by Howard Engel
“Anyway, I want to thank you for keeping your eyes open. You’re a big help. I’m getting close to something. Or something’s getting closer to me.”
NINE
I’d been playing around with the receipts from my three oil company credit cards, wondering where all that oil had taken me and how much of it was for business and how much for pleasure. There was a trip to the Hamilton registry office to check the ownership in 1938 of a house on Barton Street, which in 1938 turned out to be a peach orchard. Meanwhile my client and his problem disappeared. There was the trip to Buffalo about that custom Porsche which a client’s son had bought for two hundred dollars. My client, smelling dead fish, sent me to trace the ownership. In a rented room in Buffalo’s tenderloin, I found the former owner. His estranged wife had done just what he’d asked—sold his car and mailed him the proceeds. I couldn’t find much pleasure written on the flimsy receipts. Funny how I get paid good money to fix other people’s lives, but mine always looks like a garbage bag the cats have opened up. I’ve got a thing about tidying things up. I should make an appointment to see myself professionally one of these days.
I was beginning to think that in another hour or so I would have broken the back of my income tax, when the telephone rang.
“Hello, Mr. Cooperman? This is Andrew Zekerman.” You could have knocked me over with a burnt matchstick. His voice was a little hesitant, but he sounded as though he had something important on his mind.
“So, Doctor, you’ve decided I’m not trying to murder you after all?”
“I can explain about that, Mr. Cooperman, and I certainly want to apologize for my unwarranted attack on you.”
“Well, the occasional attack, you know, keeps me on my toes.” I was feeling a little light-headed, and held the phone away from my ear to avoid possible singeing. “How well did you know Chester Yates?”
“He was my patient.”
“For how long?”
“Since last spring. About a year. His death, Mr. Cooperman, has upset me terribly.”
“Never lost a patient before, Doctor?”
“I was with him an hour before he died. That hit me very close. I was fond of Chester.”
“He didn’t leave your place in a suicidal depression, then?”
“Of course not.”
“I didn’t think so either. You think that somebody got to him, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do. I know it. And you’ve got to get to Bill Ward and tell him.”
“Right. We can’t have the first families knocking one another off, can we?”
“You don’t understand, Mr. Cooperman, this is too difficult to deal with over the phone, and I have a patient due. Could you come to see me here at six o’clock? I’ll explain everything to you. Is that satisfactory?”
“It’ll have to be. See you at six.” We hung up. I looked at my watch. His four o’clock patient was just ringing the buzzer.
I was too excited by this recent turn of events to play with my income tax returns any more. I had two hours to kill and I was too het up to sit on my butt waiting for the hands to pull themselves past all those numbers on the dial. I wandered out into the sun, crossed St. Andrew and gasped at the jungle-mouth smell coming through the doorway of the Men’s Beverage Room in the Russell House. It was like a taste of midsummer, and I could see the ghost of old Joe Higgins selling balloons and balsa birds on sticks as he propped himself in the lee of the stoplight on his crutches. Poor old Joe.
At the library, I went through the turnstile, and found a book on Chester’s specialty, real estate. I sat down at a wide, cool table, in a quiet corner, where the fountain wouldn’t make premature suggestions to my bladder. A man with a threadbare jacket was sitting opposite me reading the Reader’s Digest. The air conditioning touched him first then moved on to me. He smelt like he’d been sleeping in old tunafish. Still, he could read upside down, which was more than I could manage.
Once I started, I soon learned how much there was to the field and how little of it I had ploughed. Mortgages to me were the things moustachioed villains brandished in front of the tear-filled eyes of the widow and her beautiful daughter. I read on, keeping half an eye on my watch.
I left myself ten minutes to walk the few blocks along Church Street to Ontario and the Physicians’ and Surgeons’ Building. The way was lined by leafless maples, the odd catalpa tree and next to the Presbyterian church, a ginkgo, the one with fan-shaped leaves in summer.
Inside Zekerman’s lobby, I still had a minute or so in hand. I used it to study the botanic structure of the plastic yucca plant which loomed over the vinyl and chrome chairs and parquet floor. The plastic yucca comes apart in your hands if you examine it too closely. The bits that come away are harder to reassemble than you would first think. There is always ample foliage from the larger lower branches to hide the remains of such an investigation. At six o’clock precisely, I rang the doctor’s buzzer. I waited. I rang again. There was no response. I lit a cigarette, deciding that I’d caught him in the john, and gave the buzzer a good long press in another two minutes. No luck. I walked calmly to the telephone booth, dialled, let it ring and got my dime back after fifteen rings. I could feel a tenseness, born of too many movies, taking hold of the muscles in the back of my neck, as I looked for the number of the building’s superintendent. It was at the bottom of all those columns of doctors. One-oh-one. I found the apartment, and as I was waiting for the door to be answered, I imagined it opening on a dark room illuminated only by the light of a television set and with a beefy man with a can of beer in his hand sitting in an overstuffed chair in front of it. Odd how reality always trips up the imagination. He was drinking his beer from a dark brown bottle. I told him what the problem was and he heaved a heavy sigh and reached for a ring of keys. He left the television running: no sense depriving the furniture of what he had to miss.
The tenth floor was cool. Ozite carpeting ran the length of the wide corridor. We tried ringing again when we got to the right door, but Zekerman wasn’t answering. The super frowned for a minute at the bunch of keys, selected one and opened the door. The lights were on. But no television. It was more an apartment than an office. There was a small kitchen and a bedroom off one large room which was dominated by two large leather chairs, the sort that tilt back, slipping a footrest under your feet when you get back far enough. There was a small desk in one corner. Large french windows let what was left of the spring day into the room. Beyond was a cement balustraded balcony. I didn’t get to admire the view, because of the mess the apartment was in. There were papers flung in every direction. Beside the desk the file drawers were open, and red filing folders stood half down from their moorings. In the midst of this mess, the first, not the last thing we noticed as we came into the room was Zekerman lying stretched out on one of the leather chairs. There was blood around the top part of what used to be his head. His mouth gaped open adding to the look of surprise frozen on his staring frightened eyes. On the floor, behind the chair, more blood had dripped. In the middle of it lay a heavy African sculpture, similar to several other wooden sculptures which were about the only conscious attempt to decorate the room. I stepped on something. It looked like a piece of shell-like pasta. It was a piece of shell-like shell, a cowrie shell; the murder weapon had a ring of them around its neck, and a number of them were scattered over the carpet near the body. The super stood with his mouth open in the doorway. The shock had made him automatically suck in his belly so that it no longer rested on his belt.
“Kee-rist!” he said. “Well, I’ll be damned. He’s dead.” There was no doubt at all on that score. I tried to escape the terror in those eyes by poking my head in the bedroom. The bed was made. No sign of a search in there. When I came out, the super had still not moved. He kept repeating, “Well, I’ll be damned,” and shaking his head.
“Better get the police,” I said. That seemed to bring him back to the world of traffic tickets and sudden death in a flash. He jumped—I almost thought to atte
ntion— and made for the telephone. “Hold it,” I shouted. “Better not use that phone. There might be fingerprints. See if you can get Sergeant Staziak at Homicide. But if you can’t, it doesn’t matter. Just tell them the address and that it looks like there’s been a murder.” He left. I almost said escaped, he went so fast. As soon as I saw the elevator door close, I ran to look at the file cabinet. As close as I could make out, whole files had been removed from their places. Whoever did it came with a box or bag to carry away with him what he knew to be here. I probed with my trusty ball-point pen into the files and found an interrupted alphabetical system. I looked up Yates. Missing. I looked up Ward on a hunch. Bad guess. I probed some of the files. Dr. Zekerman’s scrawl was impenetrable. Some of the patients were Medicare subscribers. That might help, I thought, if I could get a complete list from them. At the bottom of one file drawer, a few pages lay, spilled from their folders. I looked through the names that came to light, trying not to touch the metal sides of the case. Filing cabinets give the fingerprint boys a chance to show off. A smooth metal surface is as easy as glass. Most of the names didn’t mean a thing to me, but I was suddenly getting lucky. I recognized one of the names. It belonged to alderman Vern Harrington. Nice, I thought, very nice.
I looked around for an appointment book. That would tell who had been in and out of the room in the last few hours. That was missing too. I tried to think. What else would a good detective do while waiting for the police to arrive? I couldn’t think straight. I was concentrating on keeping my back to Zekerman’s eyes. I was putting off the job nobody liked to do. I tried to come at him so that I wouldn’t have to look at his face. I couldn’t manage it, started to retch and just made it to the bathroom in time. By the time the dry retching stopped, my glasses were misted up and I was out of breath. I fetched that back and lit a shaking cigarette. I pulled a dark blue towel from behind the bathroom door and covered up Zekerman’s head.
Now I could take him in a little better. He was wearing soft, crepe-soled shoes with floppy wool socks; an expanse of blue calf was visible above them. I touched his skin. Warm. That was a bit silly, I guess, since I knew he was alive at four o’clock. It was only just after six. A detailed medical examination couldn’t fix the time of death much more accurately than that. Zekerman wore beige corduroy trousers and an old comfortable wool sweater. He hadn’t been trying to impress today’s patients with his wardrobe. His hands lay with their backs up on his stomach. His fingernails would have kept him from getting a job as a bus-boy in a greasy spoon. The shirt collar made of some synthetic drip-dry material added a dash of green to the otherwise beige impression.
Then I went through his pockets with speed and efficiency. His wallet contained a thousand dollars mostly in fifties. He had the usual credit cards and belonged to the golf club. There were a couple of restaurant receipts he was saving for his income tax. Duty entertainment. None of this looked useful, so I put it all back.
On the table beside his chair, on the right side, a pipe lay with a lot of ashes in a big brown ashtray. The ashes in the pipe were warm, but not hot. In the ashtray next to the other chair I found an assortment of butts, some with lipstick, some without, some filtered, some plain. I could see them loving that downtown.
I heard the elevator stop on this floor through the still open door, and I tried to saunter innocently to the middle of the room. The super came in still shaking his head.
“Kee-rist, how could a thing like this happen? I’ll get shit for it sure as anything. They’ll figure out some way I should have been able to stop it. I might as well start looking for a new job right now, Kee-bloody-rist.” He seemed a bit wheezy, as though he’d run up the stairs. There was sweat under his big arms. “Anyway, I phoned, like you said. Only they’re sending over some uniformed cop right away. That guy you said wasn’t there. You’re right about not touching anything: the cop on the phone told me that too.” I handed him a lit cigarette and he took it like a junky taking a fix that’s a couple of hours late. Funny how his belly stayed behind his belt like that. That took a lot of sucking. “Jesus,” he said, “I haven’t seen a dead man since I was in Germany in 1945. Didn’t bother me then. I’d seen a few. Damn it, though, it throws you when you come on it sudden.” I told him my name for something to do, but he didn’t hear it, and when he took my hand neither of us put much into it.
It didn’t seem more than three or four centuries until we heard the elevator door again. A couple of constables from downtown made their way shoulder to shoulder through the narrow doorway. Constables Keith and Morressey. They asked if we had touched anything, and warned us in future not to touch anything if we should be so inclined. They looked around at the mess, peeked under the blue towel and took down our names in their day books. They then asked the usual questions and they wrote down our answers. They seemed to be getting a bang out of writing up more than a description of a bruised fender or noting the failure of a brake light. I couldn’t blame them; this was their glimpse of the big time.
Just when they were beginning to feel that the investigation was all theirs, someone arrived to spoil their fun. He stood about seven feet tall in his regulation boots, which went with the uniform although he was in plain clothes. His freckled face frowned at the scene around him, took us in, the body of the shrink, and the general mess. He turned to both the super and me, introduced himself as Corporal Cahill, and warned us not to touch anything. It seemed like a good idea.
The corporal led us both back over our stories after he spoke with the uniformed men. He took us one at a time into the bedroom and, sitting on the edge of Zekerman’s bed, where we weren’t blurring any latent fingerprints, he nodded his head on its thick neck as he made notes. I told him that I’d had a call from the doctor, that he had asked me to come at six o’clock to see him, and that when he didn’t answer his buzzer after I’d leaned on it for a few minutes, I hunted up the superintendent, whose name was Uhernick, by the way, and together we had discovered the corpse. He assumed that I was trying to see the doctor on business, that I was a patient of his, and short of foaming at the mouth I let him believe that. After my turn, I sent Uhernick to see Cahill. Outside the big room was alive with cops in all shapes and sizes. Flash-bulbs went off like a Hollywood opening. A guy I took to be the coroner was holding hands with Zekerman, bending his wrist back and forth. He’d removed the blue towel from where I’d put it and I got another look at those staring frightened eyes. As if my day wasn’t already perfect. The fingerprint boys had dusted the telephone, doorknobs, desk filing cabinet with talc, and were now brushing them off again with dry camelhair brushes. The coroner sneezed and shot a dirty look in the direction of the man working in a crouched position near the phone. After a half hour of this, just as Cahill had begun to think of this as his investigation, Sergeant Harrow stood in the doorway. This gave Mr. Uhernick and me a chance to escape the noise again. In the bedroom, we once more got to tell our stories. This time I didn’t do so well. He remembered me for a start. He didn’t like me much. I could see that. If it wasn’t for me he would be at home carving a supermarket roast of beef. I tried to look agreeable. It didn’t help.
“What was your business with the doctor, Mr. Cooperman?”
“He called me around four o’clock this afternoon.”
“Interesting. But what was your business with him?”
“He wanted to see me.”
“You didn’t want to see him? You’re not a patient of his?”
“No. I’m not a patient, and I’m not sure about why he wanted to see me. I think he wanted to tell me something.”
“About?”
“About Chester Yates’ death.” That got him. He didn’t like that at all. He got a mean look around the jawline, but after taking a new breath, he continued the questions.
“How was Zekerman connected with Yates?”
“Chester was a patient.”
“And you were bothering him about the sort of thing you told me on the phone last week?”
He was losing control of his temper. He did not much want to have this neat murder slop over and muddy the waters of the tidy suicide.
“I told you. He called me.” That was my best shot. “I never heard what he wanted to tell me. When we got here, he was dead.”
“You’re not going to leave this alone, are you, Cooperman?”
“What? Leave what alone?”
“You know what I’m talking about. You two-bit peeper. Who the hell do you think you are? I know my job, and I don’t need tips from a cheapie like you. You bother me, and I don’t like to be bothered by peepers. Can’t keep your hands off anything.”
“You find my prints and say that, Sergeant. Meanwhile ask your questions. It’s past my supper time too.”
“How long have you been acquainted with the deceased?” He hissed that one out from between his stained teeth. He had been smoking his butts shorter than I’d ever seen, stubbing them out with tense, nicotine-yellowed fingers.
“I’ve never been here before.” I hoped I would get away with that, but Harrow frowned. “I saw him once before. At his house. I asked him about Chester, and he didn’t want to talk about it.”
“What else?”
“Nothing else. That’s it, I swear. Believe me, would I try to obstruct the true course of law and order? I’m a citizen too.”
He led me through the story of how we found the body again, detail by detail.
“What did you take when you sent the super out to phone?” I opened my eyes wide to show my surprise.
“Who do you take me for?”
“I won’t answer that. Put your hands on your head.” He then gave me a professional frisking. Now I could be glad I didn’t dip into the wallet of the deceased. “Put your hands down. Now listen to me, Cooperman, and listen to me good: I don’t want to see you again, and I don’t want to hear from you again. Now get out of here.”
When I came out of the bedroom this time, the body had been taken away and you could see the walls better without so many cops running around. The paper mess on the floor had been sorted into cardboard boxes and was disappearing out the door in the capable hands of what looked like apprentice policemen, but I doubted there was such an animal. Mr. Uhernick who had lost his nervousness warmed to all this sudden interest in him, was telling one of the remaining constables about the D-Day landings and the carnage on the Normandy beaches that spring day in 1944. Cahill, the corporal, told me that they might need me again, so I should let him know if I was planning a sudden trip to the Fiji Islands. And that was it. My statement had been taken three times and now reposed in three notebooks. It seemed anticlimactic as I walked out Dr. Zekerman’s door.