A Victim Must Be Found (2 page)

Since he took off his white apron and chef’s bonnet, I’d seen very little of Pambos except at the United or at Diana Sweets, where most of the town filters the news of the day. It’s a sort of community dialysis. Sitting in a booth at the Di, I can see all of the kids I went to high school with and half of my teachers. Here deals are made and contracts are signed. I’ve seen a couple leaning across a table so close that their heads touched as they held hands over a banana split. Later I saw the same couple working on a separation agreement. I knew it was a separation agreement, because the boy had asked me to follow his young wife when she was supposed to be going to her choir practice. But that was in the days when there was a buck to be made in divorce work. Right now an honest private investigator has a hard time not reading the want ads. It’s the nearest thing to being unemployed in the whole Niagara Peninsula.

I’d heard that Pambos had done well. I remembered that he was managing the Stephenson House, a small exclusive hotel overlooking the old canal. “Benny, I think I need your help. I mean, I think I need your professional help. Can you sit a minute?”

“Sure, Pambos. What’s on your mind?”

The little guy stroked his chin, reaching for a place to begin and not finding it. I tried to make it easier for him. “I just moved into that apartment over the steakhouse where you used to work,” I said. “It’s a Mexican place now.”

“Yeah, Tacos Heaven. It’s run by a Hungarian from Niagara Falls. I give it three more weeks before it’s empty again.” He was still groping for a starting place. He took a stab. “You still do private investigations, don’t you, Benny?”

“Specialty of the house.”

“That’s what I thought. I should have come to your office, Benny, but seeing as how I saw you sitting here by yourself, I thought, what the hell? What can he do to me?” I gave him a grin to show that he wasn’t stepping on my corns. He smiled too, but then asked in a quieter voice:

“You want me to wait and come to the office, Benny? I can take a hint.”

“Pambos, if you want to talk to me about it here in the privacy of the United Cigar Store, that’s your privilege What can I do for you?”

“It’s a question of stolen property.”

“Pambos, I’m not a fence. I’m an investigator.”

“I know that! I’m just having trouble getting the story started. Something that belongs to me is missing. It’s not where it should be.”

“You’re talking about an expensive object?”

“I want to talk to you about a list.” He looked into my face like I was about to tell him he’d won the lottery. If he saw a shadow pass over my features it was a brief recollection of my own list in one of the twenty or so boxes in my apartment.

“What sort of list?”

“A piece of paper. It was in my office and now it’s gone.”

“I take it this list is valuable, eh?” I, always try to let my clients see into the workings of a professional investigator’s mind. Little scraps of deduction or expert knowledge always help. I once tried to get an intimate grasp of the map of the city so I could without looking recall that Binder’s Drug Store is right next to the wooden building with a barbershop on the ground floor. On the other side’s a gas station. But I was always mixing up Chestnut Street with Maple and Hillcrest with Glen-ridge. Pambos was looking at me.

“It is and it isn’t,” he said. “To some it would have value, but it’s not valuable in a general way. I mean, it’s not money or stocks. It’s just a list of names.” We both took a sip of coffee. I couldn’t help imagining Pambos’s list in the last of the boxes at my place, in the bottom. I thought of trying to put off the rest of the interview until after I’d moved in and gone back to my office on St. Andrew Street. But I didn’t. I did something that’s routine with me, in this case I meant it.

“Why don’t you go to the police about it, Pambos? The cops have a great reputation for finding things.”

Pambos’s smile went in out of the rain. “Look, I got nothing against the cops. Some of my best friends are cops. You know Christophoros Savas? He comes from Cyprus, like me.”

“Sure, I know Sergeant Savas. He’s a good cop. Why don’t you tell him about it?” I thought I’d found an out. In spite of the fact that I needed the business in a general way, what I needed right now was a few snappy stories to help lighten the load of moving-day confusion. I felt like I was a gymnast doing the splits. I was still more than half living at the City House and not safe and dry in my new home yet. I wasn’t sure if I had a bed to sleep on for the night. I had the makings of a bed, but that was a mile short of comfort. I thought, what the hell, I might as well come clean. I told Pambos about my problem. He’d just started to give me the usual list of ten reasons why he couldn’t go to the cops when I stopped him. He pulled at his chin again. It had been getting bluer as we’d been talking. Pambos needed to shave every half hour.

“Okay,” he said. “Why don’t we go back to your place? I can help you unpack and tell you about the rest of this stuff. What do you say? I’m very good at organizing things,” he said with a touch of pride. “It’s because I’m not sentimental. I got a lot of true sentiment in me, but I don’t get sentimental, if you catch my meaning. There’s a difference.”

I paid the check and we went out into the chilly March weather. At least it had stopped raining.

TWO

An hour later my bed was assembled and made up for the night, several of the boxes had been flattened and tied with twine, their contents given to the closets and cupboards of the apartment. Numbers for the remaining boxes were written clearly on four sides and the everimportant list of contents lay on the coffee-table in the middle of the room. Pambos and I sat in our sweaty shirtsleeves drinking the first cups of tea of the first day of the new regime.

Pambos Kiriakis was a little dishevelled, but he looked relaxed, balancing his saucer on his knee like an ancient spinster, and raising his cup to his lips.

“Pambos, I’ll never be able to thank you for all this,” I said. He brushed it aside with a broad gesture. “I’ll never be able to repay your kindness.” Here, the gesture was less sweeping. It felt feeble compared to the last sweeping movement of his hand. By this I saw that while I needn’t try to thank him, there was a way to repay the kindness. I got up and returned from the kitchen counter with the teapot. “This list,” I said, pouring Pambos another cup, “the one that was taken from your office. Tell me about it.”

I sat down and eased myself into a situation that couldn’t be altered. I had taken the case when I accepted Pambos’s help with my boxes. It was one of those quid pro quo something or others you read about. Now that I was all attention and tuned to hear, Pambos began by looking at my ceiling and then out through the white inside shutters with brass catches. He cleared his throat. “Well, let me see. You suggested that I talk to Chris Savas about it. I can’t. It’s a delicate matter, you see.” I smiled in spite of myself. Hell, who ever talks to a private investigator about things that aren’t delicate? The cops would be surprised too to be brought in on a case of no delicacy whatsoever.

“Maybe the time for Savas will come later,” I suggested, and he bought that for the time being. Pambos began looking lost again, so I reminded him. “The list,” I prompted from where I was sitting on the corner of the bed.

“Yes. The names on the list aren’t pulled out of the phonebook, Benny. Most of them, as a matter of fact, are unlisted. I’m talking about names that are well known from Grantham all the way to Toronto. I don’t want to embarrass anybody. You know what I mean?” I nodded as I sipped tea.

“You can’t get a new list?”

“No.” He gave me a look that said I hadn’t been listening. But I had. I put it down to Pambos knowing his story too well. He couldn’t imagine that I didn’t have all the tidy details tucked away already. I tried to look even more concentrated. I felt cross-eyed, but he didn’t get up and walk out.

“You said back at the United that this list of yours would be valuable to some people but not to everybody. Can you explain?”

“Look, Benny, before we go on with this, I want to put things on a businesslike basis. You know what I mean?” This was my cue to make a grand gesture. But I held my hands on my teacup. Somewhere inside me a voice was saying “Remember your rent!” It was right, moving from the hotel had moved me into a whole new debt bracket.

“Is this going to be worth a hundred a day plus expenses, Pambos? You have to decide that.”

“Well, Benny, I guess money is only money. You know I own a piece of the Stephenson House, don’t you? I’m no millionaire, but I’m comfortable enough, if you know what I mean.”

“Sure.”

Pambos Kiriakis owned a piece of the Stephenson House! That surprised me. I thought he was just the manager. The hotel, one of the oldest and most traditional institutions in Grantham, had been established when the old canal town was at the height of its career. It had started as a health spa when the smelly open sewer that now ran behind St. Andrew Street was a forest of tall masts making their way up to Lake Erie or downstream towards Lake Ontario. That heyday lasted until the third Welland Canal was opened just over the hundred years ago. This canal bypassed Grantham’s centre of gravity and the town began to look elsewhere for a reason for being. Somehow, some called it a miracle, the Stephenson House was spared in the general rethinking that slowly went on following the close of the Hitler war. No longer a spa noted for its healing waters, the hotel put out feelers to social clubs and Grantham’s most exclusive circles. When the private boys’ school named after the martyred Bishop Cranmer held a public dance off its Western Hill campus, the location was invariably the Stephenson House. In fact, when a fire put part of Cranmer’s lower school out of service, classes were held at the hotel until the damage had been repaired. When the mayor held a function that required a hotel’s amenities, the Stephenson was booked and the proprietors of other local hostelries didn’t even begin to question the choice. The Stephenson House was a hotel that was out of its category, a find in a small city like Grantham.

From the fifties to the seventies the hotel had been owned by the Lawder family, one of the oldest families in the district. I went to school with one of the Lawder girls, who impressed all of us when she passed around a photograph of her horse, Pegleas. I remember it with jealousy unabated over these many years. During the last decade, the hotel had changed hands at least twice that I heard about. But, then I’m not the first to hear about the wheeling and dealing among the powerbrokers of the city, even when the power is losing its steam and the broking is largely trying to pay off an incrustation of mortgages deposited along the classical lines of the ancient brick main building.

So, Pambos Kiriakis had a piece of it. Good for him. Some of the old blood around these parts is getting thin. It was time for some transfusion to come along and take a fresh look at the old place. Kiriakis had caused some local eyebrows to be raised when he began managing the hotel. I remember the gossip from St. Andrew Street about this Greek coming along and pushing old Phin Lawder off to pensionland. A day earlier the same people had been trading stories about Phin’s wasteful and intemperate ways. Phin was a drunk and a spendthrift, but he came from a good family. At least it was a good one back in 1813. Pambos’s family didn’t arrive on the scene until at least a century and a half later. His father, so he told me, became a shoeshine man in a narrow store near Queen and St. Andrew in the early 1960s. Pambos’s older brother fell in with some unpleasant characters in Malham, south of Grantham, and ended up as a sacrifice to appease some god of the wars between the mobs. While he was still alive, Pambos said, it was hard not to get a ticket for going through a green light. The cops took their responsibilities more broadly back then. But Pambos never showed any sign of letting his brother’s failure to make a success of crime build up a resentment in him for law, order and the establishment. Quite the opposite in fact. The first time I talked to Pambos, he told me about the beginnings of his coin collection, which he figured at the time was worth several thousand dollars. He didn’t get this by brother Costas’s methods, but by simply culling his change at the end of the day and checking catalogues.

Now that I think about it, Pambos was always dipping into a catalogue of one kind or another. I remember him telling me about a couple of auctions that I might have taken advantage of, if I hadn’t been living in a hotel room where all the furnishings were marked by matching cigarette burns. He once invited Wally Skeat from the TV station and me to look at his art collection. When we got to his apartment, we saw the usual Van Gogh prints on the walls. The art collection was in an old cardboard portfolio left over from public school. Three pencil drawings! Now what kind of art collection is that? One was a picture of old Joe Higgins, on his crutches selling balsa birds at the corner of St. Andrew and James, like he always was every Saturday when he was sober. The next was a group of houses in Toronto. They were heavily outlined and simplified so that what you saw was more pattern than a lot of details. The name in the lower right read “L. Harris.” It didn’t mean anything to me, but it lit up Wally’s face. “L. Harris” was, I gathered, somebody every civilized person should know about. The other drawing was a sketch of a Venetian street scene judging from the gondola and the flooded streets. The signature down at the bottom read “Perdix.” This didn’t excite Wally, so I guessed that he wasn’t a household word in as many households as “L. Harris.”

And that was it: three pencil drawings in a kid’s portfolio. The Van Gogh sunflowers by the bathroom door were looking better and better every minute. As Pambos brought his little brass Turkish coffee-maker to a boil three times, no doubt to shake off the evil eye, he explained that Harris was a member of the Group of Seven, not one of whom I’d ever run into before, and Perdix was a fellow at Cranmer College, who was, according to Pambos, gong somewhere. The sketch of Joe Higgins was by a local artist who may or may not have heard of the other two. Anyway, it wasn’t my idea of a picture collection. After we sipped the thick, sweet coffee, Pambos had got going on his hobby-horse about supporting Canadian arts, which made me feel like it was twelve-thirty instead of only a quarter after nine. Wally and I got out as soon as we could after that. I was glad Pambos had a hobby, I wished I had one.