Getting Away With Murder (21 page)

“Okay, I give in. It doesn’t even have to be certified.”

“You’ll be hearing from me.” He hung up and I was back in the saddle again. I gave him my best anti-sales pitch and he overrode my apparent reluctance. Trying to cool out new customers was part of my standard operating procedure. It set me up for a cue later on when I could say, “Hey, I told you
that
when you hired me!” Having said that, and still feeling good about the case, I had to recognize that I was no longer just a private investigator, I was a futile token gesture as well. As I hung up the phone on my end, I thought, I can live with that.

The cheque came by messenger and I took it, along with Wise’s cheque, to the bank. Both went in without a fuss and I bought myself a good lunch at that Wellington Street place where I had met Lily, Wise’s second wife. On the same trip, I dropped off a copy of my report at Niagara Regional for Pete to have a look at.

That night, Anna and I went to see an Irish play in Buffalo. It was directed by Frank Bushmill’s niece, who was over from Ireland with a lively professional company. It was very good and had us laughing most of the way home again.

Tuesday, the Ides of March, dawned gloriously. The sun poured into the apartment from an angle that seemed to be higher than it should be for the time of year. It whitened the grey carpet and crawled up the wall to where Anna was making coffee. I watched her with the grinder, pot and cups.

It looked to me like this was going to be the sort of day when there is always milk in the fridge. Anna gulped her coffee, worked on a piece of many-grained brown-bread toast and came over to the bed. “Are you getting up?”

“Sure! Doesn’t it look like it?”

“Not from here. You look pretty inert.”

I moved a foot out of the covers. “How’s that?”

“It’s a start. But I can’t stay to watch it develop. I’ve got classes.”

“Lucky classes.” Anna walked around tidying and finishing up the last crumbs of her toast and sip of coffee in almost the same gesture. She was a ballet of concise movement. And then she grabbed her coat and ran out the door, leaving my face tingling from a parting kiss.

At the office, I put in a call to Pete and got Chris Savas, just back from his holiday. He promised to tell me all about his time drinking local wine in the mountains at the first opportunity Meanwhile, he’d pass on the news to Pete that I had called.

I tried both Hart and Julie and got nowhere. Even the answering machines were in mourning. I talked to Paulette, who sounded both heart-broken and relieved at the same time.

“I’ve been expecting this for forty years, Benny! The second shoe had to drop sometime. And now it has.”

“Are you okay?”

“Oh, I can take anything. I’m durable. Made of iron. That’s me. It’s Hart I’m worried about.”

“I tried to call him. His answering machine’s disconnected.”

“He’s staying with me, Benny. He has been very affectionate and is so … broken up about Abe. He says that he was just starting to know his father.”

“Tell him I want to talk to him, will you, Paulette?”

“Give him time, Benny. He needs time.”

“Sure. All he needs. Tell him I’m sorry for his trouble.” I left word with Lily that I wanted to speak to Julie when she surfaced too. Lily wasn’t covered in sackcloth and ashes by the sound of her. But her bright talk betrayed the fact that she had been drinking. Lily wasn’t one of nature’s drinkers. She was like me. It took a lot to make it happen.

This was the Ides of March. Have I mentioned that? Julius Caesar and Little Caesar both could have been butchered in fine style while I waited for the phone to ring. The Ides were come but not gone. I tried to remember our high-school production of the Shakespeare play. I played Cinna the Poet. It was a part that allowed me to watch a lot of the rehearsals from the empty seats of the auditorium. I think at one point I could have recited the whole script. Now the Ides, such bad news to Caesar, had become good news for me. It was just a week ago that I had been indelicately hauled from my warm bed to attend Abe Wise in his lair. I rehearsed all of last week again in my mind. It seemed like three months ago.

I reread my report, hoping that the killer’s name would jump out at me like a piece of toast from a badly adjusted toaster. It didn’t.

There must be some way to match my sudden good luck with action. Reading my own prose didn’t exactly ring with clanging claymores. I wasn’t storming the barricades. I could see who was answering the phone at Wise’s secret number, but I thought better of it. The last thing in the world I wanted was to step on the heels of Pete’s investigation. I’d have to give Mickey and the boys a wide berth for a day or two. Just in case Pete was nearby.

One thing I knew I’d have to get was some idea of the timetable. Who saw Wise and when? Pete had it, or had been working on it, but I couldn’t pester him. I was involved enough in the story, so that I knew Pete would get back to me before too long. But I also knew that I was nowhere near the scene of the crime during the likely hours.

He’d told me that Julie had seen him last. It had been a busy morning. Hart, Julie and others had come over to talk to him. The last one had brought one of Wise’s old guns with a silencer attached. The gun was recovered at the scene. Pete said there were no prints. There hardly ever are on the grips of handguns. It was the silencer that intrigued me. The killer had carried it away. Why? Silencers aren’t items you can buy over the counter. They have to be made. Maybe the workmanship could be traced. That was an idea. I could easily see the reason for the silencer: it gave the murderer the chance to get away undetected.

The Three Stooges, with Mickey Armstrong thrown in, were excellent bodyguards. Their security was pretty good. At least that’s what Wise thought. In practice, they were less good than advertised. Once a pizza was introduced among them, they became side-tracked like errant Ninja turtles. They took their breakfast seriously too. Mickey told me they were a good team except when they were eating. The clear message was that the boys weren’t on the job and that the murderer was counting on this.

This review was interrupted by the phone ringing away at the ends of the earth. I didn’t catch it until the third ring, even though I was sitting within easy reach. I’d been far away in my thoughts. It was Hart. He was excited and hard to understand. I tried to calm him down, expressed my sympathy and heard from the horse’s mouth some of the hearsay I’d got from Paulette. Paulette was a good witness. After a few minutes of rambling through reports of his last few meetings with his father, he got on to the very last one, which was what I wanted to hear.

“It was early, you see. He was always at his best then. I gave him a cheque for the car. At first he wouldn’t take it.”

“You mean the sports car that you bought from Shaw?”

“Yeah. The Triumph. He covered my bad cheque and now that I had the money, I wanted to pay him back.”

“May I ask where you got the money?”

“I unloaded a few things I didn’t need any more. And I moved. I was paying too much where I was living. The sublet gave me some cash in hand.”

“And Paulette?”

“Sure. She helped. Anyway, in the end he accepted the money and we got to talking about my future. For the first time ever, he was listening instead of telling me what he wanted me to do. It was okay. Then, he had to go because there were other people waiting. We started to shake hands and then he brought up Shaw and Whitey York and how they were trying to shake him down. I got mad and he became the monster he had always been again. That was my last view of him.”

“He had a thing about control.”

“Yeah. He governed by moral terror when I lived at home.”

“I still don’t like the way this bounces,” I said, shaking my head at the window opposite me. “Shaw and York are trying to get at your father through your bum cheque, right?”

“If you say so.”

“So why was Shaw killed?”

“Yeah, I read about that! I guess he was not a team kind of guy. What do you want me to say, Cooperman?”

“One thing is sure: he wasn’t killed over a debt as small as the one you’re talking about. Your dad could have bought ten Triumphs if he wanted to and put it down for petty cash.”

“A slight exaggeration. But, I get your point. A guy like Shaw could have had lots of enemies. Lots of quasisatisfied customers.”

“Okay. Back to the morning your dad was killed. Who did you see on your way in and on your way out?”

“Nobody special. Victoria was in the kitchen baking a pie. Mickey was cleaning his boots on a newspaper, also in the kitchen. The other fellows were out of sight, in the other house, I guess.”

“Did you see any strange cars in front or in back?”

“No. And there were no cars parked anywhere near the house as far as I can remember. Wait a minute! There was a Chrysler Le Baron, now that I think of it. Parked just outside the crescent where the house is.”

“Colour?”

“Red, I think. Sort of burgundy red.”

“Old or new?”

“Newish, although it had one eye bashed in.”

“A broken headlight? Remember which side?”

“Right side, I think. Yes it was. Why? Do you know whose it was?”

I told him that it sounded familiar but that was all, then thanked him for his help and told him that I might be getting in touch again fairly soon. I had to cut off the conversation, because he began to go into the whole thing again from the beginning like a television rerun. And I had a job to do for a change: I had to try to place that car.

TWENTY-THREE

With Chris Savas back on the job at Niagara Regional, and after a two-week vacation to Cyprus, I suspected that I might find both him and Pete Staziak at the little café run by a cousin of Chris’s. It was on Academy Street near the bus terminal, which was becoming an uninterrupted asphalt wilderness with a few old houses standing like brick icebergs in the sea. One of these was the home of the Spitfire. I don’t know why Chris’s cousin called it that, but that was what it said on the plastic sign, next to the familiar red-and-white Coke symbol.

When I got there, the place was deserted and I felt strange, like I’d walked into the women’s john by mistake. The cousin tried to place me but failed. His welcome was cordial but lacking the warmth I had seen on my earlier visits with Savas. I took a small table near the back and ordered a kebab of chicken. I somehow guessed that they wouldn’t stock my usual chopped-egg sandwiches. I had taken about three bites of the chicken-filled pita, when Chris and Pete walked in. Not only the cousin but the cousin’s wife were all over Chris like a rash inside of ten seconds. The warmth of the greeting spilled over on Pete Staziak. Even in Greek it made him smile. I nibbled my kebab with the bits of salad that had been thrown in with it. Two tables were pushed together and coats were collected. Pete was the first to spot me. He alerted Chris and soon I was included in the bubble of friendliness and moved plate, fork, body and napkin to their table.

At first we quizzed Savas about his holiday. There were no signs of a tan on his big meaty face, but his eyes, usually as cold as steel ball-bearings, danced with the pleasure of recalling it for us. “The island is still divided,” he said, draining a glass of something the proprietor-cousin had pressed on Chris. “There aren’t as many UN blue berets as when I was there last. My village is still lamenting the loss of its orchards on the other side of the mountain. They say that talks are going on, but that things will never get better.” Here Chris laughed. “They’ve been saying that since the Turks came the first time. When the Venetians came. When the English came.” Pete asked a few astute political questions and we all nodded at Chris’s answers.

Without our ordering from the menu, the proprietor brought a feast to the table—soft roast potatoes, hummus, and darkly roasted pieces of chicken, lamb and maybe even goat. As our faces became rosy with contentment and grease, Chris continued to tell stories about his trip, his family, and the adventures he’d had along the way. By the time the coffee came in brass ewers like the ones in the Lebanese restaurant below my apartment, Chris was beginning to sound hoarse. I just sat there listening and chewing on a slice of lamb cooked “in the thieves’ style,” which turns out to be roasted with herbs and potatoes in a sealed container.

It wasn’t really until after we left the café that Pete had anything to say that had a special interest for me. I told him that I had been retained by Dave Rogers and that I was thus still interested in Abe Wise’s murder.

“Just as long as you stay out of my way, Benny. That’s all I ask.” He tried to give me a serious look, but the shine of grease on his face torpedoed the effect. I mentioned it and he went to work with his blue-and-white polka-dotted handkerchief. I told him that I intended to stay as far away from his investigation as possible. Then I gave him an example of the kinds of questions I would not be asking him. Sometimes that worked with Pete. This time it didn’t.

“I knew it! I knew it!” he yelled, blowing me off the curb into Academy Street.

“Stored information’s no use to you, Pete. Information only gets hot when it’s in movement. That’s when things begin to happen. Like when there’s an exchange.”

“Benny, you know what you’re shovelling? Besides, you don’t have anything to trade.”

“Easy on him, Pete,” Chris said, putting a big hand on his partner’s shoulder. “He has to make rent this month. And he never got paid when we put Julian Newby away, remember?”

“Okay, okay. We’ll entertain a few questions.” Chris rolled his eyes and dropped behind us where he could watch this process of reciprocity advance. I guess he didn’t like what he saw because he quickly caught up to us again.

“Hart Wise told me that he’d given his old man some money during their last meeting. Did you find a cheque with his name on it?” Pete looked at me like I was a stranger. He thought a minute, then shook his head.

“Why would the kid lie?” he asked both of us.

Chris shrugged. “Maybe he’s invented the story of a reconciliation just for our benefit. Maybe there was no cheque.”

“What do you know about Julie Long’s boyfriend?”