The Information Man
The Information Man
By Lore Lippincott
Copyright 2014 Lore Lippincott
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation to anyone bearing the same name or names. Any resemblance to individuals known or unknown to the author are purely coincidental.
For Cousin Robin.
* * * *
Table of Contents
The Information Man
About Lore Lippincott
* * * *
1.
For the fifteenth time in the last five minutes, George Weatherstaff patted the pockets of his morning jacket, wondering if he had packed into them all that he'd meant to. Handkerchief, cigarette case, photographs—yes, yes, they were all exactly where they should be. When handing them over, he could reach them very easily. That was good, since he knew his hands would shake. They always did shake whenever the day deviated from its preferred routine. He liked schedules. They structured his life, now that the bottom had been taken out of everything. He woke in the morning, yawned and watched the sunrise. He found the world unfolding as it was meant to, according to the timetable of his life. But then—
The whole blasted day was ruined by the unequalled worry steaming through him. Unused to such an exceptional state of concern, particularly when it came to the welfare of one he knew so well, George retained just enough awareness of his environment, and himself in a thankfully familiar environment, that he circled through the motions of an everyday morning proportionately distracted.
He patted his pockets for the sixteenth time in the last five minutes, descending on lithe but large feet on the shallow steps of the front staircase of his Deer Park mansion. In the grand hall below, he saw the lineup of his liveried staff, Domenico and Lucy and the sharp, trenchant Mrs. Bowman. A formidable staff, really. The majority of them leftover from his boyhood days, when his mother ruled with any compound of compassion that oxidized the iron fist his father used to rule.
Behind him, still in his chambers, his aide-de-camp, Williams, and the frisky, yet uncouth lad Williams was training as his potential replacement. Williams was, to everyone's regret, getting old, arthritic, and would soon retire in one of those faraway towns George had only heard about and never been, like Hamilton or Brampton. A man with power and influence on Toronto had no business going to Hamilton, unless it was to start a new factory or take over a company. George Weatherstaff hardly left Toronto. He hadn't left yet—
But it was no use. He couldn't push the thing from his mind. It was the first time in his thirty-five years that he began to feel a pang of envy for Williams, a man who could walk away to Brampton, Hamilton, London, Owen Sound—one of those damnable impartial towns that didn't really exist and had no influence on the Dominion as a whole. It would almost be nice to become as invisible and unimportant as Williams, or as one of those unfortunate towns with nothing to recommend them but quiet, tree-lined streets, of skating and pond hockey in the winter, and mosquitos in the summer.
What was it like to live so anonymously? As George Weatherstaff, he'd never know.
"Well?" he demanded of Domenico, brushing off a peculiar piece of lint that Williams, eyesight about as useless as his knurled hands, had missed. George's conscious attempts to run the house with the compassion of his mother and the rusting iron of his father had landed him somewhere between indifference and sarcasm. Feeling that there were worse attributes his attendees could find in a master, George had no emotional woes when it came to his staff. If he were to tell them the problem facing him that morning, no doubt he'd find a crowd teeming with sympathy and a desire to fix it for him. It was like having a brazen fraternity at one's fingertips. Through the last three hours, George had found nothing to tell Williams, nothing about his suspicions or his doubts. He was equally silent in front of Domenico.
Domenico had been in Canada so long that his Italian accent had been lost, and he hadn't any of his brothers' haughtiness. It was why he had done so well for himself, and they so terribly. He bowed a bit to Mr. Weatherstaff. "Good morning, sir. If you are willing, I should like to go to Hamilton today. A nursery auction is—"
New trees. Damn it all. A man comes to me with trees. "Aren't you aware that it's November?"
"Yes, sir." He caught the smallest note of laughter in Mr. Weatherstaff's eyes, coming and going quickly. "Yes—yes, sir. But the ground is not entirely frozen, and if it should warm up—"
"Please yourself—go. Take the Oldsmobile, if you'd like. And take that firecracker boy with you, the one Williams is trying to house-train. Frankly, I support the idea that he's best suited for outdoor work, at least until the full brush of winter is upon us." He glanced out the window beside the oversized front door. "Which seems to be today."
Domenico agreed that winter was nearly at their door, and commented that Eustace would go with him to Hamilton.
In George Weatherstaff's much-inflicted mind, he wondered who Eustace was, and why he was going with Domenico to Hamilton. In a flash of understanding, he grasped what he needed, returned the name Eustace to the incompetent youth standing beside the bent old oak tree Williams, and sent the groundskeeper on his way with a symbolic wave of the hand. George longed to perform the same with Lucy. What could the cook want? Words about a dinner menu for his upcoming birthday party. He cared very little. On a day like that, to think of having a birthday party!
"Put the evening on hold," he demanded in his darkest, most guttural voice. "I will not entertain guests at this time. It is ridiculous to suppose that I would."
"Yes, sir," mumbled the cook, curtseyed, and disappeared down the hall to her world of pots, pans, void of contrary masters.
"Mrs. Bowman, bring me some sense this morning!" he begged, applying a corner of a soft linen handkerchief to warm spots on his roomy forehead, below thick hair not quite red and not quite brown.
Mrs. Bowman, employed the last dozen years by Mr. Weatherstaff, was under the impression that he was fatigued that morning. She teetered on the motherly verge of suggesting he return to his room before noting the intensity of his eyes as they hit the newspaper still folded in her hand. She held it out to him, wordless, practically thoughtless.
He grabbed it, fanned it to an open position, and hungrily tore through the headlines. A body on Mutual—but it was a man's body. That was gratifying—relieving, even. But there were other headlines he breezed through—economics on Prohibition, editorials, leads, sports, but nothing—nothing at all—of what he most wanted to know.
At least she was not lying dead in an alley on Mutual, and given a restitution of sorts through the hyperbole of a gifted journalist.
The newspaper, atrociously folded, was thrown back at Mrs. Bowman. Seeing the obvious distress of her master, Mrs. Bowman tried distracting him.
"Did you see the article on the new hockey rules, sir? Most interesting, allowing the gentlemen players to substitute even while the game is going on. I think that will prove to be very confusing."
He hadn't the faintest idea what she was talking about. Who cared for new hockey rules when his life was in turmoil? It might be best if he say something, permit the charade of wellness to go on a little longer. "Oh, yes, I suppose it will." Dumb and aimless, he began to follow Mrs. Bowman into the rear of the house, where it was more open, sparsely furnished, and several degrees warmer near the busy kitchen.
"Shall you have breakfast in the dining room or nook this morning, sir?"
"Neither," he said, suddenly facing the action he must take. "I think—yes, I'd better go out this morning. I have a call to make. Yes," he said, clearly distracted, "yes, I think that is the best thing to do."
For the seventeenth time that morning, George Weatherstaff patte
d the pockets of his morning jacket. He had everything required, hadn't he? Photos, handkerchief, cigarette case. But what hadn't he done? What was missing? Other than the obvious, of course.
"Morning post," he muttered below the flat din of the house. "Mrs. Bowman, has the morning post arrived?"
Mrs. Bowman, astounded, could do nothing for the subsequent seconds but blink at him. "No, sir. It doesn't usually arrive until nine-thirty, or ten at the latest."
"I can't wait for it, then. I must go out." Disheartened as he was over the lack of morning post, and alarmed that he should be in this position at all, he found Mrs. Bowman had an object tucked between her black dress and her elbow. "Is this the morning paper? Good. I'll read it on the way. Thank you, Mrs. Bowman. And cancel that birthday party for me, would you? I don't want to entertain any guests for a while."
Bewildered, Mrs. Bowman consented to his wishes, and retreated stonily into the kitchen. Lucy the cook was there, among two of the girls, and the second groundskeeper just finishing his breakfast. Two of Mr. Weatherstaff's pointers sat on the floor, eating bones and scraps. Mrs. Bowman was relieved to find Williams appearing from the back stairwell, slowly, meticulously, thinly in control of his aching hip, his lumpy hands.
"Williams," she wasted no time reaching him. He was a winsome man, still sound in mind, still counted among the most important member of George Weatherstaff's crew. He demanded respect despite his ailments, and, because of them, demanded a fair amount of well-hidden pity. "Williams, was Mr. Weatherstaff out of sorts this morning?"
"He was a bit dazed, yes."
"Tea, Mr. Williams," said Lucy, bringing around a cup and saucer to him, with Jones the second groundskeeper sweeping out the plain wooden chair for him, as if he was as important as the man of the castle. They hung about, Jones, Lucy, Mrs. Bowman, and even the pointers directed their ears his way.
"Mark my words, if you will," said Williams, neither interested in fanning gossip nor interested in perpetuating their dislike for Mr. Weatherstaff's personal life, "but the master's present state of discontentment is a result of that unearthly and foul woman's contamination. She alone is to blame for this."
Jones, Lucy and Mrs. Bowmen murmured a repository of agreements. The pointers blinked, blew out breaths that seemed, in their own way, to concur with Williams. After all, they'd never really liked that woman, and what business did the master have of marrying someone he hardly knew? No business at all, said one pointer to the other, each returning to his bone.
Stiff in the rear seat of his everyday limousine, George resorted to a second perusal of the Gazette. Uncertain that he would find a useful sentence, the murder in the alley off Mutual Street was nonetheless piquing his interest. The article was much too long, felt forced in portions, but a man of business was not so interested in the pretentious wording of a lowly newspaperman. It was unusual that there should be such a murder the same evening that he'd discovered that his fiancée had seemingly vanished off the face of the planet.
And this would be no good. No good at all. It would be another scandal to hit the illustrious personage of George Weatherstaff.
He needed to find his fiancée, find out what had driven her away, and he needed to go about it in the quietest manner possible. What he did not want was a third violent incident in his life striking glee into the hearts of newspaper editors and augmenting the hatred of naysayers. More than that, he wanted the remainder of his years to be free of his past, to have one life-changing incident not end in death. He began to feel a curse had come upon him, starting from childhood and seeing him through all subsequent years of his existence.
Was there always something cold, dismissive and distant in her eyes when she looked at him? Had she been disturbed in a way that he was too blissfully kindhearted to see?
If she was, it hardly mattered now. She'd disappeared.
Yet he wasn't the variety of man that was handed a desperate situation and let it make mincemeat of him. No one successful could manage his life in that haphazard manner. No, he would not let her walk away from him—or be taken from him without first fighting for her. He deserved a happy ending, perhaps twice as much as any other man.
"Smith," he said to his chauffeur, enclosed in the same windowed box as he, "take us round to Victoria Lane, would you?"
George wanted this dire situation handled quietly, delicately, and only one man in Toronto worked liked that. Among the photographs of a pretty, exotic face was a business card that George read again to comfort himself.
Rex Malin
Information Services
Enquiries accepted 9 - 4, M-Sa
Victoria Lane
Toronto
* * * *