by Howard Engel
I let him go about a half a block ahead of me. I thought I could keep tabs on him without endangering the backs of his imported brown shoes. He didn’t look around once. From behind, as he wove in and out of the pedestrians and waiting at the end of the block for the light to change, he looked like an ex-football player going to flab gently. He wasn’t carrying a lot of beer fat on him, but his muscles were turning to marmalade. We were back on St. Andrew Street again, heading west, with the one-way traffic on the main street running against us.
At the newspaper office they’d been very helpful when I asked for the photograph. I’d seen it in the paper a couple of days earlier. The woman with the pink hair behind the desk thought it was just wonderful that I wanted a picture of Mayor Rampham. Thought I set a good example and didn’t care who knew it. I listened patiently until she finished and still had to pay up two dollars for the print.
Chester had stopped in front of a sporting-goods store. The window was filled with baseballs, baseball mitts, a selection of bats, bikes, golfing things and in front of everything, an assortment of imported English toys, model cars, trucks and buses. Chester pulled at his chin for a second, then entered to store. Through the glass I could see him talking to the owner. He was too old to be a salesclerk. They went to the back of the store among the bicycles and bicycle parts where they jawed for about ten minutes. The owner walked him to the door and I preceded my suspect west along the north side of the street, until I stopped to eject a stone from my shoe and he passed me again.
With the single stop at the sporting-goods store, Chester had gone in a straightforward manner to Ontario Street, where he walked north past the green expanse of Montecello Park with its bandstand gleaming in the sun, and little kids running around while their mothers gossiped on the park benches. Chester kept to the sidewalk, maintained a steady pace—not too fast, although I’m out of shape and wheeze after sharpening a pencil—and went into the Physicians’ and Surgeons’ Building across from the Hotel Dieu Hospital. It was one of the newer buildings on the street. It has replaced a hundred-year-old mansion with sixteen-foot ceilings and peacocks painted on the inside shutters. About twenty-five years ago, my mother sent me to take drawing lessons from a painter who lived in the dying mansion. The things you remember.
Chester sat down in the open vinyl splendour of the lobby. I was sure he hadn’t spotted me so I marched in too. The cushion breathed out as I sat down behind a plastic yucca plant. Chester looked at his watch, frowned and picked up a magazine. There was traffic in and out of the gift shop near the entrance, but the air conditioning kept the heat and noise outside. At three o’clock on the nose, Chester got up and pushed one of the eight-hundred buzzers on the solid marble wall by the elevators. It buzzed back, he said something and a voice croaked through a speaker. Chester went up the elevator to the tenth floor. I went over to the wall and tried to locate the right button. It had been fourth or fifth from the top in the third row. The fourth was a Dr. Chisholm on the eighth floor. The fifth was Dr. Andrew Zekerman on the tenth. There was a pay phone in the lobby. I looked up the worthy Dr. Zekerman and discovered that he was a psychia trist. I could also see that I was going to have to return at least ten of those twenty-dollar bills.
I killed exactly fifty-five minutes in the gift shop looking at quilted mauve dressing gowns and bed jackets, avoiding the hostile stare of the lady with her glasses on a string behind the glass counter. Zekerman wasn’t giving away any free time by my watch. At fourteen minutes to the hour, Chester came down from the tenth floor. Playing a hunch, I let him walk out the glass doors, leaving his tail behind him. If he had another secret, it could wait until next Thursday. In another five minutes, a stringy, fortyish woman with sunglasses and a wide-brimmed straw hat came in. At exactly four o’clock, she pushed Dr. Zekerman’s buzzer and rode up to the tenth floor.
I mentally noted “solved” on the file of the Chester Yates caper, and walked back to the office. I ducked into Diana Sweets for a chopped egg sandwich and a marshmallow sundae. Across from me, in an identical brown gumwood booth, Willy Horner was half-way through a hot hamburger sandwich. I’ve been living away from my mother’s kitchen for over seventeen years, and I still think that the gravy is the wickedest part. Willy nodded at me, I nodded back at him. We’d been in grade eight together. That’s the way it is in a small city like this, you never really loss sight of anybody. That was the year the manual training teacher announced to me, “Cooperman, you’ve got two speeds: Slow and Stop. Who are you trying to fool? You people don’t make carpenters.” On the way back to my bench I thought of one, but decided the hell with it. He was right, the breadboard I’d been working on for the last eight weeks was lopsided.
Once back in my office, I decided not to call Mrs. Yates. In the morning, it would look as though I’d earned at least half of what she had advanced me. Dr. Bushmill’s door was open. I walked into his empty waiting room. The good Irish doctor was where I saw him last, with a glass in his hand and a noggin of rye mostly in the doctor.
“Hello, Benny, how’s the boy?” he grinned at me, missing eye contact by several focal lengths. “Sit down and have a jar.” I sat down, and filled a reasonably clean glass—which on balance was also reasonably dirty—with about three fingers of rye. He did up a bottle a day, starting right after his last patient left, and not closing the door until it was gone, around nine or ten. The office smelled like most doctors’ surgeries, but this one had a stale smell of old wood, old medicine, old magazines and Frank Bushmill added to it. The word on the street was that Frank was gay, but to me he just looked miserable. My mother was always trying to get me to bring him home for a good meal. He could use one, but let her invite him on her own time.
“What are you reading, Benny?” His fingers around the glass were yellow with nicotine and the fingernails ridged and thick. “Did you look up that Simenon book I was telling you about? He’s the deep one. And everybody thinks he’s just a detective story writer. Did you know that Gide was writing about him at the time of his death? That’s a fact. Have you read Gide at all?”
“I’m still working my way through the Russians.” Slowly.
“Gogol,” he said, rolling his eyes with meaning that didn’t need further elucidation, except to me. “It’s all in his Overcoat. You know that?”
“Whose overcoat?” I’d lost him.
“Gogol’s.”
“Ahhh,” I said, nodding sagely. I sat a minute more, looking at the shining instruments in their glass cases, and then drank up quickly. “Well,” I said, “I’d better be off. Thanks for the drink.”
“Anytime, Benny. Anytime. Good night.” He didn’t get up, just went on staring at the spot I’d been sitting in.
“Good night,” I said.
I closed the office door behind me and looked up Lou Gelner’s number. Dr. Lou was a pal, and he knew everybody.
“Hello.”
“Lou, it’s Benny Cooperman.”
“Hi, Benny, how’s it hanging? What can I do you for?”
“Lou, what do you know about a Dr. Andrew Zekerman?”
“He’s a shrink. What’s to know? Has an office across from Hotel Dieu and sees a flood of patients every day.”
“What else?”
“That’s it. He’s not cheap. He’s sort of popular right now. You know, if there’s a vogue in shrinks, this is his year. How’m I doing? You hear the one about the New Zealander and the plaster-caster, Benny?”
“Save it. Whenever you start to ramble on the phone, I know you’re wearing a little rubber finger glove on your right hand.”
“A regular Sherlock Holmes, Benny. I never let my right hand know what my left hand’s doing. If you pick up a dose, call me.” I put down the phone for a minute, lit up a smoke with the last match in the office, and broke down and called my mother.
“Hello, Ma?”
“It’s you. I’m watching the news.”
“I thought I’d come over tonight. What are you doing?”
“Well, if you’re not doing anything special.thought …”
“Benny, it’s only Thursday night. You can’t wait for Friday? It’s only one more day. Your brother should drop in as often as you do. I got to go. Goodbye.”
I stared at my yellow pad for a minute and then decided to take a run over to my mother’s place just the same. She sounded a little down to me. I closed up the shop and walked to the stairs.
“Good night, Frank.”
“Good night, Benny.”
My car was parked behind the building. I went down the lane to where I’d left the Olds. For once I wasn’t blocked in. By the time I parked outside my parents’ condominium, it was getting a little purplish in the sky, but the heat hung on for dear life. It was a record spring for heat, the paper had said, and it caught everybody with his long underwear still on. The house wasn’t really a house, it was something called a unit. This unit looked like all the other units on what looked like a street, but it wasn’t a street, since all the units shared the same street address. It saved on numbers. I let myself in with my key. There were no lights upstairs and none on the main floor. She had been down in the recreation room watching television since the early afternoon. I walked over the high pile of the broadloom and went downstairs. She was where I expected to find her, where she had been since 1952 as close as I can remember.
“That you, Benny?” she asked without turning her head.
“Yes, Ma.”
“I thought it was you. Your father’s playing cards at the club tonight. This is his night to play cards.”
“Uh huh.”
“Did you eat?”
“I had a sandwich downtown about an hour ago.”
“Good, because there’s nothing to eat around here.”
“Uh huh.”
“That was too bad on the news, wasn’t it?”
“What?”
“Too bad.”
“Too bad about what, Ma?”
“About Chester Yates.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I just told you.” I went over to the set and looked for the button to turn it off. She protested, but I found it. I looked at her half expecting to see a decreasing circle of light end in a pinpoint of brightness and then go out, but she just sat there looking at the blank set.
“You shouldn’t do that, Benny.”
“You started to say something. I’m trying to help you finish it. Tell me and I’ll turn the set on again. Cross my heart.”
“Don’t get funny with your mother.”
“Ma, for God’s sake tell me what you saw on the news about Chester Yates.”
“He’s dead, that’s all. Now turn it back on again.”
“What do you mean he’s dead? I just saw him this afternoon.”
“Well, about an hour ago he put a bullet through his brain.”
THREE
For a full minute I just looked at my mother. Her face looked old and drained of colour under her blond curls. I sat down hard on one of the vinyl stools in front of my father’s other hobby, his bar, trying to get the fact through to the right terminal in my brain. I couldn’t believe that the guy who’d carried all that overweight and a three piece suit for ten blocks, leaving me huffing and puffing like the Big Bad Wolf behind him on the hottest day this spring, had suddenly become work for the undertaker. It didn’t make sense. Do people get up from their hour on the shrink’s couch and quietly plug themselves? It didn’t jell somehow. I looked around the room, hoping that something somewhere would have an answer. There was a bookcase full of all the books I’d ever bought, except for the dozen I had in my room at the hotel. There were some of my brother’s medical text book discards: Histology, Dermatology and all the other ologies which a chief of surgery can safely discard. But no answers. Right about then I would have settled for a couple of good questions. I wasn’t getting anywhere, and I had that itch at the back of my knees that said “move.” I have good ideas only at the back of my knees. So I moved. I flicked the switch and turned my mother on again. The colour came back to her face and she smiled at a familiar commercial.
Upstairs, in the living room, with a portrait in oils of my mother at forty, when she was a brunette, hanging above the fireplace, I sank into a tangerine chair on the tangerine rug looking at the tangerine chesterfield and the tangerine curtains and tried to think. I could call Mrs. Yates. Bad idea. She would be playing jacks with the cops until midnight. I had money to return to her, but that could wait. I had news for her, but I wasn’t sure whether news that her husband hadn’t been playing around with another woman would exactly light up the sky for her. I could drop by the widow’s house. I even wondered whether she was a widow yet. Maybe there was a three days’ grace period when she was just the bereaved and bereft. Then I remembered that I only had her phone number and that was unlisted. I’d have to go back to my office downtown to look her up in the city directory. There didn’t seem to be any more I could do just then, except make sure that I saw the 11:15 local news.
I let myself out. The moon shining through the windshield had a big bite out of it, and I rolled the window down as I drove through the razzle-dazzle of the fast food traps on both sides of the north end of Ontario Street. “Chazerai,” my father would say. But everybody to his poison. I turned left at the light when I got to the end of Ontario, and then joined the one way traffic along St. Andrew. There was lots of parking space where I needed it. I left the Olds in front of my office, a two-storey brick building, with a crowning cornice that jutted out two feet from the front, like all the other places that dated from the same bad year in domestic architecture. The streets were as bare as my bank account at the end of the month. I’d passed a couple looking at the pictures outside the Capitol Theatre. Except for them, everybody was safe and secure behind closed doors, or off in some shopping mall turning pay envelopes into down payments on appliances.
Frank Bushmill had either taken himself home or pulled himself the rest of the way into the bottle. His lights were out. Once, when I’d picked him up off the floor and poured him into a taxi, he half-opened his befuddled eyes from the backseat and said, “Benny, you’re a decent old skin and God bless you.” Maybe he was off with the gay crowd having a hell of a time. I hoped so, but doubted it. Around here, poor Frank was the gay crowd. No wonder he drank.
My place always looked spooky at night, with moving shadows and lights crawling over the walls and filing cabinets until I found the light switch. The fluorescent light stamped on the shadows. The office was a mess, with everything where it should be. I dragged out the city directory from under the telephone to look up Chester’s address. It was in the right neighbourhood all right. He lived up to every dollar he’d earned right to the end. To think of him lying dead, when I’d seen him healthier than me only a couple of hours ago, stubbed all reason. Well, now he can be the healthiest body in Victoria Lawn. And what about his wife? She was sitting pretty. There would be no divorce. No further business for me in her direction. She was going to come out of this smelling of cut flowers, and only I knew how close she came to blowing the whole deal. I tried her number. After three rings, it was answered by a voice deep enough to belong to a police sergeant. She was under a doctor’s care and not taking any calls, thank you. “Yeah. So what are you still hanging around for?” I wondered after I’d hung back the phone.
I’d come to a dead end. It was getting late and I’d earned my pay, so what was I worried about? If I had a private life, it was time to be getting on with it. Only I didn’t feel like going back to my hotel yet. If I were a drinking man, this is where I would open my filing cabinet and pull out a bottle of rye from behind the dead files. There was a dried-up orange back there and some dried apricots. The one was inedible and the other gave me gas. To hell with it.
I locked up the door with the frosted glass and squired myself to the car. There were two drunks talking in front of the beverage room of th
e Russell House. I looked in my glove compartment for matches. I sat behind the wheel, startled by the brightness of my tie as I lit a cigarette in the dark interior, and decided to take a run out past the Yates place. It couldn’t hurt. And I’d like to think Myrna Yates would do as much for me.
I drove along the curving length of the main drag, then turned down into the valley where one hundred and fifty years ago the ship canal that the town had grown around had been dug. Now it ran in a filthy black arc behind and below the stores on St. Andrew. The road followed the canal for a while, being choosy about picking a crossing point, then doubled back to climb up the opposite bank to the two-hundred-thousand-dollar homes of South Ridge. Beyond that, on top of the escarpment, I could see a line of lights from streets like Minton and Dover in the South End, just this side of Papertown. The illuminated green water tower stood out as usual above everything.
The streets were wide with pools of light showing the way, while the houses themselves lay well back from the street under maples and birches. Hillcrest Avenue curved along the ridge of the same valley the canal took, but at a point beyond where it was a canal. On my right, the backyards of the rich ran for hundreds of feet down to the clay banks of the Eleven Mile Creek. Driving slowly I could see the house numbers easily, not that it was necessary: two police cruisers were stilled parked outside the Yates place, where all the lights were still burning.