No theatres or cinemas, no houses or apartments. No late night cafés. If you shot someone here after midnight with a modest-sized gun, you wouldn’t even need a silencer.
I stepped briefly around the corner of the building onto Sheppard Street to have a look at the phone from which someone had called Ivan’s apartment at 1:44. There was nothing much to see, just an ordinary wooden phone booth with a black coin-phone inside. I poked around the gum wrappers on the floor to see if our caller might have left something personal behind—a hand-written note would have been swell—but there was nothing doing. It was too late to have the handset dusted for fingerprints. It had been too late at 2:45 a.m., the moment the constable had used this phone to call in the medical examiner instead of taking the two dozen extra steps to the nearest police call box. I reminded myself that constables weren’t trained or paid enough to worry about such things. But why had there been no detective on the scene?
I tightened my necktie and went back to Adelaide Street and in through the double brass doors of number 96.
From the directory in the lobby, it was clear to any reader of the financial pages that every occupant had something to do with the Watt business empire, yet neither the building itself nor any of the individual concerns bore his name. Atkins Hardware headed the list, followed by Beaconsfield Power, Canada Ski and Snowshoe, and so down through the alphabet. “P” was represented by Peerless Kitchen Appliances. Unlike the Examiner Building, 96 Adelaide had no concierge or commissionaire to make enquiries of, and I was momentarily at a loss as to how to find my man Morris. If I had to guess, I thought I’d take a chance on Dominion Consolidated Holdings, which had a certain managerial ring. Suite 402.
When the elevator came down and deposited another clutch of lunch-goers in the lobby, the operator was able to confirm my choice. He was a man of about my age with black hair slicked straight back like a jazz-band player and a right arm that ended above the elbow. I thought it would have been more convenient for him to turn about, but he plainly preferred not to unsettle his passengers by staring at them and reached across his body with his left hand to operate the controls. On arrival at the fourth floor, I did not get out right away.
“Were you on duty last night when Mr. Digby Watt left the building?”
Turning, the operator saw the police identification I was holding up. “I leave at six, sir, and come back on at eight in the morning.”
“How many times in a normal week would he stay later than six?”
“He was always in before I got here and after I left. The only time I’d see him would be when he had an outside appointment during the day.”
I saw the car was rated for a maximum of twelve passengers.
“Would you,” I asked, “always notice when he rode with your?”
“Notice?” The man’s grin showed a mouthful of tobacco-stained teeth. “He never rode with me without speaking to me, no matter who he was with. And it wasn’t just the ‘How are you, Harold?’ you get from people who couldn’t care less. Usually, he’d ask me about the hockey game, but if we were alone in the car he might try to persuade me to let him fit me out with some new artificial arm he’d heard about. I always told him I’d rather not, unless he thought a war amputee made people uncomfortable and was bad for business. ‘Not a bit of it,’ he’d say. ‘Harold, you did the Empire proud in France, and I don’t care who knows it.’ ”
The car was being summoned to the sixth floor.
“You’ll miss him, Harold,” I said.
The operator’s mouth tightened. “I thought we were through having good men shot. Hope you get the S.O.B. that did it.”
The fourth-floor receptionist, a grey-haired woman in pince-nez spectacles, sat behind a desk loaded with communication equipment, including a wax-cylinder Dictaphone and an intercom of the speaker and mike variety. I was surprised when instead of using the latter to announce my arrival she rose from her place, puffing a little as if her corset were laced too tight.
She showed me into a well-equipped office of modest dimensions and austere decor. Mushroom-grey would have been too garish a description of the wall colour. The window faced north and was covered by a Venetian blind, closed plainly more for privacy than shade. A second door stood open, revealing an office slightly larger and even less excitingly furnished.
The desk immediately before me was in fact a rather handsome cherrywood, and something told me I wouldn’t be plunking my derrière on its polished surface. On the far side of it, a thirtyish man with dark wavy hair looked up from a pile of telegrams, presumably of condolence. As his baby-blue eyes registered my presence, he passed his hand over the lower part of his face in a reflexive gesture of pain, then rose with a quite creditable smile of welcome.
“Morris Watt,” he said, coming round the desk and shaking my hand. “And you’ll be Detective Sergeant Shenstone. Please sit down.”
The armchair indicated was comfortable, but of the sort you’d find at the head of a dining room table. I was green enough in the ways of plutocrats to be expecting something plusher, more like the bloated bum rests of a hotel lounge or C.P.R. parlour car. While settling in, I noticed in a yellow metal frame on a side wall a recent studio photograph of Morris’s late father; he was smiling slightly but already in life somewhat sepulchral on account of the almost bald head and the dark skin under dark, deep-set eyes. I suspected that even a picture of Digby taken at Morris’s current age would show the son to be the handsomer of the two. The planes of Morris’s face came together in the way sculptors seemed to find congenial when portraying an idealized volunteer to adorn a war memorial. The vertical depression running from his nose to the middle of his upper lip was particularly pronounced in a way that suggested seriousness of character.
“How can I help you, Mr. Shenstone?” Morris had pushed his own chair back from his interrupted reading and was now sitting with his hands folded on his crossed legs. He looked neither nervous nor, despite his prompt, impatient. I was having some difficulty hearing in my mind’s ear the distraught ejaculations Ivan MacAllister had reported.
“Was it your father’s custom to work late here at the office?”
“Yes. Much more so since my mother’s death. That was two years ago now.”
“And did you usually stay and work with him?”
“Not every night. He was aware that, unlike him, I had a wife waiting up for me. But I was always with him when he intended to stay past eleven p.m. Then he felt it would be too late to ask Curtis to pick him up.”
“His chauffeur?”
“Oh, yes. Excuse me.”
“He never drove himself?”
“He didn’t drive, no.” Morris smiled. “Though Curtis did offer to teach him.”
“So on the nights when he was staying past eleven, where did you park the car?”
“Braddock’s Garage on Pearl Street. Do you know it?”
“Just west of York.” I remembered a one-storey building accommodating an automobile livery and repair service. Parking by the day or the month was available on the flat roof. “The car was out of doors then?”
“Yes, but at least it was off the street.”
“The traffic police approve of that,” I assured him. “On the nights the car was parked at Braddock’s, Mr. Watt, did your father usually accompany you from the office to the garage when it was time to go home?”
“If he had, none of this would have happened!” Morris exclaimed peevishly.
Now it starts, I thought. This crying over spilt milk was presumably what Ivan had heard a lot of the night before.
“You can’t be sure of that, sir,” I said. “In any case, it was your father’s practice to wait on the sidewalk while you got the car. Correct?”
“In winter or if it was raining, he might wait inside