Getting Away With Murder

by Howard Engel

  “And have you run into any exciting corns or bunions since we last talked?”

  “Ah, Benny. You don’t know the half of it. The practice of medicine, even below the knee, continues to be rewarding, but my private life is a burden. I don’t want to go into that. I feel a little like the philandering surgeon that Oliver St. John Gogarty commented on: I made my reputation with my knife and lost it with my fork. I see myself as the arch mender, if you’ll excuse the horrible pun.” He went on in that vein for a few minutes, with all sorts of references flying high and wide, well beyond my fielding skills. He always had nice things to say about Anna and I appreciated him for those.

  Then Chris Savas was there standing in a pool of water from rain dripping from his raincoat and holding an umbrella that had been blown inside out by the wind. He looked awkward standing there until I remembered how seldom he had climbed the stairs to my office. After introductions and a few pleasantries which again required a Dublin scholar to understand them, Frank tried out his Greek on Chris. There must be more kinds of Greek than one because both of them looked bewildered by what the other added to the three or four exchanges, and then they gave up and returned to English, where I tried to join them. As it turned out, Frank knew the island of Cyprus from some years ago and so I was again excluded from the conversation while unfamiliar place names filled the empty hallway between our offices. In the end, Frank begged off further palaver, said good-night, and went down the stairs and into the chilly night.

  “Is Dr Bushmill a good friend, Benny?” Frank asked when the street door closed.

  “He’s taken a few lumps on the head on my behalf since I’ve known him. Yes, he’s a good friend. He’s also trying to become my university.”

  “Whenever you can find him sober after hours.”

  “Oh, you know about Frank, do you?”

  “I live in this town, Benny, and Frank isn’t inconspicuous.”

  “He’s a damn good friend, Chris. I wish he could be less of a pain to himself.”

  “And St. Patrick’s Day is coming. He’s taking the short road to the cemetery if you ask me.”

  “What brings you to my consulting rooms?”

  “Pete’s been filling me in about Wise and Neustadt. I thought that maybe we should talk after all.”

  He pulled up a chair, one of the leftovers from my father’s store, and I pulled my swivel chair around so that the desk didn’t come between us. It was my training in amateur theatre that suggested this approach.

  “Did you know Wise?” I asked.

  “Knew? Who knew Abe Wise? He was always a mystery man. The only time he was arrested was before you were in long pants. My very first partner, dear old Michael Prescott, had the pleasure of bringing him in with a bag of illegal goodies one night on Louisa Street. It was his first collar, Benny. He told me about it one night on Lake Street when he’d been shot up and I was trying to keep him talking until the ambulance arrived. Michael—we never called him Mike—was a lot older than me; he would have been well away into his retirement now if—”

  “If he hadn’t died in the line of duty?”

  “Michael? Dead? Not a chance. He’s still running a resort up on Lake Muskoka. Still plays squash every morning like he’s forty. Still collects Toby mugs. Still dresses like a kid. No, Benny, Michael quit Niagara Regional when Neustadt got too much for him.”

  “When was that?”

  Nineteen seventy-nine.”

  “No, I mean when he arrested Wise.”

  “That was in nineteen fifty-two.”

  “The year of the Tatarski case.”

  “Yeah. This happened about a week into her trial.”

  “Pete told me that Neustadt turned Wise loose. Is that right?”

  “Yeah. And after Michael had worked so hard. He’d been watching the kid, see. Saw him go into the house and was waiting for him when he came out with the loot. He was feeling like a real cop when he brought him into the station. Michael said that Neustadt questioned the kid for half the night. Then he asked Michael to step into the interrogation room with them. Wise was sitting with his head down on the table and Ed came over to Michael saying that he thought that since the stolen goods had been recovered and since the lad—he called him a lad— had been only playing at breaking and entering and since … He went on and on with his ‘sinces.’ Michael could see what was coming, so he was ready for it. I mean, hell, Ed was a sergeant, for Christ’s sake, and Michael was still on probation …”

  “So he let Wise walk.”

  “Yeah. And that was the last time Abe Wise was in a police station.”

  “He tried to make Michael Prescott believe that he had caught Wise taking his first step on a road of crime and this was the moment to reclaim him. Is that it?”

  “That was his version.”

  “But Prescott didn’t buy that?”

  “Hell no! That kid had been in and out more windows than Peter Pan, for Christ’s sake! That’s what Michael said. He had been watching him.”

  “That fits with what his first wife told me. Do you know why he let Wise walk? Did your friend?”

  “I used to drag it out every couple of years, usually when I’d had a run-in with Ed. Never could figure it.”

  “I think I’m beginning to see some light. It’s the only thing that makes it make sense.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We know that Wise was working that part of town: Welland Avenue and north of there. Suppose, just suppose for a minute, that Wise also broke into the Tatarski house. Russell Avenue. It’s in the same part of town.”

  “Hey, what are you saying?”

  “I’m not saying anything, I’m supposing, thinking out loud.” I tried to focus again before speaking. “Wise goes into the Tatarski house. Unfortunately, Mary’s mother hears him. She comes downstairs, there’s a struggle, and she’s killed. It’s murder while a robbery is in progress. Neustadt isn’t the first cop on the scene, but he is called in. Came running, I’ll bet, because he had been in that house before.”

  “So, when Michael Prescott collars young Wise, Neustadt says nothing about what he suspects, or even what he forced Wise to admit. Mary Tatarski’s trial is going on.” Chris stared out my window with his fingers coming together under his chin. I let him think for a second. “Well, well, well!” he said.

  “Yeah. Does he call up the Crown prosecutor and say ‘Let the girl go, I’ve got the real killer,’ or does he let the kid walk?”

  “Neustadt was the chief Crown witness. He headed the whole investigation. He would have had to admit he’d read all of the evidence wrong. His whole career was riding on this trial and his handling of this case.”

  Savas blew some air between his teeth. It wasn’t quite a whistle. “Well, well,” he said.

  “What do you think, Chris?”

  “Benny, I’ve been a cop all my working life. If you’d said that about anybody at Niagara Regional except Ed, I’d have hit you so hard you wouldn’t be able to stand until Christmas. But Neustadt …”

  “But Neustadt …” We didn’t speak for a couple of minutes.

  “It makes sense, Benny. I never would have thought … You see, Ed was the first man on the scene when the Tatarski house was robbed five years earlier. Did you know that? He let the girl walk that time. Old Ed wasn’t going to be played for a sap twice. Two break-ins stretched the plausible.”

  “He saw the second break-in as a copycat of the first, the real break-in. It made a believable story. It covered the known facts or I’ve misread McStu’s book.”

  “Neustadt had this tenacious streak in him. He wouldn’t let go.”

  “So, there was an understanding between Wise and Neustadt. A deal had been agreed to, even if they didn’t put it into words. Wise would walk and keep his mouth shut. And the trial would move on just the way it was planned.”

  “You know, Benny, there are no living witnesses. They’re all dead: the Tatarski girl, the mother, Ed, and Wise.”

  �
�Yeah, we won’t be able to prove a thing without digging out your former partner from Lake Muskoka. What you just told me is officially hearsay. But it has the ring of truth.”

  “I guess it doesn’t change diddly.”

  “You know, Chris, Wise hated Neustadt for that. He was at the funeral, you know. I’ve never seen such hate. You knew Wise when you came on the force yourself?”

  “He made a career of staying away from the bright lights. Except when there was a charity ball or two hundred of our best citizens in tuxedos dressed to the nines for some reason. I saw him a few times, was part of a couple of campaigns to try to nail him for something. Hell, if they could only get Al Capone for tax evasion, I thought we might get Wise for spitting on the sidewalk. But we never could. The part of his life that we can see is—was—exemplary.”

  “And Neustadt, Chris. Did he support the schemes to bag Wise?”

  “Ed could be a stickler for boxing in a suspect. If there was an escape hatch visible, he would try to cool things down until we really had him in the bag.” Chris scratched his belly at the belt-line and considered what he had just heard. “I hadn’t thought about it, but you’re right: while Ed was gung-ho for all kinds of villains, he kind of soft-pedalled Wise.”

  “Sure. Know why? Because a tacit blackmail situation had been established.”

  “What do you mean ‘tacit blackmail situation’?”

  “After he was allowed to walk, after Mary Tatarski was allowed to hang, Wise had Ed Neustadt in his pocket.”

  “You mean Ed was paying Wise off all those years?”

  “No. As far as I know they never met again. But this secret was lying there between them. If Ed pursued Wise too closely, then Wise could tell what he knew. Wise had Ed Neustadt’s career in the palms of his hairy hands. Neither one of them probably noticed it at first. Wise had some growing and maturing in crime to undergo before his threat ripened.”

  “But Ed Neustadt gave Abe Wise a fresh start. What did he have to complain about?”

  “What does a fresh start mean in a community that will take an innocent woman and hang her?”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I invited Chris to join Anna and me for dinner at a place Anna had found near Turner’s Corners. It was an old coaching inn that had also been a gas station and a hamburger joint. Now it had been dolled up as its original self, without exaggerating things the way the Patriot Volunteer did over the river. This was authentic without hype, not a movie designer’s idea of an old inn, but the inn itself with all of its blemishes showing. The best thing about it was a huge fireplace which had a fire going in it, while a few birds and joints turned on spits above twin andirons. It was the sort of place you felt you had come home to as a familiar haunt, even though it was my first visit.

  Chris and I kept clear of the case and Anna made light of a brewing crisis in the university’s history department. The focus of the talk turned on Chris, whose recent adventures on the island of his birth held our complete attention. He was a good raconteur. Better than that, he was a good delineator of political and social differences. By the time he had finished, both of his listeners knew more about the present situation on the island and the subtle differences between the professional and other classes in the villages, towns and capital. As for the meal, it was simplicity itself, roasted meat and boiled potatoes served with greens. The dessert was apple pie. It was what the food editor of the Beacon would have called a cliché meal, but all of our faces were rosy with contentment as we gathered our coats, and ran through a fine Scotch mist to the car.

  The following morning I called Napier McNabb University in Hamilton to try to catch up with the record of Drina Tatarski, or Tait, as she was calling herself. The voice in the office at the other end took a lot of convincing. I heard a prepared speech about giving out confidential information. I explained my business, the woman on the phone explained the rules. I suggested that she should be the judge of what information was confidential and what was for public consumption. She suggested that I drive to Hamilton to see her in her office. I asked whether the rules were different for people on the spot and didn’t that tend to prejudice inquiries from, say, Halifax or Vancouver. There was a sigh at the other end, a sign either of frustration or capitulation. I pressed my advantage.

  “We have her as Alexandrina Tait, not Tatarski, Mr. Cooperman. Tait was her legitimate name. It had been legally changed. She dropped out at the end of her first year. I can’t tell you what her grades were, but they were above average for first year.”

  “You mean she could read and write?”

  “What a cynic you are, Mr. Cooperman. Miss Tait appears to have been able to do more than that. She was quite accomplished. French Club, Fencing Club, Archery Club.”

  “Is there a reason given for her dropping out?”

  “There’s a note about sickness at home in Grantham.”

  “I see. Is there anyone who knew her? I’m looking for a friend or teacher; someone who can give me a clue to where she might be now.”

  “You might talk to Professor Hardy. He does first-year English. I think he might remember her.” She gave me a telephone number and wished me luck. By the end, we were getting on famously.

  I had no luck getting in touch with Professor Hardy. He wasn’t at the number so I left a message on his machine. I began to feel the urge to drive to Hamilton to spy out the land for myself, but there was work to do on other fronts. Professor Hardy could wait.

  Julie. I decided to focus on Julie. Together with her brother, Julie had the most to gain by her father’s death. She also had a ready market for any money she came into: Mode Magazine. I called her mother. Julie hadn’t been seen. I tailed Wise’s secret number and got Victoria, who said she hadn’t seen Julie since the morning of the shooting. I finished the dregs of cold coffee in a styrofoam cup and was sitting back in my chair wondering where to look next, when the phone rang. It was Julie.

  “You’re lucky I’m a dutiful daughter, Mr. Cooperman. I just called my mother. She told me she’d spoken to you a minute ago. What can I do for you?” She sounded a trifle breathless, but it was part of her manner to appear to be in a rush. I shouldn’t imagine that she had just raced up three flights of stairs to place the call. I told her that I needed to see her. She mentioned The Snug at the Beaumont Hotel, which was still one of the few places in town where it was not chic to order draught beer, and the only place for miles around where free peanuts were supplied to every table. She gave me a couple of hours to get ready for the meeting, so busy was her schedule. I accounted myself lucky that she didn’t want to meet at the top of the CN Tower in Toronto. I spent some of the time back at the library and some of it on the phone with Duncan Harvey, the architect and crusader for the quiet repose of an innocent Mary Tatarski.

  “Sure I remember our talk, Benny. How is your case going?”

  “I’m still digging in, Duncan. There’s a lot that’s been hidden.”

  “Ah, you begin to see what McStu and I had to go through.”

  “Mary didn’t ever confess to anything, did she? Anything at all?”

  “No. She admitted that she and her mother had had words on the night of the crime and that relations between them were not happy. But that’s all. Margaret, the older sister, didn’t get on that well with her mother either. That’s why she was planning to move out. Her ‘motive’ was at least as good as her sister’s. The first story Mary told to Sergeant Neustadt was the one she stuck to: early to bed with sleeping pills after an argument, and didn’t hear anything until she was wakened by her sister after the body had been discovered and the police had been sent for.”

  “Was there any serious attempt at suicide?”

  “That was all Neustadt. She took an ordinary dose and was on her feet before the police arrived. If you need an example of ‘facts’ made out of whole cloth, that’s a dilly.”

  “She never changed any detail in her story?”

  “Not as far as I could read in the transcripts
of the pretrial and the trial. Her statement to Neustadt was almost word for word what she said on the witness stand. I talked to the matron at the jail, Mrs. Strippe, and she saw her from the first night they brought her in right up to the moment she said goodbye. She said that her story never changed. McStu talked to all of the warders, and, apart from little human stories, there was nothing new. Unless she unburdened herself to the hangman, she went through the trap with her secret untold.”

  “Did you or McStu talk to him?”

  “When the book was being researched, Mr. McCarthy was in the old country, somewhere in the Aran Islands. We tried, but we couldn’t reach him. I heard that he had come back to Ontario and was living in a house in Grimsby. I doubt if he would have anything to add to her story. They say he works fast. You can’t say a lot in thirty or forty seconds, can you?”

  “Is that how long it takes?”

  “So I’ve read, Benny. There are no speeches, you know. The sheriff doesn’t read the death warrant. Nothing like that. Strictly business. Why I remember reading in the famous Palmer case—”

  I interrupted Duncan’s extensive store of gallows lore by telling him that my other line was flashing. I have often wished I had a second line, but the excuse of having to answer the imaginary one works almost as well.

  At the appointed hour, I was waiting in The Snug for Julie Long. I hoped that she’d come alone. I didn’t think I could cope with the entourage again. And if it ever came time for me to buy a round, I’d be wiped out. Dave Rogers hadn’t said a word about expenses.

  The waiter brought me one of those Campari things and I sipped it for about twenty minutes, when the waiter returned with a note:

  Benny,

  Will you please come up to Room 614 when you get this right away. I’m in a lot of trouble.

  Julie