by Howard Engel
I slid in behind one of the police cruisers, killed the motor and doused the lights. I was on my third cigarette, when a man came out of the house. He was a big guy, so I was surprised when he didn’t get into one of the cruisers. I took a good look at his meaty face as he went under the streetlamp. He walked past my car without interest and headed along the sidewalk to a dark Buick parked about a hundred yards behind me. After he drove off, I had another cigarette, and then I thought, “Enough of this driving around.”
The national news doled out its usual helping of international calamities and national absurdities, which I was able to watch in black and white from my bed. I’d closed the dusty curtains to keep the neon out, and lit a cigarette. I’d smoked nearly two packs today without once thinking of giving it up. It had been a busy day. From downstairs came the beat of the rock group playing in the “Ladies and Escorts” section of the downstairs beer parlour. I could feel it through the mattress.
The local anchor man wore a crest on his blazer with the station’s logo on it. He looked pretty silly before he started speaking, and then it was the content that looked silly. They seemed to use the same film-clip of the back end of an ambulance three times for three separate stories. The last one was about Chester Yates. According to this account, the body had been discovered in his office on the seventh floor of the Caddell Building about five-thirty on an early security check by Thomas Glassock, who worked for Niagara. Nobody heard the shot. Chester had returned to his office just before the office staff left for the day. His secretary, Martha Tracy, who was the last one to see him alive, said that her boss had not been his usual ebullient self lately. I’ll bet Martha Tracy said ebullient. Those TV newswriters are all reaching for a Pulitzer Prize. The gun that he used was his own target pistol, and the police were hoping to wind up their routine investigation swiftly. Chester was then praised for his many public-spirited acts by Mayor Rampham wearing his other expression, and by Alderman Vern Harrington, a close personal friend, and the owner of this face I’d seen under the streetlamp leaving the home of the dear departed. That’s all there was to it. Thank you and good night.
The sun was illuminating the dust particles in my stale air at eight o’clock next morning, when I rolled out of a dream in which I’d been chased through Montecello Park by Chester and his wife followed by a dozen or so Keystone cops. Blinking, I thought that reality couldn’t be worse than this. I got up, shaved, put on my rumpled pinstripe suit again and again promised myself to retire it as soon as I could afford to. Once more I knotted my tie so that it made doing up my fly unnecessary. I tried it a second time, but it didn’t help. I grabbed a cup of coffee at the United Cigar Store, and looked through the paper to see if there was any more information about Yates’ suicide. There wasn’t. The solid citizen stuff was pushed to the top, and then the sad loss, and then the scant details about taking his life under the pressure of business and overwork. Case closed.
I climbed the twenty-eight steps to my office, and let myself in. The mail on the floor was unimpressive: “Give our Total Service a try and Save Five Dollars.” I wrapped a blank piece of paper around ten of Mrs. Yates’ twenty-dollar bills and put them in an envelope which I addressed to her. On the back of one of my remaining cards, I wrote:
Dear Mrs. Yates,
I was sorry to hear today of your husband’s sudden death, and I extend to you my deepest sympathy at this difficult time. I am returning to you part of the retainer you left with me yesterday because I have concluded my investigation, discovering that your fears were groundless and that in fact your late husband had been seeing a doctor.
I looked at it. I didn’t like my cramped words, I didn’t like my childish scrawl. I didn’t like the possibility that someone other than Mrs. Yates would open the envelope. There are always helpful people around when there’s a funeral in the air. I tore up the note and put the money in my inside breast pocket. I’d have to see her in person. But I couldn’t decently accomplish that until after the cops and the mourners had thinned out a little. I shrugged to myself and decided to buy myself a haircut. It would set me up for the whole day, and with my hair, which had been running for cover above my collar and behind my ears since I was twenty, it wouldn’t cut too deeply into my business day.
It was business I was brooding about as I walked up St. Andrew towards the barbershop in the basement of the Murray Hotel. I thought of dropping in on my cousin Melvyn to see if he needed any title-searching done down at the registry office. He could usually be relied upon to throw me some crumbs if I chirped brightly. He was even known to have paid me a couple of times. I can’t complain. It leaves me busy and like polio it keeps me off the streets. I remember the little creep sticking his tongue out at me when he was still in his playpen. Now he’s graduated and practising, he has learned subtlety. For a while I was his chief good-works project and my mother loved him for it. Lately, although Ma hadn’t noticed, his big interest in life was cuff-links made from real Roman coins.
There was a chair waiting in the barbershop. Bill Hall was sweeping up from his last customer and placed the brown curls in a white garbage can, leaving the mottled tile floor with a dull sheen.
“How’ve you been, Ben?” he asked seriously.
“Can’t complain, Bill. Nothing much doing in my line.”
“Nor in mine,” he said, cocking his bald head and looking at me meaningfully in the mirror.
“Too bad about Chester Yates,” I said, playing my king’s pawn opening.
“Well, we all got to go,” he sighed shaking his head, and trying to line up my ears on a horizontal line.
“Paper said it was business worries. What kind of worries do you get with his kind of business?”
“Real estate, developing and contracting? It’s a hustle like everything else, I guess. Most of them are walking a thin line holding their breath most of the time. They make their backroom deals and the accountants and lawyers straighten it out and make it look up and up.”
“But, if that’s the name of the game, why should he suddenly blow his brains out?”
“I guess even hustlers can have enough,” he shrugged in the glass over the bottles of hair tonic which, in the ten years I’d been coming to Bill, he’d never used on me.
“Uh huh.”
“I used to know his wife Myrna. Years ago. She came from the west end same as me. Her father had a wrecking yard out Pelham Road. There were two of them on the way out to Power Gorge, and her father ran the one closest to town. She was a saucy little tramp in public school. She, you know, developed early for a girl, and she knew what it was all about when the rest of us thought balls were for basketball hoops. Of course, she’s changed a lot now. Settled. Money does that. Funny thing about money, Ben: it makes people different, inside. Outside, you can’t tell much. I had Lord Robinson, the newspaper tycoon, sitting right where you are one time, and he wasn’t any different from anybody else. I couldn’t find any trace of his organizing genius in his hair. Ginger-coloured it was, getting kind of sparse so he liked it combed across. But where was all that power for making money? He had dandruff, same as you.”
The morning was well advanced by the time I left the hotel and started back to the office. The sidewalks showed a few storekeepers leaning against their plate-glass windows. Without thinking about it, I was staring into the window of the sporting-goods store at the baseball mitts and English Dinky toys. I could see the old man at the counter in an otherwise empty shop. An old-fashioned bell rang as I opened the door.
“Yes?” he said, looking over his glasses. “Say, aren’t you Manny Cooperman’s boy?” I nodded. “I thought so. I’ve known your father for forty years. He used to bring you in here when you were a boy. Which one are you? One of you is a doctor, isn’t that right?”
“I’m Ben, the one that stayed at home.”
“That’s right, I see you go by once in a while. You don’t come in any more. Say, I remember one time your father brought you in here, you couldn’t hav
e been more than three or four, but walking you know, and I asked you—it must have been in the 1940s, just after the war started—and I asked you, just kidding, mind, who did you think was going to win the war over in Europe. And you thought a minute, I’ll never forget it, and said that you thought that both sides were going to lose. Now can you beat that? Do you remember saying that? Did your father ever tell you that story? I know it was you. You or your brother. Couldn’t have been more than five or six. Yes, sir, I’ll never forget that.”
He seemed to sink into his private past for a minute, looking very tall and thin in the tall, thin store with the light coming in through the bicycle wheels in the window.
“It was my brother.”
“Hmmm?” he asked, pretty far away.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Is there something special you are looking for, Ben? We don’t see you much these last few years. We seem to lose them after high school and then pick them up again when they start tennis and racketball. But there’s a ten-year gap sometimes. I didn’t catch. Did you say you were looking for something special?”
“Oh, I was vaguely looking at your bikes through the window—it’s Mr. MacLeish, isn’t it?”
“That’s right. You know my brother’s gone.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Well, that was a good many years ago now. It gets longer every time I add it up. You were asking about bicycles. Yes, a lot of people your age are riding safety bikes. You know I sell more to young adults than I do to teenagers. Isn’t that a pretty paradox for you? I guess it’s the gears they have today that they didn’t have in your day or in mine. And it’s all this play they give to fitness on the television. Don’t you think that’s so?”
I walked with Mr. MacLeish to his display of bicycles. He had about twenty on the floor and another bunch hanging from hooks on the wall. Behind a partition, a teenager in a mouse-coloured shopcoat was assembling more from wooden crates.
“Funny thing,” Mr. MacLeish said, his watery eyes winking over his lenses, “speaking about bikes. You know who came in through that door yesterday afternoon? It just goes to show you that you can’t be too careful on the subject of fitness. Well, sir, yesterday afternoon
I had a customer looking at bikes, and he was a dead man by the time I closed up for the night.”
“You mean Chester Yates?”
“Why how’d you know that? That’s right. Isn’t that a remarkable thing?”
“Well, I guess anybody can look at bikes even if he means to shoot himself in an hour.”
“Ben, I agree with you. It might calm a desperate man about to commit a desperate act. But Ben, looking at bikes is one thing, and buying them’s another.”
“What?”
“That’s what I say. Buying a ten-speed bike and then killing yourself, that’s a totally different can of paint.”
FOUR
I walked back to the office without seeing anything much. All I knew was that the file I had marked “closed” was open again, and written at the top of the first page inside was “Concerning the death of Chester Yates.” It didn’t add up and things that don’t add up give me heartburn. So, I went to work. I phoned Dr. Zekerman, but got an answering service. It was the same service I use, so I was able to quiz the girl and discover that the doctor sometimes picked up his calls between patients but often didn’t bother until late in the afternoon. No, there wasn’t a nurse or receptionist who picked up the calls, it was always the doctor. I left my number with her.
Next I called Peter Staziak in Homicide. We’d been in the same class in Chemistry at high school, and I’d been in a school play with his sister. I asked him who was handling the Yates suicide and he put me on to a Sergeant Harrow, who was supposed to have all the answers. I told Harrow what I had and I could hear him breathing steadily at the other end, without any sudden intakes of air. Then he wanted to know who I was and why it had become my business. He seemed to be more interested in that than in the news about a suicide buying a ten-speed bike an hour before killing himself. Finally he said, “Look, Mr. Cooperman, I want to thank you for coming forward with this information, but the case is closed.”
“There’ll be an inquest, won’t there?” I asked.
“Sure, but that’s just routine too. You see, sir, we have the report from the medical examiner who says that death came from a self-inflicted wound in the head. The powder burns say that it was a self-inflicted wound, the fingerprints say so and so does the paraffin test.”
“That doesn’t mean much to me. I mostly do divorce work.”
“Well, Mr. Cooperman, I think you’d better go back to your transom gazing and let us get on with our work. Thanks just the same.”
“Wait a minute! What have you got for the motive? Why’d he do it?”
“Like it says in the paper: he was depressed and overworked. Look, Mr. Cooperman, this is a dead one. If you want to play sleuth, we’ve got dozens of cases you can go to work on.” His irony had the same effect as someone digging you in the ribs with his elbow repeating “Did you get it?” I got it and then got off the line.
I was getting nowhere fast. I looked up the name of Chester’s company in the book and dialled it. I asked for Yates’ office, and when the noise of clicking and switching stopped I asked for Martha Tracy, Chester’s secretary.
“She’s off sick today, sir. Can I help you?”
“Can you give me Miss Tracy’s home number?”
“I’m very sorry, we don’t give out that information.”
“I’m sure you don’t, under normal circumstances, but this is an emergency.” I heard some talking through the palm of her hand which I didn’t catch and then there was a new voice on the line.
“Who is this?” it asked, “and who do you want?” I thought that in this instance the better part of valour was retreat. I hung up. I waited ten minutes and dialled again, heard the same noises and clicks and heard the first voice again.
“Can I help you?”
“This is Father Murphy over at St. Jude’s and we’re after arranging a high mass for dear Martha Tracy’s poor unfortunate employer, may he rest in peace. But Sister Kenny can’t seem to find the girl’s telephone number at all at all. Would you help us out, Miss, and may the blessing of St. Patrick himself be on you for helping us in this sad business?”
“Will you please stop doing that,” she said, with a steel edge to her voice. “We don’t give out private numbers. If you keep calling I’ll call the supervisor.” The line went dead. I took that hard, and went out for a cup of coffee. I’d had lines in Finian’s Rainbow at school. I’d been one of the silent singers. I just moved my lips during the songs. But I had real lines.
I decided that I’d better go down there to snoop around in my own way. It was Friday, so everybody would be anxious to get away promptly at five. That made the muscle in my cheek relax a little, and when I looked at my hands, they were almost dry. I ordered a chopped egg sandwich. In the seat next to me at the marble-topped counter an old geezer was rapidly making notes. I wondered for a second whether they were on to me, but he didn’t look up at me or at anyone else; the waitress scooped the soupbowl out from under his nose and slid the ham and eggs under without getting in the way of his pencil. I took a sideways look at his notebook; the writing went in all directions. The waitress saw me staring at him when she brought my sandwich. Without any direct reference to my neighbour she said, “I knew a fellow who wore Reynoldswrap in his shorts, once: to keep the radiation away from his precious jewels.”
Back in the office, I put in a call to Niagara. Said I was Sergeant Harrow from Homicide. I found out that Thomas Glassock would be on duty as usual in the Caddell Building beginning at five o’clock. Good. I was back on the track. I didn’t quite know what I was on the track of, but I was back on it and it felt better.
To kill the time before talking to Glassock, I wandered over to City Hall. There were tulips in bud in large cement planters in front of the
war memorial as I walked up the wide expanse of front steps. I always got a good feeling walking up these steps which rise to a series of eight doors. Eight doors has a kind of New England town meeting feel. But when I got to the top, all but one of them was locked. There was a message there for me someplace; I decided to pick it up later.
I disappointed the girl behind the counter by not having my assessment with me. When I told her that I didn’t have an assessment, it nearly broke her heart. I asked her where I could find the elected members of council. She directed me and I obeyed.
The wall to wall rug down the corridor between the offices of the aldermen was thick and green. The doors were blue, I couldn’t figure that one. I found Harrington’s door, and was about to knock, when a stenographer picked the wrong moment to be efficient.
“Was there something?” she asked as though we were both speaking English.
“Yes, there was. In fact, there is. Is that Mr. Harrington’s office?”
“Yes, but …” I was wondering whether she was just playing a game with me or whether she really cared whether I got in to see him or not.
“Well, is he in it?”
“Yes, but …” It was happening a little too fast for her.
“Is he with someone?” She shook her head. “Is he asleep?”
“Sir, do you have an appointment to see Mr. Harrington?”
“No. Is it necessary to have one to see an elected official?” I pretended to bristle.
“Not really, but may I ask what is the nature of your business with Mr. Harrington?”
“Well, I wouldn’t tell everybody, but since it’s you, I’ll tell you. I want to ask Mr. Harrington just exactly what he intends to do about my wife. Call it family business or private business, whatever you like, but if he won’t see me, I’m afraid he’ll have to see my lawyer.”
“Oh! Oh dear. Why, of course, yes. You can go right in. I know he’s there. Goodness.” She visibly faded behind her pink plastic glasses, leaving only a smear of rouge and lipstick under her permanent wave. I knocked at Harrington’s door.