Howard Engel: A City Called July

“Have you found much?” I asked nodding in general at the inner office.

“What do you mean?” She opened her green eyes with new-born innocence. I liked her for that. If my business ever begins to take off, I’ll try to remember Rose Craig. It would be nice to be protected by her “What do you mean?” for a change.

“Come on, Rose, you’ve been tossing the place, same as I would in your spot.” She eyed me thoughtfully, taking the cigarette out of her mouth and babysitting it in an ashtray on the corner of the beige desk. It was her luck that a fleck of tobacco stuck to her lower lip. She didn’t take her eyes off me. She stood just far enough away from me so that she could go through all the illustrated steps in a karate manual if I got out of line.

“If that lot got in here, there wouldn’t be anything left intact within three minutes.”

“What they’re looking for won’t be found in neatly kept files. You know that better than anybody.” She smiled at me in spite of herself, but savaged the cigarette in the crowded ashtray like she was killing a spider with it. “He must have had a wonderful memory, your boss, or maybe a carefully kept code system. He could have done it on slips of paper and made it look like laundry lists. What have you found?”

She eyed me evenly. “That would be telling, wouldn’t it?”

“Okay, play coy. I’m not one of those you have to worry about. Geller doesn’t owe me six cents. Now that the story’s public property you’re going to have lots of opportunity to meet new people and develop interpersonal skills. Tell you what, you should get a security company in here to guard the office. You’ll need six men in three shifts around the clock. Get them from Niagara Security. They won’t cheat you. Probably you’ll get a fair rate on the junior men. You must have an office operations budget. Don’t tell me he cleaned that out too?”

“No. There’s a few hundred in petty cash. Damn it all, Mr. Cooperman, I’m so confused. What’s going to happen to me?”

“You’re going to get your picture in the paper, and you’re going to get an unlisted phone number for a year. Do you have a friend or relative who’ll put you up for a few days? It’s just until you can move from wherever you’re living.”

“Move? I just moved into that apartment!”

“Well, you’re going to have night visitors for a month, and nasty telephone calls for longer than that. You won’t be in any actual danger …”

“Danger!”

“Right, you won’t be, but people want to get something to ease the frustration. Remember we’re dealing with the friends and relatives of the people he cheated. You won’t have to worry about the people themselves, I don’t think, just the kin, who’ll tend to be younger and more hot-headed than is actually necessary. The cops’ll help you if you get threatened. Best to disappear for a while; that’s what they’ll tell you.”

“Damn it. I don’t need this. You know?”

“Nobody does. All you can do is get through it without skinning your knees. Low profile, that’s the ticket. Try not to talk to the paper, try to avoid photographers. Get yourself a lawyer you can depend upon.”

“Lawyer?”

“Just in the background. Nobody’s going to try to say you did it. Geller got away with a lot of money; a lot of people are cross at him; and they may think you know more than you do. It wouldn’t hurt to keep a diary about what’s happening to aid your memory if this ever comes to court.” It was part of my standard speech to clients. Now I was giving away free legal advice.

“I swear I don’t know a thing about any of this. You’ve got to believe me, Mr. Cooperman.”

“I believe you. But will they?”

“All I did was the normal legal work. I typed the wills, deeds and mortgages. I billed the clients. I kept the loose-leaf law reports up to date. I passed on messages to Ruth that he left for me. I don’t know anything. Honest.”

“I still believe you. What about a man named Kaplan? Did you know him?”

“He’s a farmer, isn’t he? Sure, he came here, but I don’t know what they talked about. I never do unless there’s some letter or minutes of agreement that Mr. Geller wants typed. With a lot of them, he typed his own notes. I heard him do it, but you won’t find them in the files. I’ve looked.”

“He must have done his bookkeeping somewhere else. Did he own or rent any other property that you know of?”

“This is the office. This is where he did his work. I mean he usually took an attaché case home with him. Why’d’ you think he must have had a second office?”

“He had a second life, didn’t he? All he’d need was a room someplace where his records couldn’t be traced back to him. He could have rented it under a false name.”

“In a town this size, are you kidding?”

“All right, forget it. It was just a notion. How much time did he spend in the office anyway? You know the routines of other legal eagles. How does Geller stack up?”

“He used to get here early. That’s one thing I’ll say for him. I used to get in by a quarter to nine and he was already dictating into his machine.”

“Often?”

“Oh, a couple or three times a week. Then he’d take long lunches. But most of them do that. You can check his desk calendar to see the people he met. Only that’s at the police station. A Sergeant Staziak has it.”

“Did he work late usually?”

“Sometimes. He’d stay on after I went home and then in the morning there’d be a batch of tapes for me to type up. But there were times when he didn’t come back from lunch at all. Or he’d come back and then go right out again saying he wouldn’t be back.”

“Was he going home, do you know?”

“I just work here, Mr. Cooperman,” she said. “I’m not clairvoyant.”

Rose had been doing some unobtrusive personal tidying while we talked. I noticed without noticing when she’d done it, that she had detected and remedied the unfastened buttons on her blouse. “Would you mind if I had a look at the private office, Miss Craig?” She put down the paper and waved me through.

There was nothing special about Geller s inner sanctum. The desk was uncluttered dark wood with a high-backed swivel chair behind it. On the wall I recognized diplomas, citations and photographs with Geller shaking hands with various dignitaries. The desk was arranged so that the morning light fell on the faces of his clients. A photograph of Ruth and the kids sat in a silver frame next to a brass calendar with the date reading Thursday, July 7th. Rose Craig, who was standing in the doorway, saw that I was eyeing the wall of filing cabinets. “There’s nothing doing in there,” she said, like a mind-reader. “I told you, I checked.”

“What used to be here?” I asked, examining a round patch on the dusty mahogany that showed less dust than the rest.

“That? It was a trophy or something he’d won when he was at law school. He told me a million times what it was, and I’ll be damned if I can remember. It had something to do with winning a prize at Osgoode Hall. He was very proud of it.”

“So, it’s not surprising, then, that it’s gone?”

“Oh, he’d take it with him all right.”

“Do you know whether he kept up with Eddie Lazarus or Morrie Freeland? They were pals of his from law school.”

“Mr. Lazarus doesn’t live here in town. I think he has a practice in the Falls. I could check. Mr. Freeland’s office is on the next floor to this. He’s with Beamish and White. Mr. Geller never called him, but sometimes Mr. Freeland would put his head in the door. They went out to eat together last winter sometime.”

I was half-way to the door of the outer office when the phone rang. I knew it couldn’t be for me, but I didn’t hurry away to let Rose answer it without a witness. From the look of her, she didn’t want me to hurry away either. It was one of those calls full of exclamations and cries of “You’re kidding!” and “What?” that convey absolutely no information to the casual listener When she hung up, she looked right at me as though in whatever game she was playing I was “it.”