Howard Engel - A City Called July

“I’ve got to have my bike,” the little girl said with a serious expression. “I need it tomorrow, Mommy.”

“We’ll see, dear.”

“I need it.”

This was my first opportunity to see a fair piece of the family together acting like a family. I watched the aunt and uncle help bundle the kids off in a car with the woman who was later identified as an unmarried cousin of I never did figure out whom.

With the kids out of the house, a source of tension was removed. Debbie lit a cigarette with her butane lighter, and I cadged a light for a Player’s off the same flame. Rose rattled her empty cup in her saucer as she got up to return the coffee things to the kitchen. “Leave it,” Ruth ordered, but didn’t take any notice of Rose continuing her mission anyway. Nobody said anything except in hoarse whispers. If Larry Geller had been laid out on trestles in front of the fireplace with his hands crossed over his chest, the atmosphere couldn’t have been more funereal. We smoked in silence. Rose returned to her place on the chintz-covered chair behind the coffee-table. Ruth huddled in a narrow occasional chair. Her painted smile was peeling away. Nathan pulled out a rounded stone from between the pillows of the loveseat in front of the windows. When she saw it, Ruth began to cry.

By now I was feeling like the fifth shoe under a bridal bed. If I’d been looking at this scene through a transom or a keyhole I couldn’t have felt more like a voyeur. The room itself seemed to be crawling away from the patched window. In a way it didn’t seem like the room I’d been in the day before. Somehow a pile of broken glass glinting on broadloom and masking tape on painted woodwork completed the work the mob tried to do. “Safe as houses,” the Welsh say. This house seemed as safe as a circus tent in a hurricane.

“Your wrist, Nathan. Look!” Debbie crossed to where Nathan’s bare arms had been dangling between his knees as he sat on the edge of the loveseat. He raised first one arm then the other. A twisted line of darkening blood snaked down his long left arm. He raised it like a surgeon scrubbing up, and then began to lick it.

“Don’t!” Ruth cried, suddenly coming to life. “I’ll get something.” But Debbie was already binding his wrist with a handkerchief.

“It’s just a scratch,” she said with some colour returning to her face. Nathan looked embarrassed.

“I hate the sight of blood,” he said “Especially my own.” His bum joke brought a laugh which cracked the mood down the centre.

“Nathan, you idiot!” Ruth said. “Here we are with the mob at the door and all you can do is make jokes.”

“Well, the mob’s gone at least. And the house is watertight for tonight. Shouldn’t you get out of here for a few days, Ruth?”

“What and have every stick of furniture stolen or smashed? Don’t be silly, Nathan. Somebody’s got to stick and stay. It’s my home. If the cops can’t protect the place with people living in it, think of what a mob could do to it empty.”

“Good point, I guess,” said Nathan. Rose sipped her coffee, which like mine was chilly.

“Will this find a corner in your report, Mr. Cooperman?” Debbie asked, returning to that annoying note she kept hitting on the first visit.

“Mrs. Geller, I’m not writing a report. I’m not here to judge you people. I’m here now because Rose Craig and I thought you might need help.”

“I called the police,” Rose added. Debbie shrugged and slumped into the long couch under a large painting of a woman in a hoop skirt playing a cello beside another at a spinet. The women were lush in their velvets and satins. Debbie Geller was wearing a large shapeless white sweater over blue jeans. All in all, she had a good face: a high forehead and clear eyes, focused on the patched window.

“You’re a son of a bitch, Mr. Cooperman, whatever you say. If this was my house, I’d show you your way out faster than I can think of my own name. Ever get the feeling that you’re not liked, not wanted?”

“Sure, it goes with the territory. Look, I’m as sensitive as the next guy, but my business is your business as long as the community is paying the shot. I know that doesn’t give me special privileges, and my nose gets slammed in the door often enough for me to wonder if I maybe shouldn’t open up a ladies’ ready-to-wear like my old man did. But as long as I’m taking people’s money as an investigator, I’ll have to go on getting my nose slammed. At least it’s better than getting shot at in a big city. Here at least you sometimes get asked in for a cup of tea or coffee.”

“You’re the strangest man.”

“I’m just out to make a living.”

“But your being here is tantamount to an accusation that my sister was involved in this dirty business with her husband.”

“It’s happened before.”

“Not with Ruthie, it hasn’t. I mean, God, just look at her.”

“Sure. I’m as susceptible as the next man to appearances. What would you have me do? I can’t flash his picture to every airline ticket agent in the country.”

“Well, you could try asking the local ones, at least.”

“The cops have done all of that, I can’t compete with the cops. I’m a one-man band.”

“Elastic band and broken. Sorry. I just don’t trust people, I guess. I m not used to strangers.”

“Look, in your place, I wouldn’t want me around either. What would you do in my position?”

“I know that’s not meant as a trick question, Mr. Cooperman, but I can’t help you. Maybe you should leave it to the police and Interpol.”

“Maybe I should. I didn’t bid on this case, you know.”

“Don’t you ever think of the cunning it took to pull off what Larry did? Don’t you ever get a sneaking admiration for the criminals you go after?”

“Mrs. Geller, I’m just a beat-up divorce peeper. Except for a few odd cases, I’ve never been on a case where anybody got much of what they were looking for. Most of the time they were so worried about being found out, they didn’t have time to enjoy their ill-gotten gains. That’s the truth. So, I don’t imagine that I’m ever going to become jealous of some poor guy who has to hide under a false name and run around frightened of his own shadow. Now, from what I know about your brother-in-law, he was a smart man. Maybe you imagine him having the horse-laugh on the rest of us. But I doubt it. Every time a phone rings, he shudders. Every time there’s a knock on the door, he gets sweaty palms. But, you’ll tell me he has all that money. Well, I wonder. How much of it can be flashed in public without getting people suspicious? If it’s in securities, the cops will find him; if it’s in cash, he has to take a chance every time he crosses a border.”

“What about those famous numbered bank accounts in Switzerland?”

“Mrs. Geller, your brother-in-law could have spent two million just setting up a deal like that. You’re talking big money, political money, exchequer and treasury money. Larry’s robbed a bunch of geriatrics in Grantham, Ontario. He’s in the Little League. He only hurt a bunch of old-timers. He didn’t knock off a bank or run over the premier’s dog. A case like this has a lot of local people hot about it, and the cops are going to do their best to find him. I’m going to do my best to find him. But it isn’t going to rate a column inch in Vancouver or Montreal. There aren’t any votes riding on Larry Geller.”

“So what can you do? What can a single private investigator accomplish?”

“Nothing, maybe. Maybe something better than that. Maybe I’ll figure some angle that nobody’s thought of before.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, like, maybe, and I’m just groping for an example you understand, maybe Larry Geller wasn’t in this all by himself. Maybe we should be looking for two people. That’s at least a different tack from the cops. And it might even pay off.”