Him I did not envy.
In sympathy, I took my own hat off and carried it. The morning was overcast, but mild and dry. Truth to tell, there wasn’t a lot of difference between outdoors and the office. The street smelled of traffic, not spring flowers. Doubtless it was the sort of day Digby Watt would have liked. A good day for business in that it did not immediately distract the susceptible with memories of springtime romance, or the more prosaic with thoughts of the golf course.
Digby Watt had rarely been distracted by any sort of weather or any normal notion of quitting time. At age sixty-seven, he had been notorious for staying at his office past midnight. It would not have been difficult for anyone who wanted him dead to find him on a dark and lonely street, empty as only a street in the financial district can be at that hour.
Despite the traffic, it took me no more than five minutes to walk from Queen and Bay to the Examiner Building, a squat four-storey block on King Street West. The commissionaire told me I’d find MacAllister on the second floor, turn right at the first landing and ask anyone in the city room.
The room contained a scattering of eight or ten reporters working candlestick phones rather than pounding the pavement. Some were bleary-eyed veterans who looked even more hung over than I felt, some teenaged cubs in their first pair of long pants. I overheard one of the latter commiserating with a man over the death of his pet monkey and asking for the juicy particulars that might pump readers’ tear ducts or jiggle their funny bone.
They all looked far too industrious to interrupt, but in the end I didn’t have to ask. I recognized my man across the room as the Ivan who had worked the same field gun in Flanders as my former classmate Horny Ingersoll.
Ivan had remained long and thin, with small thin hands I could still see flicking a clasp knife open and shut. Right at this moment, he was playing rummy for cigarettes with one of the women reporters. He had apparently made it through the war and into gainful employment with four limbs and two eyes intact. He had grown a thin, mud-coloured moustache that somehow went with the sneering expression successful newsmen are supposed to have. His brown tweeds could have leaped from the day’s fashion page—loose in the trousers, tight in the sleeves, with four buttons at each cuff. He was easily the best-dressed person in sight.
He’d spotted me right away and, without neglecting the hand he was playing, kept track of my approach, though he wasn’t able to place me until I reminded him we’d met before.
“Sure enough. Horny’s pal.” A smile broke from under the moustache and he stuck out his hand. “Lulu, your revenge will have to wait.”
Lulu moved off with a wistful look back at a hard-earned quarter’s worth of smokes she was leaving on Ivan’s blotter.
Ivan’s grip was firm, his fingers slender but strong. The finger tips were stained nicotine brown.
“What brings you here?” A half-smoked cigarette between his lips wobbled as he spoke.
I showed my wallet badge. “Digby Watt.”
“A copper!” Ivan looked me up and down more closely, evidently thinking of a newspaperly way to describe my un-ironed suit, red eyes, and badly shaved chin. “Maybe that figures. I think you impressed us at the battery as a tough guy who listens more than he talks.”
I shrugged.
“Still,” Ivan continued, “aren’t you about ten years too young to be a detective sergeant?”
Not wanting to start an argument, at least not yet, I omitted to point out that (a) I was the youngest police officer of my rank by only four years, (b) I wasn’t a total upstart as I had been on the force before the war, and (c) I could be garrulous enough when not witnessing the intimate mutilation of a childhood playmate. What I did say was—
“Looks like you’re not doing badly yourself. You have a private office where we can go and get away from these jabbering Teletype machines?”
“You’re a scream. And don’t tell me you have a private office back at City Hall, or I’ll think I’ve missed my calling.”
I threw my weight around and got a junior editor to yield up his glassed-in cubicle on the south side of the building. The sun was coming out over the lake and the room was too hot. I loosened my tie and, pushing some papers aside, sat on the edge of the desk. Ivan took a wooden arm chair and lit a fresh cigarette off the butt of its predecessor.
“You got a phone call late last night?” I began.
“At 1:45. Have you read my article? It’s all in there.” Ivan wasn’t irritated, not yet. You just got the feeling that he was intrigued by the unexpected meeting and would rather have talked about old times and old acquaintance.
“Did you check the time?” I asked, dutifully but mechanically. For my mind also was going back to that afternoon before Ypres.
“I checked the time.”
“Ivan,” I said, “how much did you know about Digby Watt before last night?”
“Lots. I’d be no good at my job if I didn’t. Big man on Bay Street without being larger than life. Came up through commerce and finance. No factory experience. Has a reputation for character rather than personality. Cheerful and humourless. A ready smile, but no wit or appreciation of wit in others. Saw The Gold Rush and didn’t laugh. Generous with money, close with information, protective of women, and appealing to women that like to be protected. But I think you’re asking when I found out who owned Peerless Armaments during the period they were killing our gunners with bum shells.”
“Well?”
“Don’t remember. Years ago.”
“O-kay. Do you live alone?”
Ivan hesitated.
“Yeah,” he said. “Over a sporting goods store, just north of the Danforth. But if you’re thinking there was no call at 1:45, the phone company will tell you otherwise.”
“Did anyone else see or hear you take the call?”
“At that hour? No, no one. I have my own telephone in the apartment. Sometimes the paper calls me late, so it’s worth it.”
“You were asleep?”
“Yeah.”
“Was the caller male or female?”
“A man.”
“Did you recognize the voice? Or is there any voice you’ve heard since that you recognize as that of the caller?”
“No and no.”
Ivan sounded relaxed, resigned now to being questioned. I dug my notebook out of an inside jacket pocket.
“I’d like to hear how the conversation went. Word for word.”
“Ring-ring. ‘Hello.’ ‘Ivan MacAllister?’ ‘Yeah; who’s this?’ ‘Is Ivan a foreign name?’ ‘Not in my case. What is this about?’ ‘Ninety-six Adelaide West. You won’t be sorry.’ Before I could say anything more, he hung up.”
I wrote. “That’s everything? You’re certain?”
“No guff—that’s it.”
“Anything there to suggest the caller’s identity? The foreign-name business, say.”
“I get that sometimes. It would have been worse if my parents had got really cute and called me Siegfried.”
Worse during the war, I thought. By now red Russians were overtaking Jerry in the sweepstakes of villainy. I let it drop.
“What did you do after he hung up?” I asked.
“Lit a smoke and grumbled to myself that it was probably some crank who didn’t like the way I wrote, but while I was grumbling, I was getting dressed and calling for a taxi. The newshound who can pass up a potential scoop might as well hand in his company pencil.”
“What