A Victim Must Be Found Read Free

for the night, several of the boxes had been flattened and tied with twine, their contents given to the closets and cupboards of the apartment. Numbers for the remaining boxes were written clearly on four sides and the everimportant list of contents lay on the coffee-table in the middle of the room. Pambos and I sat in our sweaty shirtsleeves drinking the first cups of tea of the first day of the new regime.
    Pambos Kiriakis was a little dishevelled, but he looked relaxed, balancing his saucer on his knee like an ancient spinster, and raising his cup to his lips.
    “Pambos, I’ll never be able to thank you for all this,” I said. He brushed it aside with a broad gesture. “I’ll never be able to repay your kindness.” Here, the gesture was less sweeping. It felt feeble compared to the last sweeping movement of his hand. By this I saw that while I needn’t try to thank him, there was a way to repay the kindness. I got up and returned from the kitchen counter with the teapot. “This list,” I said, pouring Pambos another cup, “the one that was taken from your office. Tell me about it.”
    I sat down and eased myself into a situation that couldn’t be altered. I had taken the case when I accepted Pambos’s help with my boxes. It was one of those quid pro quo something or others you read about. Now that I was all attention and tuned to hear, Pambos began by looking at my ceiling and then out through the white inside shutters with brass catches. He cleared his throat. “Well, let me see. You suggested that I talk to Chris Savas about it. I can’t. It’s a delicate matter, you see.” I smiled in spite of myself. Hell, who ever talks to a private investigator about things that aren’t delicate? The cops would be surprised too to be brought in on a case of no delicacy whatsoever.
    “Maybe the time for Savas will come later,” I suggested, and he bought that for the time being. Pambos began looking lost again, so I reminded him. “The list,” I prompted from where I was sitting on the corner of the bed.
    “Yes. The names on the list aren’t pulled out of the phonebook, Benny. Most of them, as a matter of fact, are unlisted. I’m talking about names that are well known from Grantham all the way to Toronto. I don’t want to embarrass anybody. You know what I mean?” I nodded as I sipped tea.
    “You can’t get a new list?”
    “No.” He gave me a look that said I hadn’t been listening. But I had. I put it down to Pambos knowing his story too well. He couldn’t imagine that I didn’t have all the tidy details tucked away already. I tried to look even more concentrated. I felt cross-eyed, but he didn’t get up and walk out.
    “You said back at the United that this list of yours would be valuable to some people but not to everybody. Can you explain?”
    “Look, Benny, before we go on with this, I want to put things on a businesslike basis. You know what I mean?” This was my cue to make a grand gesture. But I held my hands on my teacup. Somewhere inside me a voice was saying “Remember your rent!” It was right, moving from the hotel had moved me into a whole new debt bracket.
    “Is this going to be worth a hundred a day plus expenses, Pambos? You have to decide that.”
    “Well, Benny, I guess money is only money. You know I own a piece of the Stephenson House, don’t you? I’m no millionaire, but I’m comfortable enough, if you know what I mean.”
    “Sure.”
    Pambos Kiriakis owned a piece of the Stephenson House! That surprised me. I thought he was just the manager. The hotel, one of the oldest and most traditional institutions in Grantham, had been established when the old canal town was at the height of its career. It had started as a health spa when the smelly open sewer that now ran behind St. Andrew Street was a forest of tall masts making their way up to Lake Erie or downstream towards Lake Ontario. That heyday lasted until the third Welland Canal was opened just over the hundred years