Getting Away With Murder

by Howard Engel

  “That colonel from the Sally Ann gave him a first-rate send-off.”

  “He’s a major, Benny, not a colonel.”

  “I guess he was well-liked, eh, Pete?”

  “He had a few fans, Benny.”

  “Not enough to get him confirmed chief though?”

  “Damned good thing too.”

  “You must have liked him a whole lot to spill this much affection in the shadow of his cortège, Pete. What’s the story?”

  “‘They tried to get rid of him years ago, but he wouldn’t go. He held us back for years. He was an old-fashioned cop, Benny. He couldn’t make the changes into modern times.”

  “I thought he led the way to reform.”

  “Eulogies, Benny. They take a tolerant view of the facts.”

  “So he was another casualty to progress?”

  “He couldn’t be budged until his sixty-fifth birthday. The Niagara Regional Police has been making great strides since he retired. We’re almost caught up to Toronto.”

  “What took him in the end? What sort of accident?”

  “Didn’t you see it in the paper? If you didn’t read it and you didn’t know him personally, Benny, what brings you here this frosty afternoon? You working?”

  “Maybe I’m interested in becoming a part of local history, Pete. Look at all of those tombstone. How many of them have Staziak or Cooperman written on them?” Behind Pete I could see Victoria Armstrong helping Wise into a limo. Mickey was standing on the driver’s side looking at me.

  “That’s ’cause we come from good hardy stock, Benny. We don’t fade away. We’ve got staying power. Hey! Are you trying to put me off? I asked if you were working, damn it!”

  “I am. And it could get me into a lot of trouble if I was seen talking to the fuzz, Pete. Will you be at home tonight? I’ll call you.”

  “Are you pulling my leg or is this for real? Yeah, I’ll be at home minding my tropical fish.”

  “I’ll be talking to you.” Without looking in his direction, I moved off in the direction I’d seen the others go. The old policeman with his keeper was feeling all of his pockets as though he had lost his car keys or glasses, while the man in the windbreaker waited to help him into the front seat. My car was somewhere along the lane too, parked on the margin of brownish grass by the back wall. Looking up, I could see the dark branches of the maple and beech trees were putting on signs of the season to come. I put that down to the southerly slope of the cemetery away from the lake. Twigs were fattening and buds were looking shiny. Through the windshield, as I drove along the curved cemetery lanes to the street, I could see that it was starting to snow.

  * * *

  That night I called Pete from a phone booth in the lobby of the library. I had the idea that my own phone might not be safe. I was paranoid, I’m sure, but I thought that it wouldn’t hurt to play it safe. Pete was home. I inquired after Shelley, his wife, and his kid, who always beat me at chess, and finally his damned fish to get his full attention. Then: “Okay, Pete, tell me about Ed Neustadt. It may help me in something I’m working on.”

  “He was a nut and a son of a bitch and a first-rate fellow officer. Which version are you looking for?”

  “Spare me the praise. I got that this afternoon.”

  “Yeah, Ed and Major Patrick went back a long way. Their families went camping up near Bancroft. Some trailer camp. They used to go to hangings together.”

  “What? The families?” For a moment I imagined a scene from The Oxbow Incident.

  “No, Benny, just Major Patrick and Neustadt. The major was the default clergyman. If the prisoner didn’t send for the clergy of his choice, they’d send for Major Patrick. They really believed that eye-for-an-eye stuff. Oh, I don’t blame the major. He was just doing his job, but Ed Neustadt just liked to be there. He liked to watch and then talk about it afterwards. He made me sick. Oh, the two of them were quite a pair.”

  “Is that what you mean by his being a nut-case?”

  “It’s a start. You couldn’t penetrate him, Benny When he had an idea in his head, no amount of evidence to the contrary could make him see reason. Once he had it in mind that you were guilty, he’d not rest until you were put away.”

  “Are you saying that he was a conscientious officer dedicated to his work, Pete?”

  “You know goddamned well I’m not! He was Captain Bligh on Church Street, Benny. There was no sense of fairness or mercy in the man. No sense of when enough’s enough. He was a bully, that’s what he was, a bully and a sadist. I’m not saying that I’m glad he’s dead, but, hell, I’m sure glad he isn’t in charge of the day room any longer. Ask Chris when he gets back from Cyprus. Oh, he made my life hell for years. Everybody’ll tell you that. No, that’s not right. They’ll all say he was the salt of the earth. And that’s the memory that’s being enshrined. For his widow’s sake. For his daughter’s.”

  “Tell me about his accident, Pete. I didn’t read the account in the paper.”

  “He was fixing his car in his front driveway.”

  “Heart attack?”

  “No, Benny. The jack holding the Buick up somehow released while he was trying to take the nut off the oil pan and the car came down on his chest. He was smashed up pretty bad. Must have been fast, though.” Neither of us said anything for a minute. We both listened to the rock music that was somehow playing on our line as though from far away.

  “What makes a jack come down like that, Pete? Don’t you have to ratchet them down bit by bit? Or did it fall over?”

  “This was hydraulic like you see in garages. He went in for all the professional equipment. You should see his garage; looks like a car repair shop.”

  “That kind of jack doesn’t ratchet down a stop at a time?”

  “Can do. But mainly you release the valve and the car settles back to the driveway, or whatever.”

  “Pete, ‘how does an accident like that happen?”

  “Damn it, Benny! I’m getting the same ideas you’re getting and I don’t have any better answer than you do.”

  “What if somebody had it in for Neustadt?”

  “I hear you.”

  “If you were under your car and I came along and knew my business, there’s not a lot you could do about it, is there?”

  We were quiet again for a few moments. The rock music had gone and had been replaced by distant voices, high-pitched women’s voices, talking rapidly many miles away from Grantham.

  “I’m going to look into this thing, Benny. I don’t think anybody around here gave it a thought. I’ll look at the report and see what has to be done.”

  “I’ll be hearing from you, then?” I asked.

  “The hell you will. This is police business. Internal. I won’t even tell the Inspector about this until I’ve got something I can hold in my hand.” I asked him about our friend Savas’s holiday in Cyprus and speculated on the date of his return. Neither one of us could get very interested in that. Savas in the flesh was a formidable presence, but off at the eastern end of the Mediterranean he wasn’t enough to keep the conversation going. So I hung up, just in time to see Phil, the hood I’d socked from my bed yesterday in my pre-dawn kidnapping, busy pretending not to be busy watching me from the coffee stand. He hadn’t noticed that the stand was shut up for the tight. A good man can never find the cover he needs when he wants it.

  Walking home, I thought that the tidiest solution to the problem of Neustadt’s death was this: Abe Wise, that long-lived crook, was living at this moment because he hired more than one man to look after his business for him. Ex-wife Lily was right. If Wise’s enemy was the retired deputy chief, then someone would have been told to do something about it. It seemed an easy enough task to walk up a driveway, release a valve while asking street directions.

  But, if Wise was responsible for Neustadt’s death, why would he draw attention to himself by going to the funeral? He told me that his attendance at the funeral was just a device to help blacken Neustadt’s name. That was a joke
, wasn’t it? There was no figuring Wise out. That was the only sure thing I got out of my walk.

  Anna was waiting for me when I got in. Big surprise. Twice in one week! Once again, I tried to interest her in taking a short vacation in the middle of term. It wasn’t on for a number of reasons. The one I liked best was “because you’re not coming.” It was an honest attempt, but I didn’t get very far trying to argue with her.

  FOURTEEN

  The next morning I hoped that things would look better. The view from my window was not reassuring: more dull, cold weather. But the car across the street had become a steadying sign of continuity. Today was linked to yesterday and the rude awakening of the morning before that by that black Toyota. I recognized that there was a time when I had never heard of Abram Wise. That had become, in my imagination, a golden time, something to be likened to the Garden of Eden.

  Anna had left hot, fresh coffee on the counter for me. I showered, shaved and dressed thinking of it. While actually drinking the coffee, I started thinking about Ed Neustadt and his Old Testament sense of justice and fair play. But Pete had suggested more than that. He spoke of a kind of craziness, some sort of sadistic fascination. That was getting me a long way from who was trying to kill Abe Wise, but I couldn’t get rid of the notion that it was important.

  How could the case of a hard cop, recently dead, have anything to do with my job? If Neustadt had been the threat, then he had been rubbed out. From my point of view as a hireling of Abe Wise, the threat was over and my time as a minion of this arch-crook was about to be terminated. If I was being careful before, now I would have to be doubly careful, because Wise might find it easier to pay me off with a bullet behind the ear rather than with negotiable paper.

  With the night-time hours I’d put in yesterday and the day before, I thought I would open the office late on this, the third day of the job. As a matter of fact, I’d decided to finish the pot of coffee and read McStu’s book from cover to cover. And that is what I did.

  The story began as the Second World War came to an end. Sergeant Joseph Tatarski was demobilized with the called-up men in his regiment at Camp Niagara, a few miles from here. After being away from home for most of the war, Joe returned to his wife, Anastasia, his daughters, Margaret and Mary, and young son Freddy. All went well until Joe surprised a burglar one night in 1946. There was a fight and Joe was hit over the head and killed. The burglar escaped, leaving a sack of silver-plated wedding presents behind. The investigating officer, young Corporal Ed Neustadt, made a routine report to his sergeant.

  Five years later, the burglary was, amazingly, repeated with a similar tragic ending. This time Anastasia, Joe Tatarski’s widow was beaten to death with a table lamp while the household was apparently sleeping. Once again Ed Neustadt, now a sergeant, was in charge of the investigation. McStu suggests, short of inviting a writ for libel, that Neustadt approached this second murder with what he already knew about the first in mind. Picking his words carefully, McStu paints a picture of a policeman discovering that in the earlier case he’d been played for a sap by young Mary Tatarski. The two burglaries ending in two murders were just too convenient except in McStu’s fiction. Neustadt was able to show that the signs of a break-in were a sham and quickly arrested Mary, then a young mother with no husband to stand up for her. Mary was put on trial, early in the new year, 1952, for the murder of her mother. The Crown was able to show a history of conflict and bad feeling that had existed in the house since the father’s death. This was exacerbated when Mary found herself pregnant and in due course gave birth to a baby girl. When the older girl, Margaret, moved away, things got worse. Mary was a wild young woman who had friends who were allowed more liberty than the old-fashioned Anastasia allowed her. Neighbours testified to having heard running arguments, as well as the baby’s cries, coming through the walls of the house. Counsel for Mary stated that the defendant had taken sleeping pills after the most recent noisy confrontation and that she was asleep when the crime occurred. The Crown, through the testimony of an expert, was successful in proving that the pills could just as well have been taken after the murder had been committed. They had apparently been taken in sufficient quantifies to suggest that Mary intended to take her own life.

  The trial was short. Although the jury recommended mercy, the judge pronounced the sentence of death. The appeal, which was based on the circumstantial nature of much of the evidence, was rejected, and a few minutes after midnight on Thursday, December 18, 1952, Mary Tatarski walked to the gallows. She was the second-last woman hanged in Canada. It was typical of her bad luck that she couldn’t have contrived to be the last, which would at least have put her in the record books. She was only twenty-two.

  On the face of it and judging by today’s standards, the sentence and the punishment were barbaric. But stranger things happened in the 1950s. Other celebrated cases were reopened and retried, sometimes with a change in the verdict. A few years ago Donald Marshall, a young Micmac Indian from near Sydney, Nova Scotia, was freed after spending eleven years behind bars for a murder he had no part in. Certainly there were always activists, like Duncan Harvey locally, who were interested in rehearing the Tatarski case. Edwin Neustadt called them “pinko subversives” and “bleeding hearts.” He fought all their efforts to reopen the investigation. I was beginning to get a fix on the late former deputy chief. He was a charmer, all right. The world was divided into two kinds of people: good guys and bad guys. There was no crossing over, no grey areas, no special cases. I guess, for a policeman, it would simplify things. But what about people like Wise? He has never been convicted of breaking a city by-law. He gives to charity, supports the arts, helps pay for Tannhauser whether he can sit through it or not. Lots of business people today operate in grey areas where the law can’t touch them. Such people would be shocked if you called them crooks. This was the realm of white-collar crime that someone of Neustadt’s frame of mind would have a hard time dealing with. Subtlety and ambiguity are hard to judge on a scale from zero to ten. It’s hard to get a fix on the bottom line. I suddenly imagined Neustadt’s tombstone with the following epitaph engraved upon it:

  Never indicted

  I was saved from more speculation by a blast from the telephone. Picking it up, I heard a voice with a rasp in a high register. “Mr. Cooperman?” the voice began. It didn’t sound familiar. It was a woman, but beyond that, I was stumped.

  “That’s right. Who is this?”

  “I’m calling from the office of the Registrar, Ontario Provincial Police.”

  “Uh-huh. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m looking at a list of recent complaints against you,” she said. “You are well aware of the fact that the Registrar takes a dim view of licensees bringing this office into bad repute. If there is a repetition of the complaints we have been getting, we may have to convene the licensing committee.”

  “This sounds a lot like a threat. My licence isn’t due to be renewed for a year. And why are you calling me at home to tell me this? I have an office.”

  “All licences are subject to review, Mr. Cooperman. It’s a question of maintaining standards.”

  I told her to put what she had told me in writing. They hate doing that. I’ve used the ploy before and it always works like a charm. I would have liked to suggest that she give the name of my client to the active departments of her OPP office, but it seemed both futile and disloyal, so I kept my mouth shut.

  I tried to imagine where the complaints were coming from. The names Shaw and York quickly came to mind. I was getting in the way of a profitable scam and they, quite rightly, resented it. There’s nothing in the rule book that says that the bad guys can’t enlist the help of the law. After all, wasn’t I going to be paid off in money earned in all sorts of ways I didn’t want to know about?

  I was just beginning to think about lunch, when there was a knock on the door. When I got there, I saw two familiar faces. “Are we going for a ride? Have I been summoned?” I said to one of them. �
��I thought you preferred the early morning, Mickey.” I backed away from the door to allow Mickey and Victoria Armstrong to come in. Victoria’s eyes ran fingers over all my dusty surfaces.

  “I was just checking up on you. Cooperman. You didn’t go to your office in the middle of the week, so I wanted to see if you were being cute with me. Phil Green’s taking the afternoon off. He has to go to the dentist. So, I’m the guy with the short straw. You met my wife the other night, right?” Victoria and I shook hands and momentarily achieved eye contact.

  “I just came along in case there’s a chance to do some shopping,” she said. “Mickey’s schedule makes for a rough marriage, Mr. Cooperman. Mr. Wise treats us well, but he often forgets that Mickey needs time off.”

  She was dark and tidy-looking, with large brown eyes and nice skin. Her heavy wool skirt and brown boots told me about the weather outside and the pastels of her blouse and sweater told of the spring we were expecting every hour.

  “I was thinking of lunch,” I said. “Any takers?” The Armstrongs looked at each other and then Mickey grinned.

  “I guess we have to eat somewhere. And you’re on expenses.”

  “Aren’t you? Or is this bodyguarding included in normal duties?”

  We didn’t go to the Di, or to the Wellington Court, but to the restaurant downstairs, which was now called Beit al Din, a Middle Eastern place with travel posters showing off the beauties of Lebanon: vistas of crusader castles, glimpsed through Gothic arches, the cliffs of the Beirut seafront. I had been keeping an eye on this place ever since the Hungarian restaurant that it displaced closed down. The location had seen half a dozen unsuccessful attempts at exotic cuisine. This was the first to survive for more than a year. A waitress, who echoed what Paulette must have looked like in her bosomy prime, gave us a big smile and seated us near the back. Neither Mickey nor I could make head or tail of the menu, so Victoria ordered for all of us.