‘They said they didn’t get proper notes. They wanted more history. He wasn’t very formal in class. And some of the stuff he was talking about he hadn’t figured out himself. But he told us he hadn’t,’ she ended, more to herself, apparently echoing an old argument.
‘I want to know what kind of person he was. Did you know him—yourself?’
‘Personally?’
‘Yes.’
‘A little bit. I used to go up to his office once in a while and talk to him. As I said, he liked me and we had a nice time talking about stuff.’
‘He took an interest in you?’
‘He thought I might be able to write a real essay, as he called it. I tried. He told me a couple of weeks ago that the first page of my last essay was the best first page he had had all year. Still only got a B + though!’
While she was talking, Salter ordered two more beers. He could see why Summers liked Molly Tripp. He had very little to ask her himself, but a very great desire to sit with her for a while longer and watch her talk. She was nice.
‘What made the essay so good? The first page, I mean.’
‘I read it this afternoon. It sounded like him talking, you know?’ She smiled as if she and Salter were talking about a mutual friend.
‘And that was it? You were a good student?’
‘Yeah, I guess so. Oh, shit, I see what you’re getting at. He didn’t try to get my pants off. He wasn’t a groper.’
That is what I wanted to know, thought Salter, but I may have screwed this up. He acted puzzled. ‘Huh?’ he said.
‘We talked about poetry, is all. We talked some personal stuff sometimes, but not very much.’
Salter thought of a way to cover his interest, to make it official.
‘Professor Summers was not in the habit of seducing his students, then?’ There. How did that sound? Nice and pompous?
‘Hell, no. Oh, there was something there when I was in his office, Inspector. Isn’t there always between any man and woman?’
Salter tested this against several ladies he knew, and thought, No. He nodded in agreement.
‘The other kids said he spent half the time in class with his eye on me, but I think I was his litmus test. He watched me to see if what he was saying was making sense. I did like him, too. I kissed him once.’
‘When?’
‘The last time I saw him. Last week. He’d just told me he’d given me an A for the course because of a good exam. He was as pleased as I was, so I gave him a big smacker when he wasn’t watching.’
‘What did he do?’
‘He just sat there looking pleased. Now I want to go.’ She stood up. The tears were streaming down her face.
‘Where can I find you?’ Salter asked. ‘Just in case.’
‘Here.’ She gave him a card. ‘I started work on Monday as the assistant to the assistant creative director at an advertising agency, and I have cards already.’ She belted up her raincoat. ‘I hope you find this character, Inspector. What’s your real name?’
‘Salter,’ he said startled. ‘Charlie Salter is my real name.’
‘Well, lotsa luck, Charlie.’
They left the tavern and Salter watched her walk away. Her stride was long and she walked slightly hunched up as if a gale was blowing. At the corner she turned and saw him still there, and waved. Salter waved back and pretended to be looking for his car keys. He would have to see her again, he decided.
That night, after supper, Annie said, ‘I’ve invited your father to eat on Sunday.’
Seth groaned theatrically. I’ll miss Walt Disney. He doesn’t like the TV on.’
Angus said, ‘I have to do my essay in the main library on Sunday. I’ll just have a hamburger at Mac’s.’
There was a silence while they waited for Salter to start shouting.
Annie said quickly, ‘You can watch Walt Disney upstairs. And you can come home by six, Angus. Your grandfather only comes once a month.’
Angus said, ‘But this essay is important, Mum. Besides, I don’t like lamb.’
‘Nor do I,’ Seth said. ‘I hate lamb and stuff.’
Annie said, ‘It doesn’t have to be lamb.’
Salter said, holding on to his temper, ‘You can have a choice, lamb or beef.’
Angus said, ‘Couldn’t we have poached salmon with that terrific white stuff on it?’
‘You know bloody well your grandfather doesn’t eat salmon.’
‘Lasagna, then.’
‘Or any Italian food. Or French, or Greek, or Chinese food. Now knock it off you two. We’ll have roast beef, and you’ll like it, and you can watch the upstairs TV turned down low. After you’ve said hullo to him.’
‘Walt Disney’s no good in black and white.’
‘Fine. Don’t watch him, then. Now shut up, the pair of you.’
This was the true clash of cultures in the Salter home. Unlike the thoughtful, ever-accommodating relatives of his wife, his own father was a narrow-spirited misanthrope who was getting steadily worse in his old age. He watched television, calling most of it ‘bloody American twaddle’, and visited the tavern at the end of his street to moan with one or two cronies. He was a former maintenance man with the Toronto Transit Commission who had retired to a tiny flat in the East End of the city near the street-car barn. They saw very little of him, because he was an ordeal. Salter telephoned him once a week, and visited him whenever he was in the area. Annie, however, insisted on their duty to him and he ate his Sunday dinner with them once a month. She had tried him with every delicacy in her repertoire, and he ate them all with the same comment, ‘Very nice, I suppose, but I like a proper dinner on Sundays. So did Charlie, once.’ A proper dinner was one with gravy and custard. In spite of all attempts by Annie to make him smile, his visits were joyless. The real difficulty lay in coping lightly with his prejudices in front of the children. He was anti-semitic from his youth, and he had since developed a prejudice against every class and race but his own, the poor Anglo-Saxons. No visit was complete without some reference on his part to ‘them Jews’, the ‘Eyeties’, or the ‘Nig-nogs’ who were responsible for his depressed social and financial condition. He watched Annie for any sign that she was patronizing him, and criticized the behaviour of the boys continually until he provoked a flare-up of reaction in Annie or Salter. After a small row, he shut up, satisfied, with a remark like, ‘Sorry I spoke. I was just trying to be helpful.’ Once he caught Angus in a kilt (another family tradition that Annie had brought to Toronto); this offended the old man in several ways at once, including his anti-Scottish prejudice, and he wondered loudly to Salter, if the boy wasn’t turning into ‘a bit of a pansy.’
Now Salter cut the conversation off and brought out his notebook. ‘I’ve got some phone calls to make,’ he said. ‘Stay off the phone for half an hour, will you.’
The boys disappeared, still grumbling, and Salter sat down by the phone. He looked first at a list of numbers that he had transcribed from the scrap of paper in Summers’s wallet. ‘Do these numbers mean anything to you?’ he asked his wife. ‘A couple look like phone numbers, but the others don’t.’ He handed her the list.
She studied it for a while. ‘Hold on,’ she said. I thought so. This one is his Eaton’s Account; this one is the number he used to get money from one of those banking machines. Those two are phone numbers. That one I don’t know. It looks like the combination for a lock.’