Howard Engel: Dead and Buried

“What else have you got for me besides this? You have to admit that the cheque could be seen as the very opposite of what you’re saying just as well. What else is there?”

“Another cheque! I phoned Brian O’Mara-the other driver? — just to talk, you know? And I got another cheque a week later.”

“These things might not be related.”

“When they sent Jack’s things, there was another cheque, Mr. Cooperman. There’s a fishy smell to it. I watch TV. This has cover-up written all over it.”

I tried to explain to her about the differences between real life and television. She wasn’t listening. “Businesses do a lot of crazy things, Mrs. Dowden, but not all of them are illegal. Have you been threatened in any way? Have you been warned off?”

“I went up to the yard when it happened.”

“On the Scrampton Road?”

“Oh, you know the place?”

“A divorce case once took me up there.” It was a dusty road I wanted to forget. The memory of that case was still green and unpleasant.

“I took a taxi one day when I couldn’t stand it any more. Jack was the driver in our family, I never learned. I wanted to see the scene of the crime.”

“I hope you didn’t call it that.”

“Give me credit for some sense, Mr. Cooperman. I went in the gate at about noon and I was back on the road in less than ten minutes. Everybody I talked to was so polite and understanding and helpful that it made my head spin. Everybody was so kind, it made me sick. You know what I mean? I felt like I’d been handled, manipulated like a puppet. I still haven’t seen the place where it happened.”

“What do you think I can do?”

She looked at me like I’d been missing the point for the last half-hour. “You can go up there, can’t you? Say you’re taking a survey of some kind. A man can go places a woman can’t. You can get the other drivers talking. Don’t expect me to teach you your trade, Mr. Cooperman. Will you help out a poor widow woman?” She tried to look as pathetic as she sounded, but the phrase “widow woman” was overplaying her hand. Without a grey hair in her head and with a jaw that strutted its independence, she looked a lot of things, but helpless wasn’t one of them. I tried to imagine Irma Dowden in her prime: tiny, animated and cheeky. The late Jack Dowden had a formidable champion in his widow.

“What do you say to this?” I said. “Supposing I go up there to Kinross’s yard, supposing I dig around for a couple of days and come up with nothing more than a case of ptomaine poisoning from those fast-food outlets on the Scrampton Road. What then?”

“I can try somebody else. There are three other private investigators in the book, Mr. Cooperman.”

“Wherever you go, it’s going to cost you.” Irma moved the corners of her mouth. It wasn’t a smile, but maybe the ghost of one. “Mrs. Dowden, hiring a private investigator can run you into money. I hope you know that.”

“I’ve got his insurance money. I thought I could die of old age waiting, judging from the stories I’ve heard, but the company saw to it that the insurance was paid in record time.” I made a note of that on my pad. Something for the record books. “You know, Mr. Cooperman, Jack wouldn’t want me blowing his money on a big headstone. Whatever way I look, this is the best way to use all that money. Somebody killed Jack, you see. If you won’t help me find out who did it, I’ll find a detective who will. I’ll do it myself, if I have to.”

“My rates are three hundred and twenty-five a day plus expenses.” The hard numbers sometimes sober clients who are really playing around or looking for sympathy. Irma Dowden kept her steely eyes on mine. Never a wobble escaped her out-thrust chin. She reached into her black leather purse and left a flush of pink fifty-dollar bills on my desk. I felt guilty just looking at them. I didn’t have the nerve to pick them up and feel them in my fingers.

“I’ll want to ask you some more questions, Mrs. Dowden, after I’ve had a chance to think about the case as it is shaping up. How can I get in touch with you?” She gave me an address on Glen Avenue, off Hamilton Street, over on Western Hill, and a phone number. I was thinking how much bigger fifty-dollar bills look than twenties, when Mrs. Dowden got up. On the way to the door, she told me that she hoped I wouldn’t get hurt. I smile confidently at her as she headed for the stairs. As she went down them, I started feeling the pain in my nose where I’d been hit the last time I went through the gate that guarded the Kinross yard on the Scrampton Road.

Dr. Gary Carswell was not answering his telephone. I got a worn-out recorded message on his answering machine that was no asset to his practice. Even the beep at the end sounded like a badly administered hypodermic needle surprising a tenor in the rear. I left a message.

When Irma Dowden had left my office, I started wondering how badly I needed her money. There was something about what she’d told me that didn’t ring like my mother’s crystal wine glasses. I couldn’t put my finger on it, and hiked down James Street to the library. In the reference section, I looked up Kinross Disposals in a directory of Canadian businesses. The first news was good; there were no sign of Ross Forbes. He had been Chief Executive Officer at Kinross when I was acting for his estranged wife. The honcho of the moment was Norman Caine, who was new to my files, I was glad to note. That made me feel a little better about things. In the newspaper-and-periodical section, I went to the stack of old newspapers. My friend Ella Beames, who used to run the special collections department, and who had always been a big help to me in the past, before she retired to Newburyport, Massachusetts, told me that if you dug down deep enough in the stack of local papers, you could come up with the first in the series. They used to have a man on staff who pasted stiff paper on the insides of the covers of magazines and then carted them off unread to a vault somewhere, but they’d got rid of him. Here at the Grantham Library, library science was tempered by local need. Having the old papers on microfilm or in a warehouse on the bank of the Eleven Mile Creek met no local need, so, when you wanted to find an obituary, as I did, all you had to do was dig in. I dug in.

The date on Irma Dowden’s clipping had been July 16. I found the 12th, 13th and then the 14th and 15th, but no 16th. What was going on? I looked closer. The 15th was a Saturday. Of course, there was no Beacon on the 16th; it was a Sunday and there is no Sunday Beacon. That set me back, but I ploughed through the papers around my date and hoped for the best. Nothing. Not only couldn’t I find an obituary, or a notice of death, but I couldn’t even find the clipping I’d just read in my office. Things were moving in the direction of peculiar, and peculiar gives me gas.

After about ten minutes, I gave up the search. I knew it had something to do with the uneasy feeling I had about my client. I had to go along with the facts in the library: either the death of Jack Dowden hadn’t rated a word in the papers or it hadn’t occurred. If Jack’s death was phoney, why did the money his widow gave me look so real?

From one of the pay-phones in the lobby, where school kids were drinking pop from the refreshment stand, I made a call to Chet Bryant, the crown prosecutor. I identified myself to him, and he saw no reason why I shouldn’t be able to have a look at a copy of the Jack Dowden inquest transcript. After checking with his secretary to see if there was a copy in the files, he told me to come right over.

Shortly after that, I was sitting in Bryant’s outer office, staring at the date on the transcript, while his secretary prepared to leave the office for the day. I watched her clear her desk of every scrap of paper and rubber bands and turn the key in the drawer. I looked down on the open file on the death of Jack Dowden.