Getting Away With Murder

by Howard Engel

  “But you’re not trying to put him there?”

  “Hey-hey! Let’s keep this friendly. I couldn’t be on worse terms with my father. We hate one another’s guts. There’s too much history between us to change that. But I’ve been trying to find out who’s behind this since my Mom told me. Not a word of this to the old man, you understand?” I nodded in some surprise, more to see if I was still hearing correctly than as a promise of anything.

  “What have you found out?”

  “This latest crop of hired men are the worst set he has ever had. Apart from Mickey, who isn’t just one of the boys and has always been above suspicion, I wouldn’t trust the rest with delivering handbills.”

  “Mickey’s not above suspicion. That’s the first rule. Nobody is above suspicion. It’s the only way to operate.”

  “Okay, okay! I hear what you’re saying. But as for the rest of them …!”

  “Where did he find them?”

  “He picks them up through the jobs they do for him. If they work out, after a while he reels them in a little closer. Finally, they’re working for the house. Phil Green’s been there longest after Mickey. He’s not as dumb as he looks, but not much smarter either. Sidney, he’s the driver, has a record of petty crime going back to the seventies. He’s great as a driver, but he doesn’t know which side of a stamp to lick.”

  “That leaves one.”

  “Sylvester Ryan’s a punk that fell off a motorcycle and landed where my old man found him, bought him some new clothes and gave him a job. Syl’s loyal, as long as he’s being paid, and tough, but that’s all. Dad thinks he can be pointed against artillery to advantage. He hasn’t been tested yet.” And then he added, “As far as I know.”

  “Is that place of your dad’s an arsenal? I haven’t seen much of it?”

  “It could hold off the United States Marines for a few hours. The place is well set up and has an escape tunnel that comes out behind the house.”

  “I thought I had a headache before I talked to you, now it’s worse. Why do you keep up this feud with your old man?”

  “Didn’t my mother tell you?”

  “She told me what she thought. That’s not the same as asking you.” He was halfway down his third draught and I was just starting in on my second. He paused to think before speaking. A good precaution.

  “We’ve been scrapping since I was a kid. He was the one who sent my mother away. He tried to explain it, but that made things worse. He said she’d always be there for me, but whenever I wanted her, it ‘wasn’t convenient.’ The same thing happened with my dog, Sparky. ‘He’s still your dog, Hart. He just doesn’t live here any more.’ Is it any wonder we fought?”

  “So you blame him for your rotten life?”

  “I didn’t ask to be born, Cooperman! I didn’t plan on being the son of Abe Wise, the big-shot gangster. Give me a break!”

  “Sorry. Just trying to understand. All of the people I’ve talked to are sure that the threat to Abe’s life comes from close to home, not from his business contacts. What do you think?”

  “As a crook, he plays it as straight as he can, as straight as anybody. He doesn’t talk to the cops, they don’t ask him any questions. It’s a funny game of cops and robbers. They make the rules up themselves out of I don’t know what, but they all stick by them once they’re there.”

  “Isn’t it peculiar that he’s never been caught?”

  “He’s clever. He keeps his secrets and pays everybody along the way.”

  “Does he pay off the cops?”

  “Ha! He’d love to hear you say that. They come in too many flavours for that. Besides even the cops are occasionally hit by bouts of moral correctness. It would be a bad investment.”

  “I’ve been asking about Deputy Chief Neustadt. You know anything there?”

  “Nope. I never had the pleasure. What’s he got to do with anything?”

  “He may have been murdered for one thing. He probably was, for another. And your old man may have been behind it. He may have been defending himself against Neustadt before the old cop did something to him. There was bad blood. That’s known.”

  “I draw a blank there.”

  “I was admiring your TR2 the other day.”

  “I knew you’d get to the car.”

  “Well?”

  “So, I wrote a bad cheque. I’ll cover it. I told you.”

  “You know that Shaw and his lawyer, York, are trying to use you to get some cash from your old man?”

  “Lighten up, Cooperman.” He finished off the last of the beer in front of him and wiped his mouth before speaking again. “Have you seen my sister yet?”

  “Not yet. I may get lucky.”

  “When you do, give her my love,” he said with a sneer. That was the first sign of the Hart I’d seen at his mother’s house; and we’d been sitting at the bar in Smart Alex for nearly an hour.

  “I’ll remember that,” I said. He put a bill on the bar and slipped me a grin before grabbing his jacket and heading out past the three sophomores and their football heros to his TR2. I finished my beer, thought about the special burgers with curry fries, and placed an order with a waitress who tried to make me feel that she was having one hell of a time looking after all the empty tables that the snowstorm had created. Over my meal, which was better than I expected, I tried to assess all that I had just heard, and figure out what it told me that I hadn’t known when I got up in the morning.

  EIGHTEEN

  The tree that Dulcie Osborne had crashed into was still standing beside the sharp curve on the Lewiston-Youngstown highway. Even through the storm, you could still see where she and many other drivers had ploughed into it after misjudging the curve. In her case the steering of her car had been tampered with, so the death was not purely accidental. That had happened years ago, when I was first dealing with a case in Niagara Falls. I hadn’t been down this road often enough in the interval to become inured to the sudden appearance of the tree as I came around the curve. There was a guard-rail now. I was safe from the deadly white oak, although I had nearly come a cropper a few times on the terrible roads that night.

  The Patriot Volunteer hadn’t changed either. You could hear the live band from the parking lot. At five to one, the place was jumping and, if the licence plates in the lot told the truth, most of the jumpers paid Canadian taxes. The hat-check girl fought me for my coat and shook the snow from the collar like it was a vicuna. Most hat-checks have no sense of humour. The maitre d’ couldn’t find an empty table until I crossed his palm with paper. He led the way to a small table close to the double kitchen doors, where news of the orchestra could be had by e-mail.

  Basically, the Patriot Volunteer was got up to look like a frontier fort, with waiters dressed as minutemen and waitresses in hoop-skirts. A collection of muskets, drums, bunting in red, white and blue furnished most of the decor. There were reproductions of scenes from the Revolutionary War: the crossing of the Niagara on the morning of the Battle of Queenston Heights, the shelling of Fort Niagara, the burning of Niagara-on-the-Lake. The New Yorkers tended, just as we did on our side of the river, to confuse the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. They were both costume pictures with three-cornered hats and clap pipes. The orchestra, a band of seven or eight sidemen, made no attempt at historical accuracy, so they blended better with the clientele. Most of the men were necktied and jacketed; the women wore cocktail dresses, except for a few in long dresses— suggesting that this was still a place to come to put the icing on the evening you had already had.

  When the waiter insisted that waiting was something one did while holding a drink, I tried that red stuff that I’d run into at the Wellington Court: Campari and soda. The waiter frowned as though such a drink was quite out of place in colonial America. I thought that it should fit in very well considering that the cocktail was invented just down the road at Lewiston.

  Julie came in with an entourage of five people: three men and two women. The three women together coul
dn’t have weighed much more than two hundred pounds. One was blonde, hacked about the head with sheep-shears and wearing a long man’s undershirt and making less of an impression in it than I would. Her collarbones were her most prominent frontal appendages. The other model, I took the first apparition to be of that profession too, was a gaminelike presence with red hair sculpted close to her head all the way around. She looked a little more womanly than the first: I could tell right off when she was facing me. She wore a long dress of rumpled earthy colours and never smiled. The three men were wearing dinner jackets, one in pink, one white and one in a floral pastel print. They all surrounded Julie, who seemed to be eating it up like chocolate, if she allowed herself to eat chocolate. I recognized her froth her parents: she had her mother’s height and sharp features and her father’s animation. She wore an amber-coloured dress that clung to her body like it had been put on with shellac. It was a good body, if a little undernourished. Her smile, under a set of big brown eyes, was nothing less than terrific.

  They marched through a gap between the tables, followed by a platoon of minutemen, busboys and the maitre d’, forming squares around my tiny table, then moved off in good order to a big table with a Reserved sign and flowers on it. I was dragged along as a hostage. If we were any closer to the orchestra, we would have had to join the union. I carried my Campari and a minuteman brought my soda. How Julie recognized me, I’ll never know. Champagne came to the table in a magnum, with pink foil on top. There were also cans of Diet Coke and Pepsi for the working girls as well as bottled bubbly water.

  “I’m Julie Long,” said Julie, whose last name had been the chief mystery I’d run into so far. “My Mom told me what you looked like. If that hadn’t worked, I was going to test voices. It would have been fun.” The pastel-jacketed guy in the blue aviator glasses was introduced to me as Didier Santerre, the publisher of Mode Magazine. The gamine was Morna McGuire, the local modelling success story, and I didn’t catch the full names of the others. The blonde was Christa. One of the men was a make-up artist called Pierre, and the other was Felix, a designer of rainwear from New York, who apparently was paying.

  “How are we going to talk with this floor show in our laps?” I inquired. Julie just rolled her eyes.

  “You have to forgive us, we’ve been on an all-day shoot on the Maid of the Mist. You can’t believe how cold it was. We nearly sank the boat with our electric generator. We needed so much light!”

  “Couldn’t wait for spring?”

  “Can you believe this weather? It’s—”

  One has to fight the weather in this crazy business,” said Santerre. “When it’s cold, one shoots for summer. When it’s hot, naturally, one shoots with artificial snow and ice. But otherwise, we would have to anticipate the season by an impossible margin. The lead-time is bad enough already.” We exchanged names and handshakes.

  “We had to get them to put the boat in the water early. Imagine what that cost?” the blonde interjected.

  “What’s your place in all this?” I asked Julie.

  “Julie has flair, style éclat,” the boyfriend answered again for her. I was beginning to regret the bridge toll I’d paid to get here and the one I was going to have to pay on the way back. Julie tried on a shy smile at Santerre’s praise. It didn’t suit her.

  The designer, Felix, whose pink “smoking” appeared to have lost its lapels, was pouring out the champagne into far more glasses than there were people. The models were covering the glasses nearest them with their hands. One said she never drank champagne, the other said she ingested nothing after six. I liked “ingested.” She added that it was an inflexible rule.

  “Who’s trying to kill your father?” I asked over giggles, and Julie’s turned head as she spoke with Santerre in French. When she turned back to me, with a little flip of her head and a smile, she said that her mother had robbed her of a night’s sleep with the news.

  “Can’t imagine my life without Daddy,” she said, biting down on a slim piece of carrot. “He has always encouraged my interest in fashion and design.”

  “I was guessing you got this from your mother.”

  “True. Mommy adores clothes. She loves Sonia Rykiel better than the truth. But Daddy actually puts his money where his mouth is.”

  “I thought you two didn’t get along?”

  “Heavens no! He loves it now that I’ve found myself. Now that Didier and I have found one another.”

  “That was written in the stars, chérie,” Santerre added. From it I guessed that Mode Magazine was in need of a backer with the financial clout Abram Wise could give it. As long as Wise was putting up part of the money, Julie could think herself into any social butterfly net she liked and Daddy would keep on paying. But, after all, that was what Abe Wise did best.

  “Are you two planning to make this permanent?” I asked, trying on a wide ingenuous smile.

  “Just as soon as we can make it legal,” Julie said, patting Santerre’s left hand with hers. There was a white mark on the third finger of one of the hands. It was Didier’s. “I’m still legally married to my old John Long but not for long,” Julie said making Didier and Morna laugh. The others were involved, thank God, in a conversation of their own. “But my divorce will be final in three months. I’ve already got my decree nisi. So, I’m going to do the bride thing again. Getting to be a habit with me, as the song goes, but this time, I think Didier’s going to make an honest woman of me.”

  “My compliments to the bride and congratulations to the groom or vice versa.” Both beamed at me and then at one another, exchanging hugs and kisses.

  “Benny,” Julie said, leaning into me in a friendly but unnecessary way, “would you be an angel and get a white paper bag from the front seat of our car?” She said it in such an intimate way that I thought she had fallen under the magic spell of my charm. In fact, the reverse, for the moment, was true. “I’ve got a perishing headache and there are some Tylenol there.” She took car keys from her bag and told me the car to look for. I took them from her and made my way out into the dark and the snow which was still coming down.

  I found the dark red Le Baron under a white shroud and the paper bag with the bottle of pills inside. On leaving, I noticed that one of the headlights had been damaged. Expensive repairs. The night was cold on the back of me, and my fingers tingled from handling the car door. I rushed away from the unpleasant truth about the drive home into the noise and light of the Patriot Volunteer.

  “You’re an angel, Benny!” Julie said, as she took two pills with a swallow from her champagne glass.

  “It’s a terrible night out there!” I said, hugging myself and trying to get warm.

  “Let’s leave it out,” drawled Christa, who was holding a sipping straw, and trying to focus on my eyes. Felix and Pierre had straws in front of them too, although they were drinking champagne. Didier was twisting one around in his fingers and got rid of it under the table. Julie lent me an arm to restore my circulation. Santerre applied stimulants of a more conventional kind than they had just treated themselves to. I moved in closer to Julie and tried to keep my mind on my job.

  “Tell me, Julie, has your father ever mentioned his feud with Ed Neustadt to you?”

  “Is that the one who just died?” I nodded. “I think he once said that he was the only man who ever questioned him in a police station. Imagine! With all he’s done! It’s incredible!”

  “But, your father has no record. That means, Neustadt didn’t follow through. He was still ‘assisting the authorities,’ they call it, and then they let him walk. In law, a miss is as good as a mile. Why do you think he hated Neustadt?”

  “Ask him. He never told me. Maybe he hates to be beholden to anyone. I can understand that.” She reached over to get another glass of champagne and toasted me over the rim. She was in great spirits and I was rapidly going downhill. Everybody who knows Abe Wise says just about the same thing about him. If there was a conspiracy, at least it had a good leader. I was yawning into
my wine glass. It was time to go home. Our little group was being closely watched by other people in the room. When the designer got up to dance with Christa, the blonde ragamuffin in the underwear shirt, the waiters stared. Didier got up and pulled Julie after him. He must be French after all, I thought. I couldn’t think of anyone I knew leading the way to the dance floor.

  “You’re a detective?” Morna asked. I smiled a sad admittance.

  “I’ve got an office on St. Andrew Street,” I said, wondering what I could say to this exotic creature.

  “My grandfather worked with Pinkerton’s for thirty-five years. He used to tell us stories about his cases. He should have been a writer.”

  “They’re a big outfit. Go back to the Civil War.”

  “I knew that. What’s his face, the writer, used to be a Pinkerton.”

  “Hammett,” I said. “Dashiell Hammett.” She had lovely deep green eyes under her red hair.

  “Do you want to dance?” she said with a golden smile.

  “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

  NINETEEN

  Anna was away early: signs of her after-breakfast cleaning around the sink were in evidence. A half-pot of coffee was inviting me to start the day. There was a container of bran for me to pour on top of my Harvest Crunch.

  In the shower I thought about all of the characters I had met the night before. It was a peep-hole into another world, a world that my father should know a lot about, if he had ever read a fashion magazine. But he hadn’t. His knowledge of women’s ready-to-wear came not from Vogue or Women’s Wear Daily, but from his pals the manufacturers along Spadina Avenue in Toronto. Every other Wednesday, he drove to the provincial capital to buy stock and play a few hands of gin rummy with his cronies. After a corned beef sandwich at Shopsowitz’s Deli, he would visit the factories and have a shot of schnapps in a showroom before a few more hands of cards. This was the world of fashion as he knew it. To him it was all merchandise. It could have been men’s wear or hats as far as he was concerned.