3.
As a trio, they were quiet once returned to Oswald's vehicle. Rex maintained a sufficient, and very silent, line of pondering what he had seen, and, when applicable, continued making notes in Pitman shorthand with a pencil stub and a tired paper pad. Oswald, focused on steering the car through heavy traffic, both of the vehicular and pedestrian variety, turned to humming sprightly tunes if his thoughts became too tangled. Estella continued to think of rye sandwiches, and hoped that Rex was not so ill of body or mind that he'd entirely negate his brother's wish to luncheon together. Surely, Oswald was too sensitive to Rex's attitudes that a slight disinterest in food would be taken seriously; Oswald would force his brother to eat. Such a thought prompted imagery, and Estella found her mind developing thoughts of little boy Malins and how mean they might've once been to one another. She snagged a snicker, unnoticed, as Oswald had just turned the car to Victoria Lane. The tires fished for traction, but the car righted itself and narrowly missed kissing the metal bumper of a fancy limousine.
"I do believe that belongs to Mr. Weatherstaff," Oswald commented, braking then cutting the engine. He saw his brother's head crane about for a better interpretation of the fancy vehicle parked directly in front of his office building's sad and dirty lobby. "Don't you think so, Rex?"
"Could be," he replied, feeling the answer was unimportant. The real question was what in the world George Weatherstaff wished to use Rex Malin's services for—again.
"That poor man," said Estella, smoothing leather gloves over thin, short fingers. She thought back to the news headlines she'd read about Mr. Weatherstaff through the years. "I do hope he's not come for anything too serious."
Rex opened the door with a flourish of urgency. "I'm going to find out, rather than sit here speculating. Coming, Oswald, Ms. Bradley?"
Estella lingered a moment, as Oswald hadn't moved, even after Rex had shut the door with undue force.
"Has he not ever called you anything but Ms. Bradley?" Oswald possessed a smidgen of sympathy, and, for what, he wasn't entirely sure. His brother's daftness—but that was nothing new. Or was he sorry for Estella being so obviously overlooked and overworked; unappreciated, though perhaps not particularly underpaid. "And how many years have you worked for him?"
"That's all right," she dismissed with a slanted smile, "I still call him Mr. Malin," and exited the car to tiptoe across the snowy street.
Oswald was the last to enter, yet found he wasn't so far behind the steps of Estella and Rex. The latter was in the process of discarding his hat, the former undoing just the second button of her coat, when Oswald added himself to the collection of brumal-garbed persons standing in the front office. George Weatherstaff was the other. More than ever he did, Mr. Weatherstaff appeared pale and bedraggled, without the benefit of much wisdom but the boon of good looks.
"Mr. Malin, how pleased I am that you've returned," started George, repressing the need to rush them into the conversation.
"Mr. Weatherstaff," Rex finally got out of his coat, shook the hand of Toronto's leading businessman, one of its city politicians, "I hope you haven't been kept waiting, but we had some business at the station house to attend to."
"Of course," Weatherstaff replied, for a moment letting it dawn on him that Rex Malin was more than a man who knew things, intimate and frightening and hairy things, but a man who was important to the police, who might know information useful to more than everyday citizens. "No, no, haven't been waiting long. I feel that I just got here." He wondered if he had just gotten there, but the last few minutes had been brushed from memory. He couldn't even recall getting out of the car, entering the building, taking the flight of stairs—or even how he got into the office.
"We leave the door unlocked," said Rex, somehow understanding the patterns of Mr. Weatherstaff's thoughts, "more often than not, particularly when we know the office won't be empty so long. Mrs. Lange, across the entresol, keeps an eye on the place." More than she should, but he failed to add that aloud. He saw the dip of Ms. Bradley eyes, and figured she knew what he hadn't said of unfailingly nosy but endearingly sincere Mrs. Lange. "This is my brother, Mr. Oswald Malin. He's been helping me with a case."
Oswald brightened in the pleasure of being included. As he shook Mr. Weatherstaff's rather limp hand, he refreshed the old man's memory. "We've met—more than once. Most recently, we bumped into one another at Captain Anderson's benefit concert."
"Oh, yes," George recalled a lot of unusual fruit punches in pretty glasses, beautiful women hanging on the arms of sour-faced, war-torn men—and sitting through the concert with Lydia next to him. His heart thumped. "I was hoping that I might have a word with you, Mr. Malin. It's an urgent matter, and one that is rather private, I'm afraid."
Rex's expression shifted from blank to intrigued, Mr. Weatherstaff supposing that he had been offended.
"That isn't to degrade the competency of your coworkers, Mr. Malin," he bumbled through the apology, adding leers to the other Mr. Malin, to the secretary who was then returning to her desk, "but I'm sure they're quite capable of—"
"You don't have to apologize to them," Rex interrupted. "Come along into my office." But with Mr. Weatherstaff walking ahead, Rex flipped round to eye his brother, hoping that some of their childish methods of telepathic communication hadn't been depleted through the years. Oswald winced, nodded, and Rex reluctantly shut himself into the office.
Oswald leaned half of his fundament, what he thought of the good half of his fundament, upon the front edge of Estella's desk. "What do you make of that, Ms. Bradley? Poor George Weatherstaff, indeed."
Estella ignored the question, unable to formulate an answer that didn't sound too feminine; she was too sorry for Mr. Weatherstaff. Instead, she drew her gaze upon Oswald's, discovering that his intrigued rooted quickly from Mr. Weatherstaff, the body on Mutual, and whatever she might say next. "Oswald," she set her elbows on the desk, leaning in as he leaned in an additional handful of inches.
"Estella, my dear, dear Estella."
She snorted a laugh at his deep and affected tone. It was bothersome when he attempted to ladle romance upon her. Oswald was too much like her own brother, and he was too gussied in the labels of bachelorhood to render lighthearted insinuations into seriousness. "Do you know, Oswald, if there is some ailment attacking Mr. Malin—Rex?"
"Ole Rexie, is it? Well, I can't imagine what might be eating at the old bird." He looked away, looked back at her. "Rye bread sandwiches, by chance?"
She nodded. "I'm pleased you know about that."
"You're not the only one who pays attention to Rexie's unfortunate and storybook-like diet. I can read his food like a fairytale. Even as a child, we knew what mood he was in, and occasionally even what was bothering him, by what he ate—and by what he did not eat. If it's rye bread sandwiches," he stroked his lantern jaw, listening to the voices of reason as he unwound them from within, "then it's probably business-related. It could hardly be anything else with Rexie. He's never been in love, that I'm aware of. It's an unfortunate side-effect of being a male Malin. We're far too selfish to promote feelings of unselfishness, or to harbor any inclination to let the whimsy of love sail us away."
Estella had no use for the Malin men's lack of passion. Some men, after all, do not require an amorous union to obtain a happy marriage. "If you think it is business, I have every reason to trust your assessment."
"I sense the approach of an argumentative preposition. Don't disappoint me, dear Estella."
"But," she said, wagging her eyebrows as he let loose a boyish, pleased smile, "you forget, don't you, that I am at the root of this business, and I oversee the payments received, and there is no coin that flies out of this room without my knowledge."
He reached up to her ear, causing her to flinch, then he drew his hand away with a coin between thumb and forefinger. "That is true. Now," he slid from the desk, "what do you make of this body?"
"I don't make anything of the body but that it was a body. My lone reason f
or tagging along behind Mr. Malin was to smooth Cavendish's feathers."
"He does have sharp and pointy feathers, doesn't he? He's like an ambulatory busby."
Estella chortled. "With freckled hands and oversized feet."
"Yes, exactly. A busby shaped like a stork. I'm glad you went along to smooth our busby's addled feathers. Perhaps the mollification of one of his distant cousins is just what he needs." He tossed the coin, caught it, and let the two of them exchange a question-and-answer sessions without a word being passed. "Old Rexie is not the only one who is capable of discovering what is hidden. We're all archeologists of data, either that which has been brought to importance by an event, such as, let's say, an eviscerated corpse in an alley, or of information that continued to exist despite its uselessness, like keynotes in Mr. Weatherstaff's personal history."
He'd no sooner finished speaking than the subject of his oration launched himself into the front office. Hatted, coated, gloved, he gave his greetings—and a selection of farewells—to the woman and man he spotted on his way out the door.
Rex emerged from his office, yawning, wishing he had a cup of coffee and a good stew. Out the window, snow continued to fall, alluring, beautiful, sparking in him faint reminders of a home that'd existed before the war. "Oswald, are you still here?"
"As you see. I haven't quite found a way to blend myself into the wall just yet, but I'm working on it. What did Mr. Weatherstaff want?"
"The same thing anyone who walks through my doors wishes to have: information."
"Yes," Oswald continued, "but what sort of information?"
Rex unloaded it upon them, Oswald and Estella. They were his counterparts, and many times he realized how much he owed to Oswald's city connections, and to Ms. Bradley's business acumen. "Poor Mr. Weatherstaff! If it isn't one thing with that man, it's another. He woke up this morning to find that his fiancée is missing. Or, at least, he supposes that she's missing, but he hasn't enough proof of it, and she hasn't been gone long enough to bring about the concern of the police. He's asked me to look into it."
Oswald returned to a seat, this time in a more appropriate and functional wooden chair before the wall of windows. He felt the cold penetrate the exposed skin above his collar as he stared at the floor. Eventually, his gaze found Rex. "I know the woman, of course; she was at Captain Anderson's benefit. Beautiful woman, a bit exotic."
"This is she," Rex removed a photograph from his breast pocket. Oswald accepted it with his fingertips.
"Yes," he said, "that is she. I can't remember her name. Something musical. Greek? Is she Greek?"
"Canadian, through and through. Part aboriginal and part French, I guess, though Mr. Weatherstaff insists on keeping that quiet, for reasons that are rather obvious."
"French and aboriginal? Métis, is she?" echoed Oswald. A merry twinkle in his eyes suggested he'd slipped into a humorous mood. "And he still wants to marry her? I must say that my respect for him has crept upwards a noticeable notch or two. I didn't think such a stick-in-the-mud would defy the philosophy of the times—which is, of course, so backwards that it must enjoy a fine view of its ass—pardon me, Ms. Bradley—and marry whomever he wishes, with ill regard to her status and bloodlines. I did believe him better off marrying a purebred poodle! I can't say that I ever supposed her to be anything but Greek. She has passed herself off marvelously well as a European. Even I feel scammed, in quite a satisfactory manner, I assure you. I do so love it when a woman is smart enough to scam me. That woman, not Greek! I should eat my own socks. Find me some salt, Estella, and I will."
"Don't eat your socks, Oswald; it's snowing too hard outside for you to be without them. I believe that Mr. Weatherstaff is losing the battle of keeping the identify of his future wife buried, if I may say so," said Estella, having glanced at the photograph before returning it to Mr. Malin. "She is too exotic, and people will always wonder—and gossip aloud—about those who are beautifully different."
"I've been both beautiful and different all my life," Oswald interpolated, soliloquizing, "and no one has ever gossiped about my origins, though they have gossiped about plenty of other—h'mm, shall we say unconventional?—aspects of my character."
"So it seems that I'm to find her," Rex said, glancing a final time at the hand-tinted photograph before putting it away. She looked familiar, and it bothered him. "What her real name is, I can't say because I don't know. We know her in Toronto as Lydia Botsaris. As you've devised, Oswald, she has passed herself off as a European socialite educated in England."
"But she must've been educated elsewhere," Oswald continued in the same vein. "If she wasn't, then half the people I associate with on a weekly basis would know her from such-and-such public school. I know gentlemen and ladies from all parts of our fine country, and she has never been more than gossiped about, breathed about, but no one has ever come forward and mentioned that they know her from church, or school, or from a shop in Ottawa that they used to frequent. No, there is something very strange at work here. That Ms. Botsaris is of Canadian roots, I'm inclined to believe. But she is not from Canada, not raised here to be thoroughly Canadian—or, at the very least, British, if she must be that! Which begs me to interrupt your latest case, brother, and backtrack us to the body from this morning, now all properly covered with snow, I suppose."
"What about it?"
Oswald took a moment, pressing a fingertip below mustache, to his lip. "Something odd about his shoes. Did you notice?"
"They were brown—and new."
"Quite new." Oswald leapt up, careened around the room. "And manufactured by a shoe company with a factory in Hamilton. I wish I'd had a better look at his hands."
"To see if they were working-man's hands?" asked Rex, now his turn to sit, to play with a pipe that Estella hadn't seen him light in years. "I looked at the photographs, as did you, Oswald, the one Cavendish handed to us. I didn't notice anything particularly telling about his hands. They were—" He eyed Ms. Bradley engrossed in filing at her desk, but how engrossed he couldn't guess. "They were covered with blood, perhaps even gnawed on for all I could tell."
"We shouldn't be too hard on the photographers. They hadn't much to work with, and the lighting—quite atrocious. We were fortunate at all that they managed to snap a few shots before their breakfasts were lost to them. We are not all of us so desensitized to violence."
Rex carried the same belief, having had his imagination snapped and disfigured while stuck in European battles. Now wasn't the time to discuss philosophical avenues. "I can't exactly follow where you're going with those shoes, Oz."
"He means to find the man's identity using the shoes and the shoe factory," Estella piped up, hardly aware of having said anything, except the Malin brothers stopped pacing and glared at her. She regarded Oswald. "Isn't that correct?"
"Yes," he smiled at her, "it is correct. It's our only established lead on the man's identity."
Rex was unsure. "A pair of shoes?"
"A pair of shoes so new that even a shoe-hound like myself has yet to regard them in any store, including my favorite haberdashery—or everyone's beloved Eaton's. The head of the men's accouterments department telephones me whenever there is a particularly pleasing new arrival."
"You have a terrible illness, Oz," Rex commented, who hadn't purchased a new pair of shoes in five years. "You think our victim works at the factory?"
"That's my guess. At present, that is better than your guess, since you haven't one."
"Why work at a factory in Hamilton, and come to Toronto to get murdered?"
"I'm not sure how far ahead he'd planned his agenda, Rexie, and I somehow doubt that he penciled 'Get Myself Murdered' upon his all-important datebook."
"No, probably not. If you want to go to Hamilton, Oswald, be my guest. I'll gladly turn over the discovery of the victim's identity to you, while I roost on Mr. Weatherstaff's latest and greatest scandal."
Oswald was happy to oblige. His hand flipped away from his forehead a
s he bowed shallowly to his younger sibling. "Thank you, I shall. I've always wanted to visit a shoe factory, and now I've harnessed a legitimate reason. I'll call my friend Teddy. He's in the shoe business, and he knows practically everyone in Ontario that's laced into—please note the pun—such manufacturing. He'll know someone necessary to facilitate the thing. But, brother, before I'm on my way and wrapped up in my side of the case, tell me what you're going to do about the missing Lydia Botsaris."
"I don't have to tell you," Rex said, taking from the filing cabinet behind Estella a blank case-file sheet that he'd fill in. In another drawer, an unexpected empty space startled him, dulling his enthusiasm. "Ms. Bradley, have you seen the— Oh." George Weatherstaff's file, one of the thickest in the office, was handed to him. He planned to shut himself behind a closed door to peruse it. "Well, Oswald, I'll do what I normally do when faced with any of George Weatherstaff's troubles: tread carefully—very carefully. Hold my calls for a while, would you, Ms. Bradley? Not that there will be many. Oswald, happy traveling."
"What about luncheon, Rexie? We're supposed to enjoy a bit of nosh together. My treat."
"I'll grab a sandwich later," Rex said, shutting his office door so harshly that the glass panes rattled.
Oswald set palms to Estella's desk, leaned over, his air one of a master of secrets and a creator of none. "Are you sure he's not encountering any sort of financial turmoil?"
Estella quit fiddling with the troublesome ribbon in the Royal typewriter. She sighed, seeing the crisp grayness of Oswald's emotive eyes, and thinking of those stinky rye sandwiches in the trash bin. "You know, Mr. Malin, I'm not really sure at all."
He touched the end of her chin, again treating her like she was his mother. "I'll go across the way there and grab for you soup and crackers and coffee. Rex can hunt and spear his own food when he wishes to eat. But you, my dear, will not starve on my account. I should like a crumb or two if I'm on my way to the Birmingham of Ontario. Back in a few minutes!"
He left a moment later, distracted by his brother's attitude and wishing he could be a trifle more beguiled by Estella's sympathetic attitude and industrious work ethic.
* * * *