The Information Man Page 2

2.

  Secrets bounced around the office again. Estella had an extra sense that highlighted the growth of such things. In rooms like theirs, at a desk like hers, secrets were as commonplace as dust, as the stink of yesterday's discarded lunch. What aided the olfactory presence of secrets was the tell-tale crust of two slices of rye bread Estella found ineffectively buried beneath papery discard in the bin by her desk. Rex only lunched on rye bread if his nerves gnawed on him.

  She ran a finger down the day's list of appointments, then, reflecting on her own affliction of apprehension, flipped the daily calendar to the next day. November of 1927 would soon be drawing to a close, and nothing too outlandish had yet happened. Benjamin had made mumblings about the shift of moons and stars, celestial objects with funny names, it was that time of the month again when the Zodiac shifted. Maybe that's all that had dipped Rex in a mood of rye bread and repressed aggravation.

  Her buffed, perfectly shell-pink nail slid down the appointments: Tomlinson, Rickers, Oswald's for luncheon, a clear afternoon until early drinks with Inspector Newcombe at five-thirty.

  She paused, reflecting. What would Rex eat for lunch at Oswald's? If it was any sort of cereal, sandwich or heavily breaded slice of meat, his nerves continued to be bothersome. She'd have to ask Oswald later. He was a good man, always willing to explain his brother's faults to those who'd had the misfortune to meet Rex Malin prior to his long stint of adulthood. Rex was one of those that it was perfectly indecent to imagine him as a baby, a child, an awkward schoolboy. But, as far as Estella could unearth, she was the only one who knew that Rex's appetite turned abnormal when secrets bounced around the office.

  He was a fine private investigator—or whatever it was he did—and secrets were his business.

  The paint on the door, the tag on the mailbox in the old building's dilapidated lobby failed to recognize Rex Malin as a private investigator. It declared him thus: Rex Malin, Information Services.

  His was the business of gathering, distributing and realigning information that his clients wished him to congregate. At this, and perhaps only this, Rex excelled. It was his lone talent. He was not particularly good-looking, his face pockmarked and loose following a bout of some traumatic childhood ailment. He had a half-inch scar that slanted across the bottom corner of his mouth, the remainder of a brawl he'd been in as a youth. His left leg and left arm were at times slow, particularly on damp wintry days, of which Toronto possessed many, and these ailments were remainders of his time in war. He never spoke of his years in Europe. Once, when Estella seized the opportunity of asking Oswald Malin about Rex's deployment, she was given a sympathetic pat upon the shoulder, for Oswald was forever treating women as if they were his enfeebled mother, and remarked that he believed that his brother had never really quit fighting the war.

  Even before 1914, Rex had shuffled information around as often as he could, as often as he was paid for it. He'd been known throughout town as a man who delivered.

  Among the Toronto Police were those officers that both despised and respected Mr. Malin. Many times through the last five years they'd crawled, somewhat proudly, through the doors of Rex's office and wrung from the mercenary, laconic antihero a gobbet of information. Inspector Cavendish, Station 6, was one particular backwards praiser of Rex Malin's work. Cavendish didn't like to use Mr. Malin, but he did not like to refuse avenues of aid if his own instincts and talents fell short.

  At exactly two minutes after nine in the morning, Estella was jerked into surprise by the stentorian ring of the telephone.

  "Good morning, you've reached Rex Malin's office."

  "Well, Ms. Bradley, is he in yet?"

  The flat but tight voice of Inspector Cavendish sent a ball of apprehension into Estella's stomach. Mr. Malin was sitting on a secret too big to hide behind rye bread and long draws on a pipe, and Inspector Cavendish was in on it.

  "No, Inspector; he's not come in yet." Estella wondered if she should worry about Mr. Malin. "Shall I have him telephone you when he arrives?"

  "Tell him he'd better get in here."

  "Yes, sir, I will—" But she quit talking into a dead line, replaced the earpiece on the candlestick apparatus, and ruminated on the unfolding of these darkened subjects.

  No amount of thought could help. She couldn't do it another second, or she'd start biting nails, pacing the room, looking out the window down to Victoria Lane, waiting for Mr. Malin's brushed wool hat and loose coat to materialize. Rather than take the route of wallowing, Estella sorted through files.

  Becoming a secretary to a man of information was not what she had wished to be at a young age, and her skills in the department of filing were not yet finely chiseled. She was twenty-four, two older sisters and one younger brother, each sister already married, her brother a happy bachelor. Mother lived at a home for the elderly and infirm far outside town, "dying by inches rather than yards," as Mother herself often proclaimed. Father was gone, injured in the War in more ways than physical, and it was a blessing, almost, when he'd finally lapsed out of life. But that left the older sisters to marry the first suitors that came along, for Benjamin, the man of the house, to do a remarkable and worthy thing with his life, which he had accomplished by routing himself into the beer industry and adjoining that business with the ludicrous hobby of astrology. Estella Bradley stood alone, without grand prospects. Having always been a soul of independence, or what she had thought was independence—what Benjamin had laughingly called stubbornness, what Minnie had called determination, what Hettie had refrained from calling anything—Estella found work, first in the office of a church, then, somehow, knocking on Mr. Malin's door on a rainy morning inquiring after a position seen in the Gazette.

  But even that was a bit of an odd story. Estella's first espial of Mr. Malin's ad for a secretary was seen on the board of "local announcements" at a favorite eatery; then, at Eaton's one afternoon, she happened to overhear two women discussing an office on Victoria Lane, the rent of one Mr. Malin, and whether or not he could afford it. The rotational drives of her life centered around Mr. Malin's office on Victoria Lane. She was so terribly nervous, cold, and had had a spat with Benjamin in the morning, so that, when she knocked politely on the door of "Rex Malin, Information Services," she was agitated, hued with sorrow and apprehension. Being then out of sorts, Estella took one look at the fashionable, quiet, gray-eyed man who'd answered the door, and rather than say hello, give her name, or make a polite enquiry regarding his health, she blurted out, "You're supposed to hire me as your secretary."

  "Am I, really?" he asked, sweeping his intense gaze up and down her form, rather liking what he saw, and stepped aside to permit her entrance. "It's a splendid idea, and I'm all for it," he paused to grin at her, "and I'll pass it along to my brother, who's a bit more in charge of those things. I'm Oswald Malin, lone brother to the man of information."

  Estella had slipped into endless embarrassment, but found she appreciated Mr. Oswald Malin's amusement at her forthrightness. "I suggest you hire this lovely creature, Rex, or I will create some superficial and completely unnecessary position for her in my realm of quotidian drudgery, and by and by you'll see what a parcel of human excellence you missed."

  Many years before, Estella had ceased wondering if she would've been offered the position then and there had it not been for Oswald Malin's auspicious company. The result was too difficult to determine. Certainly, throughout the years, Oswald treated Ms. Estella Bradley much more like a lady than Rex. He brought her small bouquets on holidays, always remembered her birthday, purchased small corsages of orchids on the anniversary of her start of employment. If Rex had any memory of all of when he hired Estella Bradley, it was never brought up in conversation, except as a grunt when he asked where the "weeds" had come from, meaning his brother's gifted flowers, and received an answer that shone the light on a moment of history he'd ignored. That was Mr. Malin's way. Oswald was just the opposite: handsome, literate, charming, though both were unwed and harbo
red no conscious female fixation. Oswald was too social, preferring a coterie of Toronto's most glamorous to surround him while he took in plays, concerts and lectures. Rex did nothing about town but go to and from work, visit the stations of the inspectors and detectives who'd asked for his services; he'd long ago stopped accepting Oswald's attempts to make him a man about town.

  Estella had an inkling that Oswald hadn't entirely given up on his brother. Lately, there'd been a minute mention of a Thanksgiving dinner held at Oswald's house, to which Rex was invited, Estella as well. It'd become one of Oswald's unusual traditions, rounding out the day with a fine feast and an evening of old-fashioned parlor games. Estella had never had such a good time as she'd had the last two years at Oswald Malin's for Thanksgiving, nor been among such glamorous people. Not even when George Weatherstaff stormed into the office—not once, but twice! But he had a way of making those around him realize that he was, in fact, the George Weatherstaff, with an article and a position in the Government House. Oswald Malin never forgot that he was just another man in Toronto. Rex Malin threw himself into the background of Toronto as often as possible. That was Rex's way, too.

  Newspaper clippings from a file fluttered to the floor. Estella was obliged to get on her hands and knees to collect the pieces, articles ranging from 1921 to 1923, for whatever reason still of value to Mr. Malin. He was not used to having his files relegated to the rubbish heap. And, very diligently, Estella replaced the clippings into the folder. She was in an awkward position, half under her desk, stockinged legs sticking out from it, the moment Rex paraded into the office. The door shuddered to a close after a hesitant second. He wasn't quite sure what Ms. Bradley was doing bent over the floor, her shapely gams sticking out for just anyone to see.

  "Lose a penny, Ms. Bradley?" he asked, preferring to think that his impoverished secretary had a need for small forms of currency as intensely as she did the big ones.

  Estella bumped her knot of hair against the edge of the desk, trying, seemingly without success, to not look like a fool as she rose from the floor, clippings in hand. Mr. Malin appeared atypically grotesque for a Monday morning. No one had yet turned on the switch of his thoughts, and his fair blue eyes were dumb as slate. He looked clean, however, and had on his favorite black silk tie, a gift from his brother. She ignored the remark about hunting for a penny. "Inspector Cavendish has already telephoned for you this morning."

  "At nine o' clock precisely, I'll bet." He dethroned his head of brushed wool hat, removed his coat in a quick snap of fabric.

  "Nine-oh-two. He asked if you would go to the station house and speak to him."

  Rex's thin mouth thinned all the more as he drew it against his teeth. Must he? Already? Noon was too early to spend a minute in the company of Cavendish. Midnight, too, might still be considered too soon. Rex refrained from acknowledging Ms. Bradley's message, instead applying his attention to the morning post. There was nothing extravagant, only two bills and a catalogue.

  Estella recognized Mr. Malin's "studious expression." Upon his features fell a bovine dullness, like a cow in a field chewing her cud and gazing emptily at a fine day. Should she interrupt him? She tested him with a rephrasing of her brief conversation with Cavendish. "I believe the inspector was in earnest, Mr. Malin." A development of some secondary thought prompted her to go on in a different direction. "Are you unwell today?"

  "The weather's atrocious," he remarked, letting envelopes drop from his hand. "The wind is fierce, and it's started snowing. See," he gestured to the bare window with a view to the small Polish grocer's across the lane. Indeed, white marks daubed the scenery. "I'm feeling lazy this morning. I'd be happy not doing a thing."

  And, again, Estella Bradley was prompted by some intuitive voice in her head. "Perhaps, if I went along with you, it would not seem so laborious."

  He considered the proposition. A departure from the norm, of course. Ms. Bradley was meant to stay in the office, handle correspondence, send out bills, seek payments that might be in arrears, and, above all, answer the solicitations of potential clients either as they entered through the door or spoke through the telephone. Yet it was a beastly day. Who would have trouble on such a morning, other than the trouble of staying warm?

  From the hat stand, he flung a dark green coat deftly caught by Ms. Bradley. "You do handle Cavendish better than most, so let's go."

  He was planning to walk to the station, a few blocks away, and did not ask Ms. Bradley if the weather was too incommodious for her to withstand. It didn't occur to him that he should. But as they were exiting the shabby front hall, from a fine car parked at the curb, they were subjected to a series of hellos from the vocals of Oswald Malin.

  "I've come to see if we might change our luncheon plans, brother," he said, tipping towards Ms. Bradley with a pinch at the brim of his gray hat. "You're not just going out, are you? Good heavens, whatever for? I should think you'd find it ghastly out here, Rex. I find it rather balmy myself."

  And Rex found himself a trifle annoyed at Oswald's loquacity. "Inspector Cavendish wishes to speak to me."

  "In person?"

  "Well, if not, then the walk there will be an exercise in inconvenient superfluidity."

  "Ankling it, are you? Well, that's nonsense. I'll drive you there. Walk, in this weather," he opened the rear door of the coupe for them, "never heard of such a thing."

  "You did just say it was balmy," Rex reminded him.

  "For me, yes, it might be. But you shouldn't treat yourself so poorly, Rexie, and I won't have you treating Ms. Bradley with the same degree of misery you adopt for your own troubled soul. It's far too formulaic. Ms. Bradley, do sit in the front with me, and we'll see what our dear Cavendish bird wants of you."

  Inside the car, Oswald, a motorist bent on achieving perfection as if every stretch of roadway was a test, Estella let her gander roam from tall buildings to pedestrians. Rex had a pipe in his mouth, unpacked and unlit.

  "Oswald," he started, not yet sure that the subject he was about to acknowledge should be broached with his brother, "did you happen to see the newspaper this morning?"

  "Indeed, my eyes couldn't have missed it."

  Estella glanced at the driver, wondering what she hadn't seen. "I haven't a subscription, but, come to think of it, I did see many more persons on the trolleys reading it this morning as I came to work. Does it have something to do with the inspector's urgency?"

  "A most potent urgency, I should think," Oswald added.

  "There was a dead body found up on Mutual," said Rex, never sure how well Ms. Bradley took the news of cadavers, though she didn't then unleash a visible spark of squeamishness.

  "Well, this is a big city, and, unfortunately, inhabited by people, who are, unfortunately, mad at times and capable of taking the life of another."

  "What a philosophical slant you have, Estella," Oswald said in the cadence of one dishing a saccharine compliment. "But, you see, my brother aims to tell us that this dead body was particularly brutal, not just your ordinary murder. Oh, no."

  Rex bit down on the pipe, thoughts harkening back to the words in the article, interposed with battlefields of bygone, ill days in his past. He disliked Oswald's choice of descriptor; there was no such thing as an ordinary murder. "It could have something to do with what Inspector Cavendish wants to say. It might have nothing to do with it."

  "At this point, your conjecture is as hearty as mine, Rexie. And, now, here we are!"

  Oswald drove by the stone and brick entrance to the sixth station house, but found no empty place on the street, either to park or to allow his passengers a quick sprint into the relative warmth of the building. He pulled into the nearest alley, found a suitable lot with a paucity of spaces, and accompanied them into the station. Rex hadn't any interest in his brother's appearance, sure that, when Cavendish saw that his information broker had come with a genteel phalanx, neither Ms. Bradley nor Oswald would be permitted entry into Cavendish's office.

  It
was painted that way in Rex's mind, but the reality was quite the opposite. Cavendish was pleasant to Oswald Malin, courteous to Ms. Bradley. He was one of those forward-thinking chaps that believed women were reliable in the workforce, and they'd carved a niche for themselves in the Toronto Police. Women, he knew, had their uses, and he didn't mind the presence of a brain as keen as Estella Bradley's. It helped, perhaps, that he had knowledge that she lacked, that they were distant cousins, some third or fourth according to his mother, whose own mother had been a Bradley. The presence of one another in their lineage had been known to him for some time, yet he'd found no reason to tell Ms. Bradley. He wondered if Rex knew of it, or suspected it, since Rex Malin seemed to know everything at any given moment.

  He hadn't called Rex Malin into his office to discuss the avenues of his family tree. At the trio gathered in front of him, he flung the Gazette headline-side up. "Seen this?"

  "I have seen it," answered Rex. He'd devised a way of understanding Cavendish, a small, reedy man thickening just slightly at the waist, under the chin. "What do you want me to do about a dead body found on Mutual?"

  Cavendish delayed, unable to reach the pith of the dilemma quickly. He brought the paper around to his own gaze, caught words on the page that he'd read three times already. As Ms. Bradley's fine contralto lifted, so did his attention.

  "I suspect, Mr. Malin, that the man who's been found hasn't an identity at all, and something more atrocious than cold and calculated murder is behind his death."

  Rex's eyes winced at Cavendish. "This is true," he said after a span of seconds. "How interesting. And what is it that the papers haven't said, Inspector?"

  "I should think a dead body is harsh enough, a reason for journalistic censorship," said Oswald, hoping the interruption, the veil of his ignorance thrown the inspector's way, might incline the man to speak. For a policeman, Cavendish had a peculiar, introverted manner. Perhaps it wasn't a usual day for him, and this was no usual murder. Oswald had few difficulties persuading others to believe him an idiot if, for instance, it made them feel competent and confident.

  "That isn't an accurate assessment, Mr. Malin," the inspector said to Oswald. "The journalist doesn't know what to think of it, and, rather than tell what he might've glimpsed over the shoulders of a dozen of my fellow officers, is doing this best to replace facts with fiction, and was asked by this department if he wouldn't be a bit hyperbolical—at least until we get this straightened out."

  Rex's indifference stayed intact. "I still believe that there's something you're not telling me, something the journalist didn't want to put in the newspaper. What is it?"

  Cavendish blinked, glanced briefly at Ms. Bradley, then to Mr. Malin. From below the newspaper, he brought out a series of large photographs.

  "Just had these dropped off."

  Rex took the stack, flipped through them quickly, Oswald peering at the terrible images over his arm. Cavendish started taking them back.

  "Don't think they're fit for a lady, Ms. Bradley."

  Estella's lips pinched together tightly, her light hazel eyes in a potent glare. Cavendish was so stupefied by the expression that he was unable to stop her from snatching the photos out of his fingers. What Estella observed were the remains of a man—the body of him so disfigured that only his shoes, still intact, gave any indication that he was human, had once walked upright, had once lived. Estella dropped them on the desk, once she'd gone through them as thoroughly as she could. Nothing seemed particularly off about the crime scene, an alley that debouched upon Mutual, but the man's body—mauled and mutilated—that was unusual.

  Cavendish gave them a summary. "His throat was ripped clean out of him, and bits of his entrails, too. It was like a creature had come along and supped on his insides. Worst thing in a long while I've seen, and I've seen plenty of people dismembered, run over by trolleys, trains—things I saw in the War. But this was—well," he raised his gaze, remembering why he'd joined the police in the first place, "it was all the worse for being without a good reason. Trains and trolleys will disfigure anyone, and war is war, doing what it does. This hasn't got a reason, has it?" He anticipated Mr. Malin's next question. "Body's at the morgue, being looked at by the coroner." A square card of stable paper was tossed to Mr. Malin. "There's your passport to get in at the crime scene, if you need to go. Should anyone ask you too many questions, wonder why you're poking about, refer him back to me. If we find out anything of ahead of you, Malin, you'll hear about it."

  Rex agreed, the terms being standard throughout the years of their productive dyad. Cavendish gave him no other command. Not one remark of appreciation passed between them, merely a nod as Rex left the office behind Oswald and Ms. Bradley.

  "Oswald," Rex started, returned to the automobile seat he'd vacated only ten minutes before, "would you mind driving us to Mutual? I should think a connoisseur of detective novels wouldn't protest getting a look at the scene of a crime."

  "I have nothing better to do today," he paused, "or any other day, come to think of it. We were to have lunch later, brother."

  "Were we? I'm not hungry."

  Estella was attuned to this. Rye sandwiches, limited amount of hunger. Something was definitely bothering him. Oswald went on.

  "As you two fine beings of my friendship know that I have a taste for the unconventional, either in art or crimes, you'd know that I'd appreciate any intrusion I might make during your investigation."

  Rex ignored him, biting on his pipe, trying to imagine how he might discover the identity of a man disfigured beyond recognition when the police had already failed at it. He'd forgotten about Ms. Bradley, thinking of her only as someone else in the car, before Oswald spoke to her.

  "You didn't seem disturbed by Inspector Cavendish's revelations regarding our innominate corpse, Ms. Bradley, or while regarding those rather obscene photographs."

  "No," Estella replied, feeling bold, "no, I'm not rendered into a quivering crier at the evisceration of a poor man, Mr. Malin."

  Rex stared at the back of her sleek head, noting, for once, that her hair held the tint of dark brown sugar, that it had a frothiness to it. "Not afraid of blood, are you? I didn't think you were." Perhaps a family trait, he thought, remembering what he'd unearthed about the Bradley line. "Does that have anything to do with the time you spent overseas?"

  "Overseas?" echoed Oswald. Ms. Bradley's cheeks turned pink, and her heated expression tried to condemn Rex, but nothing under the sun could accomplish that. "Were you a nurse in the War, Ms. Bradley? I thought you a degree too young to be mixed up in the foolishness of disbanding empires, but perhaps I'm more the fool for thinking it."

  She had no choice now but to mention it. "Yes, I was overseas. A nurse at a hospital in Devon—that's in England. Until my real age was discovered, and I was sent home. That is all that's ever been interesting in my story. But I wonder who this man was."

  Though the deflection caused Rex to shift in his seat uncomfortably, Oswald appreciated it.

  "We'll soon find out," Oswald said, pressing forward with optimism, as he commonly did.

  "If it's possible," Rex countered.

  Estella believed it wouldn't be long before the brothers, united for this strange investigation, would tire of one another's quibbles and oppositions, and opt instead to return to their conventional methods of investigation: Rex doing the work, and Oswald pleasantly bothering him at inopportune moments with the promise of fine dining, amiable company, and conversation so gripping and intelligent that he wouldn't be able to think of work for a succession of hours.

  Estella began to change her mind once they neared the scene of the crime. A constable remained on duty to shoo away the infrequent unwanted pedestrian, but he was ineffective at hiding the large display of black, brown, rust and red that soiled the wavy old brick-laid alley. The unnatural coloration covered an expanse much wider than even Rex had foreseen.

  "What kind of crime was this?" Rex asked of no one in particular.


  "All crimes are heinous," said Oswald, "but I believe we're about to plant ourselves upon the tip of a very frightening iceberg."

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