by Howard Engel
The lights of a television film crew nearly blinded me when I came out of the building. Reporters were falling over one another, while uniformed policemen tried to keep the mob of curious gray faces back. Someone with a microphone headed toward me. I thought my big moment had come, but he went by me to grab one of the fingerprint boys. The camera crew, I was happy to see, had its camera pointed at the bright receding rear end of the ambulance.
TEN
I had hoped that there would be something in the mail for me the following morning from Martha Tracy, but the postman only brought me a coupon which would give me ten per cent off on the purchase of a welding outfit. There was also a bill from one of the oil companies, which also seemed to be going in for the same kind of merchandizing on the side. Their offer was for a genuine dutch clock that would enhance the collection of a connoisseur.
I telephone Pete Staziak to see if he could tell me anything about Zekerman’s murder. He wouldn’t spill anything, but I got the idea that the fingerprints hadn’t proved very interesting. The only prints they had to match with belonged to the body. I guess it would have surprised even Harrow if the murder weapon bore the prints of a known wanted criminal. I told that to Pete, and he started to laugh. I asked him why, but he wouldn’t say. So I had to coax him like we were in high school. Finally, he told me that the murder weapon showed a very fine copy of the prints of Dr. Andrew Zekerman. A big help. But, just to be useful, because that’s the way I am, I told Pete to tell Harrow that maybe Zekerman committed suicide like Chester did. Pete liked to share a little subversive joke from time to time, but that was going too far. He deepened his voice by an octave and said he’d talk to me later. I could just see Harrow writing “CLOSED” on this file too. Harrow wouldn’t see anything wrong with Zekerman clubbing himself to death with a rare African statue. Probably it was a fertility object of some sort, and the wider he spread his brains around the room, the better he’d score in the bedroom.
The bedroom bothered me, when I thought about it. I wondered whether he was bedding many of his patients. He didn’t look to me like a guy who would miss a trick like that. That fitted in with his not having a secretary or receptionist or anything. No waiting room to worry about either. The more I thought about Zekerman, the less I liked him. And now that I wasn’t ever going to hear what he wanted to tell me the night he was killed, I couldn’t help feeling resentful. His death was a tragedy for him, but for me it was a pain in the ass.
I put in a call to Myrna Yates. She had a woman taking calls for her. I left my number.
For a Tuesday morning, this wasn’t rising to great heights. The Zekerman murder didn’t rate nearly the space in the paper that Chester’s death had. Zekerman got a small clutch of paragraphs on an inside page. They spelled my name right and didn’t attribute anything to me that I didn’t say. Harrow’s statement led the reader to believe that he was on top of the case and expected to get a break at any moment. But then he spoiled the effect by asking for anyone with any information to call the Regional Police and ask for him. I felt like calling with my suicide theory, but I went out to grab a bite of lunch instead.
I’d been back in the office about ten minutes when the phone started ringing. I was trying to get a chopped egg stain out of one of my ties with lighter fluid, so it was a welcome change. I thought that maybe it might be my mother. Her son doesn’t get his name in the paper every day. It was Myrna Yates. She asked if I could come to see her around three o’clock for tea. Jolly good, I said.
The next call was from the office of the registrar. Did I know that there had been some recent complaints against the way I was conducting my business? Was I, further, aware that the registrar takes a dim view of licencees not behaving themselves? And finally, I should be warned at once that any further complaints against my professional behaviour and I would have to face the licence renewal committee. I asked her to let me have that in writing, and she squealed like I’d goosed her in a crowded elevator. Harassment on the phone was one thing, but harassment on paper was something else again.
There weren’t any police cruisers outside the Yates house this time. Poor Chester was old news. What was left of him was equally divided between Victoria Lawn, purgatory and probate. His wife looked as though she might be in a position to turn at least one of them to good account.
It was the sort of place that had been built for fifty thousand in the late thirties, and had changed hands enough times, been painted every five years, so now I was looking at two hundred thousand dollars worth of house. It stood solid and not altogether forbidding, rather like a cottage that kept growing, on a strip of property running from the street right down to the creek, two hundred feet away and fifty feet below. Two hundred thousand dollars worth of house, and the doorbell sounded no different than the one on my parents’ condominium. And on inspection, what was masquerading as ivy on the ivy-covered walls, looked to me suspiciously like Virginia creeper.
I was braced for the stony face of a butler, but the door was answered by the widow herself.
“Mr. Cooperman. I’m so glad you could come.” She was wearing a gray wool skirt and a blouse, both from Toronto or New York. The blouse was silk in a Paisley pattern, stretched tightly in all the right places. She led me, and I followed her trim ankles, into a hall where I got rid of my raincoat and hat on a chair that looked as though it had been made of thirty different kinds of wood. The floor was covered with mushroom-coloured broadloom, the kind you sink into just enough so you know it wasn’t bought on special at the edge of town. She led the way through a large living room with lamps and end tables bracketing sofas and loveseats. There were a few Chinese antiques, a marble-topped table, pale jade in a display cabinet, that sort of thing. After another couple of rooms, we were out on a screened-in porch, a step below the rest of the lay-out.
“I thought we’d have tea out here,” she said. “We get a nice breeze from the back.” I said that I thought that that would be dandy, and that the breeze was worth the trip by itself. Something like that. She looked older than when I’d seen her first last Thursday. Her eyes were puffier, and she’d patched up the bad spots on her face with an ointment that smelled like Miriam Epstein when my mother force me to take her to a Friday night dance at the Collegiate. On the whole, Myrna still looked better than Miriam. She had those good bones in her face which would outlast her sensitive skin. And she’d tried to cover the results with perfume.
She offered me one of a half-dozen white wicker chairs and took one opposite me. She smiled nervously and quickly took a cigarette from a silver box on the glass-topped coffee table between us. My mother has boxes like that. Only at her house she keeps stray pennies, elastics, safety pins and book matches in them.
“That was a terrible thing that happened yesterday, Mr. Cooperman. Dr. Zekerman, I mean. You were there, weren’t you? Terrible. Do you think it had any connection with what happened to Chester?” She leaned over the table as she lit her cigarette with the only table lighter I ever saw that worked, then settled back sensuously in her chair as she breathed out a plume of smoke.
Just then a maid in a peach dress and starched apron swung through the narrow doorway with a tray of tea things and placed it carefully on the table. I pretended I didn’t notice. The girl was Mary Slack, the kid sister of a friend who grew up to become a fireman. “Your husband had been seeing the doctor for about a year. I was talking to Dr. Zekerman just two hours before he died,” I said, letting the silence that followed say what had to be said about the fragile thread of life. “He wanted to see me about something yesterday. He was excited and frightened. On Saturday, he tried to burn me to death he was so frightened. It was the name of your husband that set him off. He also connected your husband’s death with your pal, Mr. Ward.”
“Mr. Ward isn’t my pal, Mr. Cooperman. He was my husband’s best friend.” I’d wanted to see if I could get a rise out of her on that point. I could. She covered her pique by pouring the tea. I generally take four lumps, but in ci
rcumstances like this I settled for two. She was able to make me feel that three lumps was a social gaffe un-tobe-forgiven, and that four would necessitate my removal from the house at once.
“Tell me about that, Mrs. Yates. I’d like to know more about your husband and Mr. Ward. Can you, for instance, think of any reason why Dr. Zekerman might think that Ward might have had something to do with Chester’s— I’m sorry—your husband’s death?”
“That’s crazy. I mean, it’s absurd to suggest such a thing. Chester and Bill grew up together. They went to the same schools, they spent summers at one another’s cottages. They travelled to Europe together in the summer of their senior year at university. They belonged to the same clubs, and, well, they are, or were, best friends.
Everything that expression implies, including trust, confidence and respect.”
“Business?”
“Yes. Up to a point. Recently Bill has been working with the city. He had had to get rid of most of his holdings. But, before that, he and Chester were as thick as … Well, they were very close in business as well as in private.”
“Tell me about William Allen Ward.”
“You make him sound so formal. I guess, from the outside, that might be how he appears. But to us, he was just Bill. He’s a fine man, Mr. Cooperman, he’s always had a brotherly interest in Chester, like an older brother should.”
“Was he in fact older?”
“Same age, really. But you know how in any group, there’s always one who takes the initiative, and one who tags along. That’s the way it was with them. Chester was always a little slow off the mark. Bill was married for nearly a year before Chester asked me to marry him.”
“Was Bill Ward part of that wild crowd you described to me at our first meeting, Mrs. Yates?”
“Yes, he was. But Bill was always different. He wasn’t a show-off like some of them. He had a deeper side, as though he knew more about life and its seriousness than the rest of us. Not that he was a sourpuss. I don’t mean that. He trained as a chemist, you know, yet he used to read novels, if you can believe it.” She smiled at me over her teacup. I was enjoying my tea. It was a real treat to drink it without having to dredge up the sodden teabag first.
“Tell me, Mrs. Yates, as honestly as you can, what was your reaction when I told you that Chester hadn’t been seeing another woman; that in fact he had been having therapy with Dr. Zekerman for a year.”
“Mr. Cooperman, I thought I knew Chester very well. When I think back on my suspicions in your office last Thursday, I know where they began. That’s clear to me. When you told me that he was seeing a psychiatrist, I knew that you must be mistaken. I’m still sure of that. I think I would know if my husband was in very delicate mental health.”
“Not necessarily, Mrs. Yates,” I said. This time I smiled, and she crossed her slim legs deftly with only a faint hiss of nylon rubbing on nylon.
“We went through a great tragedy near the beginning of our marriage. I told you about that. I could tell within a hair’s breadth when Chester would crack. He could withstand an enormous amount of pressure, pressure that would destroy an ordinary man. He was a bear for work, and he thrived on getting out of tough corners. I know that in recent weeks he had been preoccupied with his business. But that was Chester. He loved it. No, Mr. Cooperman, I’m sure that Dr. Zekerman fits into the story somehow, but I doubt that it was because of business worries.
“And non-business worries?”
“You mean us, our private lives?”
“Yes.”
“Chester never was the sort to play around, Mr. Cooperman.”
“That’s not what you thought last Thursday.”
“True,” she said, examining the rim of her saucer with her cup held like she was going to drop it about a foot from her mouth. “Normally, Chester wouldn’t look at another woman. He never did. But …”
“This has something to do with Ward.” I was guessing, but I said it like I’d got the news by registered mail.
“Chester and Bill played follow-the-leader throughout their lives, and when Bill took a mistress, girlfriend, or whatever you call it nowadays, I, well, I feared …”
“I get it. That was in the back of your mind when you came to see me?” She nodded, and sipped the tea she’d been holding in the air for the last two minutes. “Tell me about this girlfriend of Ward’s.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?” I gave her a look, and she took a deep breath. “Her name is Elizabeth Tilford. I’ve never met her, although I’ve seen her once or twice. She used to work in my husband’s office as a secretary. She’s a mildly good-looking redhead, tall, about thirty, with very little sense of what to wear in an office, if you ask me. I don’t know where she is now. She went away someplace.”
“Is Ward broken-hearted?”
“Bill has a way of getting over heart-break, Mr. Cooperman. You mustn’t imagine that Elizabeth Tilford was the first.”
“But he still lives with his wife?”
“Naturally. Neither Bill nor Pauline want the sort of public scandal that would result in a break between them. They have an understanding. In some way she knows what Bill has been doing, and in others she is able to ignore it. She’s perfectly comfortable, and has learned the value of keeping her husband on a long leash.”
“A very long leash.”
“If it’s long enough, you don’t even know it’s there.”
“Yes. Well. To change the subject for a minute, did you husband ever mention C2 to you?”
“Mention what? C2? No, I don’t think so. What is it? Is it important?”
“It could be. At this stage it’s hard to tell what’s important and what isn’t.” I put down my cup. “Well, I think that I’ve learned everything I came to find out. That’s the bottom of my list of questions. I’ve enjoyed the tea. I want to thank you for being so frank with me.” She led me back to the hall and my hat and coat. She even helped me with the sleeve I’d pulled out when I took it off. She was a real nice lady, and I hated asking her the questions at the top of my list.
“Mrs. Yates,” I asked, with my foot in the door, “would I be very wrong in guessing that you are in love with Bill Ward?”
You had to hand it to her. I thought that I’d just hit her with enough to lay her out. She stood there for a moment trying to force a smile to her lips, but her eyes told me what she thought of me.
“You really are a detective, Mr. Cooperman. Yes, I’m in love with Bill Ward. I thought I hid it better. But then I’ve always loved him. Good afternoon, Mr. Cooperman.”
ELEVEN
I parked my car around behind my office building, which formed part of an arch of brick and stone structures put up on the high ground above the old canal at the end of the nineteenth century. The fieldstone looked green and wet on the lintel of the backdoor leading to the cellar. The unpainted wood of the door looked rotten. I walked up the lane and then climbed the twenty-eight steps to my big front door. I wasn’t even breathing hard.
I put in a call to Martha Tracy at Scarp Enterprises, and in doing so, I remembered a batch of questions I’d meant to ask Myrna Yates. I was sorry that I had to take it out on her, especially since she was signing my cheques, but I needed to know more about the business end of Chester’s involvements. If he was in the middle of something when he got knocked off, there must be more than several people around town sucking in air and not letting it out. Martha was out to lunch, the receptionist reported. I left my number. To kill time, I put in another call to Pete Staziak, at the Regional Police.
“What’s with you, Benny?”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t answer a question with a question.”
“Tell my mother. What’s wrong?”
“Well, how come you’re always calling me up at work lately, and for a couple of years before this week I hardly ever heard from you?”
“What are you talking? I’m always interested in how you’re doing. How are you doing? There, I
’m asking.”
“I thought you were supposed to be a private investigator?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well, Ellery Queen and Perry Mason aren’t always phoning the cops to see what the latest developments have been.”
“That’s in books. Besides they were related to the cops or practically. Nobody tried to freeze them out. Come on, Pete, don’t hold out on me. Have you got a report back from the Forensic Centre in Toronto yet?”
“Yeah.”
“Well?” He took a long breath like someone who had just given in to lighting up his first cigarette in three weeks, two days, seven hours and fifty-five minutes.
“Okay, Zekerman was clubbed to death.”
“Stop the presses! You didn’t have to go to Toronto to find that out. I could have told you. Even that washed-up drunk Hildebrandt could have told you that.”
“Leave our former shady coroner out of this. Do you want to know when he died or don’t you?”
“Surprise me.”
“Don’t be the smart ass, Benny. He was killed just after five, as close as they can place it.”
“Could it have been just before?”
“Sure. There’s a margin in these things.”
“So, he was knocked off by someone after getting his full hour of therapy or by someone who didn’t bother to get into the nice soft leather chair.”