Howard Engel - Dead and Buried

“Oh! Mr. Cooperman! I didn’t expect to see you again so soon. Don’t you ever sleep?” A dog shoved its nose into the four- or five-inch gap Irma Dowden had made between the door and the jamb. It started barking at me. In that quiet part of town it sounded like an explosion. “Get back, Ralph! Get back!” Ralph was a small poodle, who found something fascinating about my right pantleg. That was better than big dogs; their interest is higher up. “Come in, Mr. Cooperman. Get down, Ralph! Let him be!”

She opened the door the rest of the way and I followed her past a tiny telephone nook into the living-room, where the TV was flashing the image of a familiar face reading the news. The pick of Woolworth’s art department decorated the walls. Mrs. Dowden motioned me to sit on a long venerable couch, and she joined me on the companion over-stuffed chair. Ralph watched me from the floor, then jumped up on the couch, where he settled after walking around in a tight circle. I think he curled his lip at me as he tucked his snout between his short legs.

I tried to find any signs of Jack Dowden in the room, but apart from a photograph that I took to be him, standing on the mantel above an artificial fireplace, the male touch was totally missing from the decor. The picture looked fairly recent. It showed a man of forty-five or so, who might pass for younger. He had a square-cut solid jaw and even, white teeth. He was seen opening the door of an enormous truck with the words “Irma” written on the door.

The picture was useful to me: it gave me an idea about the man whose death I was looking into. He looked bright and alert, but not somebody who could be pushed around. The appearance of “Irma” on the truck told me that he owned it, a detail, but maybe an important one. A truck-owner was a broker, a man in business, not just a hireling, not casual labour.

“I’ll put on the kettle,” Irma Dowden said, watching me as I assessed her late husband. When I turned back to face her, she had made no move in the direction of the kitchen. She was playing with the ring on her third finger, left hand. “It won’t take a minute,” she said. “It was on the boil not ten minutes ago.”

“Mrs. Dowden,” I said, probably more gravely than I intended. “I didn’t come for tea or coffee.”

“Oh,” she said, as though she’d been stung or bitten.

“No, I came to talk to you about the things you forgot to tell me this afternoon.”

“This afternoon.” She repeated the phrase as though the meaning was beyond her; she hadn’t taken it in. I could see panic in her little gimlet eyes. She was trying to think of what she was going to say.

“You know what I mean. You must have known that I’d find out.”

“I don’t understand, Mr. Cooperman.”

“Sure you do. I’m talking about a matter of time, Mrs. Dowden. Three hundred and sixty-five days that slipped your memory.”

“Oh, that.”

“Yes, that.”

“Well, if you figured out that much, you must have a good idea why I didn’t tell you straight out. I figured you for smart.”

“Save the soft-soap, Mrs. Dowden. From now on, I want from you nothing but the truth. Is that clear? Otherwise you can take your troubles to Howard Dover or one of the other investigators.”

“I’ve already been to them, Mr. Cooperman. You’re all I’ve got!”

“Well, stop abusing me. Go, make some coffee. That’s a start.”

“The kettle’s just off the boil.”

“You said that five minutes ago! That’s not just off the boil in my book!” I surprised both of us with my outburst. Both of us knew that it had nothing to do with the cooling kettle.

In a moment she got up and left the room. Ralph jumped from the couch to the wine-dark carpet and followed her to the kitchen. In another minute, I followed Ralph.

“You’re going to have to settle for tea. I’m out of coffee. As a matter of fact,” she said, in an expression of purest candour, “I haven’t had coffee in this house since Jack died.”

“And how long ago was that?” I asked unkindly.

“A year and three months ago. There! I’ve said it. I won’t tell you any more lies, Mr. Cooperman. I’ve always been a truthful woman. Honest.”

“I’m going to drop the case the next time you aren’t being straight with me. I don’t want to hear any more exaggerations or fibs. You understand?”

“Thank you, Mr. Cooperman.”

On her own ground, Irma Dowden didn’t look so ferret-like, not so small and not so apparently determined to get her own way. She looked serious and I took that to be an humble and a contrite heart. She was used to feeling mistress in her own kitchen, but she gave me lots of room as she fussed with the cups.

“Mrs. Dowden-”

“Oh, please, call me Irma. Goodness!” I nodded and started over.

“Irma, you said that Kinross had sent back Jack’s things-the clothes he was wearing, his wallet, keys. Is that right?”

“At first they said I wouldn’t want to see them, but in the end they sent them. Of course, except for digging out his wallet, I haven’t looked at the rest. They were right about that.”

“Where are they now? The clothes, I mean?”

“Jack’s glory hole is in the cellar. Everything of his is still down there. I haven’t had the heart to touch anything.” She made a gesture suggesting her loss, and I sighed and shrugged to show sympathy. “You can have a look while I finish making the tea,” she said. “His work clothes are in a shopping bag near the workbench, if you want to see them.”

“It all ends up in a shopping bag, somebody once said.” I don’t think she got it, so I turned to the cellar door.

The steps leading down to the basement were covered in linoleum, probably rescued from the most recent redoing of the kitchen floor. At the bottom, I found an ancient coal furnace adapted to natural gas. A pile of stored furniture rested against one wall. Some of it looked in bad shape, but I recognized a few pieces of Canadian pine- some chests of drawers and a hutch-that, with a little work, might pass for Early American. Besides the washtubs, a fruit-cellar, former coalbin, I discovered the workbench, a lathe and a few pieces of his handiwork: an arrow-back chair with one rung about to be replaced by a fine match for the broken pieces. Jack had been doing excellent work down here. He had left things so tidy, I wondered whether he’d had a premonition about his approaching fate.

And there was the shopping bag. I took a breath and dug in. There was less dried blood than I expected. I left the underwear unexamined in a separate plastic bag, through which I could see more than I wanted to. I found a green flannel workshirt made in Taiwan. The pockets held nothing but tobacco crumbs and lint. The trousers, heavy-duty denim that had never heard of Calvin Klein, held a soiled handkerchief, a comb that indicated a need for a dandruff remover, and thirty-seven cents. For some reason, maybe it was some scrap of my formal training showing, I looked in the trouser cuffs. Nothing but dried weeds in there. But I took a second look at them. There were a few stems, fragmented leaves and a long, silvery tissue with tiny dark seeds embedded along the length of the four-inch-long stalk. It looked a little beanlike, except that the pods were flaking off. The seeds were stuck in a delicate tissue that ran between the pods.

I slipped the dead contents of Jacks’ cuffs into the envelope with my electric bill and folded it closed. I had a friend up at Secord University who could tell me what the weeds had to say about Jack’s death, apart from the fact that he may have had a ramble in the woods some time before the fatal day. There was nothing here that told me that the accident was murder. I still had only Irma’s hunch about that. The chalky dirt on the back of the shirt told me nothing about why he was now numbered among the dead.