The Man Who Killed by Fraser Nixon Page A

the time you stopped coming to the kirk,” I said.
    â€œSo was I. Won two hundred dollars playing fan tan that morning in a den on Pender.”
    â€œThe Pater preached the fourth commandment as his text.”
    â€œWhich one’s that again?” asked Jack. “Coveting asses?
    I laughed and swallowed more of the awful cocktail.
    â€œLet me see your arms,” Jack said I stood, shucked off my coat, and rolled up my sleeves. None of the marks were recent.
    â€œGood. I want to make sure I can rely on you.”
    â€œAre you going to tell me what’s going on?”
    â€œIn the morning. Get some rest.”
    Perhaps Jack’s addition to the nightcap was a soporific. I faded away in my chair in fair imitation of death.

MONDAY
    C OFFEE CUPS CLATTERING on a tray woke me from an erotic reverie. My clothes were wrinkled and wet, a skin ready to be sloughed off. Muscles spasmed across my back, accompanied by a small hang-over. Jack was up and whistling, in the chips again. I had over a thousand dollars now when two days ago I’d been near my last buck. The Webley was on the table next to the coffee. I yawned, stretched, and asked the time.
    â€œTime to call the tune,” Jack said.
    â€œDid you slip me a Mickey Finn?” I asked.
    â€œNow that’d be apt.”
    â€œChloral hydrate, I mean.”
    â€œI know. Get up, Hippocrates.”
    â€œI need a shave,” I said.
    â€œSurely.”
    I yawned again and took some coffee and a cigaret from a box by my chair. Having never made it to any cot I’d slept upright in third-class. Jack kept whistling “Annie Laurie.” I smoked and thought.
    â€œWhat’s next?” I asked.
    â€œYou’ll see. Get ready.”
    Less than an hour later the preliminaries were complete. I’d bathed and scrubbed my teeth with a cloth. Jack loaned me a spare suit and hat, both a mite large. My lips turned numb from bay rum the barber spilled on them. Ether would have been nicer, or morphine, bedamn. We left the Mount Royal and caught a streetcar east, turning northerly up St. Lawrence Main. It was a crisp autumn day, windy and fresh with great armadas of cloud invading the sky, a lively, peppery spice to the air. We stood holding the ’car’s straps, jangling along the boulevard.
    â€œSee the ’paper there?” Jack nudged.
    A wizened gent held a folded section to his face. I managed to make out that Loew’s movie house had been robbed last night. Here I was in the news at last. Clip the article and mail it home to the Pater, for joy.
    â€œI was right,” Jack said in my ear. “The Southerner is claiming seven thousand was taken. As though a week of rotten Vaudeville and an old flicker or two could net that much!”
    I squinted. “What else does it say?”
    â€œHe can’t describe the thieves. Proves my point. The man doesn’t want us caught. He’d lose four grand from the insurance company and be up on charges himself. You hungry?”
    I was and said so. We hopped off near Duluth and went into a Hebrew delicatessen for meat sandwiches, the sausage sticks called nash, and more coffee. Jack used the toilet and met me back outside. On the boulevard an ice cart trundled behind a woebegone nag and kids fooled around in the gutter. Women walked by, resembling Mennonites in their odd poke bonnets. We passed an old Gypsy crone wearing a necklace of gold coins, Franz Joseph thalers. The street whiffed of coalsmoke, piss, horse manure, and burnt toast, that smell often a harbinger of a cerebral stroke. Trepan me with a cranial saw per the dicta of Dr. Osler, my brain simply the enlarged stem of the spinal column. Remove the offending hemisphere.
    We walked onto Fletcher’s Field past the Grenadiers’ redbrick armoury and onto a greensward. Park Avenue and the mountain were ahead, a skeleton scaffold of an unfinished cross stark against the western sky. Before us an angel