by Howard Engel
“My name is Benny Cooperman, and I’m doing some work on the Chester Yates case.” The first part of my statement didn’t move him much, but the second part caught all his attention.
“What Chester Yates case? I don’t know any Chester Yates.”
“He was one of your patients, Doctor. You saw him last just before he died.”
“Who are you?”
“I told you. My name’s Cooperman.” His foxy nose took on a pinched look. The mouth that in repose imitated a sneer opened slightly. His eyes began to shift about behind his glasses.
“Who the hell sent you here?”
“Nobody.”
“Who are you working for?” He looked scared.
“I’m a private investigator, and …”
“Don’t give me that garbage. Just turn around and walk away from here.” He was sweating now, and it wasn’t from the work on the pump valve. I’d touched a nerve. “Stop following me. Do you hear me?” He began to raise his voice. I tried to shrug and calm him down.
“Look, Doctor, don’t get excited. I only want to …”
“Get off my land. Get away from me!” He was shouting and the cords in his neck stood out white against his reddening face. I tried again to calm him down with a reassuring gesture.
“I only want to ask you a couple of questions. That’s all. Just a couple of questions.”
He backed up against the workbench and quickly shot a look to his right and left. He grabbed a blue cylindrical tank about a foot long with one hand and a thing that looked like a bent coat hanger with the other. The one struck a spark and at once the other came alive with a flame about a mile long. He lunged at me with it, singeing the arm of my coat as I lifted it to protect my eyes. “Hey, what are you trying to do?”
“Get out of here, do you hear me?”
“I’m going, I’m going.” I backed to the open front of the shed, then turned and started for my car.
“Stop following me, do you hear! Do you hear? Leave me alone.” I think he may have continued in that vein, but I missed it as I dashed the hundred yards or so to the Olds. My last sight of Dr. Zekerman, as I backed down his lane at fifty miles an hour, was of an irate gesticulating madman, brandishing a propane torch which nearly singed my baby-blue eyes. If that was standard practice for a shrink in these parts, I’m going to take all my future business to a chiropractor. And right then it looked like I was going to have a lot of business. I hadn’t had a headache like that since I fell in the dark on top of another private dick working for the other side in the same divorce case. Dr. Zekerman from where I sat, speeding back to town, looked like he was damaged and should see somebody about it and fast.
SEVEN
Back in town I did something I seldom do: I had a couple of belts of rye and a beer chaser at the hotel. Then I went upstairs to my room and nearly brought it all up again. To hell with putting my nose where it wasn’t wanted. On Monday, for sure, I was going over to see my cousin Melvyn. What I needed on a hot spring day was a cool morning searching titles at the registry office. Title searchers live a long time and hardly ever lose their sight to a propane flame. I lay back on my bed, looking up at the ceiling thinking of my resolution, when the phone rang. I grabbed it mostly to stop it making such a racket. It was Mrs. Yates.
“Mr. Cooperman? I’m sorry to bother you on a weekend, but I didn’t want you to think I didn’t appreciate what you have been doing. Mr. Ward was a little harsh with you on the telephone yesterday, and I’m sorry. We’ve all been under a great deal of pressure as you’ll appreciate.” Her voice sounded washed out, almost like she was reciting a chant.
“Mr. Ward’s word for what I’ve done is ‘harassment,’ Mrs. Yates. I know you’ve been through the wringer these last three days and you’re not in the clear yet. What I want to know, Mrs. Yates, is do you want me to go on harassing you? Are you satisfied to hear that your husband wasn’t seeing another woman, but going to see a psychiatrist?”
“Chester is dead, Mr. Cooperman.”
“Mrs. Yates, you know what you asked me to do?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I did that. I was with your husband up to an hour before his death. I can tell you that his afternoon appointment was not with the Water Board as it said on his deck calendar; he went to see Dr. Andrew Zekerman. The name mean anything to you?”
“No.” She said it breathlessly.
“He’s a psychiatrist, across from the Hotel Dieu Hospital on Ontario Street. I’ve been to see the shrink; and found out that he’s scared of something. He thinks he’s being followed. I’d like to find out why. Believe me, it’s not my imagination, Mrs. Yates. You didn’t see his face when I mentioned your husband’s name.”
“But I still don’t see …”
“Mrs. Yates, two hours before your husband died, he ordered a ten-speed bike for himself. You can check at MacLeish’s sporting goods if you don’t believe me.”
“I see.” She didn’t sound as though she did, but I took her at her word. I waited for a minute.
“Can you tell me, Mrs. Yates, who would want to see your husband out of the way? Who would profit by his death? Did he have any enemies? Don’t tell me now. I want you to think about it and let me know later on. May I suggest that we keep what I’ve said under your hat until I can find something that a court of law would recognize as proof? That is if you want to keep me busy, because frankly I don’t think we’ve got enough right now to go to the police with. If you want me to drop everything right where it is, just say so. I can take a hint. But to tell you the truth, Mrs. Yates, I’ll take it better from you than from that stuffed-shirt Ward.”
“Bill Ward? But how …? Oh, on the telephone. Yes, I understand, Mr. Cooperman. Please, Mr. Cooperman, if Chester was killed and you can find out who killed him, I’ll be eternally grateful. If it’s a matter of money …”
“I didn’t say anything about money, although I could use another two hundred. But I can wait until you get back on your feet again. Take it easy. And let me know if you think of anything that might help to shed some light around here.”
“Yes, I promise. Goodbye.” I heard the click, but listened to the dead line hum for a minute before I replaced the receiver. I was back in business. I might get burned to a crisp after all, but at least I wasn’t going to have to be nice to that bastard cousin of mine, Melvyn.
EIGHT
I won’t bore you with the rest of my weekend. One of us is enough. I could tell you about the trip to the laundromat, about how I nearly nailed the sock thief in the drier, how I pan-handled on James Street for dimes to see me through the second load after the change machine jammed. There’s a lot I’m going to leave out by jumping from Saturday afternoon and landing in Victoria Lawn in time for Chester’s obsequies on Monday.
Funerals make me nervous. I don’t care whose they are. I watched them bury Churchill and Kennedy and Martin Luther King and the other Kennedy on television, where you could see that even when you’re dead it helps to have money to bring the right tone and taste to the send-off. I skipped the church service. That’s another thing that gives me the willies. Ever since I was a kid, churches and me have kept our distance from one another. I kept thinking that because of my religion they might have to have the place reconstructed or something. I was in a religious play once. I was just a teenager, and the play was Good Friday by the English poet laureate, John Masefield. It was all about the trial of Jesus, and I played an old geezer who kept breaking through the crowd and pleading with Pilate to spare the life of this upright man, Jesus. And the crowd kept laughing at me and throwing me offstage and calling me a madman. That was a little of the old Masefield irony there in that part about me being mad. Anyway, while I was offstage, the director had me join in with the crowd shouting “Crucify him! Crucify!” It was a schizo situation, and I wonder how I got out of it alive and not even converted.
I walked up the gravel path toward an assembly of the city’s finest, planning to watch from the back
ground. I’d parked my car about a mile back along the twisting road behind the last in the funeral procession. I worked my way between granite headstones that caught the afternoon sun on their polished fronts and back. I could hear the Anglican priest giving Chester his last shove into the next world; he stood at the head of the grave which was surrounded by brass rails. Flowers covered the casket, and green imitation grass covered the earth on either side. Myrna looked brave, wearing a black hat and veil. She made a lovely widow, standing there, still looking less than forty. Next to her, a tall, sandy-haired man of about fifty, but admitting to forty-five, with the widow’s arm on his. My guess made him William Allen Ward. Next to his stood my old pal, Vern Harrington. The other mourners include the mayor and most of the other aldermen. There were no children or even any young people. From the looks of them, I could see a lot of “ought” written on a lot of faces. Faces that “ought” to be seen to have come: colleagues, cronies, and people whose presence was expected, each wearing his face for the occasion, hats doffed, eyes fixed on the flowers on top of the coffin.
“I am the resurrection and the life …” The priest’s white vestments were caught by a spring breeze. Squirrels went about their own affairs, and I stood at the back.
I tried to put names on the people standing there. There were few women. Most of the aldermanic wives had begged off, but there was a girl or two from his office. I noticed Martha Tracy had found a suitable hat, and stood with a clutch of office girls around her, like an iceberg with its chips.
When the deed had been done, the crowd started moving back toward the cars in twos and threes. Two cemetery workers who had come up behind me watched them recede through the tall monuments and along the gravel path. They started talking Greek to one another and set about making the final earthly arrangements for Chester’s eternal rest.
I was about to turn away and follow the winding herd myself, when I felt someone sharing the view over my shoulder. It was Pete Staziak from Homicide wearing a light gabardine raincoat and carrying a green tyrolean felt hat. He put it on. It looked too small for his head.
“Hi, Benny. You sleuthing?”
“Sure, Pete. Only … I can’t sell what I have.” He gave me a grin that should have been shared with a third party; it wasn’t meant for me. We started back, crunching along the path. “I thought Harrow drew this case?”
“He did. And he wrote ‘Closed’ on the file last week. He’s on something else today.”
“You one of Chester’s fans?” I asked, trying a line that wouldn’t explode in my face in case he turned out to be his cousin. Although with a name like Staziak he had as much chance of being related to the dear departed as I did.
“Nope,” he said. “But I was told that I might find you here, Benny. They had you pegged pretty good, I’d say.”
“Did they send you to see if I would steal the floral tributes, Pete?”
“Sure are a lot of them. Seems a waste, doesn’t it? I guess somebody makes a buck out of it.”
“Pete, I never knew your philosophical side. Come on, for crying out loud, as an old friend, what’s eating them downtown? What are they so worried about?”
“This isn’t official.”
“Naturally. You’re invisible. Look I can put my hand right through you. What do you take me for, Pete? Who told you to come out here and play tip toe through the tombstones? Come on. Level with me.”
We stood leaning on my car, which now looked parked foolishly far away from the grave site since the other cars had vanished.
“Benny, I could get into a lot of trouble telling you anything. But what you’ve been saying around town about Yates’ death being murder and not suicide has got a lot of important people feeling uneasy, like you might take advantage of the funeral to make a speech or point the guilty finger or stuff like that. It don’t worry me, see, because we go back a long way together, but some people worry easy.” He was scratching his head under his hat. I could see it wasn’t easy for him to lean on me. He resented having to do it and he resented the direction from which the pressure came.
“I get you, Pete. I’ll keep my bib clean. But while I’m doing it why don’t you put a couple of numbers like two and two together. Why are they on my tail? Did anybody ever worry so much about Benny Cooperman before? What are they worried about over at City Hall? Doesn’t their nervousness make you wonder what they’re nervous about?”
“Ah, they’re worried about Myrna Yates, that’s all. They don’t want anybody upsetting her on top of all her other troubles. You can understand that. So there, that’s official.”
“You mean unofficial.” I grinned and he caught and returned it.
“Yeah. Okay, you understand what I’m not saying?”
“Loud and clear.”
“Okay. Now. Tell me what you got, Benny. Let’s have it.”
“I’ve got a suicide who buys himself a going-away present with only two hours to go.”
Pete squinted into the afternoon sun a little, like he’d seen a western sheriff do it on television. “Well now, it does sound peculiar. What else did he do before he got dead?”
“He spent an hour with his shrink.”
“Christ, Benny. There goes your theory up the chimney. A shrink could have got him into a very highly excited state in an hour. He could have stirred up all that muck in his subconscious, and you know, he could have left the shrink’s office in a depressed and suicidal state. Why don’t you let it lie, Ben? No good’ll come of your playing with it.”
“Pete, look. If it didn’t get so many people worked up I might let it alone, but people don’t get excited without a reason. And that reason could be that there is more in this than yesterday’s lunch. Why wasn’t there a post mortem? Why weren’t the contents of the organs sent to the Forensic Centre in Toronto? Why weren’t there tissue samples taken?”
“Because there was no need. Look, we had powder burns on his head, right; we had contact marks, right; we had prints on the gun, right; and we have nitrates showing up in the paraffin test. So, where’s the miscarriage of justice? Where’s your case? Do you even have a client?” He leaned over me, smirklines on either side of his thin mouth.
“You’d be surprised,” I said, sighing. We both looked at the other for a few seconds, not saying anything.
“Well, Benny. Take it easy.”
“Sure, Pete. Sure thing.” I got into the Olds and started the motor. Pete Staziak watched as I curved along the road, and I could see him in my rear-view mirror until the trees and headstones blanked him out.
Back behind my desk in my old swivel chair, things started looking the way Pete said. What did I really have? I had a wife suspicious of her beloved husband and willing to pay me good money to find out what he was up to. I had a bike-buying suicide, and a scared shrink. And the towel; I mustn’t forget the towel. That was my biggest clue so far. Why I could knock down the door of the Supreme Court with a clue like that.
It was time for a very late lunch. I never eat before funerals. Around at the United I sat down at my usual place at the marble counter.
“Super Jews,” the waitress said.
“What?” I said dropping my teeth.
“Soup or juice? You want to see the menu? You know it by heart.”
“Bring me … bring me … bring me …”
“A chopped egg sandwich on white. Right?”
“Toasted,” I said triumphantly, like I’d just put her king in check and discovered “gardé” on her queen. She sniffed haughtily and disappeared to the other end of the counter. In a few minutes she dropped the sandwich in front of me without a word. She ad libbed a glass of milk and I let her. There was nothing quite like lunch to make me hurry back to the office. I kept crazy hours in my business, sometimes working late into the night and once or twice a year right around the clock. Lunch at the United was what I had instead of regular office hours.
I had just dug out my shoebox full of receipts and papers from the bottom drawer of my stack o
f filing cases with a view to doing my income tax, when the phone rang. It was Martha Tracy.
“Cooperman? This is Martha Tracy.”
“I know. I never forget a voice. Faces, maybe.”
“I saw you at the funeral.”
“Thought I’d see if you found that hat. The tall, sandy-haired jasper with the widow: was that Ward?”
“The one and only. The little guy on the other side was the mayor.”
“Stop the press! What’s on your mind?”
“They asked me to come in this morning, to clear up the junk in Mrs. Yates’ office. I’ve been knee-deep in cartons all day. Well, I ran across something peculiar. You’re the expert in peculiar, I figured, so I thought I’d let you in on it. It’s a list of appointments. I’ve never seen it before and I don’t know any of the people on it. The craziest thing is that the appointments are for just about every hour of the day. Some in the middle of the night. Are you still there, Cooperman?”
“Both ears.”
“Isn’t that cotton-pickin’ weird? Meetings at three and four in the morning, and names like Jones and Peters and Williams.” She sounded excited and was talking a little louder than absolutely necessary. “I put it in an envelope and mailed it to you. I got your address out of the Yellow Pages.”
“Martha, did you tell anybody about what you’ve found?”
“Of course not. Think I never watch television? You should get it in the mail tomorrow.”
“Depending on the mood down at the post office.”
“M’yeah, you’re right. Anyway …”