to tell about the esteem in which Moore was held by the reading community, but shed no further light on his murder. There were no children and his wife, Honour, was described as ‘estranged.’ I wondered whether or not I should tell the cops what I knew about Moore’s last few days. I always try to stay on the good side of the law. The fact that I’m more often at odds with them is just bad luck. Nobody ever condemned my good intentions. As I put a fresh toiletpaper cylinder into the gerbil cage, I decided that the sooner I talked to the investigating officers, the better.

  I was a little surprised to find that I ha
d felt nothing more than mild shock over Moore’s sudden departure from the living. I mopped up the spilled coffee, wondering if that was going to be the high point of my grief. I’d lost clients before, but this was getting ridiculous. Maybe I was relieved to be rid of the responsibilities he had given me. As I refilled my cup, I was aware of an insistent pang: it wasn’t for Moore, but for the loss of my place at the round table on the second floor at Book City.

  I shaved and put myself in order in the vast upstairs bathroom. It had more heavy white porcelain in it than a museum devoted to ceramics. The large mirror over the sink showed more of me than I wanted to see following a dose of bad news. Red marks on my cheeks, new lines under my eyes. I did the necessary and got out of there. I’d left a trail of pebbles on the floor on my way in, so I was able to find the door.

  Albany Avenue was only two blocks from Brunswick. I walked up to Barton and through the somewhat muddled street arrangements south of a big church in the block between Howland and Albany. It was the only place I knew where cars routinely ignored a one-way sign in order to continue along Barton. On foot, of course, it made no difference.

  It was no great test of detective skills to find out which house had become ‘the scene of the crime.’ Two police cars were parked on the wrong side of the street and a small group of sightseers was loitering near them, watching for the slightest movement of a curtain or the shift of a blind. A man with a camera around his neck was talking to a policeman on the front steps. I went up and introduced myself to the man in uniform. Five minutes later, I was sitting in Moore’s living room, exactly where I’d been sitting last Tuesday when the deceased offered me a drink. This time I was offered nothing more than a portion of couch and the opportunity to twiddle my thumbs waiting for Detective Sergeant Chuck Pepper of the Homicide Squad. I told him quickly about my meeting with Moore and in broad outline the work he had asked me to do for him. He gave no indication of whether any of this was news to him. You get to expect that from the professionals. Information is the coin of the realm and nobody gives change. In the end he thanked me for coming forward and relaxed enough to light a cigarette.

  Automatically, I reached into my own pocket. It was a reflex. I’d stopped smoking, but I still had the habit. I brought out a Hall’s cough candy and sucked on that. It wasn’t as good as a smoke, but it was what I was doing these days. Like a member of AA, I never said I wouldn’t start smoking again; I just tried to keep myself away from tobacco one day at a time.

  Pepper seemed to find his cigarette very satisfying. I let him know he was enjoying it for both of us. That was a good move. He began to loosen up and talk to me instead of asking questions from behind a barricade.

  ‘The paper said that the murder weapon was a rifle from his collection?’ I tried to make it sound like a question, just to see what kind of answer it was likely to get.

  ‘The Globe just hinted that. We are keeping mum about the cause of death right now. We sent the broken stock of the gun to see what Forensics could tell us. You can see where he kept his guns.’ I followed Pepper’s pointed finger to a wall where a group of expensive-looking, hand-made guns hung in a row. The pegs where one gun was missing made its own mute comment.

  I couldn’t understand collectors. How could they go from guns to rare books? How could the mind that enjoyed illuminated initial letters also admire tools for casting musketballs or tin soldiers?

  ‘Are you saying that the gun wasn’t fired?’ I asked Pepper.

  ‘That, my friend, is the main thing we are not saying, if you follow me. I reckon we might catch a monkey that way as well as another.’

  ‘Were any more of his rare books taken?’ I asked.

  ‘We’ve got somebody checking into that,’ Pepper said, putting his notebook down on the arm of his chair. His close-cropped, steel-grey hair made him look like an American career officer, but there was a slight English turn to his speech. It wasn’t exactly an accent; it was his way of putting words together that gave him away.

  ‘Any objections to my seeing where it happened?’

  ‘As long as it’s for your own prurient satisfaction, Mr. Cooperman. I don’t want to think of you as the competition. As long as you have that straight.’

  ‘I told Moore that you were the only show in town when I saw him last Tuesday. I told him he shouldn’t be hiring a rent-a-cop like me when you were on the job.’

  ‘Sure, but we needed him to die before we could go to work.’

  ‘I mean your breaking and entering specialists.’

  ‘Sorry, I don’t follow you.’ He looked puzzled.

  ‘Well, you know that last week, Saturday to be exact, he was robbed of a valuable book.’

  Pepper’s face went blank like a TV channel after sign-off. I shut up, because I’m sure he wouldn’t have taken in what I said. Gradually, I could see blood flowing above his collar-line as his face returned to its customary pink. He blinked and gave a nervous grin. ‘Let’s have that again, please.’

  I explained what I had thought he would have known already. I was wrong, it would seem, because he questioned me closely. As far as he knew, there had been no report of a theft from this Albany Avenue address. Moore had been robbed of a next-to-priceless book, but he hadn’t reported it to the police!

  Chapter Four

  Honour Griffin didn’t look more than thirty from where I was sitting. She was tall and, from a strictly male point of view, very pleasantly put together. With long flaxen hair, green eyes and a face that could have added a few ships to the fleet that Helen launched against Troy, she was, in a word, a knock-out. She was wearing a loosely knitted grey sweater that was too large for her. Her long legs were wrapped in faded jeans. She had a way of pulling at a lock of hair near her ear that I found easy to concentrate on. Sergeant Pepper introduced us as soon as he returned to the room with her. Her walking into the house had interrupted Pepper’s questioning for less than three minutes. Obviously, with her entrance, I was returned to the live box with the rest of the small fry.

  ‘Mr. Cooperman was doing some work for your husband,’ he explained simply. She nodded with a certain indifference. Obviously, this was not as big a moment for her as it was for me. But then, I hadn’t just become Tony Moore’s widow. I wondered whether an estranged wife can become a first-class widow with no points taken off. I expressed my regrets at her loss and told her that I would be glad to do anything I could to clear up the matter of Moore’s death. She frowned, not unpleasantly, in my direction.

  ‘Do you know about the theft that took place here last week?’ Pepper asked her. She shook her head.

  ‘I didn’t see Tony last week,’ she said. ‘I talked to him briefly on the phone, but that’s all.’

  ‘Then you know nothing, or very little, about who Mr. Moore was seeing during the last few days.’

  ‘That’s right. We were going through a bad spell. To make it bearable, we kept our distance from one another.’

  ‘Did he have any enemies that you know about?’

  ‘He had business rivals, if that’s what you mean. Most of them would not, I think, include murder in a normal business day.’

  I wanted her to name these rivals, but I thought that by keeping my mouth shut I might get to hear more. I couldn’t understand why Pepper was letting me hear this much. It didn’t sound like routine practice to me. But what do I know? Maybe the antics of my friends Savas and Staziak at Niagara Regional Police are not typical of policemen in general, just the aberrations of working in a community as small as Grantham, where a secret lasts only half an hour on a rainy day.

  But so far, Pepper was asking good questions. I simply made a mentallist of the ones I would have added and tried to disappear into the chintz fabric of the couch.

  ‘May I ask where you are living, Mrs. Moore? Or is it Griffin?’

  ‘I get both and answer to both. Neither is my maiden name. I have a condominium on Walmer Road.’ She gave him the number and he wrote it down along with the telephone number,
which she also sup plied. I tried to put both of them into my memory bank, since I didn’t want to risk bringing out a pencil.

  ‘Then I take it that your estrangement from Mr. Moore was not recent?’

  ‘We’ve been living apart for more than a year. Do I have to go into that?’ Here she threw me a helpless glance, as though I was suddenly an adjudicator of what was fair police practice. Was she some sort of masochist trying to get me to play ‘good cop’ to Pepper’s ‘bad’?

  ‘It would help the investigation, Mrs. Moore. I’m sure that Mr. Cooperman would excuse himself for a few minutes.’ I knew it was too good to last. I got up and backed my way through the study and out the French doors into the garden. My place was taken by a broad-hipped policewoman in uniform who’d just come into the house. Pepper gave her a grin of welcome.

  Outside in the back yard I could almost hear Moore standing at my elbow, showing me where the robbery had occurred. I looked again at the door I’d just come through. The newly repaired glass panel was shattered again. It was as though the thief who had taken the megillah had come back in order to kill Moore and had repeated his steps exactly. I turned around again and sat on the steps. I reached into my pocket for my cigarettes and brought out the inadequate substitutes. I peeled the paper from a cough candy and put it in my mouth.

  In the flower bed to the left of the steps, something caught the light. As I moved my head again, it flashed in the sunlight. I got down on all fours and looked among the fading black-eyed Susans. What I found were broken pieces of window glass. There were four fairly big fragments. I kept my fingerprints away from them, but I got as close as I could without looking like I was hunting for worms. The glass shards were all spotted from the recent rains. What were they doing there? Had Moore thrown them there when he fixed the window after the first break-in? Had the workmen who fixed the glass? Hardly likely, I thought.