The Memory Book Page 8

  “But not enough to forget to drop off my dirty underwear. Did I ever mention a girl named Rose or Rosie?”

  “Dear, you just asked us that. No, Benny, we don’t know of a Rose or Rosie in your life. But there’s lots about your life that’s a mystery since you stopped living at home.”

  I tried to recall asking them the question about Rosie for the first time, but my mind was a blank. I wondered whether there were new holes in my head developing every hour. Was I in some kind of diminishing spiral of forgetfulness? Was my memory leaking out of me like oil from the elderly transmission in the Olds? It was probable. I knew that I’d have to think about it. If I didn’t forget to.

  THIRTEEN

  That night, I slept with the damned dream again. It was like spending the night with an unwanted mistress, except that I hadn’t gone sour on her, I’d never wanted her in the first place. Maybe I picked the wrong image, mistresses being somewhat out of my line. Still, maybe you get my meaning.

  The dream had become a familiar obsession. Not only was it unwelcome, it was also boring. Nobody ever says or writes that about an obsession. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll had many emotions awakened when he turned into Mr. Hyde, but he never spoke of boredom. He never said, “Oh, no! Not this boring old charade again!” Did Jack the Ripper mutter that to himself when he felt the urge for a stroll in Whitechapel? Was there an element of boredom mixed in with the release of sexual tension?

  I knew that the dream probably held more clues for me, but I was still unable to decode them. Maybe solving this required a more intuitive kind of perception than I could provide. Introspection had never been my strong suit. I went over the details of the dream again in my head, while staring up at the irregularities in the ceiling and letting the curtain tracks carry me away from sense, logic, and deduction. My little grey cells had to do this, but they had to do it on their own. My memory had become like a sunspot. The act of looking at it burned it away in a flash.

  Through the doorway, I could hear two nurses comparing holiday information. One was just back from the Islands, and the other was drinking in the news of the place.

  “You got to get yourself some time back home, girl. Quality time, you hear? They still running cheap charters. No sense letting yourself grow strange, girl.”

  “Catch me getting on a plane these days! A woman can die of old age trying to get through Immigration.” I let their voices drift out of sense, but allowed the silvery, keyboard sounds to wash over me as my mind went slack again.

  When I next saw the light, it was electric and coming from my neighbour’s overhead fluorescent tubes. I had been dreaming about Rose. She had come up the long flight of stairs leading to my office on St. Andrew Street. I heard her knock at my door. A diffident knock. So many of my cases began with a knock like that. Rose came in. She was young and unsophisticated. Nervous, anyway; uncertain of herself calling on a private investigator. I got up from my chair, rounded the desk, and directed her to the chair facing my desk. I’d done this a million times and it was easy to imagine.

  Where did we go from here? I thought. Clients usually began by telling me how they had come to select me from the short list of investigators in the Yellow Pages. “My doctor suggested you; my brother; my boss.” Did Rose give me such a yarn? I couldn’t come up with anything here that might help. And if it had to do with something criminal, why had she come to me and not to the police? Maybe it had to do with her love life. That was a good bet; most of my business has to do with love lives pushed out of shape or out the window. I fished with that promising bait for a few minutes and then discarded the notion. My Rose had her head screwed on solidly. She wasn’t being jerked around by a gold digger or left pregnant with only dud promises to see her through to her due date.

  Rose was taking shape in my mind, if not in reality. Rose had a problem, sure, but it wasn’t her own. She was worried about somebody close to her. Her boyfriend? Her brother? Somebody she cared about but who wasn’t looking after himself? She had a vulnerable friend, someone in danger. How far could I get trying to imagine my client? I couldn’t even be sure there was a client. Still, lying there in bed, I knew she was becoming real to me. She had had grit enough to look up my name and address. She had weathered the steep climb to my door. Rosie wasn’t just anybody; she was a force to reckon with. Rose was a client. My client!

  Rose’s problem brought me to Toronto, to the edge of the university campus. Toronto? If she lived in Toronto, why bother coming all the way to Grantham to knock on my door? She might have come from Grantham, known about me from Grantham, but Toronto was where the problem was. Toronto was often the problem. Silver City had a lot to answer for. Was my retainer that much cheaper than Toronto PIs’ rates? Unlikely. So, what did we have? Rosie lives in Toronto, but hasn’t done so for long; her roots are still firmly in the soil of Grantham. She could be a student. Maybe she lives in that residence. No, it’s a senior graduate student residence. My Rosie’s an undergraduate. But maybe her friend, the one she’s worried about, lives there. I made a note to get a list of the people staying there.

  The phone rang. I kept forgetting I had one. It never occurred to me to make a call of my own. The very idea of hunting for a name and number with my flawed brain filled me with terror, but the relatively simple task of finding the telephone instrument and lifting it to my ear shouldn’t have daunted me. I picked it up.

  “Hello, Benny? Is that you?” I knew the voice at once.

  “Martha!” It was Martha Tracy from Grantham. The woman whose name I had been trying so hard to remember.

  “I’m glad you called! You can’t know how good it is to hear a voice from home.”

  “Hell, Benny, in your state you’re happy to hear any voice. That former layabout, your landlord, honked the expensive horn on his Rolls at me while I was crossing Queen Street. He put his head out the window to tell me what had happened to you. But you know how Kogan always gets things twisted, so I did my own digging. Got your pals in blue, Staziak and Savas, to add the icing. That’s how I got your number. How are they treating you?”

  It was a real delight to hear Martha again. She had helped me with one of my first cases, and ever since, I’d kept picking her brain whenever I got stuck. Martha was the true essence of Grantham: friendly, nosy, and comfortable. Kogan, my landlord, was a former panhandler who used to work the crowd shopping along St. Andrew or Queen Streets. He was once a public eyesore. Now he was living proof that being lucky still beats out being enterprising. Hearing his name and Martha’s voice suddenly made me want to see St. Andrew Street again and feel the familiar pavement under my feet. But it all seemed so far away and so long ago.

  “Benny? Are you still there or have they carted you off to the operating room?”

  I grunted a response.

  “What I mean to say is,” she continued, “are you managing? Do you need anything? Because unless you need me bad, I’m going to open another bottle of beer. That’s my formula for beating the hot weather. Okay?” I’d forgotten all about weather. It didn’t exist here.

  “It’s good to talk to you, Martha. I’ve missed you. I need my Martha fix.”

  “Now you tell me! Where were you when I needed you?”

  “Martha, you don’t need anybody. You’re an established institution.”

  “M’yeah. Don’t let the bright paint fool you, Benny. I’m running short of durability. I’ve lost three drinking companions in seven months. If I look at somebody, she has to go into hospital; if I shake hands, she drops dead. People clear the room when they see me coming. I’m not counting your cop friends, Staziak and Savas. They told me straight out that they get danger pay when I turn up.”

  “How are they?” Staziak and Savas were the cops I got to do my detecting for me. I went to public school with Pete Staziak.

  “They live under the threat of being forced to take up honest employment. They’re aging fast. They told me your office was tossed by the crowd that tried to do you in. Is that
right, Benny?”

  “Martha, you’re way ahead of me on that. I don’t even know what my blood pressure is. Can’t remember details any more.”

  “You always were more of an idea man than an encyclopedia. But really, Benny, is there anything I can do? Short of cooking and baking, that is. I don’t run to canapés or chocolate cake. Try salted peanuts and I’m yours forever.”

  “Martha, I can’t tell you how good it is to have you to talk to. Around here I get the ‘Mr. Cooperman’ treatment, which gives me gas. There’s such a thing as too much respect.”

  “M’yeah. I’ve had my share of that, too. Whenever I hear the word ‘ma’am,’ I look around for the arresting officer. The break-in at your office was in the paper. And your friend Staff-Sergeant Savas has one of his theories. But he won’t tell anybody what it is until he’s proven right.”

  I had always loved Martha’s line of talk. She could strip the egotistical barnacles off the hulls of the worst of our politicians. I wish she would.

  “Martha, did you get a call from my mother?” Two ideas were colliding in my head: one was about something Martha had just said, the other was why she had picked this moment to call me. Just then, one of the questions was lost.

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Have you talked to my mother?”

  “Well … yes. Seems to me she called. Just to keep me in the picture, you know?”

  “Yeah, I know.” My mother should be running the Secret Service. She’s like an iceberg: you only see a small fraction of what’s there.”

  “Benny? Did you hang up?”

  “Martha, I’ve been trying to place a name.”

  “Hell, I do that all the time. Is that all that’s bothering you?”

  “It’s the name of a local girl, I think. Someone with a connection to me and my job. It may be important. Could you spare it some thought?”

  “Benny, I’ll take a crack at anything. You know me. Are you going to tell me the name, or do you want to include that in the puzzle, too?”

  “Sorry, Martha. I’m getting forgetful in my old age. The name is Rose. Or Rosie. Something like that.”

  “What’s the last name?”

  “Rose or Rosie is all I’ve got. There has to be a Grantham connection somewhere and a Toronto one.”

  “You know this isn’t going to be easy?”

  “That’s why I asked you, Martha.”

  “Flattery’ll get you everywhere, young man. Let me think: Rose or Rosie.” Martha’s talk broke down into internal rumblings, fragmented words, and phrases. I thought I could actually hear her teeth grinding at one point. The silence, such as it was, was a prolonged one, the sort that would make a calm man nervous. I held on, said nothing, believing that the best encouragement was my held breath. The first silence blended into a second, punctuated over the phone by noises of an indeterminate sort. Then:

  “Benny, didn’t you once cross swords with Stella Seco? She now calls herself Vanessa Moss in LA and Toronto. Thinks it sounds more professional. Remember, she had you jumping through hoops in Toronto for a few weeks last year?”

  “Sure, I remember her. I’m still wearing the scars. What does she have to do with Rose?”

  “She has a daughter with that name. Her father was a radio announcer. Paul. Paul Moss. His voice was so deep you got the bends from listening to him. Yes, their daughter was called Rose. She’d be in her early twenties. Did you ever meet her?”

  “Stella would never have admitted to me or to anyone else that she had a grown-up daughter. That’s not her style. If she’s in her twenties, she could be in university. Thanks, Martha, you just might have found the name I’m looking for.”

  “Well, it won’t have been the first time. Benny, I’ll talk to you again. My cigarettes are in the other room and I’ve smoked this one down to my knuckles. G’bye, you little devil. Keep in touch.”

  Stella Seco. I hadn’t spared her much thought since I stopped working for her. As I told Martha, I still wore the scars from that job. She was a bloodless television executive whose houseguest had been murdered. For a while, the cops thought that she was the victim. Then they thought she was the murderer. Well, I helped sort that out. That case also took me up to Muskoka, the resort community a hundred miles north of here. I still dream about the little cottage Stella owns on the lake. At night, I sometimes get myself to sleep just by thinking of that place on the water.

  For a few minutes, I stared at the hospital across the street. The wing in which I had been born was being demolished. It was making way for a newer idea of what a progressive hospital wing should be. From my present location on the fifth floor, and with heavy traffic running between us night and day, it was hard to miss the significance or the irony. But what could I do about it? I thought my mind could no longer deal with subtle things like irony.

  Two of my therapists came looking for me. It seemed to me that they were always looking for me. One was for speech and the other was an occupational therapist. They wanted to know why I didn’t love them any more, why I was ignoring my time scheduled with them. I tried to explain that I was diseased in the mind and that my memory had largely vanished. I could see that irony wasn’t their first language, so I switched to an abject apology. They bought that conditionally, the condition being that I would make time to see them later in the day. I forget what the arrangement was, but it seemed to be a happy solution all around. I have a feeling that I’ve told you this already. I may have. The truth is that I can’t remember.

  When they had gone, I thought of all of the strings I was trying to manipulate from this hospital room. Anna was checking into my office, Martha had already come through for me, and maybe the Toronto cops would share more information before too long. In a peculiar way, I was sitting pretty. I was just trying on a big grin for size when a thought hit me from behind: everything was coming up roses, but where was Rosie? Had she come to see me? No. Not once in … in … how many weeks? If Rose was my client, where was she? Had she gone off to hire an investigator whose head wasn’t mended with sticking plaster? Now it wasn’t her presence that was bothering me, but her absence. And I couldn’t see anything good coming of that.

  I picked up the phone and dialled 411 and asked for the number of the office of Vanessa Moss, of the National Television Corporation, where Vanessa Moss worked. The operator did not play games with me. Without a quip or epigram, she passed along the main number. The next operator turned out to be the witty one. But I survived that and soon had Stella, sounding like her suspicious self, at the end of my ear.

  “Benny Cooperman? I don’t believe it! We have finished doing business together. The job I hired you for is over and paid for. A year ago! Thank you very much, and goodbye!”

  “Wait a minute! Remember we grew up together. Remember Grantham Collegiate?”

  “I’ve cut all my connections to Grantham, and your name was at the top of my list. We are no longer romping around at the collegiate. This isn’t the Diana Sweets on St. Andrew Street. Now take my name out of your book. Get out of my life. If you think you’ve got an idea for a TV series, sell it to somebody else. You’ve got enough chutzpah for—”

  “Both of us. I didn’t call to rekindle old acquaintance, Stella. I’m not selling an idea for a sitcom. I don’t want to do lunch. I want to talk about Rose.”

  “Rose? What about my daughter?” Her voice was different now, not quite unguarded, but I’d chipped through the enamel.

  “When did you last talk to her?”

  “Why, we … She is in summer school.”

  “Where?”

  “Why, U of T. Here in Toronto.”

  “Is she living with you?”

  “Of course not. She kept her room in residence. She didn’t want to stay with me, and frankly, I didn’t want her around. My life is all business, Benny. I didn’t want to deal with …” She was protesting too much and she knew it. Like the television producer she was, she went on to “take two.”

  “I’m
not the mothering sort, Benny. You know that. She has her own friends. She’s in that new residence, the one that won all the architecture awards.”

  “Clarendon House? Under the O?” It was a guess, a leap in the dark.

  “How did you know?”

  “Because a professor was murdered there. I’ve got to talk to Rose. She may be in danger. Where is she?”

  “Well, we had breakfast together, if you must know. We often do. As a matter of fact … As a matter of fact …” She stopped talking and that meant her twisted, scheming brain was working. “Benny, why are you, of all people, suddenly interested in my daughter?”

  “Stella, the professor who was killed knew Rose. There may be a connection, and that means danger for Rose.” I couldn’t swear to that, but it seemed an inference worth cultivating. I didn’t want to confess that Rose might be my missing client.

  “What do you know about her? The dead professor? This is the first I’ve—”

  “Stella, I—”

  “Why do you always irritate me? You know my legal name is Vanessa Moss. Stella belongs to the buried past. You didn’t question cheques with my preferred name on them.”

  I don’t know why I kept hitting her with her discarded name. Maybe I was a bully at heart. Maybe because it was the only predictable hold I had on her. It kept alive the Grantham connection.

  “Vanessa, please humour me. I need to find Rose.”

  “Why should I tell you, the most disloyal, argumentative, stubborn man on earth?”

  “Because I’m interested enough to ask. Because you know it’s not idle curiosity. Because you love your daughter. Because I might know something. Just because.”

  There was a pause as she looked for a loophole.